Oceans Yet to Burn

argumate:

the-grey-tribe:

And they say the EU is good for nothing! Multinational corporations sell different versions of their products in different countries, but enough is enough!

Fico threatened to boycott brands over different (lesser quality) of products in V4 countries: German biscuits made for sale in Poland have less butter. Italian Nutella is more chocolatey in Austria than in Hungary.

I kind of get why companies do this, and why people feel cheated (remember the outcry over con syrup vs cane sugar Coca Cola), but mandating companies sell the exact identical version of food products sounds over the top.

I don’t know how you would label this properly. It kind of undermines the brand of Nutella if it means different things in different places. Nutella(5)? New Nutella?

yeah just give ‘em a different name, surely

Nutella
Nutella (1)
Nutella (2)
Copy of Nutella (2)
Nutella 2008
Copy of New Nutella (3)

the-grey-tribe:

the-grey-tribe:

argumate:

infoskank:

periodic reminder that the word “emoji” is a borrowing of a native japanese word, not a reborrowing of an english word! “emoji” comes from 絵文字、a compound of「絵」(え e, “image, picture”) and 文字 (モジ moji, “word”), and is completely unrelated to the English word “emoticon.”

you could say that’s a folk etymoloji

Emoji would not have caught on in the west as a word if it hadn’t had that similarity though

Emojicon

If you are reading this message, you have been exiled to Tasmania.

Duration: Until the end of Tumblr, or six years, whichever comes first.
Reason for Exile: “Emojicon”
Appeals: Standard appeal only.

You have a right to documentation.  You may have other rights which are not listed in this document…

kontextmaschine:

trashgender-neurotica:

like I’m supposed to respect genuine human connection from someone who couldn’t face me in a fair fight

This is why all men date only wrestlers and MMA fighters, a practice I approve of in my quest to create the ultimate Brazilian Jiu Jitsu martial artist.

rendakuenthusiast:

swampkhan:

Everyone’s all “actually, stereotype accuracy!” but half the black people in my college went to the anime club meetings at least once, so.

And, like, back before I went to college I was the token white guy and also the one guy who wasn’t really into DBZ and Naruto and so on.

Puts an interesting spin on SWPL politics – maybe it’s less “white people shouldn’t be allowed to have spaces” and more “I feel guilty about being a SWPL but everything that’s popular among non-SWPLs is ~uncool~, so what we need to do is take the people who are visibly not SWPLs and somehow get them to like SWPL stuff”.

There are way way way too many Asian people who like anime for it to be a SWPL thing.

Globally, or where you live?

truffledmadness:

mitigatedchaos:

Unfortunately, the practice has a longer history in the area of Pakistan, so even if we accept your argument that it was entirely classist (which I don’t, given that I’ve read some people who tried to report it got sent for sensitivity training), being more selective about immigration still comes out ahead on the matter.

So if your police force is too “lol class” to handle the situation, and it won’t be realistically fixed soon, then you need to plan for that when setting your other policies.

And why wouldn’t the lower classes face the brunt of the cost of blind multiculturalism?  If they were the high-charisma types that are in danger from going to concerts, it would be harder to sweep under the rug.

And as you might imagine, I don’t want this sort of thing to come to America, which means putting a stop to it before, rather than after, it starts.  Because the same “it will never happen” arguments are made by the same ideological groups.

So we should just allow the class stuff to slide? So that then, by golly, at least these children will be abused by grown men of their own skin tone?

And AGAIN, you seem, despite your interest in cultural preservation, willfully determined to ignore the vast cultural differences between the United States and Britain. I’ve lived in both countries and the cultural differences, especially once you leave London, are stark.

Let alone the bizarre idea that poor people are suffering from a lack of charisma.

> Specific foreign group commits specific crime at higher rate than general population, reflecting similar crimes in country of origin
> Getting police force to overcome classism a perennial problem which is difficult to fix, unlikely to be fixed soon
> Exactly what one would expect to happen ensues

So here I am suggesting a course of action that results in less of those crimes, and your accusation is that I don’t care about the number of those crimes.

And as for the charisma, obviously if they can’t make their case well enough on the news media to get the politicians to fix their problem (or rather, get the news media to even cover their case at all), then in that sense, they lack charisma.  That isn’t really their fault.  News media is like that.  But it has to be taken into consideration.

Do tigers have charisma?  Maybe not as we humans understand it.  But they’re called “charismatic megafauna” because animals like tigers are the ones that draw in the donations and political capital to engage in conservation projects that include animals people don’t care as much about.

So you’re reading “poor people aren’t suave enough” when actually it’s more like “people don’t like poor people enough”.

So people are willing to talk about the Ariana Grande concert bombing.  And that bridge vehicle ramming in London.  But increases in other crimes will occur mostly where they aren’t priced out… which means among the poor, who will take the brunt of badly-handled multiculturalism.  And thus the poor suffering the most from it isn’t any sort of disproof that culture had something to do with it.

Unfortunately, the practice has a longer history in the area of Pakistan, so even if we accept your argument that it was entirely classist (which I don’t, given that I’ve read some people who tried to report it got sent for sensitivity training), being more selective about immigration still comes out ahead on the matter.

So if your police force is too “lol class” to handle the situation, and it won’t be realistically fixed soon, then you need to plan for that when setting your other policies.

And why wouldn’t the lower classes face the brunt of the cost of blind multiculturalism?  If they were the high-charisma types that are in danger from going to concerts, it would be harder to sweep under the rug.

And as you might imagine, I don’t want this sort of thing to come to America, which means putting a stop to it before, rather than after, it starts.  Because the same “it will never happen” arguments are made by the same ideological groups.

truffledmadness:

transgirlkyloren:

drethelin:

mitigatedchaos:

mitigatedchaos:

Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories.  This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.

Those who control the culture control the laws, after all.  Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.

Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.

If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.

Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.

The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.

You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.

“Let’s imagine an idyllic socialist utopia with a population of 100,000. In Utopia, everyone eats healthy organic food, respects the environment and one another, lives in harmony with people of other races, and is completely non-violent. One day, the Prime Minister decides to open up immigration to Americans and discourage them from assimilating. 50,000 Americans come in and move into a part of Utopia that quickly becomes known as Americatown. They bring their guns, their McDonalds, their megachurches, and their racism. Soon, some Utopians find their family members dying in the crossfire between American street gangs. The megachurches convert a large portion of the Utopians to evangelical Christianity, and it becomes very difficult to get abortions without being harassed and belittled. Black and homosexual Utopians find themselves the target of American hatred, and worse, some young Utopians begin to get affected by American ideas and treat them the same way. American litter fills the previously pristine streets, and Americans find some loopholes in the water quality laws and start dumping industrial waste into the rivers. By the time society has settled down, we have a society which is maybe partway between Utopia and America. The Americans are probably influenced by Utopian ideas and not quite as bad as their cousins who reminded behind in the States, but the Utopians are no longer as idyllic as their Utopian forefathers, and have inherited some of America’s problems. Would it be racist for a Utopian to say “Man, I wish we had never let the Americans in?” Would it be hateful to suggest that the borders be closed before even more Americans can enter? If you are a culturalist, no. Utopian culture is better, at least by Utopian standards, than American culture. Although other cultures can often contribute to enrich your own, there is no law of nature saying that only the good parts of other cultures will transfer over and that no other culture can be worse than yours in any way. The Americans were clearly worse than the Utopians, and it was dumb of the Utopians to let so many Americans in without any safeguards. Likewise, there are countries that are worse than America. Tribal Afghanistan seems like a pretty good example. Pretty much everything about tribal Afghanistan is horrible. Their culture treats women as property, enforces sharia law, and contains honor killings as a fact of life. They tend to kill apostate Muslims and non-Muslims a lot. Not all members of Afghan tribes endorse these things, but the average Afghan tribesperson is much more likely to endorse them than the average American. If we import a bunch of Afghan tribesmen, their culture is likely to make America a worse place in the same way that American culture makes Utopia a worse place. But it’s actually much worse than this. We are a democracy. Anyone who moves here and gains citizenship eventually gets the right to vote. People with values different from ours vote for people and laws different from those we would vote for. Progressives have traditionally viewed any opposition to this as anti-immigrant and racist – and, by total coincidence, most other countries, and therefore most immigrants, are progressive. Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US. Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians. But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election. Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now. (a real Reactionary would hasten to add this is more proof that progressives control everything. Because immigration favors progressivism, any opposition to it is racist, but the second we discover the hyperborder with Conservia, the establishment will figure out some reason why allowing immigration is racist. Maybe they can call it “inverse colonialism” or something.) None of this is an argument against immigration. It’s an argument against immigration by groups with bad Luck and with noticeably different values than the average American. Let any Japanese person who wants move over. Same with the Russians, and the Jews, and the Indians. Heck, it’s not even like it’s saying no Afghans – if they swear on a stack of Korans that they’re going to try to learn English and not do any honor killings, they could qualify as well. The United States used to have a policy sort of like this. It was called the Immigration Act of 1924. Its actual specifics were dumb, because it banned for example Asians and Jews, but the principle behind it – groups with good outcomes and who are a good match for our values can immigrate as much as they want, everyone else has a slightly harder time – seems broadly wise. So of course progressives attacked it as racist and Worse Than Hitler and it got repealed in favor of the current policy: everyone has a really hard time immigrating but if anyone sneaks over the border under cover of darkness we grant them citizenship anyway because not doing that would be mean. Once again, coming up with a fair and rational immigration policy wouldn’t require some incredibly interventionist act of state control. It would just require that we notice the hole we’ve been deliberately sticking ourselves in and stop digging.”

I find it sort of weird that this post assumes that diversity-loving people have never lived in the South and in fact find Southerners unspeakably alien and repulsive

like to me this is like “imagine if a town were full of people like your mom’s family and your ex-girlfriend???? THE HORROR”

A.) Russians? RUSSIANS? You’re looking for an example of immigrants who share American values and assimilate easily and you choose RUSSIANS? I….I can’t even. 

B.) Black Americans as a whole are…..not quite immigrants. Immigration implies a certain voluntary quality on the part of the demographic. Black Americans are largely the descendants of a population who came here DECIDEDLY against their will. They’ve also been here as long as white Americans, so.

C.) I used to live in a part of the country with a very large, very old Muslim population. They assimilated. Earlier, Chinese Americans assimilated. Before that, the German immigrants who scared Ben Franklin half to death assimilated. America is FANTASTIC at assimilating immigrants, and it’s something Europeans envy about us–I’ve had Scandinavians tell me they WISH their countries were so good at integrating immigrants. Your anxieties may sound plausible enough at certain phases of the moon, but in historical context, they’re hogwash.

You can have a certain rate of immigration depending on the rate of assimilation.

However, you can’t be stupid about it and pretend all cultures are equal for ideological reasons, then try to keep it covered up when it turns out they aren’t.

You can only have that immigration without major side effects if you’re willing to pay the ideological price required to accomplish it.  These days, the current consensus is not.

notebookundermydesk:

mitigatedchaos:

Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories.  This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.

Those who control the culture control the laws, after all.  Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.

Well, part of the issue is that from what I’ve seen people aren’t talking about this in terms of ‘being an ethnic majority is a thing I get benefit out of I want to have that benefit’, where this would involve then looking at how to deal with this, balance various people’s benefits, etc, given various other factors that also exist (other people also get benefit out of being ethnic majorities! The rights of and provisions for ethnic minorities! Other reasons people have to want or need to be in a territory!). They tend to a) take if as given and not even explicitly brought up that they get to get what they want, and b) not really acknowledge the needs and wants of other people involved, tradeoffs, etc. Also c) do stuff like call various ethnic minorities intrinsically evil and all that.

Also in my experience ‘Trump voters’ correlates very highly with ‘people who have not just been unhelpful but in fact often horrible to ethnic minorities in territories they’ve been ethnic majorities in’. 

Also as other people pointed out, plenty of people *exist* as ethnic minorities in their territories, this isn’t like a weird mysterious off-screen horror.

Most people are not fully consciously aware of this.  

They know, for example, that in other countries, there are polygamy and child marriage.  They often don’t think through that the imbalance caused by polygamy really being polygyny in practice is likely what leads to the child marriage (which is also present in polygamy-practicing communities in the developed countries) because of male desperation (not good).  

They know they don’t want that sort of thing mucking up their way of life, but like most normie instincts it isn’t totally wrong but it isn’t totally right, either.

If you get a country that really starts thinking all of this through, what you’re looking at is probably not Happy Liberal Land, but the Principality of Singapore.

By the way, speaking of reasons to be in a territory, culture is not independent of the territory’s economic production, nor just an output.  It’s also a key input.

fermatas-theorem:

transgirlkyloren:

drethelin:

mitigatedchaos:

mitigatedchaos:

Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories.  This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.

Those who control the culture control the laws, after all.  Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.

Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.

If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.

Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.

The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.

You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.

“Let’s imagine an idyllic socialist utopia with a population of 100,000. In Utopia, everyone eats healthy organic food, respects the environment and one another, lives in harmony with people of other races, and is completely non-violent. One day, the Prime Minister decides to open up immigration to Americans and discourage them from assimilating. 50,000 Americans come in and move into a part of Utopia that quickly becomes known as Americatown. They bring their guns, their McDonalds, their megachurches, and their racism. Soon, some Utopians find their family members dying in the crossfire between American street gangs. The megachurches convert a large portion of the Utopians to evangelical Christianity, and it becomes very difficult to get abortions without being harassed and belittled. Black and homosexual Utopians find themselves the target of American hatred, and worse, some young Utopians begin to get affected by American ideas and treat them the same way. American litter fills the previously pristine streets, and Americans find some loopholes in the water quality laws and start dumping industrial waste into the rivers. By the time society has settled down, we have a society which is maybe partway between Utopia and America. The Americans are probably influenced by Utopian ideas and not quite as bad as their cousins who reminded behind in the States, but the Utopians are no longer as idyllic as their Utopian forefathers, and have inherited some of America’s problems. Would it be racist for a Utopian to say “Man, I wish we had never let the Americans in?” Would it be hateful to suggest that the borders be closed before even more Americans can enter? If you are a culturalist, no. Utopian culture is better, at least by Utopian standards, than American culture. Although other cultures can often contribute to enrich your own, there is no law of nature saying that only the good parts of other cultures will transfer over and that no other culture can be worse than yours in any way. The Americans were clearly worse than the Utopians, and it was dumb of the Utopians to let so many Americans in without any safeguards. Likewise, there are countries that are worse than America. Tribal Afghanistan seems like a pretty good example. Pretty much everything about tribal Afghanistan is horrible. Their culture treats women as property, enforces sharia law, and contains honor killings as a fact of life. They tend to kill apostate Muslims and non-Muslims a lot. Not all members of Afghan tribes endorse these things, but the average Afghan tribesperson is much more likely to endorse them than the average American. If we import a bunch of Afghan tribesmen, their culture is likely to make America a worse place in the same way that American culture makes Utopia a worse place. But it’s actually much worse than this. We are a democracy. Anyone who moves here and gains citizenship eventually gets the right to vote. People with values different from ours vote for people and laws different from those we would vote for. Progressives have traditionally viewed any opposition to this as anti-immigrant and racist – and, by total coincidence, most other countries, and therefore most immigrants, are progressive. Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US. Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians. But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election. Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now. (a real Reactionary would hasten to add this is more proof that progressives control everything. Because immigration favors progressivism, any opposition to it is racist, but the second we discover the hyperborder with Conservia, the establishment will figure out some reason why allowing immigration is racist. Maybe they can call it “inverse colonialism” or something.) None of this is an argument against immigration. It’s an argument against immigration by groups with bad Luck and with noticeably different values than the average American. Let any Japanese person who wants move over. Same with the Russians, and the Jews, and the Indians. Heck, it’s not even like it’s saying no Afghans – if they swear on a stack of Korans that they’re going to try to learn English and not do any honor killings, they could qualify as well. The United States used to have a policy sort of like this. It was called the Immigration Act of 1924. Its actual specifics were dumb, because it banned for example Asians and Jews, but the principle behind it – groups with good outcomes and who are a good match for our values can immigrate as much as they want, everyone else has a slightly harder time – seems broadly wise. So of course progressives attacked it as racist and Worse Than Hitler and it got repealed in favor of the current policy: everyone has a really hard time immigrating but if anyone sneaks over the border under cover of darkness we grant them citizenship anyway because not doing that would be mean. Once again, coming up with a fair and rational immigration policy wouldn’t require some incredibly interventionist act of state control. It would just require that we notice the hole we’ve been deliberately sticking ourselves in and stop digging.”

I find it sort of weird that this post assumes that diversity-loving people have never lived in the South and in fact find Southerners unspeakably alien and repulsive

like to me this is like “imagine if a town were full of people like your mom’s family and your ex-girlfriend???? THE HORROR”

Yeah, this already exists inside the US and I grew up there. It’s 45 minutes west of here.  I responded by moving away, and I continue to endorse that as the correct action.

if they took over the entire country, I would move to Canada.

#I understand that not everyone can move around to avoid this kind of problem#the solution to that is also ‘make it easier for everyone to move around’

That doesn’t work if some cultures and ideologies are more viral than others.  In case you didn’t notice, Britain recently had a white man stage a van attack on unarmed Muslims leaving a mosque.  Oppressive white supremacy?

Well, it happened in an environment of Muslims frequently conducting van and knife attacks on non-Muslims throughout Europe.  It wasn’t just some isolated incident, it was an underdeveloped-country-style ethnic revenge killing.  

Justified?  No.  But “make it easier for everyone to move around” set the stage for it to happen.  All that moving is completely worthless if the problems can just follow you to whereever you and your economically productive capability go.  

transgirlkyloren:

drethelin:

mitigatedchaos:

mitigatedchaos:

Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories.  This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.

Those who control the culture control the laws, after all.  Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.

Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.

If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.

Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.

The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.

You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.

“Let’s imagine an idyllic socialist utopia with a population of 100,000. In Utopia, everyone eats healthy organic food, respects the environment and one another, lives in harmony with people of other races, and is completely non-violent. One day, the Prime Minister decides to open up immigration to Americans and discourage them from assimilating. 50,000 Americans come in and move into a part of Utopia that quickly becomes known as Americatown. They bring their guns, their McDonalds, their megachurches, and their racism. Soon, some Utopians find their family members dying in the crossfire between American street gangs. The megachurches convert a large portion of the Utopians to evangelical Christianity, and it becomes very difficult to get abortions without being harassed and belittled. Black and homosexual Utopians find themselves the target of American hatred, and worse, some young Utopians begin to get affected by American ideas and treat them the same way. American litter fills the previously pristine streets, and Americans find some loopholes in the water quality laws and start dumping industrial waste into the rivers. By the time society has settled down, we have a society which is maybe partway between Utopia and America. The Americans are probably influenced by Utopian ideas and not quite as bad as their cousins who reminded behind in the States, but the Utopians are no longer as idyllic as their Utopian forefathers, and have inherited some of America’s problems. Would it be racist for a Utopian to say “Man, I wish we had never let the Americans in?” Would it be hateful to suggest that the borders be closed before even more Americans can enter? If you are a culturalist, no. Utopian culture is better, at least by Utopian standards, than American culture. Although other cultures can often contribute to enrich your own, there is no law of nature saying that only the good parts of other cultures will transfer over and that no other culture can be worse than yours in any way. The Americans were clearly worse than the Utopians, and it was dumb of the Utopians to let so many Americans in without any safeguards. Likewise, there are countries that are worse than America. Tribal Afghanistan seems like a pretty good example. Pretty much everything about tribal Afghanistan is horrible. Their culture treats women as property, enforces sharia law, and contains honor killings as a fact of life. They tend to kill apostate Muslims and non-Muslims a lot. Not all members of Afghan tribes endorse these things, but the average Afghan tribesperson is much more likely to endorse them than the average American. If we import a bunch of Afghan tribesmen, their culture is likely to make America a worse place in the same way that American culture makes Utopia a worse place. But it’s actually much worse than this. We are a democracy. Anyone who moves here and gains citizenship eventually gets the right to vote. People with values different from ours vote for people and laws different from those we would vote for. Progressives have traditionally viewed any opposition to this as anti-immigrant and racist – and, by total coincidence, most other countries, and therefore most immigrants, are progressive. Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US. Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians. But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election. Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now. (a real Reactionary would hasten to add this is more proof that progressives control everything. Because immigration favors progressivism, any opposition to it is racist, but the second we discover the hyperborder with Conservia, the establishment will figure out some reason why allowing immigration is racist. Maybe they can call it “inverse colonialism” or something.) None of this is an argument against immigration. It’s an argument against immigration by groups with bad Luck and with noticeably different values than the average American. Let any Japanese person who wants move over. Same with the Russians, and the Jews, and the Indians. Heck, it’s not even like it’s saying no Afghans – if they swear on a stack of Korans that they’re going to try to learn English and not do any honor killings, they could qualify as well. The United States used to have a policy sort of like this. It was called the Immigration Act of 1924. Its actual specifics were dumb, because it banned for example Asians and Jews, but the principle behind it – groups with good outcomes and who are a good match for our values can immigrate as much as they want, everyone else has a slightly harder time – seems broadly wise. So of course progressives attacked it as racist and Worse Than Hitler and it got repealed in favor of the current policy: everyone has a really hard time immigrating but if anyone sneaks over the border under cover of darkness we grant them citizenship anyway because not doing that would be mean. Once again, coming up with a fair and rational immigration policy wouldn’t require some incredibly interventionist act of state control. It would just require that we notice the hole we’ve been deliberately sticking ourselves in and stop digging.”

I find it sort of weird that this post assumes that diversity-loving people have never lived in the South and in fact find Southerners unspeakably alien and repulsive

like to me this is like “imagine if a town were full of people like your mom’s family and your ex-girlfriend???? THE HORROR”

It was necessary to pick an outgroup that wouldn’t immediately be used to signal for Woke Points within moments after the reader started reading it.  You’re acting like I haven’t read how “diversity-loving people” responded in the wake of the election and in general.

• Marrying your cousin - mockworthy when rednecks do it, cultural diversity that must be respected when other groups do it.
• High religiosity - oppressive when rednecks do it, cultural diversity when other groups do it.
• Accent - mockworthy when rednecks do it, cultural diversity when other groups do it.
• Elevated crime rates - terrible and a sign of white supremacy when rednecks do it, the results of discrimination and poverty for other groups.
• Class - fair game to pick on for rednecks, not for other groups.
• Ethnic violence & terrorist attacks - oppressive white supremacy when rednecks do it, “part and parcel of living in a big city” when other groups do it.

So if, in general, “diversity-loving people” act like they find rednecks repulsive and unspeakably alien, but give a pass on the same behaviors by other groups, then it makes sense to use rednecks as the example, even if not literally all “diversity-loving people” are #woke enough to post about how they hate everyone who has ever owned something with a Confederate flag on it.

We just recently had a round of Discourse on rattumb (or at least Ranma did) on the ideology behind those Robert E. Lee statues.

I mean, what am I supposed to do, pick a foreign immigrant group that practices sex trafficking at a much higher rate?  “Diversity-loving people” already swept exactly that under the rug on purpose.

slartibartfastibast:

everything-narrative:

slartibartfastibast:

ranma-official:

slartibartfastibast:

ranma-official:

wirehead-wannabe:

There’s a well-documented attitude where humans will twist themselves into mental knots trying to come up with reasons why death or work are actually good. The thing is, even the anti-deathists (looking at you, Big Yud) will turn around and do the exact same thing about suffering, telling themselves that OF COURSE humans need suffering to be happy (just like *~death gives meaning to life~*, right?).

We COULD be working on destroying the hedonic treadmill, or making a version of MDMA without tolerance or negative side effects, or figuring out how to make wireheading work without interfering with our ability to earn a living, but instead we’ve decided to make all of that illegal.

I still haven’t seen Inside Out yet, but I get the sense that I would hate it, since really Sadness needs to be taken out behind the toolshed and put out of her misery, and out of the misery of her host.

Do you think pain is bad?

Not always, no. Define pain.

Also: http://slartibartfastibast.tumblr.com/post/113187242214/the-study-explained-such-psychological-phenomena

The sensation of physical pain. I asked wirehead actually but that was a rhetorical question so I will answer.

Pain is the body signalling “something is wrong!”. It’s of course very unpleasant, and thus technically “bad”. On top of that, the human body doesn’t deal with it all that well: it keeps telling us something is wrong when we are already aware, misreports the damage, etc.

There are people who don’t feel pain. They don’t live long.

Even every human having the ability to flip the switch to say “hey, I’m aware something is wrong, got it, bye” might have catastrophic consequences when the social expectation for manual laborers becomes “ignore the pain forever”.

Sadness is most likely exactly like that, and intentionally experiencing sadness is much more of a universal human experience.

Yep.

I think abolishing suffering kind of includes “abolish need for manual labor” as a sub-point… Just a slight hunch.

#FullyAutomatedLuxuryCommunism

#MouseUtopiaHereWeCome

Okay, but major depression and chronic pain are probably both pretty worthless, as compared to, say, the feelings of loneliness and dejectedness one might have in an exotic relationship type one has entered for ideological reasons, or the fatigue one gets to signal it’s time to stop exercising.

Also we should unbundle chest pain so it’s easier to diagnose heart attack vs just other issues.  (Or slap a monitor on it.  You get the idea.)

mitigatedchaos:

nuclearspaceheater:

mitigatedchaos:

nocherrybombs:

Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.

Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.

I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.

Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?

You could do it in far fewer generations, but you’d have to install a 20-year military governorship, still ban cousin marriages out to the third degree, enforce village exogamy, and seize total control of the educational system to wipe out non-trivial parts of the culture and replace them with ideology necessary to support Liberal Democracy.

That’s a pretty big ideological price, and it would require a long troop presence to enforce.

It’s hardly impossible.  Afghanistan was liberalizing at one point.  But if you’re too hooked on the ideology that democracy flowers in all soils, it isn’t possible for you to carry it out.

slartibartfastibast:

mitigatedchaos:

slartibartfastibast:

sacculetta:

slartibartfastibast:

the-grey-tribe:

everything-narrative:

bogleech:

The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”

So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?

Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.

Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.

Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.

How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?

What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.

No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.

Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch

Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet

Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes

Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew! 

Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.

This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.

You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.

This is why I believe more roles should go not just to asian female bodybuilders, but to tall female MMA fighters of all races.

You know how much state effort it took to make Yao Ming?

You know how much effort it takes to make a single Dinka herdsman?

Also, the former wears out after a few seasons. We’re talking about phenotypic bell curves that essentially do not overlap.

I’m like 70% joking.  I realize the upper body strength difference is almost bimodal, even at the athlete level.

But I’m like 30% not joking, because if you want to close the gap in visual plausibility of beating up a man, this looks like a lot more force is going to rain down than this.

slartibartfastibast:

sacculetta:

slartibartfastibast:

the-grey-tribe:

everything-narrative:

bogleech:

The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”

So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?

Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.

Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.

Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.

How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?

What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.

No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.

Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch

Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet

Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes

Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew! 

Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.

This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.

You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.

This is why I believe more roles should go not just to asian female bodybuilders, but to tall female MMA fighters of all races.

slartibartfastibast:

sacculetta:

slartibartfastibast:

the-grey-tribe:

everything-narrative:

bogleech:

The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”

So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?

Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.

Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.

Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.

How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?

What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.

No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.

Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch

Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet

Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes

Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew! 

Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.

This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.

You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.

Counter-point: All female characters engaging in waif fu are actually paramilitary cyborgs.

It is important to acknowledge this for the benefit of cyborg representation.

nuclearspaceheater:

mitigatedchaos:

nocherrybombs:

Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.

Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.

I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.

Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?

slartibartfastibast:

the-grey-tribe:

slartibartfastibast:

the-grey-tribe:

slartibartfastibast:

the-grey-tribe:

slartibartfastibast:

the-grey-tribe:

slartibartfastibast:

ranma-official:

ten dollars says she’s going to twist me pointing out that ada lovelace did not actually invent the computer or programming and therefore men have actually contributed to the development of computers in some way as misogyny somehow

Wolfram is a famous douche and

even he acknowledges

that she made not just significant but seminal (heh) contributions to computer programming. There’s no convincing evidence that Babbage actually wrote her notes about computing the Bernoulli numbers. She was also from a family of wacky geniuses. It’s not unreasonable to call het the mother of computer programming or something like that.

Hobbes, Pascal or Leibniz may also have been the mother of computer programming, if you look at it a certain way, or Babbage or Gauss.

Contributions to computer programming != wrote the first program

---

The problem here is that all of rat-tumb agrees on the scope of the actual contribution of Ada Lovelace to the history of computing and to the programs to calculate Bernoulli numbers in particular (http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html). We are just arguing semantics here.

Outside of rat-tumb, some people don’t know anybody else other than Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing (from that movie with Benedict Cumberbatch). What about Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Vannevar Bush, Emil Leon Post, Alonzo Church, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann? Grace Hopper or Barbara Liskov might be better candidates for “Women who invented modern computing”.

Outside of rat-tumb, what does it even matter if she did or did not predict symbolic theorem-provers over a hundred years early? Does it matter if you don’t know what a compiler is, but have strong feelings about the subject anyway?

Is the Bernoulli numbers program a computer program? Did she write it? Did anything before it count as a computer program?

Those questions settle the debate. They’re just super hard to answer in a concrete way.

Yes. No. Probably.

You didn’t read the wolfram excerpt I linked to if you really think she didn’t write the program.

So Menabrea did not?

Nope. He wrote about the engine, but it was her notes that contained the first program. Read the Wolfram article.

Ok. Menabrea wrote something non-Bernoulli as an example program, but suggested Bernoulli numbers. Ada Lovelace published the first computer program. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, if you set the cutoff right.

Originally posted by comics0026

The real reason people argue about this is because various Feminists use it to attack nerds in the tech industry.

letshearitforthisclown:

discord is the cool new place for people with foot fetishes to emulate high school drama

I thought it was the hot new place for Reactionaries to plan Counter-Revolution?

isaacsapphire:

fierceawakening:

nentindo:

seriously though, there are people on here who are so terrified of saying anything remotely offensive that they’ve cleansed their vocabulary of any meaningful insults and make every insult they go for look like a halfassed attempt for attention

anyone who replaces a post with “chungy/pee your pants/etc.” has the desire to tell someone to kill themselves or call them a cunt or something but are too cowardly to do it. 

everyone who does that shit seems to me to just scream “i’m not just a shitty person, i’m also afraid i’m not shitty in the way my shitty friends want me to be”

I honestly do not know if “pee your pants” is a euphemism for “kill yourself” or not because no one seems to have the receipts from someone coining it as a euphemism.

But, regardless of that, yes. I think we’ve basically spiraled ourselves into absurdity. We’ve decided we can’t say cutting words because “they’re triggering”…

…which conveniently lets us tell ourselves the words we have left aren’t cutting.

It reminds me of the linguistic drift you got (and presumably still get) in MMORPGs that had chat and auto blocked usual insults and slurs: that’s how “n00b” became a very strong insult.

Spoken like a true Hanzo main.

collapsedsquid:

rustingbridges:

discoursedrome:

rustingbridges:

discoursedrome:

I think I’ve already done this song and dance but my take on technological unemployment is: general AI will probably have a catastrophic effect on employment but specific AI likely won’t, and it seems really unlikely current AI technologies will generalize to general intelligence. It could be just around the corner, but it’s a lot more likely that if you gear up for it now you’ll look like those guys at the dawn of computing talking about how natural language processing was right around the corner. Admittedly when we do have real artificial general intelligence there’ll only be like 15 years to decide how we want to handle it, but that may well not even occur in our children’s lifetimes, so it hardly seems worth trying to time it.

It does seem like we should anticipate large-scale short-term unemployment from future technological innovation, though, often of people who are good at the thing that’s obsolete, bad at the thing that replaces it, and – in many cases – too old or tied-down to start over. If current events show anything it’s “probably while awaiting a return to homeostasis you should try to make those people feel like the entire system isn’t out to fuck them".

The question, of course, being how you do this cheaply.

What makes me sad is that there’s decent bipartisan support for skills retraining and job transition services and stuff like that, but in practice any attempt to do that seems to result in 90% of the money being funded to garbage profiteers who are good at bidding for contracts and pitching services to the government.

I’m not convinced that retraining and job transition services actually work - most people who don’t do this on their own seem unwilling or unable for whatever reason (which is not to say it is morally their fault, there are many reasons why someone might have difficulty in retraining).

Since profitable employment is profitable, I suspect that retraining is probably something handled reasonably efficiently by an unregulated market that is able to respond to incentives.

As such, I think throwing government money after retraining programs is going to be more graft than not.

I’m not saying there aren’t people who could benefit from retraining that they don’t have access to for reasons that are theoretically susceptible to government intervention, but in practice it doesn’t seem to pan out.

The classic complaint about corporate retraining is that people take the training and run, so it’s not a good use of money. 

Didn’t Murray find state sponsored job retraining didn’t actually work?

argumate:

thivus:

common misconception is that i want to be a girl but thats wrong

i want to be a shapeshifter capable of shedding one form and moving onto another at will, a perfect entity with total mastery over my physical and spiritual form

@femmenietzsche

Somehow, I think Thivus here has been on Second Life.

slartibartfastibast:

mitigatedchaos:

xhxhxhx:

mitigatedchaos

replied to your

post

:

I would appreciate it if some AI enthusiast would…

I’m much more skeptical that it won’t result in some pretty high unemployment, given that self-driving cars are on the horizon - and how many jobs are “merely” as difficult as driving a car? It isn’t that you have to just produce more value, you must produce *enough* value.

Sure, the individual automation processes may touch on individual tasks, but there are a lot of automation processes going on.

I don’t think you’re thinking in equilibrium

The base resources (land, metals, etc) are still scarce, so what’s to prevent them from being bid up in price?  Isn’t having to compete with 100x as productive personnel for land/etc one of the major drivers for why CoL is so much higher in developed nations?

I really don’t trust that it’s just all going to work out when we’re creating something like slices of animal brains in silicon.  

Animal brains are not made of silicon. Animal brains still do stuff silicon brains can’t do. It is still possible that silicon brains can never do everything that meat brains can. It is therefore reasonable to factor this possibility into your predictions.

Right, I was being less literal there and instead referring to how they can do multi-layered image recognition and hallucination in ways that seem unlike algorithms.