39. Threadapalooza 100 political opinions thread 🔗

Candid political opinions thread. One per like. Limit 100.

The entire case for socialism in 2019 rests on AOC dance video

UBI is a bad idea

The case for urban densification is much weaker than proponents think

Warren will beat Sanders and Biden and then Trump will beat Warren

Green New Deal is a total train wreck that does not deserve to be entertained as a serious proposal

Greta Thurnberg is actually interesting

Citizens of China are complicit in the actions of the CPP despite it not being a democracy

Bougainville island deserves independence from Papua New Guinea because they wear great hats

The Citizenship Amendment Bill in India is the most cynical political act of 2019

China’s presence in Africa is not colonialism, and African nations know what they are doing in participating

One Belt, One Road is a fragile initiative and will fail to meet Chinese objectives

Gonna start numbering.

12. Aung San Suu Kyi’s career is proof that the Nobel Peace Prize is purely expedient virtue signaling by the West to bolster legitimacy of its shaky claim to global moral leadership. It should be shut down, and endowment returned as a dividend to Swedes.

13. The correct response to all things GOP and Trump is “ok boomer”, obstruction, and running out their clock. They are beyond redemption.

14. Flight 93/Michael Anton justification for supporting Trump is stupid and people who bought it were and are delusional

15. Climate change is real

16. Vaccines are good

17. Identity tribes are not meaningful units of natural selection and people who believe they are are dumb

18. Gangsterism is a better basis for politics than purist ideology

19. “People of color” is a terrible term and I refuse to use it

20. The internet has been healthier for politics than TV and radio

21. San Francisco is not worth fixing and should be allowed to suffer the consequences of being itself by being systematically abandoned

22. High inequality is not a cosmically righteous outcome of enlightened market economics and innovation-fueled growth and people who believe that merely lack the theological imagination to worship something more interesting than financial wealth

23. Everybody should give me money

24. Seattle is the best-run major US city

25. Euthanasia and assisted suicide should be easy and legal

26. The Great Awokening has turned cancerous and should be abandoned

27. Classical liberalism is a clueless position and people espousing it should be ignored and kept away from anything important

28. The Electoral College is not a fundamental problem. Just a delaying ofvthe inevitable.

29. Plastic is good

30. Cat people make for better political leaders but dog people are more electable

31. Singapore is a fun place to visit but a terrible model polity no matter what your ideology

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

33. Latin America is politically the most ridiculous continent

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

35. Liberal democracy is still the best system of politics

36. Cosmopolitanism is more enlightened than nationalism

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

38. Russia is not a coherent political actor but a geopolitical shitposter

Hitting pause for tonight. Will drive towards 100 in a couple more session over the next week.

39. Being basic and being based are actually the same thing if you squint a bit

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.

41. The EU was a good idea and an important and brave experiment, whatever its ultimate fate

42. Georgism is a good idea that Homo sapiens is not an enlightened enough species to put into practice

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

44. Boris Johnson is smarter than Donald Trump

45. If, after thoughtful consideration, you still think a nation can be meaningfully analogized to a household, you're an authoritarian

46. All interesting politics now takes place in groups <30 in size. Above that scale is all zombie egregores.

47. QE is the monetarist equivalent of MAGA

48. States/provinces are the worst political unit, worse than both cities and nations

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

50. Politics in the EU is more primitive than in the US or Asia

51. Climate change is not solvable through politics and will fall to industry

52. There will be both left and right Neo-Puritanism on the national stage by 2035 and it will be tedious and awful

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

54. Individualism is a cancer in the social organism that deserves to win

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

56. All good politics today starts with breaking ranks and being a scab

57. Entryism is a stupid person’s idea of disruption

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

59. The externalities of the politics of localism at any scale are worse than the externalities of economic activity at a comparable scale

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.

61. Other people should have children

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

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.

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

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.

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.

67. The best politics aims for government by the mediocre, of the mediocre, for the mediocre

Okay good place to hit pause. Act 3 within the next week. Suggestions for topics I haven’t yet touched welcome.

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]

69. Horseshoe theory is only applicable to hedgehogs and it is the primary hedgehog political derangement disease

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

71. Dissensus is better than consensus, other things being equal

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

73. The impeachment does not matter

74. There should be no income taxes. Only property, sales, capital gains, exim, and octroi taxes.

75. Global open borders should be asymptotically approached via the fastest pragmatic means available to politics

76. Monarchism is bad

77. Animals that can feel pain should be represented by legitimized advocates within the political process charged with considering their quality of life

78. Capital punishment should be stopped

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

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

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

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.

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.

84. Asia (beyond just China) has forked off. There are now two competing Grand Narratives in the world.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Slavoj Žižek: Cynicism as a Form of Ideology

94. Gandalf was from Ravenclaw

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?

96. Bwahahaha rabbitocracy ftw tweet^[1] tweet^[2]

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

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 😢

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