Thread by @Noahpinion

OK, let's do this. 10 likes = 1 hot take.

(Used to be 1 like = 1 hot take, but...inflation)

1. NYC building styles range from "fairly ugly" to "very ugly", but Americans love them because NYC is our only dense city, so Americans associate those building styles with urban density

2. Star Trek DS9 was neocon. It glorified a morally inspired leader engaging in preemptive war with an enemy who would never see reason and only respected force.

3. Historians are far more powerful than economists, and their theories gain wide acceptance with far less solid evidence to back them up.

4. America has highly egalitarian values and the vast majority of Americans do not worship rich people.

5. Kefka wasn't actually a very good villain...he could have been, had they made him an annoying smug philosophy bro, but instead he was just a generic mad cackling clown.

6. Kid A is a boring, overrated album, as is Amnesiac. But Radiohead's B-sides are great.

7. The media mostly changes people's opinions accidentally, by trying to serve people regurgitated versions of their own preconceived notions but slightly failing and mutating those notions into something slightly original.

8. America is not a land of brash rude honest people, but rather a highly intricate and polite society, with dense web of social taboos, euphemisms, politeness customs, and unwritten rules.

9. Canada is just as intricate and polite as America, but in addition it also heavily features honne and tatemae (本音と建て前), in fact embodying those concepts far better than Japan.

10. Of all other cultures on the globe, the most similar to America is not actually Canada; it's China.

11.Suburbia is isolating in terms of fostering fewer casual connections, but because it forces people to hang out at each other's houses or at a few well-known hangout spots, it actually fosters close relationships and community.

12. The main problem with suburbia is not the culture it fosters -- it produces interesting subcultures. The main problem is that it costs way too much to maintain and is environmentally unfriendly.

13. "Brogrammers" are almost entirely nonexistent.

14. There is no such thing as a comfortable pair of blue jeans.

15. Stable, fulfilling platonic friendships can exist between heterosexual men and women who are attracted to each other but who never have any sexual contact.

16. A very large portion of attraction consists of how how easy it is for someone to fantasize about the other person being attracted to them.

17. Japanese compact cars of the 70s and 80s looked sleeker and cooler than old American muscle cars, and the lingering preference for the latter mostly had to do with nostalgia about the era of cruising.

18. Almost all people's noses look pretty good, even though most people are insecure about their noses.

19. A lot of the toxicity of Twitter comes from the fact that pseudonymity has upset traditional age-based status hierarchies; no one knows who's 15 and who's 65 anymore.

20. Ultra-woke people are largely right about attractiveness being culturally determined.

21. The Culture series just isn't very good, and there's no special or interesting reason it isn't very good, the characters and concepts are all just sort of generic. People like it because it was willing to say mildly socialist stuff in the 80s.

22. Whole wheat bread tastes like crap, but multi-grain bread is delicious.

23. Mops do not clean floors, they merely relocate dirt to different locations on the floor.

24. The main attraction of "incel" culture is male bonding; incels would generally rather have platonic male friends than a girlfriend.

25. GDP is a very good measure of living standards, until you get to maybe $35,000 or $40,000 (PPP), at which point it becomes less good.

26. America lost the War of 1812 but won the Korean War and the Iraq War. The only reason people don't recognize this is that our expectations for war outcomes rose dramatically.

27. Russian help only marginally benefitted Trump in 2016 if at all, but most right-wingers secretly believe it was decisive, which is why they love Russia.

28. Brown bears are the cutest bears, cuter even than pandas.

29. Our sense of animal cuteness evolved not from attraction to human babies, but from attraction to puppies. "Cute" doesn't mean "looks like a baby", it means "looks like a puppy".

30. The U.S. should apologize to countries for past war atrocities, even in wars that were 100% justified. This would increase U.S. legitimacy, rather than decrease it as many fear.

31. Jimmy Carter was the Great Deregulator, Nixon solidified the New Deal, Hoover began the New Deal, and Clinton solidified the "Reagan revolution" (last one is not a hot take but included it for completeness).

32. The way to get a Third Way policy package implemented is not to start a third party or get centrists together, it's to get both parties competing to offer their own spin on your ideas.

33. Most of the racists who are obsessed with "race and IQ" don't actually care much about IQ or intelligence of any sort. They're just looking for reasons to dunk on the folks they don't like for other, unrelated reasons.

34. Even though the ultra-wokes are mostly right that attractiveness is determined by culture, the anti-wokes are also right about men's attraction being more visually triggered, and this is probably innate. These things are both true at the same time...

35/A lot of "audiophiles" are faking it.

36/String instrument personality stereotypes are largely accurate. First violins are Type A, second violins are chill and go along to get along, violas are weird, cellos are sweet people, and bassists are delinquents and malcontents.

37/I've said this many times before, but most "climate anxiety" is just people groping for a concrete reason they feel anxious about the world, when the real thing that's making them anxious is social change.

38/Shinzo Abe was Japan's most liberal leader in the modern age.

39/Sometimes it makes sense to walk around outside in socks and then just buy new socks.

40/Americans are far more satisfied with their material conditions than they let on, and this goes double for socialists.

41/The Econ Nobel is a real Nobel Prize.

42/Many macho men want to get laid not just because it affirms their masculinity, but also because it's the only time they feel it's socially acceptable for them to be gently touched and held by another human being.

OK, that's all for now! I'll do the other 70-some-odd later! Should have set the price at 30 likes per hot take... 😅

43/The Last Jedi was not appreciably different from the other two Star Wars sequels in style, tone, or theme; all three were uniformly boring and bad for the same exact reasons, none of them represented anything deeper than failed moviemaking.

44/Girls was bad because it depicted an all-White NYC. But Friends was not bad for this reason, because it didn't show NYC much at all; they could have just said it was based in North Chicago and the whiteness would have been realistic.

Friends was just a bad show, period.

45/Seinfeld humor is 80% George. George carried the show. (Is this even a hot take?)

46/Parks & Recreation is not emblematic of the Obama era and would have fit perfectly well in the Bush era. The real iconic show of the Obama era was Key & Peele, because it was about Black guys being conservative and White audiences not realizing it. (Also it had Obama.)

47/Scarlett Johansson takes a lot of boring action-movie roles but in fact she's a great actress, and her best performance is in the movie Don Jon.

48/Chesa Boudin's ideology is mostly overplayed, he's mostly just an average crappy DA in the crappy SF justice system. But his ideology leads him to say callous things toward Asian people, which will probably be what gets him recalled.

49/Robots are good for manufacturing employment, and we need lots more robots.

50/Ocarina of Time was massively overrated. The best Zelda game is A Link Between Worlds. Breath of the Wild would have been the best except that swords break, which defeats the purpose of a Zelda game (i.e., constant compulsive sword-swinging).

51/The most beautiful spoken language in the world is Spanish, and the most beautiful Spanish accent is Mexican.

52/English accent stereotypes: Russian accents convey the impression of deep and ineffable cryptic wisdom, while Indian accents convey the impression of down-to-earth sensibility.

53/I don't speak a word of Portuguese, but for some reason Brazilian Portuguese sounds to me like a Slavic language whenever I hear it.

54/Japanese is actually a super-easy language to learn to speak, because in real life the grammar is just a bunch of long run-on sentences made by stringing together simple clauses. You can make flowery nested complex clauses but only big nerds do that.

55/A Spence signaling theory of shouting: Most people shout in arguments not because they feel compelled to shout, but because they're sending a costly signal of how upset they are and how much they care about the issue being disputed.

56/Comedy has always been mostly conservative, and comedians are often the most important culturally conservative voices, especially among minorities.

57/A Spence signaling theory of punching: Most punches don't land, but people still get very upset about being punched, because it's a credible signal that someone is very angry with you.

58/It's not cute for a dog to have a bobbed tail. It's mutilation.

59/Thanos is the main protagonist of the Marvel Universe.

60/All American generations are pretty cool, including the Boomers. The only exception is the Harry Potter Generation, born 1987-1996. It is acceptable to dunk on the Potters.

61/Immigration raises wages for native-born workers. Immigration also improves educational outcomes for native-born workers, and improves the domestic education system.

62/I've said this before, but most college crushes are mostly just exercises in egotism -- you don't like the person, you like how you imagine they would fit into your personal heroic narrative.

63/Many of your heroes in the opinion/punditry world are just emotionally troubled people working out their issues by shouting about stuff, and eventually they will do something that either morally discredits them or convinces you they're dumb.

64/A country needs both a liberal/left movement and a conservative/right movement to be politically healthy, and the real trick is getting both of these movements to be relatively sane at the same time.

65/The real solution to the pronoun wars is to just switch to using "they/them" for everyone, but as the kids used to say a few years ago, "Y'all aint ready for that conversation".

66/The Bernie socialist movement is mostly just angry jilted Robert Reich style labor-populist-progressives from the 90s, rebranded with symbols that make kids think the movement is somehow descended from the old socialism.

67/The thing that actually killed religiosity in America was Match.com.

68/More people should wear platform sneakers.

69/With Operation Warp Speed and the CARES Act, Trump actually did a very good job on two out of the three aspects of Covid response -- better than European countries, in fact. The only thing he really failed on was messaging and NPIs.

70/The worst thing FDR did wasn't even the internment -- it was the arbitrary deportation of 1 million American citizens of Mexican descent.

And yet despite this and the other bad things he did, FDR was a top 3 President.

71/Rome contributed greatly to European technological stagnation.

72/One of the main reasons Lord of the Rings is great is because it features people walking around in nature a lot. This is something that almost all modern fantasy has lost.

73/France was actually an unusually martial and tough country, and the reason they lost so many wars is that they got into so many wars in the first place.

74/I've said this one before, but the reason it's OK to have billionaires in our society is because if they couldn't be billionaires they'd be warlords.

75/Morning buns are better than cinnamon rolls.

76/Detroit-style pizza is much better than New York-style pizza, and the best thing is that New Yorkers aren't even able to get mad at this take because they don't even know what Detroit-style pizza is.

77/Skim milk is sugar water.

78/Yogurt is essentially just soft-serve ice cream with bacteria in it.

79/Orange juice is a liquid form of candy.

80/Most Ben & Jerry's flavors are just cookies & cream.

81/A briefcase is a purse. A satchel bag is also a purse.

82/Young adult novels are a 32-year-old's idea of what they think a 14-year-old would read.

83/The best Nirvana album was Incesticide, the one no one listened to.

84/Salesforce Tower is gorgeous and iconic, but San Francisco needs another 10 towers like it.

85/High school is mostly jail for teenagers who haven't committed crimes yet, but probably would if left to their own devices

86/Actually, high school should end one year earlier than it does. The last year should be a gap year when everyone travels.

87/Dune the book is good, but both the David Lynch Dune movie AND the recent Dune movie are both even better than the book!

OK I'm gonna stop there. I'm out of hot takes for today, except for the secret 2 or 3 that are too spicy to say in public! :-)