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Cory Massimino Profile picture
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13 Sep, 4 tweets, 1 min read
It's weird how Twitter seems to simultaneously promote both rote simplification and minute hairsplitting of the discursive territory.
There's an abundance of both one-line dunks or dismissals AND of detailed, even charitable, explanatory threads for EVERY SINGLE tradition, thinker, or idea.
Discourse on here often veers between either over or under simplification, usually depending on where one stands or feels in relation to the broader discursive territory.
Even now, surely this thread is comprised of generalizations that others have either already pointed out or wisely critiqued.

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More from @corymassimino

Cory Massimino Profile picture
14 Sep
The marginal tax rates faced by the very rich is of very little consequence either way.
The prospect of transferring slightly more or slightly less money from some plunderers to other plunderers is strangely obsessed over, likely because it's simply a very useful mood affiliation heuristic.
Any potential gains from redistribution pale in comparison to most alternatives (the best being e.g. direct cash payments to the global poor) and are mostly squandered by being distributed to other rich people, middle class people, or people doing violence on behalf of the state.
Read 4 tweets
Cory Massimino Profile picture
10 Sep
A 90% increase in about 50 years. What 90% shifts might we see 50 years from now?
I both expect and very much hope it's factory farming. Such evil should never have existed in the first place and the quicker it disappears the better. Our circles of moral concern and of viable alternatives to eating meat are both rapidly expanding and converging.
I could also see borders drawing more opposition (and resistance) the more porous they become. Nationalism is still powerful, but I often suspect it's increasingly brash and loud precisely because it can't really keep up with the unceasing free movement of ideas, goods, & people.
Read 16 tweets
Cory Massimino Profile picture
17 Jul
I do appreciate Marx in his more Aristotelian and/or libertarian moments but at some level it's hard to disentangle his authoritarian prescriptions from his (however potentially liberatory) diagnosis.
In stressing property/prices far more than violence/domination in his analysis of exploitation, he completely misses the main flaws of capitalism, provides blueprints for authoritarian-in-everything-but-name states, and encourages effective complacency in the fight against power.
This is why his followers ended up doing so much evil, why every communist regime has been a miserable failure, and why they consistently see anarchists as central threats to be violently suppressed.
Read 4 tweets
Cory Massimino Profile picture
30 Jun
Likely my biggest disagreement with leftists is that I think money prices tend to reflect costs, not create them. That's why I think suppressing prices mostly hurts the worst off and why helping them requires abolishing monopoly privileges and artificial property rights.
That's why I'm 100% on board with descriptions of socialism as "stateless, classless, moneyless" societies up until that very last one. Unless socialism means severe impoverishment, inequality, and waste, it REQUIRES a means of impersonally conveying tacit, distributed knowledge.
Prices are the truly cosmopolitan, egalitarian, levelling, and horizontal social technology the left has always been in search of. They are the "universal language" that transcends borders, trumps bigotry, and provides exit to the socially marginalized. Image
Read 4 tweets
Cory Massimino Profile picture
17 Jun
As far as human problems go, distribution severely pales in comparison to coordination and production.
Aggregating the amount of goods and the amount of people in need of them in a given area doesn't tell us how to get actual goods to actual people. "Give the homeless homes" or "give the hungry food" are empty aims in need of knowledge concerning the goods and people in question.
This emptiness becomes more apparent the more you increase the scale of the area in question and the diversity of the goods and people in question. "Homes" and "food" are not abstract platonic forms but particular objects existing in certain places and ways.
Read 9 tweets
Cory Massimino Profile picture
17 Jun
If you mean anarchism and fascism are our fundamental choices because they're the only conceptually stable ideologies (with everything else a confused centrist view), then yes.

But if you mean (as Rand mistakenly did) that anarchism and fascism are more alike than different, no.
This mistake is rooted in the idea that anarchism and fascism are united by opposition to rule of law, thereby endorsing rule of men. But anarchism promises the ultimate rule of law, the total abolition of the distinction between law-makers/enforcers and law-followers.
If fascism is the total embrace of power/total rejection of checks and balances, then liberal democracy is the moderate embrace of power/moderate embrace of checks and balances and anarchism is the total rejection of power/total embrace of checks and balances.
Read 5 tweets

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