@stephenjudkins as we shape our much more large-scale social context, in which some people inevitably will need to serve roles as leaders, is personal vindictiveness then a trait we should continue to reward? should we assume the trait is necessary to defend whatever good things leaders lead?
one thing our various systems seem to do is elevate vindictiveness as a character trait. musk, trump, desantis, obviously something has been adaptive for them and vindictiveness is the trait they most obviously share. perhaps this is an aspect of our systems we should work quite consciously to modify. or is leadership by the vindictive socially beneficial in ways that i fail to appreciate?
@misc reason has one answer, emotion has another. i'm not sure which one better deserves the title "me".
@DetroitDan "good" was meant a bit ironically, but it becomes "good precedent" in the sense that courts and other institutions treat it as a legitimating past practice. gerrymandering, for example, has been condemned as antidemocratic since the 19th Century in the US, but the Supreme Court cites its unremedied normalcy to justify not acting against it. It's an "accepted" part of the American political process, lots of precedent!
a bad practice unremedied is good precedent.
@DetroitDan we're probably not going to agree, but i think with respect to the kind of dynamics O'Neill mostly focuses on — that solidaristic BRICS could more effectively reform representation in the UN and other post-WWII institutions — I think quite the opposite. the consensus in the West now would kick RU off the security council and discount any assertions by China for its role vis-a-vis the Ukraine War. That may be right or wrong, but the polarization the war has provoked has made…
@DetroitDan reform of e.g. the UN both more urgent and less likely, as from all sides proposals will be evaluated in zero-sum terms across the lines of putative blocs. prior to the Ukraine War, most of the mainstream liberal West agreed in theory that post-WWII multinational institutions should be reformed to better reflect contemporary population and political heft. i think the mainstream liberal West would now make adherence, as the West sees and defines it, to the Universal Declaration...
@DetroitDan of Human Rights, prerequisite to any such reform, which, rightly or wrongly, will make it easy for the countries that are currently privileged to prevent change they will perceive as adverse...
@DetroitDan I do think the military challenge and resulting sanctions have accelerated, perhaps usefully as O'Neill suggests, financial multipolarity. I don't think that will look anything like a catastrophic collapse of the dollar, though. It portends mostly an end, for better and worse, of the United States' capacity to impose economic sanctions almost unilaterally. In a more financially multipolar world, effective sanctions will require near universal consensus.
Very measured on the BRICS, by the guy who named the club, worth reading in the face of alarmist TicTocced takes on the subject that have become very prevalent. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1758-5899.13195
(via the polycrisis newsletter by @Kmac and Tim Sahay)
@TimothyNoah i mean it might seem far-fetched to you, but if he controlled cbdc isn’t that just the kind of thing *he’d* do? “the public money of the people of florida should not be used to purchase critical race theory indoctrination, and we’re gonna put a stop to it.” if you governed like these people govern, of course you’d fear authoritarianism from the other side. they believe government is authoritarian because that’s their own playbook.
@cocoaphony (my parsimony intuitions do not go with the galaxy take. but if he gets enough bad press, esp from the genx vc master-of-the-universe crowd he values, he might fall back to publicly embracing it!)
@akkartik (thanks!)
Galaxy Take: Musk really *is* a free-expression champion, and he realized the world needed a lesson in just how brittle and capricious a centralized media ecosystem can be.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/6/23673043/twitter-substack-embeds-bots-tools-api
in a game of chicken, no one should be congratulated for their resolve when both players go over the cliff.
This interview of Masha Gessen by David Remnick feels like a kind of oasis in all the controversializing over trans issues. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trans-rights ht @mikethemadbiologist
"modernity derived its cultural power and energy from an unstable ideological compound... [a] mixture of the promise an unfettered individual will realizing its desires coupled to a system which ultimately demand that human desires be managed, predicted, and channeled to serve the ends of a market economy." @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/apocalyptic-ai
About as pithy a summary as you are going to get of how social affairs work and evolve, from @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-diachronic-social.html
@hcetamd creating an option doesn't block. surveillance is a real issue, but it's a Fed rail within a system made up of Fed rails. your ACH transactions are surveillable too, and of course your bank, whom you likely have no reason to trust any more than the Fed, sees all.
About as pithy a summary as you are going to get of how social affairs work and evolve, from @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-diachronic-social.html
America's emerging Great Firewall gets a beta test at — of course — Florida public colleges and universities. TikTok, WeChat, VKontakte, etc are banned from university networks. https://ncfcatalyst.com/congressional-opposition-to-tiktok-finds-testing-ground-on-florida-university-campuses/
@GossiTheDog it is very brave of you to post in your condition.
Over at the QSite, I am only just learning that FedNow — the United States' wayyyy overdue network for enabling many countries have had for years, "real time" (intraday) bank transfers and payments — is a conspiracy to control us, a stepping stone towards (horrors!) CBDC, and the true motive for the murder of Bob Lee.
It's important to remember that Twitter has become basically a successor to Weekly World News in order not to despair too deeply. https://twitter.com/search?q=FedNow