all right. a bunch of thoughts in no particular order
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
1. i have succeeded in pushing exactly zero policy ideas in the course of my life. the easiest way to do this is to start with something small and specific, and getting this very clear ideas in front of a bunch of existing stakeholders
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
there have been numerous efforts to push massive governmental changes from the bottom up most of the involved people end up murdered and things returning to status quo very quickly (eg French Rev) or turn out very badly and eventually revert to status quo (Communishm)
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
if you want to push for something like that, probably best to boil it down to something that can be encapsulated by a three to five word slogan (really)
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
all of *these* very large movements ultimately had quite broad intellectual support in advance, which should tell you something about intellectuals. but if you want to sway them it is important to become someone who intellectuals want to listen to first
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
a good way to do this perhaps is just to start hanging out on blogs and in comment sections and leaving incandescently brilliant comments. or at least thoughtful ones. freddie deboer and scott alexander got their start doing this sort of thing, freddie especially
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
ii. it might be worth thinking about what sort of change or small set of changes are most important to you, and think about how to accomplish them using the most modest means possible. large changes inevitably disadvantage a large number of powers who will be natural opponents
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
iii. for something like the US global empire, it might be worth spending some time thinking carefully about why it exists, what props it up, and what would happen to all of these social needs in its absence. the advantage of this is twofold
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
first, understanding why there are lots of powers propping up endless war etc by the US might give you a set of ideas about what other mechanisms might satisfy the desires of those powers and so give you a way of not making them your enemy
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Replying to @eigenrobot
Did I not strike at the heart of it in complaining about the petrodollar? Is there something I'm missing about that? Honest questions.
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well, I am not an expert in international finance by any means. but i think petrodollars are in a sense less a disease than a symptom in a lot of ways there are a lot of reasons to conduct trade in dollars. yes some of them are simply lock-in, but others have to do with supply
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
like, there are a toooooon of dollars floating around right now. and you need a certain amount of scale to be a standard unit of exchange in an economy as large as the global economy
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Replying to @eigenrobot @RatifyGuy1776
so maybe you can get an alternative global unit of exchange set up. maybe it's yuan, maybe it's bitcoin, maybe it's something else but it does exist to solve a basic problem (smoothing over exchange) and somehow that need must be met if you want to avoid many bad things
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