Popehat pointed me to this distinctly Orwellian transcript from a federal court case, in which the defendant, who wants to plead guilty, asks if she has to affirm in the plea agreement that her public defender did an adequate job when he’d actually missed all their meetings, missed key court deadlines, and couldn’t answer questions about what she was charged with:
The Defendant: What I meant to say is that at the end of the plea, it says that I have to submit and say I have been … that “I am satisfied that my defense attorney has represented me in a competent manner,” … I don’t want – I’m scared to go to trial because I don’t think that he’s going to, you know, put a fight for me. Your Honor, he didn’t submit any pretrial motions at all.
… Do I have to have the clause in there about my attorney? [referring to the part of the plea colloquy where she’s asked if she’s satisfied with her attorney's representation]
[Prosecutor]: Yes. You’re asking me?
The Court: Yes, you do. Who are you asking?
The Defendant: Just – I don’t know.
The Court: Well, you turned to [the prosecutor]. That’s part of [Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure] 11, ma’am, because you have to be satisfied with the representation and understand the terms and conditions of your plea agreement.
But in terms of satisfied with the representation, it doesn’t mean – There’s – In terms of competent representation, it doesn’t mean that [your public defender] has to look at and touch every single aspect of the case. If [the prosecutor] reached out to [your public defender] and said, okay, count number one and count number ten, which happen to be what we’re seeking your client’s guilty plea on, here’s the discovery information that directly relates to Count 1 and Count 10. If he reviews that, that’s a diligent lawyer who’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing.
…
The Defendant: Why is it the fact that even if I’m willing to take the plea, that clause about him, about my attorney? Why do I have to submit to the fact that he competently, you know, advised me in the matter?
The Court: Rule 11, there’s certain things that must happen if a person says I wish to plead guilty. As part of Rule 11, you have to believe that your lawyer is competent and has represented you properly.
The Defendant: Your Honor, I don’t believe that, but at the same time I’m scared to go to trial with him because I don’t think that he’s going to do me justice.
The judge says that if she doesn’t want to go to trial and probably get life in prison, she has to plead guilty, and she’s not allowed to plead guilty until she affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel. If she will not agree that she was competently advised, it goes to trial, and her trial lawyer will be the one who missed meetings with her and a life sentence is on the line.
She affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel.
The whole thing is just nightmarish, but to me the most nightmarish bit is that it was over a marijuana dealing operation. She was facing life in prison, she got 121 months with the plea, this whole charade of a just system charaded along, over her boyfriend growing and selling weed.
So, uh, have your usual reminder that fuck the American criminal justice system.
Now imagine the incentives of privatized for-profit prisons and prison labor on top of that - TUoC surely has, but there are still too many people that support it.
This probably wouldn’t even be that hard to remedy if they just allocated more money to hiring public defense lawyers, but who will do that? (Certainly not the state where they tried to draft the governor in due to a chronic shortage of available public defenders.) Republicans don’t actually believe in good government - they believe in the myth of bootstraps and tax cuts. Democrats don’t believe in it either, so instead of solving it we’ll just get some other bullsht social program that empirically doesn’t work, or schools that don’t discipline bad behaviors until they end up on the wrong end of a cop.
This all undermines the public’s faith in the justice system and the state generally, which makes policing itself harder, likely increasing crime. (For instance, similar failures involving simultaneous under- and over-policing continue to undermine the inner cities. Some people there now believe it is done on purpose, and they likely wouldn’t believe prosecutors could protect them from drug gang retaliation - so why would they cooperate to get rid of the drug gangs?) You can try to get around that with propaganda, and indeed to a degree they do, but it has to bottom out at reality somewhere.
Even imagine a simple rule like “as much money has to be allocated to your defense as they spend prosecuting you”. I bet most Americans would even consider that fair. But where will the political will to materialize it come from?
Computers are an absolutely amazing device but it doesn’t take that much to render them inoperable. Entropy is the norm. Order is productive but fragile.
I didn’t explicitly and solely mean contemporary material culture and technology; it can be extended to philosophy, to art, to every aspect of d e e p c u l t u r e
Computers metaphorically. AR’s fears are probably overestimated, but “if it’s so strong, how can it die?” ignores how fragile complex systems are. You can build in some antifragility, but there are limits. (Humans, for instance, can recover from a variety of injuries, but routinely die from cancer, which requires only a few molecular alterations/mutations in one cell to start.)
Computers are an absolutely amazing device but it doesn’t take that much to render them inoperable. Entropy is the norm. Order is productive but fragile.
The tombstone of Western Civilization is going to say “At least we weren’t racist”
I will be pissing on the tombstone, 40oz in hand
i’ll welcome the birth of a global civilization, where we can all live in peace, with open arms
Don’t tell me there are people who seriously believe that’s what’s going to happen once the lights go out in the west
yeah, because western society is shit
“The beatings and murders of homosexuals in Chechnya,” he said, “are nothing more than further evidence of the vile influence of Western Imperialism. Yes, it is claimed that the West loves the homosexuals, so much that they have parades of openly gay men in the cities- but this is staged by their Capitalist Hollywood studios! It is only in tolerant and culturally diverse countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that homosexuals can achieve true freedom from Western hegemony.”
“When the Revolution comes, we will finally put to rest the legacies of vile white men such as Ghengis Khan.”
I wish there was a way to say “I don’t think that (thing) is good, but I also don’t totally repudiate any identification with it.”
Also, I wish I could make some statement of traditionalist Catholicism and obedience to God but I’m shy, timid, and I also don’t want to pointlessly offend people.
See also: “I’ve been working on re-learning rigid gender roles and centering marriage and heterosexual relationships”.
There isn’t yet, but there will be. Even now, some groups are reconstructing that having certain social rules is Actually Good.
The president of the Unicode Foundation, somberly, takes the podium. “Due to popular demand,” he sighs, “the ahegao emoji will be added to the unicode standard. May history be merciful to us.”
Some sides I’m on haven’t fully materialized yet, but they will. My blog description contains more than one metaphorical truth about which sides I’m on, that should be easy enough to guess at.
But on second thought, let’s do a reading of the blog description for anyone who thought it was just flavor text. (Not you, Anon-kun. I know you’re a very smart man of many talents, which is how you can send so many asks to so many people on this website.)
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. - This is more aspirational than anything, but also I support the right of American citizens to obtain human augmentations under the 2nd amendment, subject to certain restrictions.
Wanted time criminal. - Likes to wax poetic about non-existent possible futures. Future shocked by the 2016 election.
Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. - Two-sided:
1. In the future, the government may introduce multiple classes of citizenship in order to handle the fallout of immigration issues. Also, if the formation of a North American Union happens, entering the Orange Timeline may have only somewhat delayed it. Progressively larger international unions is the current way forward for both Liberal Capitalists and Leftists.
2. Actually, to bolster Nationalism I would deliberately create a tiered citizenship system if I were Technocratic Dictator of the United States of AmericaCentral Director of the North American Union, based on a series of tests and a period of National Service which would be used for survival training and martial education to make the nation even harder to invade and help communicate the idea that citizenship isn’t something free that you just give out.
Also, as you might guess, it indicates where I happen to live.
Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, - Using cybernetic technology to make a hivemind is Bad, okay? I don’t care how equal it supposedly makes you. This is one possible nightmare future for China, which is actually even more of a nightmare for the West than the National Technocratic Black Dragon timeline.
the Ultra-Caliphate, - Islamic Theocracy may be Culturally Diverse, but it’s a plague upon mankind which wishes to enslave us. For now a wide unification across multiple polities isn’t feasible, but that may change as conditions change. Now with cybernetic implants to enforce Islamic Law.
Google Defense Network, - Let’s not explicitly make corporations with massive surveillance networks and armies of autonomous killer robots the State, okay?
and the People’s Republic of Cascadia. - Originally the Free Peoples’ Republic of Cascadia - apostrophe positioning deliberate. If we took campus Commies and campus SJ seriously and they created a state, it would be a ludicrously oppressive disaster constantly insisting that the outgroup can’t be oppressed, so therefore it’s impossible for us to oppress them.
National Separatist, enemy of the Earth Sphere Federation government and its unificationist allies. - If Open Borders becomes popular, the balance will shift towards a unifying global government, and that government will insist on controlling everything as far out as the Moon. This is almost inevitable with open borders, and will come out of crisis management treaties and a need to control criminals as they cross national borders. It isn’t an accident that power has been centralizing in the EU.
Its enemies may become known as National Separatists, and it will oppose them on the grounds that they are bigoted anti-[dominant economic mode] racist X-ophobic terrorists that are identical to Hitler. To expand its power, the ESF will leverage whatever means it can get away with, particularly economic, to pressure hold-out countries into joining.
However, the median quality of government on Earth is not America or Western Europe, but probably more like Brazil both in competence and in corruption levels. This isn’t an accident, institutions and culture both matter a lot, the causality for them doesn’t run purely from economic development to nice culture and good institutions. The formation of a world government is actually really, really bad. It must be strangled before it ever gets a chance to breath, here in the youth of our timeline, the first half of the 21st century.
In reference to this post: I would oppose a Communist revolution, through various means. That ideology has earned my “the red hammer” tag for a reason. The question was asked in the context of a right-winger attempting to determine whether I qualify as right-wing.
Although part of this consideration is that any Communism which is revolutionary is bound to end up more like previous disastrous failures than like the Israeli Kibbutzes, which while still not actually a good idea (required some subsidization, bad for children’s psychological development) didn’t involve going on internal starvation / murder sprees, and are very small (Dunbar’s Number territory - not a coincidence).
An actual Socialism that could work, that would spread throughout the world, would be based on an actual working model that exceeds Capitalist production, which could be replicated without force of arms because even 85th-percentile productive people would volunteer for it.
There is also the matter of how those movements themselves would treat me, how identity politics movements would treat me, and so on. They would all treat me as an undesirable outsider, effectively putting me with the opposition by default. Some of them would do far worse.
Some sides I’m on haven’t fully materialized yet, but they will. My blog description contains more than one metaphorical truth about which sides I’m on, that should be easy enough to guess at.
i was as pissed as anybody about banning iranians but idk why ppl get so upset about the wall? Like there was this sign on the university like “NO BAN NO WALLS” well no ban sure but illegal immigration from mexico is already banned idk the big deal about a wall, i aske dsomeone and they were like “it’s a waste of money” and that’s TOTALLY not what people are complaining about when they say “NO BAN NO WALLS”, or they’d be elsewhere writing “NO BAN NO EXPENSIVE DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS”
It’s banned as a matter of law, but if you read between the lines it’s something the US basically allows for multiple reasons.
Let’s say you had a piece of property that was yours, but for years you generally ignored it and let people wander through it or do whatever. After years this, people built their lives around being able to do this. Then one day, you show up and get everyone there arrested for trespassing and build a wall around it. That’s a fairly good analogy.
(I should point that this is a problem that is specifically addressed in legal systems through the concept of “Adverse Possession”)
If the Democrats weren’t either deliberately planning “Demographic Destiny” or just celebrating it, I’d be far less sympathetic to the pro-Wall position. Trump voters have judged that the only way to get a handle on immigration in this country is to build a physical barrier that is politically inconvenient to remove - and based on the level of quiet support for Open Borders among prominent Democrats and the like, I don’t see that they’re wrong about that.
Open Borders WILL create a World Government unless it is fought. If a giant dumb wall buys us another ten or twenty years without a World Government, then so be it.
As far as I can tell, people with poor executive functioning generally:
find it hard to get up and get water even if they’re really thirsty
get metaphorically tired after doing stuff and have to rest, even if it wasn’t really Objectively Tiring
have to put lots of effort into continuing to do stuff after they have begun
have to invest some initial effort into beginning tasks, even if the task itself isn’t that hard and/or they really want to do the task
find it somewhat metaphorically-wearying to do too many Different things without a break
and as their energy is used up, it takes more energy to do comparatively easy things, such that things that would’ve taken 10 effort at the beginning now take 100 effort
but also they can sometimes get really invested in doing a thing after they have begun, at which point it stops taking away energy and takes almost no willpower at all
the more things they have to do, the more difficult it is to begin, even if all of those things are fairly easy. it is not clear whether it takes more energy to begin, or if it’s just harder to make the Decision
Some of these are things like “bad at transitions” and “getting focused on one thing”. But other things are really weird and I don’t get why they happen.
What is this metaphorical Effort that gets depleted whenever I have to clean the kitchen or do chores, so that I don’t have Effort left to do homework, or, more precisely, so that I have to spend more Effort to do homework? And that somehow trades off against ability to get water? This sounds fake even though I know it’s not?
Is there any kind of neurological explanation for this mysterious quality that causes me to suck at doing stuff?
Your body has to expend resources to accomplish tasks, but in the ancestral environment focusing on tasks that weren’t sufficiently rewarding was dangerous as it could mean not eating. So, there is an instinct/mechanism to cut off unrewarding tasks. What happens when that instinct/mechanism is too powerful?
Huh, I would assume that too many tasks get cut off?
Do you have any sources for this?
Sorry, I should have been more clear but I was answering quickly. As someone with poor executive functioning, this is my speculation / reasoning based on observation for why it would be this way.
If we imagine the hypothetical person with pure focus, able to override all distractions and do their boring work, we have a person that might literally keep working and working on accounting spreadsheets or boring through a tree looking for honey, while they starve to death.
The cues to stop come up from within our subconscious. (We can also note people injuring themselves while under the influence of various drugs.)
So as with many things in biology, there may be a range of behaviors and the farther towards the outer edge of that range, above or below, the more dangerous. Poor executive functioning thus being below the optimal level of filtering distractions / internal rewards / stick-to-it-iveness.
A reverse haunted house for dogs like you bring your dog and scary strangers in masks casually emerge from around corners only to cower and flee when your dog barks at them, making the dog feel like it has done a very good job protecting you and getting free treats at the end
As far as I can tell, people with poor executive functioning generally:
find it hard to get up and get water even if they’re really thirsty
get metaphorically tired after doing stuff and have to rest, even if it wasn’t really Objectively Tiring
have to put lots of effort into continuing to do stuff after they have begun
have to invest some initial effort into beginning tasks, even if the task itself isn’t that hard and/or they really want to do the task
find it somewhat metaphorically-wearying to do too many Different things without a break
and as their energy is used up, it takes more energy to do comparatively easy things, such that things that would’ve taken 10 effort at the beginning now take 100 effort
but also they can sometimes get really invested in doing a thing after they have begun, at which point it stops taking away energy and takes almost no willpower at all
the more things they have to do, the more difficult it is to begin, even if all of those things are fairly easy. it is not clear whether it takes more energy to begin, or if it’s just harder to make the Decision
Some of these are things like “bad at transitions” and “getting focused on one thing”. But other things are really weird and I don’t get why they happen.
What is this metaphorical Effort that gets depleted whenever I have to clean the kitchen or do chores, so that I don’t have Effort left to do homework, or, more precisely, so that I have to spend more Effort to do homework? And that somehow trades off against ability to get water? This sounds fake even though I know it’s not?
Is there any kind of neurological explanation for this mysterious quality that causes me to suck at doing stuff?
Your body has to expend resources to accomplish tasks, but in the ancestral environment focusing on tasks that weren’t sufficiently rewarding was dangerous as it could mean not eating. So, there is an instinct/mechanism to cut off unrewarding tasks. What happens when that instinct/mechanism is too powerful?
So, I don’t wholly object to legalism. If you take the story about the roving bandit and the stationary bandit where the stationary bandit became the state, and to me that was a great advantage because it formalized the rules. You could still be exploited, but if you knew how and when you would be exploited, you could plan, you could build, you could do all sorts of things. Legalism in this case can be thought of as a technology that helped us.
But there’s a difference between that and thinking that if only we could get the right set of rules, we can be saved. In my mind, if we could make a legal system so universally good it couldn’t be abused, than we wouldn’t need a legal system because we’re already just so good. So I don’t think that rules are the answer to this problem.
I think a softer version of that same premise does work. The system creates the incentives people are responding to, they do actually respond to them, and there is a LOT of room for improvement.
The design of the system is absolutely crucial. It might require morality to enforce, but it is the system that creates the context/environment within which morality is learned - or unlearned, in the case of damage to corruption-resistance in Communist countries that lasts to this day, after they are no longer Communist.
It also creates the expectations about what is normal, which is part of what LGBTs are trying to make sure gay marriage is recognized legally (rather than opting for weaker “civil unions”).
I don’t believe the orthodox leftist answer, at least not anywhere near completely. It excuses culture, for instance. People aren’t reducible solely to economics, and it doesn’t matter whether it is AnCaps or Communists that are doing the reducing.
it’s implicit in mainstream conceptions of nationalism/national liberation that a nation can attain the fullest expression of its freedom as a nation without ‘interference’ from anyone else, i.e. in an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous state. like that’s the ideal venue for free expression, cultural flowering, etc.
Not everyone has the same experience as you, and not every Nationalist is a cultural-isolation-maximizer.
The Japanese have managed to remain Japanese while changing, flowing, adapting concepts from around the world, and they have an entire subset of their syllabulary used to represent foreign loanwords.
And yet… the lack of crime, the lack of Islamic terrorist attacks, being able to trust children to ride the train to school, carefully queuing up to receive supplies in the wake of a massive natural disaster… in other, more multicultural places this either isn’t the case, is only the case for the wealthy, or is enforced by the iron hand of a soft authoritarian state.
Culture is a wave, not a water, but that doesn’t mean we have to blur all of them together. Diversity isn’t a terminal value.
Since it sort of blew up more than I was expecting, I’ll share a few thoughts I had on matters relating to that “antipolitics“ post.
First of all, there’s the desire for rules that can’t be games by socially savvy people, but what you’re instead getting is rules that are games by people who are skilled in certain types of abstract reasoning. Legal realism means more than just “property is coercive,“ it means that you can think of law as less of rules that are followed and more and predictions on what legal judgements will be passed. When laws are vague or contradictory, as they often are, then it’s those abstract reasoning abilities that matter when arguing.
I’ve said before that it’s interesting how many libertarian bloggers are lawyers, and to me this pretty much lays out the connection. Same thing I was thinking about when I remarked on how Veblen said that lawyers tended to be most opposed to socialism or when I was mildly smug that people with a law degree are significantly worse predictors than those without. It’s all about this certain way of thinking. Hell, you can think of the legal realism school as the exception that proves the rule.
So this is a method of thinking that’s shared by libertarians, rationalists, neoreactionaries and exemplified by lawyers. I’ve got problems with this school, I think it tends against empiricism. It’s not explicit, and empirical observations can be slotted in, but they often appear to be an afterthought.
The upshot of this though is that rather than oppose this because it’s unworkable, you can view this type of legalism as just an attempt to shift power from people who do social networking to people who do this style of abstract reasoning. You may view it as not a power shift but a principled objection, but I’m sure the social networkers feel that their method is the natural and just way to organize society.
(Not saying this is explicitly self-serving, it’s just about how the patterns of thinking people have inform their worldview in way that ends up favoring themselves.)
Quite frankly, a lot of the social network dominance types (in politics) are either self-serving “protagonist-centered morality” types, or manipulators, or against some kind of empiricism. The concerns over the Tyranny of Structurelessness are very valid.
Not to mention that countries with this Rules focus are outperforming ones that have high amoral familism, etc.
That doesn’t mean Libertarianism is going to fly (as you’ve no doubt read me pointing out), though. What it means is that since we can’t entirely chase out politics, we have to plan for it. You can think of it as the values portion of the policy vector < values, efficacy >.
I could argue that the Rules focus is an illusion, and what causes outperformance is that the networks in advanced countries are more connected and less cliquish. There’s this difference between rules used to organize society and having rules, maybe rules are just used as a method for avoiding responsibility.
Ah, but how did they get that way? If you posit it isn’t the rules or the focus on rules, then you might start heading towards HBD and other more reactionary type thoughts…
Since it sort of blew up more than I was expecting, I’ll share a few thoughts I had on matters relating to that “antipolitics“ post.
First of all, there’s the desire for rules that can’t be games by socially savvy people, but what you’re instead getting is rules that are games by people who are skilled in certain types of abstract reasoning. Legal realism means more than just “property is coercive,“ it means that you can think of law as less of rules that are followed and more and predictions on what legal judgements will be passed. When laws are vague or contradictory, as they often are, then it’s those abstract reasoning abilities that matter when arguing.
I’ve said before that it’s interesting how many libertarian bloggers are lawyers, and to me this pretty much lays out the connection. Same thing I was thinking about when I remarked on how Veblen said that lawyers tended to be most opposed to socialism or when I was mildly smug that people with a law degree are significantly worse predictors than those without. It’s all about this certain way of thinking. Hell, you can think of the legal realism school as the exception that proves the rule.
So this is a method of thinking that’s shared by libertarians, rationalists, neoreactionaries and exemplified by lawyers. I’ve got problems with this school, I think it tends against empiricism. It’s not explicit, and empirical observations can be slotted in, but they often appear to be an afterthought.
The upshot of this though is that rather than oppose this because it’s unworkable, you can view this type of legalism as just an attempt to shift power from people who do social networking to people who do this style of abstract reasoning. You may view it as not a power shift but a principled objection, but I’m sure the social networkers feel that their method is the natural and just way to organize society.
(Not saying this is explicitly self-serving, it’s just about how the patterns of thinking people have inform their worldview in way that ends up favoring themselves.)
Quite frankly, a lot of the social network dominance types (in politics) are either self-serving “protagonist-centered morality” types, or manipulators, or against some kind of empiricism. The concerns over the Tyranny of Structurelessness are very valid.
Not to mention that countries with this Rules focus are outperforming ones that have high amoral familism, etc.
That doesn’t mean Libertarianism is going to fly (as you’ve no doubt read me pointing out), though. What it means is that since we can’t entirely chase out politics, we have to plan for it. You can think of it as the values portion of the policy vector < values, efficacy >.
what other frameworks can I use to understand the world which aren’t privilege/oppression?
I think one of them is Lockeanism. I’m kind of tired of Lockeanism (though I still agree with it). Also tired of the democracy/totalitarian or capitalism/communism divide since that seems really inapplicable to my actual life
who should I read? what theory should I try on? I want new ideas to think about My Life and The World so that I’m not stuck with this one that makes me feel vaguely upset at Everything
I propose a model in which power relations are between individuals, with individuals being nodes (hubs) on a graph, and the relationships being directed weighted edges (spoke arrows with numbers).
I’m kind of annoyed by the people who complain that trans people are too concerned with passing and not enough with fucking with the gender binary.
Like, dude, my concern with passing is that I don’t want to be noticed by the (dangerously common) people who want to physically remove “bitchniggas” from moving trains. Please fuck with the gender binary on your own time, when my punchable face isn’t on the line.
I really wish we could just somehow make neighborhoods be more like college campuses, but unfortunately that whole model is built on people all working (or schooling or whatever) in the same place and more or less committing to not moving for four years. (It could also be relying on people not having kids, but if anything I would expect the college campus model to be better at having local daycare services and safe, stimulating places for kids to play, so I don’t think that’s it.
Which aspects are you thinking about that college campuses have and dense urban environments don’t?
A lot more “third spaces” that function well as such, better sense of community/higher trust, green space that actually functions well as green space. Room and board + campus maintenance + activity fees combined seem to be far more modest than the cost of living in an urban area (maybe because it avoids the problems that come with having to pay for a safe neighborhood in a positional-goods type of way by being strongly selected for IQ + consciousnessness? Idk).
A lot of this is just describing, like, suburbs and small towns. Nothing stops you from continuing to live in a college town after you finish college, and there are lots of small towns with a similar “feel.”
’s point about colleges being selected for people like me becomes relevant. Plus small towns tend to lack the classes and guest speakers and general traits of academia that make it stimulating. But yes, “small Minnesota town filled with rationalists that has good access to infrastructure, jobs, etc” would be more or less ideal.
I sympathize with you and have considered urban planning from this angle, constructing medium-density communities-within-communities. Just put me in charge of the country as Technocratic Dictator Central Director of the North American Union and I’ll get it sorted.
I’m a good person, and there is little reason to worry about how this might be involved in plans to build an unstoppable super-nation. Plus, I assure you the prediction markets for the National Delegation will have my back on this matter.
for a post-racial society Tumblr sure does get heated about whether Armenians count as white or not.
it’s mercifully one of the few debates that feature the Kardashians and genocide as legitimate talking points.
I thought Tumblr was all about racial awareness, not being post-racial?
I thought that was the new SJ Left thing - racial awareness, racial consciousness, ethnic experiences - just only for those with enough overlapping categories in the Venn Diagram of Oppression.
This isn’t a debate.
Your guys’ ancestors enslaved us and treated us like property that could be disposed of easily.
Now you continue to mistreat us.
Pay up
You reparations show you are sorry for your ancestors racism and the current racism.
So pay up
My ancestors didn’t though, in fact most people ancestors didn’t. A tiny percentage of the global populace owned slaves and the majority of that was in Africa where it’s still happening today… do they pay reparations too? By your logic. Yes they do.
I do think reparations were owed, but the only sound way to do it, that I can think of, would be for reparations to have taken the form of (at least partially) education and higher vocational training, beginning immediately during Reconstruction. Even today, I think a program like that could do a lot of good, but with what we’re doing along those lines now, we begin too late. College is too late. We need to be assigning scholarships to preschools and grade schools.
“Your guys’ ancestors“, though? Please.
I don’t think reparations is owed at all, for a start the white people today who’s families did indeed own slaves at one point are not at fault for that, they didn’t personally own slaves and they could very well be upstanding members of society who would never do wrong, why should they suffer whether financially or made to sit in a classroom to be told how they’re bad.
Secondly whilst slavery was a disgusting part of human history, it was the social norm and people then were accustom to it, those who weren’t stood against slavery firmly.
Thirdly, many many many white people gave their lives in war to free slaves, no one ever mentions this, acknowledges that these people died to change the world.
All of this and more reasons are why reparations are unjust and unneeded.
When the slaves were freed and then basically just left to figure out what to do for themselves, a self-perpetuating underclass was created. This has left a black mark (no pun intended) on our social history, and a brake on our nation’s progress in countless fields.
For the ever-present “race issue“ to not be a thing that exists America, what would that be worth? For racial division to have never have been such an issue in justice, imprisonment, crime, poverty, sciences, arts,business, ownership, housing, city settling, finance, what would that be worth to a country?
Reparations isn’t just some moral absolution for a sin (yours, mine, or somebody else unrelated’s). The goal was integration, which, foolishly, was thought to be obtainable for 40 acres and a mule.
>> why should they suffer whether financially?
A cohesive society benefits all therewithin.
That isn’t what the reparations people actually want, though, and the reparations people will never agree that any sum of money is enough, so the right move for the national government is to never pay any reparations on this matter.
The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity as a terminal value, and would mean in some ways result in the dissolution of what has effectively become an ethnic group within the nation.
Can you imagine the enormous left-wing freak-out if they caught on that that was what were doing? Re-activating the melting pot within the nationon its own groups? Further transforming “American” into an outright ethnicity?
It would be worth an utterly enormous amount of money, more than it would actually cost, but no one in this country is capable of actually executing it. The ones that want to do it won’t do it correctly, and the ones that don’t want to do it don’t want to pay for it.
Why is it “ The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity “ when it comes to Black people, but integrating everything from Greco-Turkish to Scandinavian, is “Building Multicultural Diversity “. As for those that say “My ancestors didn’t own slaves”, you are copping out, they still supported a system that enshrined slavery, even if they sat around a table bitching about it. if your ancestors, like mine came over after slavery was ended, we have still benefited from the way the system was rigged.
You know how the SJ Tumblr Left constantly goes on about White People™ not having a culture? What exactly do you think happened to those European cultures that came over here? How many third generation Italian immigrants do you know that speak Italian?
Melting Pot means creating a new culture from a unifying of other existing ones. In this sense it is a Nationalist enterprise, and because culture is so important, it’s one I support. As it says on my profile here, I am a Nationalist. There are many kinds of Nationalism.
As for the debt, intergenerational justice does not exist, but it’s still in the interests of the nation and state to solve this matter as it continues to create unnecessary poverty, crime, and breaks in national unity.
If you believe in a massive and active military, militarized borders and restrictive immigration policies, support for law enforcement as they currently exist, traditional family values, and the need to preserve a national culture, you’re not a libertarian. You’re not fooling anyone. You want a highly ordered and hierarchical society enforced by state coercion, just give us all a break and stop pretending like your beliefs about taxes and firearms make you a freedom fighter
Way I think this argument is justified by those types is that because we don’t have Freedom where businesses or even towns are allowed to discriminate, the government needs to do it instead.
To me that result has a very different takeaway though.
While OP has a point, there’s also the issue that Libertarianism has to have political support (including within that culture) in order to be maintained, and mass migrations can change the political environment of a territory pretty substantially.
It makes more sense if you assume it’s fragile rather than the default to which all societies will gradually slide.
Right libertarianism doesn’t have as much support in politics because it’s a contradictory mess of an ideology.
People like the Koch brothers have legit spent millions trying to spread libertarian thought and they still can only get conservative politicians.
If libertarians were so confident in their ideas, they wouldn’t bend over backwards for conservatives like so many do.
I think the ones that are that confident become AnCaps, which I don’t consider to be an improvement.
Whenever home maintenance issues crop up I always have this futile wish for designs that are more easily hackable, eg. conduits that can be accessed without cutting holes in things, or even *gasp* plans and blueprints of how everything is laid out that get updated when someone messes with them.
This isn’t the country where all personnel have IQ 130, Owl-kun. There is no such country.
This isn’t a debate.
Your guys’ ancestors enslaved us and treated us like property that could be disposed of easily.
Now you continue to mistreat us.
Pay up
You reparations show you are sorry for your ancestors racism and the current racism.
So pay up
My ancestors didn’t though, in fact most people ancestors didn’t. A tiny percentage of the global populace owned slaves and the majority of that was in Africa where it’s still happening today… do they pay reparations too? By your logic. Yes they do.
I do think reparations were owed, but the only sound way to do it, that I can think of, would be for reparations to have taken the form of (at least partially) education and higher vocational training, beginning immediately during Reconstruction. Even today, I think a program like that could do a lot of good, but with what we’re doing along those lines now, we begin too late. College is too late. We need to be assigning scholarships to preschools and grade schools.
“Your guys’ ancestors“, though? Please.
I don’t think reparations is owed at all, for a start the white people today who’s families did indeed own slaves at one point are not at fault for that, they didn’t personally own slaves and they could very well be upstanding members of society who would never do wrong, why should they suffer whether financially or made to sit in a classroom to be told how they’re bad.
Secondly whilst slavery was a disgusting part of human history, it was the social norm and people then were accustom to it, those who weren’t stood against slavery firmly.
Thirdly, many many many white people gave their lives in war to free slaves, no one ever mentions this, acknowledges that these people died to change the world.
All of this and more reasons are why reparations are unjust and unneeded.
When the slaves were freed and then basically just left to figure out what to do for themselves, a self-perpetuating underclass was created. This has left a black mark (no pun intended) on our social history, and a brake on our nation’s progress in countless fields.
For the ever-present “race issue“ to not be a thing that exists America, what would that be worth? For racial division to have never have been such an issue in justice, imprisonment, crime, poverty, sciences, arts,business, ownership, housing, city settling, finance, what would that be worth to a country?
Reparations isn’t just some moral absolution for a sin (yours, mine, or somebody else unrelated’s). The goal was integration, which, foolishly, was thought to be obtainable for 40 acres and a mule.
>> why should they suffer whether financially?
A cohesive society benefits all therewithin.
That isn’t what the reparations people actually want, though, and the reparations people will never agree that any sum of money is enough, so the right move for the national government is to never pay any reparations on this matter.
The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity as a terminal value, and would mean in some ways result in the dissolution of what has effectively become an ethnic group within the nation.
Can you imagine the enormous left-wing freak-out if they caught on that that was what were doing? Re-activating the melting pot within the nationon its own groups? Further transforming “American” into an outright ethnicity?
It would be worth an utterly enormous amount of money, more than it would actually cost, but no one in this country is capable of actually executing it. The ones that want to do it won’t do it correctly, and the ones that don’t want to do it don’t want to pay for it.
the backer comic, “how the paladin got his scar”, is about seeing humanity and value in your enemy and avoiding the needless loss of life and recognizing others have a perspective and wants and needs and fears and all that stuff
except if you’re an MRA or GG or some similar group where the lie “these people hate and are threatening to women” has been told and has been exalted and is more important than the truth; the comic makes it clear that those people are awful and contemptible and are motivated only by malice and hatred of women and everyone should feel contempt for them and they do nothing but lie and should die
and this reminds me that the lie is more important than the truth. people literally cannot stop themselves from believing the lie. they can’t. it’s impossible. no matter how much they want to be virtuous, no matter how much they want to be honest and charitable, the lie is so much more important than the truth they are incapable of not believing it. the lie makes up a fundamental component of how they see reality. they can’t stop. they can look at the lie. they can see it is a lie. they can be told it is a lie and agree “what I am looking at is a lie, and I do not want to believe it”. then they believe that lie anyway, because popularity is invincible and inassailable and will devour all and death is the only escape.
SSC’s latest seems like a classic case of letting gender politics obfuscate power and class issues that cut across gender.
He quotes some PUA:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value dudes hording all the pussy.
And then he uses both his intuitive experience and his LW survey data to show that men and women in polyamory date about the same number of people. There’s at least no clear cut numerical advantage to men. My experience also agrees.
But what if we neuter that sentence, and look at it again:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value people dudes hording all the dates.
Which is to say, charismatic and confident people of either gender, dating a lot of people, and awkward and introverted people of both genders dating no one, only one person, or being a hanger on in a larger polycule that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the partner regardless.
That sounds… less implausible. It doesn’t exactly match my observed experience, but it’s not super far from it either. I’ve certainly seen in nerdy groups a Queen Bee that is dating half the men, in a way that seems parallel to the alpha-males that PUA’s fear/worship.
It’s not at all clear that this is bad. This seems just as likely to be the result of “some people want more partners, and are more socially outgoing to find them, while some people want less or are less willing to put themselves out there to meet them,” which would be fine. Or it could be this high-value thing. (I detest rat-tumb’s focus on high-status-males as the evil beneficiary of social engineering, which seems both empirically and ontologically unsound, but from a capitalist-critical perspective, “liberalizing trade regimes” often means “the rich people get more stuff and poor people somehow have less.”)
But, I’m also not going to be surprised by the subjective perspective of people low on the social totem pole. Before, they had hope in this pigeon-hole thing, where each person could get at most one partner, so eventually the people as attractive as them would realize their best chance for a life long relationship was with fellow low-class dates like themselves. It was a bad model, but I’m aware people believed in it. Now they worry no one will be left waiting for them, and they’ll be entirely alone forever. So there’s some people who seem to be having a lot of sex (stealing their jouissance) and they aren’t reaping the benefits.
The answers they come up with are usually dumb, but they are at least seeing/feeling a thing.
I love weird nerds but weird nerds aren’t a representative sample for the behavior of typical relationship norms.
A better example for normies applying this would be all the other countries, territories and communities where polygamy is practiced, as well as communities within the US where one man will have 11 kids by 8 different women.
No full poly until Tranhumanism makes it possible to ‘defect’ from both your sex and sexual orientation, pls.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
The problem is you end up predicting a portable fax machine.
That’s still a more interesting failure mode and it doesn’t look dated the moment it’s published. TOS has actually aged reasonably well.
I don’t really think of TOS as reaching that far in terms of predictions, at least in terms of the everyday technology used by the crew.
It did reach relatively far for its day. But it occurs to me - anything that can be displayed with paper could be displayed with a screen. So what decade would actually predict the portable fax machine? It would have to be 50s or probably earlier.
That’s what I was getting at with the storage. You can display something on a screen, but if you want to send something to someone in a way that can be stored, you would want something like a fax machine.
Computer storage already existed not that long after computers were created, though, so the one to predict a portable fax machine would be from automated telegram machines as a projection, which actually *would* be insightful.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
The problem is you end up predicting a portable fax machine.
That’s still a more interesting failure mode and it doesn’t look dated the moment it’s published. TOS has actually aged reasonably well.
I don’t really think of TOS as reaching that far in terms of predictions, at least in terms of the everyday technology used by the crew.
It did reach relatively far for its day. But it occurs to me - anything that can be displayed with paper could be displayed with a screen. So what decade would actually predict the portable fax machine? It would have to be 50s or probably earlier.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
The problem is you end up predicting a portable fax machine.
That’s still a more interesting failure mode and it doesn’t look dated the moment it’s published. TOS has actually aged reasonably well.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
Continuing the theme of that Star Trek discussion, I’ve heard of smart phone apps for calculating artillery trajectories (used in Ukraine) and calling in Airstrikes (used in Syria), but think of how it would look in a piece of fiction to have people use that. Would they be technically minded serious resourceful Heroes or garbage millennials who are too lazy to calculate their own artillery strikes?
Ah, but obviously they aren’t being serious, or they’d put it in augmented reality glasses as part of a total integration of tactical information in the battlespace. :)
Actually I do remember someone trying something like that.
Yeah, let’s pretend that never happened.
Only television writers would be dumb enough to think that your total immersion AR should involve shooting at your enemies by kickboxing them.
I’m thinkin’ about infantry though. Honestly, just looking like an FPS UI would be a step up. It shouldn’t be that hard.
