Ash on a Star✨️

Anointed with Oil A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped ...

There are a lot of books, like Annointed with Oil by Darren Dochuk and Bad Faith and Thy Kingdom Come by Randall Balmer(historian & pastor) that go into this quite a bit. They're fascinating and incredibly frustrating but good reads.

This part came from the manifest destiny expansionism from the oil boom & bust cycles of early stock market speculation, which was seen as oil driven prosperity brought by God to the South. It was a whoooole thing

Anointed with Oil A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped ...

Exactly that and add in oil money, and you've basically got the recipe for the 1979 establishmwnt of the Moral Majority and...[gestures at everything else since then]
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/darre...

Yes, also old school conservative arguments against bloated government overreach, surveillance state control, costs etc are easy points to get across to republican seats.

Pretty crazy how important the blockade of a trade route is right now

The reaction to your thread reminded me a lot of this post, if you hadn't seen it already: bsky.app/profile/pari...

In the Right to Repair/FOSS communities I've been involved in for years, Deere has always been one of those shining examples of why just technological advances=/=improving workers lives. "You'll own nothing & be grateful for it" is not enriching farmworkers lives, it's just creating technofeudalism.

—infamous for doing absolutely every method of corporate technology exploitation that you'd expect unfettered profit-driven entities to do. I don't understand why anyone purposely chooses to defend THAT as if they are the purest form of innovation idealism, over someone saying "this can go poorly."

It's been disappointing to see so many folks absolutely HELLbent on willfully misinterpreting every part of this conversation in the most stubborn contemptuous & disingenuous ways possible, especially considering the concerns in the quoted article.
In the Right to Repair community, Deere is infamous

Pronouncing things all sillylike is probably pretty high up my "gets the most joy out of smallest thing" list

Apologies for putting a politik on everyone's feed but this is how I pronounce it too and I hope more people will join because it's fun lol

Partially bc -sky as suffix is pronounced this way, but also partially because a jp poster wrote it ブスキー once (i think as a play on ミスキー) & I liked that too

Can we honestly say that the analysis of technological improvements' impact on society *shouldn't* take any of that into consideration? That the concept of the cotton gin itself should be separated from the practices around its actual application when analyzing its positive impact on all of society?

If the repercussions of chattel slavery today are still felt today deep in many country's economic & political systems, then can it still be considered a net positive gain for society? And that's not even considering the cascading effect of large scale monoculture industry on ecosystems…

Whitney's cotton gin might have been considered a fantastic technological advancement but the perspective of considering it a net positive for progress & improvement of "all" of society is a really specific perspective, and very narrow scope. Maybe easier to conclude in 2026, but maybe not?

To be more direct: what (or who) in society is acceptable to be consumed/destroyed/taken in order to achieve this "improved" baseline for societal progress. Do they mind that, as long as it's an improvement for society? Would *you* mind if your family or land is part of the acceptably consumed %?

Net positive gains ignores what is consumed, destroyed, taken to actively improve the baseline, so what (& who) are you considering to be included in "society" when you analyze what you consider to be a net positive gain for society? That is an incredibly important definition of scope for this convo

The biggest issue when having these conversations about corporate technology & resource exploitation is that the scope of improvement we analyze plays a huge role in judging what can be called net positive for society. If the scope of society is only a small %, then we ignore its impact on the rest?

I'm going to quote post this in hopes of reaching some folks before they hit the quotedunk button but this person's point is not technology=bad if you bother to read beyond the first post.
It's the opening salvo in an important conversation about corporate exploitation & the scope re:"improvement"

So strong sweeping statements about tech always being bad for society as a whole are just always going to be minimized the same way Luddites' arguments were minimized down to just being anti-technology rather than being essentially anti-capitalism/anti-exploitation😔 ppl only see the opening salvo

The biggest problem in these conversations is always going to be the narrow scopes that people are willing to analyze re:societal "improvements" so they will only look at the quality of life in one society without including its ramifications on the societies it's standing on within that conversation

I'm pretty sure I understand what argument you were trying to make in this post and agree in general, but your first mistake was using the hyperbolic phrasing "when has that ever" as a rhetorical question on this Vulcan site😅 the folks here are going to respond to that question in a literal sense

I was extremely panicked and hesitant about the Project Hail Mary movie not living up to the book but now that book-PHM ppl have posted glowing reviews of the advance screenings I'm now at 100000% excite excite excite

I realized how my perspective changed a bit as an adult after watching how a friends child treats their switch lol😅 I was impressed it still worked but it made me wonder if my family looked at how I treated my gameboy color with the same concern

I think the interim CEO is from the same company running tumblr and wordpress

Hi! Do 🫵 have an existing RSS feed for your blog? Do you want to bring it into the Atmosphere?

I built a tool that imports your blog and adds it to your PDS as a standard site publication, and imports its post as standard site documents!

Check it out here: heron.tunji.dev/import/writing

I haven't taught her "hold what you're doing, dont continue what youre doing but I wanna take a photo of you before I tell you to drop it" yet

It looked so cartoonish😹 she normally has this expression when shes about to go a-shredding bc she's gaging if something is sanctioned for shredding or not, or if I'm about to ask her to "Trade" where she gets paid in snackies if she picks up something she isn't allowed to shred(she games us w this)

LOL my dog is a sneaky paper shredding connoisseur and just walked into the room gingerly with a lil "save your soul" christian pamphlet hanging out of her mouth. Im so sad I couldnt get my camera out in time; she looked like she was about to ask me if I had a moment to talk about our lord & savior😹

Super inconsiderate when people take their frustrations out on the people around them rather than doing the considerate thing and shutting down emotionally like the rest of us :p