parchment.bsky.social
189 posts
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Discussion Master
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But yes, the world would be better off if there was more class solidarity at the bottom. Millionaires seems to manage it just fine, while the bottom quintiles fight like crabs in a bucket, with the upper middle class fiercely guarding their comfort at everyone's expense.
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I agree that, fundamentally, class is a huge driver of discrimination. Perhaps this is just framing; for me, even if class is the disease, sometimes we need to treat the symptoms as well. To someone in chronic pain, that pain isn't number 2 just because it's not the underlying cause.
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My point: rank ordering issues is difficult w/o context. Poverty and race are connected, but one is not easily reducible to the other. Red-lining wasn't just about poor people, it was often about poor non-white people. Class, race, and gender are all issues that must be addressed.
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Some of the research I've seen definitely does consider class bias. And it does change the numbers, as one might predict: poor people are disproportionately the target of policing. But so are men, and yet they don't experience across the board discrimination, it's contextual.
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I agree more black police officers won't fix anything, and I suspect that's because racism (and classism and sexism) are often systemic and institutionally reinforced. You can't replace the bad apples in the barrel if it's the barrel making the apples bad in the first place.
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All the research I've seen demonstrates a racial bias in traffic stops, even when class is considered. Google/Semantic Scholar have quite a collection of accessible papers addressing the issue of "driving while black".
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I don't think you're ignoring race, and I don't think objecting to ranking racism and class means I'm ignoring class. I think class is important. I think gender is important. I think race is important. They'll be important to different degrees depending on the context.
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Definitely closes the gap. But racism (or gender) hits in ways that wealth cannot easily erase, since wealth is not always conspicuous. Even within class there are hierarchies of power. In a nutshell: I agree with your emphasis on class, but I feel weird about ranking it in absolute terms.
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I don't think you're pretending racism doesn't exist, and I definitely agree that class is a hugely overlooked issue. In a lot of cases I wish we acknowledged class more! But ignoring the effects of racism on class or ignoring how racism can weaken the benefits of class is problematic as well.
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My point is that it's very difficult to come up with an objective ordered list of the issues in America because issues overlap/interact differently depending on context, e.g., comparing a white woman to a black man in a business environment vs being pulled over by police.
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And that black man had a butter smooth presidency because class, right? Intersectionality means "first" and "second" might be reversed in some cases or identical in others. We can work on reforming two kinds of oppression at once and we probably have to.
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I decide whether I need to make the points I’m making. You decide whether it’s worth your time to engage. I’m sorry I “forced” you off-script.
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“Use the right words” is high philosophy? Others in the main thread have made points that need more attention; there should be more talk on the impact of air campaigns, and the questionable practice of treating them as a safe default. But sure, I’m not anti-bomb enough to be anti-bomb.
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Also, my point wasn’t that bombing is good. It is not. It was that bombing is bad so let’s talk about bombing and not some other thing that would also be bad but is not happening.
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I shouldn’t have to earn the right to make a specific point by proving I’m “on the right side”. I agree that if all I do is tear down arguments like this, it’s in bad faith. But I shouldn’t be judged ON ONE REPLY. I think we need to be specific because the specificity is horrible.
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No lecture or approval offered. You posted in a social space and I shared my perspective. Sorry if I failed your ideological purity test.
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Sure! I’m not advocating civility, that’s often a cover for “shut up and stand in the corner”. I’m advocating this: call out the consequences of actions we disagree with in clear and precise terms so when we tell people to fuck themselves, it’s the right people and for the right reasons.
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I do not think the US should be bombing Yemen, I think we should use the word BOMBING because that means we can meaningfully talk about the consequences. I give more than a fuck about being accurate in my protests, but appreciate you’d rather just be rude on the internet.
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Playing semantics is conflating “bombing” and “invasion” because they both cost human lives. Both can be condemned in the strongest terms w/o impoverishing our political vocabulary for shock and awe rhetoric. Also: there are more categories of bad political actor than “terrorist”.
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Agreed. People are trying to save you from yourself because they’ve been there: don’t get mad, take the save.
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There is nothing dumb about wanting to eat a cinnamon bun the size of a small horse.
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Getting mad is unacceptable, but asking seems normal and probably a healthy part of learning. Assessing the complexity of a project on a cursory examination is a mark of craft mastery so I wouldn’t expect beginners to know unless they ask.
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They’ll just say “tunnels”. Presumably Israel’s real enemy is a well-coordinated strike force of moles moonlighting as doctors.
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Our problem has never been population, per se, it’s consumption and distribution. The Haves currently do not practice good resource management, and either the Have-Nots will continue to suffer, or the system will break when they start consuming at Have rates. Unless we change the system.
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It’s nothing that complicated. “Artificial intelligence” is part of the current commercial hype cycle, as was social media and the sharing economy before it. From a technological perspective, AI has seen multiple busts and booms, but this time there’s a lot more money behind it.
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My ideological purity is more important than half-decent solutions and “lesser evils”. So what if there are fatal consequences to my moral smugness, I can just claim that everything is bad so why try.
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Luckily, sometimes dismantling is easier than mantling. Sometimes it goes the other way. Guess it depends on the mantle and how many people have a vested interest in its current state.
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Habba: I’m trying to get it in.
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And now you are fighting 700 million Christians on two fronts 🫠
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I agree that asymmetry does not morally validate terrorism, but it does complicate the response, as we’ve seen. Likewise, indiscriminate destruction, particularly when it results in mass civilian death, is not validated by terrorism.
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But there are others who have drawn a line where “collateral damage” becomes disproportionately high. There must be a point where it goes from “unfortunate consequence of urban warfare” to “blatant disregard for civilian death”, no?
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There is a difference btw “combatants present so green light to kill everyone in the area” and “civilian infrastructure repurposed for military ends”. This is complicated by asymmetrical warfare; where exactly do we expect low-tech military combatants to be, if not among the civilian population?
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The second sentence is the answer to the first. It seems that as much as the trolls want to silence decent folk, they cannot stand the pure cacophony of embittered madness that results when dissent has been fully expunged. They don’t want to win, they want to fight. Forever.
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Maybe the approach shouldn’t be “who do I politically align with” as much a “who can I deal with in good faith”. The answer may be “nobody”, but I’m skeptical of the claim that both parties fail the latter condition to the same degree.
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What forms of credibility do you accept? Is there a form one can fill out?
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I can never decide if he’s doing it because: a) being referential is the only way he knows how to connect with people, or b) he is incapable of imagining a new thing. I’m not sure which fate is worse, living meme or terminally unoriginal.
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Have you found anyone who condemns Hamas’ initial provocation and Israel’s response in equal measure?
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Understood; just clarifying since I think some may take your complication of the issue as an outright denial that it is a problem. Thanks for indulging my thoroughness!
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But shouldn't we take the silencing of dissent just as seriously, even if it isn't widespread? Or perhaps, before it becomes normalised and widespread?
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So you encouraged someone to engage in a spirit of sincerity only to sit back with a self-satisfied smirk, having lured them into the trap of... being civil. Congratulations, I guess?
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Gotcha. Which seems like a wise and nuanced approach. There are, however, other troubling aspects of how the "war for hearts and minds" has been progressing during this war (on both sides) which might make this seem more like a canary and less like random, regrettable bird death, so to speak.
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In different contexts. In what sense are using it here?
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I don't think Hamas has as far to fall in my esteem as Israel does, so my judgements and reactions differ. Others might have similarly different expectations of the groups, hence how they apportion criticism. Also: I can think both sides are guilty without implicating every Palestinian and Israeli.
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Your knowledge and first hand experience does make your input especially valuable, but for those of us looking to sharpen our minds (rather than our knives) we crave slightly more. We're not owed it; your time, your choice. That said, even as a one off, this story seems like bad news, no?
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And while it's a nasty trick to hold someone's affiliations against their trustworthiness in a debate, it's not entirely unfair to question the motives of a fox arguing that, no, really, those chickens had it coming.
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Academic discourse shouldn't rely on a backstop of "taking someone at their word". Expertise should be considered but it can't be the only thing holding an argument together, especially in an anonymous forum where it's difficult to verify the bona fides of their interlocutor.
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Tons of people have been pushing for ending the war, so presumably you're not talking to -those- Palestinians, right?
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What is your refutation of their claim, exactly? Share with the group, we don't want to be led astray.
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"You can't defeat angry, crazy man unless you pretend he's neither. Unless you can... but let's pretend he's neither anyway?"
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Boards will never wonder this. The strategy is to generate profit from no/low paid workers and shuffle this money around between members of an executive class. They could replace business decision-making with AI now but they won't; that would be economic suicide rather than economic serial murder.