Pongalh
1yr ago
Part of a seeming trend of the left benefiting from participating in their protests. Had a girlfriend who got intentionally arrested at a Bay Area protest years ago, maybe for Trayvon Martin, I don't recall. Not only did it not hinder her career to have that on her record, it bolstered her credentials.
Woe be unto thee who is discovered to have been at January 6th or Charlottesville however. I recall news of a guy who worked at a hot dog shop in Berkeley who lost his job after it was discovered he attended the latter.
Pongalh
11mo ago
I'm one of those who believe that this is a tragedy stemming from the end of forced institutionalization and the demise of law and order. This guy could have been alive being looked after and kept away from normies.
There does seem to be a cold new strain of secular right that just sees the guy as a worthless meat sack who shouldn't even exist. Seemingly confirming the progressive suspicion that the right would rather see whole swaths of humanity simply genocided.
On the one hand the right talks about upholding civilization, but the blase attitude regarding mediating institutions and recovering a government that was makes me think a primitive vigilante-ism strain that is quite anti-civilization is taking hold. A thrill of the idea of taking things into their own hands. Perhaps a kind of Fight Club style fascination with the manhood-testing the follows from the collapse of it all. An actual disappointment at 1955 law enforcement returning. The 1955 justice system would not just kill the guy. It was not that vicious. (You could say after 40 prior arrests it would...but Neely would never have gotten to 40 prior arrests. He'd have been put away permanently.)
Pongalh
1yr 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
1yr ago
Yes the whole idea of touching grass can easily be construed as a form of escapist quietism.
I think if you care about the direction of society something you simply have to risk mental unwellness and a certain myopic obsession with politics.
Though there are weird implications of this, like conservatives being less interested in grillpilling and having families and instead staying single and devoting all their resources to politics, much like progressives do.
Pongalh
1yr ago
I think something different about today's moralism, or why youth are no longer suspicious of it, is because they see it as largely enforced by themselves. Enforced horizontally rather than vertically. While it is also wielded vertically, it doesn't seem like that's where it finds it's legitimacy.
Youth of the 80s and 90s felt the power was being wielded vertically and in an illegitimate fashion they couldn't agree with, fundamentally. They were also less consumed by credentialism, theory and, well, words. So while they had a vague sense of their own moralism it's nowhere near as self-conscious and cohesive as that of Gen Zs and Millennials. Not to mention reinforced through documentation everywhere they look within the new information environment.
Pongalh
1yr 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
1yr 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
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
9mo ago
Yeah there seems no reason for Barbie and Oppenheimer to be wedded like they are. Somebody put the Barbenheimer idea out there and it took off like wildfire, like some kind of random evolutionary mutation. So here we are.
For a minute there was a focus on their rival soundtracks but as far as I know Barbie has one and Oppenheimer doesn't. I'd seen someone put together a tracklist for Oppenheimer that included Joy Division of The Cure and other gothy groups and thought it was real, I admit.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Yea. Classical liberals like to float the "Baptists and bootleggers" thesis. Not everyone is secretly some kind of bootlegger. There are Baptists.
Pongalh
6mo ago
I believe it's because Marxism better comports with Christian egalitarianism.
Pongalh
1yr ago
"Show me a hot woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of fucking her."
Things will get tired. What you can imagine you can have will always be greater than what you can actually procure. One has to just live with that fact and begin de-prioritizing sexual variety.
There was about a two-year period in which I was with a woman who was into bringing other people into bed, but I knew it had a built-in but fuzzy expiration date. Kind of dysfunctional and couldn't go on for long.
Pongalh
1yr ago
But even the West's CIA predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine and that it would topple the country quickly. That doesn't sound like something the overdog anticipates, if it's comfortably over.
Pongalh
5mo ago
About 10 years ago the economist Stephen Lansburg got in trouble with his progressive students for floating some kind of thought experiment that they found offensive, and I believe it involved rape. An early example of cancel culture in action. They wanted his head.
I remember thinking to myself at the time, "See, this is what distinguishes conservatives from emotional progressives who get triggered by seemingly coldhearted and objective forays into political thought."
That needs reassessment.
Pongalh
1yr ago
This is too totalizing and bleak. It's a matter of degree of censorship, and approximation to liberal attitudes on speech. It hasn't been exactly like it is now since forever, otherwise we wouldn't all be talking about censorship in the current era as if something important really has changed in the last decade or so.
Tangentially, speaking in terms of "we shouldn't let that happen again, so let's censor harder," fails to grasp that there are a number of disagreements within one's own tribe or political camp.
Pongalh
3mo ago
Sure, my mom likes her. Boomer Republican, doesn't miss a 49ers game. Not Waspy rich or Jewish or anything like that. My mom works at Home Depot.
Pongalh
4mo ago
From years of reading fact checking sites for my job, this seems true. Snopes liberals fend off right wing accusations implicating and sullying Antifa with incredible regularity. Meanwhile something like smiling Covington kid, Damore and other stores that take off on the right isn't really their beat.
Pongalh
5mo ago
Speaks to the leveling instinct even among the right. "They get to do things you can't!"
On the other hand it's the American right, which contains a lot of Jeffersonian liberalism built-in.
Pongalh
1yr 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
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
6mo ago
Premium Twitter seems to be paying off. It was almost embarrassing or shameful at first to actually shell out for the blue check but more and more people are clearly doing that.
Grey Enlightenment has talked about this alot.
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
I hear that, about finishing the whole thing. That's why I only buy enough at any given time to finish that night. Of course the downside is that ends up being more expensive. A 24 pack of whatever is more cost-conscious than doing one offs most days a week.
I think the perspective of someone like Hanania is to a large degree born of the way social media just presents an onslaught of topicality. It's non-stop news, which is entirely made up of object level details and the triggered sentiment that goes along with that. It's very difficult to think high level, more like a political philosopher. Everyone goes into second order intellectual mode ala journalism, not some kind of academic-style creative synthesizer. A low-key tabloidization of everything is where even the smartest people are basically at now, and they're beginning to rationalize it. "Great minds think about ideas, media minds think about events, small minds think about people" is being rendered almost impossible to uphold.
People have already talked about the way the age of books and newspapers allowed for more disembodied reasoning. Now it's a bunch of little thumbnails of someone whose face you just want to punch (in an online environment that mimics a small town, as Megan McArdle observed) and whatever argument is attached to that, well so much the worse for it.
The people on the right who think the problem now is we didn't censor enough back in the day, I'm not sure what could have been done then would have any bearing on where we are now. Who saw censorship largely occurring in private hands in a handful of companies in California? 99% of the discussion of censorship had everything to do with government actions until about 5 minutes 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.
More options
Context Copy link