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The Fig Economy

@figgityfigs.bsky.social

13K followers 1.1K following 52K posts

Father of lots, earnest as shit, Regular and not too fancy, weird li’l guy enthusiast. He/him.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 7d

Every one of you: post at least once a day about some small thing that makes you happy that has nothing to do with politics. This is a hard and fast rule. I won’t be keeping a spreadsheet or anything but if you don’t do it, I’ll know.

Iris Meredith @iris-meredith.bsky.social · 7d

I think, for those of us on the political left, we need to address morale as a real and pressing issue that will fuck up our ability to fight if left unaddressed. We *need* to figure out a way to keep people feeling at least minimally good about things even in shitty situations.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 1m

Talking mostly about the people who spray doom and despair at everyone and then when called on it are like “oh now it is a crime for a human being to Feel Emotion?”

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2m

Just because you’re simping for a leftist conventionally attractive thirst trap white woman doesn’t make you any different from the people who spend all day doing the same on X for Elon Musk.

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 6m

As much disdain as I have for Large Accounts that do a bunch of venting on main like they’re smol beans, I have a ton more for the army of followers who swarm people like “they’re a human being, don’t police their expression of emotions!” This is the same as simping for favor from the rich.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 10m

To Dr. Liz Willson even though Dr. Liz Willson is Not Only a Girl But Dr. Liz Willson Is a Girl Vet?

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 11m

I’d even go further than that. The thing that America is meant to be, the lofty ideals it is meant to strive toward? They *hate* that.

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 12m

I love this, and have a minor pedantic point: I believe Count Orlok was found in a court of law to be *not* legally distinct from Dracula, and the only reason we still know of him today is because the court order that all evidence of him be destroyed was disobeyed.

Mx. Moz @mleelunsford.com · 15h

I've made this scale to help people out during this holiday season

a scale of Dracula to Not Dracula going from right to left: Dracula (Dracula), Count Orlok (Legally Distinct Dracula), Drake from Blade Trinity (Might Be Dracula), Vlad the Poker (Probably Not Dracula, and Morbius (Not Dracula)

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 13m

Despite cloaking themselves in it, this has nothing to do with the constitution. It’s like how the people most likely to festoon themselves with American flags have the least to do with living up to the lofty ideals it is meant to represent.

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 1h

Vought’s ideology of “radical constitutionalism” captures the defining sensibility on the Trumpist Right: “The Left,” he believes, has command of America, there is nothing left to conserve, nothing short of a radical “counter-revolution” can now save the nation.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 15m

They’re all riding in the back of my Dragula.

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 17m

Seems like the metastasis/end state of the same process that led the right to spend decades systematically demolishing the foundations of labor so that it could no longer wield significant political power. But that process at least understood it had to be undermined bottom-up.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 19m

Yeah, a bunch of people predisposed to authoritarianism without sufficient theory of mind to understand that their opponents are not.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 27m

Gonna probably go back to blocking in a hot sec because this is exactly why I had in the first place.

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 28m

Larry Underwood and Eddie Dean are Talisman-style Twinners IMO.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 29m

Yeah, Christ, this is more or less siccing her followers on someone for disagreeing with her (comments are why internet-as-validation-machine* is a plague).

*especially if you’re a conventionally attractive white woman TBH

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Fact is we designed a system with a lot of moving parts to make it so those parts would grind against each other, but they’re complicated and mostly invisible/incomprehensible to most, who don’t know they have to do regular maintenance on judges and state legislators for the presidency to work.

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

That’s fair but even there I wonder how much is institutional design and how much is still-extant traumatic memory driving things, you know?

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

I’ve been noticing that too. Some are people who I follow who I then see, so they must be temporarily deactivating? But I don’t know why it seems like so many.

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Yes, I know, but I feel like this is a different more classical type of florid insanity.

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m grappling with here. I don’t want to be fatalistic but I also feel like when a faction like Trump’s gets enough of a foothold, and has begun/completed capturing institutions, any system would rot from the inside out until it collapses.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Should be bigger news that one of the world’s richest men, clothed in great power and influence, has gone floridly insane.

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 2h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Is there a design that could have stopped a determined Trumpist faction, or the decades of scaffolding that the right wing built to ultimately prop it up? Or at least slowed it? Are we in the late period where these things are more vulnerable, or does that part not matter at all?

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Is there a systemic design that gets you over the duration hump in the early vulnerable years? Like did the US’s design help it last the first couple of generations or was so much of that down to the contingent event of Washington feeling like retiring?

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Like maybe we’ve got three factors:

1) strength of design
2) duration of institutions
3) determination of those who would destroy the institutuons

My intuition is that on 2, systems are probably at their weakest early on and late (whatever late means).

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

Like if we’d had better systems maybe we wouldn’t be here now, but also maybe if we’d had better systems and Donald Trump had come along 100 years ago we’d have been here 100 years ago.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 2h

I think my only question here is whether every system/polity becomes subject to this kind of institutional capture, and if so, if we can push off how long it takes until it happens through institutional design.

Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 3h

No institutional design can overcome a lawbreaking president, a Congress defending lawbreaking and forfeiting its own power, a Supreme Court that pretends legal text doesn’t count to facilitate lawbreaking, and a citizenry that votes for all that.
Need at least one that wants rule of law. Maybe two.

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👁🌻🦊⚙️⚓ Bob, Engineer, Pusher of Paper @navmecheng.bsky.social · 21h

> It is 2025 BC. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

> It is 2025 AD. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

Soldiers at the Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis, TN.

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