Tweet

More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 31

I've unpaywalled my post "Wokeness as respect redistribution".

It was the first of a series of posts I've been writing about woke culture's place and purpose in American society. Check it out!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…

The thesis of this piece is that by 2013, American society had become a supersaturated solution of disrespect -- an increasingly diverse populace where White was still equated with normal, an increasingly gender-equal economy where women still got harassed at work, etc.

Something like wokeness had to happen, because our country couldn't continue that way. You can't have a country that only respects a small subset of its population.

Wokeness, I argue, can be seen as a leveling movement: A socialism of respect.

Read 5 tweets

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 29

@popedum

@popedum The U.S. elite becomes integrated through universities; these are where the top 1/3 of the economic pyramid learn to become one people (what the army did for the working class during WW2 and the Civil War but not usually)...

@popedum

@popedum At these universities, elite Americans need something to unite them into one people. Perhaps 150 years ago, rigid ideological and identitarian conformity would have been enforced at universities, but certainly not now, and not for a very long time...

@popedum

@popedum Instead, American universities teach young elite Americans to find unity in diversity -- to embrace their particular identities (racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic) while finding unity in the fact that they all value these same things.

Read 10 tweets

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 28

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1486859458936401922

When I was a kid, we had domestic terrorists killing hundreds of people and bombing the Olympics. We had 2200 murders in NYC in one year. We had 30,000 nukes pointed at us, on hair-trigger alert.

And this is what we now remember as a golden age.

So...maybe we'll be ok.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1486859458936401922

Three times as many people died in one single riot when I was a kid as died in an entire summer of nationwide George Floyd protests.

3x people died in one right-wing terrorist attack in the 90s than rightists killed during Trump's entire term in office.

The government laid siege to a cult just down the road from the town where I grew up. The cult burned down and like 80 people were killed.

Some guy stole a tank and rampaged through Los Angeles.

And it was just...stuff we saw on the news.

Read 4 tweets

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 28

@RichardHanania

1/Just for fun, let's go through the part of @RichardHanania's post where he talks about the likelihood of an insurgency in Ukraine, should Russia invade and seize the Eastern half of the country.

richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-th…

2/The overall theme of the post is standard conservative stuff -- liberals are obsessed with Russia and with LGBT, etc. etc. Not super interesting.

But then he asserts that Ukrainians wouldn't fight an insurgency, and that this means Russia will prevail in this confrontation.

3/This argument -- Russia cares about Ukraine more than the U.S. does -- also applies to the USSR and Poland in the 80s. And yet Poland left Russia's orbit and joined the West.

What Poland wanted was more important than what the U.S. OR the USSR wanted.

Read 14 tweets

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 27

https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1486563072785408001

It seemed that way in the 70s too, but in the end the choice was "neither", and the world sort of puttered along. More and more, I'm betting that that's basically what'll happen this time too.

https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1486563072785408001

Which is not to say that I'm not afraid of a dark fascist nightmare (I am!) or that I wouldn't like a transformative and new society (I would!). But I increasingly doubt that American society has the cohesion or the capacity to produce either of those.

In any case, I also recommend you read The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. But -- spoiler! -- it's about a society that putters along, pulled by its radical dreams but always restrained by its complex, unwieldy reality.

Read 5 tweets

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 24

The reason all sides seem so unreasonable in a Time of Unrest is that everyone is afraid of Passion For Change being monopolized by the opposing side, so they all try to summon unreasoning passion for one thing or another.

This is why unrest is a macro variable that modulates all the micro variables in politics and culture; when the music plays, everyone has to get up and dance.

This does not mean there is no good side and no bad side in a Time of Unrest; instead it means that when we look back at the period from a time of reasoned calm, even the side we eventually recognize as "good" will seem fairly wacko.

Read 4 tweets

Share this page!

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Like this author's thread?