What do you think the odds are of least one congressman in the next few years coming out and saying they think the Earth is flat and that NASA’s been lying to us? Realistically, 10, 12%?
Like, the head of an MRA reddit got outed as an elected rep, you’re acting like these people don’t already control NASA funding
Redpill, not MRA
Remember when an article was published saying that “MRAs” were in a frothing rage over Mad Max: Fury Road, but actually it was RoK, a site that explicitly thinks MRAs are all losers?
At this point, I’m very close to thinking the misinformation is deliberate.
Our descendants will find our songs about butts and preference for thick ones ridiculously quaint, much like the Victorians going apeshit over visible ankles.
#god knows what they will be into #livers maybe
Nah man,
This trend ain’t sustainable. Eventually you get into stuff that’s taboo because it’s actually grievously harmful, and then there will be more rebellion against decadence than there already is. People talk like that about mono people doing BDSM in their bedrooms while looking nornal on the outside, but that doesn’t even begin to touch the barest outer surface of harmfulness of some possible tracks.
So I think it will split, and we’ll be looking at weird transhuman augmentations and monstergirls/boys, catgirls, and so on while another group goes to restore tradition and yet another group becomes truly debauched degenerates.
Also in the future, I think they’ll look at porn somewhat like we look at alcohol.
the gay marriage will lead to polygamy slippery slope argument makes it sound like homophobes are more worried about a dude marrying two women than another dude.
It isn’t obvious, Argumate, dear old boy? It’s trying to trade against the greater remaining taboo value of the second to stop the first. The ideological tools to pass the first will be used to try to allow the second, even though gay marriage is most likely pro-civic while polygamy is very likely anti-civic. (The civicness is not the argument being used, after all!)
I’m trying to understand the point of this NRx post from 2015, so maybe some defenders of this perspective can explain.
It seems to say as trust in a cynical Cathedral collapses, then people have no source of knowledge but tribal ingroup beliefs. This leads to cynical nihilism and blind allegiance to your social division.
Which, true, but how is this different than before? As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities. You’ve traded one authority for another, but how did things get worse and why would you want to go back?
“As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities.” The piece definitely does not acknowledge this, not in the way you’re framing it, which is kind of the critical point.
As the theory goes –
* Objective truth is an accessible and relevant thing. (In your language: science, and similar methodologies, provide some level of access to the Real.) There is an important difference between listening to your doctor and listening to your priest, which is that your doctor actually knows complicated facts about the actual goddamn universe that will allow him to solve your medical problems, whereas the priest is mostly just an expositor of local ideology.
* “Rational ignorance” is the practice of deferring to the expertise of those who know Science! that you don’t, because you can’t know all the Science! yourself.
* Scientific experts can “sell out to the Cathedral” by lacing their allegedly-scientific recommendations with ideology, or even by outright dropping the science wholesale and purveying uncut ideology. This can pay dividends for them in terms of social power, cognitive assonance, etc. However…
* …it’s a self-destructive strategy in the long term, because you can’t fool all the people all the time. Eventually, your patients are going to notice that your “medical advice” is no longer doing any better than priestcraft in terms of getting them results.
* At which point they abandon you and start listening to whichever set of priests they like best anyway. Faith in Science! as an objective, neutral, supra-ideological methodology has been destroyed.
You can feel about that however you want, but I’m pretty sure it fairly describes the content of the post.
Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?
There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.
Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.
There was literally a Battle Royal at a local public high school a couple years back. A 14 year old was arrested a couple days ago with a loaded gun. All gang related, of course.
When physical safety can’t be assured in the school, if you call it racism and classism that people want to pull their kids out, aren'tyou just assuming that certain races and classes are inherently violent and criminal?
I’m saying that parents view certain races as inherently violent and criminal. They are the ones who will be choosing where their kids go.
The article in question doesn’t seem like a very convincing counterargument, honestly. It’s not so much that people want to take their kids out of “ethnic” schools because they’re racist, it’s that people want their kids in good, safe schools, and those are heavily linked to class and economic factors, and those are heavily stratified by race due to legal and historical factors. But you’d see the same general pattern even in a society with no racism, it’d just be aligned on whatever axes of social inequality were most relevant in that society.
Personally, I have mixed feelings on the subject. The current system fucks up property values in ways that have negative side-effects, it’s still gameable, and it’s essentially crab-bucketing – the idea is to make it hard for even upper-class people to escape terrible hell schools, so that they’ll be motivated to make them less bad, but that doesn’t seem to have really manifested.
On the other hand, social stratification is certainly going to be worse under vouchers, and it will mark a movement to a more high-pressure cram-school type lifestyle for students. It will diminish the proportion of the population that’s trapped in the dead-end hell schools while still keeping it enormous, which increases the likelihood that they’re there for good. So it’s really a question of what percentile we want to optimize for here. Obviously, people mostly want to optimize for theirs, but it’s not at all clear to me that there’s a right answer.
The upper class people aren’t *allowed* to make the schools less bad. When some kid comes in with the intention of starting a knife fight, knife in hand, he needs to be either punished hard, or kicked out of the school. Ideally bad behavior should be punished proportionately long before then. It doesn’t take much to disrupt a classroom if no one has the ability to remove a child or punish them for being disruptive and the kid knows it.
Many on the Left think it’s just about being discriminatory, but do people really think my parents would give a damn about the number of black kids if they were all college-bound? No, this is almost entirely about selecting the kids whose parents will punish them for causing trouble (which is what actually gives detention any teeth) and kids who actually have something to lose.
It’s been deemed unethical to allow the schools to punish the children, so that just leaves exclusion.
To prevent stratification, just don’t make the vouchers additive - you either pay only the voucher or you pay the whole thing yourself. That will allow routing around the political damage.
All this complaining about racism and classism, but who is really being hurt most by the status quo? It certainly isn’t upper middle class suburbia.
I feel the left (as represented here on Tumblr) is too busy looking backwards and larping the Spanish Civil War, and it’s sort of sad.
If you look back at socialist activism 100 years ago it was dynamic and offered a vision of the future that was challenging, while today it’s all about justifying failed states and bickering over whether Stalin was really that bad.
maybe there are exciting things happening in leftist enclaves somewhere, but they don’t seem to have any impact or be able to capitalise on things like the GFC or public dissatisfaction with neoliberalism.
Anyone talking about workers’ councils is stuck in the 20th century. The future is digital and uses far more exotic organizational systems.
Hey quick question, why is the music app on the iPhone so fucking worthless? Cant repeat songs anymore, cant listen to all a bands albums back to back. Wtf, it’s unusable.
No competition.
Don’t be so harsh Ranma-san. They’re just trying to ~simplify~ the listening experience. Listening to one song over and over repeatedly, hah, who would do such a thing? Sounds like a total dork!
* hides in the bushes with an Android phone, listening to one song over and over again, as Apple iCopters buzz overhead, searching for the last users to escape the Walled Garden of Babylon, *
Sometimes I forget that you’re older and thus a more powerful vampire more experienced than me.
Forgive me if I ever seem too provincial.
I leave out all the boring and embarrassing details. FWIW I might have been the dumbest least well-adjusted guy in my class.
Scattered thoughts on education:
If a technocratic dictator instituted a centrally managed, stratified education system (tracking), then party officials/bureaucrats would use it to extort parents by holding children hostage.
If school vouchers/tutor vouchers are in any way transferrable or fungible, alcoholic parents will sell them to temporarily embarrassed, frugal intelligentsia and thus widen the educational gap.
Efforts to make education more integrated are sold as left-wing or fostering solidarity and social cohesion, but are actually cost-cutting measures that make education net worse for everybody (Will-Rogers-Effect).
There is a lot of confounding going on between socioeconomic class and school/teaching style. Waldorf education is notoriously bad at actually imparting knowledge on children, but it tends to attract hippie parents with strong convictions and disposable income (I knew a couple of Waldorf-educated math students. They hated it. I don’t know if they would have hated regular high schools less, but still).
Montessori Schools are actually based on constructivist developmental psychology and not eastern mysticism woo, but the selection effect is even bigger there.
Moscow-educated mathematicians or rather math teachers trained by Moscow-educated mathematicians were great at actually teaching math. I learned more English from Cartoon Network than from my teachers though. Eastern bloc English teachers were not very good. Same goes for Latin, but there was no Reticulum Tabulae.
I liked several books that were later required reading, before they were required reading.
Finnish comprehensive primary school until grade 10 with a good teacher/student ratio has the best outcomes in the EU. It’s not at all clear what causes that.
Back to vouchers:
I personally believe that there are lots of high school teachers out there either who do not understand the subject they are teaching or suck at the didactics of their subject. Good teachers can have a positive effect on students, but are limited by the material they work with.
Bad students can drag the rest of the class down. Smaller classrooms have numerous benefits: Not only does the teacher have more timer per student, but students who are slow to grok a particular concept keep the whole class back. It makes a difference if you have one stupid question per hour or three. The time adds up. It’s not always the same student lagging in every subject.
If you can use vouchers to pay for remedial classes or individual tutors in specific subjects, you could have slightly bigger classes moving on a much more consistent pace. It might be smarter to reduce the student/teacher ratio as needed for specific students and subjects.
I am much more skeptical of vouchers for whole schools (Which seems to be the proposed policy in the US?).
Actually, I already laid out a plan for a total revamp, something I’d instantiate a few prototypes of were I actually the technocratic dicta- er, I mean Central Director. Perhaps you could comment on it.
Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding.
But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system.
(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)
“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.
Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.
So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.
Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.
I went to a high school that was created before the fall of the Iron Curtain to turn gifted children of trusted citizens into scientists and engineers. The schizophrenic stance of progressive governments to create more comprehensive schools while simultaneously claiming education is the future must be grating. Nobody really believes that we need any bakers, butchers, farmers, plumbers, carpenters, or locksmiths. I guess that’s why people IRL dismiss any and all of my thoughts on education policy.
Who wants to be any of those things when they don’t pay enough money (or else are tough to get into) and housing prices are rising out of control due to bad policy backed by bad politics?
Who wants to go to a comprehensive school that pays lip service to the idea that intelligentsia and working class go there together, but actually there are no working class jobs and you’re fucked if you don’t get a university degree? Why even bother with all this inclusion? Why have comprehensive schools at all in this environment?
Does America have comprehensive schools in that sense? From what I’ve seen, talking about how the school includes blue collar elements is the lip service, and those programs are being cut.
But then, I come from a background where my formative high school years were in a school district that educated professionals moved to to raise their kids in a good school district.
Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding.
But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system.
(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)
“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.
Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.
So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.
Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.
I went to a high school that was created before the fall of the Iron Curtain to turn gifted children of trusted citizens into scientists and engineers. The schizophrenic stance of progressive governments to create more comprehensive schools while simultaneously claiming education is the future must be grating. Nobody really believes that we need any bakers, butchers, farmers, plumbers, carpenters, or locksmiths. I guess that’s why people IRL dismiss any and all of my thoughts on education policy.
Who wants to be any of those things when they don’t pay enough money (or else are tough to get into) and housing prices are rising out of control due to bad policy backed by bad politics?
Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?
There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.
Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.
Ah yes, there are no actual problems, just bigotry…
Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?
There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.
Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding.
But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system.
(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)
“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.
Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.
So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.
Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.
The year is 2064. Having given up on America and Europe, the last remaining members of the Alt Right undergo racial alteration surgery and genetic splicing to join Chairman Liu’s Neo-Chinese Empire, a governmental franchise operating seven megacities on the Asia-Pacific rim.
As a security officer at the front of the Empire’s fight against the Pan-Islamic Caliphate, a sort of distributed theocratic government with enclaves throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Victor Fang (born Richard Spencer, many years ago) is returned to Hong Kong after being injured by an IED, but he’s about to find out just how deep the Caliph’s conspiracies run…
Discourse Questions
What is the value, positive or negative, of a racial ethnostate in a world where race is mutable?
Do the Alt Right and White Nationalists value whiteness as a terminal value, or merely as a means to other ends? If they could, would they abandon it for some other race to obtain racial solidarity? Would they adopt another heritage, just to have one?
Will governance become something marketable, that can be purchased by democratic polities and multinational conglomerates?
Could enclaves of Islamic Law form in Europe in order to try and maintain Liberalism? The idea of sub-groups with their own laws is not unprecedented, after all.
What are the implications if jurisdictions break down into various self-governing ethnic groups, united not by the larger territories they live in but through religion and ethnicity as experienced over the Internet?
Can Richard Spencer ever be redeemed? What would it take to redeem him?
Write a 5-page call-out blog post based on answering one of these six topics and submit it to Tumblr Dot Com.
The year is 2064. Having given up on America and Europe, the last remaining members of the Alt Right undergo racial alteration surgery and genetic splicing to join Chairman Liu’s Neo-Chinese Empire, a governmental franchise operating seven megacities on the Asia-Pacific rim.
As a security officer at the front of the Empire’s fight against the Pan-Islamic Caliphate, a sort of distributed theocratic government with enclaves throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Victor Fang (born Richard Spencer, many years ago) is returned to Hong Kong after being injured by an IED, but he’s about to find out just how deep the Caliph’s conspiracies run…
as morbid as it is, I wonder how many Baizou jihadis will have to kill for them to realize what’s at stake here
like after Pulse, me and every other LGBT person I knew had the same reaction
“that could have been us”
now on one hand, we did rally around LGBT muslims because they were gonna get a lot of flak because wide nets and all, and because we had a new empathy for what they escaped from, but Pulse kind of brought the war to my community
in the eyes of the Baizou, there is no war, and that won’t change until the war comes to them
The idea is to show that men who enforce strict gender roles are failing on their own terms, which is hard to mistake for endorsement of those roles. It’s similar to how it’s not homophobic to make fun of the gay scandals of anti-gay politicians.
I disagree with this; for reference consider critique of anti-feminist women such as Phyllis Schlafly or Ann Coulter which focuses on shaming their appearance and casting aspersions at their sexuality; this might be ironically highlighting the difficulty of performing femininity to the degree that they themselves would advocate, but it’s still a fucked up approach with considerable collateral damage.
Consider: Almost no one that doesn’t already agree will see this as “well we’re just pointing out how they ~ironically~ fail to live up to it”. They will see it as hypocrisy from a movement that they already know is full of hypocrites.
The whole “man tears” thing was similar, and similarly stupid.
The irony is that the United States could have permanently transformed Afghanistan if it were more ruthless in its cultural imperialism and didn’t go to Iraq.
He was British born and radicalized. Not a refugee although I think his parents were from some time ago.
I feel like a lot of terrorists in the West are like that: born in their residing nation as a citizen but then radicalized. Makes me wonder what the hell is going on to do that to children of immigrant families.
This is true.
They also tend to be pretty religiously unobservant
A big factor seems to be that they are strangers both to their ancestral culture and to the place they live.
The parents left the places ruled by Islam and all the bad effects that come from that. The children did not. We don’t see radicalized Hindus carrying out these second generation attacks, however. Why? Most likely because Islam has latent instructions that most Muslims ignore day-to-day but which get triggered if you’re a young male outside of society - a condition Islam itself creates in countries where it is dominant (through polygyny).
The Liberals think they’re going to love and tolerate that out of existence, but it doesn’t work that way, because it isn’t ‘fake’ Islam.
the posts that push back against men who enforce strict gender roles typically end up reinforcing those same roles by using them as weapons (”insecure in your masculinity, what are you, gay?”) and also by the implicit assumption that men are stronger and can take a rhetorical beating, whereas similar rhetoric aimed at the women who work to enforce strict gender roles would seem much less acceptable to the writer.
Also they don’t even realize the irony, which shows how deeply drenched they are in male hyperagency.
Possibility #4: Osama was a time traveler trying desperately to avert our collision course with disaster, only to discover that through an ironic tragedy his actions resulted in our current situation.
Proposition: Al Qaeda wanted to get the West to stop fking with the Middle East. (”Terrorism is geopolitical, [not ideological].”)
Reality: No 9/11 likely means no Iraq War.
Three possibilities:
1. They were too stupid to realize invasion would be the response.
2. They were too drunk on ideology to realize
invasion
would be the response.
3. The proposition is false. That wasn’t their actual goal.
Didn’t Osama specifically think that dragging the Americans into an endless war in Afghanistan would ruin them the same as it did the Russians?
Wasn’t his other goal to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia, and they pulled out in 2003?
But that’s different than getting the US to just GTFO.
I think the motivation is in significant part ideological, not just geopolitical, because a campaign to just get the US to leave would look more like what was done by the IRA, and would likely have been far more successful.
One would look to cause large amounts of expense without large amounts of casualties, creating the political drive to Do Something, but without the political drive for an invasion.
I won’t go into them, but if one is willing to die, there are all sorts of ways to be extremely expensive to the elites that won’t create enough ire among the regular people to politically support a war effort.
The point of this was post was to illustrate that neither ethnic homogeneity nor a lack of natural resources qualify as unsurpassable barriers to the creation of redistributive welfare states. It has nothing to do with immigration except insofar as immigration contributes to ethnic heterogeneity. If I wanted to illustrate that immigration also does not qualify as an unsurpassable barrier (which it doesn’t), I would make a post actually addressing that point.
Now see, Prof. Stone, was posting that in response instead really so hard?
“This multi-ethnic, religiously pluralist nation that has near-zero tariff rates and encourages citizens to live abroad for a number of years is nationalist actually, because that term means whatever I want it to”
If you send citizens to study abroad and then come back to improve your own country, that is putting the country over individuals. I see now from this and your other posts that others’ assessments of you were more correct than I thought.
“#drama”
Yes, some of my readers may not want to see this exchange, so it is tagged, Prof. Stone. Not that hard to realize. I don’t make comments like the second one that often.
>“Social democracies like Norway only work because they’re ethnically homogeneous and swimming in oil money”
>Small island nation of Mauritius has highest standard of living in Africa
>No natural resources
>68% Indo-Mauritian, 27% Creole, 5% other
>(Religion also split between Hindu, Catholic, and Muslim)
>Leftist parties make up vast majority of parliament
>Free healthcare and education, including college
>Right-wing Heritage Foundation still lists their economy as 15th “freest” in the world
>Ranked more democratic than the United States by the Economist Intelligence Unit
>mfw
The family planning programs’ success was due to support from the government and eventually the traditionally pronatalist religious communities, which both recognized that controlling population growth was necessary because of Mauritius’ small size and limited resources.
Tight feedback loop, effects of policies more immediately obvious because there is no where to go, and percent control of the polity per person is higher.
Downturns in the sugar and textile industries in the mid-2000s and a lack of highly qualified domestic workers for Mauritius’ growing services sector led to the emigration of low-skilled workers and a reliance on skilled foreign labor.
Hmn, I wonder what impact that might have.
Since 2007, Mauritius has pursued a circular migration program to enable citizens to acquire new skills and savings abroad and then return home to start businesses and to invest in the country’s development.
This is Nationalist. An Internationalist program would involve them leaving the island permanently.
Net migration rate: 0 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2016 est.)
Huh. Doesn’t sound like mass migration to me.
Of course, many of the objections to the United States becoming Singapore are based on things like its size, relative concentration of population, and so on. …criticisms which could also apply to Mauritius.
So, OP, do you agree that the United States could become Singapore?
It seems what we have here is not an argument for Open Borders Neoliberal World™, but rather, an argument for small countries which have tight political feedback loops between policy and its effects, and high percentage of political control per person. (Something I have been considering myself.) This means people have to live with the consequences of their political decisions and have the ability to do something about it.
ETA: The real question here is, can we find one of these that’s big? Japan (127M) and Korea (50M) both fare reasonably well despite being over ten times the size of Norway (5M) and for Japan, about 100x the size of Mauritius (1.3M). …but they’re those evil ethnically homogenous type nations we’re all supposed to hate.
Your ability to constantly dance around what is being talked about and then randomly conclude that All Of Your Beliefs Are Correct continues to impress
So you aren’t in favor of mass migration? Is not “mass migration is actually Good” the entire point of such rhetoric? Otherwise, there is little reason to worry about cultural replacement.
And hey, maybe you’re a full-blooded Communist and not a Neoliberal. That also works on a sufficiently small scale. Or maybe you’re a Libertarian. It doesn’t make that much difference in this case.
“This multi-ethnic, religiously pluralist nation that has near-zero tariff rates and encourages citizens to live abroad for a number of years is nationalist actually, because that term means whatever I want it to”
If you send citizens to study abroad and then come back to improve your own country, that is putting the country over individuals. I see now from this and your other posts that others’ assessments of you were more correct than I thought.
Why do so many leftists, reasonably intelligent (and possibly very socially intelligent) people, write posts about talking-to-upper-class-conservatives that sound like lessons on how to inadvertantly radicalize people into fascism?
If all you have is a hammer and sickle, every problem starts to look like a wheat field
That is the most bizarrely mixed metaphor to date. Especially because what’s the hammer for?
smashing the state obvi
The hammer is for wheat farming why do you think they had so much famine
Inserting random Trump burns into your non-political writing might help your LibCred™, but the Trump voters already knew they were socially disapproved of, and all they’re getting is yet more “I SOCIALLY DISAPPROVE OF YOU” and they Trumped in part to spite that. So you get -1 Activism Points. I hope that feeling of smug condescension is worth it.
By the way, despite the in-jokes, it isn’t the Trump voters that are inbred.
I can tell you who really is, but it’s forbidden to know.
prompt: Trump withdraws the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement convinced that it would have a positive impact on the economy. Little did he know that more and more non-US businesses demand green products and certifcates like Sedex. Write about how america becomes an autarky, isolated from the rest of the world.
honeys, the > sign has been used to denote quotations in flat text since before 4chan even existed. If you’re worried about its ideological contamination, and that the syntax might twist your soul into an Alt-Righter or something, you’re an idiot.
Careful, you will end up with a country where everyone proudly marches on National Day, burning flags held aloft in a unifying display of patriotism…
…and people who douse the burning flags with water are considered terrorists.
Protesters proudly holding up the Unity Flag of the Earth Sphere Federation as flags of the former nations their ancestors belonged to burn beneath their feet in a display of tolerance and multicultural understanding. I grasp the bucket and-
Oh, um. Sorry, I got the timelines mixed up again.
Protesters proudly holding up the flag of the European Union as the flags of the former countries their ancestors fought and died for burn beneath their feet in a display of tolerance, the political power that is rightfully theirs flowing away from them into an unaccountable body that is neither a band of countries nor a true federal superstate, its shining currency draining the blood from their economies.
Hypothesis: the glaring flaws in rationalist ideas that people jump on (a fascist shared house!) are only there to hide the more insidious flaws that are actually far more damaging in retrospect (you can’t build a reliable system if you have components that aren’t 100% reliable, redundancy and fail-over isn’t a thing, relationship drama can be eliminated by agreeing on rules in advance and if necessary inventing new words, object-level critique can be dismissed with meta-level rebuttals, meta-level critique can be dismissed with object-level rebuttals, etc.)
It turned out that Rationalists were only interested in polyamory in order to obtain passive failover relationships configured as redundant arrays of inexpensive drama.
If you’re arguing about whether the U.S. should weaken protections of freedom of speech, I’m likely to find you a lot more persuasive if you examine other Western nations with weaker free speech protections (i.e. most of them) and the observable consequences of that, than if you expound on the most horrifying dystopia that you can imagine resulting from the opposing side.
Yeah. As someone who’s innately a free speech absolutist, it’s hard to admit that moderate limits on speech aren’t necessarily very onerous and can be maintained for decades (at least) without spiraling into anything much worse, but it’s pretty obviously true. Doesn’t mean the restrictions pass a cost-benefit test,
but it’s pretty obviously true.
I do actually think that European and Canadians restrictions on speech are already onerous, and American 1st amendment jurisprudence is the one major thing that is genuinely politically superior about the US compared to those countries. I keep seeing stories about the cops being called on people for hate speech tweets in the UK that would be unambiguously constitutionally protected in the US, and thinking I’m glad my servers are here and not there.
If I lived in one of those counties I would consider it politically important to move local law more towards the US model, or barring that preventing effective enforcement of censorship law; since I live in the US, I consider it politically important to prevent the state of 1st amendment law from moving even a little bit in the direction of Europe and Canada (which I agree are not dystopias).
It’s also worth recognizing that with the advent of the internet, European nations get a lot of benefit from American speech protections. There are lots of things put online by Europeans which would be taken down by lawsuit except that they’re hosted in the US.
Of course, European nations were hardly dystopias before that, but things like bringing legal action against critics of Erdogan really do frighten me.
and there are things hosted in Europe that would be taken down within seconds if they were hosted in America. really the internet strongly benefits from hopping around trying to be a neutral waters territory
I hope people realize that having a single, unified, global government is a terrible idea before it gets locked in as inevitable.
It’s actually beneficial to have a diversity of legal regimes. That’s contra much modern Progressivism, though, which pretends to universality.
