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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Kinda interesting, but it gives me a sense of human history only beginning when the subject (Klein) came of age.

That's fine for pop culture stuff. But when she's an activist against a problem that's older than the pyramids - it leaves me with the impression that her cause is hopeless, because every single generation of humans forever will have to re-learn the hard way.

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Cleaning my house is hopeless because it will get dirty again.

Maintenance of democracy takes effort, yes. We knew that from the start.

I'll guess that you clean your house regularly enough for it to be "pretty clean" all the time. Vs. going through cycles of letting it degrade into a stinking mess, then having to do an enormous clean-up, without ever learning to do regular cleaning.

And if you have kids, that you'll have done a good job of teaching them in turn, before they are grown up and have houses of their own to keep clean.

“I have found the image of a spiral really useful, in terms of how to make sense of the fact that our era is both familiar and different,” Klein says. “The thing about a spiral is that you’re going round, but you’re not going to the same place. If the spiral is pointing down, it’s deeper, it’s tighter, it’s carrying more velocity, it’s carrying more force, it’s carrying more heat, it’s carrying more violence.”

What do you think this means?

it means what she explains it means in the article

...which is to say that the current social condition belongs to the tail end of a continuum, the trajectory of which is less important to comprehend than the so-called "jetztzeit" is, which is supposedly incomprehensible itself?

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