Same energy as those awkward sports team photos when you’re 12 years old

Heartfelt

Great rant

Really, I think a strong argument could actually be made that Daredevil is the real antagonist of the show, given how the people who he saves most are the most awful people in the story.

I actively avoid capeslop but I think this goes for virtually all of it. Take it as an axiom that the superhero is a bad person, or at least effectively an obstacle for the real emancipation of the society they are trying to save.

Unlimited touchscreen infotainment on the imperial cops

The comment thread is about “very long stretches of highway in the US that see little to no traffic” and 1,000 is a round number. It’s not that outlandish to drive that far in the US especially if you count round-trip distance.

Saving 2.5 hours of boredom evidently is compelling, that’s why people do it.

For a 1,000 mile trip, driving 85 instead of 70 can save 2.5 hours. That’s a pretty compelling reason to do it when the road is perfectly straight and flat for most of that journey.

The increased fuel consumption and reduced ability to avoid animals would be bigger concerns to me than personal safety

Driving can be therapeutic in a way that’s hard to describe. I could find some sort of satisfaction driving almost anything; bus, forklift, riding mower, Zamboni… something about steering a machine around a space just scratches the itch. It helps if you have the right vehicle and a manual transmission to maximize the stimming potential.

I wouldnt impose this on all of society, but I’m sure there are others like this, that’s why so many people dream of being a bus driver

I’m skeptical about this author’s grasp of the Hegelian dialectic, let alone the Marxian variant.

Critics note that Hegel’s style of dialectical logic was speculative and unfalsifiable

This is a meaningless accusation. The point of Hegel’s dialectic is precisely to remove the arbitrariness of this speculative moment, to ground that speculation entirely in the subject matter without any external reference, i.e. in immanent critique.

If one wants a useful critique of Hegel, look no further than Marx’s own Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The problem with Hegel, according to Marx, is not that his speculation is arbitrary. It’s the opposite; it inevitably reinforces the status quo, because the Hegelian dialectic can only justify the object of critique while pretending to negate it.

There is no removing speculation from the scientific process. Ever. Speculation is essential to science. If we must insist on the grade-school rubric of the scientific method, the one that moves like hypothesis — experimental setup — data collection — analysis — conclusion, then the speculative moment is inherent or maybe prior to the hypothesis stage.

Dialectics is necessary in Marxism precisely because it resists positivist, Popperian vulgarization of science. That they cite Karl Popper favorably, and uncritically, says enough for me to dismiss the rest of the article. Certainly, complaints about falsifiability induce eye-rolls.

I would agree that there are many bad interpreters of dialectics, even supposedly great Marxists. This is not a reason to reject dialectics but rather to improve on our collective understanding and on our pedagogy.

Marxism without dialectics would not be recognizable to me as Marxism. Anyway, this has already been attempted by the so-called Analytical Marxism school headed by G. A. Cohen. It is not useful.

I’ll admit after perusing the blog a bit more, that I agree with you on the general character of this blogger as ultra pedantic and shit-stirry. I can’t agree that the blogger did any malicious editing of quotes. It’s clearly a paraphrase of both Marx and Harvey despite the quote formatting:

More important to me is the general complaint about Harvey, which imo is not pedantic. It is actually a rather large debate in modern Marxism; you’re free to argue the importance of the debate, but it is relevant, and I am certain that Harvey is aware of it and the special significance of terms like a priori in relation to chapter one. There is continuity between this misinterpretation by Harvey and his rejection of major pieces of Capital, like the tendency of the falling rate of profit. It’s not a separate matter that Harvey is one of the least revolutionary Marxists in popular discussion.

Yea, I’m sure people with this expertise are around. They’re just not assigned to FOIA request processing duties.

I feel like this is an easy lawsuit within the scope of the FOIA statute? The government can’t just not follow the law due to staffing issues.

It’s funny to imagine a baby articulating their own philosophical dilemmas with such clarity and intellectual rigor when it’s precisely their developing brains that prevent them from reaching the answer.

Or maybe it’s that, because babies are babies, we typically think of them as beyond the reach of the modern condition of shitposting and AI slop, so it’s subversive to suppose a baby that is part of that same discourse as the rest of us.

There’s also some inherent social commentary about clickbait; how emotional expressions trigger more curiosity in an adult viewer than any intellectually stimulating content.

That island is beautiful tho

They took a cue from the Greenland/Iceland dichotomy to make a secret paradise with accessibility as a human right

lol this is their holy grail? Eyewitness testimony and an artist’s rendition?

The History Channel-ification of the White House needs to be studied

Maybe I’m projecting too much of my inner mood, but this year things have been too real and depressing to really joke about them. It has been straight to gallows humor it seems, hence the Kirkification of discourse.

There are classist and misogynist elements of beauty standards also.

Class - because fair (untanned) skin, healthy delicate hair, unbroken nails, lack of scars, etc are indicators of a person’s social status and lack of manual labor.

Misogyny - because long hair, long nails, fair skin, and so on are often held as standards for women, precisely so that they can be confined to property status instead of active (laboring) members of the community

Non-vegan communists should concede the moral correctness of veganism even if they aren’t there yet. Rooting out cognitive dissonance and latent prejudice is a fundamental aspect of being a communist. Inability or unwillingness to do that is very suspicious

If I reincarnate into some animal, a goose would be near top of the list of animals to be

The US is one of the largest oil exporters in the world, so the oil industry is making absolute bank off this situation. The Trump admin will let the prices soar precisely until the economy just starts to falter. Then they will subsidize the remainder. Effectively this would be an upward wealth transfer as the masses are taxed in order to finance immense oil profits.