Goldwater’s also somewhere you can look to understand how far right we’ve come. He was considered so extremely, radically conservative in 1964 that his defeat was one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. Yet, if I remember correctly, in “Conscience Of A Conservative” I think he says something along the lines of “many unions are good and do important work, I’m just opposed to the huge ones and the radical ones.”
When was the last time you remember any Republican saying anything good about any unions? Like, even if he didn’t actually believe that, the fact he even felt the need to make that qualification speaks legions to the power and acceptance of labor unions in America at the time.
I feel like the loss of the communist bloc as a looming threat went a long way toward radicalizing American capitalism. There was a long period there where communist revolution was understood to be “plan B” for the working public, which meant the powers that be had a strong interest in making plan A look appealing. After the fall of the USSR the capitalist argument drifted toward “you’ll take what you get because you’ve seen the alternative,” and it’s not a coincidence that the upper crust became a lot more extractive over that period.
Of course this is the thing that leftists always complain about – how market socialism was guided by the CIA, how labour reforms were a sop to protect capitalists – and there’s room to criticize, in that the earlier concessions facilitated an exclusionary guildism that maintained the existence of an (especially black) underclass. On the other hand, I do like leverage and I don’t think the loss of it has been good for American workers or for the “first world” generally.
The leftist criticism is that these concessions stole momentum from an unborn revolutionary movement that could have fixed everything if only it had been brought to term, but I have no expectation that it would actually have worked out that way, so I’d be plenty happy to have a movement like that back again even if only for the express purpose of stealing momentum from it.
On the other hand, pressure for automation has pushed the UBI from the fringes to slowly creeping into the mainstream, and with the new President rising on Populism, we may see the emergence of a new equilibrium.
People’s Action Party (SG):* wins election with 60% of the vote, down from 70% last time around *
People’s Action Party (SG): This is a rebuke of our governing performance! We need to reconnect with voters and do more things that people want!
Democratic Party (USA):* loses election by narrow margin *
Democratic Party (USA): We lost because our opponents are racist, sexist, xenophobes! We need to call them out repeatedly on their lack of virtue! No mercy and no deals for Fascists!
Mum, Dad, I’m not sexually aroused by Japanimation.
No, it doesn’t do anything for me at all.
Don’t cry, I’m still the child you always knew, I just don’t crank it to cartoons.
I’ll explain to Grandma next time I see her, she’ll understand.
The year is 2078, a group of owls congregate in cyberspace…
Argumate Jr, your mother and I are worried that you’re getting too close with those Normies.
No, your other mother.
That isn’t the point. These are the kinds of people that want to ban bishounenification surgery. What if you start kinkshaming? What if you start bodyshaming?
They tried to ban something as harmless as moe overlays. Do you really think they’ll treat you like - they are not your friends! Hey, don’t you -
It is vitally necessary to defend him because the attack on communism begins with the argument that communism leads to genocide. Rehabilitating Stalin would very definitely improve the cause of socialism worldwide.
X implies Y is a problem because X is good and Y is bad, therefore X does not imply Y.
It is vitally important to defend Chernobyl because the attack on Nuclear Power begins with the argument that Chernobyl killed people and caused large amounts of radioactive contamination. Rehabilitating Chernobyl would improve the cause of Nuclear Power worldwide.
I mean, I suppose we could alternatively argue that Chernobyl was managed terribly (which has the advantage of being true), and alternative plants with containment domes and different reactor designs don’t have the same safety record (also true), and commercial nuclear reactors generate utterly enormous amounts of economically-valuable electricity with a long-lasting power source, low area footprint, and low carbon output. And we could devise and test better methods to make nuclear plants safer. We might do that.
And if we did that, people wouldn’t find out that we were lying about Chernobyl being this great thing that never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, since we didn’t go the route of trying to “rehabilitate Chernobyl”…
Also let’s please not act like minisoc’s antisemitism is in any way unique. Other tankies on here like marxism-leninism-memeism have said worse things, like that Jewish people ought to be thanking Stalin for saving them from the Holocaust.
Let’s eradicate this preposterous notion that you can be a defender of Stalin and not simultaneously be a raging antisemite racist homophobe. There are no non-problematic tankies. If you defend Stalin, you defend ethnic cleansing, the arrest, enslavement, and murder of gay men, antisemitic purges, and a million other atrocities.
Tankies like to pretend that Stalinist mass murders and systems of forced labor camps were substantially different and in no way comparable to the Nazis because the Stalinists at least on the surface espoused the values of internationalism and anti-racism. But in practice the gulags and the purges were systems of racist terror. Hitler killed more people but Stalin sure gave him a run for his money.
I can’t wait for people to performatively denounce the ““““tankies”“““ for five seconds while doing literally zero self-reflection
Wasn’t that called McCarthyism?
Stan’s body count is miles higher than Hitler’s last I checked. Unless I’m having a moment of bad memory at 430AM
If you compare intentional murders, Hitler’s is higher. Famine deaths were definitely caused by Stalin’s policies, and the word genocidal certainly qualifies in the case of the Ukrainian famine, but I think it’s not quite the same to say that famine deaths should count equally as people being rounded up and arrested, and then shot or gassed to death or killed from overwork and brutal conditions in a prison camp.
Still though, counting only intentional murders, Stalin’s death toll easily makes it into the 7 figures.
the key difference here imo is that both angles are incorrect: Nazism inherently leads to mass murder as per Generalplan Ost, since the whole plan is to lebensraum new territories and get rid of or enslave the population there, however, communist governments ended up with such an enormous death toll because the countries where communism was enacted were so big. so this implies three things: authoritarianism equals mass murder even if you are the “””good guys”””, communism doesn’t scale well at all, and “hey you thought my ideology murders the most people in history, whereas it only murdered the second most people in history” does not sound enticing
I feel like
If you take somebody’s food
That they say they need
And then they starve to death
That’s murder, even if you didn’t believe them when they said they needed the food.
Yes but if you do that you have to start accounting for capitalism’s death toll too. But no one wants to say it’s the government’s fault that a bunch of people without money starved when the crops failed, that was just like, completely external or something.
It’s one thing to have people suffer in a famine, it’s another thing to cause one that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
Anyhow, suppose there is some baseline level of famine that occurs in any country as a result of environmental conditions, and some minimum number of people who will die from it. Ideologies/economies are judged by how far above that number they come in. Does Capitalism do better on that metric? Does it do better than Feudalism?
But if we’re going for this level of detail, then slow economic growth counts against Communism, too. How many have died because of less wealth for healthcare, or for safety procedures? How many have died due to a slower pace of technological development? How many have died because Communist governments were so bad that they created massive amounts of corruption that persist to this day?
I guess I’m just annoyed with that comic with a Communist sitting on a tiny hill of skulls while a banker stands next to a small mountain of them. Even after you account for, for instance, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which can be attributed to Capitalism, Communism is still going to end up responsible for more net deaths, and yet so many people smart enough to know better want to try it again.
TIL, secondhand, that some people won’t accept the earned income tax credit (a US federal tax credit for people with low/moderate income, especially ones with kids. As income increases the credit amount increases, then flattens, then decreases) because they think it’s “welfare” or “political control of their lives”, or that it’s somehow wrong to accept help from anyone other than family or church. What can you even do. :|
Anyway, I guess the lesson here is it’s only okay to receive government assistance if it’s very heavily disguised as being something else, preferably through an unrelated third party (such as a corporation that’s being “incentivized” to build factories near you or whatever). Sort of like money laundering, in concept.
yes, one of the downsides of basic income that I think about a lot is that it’s going to piss some people off to think of themselves as dependent on others unless they can reframe how they spend their life as providing some vital function that everyone else benefits from.
Isn’t that rather easily solved by making it something you apply for, and automatically granting it to those who apply?
My feeling here, as all such similar questions that devolve to “would you tell this to a 55 year old Walmart stocker that (we wont give her free money to live on because her job gives life value)(her job has no value)?” is to ask the people involved. We should like, poll some working class people and ask them which system they’d prefer.
If it’s significantly split, well you’re fucked no matter which policy you go with. But you know, you asked, rather than played some thought experiment about What The Middle America In My Head Wants.”
(Not faulting anyone in this thread for this, just, the dynamic shows up in way too many discussions about UBI)
Unfortunately, I think your proposed (reasonable, common-sense) approach fails on basic predictable human-psychology grounds. In this case, anyway, and cases like it.
Like…I’m pretty sure we know what most people’s first-best choice here is. “I want a job that rewards me both with a substantial wage and a substantial status boost, in which I provide a needed good or service to the world, demonstrating that I am a worthy worthwhile person deserving of pride and also that I am better than all those lazy unskilled slobs who might have some use for welfare.” We could run a poll to see whether that’s actually the outcome that people would prefer, if you believe it valuable, but I’m really quite confident in it. It is the ideal promulgated by pretty much every facet of American culture, and if it’s not your first-best choice, it means that you’re some kind of weirdo who’s broken away from your cultural training.
But of course that doesn’t get you very far, because that option is Definitely Not Available for many many many people. The real choice is often between, say, Welfare or Subsidized Makework Job or Poverty. (Or something like that.) That’s the polling data you actually want.
Except that…
A. It is really hard to get people to believe that their first-best choice (to which they feel entitled) is unavailable and that they have to consider second-best options. If it is at all possible for them, they will find a way to delude themselves into believing that one of the proffered options will lead to the thing they actually want.
B. It is really really hard to get people to believe this when “your first-best choice is unavailable” continues into “…because you have no presently-desirable skills and the free market has no use for you as anything more than a warm body.”
C. It’s especially really really hard to get people to believe this when you have malicious actors actively lying to them about it. And make no mistake, that is a thing that is happening, and will continue to happen. Someone is going to be pushing the line that the Republicans are pushing right now: “as soon as we gut the welfare state and free the market, all those Real Jobs that gave you Real Dignity will come roaring back!”
I am strongly of the belief that there are many people for whom decent welfare would be much better than any job they could ever get (or at least “extremely desirable as a supplement to wages”), but who will never ever admit this even to themselves, because they are strongly invested in not being the sort of losers who would need to think that way.
In short: poll all you want, but good luck getting people to face up squarely to the question long enough to give you a genuine answer.
While hourly direct-to-employee wage subsidies would still have some of these marketing problems, the massive cuts to the minimum wage (with no loss in living standards) they would allow one to make can at least create lots and lots of jobs that don’t look entirely makework since someone in the economy is at least willing to pay some amount for them.
One side effect is that it could make a lot of people feel more in demand, since there would be so many job offers going unfilled.
“That’s funny. Your side are the ones covering their faces as they stifle free speech, destroy property, and attack innocent civilians. Maybe, just maybe, you guys are the bad ones…”
OR… WAIT FOR IT… YOU’RE A FUCKING NAZI THAT WANTS ALL OF AMERICA’S RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS FOR YOURSELF BUT NOT FOR OTHERS <insert race that isn’t white trash here>
So #1 Go Fuck Yourself and #2 Go Get Me a Sandwich Bitch
It’s all fun & Nazi punching until you pepper-spray a woman wearing a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat and attack an immigrant in a business suit. (That actually happened, by the way.)
Because when you encourage “punching Nazis”, that’s what actually happens, because lots of people love punching more than they care about figuring out whether who they are punching is an actual Nazi.
You could have had Nazi punching if the Nazi punchers were the kind of person that didn’t support punching Nazis, since they tend to do a better job figuring out who is and isn’t a Nazi.
But now people that aren’t Nazis have to defend the physical security of Nazis because Tumblr thinks the proper answer to “but what if I thought I was punching a Nazi but it was just a white guy with a shtty haircut” is “run” and not “don’t be a dumbfk that punches people without checking whether they’re actual Nazis first”.
That doesn’t even get into what happened with the actual Nazis and street violence (it didn’t stop them), or the threat level they represent right now (fairly low), or whether they can be won over by other means (one black man got some huge number of dudes to quit the KKK by befriending them), or ideological consistency (you also have to punch Tankies), or whether there will be retaliatory violence (oh Nazis would love that) or whom that retaliatory violence would fall on (hint: usually people more marginalized and vulnerable than the punchers).
While I don’t agree with much of it, it occurred to me that anyone engaging in these debates about “what the Democratic party should focus on” and ideology in general, should at least be familiar with this post from David Chapman.
Haha, fun read. It occurs to me that in some worldbuilding I’ve been doing, I already split the cultural functions of government off from the boring policy functions, divided between royalty made of formally-recognized national heroes and a subtly, quietly terrifying postcyberpunk state bureaucracy that had what we would think of as prediction markets in the 1980s, and is now using what comes beyond that.
Jesus this is the most frustrating thread ever. I get banning guns and knives, but who in their right fucking mind would ban goddamn pepper spray? What the fuck do they think people are gonna do if they’re allowed to have it? I keep seeing people talk about how the need to defend yourself is rare and letting people have weapons would make things worse but I don’t see how that applies to mace at all.
I’m so glad the 2nd Amendment covers my right to military-grade prosthetic limbs.
Edit: More seriously, erosion in this direction is what they’re worried about.
I feel like you could very easily make things like “does this cause permanent harm” or “is it useful in muggings” as your criteria, though. The thing that makes pepper spray good from a societal standpoint is the fact that it’s significantly more useful defensively than offensively.
That is not the logic under which weapons are restricted, though. I suppose things would be better if it were.
Very very few people are actually anti-immigration. It’s the ILLEGAL part that people don’t like.
seriously tho? a shit-ton of people are actually anti-immigration, this is hardly a fringe view, jesus.
I’ve never inderstood why the legality or not of immigration is supposed to have moral force. a) Its pretty commonly agreed that hte current immigration laws arent fit for purpose, and are only that way due to political deadlock. b) The moral obligation to obey a law comes from being part of the country/community that sets the law, if you are not an american citizen you have no obligation to obey US law.
A) Just ignoring them is almost equivalent to Open Borders, which if you’re a Nationalist, is something you don’t want. (Maximum rates of assimilation, wanting to be allowed to have a country of your own to at least some level culturally, effects on wages, effects on crime, etc.) Ignoring them isn’t really a compromise, either, it’s basically just giving the Leftists what they want.
What they really want is more complicated, but using legality as a fence is much simpler and faster to communicate, and is part of expressing that they are not-racist.
B) You should really be careful with that knife since it has a two-sided blade. If they don’t have any obligations, then they don’t have any rights, either. Furthermore, isn’t that like saying a trespasser has no obligation to obey the property owner when they aren’t even supposed to be trespassing in the first place?
Jesus this is the most frustrating thread ever. I get banning guns and knives, but who in their right fucking mind would ban goddamn pepper spray? What the fuck do they think people are gonna do if they’re allowed to have it? I keep seeing people talk about how the need to defend yourself is rare and letting people have weapons would make things worse but I don’t see how that applies to mace at all.
I’m so glad the 2nd Amendment covers my right to military-grade prosthetic limbs.
Edit: More seriously, erosion in this direction is what they’re worried about.
superheroes only work because they are given perfect information; even when the Avengers screw up they never seem to screw up in ways that would get them fired, like accidentally mistaking some normie for a supervillain and punching their head right off.
Well, that’s a good reason for superheroes to have no-kill policies, even when it sometimes seems obvious that they should just kill the villains that keep coming back every few episodes and endangering the city, since one failure could cost thousands of lives.
Usually superheroes find criminals in the act, but even so, tying them up and leaving them for the cops after beating them up has a much better failure mode, limited in part by the quality level of local law enforcement.
The problem is not that the Onceler is morally bad, but that he is rationally responding to bad incentives which lead to bad outcomes: he is indeed “doing what comes naturally” in the current (lax) regulatory environment.
If the only way to avoid bad outcomes is for everyone in your society to be morally virtuous and to have access to perfect information then you have a problem!
A better way would be to pay attention to outcomes and have a system of checks and balances that provides a feedback loop to correct the incentives that led to them, combined with an enforcement mechanism to punish violators.
My my, Argumate, what a novel idea.
Are you suggesting that perhaps we should also judge the rule systems themselves by their outcomes?
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.
I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.
Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.
I think it runs afoul of so many measurement, externality, long tail, and other issues that what you’re going to get is a mess, especially if you try it on everything at once.
It’s part of a general vein of policies that don’t have to be implemented all at once.
For instance, we could start by requiring legislators to make non-binding predictions about the legislation they pass when it’s passed, with specific, measurable outcomes, like “the annual murder rate will decline by 3-5% with 80% confidence”. No differences in pay, no firing, just a formal record to compare to. It might not sound like much, but it’s a step towards explaining the expected outcomes of massive bills in clearer language that can be verified.
Then if that works, we can expand it and start awarding compensation based on the outcomes. (Although I admittedly have been thinking about a far deeper version where percentile score in a legislative outcome prediction market is part of a formula that determines public funding of parties, with lots of delegated voting and other things.)
Other options to improve governance include automatically putting sunset provisions in bills and various regulations so that they don’t just keep accumulating and accumulating if they aren’t actually that politically important. Again, small step that can be reversed.
If people weren’t such idiots, we could get cities to volunteer to test various policies like basic income or wage subsidies before national rollouts instead of just kinda assuming they’d work because it’s morally virtuous without successively larger scales of testing.
We could probably also pay more to legislators, like they do in Singapore. It was only about $250 million or something to give all the congressmen $500k-$1M salaries, plus another $30M for the President. For a bit more, we could pay them significant pensions and forbid them from working for anyone but the government afterwards. If it saves the US economy well under 1% of GDP (0.0014%?) due to getting a better quality of legislator, it comes out to a net gain. The exact numbers here are less important than the orders of magnitude. Congress has an enormous amount of power over the economy, but they aren’t paid based on that. However, they can use that power to get wealth by converting it via corruption.
There have got to be a hundred things we could do better.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.
I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.
Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Right, but one might want organizations to make decisions based on more accurate information, not just individuals, and measuring the rate of underground bunker construction doesn’t tell you which apocalyptic scenario is most likely - and thus needs to be most addressed.
The following assume the prediction markets are being used to help evaluate the standing of government bureaucrats or employees in another very large organization. In this instance, the resource being bet is not currency per se, but a “credibility score” used in hiring and other decisions.
Reselling Shares of Predictions
One issue with making bets is that they may take longer than your lifespan in order to pay out. Shares of bets on, for example, global temperature in the year 2100 should be something that can be traded by itself. In this sense these kinds of bets become a long-term investment that can be used to hold one’s credibility score, particularly if bet payoffs are indexed to prediction market inflation.
Catastrophe Bets Reserve Catastrophe Goods
A basket of catastrophe goods are held in reserve for those who make predictions of incidents which would cause the prediction market to end. This might include gold, guns and ammo, priority access to bunkers, and so on. These would be distributed by the market operator in preparation for the event, but are only held by the bettor unless the actual catastrophe kicks in.
Prohibition of Close Involvement
Based on the level of control someone has over the outcome of a scenario being bet on (1/N?), they may be prohibited from betting on it.
Alternatively,
Prohibition of Betting Against Own Success
If you’re on a project, you can only bet on it succeeding, not coming late or failing. Colluding with outsiders to get payment for the project failing is a punishable offense, and these will be monitored and punished.
Alternatively,
Randomization of Selection of Betting Participants with Self Recusal
Spread bets over the organization at random to lower the probability that any participant has too much control over the outcome and is thus able to sabotage it. This may result in a hit to accuracy, depending on the estimating capabilities of your organization.
There are probably other mechanisms that can be added to try and get better / less corrupt behavior from the prediction markets.
to add to this “humans are weird” thing did you know that humans are the only species on earth with the ability to throw things with any significant degree of accuracy and force (apes can throw with about the force of a human ten year old, but cant lock their wrists well enough for accuracy)
and we just never really think about it bc its so easy and simple to us that pretty much all of our sports are based around the concept of throwing things accurately
so what if the concept of projectile weapons takes most species FOREVER to get the hang of, or even come up with in the first place. a human goes onto a ship and throws some trash into the nearest reclaimer, shouts “kobe!” and all the other aliens on board absolutely LOSE THEIR MINDS
I definitely didn’t know this about humans but it’s actually really neat
We have a bunch of very weird traits that aren’t found in taxonomically nearby species. It’s really blatantly obvious that we’re eusocial or otherwise superorganismic. But EO Wilson got a mountain of shit for pointing this out in 2011, so the status quo is still basically that Ayn Dawkins’ discrete genome sequence proves that everyone should eat the poor because Hamilton’s rule says we’re all equal in the eyes of a dead God.
So hyped to watch as our future becomes so crazy that intellectuals now would be hostile if you even suggested it as a possible future
I propose a new form of measurement of how interesting the times you live in are - the amount of days you’d need to travel backwards in time until the average person would refuse to believe you and perhaps think you were joking/insane/trying to start a fight for describing to them the major historical events that happened between their time and yours. Let’s call the unit of measurement the cassandra.
For example, on the day after the 2016 election, you’d only need to travel back a single day and tell them that Trump won to get that reaction. November 9th was a 1-cassandra day. Since Trump has taken office I think we’re averaging about 7 cassandras. But I estimate most of my lifetime has averaged in the hundreds of cassandras at least. And throughout most of history I’d estimate the cassandra level has been in the thousands, easily.
“Communism will be a system of workers’ councils or it will not exist. The “association of free and equal producers;’ which determines its own production and distribution, is thinkable only as a system of self-determination at the point of production, and the absence of any other authority than the collective will of the producers themselves. It means the end of the state, or any state-based system of exploitation. It must be a planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitudes of the market system.”—
Difficult for the workers councils over here and the workers councils over there to coordinate their production to ensure that there are no shortfalls or gluts without an effective way of allocating targets and determining the most efficient ways of reaching them.
it sounds like this “association of free and equal producers” includes all producers, hence an authority that rests with the “collective will of the producers themselves” and a concept of “planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitude of the market system,” which is only thinkable as a comprehensive system of allocative planning
it doesn’t really sound like “the end of the state,” though; it’s just that here “the state” has been replaced by the TUC/AFL-CIO
Cyberpunk dystopia where mega-unions for the largest producers dominate the Central Council by having the largest number of employees, obtaining the most resources for themselves by controlling the planning process.
concept: feminists should encourage straight women to attempt to initiate more relationships with men instead of waiting for men to initiate.
I thought this was the case already, no?
I could be wrong, but at based on my observations there are at least ten thinkpieces recommending men should make fewer approaches for every one suggesting that women should make more.
At least based on a simple monogamous relationship model where both sides desire to find a partner, women are going to have to expect to tolerate a lot more approaches unless they’re willing to make a lot more approaches.
(Note that this model can break down if one gender is more eager to trade up than another or more interested in non-monogamous relationships or whatever).
“I don’t think there’s a young person, a woman, a Democrat, independent or a diverse voter that will stay home.” Stephanie Cutter, Democratic strategist, on the impact of a Republican decision to not nominate a supreme court justice, as quoted in the NYT.
Just one question comes to mind: how does a voter become diverse?
idk about you man but I am diverse as FUCK
American racial euphemisms are so frickin’ cringey
White people, particularly white men, know that they will never be counted as “diverse”, further increasing their incentive not to support “diversity”.
re: The Unfreedom of Scarcity, this looks like the usual claim of people's actions are affected by incentives, and sometimes those incentives are ugly and not uniform across the population. Therefore, in order for people to be free from these ugly incentives, you need an all powerful central authority to enforce equality. This is Chomsky's anarchist position.
I think it went even beyond that to suggest that consent was not meaningful in those circumstances. An attack on free civil society has to begin with attacking the validity of consent in some way - suggesting that voluntary institutions aren’t really voluntary for some reason. If some central institution of a free society can be declared coercive somehow, then of course coercion is justified in fighting back against it, and it’s a short hike from there to liquidating the kulaks.
I saw an Internet comment once that joked that every line of argument made by a radical feminist ultimately ends by trying to prove that women are incapable of consenting to sex. Anti-capitalists do the same thing, but they try to prove that workers are incapable of consenting to employment. And then oftentimes the same people will demand obedience to the state claiming that every citizen has freely consented to a wholly imaginary social contract!
You’ve just got to be relentlessly dedicated to truth and critical thought when you’re dealing with stuff like this. Do those ‘ugly non-uniform incentives’ invalidate anyone’s agency? That’s absolutely central to their argument, and yet…no, they just don’t. Imagine if you were in a court of law and someone was on trial for murder and they claimed it was self-defense because the victim offered them a trade they found very difficult to turn down and thus they were being coerced. That’s the core of what the whole case turns on. Everything else they have to say is dependent on that twisted logic. They proceed past it as swiftly as they can and try to cover it with emotional appeals but that’s the cornerstone supporting their entire ideology, and it’s nonsensical.
People saying Trump’s plan to deport millions are “unprecedented”, like Operation Wetback wasn’t a thing.
“Unprecedented” does not mean extreme, or bad. If Trump announced an intention to bring back slavery, that would be pretty extreme, and pretty bad, but it’d be the exact opposite of unprecedented.
Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.
wut
A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.
…wait, what?
a twisted version of Gift of the Magi: the woman who mistakenly thinks her husband is a cuck due to a miscommunication earlier in their relationship and sadly goes along with it to please him; he doesn’t get anything out of it at all but it’s gone on so long he can’t find a way to admit the truth.
A second-order cuck who enjoys the marital infidelity of others but would never touch a woman himself, running for office only to find out that existing social changes already in motion made his plans irrelevant.
Problems in privacy engineering that seem unsolvable:
- sending information to another party that lets them observe and interact with it, but not store it indefinitely (or only lets them store it imperfectly)*
- sending information to another party that lets them save it and interact with it however they want, but not share it with a third party*
- verifying that one is not currently being observed (maybe use short-range EMPs to solve this in the case of checking a room for bugs?)*
- being able to store and retrieve information from a device in a quickly and easily human-readabe format that no one else can understand
- being able to e.g. enter passwords without anyone observing or understanding the step between thinking of the password in your mind and the device receiving the password*
- encryption that can be broken only with a warrant somehow
- being able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved and used publicly, but not without the owner learned why and how you used it (this one may be very bad for people interested in reducing the power of IP laws)
Pretty sure many of these are actually theoretically impossible unless you can restrict the amount of surveillance or computational power that potential observers have access to.
The ones marked with a * are things that, as far as I can tell, intuitive social interaction and subjective feelings of security and privacy depend on. If they end up being major problems and sources of risk, I predict widespread mental health problems.
Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.
wut
A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.
But there’s a real, and significant, segment of his supporters who voted for him because of, not in spite of, the racism, misogyny, and fascist policy.
Do you know the logic behind the US government releasing Tor to the public? It’s along the lines of the following - if the only people that use Tor are American spies, than any US agent found using onion routing software will be outed. If many people use Tor for a variety of activities, then the presence of onion routing software could mean anything from ordinary local black market dealings to just being paranoid.
The signal is hidden in the noise.
Well, congratulations, because that can also happen unintentionally as a Tragedy of the Commons with words such as “racism” and “misogyny”. People were told to be careful with overusing the terms, but haha, like that was going to happen. Besides, the people questioning the use of such terms were the Oppressors, right? They should be mocked for “freeze peach”, right?
Now the overuse of antibiotics has created a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Oops.
(1/2) A little while ago, you said: "I can’t think of a great way for a liberal to establish that credibility - emphasizing that you understand why they believe the things they believe was tried very loudly during the campaign ...". You were probably much more in tune with the campaign than I was, but this really isn't what I remember. I recall hearing a lot of "Trump is crazy and so are his policies; it's obvious and he can never win."
(2/2) There’s the Michael Moore speech, but I’m not sure what (if anything) he was advocating there. There was also Obama’s thing, but that was at a Clinton rally with Clinton supporters, not an outreach event. Can you point to some examples of Clinton supporters trying to convey understanding to Trump supporters?
I’m thinking mostly of the deluge of articles like these:
I feel like this was much much more of a genre in the media I was consuming this election compared to any previous election. Of course, maybe all of these attempts at credible empathy were just really bad, because they failed to capture what Trump voters actually cared about or just seeded their characterization with enough “but of course Trump’s still terrible” that it couldn’t resonate with the people it was supposed to describe, but I definitely saw a lot of ‘let’s understand Trump supporters!’
A Calexit would cost the country an enormous amount of money, it’s true, and weaken Trump as well.
But if you’re worried about the most powerful country in the world being too right-wing, removing a large portion of the left-wing population from the voter base seems like the exact opposite of what you should want to do.
The State of California’s elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump’s Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump’s sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.
California’s Democratic leaders believe there are numerous federal programs receiving state funds as well, which they will seek to cut, to make up for anything Republicans siphon out of their budgets. San Francisco’s CBS affiliate reports that the federal government only spends 78 cents in California for every tax dollar sent from that state to Washington:
The state of California is studying ways to suspend financial transfers to Washington after the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal money from sanctuary cities, KPIX 5 has learned. “California could very well become an organized non-payer,” said Willie Brown, Jr, a former speaker of the state Assembly in an interview recorded Friday for KPIX 5’s Sunday morning news. “They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
Isn’t most of the transfer from CA to the federal government in the form of individual Californians having their wages garnished by the IRS? Is Sacramento just going to suggest that Californians stop paying their income taxes and promise to protect us somehow?
“They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
This sounds like a “yes” to me. The IRS can’t arrest thirty million people who have the state government on their side, so this is pretty much the exact one way a tax resistance could work effectively. If enough Californians simply stop paying their federal taxes (especially big corporations) it would quickly clog the ability of the feds to respond in any meaningful manner apart from rolling in tanks like the USSR.
DO IT
Stop California paying taxes, or rolling in the tanks? At this point I could go for either one.
when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.
Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.
Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man. He killed people that didn’t need to be killed. He dropped people out of helicopters. He used methods of great violence. No one should imitate him.
But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.
So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.
Whenever you have a highly controversial word, go to the root. Anarchy means “without hierarchy.” It should not be about the lack of government, but about the lack of levels of power altogether.
Some anarchists do just see it as a lack of government (or rather, the State.) I think they are blisteringly wrong. This would be particularly dumb for anyone who shares normal social justice concerns, because can’t they see right now that women and racial minorities have formal equality before the government, but massively lack social and soft power, such that they get exploited? For all the many problems with the current Left, it is at least aware of the existence of social power in most of its critiques. I can’t see why they’d simply want to do away with the cops and laws and hope… everything works out.
I guess it makes sense for the AnCaps, but they’re just really wrong and would make a Hellworld.
Lack of hierarchy would be better than that, and address the concerns in my Unfreedom essay.
However, I subscribe to anarchism as a lack of coercion, where no one is coerced to do something they don’t want to by any means (well, socially at least.) Coercion is still possible under flat, egalitarian systems after all, and so are many problems of the state, like a cruel justice system.
It’s a long way to get there, which involves everyone’s norms getting on the page of genuinely caring about the well-being of others (and not throwing a wrench in the works of every consensus because of self-interestedness or fear), but I think it’s possible and better than any of the alternatives. Coercion is just terrible, and begets terribleness.
Right now of course in social terms, anarchist is just an edgelord word for social justice liberals who found their own intentional communities and political action groups, suffused with a great deal of judgmentalism and disregard for the cultural norms of society around them. This disregard includes norms like “Christian charity” and “innocent until proven guilty” so I don’t really give two fucks about them as allies.
Simply: I don’t think this alternative is possible, and the path attempting to get there will just result in social power dominating.
I don’t think it’s actually feasible to get everyone to care about each other like that without massive violations which involve large amounts of coercion to begin with. Brainwashing techniques and probably literally mind-altering invasive procedures would be required. Social power is natural and organic, and will arise in almost any system among humans. People are born unequal before society even gets its hold on them.
Like, are you just going to cancel introverts or something? Or are you going to get rid of extroversion? Because if you don’t unify the preferences, then extroverts will have more social power even if they have equal material resources, without even attempting to do so.
There’s no logical proof that they can declaw all religions equally, or
that the distribution of violence is the same at the tails of all
otherwise-declawed religions, though.
Religions are declawed in a secular society naturally as long as no deliberate action (that ensues resistance) is taken. Christianity is very heavily fragmented and society in general has done a really good job declawing it. We are at a “you can’t even prove if God exists or not” level right now. That’s an absurd step down from the absolute majority of humanity’s history
What if your religion expressly forbids secular government/society?
Gets declawed and settles down. Most religions are against any government ever overriding religious laws.
What if it has standing kill orders against people who leave it? What if it starts demanding concessions like being able to have its own courts, so loudly to the point that people overestimate its presence in the country by a factor of three?
Of course people won't stop making art if you took out copyright! It'd just be harder for anyone to be a *professional* artist, who makes art full-time, in any format that's easily copyable and time-intensive. So, you're left with 1)people who can get patrons to support them, 2)people who can do it full-time because they don't have to work, and 3)amateurs/hobbyists (there's nothing wrong with art as a hobby! but typically skill has some correlation with amount of practice).
Yes. And coordinating large groups of people to make art that requires significant investment (say, movies) would become substantially more difficult.
(Which isn’t necessarily a downside, arguably movies don’t make our lives any better, especially those that require immense budgets. But still).
or maybe just take the Civilization premise seriously and make it that you’re an honest to god immortal born into the world in 4000 BC and obsessed with micromanaging your people to greatness.
I wonder how feasible it would be to have a human population on a planet in the same system as a super-earth ocean planet by growing food on the super-earth, then transporting it to the inhabited planet.
Wouldn’t it always be cheaper to build algae bioreactors than pay the launch costs for the food?
