Audio Grab Bag. Sovereign Wealth Fund Ranting.
Added 2024-09-08 13:49:45 +0000 UTCGang back.
Comments
It seems like the Disagreement is just going to be full of the types of discourse that McIntyre talks about in After Virtue - two people will come in with incommensurable moral arguments and talk past each other
Teddy Duchow-Pressley
2024-09-21 01:35:13 +0000 UTCThe SWF rant is so, so good
Ethan J
2024-09-17 17:33:26 +0000 UTCWhen I visited Australia during the US’s summer, I completely spaced on the seasons being flipped and had to buy a winter coat while I was there. Incidentally my pic on this app is me inside a Melbourne cafe for breakfast. (The avocado toasts and coffee were killer.)
Joey Trimboli
2024-09-17 14:46:39 +0000 UTCNot me growing up in Australia thinking for a while that the months were also flipped in the northern hemisphere 🙃 this is not an endorsement of universal time tho thanks Matt I hate it
Caitlin Still
2024-09-17 09:47:39 +0000 UTCIf Claire continues to be technically proficient in sports but not into the physical aggression part of it, tennis could be a really good outlet for her
Micheline
2024-09-16 15:21:45 +0000 UTCIt’s very hard for humans to tell the difference between action and thinking about action.
Caryn Brooks
2024-09-11 16:34:23 +0000 UTCI think some people just don’t want to have kids (and that’s fine) but they have this annoying need to be morally superior in that position. They can’t have “to each their own” because it doesn’t present them as being better than the people who choose otherwise.
Joey Trimboli
2024-09-10 22:24:54 +0000 UTCThe “one time everywhere” is Zulu (it’s just GMT) :-)
C.t. Grayson
2024-09-10 17:55:21 +0000 UTCThough anarchists seem exactly like the kind of shallow left-wing critics of any tangible socialist policy that Matt is talking about. No vision for what their social alternative will look like, only endless ineffective and incoherent expressive political action.
Josh B
2024-09-10 17:52:03 +0000 UTCRetirees still produce emissions in that model because they are still receiving income, right?
zachtgray
2024-09-10 16:10:01 +0000 UTCFINALLY someone discusses Benatar-as-antinatalist and actually mentions The Second Sexism. Dude wanna be any more obvious about his mummy-rage? The ‘better never to have been’ arg makes no epistemic sense. You literally cannot have a real concept of never having been; it’s not a state you can phenomenologically appreciate. So you have fuck-all basis to compare it to the state you actually can appreciate (or not, apparently).
Caitlin Still
2024-09-10 11:20:30 +0000 UTCYeah but i guess speaking of irony, we’re discussing this on the page of (no stranger to the troll-y shit post) matt bruenig’s podcast
ag
2024-09-10 03:47:33 +0000 UTCSure, but Matt is very much a policy rather than politics guy. He's been pretty open that he has no idea how to best get his policies adopted other than supporting left-wing candidates in primaries and just making coherent args to anyone who will listen. Given that there is no independent left-wing political power in the US, I think it's pretty clear that no one knows how to solve the "political" issue of socialism in America. It's therefore much simpler to solve the "policy" issue of what socialism can or should look like if the political opportunity ever presents itself. Many of the left-wing people who criticize things like the SWF or the welfare state often have answers to neither the political nor policy issues of socialism and are instead content to endlessly spin their wheels with ineffective and incoherent expressive political action. These are the people I feel Matt was criticizing.
Josh B
2024-09-10 01:17:01 +0000 UTCI share your frustration with endless critique, though I think that people who are super plugged in to online/the media think it's a bigger factor in left organizing than it actually is in practice. The issue though is that "The Socialist SWF" and "endless critique" are kinda in the same category of inapplicable abstractions unless and until we build power, and Trump and Biden (two guys who love to mention a thing once and then never even try to do it) offhandedly talking about a bourgeois SWF doesn't bring us any closer.
Ian H
2024-09-09 22:54:54 +0000 UTCThis is the downside of being a Weisenthal-type poster, something I never could get on board with: the 10 layers of irony they hide under. It’s not possible for his post to be clunky, or that people have other things to do than keep up with his references. It’s their fault for simply “not getting it”
A.
2024-09-09 22:49:55 +0000 UTCI think the people opposed to socialized profits that Matt is coming across are in some proportion anarchists who don’t even believe in money or wages in general. To each according to their need, regardless of ability kinda stuff
Justin Hubbard
2024-09-09 22:01:22 +0000 UTCMatt Stoller took such an L there that he's been tweeting about it for days trying to even the score. Changed my view of the man, allowing himself to corncob like this
Mr. Mike Man
2024-09-09 20:57:22 +0000 UTCObviously a SWF will only lead to socialism if the government in charge of it is willing and driven to use the SWF to actually socialize a majority of the society’s capital income. The key though is that the SWF (or some other mechanism of social ownership) is the mechanism of achieving socialism, not endless critique and struggle over the labor vs capital share of societal income.
Josh B
2024-09-09 19:44:21 +0000 UTCLove to hear Matt go Meidner mode
chris degener
2024-09-09 19:20:21 +0000 UTCSurprised Matt didn’t roll out the fact we already have universal months despite hemispheric differences in season in support of universal time
Josh B
2024-09-09 14:21:18 +0000 UTCHe’s enough of a narcissist - I think he’ll do it
Patrick
2024-09-09 11:23:50 +0000 UTCWe need the Geoffrey Wolfers ep 😂
Patrick
2024-09-09 11:23:20 +0000 UTClol the incredibly abrupt ending without Rick Perry
Jacob
2024-09-09 09:36:27 +0000 UTCI forgot how good Mad Matt is for content. Haven’t heard him go off like this since the great Dem Childcare Battles of BBB. A more innocent time. Great ‘casting!
Jacob
2024-09-09 05:38:27 +0000 UTCI’m jealous I didn’t come up with the “one universal time zone worldwide” thing. Damn, what a banger.
Joey Trimboli
2024-09-09 04:59:27 +0000 UTCI feel like somewhere around the 37 minute mark Matt starts getting mad at a composite figure in his head, rather than specific people who made real (silly) arguments recently. So while I'm certainly not against SWFs and don't have the sort of weird aesthetic objection to the workers/the state owning capital that he imputes here, wouldn't a real critique be that the Meidner Plan didn't actually happen? Or that Saudi Arabia isn't currently instituting Socialism? While socialists holding state power could use a SWF in all sorts of interesting ways, to equalize incomes, to control corporate behavior, to prevent capital flight etc., "socialists holding state power" is the key factor. Without that, backed by militant labor/mass street politics/organized rural populace every "one weird trick" social democratic reform can be absorbed and redirected or undermined by the ruling class without issue. Or in the case of a Trump or Harris administration, or most countries that currently have SWFs, just be a funding tool for a regular capitalist state with no mandate to address inequality or undermine bourgeois power at all.
Ian H
2024-09-09 04:24:38 +0000 UTCDude like .005% of the world's population lives in the Arctic, I don't think we need to rework global time on their behalf.
Ian H
2024-09-08 22:35:32 +0000 UTCI think Benatar's thing trades on an asymmetry - you can't wrong a person by not bringing them into existence, but you can wrong them by bringing them into existence. It's not strictly just that life is rubbish. He thinks it holds even if life is on balance with living. It's still a silly argument, and he's def a weird by guy, but just to give him his due on that one
Jack W
2024-09-08 21:25:19 +0000 UTCMaybe i’m reading it wrong but i thought joe weisenthal’s swf tweet (https://x.com/thestalwart/status/1832437875734147104) is a shit post trolling all the people who were upset about the recent unrealized capital gains tax a la https://x.com/thestalwart/status/1826295957107114440
ag
2024-09-08 21:17:14 +0000 UTCWould love to hear the Bruenig v Teachout debate
Jn
2024-09-08 17:12:37 +0000 UTCMaybe Liz is thinking of NYT's "The Argument" (now discontinued, apparently?) podcast? "The Disagreement" doesn't seem like it has anything to do with NPR but maybe you know something I don't...
Norman X. Picklestein
2024-09-08 15:35:02 +0000 UTC
