davestrock.bsky.social
Oof, what if we did good things for people instead?
Read a book.
891 posts
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There are few things I miss from university more than the time and space to focus on one thing until deep understanding emerges.
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I was just talking about this with my son as the one thing gen x actually succeeded in.
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Realizing that one only need wait a couple months for the price to drop significantly works in the opposite direction.
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Oh god. Please stop.
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Genuinely curious what a psychologist would say is the best way to break through that.
Hugging random red hatted dudes probably ain't it.
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The idea that left is too mean for critiquing liberals, but liberals neutral is wild.
bsky.app/profile/hrry...
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First, I think most MAGAs would take both the idea they were wrong and the idea they were lied to similarly.
Second, this feels a lot like trying to coexist with cancer.
Maybe this is the first step, but I don't think we get far without honest education and accountability.
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A bit of a "Schrödinger's leftist" thing going on here.
Simultaneously "huge account" and "only interested in differentiating for personal gain"
Or she could just be interested in gaining support for addressing root causes?
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I've literally never heard her name before today 🤷♂️
Profilicity is certainly a negative, but it's basically impossible to avoid.
The capitalism the sign holder is ok with created the thing you dislike.
It's almost like she's pointing at root causes and you're saying "don't look there."
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Imagine thinking these people so fragile.
Many would probably understand the poor taste of their joke if it was explained to them.
But to you the person critical of complacency is an "idiot", but the complacent are neutral?
One side can joke but the other can't?
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Yes, and if they can't hear the criticism you're deriding they're not actually allies and should not be trusted to not fall to a lesser fascism that is more palatable to them.
I'm all for broad coalitions.
But if we have to be quiet about our interpretation of really, it's not really a coalition.
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The biggest alienator is the capitalist production system that this sign holder defends.
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Am I not allowed to feel alienated by that sign?
I think alienation is an internal response, not an external stimulus.
One could choose to learn and correct their previous understanding, or one can claim a victimized version of alienation.
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How is the worse version of what was already happening going?
Are you serious with this?
Neoliberalism was doing over 5 decades what Trump is attempting to do in 5 months.
That's not a critique of the left in any way.
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Ahh yeah, the neutral "dying".
It wasn't "being killed" over and over by people with names and addresses, right?
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This quote tweet is literally pointing to a LACK of solidarity.
Status quo folks are not in solidarity with folks who need or want significant change. They are an obstacle to it.
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Because it's so hard:
bsky.app/profile/dave...
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Oh man, rereading this just after posting and I'm already embarrassed that this doesn't really point to a clean understanding.
What if we just used terms of art as intended and didn't project "boring" onto things we don't yet understand?
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"Inherent contradictions" could possibly be a simplified shorthand, but that doesn't seem significantly easier, looses a lot of meaning, and removes the term from its traceable history.
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Looks like I was overly ambitious in my attempt to distill dialectics to a single paragraph. This thread still doesn't do it justice.
Maybe I could do be if it wasn't stream of consciousness 🤷♂️
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Hegel took Plato's dialectics and tried to tease apart how it worked, labeling the ideas above as such, but people so often drop the part about how the ideas discovered are inherent in the thing and did not come from the discoverer, but instead are necessary consequence of the existence of thing.
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Namely that it is a *process* that *identifies* new ideas by the interplay of inherent contradictions.
It's not that one thinks of a thing and another thinks of an anti-thing.
It's that the anti-thing becomes evident because it was always an inherent part in the understanding of the first thing.
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Seriously. Many people think "dialectics" refers to "comparing two things".
Even the slightly more complicated oversimplification of Hegel's dialects, ie "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" ignores the most important parts.
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The theory of "everyone as small business owner" is not great actually.
It's just a semantic way of hiding extreme atomization / individualization.
It's the opposite of unionization and collectivization.
This kind of theory should be laughed at.
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I wrote about this recently for Noema! That time was also defined by the fruits of an activist, interventionist and progressive government — one that changes the market, not with tariffs, but with research and guidelines that make life in consumer society better. www.noemamag.com/the-good-soc...
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And what was the top marginal income tax rate?
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I dunno wtf you're talking about.
I called you a "defender of Biden"
And I pointed to the similar attitude you and Vance have, that we should all be so grateful for the minor positive policy changes by an admin that also enacted many major negative policy changes/continuations of previous admin.
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It's so weird it can't be "and" with defenders of Biden.
Yea, he turned (slightly) back towards the New Deal AND he was a strike breaker AND he negotiated them a better contract AND it was worse than they deserve/would have gotten on strike.
This is why Dems lost.
You and Vance: "Say thank you"
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Imagine thinking we live in a "Democratic society"
Must be nice.
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Time Magazine, 1957
time.com/archive/6869...
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It's like you guys can't stand the question "Why?"
The reality is you should be asking it over and over and over.
There is the concept of "Five Whys", but I prefer:
"Ask why until you get the the why that makes you cry"
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But why DONT we regulate it?
Certainly has nothing to do with the production mode 🙄
Even pretending that the huge consolidation that has happened in every industry since the inception of the Internet is somehow unrelated to these firms' ability to keep people in the funnel is insane.
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lol, how tf are you going to explain an acceleration of exploitation and atomization of the population without examining the production system underpinning it all, and then pretend you're trying to understand 🙄
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What "technologies" were invented?
Literally name them.
You can't because they don't exist.
Nothing new was created to exploit this desire, it was just the application of old techniques in a new medium.
It did not have to go that direction. This inevitably is insane.
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This is why everyone is famously addicted to heroine 🙄
"Nothing we could do. This has to be the best of all possible worlds or it wouldn't exist" 🙄
Why do you guys work so hard to miss the actual machinations.
What did Upton Sinclair say about that?
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There is an obvious middle-ground between the private unhindered exploitation we enacted and the far better world where it remained public: a highly regulated private industry
But people like Will want to argue that potential away with nonsense like "no one wanted that, they wanted what they want"
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"The internet" didn't great Trump.
"The internet" was a bunch of science nerds sending large data sets to better understand the universe.
Capitalism created Trump.
It co-opted a public good for private profit and then tuned "the algorithm" to increase that profit.