vitalredundancy
vitalredundancy on Hacker News
Even if this were true - and Commodore Perry, Manifest Destiny, and our zealous pursuit of trade among other skeletons of history fly in the face of this - why would we want to return to a status quo when we are so far removed from it now? The global landscape has changed, and we were the primary motivator of that change. After decades of assassinations of political leaders abroad and shock doctrine economic policies, we are to pack up our bloody toys and go home? The moral objections aside, this is a foolish and shortsighted policy that leaves only chaos. We will not preserve anything about our way of life, because it's been spliced with the genes of a globalized, post ww2 administrative world we created.
Graeber's an anthropologist who took a broadly emic approach. He also happens to be an anarchist living in a capitalist, class-based society. This book is making a systemic critique of jobs and meaning under capitalism. While Graeber's a product of the culture he's critiquing, he doesn't buy what the culture is selling and diagnosing the symptoms he sees around him.
This response here is by someone who's embedded in the power structures of that culture(he's a finance guy!), and the response is filled with hand-waving or justification of those symptoms as unavoidable or even positive features capitalism, without ever really engaging in the actual meat of Graeber's work, which is that the very structure of our economy, culture, and world is arbitrarily decided by those in power, and our job if we want to survive is ultimately to reproduce that structure, even if it's not really to our benefit or to outsized benefit to those in power. This blog isn't even a defense of the structure: it gestures to our current setup as normal or natural and the results of rational action, without making any effort to justify it besides saying that if it didn't work, we wouldn't have it. That's shallow at best. It's an emic defense to an emic critique, but it's not operating at the same level that Graeber is working at. At the very end it hand-waves any phenomenon that doesn't seem rational in our economy as merely 'weird', and seems to cross it's arms and say "that's just how it is!". This finance guy's response is too narrowly emic in this way, a result of being too deeply embedded in something to actually critique it. He can't incorporate negative data into any analysis of the system he(and us) are in, because he won't allow himself to critique it. You could say it's a terrible, curiousity-killing blog. Read more David Graeber instead.
there's a fallacy of scale here, in the same way a handgun isn't the same as a nuclear weapon, and so should probably have different provisions applied to it. land is vastly more useful, and usable, than someone's shirt or ipad. multiple people can enjoy a stream, or a forest, or even a singular tree on a piece of land at the same time, and in a multitude of ways. that's not true of an ipad or shirt. this diversity and simultaneity of use puts land in a different class. severing tight coupling of personal property(like shirts and ipads) with private property(land, generally structures on land, though the latter is admittedly more contestable), is pretty useful and seems totally rational to me. it seems less rational to think weakening one would weaken the other. If anything, the distinction between personal and private property opens up new ways of thinking about property that can lead to agreeable outcomes. more generally, see also the benefits of the commons - https://www.nature.com/articles/340091a0
that said i'm with you in certain respects, i generally like solitude personally, but though i dream of having ten or so acres myself, i don't want to deprive anyone else of thoughtfully, carefully, and temporarily enjoying it either.
the point of the article, and what i think you're ignoring, is the decades of cover-up by the corporate producers of these chemicals to protect their profits. that's not a good look if they're convinced their products are worth the damage
to wit: lead dropped the average iq of the americans since 1940: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh...
how do we measure this kind of toxicity, except well after the damage is already done? if we know something is toxic, why don't we stop using it?
> What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.
the only propaganda about PFOS was made by 3M, telling us these chemicals were safe, when they knew they weren't.