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32. Political Islam is an overblown threat because it does 2x damage to itself in its territorial dar-al-islam core for every 1x damage it attempts to inflict on dar-al-harb, making it a self-limiting problem that will decline with the oil economy
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34. Anyone pretending to have more than 3 real political opinions is making shit up for lulz or delusionally self-important because politics is too hard to develop more than 3 real opinions in a lifetime
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37. China under the CPP is not a credible ideological competitor to the West outside of China and will never enjoy the kind of soft power the US-led West once did, or even the level that South Korea enjoys today
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40. The Nehru-Gandhi family should be ashamed of itself, take partial responsibility for turning the BJP into an unchecked force, and withdraw from public life.
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43. Politics is essentially a digital computer (as in support for people or policies is fundamentally 0/1), public political debate is meaningless, nuance kills agency, and the only way to influence it is to prepare new 0/1 options in private settings
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45. If, after thoughtful consideration, you still think a nation can be meaningfully analogized to a household, you're an authoritarian
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49. All ideologies are the products of people resentful about either being unable to get into, or out of, dying cushy institutions, not values or ideals
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52. There will be both left and right Neo-Puritanism on the national stage by 2035 and it will be tedious and awful
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53. All humor is reactionary and if you want to retain the right to laugh, the best thing you can do is pick the best era to be reactionary about, which is the 1980s
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55. Solidarity is a stupid tactic in a social media era because it makes you a dumber actor than algorithms acting on high-visibility social graph
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58. Everybody should be able to vote in every election anywhere in the world, with their vote weighted in inverse proportion to their distance from the jurisdiction of the political office in question
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59. The externalities of the politics of localism at any scale are worse than the externalities of economic activity at a comparable scale
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60. Modern collectivism is just 20th political consumerism, not a manifestation of some ineffable essential social nature of Homo sapiens. It has more in common with shopping than primate ethology.
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62. The most deeply subversive political skill is learning to see what’s real about other people, 1 at a time, not what’s fake about them, 1000 at a time. Learning to see the fakeness at scale wins you elections, learning to see unscalable realness wins you history
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63. You can win elections and lose history, and vice versa, or win both, or lose both. Winning history matters much more than winning elections.
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64. Politics is always a choice between competing bets on the past masquerading as bets on the future, and you should bet on the weakest such bet
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65. Star Trek is the best political universe but most humans are either too smart or too stupid to live in it. Mostly the latter.
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66. The global political future is headed for Fireflyverse: globalized, aestheticized, romanticized, sanitized, sentimentalized post-civil-war American south with Chinese characteristics. Where stupid people will be sustainably miserable.
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