Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
Has anyone examined this specific form of conservative nostalgia that specifically focuses on crime?
Usually goes like “back in my day you didn’t need to lock your door when you left” and stuff like that. Which usually ranges from false (crime went down overall) to cartoonish (people are saying these things about 90s Russia, when the country was literally ruled by organized crime)
Many say it’s straight up racism, but it’s pervasive in relatively monoethnic countries too.
It may also be a rural/urban thing. Crime is higher in urban areas for reasons (unless you’re Singapore or something), but over time people move and also (at least in this country), most areas become more urban.
There may also be more awareness of crime (due to media), or alternatively, crime may be a lot higher in certain areas, while overall it has declined in the national average.
@atheistjapanesesocialist“ATLAS SHRUGGED,” A NOVEL THAT PREACHES THE FERENGI CONCEPT OF OBJECTIVISM AND THE EVILS OF ALTRUISM AND HANDOUTS, WAS MADE INTO A TWO-PART FILM. PART ONE WAS SUCH A FINANCIAL FAILURE THAT THE PRODUCTION TEAM TURNED TO KICKSTARTER TO ASK FANS TO DONATE THE FUNDING FOR PART TWO. THEY REFUSED TO SEE THE IRONY IN THIS.
“Have you read Atlas Shrugged in the original Ferengi?”
As we all know, under the principles of Affirmative Action, Asians, particularly East Asians, are not only white, but whiter than white people, and may in fact be the whitest race in existence.
Thus it is entirely appropriate that the Korean Overwatch character D.Va should receive a skin inspired by an American con artist.
the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence against its own citizens is a ‘common good’ with respect to the capitalist class, in the same way that roads and schools are common goods with respect to the rest of society… as neoliberalism slowly strips away the functions and capacities of the state in order to sell them for scrap, what remains untouched by the ravages of privatisation is nothing else but the coercive monopoly. when better than the present to serve as a police officer?
I suspect that the past was a better time to serve as a police officer, and it’s unlikely to get better in the future.
It has already begun with Libertarian/Capitalist plans to “make the perpetrators of crime responsible for paying its costs” as city budgets have declined, resulting in police forces bringing back debtors’ prisons and getting a significant part of their revenue from fines, which is partly responsible for terrible racialized police relations in many US communities (even though many US police forces are multiracial).
Because, y'know, having a justice system that actually works isn’t a public good, right? People are ‘totes atomic yo.
The Left could maybe have put a stop to this… but the problem is that since they have embraced Globalism, you can’t have a sturdy social safety net and mass immigration, because it incentivizes people to migrate to go on your welfare system. It also gives you a disadvantage in the global marketplace over countries that are willing to be crueler for money. The natural tendency of Globalism is towards atomized global capitalism in which the wages of all across the world will be equalized and social protections will not exist.
You could do some things to fix this - in one nation, where the benefit of the people of the nation was considered valuable rather than oppressive.
Man: *says something a little misogynistic*
Feminist Man: yeah well you wouldn’t be saying that if you just got some pussy, you fucking faggot-
I can’t tell if this is a pro-feminist post or an anti-feminist post.
it is exactly what it appears to be: pointing out that people repeat messages that claim to be feminist, but which reinforce the traditional patriarchal world-view, and indeed only make sense at all in terms of that world-view.
whether you interpret that as a a criticism of feminist ideology, or a criticism of people who claim to be feminist but aren’t really, or a criticism of the way that every ideology that gains any status at all is quickly subverted and repackaged as a harmless commodity, is entirely up to you.
I just think it’s annoying for people to go around saying the opposite of what they claim to mean, because I am a huge dork.
Uber is only a pyramid scheme if early investors are smart enough to cash out.
yesterday I was thinking about how our only solutions for low-level pain relief are basically paracetamol and ibuprofen, which haven’t changed for over 50 years; so much for tech progress.
then I heard a breathless advertisement for a revolution in pain relief! …it was a tablet that combines paracetamol and ibuprofen.
at this point it seems likely that the biggest advance in pain management in the 21st century will be legalizing weed.
Nah, there’s some combination of chemicals in the research pipeline that eliminates physical pain entirely. Of course, then you get the same problems as those guys who are congenitally unable to feel pain, but that’s probably a step up for many of the chronic pain cases.
Pope Francis is meeting with Trump.
Hopefully he is the man who can break his pride. Perhaps it is for this that he was born, that he became a hierarch.
Doubtful, but at least we’ll probably get some good memes
“The ratings!” Trump declared, “the ratings are incredible!”
5% probability it’s the goal of the entire Meme-American Presidency.
Native born
Ludicrous! Ridiculous! Outrageous! Preposterous! Blasphemous! Villainous!
Embrace it, Slart. Embrace what you have become.
We are villains, now. Supervillains. The debt will never be repaid.
(There is the small matter, of course, that we will need to get you a new uniform. Maybe with a cape.)
Is this about MRAs?
Anon-kun, honey, I am not an MRA. I am an MRA sympathizer and Feminism sympathizer.
And as for the MRAs, of course they will come off as jerks - their ability to get any resources has been made dependent on showing that men have it as bad/worse than women, because they are constantly shut down for “WELL WOMEN HAVE IT WORSE” which implicitly ends with a very sexist “therefore your problems don’t matter and no resources should be devoted to addressing them.” (And resources have been denied IRL from attempts to address those problems.)
Look, you can either have a movement which actually attempts to resolve all gender issues for real and does not dismiss them because they are coming from “oppressors,” accurately realizing just how bound up together the knot of gender is, or you can have a movement which focuses exclusively on the issues of women. You can’t have both. You tried to have both, and that’s what got you MRAs.
I would also like to suggest cutting back on some of the demonization. For instance, there was an “MRAs Hate Mad Max: Fury Road!” article circulating about. I went looking in places where I previously saw MRAs gather, and they were all baffled by it, because none of them hated Fury Road.
The group that would have disliked it are the r/theredpill types (warning: r/theredpill has lots of actual misogyny, I cannot stand to read it), who are not the same group, but which there is a propaganda advantage to conflating with MRAs, who threaten feminism’s monopoly on the non-trad gender discourse.
A majority of MRAs could still be demobilized if Feminism were BETTER. That won’t happen, because Feminism not being better is how MRAs came to exist in the first place, and the forces that caused that haven’t been corrected, so in fact we’re just going to see more MRAs created.
Yes, that’s right, Anon-dear. More MRAs.
As for GamerGate - have you ever heard of something called the GNAA? Professional troll groups were trollin’ like there was no tomorrow, and GGers were also receiving death threats, questionable mail, etc. The whole thing didn’t really explode until all the “LOL GAMERS ARE DEAD” articles came out.
Might I suggest not engaging in an attempted cultural takeover that involves kicking the original demographic out of their own subculture, which is exactly what those articles were. Everyone knows that if the target weren’t predominantly white, low-status males that wouldn’t have flown.
The transition of GGers to further right-wing has been interpreted as evidence that they were vile oppressors all along, but actually the causality is the other way around. An opening was created for them to become disillusioned and more right-wing by the situation, the callouts, what many felt was a misrepresentation of themselves in the MSM, and so on.
There are two other groups this anon could be about.
Nationalists - Who, like the bean counters that keep corporations afloat, will always be perceived as villains by some because they are the ones on whom responsibility for buzzkilling various liberal projects falls.
Rationalists - I don’t really qualify as one, though I probably qualify as -adjacent.
I am not sure how to respond to this
Honestly, I mostly agree with you that this is the explanation. There’s kind of a pattern where liberal thinkpiece writers will either try to explain the Trump phenomenon in terms of one or a few components of these things, or else think of it as a result of a bunch of independent factors that add up to produce it. In reality, Trump voters seem to believe in the entire narrative, and it seems like a mistake to address it as though it’s merely the sum of its parts. “Illegal immigrants come to America, take our jobs, dilute our culture, bring crime and drugs, spur social atomization, and collude with the left to keep us down, all while shipping what few jobs are left overseas and imposing stupid and/or malicious regulations on us to benefit the bureaucrats over the little guy” is an entire worldview that, despite how silly it might seem to us liberals (except for maybe the part about cronyism), a large fraction of the country Actually Believes. Economics lesson about the Iowa Car Crop don’t seem to be helping much, and I’m not sure how much we can get Trump voters to trust us when we tell them that the narrative is faulty when there’s a genuine value difference in how much we care about preserving Red Tribe culture and helping the ingroup versus trying to help everyone by being globalist/universalist.
not to keep banging this drum, but most dentist visits are unpleasant for the patient in two ways: physical and psychological, so if regular visits are important for health it would be helpful to find some form of positive reinforcement.
After the visit, we could give patients cand- oh.
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