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But don’t let contempt for the messenger blind you to the validity of the message. The set of “washing” labels produced by the ethics theater era: green, local, organic, cruelty-free, fair-paid, non-sweatshop, carbon-neutral, recycled was merely the MVP. The UI mock-up.
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10 years later, a third of these activist kids turned into social media grifters writing woke-washing clickbait to make rent in overpriced cities. Another third had given up and turned normie or retreated in idealistic depression. But a last third got serious.
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Covid-fragility collapse is vindication of the broad critique of industrial mode capitalism that drove left-anti-globalism activism of two decades. They got most of the details wrong, and their prescriptions (reactionary labor politics) are not even wrong. But credit where due.
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The generation of millennial activist college kids from 10-20 years ago (just a little younger than me) who gave us our current state of play is now getting its first taste of political power. Their first attempts at reform (eg GND) have been mixtures of incompetence and grift.
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BUT, there’s a minority that is doing the actual work. They’ve walked the fake-it-till-you-make-it path. They understand the problems, are interested in more than virtue signaling, and in solutions that go beyond reactionary labor politics and knee-jerk anti-globalism.
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Perhaps most importantly, in the last 4 years, they’ve gotten a first taste of the adult political battles that will shape the rest of their lives: against ethno-nationalist extraction-oriented industrial capitalism. The anti-globalists on the right. Their evil twins.
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The two sides share many elements of the diagnosis (hence the horseshoe-theory flipping between Trump and Bernie support. But otherwise they are poles apart. One side simply wants their shot at extraction. The other side wants a non-extractive approach to the economy.
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This battle will mature, deepen, get 100x more serious, and dominate the next few decades. Chickenification is not an isolated pattern. It’s the fingerprint of global geopolitical and techno-socio-economic futures. Everywhere you see it, the war has arrived for real with Covid.
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We conclude this sermon thread with a very tasty virtue signal. The Just Egg breakfast quesadilla I just made for myself. Repent ye sinners (within your respective budgets). A more virtuous life is possible.
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Nice sear! Yet I struggle with 500 dubiously *self* regulated chemicals that fall under "natural ingredients" in Just Egg and all the other vegetarian *processed* food. What's the middle way ?
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Hmm, pondering death is always helpful! The frame of my moral dillemma is less hacking health for optimal longevity, and more managing compassion for animals humans and env *AND* a regenerative ag/permaculture view of bio-mimicry that requires animals.
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