Pongalh
7mo ago
You make a good point. Strictly speaking an economic analysis of this stuff should be culture-free, with no implicit notion that the employers are conscientious, bright and noble and their employees are parasitic drag-em-downs. They are just two groups of actors engaged in contractual dispute/process. Whatever emerges from that just is the market. There's no reason why a victorious union should not be thought of as the clever, superior stock of human capital.
But the US-style Daniel Plainview conservativism always leaks its way in.
Pongalh
1yr 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
5mo ago
I've heard progressives say that abolishing the Civil Rights Act is absolutely letting back in Jim Crow and full blown racism. They don't believe Constitutional talk of the value of federalism or decentralization and private, voluntary action. No, CRA removal is just an exterminationist aim.
Speaking of QAnon, the focus there seemed to be Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk, or a bunch of wealthy straight guys diddling young girls. How has that morphed in the last few years into an obsession with drag queen groomers?
Is the continuity just a focus on the intersection of children and debaucherous sexuality that just follows where the news and vibes go, almost unconsciously?
Pongalh
1yr ago
My coworker brought this up just recently. When asked by another coworker why the Royal Family seemed (disputedly) to have it out for Megan Markle, they - they're trans, and by far the most politically vocal on the team - responded with "racism." The co-worker who had brought it up suggested it was because she was American. No, they don't like the Duchess because she's black, full stop.
Pongalh
1yr ago
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.
Pongalh
3mo ago
"jealousy is the core of privilege discourse..."
Interesting. This seems at odds with the analysis of someone like Wesley Yang, that privilege discourse is a rhetorical weapon of the strong, a clever and perhaps counterintuitive domination of the weak. The "successor ideology," or the new way the upper class advances itself.
So, a jealous upper class?
Pongalh
7mo ago
More than half of all smartphones are Apple, in the US. Interesting that the affluent set uses the most popular phone. You'd think there'd be a "rich people phone" that stands out among the plebs.
(Maybe it does, and it's the fanciness of said iPhone, i.e. new and not used, or more memory, that makes the difference.)
Pongalh
1yr ago
The '50s specifically cited as a time when degeneracy could have been resisted were themselves criticized as being degenerate by conservative observers at the time including the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood iirc.
Pongalh
1yr 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
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
1yr ago
Yeah I think of the YouTube shooter as a kind of weird unsung hero or patron saint of those who are slaves to social media view counts. A uniquely 21st century kind of disgruntled.
Pongalh
1yr 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
1yr ago
Well Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the only star in a film. Typically in Schwarzenegger films there are plenty of white men (speaking to my own demographic) speaking English and making cultural references I understand that more than outweigh how alien Schwarzenegger's body is, even if white.
Racial representation is not everything but it might be the single largest factor going into why I will gravitate towards something. Like maybe it's 30%, and various other factors represent 20% and so on. (If ethnicity is a combination of race and culture then I suppose that is really what I'm getting at.)
Slice of life-style dramas do need to be culturally familiar, again with race acting as a rough proxy. I recently watched the Polish series High Water, about the floods of the '90s. The main star was a heroin junkie. Now, I watched that series because the flood was interesting. I couldn't hang with just a Polish drama about a heroin junkie. But I know I could do that for its American counterpart.
Basically some other culture's/race's noir or rom-com is nowhere near as interesting as my own. There needs to be some wild external factor that would be interesting anywhere, e.g. in Squid Game.
Pongalh
1yr ago
The point is that we were apparently already degenerate then, in the 50s, so already degenerat-ing before then, which suggests we've always been degenerate and degenerating, which takes away the notion's give-a-shit power.
Pongalh
9mo ago
Allende is set to opposed the threat of a good example. But now Pinochet exists as an example of a bad capitalist.
I have a friend from Chile who is absolutely opposed to the woke (and to a somewhat lesser degree the broader left) but wants to vomit when you bring up Pinochet. His family personally suffered.
Pongalh
1yr 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
7mo ago
Unions are as much market forces as the entire edifice of corporations and business, which are also protected by government.
This idea that all the weird and specific permutations of business ownership is natural oh but unions are artificial and imposed by government is wrong.
Pongalh
1yr ago
As far as Russian resources being depleted, is it true that they've largely restrained from using air power? If so their aircraft resources would seem to be in good shape.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Can we talk about Sandman instead? Anyone watching that?
Or how about Cobra Kai? Though that one I admit is a bit dimwitted and downscale.
Pongalh
3mo ago
Are Davos people jealous? Are they the 1% or the 10%?
I'm probing as I'm curious how this reconfigures political understanding. So, a right-populism that hates the top 10% virtue-signallers - but only superficially for class-based reasons, as it's really cultural and psychological - and is joined by the top 1% the loser top 10% are jealous of. Which raises the question, why are the top 1% not also virtue signalers? Do you really stop seeing successor ideology antics at that strata?
Pongalh
1yr 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
1yr 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.
Pongalh
7mo ago
Yes. In the US there's a sense that you don't have the freedom to escape the pressure to try to be rich. It's up or out, striver for everyone. (Unless you want to join the ranks of the homeless, dropping out of any semblance of a normal middle class existence.)
I've been doing contracting jobs for years in tech and anyone not already looking over their shoulder at the next job when they're only a week in to their current one is kind of a sucker. An endless hustle.
I believe it's because Marxism better comports with Christian egalitarianism.
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