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Sure! By the way, if you think my username is too lowbrow for this forum, feel free to request me to change it.
I’m from group 3, and this describes me exactly. One important thing is that people from my cohort didn’t just experience the Internet as liberatory and rebellious, but experienced computing as liberatory and rebellious. The computing environments of the 40s-50s were owned by institutions, but programmers still had a high degree of control. With the advent of the PC, you owned your computer, and operating systems still exposed their inner workings so you could manipulate them. These have gotten locked down over time, and now smartphones don’t even expose the filesystem to users. (This becomes problematic when teaching operating systems to young zoomers!)
The experience of programming has also changed over time. Early programs were usually physical simulations, eg of ballistic trajectories. At the dawn of the PC era, one would write code where one was omnipotent (you could do whatever you wanted) and omniscient (you had to do everything and understand everything that you wanted to make happen).
Sadly, this world of computing and programming, which encouraged a sense of agency and responsibility, is slowly fading away.
To what extent is the YIMBY movement connected with the bicyclist movement? The YIMBY movement seems to be active online, on both Twitter and FB (eg teen memes), yet seems to have very little to show for it, policy-wise. Yet bicyclists don’t seem very publicly organized on social media, yet they’ve managed to wipe out so much downtown street parking and turn 2-lane roads into 1-lane roads, all across America. The latter’s effectiveness is interesting, given that millennials are generally quite sympathetic to the YIMBY cause, yet even liberal millennials get tired of rude bicyclists.
> This is a speech designed to appeal to the sensibilities of a boomer living in rust belt America.
I think it may actually appeal even more to millennials who grew up in Rust Belt America, who have emigrated to one of the Coasts, yet who have nostalgia for their upbringing and revulsion for their new surroundings. It is these people who actually comprise the core of both the New Right and the Dissident Right. The ones who join and are formed by Judeo-Christian religion, like JD Vance, form the New Right. They want to rebuild the Rust Belt economy and culture/religion. The ones who don’t, join the Dissident Right. They don’t think rebuilding is possible, and want to smash the current system as punishment.
Both these groups are small — too small to directly matter electorally. But that’s not the point of Rod’s speech. What these groups lack in numbers, they make up in elite-ness, or potential to form a new elite. Like the original Benedictines, and like the New Right and Dissident Right movements, the Benedict Option is premised on inspiring traitors within the elite.
From that perspective, Rod’s speech is a success.
I think it partly depends on what is meant by “New Right”. Is it the “national conservatives” or the “dissident right” to use Aaron Renn’s classification (https://themasculinist.com/the-masculinist-53-understanding-the-dissident-right/)? Aaron Renn makes a strong case that religion is the primary factor, at least measured in terms of “variance explained.”
Another fascinating split in the New Right relates to China and Xi. Two of the 3 leading NRx writers, Nick Land (eg https://www.xenosystems.net/nrx-with-chinese-characteristics/) and Spandrell (eg https://spandrell.com/2018/01/21/leninism-and-bioleninism/) have long been pro-CCP, at least in a pragmatic sense. Now it seems the third, Moldbug/Yarvin, has joined them (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-and-xi-jinping). This would be unthinkable coming from the national conservative camp, much less the Bush-era Vulcans.
But I do think (thinking in Chait’s terms) that the dissident right is made of people of the same personality type as the Vulcans. To embrace life without faith (including the faith that all men are created equal) and to embrace Xi’s China requires the sort of person who thinks the “dark side” has some merits, I suspect.
Even if taking Taiwan requires military conflict, I would think that China would prefer to have a decisive sea/air victory that makes a ground invasion more-or-less unnecessary. A blockade of Taiwan, followed by a military victory in which a US aircraft carrier is sunk, would probably mean the Chinese could land in Taiwan with little military resistance, right? That could be what Xi envisions as a peaceful reunification.