#Incrementalist

[drnic1]

Sweet Dreams in a Clickbait World

Sweet Dreams Snooze or Lose The latest pick-up in the press with a clickable link from Axios is How to get more sleep (Americans need it), which frustratingly fails to include a proper reference to the actual source paper or data. The notation “Data: Apple Heart and Movement Study” suggests the data came from this study group out of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital with a web page here. But…

[callmearcturus]

I had a very long, emotional talk with a friend about the state of the world and the darkness hanging over us all, and how grim it all seems.

There is just one thing I wish I could give to everyone is the idea that part of the Struggle, of wanting a better world, is that you need to celebrate the victories and not just sink into despair.

I think this hit me a few years back, maybe 3 or 4, when I saw someone say "If all you reblog about trans people is how much you hate terfs, what are you even doing here? make sure you're elevating us and not just our haters"

which unlocked something in my brain. that I needed to love trans people more than I hated transphobes. hate can't be the point.

a diet of fear and anger will poison you, you need to have joy too. you can't lose sight of the joy and hope. we have to know that we can win, and we have to celebrate everyone around us. if all you can think about are the failures and you can't remember where we won, then what are you doing here? how do you see the future? will I see you there?

i hope so, and that's the guiding light.

[taohun]

people on here complaining about “burn it all down” leftists as if their problem is that they’re incrementalists and not that they’re not leftists

[reunionandthen]

....

[karlachian]

i genuinely believe duke consort astarion's #1 agenda in life (after ->enjoy decadent safety and ->love wyll) at least in the beginning is to drive ulder to suicide. this is fine though because ULDER'S #1 agenda in life is to annoy astarion so much that he goes and lives in a separate house (not even divorce ulder doesn't like having lofty goals he's an incrementalist). it's also even more fine that astarion wants his father in law to kill himself because ulder is the type of man who refers to suicide as "pussy shit".

[probablyasocialecologist]

Those of us on the left who call for radical change are sometimes accused of having “pie-in-the-sky” ideas by milquetoast liberals. Well, if it’s pie-in-the-sky to want everyone to have their basic human needs met, then so be it. Anyone who is unhoused cannot thrive. Being unhoused significantly raises one’s risk of mortality and lowers one’s life expectancy. We have to care enough about unhoused people to demand they get what often seems unthinkable: housing! Incrementalist change is often rotten. It’s the natural outcome of a politics that refuses to see people’s human rights as nonnegotiable and that lacks a fundamental willingness to challenge structural causes of injustice. We need to have a pie-in-the-sky dedication to creating a society with zero homelessness and zero hunger, to ending poverty and unmet healthcare needs once and for all. Our society needs to center human needs, not private profit. We need to be a society that truly allows people to thrive—not one that, as Malcolm X said, merely pulls the knife in people’s backs out by a few inches.

[gynii]

i’m catching up on the qsmp debate and frankly, baghera bbh and gegg are really the stars here. baghera and bbh, while having different plans for the new governmental system, are at least campaigning to restructure and reject the system set up by the federation. gegg supplies the passion and ideology to reject the federation, and i think the three of them combined would be a very respectable force to be reckoned with.

that being said, i think it’s really funny how most of the candidates lump bbh and baghera together despite them having near opposite governmental structures in my mind. While bbh is promoting an informal and unstructured system based off of mutual aid and bond of word style honor, baghera is promoting a very structured council system with voting and community lead aid systems. yet the ‘true’ presidency candidates are lumping them together as the same ideology because they are both trying to challenge the system immediately, and thus cannot identify the nuances in their proposals.

gegg is nearly completely dismissed because of his more radical and comedic deliveries, but is essentially the distilled essence of resistance. he supports both baghera and bbh BECAUSE they refuse to comply with the greater systems, and wants to push them and the voters to think more radically. gegg is not a candidate in the traditional sense, but a pushing force to challenge as many candidates and voters intellectually as possible. the only flaw is how effectively he’s dismissed.

the presidency candidates will twist his words to support their agendas, the audience will scream ‘based’ and ‘spitting facts’ without truly incorporating his ideals into the worldviews. they understand ‘federation bad’ and gegg’s platform is the most clearly anti-federation, yet people dismiss his more radically inclined phrases as absurd and hyperbole. yet it’s his extreme stance that is necessary to invoke true change.

tldr: really fucked up the gay cat boy is turning out to be an incrementalist boot licker /LH /J /RP

[unsoundedcomic]

So Shadwe is a genuinely good guy then? I was honestly half-expecting that he’d turn out to be monstrously corrupt, maybe even involved in Duane’s assassination somehow. Even at best I figured he’d be a grody in that he’d representative of Alderodes more repressive and traditional side. But giving rights to women, treating other castes well, and supporting third options? Man sounds like he’s way ahead of his time.

He's a thoroughly decent human being, in the context of his time and place. I always thought that was really apparent right from the start considering where we see that Duane is when we first meet him in Alderode. Duane's from a low place in the world but he's been elevated to this pretty prestigious position, with an even more prestigious calling ahead of him. None of that would be possible if he wasn't serving a man willing to overlook his low birth and caste. Grandvin even smoothed over the Bodie incident (though it was by letting Bodie kick Duane's ass, of course).

So yeah, a very fair-minded man, but an incrementalist, as so many Jet and Copper tend to be.

[drnic1]

The Good, The Hype, and The Doctor's Perspective

AI in Healthcare This week I am talking to Rob Brisk, MBChb PhD Chief Scientific Officer for Eolas Medical (@EolasMedical). Rob has a fascinating background with experience in both healthcare and machine learning and artificial intelligence. Robe shares his journey from being a physician to venturing into the world of AI and emphasizes the importance of clinicians’ involvement in AI…

[comparativelysuperlative]

What was the book? With the Definitely Real Banishment

Spoilers (obviously) but it's the Lightbringer series. That villain was pretty good! The word-by-word writing is fine! The plot is, for several books' worth, aimed at being Very Generic Fantasy (for reasons that will make sense later). Incoming long post about its philosophy, with even more spoilers.

It's not often that I read a book and immediately go "I can tell you what kind of middle school this author went to." In this case, it was drawing on the author's experience of exactly the theology I grew up with, which was almost eerie.

(I read book one years and years ago, and didn't retain much other than "cool magic system." Probably everything in this post is true about book one as well, but I wouldn't know.)

Google will tell you that the series gets gradually very Christian, to the point where the climax of the last book contains a sermon. But it's more specific than that. These books scream "Protestant, American, classically educated, does not travel internationally very often, male, straight, probably white, the kind of person who would vote straight-ticket Republican until that meant Trump at which point all bets are off." I did not bother confirming most of those. They're just obvious.

The loudest part--to me at least--was the "classically educated." (If you're not familiar, it's this thing.) The series would mention quotes from fantasy medieval Catholics or fantasy ancient Greeks or whatever, and I'd recognize the quotes or the names because they'd be real people I ran across in school. Sure enough, author went to Hillsdale.

Lightbringer is interesting for having an actual vision of a conservative society, not just about hating the right/wrong people. Not being on that team anymore I don't actually like this vision very much, but compared to current conservatives, credit for having one at all.

Differences between people obviously don't affect your value as a person, they just might make it easier or harder or mean you have to specialize differently to accomplish as much For The Group.

(That opinion makes perfect sense for characters in an elite military unit/training for that unit. But that context is mostly specific to book two, and the philosophy really isn't.)

This applies to everything. Physical condition, including strength/weight/gender. Color-blindness. Superpowers. Being straight. (I'm genuinely not sure if that part was intentional. Characters kept getting distracted at terrible times, and the narration outside their head sounded exactly the same as when someone can't run a mile without Trying Very Hard.)

It does not matter whether your mental illness turns out to be literally demons in your head. Either way you've still got to either work through it or specialize around it.

Tradition matters, even when we don't understand the reason behind it.

If you happen to be in a fantasy book and have access to magic, consorting with demons is evil but fancy physics is fine. You can just BET this author got into fights with other Christians about whether Harry Potter was anti-Jesus.

"Irredeemably bad" isn't really a thing. "Not in fact going to be redeemed" is, but it's worth trying to show mercy if you have the chance. If you don't have the chance, kill 'em. Don't enjoy it, though.

Forgiving people for actually-bad things is hard, can't just go "idk, they're good guys now," but it's also important. (I do think this is underrepresented in secular fiction, where it's either depicted as "how could you work with THEM" or "come on, get over it already and team up against the whatever.")

One of the big reveals at the end is "the Christian God is real." The answer to the problem of evil is indeed the popular answer in the denominations I grew up with. Human choices something something mumble free will.

Very incrementalist. You do as much good as you can as fast as you can, but obviously without overthrowing the entire order or anything. Only evil opportunists would want to do that. Yes, even if the existing order is corrupt all the way through.

Speaking of which, you know that organization/political entity claiming to represent God? Corrupt all the way through. God is more personal than that. Protestantism!

Personal morality matters. Your leaders absolutely must be good people, or at least trying to be, or you're screwed.

Personal morality matters. It is safe to assume you'll end up as exactly what your peers expect of you, so pick good peers.

A man should be faithful to one (1) wife. Viewpoint characters speedrun figuring out the philosophy behind this.

(IMO monogamy was a legitimate human rights win by early Christianity, relative to what came before, and I think something similar applies in this setting. But since the real-life alternatives today are so much better than women being property, giving this a lot of screen time sounded like the book is fishing very hard for things historical Christianity did right.)

Also, once you are married you Are Married. It's not that changing that would be unthinkable, just that if you do treat it as an option you're obviously doing it wrong.

Gay people don't exist. Any variety of non-straight, really. Nobody says that it should be that way. It just doesn't come up. Characters are written in enough detail that I can tell you how they'd react if you asked them, and it's mostly the "not my business" + "prefer not to think about it" kind of low-grade homophobia. A few would be explicitly okay with it. But it does not come up. If there were a gay relationship depicted, I'd expect it to be "coincidentally" problematic in some other way.

(I guess there's that one slaver-antagonist whose sexuality is just "sadist." Yeah, one might call that problematic.)

Practically dripping with Great Man Theory of History. There's a scene where the protagonist has a self-affirming/emotional moment about not relying on his family name and meritoriously earning his first kingdom. This is played completely straight.

Don't worry, he uses it for good. At least as much good as he can without overthrowing the existing order etc.

If there are end times prophecies, they might well be true but you can't trust any specific interpretation so it's wiser to just do your best without reference to the prophecy. (This is an interesting take! And not heresy but also not common! I bet the author's reacting against some interesting strains of fundamentalism there.)

A cool idea where angels and demons can be anywhere in any world at any time in history, but are very reluctant to actually do that because they can't pick the same time twice. You can just tell it's the author's Christianity headcanon.

You win by doing your best and having faith in God. The villains are very much a sideshow.

(I think if everyone followed this book's philosophy more it would be a mostly bad thing. Let's not do that.)

(But wow, I wish modern conservatives were only this bad.)

It probably sounds like I didn't like this series. But I did read five doorstoppers' worth. This post is just about the opinions, and the opinions sucked.

Anyway. This has to be on purpose, right, and 10 or 15 years ago I was pretty much the target audience for this. Guess I'm old.

I used to explicitly think "I'm Christian, but atheist fiction is more interesting," and this book is the kind of thing that...tries...to counter that. Fails, because resolving major conflicts with divine intervention is tricky to make interesting. But you'll see why it's going for Every Other Book, But Christian. (Also, the amount of sex in these books is much higher than you might think, given everything. I wish I knew less about what body types the author is attracted to.)

Anyway, I can't really say I would recommend it. But if you're interested in what would happen if Card or Sanderson tried to be Evangelical Lewis for adults, Lightbringer isn't bad.

[pb-dot]

Buddy Dawn is such a fascinating character to me because he's the kind of religious person who projects their faith by pretending they've never had a bad day in their life. It's such an intensely American way of being religious, and I am riveted by it.

As far as I see it, there are three potential paths the boy can take. 1: He can have a few bad days, preferably in a row, which will either disillusion him or bring him into an explicitly dangerous fanaticism instead of the honey-tongued incrementalist danger he currently presents, or give him a more grounded character, be that as a hero or a villain. 2: He can be revealed to secretly be evil and this compulsively cheery persona is his caricature of what being good is, think "Mormon Light Deathnote." 3: He can spend the rest of his days as the most loathsome of creatures: A youth pastor who also makes terrible Christian Helioic Rock.

[pearwaldorf]

Jesus fucking Christ. Luv 2 be scolded for seeing both sides of a situation!

Biden has certainly done a lot for people in ways that aren't necessarily acknowledged. The paid leave for the railroad workers. Infrastructure investments. And all the stuff mentioned in the thread above. He is an old school incrementalist who has used the connections he has made in the decades he's been a Washington insider to make things better, and it's true it's not entertaining or obvious.

I am also allowed to say that he has not done enough, because he hasn't. To be clear, this is not all his fault. Both parties have spent decades disinvesting in useful and important things (infrastructure, education), because that's what neoliberal capitalism does. He also helped create the student loan crisis because Delaware's economy is basically nothing but predatory financial institutions (this is an oversimplification but you can look it up).

I think it's fair to expect him to unfuck the things he fucked, at the very least. But I also think it's reasonable to expect more without being called somebody who thinks the perfect is the enemy of good.

[thepolyamorouspolymath]

Republicans are not winning with bipartisan support and there are more Democrats than republicans. Also Universal Healthcare WAS on the party platform until around 2016 and they took it off to appeal to the "moderates." The Democrats had a supermajority post-Bush administration until 2012. They could have forced Universal Healthcare through the house AND senate and instead they tried including a newly radicalized and recalcitrant GOP with its "tea party" movement not only water it down to the incrementalist BS called the ACA but spread their lies while their opponent Dems "went high." The Democratic party has moderated and moved more to the right since 2012 and 2023. They are losing their base. Even if you are correct and you cannot win with just your base, you are DOOMED without it.

You ask for patience while admitting this process has been broken and just been breaking more and more since LBJ. I think its time to come around and realize that merely pulling a lever for whoever is blue isn't working and other methods of protest and action are required to force the hand of any of these politicians (not advocating violence or anything). Neither party are representing our interests. We can't push one way or another. The only message they're possibly willing to understand is mass civil movement and political defeat.

Ok, first, I 100% agree with you that Obama absolutely squandered that supermajority. He had the chance to be transformative and threw it away bc he wanted to be liked, by people who were never going to like him, though that supermajority was only through 2010 -- he lost it in the midterms as was to be expected

Also, I have NEVER said that change begins and ends at the ballot box. I have said that those who don't show up there don't get listened to elsewhere. I'm all for wide and varied forms of protest -- two I advocate for constantly within the system are becoming a delegate (THEY took universal Healthcare off, at a time when they knew they couldn't get the votes and the Third Way Democrat candidate running didn't support it -- and they are mostly minor local party players. Big donors and insiders don't become delegates. However, if more activists became delegates, they could force candidates to more leftist, while still winnable positions. Bc yes, winnable is more important than ideal -- wins by inches.)

The other thing I recommend highly is getting involved with or starting activist groups pushing for open primaries and ranked voting and splitting electoral votes, such as Maine does. Those changes have actually been demonstrated through real world application to improve engagement and representation (you can read up on Alaska's results adopting it -- they may not be the results you'd want but they are representative of what Alaskans want.) In most places you can do that by ballot initiative which you can get done as citizens.

I'm also a huge fan of making a nuisance of yourself -- when enough people raise enough fuss, Congress may continue their rhetoric but they change their votes. Look up how many substantive bills passed Congress during Trump's administration -- 1 and it was the congressional GOP tax plan. For all they toadied for Trump in front of reporters, they didn't give him their votes. The attempted repeal of Obamacare was only the most spectacular example.

I'm a huge fan of civil disobedience, I've done it more than once myself. Be prepared you may get arrested, and worse you may get hurt doing it, not to deter you but you should know the risk -- I've done it bc I don't care if I get hurt, but it's not a political activity I would have taken my kids to.

Yes, things have gone downhill since LBJ. Just as before that they had a 35 year climb upward since FDR was first elected. Politics is cyclical. Hoover led to FDR, LBJ (who was the one who actually did most of the good shit Kennedy gets credit for on civil rights, along with expanding Social Security and creating Medicare and Medicaid) led to Nixon, Obama (who was mediocre except in set precedent for a minority President) led to Trump bc the pendulum always swings.

Without protest votes, we could have skipped Afghanistan, Iraq, the Great Recession (maybe, economics is somewhat independent) and the Patriot Act. We could have avoided torture and Gitmo. Bc Al Gore lost by 527 votes. If Nader voters had voted for Gore instead it would have been a walk off, even with all the other things that went wrong. Would Gore have been a perfect President? No. But he'd have been a better one.

It's not that I do not understand the frustration and the feeling that it's both hopeless and pointless bc I do. I have been disappointed in so many candidates and officials and the party more times than I can count.

But I continue to believe we can be better, and continue to try to help us get there, and I have been involved in politics long enough to know that dropping out is not an effective strategy. If you do not show up to vote, then they don't care. There could be rioting in the street in every city in America for universal healthcare and if exit polls showed it wasn't a priority for those who showed up to vote, no politician would give a shit.

Also there's a matter of statistics. No Republicans aren't winning by picking up Dem voters -- they are picking up independent voters though (that middle 30%). And yeah they need less of them, bc they currently have a cult. Where Democrats won in 2020 by not just picking up independents but GOP voters who couldn't stomach Trump too.

You tell me, what policies could Biden have gotten passed by Congress with the margins he had and didn't capitalize on? Bc I'm frankly shocked on the number he managed to get.

Principles matter. The end goal matters. But you get to that goal in steps that can can pass at the time, the slow running game of inches rather than Hail Mary passes, bc those rarely work.

I'm sorry that the entirety of human history demonstrates exactly that. I'm sure you wish it didn't too. But you cannot find me a civilization that it was not true of, bc it has never existed. "Its time to change that." To something humanity has never been able to do? Well fuck in that case it's time for world peace, an end to poverty, unsatisfying jobs, bad coffee, pronouncing words as if they contain letters that they don't, dictatorship, hatred, bigotry... I'd love to solve that overnight and you tell me HOW, I'll join you. Instead of just telling me why you're mad -- fuck I know why you're mad, I've been queer since the 90s -- tell me the plan to get from here to there. If you've got one that has any chance of working I will join you, but 3rd party votes have been tried and always failed, and no one gives a shit if the voting rate falls to 5%, if they did they would make it easier to vote. So give me your ideas that can SUCCEED, bc pointless self congratulatory shows of purity that help no one don't impress me, they just tell me that you're a coward who doesn't want accountability for a system that represents you and think you should be applauded for being one.

Also, if your convictions are so strong, you could at least put your anonymous already user name on your ask -- I sign everything I write at least.

[bijoumikhawal]

yes!: talking about how unprepared revolutionaries are for producing and distributing medicine, and that safe DIY pharmaceutical production should not be mocked as it will save lives

Shut the hell up: piggybacking on that to imply all people who are revolutionary instead of incrementalists are ableist and dint think or care about disabled people

[ntrlily]

becoming an incrementalist and proposing copyright termination upon creator's death

[scorpius-rising]

Having observed reactions on all three sittings on the ICJ case, something I've noted is that lack of particular knowledge about the nature of International Law causes a whole lot of angst and anger when people run hard into the limits of the framework. The righteous anger is justified, absolutely. It doesn't go far enough. But the entire international legal framework is just fucking like that, because it's a mutually agreed intergovernmental system with no external enforcement mechanism beyond other countries choosing to abide by it.

It's been like this since the founding of the UN and the modern international order in 45, with the only real enforcement power delegated to the Security Council, and that had the veto powers of the Permanent Five members baked in at the start- none of them would have agreed to sign up otherwise. Hell, the main reason the US is so violently anti the International Criminal Court, despite having been a key player in its creation, is because at the last minute the Rome Statute was changed so that it would be able to independently choose who it prosecuted, instead of having that chosen by the Security Council. The US has a law on the books *that will take it to war with the Netherlands* if any US citizens are charged in the ICC. The simple fact that their choices aren't dictated by the UNSC angers the fuck out of the USA.

The modern international order has *always* hopelessly hobbled in its ability to enforce its rhetorical goals. But that doesn't mean it can't be useful, in its own ways. the entire COP and UNFCCC processes, for example, have had real, positive effects on getting everyone on the same page and willing to criticise each other for failing to meet commitments on climate change, even if the changes are pitifully small.

Trying to explain this to people when they're justifiably furious about inaction right at that moment, however, doesn't tend to go well. Generally, people tend to find even limited defense of these systems as liberal proceduralist apologia, which tends to be a fair charge overall given how many liberals swear by purely legalistic and incrementalist methods of social change.

But this is the point I wish to make clear- there is some place for legalism and incremental change as part of the building of revolutionary change and efforts to reduce global suffering. The reason this is so hard to articulate and maintain as a position though, is because the dominant ideological drive of status quo liberalism under capitalism is to posit incrementalism as an *inherently good* End in and of itself, rather than as a limited instrumental tactic as part of a wider strategy of revolutionary socialist change.

But to effectively engage in incrementalist tactics and organising requires one to clearly understand the contexts and limits of the systems one is engaging in, and unfortunately, critical socialist organising and education about the systems of international diplomacy has not been happening widely.