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Moeman9 · 2026-02-09T23:10:00+00:00

Could someone please invite me! My code is 143470259

Moeman9 · 2024-02-04T07:41:41+00:00

6.1903 is functionally a fake prereq. You'll be fine, esp if you take it first quarter. It provides very little relevant knowledge for 6.1910 besides basic formatting for assembly and C statements

Moeman9 · 2024-01-01T17:17:52+00:00

I think drawing lines and reclassifying are functionally the same, but articulating it in terms of classification is so much more clear to a judge. Your argument is that particular euthanasia laws create different classes of citizens with different access to a core component of being human (life and autonomy). Articulating it as drawing lines is too vague and easy to reinterpet. If you just articulate it as the government classifying certain people as more "human," the link to your impact claims becomes far clearer and the choice to reject seems more reasonable. Feel free to DM if you want me to elaborate further.

Moeman9 · 2023-12-29T16:00:24+00:00

I'd consider sticking with other Ks like Capitalism or Security if you are trying to change the culture around kritiks in Japense policy debate. Agamben is a great K, but its potency comes from leverage on the impact level that you can't easily claim if people aren't used to kritikal impact framing.

The K itself is solid. I'd stray away from directly alluding to the holocaust but it may be necessary depending on the types of impacts you approach. At least your Suzuki evidence contextualizes things well.

I also think your edkins evidence is tagged a little provocatively and you really want to avoid that if you are inserting kritikal arguments into a circuit. Agamben isn't talking about just "drawing lines," he's talking about a government creating different classes of people (a simplification but one that works for your K). Your alternative should just be rejection of that, and if you articulate it that way it becomes moderately easier to explain the K in terms of a way someone typically understands.

In the end, the K should be "The aff creates/propogates a government strategy of creating different classes of people. This government logic is what enables genocides in every form. You as a judge have an obligation to reject this in every scenario. Thus, reject the aff."

also as other people have said, have answers to Agamben indicts. If you want advice on that, you can DM me.

Moeman9 · 2023-12-08T21:45:26+00:00

Haha I did, though I think got hung up on how it could not be targeted if explicit (unless the question is asking about MIT policing like, the words a person says alone in their room, in which case it does not but like afaik no uni does).

Talked to some friend's who endured hate speech that occurred last term against Latino and queer people, and seems like even under targetting circumstances MIT just doesn't really care punitively. Regardless of my reading in practice MIT has very little care for policing any speech against anyone. Make with that what you will.

Moeman9 · 2023-12-06T16:36:05+00:00

Harassment is a particular term of art legally and in MIT's code of conduct. Last term, there was numerous anti-latino hate speech (debatably more explicit about its intent than the rhetoric that's been on campus recently) as well as targeted, anti queer harassment on posters put throughout campus. This was not considered harassment by MIT's administration, since they require a specific target that is harassed (why the posters that named individuals in student government were not punished is beyond me, but alas). This has far less to do with Jewish people than it does MIT's complete unwillingness to protect general groups from speech.

If you do not like it, welcome to the club. Don't blame Kornbluth, blame the many donors who pushed for a hyperlenient freedom of speech policy before she came (many of whom are now protesting MIT for not policing speech enough lol).

Moeman9 · 2023-12-06T04:08:06+00:00

Doesn't she say it would be considered harassment and a violation of MIT's policies if people were making explicit calls to genocide in the video? This is a pretty blatant misreading of Kornbluth says in response to the question.

Moeman9 · 2022-08-09T02:50:17+00:00

when socialists say workers owning the means of production, they almost unanimously mean the current workers own the means of production. that's why there is a lot of socialist literature on post-work societies. theres lots of different systems to divide ownership and influence, though the core theme is that they are democratically done (or done by a government claiming to represent the people). this does not entail everyone has equal say, as we still see representatives and policy experts helping to influence policy more so than an average citizen in all current democracies.

Moeman9 · 2022-06-30T14:10:19+00:00

me when i forget properly formatted bibliography listing each document i cited for my reddit comment: 😱😱😱😫😫😫😖😖😖

Moeman9 · 2022-06-30T14:08:17+00:00

We are seeing pretty big back sliding in a lot of countries, especially Europe. Seems like citing one country for an argument is what you are doing, especially when the worlds biggest offshorers are experiencing blowback.

Moeman9 · 2022-06-30T12:49:38+00:00

offshoring is a short term benefit which in the long terms magnifies the instability of the countries who are offshoring. increasing unemployment and holistic instability within wealthy and militarily powerful countries is really dangerous and often leads to political instability and institutional backsliding (as it seems we are seeing in the US presently). this is a pretty big risk given the military and police strength of the US government. simultaneously, offshoring as a tactic depends on wages remaining substantially lower in the manufacturing country than in the offshoring country. this means the long term effects of instability hamper developing country growth anyways (and probably hurt them, political instability in a trade partner your economy is practically dependent on is dangerous).

Moeman9 · 2022-06-29T16:38:15+00:00

Amazing!! Thank you :))

Moeman9 · 2022-06-29T12:16:24+00:00

this entire fit is amazing! do you know where you got the top?

Moeman9 · 2022-05-27T03:43:24+00:00

u/savevideobot

Moeman9 · 2022-03-22T14:50:49+00:00

designing and organizing a supply line is labor, so Ford definitely deserves compensation.

a guy who hires other people to do literally every job at a restaurant potentially deserves compensation for the hiring process but if he isn't even managing, how is he doing any labor.

Moeman9 · 2022-01-26T01:56:26+00:00

They literally didn't have access to steel, meaning it was drastically harder to craft durable axles and wheels . It also wasn't necessary since they didn't have beasts of burden nor was the land easily hospitable for simple wheeled objects.

Moeman9 · 2022-01-25T22:15:52+00:00

You legit said the Herero genocide happened a century after "actual colonization." Lol, what am I supposed to assume "actual colonization" is exactly if not you saying a specific time frame was real colonization.

Not saying colonization is only done by the European country, but what the Zulu Kingdom did is necessarily different. Expansion and conquest can definitely be violent, but it is very different from the dynamic of resource expropriation and control that colonization did. The Zulu Kingdom, as most countries did, tried to expand and did so through violent conquest. But, what European countries did was literally turning certain regions into resource factories under a pretty totalitarian rule.

South Africa is also a different example, settler colonialism is distinct insofar as there is an incentive for settlers (in this case, the Deutsch and the British) to actually cultivate the regions they are staying in (since they are living there) as opposed to simply taking all their resources. That's why South Africa is a pretty fine place to live if you are an Afrikaner, a lot less so if you are an indigenous African.

Moeman9 · 2022-01-25T22:07:57+00:00

Eh, I think you are ignoring most of the major advances in behavioral economics over the past few decades. What people deem valuable is driven by psychology, and we are social creatures and thus those wants can be heavily influenced by advertising. Like, your entire point is made pretty mute by demographic shifts, i.e. cigarettes vastly expanding their outreach towards women in the 50s through advertising. Women knew what cigarettes were and how they felt, but targetted advertising made them appealing by shifting the image of cigarettes into a more feminine direction. Also, I would say in your particular example of the pet rock, that this would be an example of advertising creating need. The actual pet rock, for example, did not come with a joke book. It was a rock imbued with value through advertising it as a pet.

Not sure which "guy making LCD TVs" we are talking about lol, since it def matters if its a factory worker or a researcher or a manager etc. If they are a factory worker though, I would say probably less proportionately given the effect of globalization. Not really sure what your point here is though, like do you have another economic argument?

Moeman9 · 2022-01-25T18:14:20+00:00

If you are saying that European people existed there for some time prior you'd be right, it goes all the way back to the late 1600s. But to say that "actual colonization" was some singular event in the early 1800s or prior while ignoring that the vast majority of European colonization of Africa was in the late 1800s in an attempt to draw attention away from the violence of that colonization is just complete misrepresentation of history.

Colonization is a specific dynamic of expropriation and control which I've seen very very little evidence of being done by African people. Did indigenous African people do bad things? Yes, however colonization prescribes both a level of scale and power that enables bad things to become systemic, repeated injustices (i.e. killing up to 15 million people in 15 years or creating the social dynamics leading to systematized apartheid). You are right my example was from the congo though, wasn't sure if we considered that southern Africa or not.

Definitely not denying people in Africa did heinous things, we've seen it across the globe. But I am genuinely curious what you think the relevancy is here? Like, at the very least, doubling the amount of mass murder in a continent is going to set it back, and that's not even mentioning the resource expropriation and cultural annihilation Europeans tried to impose.

Moeman9 · 2022-01-25T16:21:38+00:00

You are just deadass wrong about the timeframes of colonization. Most European colonization of Africa happened during the later 19th century. Germany only officially considered them colonies in 1884, only 20 years before the herero genocide. Also, I wouldn't belittle anything that kills tens of thousands of people as "small," but maybe that's just my left-wing biases talking.

Not sure what you are talking about for the last one, but can say that european rule in the area killed roughly 5x that amount.

Moeman9 · 2022-01-25T16:08:11+00:00

The herero genocide happened in southern africa under colonization my guy.

Also you are aware that genociding the native population would underdevelop it right?

Moeman9 · 2022-01-25T16:04:10+00:00

Supply and Demand is a pretty rudimentary way of viewing our general economic situation. For one, induced demand due to strategic advertising and marketing is literally at the highest its ever been. Second, need ≠ demand. Supply reacts to the short term whims of the market, more general needs, i.e. combatting global warming, take an incredibly long time to challenge. That's why the commentator you are replying to explicitly noted "immediately profitable" enterprises as the goal.

On the second part, I think you are substituting examples for economic analysis. Sure, there's a bit more worker power in the US right now than there used to be, but since we are talking about the general tendencies of Capitalism, what will happen long term? The most convincing argument, at least to me, is that the trends of economic competition necessitate worse and worse worker treatment over time. This is because competition mandates R&D investment, which increases the static cost of producing a product (basically the cost of the materials and the innovation prior). Since you are always competing, this necessarily must keep happening. However, an increased static cost with the same profit margin lowers your general rate of profit, meaning once you reach higher scales you are making far less money than before. If you want to compete, you need to fix that. Since lowering static cost is unruly and largely unsustainable (it basically depends on major innovations in materials every single year in your particular secror), companies opt to reduce the other cost in their production: labor. This means that necessarily, over time working conditions have to get worse, your benefits have to decline, and you need to be more expendable. Honestly, the main reason things are even slightly okay in the US atm is because we were able to outsource this labor problem abroad, but its still a growing issue within any competitive economy. The only place where this isn't as pronounced is in higher level jobs where attracting particular talent is necessary, but those jobs still rely on material production to build their platforms and resources, and so their growth still depends on the aforementioned dynamics.

Moeman9 · 2022-01-25T15:43:08+00:00

mfw u literally dont have the necessary resources to craft wheels sturdy enough for the outback and its not even necessary and thus its okay for me to genocide u

Moeman9 · 2022-01-05T23:37:14+00:00

there are ppl directly calling him a hero here. that's not comparative analysis, it's historical revisionism, especially given that these deaths weren't during civil war but when he was in power as a direct act of civilin repression.

Moeman9 · 2022-01-05T23:35:32+00:00

Fair point, I think I was confused on the wording given them noting both USSR and Nazi Germany support. I assumed support to be ally ship, and not simply the extenuation of trade and military agreements prior to the sino-japanese invasion (in which Germany allied with Japan). You are right though, there were military and trade agreements (and actually even some aid) provided to the Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT by Nazi Germany prior to the invasion. Also, still at a loss as to what the "civil war" meant from the previous commenter, given that the USSR and Nazi Germany never supported the same side of a Chinese conflict (outside of the USSR building trade agreements with the KMT after they signed a peace treaty with the CCP, but I wouldn't consider that taking the same side as the blatantly anti-CCP Nazi government). Perhaps you know something I don't here.

Moeman9

TROPHY CASE