MA student in Poli Sci @ UCalgary.
"Cosmic Egalitarian"
Voted "Most likely to have that dream where your teeth fall out" four years in a row.
he/him
Jul 21, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
@mutual_ayyde Really good points. I wonder how much of it goes back to your other thread about the translation for Marx's "scientific socialism". Because you argue, resurrecting the Hegelian parts of Marx, that his view of conscious, rational planning had more to do with people having a--
@mutual_ayyde --sort of communal spirit and being aware of each other's needs, where-as the "anarchy" of production was the stereotypical myopic sort of characters we call "homo economicus" just blundering around. Both types would support autonomous decision-making, but one is "conscious"--
Jul 8, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is, without a doubt, one of the most inhuman, despicable, and evil things I've ever read.
It doesn't even matter that their white supremacist views are wrong (pre-colonial Indigenous cultures have not only never been "primitive" by any reasonable standard, but they've--
--been important *influences* on the best parts of modern culture, including the US Constitution), but any worldview that thinks you can massacre and oppress a group of people as a way of "saving" them is unredeemable. All you'll do is cause mass misery and hold back actual--
Jul 8, 2021 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
To help me cope, and because I don't have a blog, here's my review of all the goaltending performances in the 2021 playoffs. Full disclosure, obviously, I'm an aggressive Carey Price defender so that's gonna colour everything, but here it goes, starting from first elimination:
St. Louis: Jordan Binnington is a right fucking asshole, but according to Clear Sight Analytics he had the strongest record in the final part of the season--it sort of showed. This series was Colorado at its strongest, so even though he went 0 and 4, it easily could've been worse
Mar 21, 2021 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
@jasonleebyas@rechelon I'm gonna take some offense to that, since my position is what it is precisely *because* I think Rothbard's version of society so frequently entails coercive institutions.
Are voluntary defense organizations the same as the military or police? Not necessarily, but in the--
@jasonleebyas@rechelon --presence of a level of inequality that allows unilateral action, then yes it's the same. And not only do the social institutions that would result from Rothbard's fusionist phase (which are themselves highly coercive) generate the level of--
Mar 20, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
@jasonleebyas@rechelon I mean, his original point that got everyone angry was that AOC was more libertarian than Ron Paul. I dunno if you'd disagree with that or not.
But like, it's true that AOC is a statist (I'd call her and most of the DSA social democrats at most), but that in of itself--
@jasonleebyas@rechelon --doesn't mean that she's less libertarian than an "ancap" if it can be established that said ancap is, at his worst, basically recreating all the most coercive elements of the state under the guise of defending "private property". Which I think is defensible:
Sep 30, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Something that's important to remember about fascism is that, at it's core, it's only and entirely about exercising power for power's sake. That means two things:
(1) Trump frequently contradicting himself isn't an issue, because the point is to exude power at all times.
(2) It's an ideology that quite legitimately *forces* you to simplify the world--like you have to proactively waste energy avoiding the complexities of real life in order to maintain a fascist mindset.
There's been a ton of research on how fear and things like financial--
Sep 24, 2020 • 38 tweets • 7 min read
Read a really interesting article by Todd N. Karhu, "Non-compensable harms," and boy-howdy, do I have some (mostly positive) thoughts on it.
academic.oup.com/analysis/artic…
Karhu's basic argument is that the perpetrator of a harm has a duty to compensate their victim, but for extreme crimes--like murder--this is an impossibility. You can't compensate a dead person, for example. Alternatively, he gives the example of someone giving someone else a--
Sep 22, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I think that if you fundamentally dig into the semantics, there isn't any distinction between "Positive liberty" and "Negative liberty". Both of the concepts contain at least part of the other: the idea that you're not being interfered with entails that, in your space, you're--
--free to do whatever you want, while the idea that you have the ability to do what you will entails that you're not being interfered with. The two concepts can't really be separated without the very meaning of the word "liberty" being sucked of a lot of its content.
What I--
Sep 21, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I definitely used to hold this fairly absolutist position--that there isn't any meaningful doing/letting happen distinction--but, man, it really does lead to absurd conclusions if you don't make at least some distinction. We *do* distinguish between gross negligence and murder.
I think you can still have a very strong ethical obligation to actively attend to the needs of others without failing to do so having the same moral repercussions for you as actively committing harm. Because no one individual is ever going to be able to solve the kinds of--
Sep 17, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I've seen a couple of places/people mention that the forced sterilizations at ICE facilities represent the Federal Government's history of eugenics coming back, and while I think that's true to an extent, I think it's also way *worse* than that (and far more Nazi-like).
Because think about it: ICE facilities are to detain people that the US doesn't want in their country--they're people that are going to be deported, at least in theory (for all we know they're just being tortured then killed for the hell of it). That means ICE is sterilizing--
Sep 8, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Socialism is antithetical to nationalism because it recognizes that people are separated more by structures of power than by borders, and that the privileging of your own country over others is an excuse for selfishness at the expense of cooperation and altruism. Capital is--
--already transnational too, and so labour, egalitarianism, and economic democracy has to have a transnational outlook as well. Otherwise we're fighting a 21st century battle with 19th century tactics.
Actually that sentence describes the "left" pretty much entirely...
Sep 8, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Legitimately terrified that there's a huge "syncretism" hole that O'Toole is going to capture, where we get trade protectionism/distributist rhetoric/some redistribution and a whack of social conservatism. So, y'know, Tucker Carlson, but with maple syrup.
--help democratize the economy and eliminate economic hierarchies/inequality, it's not going to give people more control over their lives, and it's not, ultimately, going to weaken the power of business elites and capital's owners. What it *will* do is shift the rhetoric of--
Sep 6, 2020 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I think the fact that it fundamentally feels good to do good, that we can personally gain from being altruistic, and that ultimately sentient life can't exist without what we'd call goodness being a dominant strategy are all proofs that if God exists then He isn't an evil bastard
Mad respect to George Price for trying to prove that completely selfless altruism exists, and I mean in a way he sort of *did*, but the fact that altruistic and compassionate acts don't require unending sacrifice *and* can indirectly benefit the altruist in the long run is...nice
Sep 6, 2020 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
If now's the first time you've ever heard of "Critical Race Theory", that's because it's a pretty broad group of approaches to a large number of disciplines and really only shares the idea that racism is structural and has continuing cultural influence. Most other things differ--
--from author to author, and like a lot of the lower-case c "critical theory" (actually this is true of the capital-C Critical Theory of the various generations of the "Frankfurt School" too), there are a lot of heated debates between the people that get lumped under this label.
Aug 31, 2020 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
My first thought after reading this is that it doesn't actually tell us that much. Even with the meta-analysis. It doesn't tell us that much because the studies are effectively measuring how successful an approach is in meeting some standardized level of knowledge and skill--
--by that I mean that educational standards in the United States by-and-large revolve around performance on a fixed set of knowledge-questions and demonstrable skills, and have for some time), and so it makes sense that the approach that emphasizes repeating a fixed set of--
Aug 30, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
JUSTICE LEAGUE (2001) CHARACTERS AS CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHERS: A SINFUL THREAD
Superman: Murray Bookchin
-Emphasizes egalitarian, down-to-earth ways of living, and wants all living creatures to get the most out of their lives
-Will just never really get along with Lifestyle Anarchists
Aug 30, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Even the most minimalist theories of democracy presuppose that a whole bunch of shit has to happen *long before* a vote takes place. I mean this *should* be obvious, because we only got "universal suffrage" thanks to social movements vocally taking to the streets and organizing.
(i put "universal suffrage" in air-quotes because disenfranchisement is widespread in even the strongest measured democracies).
So the people who waste all their energy on voting and *only* voting are missing a big part of what makes democracy, y'know, democratic. But the--
Aug 17, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
"It is also important to remember that the whole group of alleged rights known as property rights are not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence's Preamble at all, and constitute no part of the basic schedule of human rights.
"At best, they are a device by which a community may deem it advisable to reward services rendered, and cannot be extended to conflict with personal rights, which are much more fundamental.
Aug 15, 2020 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
So I'm just hypothesizing here (which is code for "please throw things at me if I'm wrong"), but I think that empathy is absolutely, non-negotiably essential for metacognition to exist and that this explains why social animals--like humans, elephants, etc--are more intelligent.
Here's what I'm thinking: it's increasingly obvious that emotions and reason aren't even remotely antithetical to one another. If anything, you can't have one without the other and people like Martha Nussbaum have made very thorough arguments that emotions are cognitive in nature
Aug 9, 2020 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Even from his completely idiotic and myopic position (i.e., we have to ration out resources because, I dunno, the hoarding of wealth isn't a problem but population somehow is), this sentiment makes no sense. If living things don't have intrinsic value then we shouldn't worry--
--about who gets what anyways: it's all completely arbitrary and "economic efficiency" as a concept becomes totally meaningless. Worrying about the distribution of resources--even from a disgusting Malthusian position--entails people being owed something, and there's no--
Jul 26, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is a good time to remind everyone that class conflict, as a concept, predates Marx (hell it even predates Smith and political economy in general, though Smith was among the first to emphasize that society's classes weren't in harmony) and is not an exclusively Marxist thing.
There is exactly one political philosophy out there that, under no circumstances, allows for the existence of an inherent conflict between economic classes: Traditional Conservatism, which lives and dies by the concept of "Organic Unity". Other types of conservatism--
