Pongalh
2yr ago
The iPhone people are the only ones that had a crack at that new and short-lived Elon Musk Twitter blue check thing. I think their blue checks remain though yes? That's an enduring iPhone-driven status thing.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I guess I'm saying that the suppression of that desire is as real as it's unleashing. So the prioritizing of the bad behavior/utterance as Real You is just pessimism in disguise. You can just as well focus on the part of you displayed when you're not drunk and say that's the authentic you and the authentic opinion.
Getting sober can reveal old thoughts as well, unmasking the desire, hidden all along deep down, to be a better person.
Pongalh
2yr ago
"Your culture sold to you..."
That's a sentiment that understands precisely where the woke are coming from, incidentally. Mentioning this because it comes up a whole hell of a lot in this forum.
Culture can belong to a whole people. "Cultural appropriation" is a real and troubling phenomenon.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I want to approach this from a somewhat different angle. The right echoing a lot of anti-globalization left talking points up until about 2010 seems to me to invoke the trope of "you want to be an individual, just like everyone else"" which has a superficially clever ring to it but is not very compelling.
Ask for immigrant communities maintaining their ways, the right is split. They like the conservatism but they don't like the lack of assimilation. Ideally, Republicans swingers in Florida would move a bit closer to where these first generation immigrants are at, lifestyle-wise, while all the immigrants would start speaking English anywhere native born Americans might hear them and also stop voting Democrat.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I've never really understood this line of thinking, that the "real you" comes out when you're inebriated. Couldn't both sides of her - drunk and sober - represent what she really thinks, such that one could just as well say that when she's drunk she's being too impolite to say the truth?
Pongalh
2yr ago
This is not surprising. I haven't even looked at Coinbase or touched my Coinbase credit card in like half a year. In 2021 those things were very, very important to me. That was a banner year.
Pongalh
2yr ago
"Since when do we expect rappers to be articulate?"
I don't know. Rappers do truck in wordsmithery after all. The gift of gab is out front in that particular genre of music more than any other.
Pongalh
2yr ago
San Francisco news interviewed local business owners/workers in the vicinity of Twitter HQ who are excited about Musk's plan to bring people back in the office. They want that lunch and dinner/happy hour business that's been missing since 2020.
So the cruelty of laying off WFH Twitter people is somewhat offset by that.
Pongalh
2yr ago
This is interesting because it seems to turn the notion of the disenfranchised and down and out being most tempted by a potentially dangerous nationalist spirit on its head. Nay, it's employed professionals? In this case in tech.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I remember that as well. It was essentially secular population reductionists against often religious pro-natalism types.
The fashionability of Westerners telling people in the Global South to have fewer babies has diminished since then, weirdly putting progressives closer to Catholic conservatism stateside that hated the efforts of the United Nations etc.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah, I was reminded of the debate here regarding torture watching this Breaking Points video earlier, where torture comes up in the conversation with the implication that actually yea, it works. I think when that issue is not salient everyone falls back on "of course torture works." And introspection certainly tells me it does. The idea that it doesn't work was a weird 2000s era blip born of disliking George W Bush and company.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lS3vyB7gcNA (a little past 3:30 in)
Pongalh
2yr ago
I was living in San Francisco for the past few months (and may return in the new year) and when riding Bart in the odd hours I decided to just ditch the fair. I felt like a chump paying when so many others neglected to; and when the machines didn't work, and there was no one around to help. You just want to get the hell out of those rotten stations as quick as possible at ~midnight in any case.
So I saw how deterioration of norms can come after the bourgeois too. I never skipped fare before but this year was a tipping point.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Geoff Shullenberger and guest had a pretty good podcast on this recently which took a look at how movies once promoted a fashionable kind of conspiracy mindset (Slacker, JFK). Needless to say that is way, way out now.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Well they want to hold the Atlantic writer accountable, not a politician. And even if she is on record having been on the wrong side before, people like her must never be allowed to forget. There is no moving on.
Never. Forget.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Funny how the right is now in the position the left was wrt color blind meritocratic liberal centrism. "Oh, NOW you want to wipe the slate clean, after everything was in white people's/covidians' favor that whole time?"
Pongalh
2yr ago
As someone who went from single and bouncing around family members' homes in fly over country to then having a girlfriend and living in San francisco, I can attest that my social life has blown up but also that it's extremely expensive. I wonder how much being broke factors into sitting around and doing nothing by yourself. Luckily I have not been broke throughout all of this, but I was certainly able to save money and throw it at stocks and whatnot until the last few months in SF.
This resonates. If the general culture was so oppressive toward white males what I should be seeing is my friends, most of whom are white males and more successful than me, doing poorly and not understanding why and looking to me for the answer. After all, I'm the one that pays so much attention to politics.
The thing missing here is some kind of class analysis. Of course it gets tricky because if you're smart enough to see the class dimension to life - not as visible as racing attendant racial oppression - you begin confronting "you made your bed" problems if you're not particularly successful. So you have to acknowledge that and say "I chose to be less successful than I could have been in order to complain about the plight of everyone else who couldn't choose."
Pongalh
2yr ago
"To make sure 85-year-old can live to 86?"
Yikes, I see a sentiment like this and it makes me think it's not the left that is on the side of some kind of youth cult that disrespects elders but rather the libertarian right, which is just the entire American right it seems, even when they're not talking about wealth creation and entrepreneurship. There's a flippant, distinctly young healthy male attitude to so much of their thinking
Pongalh
2yr ago
Some people get extremely apoplectic about racism in a way I don't understand either.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Interesting. But economics taught me that these Canadian healthcare workers aren't dealing with their own money, but rather taxpayer money, so why should they care about costs? They have soft budget constraints.
As for nudging, is there any such thing as merely making people aware of their options, or is that actually impossible? Any option you make people aware of you've necessarily nudged them toward?
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yea. But by far I put most of the weight of that on technology, which doesn't exactly lead one to New Right territory.
I've seen the left going gaga over Mastodon in response to Musk helming Twitter. Suppose it's a good time to be that company.
More options
Context Copy link