Some of this has to do with the weird track Marx hopped. He was not primarily a cultural critic (though he did some cultural criticism), but rather a very conventional "political economist". Some things get lost when trying to make him primarily a lens for the Humanities
(None of this is a dig on the humanities in general, btw. These are important fields! But I'm not sure Marx would recognize most of the applications you find at universities in 2021, let alone agree with them)
A lot of Marx's economic critique was superseded by what's known as the Marginalist Revolution. The best comparison I can give is imagine reading a treatise on Miasma Theory to explain the pandemic and your lit professor thinks it's current
Bessner Tweets a lot of bad analysis and, hear me out, maybe reading Marx would help him do better
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I guess what I'll say about any apparent link to an Odal rune a certain stage might have is that's a pretty deep cut from Nazi iconography and there are a lot more overt things said by CPAC attendees that require far less parsing and have far less plausible deniability
On the one hand, you literally have to ignore part of the stage to see a strict Odal rune so color me doubtful. On the other hand, if conclusive evidence of this theory emerges, I'm not going to be sitting here going, "Nazis! At CPAC! Well I never!"
A bunch of people who I would bet money did not know about Norse runes or their link to Nazi symbolism are saying that someone in the planning should have seen this and I really do not buy that we all need to have the Elder Futhark rattling around in our heads to prevent this
On a very superficial level, #DontKillItBernie is a lot to take in. Set aside what you think the right thing is to do, imagine if Warren were budget chair what that would look like
This is the first time I've ever seen Uygur talk about an MOC in less than vitriolic terms
I cackled a vengeful, inappropriate cackle when I saw, "Don't listen to Biden!" Harris has the ultimate authority here, though Leahy would probably wield it as a practical matter
1/ Yesterday I spent way to much mental energy on this very tiresome man insisting we must DO SOMETHING bout Greene calling for adjournment. He eventually called me a Nazi sympathizer for thinking she had no power here
2/ I'm not posting cold tea from yesterday's Twitter drama to relitigate it, though I am petty enough to point out he may not understand that the House had rules
3/ Just a few bad arguments I see a lot that this man managed to cram into our back and forth. The first the idea that McConnell was generally an evil wizard so Schumer should be able to pass anything by being an evil wizard
I'm also increasingly disenchanted with the term "culture war". I think it's a good political science term, but its popular use is increasingly to mean, "Distractions from *real* issues" which are usually the speaker's personal interests
I agree that there is a political class cynically elevating TERFism for political gain, but I also think a significant number of people, both in leadership but especially among voters, now count the oppression of trans people as one of their personal interests
Even if it is some kind of "false consciousness", it's still an immediate threat to the physical, mental, and economic well-being of trans people in our communities and downplaying that because it would require your metaphysics to account for what is happening now is wrong
I think it's...interesting...that a lot of people are very convinced that there is no motivated reasoning on the left and also very convinced that the science is settled on a large minimum wage hike
The disagreement among economists isn't particularly ideological; it comes down to whether or not you think it's appropriate to have a certain kind of dummy variable when comparing data from a natural experiment
(To be sure, I fully expect a careful accounting of who supports which variable is influenced by their ideological priors. The point here is both sides have plausible intellectual cover for that)
1/ Before I get into this, the discourse right now sometimes gets treated as an invitation to speculate on people's genitals. You know what you don't have to do? THAT! But since we're talking gender affirming policy, here's a study about trans healthcare
2/ All binary trans people in the survey (which had a small N, so don't generalize too aggressively) said they would at least consider hormone therapy. 22.9% of non-binary (NB, pronounced "enby") people ruled it out, with another 40.0% unsure
3/ The takeaway if you're supporting legislation: Access matters a lot, but not every non-cis person wants to access it