“Competitiveness is an interesting concept, and an interesting principle on which to base social and economic institutions. When we view situations as ‘competitions’, we are assuming that participants have some vaguely equal opportunity at the outset. But we are also assuming that they are striving for maximum inequality at the conclusion. To demand ‘competitiveness’ is to demand that people prove themselves relative to one other.
[…] Why would it be remotely surprising, to discover that a society in which competitiveness was a supreme moral and cultural virtue, should also be one which generates increasing levels of inequality?”
“But I think this unwillingness to deal with tough issues–or worse, to pretend they’ll all go away if we can hit 4 percent growth targets–is a significant failure of modern conservative politics. And looking at the political landscape, this failure may very well have destroyed the conservative movement as we used to know it.
And what do you have to say to liberals?
Well, it’s almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside.”
“I’ve tried to boil down negotiation to ten rules. The rules, in order of appearance, are:
- Get everything in writing
- Always keep the door open
- Information is power
- Always be positive
- Don’t be the decision maker
- Have alternatives
- Proclaim reasons for everything
- Understand what they value
- Be motivated by more than just money
- Be winnable
“
“What’s happening to this country has happened before, in other nations, in other anxious, violent times when all the old certainties peeled away and maniacs took the wheel. It’s what happens when weaponised insincerity is applied to structured ignorance. Donald Trump is the Gordon Gekko of the attention economy, but even he is no longer in control. This culture war is being run in bad faith by bad actors who are running way off-script, and it’s barely begun, and there are going to be a lot of refugees.”
“So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements, including the fringe that is sometimes attracted to neo-Nazism. They would not even accept immigrants who fully assimilated to the culture. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.”
from: July 13, 2016 at 01:31PM
“The hardest activities to automate with currently available technologies are those that involve managing and developing people (9 percent automation potential) or that apply expertise to decision making, planning, or creative work (18 percent).”
from: July 13, 2016 at 10:51AM
from: July 13, 2016 at 09:30AM
from: July 5, 2016 at 06:39PM
“In January, the government sat down with the centre-right opposition, hoping to reach an agreement on how to increase building. But the centre-left – wanting more state funded rental accommodation – clashed with the centre-right, which wants more deregulatory measures to encourage private construction.”
from: July 3, 2016 at 07:36AM
“I have no way of knowing whether Pynchon has ever read Virginia Woolf, but it seems clear that both chose a similar problem and found a similar solution. Each experienced, as everyone does sooner or later, the great unanswerable questions that only get asked in solitude and silence, when the fuss and clatter of daily life suddenly falls silent and “the party’s splendour fell to the floor.” Each chose a more or less ordinary woman, with no special strengths beyond a sharp distaste for power-hunger and cruelty, as the reluctant hero of an inward quest for meaning and value. Each told a story with little outward drama, because the heroine faces a crisis that is invisible to everyone but herself.”
from: July 2, 2016 at 09:02AM
from: July 2, 2016 at 09:00AM
from: July 1, 2016 at 12:20AM
“Sivan – which, according to its Israeli director Zohar Elefant, was created as a ‘tongue-in-cheek answer to Zidane, the 2006 documentary that followed the soccer star through a single game’ – puts fandom under close inspection, chronicling the emotional volcano that erupts from a diehard football fan over the course of a full match.”
“What the work suggests is that we infer how trustworthy someone is going to be by observing the kinds of judgments and decisions that they make. If I’m interacting with you, I can’t get inside your head. I don’t know what your utility function looks like. But I can infer what that utility function is by the things that you say and do.
This is one of the most important things that we do as humans. I’ve become increasingly interested in how we build mental models of other people's preferences and beliefs and how we make inferences about what those are, based on observables. We infer how trustworthy someone is going to be based on their condemnation of wrongdoing and their advocating a hard-and-fast morality over one that’s more flexible.”
So defining transgender people as those who at birth were not assigned the correct place on the gender spectrum has the implication that every single one of us is transgender; there are no cisgender people.
The logical conclusion of all this is: if gender is a spectrum, not a binary, then everyone is trans. Or alternatively, there are no trans people. Either way, this a profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion, and one that serves both to obscure the reality of female oppression, as well as to erase and invalidate the experiences of transsexual people.
The thing that will not work, however, is just talking to men. Male desire and craving are not intellectualised away with some didactic lecture about how the brain or the economy works, or some sermon about what Jesus or Muhammad want from you. Desire must be redirected into some form of non-destructive expression, or defused, not just talked about. It’s the job of culture to help with this redirection, and the Abrahamic cultural traditions have outlived their effectiveness in doing so.