What Is Marks Saying?

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Ano mark famously didn't really talk very much about what the communist, the new communist city would look like. He was more focused on the critique of capitalism. And i think you can, to an extent, separate the critique of Capitalism from whatever kind of vision you have of a better society. The reason this matters is that if we're going to lever levy critiques of capitalism and its consequences, we probably want to make sure that what we're critiquing is capitalism specifically - not some other correlate of capitalism.

David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested “Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg’s demon-entity Moloch) that lead to human misery and values tossed out the window. Does Alexander’s rationalist conception of human nature ignore the work of VBW favorites like Joe Henrich and Robert Frank? Is he a little too friendly to the neo-social Darwinism view of some guy named Nick Land? And oh no, why does he have to go transhumanist at the end?! Plus, we talk about the unique comic vision of Norm Macdonald and why we loved him.