Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
I don’t think this actually true. Bill Gates, 1/8th of that number, is *already* doing massive-scale philanthropy, it hasn’t yet solved the problem of human poverty because human poverty is an even more massive scale problem, and it’s not obvious to me that any authority that could tell Gates to run his philanthropy differently/confiscate his money and do it instead of him would necessarily do a better job than him.
I’m in favor of governments taxing very wealthy people and using the money to pay for things that make the lives of poor people all over the world better, but I think this specific claim about the 8 richest people in the world makes solving poverty seem like a smaller problem than it actually is.
The thing about using mass immigration to try to solve global poverty is that it can’t keep up with birth rates. Redistribution from the wealthy mostly can’t, either.
Only what is produced can be consumed. The production capacities of these migrant-generating countries must be increased, and their birthrates must fall (increasing paternal investment per child, further increasing per-capita economic productivity in addition to not spreading limited base resources as thinly).
Probably the way forward isn’t quite giving or taking but something like partially self-funding institutions that “sell” infrastructure at a discount and promote development of local businesses and foster self-improving attitudes, promoting the formation of better institutions that will help the changes to stick.
“. If you identify yourself “I am a PHP programmer“ or “I am a Windows user“, that sounds like you can’t change that! Criticism of your tool, or of the ecosystem around your tool, sounds like an attack on your personality. You are forever married, shackled even, to an editor, operating system, language, graphics editor. “ <- I really dislike this attitude. I think that programmers should view all these things as tools that can be taken up and put back down again as needed rather than being a part of your identity.
That makes sense, after all a language is just a language, and while they sometimes have new concepts and idioms to learn, IME they aren’t that challenging to switch between.
My question is whether employers will treat it that way. It’s obvious to me that a good C# programmer is only N months away from being a good Java programmer, but the job listings don’t seem to work that way.
Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.
If someone from another field successfully invades physics or math, we just call them a physicist or mathematician instead of whatever they were originally.
What about when a Poli Sci major ships software?
“Money is no object”
That’s right, as my new theory details, money is not a collection of particles, but actually a wave -
FIRST DATE IDEA: Go on about how women don’t have souls, but neglect to mention that you don’t believe in souls period.
Alternatively, women are the damned creations of a twisted heathen god.
As are men, and indeed all living things.
Born from the fire of the wicked lands, she is Woman, terrible and cruel, violent and tribal, a maelstrom of hatred and injustice.*
* Do you like Woman? Please see our related companion product, Man, the Fire that Kills™
come to think of it why don’t Australians call software developers softies
maybe all Australian software developers are totally ripped from a regular routine of surfing and fighting kangaroos to the death
i’m told this is the normal daily routine in Australia
The internet has truly led to a Golden Age of jokes that are just rewrites of actually funny jokes with three words changed so that now they’re about politics and suck ass
you know who else sucks ass? Mitch McConnell
you know how Trump gets ass? Mitch McConnell
you know who photographs Trump’s ass? Mitch McConnell
wait guys we have to stop, I can suddenly hear Gaston music and it’s getting louder
“not being white does not mean you are of color”, while a perfectly reasonable statement in the right context, suggests a categorisation scheme of:
- white (or “people who think they are white”, Ta-Nehisi Coates)
- people of color
- just folks
Whiteness/Colorness is defined by oppressiveness. Therefore, Yamato in Japan and Han in China are not People of Color.
Shitpost, or just another mileage marker on the road to Asians leaving the Democrats’ coalition in the US? Our expert DiversityTek™-certified discourse panel debates…
(edit: geez just how tired am i getting one of the countries wrong)
One Direction, corrupting an entire generation of potential logicians (via argumate)
In the future Deep VR Tumblr, Discourse is carried out entirely through Disney-like musical numbers.
So, to return to Jeb Bush:
BUSH: I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.
That’s a justification. It’s just one that turned out to be wrong.
Alrighty, we’ve established that Jeb Bush thinks Iraq was justified.
Clearly the whole thing was a massive case of motivated cognition:
Step 1: We want to invade Iraq.
Step 2: Cook up an excuse to do this.
Step 3: Convince enough people it’s not bullshit.
Step 4: Quagmire.And of course the real question for elected officials is not just Iraq: yes or no, but why Iraq at all? Why not Saudi Arabia? and so on.
But I’m just feeling slightly ancient in that this Iraq question was the defining issue of the early blogosphere, circa 2003-2005.
It split the tech community into two camps, the pro-War bloggers (also known as the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, or chickenhawks) and the anti-War bloggers (also known as the Decadent Left Fifth Column, or pro-Saddam stalinists).
It was a deeply stupid time.
Understanding the depths of the stupidity may help those who were not there avoid such stupidity themselves, when they face the next great challenge.
I’m younger than you, and I was too young to understand how strange it should have seemed to me at the time.
But I have not forgotten.
Fortunately, I already understood what a mistake it was by the time I was able to vote.
Thesis: the narrow focus on public performance over substantive action in certain activist circles has less to do with cynical schemes to game the system for progressive brownie points, and more to do with the fact that many folks basically think social activism is a form of ritual magic. Popular histories give us images of Great Men making speeches and leading marches and circulating petitions, and completely erase all the ground-level infrastructure that made all that stuff work; the end result is that a lot of folks seem honestly to believe that bringing about social change is a matter of performing the appropriate symbolic actions and waiting for reality to reconfigure itself accordingly.
Also, for any issue that society gradually comes to a new position on, the popularity needed to stage mass activism is almost the level needed to simply institute the desired policy. So, for those issues determined more by material circumstances, it’s possible that the policy would have happened without any activism whatsoever, but you’ll still see the most activism just before it’s accepted, creating the illusion that it was accepted due to activism.
Interesting thought.
In Second Life, your gender presentation isn’t just who you are, it’s a signal about your intent. It’s a bit complicated, and I can’t fully explain it.
Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.
Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.
Somewhere in some distant alternate universe, anime girls browse a blue website, posting pictures of scantily-dressed neckbeards, arguing about their inability to see with their tiny, unrealistic eyes and bizarre body proportions.
@discoursedrome: in the grim darkness of the far future, the furry vs. scaly war knows no end
That’s the spirit!
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
The main reason is that most people I’ve encountered were big boosters of transhumanism seemed to consider it a kind of cheat code for fundamental social and ecological problems – in other words, they conceptualize it as a way to get easy answers to hard problems, with the details left extremely vague. Very often they seemed to have a fantasy of technological wonders saving them from death and taxes. So, that all goes in the same bucket as other sorts of utopianism.
I’m not against the idea of using technology to solve our problems, even if it means changing ourselves in the process, but that isn’t some kind of new thing, it’s a continuation of the same process as the invention of agriculture, in the same way that GMOs are a continuation of ancient crossbreeding. Calling that “transhumanism” implies a quasi-religious millennarian outlook, which makes me extremely wary. It seems like a way to get religious salvation out of technology for a lot of people, and that is not the kind of outlook I want someone to have when tinkering with radical, dangerous civilization-scale technology.
I don’t think it actually solves race or gender, per se… I mean, kind of. It sort of explodes them instead, and new issues are created, but often dealing with the new issues will be preferable to the old ones.
What does race discourse look like when you can change your race? Or less radically, when you can copy all the non-appearance genes from whatever race you like?
What does meritocracy look like when everyone already has the basic “good” genes and massive, expensive genetic problems only exist in the time-local version of anti-vaxxers?
What does gender discourse look like when people can change their sex easily?
Et cetera.
I think it’s net beneficial to go there, but I see it as important that we are prepared, first.
(Also, notice how totally unprepared most WNs are for these changes.)
Had a thought about a future with men being forced to take some kind of drug when their partner’s found to be pregnant that stimulates bonding hormones, with a hell dump of it when the baby’s born, to mirror bonding hormones in the mother and dissuade abandonment
don’t men naturally already get something like that?
Yeah, isn’t this already the Bonding Hormones AU?
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
Some of it is consequential - there are some potential dark futures in that direction. But I think mostly, they’re at peace with their sex, their body, and with aging, so H+ seems like an alien, “arrogant,” or “immature” value system to them.
kinda independent though? like I’m at peace with not being splattered across a mountainside but I don’t get enraged at people who fly wingsuits.
Once the Transhuman Genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. The alternative of banning it prevents them from having to become the cyberpunk version of the Amish, leaving them in the mainstream.
To pick another example, letting gays get married also means living in a society in which gays can marry, in which that becomes normal, even if you don’t get gay married. And that’s a bit less irrevocable!
So if you don’t want to see what Tumblr users will become when allowed access to 2090-era robotic surgeons, implanted computers, and automated tissue engineering facilities, you have to oppose it before it starts.
You’ll also die because a cure for whatever disease you have won’t exist, or else your body will fall apart, but you already didn’t care as much about that, soooo…
By the by, @kissingerandpals, one of the reasons I’m not a pure Capitalist is that I think such things should be voluntary, even living in communities based on it.
If you are a purist Capitalist and not a Transhumanist, then I suggest abandoning Capitalist purism. In the long run, Capitalism will sell you out to Transhumanism unless it is leashed by a strong hand. Its alignments with traditionalism in some cases are less to do with its fundamental nature as technology increases, and more to do with other factors (like not needing the same structure to enforce as the economy of the USSR).
I am not a capitalist, I do not know how you came to this conclusion.
“If” wasn’t a throwaway word, I really did mean “if you are…”.
A lot of the people who are against Transhumanism are also Traditionalists and Capitalists, who have bought into the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism.
I disagree with the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism, partially because I worry about some of the dark futures it may create, so I leverage people’s hatred for/fear of cybernetics and the like in order to convince them to ditch it.
If not you (maybe you’re a Communist or a Distributist or something), then one of the other readers will be both averse to Transhumanism and a moral Capitalist.
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
Some of it is consequential - there are some potential dark futures in that direction. But I think mostly, they’re at peace with their sex, their body, and with aging, so H+ seems like an alien, “arrogant,” or “immature” value system to them.
Transhumanists are scum of the Earth and should perpetually burn in their virtual hells that they will probably invent for themselves
I’m not obligated to permanently and completely die and be erased from existence just to fulfill your ideological burden, and if we do it your way, permanent non-existence is the fate of every human being on Earth.
It’s an obviously over the top joke about transhumanist conceptions about the afterlife, but okay. I never said anything about killing you and erasing you from existence.
I think it’s kind of humorous though that you label the natural order of things “my way.“
It could be read that way, but it could also be read as being a lot more spiteful, and a lot of people reaaally hate Transhumanism. (I end up using the #shtpost tag a lot to disambiguate my posts.)
I was just being poetic with my language about afterlives, anyway, in order to push home the idea that if one is not religious, and one does not want to die after a roughly arbitrary period of time that is not determined by moral worth, it’s basically the only way forward.
As for the natural order being “your way”, well, if the alternative becomes technologically feasible, and you still support becoming weak, sick, and mad just for being alive “too long”, then it kinda is your way, then. Presumably, you don’t want these technologies to even be developed, which makes it very much your way.
By the by, @kissingerandpals, one of the reasons I’m not a pure Capitalist is that I think such things should be voluntary, even living in communities based on it.
If you are a purist Capitalist and not a Transhumanist, then I suggest abandoning Capitalist purism. In the long run, Capitalism will sell you out to Transhumanism unless it is leashed by a strong hand. Its alignments with traditionalism in some cases are less to do with its fundamental nature as technology increases, and more to do with other factors (like not needing the same structure to enforce as the economy of the USSR).
Transhumanists are scum of the Earth and should perpetually burn in their virtual hells that they will probably invent for themselves
I’m not obligated to permanently and completely die and be erased from existence just to fulfill your ideological burden, and if we do it your way, permanent non-existence is the fate of every human being on Earth.
@kissingerandpals: #what is wrong with transhumanists #hasn’t technology ruined our lives enough?
No God in Heaven, no Devil in Hell. The only paradises can be the ones we make for ourselves, and one man’s paradise is another man’s torment.
My paradise, the body I want, doesn’t come standard, so the only thing to do is build the society capable of producing it.
Come to me with real magic and I might reconsider.
Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.
Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.
It’s like the tension in MMORPG design: if everyone does the same quest it destroys the logic of the game world to some degree (the bad guy is beaten millions of times!) but if quests have to be unique for each player you can’t share the experience.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
On the other hand, each link adds a greater chance of costs external to the pilfering of the treasury like hiring a less efficient jet manufacturing company or passing needless regulation to enable rent seeking. Directly raiding the treasury would have less real world consequences besides enriching the crook..
Ah, but you see, one of the cheaper links to add…
Is just to pay your politicians more money.
People just hate politicians, so they’re unwilling to do this, but every doubling of a politician’s income is a doubling of how much money it takes to bribe them, possibly greater as money becomes relatively less important the more of it you have.
Kickbacks have to be hidden in larger projects/funds, so going from $100,000 in kickbacks to $200,000 in kickbacks could mean an increase in costs of $1,000,000, which just makes the thing even more noticeable.
I once calculated that it would cost something like $250 million USD to highly pay the US Federal legislators and President something like $500,000-$1 million each, annually.
That sounds like a lot of money, but suppose the federal government spends 25% of an $18 trillion dollar economy.
If we got a 1% improvement in federal government spending, it would provide potentially $45 billion in value, 180x that increase in cost. Does it seem feasible that we’d get 1% better spending out of congress if we paid them at that level? Not from existing congress critters, maybe, but some of those seats might start to look really tempting to more talented individuals…
Minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies are the perfect example of why testing won’t work. All of them will cause effects like migration if tested in a region that won’t apply if used universally. All of them have inflation fears that won’t be seen if tested in a small population. All of them have work disincentive effects that won’t be visible if tested in a small region. And all of them can have effects that are swamped out by economic fluctuations that are unrelated and therefore can have difficult to interpret effects.
And wait, don’t we have to test miti’s iron fist control of the central government before we test any of the rest? I think we’ve gotten trapped in an infinite recursion here, we have to test the act of experimentation before we test experiments.
To a degree, but incremental testing will have less of those effects, as would varied testing across various areas. It should be possible to extract a decent amount of information just from testing lesser versions of all of them in multiple differing areas.
After all, you have to test them in a world where migration exists, unless one of your tests is banning migration. If your policy fails so badly that you have to build a wall to keep people from leaving the country, that is very important evidence in itself. Likewise, if immigrants swarm into one of your districts to free ride.
For some items that do require national-scale implementation (aside from the rather dramatic alternative of splitting the country in two, which would have been quite interesting to see with Commies/Anarchists), the policymakers should be registering their bets before it goes into effect. (Additional considerations modifying those bets can be worked in later, it will get a little complicated, but should be possible.)
Iron fist control of the national government was presented only as a framing device.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
look man, all I’m saying is I want a semi-secret anti-corruption unit to rope in and either get cooperation from or impersonate various businesses and offshore banks so that my politicians never know whether any kickback/bribe attempt is actually an elaborate sting operation,
and make my politicians pseudonymous so that would-be kickbackers can’t be sure who they’re dealing with is the real legislator they wanted to bribe or a member of the anti-corruption task force impersonating one as part of an elaborate sting operation, or replace them with think tanks which cost more money to bribe
I’m really a very reasonable person
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalismI guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.
Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.
Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.
Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.
I like to think the first is a result of the second.
I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power. There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.
Agree. Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.
It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.
Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness. Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.
I mean, you can view the anarchist/leninist debate (which is what I was thinking of) as moral, but you can also see it argued in very technocratic terms. Anarchists argued a Leninist state would become oppressive. Leninists argued a anarchist non-state would be either impossible, or end up a state in all but name.
And the whole concept of “testing“ isn’t really possible. What works for small groups doesn’t for large groups, what applies to a part doesn’t apply to the whole. Meaningfully testing these thing is hard, hell, look at the replicability crisis in the social sciences, and those are much easier problems.
For a total revamp, sure. If you have iron fist control of the central government, though, you can do some pretty extreme tests, far more daring and dangerous than I would do, with the organization of the provincial governments, however. There are ways out of this testability mess, but they don’t really appeal to the political mind IME since political justification is often from perceived moral binding.
Imagine, for a moment, that the Central Director of the North American Union wants to test the results of various new minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies programs, and the National Technocrats have seized power and excluded all others from the legislature. She could have the legislative factions lay out multiple plans that are estimated to have a reasonable chance of success, then have the leadership of various jurisdictions rank them according to which they would like most for their district, and use that to guide district selection with a reasonable variation to choose from. A set date could then be set for evaluation before the next round, probably 3-5 years.
Even the United States in its current form provides some evidence from differing experiments, but our politicals mostly just throw it out amd go with whatever policy they already wanted.
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalismI guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.
Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.
Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.
Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.
I like to think the first is a result of the second.
I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power. There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.
Agree. Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.
It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.
Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness. Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
If I still don’t have your attention, consider this: county by county, where life expectancy is dropping survivors are voting for Trump.
very relevant
(cw: suicide, drug overdose, Trump, comparisons of things that aren’t like the AIDS crisis to the AIDS crisis.)
This is interesting, but it shies away from a lot of overt revelations.
The author had to lump together various types of death to make the comparison to the AIDS crisis work, but it kinda occludes a serious issue. There is a surprising increase in white (and Native American/Alaskan) suicide rates, but it’s not the cause of that terrifying map atop this post. A 40% increase in suicide rates makes up 6.4 deaths per 100,000 people, but at most that’d drop the red areas to a mere yellow. Suicide’s always been a rural issue, and we’ve had jumps in recessions before. By contrast, the increase in drug-related overdoses looks like this. Some of the more vulnerable populations had 30 death per 100,000 capita increases in drug and alcohol-related deaths (Case-Deaton 2016).
The other is the definition of “unnecessariat”. Scott Alexander tries to discuss this in terms of the (low) unemployment rate, but between SSDI and the nature of the term, that metric’s essential been consumed by Goodhart’s law. Labour force participation is the central focus, and it’s down significantly in these states. West Virginia notably under 50% of adults, and worse in some counties! But that’s been a long, slow decline for quite some time, and indeed if you look both the total employment count and total population hasn’t changed much since the 1990s. They’re not completely jobless – but they’re increasingly fractured between those with short-term jobs and those on the disability rolls who can’t take any above-the-table work without losing money in toto. There’s not so clear a delimination between the unnecessariat and precariat, or even the secretariat, as implied here.
This also leads to the awkward issue of mobility. Population growth for West Virginia has been incredibly low for over two decades, sometimes even dipping negative. That’s not because West Virginians have lost appetite for underprotected hetero sex, but because those who can, leave for greener pastures. You get a sort of evaporative cooling, with the remaining population too old or ill to work, with too much capital sunk into houses you couldn’t even get fire insurance on, or tied to those who do. Divorce plays a heavy role, not just because of broken relationships, but also from lawyer and court fees.
((It’s worth pointing out, here, that there’s not a single Great White Ghetto, but multiple, just as Baltimore’s problems are different from Detroit’s are different from Oakland’s. The Rust Belt’s issues have overlap with the Appalachia, and the Appalachia’s with the Plains, but they’ve significant differences that adding all the groups together obscure. Indeed, not all of the Great White Ghetto is even white! The suicide and drug epidemic has struck Native Americans first, and some enclaves through the southern Appalacians are majority-black. Not all of these matters with generalize.))
It’s also worth pointing out the sense of decay that’s universal throughout these areas, like something out of a post-apocalyptic film. That’s most obvious in Detroit, of course, where one driving up i-75 gets a scenic view of a crumbling concrete parking garage, of the sort most Coastals would normally only see when visiting other countries after cautions not to drink the water. But between the amateur eschatology on signboards and Grandpa’s Cheese Barn there’s countless barns falling apart, and an even greater number of houses with ill-patched roofs or long-past-expiration siding. Where things are brand new, it’s often because no one owns them – tractors either date back to the seventies or are controlled by a far-off computer, motels are either rusted and closed or ‘safe’ franchises. Skyscrapers in the midwest won’t even publish their capacity (never high to start with), and remain maintained as much by embarrassment as by popular support.
There’s folk who try to undo this – anyone who’s done their taxes through TurboTax has, unknowingly, contributed to an attempt to revive downtown Detroit – but it just ends up being fancy storefront with no actually homes or businesses inside. Literally: there is a class of construction made to look used without occupants.
((This decay combined with deep-but-few-roots end up with bad economic structural differences: you see alcohol, pepsi, firearms, and trucks used as mediums of exchange and stores of value pretty heavily, and then exchanged for labour or cash during hard times. The lure of the tipped employee comes, at least in part, from having their pay today rather than in a week and a half. But increasing commodity value and decreasing land value and manpower value and even utility of extra manpower makes for a weird barter-environment version of deflation.))
The political aspect is… more complex. There’s a whole lot more to the unnecessariat’s dislike of Sanders than just that he can’t win the primary – a good many of them see promises of free or low-cost as just more ineffective job training, hear ‘clean energy’ as another nail in the coal industry coffin and another business in California, and think of infrastructure investment as another highway overpass on the other side of the state. No one’s going to turn road trips into an American past-time again – the closest we’ve seen are folk that want to replace aircraft with trains – and certainly not enough to make the motel industry viable again.
That article also misses the sense of randomness, of assault under the pressure of unpredictable and maybe unpredictable outsiders. The speeding ticket is definitely part of it – you’ve not seen midwest decay til you see someone break down over a fifty dollar speeding ticket – but it’s really just the shadow. West Virginia’s coal mines didn’t lose production because they tapped out, but because of an intentional domestic coal phaseout and increasing political protest preventing even international shipment. For the midwest plains, the Bundy group started because a single wildlife determination put his business under, and even if most people don’t take it as far as he did, most know or know of someone who’s had to fight outsiders over similar stupid problems. ((And linking to the SLPC as a summary of LaVoy Fininicum is… tasteless, especially given the current investigation in FBI misbehavior.)) It doesn’t help that ‘outsider’ can be someone who married and moved into the county a decade ago, but if you want to understand the distrust, you have to examine that.
interesting, and sad.
Of course, having seen a bit of Tenchi again recently, it strikes me just how much each of the characters is SPACE [feudal fantasy type].
Mihoshi is of course a Space Constable and so on. Overall it’s still a chosen one farm boy warrior hero fantasy, but further emphasized by making the entire planet the backwater rural area.
And I can’t say I really object. It injects life into the setting and characters in a way that works for the kind of genre it is, and what is creativity but the finding new links between existing concepts?
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalismI guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
It’s certainly possible to try avoiding these bugs, or dramatically improve the current social order, or to try and build some other system entirely, but then/instead you get people like @redbloodedamerica openly celebrating fucked up shit because capitalism is good and cool and therefore bonded labor is good and cool also, hence, tankies but for capitalism.
Anarchists say they’re against it, but I’ve never seen them lay out how they would prevent it from happening except to claim they wouldn’t have a state - but Catalonia had death squads, perhaps not Stalin-tier death squads, but apparently it did have them. I think the way to socialism now, the way to actually convince people, is to stop telling people to embrace a Communist revolution and instead buy up a huge tract of land in a country with a weak central government and demonstrate a real, working, unoppressive, prosperous model.
I don’t actually think they have that model, so I don’t see myself supporting Communism over Boring Welfare Capitalism any time soon.
my dream is to be cited by Vox as “Tumblr teen argumate”
It is also my dream to be cited by Vox as “Tumblr teen argumate”
the confusingly obscure nature of the Tumblr reblog makes this a virtual certainty
> in which both @argumate and @disexplications are cited by Vox as @ranma-official, who is described as a teenager living in Atlanta, Georgia
To all y'all liberal kids that are getting icky feelings about punching Nazis and other forms of violent protest:
Voldemort was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
Darth Vader was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
Jeanine Matthews and the Eurydice faction were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
President Snow and the government of Panem were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
The Homeworld Gems were stopped from destroying Earth by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.
I mean damn. One Piece, Bleach, Ghost in the Shell, we can stretch it and say The Silmarillion, Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Animorphs, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron, I could probably name more if I had time, all this has in common is that the bad dudes with power WILL NOT GIVE THEIR POWER UP. EVER. It had to be TAKEN from them.
If y'all can understand this and relate to fictional characters, why can’t you do this to your fellow humans in real life?? Y'all are supporting the Death Eaters, the Empire, the bad guys you say you hate. Get your priorities in order. Get over that “Non-violence” bullshit.
I never saw Princess Leia shake hands with the Sith.
Where’s the picture, one of my followers has to have it.
@klubbhead @jetpack-jennyI’m on mobile dammit
The difference was all those baddies INITIATED the violence. Here, you’re the one initiating violence which makes you the baddies.
Hi yes umm the presence of a Nazi/fascist is an inherently violent act. Someone saying stuff like “I want a white enthnostate!” Or “[insert type of person] aren’t really human!” IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.
The existence of Nazis is violence
The existence of white nationalists is violenceThe antifa or any other group protesting the Nazis are a reactionary force. They would not exist if the Nazis didn’t exist, but they do so here we are.
The violence has already been initiated. These Nazis and fascists are killing people, are taking away rights, they’ve infiltrated police and government, they want people DEAD.
The violence is already here, and if you cannot/will not see that, you are complicit.
Words are not violence. Opinions are not violence. Nazis existing is not violence. The fact that you believe those qualify as violence tells me you’re either a troll or delusional and in either case having any kind of rational discussion will be a fruitless endeavor. Though I am curious what you’ll try to pass off as examples of Nazis and fascists killing people or taking away rights in the U.S. and what bullshit CNN article you’ll try to use as evidence.
Words lead to physical violence. Also, these people don’t stop at words, they stab people, they take away peoples rights, they murder and destroy lives. That’s violence. If we tolerate the existence of fascism, we allow it to grow and infect others. We are complicit in the violence to come. Also, I’m at work and on mobile, so I can’t hunt for sources right now, but give me a few hours, I’ll post some later tonight.
Jesus christ how do people think these fictional facist powers rose? With ‘charm’, guile, with WORDS. Theyre posion-tongued bastards that are trying to weasel their way into power. They know that if they start with all their views than they’ll be shunned right off the bat. So they sugarcoat it, they say its just their opinion, that theyre just exercising their right to free speech. It starts small and it depends on people like you @mister-christmas saying that theyre not doing anything wrong. Excusing their behaviour and, in the process condoning it, until its too late. Until theyve seized power and they can start to do what you qualify as violent acts. Get over yourself you milquetoast motherfucker.
WHY ARE WHITES LIKE THIS OH GOD
Don’t you have drugs to sell and police officers to bribe, neetsocks?
*white person voice* omg thats something only voldemort would say
“Ghost in the Shell” a series based around an elite police unit stopping terrorist and dealing with political/intelligence conspiracies is somehow “radical antifa story” doesn’t this go against the whole ACAB shit antifa spews out? Or let me guess you only saw the live action film.
Yes, must’ve been the live-action one, “left-wing anti-fascist radicals“ is not how I would describe a group of paramilitary counter-terrorist cyborgs that report only to the Prime Minister.
Of course, that isn’t the real problem here.
The real problem is the citing of fictional evidence by which liberal society feeds its own mythology about democracy, justice, tolerance, acceptance, and so on back to itself.
Yes, mythology, dear readers. The way Hitler is treated, the way World War 2 is treated, is not as a historical study but as the founding mythology for the post-war order. That doesn’t mean that Hitler was a good man - he wasn’t - but he’s essentially treated as a borderline supernatural adversary figure with an inverse halo effect.
As for the OP and some of the others, true White Nationalists are not anywhere close to obtaining real political power in the United States, unless you do definitional game-playing that essentially amounts to lying. However, every AntiFa dumbass out there hitting people with bike locks, pepper-spraying bitcoin hat wearers, and so on, is contributing to an increase in White Nationalism.
Normally, the White Nationalists don’t have much to offer. Normally, of course, when you don’t brand every single voter for a rival presidential candidate as “Fascist” and then say “we need to kill all Fascists” and a few people are stupid enough to take both seriously.
Need to get someone to promise to eat something ridiculous if Donald Trump get impeached. A hunk of granite maybe? Maybe some of the Swedish rotted fish thing?
can i volunteer to eat abstract concepts
