Venkatesh Rao

Solely the mechanism by which 3 occurs; you believe red has an absurd caricature of blue, then proceed to make one of red; based on that caricature, you seem to think they need an understanding of shared humanity instead of job opportunities.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1307419044115406848?s=20 …

This is not a caricature. I’ve had red ideologues make pretty much this exact argument at me multiple times. And their relentless support for Trump and everything he’s done/tried to do dies not exactly falsify the caricature.

I see; it's their support for Trump that tells you they don't have an understanding of shared humanity? As well as them saying so directly? b/c Disliking Kissinger's profit-making by the deindustrialization of America (for added green PR) is not a rejection of shared humanity.

Both. And I don’t see the deindustrialization of America as a problem. Outsourcing to China was the best thing for both countries at the time. Post-Covid the US is going to reindustrialize, but in a high-automation software-eaten robots-and-AI way that won’t help Red much.

Profits are good. China developing rapidly in 20 years while supplying far cheaper goods to the US than it could to itself was good. Attaching Kissinger’s name to a broad historical trend is a kind of meaningless smear. Chimerica was an inevitable thing for its time.

At some level that’s shared humanity. You recognize the value of good things happening for others. If it means you sometimes have to scramble to reposition, so be it. But if “profit” and “green” are suspect terms for you, you’ll ofc see blue as irredeemably corrupted.

I am sorry, but profits gained from reviving slavery and free-range industrial pollution are neither "good", "green" nor "shared humanity". And yes I am very suspicious of those who would call net higher emissions "green" and profits from slave labor "good".

Your conundrum that you are apparently trying to “use twitter to deradicalize well-intentioned people” to quote your twitter profile. That suggests a certain radical confidence in your own unradical reasonableness. I think such a posture is both impossible and doomed today.