46. All interesting politics now takes place in groups <30 in size. Above that scale is all zombie egregores.
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47. QE is the monetarist equivalent of MAGA
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48. States/provinces are the worst political unit, worse than both cities and nations
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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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50. Politics in the EU is more primitive than in the US or Asia
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51. Climate change is not solvable through politics and will fall to industry
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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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54. Individualism is a cancer in the social organism that deserves to win
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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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61. Other people should have children
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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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67. The best politics aims for government by the mediocre, of the mediocre, for the mediocre
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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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71. Dissensus is better than consensus, other things being equal
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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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73. The impeachment does not matter
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74. There should be no income taxes. Only property, sales, capital gains, exim, and octroi taxes.
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75. Global open borders should be asymptotically approached via the fastest pragmatic means available to politics
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76. Monarchism is bad
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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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78. Capital punishment should be stopped
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79. The world would be a much healthier place if there were habitable ungoverned regions set aside by international agreement as exile spaces for anyone to go to
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80. Libertarian paternalism (aka Sunstein/Thaler Nudge models) is a bad idea in and of itself even if it doesn’t degenerate into basic paternalism
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81. Every significant tech era retires a few ideologies and enables a few new ones. The ones being retired by software eating the world are: socialism, classical liberalism, eurocentrism, and identitarianism, and each is the core of a reactionary movement right now
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82. No "new" ideology currently has a fully established claim to a seat at the big table as a new political actor, despite frantic posturing to pretend otherwise.
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83. The top 6 ground-level phenomenology trends driving the new politics are: climate change/energy transitions, housing in metro areas globally, aging and falling birth rates in west, migration, inequality and healthcare. Your opinions on these 5 things ARE your ideology.
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84. Asia (beyond just China) has forked off. There are now two competing Grand Narratives in the world.
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85. The financial/investment world has no clue what's going on, is afraid of everything, and has been largely reduced to One Weird Trick: financialization. The One Weird Trick is increasingly being executed by minds that have already retreated to New Zealand bunkers
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