Pongalh
2yr ago
I remember a study or book years ago showing that nerdy black kids in all black schools got hassled less because they couldn't be so easily compared to Asians or whites.
(Of course who were they getting hassled by?...)
Pongalh
2yr ago
Liberals with a capital L, market enthusiasts and lawyers all sort of hew closely to this line.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Speak of the devil. I just attended a Curtis Yarvin, Delicious Tacos et al. event 5 days ago not 2 miles from Dodger stadium.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Post-liberalism has accepted as good everything ugly about politics the rationalists wanted us to get past. Clickbait is good. Sensationalism is good. Treating arguments as soldiers is good. Thinking ideologically is good. Just picking a damn side already is good. Thinking of people as ultimately political and not having some valuable quality that is outside of politics is good.
And so on.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I see. You're doing the No True Scotsman redefining of libertarianism to the stricter anarcho-capitalism only
Pongalh
2yr ago
Well the libertarian ethos that has defended wealthy weirdos and their right to innovate and Do Their Own Thing is certainly wedded to the uncomfortable subway person in spirit.
And America's love of rags to riches stories also suggests that the uncomfortable subway person may one day be a startup founder!
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah I've definitely moved further into the let's sacrifice innovation camp. If the most productive or ambitious or idiosyncratic feel kneecapped, so be it, for the sake of public order and a general ethos that supports regular people's dispositions.
Pongalh
2yr ago
San Francisco is actually experiencing mini renaissance within a broader decline, namely in AI. Think the neighborhood dubbed Cerebral Valley.
Maybe that has something to do with it. Those are the people buying those homes.
Pongalh
2yr ago
That's interesting. There's a new book called Inhuman Capital that pretty much makes this point, from indeed a Marxist pov. The endgame is no humans at all.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Interesting. Reminds me of the movie How to Blow up a Pipeline, which I saw recently. They actually have a red state conservative Christian type (literally the only one married with kids) on the team of ecoterrorists, motivated by government strong-arming use of his land to build, you guessed it, a pipeline.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I'm one of those who believe that this is a tragedy stemming from the end of forced institutionalization and the demise of law and order. This guy could have been alive being looked after and kept away from normies.
There does seem to be a cold new strain of secular right that just sees the guy as a worthless meat sack who shouldn't even exist. Seemingly confirming the progressive suspicion that the right would rather see whole swaths of humanity simply genocided.
On the one hand the right talks about upholding civilization, but the blase attitude regarding mediating institutions and recovering a government that was makes me think a primitive vigilante-ism strain that is quite anti-civilization is taking hold. A thrill of the idea of taking things into their own hands. Perhaps a kind of Fight Club style fascination with the manhood-testing the follows from the collapse of it all. An actual disappointment at 1955 law enforcement returning. The 1955 justice system would not just kill the guy. It was not that vicious. (You could say after 40 prior arrests it would...but Neely would never have gotten to 40 prior arrests. He'd have been put away permanently.)
Pongalh
2yr ago
I think this is true and it actually shows something about the evolution of political ideas in America. We know too much about each other's positions now. We genuinely and correctly feel there isn't much to be had by any more debate.
We all know where we stand. There is no more blood to be squeezed from that stone.
Pongalh
2yr ago
"people who have in fact silenced others..."
By this do you mean specific people or people who belong to a group you don't like? The difference is constantly being elided or not indicated.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Kind of an aside, but didn't Contrapoints appear on Hillary Clinton's show/podcast thing?
Pongalh
2yr ago
People seem to be abandoning the ideal of not relying on that. It's an anti-intellectual move.
"Where's your evidence?"
"I don't know, they're just like, ugh."
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yes in the '90s the education industrial complex and the media, news but especially entertainment, was left and Dem aligned. But the "daddy" side of government remained more Republican. But now that has overturned.
Local law enforcement is still largely on the Republican side however in keeping with the 90s. Local cops remain a target of national media.
Pongalh
2yr ago
More and more there's a clear trend of "vibes" as legitimate source of political motivation.
But those "personal preferences" for abstraction are more difficult to map on to any given object-level thing directly in front of you.
Are you making a kind of critical race theory notion that objectivity is actually just very much interested subjectivity?
"There's his opinion, her opinion and then there's the truth."
No no, the truth is just another opinion?
Pongalh
2yr ago
Another instance where Team Liberal realizes it's a fair weather friend to Team Right and Team Left.
There are just not very many people for whom truth matters. Most just grope around for issue sets, decide what and who they don't and do like, and then go full sacking of intellectual integrity in order to promote or bash their particular feelz.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Well there is the "Boston School" - as opposed to Chicago School - of individualist anarchism, which has arguably been channeled into a generalized libertarianism you see all across the US cultural-political spectrum, be it cold-dead-hands right-wingers or leave-the-homeless-alone left-wingers. And of course tech libertarianism and crypto.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra seems equally outlandish. Time for the flip-side I guess...
Curiously, when I googled Netflix Cleopatra the first story appears critical, at least at a glance: https://greekcitytimes.com/2023/04/13/queen-cleopatra-netflix/?amp
Article can't get enough of the turn "blackwashed" like some kind of anti-woke SEO strategy.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Actually no, I don't think every gross old rich guy does have whores. Much less famous pornstars.
Pongalh
2yr ago
At the time it seemed farfetched but since then we learned that he really did sleep with a pornstar. If these events had happened in reverse I'd find it highly plausible he did that kinky Russian prostitute thing too.
The bigger lesson is that rich and famous people really are engaged in crazy things that the rest of us don't get to do. A separate moral universe.
Seems prestigious shows have to actually resemble real life. Mad Men. White Lotus. Succession. These shows are huge with coastal PMCs. The proles have Walking Dead and Viking dramas. Things that take you out of the modern, as-is world.
Of course reality TV is a major rebuttal to this...
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