(I'm into perfume, and you can see new international markets in the perfume trends. Back in 2005-2010, the world's nouveau riche were the Arab gulf states, so you saw a lot of pseudo-oudh perfumes. Now it's the Chinese, and so you see a lot of pale watery perfumes.)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
nationalists have kind of consolidated around anti-China because a.) trade with China really did cause US manufacturing job loss, it seems; b.) the CCP really does do some bad things; c.) it's hard to see China as a pitiful victim when they're obviously an ambitious nation
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
and d.) all politics is local, the real antipathy is against *rich people* who went "ooh shiny, $$$" when not everybody has that option. (I'm sure literal anti-Chinese racism is a thing but it seems dumb and I don't see nearly as much of it myself.)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
ofc, I don't think the "ooh shiny, a new opportunity for profit!" impulse is something that should be squashed, because it's pretty central to how I go through life, and it seems like it brings a lot of good things.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
but the nationalists' concerns are that too many people went "wheee! $$$" and didn't pay enough attention to second-order effects on other Americans and on discourse norms. (If you're too heavily invested in China, you can't break with the CCP party line.)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
the canonical "classical liberal" thing to do is to have a set of principles, and then jump at opportunities that don't violate your principles, and stop when they do.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
this, however, places some limits on growth if your principles aren't widely shared. eg if the CEO of a company wants to challenge China even though that'll lose money, he'd better actually have enough control over the board, or have a board that understands his choice.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
if there's a critical mass of $$$ in the hands of "squishy" people who literally don't have *any* principles or even specific preferences, growth will go to the squishiest...until the "squishiness" crashes against an actual bad consequence.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
mostly you see critique of "woke capitalism" from people who have different values than mine (they *actually* don't approve of money or homosexuality or feel-good pop media or w/e) so it's difficult for me to relate to.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
and, like, I think convenience and pleasure *are* values, it is nice to have nice things, nothing else makes sense if you reject that at a radical level (rather than just instrumentally accepting that some conveniences/pleasures have bad consequences).
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but what I *can* identify with is the fear that there's this "squishy" population that doesn't have boundaries it won't cross at *all*, and treats you like a pariah if you ever go "hey but I don't like that" to the thing that is currently the most Winning.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
(socially Winning, I mean.) That's mob rule. Even if the "mob" is mostly elite. Normal humans have *some* things they wouldn't want to do even if those things were prestigious. So you get populists going "guys, there are these people who are literally only tracking prestige"
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman and
and of course most of the populists have their boundaries in a different place than mine are, so they're gonna accuse elites of doing things I don't actually think are bad.
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