remedialaction said: As usual, you all approach from an attempt at designing some system, rather than one of what is morally correct. Or I guess thats a utilitarian tendency of conflating the two.
do you really want the state making determinations of what is morally correct?
why do grown ass men at my work think it’s a compliment to say things like, “it’s so endearing that you’re such a nerd but if you were a guy i’d totally wanna be you up for being a loser!!! hahahaha!!!” fuck off jesus
“since I wanna fuck you I don’t think you’re a loser”
It's not necessarily a "fail" if the min-maxing is itself enjoyable, especially if the thing you're min-maxing is itself recreational and not subject to any particular time pressure. I suspect that sometimes when the thing *isn't* recreational, then min-maxing is a subtle attempt to wring some kind of enjoyment out of the process.
I was wondering why Dubya is being marketed lately. Turns out he is releasing a book of portraits of soldiers wounded in his wars, all profits go to their rehab.
I… don’t know how to feel about this.
It’s easier to imagine that he didn’t care, and sent them away to fight solely for his own benefit.
I think maybe he cared, but many of the people around him didn’t, and those who did were blinded by ideology.
I think it’s alright to feel okay about this book. It’s a net improvement in this timeline, isn’t it?
What’s the plan here for open borders, dissolution of nations stuff?
I mean, let’s stop and think about this for a minute.
Presumably, open borders will still be accompanied by democracy by geographical area. In the interests of fairness, voting will also be extended to migrants.
However, there is no limit on the number of people that can move into an area in a given timeframe, as this would end up being considered some form of discrimination. This means that in any year, the people living somewhere could effectively have themselves replaced with a migrant population that then changes all the laws to suit them.
Since the residents lack the ability to exclude people from the government, they lack the ability to control it, and thus don’t effectively own it, since the ability to exclude is one of the core things that ownership is about.
Which, sure, people have been saying “it’s not YOUR government!” and talking about how people don’t have the right to exclude those of other cultures (while either letting cruelties like FGM off the hook, or pretending it isn’t cultural).
But if they don’t own it, why in the world would they fight for it? Why would they fight to defend a government that doesn’t belong to them, doesn’t care about them, and at any time could be taken away from them and looted by others? In a war, why wouldn’t they just leave the territory? If environmental issues become a problem, why not just contribute to them until it’s unprofitable, and then flee?
Some modern countries are already having problems getting enough personnel to staff their armies as it is, and we’re not even halfway this far into Globalism.
Who will fight and die to protect their access to consumer products? Who will fight to protect the rights of others that don’t care about them or their values at all? For a territory that isn’t even really theirs?
All you’re left with are mercenaries. And mercenaries are a terrible option, known all the way back in the days of Machiavelli.
But there are other group memberships that people might be willing to fight for. Ethnic groups, as have been a source of fighting for dominance throughout the ages. Religions, which promise eternal reward after death. Drug cartels and other criminal organizations, with the promise of great payout for the desperate in this life, regardless of whether it’s true. Right-wing and left-wing paramilitaries that are dedicated to ideology.
And, as this starts spiraling out of control, sub-national organizations that, ostensibly, originated for mutual defense.
Having defeated the nation-state, the monopoly on violence loosens, and the fighting shifts to the sub-national level.
transgender people should get to use the correct bathroom and not be misgendered, and it is an issue of basic rights. and trans people are not going into bathrooms to commit sex crimes, that whole idea is absurd
but the conflict is not relevant to most people in the country and they view it as either a distraction, or just more culture war or at worst an attempt to sexually threaten precious and vulnerable women. pushing on the issue almost unavoidably creates disproportionate blowback because to the majority of people, the issue is being given a disproportionate focus and that means it must be nefarious
so why haven’t we, instead of saying “we keep pushing in exactly the same way, casting it as an issue where everyone who opposes us is ideologically befouled and deserving of punishment, thus getting disproportionate blowback and alienating people who we should not be alienating because that leads to a loss of our political power”, and instead of saying “we get so much blowback from how we present this issue as one where people must bend the knee to us or be cast out of respectable society, so we should give up on trying to secure rights for trans people as it’s not convenient for us to do so any more”
why don’t we make the law “people are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but if someone is convicted of sexual assault in a bathroom that they entered by pretending to be a different gender, their sentence is more severe”?
like from our point of view, we’re not losing anything. we know trans people are far less likely than baseline to commit sex crimes and bathroom access is not about enabling sex crimes. but for the people who don’t already agree with us, it looks like we’re both taking measures to deter the thing they don’t want to happen, and putting our money where our mouth is, instead of telling them “this is how things are you are not allowed to notice otherwise now bow to our worldview”. by making it a sentencing rider, we don’t increase the ability of transphobes to frame trans people for sex crimes – if we are afraid this law would encourage them to do so we should be exactly as afraid of them doing so without this law.
like if your position is “we should allow X because it is just, and will not allow Bad Thing Y at all” and your opposition says “we should not allow X because it will just promote Bad Thing Y”, it seems to me that “How about we allow X, but punish Bad Thing Y more harshly if it gets promoted by X, so people don’t do it?” is pretty much the easiest compromise ever.
so why won’t that work?
I imagine people would just say it’s already creating a dangerous situation where sexual assault is more likely to happen and reject it. They will say you are already allowing a risk and that in itself is unacceptable. (Same reasoning why same sex parents adopting kids is not allowed here, even when there is heaps of data showing kids elsewhere are fine, they insist we cannot put children at such a risk not knowing the consequences (even if we DO know!) and it’s too much of a gamble.)
Also we both know cases of fake sexual assault stories, who are widely believed even when there is plain evidence of the contrary, exist. What makes you think it would not happen in this case, when trans women are seen as even more inherently predatory than men?
If they say “Punishing people more won’t deter them from doing bad things” then we just won a huge victory and we get to reduce all the Draconian sentences for all this other shit, since they are the exact people who say we need to have incredibly harsh sentences to prevent people from doing bad things. But I doubt they’ll say that.
And yes, we do know cases of fake sexual assault stories exist. The point is that by being a rider on a sexual assault conviction instead of a crime in and of itself, it does not increase the ability of anyone to frame trans people for sexual assault. It doesn’t even increase the incentive to do so, as it isn’t like the utility of framing someone for being trans is correlated with the number of years they serve is convicted.
We keep saying that there’s no reason to be afraid because letting trans people use the right bathroom is not exposing anyone to danger. If we won’t do this, then either
A: we believe that trans people will commit enough sexual assault in bathrooms that this will be a problem and that means we have been lying this whole time, or
B: we believe that trans people using the right bathroom in transphobic areas will lead to a rash of them being falsely accused of sexual assault, in which case why the fuck are we trying to push this law on transphobic areas when we believe it will just lead to trans people being falsely accused?
right-wingers keep saying “The left wants to let people into the women’s room to assault them because they can claim they ‘identify’ as a woman! It’s just a way for perverts to threaten (precious, wonderful) women!”
we keep telling them “That isn’t what this law is about and that isn’t a thing that happens anyway, the thing you are concerned with is not an event that occurs, you are imagining it, this is only about not harming people for being trans”
if the slightest token effort to put our money where our mouth is and say “this is so much not about letting people attack women in the bathroom that if anyone actually tries to do that we’ll come down way harder on them, because we want to show that we are not about letting women get attacked, and because we don’t think trans people being allowed to use the right bathroom will cause them to attack women” gives us pause, then we need to stop and figure out how we have fucked up because we have fucked up very very very badly.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
I find it very hard, in the general case, to see “giving people free stuff, but in a different way”, as screwing over. Given that a reasonable alternative is “you get nothing” (this is definitely reasonable, as people 60 years ago did not receive medical care from the state and nobody thinks this was screwing anything), why the hell should you be allowed to tar refactoring the system as “screwing”
I’m guessing this applies to me and not SE…
That basically ignores the massive impact that both random chance and imbalances of power have on people. Illness is largely not distributed in a meritocratic way, and even just staying employed in a Capitalist system can contribute to it.
Also, there was a post not long ago about normalizing private charity as the way to provide healthcare for those who can’t afford it, which implies that the alternative is indeed “you get nothing,” since there is no way that private charity will truly replace the cost.
Mostly, though, I don’t mind some level, quite possibly even a very significant level, of liberalization, but I’m seeking something from a basket of ideological trades. Think of it in the vein of “you hate minimum wage because it lowers employment, I think we normally would need minimum wage because those at the bottom are often desperate (thus less negotiating power) and they have a minimum cost for survival, so let’s ideologically trade by lowering minimum wage while simultaneously issuing direct wage subsidies.”
Or having a well-regulated insurance requirement for worker safety or environmental damage by corporations, since causing damage is so much cheaper than fixing it, executives are gone before the damage actually hits, the company can cause more damage than it can ever pay back, etc, so not having a pot of money to solve it creates externalities… That sort of thing. Technically, it’s a kind of state intervention. Technically, it’s a kind of wealth transfer. Also, it pulls on optimization from markets in the hope of more accurately pricing the externalities of injuries/environmental damage/etc. So is it a “market solution”? Or is it evil Statism? Etc.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
Look. You claim you want an efficient system, right? Not just trading someone else’s increase in suffering for another $10,000 worth of luxury car for yourself, right?
I like an efficient system. More healthcare can be purchased for the same amount of money in an efficient system. But as far as I’m concerned, if the money just gets redistributed upwards it’s worthless to my goals, so I have no reason to free up those resources for the sole purpose of them being captured by the wealthy so they can plow them into political campaigns to further undermine public ownership of the state.
And I have no reason to believe that the people complaining about how they have to pay taxes to help those accursed poor single mother welfare recipients are really going to put an equivalent amount of money into charity. Why would I?
But I do like efficiency, so I’m willing to make a trade. If it’s really an efficiency solution, not just a cash grab for the upper class, then we can keep current healthcare spending, oh, or maybe a little lower, so let’s say on par with those evil European countries as a percentage of GDP, and cut everyone a check evenly just for healthcare funds. Let them put it in a health savings account, spend it on insurance, maybe let the unspent health savings be inherited or something. Collect %s of future checks to offset the costs of emergency care for the uninsured.
Maybe not a check, maybe that’s not the most efficient method in particular, but you get the idea.
If you’re willing to make that sacrifice or one like it, then, maybe I and others could believe that this is actually, really about efficiency.
(Edit: Also, on a side-note since it’s not really the core purpose of this post, as the core purpose is to offer that above ideological trade - legislators are actually paid to do legislation, and they have staffs and think-tanks that work for the parties at their disposal. Specialization of labor doesn’t just apply to the private sector. Individual citizens largely don’t have these things and the trust networks around them are different since there’s a lot of money to be made by scamming people (see: homeopathics are still a thing). So there is some reason to believe that the political parties and legislators might outperform individuals. Now, regulatory capture is an issue, but since the proposed solution tends to be “just let companies do whatever they want”, and that usually is the situation that caused regulation to come into existence in the first place, it often isn’t a real solution. I think government itself can be designed much better, but others seem to either believe we don’t need to, or that it’s impossible, so…)
Your fetish is the main topic of a two hours long movie where it’s applied to the whole world. There’s no sexy time, the whole movie is about the financial and societal consequences on your fucked up fetish on society.
How boring is it?
Oh my goodness.
Well, at least there would be immortality, and an effective guarantee that the universe wouldn’t end. On the other hand, prepare for one helluva culture shock, we’re going deep, and magic is real.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Additionally, by trying to refocus their campaigning for lower taxes and reduction of artificial costs of living by showing them the calculations on how much even minimum-wage workers can end up paying (an awful lot, possibly even more than some millionaire investors) and how the state wastes most of the money it takes instead of spending it in any useful way, and how much of the price in the things they would want to spend those minimum wages on is artificially created through dysfunctional regulation.
Capitalism benefits from patriarchy, white supremacy, rape culture. These divide the working class, produce markets, etc. So capitalism cannot effectively end them.
I hear this a lot and I can’t help but notice that white supremacy and patriarchy have taken a lot of hits over the past 50 years or so and I don’t see anyone describing this period as being a setback for capitalism in fact the contrary
But have you noticed that right-wing political parties often have to lean on patriarchy and white supremacy to maintain their position? Do parties that purely push free-market policies without the rest of that stuff do well?
If you are forced to divide every possible political issue between two sides then you’re going to get incoherent results, so don’t do that.
Technically under Anarcho-Capitalism, it isn’t against the rules to create a really elaborate Communism theme park.
there isn’t anything in the rules that says a dog can’t be General Secretary of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, President of the People’s Republic of China, 1st-ranked member of Politburo Standing Committee,
Comrade Barx’s Communist Funland is a jointly-owned subsidiary of the Northern Arizona Mutual Assistance Association (NAMAA). By entering, you agree to waive liability against Comrade Barx’s Communist Funland, its employees, and owners, including the Northern Arizona Mutual Assistance Association, in accordance with the Standard Voluntary Commercial Code.
Please act reponsibly, have fun, and remember: the dream of Socialism begins with you!
Technically under Anarcho-Capitalism, it isn’t against the rules to create a really elaborate Communism theme park.
(disclaimer: am not an economist, middleish epistemic status, etc.)
Indeed, and this is a common argument used in their favor, which fair enough, but the problem is socialism is expensive, and unless they start out in control of a very large chunk of wealth and resources after the Revolution, they are not going to be able to accumulate enough to help everyone, like they could if they could redistribute property- after all, nothing like this has formed already, and AFAICT there is no law against it, atleast not everywhere…
Honestly, I was just joking about how hilarious it would be to find Marxland™ in Ancapistan, complete with ironic Stalin posters and Modernist/Brutalist architecture.
I don’t actually want to live in or anywhere near the nightmare that Ancapistan would be. I don’t even want to live in the society AnCaps think Ancapistan would be.
I like how the literal symbol of communism is actually two pieces of physical capital.
the workers own their own personal possessions and small tools, while tractors and the fields themselves are owned by the state on behalf of the workers.
How big can a tool be before it is state property?
Hand Drills?
Electric Drills?
Drill Presses?
Milling Machines?
It’s determined dynamically according to the total capital of the commune, where the tool’s value is determined by a system of dynamic bidding split amongst the participants in order to determine the opportunity cost of the time and resources used to create and maintain it and -
oops.
additional hammers and sickles can be exchanged for marxbucks!
Marxland™ is an authentic recreation of the Communist™ Experience™, fun for the whole family!
Located only ten miles south of the Samsung-Sony Freedom Arcology in the area formerly known as New York City, Marxland brings the values of the past to life in the relatable, old-fashioned manner of direct physical experience. Harvest live Monsanto Simulcorn™ in the fields, share property communally, or engage in numerous classic human activities such steelworking and fishing right here in our scenic historical compound…
I like how the literal symbol of communism is actually two pieces of physical capital.
the workers own their own personal possessions and small tools, while tractors and the fields themselves are owned by the state on behalf of the workers.
How big can a tool be before it is state property?
Hand Drills?
Electric Drills?
Drill Presses?
Milling Machines?
It’s determined dynamically according to the total capital of the commune, where the tool’s value is determined by a system of dynamic bidding split amongst the participants in order to determine the opportunity cost of the time and resources used to create and maintain it and -
I reasoned the PC stuff was like antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It doesn’t matter today, it doesn’t matter tomorrow, but one day, 30 years from now, multi-drug-resistant TB develops and the problems pile on and on from there.
…but if you can keep developing new antibiotics fast enough to keep up with it, you can sort-of ignore your bad practices and the collateral damage they cause.
I thought that’s what was happening, and that the reckoning wasn’t going to be until 2028, as the result of a slowly building fire of, well, various mens’ movements refusing to comply with male gender roles (something already in progress at the fringes). Instead the tension was lurking beneath the surface across multiple axes, but the media didn’t want to talk about it and people would be socially punished for talking about it sometimes, so it wasn’t as visible.
I’d like to think there is some new path where the word “Racism” can be made powerful again, but I cannot find it. It would require socially punishing false accusations of racism, which simply isn’t feasible under the current ideological framework. I’m not one to buy into the “Contradictions of $Ideology” idea much, (since most of the people pushing it are Communists ignoring the ‘contradictions’ essentially inevitable to their own system,) but I think this is partially a case of that.
In some ways I welcome the Populism, though. My estimate of corporate oligarchy and permanent majority has declined significantly.
This is something I might write a longer more thought-out thing about later
But did anyone else (especially girls with big boobs) feel like, throughout your childhood and teen years, everybody was always saying guys were into big boobs and that conventionally attractive girl = girl with big boobs, but this never actually seemed to be the case?
Like girls in real life and in teen books would be all bemoaning their flat chests and wishing they had big boobs so guys would be into them, but then in real life, the popular girl the guys were all into was some skinny thing with C-cups at best, and the media-sanctioned epitome of female beauty was people like Keira Knightley and Rosario Dawson.
I just got reminded of this hard when I was re-watching Galavant. Madalena is initially the hero’s love interest and she’s always positioned by the show as super sexy and irresistible. Here’s how she’s described:
Long legs and perfect skin A body built for sin With cleavage you could hold a whole parade in!
…and here’s that ‘cleavage’ in action:
What’s with this? Why is this a thing?
I feel like I have a hunch as to some reasons, but it’s hard to put a finger on.
- “Big tits” is just a really easy description, and that should never be underestimated as a cause for overuse.
- It is a positive that’s correlated with negatives (it’s very obvious although rarely said that big tits on fat women don’t really count).
- Modeling has more specific demands than just “being hot to men”, and these anticorrelate with big breasts somewhat, and modeling is really influential.
- The first point also might work against women with big breasts (esp. in settings where other women are involved), as it is also really easy to go “people only like you for your tits”, and/or big tits are seen as kind of crude (c.f. girls in American schools being told they’re dressed provocatively for clothes that would be utterly normal on smaller-breasted girls).
I don’t really see how any of those explain it? I mean, ‘thin’ is an even easier description. The influence of modelling can make the Keira Knightley figure mainstream-attractive, but doesn’t explain why people would keep talking as if big tits were what everyone was into. 2 and 4 explain some degree of animosity toward women with big tits, but not how the world would settle on this bizarre convention of talking as if they are considered attractive but acting as if pretty much the opposite is true.
Also with the modelling thing, I understand that the convention for modelling is that models should avoid having curves at all costs, and that once something is the done thing it can stay that way just because that’s the way we do things. I don’t buy that there’s any reason why it necessarily should be that way. I mean even if you buy the argument that it’s easier to do cool and elaborate things with clothes when you don’t have to worry about making it work around curves, high-end fashion is ostensibly about showing off that you are the best at designing clothes. One can easily imagine a world where runway models had to have the most extreme curves you could find, because if that makes it harder, then clearly the curvier your models, the more skilled you must be to make your clothes work on them.
Kira Knightly has ~100k followers on Instagram, a place you can get lots of pics of her. Kim Kardashian has 100M followers.
Throughout my childhood and teen years, Kim Kardashian was not a thing.
Kim Kardashian (who has a D cup and is very curvy) has been a thing since 2007. Before that you had women like Jessica Simpson (D cup) and Pamela Anderson (whose implants were famous) and Angelina Jolie (who has an hourglass figure 36-23.5-35).
Mainstream American culture considers a few body types as “beautiful” but large breasts are “sexy.” Women with smaller breasts who want to be seen as “sexy” (on the national level) either need to dress in a way to make it seem like they have big breasts (photo shoots from certain angles, clothing designed for this effect), or find some other method to get that association in people’s mind (having a sex tape leak or whatever Miley Cyrus did both come to mind). Whereas (relatively skinny) women with larger breast have a hard time not being seen as “sexy” by mainstream society.
Also “big boobs” often means “big boobs relative to BMI”, so a thinner woman can be considered busty even if her actual breast volume is below average.
Also also, because it’s seen as sexual/sexy, liking big boobs is seen as crass and objectifying, or low class(?), particularly for heterosexual men. It’s basically assumed that it’s all the guy likes about the woman if he acts like that.
Really says something that now I sort all political commentary I read into “Pre-Trump“ and “Post-Trump.“
mitigatedchaos said: Did you at least give Trump a 15%+ chance of winning the election?
I hate to give odds on stuff like that because it drives me nuts, but to me the “Trump era” starts well before the election. I’m defining it as the moment when we knew that “Trumpism” was something that existed and was more than marginally popular in the US.
Even if Hillary had won or probably even if Cruz had squeaked out the nomination, it would have changed shit. The political writing reflects that.
What about all the people who were going nuts for Palin in 2008?
Palin didn’t go through the primary. We could all say that she basically didn’t matter. She was just this weird VP that McCain chose and didn’t take seriously. Trump was chosen directly by primary voters, the fact that he could win says something.
I would tend to agree on Palin. I haven’t seen excitement for Palin like I have for Trump.
There are so many things that allowed this to happen, and I think many of them would have been preventable if people, uh, behaved better. I don’t mean this as a virtue critique of the Trump voters, but rather the opposite. Overuse of terms like “racism”, ignoring the plight of American workers, not reaching out to areas outside the cities, focusing primarily on minority demographics, talking about “demographic destiny” with glee, and so on.
@collapsedsquid My question was mostly to ping whether you were aware of these looming things beforehand, and if so, for how long. While I saw “sexism” being overused as a term, I didn’t really realize just how thin it had worn outside of internet communities. However, the further they got into the primary, the more I said “this is unpredictable, so I’m revising the chance of a Trump win upwards”.
It was the most elite unit we [ie: The Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had. The members were suicidal – not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.
“My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.
Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.“
“So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.
Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.”
I’m a crazy romantic and even I didn’t expect that tying guys like these down with wives and kids would have such a radical civilising effect. I wonder if this has any implications for gangs or other violent pests?
If that’s the case though, then polygyny is a bad thing unless you want large numbers of risk-tolerant men.
How should doctors and hospitals act with regards to emergency care, assuming an inability to tell for sure whether or not someone has insurance at the time treatment is given and an inability to shop around for hospitals during an emergency? What should happen when I call 911 as a patient? What about as a bystander?
Until EMTALA in 1986 we got along without hospitals being forced to provide emergency care for everyone and somehow society was able to function, but that requirement is to a significant degree responsible for the massive rise in health care costs since then, and the failed attempt to force everyone onto insurance that was Obamacare was essentially a way of attempting to deal with the severe negative consequences of EMTALA, which has forced many hospitals to stop providing any emergency services whatsoever.
The libertarian thing to do would be to go back to how it was before Congress intervened in 1986, and let hospitals decide for themselves how to provide care and to whom, as is their right. Then if your top priority is making it so that poor people are treated regardless of ability to pay, organize a charity and pay for them yourself, don’t push it onto hospitals as an unfunded mandate that messes up the entire health care system.
So before EMALTA, how was it determined whether someone would be treated? Did hospitals turn people away if they didn’t have insurance cards? If they did, would the ambulance keep on going from hospital to hospital until they found someone who would treat the patient? How often were people with insurance accidentally turned down? If the passage of EMALTA caused prices to rise as much as you say it did. Then obviously there had to have been a lot of people who used to be turned away but now are not. What do the profiles of these marginal people look like?
Hospitals did turn people away if they thought they wouldn’t be able to get them to pay for care, yeah, but I think that’s rational and defensible. Insured people accidentally getting turned down didn’t seem to be a significant problem - if you have insurance you’ll probably always have your insurance card or at least an ID with you out in public, and if you’re having an emergency at home you’ll probably get brought in by someone who knows who you are. And I think hospitals were more focused on denying care to people they were already certain wouldn’t pay than unidentified unconscious people in urgent need.
A lot of the people who would have been turned down before EMTALA are people with non-life-threatening conditions who go to the emergency room knowing they can’t be turned down for treatment and then disappear without paying. I used to date a girl whose job it was to try to bill those people for the care they received at her hospital - less than half of emergency care in the US now actually gets paid for, they wind up just having to write most of it off and the rest of us pay for it through higher insurance premiums, ultimately. It’s a significant component of why health insurance has become so unaffordable.
Her hospital at least worked with charities to try to make sure the true charity cases got paid for, and some people who had the means but refused to pay were sued or referred to collections agencies so ultimately the hospital would receive pennies on the dollar. Poor US citizens are covered by Medicaid. This was in California, so the real problem was illegal immigrants - they couldn’t get insurance but they couldn’t be made to pay for anything either, so hospitals are just forced to give them unlimited free care and they jam up emergency wards with non-urgent problems because they have no other place to go. It’s not their fault, really, but the inefficiency of this system is mind-boggling, the waste of medical resources is immense, and it generates a lot of animosity against illegal immigrants. California passed a ballot initiative in the 1990s that would have allowed hospitals to deny emergency care to anyone in the country illegally but it was struck down as going against federal law.
In Libertopia there’d be no such issues with citizenship status preventing people from getting insurance or simply paying for care on a fee-for-service basis, which would likely be much more common without the tax incentive for employer-provided health insurance, one of the other big problems ruining US health care. Costs would drop massively and I think it’d bring guaranteed life-saving emergency care (within reason) for almost everyone within the range of things that could easily be accomplished through voluntary charity in a developed country.
It’s the discrimination problem once again; if you make decisions on the hospital level you can turn away the people who are obviously Not Going To Pay without causing more than a few highly-visible false positives (and even there making it possible to create better commitments like “I know my situation looks sketchy but if I skip paying you’ll just contact my Dia group and they’ll pay you okay” would make it easier to discriminate accurately), but if you’re trying to make sweeping policy-level decisions you inevitably have to discard massive amounts of information, rendering the bureaucracy necessarily stupid. Then economic incentives lead to people capitalizing on that enforced information asymmetry.
Additionally, you can use modern technologies to create robust reputational systems that reward hospitals that deliver care for true emergency cases (= actual unanticipated emergencies, not “this known but untreated condition has gotten worse over time and it was inevitable that it would cause an Expensive Crisis at some point”) regardless of immediate ability to pay. If customers prefer hospitals that do provide such care, that’s effectively an indirect subsidy for privately socialized emergency care.
As a patient I’d prefer to have some more specialized number than 911 for contacting my own emergency health provider. Additionally I’d probably be totally fine with an rfid chip linked to a blockchain identity smart-contracted to my insurance subscription (= subscription and payment status verifiable by anybody with internet access) assuming I had actual control over it and could wipe+reprogram it at will whenever I want to use a different identity for whatever purpose.
I mean, the advantage of 911 is that it’s a universally known “OH SHIT FUCK HELP” button that even a five year old can understand how to use. Complicated setups with rfid chips make that harder. Same problem with private solutions to policing, really. People need simple, universal, easy to understand panic buttons that will put them at least somewhere close to the right track. Like, police aren’t ideal, but I feel like there has to be SOME kind of publicly run organization that handles emergencies or things-that-vaguely-seem-like-they-might-turn-out-to-be emergencies, and unless that organization asks for upfront payment on a per-call basis it’s gonna be a public good. (Yes we need to make the cops not be the default responders, but I’m not convinced that this necessarily involves getting rid of 911).
I don’t know what you were expecting. Privatizing everything based on assuming the rationality of economic actors is kinda the ‘thing’ of the ideological group you reached out to.
Some answer where some regulations are loosened while others are strengthened is not what you’re going to get. And if you’re going to have generic emergency responders in America that aren’t cops, then they’ll need guns.
But here, let me throw in an oddball solution. Have multiple competing police agencies - but under the government, contracted at the municipal level.
Edit: Actually, let me throw a more serious one out here. People are bloody irrational, so I don’t care if they want to spend it on something else: tax everyone and give them an $X,000 healthcare voucher which can either be spent on insurance, or a health savings account. Take money out of it for unpaid emergency care at some rate over time. Maybe allow the HSA to be inherited.
Goldwater’s also somewhere you can look to understand how far right we’ve come. He was considered so extremely, radically conservative in 1964 that his defeat was one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. Yet, if I remember correctly, in “Conscience Of A Conservative” I think he says something along the lines of “many unions are good and do important work, I’m just opposed to the huge ones and the radical ones.”
When was the last time you remember any Republican saying anything good about any unions? Like, even if he didn’t actually believe that, the fact he even felt the need to make that qualification speaks legions to the power and acceptance of labor unions in America at the time.
I feel like the loss of the communist bloc as a looming threat went a long way toward radicalizing American capitalism. There was a long period there where communist revolution was understood to be “plan B” for the working public, which meant the powers that be had a strong interest in making plan A look appealing. After the fall of the USSR the capitalist argument drifted toward “you’ll take what you get because you’ve seen the alternative,” and it’s not a coincidence that the upper crust became a lot more extractive over that period.
Of course this is the thing that leftists always complain about – how market socialism was guided by the CIA, how labour reforms were a sop to protect capitalists – and there’s room to criticize, in that the earlier concessions facilitated an exclusionary guildism that maintained the existence of an (especially black) underclass. On the other hand, I do like leverage and I don’t think the loss of it has been good for American workers or for the “first world” generally.
The leftist criticism is that these concessions stole momentum from an unborn revolutionary movement that could have fixed everything if only it had been brought to term, but I have no expectation that it would actually have worked out that way, so I’d be plenty happy to have a movement like that back again even if only for the express purpose of stealing momentum from it.
On the other hand, pressure for automation has pushed the UBI from the fringes to slowly creeping into the mainstream, and with the new President rising on Populism, we may see the emergence of a new equilibrium.
People’s Action Party (SG):* wins election with 60% of the vote, down from 70% last time around *
People’s Action Party (SG): This is a rebuke of our governing performance! We need to reconnect with voters and do more things that people want!
Democratic Party (USA):* loses election by narrow margin *
Democratic Party (USA): We lost because our opponents are racist, sexist, xenophobes! We need to call them out repeatedly on their lack of virtue! No mercy and no deals for Fascists!
Mum, Dad, I’m not sexually aroused by Japanimation.
No, it doesn’t do anything for me at all.
Don’t cry, I’m still the child you always knew, I just don’t crank it to cartoons.
I’ll explain to Grandma next time I see her, she’ll understand.
The year is 2078, a group of owls congregate in cyberspace…
Argumate Jr, your mother and I are worried that you’re getting too close with those Normies.
No, your other mother.
That isn’t the point. These are the kinds of people that want to ban bishounenification surgery. What if you start kinkshaming? What if you start bodyshaming?
They tried to ban something as harmless as moe overlays. Do you really think they’ll treat you like - they are not your friends! Hey, don’t you -
It is vitally necessary to defend him because the attack on communism begins with the argument that communism leads to genocide. Rehabilitating Stalin would very definitely improve the cause of socialism worldwide.
X implies Y is a problem because X is good and Y is bad, therefore X does not imply Y.
It is vitally important to defend Chernobyl because the attack on Nuclear Power begins with the argument that Chernobyl killed people and caused large amounts of radioactive contamination. Rehabilitating Chernobyl would improve the cause of Nuclear Power worldwide.
I mean, I suppose we could alternatively argue that Chernobyl was managed terribly (which has the advantage of being true), and alternative plants with containment domes and different reactor designs don’t have the same safety record (also true), and commercial nuclear reactors generate utterly enormous amounts of economically-valuable electricity with a long-lasting power source, low area footprint, and low carbon output. And we could devise and test better methods to make nuclear plants safer. We might do that.
And if we did that, people wouldn’t find out that we were lying about Chernobyl being this great thing that never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, since we didn’t go the route of trying to “rehabilitate Chernobyl”…
Also let’s please not act like minisoc’s antisemitism is in any way unique. Other tankies on here like marxism-leninism-memeism have said worse things, like that Jewish people ought to be thanking Stalin for saving them from the Holocaust.
Let’s eradicate this preposterous notion that you can be a defender of Stalin and not simultaneously be a raging antisemite racist homophobe. There are no non-problematic tankies. If you defend Stalin, you defend ethnic cleansing, the arrest, enslavement, and murder of gay men, antisemitic purges, and a million other atrocities.
Tankies like to pretend that Stalinist mass murders and systems of forced labor camps were substantially different and in no way comparable to the Nazis because the Stalinists at least on the surface espoused the values of internationalism and anti-racism. But in practice the gulags and the purges were systems of racist terror. Hitler killed more people but Stalin sure gave him a run for his money.
I can’t wait for people to performatively denounce the ““““tankies”“““ for five seconds while doing literally zero self-reflection
Wasn’t that called McCarthyism?
Stan’s body count is miles higher than Hitler’s last I checked. Unless I’m having a moment of bad memory at 430AM
If you compare intentional murders, Hitler’s is higher. Famine deaths were definitely caused by Stalin’s policies, and the word genocidal certainly qualifies in the case of the Ukrainian famine, but I think it’s not quite the same to say that famine deaths should count equally as people being rounded up and arrested, and then shot or gassed to death or killed from overwork and brutal conditions in a prison camp.
Still though, counting only intentional murders, Stalin’s death toll easily makes it into the 7 figures.
the key difference here imo is that both angles are incorrect: Nazism inherently leads to mass murder as per Generalplan Ost, since the whole plan is to lebensraum new territories and get rid of or enslave the population there, however, communist governments ended up with such an enormous death toll because the countries where communism was enacted were so big. so this implies three things: authoritarianism equals mass murder even if you are the “””good guys”””, communism doesn’t scale well at all, and “hey you thought my ideology murders the most people in history, whereas it only murdered the second most people in history” does not sound enticing
I feel like
If you take somebody’s food
That they say they need
And then they starve to death
That’s murder, even if you didn’t believe them when they said they needed the food.
Yes but if you do that you have to start accounting for capitalism’s death toll too. But no one wants to say it’s the government’s fault that a bunch of people without money starved when the crops failed, that was just like, completely external or something.
It’s one thing to have people suffer in a famine, it’s another thing to cause one that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
Anyhow, suppose there is some baseline level of famine that occurs in any country as a result of environmental conditions, and some minimum number of people who will die from it. Ideologies/economies are judged by how far above that number they come in. Does Capitalism do better on that metric? Does it do better than Feudalism?
But if we’re going for this level of detail, then slow economic growth counts against Communism, too. How many have died because of less wealth for healthcare, or for safety procedures? How many have died due to a slower pace of technological development? How many have died because Communist governments were so bad that they created massive amounts of corruption that persist to this day?
I guess I’m just annoyed with that comic with a Communist sitting on a tiny hill of skulls while a banker stands next to a small mountain of them. Even after you account for, for instance, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which can be attributed to Capitalism, Communism is still going to end up responsible for more net deaths, and yet so many people smart enough to know better want to try it again.
TIL, secondhand, that some people won’t accept the earned income tax credit (a US federal tax credit for people with low/moderate income, especially ones with kids. As income increases the credit amount increases, then flattens, then decreases) because they think it’s “welfare” or “political control of their lives”, or that it’s somehow wrong to accept help from anyone other than family or church. What can you even do. :|
Anyway, I guess the lesson here is it’s only okay to receive government assistance if it’s very heavily disguised as being something else, preferably through an unrelated third party (such as a corporation that’s being “incentivized” to build factories near you or whatever). Sort of like money laundering, in concept.
yes, one of the downsides of basic income that I think about a lot is that it’s going to piss some people off to think of themselves as dependent on others unless they can reframe how they spend their life as providing some vital function that everyone else benefits from.
Isn’t that rather easily solved by making it something you apply for, and automatically granting it to those who apply?
My feeling here, as all such similar questions that devolve to “would you tell this to a 55 year old Walmart stocker that (we wont give her free money to live on because her job gives life value)(her job has no value)?” is to ask the people involved. We should like, poll some working class people and ask them which system they’d prefer.
If it’s significantly split, well you’re fucked no matter which policy you go with. But you know, you asked, rather than played some thought experiment about What The Middle America In My Head Wants.”
(Not faulting anyone in this thread for this, just, the dynamic shows up in way too many discussions about UBI)
Unfortunately, I think your proposed (reasonable, common-sense) approach fails on basic predictable human-psychology grounds. In this case, anyway, and cases like it.
Like…I’m pretty sure we know what most people’s first-best choice here is. “I want a job that rewards me both with a substantial wage and a substantial status boost, in which I provide a needed good or service to the world, demonstrating that I am a worthy worthwhile person deserving of pride and also that I am better than all those lazy unskilled slobs who might have some use for welfare.” We could run a poll to see whether that’s actually the outcome that people would prefer, if you believe it valuable, but I’m really quite confident in it. It is the ideal promulgated by pretty much every facet of American culture, and if it’s not your first-best choice, it means that you’re some kind of weirdo who’s broken away from your cultural training.
But of course that doesn’t get you very far, because that option is Definitely Not Available for many many many people. The real choice is often between, say, Welfare or Subsidized Makework Job or Poverty. (Or something like that.) That’s the polling data you actually want.
Except that…
A. It is really hard to get people to believe that their first-best choice (to which they feel entitled) is unavailable and that they have to consider second-best options. If it is at all possible for them, they will find a way to delude themselves into believing that one of the proffered options will lead to the thing they actually want.
B. It is really really hard to get people to believe this when “your first-best choice is unavailable” continues into “…because you have no presently-desirable skills and the free market has no use for you as anything more than a warm body.”
C. It’s especially really really hard to get people to believe this when you have malicious actors actively lying to them about it. And make no mistake, that is a thing that is happening, and will continue to happen. Someone is going to be pushing the line that the Republicans are pushing right now: “as soon as we gut the welfare state and free the market, all those Real Jobs that gave you Real Dignity will come roaring back!”
I am strongly of the belief that there are many people for whom decent welfare would be much better than any job they could ever get (or at least “extremely desirable as a supplement to wages”), but who will never ever admit this even to themselves, because they are strongly invested in not being the sort of losers who would need to think that way.
In short: poll all you want, but good luck getting people to face up squarely to the question long enough to give you a genuine answer.
While hourly direct-to-employee wage subsidies would still have some of these marketing problems, the massive cuts to the minimum wage (with no loss in living standards) they would allow one to make can at least create lots and lots of jobs that don’t look entirely makework since someone in the economy is at least willing to pay some amount for them.
One side effect is that it could make a lot of people feel more in demand, since there would be so many job offers going unfilled.
“That’s funny. Your side are the ones covering their faces as they stifle free speech, destroy property, and attack innocent civilians. Maybe, just maybe, you guys are the bad ones…”
OR… WAIT FOR IT… YOU’RE A FUCKING NAZI THAT WANTS ALL OF AMERICA’S RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS FOR YOURSELF BUT NOT FOR OTHERS <insert race that isn’t white trash here>
So #1 Go Fuck Yourself and #2 Go Get Me a Sandwich Bitch
It’s all fun & Nazi punching until you pepper-spray a woman wearing a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat and attack an immigrant in a business suit. (That actually happened, by the way.)
Because when you encourage “punching Nazis”, that’s what actually happens, because lots of people love punching more than they care about figuring out whether who they are punching is an actual Nazi.
You could have had Nazi punching if the Nazi punchers were the kind of person that didn’t support punching Nazis, since they tend to do a better job figuring out who is and isn’t a Nazi.
But now people that aren’t Nazis have to defend the physical security of Nazis because Tumblr thinks the proper answer to “but what if I thought I was punching a Nazi but it was just a white guy with a shtty haircut” is “run” and not “don’t be a dumbfk that punches people without checking whether they’re actual Nazis first”.
That doesn’t even get into what happened with the actual Nazis and street violence (it didn’t stop them), or the threat level they represent right now (fairly low), or whether they can be won over by other means (one black man got some huge number of dudes to quit the KKK by befriending them), or ideological consistency (you also have to punch Tankies), or whether there will be retaliatory violence (oh Nazis would love that) or whom that retaliatory violence would fall on (hint: usually people more marginalized and vulnerable than the punchers).
While I don’t agree with much of it, it occurred to me that anyone engaging in these debates about “what the Democratic party should focus on” and ideology in general, should at least be familiar with this post from David Chapman.
Haha, fun read. It occurs to me that in some worldbuilding I’ve been doing, I already split the cultural functions of government off from the boring policy functions, divided between royalty made of formally-recognized national heroes and a subtly, quietly terrifying postcyberpunk state bureaucracy that had what we would think of as prediction markets in the 1980s, and is now using what comes beyond that.
Jesus this is the most frustrating thread ever. I get banning guns and knives, but who in their right fucking mind would ban goddamn pepper spray? What the fuck do they think people are gonna do if they’re allowed to have it? I keep seeing people talk about how the need to defend yourself is rare and letting people have weapons would make things worse but I don’t see how that applies to mace at all.
I’m so glad the 2nd Amendment covers my right to military-grade prosthetic limbs.
Edit: More seriously, erosion in this direction is what they’re worried about.
I feel like you could very easily make things like “does this cause permanent harm” or “is it useful in muggings” as your criteria, though. The thing that makes pepper spray good from a societal standpoint is the fact that it’s significantly more useful defensively than offensively.
That is not the logic under which weapons are restricted, though. I suppose things would be better if it were.
