orthogonal to alive @avi@computerfairi.es

the thing is that everyone understands that economies are planned when they're going about their daily life, but it's only when they're asked to think about it that they go into this mode where they regurgitate the propaganda they've been taught in school

every single libertarian nerd who goes on about the virtues of the free market and the evils of central planning has a PNG saved to their hard drive that describes the next ten years of Marvel movies

capitalism likes to pretend that it's this emergent phenomenon, where you leave people to their own devices and then magically the economy grows and people's needs are met, but this ignores that the market isn't free of influence, companies are constantly planning their own growth over time, marketing exists and influences decisions in irrational ways because human beings aren't perfectly rational, huge monetary and power disparities exist and these determine the influence any individual can have on the whole economy, goods with inelastic demand are prone to price gouging, the huge advantage of economies of scale in cornering markets, the natural interest that powerful entities have in maintaining and expanding their own power, and the financialization of capital away from use into money-generating abstraction

but if you ignore all of those things then yeah it basically just shows up on its own and does a pretty decent job

mary midgley's "evolution as a religion" sounds like evangelical tripe but it is actually a fascinating philosophical investigation of how evolutionary metaphors have infiltrated sociological and political thinking when darwin himself was actually horrified at people taking his ideas out of a purely biological context

techno-libertarians: when will bodyhacking become really possible
me, a trans woman: about ten thousand years ago an ancestor complains that bread is unnatural

still thinking about making a music genre called Post-Core. no root word, just prefix-suffix.

a few days ago I was listening to a podcast I otherwise really liked until the host and the guest went off on a protracted tangent about masculine and feminine energy and the divine masculine and feminine

if there's one thing that makes my eyes roll so hard that they create grooves in my skull, it's that