Man, basically this. (I used to read Tim Bray for some Android things or something, but he's one of the few I've kept around for being just pretty interesting at blogging kinda in the way that I want to be?)
I guess why I was psyched about Bernie despite it no longer being cool was this: an economy that looks hopeless and broken forever, for a lot of (most?) people.
Like, my future looks bright in the short term. I'm one of the people that mainstream Democrat party cares about, I've got a 401k, I've got steady housing and employment and food and I'm unlikely to get all revolutionary, I'm demographically likely to support rather safe progressive values (e.g. LGBT equality)... but look, we need the unsafe progressive values, the ones that Buddha (our salvation is all bound up in each other) and Jesus ("whatever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me") and Gandhi/Dostoevsky/Churchill/Whoever ("you can judge a society based on how it treats the least of its people"). A functioning society that only works for me and my 401k doesn't work. But this is obvious; go back and read that Tim Bray post and the ones he quotes like the Unnecessariat post.
Especially the one about how moral appeals don't work for some issues. Which is why am I focusing more on the chunk of the world that's our economy than some of the other pressing issues. It seems likely that enough people are going to get angry enough that they're going to overturn the NC bathroom law; it seems less likely that we're going to get so straightforwardly angry about the economy. I mean, the series of small cuts that's giving us the ongoing long-burning economic crisis (and heroin and suicide crises) is leading some of those people whose lives have been hosed to... Trumpism? That seems like some people are taking advantage of the complication of all these issues.
Maybe global warming or malaria are still bigger issues. Ok. There's also the argument that, if you take the (maybe?) most powerful country in the world and let it eat itself with bad economics, you're not going to solve global warming or malaria. But I'd believe that we should focus on global warming or malaria too.
I guess why I was psyched about Bernie despite it no longer being cool was this: an economy that looks hopeless and broken forever, for a lot of (most?) people.
Like, my future looks bright in the short term. I'm one of the people that mainstream Democrat party cares about, I've got a 401k, I've got steady housing and employment and food and I'm unlikely to get all revolutionary, I'm demographically likely to support rather safe progressive values (e.g. LGBT equality)... but look, we need the unsafe progressive values, the ones that Buddha (our salvation is all bound up in each other) and Jesus ("whatever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me") and Gandhi/Dostoevsky/Churchill/Whoever ("you can judge a society based on how it treats the least of its people"). A functioning society that only works for me and my 401k doesn't work. But this is obvious; go back and read that Tim Bray post and the ones he quotes like the Unnecessariat post.
Especially the one about how moral appeals don't work for some issues. Which is why am I focusing more on the chunk of the world that's our economy than some of the other pressing issues. It seems likely that enough people are going to get angry enough that they're going to overturn the NC bathroom law; it seems less likely that we're going to get so straightforwardly angry about the economy. I mean, the series of small cuts that's giving us the ongoing long-burning economic crisis (and heroin and suicide crises) is leading some of those people whose lives have been hosed to... Trumpism? That seems like some people are taking advantage of the complication of all these issues.
Maybe global warming or malaria are still bigger issues. Ok. There's also the argument that, if you take the (maybe?) most powerful country in the world and let it eat itself with bad economics, you're not going to solve global warming or malaria. But I'd believe that we should focus on global warming or malaria too.
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