WhatDoYouMeanPodcast

That's not what you said on all those dorty websites

“Once events that involve good and evil simply become a financial product, I don’t know how right and wrong matters any longer,” he continued. “People shouldn’t be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet.”

America already has health insurance companies. The ship has sailed. It is abundantly clear that financial products are sovereign and morality is an unaffordable luxury. Pay that sucker out!!

Baby Dort Owl clamoring for their first bit of Dort (1744, colorized)

I can imagine an extraordinary person doing something awesome and getting paid 10 million USD for it. Like if the inventor of synthetic insulin were around today, gave away the patent for a dollar, and did a bunch of podcasts for money would he need to be mulch? I also don't particularly want to instagib professional athletes and celebrities. But a cynical person can do a lot of exploitation with 10 million dollars, plus it puts you well into the top .1%

A vanguard party is different because you could take the person into a room and be all "let's talk..." and the optimist in me believes some of them would talk

In this moment I'm entertained by AI. Do what you have to do about it

shoves you into a locker

Heh, see that, babe? I showed him

She has such a myopic view of people's abilities you'd think she works in HR making job descriptions.

for me personally it's how the poem is about how they came for the communists and presumably they're crying about a policy they perceive as communism. But also I'm sure it's some kind of modest wealth tax that enables them to build something that's not the torment nexus.

As of writing I see two thoughtful posts, one of which shows me the phrase I was looking for. I just want to reiterate that the idea of an unjust heirarchy is central to the issue. There are heirarchies worth opting into.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, for example, is graduated by belt level. It's heirarchy derived from skill in a sport. It's very useful for organizing competitions as well as being a good signal as to whether you want to learn from someone. If I'm a brown belt (proximate to black belt i.e. competency in the art) and your head instructor is a blue belt (between years ~1-5), I'm probably not going to choose to opt into your heirarchy - I don't trust that you're competent to the material you want to teach. I don't really want a collective teaching experience and I don't really care if a bunch of white belts think I deserve my black belt. Every technique I use against a new player makes a sound like the home run bat from smash bros, of course they think I'm competent - they're not a good judge. Such a thing is heirarchical in nature but it's opt in, useful, and practical.

Combat sports are special because your claim of individual competency gets immediate feedback. In professional endeavors especially because you gain a record of who you beat and who you lost to, how it went down, who was coaching you, etc. It graduates the people who participate even further than a belt system and that's... le good!

I was writing a novel about a VRMMO in 2017 which was set 100 years in the future. AI was so advanced "it created puzzles that weren't even random!" One of the major themes was how it would sap away the player's mental well-being because of how realistic it all was.

To make the point that a mask that they could put on was equivalent to Majora's mask in terms of making others perceive you as mad was dangerous, I had an idea for comparison. In 2045 there was a landmark lawsuit because researchers were testing biometrics in VR cloth that was much more comfortable than plastic. One of the participants was shown a scenario where he had a wife and kids for a short time. The sudden loss that he felt was so overwhelming it drove him to take his own life. Thereby, colloquially, the point of no return for a VR inspired madness was named after him. The narrative recalls this moment before characters deliberated about whether putting on the mask was such an event.

Clearly I underestimated the timeline and magnitude of input needed to drive someone's mental health beyond repair.

the young girls that you reference, would be … live a life in a barbaric, unequal society behind a burqa, with no ability to make career choices,”

The US is a barbaric, unequal society where 10 companies own everything. There's not really a compulsion to wear a burqa (which is a dubious premise). But an American has plenty of compulsions and limitations that are unique to them. Imagine if the young girls were required to stay in an abusive relationship if they wanted continued access to healthcare for a chronic illness or disability in a barbaric unequal society. That would be even worse than a burqa!

This is actually what I view as illustrative of the problem. If you want to dazzle the audience you can talk about all the shit that doesn't work and how things have changed. Nuclear weapons means chauvinist foreign policy gets us killed. Climate disasters mean people are going to come in contact with each other. Pandemics require coordinating. The stakes are such that cooperation isn't just the courtesy a lot of people take it for - systematic exploitation means that Gaza becomes your neighborhood when they point the torment nexus at you

But if you really want to get the person on the other side of the conversation to hear you, you need empathy. They need to feel heard before they're going to listen to you and that's just wired into us. They need to feel like you've contextualized their pain and all the ways they've been exploited into something solvable. Because they're probably not down for spending some more money on shit they feel is unimportant. You're never getting through to them because liberal arts and humanities have a certain caricature that you're not winning by arguing against.

So if you can hear how capitalism has tortured this person and maybe only plant the seeds of change by letting them know better future is possible then they might come around to understand that student loans are a dumb idea, intensely exploitative, and puts downward pressure on the sophistication of society. I met a person recently who was annoying and chauvinist, but they led with their lamentation about the lack of a 3rd place and the capture of all leisure by private corporations who tell you to take it or leave it. So maybe Marx is working his magic on this poor soul. Who knows?