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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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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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Okay good place to hit pause. Act 3 within the next week. Suggestions for topics I haven’t yet touched welcome.
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68. Big-tent-leftist-causes approach to climate are a bad idea both pragmatically and ideologically. It's a surgical cause. [Gonna slow-walk my own thread as a sort of threadapalooza median-pace-setting mechanism, and and add an opinion for every dozen or so I see float by]
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69. Horseshoe theory is only applicable to hedgehogs and it is the primary hedgehog political derangement disease
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70. Politics is unduly influenced by those with the time/energy to call their representatives and/or show up for town halls and things. It is 80% You're Not Yelping and only 20% Doing Noble Civic Duty.* * Hot take based on video clips on twitter
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72. The global diffusion of regional cuisines and ingredients has been the biggest driver of goodwill, harmony, and collective mental health on the planet and aggressive purist evangelism of any diet aimed at “optimizing” nutrition for health alone is anti-humanist sedition
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75. Global open borders should be asymptotically approached via the fastest pragmatic means available to politics
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77. Animals that can feel pain should be represented by legitimized advocates within the political process charged with considering their quality of life
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