Ant 🐜 in my tea ☕️ 😡

And the World Wide Web

Gonna be an awesome convo. One angle I think about a lot:

Don DeLillo described the Kennedy assassination as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.”

And he did so because after that Americans lost conviction in capital-T Truth, in a fundamental coherence of the universe. After all if we can’t even determine who committed the most famous murder since Franz Ferdinand, if we have to fall back on “magic bullet” theories, does anything mean anything? Is there something behind the curtain?

This, coupled with Vietnam, creates the perfect backdrop for the intellectual revolution that is postmodernism and all its tributaries and outgrowths.

Postmodernism takes over college campuses. Critical theorists like Derrida and Foucault and de Man become rockstars. Academia becomes almost a competitive game to see who can formulate the most radical understanding of the world.

We go off gold in 1971, and inflation ensues. For the next 50 years everything gets more expensive, especially higher education. So at the same time post-structuralists and post-colonialists et al are saturating the academy, the number of folks who can actually afford to go to the academy is decreasing.

So now we have elite schools increasingly captured by what is essentially an evolved viral (almost Darwinian) Marxism, teaching increasingly wealthy and well-connected kids. This is where we are now. With the country’s most affluent, privileged, educated kids becoming the most politically radical, and it’s all occurring in a way and in places more and more detached from the lived reality of normal people. And these kids of course grow up to take powerful positions in society (because they’re wealthy and well connected).

So a schism between “the Left” and the constituents it purports to care most about, “the working class,” emerges and grows.

Most regular people are basically just like what the actual fuck are you guys talking about.

And so the Left becomes utterly detached from its target demographic and becomes instead like an eternal regress of theoretical nonsense.

Like the bird in an early David Foster Wallace story (the title escapes me at the moment) that flies in increasingly narrower circles until it actually flies up its own ass.

Voila here we are. nostr:note1vysmayhv5xa3hsj42vfs8jt0ze6kzf7vqpqn766yy0yrlk63vjnq8t05lw

So this is the biggest tomato I’ve ever grown. Over 3lbs.

#gardenstr

Supremely bored by bitcoin Twitter's book recommendations. It's always the same thing – Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Ayn Rand, that sovereign individual, yawn, yawn, yawn.

I want books that make me think, not books that reinforce what I already know. Give me niche post-structuralists, anarchists and revolutionaries. Give me poets and weirdos and outcasts, not CIA funded neocon thinkbois. Escape the echo chamber, anon.

Couldn’t possibly agree with this more. Anybody who thinks ayn Rand is an elite novelist has simply not read enough (or widely enough) to know what an insane opinion that is.

Infinite Jest, for example, is a far more interesting rumination on freedom in America than anything by Rothbard, Rand, etc etc.

You will learn more about humanity from Shakespeare than from the Mises (all due respect to Mises).

So many incredible conversations about big ideas live in works of fiction or poetry, where people tend not to look.

100% endorse not just reading more but reading outside of your comfort zone. Read poetry, read more fiction, read something you think you might disagree with, read something long.

Imagine how absolutely miserable hyperbjtcoinization will be if everyone just reads and talks about the same five books. nostr:note1xd2jq296f7vm302ke6vmhd78y7zfqckg6j4564tdtrdg25gyyw0s73v45n

Supremely bored by bitcoin Twitter's book recommendations. It's always the same thing – Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Ayn Rand, that sovereign individual, yawn, yawn, yawn.

I want books that make me think, not books that reinforce what I already know. Give me niche post-structuralists, anarchists and revolutionaries. Give me poets and weirdos and outcasts, not CIA funded neocon thinkbois. Escape the echo chamber, anon.

Anyone here do meditation?

What kind?

Excuse the cooler

#flowerstr

Lettin' these hot-n-sweet collard greens simmer all day #foodstr

On Tim Walz and his repeated digs at J.D. Vance for getting an education and making some money:

I was born and raised in a small rural town near the Appalachian Mountains, 2 hrs from the nearest major city. Still work in this town today.

My father was born and raised in an even smaller town, even more rural town with a population under 2,000.

I have three degrees from three elite institutions because my folks believed in aspiring to education, that it opened doors, created opportunities, and allowed you to experience more of the world. They instilled that in me.

I am a cocktail of my upbringing and my education.

I shoot guns, and I quote Shakespeare.

I eat venison, and I think about Dostoyevsky.

I am comfortable in both Waylon Jennings and Mozart, Steve Earle and Alice Coltrane.

I can cite Luke Combs and Lou Reed, wax poetic about Top Gun and Le Mepris.

I buy food (and milk) from farmers.

I am an attorney, yes, and my J.D. is from an elite institution. I represent the blue-collar folks of my hometown.

I am neither a supremacist, nor a relativist.

I am a dad and a husband.

I am a #bitcoin er

All my life I have had one foot in the ethos and spirit of my rural hometown and the other in the rarefied echelons of the elitely educated, the financially successful, and the well-connected. It's not always comfortable.

All my life I have climbed, my folks sacrificed and pushed me to climb and to aspire. "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," to quote Tennyson (see, I told you I can do that).

And all my life I have kept my upbringing close to me, because it is a part of me. I don't shed my lived experience, nor do I forfeit its imprint, its impact, simply because I pursued the best education and got a professional job. The validity of my experience does not expire upon achievement.

So when Tim Walz repeatedly attempts to invalidate J.D. Vance’s upbringing, to cast him as some inherently callous, rich interloper, out of touch with the "heartland" simply because he pursued the best education he could and made some money, it bothers me on a deep, personal level.

In the Walz taxonomy, which is binary, but only binary for non-Democrats apparently, financial success or an Ivy-League education, automatically and irrevocably renders one out of touch with "regular" people. Further, aspirations to these things are no longer to be applauded; they're punchlines in campaign speeches.

Never mind the financial success and education of the Obamas, the Clintons, Kamala Harris, Oprah, etc. This does not invalidate their respective experiences, the journeys they each took to get there.

Only if you're J.D. Vance does success actually make you a charlatan to yourself, an interloper in your own life, an enemy to your past.

It's not right. We should be applauding folks, no matter their race or political affiliation, for aspiring, for traversing the brutal terrain of class, region and familial afflictions and making it.

You may agree or disagree with J.D. on the issues, of course. That's perfectly fine.

But dismissing him simply because he managed to go to Yale (like so many Dems, by the way, who readily purport to be regular, working class heroes), or because he majored in philosophy, or because he eventually worked in finance and made some money, is craven, disingenuous, breathtakingly lacking in self-awareness, and offensive to anyone who has actually grown up in the "heartland," myself included.

Like so many other Americans, I contain multitudes, Tim Walz, but your taxonomy apparently doesn't allow that.