David Tinapple

“The question we need to ask is not, “How should we create a centrist bulwark against populism?”, but “How can we give progressive shape to people’s disaffection?”” source

“MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what the newspapers said was that the bailout saved the banks. To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their […]

“MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what the newspapers said was that the bailout saved the banks. To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their […]

“But can’t VR at least help us take on the perspective of other people – such as those experiencing homelessness or racial discrimination? After all, two humans are much more alike than humans and cows. However, here, too, VR fails to generate the kind of empathic perspective-taking it’s sold as offering. As with Nagel’s bat, the best we can do with VR is to see what it might be like for us to experience some […]

“Those who have lived their entire lives in functioning democracies may find it hard to grasp how easily minds can be won over to the totalitarian dark side. We assume such a passage would require slow, laborious persuasion. It does not. The transition from day to night is bewilderingly swift. Despite what many assume, civilized coexistence in a culture of tolerance is not always the norm, or even universally desired. Democracy is a hard-won, easily […]

“Are these dark times, or are they unconscionably stupid times? Are they both? Is it the case that the worst, when it comes, comes in a clown car? How did I live so long believing that evil might have its own dignity?” source

https://thebaffler.com/latest/carbon-ironies-stephenson This is a nice review by William T. Vollmann of the baffler. I found this at https://kottke.org/18/06/are-we-completely-fucked-because-of-climate-change “Yes, of course, we’re fucked. (Though it’s important to specify the “we” in this formulation, because the global poor, the disenfranchised, the young, and the yet-to-be-born are certifiably far more fucked than such affluent, white, middle-aged Americans as Vollmann and myself.) But here’s the thing: with climate change as with so much else, all fuckedness is relative. Climate […]

“We seem to all be suffering from something of a low-grade MOOC hangover. Even though those of us who actually work on open online courses never believed the MOOC hype – we knew that they would not change the system of higher education – we did enjoy the brief attention from our (then) provosts. The best thing about MOOC mania was that it got folks around campus who have not thought too much about the […]

“The truth is that dents in the universe are only observable after they have occurred; this is why their continued creation is best induced by the establishment of conditions in which risk-taking and experimentation are rewarded. The temptation is to adopt the mistaken mindset that all there is to be invented — and, more pertinently, to be adopted — already exists.” source

“Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz tried to explain in 2015 just how integrated WeChat is into the daily lives of nearly 900 million Chinese, and that integration has only grown since then: every aspect of a typical Chinese person’s life, not just online but also off is conducted through a single app (and, to the extent other apps are used, they are often games promoted through WeChat). There is nothing in any other country that […]