I'm happy to be proven wrong, but my understanding of history is that nations and cultures achieve broad-based prosperity for very brief periods, in the aftermath of a major territorial conquest or postwar economic boom (on the winning side).
reinventing classical liberalism from scratch is a mistake, because reinventing anything from scratch is a mistake, as G.K. Chesterton would readily remind us.
The real question is whether our ancestors built a civilization where people, broadly speaking, could earn a living wage under reasonable working conditions. Also of interest is whether any other culture has ever achieved this.
After the election, I made some big-brain takes on #fedi to the effect that whoever abuses the ban button loses the election and gets banished into the wilderness of political irrelevancy
Yes, I'm KbC-anon on a 1-user instance in #Tokyo, and I'm unironically saying that reddit is politically irrelevant. I'm very proud of my koolaid actually
I still hold on to the "ban button is political suicide" theory. I think that the #elonmusktwitter meltdown is #GamerGate2 and will blow up in Elon's face; a totally unforced error on his part.
We don't have to win; we already won. There's a reason why our GDP is over seven times as much as India's. There's a reason why America's per-capita GDP is roughly 15 times India's.
Vivek's family wouldn't have immigrated here if that were not the case.
The thing most tiresome with Vivek's and Elon's shtick about "we have to win" is the implied urgency. China's missiles will launch in exactly 1000 days if we don't hire the bEsT eNgInEeRiNg tAlEnT
China's missiles with launch in exactly 999 days if we don't hire the best engineering talent
sorry, I'm not planning on inviting more people on my instance. Mainly for performance reasons and to skimp-out on responsibility for tech support.
Also because I want the ability to take down my server impulsively, migrate to another server impulsively, fork or tweak the source code impulsively. I probably will do those things eventually.