domain:noahpinion.blog
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Sure the Chinese are not immune to “fuck you, I got mine” but at least in the past they were generally pretty capable of buckling down and sacrificing personal desires for the good of the family or the nation. Whether they still are remains to be seen, that hasn’t been tested on a large scale in quite a while.
TIRM
1d ago
There is some discussion of cost disease around here. Scott wrote a bit about it. May I present its cousin: schedule disease.
There is a particularly silly recent example. The city of Pasadena in California has a project to bury some power lines. That's the sort of thing you expect a local government to do. There are various benefits to buried power lines. All good so far. Not obviously silly or indicative of a broad societal failure.
Guess what the estimated schedule will be? This is a town of 133k people. 23 square miles. The scope of this project is small. Take your best guess and check the spoiler below.
We used to be able to build things. Infrastructure. Nuclear power plants. Trains. The California high speed train project is a much more impactful example of cost and schedule disease. But this Pasadena buried power line project stands out for the combination of small scope and deranged schedule.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
Why is it motivated reasoning? My impression is that the GWOT is fairly widely regarded as...not the most successful foreign policy, no? Or are you trying to make the argument that the US state department is competent, but got played by even bigger-brained Israelis?
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already.
The confidence you have in stating these counterfactual alternate histories is just astounding to me, but I guess there's no stakes when nothing is falsifiable. I won't pretend to know what the world would look like had China failed to industrialize, but I'm also not buying your interpretation offered with the barest of rationales and no evidence. I could just as easily argue that a world where China failed to industrialize is one in which glorious America land still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world with no real peers, and the only way to settle the argument would be the floridity of our prose and our imaginations.
Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out.
Ah, that was very generous of them. I'm sure self-interest played no part in it, and it's not even clear what you mean by that - buying treasuries? If so, they bought treasuries throughout the early 2000s at a rate not that different from 2008 - was that also for altruistic reasons?
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Vietnam war and Afghanistan/Iraq were competent policy? What about the inflation of the 70s and early 80s? All the NIMBYist policies that birthed our housing crisis and inability to build anything, falling birth rate, crumbling infrastructure? Contrary to some of the blackpillers, I won't pretend that the last 50 years have unilaterally been failures, but all the available evidence points towards relatively normal people muddling along rather than a cabal of puppetmasters making the rest of the world dance. All the problems that put us on the path to being peers of and/or eclipsed by China were born during the golden age you're gesturing towards.
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world
How do you propose to leverage this? Tariffs?
most of the world's most prized IP
Indeed - Thankfully, China also has a robust track record of respecting those IP rights.
having military presence in all corners of the world.
Maybe.
I'd say you left out immense natural resources (even more so if you include the 51st state), vast oceans on both flanks and (I laugh while writing this) the ability to appeal to talented immigrants from around the world, and integrate them into the social fabric.
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it.
I'll take your word for it. Would you agree that the vast majority of people have gotten it wrong, over and over again? Including (I'd guess we can infer) the US and Russian state departments?
What did you say at the time?
I kept my mouth shut because I at least have the self-awareness to know that I know fuck all about Ukraine and Russia.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
Hardly. It's an argument that we were undeniably the most powerful country in the world and, while we caused plenty of misery, our reign was fairly benign.
I'm under no illusions that America in 2025 is the superpower it was in 2000, or that China is a nation of rapacious peasants riding the coattails of the Master Race to success. There's a fair chance that China destroys my industry the same way they destroyed western manufacturing, with your prized Tsinghua graduates grinding 996 for poverty wages to fuck me in the ass.
But you have a susceptibility to grand, romantic narratives where small numbers of people can leverage their brilliance into enormous influence on the course of history rather than human matters largely being emergent phenomena. If you think I'm wrong, make some concrete predictions about how China will bring about America's ruin in the next three years - should be plenty of time for a couple of Tsinghua galaxy-brains forged in the fires of the gaokao to run circles around some retarded Orange Man sycophants, no?
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
The problem is that anything that has a mandatory hearing before the Supreme Court is going to put a massive strain on their case load. Voting Rights Act cases already have this and it’s a huge pain.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
This won’t happen. America is HUGE. Not being able to afford a home in top metros won’t stop most Americans from home ownership because lots of Americans will move to Indianapolis for a more affordable lifestyle- far more than 15% of them.
Yes, there are bubbles- and some of those bubbles are disproportionately influential- which view living in a second tier city(or having black neighbors) as a fate worse than death. But most Americans aren’t part of them. Standard of living trumps all, it’ll shake itself out. This isn’t an Asian country where conformism lets such tendencies run rampant.
Tree
1d ago
That’s a good defining aspect of the woke right.
The discrimination against whites and males, that is on the books, enshrined in government contracts, jurisprudence, harvard. Explicit. Not woke right.
To justify the octopus conspiracies otoh, they have pamphlets from the 19th century, hinting at early life bios of successful people, coded parentheses, jewish media interpretation, and aryan studies. It's all implicit mystery knowledge, like the tenets of scientology. You then become clear, awaken, put on the 'they live' glasses, get a superpower where you don't have to check early life section anymore.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
they're saying they use the same illiberal tactics as the woke
Do the illiberal tactics include trying to scare away Joe Rogan and other people with big platforms from having conversations with certain people? Do they include lumping in people you don't like with nazis? Do they include complaints about online abuse when people start commenting on how you're being ridiculous?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
Can you name people who actually have this as their ideology except random anon accounts on Twitter?
I sense that people like Lomez are probably the closest to what you mean, but he's published enough books that contradict this reading profusely that it seems specious.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
Not at all, what they are referring to is people on the right wing who do not buy into liberalism.
Otherwise you're going to have to explain to me when Auron McIntyre has ever done any of these things for Lindsey to coin the term to go after him and his ilk.
If someone makes more money than someone else, or one group is healthier than another, or people from one neighborhood go to jail more often than people from the next neighborhood over, the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions.
To be fair, there is a relatively small but quite loud subset of right-wingers who believe exactly this about Jews. And there are quite many right-wingers who really overestimate the degree to which leftists make their decisions out of deliberate maliciousness and really underestimate the degree to which leftists make those decisions out of a combination of ignorance and pathological empathy. Some right-wingers have even adopted a Rousseauian "man is innocent in the state of nature" attitude, except their idealized pre-modern utopia from which humanity has fallen is some kind of amalgam of ancient martial cultures, 19th century farmsteads, and the 1950s.
hanikrummihundursvin
1d ago
Except if that definition were operative it would make no sense for guys like Lindsey, Murray, Kisin or Peterson to talk about the woke right. All four take up the mantle of 'concern for where the discourse is headed' if people they don't like are allowed to speak freely on topics they disagree with.
'Anti-liberals use illiberal tactics' is a silly kind of thing to complain about.
But also, I don't think it's apples to apples. IME when people on the right are doing this it's often simply trying to get leftists held to any kind of sane standard at all -- saying 'kill all white people' should not be tolerated in polite society, but generally is. Whereas the left, again IME, is generally happy to ruin lives over much less, e.g. refusing to create art celebrating gay 'marriage'.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
World War II is basically the world’s secular creation myth now. Implying that this vastly destructive war that killed 60 million people could or should have been handled differently or, God forbid, avoided is basically heresy. It’s like saying “maybe Pontius Pilot shouldn’t have signed that one guy’s death warrant, because letting an angry mob override the fair application of law and due process is wrong”. In any other context a reasonable and good thing to say; but given the specific chain of events that came after and what they mean, unthinkable.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I look forward to an eventual SCOTUS case that crushes them.
I know, it being real estate - and residential real estate at that - there's whole multibillion dollar lobby and industry behind it. Still, I think once home ownership becomes an actual impossibility for 85%+ of Americans, the worm will turn.
guajalote
1d ago
When people refer to the "woke right" they're referring to right-wing people who behave like woke people in the sense that they try to censor, cancel, and thought-police those who disagree with them. They aren't saying the woke right is politically woke, they're saying they use the same illiberal tactics as the woke.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
My understanding of the claim was that the proportion of undateable people wasn't changing:
I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then.
If the proportion of undateable people is increasing, then it's entirely possible that if you can't get a date now, you could have gotten a date before. That's what it means for the proportion of undateable people to increase.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
The number of specific cancellation incidents was fairly low compared to Hollywood and politics. But I do think that was the moment when the vibe turned against the industry. For the twenty years before that, the left basically gave pornography an indulgence to be a morality-free zone due to the industry’s valuable service to the left as a battering ram against Christian morality. Even stuff like extreme racist themes and violence against women was given a pass in the name of kink. The right mostly left the industry alone too because the right was trying to shed the Moral Majority fuddy-duddy image that was beginning to become a liability for them in the 80s. After 2016, suddenly both the left and the right decided they weren’t willing to tolerate all this skeezyness anymore. You never saw much direct action about this because the porn industry is very attuned to cultural vibes and it very quickly moved to internally clean up its own image a bit, comics-code authority style.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
This is the meaning of "woke" that is then applied to "the woke right" when it begins engaging in similar anti-free-speech behavior for partisan gains.
There's a slight problem here, because from my point of view the Jedi are evil "anti-woke" are the ones doing this. Trivially: who's the one whinging to Joe Rogan that he shouldn't have so many people with [insert opinion] on?
srf0638
1d ago
I think most women consider the idea of various forms of sex work as a fantasy in much the same way that most men vaguely fantasize about violent crime, or of running off to work on an oil rig.
Whoa
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
'Woke' is having become awakened to the 'reality' that all differences in hierarchy are unjust (…) the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions.
These strike me as different claims. Wokeness as originally defined was really more about the second one. The moral truth that inequality is unjust was taken for granted from the start; it needn't be "awakened" to. Woke in the original sense was very much about "awakening" to the pervasive-systemic-oppression theory of why inequality of outcomes arises. The two different claims can be believed independently. And more importantly, believing both still doesn't inherently require you to be in favor of censorship/cancel culture.
I think at this point "woke" in colloquial Internetese long ago ceased to have anything to do with the original meaning, and means something more like "leftist Political Correctness thought-policing" whether it's about racial equality or anything else. This is the meaning of "woke" that is then applied to "the woke right" when it begins engaging in similar anti-free-speech behavior for partisan gains.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Technically, the pantex plant in Texas builds nuclear weapons.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1d ago
My view of the Dissident Right is that it's an evolutionary memetic algorithm generating a post-postmodern Right Wing. But it will be regarded as Fascist by conservatives and Woke alike, whether or not that is the proper academic use of the term.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
"Matt Walsh posts Swastika on Timeline" is not a controversy that someone generally wants to be involved in.
On the other hand, if the sharks smell blood, they'll rip you to shreds. "Never apologize" has been the standard advice by people who observed these controversies with any amount of care, right-wing or otherwise.
Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Let us use argumentum ad Hitlerum to demonstrate what I mean. Hitler is uncontroversially a Nazi, a fascist, and a white nationalist. To call him 'woke' is a definitional collapse. He's not building a intersectional coalition against Zionism and its supporters. He has a particular volkgeist and conceptions of ethnic superiority that is not postmodern in the least. (This is why hoteps aren't woke, despite arguably being the originator of the term: they're particular, not universal.)
It's dumb. It's dumb, lazy thinking: liberals playing definitional games and labels as if they mean anything. If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
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