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
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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86. Neither the 1% nor the under-the-API nouveau-poor (bottom 60%?) can invent the future that needs inventing now. It's up to the mediocre-normie middle class. It's a race between forces shrinking this class, and imaginative political actions emerging from this class.
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87. LOTR is about 2 political events: Tom Bombadil being disinterested in the ring, and Gandalf v. Balrog battle which happens offstage. The rest of the plot (Mordor v. Frodo's Army) is noise and fury signifying nothing.
Yes this is a metaphor.
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88. All pure, radically decentralized political ideologies are bs because humans want maximally intimate belongingness so badly that they'll max out the technically possible scale of centralized organization every era. If a 7.5b hive mind were possible, 6.5b would sign up.
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89. I'd be in the 1b that would refuse to sign up for said hive mind in 88. It sounds awful, but then most humans are awful and would choose that state.
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90. Most bad politics arises out of bad literary tastes, as in enjoying stories about stereotypes. Good politics arises out of pattern matching archetypes while they still have "alpha" (predictive power) with a tasteful literary sensibility
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91. Stereotypes are real, and there is always a subset of every stereotyped population that actually willingly conforms to that stereotype, performing it with an aggressive deadness. These dead player zombies are the core of all politics. All politics is about seeing dead people.
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92. All Straussians are wrong about almost everything just by virtue of being Straussian and being unable to come to terms with the central (heh!) role of mediocrity in the human condition. Their Noble Lies are mainly to themselves.
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93. Zizek is correct. The Normie ideology is cynicism, and conversely, all ideology turns into cynicism by the time it goes normie. This is why Noble Lie political philosophy is bs because there is no unawakened consciousness laboring under from it. autodidactproject.org/other/cynzizek
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94. Gandalf was from Ravenclaw
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95. Opinion stolen from someone I've forgotten who: SE Asia has the potential to be the political laboratory of the future due to its diversity and topography (archipelago). One ideology tested per island, each with a Big Tech sponsor?
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96. Bwahahaha rabbitocracy ftw
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24. Joe Edelman told me that the people without any "takes" (regardless of temperature) should be the ones leading/controlling a discussion. He calls this Turtleocracy notion.so/Turtleocracy-4
I want to try this at least once in the next year.
Show this thread
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Gonna slow-walk these last 4 to the finish line and try to be first-in-last-out.
For 97, let’s rerun an oldie
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You have no obligation to be useful or interesting to the world.
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98. The right to freedom of information aka internet access is the most basic human right now, and states can only be trusted to the extent the protect it. This is the new Zeroth Law of Governmentics and sadly India has joined the ranks of countries currently breaking it 😢
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99. I expect the Westphalian nation state default to start crumbling within my lifetime (ie next ~50y) and the only questions are a) how messily/violently and b) where can I hide out and tweet about it
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