Stupid Danes just don’t understand how all that rape helps their economicses. Everyone needs to have lots of economicses. Rape isn’t very quantifiable (because that would be offensive) and therefore doesn’t exist. But economicses exist. There are courses in school about them. Have you raised all your boat sails with my Keynesian theories of human trafficking? If you sell one child per family you can fund AI research. People aren’t real. When do I get my hedonium implants? Why are people so mad about rape when we will all soon get hedonium implants?
How many utilons can be exchanged for one rape?
This is a mindset that I’m finding very frustrating, in that I’m having difficulty categorizing it. Is it a reasonable, rational understanding of actual conditions? Is it xenophobic dog whistles, predictable playing on the existing memes of “furiners gonna rape our women”/miscegenation threat?
What are the underlying issues here? Increased pressure from refugees/migrants from the Middle East (not all of whom are Muslim)? The impending population decline? A sudden rise in giving a shit about rape?
WTF is actually going on? Because everyone seems to be going around with blinkers on, cherry picking and building echo chambers and rubbing themselves with factually incorrect memes.
Memes about how everyone is biologically identical and culture is arbitrary reached peak signalling potential and then the same portable media tech that motivates opportunist migrants also made it impossible to cover up the horrifying consequences of importing them (we used to be able to nip those stories in the bud, or obfuscate perp details).
Rotherham also hit the news in 2014, so that didn’t help.
Additionally, while conservative types may not want to pay the price of shifting the burden of evidence on rape cases, lowering the number of immigrants from high risk populations for it is a very cheap price to pay for them. After all, they don’t need to bring in huge populations while ignoring cultural differences just to show how fiercely not-racist they are.
And, while Marxists may use the language of ideological contradictions, they aren’t the only ones who can notice them. Setting aside the whole issue of genetics, as I think culture is sufficient and I’m committed to a multiracialist civic nationalism anyway: Liberals/Leftists have been treating culture as not mattering at all (when they import foreigners) yet mattering a lot when they fight to change it locally (eg, quit oppressing the gays)! This is accomplished in part by pretending the host nation’s majority culture isn’t actually a culture (“white ppl don’t have a culture”) including the meta-culture use to assimilate immigrants into American-style Food Court Ethnicity! …and then they attack the engine of assimilation, insisting that it’s unfair to demand people give up parts of their culture. But if culture doesn’t actually matter, as the earlier positions imply, then there is no reason to seek “diversity” in the first place. It’s incoherent.
…but people were socially prohibited from noticing it was incoherent, until the weight of the contradictions was enough under the mass migration in the EU that people couldn’t stand to pretend that all cultures are equal anymore. It’s perhaps a close enough fit for Western Europe, but it sure isn’t one globally. And since noticing it was suppressed before, and they’re still trying to suppress it now, there is a backlash.
the weirdness of people buying tons of vitamins and other health supplements to take back to China is something I still can’t get over; talk about market failure!
both state interference and a lack of state interference (states create markets!)
for example without enforcement of various consumer protection laws, IP laws (trademarks), and product safety regulations, you end up with a market for lemons where premium products cannot easily gain consumer trust, and people would rather fly to another country and raid the supermarkets there.
Plot Summary: After finishing his fight against Mega Ultimate Frieza and achieving the state of Super Saiyan 25, Goku stares out into the ruins of a dying universe and realizes that his final enemy is entropy itself. He travels back to the very origin of Time in order to make one last sacrifice.
2007: Your robotic catgirl girlfriend will satisfy your every whim in her adorable cuteness.
2017: Your robotic genderqueer trap catgirl waifu will harvest information in order to target advertisements deep into your soul, sponsored by Woke Brands such as Target, Starbucks and refreshing Coca-Cola™, as well as providing information to the loyal, pro-diversity, freedom-loving patriots of the Deep State.
Explain this obsession with murdering people who block traffic. People e-brag about shooting them with shotguns or more commonly just plowing into them at full speed on their cars.
Not sure. I’ve seen people joke about it at least. Maybe because it’s the only way protesters practically interfere with the daily functioning of their lives? At least one ambulance has been blocked, though the use of lethal force to disrupt traffic-blocking protests would almost certainly increase net casualties.
I still contend that America is simply not competent enough to enact (as in justify) restriction policies on the level of soft authoritarian countries in Asia.
What’s soft authoritarian? Singapore? Hongkong?
Something along those lines, yes. Caning for vandalism, death penalty for smuggling drugs, dominant party since the nation’s founding with a habit of suing its opponents into submission, that sort of thing.
I can be pretty freakin’ Statist. People get offended over banning chewing gum. Me? When I looked up the reason why they did it, I might well ban it too. And that’s just a ‘silly’ example. There are some much more extreme policies I might go along with if I trusted the government enough.
…which I don’t, especially not the American government, which is rife with incentivization problems, lobbying, and shear incompetence at every level. For example, Illinois had to amend their state constitution to get their politicians to actually spend the state transportation funds on transportation.
Singapore has the kind of government that freaks out when they go from 70% of the vote to 60% of the vote, which in any other country would be considered a landslide victory, then managed to get back up to 70% of the vote.
America has the kind of government that needs the occasional large-scale protest because the guys in charge are either dishonest, stupid, or both.
And quite frankly, there is no path to the formation of an American Action Party which then obsoletes one or both of the existing parties and rules America with a studious technocratic fist.
Edit: China, of course, also an authoritarian country in Asia, but they flat-out don’t deserve it.
Explain this obsession with murdering people who block traffic. People e-brag about shooting them with shotguns or more commonly just plowing into them at full speed on their cars.
Not sure. I’ve seen people joke about it at least. Maybe because it’s the only way protesters practically interfere with the daily functioning of their lives? At least one ambulance has been blocked, though the use of lethal force to disrupt traffic-blocking protests would almost certainly increase net casualties.
I still contend that America is simply not competent enough to enact (as in justify) restriction policies on the level of soft authoritarian countries in Asia.
“it does seem uncharacteristic that the Americans specifically chose to forgo unnecessary power in exchange for a lower risk of accidental death.”—@discoursedrome, on 110V (via argumate)
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.
How do you prevent reversion to non-secular society when you constantly import (and don’t police) extremely conservative people that have been cousin-marrying since classical antiquity? Do you know about clannishness vs. W.E.I.R.D.ness?
The allure of sexy secular people, particularly young women, is an extremely well established method of getting the second generation immigrants to defect from their culture.
Well, the Gods of the Copybook Headings with monkhood and marriage return, I guess.
I doubt that’s a long term solution. Eventually the sex and apostasy gets boring and then memory and hopes of marriage call one back, maybe to a better place than one was in at first. It happened to me.
#plz no declaw
You’re Christian. Your religion’s central idea of martyrdom, as popularly understood, and brutally oversimplified, involves the government nailing some guy to a stick.
And in this sense, “declawed” refers primarily to religiously-motivated violence, though I suppose it also refers to virality, which is also a (longer-term) risk factor.
So as you might gather, it isn’t Christianity with its “render unto Caesar” and liberal democratic governments that I’m worried about. Nor Buddhism, nor Hinduism…
Anyhow, I think some of the rampant sex culture will decline on its own even without religion, just from people noticing what they previously weren’t socially allowed to notice - most people do seem to emotionally bond from sex, so for most people it really isn’t just some fun casual activity to do with randoms, and also long-term accomplishment tends to build a higher baseline level of happiness than momentary hedonism.
it is v amusing to me that i didn’t expect ppl to find this puzzling
uh non-exhaustive collection of reasons
A) i don’t like being obsolete. i like solving problems and building cool things and stuff, and i like it when those things are useful.
a_1) it tends to go along with something resembling Fully Automated Luxury Communism Where Machines Will Do Anything For You If You Ask
a_2) it tends to allow for arbitrary intelligence boosts and/or hivemind creation
a_3) i don’t think i want to live within range of either of those things because A
B) takes a very gung-ho attidute toward modifying minds which i consider a thing to be done Extremely Cautiously
b_1) i should not be able to make significant changes to myself on impulse. especially not irreversible ones.
C) many of the Ideal Forms i have heard described i would not actually ever want to be in the presence of, often due to effects relating to B
D) pettiest objection: monsters are not my aesthetic :V
E) I REALLY do not want to end up in a Red Queen race where everyone is recklessly modifying themselves so they aren’t at a mental or physical disadvantage relative to their neighbors.
In the future, this era of involuntary death, famine, and war will be thought of as in some ways a more innocent time where the barriers of reality as we intuitively know them were only just starting to break down.
I will miss the year 2007. However, for those unwilling to die, there is no choice but some level of Transhumanism.
What we do in this time, however, matters perhaps more than at any previous time in human history. The ideological justifications for Capitalism as a moral system rather than a means to an end (merely a pragmatic choice based on its effectiveness) must be destroyed if total competition is not going to destroy everything we hold dear.
Honestly tho I just want to be Motoko Kusanagi or Hideo Kuze plzthx.
All of us, Democrats and Republicans, libertarians and communists, tradcons and feminists and cybertranstopians, believe in philosophies that could, if given real power, do harm to people because of their failings. We can not predict what government enforcement or cultural dominance will really look like, and all the mistakes the fallible humans instituting it will make.
The question is not the purity of our mission at the outset, but if, when confronted with these grievances, will we acknowledge them and try to fix them, or will we declare all complaints as trivial, hoaxes, distractions, “not the real problem,” and double down on our vision?
Tell me you’ll give a damn when the errors start mounting up in lives destroyed, and I don’t really care what form of government you pursue.
I’m sympathetic to this, though finding someone who is both that pragmatic and that compassionate is difficult, much less putting them in power.
remedialaction said: As usual, you all approach from an attempt at designing some system, rather than one of what is morally correct. Or I guess thats a utilitarian tendency of conflating the two.
do you really want the state making determinations of what is morally correct?
why do grown ass men at my work think it’s a compliment to say things like, “it’s so endearing that you’re such a nerd but if you were a guy i’d totally wanna be you up for being a loser!!! hahahaha!!!” fuck off jesus
“since I wanna fuck you I don’t think you’re a loser”
It's not necessarily a "fail" if the min-maxing is itself enjoyable, especially if the thing you're min-maxing is itself recreational and not subject to any particular time pressure. I suspect that sometimes when the thing *isn't* recreational, then min-maxing is a subtle attempt to wring some kind of enjoyment out of the process.
I was wondering why Dubya is being marketed lately. Turns out he is releasing a book of portraits of soldiers wounded in his wars, all profits go to their rehab.
I… don’t know how to feel about this.
It’s easier to imagine that he didn’t care, and sent them away to fight solely for his own benefit.
I think maybe he cared, but many of the people around him didn’t, and those who did were blinded by ideology.
I think it’s alright to feel okay about this book. It’s a net improvement in this timeline, isn’t it?
What’s the plan here for open borders, dissolution of nations stuff?
I mean, let’s stop and think about this for a minute.
Presumably, open borders will still be accompanied by democracy by geographical area. In the interests of fairness, voting will also be extended to migrants.
However, there is no limit on the number of people that can move into an area in a given timeframe, as this would end up being considered some form of discrimination. This means that in any year, the people living somewhere could effectively have themselves replaced with a migrant population that then changes all the laws to suit them.
Since the residents lack the ability to exclude people from the government, they lack the ability to control it, and thus don’t effectively own it, since the ability to exclude is one of the core things that ownership is about.
Which, sure, people have been saying “it’s not YOUR government!” and talking about how people don’t have the right to exclude those of other cultures (while either letting cruelties like FGM off the hook, or pretending it isn’t cultural).
But if they don’t own it, why in the world would they fight for it? Why would they fight to defend a government that doesn’t belong to them, doesn’t care about them, and at any time could be taken away from them and looted by others? In a war, why wouldn’t they just leave the territory? If environmental issues become a problem, why not just contribute to them until it’s unprofitable, and then flee?
Some modern countries are already having problems getting enough personnel to staff their armies as it is, and we’re not even halfway this far into Globalism.
Who will fight and die to protect their access to consumer products? Who will fight to protect the rights of others that don’t care about them or their values at all? For a territory that isn’t even really theirs?
All you’re left with are mercenaries. And mercenaries are a terrible option, known all the way back in the days of Machiavelli.
But there are other group memberships that people might be willing to fight for. Ethnic groups, as have been a source of fighting for dominance throughout the ages. Religions, which promise eternal reward after death. Drug cartels and other criminal organizations, with the promise of great payout for the desperate in this life, regardless of whether it’s true. Right-wing and left-wing paramilitaries that are dedicated to ideology.
And, as this starts spiraling out of control, sub-national organizations that, ostensibly, originated for mutual defense.
Having defeated the nation-state, the monopoly on violence loosens, and the fighting shifts to the sub-national level.
transgender people should get to use the correct bathroom and not be misgendered, and it is an issue of basic rights. and trans people are not going into bathrooms to commit sex crimes, that whole idea is absurd
but the conflict is not relevant to most people in the country and they view it as either a distraction, or just more culture war or at worst an attempt to sexually threaten precious and vulnerable women. pushing on the issue almost unavoidably creates disproportionate blowback because to the majority of people, the issue is being given a disproportionate focus and that means it must be nefarious
so why haven’t we, instead of saying “we keep pushing in exactly the same way, casting it as an issue where everyone who opposes us is ideologically befouled and deserving of punishment, thus getting disproportionate blowback and alienating people who we should not be alienating because that leads to a loss of our political power”, and instead of saying “we get so much blowback from how we present this issue as one where people must bend the knee to us or be cast out of respectable society, so we should give up on trying to secure rights for trans people as it’s not convenient for us to do so any more”
why don’t we make the law “people are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but if someone is convicted of sexual assault in a bathroom that they entered by pretending to be a different gender, their sentence is more severe”?
like from our point of view, we’re not losing anything. we know trans people are far less likely than baseline to commit sex crimes and bathroom access is not about enabling sex crimes. but for the people who don’t already agree with us, it looks like we’re both taking measures to deter the thing they don’t want to happen, and putting our money where our mouth is, instead of telling them “this is how things are you are not allowed to notice otherwise now bow to our worldview”. by making it a sentencing rider, we don’t increase the ability of transphobes to frame trans people for sex crimes – if we are afraid this law would encourage them to do so we should be exactly as afraid of them doing so without this law.
like if your position is “we should allow X because it is just, and will not allow Bad Thing Y at all” and your opposition says “we should not allow X because it will just promote Bad Thing Y”, it seems to me that “How about we allow X, but punish Bad Thing Y more harshly if it gets promoted by X, so people don’t do it?” is pretty much the easiest compromise ever.
so why won’t that work?
I imagine people would just say it’s already creating a dangerous situation where sexual assault is more likely to happen and reject it. They will say you are already allowing a risk and that in itself is unacceptable. (Same reasoning why same sex parents adopting kids is not allowed here, even when there is heaps of data showing kids elsewhere are fine, they insist we cannot put children at such a risk not knowing the consequences (even if we DO know!) and it’s too much of a gamble.)
Also we both know cases of fake sexual assault stories, who are widely believed even when there is plain evidence of the contrary, exist. What makes you think it would not happen in this case, when trans women are seen as even more inherently predatory than men?
If they say “Punishing people more won’t deter them from doing bad things” then we just won a huge victory and we get to reduce all the Draconian sentences for all this other shit, since they are the exact people who say we need to have incredibly harsh sentences to prevent people from doing bad things. But I doubt they’ll say that.
And yes, we do know cases of fake sexual assault stories exist. The point is that by being a rider on a sexual assault conviction instead of a crime in and of itself, it does not increase the ability of anyone to frame trans people for sexual assault. It doesn’t even increase the incentive to do so, as it isn’t like the utility of framing someone for being trans is correlated with the number of years they serve is convicted.
We keep saying that there’s no reason to be afraid because letting trans people use the right bathroom is not exposing anyone to danger. If we won’t do this, then either
A: we believe that trans people will commit enough sexual assault in bathrooms that this will be a problem and that means we have been lying this whole time, or
B: we believe that trans people using the right bathroom in transphobic areas will lead to a rash of them being falsely accused of sexual assault, in which case why the fuck are we trying to push this law on transphobic areas when we believe it will just lead to trans people being falsely accused?
right-wingers keep saying “The left wants to let people into the women’s room to assault them because they can claim they ‘identify’ as a woman! It’s just a way for perverts to threaten (precious, wonderful) women!”
we keep telling them “That isn’t what this law is about and that isn’t a thing that happens anyway, the thing you are concerned with is not an event that occurs, you are imagining it, this is only about not harming people for being trans”
if the slightest token effort to put our money where our mouth is and say “this is so much not about letting people attack women in the bathroom that if anyone actually tries to do that we’ll come down way harder on them, because we want to show that we are not about letting women get attacked, and because we don’t think trans people being allowed to use the right bathroom will cause them to attack women” gives us pause, then we need to stop and figure out how we have fucked up because we have fucked up very very very badly.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
I find it very hard, in the general case, to see “giving people free stuff, but in a different way”, as screwing over. Given that a reasonable alternative is “you get nothing” (this is definitely reasonable, as people 60 years ago did not receive medical care from the state and nobody thinks this was screwing anything), why the hell should you be allowed to tar refactoring the system as “screwing”
I’m guessing this applies to me and not SE…
That basically ignores the massive impact that both random chance and imbalances of power have on people. Illness is largely not distributed in a meritocratic way, and even just staying employed in a Capitalist system can contribute to it.
Also, there was a post not long ago about normalizing private charity as the way to provide healthcare for those who can’t afford it, which implies that the alternative is indeed “you get nothing,” since there is no way that private charity will truly replace the cost.
Mostly, though, I don’t mind some level, quite possibly even a very significant level, of liberalization, but I’m seeking something from a basket of ideological trades. Think of it in the vein of “you hate minimum wage because it lowers employment, I think we normally would need minimum wage because those at the bottom are often desperate (thus less negotiating power) and they have a minimum cost for survival, so let’s ideologically trade by lowering minimum wage while simultaneously issuing direct wage subsidies.”
Or having a well-regulated insurance requirement for worker safety or environmental damage by corporations, since causing damage is so much cheaper than fixing it, executives are gone before the damage actually hits, the company can cause more damage than it can ever pay back, etc, so not having a pot of money to solve it creates externalities… That sort of thing. Technically, it’s a kind of state intervention. Technically, it’s a kind of wealth transfer. Also, it pulls on optimization from markets in the hope of more accurately pricing the externalities of injuries/environmental damage/etc. So is it a “market solution”? Or is it evil Statism? Etc.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
Look. You claim you want an efficient system, right? Not just trading someone else’s increase in suffering for another $10,000 worth of luxury car for yourself, right?
I like an efficient system. More healthcare can be purchased for the same amount of money in an efficient system. But as far as I’m concerned, if the money just gets redistributed upwards it’s worthless to my goals, so I have no reason to free up those resources for the sole purpose of them being captured by the wealthy so they can plow them into political campaigns to further undermine public ownership of the state.
And I have no reason to believe that the people complaining about how they have to pay taxes to help those accursed poor single mother welfare recipients are really going to put an equivalent amount of money into charity. Why would I?
But I do like efficiency, so I’m willing to make a trade. If it’s really an efficiency solution, not just a cash grab for the upper class, then we can keep current healthcare spending, oh, or maybe a little lower, so let’s say on par with those evil European countries as a percentage of GDP, and cut everyone a check evenly just for healthcare funds. Let them put it in a health savings account, spend it on insurance, maybe let the unspent health savings be inherited or something. Collect %s of future checks to offset the costs of emergency care for the uninsured.
Maybe not a check, maybe that’s not the most efficient method in particular, but you get the idea.
If you’re willing to make that sacrifice or one like it, then, maybe I and others could believe that this is actually, really about efficiency.
(Edit: Also, on a side-note since it’s not really the core purpose of this post, as the core purpose is to offer that above ideological trade - legislators are actually paid to do legislation, and they have staffs and think-tanks that work for the parties at their disposal. Specialization of labor doesn’t just apply to the private sector. Individual citizens largely don’t have these things and the trust networks around them are different since there’s a lot of money to be made by scamming people (see: homeopathics are still a thing). So there is some reason to believe that the political parties and legislators might outperform individuals. Now, regulatory capture is an issue, but since the proposed solution tends to be “just let companies do whatever they want”, and that usually is the situation that caused regulation to come into existence in the first place, it often isn’t a real solution. I think government itself can be designed much better, but others seem to either believe we don’t need to, or that it’s impossible, so…)
Your fetish is the main topic of a two hours long movie where it’s applied to the whole world. There’s no sexy time, the whole movie is about the financial and societal consequences on your fucked up fetish on society.
How boring is it?
Oh my goodness.
Well, at least there would be immortality, and an effective guarantee that the universe wouldn’t end. On the other hand, prepare for one helluva culture shock, we’re going deep, and magic is real.
The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Additionally, by trying to refocus their campaigning for lower taxes and reduction of artificial costs of living by showing them the calculations on how much even minimum-wage workers can end up paying (an awful lot, possibly even more than some millionaire investors) and how the state wastes most of the money it takes instead of spending it in any useful way, and how much of the price in the things they would want to spend those minimum wages on is artificially created through dysfunctional regulation.
Capitalism benefits from patriarchy, white supremacy, rape culture. These divide the working class, produce markets, etc. So capitalism cannot effectively end them.
I hear this a lot and I can’t help but notice that white supremacy and patriarchy have taken a lot of hits over the past 50 years or so and I don’t see anyone describing this period as being a setback for capitalism in fact the contrary
But have you noticed that right-wing political parties often have to lean on patriarchy and white supremacy to maintain their position? Do parties that purely push free-market policies without the rest of that stuff do well?
If you are forced to divide every possible political issue between two sides then you’re going to get incoherent results, so don’t do that.
Technically under Anarcho-Capitalism, it isn’t against the rules to create a really elaborate Communism theme park.
there isn’t anything in the rules that says a dog can’t be General Secretary of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, President of the People’s Republic of China, 1st-ranked member of Politburo Standing Committee,
Comrade Barx’s Communist Funland is a jointly-owned subsidiary of the Northern Arizona Mutual Assistance Association (NAMAA). By entering, you agree to waive liability against Comrade Barx’s Communist Funland, its employees, and owners, including the Northern Arizona Mutual Assistance Association, in accordance with the Standard Voluntary Commercial Code.
Please act reponsibly, have fun, and remember: the dream of Socialism begins with you!
Technically under Anarcho-Capitalism, it isn’t against the rules to create a really elaborate Communism theme park.
(disclaimer: am not an economist, middleish epistemic status, etc.)
Indeed, and this is a common argument used in their favor, which fair enough, but the problem is socialism is expensive, and unless they start out in control of a very large chunk of wealth and resources after the Revolution, they are not going to be able to accumulate enough to help everyone, like they could if they could redistribute property- after all, nothing like this has formed already, and AFAICT there is no law against it, atleast not everywhere…
Honestly, I was just joking about how hilarious it would be to find Marxland™ in Ancapistan, complete with ironic Stalin posters and Modernist/Brutalist architecture.
I don’t actually want to live in or anywhere near the nightmare that Ancapistan would be. I don’t even want to live in the society AnCaps think Ancapistan would be.
I like how the literal symbol of communism is actually two pieces of physical capital.
the workers own their own personal possessions and small tools, while tractors and the fields themselves are owned by the state on behalf of the workers.
How big can a tool be before it is state property?
Hand Drills?
Electric Drills?
Drill Presses?
Milling Machines?
It’s determined dynamically according to the total capital of the commune, where the tool’s value is determined by a system of dynamic bidding split amongst the participants in order to determine the opportunity cost of the time and resources used to create and maintain it and -
oops.
additional hammers and sickles can be exchanged for marxbucks!
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Located only ten miles south of the Samsung-Sony Freedom Arcology in the area formerly known as New York City, Marxland brings the values of the past to life in the relatable, old-fashioned manner of direct physical experience. Harvest live Monsanto Simulcorn™ in the fields, share property communally, or engage in numerous classic human activities such steelworking and fishing right here in our scenic historical compound…
I like how the literal symbol of communism is actually two pieces of physical capital.
the workers own their own personal possessions and small tools, while tractors and the fields themselves are owned by the state on behalf of the workers.
How big can a tool be before it is state property?
Hand Drills?
Electric Drills?
Drill Presses?
Milling Machines?
It’s determined dynamically according to the total capital of the commune, where the tool’s value is determined by a system of dynamic bidding split amongst the participants in order to determine the opportunity cost of the time and resources used to create and maintain it and -
I reasoned the PC stuff was like antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It doesn’t matter today, it doesn’t matter tomorrow, but one day, 30 years from now, multi-drug-resistant TB develops and the problems pile on and on from there.
…but if you can keep developing new antibiotics fast enough to keep up with it, you can sort-of ignore your bad practices and the collateral damage they cause.
I thought that’s what was happening, and that the reckoning wasn’t going to be until 2028, as the result of a slowly building fire of, well, various mens’ movements refusing to comply with male gender roles (something already in progress at the fringes). Instead the tension was lurking beneath the surface across multiple axes, but the media didn’t want to talk about it and people would be socially punished for talking about it sometimes, so it wasn’t as visible.
I’d like to think there is some new path where the word “Racism” can be made powerful again, but I cannot find it. It would require socially punishing false accusations of racism, which simply isn’t feasible under the current ideological framework. I’m not one to buy into the “Contradictions of $Ideology” idea much, (since most of the people pushing it are Communists ignoring the ‘contradictions’ essentially inevitable to their own system,) but I think this is partially a case of that.
In some ways I welcome the Populism, though. My estimate of corporate oligarchy and permanent majority has declined significantly.
This is something I might write a longer more thought-out thing about later
But did anyone else (especially girls with big boobs) feel like, throughout your childhood and teen years, everybody was always saying guys were into big boobs and that conventionally attractive girl = girl with big boobs, but this never actually seemed to be the case?
Like girls in real life and in teen books would be all bemoaning their flat chests and wishing they had big boobs so guys would be into them, but then in real life, the popular girl the guys were all into was some skinny thing with C-cups at best, and the media-sanctioned epitome of female beauty was people like Keira Knightley and Rosario Dawson.
I just got reminded of this hard when I was re-watching Galavant. Madalena is initially the hero’s love interest and she’s always positioned by the show as super sexy and irresistible. Here’s how she’s described:
Long legs and perfect skin A body built for sin With cleavage you could hold a whole parade in!
…and here’s that ‘cleavage’ in action:
What’s with this? Why is this a thing?
I feel like I have a hunch as to some reasons, but it’s hard to put a finger on.
- “Big tits” is just a really easy description, and that should never be underestimated as a cause for overuse.
- It is a positive that’s correlated with negatives (it’s very obvious although rarely said that big tits on fat women don’t really count).
- Modeling has more specific demands than just “being hot to men”, and these anticorrelate with big breasts somewhat, and modeling is really influential.
- The first point also might work against women with big breasts (esp. in settings where other women are involved), as it is also really easy to go “people only like you for your tits”, and/or big tits are seen as kind of crude (c.f. girls in American schools being told they’re dressed provocatively for clothes that would be utterly normal on smaller-breasted girls).
I don’t really see how any of those explain it? I mean, ‘thin’ is an even easier description. The influence of modelling can make the Keira Knightley figure mainstream-attractive, but doesn’t explain why people would keep talking as if big tits were what everyone was into. 2 and 4 explain some degree of animosity toward women with big tits, but not how the world would settle on this bizarre convention of talking as if they are considered attractive but acting as if pretty much the opposite is true.
Also with the modelling thing, I understand that the convention for modelling is that models should avoid having curves at all costs, and that once something is the done thing it can stay that way just because that’s the way we do things. I don’t buy that there’s any reason why it necessarily should be that way. I mean even if you buy the argument that it’s easier to do cool and elaborate things with clothes when you don’t have to worry about making it work around curves, high-end fashion is ostensibly about showing off that you are the best at designing clothes. One can easily imagine a world where runway models had to have the most extreme curves you could find, because if that makes it harder, then clearly the curvier your models, the more skilled you must be to make your clothes work on them.
Kira Knightly has ~100k followers on Instagram, a place you can get lots of pics of her. Kim Kardashian has 100M followers.
Throughout my childhood and teen years, Kim Kardashian was not a thing.
Kim Kardashian (who has a D cup and is very curvy) has been a thing since 2007. Before that you had women like Jessica Simpson (D cup) and Pamela Anderson (whose implants were famous) and Angelina Jolie (who has an hourglass figure 36-23.5-35).
Mainstream American culture considers a few body types as “beautiful” but large breasts are “sexy.” Women with smaller breasts who want to be seen as “sexy” (on the national level) either need to dress in a way to make it seem like they have big breasts (photo shoots from certain angles, clothing designed for this effect), or find some other method to get that association in people’s mind (having a sex tape leak or whatever Miley Cyrus did both come to mind). Whereas (relatively skinny) women with larger breast have a hard time not being seen as “sexy” by mainstream society.
Also “big boobs” often means “big boobs relative to BMI”, so a thinner woman can be considered busty even if her actual breast volume is below average.
Also also, because it’s seen as sexual/sexy, liking big boobs is seen as crass and objectifying, or low class(?), particularly for heterosexual men. It’s basically assumed that it’s all the guy likes about the woman if he acts like that.
Really says something that now I sort all political commentary I read into “Pre-Trump“ and “Post-Trump.“
mitigatedchaos said: Did you at least give Trump a 15%+ chance of winning the election?
I hate to give odds on stuff like that because it drives me nuts, but to me the “Trump era” starts well before the election. I’m defining it as the moment when we knew that “Trumpism” was something that existed and was more than marginally popular in the US.
Even if Hillary had won or probably even if Cruz had squeaked out the nomination, it would have changed shit. The political writing reflects that.
What about all the people who were going nuts for Palin in 2008?
Palin didn’t go through the primary. We could all say that she basically didn’t matter. She was just this weird VP that McCain chose and didn’t take seriously. Trump was chosen directly by primary voters, the fact that he could win says something.
I would tend to agree on Palin. I haven’t seen excitement for Palin like I have for Trump.
There are so many things that allowed this to happen, and I think many of them would have been preventable if people, uh, behaved better. I don’t mean this as a virtue critique of the Trump voters, but rather the opposite. Overuse of terms like “racism”, ignoring the plight of American workers, not reaching out to areas outside the cities, focusing primarily on minority demographics, talking about “demographic destiny” with glee, and so on.
@collapsedsquid My question was mostly to ping whether you were aware of these looming things beforehand, and if so, for how long. While I saw “sexism” being overused as a term, I didn’t really realize just how thin it had worn outside of internet communities. However, the further they got into the primary, the more I said “this is unpredictable, so I’m revising the chance of a Trump win upwards”.
It was the most elite unit we [ie: The Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had. The members were suicidal – not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.
“My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.
Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.“
“So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.
Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.”
I’m a crazy romantic and even I didn’t expect that tying guys like these down with wives and kids would have such a radical civilising effect. I wonder if this has any implications for gangs or other violent pests?
If that’s the case though, then polygyny is a bad thing unless you want large numbers of risk-tolerant men.
How should doctors and hospitals act with regards to emergency care, assuming an inability to tell for sure whether or not someone has insurance at the time treatment is given and an inability to shop around for hospitals during an emergency? What should happen when I call 911 as a patient? What about as a bystander?
Until EMTALA in 1986 we got along without hospitals being forced to provide emergency care for everyone and somehow society was able to function, but that requirement is to a significant degree responsible for the massive rise in health care costs since then, and the failed attempt to force everyone onto insurance that was Obamacare was essentially a way of attempting to deal with the severe negative consequences of EMTALA, which has forced many hospitals to stop providing any emergency services whatsoever.
The libertarian thing to do would be to go back to how it was before Congress intervened in 1986, and let hospitals decide for themselves how to provide care and to whom, as is their right. Then if your top priority is making it so that poor people are treated regardless of ability to pay, organize a charity and pay for them yourself, don’t push it onto hospitals as an unfunded mandate that messes up the entire health care system.
So before EMALTA, how was it determined whether someone would be treated? Did hospitals turn people away if they didn’t have insurance cards? If they did, would the ambulance keep on going from hospital to hospital until they found someone who would treat the patient? How often were people with insurance accidentally turned down? If the passage of EMALTA caused prices to rise as much as you say it did. Then obviously there had to have been a lot of people who used to be turned away but now are not. What do the profiles of these marginal people look like?
Hospitals did turn people away if they thought they wouldn’t be able to get them to pay for care, yeah, but I think that’s rational and defensible. Insured people accidentally getting turned down didn’t seem to be a significant problem - if you have insurance you’ll probably always have your insurance card or at least an ID with you out in public, and if you’re having an emergency at home you’ll probably get brought in by someone who knows who you are. And I think hospitals were more focused on denying care to people they were already certain wouldn’t pay than unidentified unconscious people in urgent need.
A lot of the people who would have been turned down before EMTALA are people with non-life-threatening conditions who go to the emergency room knowing they can’t be turned down for treatment and then disappear without paying. I used to date a girl whose job it was to try to bill those people for the care they received at her hospital - less than half of emergency care in the US now actually gets paid for, they wind up just having to write most of it off and the rest of us pay for it through higher insurance premiums, ultimately. It’s a significant component of why health insurance has become so unaffordable.
Her hospital at least worked with charities to try to make sure the true charity cases got paid for, and some people who had the means but refused to pay were sued or referred to collections agencies so ultimately the hospital would receive pennies on the dollar. Poor US citizens are covered by Medicaid. This was in California, so the real problem was illegal immigrants - they couldn’t get insurance but they couldn’t be made to pay for anything either, so hospitals are just forced to give them unlimited free care and they jam up emergency wards with non-urgent problems because they have no other place to go. It’s not their fault, really, but the inefficiency of this system is mind-boggling, the waste of medical resources is immense, and it generates a lot of animosity against illegal immigrants. California passed a ballot initiative in the 1990s that would have allowed hospitals to deny emergency care to anyone in the country illegally but it was struck down as going against federal law.
In Libertopia there’d be no such issues with citizenship status preventing people from getting insurance or simply paying for care on a fee-for-service basis, which would likely be much more common without the tax incentive for employer-provided health insurance, one of the other big problems ruining US health care. Costs would drop massively and I think it’d bring guaranteed life-saving emergency care (within reason) for almost everyone within the range of things that could easily be accomplished through voluntary charity in a developed country.
It’s the discrimination problem once again; if you make decisions on the hospital level you can turn away the people who are obviously Not Going To Pay without causing more than a few highly-visible false positives (and even there making it possible to create better commitments like “I know my situation looks sketchy but if I skip paying you’ll just contact my Dia group and they’ll pay you okay” would make it easier to discriminate accurately), but if you’re trying to make sweeping policy-level decisions you inevitably have to discard massive amounts of information, rendering the bureaucracy necessarily stupid. Then economic incentives lead to people capitalizing on that enforced information asymmetry.
Additionally, you can use modern technologies to create robust reputational systems that reward hospitals that deliver care for true emergency cases (= actual unanticipated emergencies, not “this known but untreated condition has gotten worse over time and it was inevitable that it would cause an Expensive Crisis at some point”) regardless of immediate ability to pay. If customers prefer hospitals that do provide such care, that’s effectively an indirect subsidy for privately socialized emergency care.
As a patient I’d prefer to have some more specialized number than 911 for contacting my own emergency health provider. Additionally I’d probably be totally fine with an rfid chip linked to a blockchain identity smart-contracted to my insurance subscription (= subscription and payment status verifiable by anybody with internet access) assuming I had actual control over it and could wipe+reprogram it at will whenever I want to use a different identity for whatever purpose.
I mean, the advantage of 911 is that it’s a universally known “OH SHIT FUCK HELP” button that even a five year old can understand how to use. Complicated setups with rfid chips make that harder. Same problem with private solutions to policing, really. People need simple, universal, easy to understand panic buttons that will put them at least somewhere close to the right track. Like, police aren’t ideal, but I feel like there has to be SOME kind of publicly run organization that handles emergencies or things-that-vaguely-seem-like-they-might-turn-out-to-be emergencies, and unless that organization asks for upfront payment on a per-call basis it’s gonna be a public good. (Yes we need to make the cops not be the default responders, but I’m not convinced that this necessarily involves getting rid of 911).
I don’t know what you were expecting. Privatizing everything based on assuming the rationality of economic actors is kinda the ‘thing’ of the ideological group you reached out to.
Some answer where some regulations are loosened while others are strengthened is not what you’re going to get. And if you’re going to have generic emergency responders in America that aren’t cops, then they’ll need guns.
But here, let me throw in an oddball solution. Have multiple competing police agencies - but under the government, contracted at the municipal level.
Edit: Actually, let me throw a more serious one out here. People are bloody irrational, so I don’t care if they want to spend it on something else: tax everyone and give them an $X,000 healthcare voucher which can either be spent on insurance, or a health savings account. Take money out of it for unpaid emergency care at some rate over time. Maybe allow the HSA to be inherited.
