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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I don't know if I'm stating the obvious here, but nothing about this tells us that "urgency" is bad per se, let alone how any of it is a value of "white culture" specifically. It seems at least possible that the activist's arrest was more important than her training, even from the narrow perspective of "perpetuating racism", but Okun appears incapable of entertaining that idea.

There's a certain obvious and probably inevitable professional deformation that occurs in people in Academia (some fields more than other). Consider, for example, a philosopher. His career trajectory, his current social status and salary, are pretty much entirely determined by the opinions of his peers and superiors. If they think that he's cool, his salary will increase. Then he goes and spends his paycheck buying food and stuff, and is upset that he can't buy everything he wants.

Now, in theory, if asked, he probably could explain that the food he buys is produced by real people, delivered to the supermarket by the real people, there's a lot of effort required for all that, there's a limited amount of effort available to the society, so you can't just set everyone's salary at a million dollars per month and let them have anything they want. But his world--all his lived experiences--scream at him that you definitely could, his paycheck is a meaningless number not connected to anything in reality and set by other people who could just as well double it if they wanted, and the goods on supermarket shelves are conjured from thin air by extradimensional aliens for all he can tell.

This has obvious consequences. For example, his gut tells him that communism is totally viable and money was invented by evil people for the sole purpose of causing suffering in their lessers. His mind knows about supply-demand curves (hopefully) but in his gut he knows that it's bullshit invented by evil people, look, you take a piece of cheese from the supermarket shelf and tomorrow there's another piece of cheese there, what supply and demand? It's like when you scoop some water from a river with a bucket and it's immediately replaced with more water, sure, someone might try to charge your for that, and you might yield due to the social pressure, but in your gut you know that it's unnecessary and unfair.

Similarly, in this case Tema Okun probably lives in an academic bubble detached from the reality where stuff is made by someone, and where if all those someones suddenly decide that urgency is a useless value, she will discover that supermarket shelves stay empty and starve to death.

There's something ... vaguely true about this, but isn't it undercut by observing the consistent support of many working-class people for things like communism / welfare / gibs? Other past varieties of leftists are union members/organizers, or the activist who donates his time to helping the poor and raising class consciousness - both of these think the money supply is evil and the rich are thieves, even though they're both viscerally exposed to how things aren't free.

I think you’re on to something with the intuitive decoupling of abstract work from physical rewards.

I don’t believe it’s an obvious explanation for communism or such. Socialist fantasies arise from a more prosaic observation: he has all the money, and that’s unfair. It was labor first and foremost. The association between bourgeois academics and communism is only so prominent because of how badly labor fared over the 20th century.

O hai, that's my comment =)

the goods on supermarket shelves are conjured from thin air by extradimensional aliens for all he can tell.

At the risk of strawmanning or picking out particularly egregious commentators, there is a genuine lack of agricultural awareness. Recall the fellow who remarked on the pretty inexplicable patterns in the countryside from his aircraft: https://twitter.com/KyleKulinski/status/1190737140688326656

A more serious and tragic example is the Sri Lankan government banning fertilizer, leading to an economic disaster: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03/

Perhaps instead of raising awareness of mental health or climate change, there should be awareness-raising of the importance of fertilizer in agriculture, of the need to produce nitrates and various pesticidal chemicals in factories, of the need for cheap energy supplies to sustain industrial civilization?

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