By now, you’ve all seen this week’s proverbial “turd stuck in the goose”, my manifesto outlining Critical Intersectional Zero-Sum Theory.
This article is basically the big reason why I’ve been missing deadlines despite being nominally done with the moving and vacations of last month. I wanted to get it out before moving on to the other case studies and articles, because I felt like it was critical to being able to build those arguments.
Anyways, let’s do the roundup.
“Problems have solutions, but predicaments have outcomes”. A quote from the Strong Towns podcast this week. Notable because it’s a GREAT statement of zero-sum vs. positive-sum.
America’s underinvested neighborhoods ought to be the next great frontier of growth. Just think of all the space we are under-utilizing! People who are not allowed to produce to their full potential! We live with an entire sub-class who we currently spend untold energy mercilessly extracting wealth from, when we could be getting far more by living harmoniously with them.
We all too often look at developing countries and reminisce about when we had that sort of growth - growth all too often built on imperialism and colonialism. But the truth is, we could start grabbing this growth tomorrow if we wanted to.Right-wing authoritarianism isn’t just an attack on democracy, it’s a tax on democracy. Until it’s evolved out of our psyches - a hundred-thousand-year process - it’s always going to be a component of human thought. But it’s also not as prevalent as some liberal alarmists think. Not everyone right of center is an RWA, despite what #Resistance Twitter will tell you.
The original research has been contested and considered “debunked” for a while, but I think the ebb and flow of hard-right parties’ performance in proportional elections has proven that Altmeyer was accidentally correct all along: it’s roughly 15-30% of the population. Note that that’s not the 40-50% some liberals will tell you.
The reason why we need to understand RWA as a tax, is that attacks can be repelled from time to time, but a tax must always be paid. We need to structure our systems to be able to pay it, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.The JD Vance campaign is a perfect example of why the American Nations narrative is highly relevant.
Likewise, Anat Shenker-Osorio’s “there is a faction” is a perfect example of how liberals and progressives alike simply struggle to understand who they’re fighting. She’s probably the furthest along in understanding it - she describes this faction as having existed throughout our history.
But can she name it? Because I can. It’s pretty clearly Woodard’s Deep South. And for the record, JD Vance is clearly appealing to Greater Appalachia.
Being able to name what you oppose is critical to even beginning to understand it.Are we absolutely sure that “the cruelty is the point”? Matt Yglesias’ interview was much better than Ezra Klein’s - I had to stop listening to Klein’s about 15 minutes in - but… damn. I feel like the cruelty is more of a distraction than anything else. It’s easy to get worked up and feel like you have to act. And yes, the other side really was enjoying the cruelty.
But we can’t leave it at that. We have to ask ourselves why they enjoy it. What’s driving them to it? “Right-wing authoritarianism” is my answer. What’s yours? Because if you don’t have an answer, then knowing that “the cruelty is the point” isn’t going to help you one damned bit.Adam Serwer (“the cruelty is the point”) is right about one thing: Rural conservatives truly are more isolated from liberals than urban liberals are from conservatives.
You’ll often see the opposite of this meme make its rounds, coming from some center-right conservative, where they insist that they feel like they’re surrounded by liberals. What they’re describing is the concept of publics and counterpublics; and the key here is that the counterpublic acts based on its perceptions, perceptions that don’t necessarily reflect reality.
The upshot is, urban conservatives may feel surrounded by liberals a lot of the time, but they’re really not. By contrast, rural liberals truly are highly outnumbered.If you think about it, the anti-Semites have it totally backwards. The Jews, through centuries of diaspora and interbreeding, are perhaps the highest expression of pan-European ancestry.
Of course, not that that means anything. The whole notion of racial or ethnic “purity” is puerile and oxymoron at best.I hope that the silver lining of these billionaire space flights is that it makes them more civic-minded. Short of that, maybe they just spark off a dick-measuring space race that fuels a new era of game-changing inventions like the original space race did.
Reading “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”. I do appreciate that modern science can actually put into perspective some of the more poetic, hippy-dippy-er statements like “We are all children of the Sun!”. In a very real way… we are: the energy that animates every living thing on this planet does come from the Sun.
FALC is a good book, but what I don’t like is that he hangs a lot on future tech. Now, most of that tech is not totally implausible, but the futurism weakens his argument, just like it did for Marx. You can’t predict the future!
I’m mostly on board with the actual politics though. In a way, it reminds me of “Why The West Rules - For Now”. FALC is basically what we ought to be aiming for as a society, in order to make the next age more peaceful and successful than the last several have been.Had to read Federalist for the CIZST article. Man, I forgot how much of a screaming indictment #22 is of the Senate and filibuster. Too bad it never prevalied.
#28 was also totally wrong: As we’ve just recently seen, the states have always been the incubators of usurpation, not the preventers of it.
Have a good weekend, folks!