Pongalh
10mo ago
Arnold Kling has a saying, a sort of right wing spin on this, that, "Markets are unfair. Use markets."
It has the same He Giveth and He Taketh Away result.
Pongalh
10mo ago
There is no such thing as all black people and all white (or other racial groups) people getting along.
Pongalh
10mo ago
Interesting. Oppositional defiant disorder sounds like the opposite of "mass formation psychosis." Pathological consensus versus pathological anti-consensus.
Pongalh
3mo ago
Wrt the advertising industry, there was an amusing but brief series with Steve Coogan on Showtime years back, called "Happiness" iirc, that depicted the downside of becoming middle-aged in advertising.
Pongalh
6mo ago
Okay. I've seem quite a few blue checks who don't seem to get any more engagement than if they had never shelled out for that. You can't get lower than zero likes or replies.
But maybe they're just really terrible at getting attention, or agreeing enough with any subculture of Twitter users. Premium gives them no boost.
Pongalh
7mo ago
How determinative is age really, on covid policy opinion? The youthful Briahna Joy Gray e.g. appears to agree with the oldies on this subject.
Pongalh
7mo ago
I'd love if we could get their health coverage in exchange for our military coverage.
Pongalh
8mo ago
I thought Huffington Post and Gawker and other "new Media" folk of the early 2010s were no longer relevant. But they can still wipe the floor with upstarts like Substack it seems.
Pongalh
9mo ago
Maybe they show that they care about the ugly by not wanting to explicitly refer to them as ugly and reify it.
Pongalh
9mo ago
Cycle of violence my friend. I'm going to assume with a comment like that that your family ought to be Roman-offed.
Pongalh
11mo ago
I see. You're doing the No True Scotsman redefining of libertarianism to the stricter anarcho-capitalism only
Pongalh
3mo ago
The "lying flat" movement in China would seem to buttress what you're saying.
Pongalh
4mo ago
The Italian School-loving New Right which seems to have a lot of sway here is quite overt about putting status and cool above any kind of lame moralistic principled considerations. There is only health, wealth, power, consequences, and demographic blocks determined by great men, not corny meditations on the morality of any given act - in war, or backroom political dealings - driven by resentful leveling.
Of course whenever it clashes with the east coast journalistic establishment it's shown up to be quite cringe and uncool. Maybe the tech/coastal crypto-right being so adjacent to edgy and cool - unlike the flyover populists who are distant and hopeless - makes them value it more than even the official culture industry, who take it for granted because they're directly at the center of it.
Pongalh
7mo ago
I'd add it from an employer rights or business rights angle - as opposed to worker rights - it also feels intuitively absolutely insane that you would be stopped from putting to use your own materials because of intellectual property, or unable to repair something on your own (ala Louis Rossman on YT).
There are a lot of insane things in this world. What one chooses to highlight gives away a bias.
Pongalh
8mo ago
It is eerie, and jarring. Like seeing Norm MacDonald be obsequious to The View.
Pongalh
8mo ago
Successfully pissing people off - left, right, up or down - is a strange thing to have become an accolade.
Pongalh
10mo ago
I wonder what "practicing" Marxists means here. Most of them are just people with an opinion.
Pongalh
10mo ago
Interesting that being concerned about corruption is for old, out of touch people.
Pongalh
10mo ago
I think it's been I dunno, a year or so since I promoted one of my interviews here (that included Yassine Meskhout and TW), so I wanted to link The Motte to my talk with Alex Hochuli of Aufhebunga Bunga podcast. Part 1 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=6OiZUUGNOr0) gets into - and this is mostly me here, not Alex - the turn in market thinking away from sunny, Milton Friedman-esque universalism and towards elitist and/or nationalist framings. Think the Hanania-esque or Caplanian disdain for the masses combined with a love of Jeff Bezos...whose companies serve the dumb masses. (Someone like Brink Lindsey otoh, representing the older right-liberal think tank crowd, still has affection for Joe Consumer Citizen.) As if the new point of capitalism is to give those of us with high human capital a properly challenging space to achieve, as a role model for us all perhaps, not to provide Count Chocula cereal. Objective standards vs. relativism of the market is also touched on.
In part 2 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=VUlgKio5f7k) we discuss the role of ideology: How viable is trying to be non-ideological? South American vs. Western left/right politics and the notion of false consciousness or citizens' latent revolutionary potential are also broached, among other things.
See too my interview with Anton Cebalo, author of last year's somewhat viral "The Social Recession": https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers
Part 1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dhbq3JxOrg
Part 2: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HGlkuScNNRg
My whole channel: https://youtube.com/@champagnebulge1/videos
Pongalh
10mo ago
Seems the general thrust of the "market right" in the last twenty years has moved away from competition - and its reliance on taking consumer preference/sovereignty for granted - as particularly important and toward a greater reliance on human capital and realism about the gulf between what the best and brightest in Big Biz know vs. everyone else. You can see how this dovetails with "state capacity libertarianism" or a more holistic, body-politic-as-organism kind of mentality. A corporate noblesse oblige that is more concerned about rival states and national striving than petty consumer preferences. Big business and government allies as tastemakers, not taste-takers.
We don't even hear chatter anymore about the importance of small, nimble companies, as somehow inherently better incentivized by non-complacent thirst for profits and local knowledge. That's all out. Who can even talk about that when AI and its reliance on behemoth companies' data collection is all the rage?
Yeah the irony is the kind of people so transparently itching for a fight with dysfunctional black America is dysfunctional white America.
More options
Context Copy link