Live data from Hacker News

David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

nymag.com

191–194 of 194 posts

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graeber was certainly not Marxist. And the whole nature of his new book and the rest of his work is the opposite of the idea of portraying history as a "sequence" of acts at all let alone defining them in some just/unjust binary.

How could history not be a sequence of acts?

How could there be more than one source of a river?

How can one one river enter the sea in more than one place?

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To name just one of Graeber's essential lies: he makes the claim that Federal Reserve issuing American debt is privately controlled From a short piece of writing from the St. Louis Fed itself, linked to in another comment below: >The Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress. Now, we could quote the next few lines too, for a bit more context: > So i…

American debt is issued entirely by Congress and the Treasury, and its monetization controlled by the Fed's Board of Governors, which is appointed by the government and independently operated. There's no means of control over these two things outside the U.S. government. There's also the FOMC, but this is relatively unessential such that it's unlikely to be related to whatever "essential truth" Graeber has in mind. I…

This dispute might originate deeper into Graeber's other work on debt in "Debt: The first 5000 years." In common parlance, Treasury Bonds are the debt. But, in Graeber's theory of debt, the currency itself is also debt.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#193

Graber vs Thiel discussion 2020: https://youtu.be/eF0cz9OmCGw

Very good. Thank you. I had previously avoided this video because the thumbnails (of some instances) show a grotesque depiction of Theil. That's unhelpful. Errata, this debate was in 2014. My preassumption was this would simply be a fintech billionaire disagreeing with an academic that financialization of the economy in the 70s is the root cause of our ongoing malaise. Yet another food fight. I'm glad I was wrong. Th…

I think one can learn quite a bit from Thiel even if one is not ideologically aligned with him.

Here is a much more lengthy discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do AnCaps present themselves as anarchist? Is it a name recognition marketing strategy? Are they themselves mistaken, or are they trying to convince others of them being anarchist? I see this a lot, where ancaps present themselves as anarchist, and believe that they are left wing, but when asked are shown to be ancaps by their answers. I don’t know what the endgame is in these conversations, for them or for me, a…

Murray Rothbard did it to both high jack left wing fervor and also to convince people that it was radical to give capitalists unfettered power. It's little more than an attempt by capitalists to create a fake opposition that is actually anything but. Most AnCaps do it because they have been duped into thinking it's real Anarchism (I was a fervent AnCap from 2012-2015. The Ron Paul campaign got me in, and Rand Pauls h…

Late reply, but do you happen to have more info around timelines? I feel like the name Murray Rothbard is familiar but doesn’t ring a bell.
Post reply on HN