Pongalh
10mo ago
I wonder what "practicing" Marxists means here. Most of them are just people with an opinion.
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.
Pongalh
10mo 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
10mo ago
There is no such thing as all black people and all white (or other racial groups) people getting along.
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
8mo ago
Successfully pissing people off - left, right, up or down - is a strange thing to have become an accolade.
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
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
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
10mo ago
Interesting. Oppositional defiant disorder sounds like the opposite of "mass formation psychosis." Pathological consensus versus pathological anti-consensus.
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
11mo ago
I see. You're doing the No True Scotsman redefining of libertarianism to the stricter anarcho-capitalism only
Pongalh
9mo ago
Yeah the irony is the kind of people so transparently itching for a fight with dysfunctional black America is dysfunctional white America.
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.
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
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
7mo ago
Being for a strong military as an expression of national virility but also being isolationist seems like a strange combination to me. What should the military do then? Lots of drills and restricting yourself to monitoring the coasts certainly doesn't seem particularly glorious as a display of male capacity.
I think the part of the New Right that is big on the former realizes there's tension here, and so they've actually gone in for interventionism to square the circle, and want to separate themselves from the loser-y defeatist vibes of the libertarian non-interventionists.
Not liking libertarianism is really big with the new right, and being anti-war there is a trope. So that ends up being implicated in their disdain for free market liberals. But of course if you go too far this direction you end up right back in NeoConland.
Pongalh
7mo ago
A sex addict. So addicts are sleeping with addicts. Sounds like compromised ability to consent all around.
Pongalh
10mo ago
That's the one great legacy of covid. It took that big exogenous shock to move the needle toward remote work. The viability of such work was mostly speculative before then.
A giant blow against an Office Space-style quality of life pain point.
Pongalh
11mo 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
11mo 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
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?
Exactly how I feel about the Ukrainians. They're not going to win against Russia. Their stubborn refusal is going to get them killed. It's irrational.
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