Skip to main content

Matt Christman on the Chaos of Capitalism

On the latest Chapo Trap House Matt Christman discusses (starting about 1:03:00) the job-seeking advice contained in Megan McArdle's 2014 book The Up Side of Down.

She makes "two incredibly banal points...Advice for job-seekers 1: keep applying! Don't give up, keep it up, keep applying, even though it's discouraging...The other one that is duh and also vile is: Oh, and have you considered moving? The Kevin Williamson shit...

"Nothing highlights libertarianism's cold-blooded disconnection from any notion of human interaction or society better than their penchant for saying that people should just move around to the jobs and create these atomized pinball-humans moving from shantytown to shantytown looking for employment, and just sundering all communal bonds along the way. Nothing makes me more sympathetic to the trad caths than reading this fucking garbage..."

McArdle suggests that people could be helped to move to North Dakota where unemployment is low: "There are two hilarious things about that. One is now, in the last couple years, because of the falling oil prices, all those jobs in North Dakota have dried up pretty quickly. So joke's on you if you fucking piled in the minivan and spent your last 50 bucks to get to North Dakota to show up and find out all those jobs are gone.

"And the other is that even when that boom was happening, those oil towns in North Dakota were basically dystopian nightmare hells, like Philip K. Dick mining colonies. The kind of thing that no one on Earth would want to live in, the kind of place where community is basically impossible to form. So like Kevin Williamson, her recipe is basically 'have you considered turning the world into a sci-fi dystopia?'"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

The Setswana Grammar Manual

One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...