YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
“In 2022, Andreessen [owner of however many multi-multi-million $ properties] and his inveighed against building multi-family housing in their swanky Peninsula hometown of Atherton - average annual income $539,000, median home price $7.9 million - with an email to city government that read: ‘Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multi-family overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbours and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic’
Like there’s already the completely twisted economic logic of housing as a personal investment, propped up by too many governments everywhere who can’t afford to lose votes by pointing out that it’s been nonsensical and unsustainable for decades, but to then add to that the logic of doing it even when you don’t have any genuine perverse incentive to insist on making ROI from the resale value of your house
Just “I’m white as shit and this is what we do when we’re billionaires too”
You know, if you can remotely put aside the less-than-dogwhistling racism for a second
i had a moment and i wanted to share it with everybody
Well you make zero distinction between any of those things, most of which (BDS?!) aren’t even under discussion here, and your target is Ian Miles Cheong’s opinion-having about the US, particularly with respect to Oregon
What do you want me to do here?
Edit: let me rephrase that, what the hell do you want me to do here? Are you serious?
Whenever one of these comes out and gets posted to /r/SneerClub it feels like going to see band you’ve loved since they were hometown favourites play a big venue in another city, except that you always despised the band and they’re leading major policy decisions which aim to destroy everything you love
There’s nothing ipso facto wrong with thinking that a country to which you don’t belong should adopt a particular policy, whether it regards rights for pastafarians, the promotion of secular society, or more aptly rights for gay people. Gay people are the obvious point: I would hope that you think on some important level that Russian law should not discriminate against gay people. To be authentically in favour of democracy is to be in favour of democracy’s good, not to reify democratic process as an end in itself - and indeed one should want Russia to be democratic, which is not the case as things currently stand, but only on grounds of democratic good, not of process as an end in itself.
One reason to limit one’s criticisms of a country’s internal democratic politics is lack of understanding, and that seems to be the closest thing to what you’re shooting for here that isn’t what I would bluntly call an inauthentic pro-democracy stance. That’s a reason for being cautious, and it’s closely related to good arguments against particular interventions by outsiders in the internal affairs of a polity: a bunch of Westerners get up in arms that Indonesia, for example, introduces a law which negatively affects or appears to negatively affect gay people, but their failure to understand Indonesia’s highly complex politics means that their outraged arguments don’t even touch on what the effects of the new law actually are. Their hearts were, so to speak, “in the right place”, but in the worst way, and they only ended up making things worse.
In a sense these situations do touch on a right that members of a polity have which outsiders don’t, which is the right to “have a say” in the management of their affairs. If outsiders begin to “have a say” and the polity begins to lose some of its democratic character as a consequence, then there is a genuine concern that self-determination is at risk, not to mention the intelligent management of things by people who actually understand how things work locally. But this is not absolute, and indeed cannot be absolute, otherwise we would be left with a political world in which the only rights we gave people were those they got from the polity of which they happen to be a member, and Russia would be off the hook - there is clearly another order beyond the locally political by which people deserve morally good treatment, and outsiders to a polity cannot be denied a say in the nature of that order.
I’m a communist, I’ll criticise who I want about what they do wherever
If the last act of the human race is to raise a forlorn statue of that woman in every town square it will be a fitting end
Un-fucking-believable
They aren’t their goalposts! They’re the goalposts already laid out in advance by the discourse and shaped in press releases since god knows when, that’s why it’s so easy to shift! There’s a whole avenue to be burrowed in Rationalism Studies, incidentally, about how Yud and his ilk inherited the same techniques from tobacco companies and the defense industry of the 1980s.
I understand that you’re olive branching me here, but I don’t accept “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess”. Trends are analysable, and the sources of projections are equally analysable. A book that’s ten years old is far better than (a) 30-year old (and more) newspaper-level stuff, without citations, about backyard anthrax, (b) nothing, and (c) two links to tangentially related reports, and you’ve brought those three.
I am seriously concerned about the confluence of two things: (1) how closely your comments here mirror, right down to the level of language, press releases and opinion columns paraphrasing press releases, some of them (the anthrax stuff) extremely old hat; (2) the level of outrage and confidence you bring to the table when challenged on this and similar. Phrases like “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess” are press release language - they have absolutely no place in serious discussion, but they have a powerful rhetorical effect which allows them to displace serious analysis, and that displacement furthers specific, analysable, interpretable sectoral and political interests.
The same goes for “bio tech revolution” - you are never clear, in any of this, what that actually entails. What you do is cite possibility and unknowability, in a manner innovated precisely by sectoral and political interests from the 1950s onward. You have no detail of any value, and you write off actual detail with speculation and glib remarks about the age of the detail you’re given - that is a political innovation to which you have allowed yourself to be susceptible. You may also try on Naomi Oreskes for size as an author who grapples with this in both directions.
I don’t have the source article, my full title is all one quote from the latest issue of the London Review of Books. But I’ve seen it before multiple times - it’s out there and findable