I like this essay a lot. The map 401'd on me so the lines are on a tiling of error barcodes which really adds to it lol. I'll check out the book too. :)
Lmao perfect, time to move into my crank era.
I haven't, but I've just added it to my list. It sounds good from the description. :)
Anatomy of an AI System - The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources. By Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018)
While this kind of thing isn't quite 'theory', it definitely has some elements of theory within it, but it also uses very grandiose writing and mythological references. This one seems to be created as a museum exhibit with some connection to Mozilla.
Is there a name for this type of essay or a way I could find more like it? This sort of thing is very fun to read even if it's not serious theory. The subject matter is more or less unimportant to me.
The footnote for this one has this quote too:
Together, the three elements that I just described create a kind of narcissistic orgasm of defeat and purity. The subject takes pride in not having any relationship with the entire historic concrete movement of the working class socialist and liberation revolutions. They take pride in not having any theoretical or political connection to the revolutions in China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola. They are, instead, proud of the supposed purity that their theory is not contaminated by the hardship of exercising power, by the contradictions of historical processes. Being pure is what provokes this narcissistic orgasm. This purity is what makes them feel superior.
Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture - Jones Manoel
same lol
basically what's said already in this thread, but the podcast covered this lol
Copied from The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber - Heavily edited down to summarize.
These books are not just appealing because they create endless daydream material for the inhabitants of bureaucratic societies. Above all, they appeal because they continue to provide a systematic negation of everything bureaucracy stands for. Just as Medieval clerics and magicians liked to fantasize about a radiant celestial administrative system, so do we, now, fantasize about the adventures of Medieval clerics and mages, existing in a world in which every aspect of bureaucratic existence has been carefully stripped away.
- Fantasy worlds tend to be marked by an absolute division of good and evil - this negates the bureaucratic principal of neutrality
- The existence in fantasy universes of demi-human species—gnomes, drow, trolls, and so on—which are fundamentally human, but absolutely impossible to integrate under the same larger social, legal, or political order, creates a world where racism is actually true. - this negates the bureaucratic principal of indifference
- Legitimate power in fantasy worlds tends to be based on pure charisma, only the villians will use systems of administration - this negates the bureaucratic principals of regularity and predictability
- In fantasy, political life centers around the creation of stories - this negates the mechanical nature of bureaucratic operations
- Protagonists are endlessly engaging with riddles in ancient languages, obscure myths and prophecies, maps with runic puzzles and the like. - Bureaucratic procedures in contrast are based on a principle of transparency.
However, in another sense, D&D represents the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy. There are catalogs for everything: types of monsters (stone giants, ice giants, fire giants …), each with carefully tabulated powers and average number of hit points (how hard it is to kill them); human abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution …); lists of spells available at different levels of capacity (magic missile, fireball, passwall …); types of gods or demons; effectiveness of different sorts of armor and weapons; even moral character (one can be lawful, neutral, or chaotic; good, neutral, or evil; combining these produces nine possible basic moral types …). The books are distantly evocative of Medieval bestiaries and grimoires. But they are largely composed of statistics. All important qualities can be reduced to number. It’s also true that in actual play, there are no rules; the books are just guidelines; the Dungeon Master can (indeed really ought to) play around with them, inventing new spells, monsters, and a thousand variations on existing ones.
you gotta admit that it makes for some funny posts though
chat, is this real??
iirc it's from ubuntu-advantage-tools - you can remove it, but it's set as a dependent for something important (ubuntu-minimal?) which makes it really annoying. I don't use ubuntu anymore so hopefully someone who knows more will stop by.
I have no idea who that is, honestly even with the body text as context
E: yeah, I've seen this picture before. Never knew the character's name though
I'm pretty sure FDIC gives the bank money rather than individuals. Very rich people sometimes do targeted bank runs for profit, the SBV collapse is a good example. It mostly works when corporate deposits exceed FDIC because hypothetically they won't get it back (in practice they did iirc). Sorta tangentially, I think banking law people were worried(?) hopeful(?) that this sorta negates the privatize banking system broadly. Cause essentially SBV, and any bank, was backed by the fed as 'too big to fail'. Idk everyone just stopped talking about that aspect of it a couple weeks later and it was never resolved. (lol)
Doing a bank run is hard though, because to do it you need to exceed the bank's reserve, which is hard even as a group. Plus, it kinda doesn't benefit the people doing it, right? Like if you did a bank run it would collapse and you'd need to apply for an account at a different bank. Maybe they'd even know you did a bank run and not accept you. (Probably not IRL, but hypothetically). You can't really profit off of the bank collapsing unless you have a lot of money / leverage / etc.
An additional collateral attack than can be made is to simply not pay any debts (mortgages, credit cards, etc) owed to that same bank.
Debt strikes are much easier to coordinate. It's still really really hard, but it's easier because people tend to have a lot of debt. It's still very risky for the people doing it. The gambit is essentially for the bank to settle for less than the total debt.
E: also maybe check out The Debt Collective
To fight nihilism broadly, but I guess also to be annoying unfortunately. I think this essay that someone linked explains why nihilism is bourgeois and evil, but I haven't read that specific one so I'm not sure.
tbh for that part of the post I just looked up "bourgeois nihilism guy" and took the first result. I don't think that's usually the takeaway though.
Sorry this was sorta vagueposting / badposting on my end. My point is all nihilism is bourgeois and reactionary. It's to make fun of 'nihilists'.
If you need to explain, never ever shorted the phrase. Just keep saying "bourgeois nihilism".
> The bourgeois nihilism of today is distinct from the bourgeois nihilism of Nietzsche's era...
I know this post is like a decade late and very boring, but I gotta post it anyway
Basically, with employer-sponsored health insurance the employer pays half and the employee (you) pays half. The cost of your insurance goes way down if you have a high deductible, and a deductible is basically what you'd have to pay before the insurance actually pays anything. So 'high-deductible' means you have to pay a lot before insurance pays anything, and it's a lot cheaper to buy that insurance cause the insurers often just don't pay anything ever. If it's $5,000 before insurance pays a dime, often times you have to just pay as though you had no insurance. This is obviously bad, but it's also cheap so like maybe you just luck out an never get sick or injured, right...?
Anyway, HSAs. Yeah, it's called "Health Savings Account". It's marketed as a tax-advantaged, investor-y, bougie-"we're comfortable" lifestyle way to really feel like a keen insider. Picture this: what if health insurance was individualized in the same way 401k and retirement stuff was, and you could "call your broker" at your "health savings account" to tell them to invest your tax-free "medical dollars" in the latest gizmo or whatever. Just deeply bad for solidarity and also very weird. And this is how basically everyone thinks about HSAs. A "tax-loophole" for the rich that I can also use because "I'm actually very financially savvy, just like the rich, who got where they are because of a weird hyper-individualized investment thing rather than any underlying systemic basis of societal organization".
And you're probably thinking: "But I already hate the suburban petite-bourgeois and their annoying mannerisms for reasons that are way less boring and meaningless." Well you're right, but also: high deductible plans are a requirement of HSAs so the employer's half decreases significantly. Your employer doesn't contribute to the HSA (they technically could, but if you're reading this post they don't [incredibly silly losing battle available there for libs]), so hopefully you do at least up to your deductible, but it's pretty likely that's not possible even if you had the money (no one does) because you literally aren't allowed to due to contribution limits. (if people did have the money it would probably be better to get different / better / additional health insurance anyway.) But importantly and I guess obviously: nobody contributes to their HSA. It's basically the chance for each person to individually manage an insurance fund for only themselves, which is almost exactly the same as paying out of pocket, the main difference being the additional bank account and a make-work program for MBAs. I've talked to almost a dozen office workers about this and they mostly have no idea what I am saying at all or say "yeah, I added money in onboarding, but I canceled it once I realized it came out of my pay."
There's no non-scam option btw if that wasn't clear. And, yeah, obviously all health insurance is a scam, but this is a different scam run by a slightly different set of people (there's def overlap though don't get me wrong). The office job benefits world is basically a choice between varying levels of high-deductible plans + HSA (ie. $1.5k, $3k, $5k...) with maybe one ridiculously expensive low-deductible plan.
Anyway, thoughts? I needed to get this rant out, I guess. Maybe I just missed the discourse on this because I was a child at the time lol.
Gotta be one of the most cynical and villainous recent euphemisms. At least top 5. I haven't seen it recently though which is good.
As of March 2018 Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist who typically covers El Chapo and ISIS, can add to his list of accolades a nomination for a James Beard award, given for excellence in culinary writing. What’s a writer who used to work for the Department of Defense doing…
Never meet your heroes that you learned about from a couple of quotes online and never think about until you're watching the Vietnam-Obama episode with your family and getting increasingly skeptical and nervous.
> The family is one of the largest land-owning families in the state of Oklahoma and the United States. In 2017, the family owned 433,000 acres according to The Land Report magazine. In 2022, the family was the largest land-owning family in Osage County, owning about 9% of the county.
> Drummond became known for her blog, The Pioneer Woman, which documented her life in rural Oklahoma.
Yes, I know I'm a million years late to learning about this. I don't watch TV.
For the record I don't think this would matter or anything, but it would be fun to pretend to be a single issue voter about this.
I promise this is not trying to have a hot-take or anything. I don't understand what I'm supposed to be getting out of the book. I've read like 3/4ths of it now and it seems like mostly normal pretty standard speeches and government stuff.
Some parts gave me a pang of sadness realizing this is what a competent government would look like, especially in the beginning sections where it's like "we should eliminate poverty starting with rural extreme poverty" because I know that they succeeded. It's kinda a reminder that these are problems that could be solved and it's not utopian to believe things could be better.
But most of the book seems to be "we should ensure peaceful, cooperative, and friendly relationships with other countries and expand existing trade relationships....". + Belt and Road stuff.
I understand that this is a collection of speeches rather than a book about ideology or a textbook, but is there something I'm supposed to be getting out of this that I'm not? Sorry that this question is really open ended.