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The End Times Profile picture
The End Times
@TheAgeofShoddy
Ugh, fine.
Nov 17 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This thread is honestly argued and well, but I believe it misses the fundamental issues in two ways. First:
Aug 23 • 9 tweets • 7 min read
Well now.



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Nov 25, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Many Jewish leaders believed, in the shadow of the murderous particularism of mid-century Germany, that the solution was universalism. But universalism is just that- it dissolves all bonds, renders all down to base components; it is incompatible with collective identity. Image It is as incompatible in the end, with Jewishness as it is with any other collective identity. Thus the ideal had to be a sort of kludge: non-universalist universalism, universalism for some, in some places, at some times, in some degree- but not all, everywhere, always, total.
Nov 15, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
And the hits just keep on coming from Sober, Intellectual Conservatism today. The adults are back online. Image There’s an entire worldview that boils down to this headline, and part of political life is about the constant collective need to drive these people out of power with a whip. I am not a populist because “populism” means nothing, but resistance to misrule is a human duty. Image
Nov 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is not a dunk, but the open bipartisan cross-ideological tolerance, verging into outright celebration, of racial hierarchy and racial vengeance, racial superiority and racial blood-guilt, made this inevitable. The form of anti-semitism is a shared framework now. This is why hatred of Jews, hatred of white people, hatred of men, etc. are not separable as issues. The patterns we see now are very much characteristic of historical anti-semitism, but those patterns became institutionalized by choosing more politically acceptable targets.
Sep 7, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The argument has been that there is something inherently superior, both morally and practically, about migrants- they were more willing to work, more entrepreneurial, willing to make due with less, more in tune with American values, more patriotic (somehow), thus more deserving. That’s easy to believe when you’re comparing an idealized migrant to the worst assumptions you harbor about your domestic enemies; less so when comparing actual human beings, their needs and strengths and frailties, against all of your most cherished assumptions about yourself.
Aug 30, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
It’s worth noting that there is almost no one in the entire GOP who is making any kind of a case, to anyone, for why they individually or the party as a whole should be put in power. It’s like the idea of doing such a thing doesn’t even register as possible or necessary. There’s a negative case based on issues with Democrats, but even that’s barely getting made; and what’s the positive case? “We’re angry about non-specific process violations at DOJ”? What group of Americans has any reason to think they stand to benefit from a GOP presidency?
Jun 25, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
In some ways the difference between left and right is that the left will create a sense of belonging and community which it holds over the heads of people with the threat of leaving them isolated, while the right cuts to the chase and just tells them to kill themselves up front. The left will spend decades carefully building up institutional capacity through NGOs and associations, weaving their way into the lives of young people and becoming the default against which other things are measured; the right will say, hey, prove you’re not defective.
Jun 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Always it comes back to this: a demand for people to stop trying to understand the world or exert any control over it, because they are not legitimate actors with any right to do so. It is the fundamental assumption of totalitarianism, whatever other trappings it takes on. Every excuse of this kind is an attempt to set up an unchallengeable source of absolute authority that people must pay deference to, no matter the cost. Science, God, the state, “progress,” a book, the nation, men cycle through justifications, but the same impulse remains below.
Jun 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The mistake here is to think that formats which privilege useless, badly-designed, often fraudulent arguments which steal the name of “study” is innately better. But this is the same demand as “debate me”- an attempt to load the deck on fundamental questions to avoid scrutiny. The act of dismissing any ideas or perspectives that you don’t value as inherently untruthful is itself an almost textbook definition of bad faith; and there it is right in the dead center of a defense of “the science.”

This is a desperate claim of privilege, no more or less. Image
Jun 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
People carrying high school with them too far into life is a recognized trope, but there’s a second phase of it in which people finally settling down in middle age and people who were always settled and self-consciously boring regard each other with a complex tangle of emotions. They more people make it into their 30’s and 40’s without lasting marriages, the more of a fault line this is going to become. People finally feeling things tilt their way but only as a last option, people still terrified of “settling,” seeing old resentments in each other, etc.
Jun 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
You can pick apart the individual biography and choices of any one person who presents their situation as a major collective problem, but if you have to do this over and over and over, maybe it actually is a collective problem. And that may require a policy response. In this situation there’s two real answers:

1) This problem is not amenable to state action, because (reasons).

2) This is our plan to deal with the problem.

If you choose neither you effectively lose a default judgment, and those are hard to undo in the court of politics.
Jun 14, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1. 2.
Jun 13, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One theory is that urban disorder represents, to a certain kind of young man, the idea of opportunity for physical adventure of the kind young men have always sought, and which seems otherwise unavailable now for various reasons. It is their idea of how to prove manhood. You can’t join the military because Our Kind Doesn’t Do that, and you won’t become a firefighter because there are class expectations around education, but you can tell yourself almost often enough to believe it that you proved something by living in a gritty, tough city.
May 17, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Correct, she wants female attention for turning down male attention. This is as always about women competing with women and using men as a currency in which they keep score. What’s changed is that getting male attention used to be high-status; now rejecting it is. This is not, ultimately, a negative on women in general- of course women are going to compete with women, as men compete with men (albeit in different ways). The problem is that we’ve elevated contempt, disgust, and lack of interest in each other as values to aspire to.
May 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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May 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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May 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
You refuse to use the words that describe your actual position because doing so marks you out as insufficiently radical, thus presumptively bigoted and worthless, within your own group, and expect everyone else to read your mind and save you from this social dilemma. You also require them to carry the cost of your strategic ambiguity, both in being required to identify as “racist” by acknowledging your “real” meaning, and also of having to accept the risk of you changing mid-stream and deciding that actually you do mean “abolish.”
Apr 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The rare reverse-Baldwin here, as an aging former player confuses a cylinder of blanks for live rounds. Ted Kennedy, the last living link to Kennedy myth, died in office 14 years ago in 2009; it feels like 40. The last nationally elected Kennedy left office two years later in 2011, to little real notice. Generations have grown old since “The Kennedys” were a political focal point.
Apr 5, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Two edges of a blade: So I got jumped yesterday in DTLA on my way to a job interview. From what I could make out the guy had decided that I was dressed too well and this had to mean I was LAPD, and “my cover was blown” so he was going to “cut my throat.” Anyway, he gave it a go and it didn’t work out.
Apr 4, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The problem is that Biden and his circle do not conceive of their own legitimacy or the point of policy in terms of America as an actual nation, which they are quite upfront about. That what “America is an idea” is intended to convey- idealism in opposition to anything concrete.