Pongalh
2yr ago
"Can something be a culture war topic by being culture war free?"
This reminds me of the notion of "radical centrist." It sounds oxymoronic but makes sense when a significant number of people move away from centrism such that centrism inches closer to an offensive abnormality.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Of course the more such overreactions are taken as valid, the more people who might provoke such reactions are driven underground, creating a feedback loop of anti-social provocations and witch-like associations.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Spanish.
Oh and I buy all that, and the challenge it presents to my POV here. I'm just saying functionally that's how it "feels" on a work-a-day level and I think just how it goes in America.
They're all kinds of incidental and less obvious markers that can upset this schema.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah. I figure someone like your wife is white in Mexico but not white here. Like Bolsonaro in Brazil and so on.
If everyone already speaks Spanish that no longer qualifies as a non-white, "Latino" characteristic. So you rely on what's left.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Right. One could consider it a fuck you to Marie Kondo striver culture, a "laying flat" as the Chinese under-zeitgeist has it.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I feel like the definition of deadbeat junkie has moved from parasitic freeloader who has debts to...software engineer not living his best life.
Pongalh
2yr ago
They sold them the Patriot missile system, and F-16s allegedly on the way.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Feeling your way around an issue beats reason and knowledge any day. The illiberal trads and woke can agree on that.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I get that abstract principles are having a tough time right now, I'm curious what goes into identifying friend vs. enemy. It's certainly not as simple as demographics, so it's not like we've gone directly from principles to its crudest opposite.
I want to say something like egregore-fueled "essences" or something. Resistance to AI art can be tied to a tech bro "essence" of some kind, which actually does make it somewhat demographically-informed. But at any time a good tech bro may be identified, because it's short-term politically useful. That time-dependent aspect is linked to the egregore dimension.
Pongalh
2yr ago
If an area is over a threshold of progressivism then becoming a family man actually solidifies progressive opinion, because you're more institutionally invested and it's vital to keep up appearances among friends of friends and whatnot. My married friends or more woke than my unmarried friends. I'm in California.
Dynamics could be completely flipped in Alabama.
Pongalh
2yr ago
My guess is it's an attempt to accommodate body types they associate with the Global south. Primarily Africa, and furthermore West Africa.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah I should be more specific. At least insofar as young women themselves doing the trashing of older women, seems no one much gives a damn. I think it rises to the level of uncouth but no more.
Pongalh
2yr ago
It appears one big upside to Western degeneracy is an inability to create super villains.
Pongalh
2yr ago
She had another survey that looked at success of escorts by age and found younger more successful, which was apparently not particularly controversial.
But ageism isn't something that ever really caught on with current progressives. I still recall a prominent Babe.net (of Aziz Ansari bad date fame) defender trashing some critic by calling her old, without much pushback.
Your surprise at the reaction to this is why "radical centrism" is actually a thing now. Previously bland, no-shit-sherlock observational territory is becoming verboten.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Tangential, but decaying infrastructure + rise in conspiracy theory is a terrible combination. The latter will be invoked to explain perfectly predictable outcomes from the former.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yea. Classical liberals like to float the "Baptists and bootleggers" thesis. Not everyone is secretly some kind of bootlegger. There are Baptists.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Right, the boom in and trendiness of dramatized true crime, which blends fiction and fashion with the facts, makes one more suspicious than ever. Netflix in particular seems to be running away with this genre.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Total overstatement. I feel the need to drag out the trope of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Where are good statistics on the reversal of remote work? That still seems very much up in the air. Office vacancy is still high in the flagship coastal metros, though I hear offices are fuller in the heartland.
I've had uninterrupted remote work since March of 2020 (which included switching jobs) so at least for me it's all alive and well. Incredible life-changer in fact.
There are all kinds of ancillary voice assistant-ish stuff like voice to text, or text to voice, or doing voice driven commands in an Apple TV search (so incredibly superior to having to punch text with a button), or just setting reminders - as opposed to voice-driven shopping or games/trivia - so this is by no means a lost industry. Ambient computing and its contactless, labor-saving attributes is not going anywhere.
I worked with chatbots and voice assistants for about a 3-year period ending in 2018, but looks like I might have dodged a bullet long-term. In fact I worked on Bixby which everyone knew was dead in the water even before now. (Samsung attempted to have their own standalone device ala the Amazon Echo which was even more outlandish.)
Pongalh
2yr ago
This is a good point. The individually useful thing is the result of a kind of libertarian transactionalism that once learned is difficult to unlearn. You can posit a possibly naive but socially useful state of mind wrt politics before coming into contact with it.
But I'm too far gone now. I can't pretend like I didn't learn it.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yes. My girlfriend has voted like five times in San Francisco this year. She complains they have too many elections there, but keeps voting anyway.
I haven't voted since 2008.
Pongalh
2yr ago
There's a lot of Yarvin's POV running through these replies. That the profit motive is not actually running the show within for-profit companies. Rather a cadre of ideological actors who are not motivated by profit but purely power and status. It's difficult to wrap once head around when you consider the power and status is achieved by being profitable, or so you'd think.
There was an interesting point in Yarvin's discussion with Ben Burgis (via Thaddeus Russell), wherein he says Fox News, while a media company, is not really the media because it's actually interested in making a profit. The whole rest of the media, well that's actually Media, an ideological non-profit endeavor.
I see pop culture as actually having a fascination with poor or working class white people, just as long as they are quirky somehow. Or criminal. Tiger King. The hatchet-wielding hitchhiker. Former mobsters moving to Oklahoma (Tulsa King).
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