data has become the opiate of the professionals, inkblots only they can properly interpret, from which they weave accounts of the world in which everything is fine for everybody if only they wouldn’t change anything serious, and anything who says otherwise is objectively, mockably wrong.
i read people on bluesky describing a crisis of affluence and i tell you i don’t know what country we’re sharing.
i live in a country where the crisis is cost of living, where the burden of securing “ordinary” goods like safety, shelter, decent peers for ones kids, health care has become impossible.
people who quietly know the community they’ve joined up with is not right. but who are making good money, and feeling so fulfilled by great projects membership in that community helps get funded.
i suppose one shouldn’t be surprised to find that capital is on the side of an autocracy of capital.
“data” tells you much less than you think. the odds that you interpret it in a way that accurately addresses the question, rather than in a way that provides an answer you have some interest in, are not so great. “data” says nothing without interpretation, and we are all unreliable interpreters.
remember JD Vance?
i think events over the last week or so really put a nail in the coffin of the thesis of this one.
Cover of Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom"
there will be other events like Luigi, and they will use them to crank up the surveillance and Palantir the fuck out of us. stuff our phones overhear and snitch will constitute threats of domestic terrorism, considering the status of our country at this point.
Calling and data rates may apply.
hey guys what if they’re not drones at all but actually BALLOONS?
reality has a well-known liberal bias, but human psychology has a well-known conservative bias.
@ItsThatDeafGuy we prefer “rustic”.
@ItsThatDeafGuy it’s paradise, right!
We would like your feedback!
Text: When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs.
“Our Healthcare System, a Reign of Terror” by #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/our-healthcare-system-a-reign-of
if they are in the business of telling you what you like to hear, they are in the business of lying to you.
one way to understand the recent election is as a contest between reformists and accelerationists.
that ticking sound we hear is the chain dragging our roller coaster car, upward, upward. Tick tick tick.
A great rendition by @paninid of George Washington Plunkett on "honest graft" https://dept.math.lsa.umich.edu/~bennet/graft.html
people complain that the English language is overly complicated and fussy.
we have some great news!
we're finally eliminating the confusing distinction between grift and graft.