I wanted to say “Trump is worse because he has a military to command” and then realized that Le Pen getting elected would mean having to deal w/ the fact that
France has the biggest fucking military in Europe
What exactly were you expecting Le Pen to do with this military? Invade and bomb countries in order to cause more mass migration?
I’m Consequentialist, so I don’t think the fundamental difference in axioms will be resolved here. Any other system seems to prioritize rule-following over people to me.
What squid said, plus there’s a reason states own (yes, own) all the valuable land. It isn’t some kind of accident.
You want a justification? The state owns the land as a joint private owner, you’re just renting it. Tada! Now everything the state does except for foreign invasions is justified.
Liberty is not a means; it is an end. One does not defund the program to balance the budget; one resists taxation in order to abolish the programs. The object of property is property. The object of resistance is resistance. The object
of liberty is liberty.
Since taxation is actually good, it sounds you’re advocating for a bad thing as a means to a bad thing
I kind of figure that taxation is a good or as bad as what it’s funding
RE: Centrists: The question then becomes, how does real change become possible? Revolution isn't a good option, since it tends to kill lots of people without much actually-good change.
i legitimately dont know, because it seems any democratic option is instantly suppressed
maybe a mass uprising like in tunisia or egypt demanding politicians step down or make reform.
To put the culture post another way: Muslim countries get Muslim laws.
This isn’t just under democracy, but also dependent on raw ability to wield force, which is also impacted by how big and willing to fight the dominant cultural group is.
If you want a Liberal country, with Liberal laws, then either you need to have a Liberal culture, or someone strong enough and with enough backing to impose Liberal laws.
If an imported culture gains ground until it replaces the dominant culture, then it will replace the dominant culture’s laws.
I wonder what you'd get out of a survey that was structured like voting is--i.e. *guaranteed* anonymous, without having to say your answers to a person, just marking your answers and putting it in a box--and offered to all registered voters. Actually, it seems like a good idea to have something like that anyway--having an actual legally binding vote be people's main forum for ~expressing their opinions~ is far from ideal.
Current representative democracy doesn’t give voters any direct influence over specific policy questions, literal direct democracy makes them vote on every issue, and most people suggest a sensible hybrid where everyone votes on every issue but you can delegate your vote to representatives at varying levels of pickiness.
I mean, I agree, but also “immune systems” are bad wrt nationalism.
A country is not an organism. A body needs to keep the body safe; a culture does not need to keep itself safe, rather it needs to keep the people in it safe.
The culture doesn’t need to be preserved if “culture” is just hot dogs vs sushi, ballet vs rap, basketball vs rugby. In other words, if it’s just aesthetics. Falling below a certain level of Nationalism makes it infeasible to field an army - but fielding an army to defend sushi would indeed be overkill. However…
Consider FGM. We now have it in Michigan, apparently. For now, it’s still considered a criminal activity. But what happens when 5% of the population supports it? 10%? 15%? Eventually, it becomes more normalized and the political will to legalize it will materialize and be captured by some political party. FGM is actively harmful and unironically bad.
However, that still only affects one group. What about long runs of repeated first cousin marriage? That’s a cultural thing, and the effects stack the longer it goes on, putting a disproportionate burden on the healthcare system.
But even then, you could hypothetically force the entire medical system to be ‘free market’ to make individuals pay for the burden of that instead. So let’s step it up again. What about who deserves the fruit of the economy? Is the society individualist or collectivist? Should we help each other or is it smart to screw each other over at the earliest opportunity? Differences on this matter impact the political will to perform redistribution - either with no redistribution, some redistribution, or proceeding to Venezuela-tier “bordering on a failed state” botched Socialism. That has a HUGE effect.
What religion should be the dominant one, and should it have control over what to do with heretics and “degenerates”? You know, like LGBT people are considered in some countries and territories, like, say, Chechnya.
Ultimately, culture is not actually individual and not actually escapable at the national level. To keep the people safe, it is actually necessary to keep the culture some level of safe, particularly if that culture involves not becoming Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.
What do you think is the rationality community's fatal flaw? I want to hear yours before you hear mine, so as not to influence your thinking
I’m not sure if it makes sense to talk about communities having fatal flaws, and I’m not actually involved in this community, so I couldn’t really say.
This is bad. Le Pen was supposed to be leverage to get the rest of these people to wake up and fix the giant holes in Liberalism. Instead, honor killings, FGM, and burkhas will be politically unremovable in France in 30 years or, left to boil over with no real solution, FN will be back after winning more mayorships for a showdown.
Tumblrites are talking about how men rarely feel objectified, both the negative and positive parts of that, so I thought now was a good time to post my essay on men and women, subjects and objected.
Back when I kept my eyes on MRAs, they called this hyperagency/hypoagency. (Outside of them, there is an idea of “hypermasculinity” applied to black people, but I don’t know the details.)
It likely originates in the biological expendability of men as compared to women in terms of being a population bottleneck.
Regardless, because the MRM is a reaction to Feminism and Traditionalism (and could be considered a rogue school of Feminism), it can incorporate these ideas. A high quality MRA is thus often more clueful about gender equality than the median Feminist.
Low quality MRAs not so much.
sexbots for the men, emotional support bots for the women!
or is it the other way around.
It is but you can’t admit to it, so you make sexbots that perform emotional support and emotional support bots that perform sex. That way everyone can save face.
> 2058 > arguing with Commies on minicom > point out that the GDP per capita of the DSAZ is 8x that of Seattle > point out no lines for antirejection drugs in DSAZ > mfw “the Free Peoples’ Republic of Seattle isn’t real Socialism” > mfw “Detroit Special Autonomous Zone is Fascist Dictatorship” > mfw receiving these messages at coffee shop w/in DSAZ
Imagine a world without hate, violence, wars, weapons, a world where everybody is kind, and loves each other. Without starvation, poverty, or pollution. A world where all the people are happy. And then imagine us attacking that world. They wouldn’t stand a chance.
That’s an engineered species. An evolved species can’t be like that.
Regarding voter suppression, it's not the ID Laws themselves that creates the issue (even though it's a solution for a problem that is extremely rare), it's in conjunction with limiting days for early voting, closing down DMV offices in areas of certain populations, onerous requirements to obtain the IDs in either the costs of registration, time/transportation to get to the offices or obtaining the necessary documentation. This while they also oppose measures to help register people better.
my concern was that, is that really quantifiable evidence of fascism?
its more a symptom of plutocratic classism with intersection with racism.
the aim of Voter IDs is not to coalesce power into the hands of one leader and the absolute control or establishment of strict order of society… but to diminish the capacity of the more populous, poor of the country to influence the affairs of government that threaten to undermine the state granted privileges of the wealthy.
They wouldn’t want to totally control the poor and the minorities or how they live, they would actually prefer to preserve the freedom they feel the poor enjoy, but only greatly reduce their share in governance. The rich care so little for how the poor and minorities in the country go about their lives, they only care if it gets in the way of their own interests
Calling it fascist and likening it to nazis and shit just obfuscates that and makes it all the more difficult in addressing and fighting it.
House is reactionary. YesMan is a prog. NCR is imperialist but liberal. Caesar is for faggots who aren't edgy enough IRL.
It genuinely disappoints me that the Legion is more of a twisted parody of Caesarism rather than an actual revival. It would have been interesting to see a nuanced portrayal of right-wing authoritarianism.
Temporal pre-familiarity bias. You are remembering my posts from the future, causing the release of endorphins and other neurochemicals. The posts aren’t actually that good, it just feels like that when you read them. They’ll seem normal again in a few months.
Eh, New Vegas is far more divorced from progressive orthodoxy than Fallout 3 or 4. You can tell that they put a lot of effort into making House and Yes Man as close to morally equal to the NCR (the clear prog favorite) as possible. All the prog bias is entirely unintentional, and the game goes out of its way to not preach to you, except all the times it tells you that it’s important to look at a problem from multiple angles and consider different perspectives.
It isn’t as dangerous, but also the number of police shootings is lower than some people expect, if I recall correctly.
But then, I’ve generally lived in areas where the police would actually come and intervene if there were a problem. That varies a lot in my country though, by area.
Lately, in developing a hypothetical/fictional country, I’ve been pondering foot patrol officers assigned to specific neighborhoods (rotated on a five year basis), trained in EMT stuff as well, with the different role of “Community Support Officer”. Separate out the heavy guys for use solely on bank robbers.
Edit: The idea being that you want someone who can use discretion, who lives nearby and is more of a part of the community than an occupying force within the community. All sorts of contextual information. But you don’t want them to stay so long that they set up a bribery network or something. You’d have to combine this with a whole bunch of other stuff to make it work, though. It isn’t so helpful if your CSO arrests some kid for vandalism after several warnings and the prosecutor sends him to prison in order to max his “woo, tough on crime!” ratings. (Instead of, you know, making the kid clean up the spray paint.)
I’ve no clue why I keep reflexively defending cops given the fact that I’ve been a victim of a crime several times and the cops never did anything to satisfyingly help
Based on your blog’s usual content, I imagine you’re encountering people that want to get rid of the police force entirely (or something equally wacky), which will go about as well as that time the police went on strike in Brazil.
You also probably realize on some level that better policing is possible, just like better zoning laws are possible, and better drug laws are possible, and… now if only improving the overall quality of government were as exciting as social wedge issues.
Tfw you wanna be a “good ally” and think you should “play it safe” by defaulting to the most hardline views on cultural appropriation and suddenly you’re a reactionary cultural nationalist
white people shouldn’t participate in cultural appropriation discourse without permission because it doesn’t belong to them
tfw when you take it so far that you loop around to grouping culture by race and not wanting people to leave their racial culture because that would be “inauthentic” and you oppressing them because your racial imperialist aura is just that strong
Because no one in America who doesn't live in NYC or the Bay Area really understands that the stratospheric housing costs there define the merely "rich" in conventional earned income (as opposed to those making literal Wall Street finance money and/or living entirely on capital interest), out of the rich category, so their infelicitous attempts to wrangle their actual horrible money problems get them automatically assigned to the mustache-twirling villain category.
It was fun reading through that OP thinking “well, this seems like a cool way to just remove poor people from an area while possibly dodging regs about affordable housing, but I will withold judgment until I see what benefits you think that captures” only to to realize that those were the benefits.
Imagine being so evil that you spend your days thinking up cool new ways to help the wealthy avoid contact with the poor while simultaneously saving them (the wealthy) money (which they, definitionally, have plenty of).
Fuckin’ imagine.
I think there’s a difference between wanting the rich to segregate themselves off vs accepting that it’s going to happen and trying to minimize the damage.
Unless I’m missing something, the proposal at hand exactly and only minimizes damage to the wealthy? And for a value of “damage” which means “spending money on housing?”
Come at me with a solution that helps those already subject to disproportionate risk and we’ll talk, I guess.
Become Singapore.
Oh, sorry. Let me try again. You can give people money, but you have to actually take it away if they misbehave. A good program would be to lower the minimum wage while issuing hourly direct-to-employee wage subsidies - thus making the effective wage received higher while simultaneously increasing available jobs and negotiating leverage for low-income workers. This has some backing from economists and can be rolled out and tested incrementally. The Democrats should be hype for it but the Democratic Party is dumb.
There are other factors, like dealing with the simultaneous under/overpolicing, punishing wayward children *before* the end up on the wrong end of a police officer, and so on. Get crime under control and you can fix the zoning laws. Fix the zoning laws and you can build cheaper housing where it’s needed.
None of this will actually happen though because the Democratic party is about as much about helping the poor as the Republicans are about saving money.
Yeah, I think it would probably be deemed to be a tip and not a gift. Just *saying* "this is a personal gift and not taxable" isn't a magic spell you can recite to make something nontaxable! Of course, nobody's going to actually care about an unreported, looks like $7 there, per se, but if it's a regular thing it could be a problem.
I think to make it stick you’d have to switch to a complete gift economy, where you regularly give gifts to people who aren’t currently providing you services, and don’t give gifts to people who are (as that is their gift to you).
That works for small groups, but doesn’t work so well in cities of millions where you can’t effectively maintain personal social ties with every single person you might possibly interact with. Then if you use an app or something to keep track of gifts you’ve just invented a new form of currency, which would actually be kind of cool.
Honey, if men* got pregnant, the entire evolutionary balance of our species, including reproductive strategies, would be wildly different. You aren’t just talking about a world where the dialogue on abortion has shifted (and there are plenty of pro-life women), you’re talking about redefining the entirety of human history and social organization.
The forms of organization are themselves dependent on just how the mechanics work! There is a tacit admission of this in the original, but it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Is it random? Do men always bear the child? Sometimes? For part of the cycle but not the whole?
And it doesn’t end there. Men would be shaped differently. Men would be sized differently. Women have fat deposits on their bodies because making human babies is so ludicrously expensive that preparations need to be made beforehand in pre-modern societies. Men are in part organized the way they are because they are more expendable biologically. Higher risk/higher reward.
If men got pregnant, then that goes away. The changes would be so drastic that they could not be called men anymore.
(*in the classical sense the kind of people that make this comment use, since otherwise they wouldn’t be be making this comment in the first place)
Well, NIMBYs killed microhousing in Seattle which was going to be the kinds of small, affordable apartments that people could actually afford to live in.
Yeah, that’s one of the problems with the whole “but that isn’t REAL Capitalism! We need to deregulate!” things. The regulatory capture that corrupted the existing process will also corrupt its dismantling unless you fix it, and Capitalism pays people to subvert public ownership of the state.
Hot take: the problem with homelessness does not boil down to “count amount of homeless, count amount of houses, if the latter is larger, then capitalism is intentionally making people homeless and will collapse if they aren’t, therefore get rid of capitalism to instantly solve homelessness”.
Pay attention to the fact that there are much more homeless people per capita in cities than in half-abandoned villages, and you will realize that the problem isn’t just not having a home, but not having a home where you want to have a home, to the extent where they would rather be homeless in a city than landlords in a village.
There are obvious easy solutions, like falsely reporting that you have solved homelessness while carting people out of the city (adjusting visibility), or forcing people to live in certain places regardless of where they actually want to live (adjusting mobility), but they don’t fix the actual underlying issue.
Policy changes to address this are going to be very expensive, unless you want to reduce safety restrictions for houses, which you should not.
And not expensive because robber baron capitalism pigs, but expensive as per LTV - construction is a man hour hungry process.
You have to make other changes that allow you to fix the zoning laws, but even that only gets you so far, so basically this.
