ericforest.bsky.social
662 posts
40 followers
80 following
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I’m convinced a lot of people vote republican because they’re mad about how many minority characters are on tv these days, and it’s like, the president cannot change that!
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Which is also true for childhood, but… maybe less so?
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I feel like this is very dependent on how satisfying your job is and your financial situation.
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I guess “better” in this case means a republicans ruining the economy.
But if we get to the next election (assuming we have one) and the press is touting the strong republican economy, democrats need a way to counteract that.
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It matter because it’s relevant for next election . If the lesson was dems lost because inflation, it means they should be okay next election if there’s less
inflation.
But if they lost because the media kneecapped them, that will happen again, so they need to have a plan to counteract it.
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That’s kind of what I’m saying. The OP was saying democrats lost because of inflation, but it wasn’t actually inflation, it was false media narratives about the economy that played on people misperceptions.
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Sure, but that still complicates the narrative.
People weren’t mad about inflation, they were mad prices went up, and didn’t know or didn’t care that they were making more money because of democratic policies.
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That explanation is complicated by the fact that inflation had pretty much gotten back to normal by the time the election rolled around.
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Point being Star Trek’s commentary on the real world isn’t always clear, but in this case it feels like there’s a pretty consistent pattern.
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In that episode the writing comes down more obviously in favor of indigenous people relocating in response to great power decisions, which sets a pattern that is repeated in the maquis conflict.
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Also related: there’s another episode (I liked it up and it’s s03e02) that works as an even better analogy to Israel or the balkans, where the federation cedes a planet to some aliens and have to move a lost human colony that’s been on the planet for generations.
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That’s fair, it’s definitely not perfectly analogous, but that feels like a dodge to me. The relevant question is whether a fictional analogy to real world issues is strong enough that an opinion on the fiction applies to the real world. And in this case I think it does.
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I mean Star Trek has always relied on analogies to real life issues. And the showrunnerrs themselves have said the maquis and bajorans were an analogy for the real life political conflicts of the time.
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The showrunners have said in interviews the Maquis conflict were supposed to evoke the Palestinian and Balkan conflicts.
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Noted: if land is ceded to a group in a treaty by a colonial power, the actual inhabitants of that land should just leave.
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A colonial power cedes land to another group, and the original inhabitants of that land refuse to leave and start a conflict? Seems pretty similar to me.
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Careful, posting “one side of this fictional Israel/palestine conflict is obviously in the wrong” is a good way to blow up your feed.
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I think it was a very difficult situation last year because explicitly calling Gaza a genocide actually made it more likely the genocide would continue. Which is of course what has happened.
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I always assumed graeber was expanding his experience of the academic administration explosion and applied it to to cover all of society, which maybe doesn’t actually hold true, but I always thought it was a compelling argument.
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It seems pretty likely these administrators don’t really do anything, since universities functioned just fine before the expansion of administration.
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Also I think graebers thesis applies the easiest to academia and that’s where his best examples come from. Over the last twenty years there’s been a huge expansion of academic administration, that has captured more and more of the money in the university system.
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Bullshit jobs offers a reason that hasn’t happened, which is that society has just created busy work to keep people occupied.
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I think one thing that stuck in my head from back when I read it is t contained in the book itself. But I always remember Keynes predicted with advances in automation people would only need to work twenty hours a week to support themselves, but that never happened.
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I really enjoyed the book when it came out and thought it made a lot of sense. I want to defend it but it’s been so long since I read it that it’s hard for me to do so.
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I’d pay someone to think of a way. That’s what being rich is all about.
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Yeah I know. It’s follow the rules.
I just meant I’d build a 10 million dollar robot that followed the guidelines and be unbeatable.
I’d be the ultimate rich guy heel
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Awful. It’s terrible that there’s absolutely no way to stop this.
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Taxing away a lot of Silicon Valley’s money and using it to upgrade infrastructure and provide health care would be a really good idea.
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Even if a Soviet style planned economy isn’t viable, the government should probably direct a lot more economic activity than it does right now.
The US has given the private sector access to the vast majority of the nations wealth, and they’ve mostly used it to create apps to screw over workers.
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We’ll have to see how bad the shortages are. There weren’t empty shelves during the dotcom bubble burst or 2008. That’s more like Covid except we can still go out.
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I was a huge Trekkie as a kid, and strange new worlds is the only one of the new shows I like. It’s just so well put together.
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I’d create a military grade robot and use it to compete on Battlebots.
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Which was Will’s original point: That the internet has fundamentally altered how information is spread in a way where the systems of government designed during the era of the printing press can’t function anymore.
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You could make the argument it was military technology rather than media. There were lots of peasant rebellions during the medieval era but they all failed because aristocrats had a lock on military technology.
But the effect of the printing press on how idea spread was also a key part.
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And that is sort of similar to what happened in 2024. The press gave people the idea things were bad. And there were problems, but the media changed the perception of them.
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So yeah it’s not material condition, it’s expectation of material conditions. Peasants in 11th century France thought this was as good as it gets, it wasn’t until the printing press gave people the idea things could be better that they started fighting for more.
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And like, material conditions from 1000-1500 were by definition much worse than they were during the French Revolution, but there wasn’t a successful mass uprising against the aristocracy.
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I think his point was there were many points in history where France had a terrible economy and they didn’t have a revolution, so there had to be other variables at work.
Which is true. European countries went bankrupt every 10-15 years in the early modern period.
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The future is unknowable but it will be funny if in the future rich countries desperately compete to attract as many immigrants as possible to keep their populations stable.
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The Wi spa is an excellent Korean spa. Always a great way to relax
If you want something cheesy i had a good time at the magic castle
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A couple of them vote democrat and complain about it endlessly, and a couple vote third party.
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That could be just my family but I get the feeling a lot of independent’s animus to the left is over race or gender issues.
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Sort of disagree with this. I have family that likes to say they’re independent, and what it actually turns out to be is they agree with most dem policies but they believe the dems favor blacks to the detriment of everyone else.
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I don’t know how it can be a tv show to him if he actually knows people who have been deported. That seems pretty real to me.
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Well there’s only so many ways to get that much attention. If she can’t be an entertainer or a businesswoman how else could she get the level of media coverage and access she has? Maybe politician is where her skill set rests.
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This is why I like him. Figuring out which takes are good and which are bad is good for my brain.
If I almost always agree or disagree with someone i don’t think as hard about what they’re saying.
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I like the idea the technology is heavily regulated for seniors but they used it to make a game and didn’t bother to regulate it at all. Seems like the kind of thing that would happen.
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Yeah I went back and rewatched San junipero after this episode and they do in that episode