alignments and outcomes:
working class+professional class ⇒ social democracy
professional class+plutocrats ⇒ liberal plutocracy (“neoliberalism”)
working class+plutocrats ⇒ fascism
// i posted this on twitter in 2019. it's terribly simplistic.
// but i still like it, and i'm seeing some relevant conversations.
i always used to, pretty much every stupid day.
it occurs to me that i rarely know the main character any more, though if i have to guess i guess i'd presume it defaults to elon.
"Elementary school students are about 2-3 months behind their pre-COVID selves, while middle-school kids are more like 4-6 months behind. What's even worse is that in the current school year they appear to be falling even further behind" #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/covid-really-did-a-number-on-americas-kids/
// seems not so consistent with the thesis that school closure / remote schooling is the sole culprit here, although of course it may play a role. there has been a lot of trauma and disruption.
"Neoliberal capitalism has done much more damage to the traditional English way of life than 'cultural Marxism' or 'wokesters' ever have." #ChrisDillow on small 'c' conservative which belongs neither to "left" nor "right" https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/07/on-being-conservative.html
"The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree." #ScottAlexander https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank
@pakatter (thanks!)
@DetroitDan @t0nyyates @yoyoel but note again these are political roles, at the direct behest of the executive, not “deep state” within intelligence agencies or other forms of civil service. each president appoint her NSC.
overstating the extent of (nevertheless real) foreign influence ops was a political project by an electoral faction, not the work of some decades-old cadre among unaccountable nameless bureaucrats.
[new draft post] Cornering the future https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/07/10/cornering-the-future/index.html
@AthenasOwl @JonChevreau one’s an overachiever!
@DetroitDan @t0nyyates @yoyoel (i don't think it's right to blame stuff like Hamilton68 on the intelligence agencies per se. i see them as more like Dick Cheney et al's "Office of Special Plans". sure, they involve sympathetic individuals from the intelligence community, but they are the institutional version of motivated reasoning, founded by political actors for political purposes. most people in the actual intelligence agencies are doing their best to do the right thing, i think.)
@DetroitDan @t0nyyates @yoyoel (a tentative observation is that individuals with intelligence agency backgrounds who speak or act publicly, especially when they do so after or outside the formal boundaries of their service, should be taken with particularly large boulders of salt. they sell themselves as knowledgeable insiders when, in my experience, they can be unusually unreliable fabulists. i'd be careful taking these entrepreneurs as representative of their former institutions.)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite you are truly an innovator!
consider how much economic value is literally tossed into landfills because celebrities don’t bring to market their used toothbrushes.
back in the ussr.
you find yourself in a crowd and the humans tak tak tak they are talking talking talking and with all those people and all those words you wonder what they could possibly have that much to say.
the young smoke to flaunt their youth, to flash just how much debilitation they, but not we, can afford.
i used to tweet this on the bird site, this day, most years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_tyWt_9Bfs
@DetroitDan @t0nyyates Gentle with people, tough on ideas is an ideal I generally endorse with respect to public discourse. But there are public figures who exercise influence not by virtue of mere persuasion, but via the exercise of economic or political power. Elon Musk doesn’t offer meaningful arguments in order to persuade. He purchases a public square in order to influence. 1/
@DetroitDan @t0nyyates As a human being, I wish Musk well, as I wish all human beings. But in his capacity as an exerciser of economic and political power, I do not wish him well. I wish him stripped of his extraordinary influence. All billionaires are policy failures, in part because their extraordinary economic power translates to influence that subverts democratic deliberation. Musk is an ostentatious and unapologetic exemplar of that. /fin
@DetroitDan @t0nyyates if you recall it was @yoyoel who called bullshit on that long before musk was on the scene. musk has tried to exonerate by force of will his mostly mistaken prejudices with respect to the moderation of pre-musk twitter. i disliked lots about pre-musk twitter’s moderation, but by comparison to current twitter, they were actually trying (sometimes failing) to adhere to norms they openly set out. now it’s just musk at the colliseum, thumbs up, thumbs down.
paraphrasing @t0nyyates a bit https://twitter.com/t0nyyates/status/1675988026902626305 Elon Musk is the sort of principled libertarian whose motivating principal is maximizing the liberty of plutocrats and autocrats.
the choices he makes — mocking and suppressing speech asserting rights to defy people like him, amplifying fanbois of rightwing strongmen, acceding without resistance to takedown orders by autocrats — all make sense if you grant that Musk indeed has principles and follows them exactly where they lead.
@DetroitDan @SteveRoth i don’t think we have any idea how much or little Russia is “divided”.
