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David Watson 🥑
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keke de namasté
@aureliano451
Your essay is interesting, but wrong. "If a corporation or a billionaire tried to acquire one one-trillionth of the state’s capacity for legitimized violence the state would vaporize them." is naive. That only works in places with a strong rule of law, which isn't everywhere.
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Teapot liker
@Muximori
Absolutely fantastic. Vulgar Materialism going on heavy rotation in my vocab. Tangentially, wasn't Maelstrom a huge disappointment? Nothing like Starfish or Blindsight.
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nx
@nearX86
oh wow i felt like i identified this but never had a name for it!
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Filip
@filipviz
I liked this! Teenagers get ridiculous haircuts to assert a kind of sovereignty ("it's a bad idea, but at least it's mine"). Maybe patterns like vulgar materialism and conspiratorial thinking play a similar role - they're a way to reclaim intellectual sovereignty from "experts"
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trespaul
@_trespaul
Well, yes, but also, even if the beneficiary of an event didn't cause it, they are still incentivised to play it up, spin it in a way that ensures that it benefits them, or at least not oppose it as much (e.g. I'm sure there are many people at Lockheed Martin who are sincerely
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MadB
@momob3an
wait but the point is not that it’s bad to profit off of good things but that profit becomes a primary incentive to do anything. as a mediating variable between you and your goal, it becomes the new goal.
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