ordinalandsman.bsky.social
Senior Political Analyst at YouGov Blue, Political Science PhD candidate , Ranked Ballot Nerd, Map poster.
168 posts
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227 following
Getting Started
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Part of this is that an RPG where body modification essentially works like gear in a fantasy game and characters progress in a linear way towards being more and more powerful and high agency is not a particularly great vehicle for telling this kind of story.
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TBH the mass audience for the game doesn't even get the exploration of transhumanism, commodification and dissociation the game does have (e.g. the insistence that cyberpsychosis isn't real or is some kind of conspiracy because the PC can't succumb). Not sure exploring further would have gone well.
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To say that Snow Crash libertarianism must have been good because it led to the (still deeply flawed) post scarcity world of Diamond Age is… typical of the level of rigor with which libertarians engage with stuff.
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Diamond Age is set ~50 years later in a completely different political context that is downstream of the heroes of Snow Crash intervening to stop the global domination of a right wing mind control cult.
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The contrast to Diamond Age is stark here in it's superficially similar politically but Diamond Age is explicitly post-scarcity and even the low class people have access to tech that makes them unequivocally better off then most people now. Maybe the mistake is reading Diamond Age onto Snow Crash?
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I don't think it's satire but the Snow Crash world is not supposed to be 'good', living standards way below 90s America, ecological devastation, etc. IMO Stevenson is pretty neutral towards the libertarian elements but the villains are pretty straightforwardly rightwing caricatures.
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We basically escaped the Syriza trap described by @ryanlcooper.com where the left charts a path out of austerity but doesn't seal the deal and the far right runs with it and now we're in a bizzarro version where the right is charting a very alarming path out of countermajoritarian institutions.
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The irony is that it's actually much easier to imagine yourself within Star Wars if the force is something you can learn and believe in with enough faith/dedication, which was clearly what Johnson was going for with TLJ.
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Rey as a nobody provides an in to exploring how the force works for people who aren't part of a lineage of chosen ones. You could explore what *makes* someone strong with the force beyond 'medichlorians' in ways the franchise hasn't shown interest in in decades.
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Unironically the best possible outcome here is probably something like 'Musk purge + legislative unity govt, Trump as a figurehead who does stuff like plan the Kennedy center schedule.'
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The principal agent problem the right faces is that they think scamming people is a sign of competence and intelligence, they have an incoherent agenda, and they don’t believe in any kind of virtue or virtue signaling. Don’t see why Groypers would be an exception.
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Since Bush 04 the Republican Party has not been able to keep the electorate on board with their policy agenda for more then a few months at a time. Their problem is more that fascism is not even really a solution to the contradictions that are causing that.
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the logical demand at this point, I think, is for a constituent assembly
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More broadly, lots of people are saying things like ‘foreign aid is unpopular’ as if that has never occurred to the people working on it. They had an elaborate and comprehensive program of congressional buy-in that they thought protected them. There are massive consequences to that being wrong.
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It's a problem they could solve, but I do think it's notable for Musk et al that unlike Trump who cut his teeth in markets deeply embedded in politics (and organized crime) SV doesn't really have a theory of political survival beyond breaking things and flaunting existing orders.
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A major dig at the fascism hypothesis has always been that Trump wasn't embedded enough in a paramilitary infrastructure, but one hypothesis you could have here is 'Musk doesn't care to develop that infrastructure because he thinks (stupidly) he can replace it with robots.
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Could be wrong, but a big question mark here is SV's total naiveté about the role nat-sec in their new regime. The clumsy and seemingly failing purge of the FBI is a good example as is stuff like this. They don't seem to take the humanity of their security staff seriously. bsky.app/profile/ordi...
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The most annoying replies are the 'Project 2025 said they were going to do all this' ones, Project 2025 had a relatively positive vision for international aid (in the sense of wanting to redirect it but do about the same amount). They put their Project 2025 guy in and he resigned!
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If Peter Thiel had a better answer here I think we'd know what it is. Instead they seem to gravitate towards people like Yarvin who don't even really acknowledge that retaining the loyalty of the security forces is a problem.
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I don't think Silicon Valley in general has any meaningful theory of regime survival and which groups you can and can't afford to piss off, visible in stuff like the Yarvin interview and also in stuff like this: www.theguardian.com/news/2022/se...
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The part of all this that makes the least sense is Trump and Musk shredding the rule of law while actively attacking the nat-sec state. Flaunts the most basic rule of political science (that leaders number one priority is survival).
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The only reasons I can imagine seeing this as important is if you were trying to do character assassination on FDR or if viscerally get off on the idea of powerful women being chewed out.
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What we now call accelerationism is going even further and saying that Hoover should have won because he could have pushed the contradictions of capitalism farther into socialist revolution territory rather than the New Deal settlement.
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I mean, the orthodox marxist historian take on this stuff is that Hooverism was too late but basically the correct state ideology for an earlier period of capitalist victory over feudalism.
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You probably need to sacrifice either some democratic-ness or some disruptive-ness most of the time in practice which complicates the idea of a total overhaul of the southern class system.
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Possible absolutely but 'can you deliver massive and extremely disruptive increases to shared prosperity within the context of change averse population that is democratically empowered to set economic policy.' Is very much still an open question.
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Oh I'm not arguing that Jim Crow was ineveitable, but there's a vulgar leftist belief (that I am extremely sympathetic to) that the failure to kill Jim Crow was a symptom of some broader macro-economic failure to deliver prosperity that I think is unfortunately wrong.
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IMO 'was American capitalist domination of the global economy inevitable' is the big question here. Lots of reasons to believe that it was but also lots of countries that looked to be on the same trajectory as the U.S. (Chile, Argentina, to a lesser extent Mexico and Brazil) that stagnated.
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Like the populist frustration was that smallholder farmers were being forced of their land and into dangerous urban factories which was a completely valid complaint and also objectively the optimal path forward for the U.S. economy without which a bunch of things probably happen much more slowly.
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'Northern Republicans had disastrous economic policy beliefs that sunk reconstruction' was definitely how I read the history of the antebellum period the first time, but it's hard to see how the U.S. becomes an economic giant without the wildly unpopular economic transformations of this period.
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This is wildly speculative, but I have been wondering about this with the 18/19 year old that is supposedly involved with the OPM fiasco after being a camp counselor/interning for Musk.
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Even the notion of a deep state implies a tricky principal agent problem where there are insidious forces creating friction. This is face-planting on 'easy to digest principal agent problems for toddlers.'
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[Getting my ass handed to me because I'm in a principal agent problem and I told my agents that however they performed I wanted to fire and humiliate them]: 'The deep state did this'
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Follow the fednews subreddit for my spouses job and if that place is any indication the federal workforce is already in the process of going full Lib ISIS after that email.
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Executive orders are not self enforcing, if the Supreme Court orders one thing and Trump orders another every individual agency has to decide whether they start turning the money spigot on or off and Trump’s options for forcing them to keep it off are limited to firing more people.
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Have been thinking a lot about NEOM this week because it's the perfect encapsulation and antithesis of Yarvin's belief that absolute monarchs can just will things into happening.
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Doesn't trying to ethnically consume just bring us back to the consumption oriented leftism you were talking about before? The no ethical consumption thing felt like an attempt to break that that got completely subsumed by the consumption black hole to mean something much more nihilistic.
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One theory of the present moment I keep coming back to is 'too many millennials went to law school after 2008 and inadvertently indoctrinated themselves into modes of political action that were at total cross purposes with their notional goals.'
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I mean, yes, doing all of your controversial pardons during the lame duck period is usually how you handle wanting to do things that are going to be very bad for your popularity and unhelpful to getting other things done.
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Maybe they will maybe they won't, but to go back to @ryanlcooper.com's original framing, 'Why didn't Biden do a bunch of unpopular pardons of violent criminals on day one?' is a question that answers itself.
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The immediate Jan 6 pardons are a good example of a self executing policy, they’re also going to be very unpopular and unclear to me what having RW paramilitary people back on the streets does for Trump short term.
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It's also classic cart before the horse. Trump hasn't yet installed the political appointees/ideological commissars who would make this move faster and announcing what he wants them to do (like end birthright citizenship) before he has then will make them harder to get in and make their jobs harder.