Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.
I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.
Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Right, but one might want organizations to make decisions based on more accurate information, not just individuals, and measuring the rate of underground bunker construction doesn’t tell you which apocalyptic scenario is most likely - and thus needs to be most addressed.
The following assume the prediction markets are being used to help evaluate the standing of government bureaucrats or employees in another very large organization. In this instance, the resource being bet is not currency per se, but a “credibility score” used in hiring and other decisions.
Reselling Shares of Predictions
One issue with making bets is that they may take longer than your lifespan in order to pay out. Shares of bets on, for example, global temperature in the year 2100 should be something that can be traded by itself. In this sense these kinds of bets become a long-term investment that can be used to hold one’s credibility score, particularly if bet payoffs are indexed to prediction market inflation.
Catastrophe Bets Reserve Catastrophe Goods
A basket of catastrophe goods are held in reserve for those who make predictions of incidents which would cause the prediction market to end. This might include gold, guns and ammo, priority access to bunkers, and so on. These would be distributed by the market operator in preparation for the event, but are only held by the bettor unless the actual catastrophe kicks in.
Prohibition of Close Involvement
Based on the level of control someone has over the outcome of a scenario being bet on (1/N?), they may be prohibited from betting on it.
Alternatively,
Prohibition of Betting Against Own Success
If you’re on a project, you can only bet on it succeeding, not coming late or failing. Colluding with outsiders to get payment for the project failing is a punishable offense, and these will be monitored and punished.
Alternatively,
Randomization of Selection of Betting Participants with Self Recusal
Spread bets over the organization at random to lower the probability that any participant has too much control over the outcome and is thus able to sabotage it. This may result in a hit to accuracy, depending on the estimating capabilities of your organization.
There are probably other mechanisms that can be added to try and get better / less corrupt behavior from the prediction markets.
to add to this “humans are weird” thing
did you know that humans are the only species on earth with the ability to throw things with any significant degree of accuracy and force (apes can throw with about the force of a human ten year old, but cant lock their wrists well enough for accuracy)and we just never really think about it bc its so easy and simple to us that pretty much all of our sports are based around the concept of throwing things accurately
so
what if the concept of projectile weapons takes most species FOREVER to get the hang of, or even come up with in the first place.
a human goes onto a ship and throws some trash into the nearest reclaimer, shouts “kobe!” and all the other aliens on board absolutely LOSE THEIR MINDSI definitely didn’t know this about humans but it’s actually really neat
We have a bunch of very weird traits that aren’t found in taxonomically nearby species. It’s really blatantly obvious that we’re eusocial or otherwise superorganismic. But EO Wilson got a mountain of shit for pointing this out in 2011, so the status quo is still basically that Ayn Dawkins’ discrete genome sequence proves that everyone should eat the poor because Hamilton’s rule says we’re all equal in the eyes of a dead God.
Did you mean *quantum* eusocial superorgasmic?
Science fiction is cultural arbitrage against the future.
I propose a new form of measurement of how interesting the times you live in are - the amount of days you’d need to travel backwards in time until the average person would refuse to believe you and perhaps think you were joking/insane/trying to start a fight for describing to them the major historical events that happened between their time and yours. Let’s call the unit of measurement the cassandra.
For example, on the day after the 2016 election, you’d only need to travel back a single day and tell them that Trump won to get that reaction. November 9th was a 1-cassandra day. Since Trump has taken office I think we’re averaging about 7 cassandras. But I estimate most of my lifetime has averaged in the hundreds of cassandras at least. And throughout most of history I’d estimate the cassandra level has been in the thousands, easily.
No chance in hell. These suckers are gonna spend the rest of the century scraping every last grain of salt to make me rich.
No chance in hell. These suckers are gonna spend the rest of the century scraping every last grain of salt to make me rich.
no?? some people don’t do shitty memes???? to cope?????
Paul Mattick (in Anton Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils)
Difficult for the workers councils over here and the workers councils over there to coordinate their production to ensure that there are no shortfalls or gluts without an effective way of allocating targets and determining the most efficient ways of reaching them.
(via argumate)
it sounds like this “association of free and equal producers” includes all producers, hence an authority that rests with the “collective will of the producers themselves” and a concept of “planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitude of the market system,” which is only thinkable as a comprehensive system of allocative planning
it doesn’t really sound like “the end of the state,” though; it’s just that here “the state” has been replaced by the TUC/AFL-CIO
(via xhxhxhx)
Cyberpunk dystopia where mega-unions for the largest producers dominate the Central Council by having the largest number of employees, obtaining the most resources for themselves by controlling the planning process.
concept: feminists should encourage straight women to attempt to initiate more relationships with men instead of waiting for men to initiate.
I thought this was the case already, no?
I could be wrong, but at based on my observations there are at least ten thinkpieces recommending men should make fewer approaches for every one suggesting that women should make more.
At least based on a simple monogamous relationship model where both sides desire to find a partner, women are going to have to expect to tolerate a lot more approaches unless they’re willing to make a lot more approaches.
(Note that this model can break down if one gender is more eager to trade up than another or more interested in non-monogamous relationships or whatever).
no person is illegal, anon
no person is illegal, anon
“I don’t think there’s a young person, a woman, a Democrat, independent or a diverse voter that will stay home.” Stephanie Cutter, Democratic strategist, on the impact of a Republican decision to not nominate a supreme court justice, as quoted in the NYT.
Just one question comes to mind: how does a voter become diverse?
idk about you man but I am diverse as FUCK
American racial euphemisms are so frickin’ cringey
White people, particularly white men, know that they will never be counted as “diverse”, further increasing their incentive not to support “diversity”.
I think it went even beyond that to suggest that consent was not meaningful in those circumstances. An attack on free civil society has to begin with attacking the validity of consent in some way - suggesting that voluntary institutions aren’t really voluntary for some reason. If some central institution of a free society can be declared coercive somehow, then of course coercion is justified in fighting back against it, and it’s a short hike from there to liquidating the kulaks.
I saw an Internet comment once that joked that every line of argument made by a radical feminist ultimately ends by trying to prove that women are incapable of consenting to sex. Anti-capitalists do the same thing, but they try to prove that workers are incapable of consenting to employment. And then oftentimes the same people will demand obedience to the state claiming that every citizen has freely consented to a wholly imaginary social contract!
You’ve just got to be relentlessly dedicated to truth and critical thought when you’re dealing with stuff like this. Do those ‘ugly non-uniform incentives’ invalidate anyone’s agency? That’s absolutely central to their argument, and yet…no, they just don’t. Imagine if you were in a court of law and someone was on trial for murder and they claimed it was self-defense because the victim offered them a trade they found very difficult to turn down and thus they were being coerced. That’s the core of what the whole case turns on. Everything else they have to say is dependent on that twisted logic. They proceed past it as swiftly as they can and try to cover it with emotional appeals but that’s the cornerstone supporting their entire ideology, and it’s nonsensical.
People saying Trump’s plan to deport millions are “unprecedented”, like Operation Wetback wasn’t a thing.
“Unprecedented” does not mean extreme, or bad. If Trump announced an intention to bring back slavery, that would be pretty extreme, and pretty bad, but it’d be the exact opposite of unprecedented.
Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.
wut
A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.
…wait, what?
a twisted version of Gift of the Magi: the woman who mistakenly thinks her husband is a cuck due to a miscommunication earlier in their relationship and sadly goes along with it to please him; he doesn’t get anything out of it at all but it’s gone on so long he can’t find a way to admit the truth.
A second-order cuck who enjoys the marital infidelity of others but would never touch a woman himself, running for office only to find out that existing social changes already in motion made his plans irrelevant.
Problems in privacy engineering that seem unsolvable:
- - sending information to another party that lets them observe and interact with it, but not store it indefinitely (or only lets them store it imperfectly)*
- - sending information to another party that lets them save it and interact with it however they want, but not share it with a third party*
- - verifying that one is not currently being observed (maybe use short-range EMPs to solve this in the case of checking a room for bugs?)*
- - being able to store and retrieve information from a device in a quickly and easily human-readabe format that no one else can understand
- - being able to e.g. enter passwords without anyone observing or understanding the step between thinking of the password in your mind and the device receiving the password*
- - encryption that can be broken only with a warrant somehow
- - being able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved and used publicly, but not without the owner learned why and how you used it (this one may be very bad for people interested in reducing the power of IP laws)
Pretty sure many of these are actually theoretically impossible unless you can restrict the amount of surveillance or computational power that potential observers have access to.
The ones marked with a * are things that, as far as I can tell, intuitive social interaction and subjective feelings of security and privacy depend on. If they end up being major problems and sources of risk, I predict widespread mental health problems.
Neural interface, brah. Helps with some of them.
Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.
wut
A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.
…wait, what?
But there’s a real, and significant, segment of his supporters who voted for him because of, not in spite of, the racism, misogyny, and fascist policy.
Do you know the logic behind the US government releasing Tor to the public? It’s along the lines of the following - if the only people that use Tor are American spies, than any US agent found using onion routing software will be outed. If many people use Tor for a variety of activities, then the presence of onion routing software could mean anything from ordinary local black market dealings to just being paranoid.
The signal is hidden in the noise.
Well, congratulations, because that can also happen unintentionally as a Tragedy of the Commons with words such as “racism” and “misogyny”. People were told to be careful with overusing the terms, but haha, like that was going to happen. Besides, the people questioning the use of such terms were the Oppressors, right? They should be mocked for “freeze peach”, right?
Now the overuse of antibiotics has created a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Oops.
(2/2) There’s the Michael Moore speech, but I’m not sure what (if anything) he was advocating there. There was also Obama’s thing, but that was at a Clinton rally with Clinton supporters, not an outreach event. Can you point to some examples of Clinton supporters trying to convey understanding to Trump supporters?
I’m thinking mostly of the deluge of articles like these:
This is who votes for Donald Trump
What a liberal sociologist learned from spending five years in Trump’s America
Who are Donald Trump’s supporters and what do they want?
Understanding the undecided voters
I feel like this was much much more of a genre in the media I was consuming this election compared to any previous election. Of course, maybe all of these attempts at credible empathy were just really bad, because they failed to capture what Trump voters actually cared about or just seeded their characterization with enough “but of course Trump’s still terrible” that it couldn’t resonate with the people it was supposed to describe, but I definitely saw a lot of ‘let’s understand Trump supporters!’
A Calexit would cost the country an enormous amount of money, it’s true, and weaken Trump as well.
But if you’re worried about the most powerful country in the world being too right-wing, removing a large portion of the left-wing population from the voter base seems like the exact opposite of what you should want to do.
The State of California’s elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump’s Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump’s sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.
California’s Democratic leaders believe there are numerous federal programs receiving state funds as well, which they will seek to cut, to make up for anything Republicans siphon out of their budgets. San Francisco’s CBS affiliate reports that the federal government only spends 78 cents in California for every tax dollar sent from that state to Washington:
The state of California is studying ways to suspend financial transfers to Washington after the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal money from sanctuary cities, KPIX 5 has learned. “California could very well become an organized non-payer,” said Willie Brown, Jr, a former speaker of the state Assembly in an interview recorded Friday for KPIX 5’s Sunday morning news. “They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
Isn’t most of the transfer from CA to the federal government in the form of individual Californians having their wages garnished by the IRS? Is Sacramento just going to suggest that Californians stop paying their income taxes and promise to protect us somehow?
“They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
This sounds like a “yes” to me. The IRS can’t arrest thirty million people who have the state government on their side, so this is pretty much the exact one way a tax resistance could work effectively. If enough Californians simply stop paying their federal taxes (especially big corporations) it would quickly clog the ability of the feds to respond in any meaningful manner apart from rolling in tanks like the USSR.
DO IT
Stop California paying taxes, or rolling in the tanks? At this point I could go for either one.
Yikes
In all seriousness, isn’t this a violation of the right to assemble?
Dammit, this isn’t Singapore. One can’t just restrict protest in America like this without leading to bad things happening.
when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.
Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.
Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man. He killed people that didn’t need to be killed. He dropped people out of helicopters. He used methods of great violence. No one should imitate him.
But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.
So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.
My concern about Anarchism is that it will just replace formal power with social power, and I don’t think that’s really a step up.
Yuuuup. I started getting suspicious about how many Anarchists are people who (think they) have social power but lack formal power.
Since you mentioned this in the other thread, I thought I should round up some of my comments and thoughts on anarchism.
Whenever you have a highly controversial word, go to the root. Anarchy means “without hierarchy.” It should not be about the lack of government, but about the lack of levels of power altogether.
Some anarchists do just see it as a lack of government (or rather, the State.) I think they are blisteringly wrong. This would be particularly dumb for anyone who shares normal social justice concerns, because can’t they see right now that women and racial minorities have formal equality before the government, but massively lack social and soft power, such that they get exploited? For all the many problems with the current Left, it is at least aware of the existence of social power in most of its critiques. I can’t see why they’d simply want to do away with the cops and laws and hope… everything works out.
I guess it makes sense for the AnCaps, but they’re just really wrong and would make a Hellworld.
Lack of hierarchy would be better than that, and address the concerns in my Unfreedom essay.
However, I subscribe to anarchism as a lack of coercion, where no one is coerced to do something they don’t want to by any means (well, socially at least.) Coercion is still possible under flat, egalitarian systems after all, and so are many problems of the state, like a cruel justice system.
It’s a long way to get there, which involves everyone’s norms getting on the page of genuinely caring about the well-being of others (and not throwing a wrench in the works of every consensus because of self-interestedness or fear), but I think it’s possible and better than any of the alternatives. Coercion is just terrible, and begets terribleness.
Right now of course in social terms, anarchist is just an edgelord word for social justice liberals who found their own intentional communities and political action groups, suffused with a great deal of judgmentalism and disregard for the cultural norms of society around them. This disregard includes norms like “Christian charity” and “innocent until proven guilty” so I don’t really give two fucks about them as allies.
Simply: I don’t think this alternative is possible, and the path attempting to get there will just result in social power dominating.
I don’t think it’s actually feasible to get everyone to care about each other like that without massive violations which involve large amounts of coercion to begin with. Brainwashing techniques and probably literally mind-altering invasive procedures would be required. Social power is natural and organic, and will arise in almost any system among humans. People are born unequal before society even gets its hold on them.
Like, are you just going to cancel introverts or something? Or are you going to get rid of extroversion? Because if you don’t unify the preferences, then extroverts will have more social power even if they have equal material resources, without even attempting to do so.
There’s no logical proof that they can declaw all religions equally, or that the distribution of violence is the same at the tails of all otherwise-declawed religions, though.
Religions are declawed in a secular society naturally as long as no deliberate action (that ensues resistance) is taken. Christianity is very heavily fragmented and society in general has done a really good job declawing it. We are at a “you can’t even prove if God exists or not” level right now. That’s an absurd step down from the absolute majority of humanity’s history
What if your religion expressly forbids secular government/society?
Gets declawed and settles down. Most religions are against any government ever overriding religious laws.
What if it has standing kill orders against people who leave it? What if it starts demanding concessions like being able to have its own courts, so loudly to the point that people overestimate its presence in the country by a factor of three?
Yes. And coordinating large groups of people to make art that requires significant investment (say, movies) would become substantially more difficult.
(Which isn’t necessarily a downside, arguably movies don’t make our lives any better, especially those that require immense budgets. But still).
or maybe just take the Civilization premise seriously and make it that you’re an honest to god immortal born into the world in 4000 BC and obsessed with micromanaging your people to greatness.
I could go for this.
I wonder how feasible it would be to have a human population on a planet in the same system as a super-earth ocean planet by growing food on the super-earth, then transporting it to the inhabited planet.
Wouldn’t it always be cheaper to build algae bioreactors than pay the launch costs for the food?
IDR the specific arguments about that but an inter-stellar coalition of planets replicating imperialized relations between the home planet and the colonies does seem like it’d b very feasible
unpopular opinion: what if globalisation was fuckin’ awesome
Argumate, I didn’t realize you were on the Clinton campaign staff.
Richard Spencer got thrown out of the fucking libertarian conference. if you can’t hold a table at a libertarian convention, you’re having a bad year.
from what i’m reading he never had a table to begin with, he just kind of set one up in the lobby
he taped a poster board with his name written in marker onto a table in the lobby outside the conference. people filmed the exchange leading up to him being ejected from the hotel. at one point he said “america is a european country” and a bunch of libertarians laughed at him. an anarcho capitalist asked him if he knew what hemispheres were
imagine getting owned by an ancap of all people
it’s not slavery if it’s voluntary, and he definitely walked straight into that one :^)
What the European left/center-left needs to do yesterday is to hire the best damn PR people and spin a massive bipartisan thing about integrating immigrants better - something that’s both massively important as a long term policy and to move away from the awful no-win one-dimensional debate, “holy shit just let people in” vs. “they are scum and should keep languishing Over There”.
Jesus fuck. Integration needs INVESTMENT. You don’t just fucking dump people on the ground, give them meager welfare and expect most of them them to adapt somehow. The horrible flaw of liberalism appears to be the unwillingness to convince people that investing in migrants is both better and safer, and instead ending up with a compromise that might well blow up in their faces.
Yes, immigrant crime/etc is not statistically That Bad, but still there’s no way to win on it when your position is not having a position + vague appeals to humanitarianism. If you could outflank the Right on “oh yes, we agree, better law and order, better employment programs, strong communities”, then you’d have something to go on without actually being horribly evil.
Immigration is *not*, historically, a threat to nations - the Goths being an exception that proves the rule. And Europe is wealthy and stable and powerful. This fucking shit should be easy.
Instead, we’ll most likely get a creeping compromise with the Right: less access *and* less funding for helping migrants already here. Which is fucked up.
(p.s. I’ve seen so much concern trolling along the lines of “like it or not, this nice bleeding-heart liberal experiment is something people hate, and it’s with a heavy heart that I call for more barbed wire”. I fucking hate that. The Left needs to save open borders, and the only way to do that is to improve/reframe the whole toxic debate. Not just fucking capitulate.)
I’m sorry, but integrating immigrants is White Western Cultural Imperialism.
I mean, I’m joking, but good luck getting the Left to abandon that kind of thinking, and without abandoning that kind of thinking, good luck getting them to support integration.
The wonder of a post scarcity society is that it some people can have this without the rest of us needing to be communist catgirls. Also, aren’t most catgirls ancaps? or is that just my bubble?
the issue here is that the “prominent person” in question has no intrinsic value, thus strip-mining them for news leaves them with nothing left.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have each said a host of problematic things over the course of their lives, yet strangely they haven’t been abandoned by everyone yet.
Trump was elected because of this and actively exploited it on purpose, a move most others cannot safely execute.
Intrinsic value isn’t the actual defense against it. It’s more about a sort of social or political power.
Sometimes, a prominent person P says something ambiguous and weird on TV. It can be pre-taped, but it has to be “live” like an interview or a late night talk show. The statement is possibly problematic when taken out of context, and only a small point in support of the main thesis.
For example: “If you don’t know what the candidates stand for, maybe don’t vote” or “Women’s child rearing work is important and should be valued”or “Black men have big penises”.
The talk show host asks next question. Someone tweets this sentence in isolation.
News Cycle I
“P said racist/sexist/fascist thing”
“Other people react to thing said by P“
“What twitter users think of P’s latest gaffe“
“Former friend condemns P”
“People distancing themselves from P”
Now our protagonist clarifies that they meant what they said, but they meant it in an innocuous, literal way.
News Cycle II
“P doubles down on racist/sexist/fascist comments”
“P still not apologising”
“Right-wing weirdos agree with P“
Now P must clarify that he really didn’t mean it like that. He does not agree with the weirdos at all and regrets any offense he may have caused. He clarifies his original statement to eliminate any confusion.
News cycle III
“P offers non-apology, repeats offending statement”
“We decided not to give P a platform any more”
“Has racism/sexism/fascism re-entered the mainstream? A political scientist explains, also P is terrible“
At this point, the actual statement by P is buried three clicks deep in these news articles. P thinks the original offhand statement was blown out of proportion. He tries one more time.
News cycle IV
“P: Concerns about racism/sexism/fascism blown out of proportion“
“P goes on offensive in racism/sexism/fascism row“
Q, a friend of P, tries to give a sympathetic account of the original statement.
News cycle V
“Q: P was misunderstood“
“Q defends P’s racist/sexist/fascist outburst“
“Q’s defense of P proves old boys networks still at work“
“P’s employer has still not fired racist/sexist/fascist P“
After Q, nobody wants to stick their neck out for P now, and nobody wants to be seen talking to P. People who defend P mostly do so anonymously.
News cycle VI (mostly think pieces, not news stories)
“People need to stop defending P“
“Stop saying racism/sexism/fascism is no big deal“
“Waffling about giving racist/sexist/fascist people a platform hurts marginalized people the most“
The media realise that there is nothing more to say, and smaller outlets/latecomers try to milk the issue one last time. Nobody wants to talk to P any more, and P is wary of any journalist who contacts him.
News cycle VII (still no news stories)
“The privilege of P-supporters“
“We’ve had it with pro-P trolls in our comment section“
“Why we don’t talk to P and why people like P do not deserve a right of reply“
P tries to find somebody who wants to talk to him, somebody sympathetic. He does not want to talk to anybody who previously painted him as racist/sexist/fascist.
News cycle VIII
“P sets record straight“
“P shows true colors, talks to far-right ‘newspaper’ “
Repeat until so many people get fed up with racism accusations / fear unfounded racism accusations that a living meme gets elected President by showing he doesn’t care about racism accusations and plows through them like fresh fallen snow.
When a university student living in the Philippines uses American Black lingo like “fam,” am I supposed to criticize his cultural appropriation or celebrate his multicultural diversity?
yeahh like the fact that the author of that quote is a white man who says he was born in a rural ohio town makes it really transparent that he was speaking from a “fish dont know water” angle
“It isn’t fair to measure the salinity of the ocean by its saltiest tidal pools.”
an editor for the economist retweeted me do i have to seppuku now
I will bring the ceremonial Number Knife, so that you may carve the Grid of Shame into your body and commit sudoku honorably.
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s hugely disparate.
I… Can’t really confidently accept that. Like, I agree that just criminalizing abortion in a country accustomed to having it legal, and not doing anything else, would be spectacularly ineffective and destructive.
But we have to actually end it. I’m not willing to lie to myself.
My concern about Anarchism is that it will just replace formal power with social power, and I don’t think that’s really a step up.
First question: What does one even do about Russia secretly interfering with our politics? If people are actually involved (and apparently Flynn was) you can impeach or disqualify them. Trump has been president for a few weeks and has managed to screw up royally, so we could kick him out, but earlier on… you’re kinda out of luck unless you want to totally screw up the politics.
Second question: What is actually going on? Is Trump genuinely trying to be friends with Russia and enemies with China (stupid plan in a world that successfully avoids war!) or just Putin wants to weaken the USA with idiot leaders or what?
My gut feeling is that either that Putin blackmailing/threatening/bribing Trump, or that authoritarian leaders with a socially conservative support base flock together. Or both.
Russia + China is not an unreasonable combination. So yes, I think preventing that is part of it. China is about to enter a period of decline, but it’s still more likely to become a global hegemon than Russia.
I think there are several things going on here.
I suspect that the real answer to ‘why do we need a Metal Gear’ would be ‘because the US Army wants a larger budget and more influence on US strategy’
We can’t kill the metal gear program, the plant where they make the siding employs 1000 people in my congressional district!