@passenger @HeavenlyPossum i think analyzing these questions — why beyond our gauzy fairy tales do some states seem to succeed for a while? what part of that success represents genuine virtue, what part of it is due to awfulnesses we paper over? how can we sustain the success while increasing the virtues and mitigating the awfulness? — these are the crucial questions. 1/

@passenger @HeavenlyPossum what i don’t think is sufficient is to say, well, just don’t do the awful stuff and everything will be great. to the degree the apparent success depends on the awful stuff, things won’t be great if you just stop. you have to actually figure out what you can do to make thriving consistent with less exploitation and subordination. and that’s hard, but i don’t think impossible. 2/

@passenger @HeavenlyPossum when you analyze the world in functional terms, what is functional and what is moral don’t magically coincide. our work is to figure out how to make goods that contain strong tensions and contradictions between them able to coexist. /fin