The Prince of Panic

@tiredie @Shialabeefsteak Literally an Evangelist, I’ve never been so sure of the Second Coming. Reminds me of Borges, actually, in the way he closes off all the exits and leaves you wondering whether you’re dealing with a madman.

@Shialabeefsteak Girard was an exegetical theorist not a social but literally parasocial writer with an idée fixe like no other and truly so beyond compare as to be comparable with the entire universe. Hope this helps.

I haven't read Renee Girard - and I'm thinking about Louis CK posting - but why do we need a French social theorist to explain how people on the internet are kinda stupid and mirror opinions? They literally tell you you're a grouch and a crank when you disagree.

@avrilbradley23 A lot more local, then, though. The odd thing is having such a nation-wide environment where the sources of information are so fragmented and openly ideological.

I would add the media environment is much closer to the 19th Century nowadays. Instead of Big Three broadcasters all striving to neutrality, cable news channels or political YTers/podcasters are more akin to partisan newspapers of this era.

“One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.” —Wittgenstein

@___as_a_jew___ You’re welcome. If you don’t mind, I’m curious, what were your impressions?

@Emhoward2210 @JoyceCarolOates Rifkin’s really interesting, reflections by an artist close to the end, who’s grown accustomed to the idea that he never achieved what he hoped to in art, and now imagines a new kind of immortality. The work of an artist who already seems to have passed on, in fact.

@JoyceCarolOates He’s basically made the same movie for the last 30 years.

Oh no-- another of these Woody Allen quasi-autobiographical films with Wallace Shawn in the role o Woody....? so hoping for a new film by this once-inventive director which will be genuinely new, transforming. this does not sound like it. (what do you think, Eddie?)

@___as_a_jew___ Do you know Unger? Can’t understand why he’s not more popular here, the only real one. m.youtube.com/watch?v=DZg6Y-…

@___as_a_jew___ 💯💯💯💯💯

@JacobAShell @classreductress @sunraysunray @DouthatNYT 🤷‍♂️ Lia Thomas? Kendi? Basically all the stuff he’s smart enough to realize limits the breadth of the left, but which his followers are deeply invested in.

@BorgesCarpenti @classreductress @sunraysunray @DouthatNYT What’s “the culture war”?

This is so important for people to hear. Live abroad for a while and you will see it clearly too. Great interview @sunraysunray My 2 cents: the U.S. is much less xenophobic and anti-immigrant than most places. The left should feel confident about this!

@JacobAShell @classreductress @sunraysunray @DouthatNYT He’s always been more skilled and less principled than Bagel, never quite embraced these ideas, certainly never rejected them, and never for a moment stopped insisting on the total irrelevance of culture war to his project.

@DouthatNYT It really should be someone like Angela Nagle sitting in that chair. Somebody who actually made a point during woke to step outside of it and criticize it from the vantage point of something else the left had been (and still could have been, and maybe even still could be). Whereas, Sunkara during 2014-22 led Jacobin to embrace virtually every woke position (it seems he doesn't understand this about his own leadership).

@pegobry_en “Believe” is a pretty strong term to describe the nature of their commitments. They won’t change bc it’s not standing in the way of their goal, which is coalitional power. My question is: why the fig leaf “culture war indifference?” It must serve some purpose, but what?

I see conversations among leftists about whether the "populist left" should "focus" on economic issues or social/culture war issues. What all these people seem to miss is that the issue isn’t "focus." The way that Bill Clinton and the New Democrats managed to shed their party’s toxic bagage was not by changing their "focus", it was by changing their *positions.* This was the significance of the "Sister Souljah" moment. Clinton wasn’t saying "Oh this stuff isn’t my priority." He was saying "I *disagree*, and here is a thought-out argument why, so you can trust that I mean it when I say I disagree." DSA types can choose to "focus" on whatever they want, as long as they subscribe to the laundry list of toxic issues, they will be vulnerable to attack on that basis. But they won’t change. Because they really believe that a dude beating up a woman on a boxing ring is good. They really believe castrating children is good. They really believe Hamas is good. They really believe borders are evil. And because they do, other people can point out that they do, and this will cause them to lose electoral support since most people find those views abhorrent. Regardless of what they choose to "focus" on.

When we win, you will be speaking Yiddish. That's close enough to German, so quit your whining.

@voluntarysarg @sunraysunray It seems you can’t make up your mind whether the ideas of classical liberals were always out there, just waiting to be discovered, like Platonic forms, or were invented in a particular time and place to help certain people cope with novel problems, like a new tool.

@BorgesCarpenti @sunraysunray Its not neither. Its literally a meta norm developed by classical liberals to avoid conflict over scarce resources

The difference between social democracy and democratic socialism is worth discussing. But if you're an egalitarian who thinks having society divided between people who own productive resources and people who have to work for them, then I'd argue you're not egalitarian enough!

@voluntarysarg @sunraysunray particular political process. It’s not a realm of “absolutes,” that’s as though you believed all of natural history had been “leading to” homo sapiens, that we were the teleological endpoint of life on earth. It doesn’t work like that.

@voluntarysarg @sunraysunray It’s neither, private property is what came about when the middle class entered the picture and the source of wealth stopped being the land itself, but the productive use that could be made of it. The point is that what we call “private property” is just the end result of that

@voluntarysarg @sunraysunray just the way things happened to turn out. That’s why I call you guys “market fundamentalists.” You prefer the Seven Days of Creation to Darwin.

@voluntarysarg @sunraysunray But that’s just a fairytale. Private property evolved from battles in the later feudal period between sovereigns and barons over who was allowed to dispose of lands technically owned by kings but actually worked by knights, serfs, etc. There’s nothing logical about it, it’s

@sunraysunray Market fundamentalists get confused by forgetting that they themselves believe private property is the means rather than the end.

@sunraysunray “Democratizing production” simply means finding the institutional mechanisms to do what market fundamentalists claim capitalism is already doing (but which it obv isn’t): making sure the use of society’s productive resources goes to whoever can bring in the best return.

I agree it's not magic. It's human. Productive forces are owned by private individuals but the labor on which they rest is social. Saying you want to democratize production and worker control of industry is saying you value the intentional & intelligent effort of ordinary people.

@voluntarysarg @sunraysunray I think you’re making my argument for me. Whether physical or intellectual, private property is never absolute, it’s subject to democratic discretion.

@BorgesCarpenti @sunraysunray Right but the biggest problem with your analysis is you cant have a property right in ideas. Property rights apply to rivalrous and conlictable mserial objects. Ideas are neither so a "property right" in them is just a non contractual negative easement enforced by govt