[New Post] Round up, wind up https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9881.html
"The problem with woke capitalism is that it's no substitute for a union." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/
If somebody believes a lie, and then tells it, are they lying?
@paninid @billseitz I guess it's right out of that same passage of Keynes. ("Thus the remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last.")
But in my own view, interest rate policy is a bad lever to modulate demand, we'd be better off keeping short rates between 5% ± 2% and use other tools when that degree of "fine-tuning" isn't enough.
@paninid @billseitz "The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom." —J.M. Keynes
Here's to more resilient bubbles!
@karchie I agree 100%. The let's-ban-woke crowd is not there to "protect children" but to exercise power in hopes of imposing terrible policies and an unjust hierarchy on us all, and we should plainly say that. 1/
@karchie It's not "book banning" per se we're objecting to. We're kind of hijacking a virtuous aura from older civil rights battles by framing it that way, but we're not making our truest or strongest case, and we're leaving ourselves open to fascists' most effective persuasive tool, the claim that liberals are the real fascists because we impose a hierarchy based on who actually gets to enjoy putatively universal liberal rights, and from whom they are somehow withdrawn. /fin
@admitsWrongIfProven Agreed that age-appropriate may be a reasonable basis for library curation choices. But then much of the "book banning" debate in the US is just disagreement about whether LGBTQ+ themes are age appropriate. I think they are appropriate for any age, but others disagree.
You hint that "nonviolent ideas" might be a criterion. If so, that clearly distinguishes the Turner Diaries (which is agitprop for violent revolutionary racism) and could justify its suppression. 1/
@admitsWrongIfProven But that could justify lots of eg Marx and Marxist works as well. As well as, say, writings by founders of the American republic, who after all advocated violent revolution under the circumstances in which they lived. /fin
@LouisIngenthron Ha! Maybe less notable than I think!
Sometime in the 1990s I actually read the Turner Diaries, as an old-school physical book. I remember getting challenged in a cafe in Cambridge MA, angrily asked "What are you reading?" I'm like, hey, I'm a rootless cosmopolitan Jew but some motherfucker just blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City and I want to understand WTF they are on about.
@LouisIngenthron @karchie Yes. There were a lot of those that were unpleasant. But notability is usually enough to keep them (dangerously for our sanity!) in the library, where we migt accidentally begin them even if we are not assigned them...
@karchie To be clear, I'm not arguing that "Turner Diaries" need to be in every high-school library! I'm mostly suggesting we acknowledge that we nearly all are okay with content-based decisions about accessibility in libraries, and that accusing those we disagree with of "banning" while pretending we would never do any such thing is mistaken and ultimately unhelpful. (I also agree almost nothing shld be state-banned. Amazon does carry Mein Kampf, I guess bc historical or scholarly importance.)
@LouisIngenthron Again, we're not disagreeing in principle. We both agree that it's legit for libraries to make choices on the basis of some nonideological mix of popularity, notability, value-as-a-reference, etc.
I'd put to you, though, that the fact that I could bring up the Turner Diaries and pretty much all of my interlocutors know what I am talking about suggests that it meets a notability threshold that, absent other concerns, would be sufficient for many libraries to carry it.
@LouisIngenthron @karchie I guess the question I posed was trying specifically to acknowledge that. I agree there's no issue if we just think no one is interested in Turner Diaries. A library can't carry everything. But I don't think that's actually why Turner Diaries aren't in government libraries. I think there'd be more interest in it than in lots of books libraries routinely carry, and that it's obviously a notable work (even if it is a bad novel in more than an ethical sense).
@LouisIngenthron I think that's principled enough, as long as you acknowledge — which you do — that the *status quo* then is government suppression of Turner Diaries that should be remedied by its inclusion in age-appropriate, well-contextualized government provided sources of books. (Obviously that is not the case right now, so you are arguing for more affirmative government action to undo its current suppression of bad speech.)
@admitsWrongIfProven I certainly agree that forcing anyone to do menial work without pay is fascist or some epithet just as bad or worse. Enslavement is never good policy, in an ethical (or any other) sense.
But pay (and work conditions) are continuous, so it takes judgment to distinguish between "wage slavery" (what if we pay them 1¢ per hour?) and something maybe reasonable. 1/
@admitsWrongIfProven I don't think having some kind of public works corps ppl could volunteer for as part of a path to legal immigration is necessarily fascist or a bad idea. (To be less coy, I think it could be a very good idea.) But the ethical quality of a proposal like that depends on the actual quality of the conditions ppl would volunteer into: are the pay + conditions sufficiently decent that we can understand this as people reasonable "paying dues" rather than horrifyingly enslaved? /fin
@karchie i’m not a great fan of Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, because I think in practice once we accept it we have no principled grounds for line drawing. the same case for free speech broadly (we might be wrong!) should chasten us in imagining we can identify meritless intolerance.
but putting that aside, at least invoking the PoT is an open and principled way of acknowledging that sometimes we do mean to suppress things, and that what we are objecting to is bad criteria for doing so.
@admitsWrongIfProven who is discussing forced work for asylum seekers? i’m asking not rhetorically — fascist or not, i think liberalizing immigration on condition of participating in some kind of work program (“you can come, but you have to pay your dues”) might be a worthwhile way of overcoming public resistance to allowing entry by people otherwise in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. (is it fascist to consider this?)
@karchie the same government libraries that Gender Queer is being pulled from I very strongly suspect don’t carry Turner Diaries.
do you disagree? do you think that choice is content neutral, just that libraries can’t carry everything and Turner Diaries isn’t notable enough?
listening to an NPR segment discussing “Gender Queer” as a “banned book”, i looked up “Gender Queer” on Amazon, and it was there, available to purchase. i looked up “Turner Diaries”, and it was not.
“Gender Queer” is, I am sure, “banned” from many schools and public libraries (which also, I suspect, don’t carry “Turner Diaries”).
should we be outraged by the suppression (“banning”) of “Turner Diaries” too, or are we arguing more about the criteria of suppression than the fact thereof?
"What the Nordics Can Teach California About Sector Bargaining" #NickWarino https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/10/what-the-nordics-can-teach-california-about-sector-bargaining/