And tbh Chalamet deserves a long moratorium on being made fun of after this, seriously first rate performance

I know it’s incredibly incredibly difficult. But it’s just weird to me that the individual human beings with names and lives and favorite bands seem to be, despite being maybe the starkest expression of the depraved class war of attrition, exclusively a Church / NGO concern even in discourse?

would be foolish, and utterly and completely just John Rawls the Liberal, not to choose a society all of whose spoils are distributed equally and in proportion to the needs of human flourishing.

his veiled subjects in the state of nature would have chosen. Meaning that, in the first place, the difference principle was not construed as socialist, even though it would seem obvious to anybody engaged in the purposive task of an *ideal society based on self-unaware self-interest* —

Later, after about ten thousand more pages of the most heavily abstracted liberal theory, pages that go down like sand, and after several years, Rawls publishes an addendum to his gigantic book, in which he discovers that a broadly socialist sort of society is actually the sort of society that —

at best a spicy plot twist in a thought experiment that is unable to map itself onto anything resembling the terrain of reality for which it is meant to serve as an allegorical representation.

disadvantaged underclass. Rather than just getting rid of that, for some reason, these blindfolded political philosophers choose a society in which there is a substratum of the relatively disadvantaged. He calls this the difference principle. It’s hard to see how it’s a principle, rather than—

But are not able to decide the obvious: a society in which the resources required for individual flourishing are distributed equally amongst everybody. Instead, Rawls picks something that hardly merits the name of “ideal” theory, including, as it does, the bizarre assumption of some —

Then the participants of the veil meeting sort of forget that their job is to do ideal theory about what kind of society would be best. The people/person under the veil clearly knows enough about political theory that they can come to Rawls’ ultimate and wretchedly defended conclusion —

You don’t know anything about yourself except you know about all the other things including what you ought to wager on for your self interest, there’s a bunch of you but since there is nothing over which to bargain, there could just as well be one, namely John Rawls

application deadlines again. But whatever, I’m gonna get into schools sooner or later, by hook or by crook, as the zoomers say

It’s fundamentally changing important aspects of my argument in the paper I’ve been tortuously trying to write on Marx and moral philosophy (moral, as distinct here from the broader ethical), which I am grateful for, I needed a catalyst. Not so grateful for the fact I’ll almost certainly miss phd —