I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.
One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“ Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.
Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.
don’t ancoms need a way to “unenforce” property rights? why is that less powerful than a state?
The vibe I got was that this would be done by The Community somehow. …which basically means it is the state, only power will be more evenly distributed or something and it will dissolve afterwards when not needed?
Of course there’s a reason I’m a Nationalist not any kind of Anarchist. Naturally I don’t expect that to work. At least it’s better than Tankies though.
I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.
One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“ Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.
Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.
I really don’t understand white nationalists who think antebellum slavery was a good idea - even from a self-interest perspective.
Like, you guys do realise how the people you hate so much got to the Americas, right?
For people who say blacks can’t swim, you seem surprisingly convinced that we crossed the Atlantic without help.
The first White Nationalist I’ve met in a while does indeed think that the Atlantic Slave Trade was a bad idea, and roughly for that reason.
From a regular Nationalist perspective racializing slavery was also a dumb idea since it essentially created a separate ethnicity in a group that could have been fully integrated, causing expensive and politically-divisive rifts in society that last to this day, undermined the nation’s moral character, undermined national morale, etc. And that’s before even accounting for the ordinary moral damage it did in terms of unnecessary human suffering, which was enormous.
Of course if one is the kind to practice mass racialized slavery, one may not be the kind to give thought to the long term implications of mass racialized slavery on others in general.
nostalgebraist said: i don’t understand these two sentences – if they couldn’t reach him, how do they know what he said? – “Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon.”
blatant bullshit Kremlinology, I just like the fact that Americans spend so long vetting their presidential candidates (over a year!) then once elected they immediately install a cabal of incredibly shady characters to run everything.
“oh I’d have a beer with Dubya!”
*cue Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz striding into Whitehouse in slow motion like world’s worst boyband*
Some dark part of me longs for Technocratic Dictatorship.
G-d. I am so fucking nervous about where this anti-fascist stuff's going. I feel like I'm an island in a sea of an increasingly violent left-wing culture. I lean left and libertarian. I sincerely feel that initiating the use of force is wrong. I have a kid. I don't want her growing up in the middle of a civil war or a totalitarian regime, and I feel like one or the other's inevitable. People keep telling me 'if there are Nazi sympathizers in power, why shouldn't we use violence', but no, _no_...
*hugs*
I know how you feel. I’m terrified. But I think in the coming months it’ll settle down a little as the left realises that Trump isn’t going to run away scared and the Administration realises that people are actually going to resist if they do anything egregious, and we’ll reach a lower-energy-if-still-unstable equilibrium.
I’m still not happy about anything that’s happening, though. You have all of my sympathy. Feel free to message me any time.
Unpopular opinion: intersectional feminism is responsible for a lot of collateral damage that it is becoming increasingly urgent to address. It presents itself as comprehensive in its revelatory powers re: marginalized experience even though it actually enables silencing and reinforced marginalization of the most marginalized of such experiences by virtue of its very theoretical structure. Its ideals are not practically supported by its theoretical tools due to their own structural flaws.
In brief, upholding positionality as a criterion of discourse and ultimately decentering privileged commentary in attempt to define narrative authority ends up fostering oppressive dogma and suspension of necessary critical inquiry in the very attempts to do the opposite, and in ways that large-scale matter to the lives and plights of the most marginalized. […]
This may be a relatively digestible bit of expansion copied from another thread. For context, someone was musing about how third wave feminism seems to have a severe problem recognizing issues like misogyny and homophobia and generally identifying social conservativism within Muslim communities:
Honestly I think this is partially wrought by intersectionality theory itself. It tries to unravel and juxtapose nuanced experiences within marginalized groups, but is absolutely ill equipped to do so because it falls into the trap of crystallizing identities and experiences to the testimony of visible community voices without interrogating those voices to begin with, because its very model undermines interrogation. It hinges on mechanisms like positionality to center the voices and experiences of oppressed people, such that representatives of those people are granted authority and outsiders are considered incapable of accessing the knowledge and experience to challenge that.
Except when those representatives given authority by virtue of their positionality are themselves bound to a conservative institution and dedicated to a cultural zeitgeist that is at odds with the values underlying intersectional theory to begin with, while intersectionality itself put roadblocks against any capacity to question or challenge such positionality and upholds a model of specifically decentering critique from outsiders, you get people who believe they are being the most authentic and supportive they can by refusing to extend models of critique that are not necessarily limited by their position as outsiders by sheer virtue of how they are positioned. So they eat all the BS up and the Linda Sarsours of marginalized communities continue to be upheld as representatives beyond reproach. And that’s third wave feminism ‘done right’.
There’s something perversely lacking in self awareness about the very theoretical models people take as authoritative right now precisely because they attempt radical self awareness.
Querent - “How can I figure out what I should be doing to fight racism without burdening people of color by constantly asking them what I should do?”
@ozymandias271 - “You have a brain? Presumably you can use it to assess the quality of information yourself? Why are you making people of color do this for you?”
It’s one thing to recommend a debiasing intervention (e.g., ‘people under-weight evidence in the form of self-reports of others’ experiences when those people have lived very different lives; assign more weight to compensate’), and another thing to act as though the debiasing intervention replaces normal weighing-of-the-evidence altogether.
First-hand accounts from the disprivileged are a weight on the scale, not a qualitatively higher form of evidence/argument; obscuring that fact and talking in non-quantitative terms encourages epistemic learned helplessness like in Ozy’s post.
I mean, the exchange makes perfect sense once you take into account that Querent readers are trying first and foremost to ensure that they don’t get yelled at, and that openly admitting to that would get them yelled at. Ozy’s approach is the one that actually works better for everyone in the absence of any risk of yelling.
I just encountered a tweet with a gif that showed a woman in a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat being blindsided and pepper-sprayed by some guy, with a reply saying “you dont often see female nazis getting what they deserve”
Originally, a “Nazi” meant someone who wanted to create a fascist state and commit genocide. Any decent person would hate these guys, so we all understood that Nazi=Evil.
Then “Nazi” meant someone who endorsed racist beliefs, regardless of policies. This was transparently diluting the meaning from its original form, but we didn’t really mind, because racists suck and we were going to be pissed at them anyway.
Then “Nazi” meant someone who supported Donald Trump for any reason. ie: Over a third of the USA.
Now “Nazi” means someone who wears ~edgy~ hats supporting bitcoin.
And, regardless of your opinion on genocide - or literally anything else, for that matter - in a month, “Nazi” is going to mean you.
It literally does not matter what you believe. Not a single bit. You could be the most fervent anti-racist in the world. You could hate Hitler with all your heart. You could have been completely certain that no one in their right mind would call you a Nazi.
And then someone wearing a dumb hat got pepper-sprayed.
So, the next time you see the punching discourse, remember this: All of those arguments in favour of punching Nazis are encouraging people to punch anyone in a silly hat. Even if the person making the argument doesn’t endorse punching people in stupid hats, this is where it leads. And saying “But I thought they’d only punch the real Nazis!” is no excuse.
Saying “You can punch Nazis” means “You can punch people you call Nazis”. Simple as that. There is no ledger in the sky listing the True Nazis and distinguishing them from the Fake Nazis. If there was, people in stupid hats wouldn’t be pepper-sprayed. Any and all endorsement of punching Nazis on sight is an endorsement of “Use your judgement to decide who to punch, because no one’s judgement is ever flawed”.
And then people wearing the wrong hat will be punched. And people wearing the wrong shoes will be punched. And people eating the wrong food will be punched. And people listening to the wrong music will be punched. And you will be punched. You will always be someone’s Nazi, and this is the political climate in which they will feel justified in assaulting you.
So, if being a fucking decent person who doesn’t attack strangers based on their hat doesn’t compel you, at least let a little self-interest do it. Do you want a jacked up whiteboy with a saviour complex to beat your ass for walking down the street the wrong way? No? Then don’t contribute to the culture that wants to make that happen.
Because when you ride with the disintegration of the social order, you ride with Hitler. ///
Ayup.
Why do we not like Nazis? Because they want to use violence on the people they don’t like. What normalizes Nazis? Using violence on the people we don’t like.
“You will always be someone’s Nazi, and this is the political climate in which they will feel justified in assaulting you.”
This is exactly the sort of thing that’s a counterpoint to everyone I’ve seen whining about how slippery slopes don’t apply to nazis.
I disagree. I don’t have to worry about being someone’s nazi. There are actual emboldened or recently converted nazis out there who worry me more. But stepping away from the element of personal preservation, let me argue more objectively.
You don’t like the argument that punching fascists, assaulting nazis, is categorically different from other violence. OK. Then let’s perceive the phenomenon dimensionally. Everyone can be placed on a scale of 0-100 in terms of nazi quintessence. Public outcry for and against violence done to a fairly high level nazi is a known value: lots of approval, some guilty appreciation, lots of moderate condemnation, and some nazi response. Someone is lower on the nazi scale? Radicals still cheer, but the guilty appreciation and moderate condemnation factions grow. Nazi response is a constant, because they’re nazis. This pattern continues until the majority of society sort of agrees that no, this particular act of violence is not meme-worthy. The market speaks, and our collective decision tree reaches a conclusion - level 69 nazis are not nazi enough to punch, or whatever the needle lands on. People won’t keep slapping level 12 nazis, because the blowback will be huge. It will get no likes.
I trust this system. It will never bite me in the ass. Under no circumstances will I ever be anywhere near the margins of maybe-punchable. Which is as it should be, because nazis are inherently the worst sort of extremists. Avoiding this ideology should be political easy mode. If this social wayfinding violence convinces a few people to maybe shift a little down on that scale, away from the 60-70 splash zone, forgive me for not stepping up to protect their collective right to be dill holes.
So, I have three problems with this:
The first is that the Nazi scale is not consistent or predictable. Lots of people think the scale is in a completely different place from other people. I’m not saying some people want to punch level 50 Nazis, while others only punch 80 and up, and the former is willing to defer to the latter to avoid backlash.
I mean people who actually don’t realise that other people might see the person they’re calling a 90 as being a 20. I have encountered people who are honestly confused that someone on the left might think they’re an asshole if they punch anyone registered to the Republican party, regardless of how or whether they voted. There are people who don’t understand that there might be backlash from all quarters - not just the administration - if Trump’s grandchildren were kidnapped.
There are people whose scales look nothing like anyone else’s, and I don’t even want them to hear “punching level 90 Nazis is OK” because then they’ll punch people no reasonable person would count. I want a blanket injunction because it’s the only thing that’ll stop the paranoiacs who twist everything into Nazis under the bed.
But even beyond that - even if we granted the idea that the perception of the Nazi scale was consistent across everyone - I still don’t want violence to slide further down it. Do we want to to go from punching 80s to punching 60s to punching 40s to the breakdown of civil discourse (to the extent that we still have any)? This is why I want people to stop calling for violent escalation. I want to at least arrest the decline of civil society.
Furthermore, even with a consistent scale, there are outliers. Even if, by some miracle, we could get most people to agree on 60, there would still be people who’ll punch at 30 and damn the consequences because they’re ~saving the world~. Like, if there are already people at the “pepper spray silly hats” level of nonsensical extremism, do we really want the situation to deteriorate? Do we want to lower the average and let the outliers get worse?
I’m in the same position, mate. I’m Black and Jewish and gay. Any true Nazi would triple-oven me in a heartbeat, so I am fully motivated to track and shame and discredit them.
But some people just don’t fucking get that. I have been called a Nazi on several occasions by obvious idiots. These are the “someones” I mean when I say “someone’s Nazi”. Luckily, none of the people who’ve called me that would have been willing to punch me for it. But that’s the thing: I don’t want that to change. This safety margin is important.
I want the people stupid enough to believe in gay black Jewish Nazis to keep their hands in their fucking pockets. I do not want them to be in an environment where they feel like this is at all justifiable, because those people cannot be trusted to know who to punch. And I have enough on my plate without having to watch my back from so-called allies.
Just to pile on top of this, right wing actions do not occur in a vacuum. Right-wingers are often oversensitive to threats. As the punching spreads, because some people are out there enough to combine “we should punch white supremacists” with “all white people have internalized white supremacy”. Right-wingers are going to respond to that sort of thing by either punching equally unrelated people or going after Leftists. …and they have about as much justification to go after tankies as Leftists have to go after Nazis.
Thanks! That’s not really a question though. And mostly that makes me wonder “why?”
(Also I guess, why is this anonymous? Is liking my blog some dark secret?)
Which reminds me, why do people follow without liking or reblogging some posts. It always makes me curious “what did I just say to make you follow me now?” Instead they just seem to spontaneously come out of the aether.
The situation I’m imagining that brings about massive technological unemployment is one in which most workers’ marginal value contains both a positive and negative component. If the net is positive, then the concept of comparative advantage applies and there is always something that they have comparative advantage at that they can trade with the people who own and operate robots, and still come out ahead. This is the standard rebuttal to the claim that technological unemployment is even possible in a decently free economy.
But given that there is a negative component, this does not follow, because it is enough for automation to reduce the positive component to a sufficiently small (but still positive, by comparative advantage) level that it cannot compensate for the negatives of dealing with them and their marginal value as employees becomes zero or negative if you have access to robots instead, which is not a situation normally dealt with in analysis that assumes that the median worker’s marginal productivity is always positive, even if small.
(If we’re opening up net marginal productivity into a positive and negative component, then robots have their negatives to, of course. But I don’t think this affects the point.)
My worry has long been that their marginal productivity is positive (because I’ve made the exact mistake you point out) but that it wasn’t positive enough.
My “comparative advantage” doesn’t matter if it’s small enough that my resulting gain from trade isn’t enough to live on.
Now that you mention it, the concept of comparative advantage only guarantees that you will always be better off under trade than you would be under self-sufficiency. (Except the unlikely situation where you are inferior at everything by the exact same factor, in which case you are still not worse off.)
But a worker is already involved with trade when they sell their labor to an employer. Comparative advantage itself says nothing whatsoever about what might happen to your position when new traders appear in the market to compete with you.
So if your “self-sufficiency” is below sustenance, then comparative advantage, even where it’s assumptions are valid, only guarantees that trade will at worst leave you just as dead but will most likely let your live slightly longer. There is no guarantee that it can raise you above sustenance if you don’t have anything valuable enough on offer.
I’m puzzled that I’d never realized this before. Apparently the main concept used to argue that technological unemployment is impossible doesn’t actually apply to the situation at all? Maybe I’m missing something.
I thought this was reasonably obvious, and was continuously surprised on people not noticing this.
See also, my recent post about the issue with the idea of the cost of goods going towards zero.
Yeah, property is violence. I don’t disagree with you. What’s plan b,
though? I want something and you want something, how are we going to
settle this? Negotiation when it’s most advantageous and violence when
it’s not.
One of the hopes of the ancap system (and most other systems of
government) is to incentivize conflict resolution in a way that reduces
the creation of negative externalities.
Democracy is how we deal with this type of decision. At the very
least, accepting that property is coercion means that we should reject
totally the idea of democratic “interference“ in property as being
inherently incorrect.
No, I agree that the anarcho capitalist future probably doesn’t end
particularly well (but then, I feel that way about most (all?) potential
systems). Claiming that homosexuals, feminists and minorities must be
expelled ignores history though (they had to pass laws to keep market
competition from reducing segregation).
Alright, so the problem here comes with the larger issue. As
minorities, feminists, and others gained power, they change society in a
social democratic direction. If you reason like this, the empowerment
of minorities becomes an externality, it can be good for the person
involved but is catastrophic for the greater society. It’s very similar
to when Peter Thiel said we lost the ability to be a free society when
we let women vote.
And this connects with the other point,
political stability is the greatest externality there is, and we know in
regimes where property rights are supreme how it gets resolved. Reactionary militias and death squads are used to enforce the will of
the property owners. Sometimes this is through the state, but the state
is by no means required.
These ideas of private security
forces is laughable, why would you hire purely for profit mercenaries
that will run away when instead you get cheaper and more dedicated
reactionaries to do the job as long as you let them let them torture some
feminists and minorities.
Of course things won’t work out exactly like he imagines.
But the unimaginable catastrophe is ongoing. How many millions died without need in 2016? How many will die this year?
And many of the libertarian policy proposals are actually plausible,
in that there are people who would stand to benefit if they came in
place. Even with that, it’s hard enough to get anything political done.
And why do you think this would be better? How good did the
“liberalization“ of Russia work? What happened in Greece when they had
their “free market reforms” after the crash, did that work better? Do you really
think that things today can’t get much much worse? This is peak
interventionists fallacy here.
Democracy is how we deal with this type of decision. At the very least, accepting that property is coercion means that we should reject totally the idea of democratic “interference“ in property as being inherently incorrect.
I’m no monarchist, and I don’t entirely reject the idea of democracy (ask me about land value taxes! (actually don’t internet, I don’t know anything, tell me about them if you have strong opinions. but it sounds like a good idea.))
But the issues of rampant democracy are well known. The common decency of man works to limit the rate of the damage - just as most won’t steal a phone off the ground, neither will most support a law of blatant robbery. But the moral hazard is very real.
And the moralizers are even worse! Someone with no real stake in the matter has decided that selling marijuana ought to be punished by jail time. So that they could feel better about themselves (at best) or enrich their crony friends (at worst) many people have suffered (and so has my paycheck, as with every other working american).
Alright, so the problem here comes with the larger issue. As minorities, feminists, and others gained power, they change society in a social democratic direction.
I don’t believe this at present.
If you reason like this, the empowerment of minorities becomes an externality, it can be good for the person involved but is catastrophic for the greater society.
That is an excellent case for putting it to individuals who might pursue a self interested course, rather than putting it up to a mechanism that a majority can use to violently enforce discriminatory norms against a minority.
It’s very similar to when Peter Thiel said we lost the ability to be a free society when we let women vote.
Well, if peter thiel wants to spend more money to be without women, let him. Good riddance and we’ll be alright without him.
And this connects with the other point, political stability is the greatest externality there is, and we know in regimes where property rights are supreme how it gets resolved. Reactionary militias and death squads are used to enforce the will of the property owners. Sometimes this is through the state, but the state is by no means required.
Political stability is valuable. And once we have that I think the best you can hope for from government is to limit the misgovernance.
These ideas of private security forces is laughable, why would you hire purely for profit mercenaries that will run away when instead you get cheaper and more dedicated reactionaries to do the job as long as you let them let them torture some feminists and minorities.
This is just as true for publicly provided mercenaries as it for private. You can’t dodge this sort of problem by publicizing it.
There are more private security personnel in the united states than there are police officers. And in my experience they’ve generally been more courteous and less bloodthirsty than their public counterparts.
It probably helps that they can actually be held liable for murder.
Do you really think that things today can’t get much much worse? This is peak interventionists fallacy here.
Of course things can get much worse than they are. That seems a distinct possibility. The traditional lever for making things much worse is a powerful centralized government. As such, I see it as being in my self interest to bind the hands of any future tyrant as much as possible.
Does that mean we should overthrow the government today? No, if you want that sort of radicalism you’ll have to look elsewhere. I want to sell the detritus of the state until we stop getting a good deal.
Do you want to keep up the drug war?
Do you want another land war in the mid east?
Do you want it to be illegal to build housing near to jobs?
Do you want billions of dollars to be wasted on signature campaign projects rather than meaningful public transit?
I don’t.
Does that mean we should overthrow the government today? No, if you
want that sort of radicalism you’ll have to look elsewhere. I want to
sell the detritus of the state until we stop getting a good deal.
I mentioned Greece and Russia before, so let me mention them again. This does not actually work.
Look the problem here is that you can’t just assume away the need to get approval. The need to get public approval doesn’t go away. I think you vastly underestimate the amount of government that is need to do this for a modern society.
In the current system you can blame government for all the sins, because it that carries out the jobs nobody wants to admit to needing. You abolish government, you don’t abolish the desire for cheap oil and the desire to keep wealth through housing or the desire of some people bust heads, You just abolish democracy and accountability. You just get nasty politics. You get the authoritarian leaders who promise you those things. And in your desire to bind tyrants you just create them as the rules you choose become unbearable for the people living in them.
The state is not the cause of sin, it is just it’s bearer.
The Paperwork Reduction Act was enacted in 1980 to require federal agencies to fill out paperwork in order to request permission to require citizens to fill out paperwork.
phrased this way it sounds like a great idea
you can’t inflict it on others until you suffer it yourself, and maybe you realize how awful it is and stop yourself
This is why I want many policies by Politicals to apply to the same Politicals that propose them even when it otherwise would seem wasteful. Inflicting costs on others needs to have a cost in itself.
A number of the “No Robot Jobpocalypse” arguments seem to hinge on the idea that as productivity increases, the costs of goods and services will approach zero.
But this seems based on the assumption that resources are effectively a function of labor. However, if base resources are largely fixed after some level of labor (e.g., there are only so many iron atoms in a volume of dirt), and there are other potential uses for those resources than feeding the proles, then the laborers must competitively bid for the resources.
In that bidding, they may have to bid with someone several orders of magnitude more productive than they are (either due to owning the robots or just being that much more skilled/productive). What guarantee is there that, even as the price of goods produced from the resources decreases overall, they are not bid out of the reach of the low-marginal-production workers?
“Instead, the attempted transformation of the euro area into Greater Germania has simply dumped the persistent surpluses of German-speaking Europe, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia onto the rest of the world. Between 2008 and 2016 the combined current account balance shifted by 0.8 percentage points of world GDP. This can be explained almost entirely by a collapse in consumption and investment in Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. That was mostly a consequence of policy choices pushed by the European Central Bank, the Eurogroup, and the IMF, with strong guidance from Germany and the Netherlands.”—
If this is doing what I think it’s doing, a single country could get part of the way there by having its own currency and applying tariffs at a rate based on its trade balance. I was kind of hoping the Orange Man might do something like that, but it looks like he won’t and will do per-country punitive tariffs instead.
I think we can guess a few things - I think Hillary won in 2016-αagainst Jeb, who was weakened in our timeline by the changes made to the Republican primaries after 2012 (which were influenced by Trump through Reince Priebus, another possible time traveler, judging solely by his name), as well as early targeted attacks from Trump himself. But Trump had a strong strategy in mind for beating Hillary, which he was absurdly confident in as far back as 2012 - and I think it’s possibly because he saw it work already. I think he might have copied his style, key elements of the campaign (the MAGA hats? the critical Rust Belt working class focus? his Twitter media manipulation? maybe the hacking of the Hillary campaign was accomplished using Trump’s foreknowledge?) from someone else who ran against Hillary in 2020-α, who was possibly even more of a strident nationalist than Trump and was riding an even greater populist backlash against Washington DC.
Perhaps this was one of the things Trump came back to prevent - something that became much more worthy of being called a fascist takeover of the US. And he did it using their methods because he knew they worked. Maybe the hats originally just said ‘Make America Great’ and Trump added ‘Again’ because for him, it’s the second time.
I’m not sure who this mysterious nationalist candidate could have been, but maybe Andrew Breitbart survived in the original timeline (did a time-traveling Trump orchestrate his mysterious death?). Maybe it was actually Richard Spencer? Maybe it was a reality TV host, which would explain why he did The Apprentice. Or possibly Steve Bannon - that would explain Bannon’s position in the Trump administration, perhaps.
Trump being a time traveler might explain his odd organizational structure, too - the handful of insiders who run everything and report directly to him could be the only people who know he’s from the future and can understand what he’s actually trying to do. And all the people who are otherwise unknown/from humble backgrounds but have been given a large degree of authority - it could be that Trump knew them in the future of the alpha timeline. I think one could argue that the way Trump does things is exactly how one would expect a time traveler to run an organization. Especially if that organization is inexplicably effective for how small and ad-hoc it seems - like if it can run a successful presidential campaign and manage billions in assets with just a few not-that-competent-or-qualified-seeming people.
If we assume that Trump’s major policy initiatives are anticipating the problems he’s seen the US run into in the alpha timeline, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. I think his seeking detente with Russia and attempt to weaken Chinese industrial power and enhance America’s domestic industrial base suggests that in the alpha timeline, the US faced a strong Russo-Chinese alliance in some manner of conventional conflict - perhaps a new cold war, with many proxy conflicts around the world? Maybe a direct conflict in the South China Sea?
His rhetoric around Israel is basically ‘I’m going to be amazing for Israel’ with few explicit stated benefits - maybe in the alpha timeline, Israel suffered a great deal and possibly was destroyed, but Trump is confident he can prevent that? Maybe that has something to do with his similarly sketchy but apparently powerful hatred for Obama’s Iran deal? And the Wall - what did Trump see happen to Mexico that he’s so keen on building it so quickly? A natural disaster, a plague?
Perhaps also there was a terrorist attack early in 2017-α and Trump’s seemingly hamfisted immigration order was designed to disrupt it in our timeline - there’s a lot about the order that doesn’t add up unless there’s something bizarre like that going on. And tonight he made it obvious that he already knew the outcome of the Super Bowl, of course. Anyway, I think as his administration goes on, we’ll see more signs of the future Trump came back to prevent. Keep watching!
This is not the first time Trump has come back. Perhaps this is his fitfh attempt, or his fiftieth. He communicates in Tweets because he’s sick of long professional speeches, he’s memorized them by now and boiled them down to their 140-character essence. They haven’t saved us from nuclear war in any previous timeline, but maybe now… if he can just grab enough global attention, knock fate off its path by any means necessary… we may yet be saved.
What if a (new) city kept all land as municipal property, but auctioned n-year ground leases. Furthermore, bids could have conditions on them, such as public availability of amenities like bathrooms, amount of commercial storefront space available, etc. Other parties, such as neighbouring leaseholders or residents, could contribute to bids that provided benefits to them, and avoid contributing to bids that were harmful, to help internalize those sorts of externalities.
To ensure compensation for improvements on the land, on lease expiry, run two sets of auctions, one with all bids conditional on demolishing the existing improvements, and the other without that restriction. The demolition-conditional amount goes to the city, and the difference between that and the most successful bid that doesn’t condition on demolition goes to the previous leaseholder.
I haven’t checked this for exploits, like, at all, and my intuition says there probably are some. Also, allowing conditional bids would end up being complex and combinatorial; I’m not volunteering to write the software for that sort of auction system. But it seems like it’s potentially neat.
centralised zoning by a non-state entity that owns all the land; and I heard a sound as of a million Libertarians screeching
Daily reminder that in the highly capitalist and efficient city-state of Singapore, over 80% of residents live in housing leased from the state.
(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)
The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state
You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).
History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.
I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.
The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.
I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.
I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.
One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.
See, I think incentives are the problem with their system. One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world. The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power. The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.
I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider. It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions. These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these toy problems are used to show how great their system is.
I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want. People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power. These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives. You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality. Much better to observe what people actually do.
So, friedman again, both because he’s the author I’m most familiar with and mainstream enough that I don’t think this is cherrypicking. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of a chapter he spends arguing against unsophisticated strains of libertarianism:
Many libertarians appear to believe that libertarianism can be stated as a simple and convincing moral principle from
which everything else follows. Popular candidates are ‘It is always wrong to initiate coercion’ and ‘Everyone has the
absolute right to control his own property, provided that he does not use it to violate the corresponding rights of
others.’
…
My purpose is to argue that libertarianism is not a
collection of straightforward and unambiguous arguments establishing with certainty a set of unquestionable
propositions. It is rather the attempt to apply certain economic and ethical insights to a very complicated world. The
more carefully one does so, the more complications one is likely to discover and the more qualifications one must put
on one’s results.
I think if you look at the stronger versions of these claims, rather than j random tumblr ancap’s retelling of them, you’ll find that they are mostly close examinations of real situations. There’s still plenty to disagree with, but ignorance of the idea that society is governed by power is not one of them. One of the goals of libertarian policy is to limit the extent to which that power can coerce.
Friedman’s text in particular is full of historical observations and precedents that support many of his arguments, and almost all of his practical ones.
His section on a hypothetical ancap future is just that, hypothetical. But that has no bearing on his practical policy claims.
In his section on reform, he often starts with something along the lines of “let us suppose”, but for the most part he merely wants you to suppose things that have really happened.
You see, I reject his entire framing. I go with the legal realist point of view here, property is coercion. Property is permission to do violence.
So, you could regard this as a bit of rhetorical irrelevance, but it’s not. You can recreate horrible government systems using libertarian ideas. I know this because one libertarian has, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He suggests that in a libertarian system, most people will exist as tenants on the property of rich people, there will be no free speech and no rights apart from that the landlord gives you, and leftist, homosexuals, feminists, and minorities must be expelled. Libertarianism is quite compatible with genocide in that way, you just starve people. When you get to how people in an actual “libertarian“ system might act who aren’t bound by postulates like theoretical people, it can get even worse.
Property is power, there’s no getting around that. They have to do this “non-coercion“ bit to dodge that, but ultimately it is power and generally what the rich say goes. The game of closing your eyes and pretending that this isn’t power is ridiculous. And then he imagines that these powerful people will play even by the rules he sets?
His historical arguments are, as in other other article, cherry-picked examples he uses to suggest that things will work the way he intends. Because something happened once in one context he doesn’t fully understand and in fact nobody does, he suggests that it definitely will happen that way this time. It’s wishful thinking on an extreme scale, and as stated in that other article when he is wrong it will cause unimaginable catastrophe for everyone except possibly him and his rich friends.
And the “let us suppose“ bullshit not only allows you to phrase questions to get the answer you want, it also allows you to ignore certain causes that you may judge as irrelevant. It’s all about phrasing shit in the way of high-school math problems that we’re all trained to just accept and not question the premises or results to get out the “correct“ answer.
“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.
it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”
Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.
I’m not convinced that it says something about Muslims that similar circumstances wouldn’t say about other groups. (Having conveniently used the term “similar circumstances” in such a way that I’m not sure that similar circumstances exist for any other group, rendering my claim suspiciously difficult to disprove). It seems to just say that this course of action will have the effect of non-negligibly increasing the very small proportion of Muslims who think that All Americans Deserve to Die, on account of this being a course of action that will likely (and not with maximal inaccuracy) paint us as Bad People who Must Be Destroyed.
What I mean is what it says about left-wing opinion of them. “Oh those poor Muslims, they’re so easy to rouse to violence. They can’t help it, so be nice to them!” It’s a form of special treatment that would not have been given to other religions, and it isn’t a form of respect.
But of course, the Left already doesn’t want real cultural diversity on this matter. They don’t want, for example, the Jizya. They want a watered-down version of the religion that is compatible with Western Secularism.
“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.
it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”
Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.
so yeah the obvious reason why the left shouldn’t justify its policies for non-leftist reasons is that short-term justifications are slippery and can twist in your hands, and you don’t want to put effort into undermining your own ideology.
for example, say you justified an extensive recycling program on environment grounds, then later it turned out that it actually had a higher environmental cost than straight landfill- wait shit this is a terrible example let me come in again.
say I strongly believe that these propositions are true:
A A → B A → C A → D …
perhaps proposition A is that everyone deserves equal opportunity in life, and from that I draw B (open borders!) and C (public healthcare!) and D (antiracism!) and all kinds of other things.
now perhaps I can’t convince someone of proposition A, or I’m too gutless to try, so instead I construct alternative justifications and try to sell those instead:
X → B Y → C Z → D …
perhaps proposition X is we should strengthen the country (by boosting skilled immigration!), and Y is that we should strive for efficiency (public healthcare!), and Z is that we shouldn’t make Jesus cry so much (fight racism!).
but wait, these alternative justifications might prove much more than I intended! investing heavily in the military might also strengthen the country, and clamping down on premarital sex might also stop Jesus crying.
or the implications may not be factual: someone might decide that actually the country isn’t strengthened by increased immigration, and then we have a pickle on our hands; by ceding our true motivations we’ve compromised our entire political program.
this doesn’t mean you can’t mention when a policy has multiple benefits, and something can be win-win on more than one axis. but it’s almost impossible to be a win on every axis and anyone who says otherwise is lying, although typically to themselves.
Sometimes people may also not agree on the A→B, however. I’m not a Nationalist because I think my country is always correct, but for more Consequentialist reasons. Same thing for rejecting open borders. Antiracism seemed to be a good thing but as practically implemented by activists it’s a lot more mixed (see: Bernie got accused of being White Supremacist, numerous attempts to redefine both “Racism” and “Violence”.) My opposition to Communism is not because I’m against redistribution from an inherent perspective - I believe property is useful but not true - but based on how it turned out.
The anon asks I’ve been getting have continued after I blocked the first one, so clearly they’re coming from multiple sources, so lemme be LOUD AND CLEAR for anyone who somehow isn’t getting this
LIKING 1940S CLOTHES DOESN’T MAKE ME A FUCKING NAZI AND IMPLYING IT DOES IS ACTUALLY INCREDIBLY OFFENSIVE TO COUTURIERS OF THE TIME WHO WERE ACTIVELY RESISTING NAZIS
That you even need to specify this shows that the pro-punching crowd can’t be trusted with punching.
Should the left spend more time wording messages to work on other emotions other than pity? For example, "increase immigration to Canada, because that is the most effective way to increase Canada's strength." (Targeted toward Canadians)
There is a broader question here: to what degree are political movements about outcomes over emotional affiliations.
(And of course, “being about outcomes” is another emotional affiliation!)
I think China’s gonna get stuck in the late-Soviet productivity trap, you guys
like, the problem with Beijing crushing Hong Kong and Taipei is that the non-communists were the only folks who knew how to coordinate investment, marketize innovations, and reward efficiency
letting Beijing and Shanghai coordinate investment while promoting SOEs, starving private firms of capital, and distorting financial markets is a recipe for disaster
I’ve gradually become convinced that the 21st century is going to remain the American century until some other region of the world can pull its head out of its butt and craft some decent institutions.
Europe and Asia might have just had a disastrous run of own goals, but now America’s working hard to even the score
meanwhile on Earth Prime, President Clinton has opened the borders with Mexico and Canada and is negotiating a global free trade deal
on Earth Prime, Stein and Johnson and Sanders voters are all very smug
(more interesting is Earth 3, where Bernie presides over the killing of Nawar al-Awlaki and years of legislative gridlock)
Surely there is some way to let people have as many kids as they want without that fact thereby giving them disproportionate control over the future. Like, requiring conceptions to be based on a random selection from the nation's genotypes. This would at least remove the genetic component of natural selection in the direction of a world dominated by hasidic quiverfulls, which is a dystopia to many.
“Having conception be based on random selection” fails at “letting people have as many kids as they want” so hard it’s not even funny.
Like, you do realise that deciding who gets to have kids via lottery has exactly zero relation to letting them have the number they want, right? You are necessarily going to force some people to have fewer kids than they want, or some to have more kids than they want, or probably both.
I mean, as long as we have democracy, things are going to go one of two ways: 1) There will be a lot of people from groups who are currently minorities and the political landscape will shift and there may end up being laws which fuck you over and maybe become bad enough to be dystopian, or- 2) Massively invasive fertility controls or genocide get implemented to ensure that we definitely have a dystopia.
Which basically boils down to “Democracy sucks when you’re not in a powerful coalition”, which is also the status quo that people currently in powerful positions don’t recognise. This is also a major reason why countries limit immigration. It sucks when you end up in the cluster on which the laws are forced and from which the rents are sought.
Solution here, it seems to me, is to end the state - but that’s its own can of worms.
opposition to Trump seems a lot wider and more unified than opposition to Dubya; we’re barely three weeks in and the people are preparing to march on the White House.
maybe because Dubya passed the “bloke you’d have a beer with” test, and we all know Trump has no hope in hell of ever passing that.
even after the Iraq War kicked off, a lot of people who opposed it were still iffy about opposing Bush’s whole agenda, whereas it’s harder to believe that Trump has some hidden reserve of Good Policies he’s going to wheel out any day now.
Also, W has already happened, informing current political discourse.
Forget Bitcoin: I could mail someone physical gold coins in a shorter time than it takes to fully transfer money from one bank account to another.
I just don’t understand why this is…
antiquated systems? transfers are typically overnight or in some cases close to immediate within Australia, but international can be anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the banks involved.
I just don’t understand what the bottleneck is. Are they using the Pony Express to deliver the request from one bank to the other?
I can take a picture of a check and deposit it into my bank account overnight. That’s about the fastest thing I can think of involving banks.
Anything else, such as withdrawing money from any kind of online service (such as Paypal or whatever) takes at least 3 business days. It even takes 4 business days for my dad to send me money electronically—and he uses the same bank!
This post was prompted by the fact that I was just told by Amazon that withdrawing $13.49 from Mechanical Turk (yay, surveys!) would take 5-7 business days before it is actually spendable in my bank account. ?!?!
Don’t they collect interest on the money while they wait to transfer it?
Supposedly it would be in their interests to transfer money faster, but since everyone does it, and a faster money transfer presumably would not get them a significant number of new customers because it isn’t particularly glamorous, what’s their incentive to do better?
Not that I haven’t always been annoyed at it, too.
m8, none of those things are guaranteed. I mean, the establishment that we thought was supposed to be so invincible couldn’t even keep a reality TV star from becoming the President of the United States. Solar panels are still getting cheaper just as we need them to, CPU development is probably slowing and with it AI will take longer to eat all the jobs, basic income is gaining more support, and people are becoming at least somewhat more environmentally conscious, especially the new generations.
Yes, it could all become a cyberpunk dystopia, but there’s also a reasonable chance of a golden age if we manage to make it through the time window as a civilization.
None of that will stop the dysgenics, the hedonic treadmill, the pro-life attitudes, the loss of privacy, the shitiness of the discourse, or the overpopulation. Also, it’s improvement in AI, not computing powers, that will take our jerbs. And even then it’s not about the jerbs so much as the feeling that you’re capable of doing SOME difficult task that a robot can’t. Plus the fact that you can’t reasonably defend yourself from robots with even slightly above-human intelligence.
There’s little reason to worry about the dysgenics for now, since by the time they actually start biting with real teeth, genetic engineering will be cheap enough to reverse the effect. The pro-life attitudes will also die off in time - by necessity when life extension arrives - and there will still be privacy in virtual reality. Population growth is still cratering and I think with higher average intelligence the political will for some restrictions will emerge when life extension does. The big reason people don’t support it right now is the literal Nazis and the previous racists in various countries.
m8, none of those things are guaranteed. I mean, the establishment that we thought was supposed to be so invincible couldn’t even keep a reality TV star from becoming the President of the United States. Solar panels are still getting cheaper just as we need them to, CPU development is probably slowing and with it AI will take longer to eat all the jobs, basic income is gaining more support, and people are becoming at least somewhat more environmentally conscious, especially the new generations.
Yes, it could all become a cyberpunk dystopia, but there’s also a reasonable chance of a golden age if we manage to make it through the time window as a civilization.
(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)
The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state
You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).
History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.
I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.
The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.
I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.
I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.
One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.
See, I think incentives are the problem with their system. One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world. The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power. The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.
I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider. It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions. These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these toy problems are used to show how great their system is.
I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want. People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power. These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives. You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality. Much better to observe what people actually do.
It isn’t even that incentives are a terrible way to predict actions, it’s just that AnCaps are so horrible at using them that their analysis is useless. You can do analysis with incentives, but not if you chop half of them out. I would also have to say that my experience is the opposite of rustingbridges’ - AnCaps are way worse at predicting how people actually act than boring centrists, and the shear gap between how they think people act and how people actually act is part of why I find their neofeudal ideological system so frustrating.
(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)
The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state
You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).
History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.
I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.
The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.
I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.
I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.
One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.
See, I think incentives are the problem with their system. One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world. The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power. The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.
I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider. It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions. These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these toy problems are used to show how great their system is.
I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want. People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power. These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives. You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality. Much better to observe what people actually do.
It isn’t even that incentives are a terrible way to predict actions, it’s just that AnCaps are so horroble
One of the reasons that’s generally given for Trump wanting a war against Iran, China, or somewhere else is the idea that it will unify the nation behind him. Could prove unpopular in the long run, but as long as the long run after re-election that’s not too much of a problem.
This time though, I’m not sure if a war would be unifying barring a Chinese attack on Japan or something equally extreme. I can’t think of a scenario that both doesn’t involve Xi acting like an extreme dumbass that gets war without massive day one opposition. Maybe I’m just comically naive though.
The 2003 Iraq war had massive opposition from day one, and it still bumped Bush’s approval rating from 55% to 75% overnight.
From eyeballing the graph, it’s seems that the 20% boost basically persisted (the approval decays at the same rate, but from a higher starting point), which if true was probably enough to carry the 2004 election?
“I oppose no war; I opposed one once and it ruined me. Henceforth I’m for war, pestilence, and famine!” —Justin Butterfield
Yeah, this is why you could think it could unify, but I’m thinking the opposition here could be on a different level. At least then it was tacitly accepted that Bush had the authority to take the US to war and we had the 9/11 attacks. Even people against the war felt we had to “support our troops.” Don’t think that’s the case for Trump, the war would be not just bad, but illegitimate.
Don’t really know though.
Speaking as someone who did not oppose the Iraq War (I was too young to realize the implications), and who has never attended a protest - I have never forgiven the Republicans for the Iraq War, and I will be out in the streets if they try to start some fake war with Iran or China. I, who rolls eyes at protesters and have never protested. Keep in mind the new President denounced the Iraq War, too.
Do you think Reinhardt is broken? I think he is. He gets shit all over by everyone. They need to either give him a speed or damage boost. (Only slight, obviously."
He’s pretty much required in every game. He really isn’t underpowered.
Tell me something about urban combat, please, because I'm worried that the right really will win, especially if they control the food supply
Well what’s true about urban warfare is you can fortify prepared positions against bullets and use local knowledge and interior lines well enough that the defender’s at a huge advantage if you’re limited to small arms. You’d want air support or artillery, howitzers at least. Maybe you could do it with support weapons or explosive charges for breaching, but that’s very expensive in time and men, and explosives aren’t just lying around anymore. (Tannerite?)
I’m thinking of Vienna in the Austrian Civil War, the Karl-Marx-Hof housing development that leftists held against trained soldiers. Until they brought cannons in.
Which is the thing, when you line up your logistics and your politics (in a civil war, the besieger often starts off wanting to capture intact) to the point where you have heavy weapons, things change.
The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia - that was a group that had fortified their base, which was in a rowhouse block with party walls that could be tunneled through, and explicitly planned a dramatic final stand, but the Philly police had the logistical and political support to bring in a helicopter and bombs and they won it in a rout.
Guernica, you remember the Picasso painting, that’s from the Spanish Civil War, that’s a thing a right-insurrection pulled against a left-held town when it got bomber planes and worked up a “gloves are off” ideology.
The Siege of Sarajevo, that went on for years and there was hostile artillery in the hills encircling the town, but the New World Order crimped the besiegers’ materiel supply, denied airspace, and resupplied the city with UN convoys, you’d need US or Russian government patronage to pull that off.
The food supply - yeah, on one hand the just-in-time supply system cuts down stocks but from the French and Russian Revolutions we know cities are perfectly capable of fielding expeditionary forces of sufficient mass to seize food from more thinly populated areas.
(when it looked like Trump was going to lose and things might get rough in that direction, I looked up the location of nearby distribution centers, not the worst idea)
On the other hand, the idea that rightist forces would be able to lay sieges on cities strong enough to contain breakout attempts, long enough to force submission, prevent resupply by air or sea, either prevent reinforcements from elsewhere from breaking the siege or siege all leftist centers simultaneously while holding off any external intervention, but at that point we’re still talking militia guys with ARs and not an actual military, what scenario is that?
surely lack of citizenship is revolting, ie. the fact that a person can be abandoned by every state on Earth, trapped in no-mans-land without support or freedom of movement.
Actually, it’s against international law to make someone stateless. Everyone is supposed to belong to some state, even if many people would rather belong to a different one.
Having mechanisms of citizenship is just acknowledging incentives, though.
So am I a leftist (not a liberal) because I am unmoved by arguments that XYZ activist tactic is “incompatible with the norms we must maintain as a free society” or the like
Or am I a liberal (not a leftist) because when I read the news about whichever XYZ people are talking about in this way, it usually looks to me like no political goals are being accomplished and it’s not helping anyone
I want people to tell me about effectiveness and not principles, and a lot of leftist pro-XYZ stuff is still about principles, just the other way around: “since I have no principle against doing this, it’s a good idea”
When I read stuff like this
The bloc takes care to stay together, move together, and blend together. Within minutes, bottle rockets were shooting skyward and bricks were flying through bank windows. You don’t know who does what in a bloc, you don’t look to find out. If bodies run out of formation to take a rock to a Starbucks window, they melt back to the bloc in as many seconds. Bodies reconciled, kinetic beauty. If that sounds to you like a precondition for mob violence, you’re right. But this is only a problem if you think there are no righteous mobs, or that windows feel pain, or that counter-violence (like punching Richard Spencer) is never valid.
I feel like I’ve woken up to find that my bed is covered in piles of fertilizer, and I’m like “why is my bed covered in piles of fertilizer,” and my weird roommate, who put piles of fertilizer on my bed, is all “do you think there should never be fertilizer anywhere? you think farmers should just not fertilize their crops?”
Or like smashing banks’ property is a perfectly acceptable expression of rage and revenge at such powerful institutions causing immense suffering and if there any fucking justice in this world someone in power would punish the bastards so violent mobs don’t have to do it themselves.
Hah, as if those in charge of the banks will let the burden fall on themselves and not push it off on their underlings and customers, as they have the power to do! Smashing banks is meaningless self-gratification that is used to fuel the Police State.
I’m not going to tell you what kind of political violence would be necessary to be more effective, because I don’t want to encourage political violence, much less effective political violence, but that sure isn’t it.
Oh, huh, a Democrat who thinks that raising the minimum wage at which (foreign) workers can be hired causes less of them to be hired? I don’t think they got the memo about how price doesn’t actually affect demand and economics was an inside job.
The system does need to be reformed, but a better way would be to replace the lottery system with a blind auction rather than setting salary requirements.
Yeah, an auction would price it more accurately. Other interventions include making it easier for H1Bs to change jobs - thus if they really are worth more than the lower wages that are claimed, they won’t stay at the company. Making it easy to deport but hard to change jobs is just begging for corruption and replacing the native labor pool with labor that can be credibly threatened with being kicked out of the country.
Though, I admit my first instinct was to limit the number of slots and auction them off. “Oh, it’s so important to you? Then clearly, you’ll be willing to pay the necessary amount of money to show it’s important.”
i should follow more people. get my attention, fags
You should follow me because:
1. I’m definitely not a Time Cop.
You can tell because, let’s be honest, how many future timelines are dominated by Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalists rather than either Leftists, the Chinese Hyperunion, the Ultra-Caliphate, or Google Defense Network?
2. Even if I were a Time Cop (which I’m not), there’s no way I’m from the mid North American Union timeline and am just visiting the Trump Timeline, since, let’s be honest, there is no way any timeline Leftist enough to unite North America into one country modeled on the EU would allow time travel to right-wing timelines, much less by paramilitary cyborgs.
3. You already follow me in several branches already. Probably. This is just a hypothetical which I’d have no way of knowing. I’m just, you know, putting it out there as a possibility.
i remember years ago before LRAD cannons were a thing i watched a TED talk from the guy who developed LRAD cannons and he demonstrated the technology for the audience - using soft orchestral music, at its base LRAD is a technology for long-range projection of any sound - and was like ‘haha yeah we sold this shit to the military, no idea what they’re gonna do with it’
this one, it was filmed way back in 2004. LRAD cannons weren’t used against protesters in the US until 2009 during the pittsburgh G20 protests
Ideas worth spreading®
i swear to fuck this is why i hate when people share videos of those boston dynamics robots acting like they’re all cute when 10 years down the line they’ll have tasers and pepper spray and mini lrads and millimeter microwave guns and they’ll be using them on protesters
Just for future reference, readers, whenever you see me post a video of some Boston Dynamics robot that moves way too much like an animal, assume there is some minor nervous undertone, even though I’m not the protesting kind.
Why am I getting reblogged by tacky Western porn blogs all of a sudden?
I mean, at least they don’t sound like bots or anything but… why?
I give it 80/20 it’s just a more sophisticated component of spam vs you just happen to appeal to those people by posting what you post. (I follow you partly because you remind me a bit of one of my exes.)
Porn bots also follow people to get clicks, to answer one of your earlier probably rhetorical questions.
I was mostly just wondering why they’d want my posts over at their blogs.
I mean, it was a relationship post but it was not the lewd kind, it was the heartwarming kind.
Not to mention the fact that I have a personal aversion to meatspace porn, still…
(Derailing my own post to ask: In what ways am I like your ex? Good ways, I hope?)
I was mostly just wondering why they’d want my posts over at their blogs.
To be honest, I don’t fully understand the behavior of porn blogs on this platform, and I can’t figure out how to tell which ones are real and which ones are bots, nor why some (but not all) of the bots do what they do.
It feels almost like they just exist to insert porn into places for no reason, or as part as some sort of “sexual enrichment project” or something.
“Here, mammal, we see that you find images of copulation satisfactory with high probability, based on your demographic data. Gaze upon these images. Our bountiful network capacity blesses you with these gif(t)s.” - pornbots, probably
(Derailing my own post to ask: In what ways am I like your ex? Good ways, I hope?)
That’s, uh, complicated. But I don’t hate-follow blogs, so it’s good ways, yeah. Most of my exes are nerdy subby bi women. One of them was very devoted, and needed me as a stabilizer at the time. I’d still be with her today except for reasons. You aren’t exactly like her, you just have some traits that happen to line up.
The primary reason I follow your blog is that I find it interesting, though. In fact, I seem to recall having briefly seen it some years ago while reading some discourse involving theunitofcaring, I think? I registered a Tumblr lately because I was impressed with the discourse on Rationalist/Rationalist-Adjacent Tumblr. I added your blog a while after I saw it again.
Trump is like a Nazi because he advocates for an immigration policy slightly less strict than that of Australia.
Now you can go a few different ways with this observation:
1. This demonstrates that comparing Trump with Nazis is hyperbole that may just cause people to tune out. (”Are you saying that Australians are Nazis too?”)
2. Immigration is only one issue, you also have to look at other economic and defense policies, the complete picture is suggestive of fascism.
Why am I getting reblogged by tacky Western porn blogs all of a sudden?
I mean, at least they don’t sound like bots or anything but… why?
I give it 80/20 it’s just a more sophisticated component of spam vs you just happen to appeal to those people by posting what you post. (I follow you partly because you remind me a bit of one of my exes.)
Porn bots also follow people to get clicks, to answer one of your earlier probably rhetorical questions.
immigration policy is the equivalent of the state offering insurance for damages to the host nation. not gonna convince progs, might convince libertarian or ancap types.
