Free market communist

keep it shut down until 2029

On the question of "what does Epstein tell us about power?" A useful observation is that elite networks often center around rare types of access, not always so deplorable.

Not hard. Just archive the material artifacts that give evidence to the provenance.

The true merit of the anarchists.

I'm the sort of pragmatic leftist who likes to sample from every ideology that's committed to material egalitarianism.

Let's be real. Sexism and racism are horrible. Is it strategic to nominate AOC for president?

My Lyft driver in Indiana who was driving a car from at least two decades ago said he wouldn't vote for Biden because he was a chomo

Streamers desperately create and feed drama to drive engagement. It's just the state of evolution of a doomed cultural form.

Yet here you are will

Experienced programmers who try claude code know their work is transformed, some for the better, but many for worse.

halftime show

what a shot

What do we do when we have power so that we win in the long term?

I watched videos of someone building a website using Claude. We are coming closer to how William Gibson imagines cyberspace.

Use empiricism and pragmatism to achieve consensus among competing subfactions by demonstrating that policy decisions are not being driven by the interests of one faction against the others. The coalition always benefits as a whole.

Woke 2.0 is a new type of radical liberal that is committed to doing what it takes to seize power and use it to achieve political goals of its social movements. Take risks in smart ways by doing many experiments that test ideas but are fairly cheap, and move extremely fast.

Like I think instead of defunding or abolishing the police you use the power you have to become the police and change the institution by changing its rules and workforce. In hindsight, we should have done the work to coerce the police to be better in radical ways starting back in 2014 in BLM 1.0.

But if you don't seek to design power structures to be both constraining and constrained you have to settle for symbolic and cultural victories, which are great because they are natural constrained, but your culture will not constrain your enemies or protect your from them.

I admire your serious attitude about power and view of liberalism as a radical movement, which it surely is on a historical timescale.

My hot take is that liberals are closet anarchists, too suspicious of power to tightly grasp it, unless power is obscured by culture (morality or aesthetics).

I have to admit, I see the appeal in anarchists' aesthetics, even if they are very limited in politics.

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

In common, they both value diverse bodies in their aesthetics, but anarchists are more willing to play with shock value, typically aiming to challenge liberals' in their comfort.

I think, liberals and anarchists have fundamentally similar preferences for autonomy, freedom from domination, social structures that empower them and don't oppress others. Liberal aesthetics are conventional, clean, & middle class. Anarchist aesthetics involve queerness, violence, crust, etc.

But power / hierarchy happen without formalizing them. Actually, formalizing a power structure is a necessary step in limiting it.

To clarify. I don't mean networks are hierarchical in essence, just that networks aren't a meaningful opposite of hierarchy. I think anarchists have simplistic ideas about how hierarchy or power happen, often reducing them to formal roles and structures.

Crime is a pretty cool function though!

Why look to networks if they are hierarchies? The differences are superficial things like aesthetics and whether have office jobs or not. Not sure what makes my concept of liberalism 'American'.

Mentioned above, Jo Freeman's Tyranny of Structurelessness shows how easily status hierarchies emerge among anti-hierarchy activists. Earlier, onetime-anarchist Robert Michels argued for an "Iron Law of Oligarchy" where such subtle inequalities build on themselves into authoritarianism.

I agree except for the no hierarchy part. Hierarchy is inevitable and okay, and important to be intentional about. Tyranny of Structurelessness is real.

What actually existing worker cooperative is non-hierarchical?

Networks can easily be hierarchical. See the Chacoan culture. Hierarchy is not the enemy. The enemy is concentrated and undemocratic power. Anarchists are just extremist liberals.

alternet is a joke. ridiculously sensationalistic.