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.
He worries that if we focus on opposing Trump, and Trump is impeached or obstructed or just all around foil and discredited, it will open up a lot of space for other conservatives to be seen as “acceptable” and “moderate.” “Oh, you only want to gut the welfare state, you don’t want to stop green card holders from entering the US because they’re brown? Well that’s not so bad.”
History has provided plenty of examples of that.
The other possibility is that if Trump is discredited as a massive joke, everything even remotely related to him is going to look bad, and left-liberals will get a surprisingly free hand to implement their agenda while accusing anyone who isn’t on board with them of being a Trumpkin.
History has provided plenty examples of that.
Not to mention the possibility that attempts to defeat Trump will all fail and we are wasting our breath talking about Paul Ryan.
And the thing is, each of these seem equally plausible to me. I feel I have no way to determine what the political order of a post-Trump world will look like. I don’t know if deBoer is just being small-minded, or this is the actual threat to watch out for.
Consequentialism is true, but of limited usefulness, and not trustworthy in just anyone’s hands. Rights are not true, but are great for resolving situations.
Australia should take America’s Trump trouble as a galvanising moment. Universities, corporations, industry associations, sports bodies, cultural institutions and governments should step up recruitment efforts to win the attention of an entire generation of ambitious and talented people who would normally have had their sights set on the US. And bring the best of them to Australia to top up our human capital.
As a Nationalist I cannot object to Australia doing this, as weird as that may sound.
Last night there was a highly upvoted, highly-trafficked post on r/the_donald declaring that the Quebec shooter (a far-right white nationalist) was definitely a Muslim because no information had been announced yet which meant the media was colluding to cover for a Muslim. Some select (upvoted) comments:
There are rumors of one week old refugees committing this act of terrorism. Wake the fuck up people.
“the media will not report on violent incidents till they ascertain that the perpetrators were not muslim”
Takes time to patch up all the cracks in The Narrative™
> Also to poorly photoshop their picture so they appear whiter.
I checked back there this morning to see if the news that the shooter was actually a white rightist Canadian had gotten any discussion. It hadn’t, of course - the front page is all people declaring they’re proudly boycotting Starbucks, which recently said they will hire refugees.
I bet there are a lot of people who read r/the_donald and have a vague impression that refugees committed six murders in Canada last night, a vague impression which will stack with other similarly unverified vague impressions and leave them convinced there’s an epidemic of refugee violence. I have no idea what to do about that, and it terrifies me.
This is partially a side effect of the media blowing their own credibility, and partially a side effect of conservatives setting up their own bubble. I’m not even a conservative and I don’t really know who to trust these days.
It’s hardly unique to the Left though, since social conservatives burned through an unbelievable amount of social capital fighting against gays lately.
I think you’re overconfident in your interpretation of what the anon meant. Maybe that’s what you would’ve meant in their shoes, but they’re them and you’re you.
I think people can pick up on these things on a subconscious level even if they aren’t fully thinking that way explicitly on a conscious level. I certainly can’t name most logical fallacies even when I can spot them. (I didn’t know what the formal name for what the problem with religious threats about the afterlife was, but I could tell something was wrong with them, for instance.)
Take, for example, the treatment of racial diversity in America. If a 100% black company is okay, but a 100% white company “needs diversity”, then this implies that blacks are worth more than whites. That may not be what (most of) the advocates really mean, but that’s the sum vector of their words and actions as received by a number of people. And people pick up on that as being unwanted/unwelcome.
Or to take a stronger example, if men and women are equally capable of doing good things, but men are uniquely violent and evil, then it logically follows that men are worse than women. …and the ways to escape that tend to look like either MRA or “redpiller” (not the same thing) behavior, which are definitely not welcome within Feminism.
It should come as no surprise that are a lot of people that do not feel wanted/welcome within Feminism and refuse to have the label applied to them, even though many Feminists would want to apply the label to them.
But anyhow, both groups often don’t really go chasing down these chains of reasoning and making them explicit, since people don’t really think that way (and most people are relatively average). But I think they do notice them, and they become feelings that baffle their opponents.
Now, it’s possible that the Anon really does believe America has an ownership claim to those University positions, and that Anon has a partial ownership claim to America, and thus some claim to those positions. But that gets into the philosophy of ownership/property, which is a whole other thing, especially since I view ownership/property as useful rather than true.
Anyway…I don’t know much about the history of academic visa policy in America. So I can’t comment on whether every attempt to tighten it is characterized as racist xenophobia. But this particular attempt pretty clearly is xenophobic and maybe racist too.
Well, I don’t think it was handled well. I would have done TUoC’s “xenophobic plan” version instead if I were Orange Capitalism Man. But there is a reason I didn’t vote for Orange Capitalism Man despite being an unironic Nationalist.
What about the American PhD students the Iranian PhD students were taking grad school slots away from?
I think grad schools should accept the best students for their programs. I think taking less qualified students because by random accident they were born in the country, instead of people who are actively choosing to spend their lives in this country, does not strengthen the country, it weakens it.
And I think that the costs imposed by suddenly yanking the rug out from under someone who has been here five years are unacceptably high, and that if we decided to go full racist xenophobes we should at least be racist xenophobes with some semblance of trustworthiness and integrity by making the ban one on evaluating or accepting future students, instead of stranding people who have already built lives here.
Doing it this way is not just horrible, it is demonstrating a willingness to be gratuitously horrible on a whim, and one of its consequences is that no one should ever again expect that the U.S. government will behave consistently or make it possible to make long-term plans that involve travel into or out of the country. And the cost imposed by that expectation is extraordinarily high. If you care about financial outlooks more than the lives of people stranded in foreign countries away from their newborn children (yes, I personally know of a case of that), you might care that lots of companies have frantically recalled departments of overseas workers lest they later not be able to return to the country, and that they’ve said research and development and their success as businesses will be damaged by the necessity of coping with an immigration system that is suddenly bucking wildly at the whims of an appallingly ignorant corrupt cronyist.
But mostly it’s just that if you think where people are born should decide what rights they have, then we’re fundamentally on a very different page about everything.
then again, banning citizens of every Middle Eastern country except those involved in the 9/11 attacks is about as sensible as invading every country except those involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Orange Capitalism Man has shown more opposition than most politicians to the apparent US Death Pact with Saudi Arabia, but it remains to be seen if he’ll do anything about it.
What about the American PhD students the Iranian PhD students were taking grad school slots away from?
I think grad schools should accept the best students for their programs. I think taking less qualified students because by random accident they were born in the country, instead of people who are actively choosing to spend their lives in this country, does not strengthen the country, it weakens it.
And I think that the costs imposed by suddenly yanking the rug out from under someone who has been here five years are unacceptably high, and that if we decided to go full racist xenophobes we should at least be racist xenophobes with some semblance of trustworthiness and integrity by making the ban one on evaluating or accepting future students, instead of stranding people who have already built lives here.
Doing it this way is not just horrible, it is demonstrating a willingness to be gratuitously horrible on a whim, and one of its consequences is that no one should ever again expect that the U.S. government will behave consistently or make it possible to make long-term plans that involve travel into or out of the country. And the cost imposed by that expectation is extraordinarily high. If you care about financial outlooks more than the lives of people stranded in foreign countries away from their newborn children (yes, I personally know of a case of that), you might care that lots of companies have frantically recalled departments of overseas workers lest they later not be able to return to the country, and that they’ve said research and development and their success as businesses will be damaged by the necessity of coping with an immigration system that is suddenly bucking wildly at the whims of an appallingly ignorant corrupt cronyist.
But mostly it’s just that if you think where people are born should decide what rights they have, then we’re fundamentally on a very different page about everything.
Where, oh where, is the constituency for moderate liberal democracy, the constituency for assimilation? Radicals to my left, saying you should bring your vile customs here; fascists to my right, saying you should keep your vile customs at home. Where are the liberals saying that you can bring the surface features of your culture here–we’ll cover your traditional bread-and-protein dish in cheese and sugar, and your myths and heroes will appear in our comic books–but the rest, you have to leave behind. Your religion will be about as mighty a cultural force as Unitarianism; your deep tribal divisions will mean as much as anti-Irish sentiment means nowadays; you will be another slice of modern liberal democracy with a fancy new paint job.
You wouldn’t want to use your vile White Western Imperialist Colonialist Culture to erase that of proud foreign People of Colour and other Minorities, would you?
In other words, the people now believe their own information-culture war munitions. Those whose goal is to play ideological chicken with Islam and cultures that involve FGM and honor killings, and think Liberalism will win, on purpose, are becoming fewer and farther between.
The actual purposes of both diversity and religious tolerance were not even forgotten, as they weren’t even known in the first place.
What about the American PhD students the Iranian PhD students were taking grad school slots away from?
I think grad schools should accept the best students for their programs. I think taking less qualified students because by random accident they were born in the country, instead of people who are actively choosing to spend their lives in this country, does not strengthen the country, it weakens it.
And I think that the costs imposed by suddenly yanking the rug out from under someone who has been here five years are unacceptably high, and that if we decided to go full racist xenophobes we should at least be racist xenophobes with some semblance of trustworthiness and integrity by making the ban one on evaluating or accepting future students, instead of stranding people who have already built lives here.
Doing it this way is not just horrible, it is demonstrating a willingness to be gratuitously horrible on a whim, and one of its consequences is that no one should ever again expect that the U.S. government will behave consistently or make it possible to make long-term plans that involve travel into or out of the country. And the cost imposed by that expectation is extraordinarily high. If you care about financial outlooks more than the lives of people stranded in foreign countries away from their newborn children (yes, I personally know of a case of that), you might care that lots of companies have frantically recalled departments of overseas workers lest they later not be able to return to the country, and that they’ve said research and development and their success as businesses will be damaged by the necessity of coping with an immigration system that is suddenly bucking wildly at the whims of an appallingly ignorant corrupt cronyist.
But mostly it’s just that if you think where people are born should decide what rights they have, then we’re fundamentally on a very different page about everything.
I’m sad. A lot of good, brilliant, kind people who believed in what the United States stood for, and wanted to work and study and build lives here, are instead stranded in countries where they are in a ton of danger. People who helped Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and risked retaliation for it, have been betrayed; we promised them they’d have the chance to come build lives here. We broke that promise. Hopefully no one in occupied countries will ever trust us or cooperate with us again.
I’ve been refraining from saying anything because I can’t think of anything charitable and balanced and open-minded that will resonate with people who think turning away Iranian PhD students is some sort of courageous strike for justice. I have nothing to say to those people right now. I value non-Americans and I want them to be safe and happy and I think we and they are strengthened when they have the chance to live and work here; if you don’t care about people who birth placed outside our borders, then for the moment I can’t think of anything to say to you.
But I’m not going to stay quiet until I come up with something.
This is wrong. This is cruel. This should be fought in the courts and fought by any other achievable means. This is not defensible as a means of reducing violence; this is not defensible as a means of preserving our values; this is only defensible if you think people born in other countries don’t matter, and promises don’t matter, and integrity doesn’t matter, and symbolic expressions of loathing for Muslims matter a great deal.
That’s not charitable at all. I don’t think I really care.
Maybe someone could organize a fund to pay to house these people for the duration.
The statuary source of that executive order from 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) is … pretty broad and far reaching:
Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. […]
There seems to be no Congressional check at all on that power? The president can basically shut down entry into the US as he pleases, effective immediately and indefinitely? This seems kind of excessive.
there might be a number of situations where granting excessive powers to the executive branch begins to feel like an error in hindsight.
“But Our Guy would never have abused them!” - politicals
that's sex workers operating in a secure setting designed to parody courtship priming
And, like, phoneworkers and people in brothels; both of which might be considered “secure”, but neither of which is really an imitation of anything like courtship.
Sure, there’s intimacy, because this is someone you’re being sexual with - but I think that’s kind of the point. These are people who can’t let their guard down around anyone else because they can’t feel intimate with anyone else.
The other issue here is “melting pot” ideology. The melting pot imagines that all cultures can not only coexist, but also borrow from each other indiscriminately, and blend together into a colorblind mush.
quick: dailystormer or everydayfeminism
How about truth? The entire point of Melting Pot is to destroy deep cultural differences and leave only surface ones.
It’s the ethnic food court model of culture - lots of different dishes, all served on the same Capitalist plate.
Under melting pot, a more painful cultural difference like FGM is usually destroyed and replaced with bland (and less violent) Liberalism.
What is but one little lie if it serves the greater cause of Justice, Comrade, eh? Haha.
No but seriously, I have seen some drama around this user, BB. I wouldn’t necessarily assume they are acting in good faith, or are charitable enough to forgive an internet hiccough.
For the record to third parties, I have argued repeatedly with BB without getting blocked, and haven’t seen any indications of them blocking anyone yet.
I wish that “It’s a moral imperative to enact libertarian policies even if they result in mass starvation“ got people even a quarter as mad as “Punching Nazis is good.“
But apparently endorsing mass death makes you an interesting person to ask economics and ethics questions to as long as you do it in the right way.
Brah, I argue with Right Libertarians pretty often, and even accused a man in a “Taxes Are Theft” shirt of being an enemy of humanity due to automation once.
Noah Smith is doing his “you people on the left need to be re-conciliatory, join up with moderate conservatives like McMullin to fight Trumpism“ that’s continuing his “The US is turning into civil war spain“ idea.
And he’s presenting it like people on the left are too prideful to do it, which some are. But the other problem with this he’s not addressing is that this plan could basically be “We’re about to be shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean, so what we need to do is to tie ourselves to the heaviest and fastest-sinking piece of the ship!“
Boring answer is that granting the premises there’s risks and benefits to either strategy, and while the risks and benefits for one strategy or the other might in principle be calculable, the noise of motivated reasoning means we won’t be able to tell which strategy is “right” ahead of time.
I’m largely in the camp that we should do what we can to defend liberal-democratic norms and make a coalition with anyone else who is also defending liberal-democratic norms, whatever else their views may be. Granted, that’s partly because there’s no real coherent agenda with broad support among the left, and we shouldn’t be picky about ideological purity when we don’t know what our ideology is.
(I mean, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are very popular on the left, but their popularity is more about personality and symbolism than policy)
I think the agenda with broad support is social democracy. That’s what the Bernie and Warren supporters want, that’s actually something that exists, and it’s a goal that can be worked towards.
And I’m not sure what level or type of support the left is expected to give. Is the left supposed to agree with McMullin when he says the Real Problem is the size of the US deficit? That’s the problem here, what exactly does this “coalition“ entail? Who gets thrown under the bus?
The closest thing to an answer I could think of is the generic culture war “Tone down the PC“ thing. But even leaving aside the morality and possible damage of that decision it’s tricky because it’s not something that can be given away, I don’t think it’s so much the law that pisses people off as the actions of people. It’s not available to give up.
I think we could actually get some support for social democracy. I don’t think it will be as pragmatic as I’d like, but a relatively coherent social democracy that is not indifferent to the conditions of WWC rural Americans could rally up some enthusiasm and take some of the pressure off of automation.
And yeah, social democracy exists, and unlike Communism, it doesn’t involve killing lots of people.
I’m not sure how well it would work when combined with Globalism, which seems to be a thing the Left really does not want to remove, which I want to see removed.
On top of that, I recently had someone argue that all cultures are equal, despite my clearly explaining that FGM is cultural (not even religious), and them appearing to be opposed to FGM. So I’m not sure how much pragmatism there is to be had.
So, the current president of the US and the political party that controls the government won, this year, on a platform that, in part, openly appealed to white nationalists. The only thing I have seen from the rationalistsphere about this fact is A) telling people they're overreacting and B) treating people like monsters because they don't condemn the punching of a prominent neo-nazi. Why is this? Why the commitment to pretending that the "left" in the US is the real danger?
A fair question. I agree with @raggedjackscarlet the other day that lots of anti-SJ types are underestimating the possibility of right wing dictatorship.
I think a lot of people are struggling with how to deal with Trump, and honestly no one has found a good way to do so yet. He’s like the zombie we’ve shot all our ammunition into, and keeps on coming. Finding out how to defeat him is a top priority.
But let’s not ignore how much of the world is a liberal order - ie, focused on rights like free speech and property and voting and privacy, rather than trying to merge all of society into one collective body under the Leader. Even if Trump isn’t a rights based liberal, he doesn’t run all of society. Paul Ryan is a libertarian, and most Senators can be fit under this rubric. The richest CEOs of the richest companies are good liberals (like Tim Cook.) The top bureaucrats at all agencies believe in this worldview, not to mention the media and academia.
So if you’re worried “liberals might hate me and wish me harm” vs “fascists might hate me and wish me harm” that former group still has a lot more power to do so. And if liberals promise to be kind to each other and protect each other, actually the fascists will find there isn’t much they can do to us.
I at least reject very much political programs that try to unite everyone around hating “one idiot.” Even the most dangerous idiot in the free world is still one dude. The question is the system that gets everyone to play along to his stupid antics.
Don’t read his twitter.
Don’t believe what his federal agencies say and who they accuse of crimes especially.
Don’t give him ratings.
Don’t turn in immigrants and Muslims.
Don’t accept his “us vs them” mentality.
…is how I fight Trump. Dodge the draft and evade taxes if it becomes necessary even.
I admit this doesn’t sound like the most effective plan ever. But in absence of a guaranteed way to defeat him, for the love of god, stop beating each up or other bystanders.
*****
Also you are not a monster if you want to punch a Nazi. It’s okay. These are pretty normal urges shared by many people. I hope you don’t do it, but I definitely don’t think you are a monster. Like, how would you even log onto to tumblr and submit an ask if you were? The monitor would melt and your claws would crush the keyboard. No you’re totally human.
Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.
Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
Immortality for all.
basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
That’s a good point, actually. If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.
Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive. If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.
The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are. It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.
You most likely would not be eliminating old age and end-of-life costs but only delaying their onset by X years. And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
That’s assuming the life extension effect doesn’t kick in until the person is already quite old. That probably is not the case, or the life extension mechanism is not likely to be effective at its goal of extending life. It won’t stretch out puberty, either (probably), so that leaves an effect on early and particularly middle adulthood, which are prime earning years.
If you can extend the amount of time that someone is effectively 40 by about a decade, or even just five years, then sure it isn’t as fun as being in one’s 20s, but it still adds plenty of earning potential.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
At first, sure. And the willingness of wealthy tech executives to pay almost any cost for it will fund a lot of the research necessary to make it cheap enough to be more widely available. But while we are on the side of the medical cost curve where medical costs come down from infinity, and therefore costs go up since we start actually paying them rather than dying, there should be a far side of the curve where the costs start going back down again.
We’re growing new organs on laboratory animals, printing new (and functional) organs with 3D printers, and we just got CRISPR. Apparently this year the NHS will be testing some kind of gene therapy on a subset of blind patients. Surgical robots, while not autonomous, are becoming more common. (That’s leaving aside the prosthetic robot arms since those aren’t relevant to aging right now.) Even those immunotherapy drugs are a step up.
On the far side of that curve, the sorts of chronic conditions that cost us so much money are prevented through gene therapy and selective IVF, while tissue engineering replaces organs damaged by disease with natural ones that require no immunosuppressant drugs. Robots decrease the cost of surgery, either by automating part of it or allowing more labor to enter the field from elsewhere in the economy. Critically damaged limbs can be replaced by nervous-system-linked prosthetics (which already exist) produced by highly-automated factories and custom-fit to the patient (factories are getting massive reductions in staff even in places like China), without drastically impacting patient mobility.
Much of the cost is in the research. One can gene mod bacteria to synthesize the desired chemicals, build big heavily-automated factories, that sort of thing.
Many very expensive drugs cater to an illness that is not common in the population. However, the market for life extension is probably at least one quarter of the population in all developed nations, if not much more, and they would be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have it. That’s a very large number of people to amortize the research cost over.
Now, reading all this, you might say I’m being naive and that it will require personalized interventions for each person, not a nice mass-manufactured one-size-fits-all solution.
But that’s what we have computers and big data for. The market is enormous, and computer power is still increasing, so even if the genes have to be tailored to each specific person, the genetic tailoring can still probably be done by machines.
Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it will remain unreachably expensive forever. However, I think that sort of pessimism on this matter is driven in large part by how unattainable life extension has been for humanity, and all the Deathist myths in our culture that tell us that old age and mortality are really better for us, and that the immortality we crave but cannot have would be terrible. In our myths, it is often associated with vampires and other undead, the temptation that drives sorcerers and other villains to do evil and corrupts their hearts.
In fact, weren’t people joking about Peter Thiel wanting to look into the qualities of young blood? But we can just grow cell cultures, and if it’s something that’s common to all young blood, then that sort of thing would only last for about ten years before they crack the secret of how to do semi-artificially it on an industrial scale.
It seems likely to me that either the rich will have life extension treatment and it will become cheaper over a couple of decades, or that no one will have effective life extension treatment worth more than a few years, and not a stable in-between state where we go for a century with only the wealthy having life extension.
Clearly the interventions won’t be priced in the mid-six-figures on the rare-disease model, but that doesn’t mean that an intervention with everyone as its target market will necessarily be cheap, nor that there’ll be the fundamental willingness to pay for it on a large scale. Right now there are mortality-extending drugs for patient populations in the millions, pricing in the $4K-$6K a year range – that’s rack rate, obviously, much higher than the various sorts of actual rates – and the payor landscape has been extremely resistant, despite not only rigorous clinical evidence and strong medical guidelines recommendations but also great pharmacoeconomics models and strong value propositions across health-systems, hospital, and patient levels. It’s not going to be as simple as demonstrating impressive clinical benefits and rigorously proving cost-effectiveness.
(And I mean I’d really, really like the answer here to be as simple as “well, fucking well charge a bit less and just roll around in a zillion tons of moneys instead of a jillion,” cf: literally everyone. I get that. I spent fifteen years in oncology. I’ve seen some shit. Suffice it to say structural incentives across biopharma and the entire US access landscape are pervasively and fundamentally fucked in that way where you can’t do much more than tinker with any one bit without catastrophic repercussions due to the whole contextual gestalt of it and solving for pricing strategy is a killer of a hard problem.)
As per the rest of your response, of course, there’s always the possibility (necessity) of a lateral and sharply innovative solution.
I actually like your optimism and find it less implausible that outsider/cross-industry thinking could in fact end up generating the way to break the back of what look like intractable problems from here than that the healthcare industry will manage to painfully stepping-stone its own way out of the mess. I’ve been in the industry for a long time (mostly in biopharma rather than devices, which your post is kind of suggesting to me might be part of the problem) and I’m tired and maybe jaded. And personally I might be a little bitter about transhumanism. I’m over forty and feel like even if all of this really truly comes to pass it’s going to be too late for me to benefit, certainly while in my prime, on which I haven’t yet lost my goddamn death-grip [so to speak] thank you very much but the writing would seem to be on the wall even if I’m not yet forced to look that way. It’s hateful tbh.
And personally I might be a little bitter about transhumanism. I’m over forty and feel like even if all of this really truly comes to pass it’s going to be too late for me to benefit, certainly while in my prime, on which I haven’t yet lost my goddamn death-grip [so to speak] thank you very much but the writing would seem to be on the wall even if I’m not yet forced to look that way. It’s hateful tbh.
I’m younger than you are, enough that I may benefit from at least replacement organ technology (probably only 10-20 years out now), if not reach at least the early tiers of life extension or cryo that actually works.
But my parents aren’t. I’m fortunate enough that they’ve made it this far, but I need to start thinking about how they may not be here in 20 years. And that hurts, because I have not yet showed them me being successful. I want them to at least see that, before it’s too late. I’m trying to record some more things, too.
They had me late. On the one hand, that put me perhaps ten years farther into the future, which gives me more of a fighting chance, and allowed me to meet the people and have the experiences that are important to me. On the other hand, I won’t be able to know them as long, and they are good people.
I know you may feel bitter about Transhumanism, because younger generations will benefit more than you will, and younger generations still would benefit more than me.
…but isn’t it better to be one of the last generations than any generation before? Isn’t it better than to be born earlier than this, in the 1700s or the 1800s, or the early 1900s, where the people were recognizable to us, but the only hope was some vague abstract notion that progress would overcome it? Clashing against a seemingly-indestructible monolith of despair.
It’s like knowing a war will end soon, and that even though you won’t make it through to the end, your children will, and after this, they may never have to experience a total war again, not the way you have.
Please, keep fighting, though. At this point, even a few years could make a difference, for both you and for others. Those tech billionaire money spigots are starting to turn. If we can just manage to keep the economy going for another 20 to 30 years, I think we may just make it through to the other side as a species.
