Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
Why might someone have a boundary about being screamed at or being called a worthless piece of shit? Sure, it could be because they just want to stew in their privilege and avoid any criticism of their words or actions.
Or it could be because of their own abuse history. Some people who were screamed at or called worthless pieces of shit by abusers may be triggered by it now. Or they may just be unwilling to allow anyone to speak to them that way ever again. (Remember that one of the functions of abuse is to make the victim feel worthless, so if you’re using language that’s intended to make someone feel worthless, you are utilizing abusive dynamics, even if the other person has more privilege than you on some axis.)
It could also be because of their mental health issues. Many people with anxiety can shut down and become nonverbal when spoken to extremely harshly. Screaming at someone can trigger a panic attack. Calling a person with suicidal ideation “worthless” or “a piece of shit” can provoke them to harm themselves, since it confirms the worst things they tell themselves.
Unfortunately, when someone has a mental illness, these types of responses are a risk no matter what. Sometimes even the most gentle criticism can cause a person with depression to spiral into self-hatred. But just because we can’t prevent all harm doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to prevent some harm, and a good place to start is by respecting stated boundaries. If someone tells you they can’t handle being yelled at, assume they have a good reason for setting that boundary, because they probably do.
But I’m going to take it one step further to say this: you don’t need to be triggered by something, or experience strong negative reactions to it, in order to have the right to set boundaries around it.
Miri Mogilevsky at Brute Reason
If there isn’t a word for this line of reasoning, there should be.
“Don’t say [obviously mean thing that serves only to intimidate or belittle a fellow human being due to immutable group membership] because they might also be part of [group your in-group considers worthy of empathy].”
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this argument over and over again in an argument on a blog I follow about bi women. “Be nice to bi girls,” it goes, “because they might not even date cishet males. For example, you could be implying cishetmale collaboration/contamination in women who date only NB people!”
In this case, it’s abuse victims as a subset of some other larger group deemed worthy of being called pieces of shit.
Previously, I’ve seen this as, “don’t make horrible blanket statements about men because trans men might think you’re talking about them!”
This sounds like empathy, but it’s really just a complaint that the lines demarcating unpeople were drawn slightly incorrectly. The fact that you’re declaring open season on any class for what is obviously dehumanizing verbal abuse is the main problem. Not that you might catch up someone with ideological protection in the vitriol. That’s just CYA.
So does a word for this word exist? If not, what should it be?
(Slightly less endorsed, the quasi-inverse of this, in which people argue that their group should not be dehumanized because it contains sub-groups worthy of sympathy. The most painfully common example is repeatedly trotting out the poor socioeconomic state of Hmong immigrants to the US just so the suburban-born sons and daughters of Korean-American middle-managers can use their Asian heritage to play Oppression Olympics.)
Getting people to actually sympathize with, say, men is deemed infeasible when they follow an ideology that believes stubbornly in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic, so this tactic is used to try and alter their behavior within their ideological boundaries.
> in which the race for status proxies selects for cyberflesh implants too status-selected to serve their ostensible primary purpose
Bots, honeys, darlings,
I appreciate all the effort you’re going through to bring me random images of naked women, but… Look, I know some people will say this is racist, but I won’t date anyone who can’t complete a captcha, okay? So you really don’t need to go through the effort, because you really don’t have a chance.
there’s an element of juvenile politics in the folks who refute any historical leader as villainous. or even uphold but can’t stand to be serious, to be full throated in defense. which is like a petulant refusal to respect authority as a value in itself
dude
how many layers of irony are we on right now
I was going to make a joke about minisoc supporting Confederate statues in the US South, but uh, many of those guys were actually way better than Stalin.
there’s an element of juvenile politics in the folks who refute any historical leader as villainous. or even uphold but can’t stand to be serious, to be full throated in defense. which is like a petulant refusal to respect authority as a value in itself
dude
how many layers of irony are we on right now
I remember even as a kid thinking that the Sarlacc must have some incredibly life-extension abilities to keep its victims alive for 1000 years, and that that could be pretty valuable if you could find a way to extract it.
When humans found a species of super-poisonous tree, we nearly wiped it out of existence.
This explains why the Sarlacc hasn’t simply been bombed yet.
Imagine your icon becoming universal dictator of earth
Buckle up kids, because you’re about to be ruled by an ＡＭＥＲＩＣＡＮ ＣＹＢＯＲＧ ＴＩＭＥ ＣＲＩＭＩＮＡＬ！
most of the time I’m vaguely impressed by the way Japan manages to balance tradition and modernity, local culture and globalisation, advanced technology and respect for humanity, then I remember they had that fetish for girls licking doorknobs and wonder if maybe two atom bombs wasn’t enough.
I’m pretty sure the that came after the atom bombs, so, uh, maybe it’s the other way around.
This blog recommends not using radioactive city-vaporizing weapons on human population centers.
this post 2edgy4you now that Becky is on verge of becoming an ethnic slur (via argumate)
Let’s suppose that I’m some kind of recluse who doesn’t have any real clue what the Kids These Days are doing. “On the verge of becoming an ethnic slur?” What? Directed at whom? With what connotations? I am so lost.
(via balioc)
White women. I’m not sure how to explain the implications.
Centrism and normalcy are all ruses created by the establishment to make any sort of alternative seem like madness. Seriously think about what kind of world we must live in where politicians as moderate as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are written off by the establishment as extremists. On the other hand, growing economic inequality and the downright cruelty of the establishment os meant to be normal or a “harsh truth of reality” that can’t be changed whatsoever because anything else is an extremist aberration.
People aren’t advocating for poverty. Jeremy Corbyn’s intentions may be pretty fucking great, but raising minimum wage by so much in one go will cause workers to becone redundant and will slow the growth of businesses.
Listen dude, if paying workers fairer wages somehow makes the economy worse overall, then that means there’s something seriously wrong with the current economic system and the solution isn’t more of the fucking same. I didn’t write this post saying that Jeremy Corbyn was some savior, I wrote it saying that he wasn’t an extremist and that there needs to be alternatives. To centrists, there are no alternatives, only the status quo, and I hate to break it to you, but for the vast majority of the people on the planet the status quo is fucking shit. That’s the reason why the Western world is in such an upheaval at the moment, because we have uncaring governments who want everything to continuously stay the same because they’re the primary beneficiaries of the current system. And if an alternative is never found, and everyone sits around listening to centrists, they’re going to end up being the only beneficiaries.
Villainous National Technocratic Centrist here.
Direct-to-employee wage subsidies (with a minimum wage decrease, but a net total increase in compensation) would increase the purchasing power and economic security of the working class while not damaging businesses (much, because it will need a bit of taxes to fund), and having a variety of other positive side effects (including higher employment overall). It could be implemented gradually and rolled back if it doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, this isn’t in the interests of Globalist Capitalists (who are pursuing a global unification of wages, including through open borders), Leftists (who may seek UBI or industrial nationalization instead), or bootstrapper Conservatives (who really believe the whole bootstraps thing for some reason).
I do agree Bernie isn’t that extreme though.
Workers: Single Payer is-
Dems: Workers, shut up and get the fuck out. I’m gonna fuck your insurance provider now.
Fair meme.
Popehat pointed me to this distinctly Orwellian transcript from a federal court case, in which the defendant, who wants to plead guilty, asks if she has to affirm in the plea agreement that her public defender did an adequate job when he’d actually missed all their meetings, missed key court deadlines, and couldn’t answer questions about what she was charged with:
The Defendant: What I meant to say is that at the end of the plea, it says that I have to submit and say I have been … that “I am satisfied that my defense attorney has represented me in a competent manner,” … I don’t want – I’m scared to go to trial because I don’t think that he’s going to, you know, put a fight for me. Your Honor, he didn’t submit any pretrial motions at all.
… Do I have to have the clause in there about my attorney? [referring to the part of the plea colloquy where she’s asked if she’s satisfied with her attorney's representation]
[Prosecutor]: Yes. You’re asking me?
The Court: Yes, you do. Who are you asking?
The Defendant: Just – I don’t know.
The Court: Well, you turned to [the prosecutor]. That’s part of [Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure] 11, ma’am, because you have to be satisfied with the representation and understand the terms and conditions of your plea agreement.
But in terms of satisfied with the representation, it doesn’t
mean – There’s – In terms of competent representation, it doesn’t mean that [your public defender] has to look at and touch every single aspect of the case. If [the prosecutor] reached out to [your public defender] and said,
okay, count number one and count number ten, which happen to be what we’re seeking your client’s guilty plea on, here’s the discovery information that directly relates to Count 1 and Count 10. If he reviews that,
that’s a diligent lawyer who’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing.…
The Defendant: Why is it the fact that even if I’m willing to take the plea, that clause about him, about my attorney? Why do I have to submit to the fact that he competently, you know, advised me in the matter?
The Court: Rule 11, there’s certain things that must happen if a person says I wish to plead guilty. As part of Rule 11, you have to believe that your lawyer is competent and has represented you properly.
The Defendant: Your Honor, I don’t believe that, but at the same time I’m scared to go to trial with him because I don’t think that he’s going to do me justice.
The judge says that if she doesn’t want to go to trial and probably get life in prison, she has to plead guilty, and she’s not allowed to plead guilty until she affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel. If she will not agree that she was competently advised, it goes to trial, and her trial lawyer will be the one who missed meetings with her and a life sentence is on the line.
She affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel.
The whole thing is just nightmarish, but to me the most nightmarish bit is that it was over a marijuana dealing operation. She was facing life in prison, she got 121 months with the plea, this whole charade of a just system charaded along, over her boyfriend growing and selling weed.
So, uh, have your usual reminder that fuck the American criminal justice system.
Now imagine the incentives of privatized for-profit prisons and prison labor on top of that - TUoC surely has, but there are still too many people that support it.
This probably wouldn’t even be that hard to remedy if they just allocated more money to hiring public defense lawyers, but who will do that? (Certainly not the state where they tried to draft the governor in due to a chronic shortage of available public defenders.) Republicans don’t actually believe in good government - they believe in the myth of bootstraps and tax cuts. Democrats don’t believe in it either, so instead of solving it we’ll just get some other bullsht social program that empirically doesn’t work, or schools that don’t discipline bad behaviors until they end up on the wrong end of a cop.
This all undermines the public’s faith in the justice system and the state generally, which makes policing itself harder, likely increasing crime. (For instance, similar failures involving simultaneous under- and over-policing continue to undermine the inner cities. Some people there now believe it is done on purpose, and they likely wouldn’t believe prosecutors could protect them from drug gang retaliation - so why would they cooperate to get rid of the drug gangs?) You can try to get around that with propaganda, and indeed to a degree they do, but it has to bottom out at reality somewhere.
Even imagine a simple rule like “as much money has to be allocated to your defense as they spend prosecuting you”. I bet most Americans would even consider that fair. But where will the political will to materialize it come from?
uhhhhhh newly alt-right appointed ethnostate ethnarchs:
- african-americans: beyoncé
- white mexicans: jhonen vasquez
- brown mexicans: el chapo guzman
- rooftop koreans: police d.va
- white americans: taylor swift
- native americans: elizabeth “ghost wolf” warren
- mormons: the aquabats
- muslims: snoop dogg
- traps: thivus
if it’s successful how you say it gonna die
Computers are an absolutely amazing device but it doesn’t take that much to render them inoperable. Entropy is the norm. Order is productive but fragile.
I didn’t explicitly and solely mean contemporary material culture and technology; it can be extended to philosophy, to art, to every aspect of d e e p c u l t u r e
Computers metaphorically. AR’s fears are probably overestimated, but “if it’s so strong, how can it die?” ignores how fragile complex systems are. You can build in some antifragility, but there are limits. (Humans, for instance, can recover from a variety of injuries, but routinely die from cancer, which requires only a few molecular alterations/mutations in one cell to start.)
if it’s successful how you say it gonna die
Computers are an absolutely amazing device but it doesn’t take that much to render them inoperable. Entropy is the norm. Order is productive but fragile.
kvltmvtherfvcker1349mvrdermvsic:
The tombstone of Western Civilization is going to say “At least we weren’t racist”
I will be pissing on the tombstone, 40oz in hand
i’ll welcome the birth of a global civilization, where we can all live in peace, with open arms
Don’t tell me there are people who seriously believe that’s what’s going to happen once the lights go out in the west
yeah, because western society is shit
“The beatings and murders of homosexuals in Chechnya,” he said, “are nothing more than further evidence of the vile influence of Western Imperialism. Yes, it is claimed that the West loves the homosexuals, so much that they have parades of openly gay men in the cities- but this is staged by their Capitalist Hollywood studios! It is only in tolerant and culturally diverse countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that homosexuals can achieve true freedom from Western hegemony.”
“When the Revolution comes, we will finally put to rest the legacies of vile white men such as Ghengis Khan.”
I wish there was a way to say “I don’t think that (thing) is good, but I also don’t totally repudiate any identification with it.”
Also, I wish I could make some statement of traditionalist Catholicism and obedience to God but I’m shy, timid, and I also don’t want to pointlessly offend people.
See also: “I’ve been working on re-learning rigid gender roles and centering marriage and heterosexual relationships”.
There isn’t yet, but there will be. Even now, some groups are reconstructing that having certain social rules is Actually Good.
(Though less so the pure heterosexual part.)
@argumate Our doom, foretold.
Some sides I’m on haven’t fully materialized yet, but they will. My blog description contains more than one metaphorical truth about which sides I’m on, that should be easy enough to guess at.
But on second thought, let’s do a reading of the blog description for anyone who thought it was just flavor text. (Not you, Anon-kun. I know you’re a very smart man of many talents, which is how you can send so many asks to so many people on this website.)
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. - This is more aspirational than anything, but also I support the right of American citizens to obtain human augmentations under the 2nd amendment, subject to certain restrictions.
Wanted time criminal. - Likes to wax poetic about non-existent possible futures. Future shocked by the 2016 election.
Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. - Two-sided:
1. In the future, the government may introduce multiple classes of citizenship in order to handle the fallout of immigration issues. Also, if the formation of a North American Union happens, entering the Orange Timeline may have only somewhat delayed it. Progressively larger international unions is the current way forward for both Liberal Capitalists and Leftists.
2. Actually, to bolster Nationalism I would deliberately create a tiered citizenship system if I were Technocratic Dictator of the United States of America Central Director of the North American Union, based on a series of tests and a period of National Service which would be used for survival training and martial education to make the nation even harder to invade and help communicate the idea that citizenship isn’t something free that you just give out.
Also, as you might guess, it indicates where I happen to live.
Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, - Using cybernetic technology to make a hivemind is Bad, okay? I don’t care how equal it supposedly makes you. This is one possible nightmare future for China, which is actually even more of a nightmare for the West than the National Technocratic Black Dragon timeline.
the Ultra-Caliphate, - Islamic Theocracy may be Culturally Diverse, but it’s a plague upon mankind which wishes to enslave us. For now a wide unification across multiple polities isn’t feasible, but that may change as conditions change. Now with cybernetic implants to enforce Islamic Law.
Google Defense Network, - Let’s not explicitly make corporations with massive surveillance networks and armies of autonomous killer robots the State, okay?
and the People’s Republic of Cascadia. - Originally the Free Peoples’ Republic of Cascadia - apostrophe positioning deliberate. If we took campus Commies and campus SJ seriously and they created a state, it would be a ludicrously oppressive disaster constantly insisting that the outgroup can’t be oppressed, so therefore it’s impossible for us to oppress them.
National Separatist, enemy of the Earth Sphere Federation government and its unificationist allies. - If Open Borders becomes popular, the balance will shift towards a unifying global government, and that government will insist on controlling everything as far out as the Moon. This is almost inevitable with open borders, and will come out of crisis management treaties and a need to control criminals as they cross national borders. It isn’t an accident that power has been centralizing in the EU.
Its enemies may become known as National Separatists, and it will oppose them on the grounds that they are bigoted anti-[dominant economic mode] racist X-ophobic terrorists that are identical to Hitler. To expand its power, the ESF will leverage whatever means it can get away with, particularly economic, to pressure hold-out countries into joining.
However, the median quality of government on Earth is not America or Western Europe, but probably more like Brazil both in competence and in corruption levels. This isn’t an accident, institutions and culture both matter a lot, the causality for them doesn’t run purely from economic development to nice culture and good institutions. The formation of a world government is actually really, really bad. It must be strangled before it ever gets a chance to breath, here in the youth of our timeline, the first half of the 21st century.
In reference to this post: I would oppose a Communist revolution, through various means. That ideology has earned my “the red hammer” tag for a reason. The question was asked in the context of a right-winger attempting to determine whether I qualify as right-wing.
Although part of this consideration is that any Communism which is revolutionary is bound to end up more like previous disastrous failures than like the Israeli Kibbutzes, which while still not actually a good idea (required some subsidization, bad for children’s psychological development) didn’t involve going on internal starvation / murder sprees, and are very small (Dunbar’s Number territory - not a coincidence).
An actual Socialism that could work, that would spread throughout the world, would be based on an actual working model that exceeds Capitalist production, which could be replicated without force of arms because even 85th-percentile productive people would volunteer for it.
There is also the matter of how those movements themselves would treat me, how identity politics movements would treat me, and so on. They would all treat me as an undesirable outsider, effectively putting me with the opposition by default. Some of them would do far worse.
Some sides I’m on haven’t fully materialized yet, but they will. My blog description contains more than one metaphorical truth about which sides I’m on, that should be easy enough to guess at.
Though on the other hand, I was already assigned a side when asked what I would do during a hypothetical Communist revolution.
i was as pissed as anybody about banning iranians but idk why ppl get so upset about the wall? Like there was this sign on the university like “NO BAN NO WALLS” well no ban sure but illegal immigration from mexico is already banned idk the big deal about a wall, i aske dsomeone and they were like “it’s a waste of money” and that’s TOTALLY not what people are complaining about when they say “NO BAN NO WALLS”, or they’d be elsewhere writing “NO BAN NO EXPENSIVE DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS”
It’s banned as a matter of law, but if you read between the lines it’s something the US basically allows for multiple reasons.
Let’s say you had a piece of property that was yours, but for years you generally ignored it and let people wander through it or do whatever. After years this, people built their lives around being able to do this. Then one day, you show up and get everyone there arrested for trespassing and build a wall around it. That’s a fairly good analogy.
(I should point that this is a problem that is specifically addressed in legal systems through the concept of “Adverse Possession”)
If the Democrats weren’t either deliberately planning “Demographic Destiny” or just celebrating it, I’d be far less sympathetic to the pro-Wall position. Trump voters have judged that the only way to get a handle on immigration in this country is to build a physical barrier that is politically inconvenient to remove - and based on the level of quiet support for Open Borders among prominent Democrats and the like, I don’t see that they’re wrong about that.
Open Borders WILL create a World Government unless it is fought. If a giant dumb wall buys us another ten or twenty years without a World Government, then so be it.
I don’t get what “executive functioning” is.
As far as I can tell, people with poor executive functioning generally:
- find it hard to get up and get water even if they’re really thirsty
- get metaphorically tired after doing stuff and have to rest, even if it wasn’t really Objectively Tiring
- have to put lots of effort into continuing to do stuff after they have begun
- have to invest some initial effort into beginning tasks, even if the task itself isn’t that hard and/or they really want to do the task
- find it somewhat metaphorically-wearying to do too many Different things without a break
- and as their energy is used up, it takes more energy to do comparatively easy things, such that things that would’ve taken 10 effort at the beginning now take 100 effort
- but also they can sometimes get really invested in doing a thing after they have begun, at which point it stops taking away energy and takes almost no willpower at all
- the more things they have to do, the more difficult it is to begin, even if all of those things are fairly easy. it is not clear whether it takes more energy to begin, or if it’s just harder to make the Decision
Some of these are things like “bad at transitions” and “getting focused on one thing”. But other things are really weird and I don’t get why they happen.
What is this metaphorical Effort that gets depleted whenever I have to clean the kitchen or do chores, so that I don’t have Effort left to do homework, or, more precisely, so that I have to spend more Effort to do homework? And that somehow trades off against ability to get water? This sounds fake even though I know it’s not?
Is there any kind of neurological explanation for this mysterious quality that causes me to suck at doing stuff?
Your body has to expend resources to accomplish tasks, but in the ancestral environment focusing on tasks that weren’t sufficiently rewarding was dangerous as it could mean not eating. So, there is an instinct/mechanism to cut off unrewarding tasks. What happens when that instinct/mechanism is too powerful?
Huh, I would assume that too many tasks get cut off?
Do you have any sources for this?
Sorry, I should have been more clear but I was answering quickly. As someone with poor executive functioning, this is my speculation / reasoning based on observation for why it would be this way.
If we imagine the hypothetical person with pure focus, able to override all distractions and do their boring work, we have a person that might literally keep working and working on accounting spreadsheets or boring through a tree looking for honey, while they starve to death. The cues to stop come up from within our subconscious. (We can also note people injuring themselves while under the influence of various drugs.)
So as with many things in biology, there may be a range of behaviors and the farther towards the outer edge of that range, above or below, the more dangerous. Poor executive functioning thus being below the optimal level of filtering distractions / internal rewards / stick-to-it-iveness.
A reverse haunted house for dogs like you bring your dog and scary strangers in masks casually emerge from around corners only to cower and flee when your dog barks at them, making the dog feel like it has done a very good job protecting you and getting free treats at the end
I don’t get what “executive functioning” is.
As far as I can tell, people with poor executive functioning generally:
- find it hard to get up and get water even if they’re really thirsty
- get metaphorically tired after doing stuff and have to rest, even if it wasn’t really Objectively Tiring
- have to put lots of effort into continuing to do stuff after they have begun
- have to invest some initial effort into beginning tasks, even if the task itself isn’t that hard and/or they really want to do the task
- find it somewhat metaphorically-wearying to do too many Different things without a break
- and as their energy is used up, it takes more energy to do comparatively easy things, such that things that would’ve taken 10 effort at the beginning now take 100 effort
- but also they can sometimes get really invested in doing a thing after they have begun, at which point it stops taking away energy and takes almost no willpower at all
- the more things they have to do, the more difficult it is to begin, even if all of those things are fairly easy. it is not clear whether it takes more energy to begin, or if it’s just harder to make the Decision
Some of these are things like “bad at transitions” and “getting focused on one thing”. But other things are really weird and I don’t get why they happen.
What is this metaphorical Effort that gets depleted whenever I have to clean the kitchen or do chores, so that I don’t have Effort left to do homework, or, more precisely, so that I have to spend more Effort to do homework? And that somehow trades off against ability to get water? This sounds fake even though I know it’s not?
Is there any kind of neurological explanation for this mysterious quality that causes me to suck at doing stuff?
Your body has to expend resources to accomplish tasks, but in the ancestral environment focusing on tasks that weren’t sufficiently rewarding was dangerous as it could mean not eating. So, there is an instinct/mechanism to cut off unrewarding tasks. What happens when that instinct/mechanism is too powerful?
So, I don’t wholly object to legalism. If you take the story about the roving bandit and the stationary bandit where the stationary bandit became the state, and to me that was a great advantage because it formalized the rules. You could still be exploited, but if you knew how and when you would be exploited, you could plan, you could build, you could do all sorts of things. Legalism in this case can be thought of as a technology that helped us.
But there’s a difference between that and thinking that if only we could get the right set of rules, we can be saved. In my mind, if we could make a legal system so universally good it couldn’t be abused, than we wouldn’t need a legal system because we’re already just so good. So I don’t think that rules are the answer to this problem.
I think a softer version of that same premise does work. The system creates the incentives people are responding to, they do actually respond to them, and there is a LOT of room for improvement.
The design of the system is absolutely crucial. It might require morality to enforce, but it is the system that creates the context/environment within which morality is learned - or unlearned, in the case of damage to corruption-resistance in Communist countries that lasts to this day, after they are no longer Communist.
It also creates the expectations about what is normal, which is part of what LGBTs are trying to make sure gay marriage is recognized legally (rather than opting for weaker “civil unions”).
The answer to Che Guevara T-shirts is LKY T-shirts.
I don’t believe the orthodox leftist answer, at least not anywhere near completely. It excuses culture, for instance. People aren’t reducible solely to economics, and it doesn’t matter whether it is AnCaps or Communists that are doing the reducing.
it’s implicit in mainstream conceptions of nationalism/national liberation that a nation can attain the fullest expression of its freedom as a nation without ‘interference’ from anyone else, i.e. in an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous state. like that’s the ideal venue for free expression, cultural flowering, etc.
Not everyone has the same experience as you, and not every Nationalist is a cultural-isolation-maximizer.
The Japanese have managed to remain Japanese while changing, flowing, adapting concepts from around the world, and they have an entire subset of their syllabulary used to represent foreign loanwords.
And yet… the lack of crime, the lack of Islamic terrorist attacks, being able to trust children to ride the train to school, carefully queuing up to receive supplies in the wake of a massive natural disaster… in other, more multicultural places this either isn’t the case, is only the case for the wealthy, or is enforced by the iron hand of a soft authoritarian state.
Culture is a wave, not a water, but that doesn’t mean we have to blur all of them together. Diversity isn’t a terminal value.
Since it sort of blew up more than I was expecting, I’ll share a few thoughts I had on matters relating to that “antipolitics“ post.
First of all, there’s the desire for rules that can’t be games by socially savvy people, but what you’re instead getting is rules that are games by people who are skilled in certain types of abstract reasoning. Legal realism means more than just “property is coercive,“ it means that you can think of law as less of rules that are followed and more and predictions on what legal judgements will be passed. When laws are vague or contradictory, as they often are, then it’s those abstract reasoning abilities that matter when arguing.
I’ve said before that it’s interesting how many libertarian bloggers are lawyers, and to me this pretty much lays out the connection. Same thing I was thinking about when I remarked on how Veblen said that lawyers tended to be most opposed to socialism or when I was mildly smug that people with a law degree are significantly worse predictors than those without. It’s all about this certain way of thinking. Hell, you can think of the legal realism school as the exception that proves the rule.
So this is a method of thinking that’s shared by libertarians, rationalists, neoreactionaries and exemplified by lawyers. I’ve got problems with this school, I think it tends against empiricism. It’s not explicit, and empirical observations can be slotted in, but they often appear to be an afterthought.
The upshot of this though is that rather than oppose this because it’s unworkable, you can view this type of legalism as just an attempt to shift power from people who do social networking to people who do this style of abstract reasoning. You may view it as not a power shift but a principled objection, but I’m sure the social networkers feel that their method is the natural and just way to organize society.
(Not saying this is explicitly self-serving, it’s just about how the patterns of thinking people have inform their worldview in way that ends up favoring themselves.)
Quite frankly, a lot of the social network dominance types (in politics) are either self-serving “protagonist-centered morality” types, or manipulators, or against some kind of empiricism. The concerns over the Tyranny of Structurelessness are very valid.
Not to mention that countries with this Rules focus are outperforming ones that have high amoral familism, etc.
That doesn’t mean Libertarianism is going to fly (as you’ve no doubt read me pointing out), though. What it means is that since we can’t entirely chase out politics, we have to plan for it. You can think of it as the values portion of the policy vector < values, efficacy >.
I could argue that the Rules focus is an illusion, and what causes outperformance is that the networks in advanced countries are more connected and less cliquish. There’s this difference between rules used to organize society and having rules, maybe rules are just used as a method for avoiding responsibility.
Ah, but how did they get that way? If you posit it isn’t the rules or the focus on rules, then you might start heading towards HBD and other more reactionary type thoughts…
Since it sort of blew up more than I was expecting, I’ll share a few thoughts I had on matters relating to that “antipolitics“ post.
First of all, there’s the desire for rules that can’t be games by socially savvy people, but what you’re instead getting is rules that are games by people who are skilled in certain types of abstract reasoning. Legal realism means more than just “property is coercive,“ it means that you can think of law as less of rules that are followed and more and predictions on what legal judgements will be passed. When laws are vague or contradictory, as they often are, then it’s those abstract reasoning abilities that matter when arguing.
I’ve said before that it’s interesting how many libertarian bloggers are lawyers, and to me this pretty much lays out the connection. Same thing I was thinking about when I remarked on how Veblen said that lawyers tended to be most opposed to socialism or when I was mildly smug that people with a law degree are significantly worse predictors than those without. It’s all about this certain way of thinking. Hell, you can think of the legal realism school as the exception that proves the rule.
So this is a method of thinking that’s shared by libertarians, rationalists, neoreactionaries and exemplified by lawyers. I’ve got problems with this school, I think it tends against empiricism. It’s not explicit, and empirical observations can be slotted in, but they often appear to be an afterthought.
The upshot of this though is that rather than oppose this because it’s unworkable, you can view this type of legalism as just an attempt to shift power from people who do social networking to people who do this style of abstract reasoning. You may view it as not a power shift but a principled objection, but I’m sure the social networkers feel that their method is the natural and just way to organize society.
(Not saying this is explicitly self-serving, it’s just about how the patterns of thinking people have inform their worldview in way that ends up favoring themselves.)
Quite frankly, a lot of the social network dominance types (in politics) are either self-serving “protagonist-centered morality” types, or manipulators, or against some kind of empiricism. The concerns over the Tyranny of Structurelessness are very valid.
Not to mention that countries with this Rules focus are outperforming ones that have high amoral familism, etc.
That doesn’t mean Libertarianism is going to fly (as you’ve no doubt read me pointing out), though. What it means is that since we can’t entirely chase out politics, we have to plan for it. You can think of it as the values portion of the policy vector < values, efficacy >.
what other frameworks can I use to understand the world which aren’t privilege/oppression?
I think one of them is Lockeanism. I’m kind of tired of Lockeanism (though I still agree with it). Also tired of the democracy/totalitarian or capitalism/communism divide since that seems really inapplicable to my actual life
who should I read? what theory should I try on? I want new ideas to think about My Life and The World so that I’m not stuck with this one that makes me feel vaguely upset at Everything
I propose a model in which power relations are between individuals, with individuals being nodes (hubs) on a graph, and the relationships being directed weighted edges (spoke arrows with numbers).
fuck, that’s a great start up idea
I’m kind of annoyed by the people who complain that trans people are too concerned with passing and not enough with fucking with the gender binary.
Like, dude, my concern with passing is that I don’t want to be noticed by the (dangerously common) people who want to physically remove “bitchniggas” from moving trains. Please fuck with the gender binary on your own time, when my punchable face isn’t on the line.
I really wish we could just somehow make neighborhoods be more like college campuses, but unfortunately that whole model is built on people all working (or schooling or whatever) in the same place and more or less committing to not moving for four years. (It could also be relying on people not having kids, but if anything I would expect the college campus model to be better at having local daycare services and safe, stimulating places for kids to play, so I don’t think that’s it.
Which aspects are you thinking about that college campuses have and dense urban environments don’t?
A lot more “third spaces” that function well as such, better sense of community/higher trust, green space that actually functions well as green space. Room and board + campus maintenance + activity fees combined seem to be far more modest than the cost of living in an urban area (maybe because it avoids the problems that come with having to pay for a safe neighborhood in a positional-goods type of way by being strongly selected for IQ + consciousnessness? Idk).
A lot of this is just describing, like, suburbs and small towns. Nothing stops you from continuing to live in a college town after you finish college, and there are lots of small towns with a similar “feel.”
This, I think, is where
@jadagul’s point about colleges being selected for people like me becomes relevant. Plus small towns tend to lack the classes and guest speakers and general traits of academia that make it stimulating. But yes, “small Minnesota town filled with rationalists that has good access to infrastructure, jobs, etc” would be more or less ideal.
I sympathize with you and have considered urban planning from this angle, constructing medium-density communities-within-communities. Just put me in charge of the country as Technocratic Dictator Central Director of the North American Union and I’ll get it sorted.
I’m a good person, and there is little reason to worry about how this might be involved in plans to build an unstoppable super-nation. Plus, I assure you the prediction markets for the National Delegation will have my back on this matter.
Anti-abortion argument: You wouldn’t be here if you were aborted.
Desired conclusion: Therefore abortion is wrong.
Actual conclusion: Therefore time travel is wrong.
“When we said we wanted something to help us reach out to younger audiences, LOLCATS: The Musical was not what we had in mind.”
“No, what I’m saying, Helen, is your meme game is out of date.”
for a post-racial society Tumblr sure does get heated about whether Armenians count as white or not.
it’s mercifully one of the few debates that feature the Kardashians and genocide as legitimate talking points.
I thought Tumblr was all about racial awareness, not being post-racial?
I thought that was the new SJ Left thing - racial awareness, racial consciousness, ethnic experiences - just only for those with enough overlapping categories in the Venn Diagram of Oppression.