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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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That's a common sentiment among the radicalized; they believe themselves in a moment of crises in which the tenants of civil society need to be abandoned (&can be abandoned w/o personal consequence).
They then inevitably attempt to coerce others into their absolutist morality.
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Nope. Not at all what I meant. Based on our conversation, seems to me you’re much more of a radical than I am. Your posture feels largely like projection. I wouldn’t be so sure you’re not the one in need of deradicalization. Luckily for you I don’t see it as my job.
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The presumption that you’re the magisterially correct and non-radical judge of who is “well intentioned,” whose own intentions and non-radicalness are self-evidently obvious... needs modulation with some doubt.
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The basis of my disagreement with you is that your solution to the economic disparity is to make the red express an understanding of shared humanity in terms you can recognize; further, you think an un-radical posture is impossible and doomed "today"; wasn't going to go there but
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No. I’m saying certainty/confidence in ones own unradicalness is arrogance. You are also mischaracterizing my solution. I don’t have one. I’m suggesting something inspired by Marshall plan. The shared-humanity-narrative point is just an observation. It would be nice to have.
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I encourage you to read Karl Popper "the Open Society and its Enemies"; you can get a nice, subjective understanding of radicalism from his "paradox of tolerance".
It's not correctness I'm certain of--that *would* be arrogant--but my understanding and aversion to radicalization.
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