drawing skulls underneath things because this is a simple enough shape that you can manipulate it in your working memory buffer because you’re used to drawing fictional mechanical objects, not faces
> sending me this instead of shitposting about how you’re going to attack me with a Federation mobile suit for supporting the extremely problematic Zeon colony drop like ten posts ago
At this rate, you’ll never be able to stop me from seizing control of Earth and paving over everything you have ever known with trees self-replicating solar-powered CO2 scrubbers, Anon-kun, much less your belovedWestern Australia.
All I need is a few hundred million in venture capital and a marine biologist.
We can make a new biosphere in the empty wastes of the South Pacific Ocean.
First you need some kind of substrate, like concrete barges or a floating grid of bamboo, something cheap and simple and easy to mass produce.
(It would need to be anchored to something, unless it’s practical to use sails or some other active mechanism to maintain position. Probably not?)
Major priority is to get plants growing. Mangrove swamps, coral reefs, forests of kelp, plankton blooms, you gotta get something growing there to kickstart life.
Once you’ve got plants growing, little things are going to show up to eat them, then bigger things are going to show up to eat the little things, and soon you’ve got the whole circle of life shenanigans on your hands.
That’s the bootstrapping phase, now the floating island of biological plenty needs to be made self-sustaining and self-repairing and self-reproducing, so that it can be expanded to thousands of square kilometres in size.
Anyway, that’s phase 1. Who’s in?
a year has passed and I haven’t tiled the south pacific with micro biomes yet
time wasted on Tumblr
How do you keep it from
1. Sinking normally from the floater materials being worn down
As far as advice from right-wing reactionaries goes, “if you’re feeling sad, go work out” is pretty good. Certainly beats “we need to bring back the monarchy”.
I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.
Modelling The Interesting Stuff
In order to make your city-planning ideas work in a game you would either have to model incentives based on individual in-game agents, and thus give agents complex AI for long-term decisions like when to buy or rent or move or renovate or change jobs, how much money to save or to invest with some risk or to spend, how many children to have and so on. You would have to model trust and civic engagement and social cohesion. Or all these factors would just be variables in an abstract cellular automaton based on a system of differential equations, like the original SimCity. In that case, you would have to make simplifications and judgements that look like begging the question.
The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.
You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…
Communicating With The User
You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.
It is important for two reasons:
If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring
If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair
I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.
I agree, but in this case I can use some of those ideas as starting places to give more depth to the simulation, so there can be some simulation of those ideas that isn’t feasible in existing city builders, without the kind of in-depth total simulation we might do if this were a university research project.
Thus, the OTV Game can be differentiated by support for mixed-used buildings where the bottom is commercial and the upper portion is residential, zoning regulations with more potential control, rent bidding, etc.
The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.
This is essentially my plan, along with a goal of 1,000,000 agents and 64km2 of area. Decision trees can be manageable for each agent if they are very small, and various heuristics will be used to make the simulation feasible, including use of grids and hierarchical routing.
Initial simulation will be simpler and focus on the core economic elements, and more complexity will be added over time. For instance, once basic markets are implemented and tested, more industries and specializations can be added and simulation load and difficulty observed.
You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…
Yes, some of that is definitely on the initial slab of what I want to develop, and how to rig up property developers will be one of the interesting questions, since I plan to track firms’ profits and accumulated capital.
However, I think sufficiently complex behavior can be obtained with fairly simple rules - for instance, that firms have a base cost and marginal cost, and scale up production when they make a profit and scale down production when they fail to make a profit, and that when they accumulate enough saved up capital and are profitable, they move to a bigger building to expand.
This pent-up capital accumulated for bigger buildings could then be part of the heuristic used by property developers. (Which probably would skip being physically represented as owning offices in the city, unlike other businesses.)
You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.
It is important for two reasons:
1. If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring 2. If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair
Yes. This will require combing the grid for issues and representing them as visual cues for the users. The form that takes will have to depend on magnitude and kind.
The stylized aesthetic provides plenty of room to provide visual cues in addition to cues such as floating event bubbles above businesses going bankrupt. It also provides room for some interesting overlays.
Ideally, we could also access individual citizens at their home or workplace and get more detailed information about them, but in practical terms this isn’t efficient for a city of 200,000, so there must be other ways to display this data.
Preparations are now in motion. I will be evaluating the difficulty of the development path I want to pursue, level of interest, and so on.
the funny thing about that David Brooks piece is an uneducated lower class person having a crisis over deli food with fancy immigrant names like “baguette” and going to normal honest American food, like tacos and burritos instead
Honestly that never occurred to me, Mexican food is considered totally unadventurous comfort food, here on the west coast, at least
I just got back from having carne asada tacos for dinner in a taqueria that had mariachi music playing, and it still had a bunch of American flags up around it since the town had a 4th of July parade last week
I was thinking it’d be good if I could get my family to try something a little fancier and more exotic like Greek or Thai food instead of the old familiar standbys we’d all been eating since my older relations were kids, like Mexican, Chinese, and Italian…I guess that sounds odd if you think about it objectively
As far as I know, San Francisco claims to have invented the burrito. And, as much as they are loathe to admit it, they are still part of the United States
San Francisco invented the Mission burrito, in the ‘60s, the original burrito is older and probably actually from Mexico
I have seen exclamations like “I bet he does not even have one gay/black/jewish“ friend, used as some kind of bait, to make the target say the unfortunate words.
That’s when to either go meta, attack along another vector of the same topic (“oh, so the only real gay people are the ones that already agree with you?”) or flip the switch and start shitposting about how you are friends with literally every Jew on Earth, including the questioner.
Birthrates have dropped; in the past it was not unusual to have 8+ kids.
Exactly how many people were gay in the past? Most of them?
I was given to understand that higher population density is correlated with a higher proportion of gay individuals, so presumably these two factors cancel out somewhat
we’ll figure this out one day.
No one expected the arrival of what 4chan dubbed the “Fag Maximizer” AI.
(Or, as the beleagured sociology students that accidentally unleashed it onto the world called it, Kinsey Indexer.)
Also, while we’re on the topic of annoying conservative rhetoric, let’s talk about Rotherham. I agree that it happened, and that it was bad, and that people covered it up for ideological reasons. The unspoken assumption that I don’t agree with and that people seem to keep trying to sneak in here is that it happened because Muslims are inherently more evil than the rest of us. Like, this fits the narrative of “social progressives sometimes behave like ideologues-in-the-pejorative-sense and cover up scandals to avoid making their side look bad just like other ideologues do” but not “social progressives are automatically wrong because of this.”
Rotherham bubbled up periodically and was ignored again. People have not shut up about Rotherham because it’s not over! People were still tried convicted in 2017! And some people are still trying to look away!
But the ideology and the cover-up betray something deeper: The progressives *knew* that the facts of these cases went contrary to their narrative. CPS and police *expected* these cases to be viewed as evidence against a happy multicultural narrative. That’s why they covered them up! These people were not high on their own ideology, they acted either under pressure from above, or out of self-interest, but they made the correct inferences from the situation!
Meanwhile, the Right are turning all the Progressive Left platitudes about Multiculturalism into a dark joke.
“Culturally Enriched” - Harmed or even killed.
“Diverse” - Non-white. (And this almost never comes up with some ethnicities, while it comes up a lot more with others.)
“Religion of Peace” - Religion of violence.
“Truck of Peace” - Ramming attack against unarmed civilians. It was even used to describe the ethnic revenge killing by a white man against Muslims.
The actual Progressive Left response we’re going to get is to clamp down on these uses, denounce those using them, and create a new set of platitudes or euphemisms.
Apparently in a video of a religious van and knife attack, some people could be heard saying that they thought the government had got a handle on this whole terrorism thing. And there are a pair of tweets going around of someone who had previously attended a “refugees welcome” event, after the Ariana Grande concert, saying they were scared and wanted to leave the country. (But I can’t confirm it because the account has since been suspended.)
It is important to realize that these practices of suppressing the news of the problem in the name of upholding multiculturalism actually undermine the multicultural project. One can potentially do this multiculturalism thing, but one can’t be an idiot about it and just hope for the best, and one can’t be cultureblind, just like we were told colorblindness isn’t good enough anymore.
contra yourself+anons, you make/reblog a bunch of good posts, indeed it would be difficult to imagine you not doing so given the volume of content you spew forth
“your original posts are not good, and your good posts are not original”
Unironically: in the fictional Black Forest Country I developed to work out some of my ideas, the quad is the basic unit of civil defense and they’re all equipped with an underground shelter with freeze-dried food in case of nuclear war, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.
I want you to know that your weird, detailed, obsessive hypothetical city planning series is relatable to me on a very, very deep level and that even if I understand nothing about city planning it still provides me with a deep feeling of calm and belonging to be reading them. Thank you so much for writing them! (If you've ever played Cities: Skylines or the like, I and others would probably love to see your creations.)
My dear anon, be on the lookout for a new blog sometime in the next week or so.
maybe I’m technically an extremist outlier on all of this and just don’t realize it. apparently pretty nearly the entire thinky universe is yearning for more fucking tribalism, and I just, what the fuck is wrong with you
you and me both! hey maybe we should get together and form a- you know what never mind.
@anaisnein actually tbh I think it’s just me and certain right-wingers, and I don’t think most of them are being clever enough about it
In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points over an average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40.
Well now, that doesn’t sound so dangerous - wait, what’s this following paragraph?
Repeated consanguineous marriages within a group are more problematic. After repeated generations of cousin marriage the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship would suggest. In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.
Given the high rate of such marriages, many children come from repeat generations of first-cousin marriages. The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability. The BBC also states that Pakistani-Britons, who account for some 3% of all births in the UK, produce “just under a third” of all British children with genetic illnesses. Published studies show that mean perinatal mortality in the Pakistani community of 15.7 per thousand significantly exceeds that in the indigenous population and all other ethnic groups in Britain. Congenital anomalies account for 41 percent of all British Pakistani infant deaths.
Well, fuck. This isn’t good.
The increased mortality and birth defects observed among British Pakistanis may, however, have another source besides current consanguinity.
Oh, you mean it might be some kind of outside oppression? I bet Whi-
Population subdivision results from decreased gene flow among different groups in a population. Because members of Pakistani biradari have married only inside these groups for generations, offspring have higher average homozygosity even for couples with no known genetic relationship.
Oh. Nope, having kids with people who are too genetically similar to each other.
Now remember, we’re talking about information from Wikipedia and the BBC, not Evil Hatefacts from an Evil Hatesite.
So that’s the genetic aspect. So why do they do it?
To keep wealth within the family and stick close to the father’s genetic line.
It isn’t some huge, secret magical diverse cultural benefit that the Middle East has and we don’t. It’s just clannishness. (In fact, I suspect the clannishness is even responsible for some of the issues in their armies.)
Now, the Alt Right seems to think that as a result of this and other issues, all Muslim immigrants must be kicked out of the UK.
That is not necessary. Also it would probably get a lot of people hurt or killed, which is bad. So let’s not do that.
For the Liberals, we should keep in mind that cousin marriage likely promotes clannishness and amoral familism (”my family, right or wrong”), due to increased genetic similarity and insulation from the outer world. In fact, that’s pretty much the purpose of the practice.
Remember that social atomization that was supposed to melt away the religions and make everyone into happy Liberals? That isn’t going to happen if they all marry their cousins, which enables and incentivizes close, repressive, tight control of women, and insular culture.
If we want Islam to chill out and liberalize and soften, like Christianity, and we want the Muslim immigrants to become happy Liberals, then we must ban cousin marriage.
No excuses because “it’s their culture,” or “you’re just a repressive [ethnic majority].” That isn’t helping them.
That’s enabling them. Cousin marriage is bad. It’s self-destructive behavior. It’s other-destructive behavior for the kids, too.
Human beings are resilient. It won’t take that long to start removing the most negative effects, if we start now.
@silver-and-ivory:
Also: why should we have nations instead of familial tribes?
Nations are a lot bigger, more productive, and more flexible.
We want people to be able to roam around some without having to marry in to a tribe for protection, including being able to flee abusive family members. This is feasible in a city-state, bigger nations such as France, or a collection of city-states. Blood ties make this a lot harder.
While we also want them to share cultural elements such as language, they don’t need to share all cultural elements in order to have the necessary level of unity. This makes it easier to satisfy peoples’ needs, which vary.
Nations are also much more productive, easier to physically defend.
In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points over an average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40.
Well now, that doesn’t sound so dangerous - wait, what’s this following paragraph?
Repeated consanguineous marriages within a group are more problematic. After repeated generations of cousin marriage the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship would suggest. In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.
Given the high rate of such marriages, many children come from repeat generations of first-cousin marriages. The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability. The BBC also states that Pakistani-Britons, who account for some 3% of all births in the UK, produce “just under a third” of all British children with genetic illnesses. Published studies show that mean perinatal mortality in the Pakistani community of 15.7 per thousand significantly exceeds that in the indigenous population and all other ethnic groups in Britain. Congenital anomalies account for 41 percent of all British Pakistani infant deaths.
Well, fuck. This isn’t good.
The increased mortality and birth defects observed among British Pakistanis may, however, have another source besides current consanguinity.
Oh, you mean it might be some kind of outside oppression? I bet Whi-
Population subdivision results from decreased gene flow among different groups in a population. Because members of Pakistani biradari have married only inside these groups for generations, offspring have higher average homozygosity even for couples with no known genetic relationship.
Oh. Nope, having kids with people who are too genetically similar to each other.
Now remember, we’re talking about information from Wikipedia and the BBC, not Evil Hatefacts from an Evil Hatesite.
So that’s the genetic aspect. So why do they do it?
To keep wealth within the family and stick close to the father’s genetic line.
It isn’t some huge, secret magical diverse cultural benefit that the Middle East has and we don’t. It’s just clannishness. (In fact, I suspect the clannishness is even responsible for some of the issues in their armies.)
Now, the Alt Right seems to think that as a result of this and other issues, all Muslim immigrants must be kicked out of the UK.
That is not necessary. Also it would probably get a lot of people hurt or killed, which is bad. So let’s not do that.
For the Liberals, we should keep in mind that cousin marriage likely promotes clannishness and amoral familism (”my family, right or wrong”), due to increased genetic similarity and insulation from the outer world. In fact, that’s pretty much the purpose of the practice.
Remember that social atomization that was supposed to melt away the religions and make everyone into happy Liberals? That isn’t going to happen if they all marry their cousins, which enables and incentivizes close, repressive, tight control of women, and insular culture.
If we want Islam to chill out and liberalize and soften, like Christianity, and we want the Muslim immigrants to become happy Liberals, then we must ban cousin marriage.
No excuses because “it’s their culture,” or “you’re just a repressive [ethnic majority].” That isn’t helping them.
That’s enabling them. Cousin marriage is bad. It’s self-destructive behavior. It’s other-destructive behavior for the kids, too.
Human beings are resilient. It won’t take that long to start removing the most negative effects, if we start now.
In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points over an average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40.
Well now, that doesn’t sound so dangerous - wait, what’s this following paragraph?
Repeated consanguineous marriages within a group are more problematic. After repeated generations of cousin marriage the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship would suggest. In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.
Given the high rate of such marriages, many children come from repeat generations of first-cousin marriages. The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability. The BBC also states that Pakistani-Britons, who account for some 3% of all births in the UK, produce “just under a third” of all British children with genetic illnesses. Published studies show that mean perinatal mortality in the Pakistani community of 15.7 per thousand significantly exceeds that in the indigenous population and all other ethnic groups in Britain. Congenital anomalies account for 41 percent of all British Pakistani infant deaths.
Well, fuck. This isn’t good.
The increased mortality and birth defects observed among British Pakistanis may, however, have another source besides current consanguinity.
Oh, you mean it might be some kind of outside oppression? I bet Whi-
Population subdivision results from decreased gene flow among different groups in a population. Because members of Pakistani biradari have married only inside these groups for generations, offspring have higher average homozygosity even for couples with no known genetic relationship.
Oh. Nope, having kids with people who are too genetically similar to each other.
Now remember, we’re talking about information from Wikipedia and the BBC, not Evil Hatefacts from an Evil Hatesite.
So that’s the genetic aspect. So why do they do it?
To keep wealth within the family and stick close to the father’s genetic line.
It isn’t some huge, secret magical diverse cultural benefit that the Middle East has and we don’t. It’s just clannishness. (In fact, I suspect the clannishness is even responsible for some of the issues in their armies.)
Now, the Alt Right seems to think that as a result of this and other issues, all Muslim immigrants must be kicked out of the UK.
That is not necessary. Also it would probably get a lot of people hurt or killed, which is bad. So let’s not do that.
For the Liberals, we should keep in mind that cousin marriage likely promotes clannishness and amoral familism (”my family, right or wrong”), due to increased genetic similarity and insulation from the outer world. In fact, that’s pretty much the purpose of the practice.
Remember that social atomization that was supposed to melt away the religions and make everyone into happy Liberals? That isn’t going to happen if they all marry their cousins, which enables and incentivizes close, repressive, tight control of women, and insular culture.
If we want Islam to chill out and liberalize and soften, like Christianity, and we want the Muslim immigrants to become happy Liberals, then we must ban cousin marriage.
No excuses because “it’s their culture,” or “you’re just a repressive [ethnic majority].” That isn’t helping them.
That’s enabling them. Cousin marriage is bad. It’s self-destructive behavior. It’s other-destructive behavior for the kids, too.
Human beings are resilient. It won’t take that long to start removing the most negative effects, if we start now.
the eternal conundrum: should I explain, potentially coming off as condescending and forcing my conversation partner into an awkward, petulant-sounding statement that actually they did know already
or should I deliberately withhold information, potentially forcing my conversation partner to ask for more and thereby humiliating them by forcing them to admit they didn’t know?
That feeling when you watch a video on youtube and then glance over at the recommended videos tab and realise what the site really thinks of you.
if you enjoyed this post, why not click through to see other recommended posts!
algorithms don’t know your stated preferences, only your revealed preferences.
Now I have an image of a dystopian story with a “friendly AI” which, instead of keeping us safe or wireheading us (but same genre as those ones, a la “with folded hands”), provides humans with their revealed preferences rather than their stated preferences, and keeps bombarding us with weird porn we pretend not to like or horribly unhealthy food or outrage addiction-type stuff.
Historically, I’ve considered myself more center-left or centrist. I disagree with much of the economic and social dogma of the American right.
Before coming to Tumblr, I devised a fictional prototype National Technocratic country, which helped shape some of my new ideas as an exercise, but in that country, I deliberately fucked with things to change what it meant to be reactionary. I changed the conditions in such a way that precursors to certain modern practices were thousands of years old, while others had little to no influence.
Admittedly, foreign communists would have sneeringly described it as a right-wing dictatorship, but I promise you that American conservatives would also regard it as a sinister rival left-wing state. (At least after the Cold War.)
Why do the autistic rationalists get an exception from "poly is bad"?
When normies practice polygamy, what actually happens is polygyny. It is from polygyny that many of the worst consequences of polygamy arise. The domestic violence, the crowds of unwanted young men with no future and inadequate ties to society, and so on are what happens when polygamy is applied to ordinary gender stuff.
Autistic rationalists do not necessarily conform to the same gender conditions, being a bunch of (lovable!) weird nerds. (I am also a weird nerd, as evidenced by this very blog.)
It is important to understand thresholds of social behavior, which means that weird nerds practicing something does not have the same impact on society as everyone practicing something.
Likewise, exclusively gay men practicing polygamy would not create a mass gender imbalance in the dating ‘market’ that incentivizes bad behavior (including child marriages as desperate straight men try to secure access to women), because they are all gay, so they would not have dated women in the first place.
However, it isn’t politically possible to have “polygamy, but only for LGBTs and weird nerds”, so multiple marriage must remain banned at least until people have the ability to change their sex/sexual orientation cheaply and with few side effects.
Also, the situation where one man has eleven children by eight different women has enormous costs to society and must be discouraged.
Outright stopping poly people from engaging in non-marriage relationships, however, would be much more harmful than beneficial.
In the Transhuman Space Future, some of these conditions will no longer apply, and polygamy is much less of an issue.
There this rightist thing that keeps fucking infuriating me more and more, where they won’t state outright whether their bundle of policy and norm and social technology proposals is supposed to help everyone or whether it’s supposed to help the ingroup. Like, is this whole localism-ingroupism thing supposed to be pursuing the utilitarian optimum, or is it supposed to be pursuing ingroup benefit at the expense of everyone else, or is it supposed to be giving up on the rest of the world and saving yourselves or or or or or or I’ve never found any socially conservative rhetoric that didn’t leave me ruminating for hours on end trying to extract something coherent and driving myself insane trying to articulate what specifically it even is that’s nothing me.
How much freedom should others have?
It isn’t a trick question.
The reason it doesn’t seem like localism-ingroupism is either trying to completely solve for global utility optimum or global freedom or fuck-everyone-else-ism is because it’s trying to find a balance between competing concerns.
If I am responsible for the well-being of everyone, then I become obligated to destroy their cultures and replace them with something more effective/efficient, because I am not interested in paying for the side effects of their dumb cultural policies.
If there is total freedom, then like Hell am I paying for everyone else’s dumb decisions, because there will be no end, ever, to the subsidy. And if it ever seems like my shining army of economic robots has finally defeated the scarcity and delivered the desired level of wealth at the same time as full freedom? They’ll just have more kids and push the per-capita wealth right back down again.
This localism-ingroupism places non-absolute limits on freedom and non-absolute limits on obligation, making it feasible to transfer wealth to the worse off by limiting the effects of cultural policies that would destroy or overwhelm the ability to create that wealth in the first place.
And, it says “well if you want to do something that stupid, then go do it over there and don’t make me pay for it”, so there is still even more freedom, but it’s decoupled from obligation.
And, if every country works for its own benefit but without randomly trainwrecking other countries in the manner of the Bush Administration, then the effect is somewhat akin to the invisible hand - different climates, economies, and populations have different needs, so it makes sense for those close to these needs who are acquainted with them to make the law.
(Thus I oppose a number of measures which various right-wing or more dominance-focused nationalists would support. Seeing as I’m trying to summon a new ideology from beyond the veil, I’m not necessarily a representative sample.)
Why do the autistic rationalists get an exception from "poly is bad"?
When normies practice polygamy, what actually happens is polygyny. It is from polygyny that many of the worst consequences of polygamy arise. The domestic violence, the crowds of unwanted young men with no future and inadequate ties to society, and so on are what happens when polygamy is applied to ordinary gender stuff.
Autistic rationalists do not necessarily conform to the same gender conditions, being a bunch of (lovable!) weird nerds. (I am also a weird nerd, as evidenced by this very blog.)
It is important to understand thresholds of social behavior, which means that weird nerds practicing something does not have the same impact on society as everyone practicing something.
Likewise, exclusively gay men practicing polygamy would not create a mass gender imbalance in the dating ‘market’ that incentivizes bad behavior (including child marriages as desperate straight men try to secure access to women), because they are all gay, so they would not have dated women in the first place.
However, it isn’t politically possible to have “polygamy, but only for LGBTs and weird nerds”, so multiple marriage must remain banned at least until people have the ability to change their sex/sexual orientation cheaply and with few side effects.
Also, the situation where one man has eleven children by eight different women has enormous costs to society and must be discouraged.
Outright stopping poly people from engaging in non-marriage relationships, however, would be much more harmful than beneficial.
In the Transhuman Space Future, some of these conditions will no longer apply, and polygamy is much less of an issue.
I have proposed Regional Federalism for the US previously, but it’s becoming clear that the divide is less along state lines and more along urban/rural lines. I’ll have to devise something new.
Ok, broad question, feel free to answer with a couple links rather than an effortpost but... why are nations a desirable end state? They seem like a piece of legacy infrastructure, a chesterton's fence not to be too quickly destroyed, but hardly good in and of themselves. I feel far less fraternal affection with most co-nationalists than I do with say argumate, even though he's behind a different border.
I’ve been planning a longer post on this that I just haven’t gotten around to.
Meandering rant/textwall incoming. TL;DR readers: just skim the bolds.
1. The thing to understand is that ingroup/outgroup is actually to do with incentives and information cost. It’s a successful heuristic, rather than some huge irrational distortion that needs to be answered with “why can’t we just all get along?”
- When an outsider comes to our community, we lack information about them. Obtaining this information has a cost, whether we or others bear it. Part of that is time - getting to know others requires effort and time, and as mortals, we could easily spend those scarce resources on something else. As that information is obtained, the outsider can become more of an insider.
- Bad people do actually exist, whether created by conditions or born predisposed that way. (And sometimes, we are the bad people.) The benefit of a new community member is good, but the cost of letting in a bad apple is much more extreme. It could be discord which breaks the community apart. It could be theft. It could be murder. Each of these erodes trust significantly in addition to being harmful, and trust, when not abused, is extremely resource-efficient, so this is even more costly than it first appears.
Losing $5 in cookies to theft doesn’t seem like much, but it will cost a lot more than $5 in the end.
(Resident adjacent guru Slartibart would probably link you to that video showing that all the tail risks we accumulate over a lifetime add up to a much bigger risk than they are individually, so minimizing them is rational.)
- There is significantly less leverage over outsiders, since a considerable portion of our soft leverage is in the form of social sanction. This must be spend wisely, for it can be squandered. So if there is a bad apple within our community, this may be more manageable.
- Ultimately, for any of this to work, there must be either punishment or exclusion. We must be able to either punish the thieves or keep them out of the community. If we can do neither, the community will gradually disintegrate in cohesiveness as trust evaporates.
2. But even that assumes roughly similar preferences that could all be met by one community.
Let us suppose there are the Billys and the Sarahs, who are fans of the obscure Australian faux-anime Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San (or “Emoji Girl Unicode-san” for our American viewers).
(This example may seem a bit contrived, but I’m avoiding picking a real ethnicity here.)
Billys and Sarahs are rather dorky people with a low average level of social skills. Some have higher social abilities, but the median level for the community sets the expectations, and these expectations are comfortable for the Billys and Sarahs, who do not find them emotionally taxing.
At this point, wearing an Emoji Girl t-shirt isn’t just a sign of having watched the show. It’s also a proxy for being a Billy or Sarah. A cultural signifier that, out in the wild, lets them know they’ve found someone they could connect with. That’s actually a really big benefit! It reduces the social risk of approaching someone to create a connection significantly!
One day, internet celebrity, ironylord, and athlete Bruno Pauerlifter features Emoji Girl on his podcast, and many Chads and Staceys begin to pour into the community.
The Chads and Staceys like to enjoy Emoji Girl on multiple levels of irony, and are suave socially adepts.
Soon they outnumber the “natives.” The median social skill goes up, and with it, the expectations. The level of irony goes up as well.
The Billys and Sarahs do not enjoy the new level of social expectations, and like to enjoy Emoji Girl unironically.
The Chads and Staceys haven’t done anything wrong, per se. They’re not actively trying to exclude others with their irony. They just really like irony, and the others, well, don’t.
The usefulness of Emoji Girl t-shirts as identifiers for Billys and Sarahs is obliteratedwithout anyone even trying to obliterate it.
And that’s how you get gatekeeping behavior on things as “trivial” as video games, anime, and so on.
Now imagine a preference clash over something that actually matters.
3.People will thus ingroup/outgroup automatically. Putting everyone into one big ingroup is not actually possible.
And because it isn’t possible, trying is only going to fail while creating side effects.
4. The idea of multiple overlapping governments in the same area administering different laws to different individuals is a fantasy, because not only will they disagree on externalities, but some externalities are social.
Is it absolutely proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that polygamy must result in worse mental health outcomes for women and children, fewer rights for women, more social control of women, and expelling lower-status men?
No.
But considering that many of these are still issues with polygamist communities in developed countries, it’s likely it does, and it makes sense given the incentives of polygamy. This includes things like child marriages.
Now, suppose a culture decides to have polygamy in the same geographic area as me, backed by their particular overlapping government.
Could their pool of undereducated, unattached, desperate “surplus” young men become my problem? Very much yes.
And this isn’t anywhere near the only social issue with externalities.
5. Satisfying preferences has economies of scale.
The easiest way satisfy the people who want to live among Parisian architecture, and not some mish-mash of ugly whatever in the name of freedom, is to have a city or city district where all other building styles are prohibited.
(The above isn’t secretly about race. I literally mean architecture.)
This applies to many, possibly most, preferences.
6. People will therefore act to rule over others and enforce their preferences wherever they must live with the consequences.
They may not even do this legally.
7. The natural boundary in the absence of nations is around religion, ethnicity, race, class, or clan, not “human.”
Religion is a natural boundary for reasons that should be obvious. Also, many adherents ACTUALLY BELIEVE religion and are NOT SECRETLY JUST LIBERALS FAKING IT UNDERNEATH.
Race forms a natural boundary because it’s a team you can’t quit and you’re stuck with the actions of others in the same race whether you agree with them or not.
Ethnicity is a bit of a mashup between the two, but a bit less strong.
Clan, of course, genetic relations, etc.
All of these subgroups are going to be more likely to back you up in a conflict than the unified “Earth ingroup”, and organizing around them presents negotiating advantages.
Removing the nation will not remove armed conflict. It merely moves it inwards one step.
Like, say, a white man ramming unarmed Muslims exiting a mosque with a van as an ethnic revenge killing in retaliation for van attacks by other Muslims.
8. The nation is an engineered pseudo-ethnicity.
This is GOOD, because we can use it to create a bigger ingroup (as it still has exclusion, punishment, and shared traits for cohesion) and overpower lesser subdivisions that might normally cause issues.
Additionally, because people are more likely to help the ingroup than the outgroup, by putting them in a cross-class ingroup like this we might be able to actually fund welfare programs.
It’s also necessary to defend territory, and by God can nations defend territory. (And no, you’re not going to be able to just stop defending territory.) People feel like they own the nation. That matters. A lot.
Each nation can then be specialized, with different rules to fit different preferences, and limited cross-border migration which does not exceed assimilation levels.
9. Open Borders has bad incentives.
- Extract the maximum value from your area of residence, then leave before the bad side effects catch up with you, moving out to an area that excludes by pricing the poor out of the market.
- Don’t bother helping the poor outside your immediate group, since you have no connection to them and can replace them with new immigrants at a moment’s notice.
- Prohibited from excluding trouble-makers by any other means, pricing is again used to keep out both the regular poor and the criminal poor. (Any sufficiently large area exclusionary private-buyout counts as “creating borders/nations again” and will be legally destroyed for ideological reasons.)
- The way to deal with poverty in foreign territories is for those areas to PRODUCE MORE. You can help them produce more, but only what is produced can be consumed. Everyone talented who can leave escaping will not accomplish this.
And so on.
But it gets a lot worse.
10. Open Borders means World Government.
Someone has to track criminals across the opened borders.
And people aren’t going to sign up to fight and die for territories they don’t really own - and if they can be swamped with migrants that can vote at any moment, they don’t really own the territory.
This means the creation of a world police.
The creation of a world police requires the creation of a world law.
Power flows upwards and centralizes. As the national governments degrade under open immigration, power will shift upwards towards what little world government there is, which will gradually expand.
US Federal power expanded. EU power expanded. This is the natural course of things.
11. World Government is very, very bad.
11.A. The larger the pot, the bigger the spoils.
This means that every political and ethnic faction has near-maximum incentive to subvert control of the world government because it controls all of humanity and the entire economic output of Earth.
Almost any price is worth paying to a political faction to take over Earth and permanently enshrine their ideology or religion as a global dictatorship.
Likewise, the government won’t allow any breakaways, since that would cause a chain reaction that would destroy it. This includes space colonies and any infrastructure on the Moon.
So if you make an Earth Sphere Federation, don’t be surprised when you get Gundam-tier interstellar colony-drop war bullshit. Just, you know, with power armor, because mobile suits are too large to be practical.
11.B. The larger the pot, the less your chip matters.
Meanwhile, individual voters have little incentive to pay close attention, because their vote is marginally worthless.
This means the quality of the world government will be terrible. In fact, the median government on Earth is probably much closer in quality to Brazil than it is to the United States of America.
And it plays into 11.A above, since that makes more extreme actions more cost-effective versus worthless voting.
11.C. There is nowhere to flee to if it fucks up.
Seriously.
Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like weaving an environment that people can put themselves in and have some semblance of identity, forms a perimeter for arguing against bad social effects in general, and so on and so forth.
But I should probably be more surprised no one is noticing that eliminating nations is the clearest pathway to a world dictatorship.
Also, while we’re on the topic of annoying conservative rhetoric, let’s talk about Rotherham. I agree that it happened, and that it was bad, and that people covered it up for ideological reasons. The unspoken assumption that I don’t agree with and that people seem to keep trying to sneak in here is that it happened because Muslims are inherently more evil than the rest of us. Like, this fits the narrative of “social progressives sometimes behave like ideologues-in-the-pejorative-sense and cover up scandals to avoid making their side look bad just like other ideologues do” but not “social progressives are automatically wrong because of this.”
Sunni Islam actually is worse than other religions. (Maybe not Scientology.) There is no rule that says that all religions have to suck equally. Religions are part of the same general space as political ideologies, and you will acknowledge that not all political ideologies suck equally.
However, the child sex trafficking appears to be more of a regional thing, like the FGM is more of a regional thing, and it could be eradicated if the suitable ideological price were paid.
Ok, broad question, feel free to answer with a couple links rather than an effortpost but... why are nations a desirable end state? They seem like a piece of legacy infrastructure, a chesterton's fence not to be too quickly destroyed, but hardly good in and of themselves. I feel far less fraternal affection with most co-nationalists than I do with say argumate, even though he's behind a different border.
I’ve been planning a longer post on this that I just haven’t gotten around to.
Meandering rant/textwall incoming. TL;DR readers: just skim the bolds.
1. The thing to understand is that ingroup/outgroup is actually to do with incentives and information cost. It’s a successful heuristic, rather than some huge irrational distortion that needs to be answered with “why can’t we just all get along?”
- When an outsider comes to our community, we lack information about them. Obtaining this information has a cost, whether we or others bear it. Part of that is time - getting to know others requires effort and time, and as mortals, we could easily spend those scarce resources on something else. As that information is obtained, the outsider can become more of an insider.
- Bad people do actually exist, whether created by conditions or born predisposed that way. (And sometimes, we are the bad people.) The benefit of a new community member is good, but the cost of letting in a bad apple is much more extreme. It could be discord which breaks the community apart. It could be theft. It could be murder. Each of these erodes trust significantly in addition to being harmful, and trust, when not abused, is extremely resource-efficient, so this is even more costly than it first appears.
Losing $5 in cookies to theft doesn’t seem like much, but it will cost a lot more than $5 in the end.
(Resident adjacent guru Slartibart would probably link you to that video showing that all the tail risks we accumulate over a lifetime add up to a much bigger risk than they are individually, so minimizing them is rational.)
- There is significantly less leverage over outsiders, since a considerable portion of our soft leverage is in the form of social sanction. This must be spend wisely, for it can be squandered. So if there is a bad apple within our community, this may be more manageable.
- Ultimately, for any of this to work, there must be either punishment or exclusion. We must be able to either punish the thieves or keep them out of the community. If we can do neither, the community will gradually disintegrate in cohesiveness as trust evaporates.
2. But even that assumes roughly similar preferences that could all be met by one community.
Let us suppose there are the Billys and the Sarahs, who are fans of the obscure Australian faux-anime Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San (or “Emoji Girl Unicode-san” for our American viewers).
(This example may seem a bit contrived, but I’m avoiding picking a real ethnicity here.)
Billys and Sarahs are rather dorky people with a low average level of social skills. Some have higher social abilities, but the median level for the community sets the expectations, and these expectations are comfortable for the Billys and Sarahs, who do not find them emotionally taxing.
At this point, wearing an Emoji Girl t-shirt isn’t just a sign of having watched the show. It’s also a proxy for being a Billy or Sarah. A cultural signifier that, out in the wild, lets them know they’ve found someone they could connect with. That’s actually a really big benefit! It reduces the social risk of approaching someone to create a connection significantly!
One day, internet celebrity, ironylord, and athlete Bruno Pauerlifter features Emoji Girl on his podcast, and many Chads and Staceys begin to pour into the community.
The Chads and Staceys like to enjoy Emoji Girl on multiple levels of irony, and are suave socially adepts.
Soon they outnumber the “natives.” The median social skill goes up, and with it, the expectations. The level of irony goes up as well.
The Billys and Sarahs do not enjoy the new level of social expectations, and like to enjoy Emoji Girl unironically.
The Chads and Staceys haven’t done anything wrong, per se. They’re not actively trying to exclude others with their irony. They just really like irony, and the others, well, don’t.
The usefulness of Emoji Girl t-shirts as identifiers for Billys and Sarahs is obliteratedwithout anyone even trying to obliterate it.
And that’s how you get gatekeeping behavior on things as “trivial” as video games, anime, and so on.
Now imagine a preference clash over something that actually matters.
3.People will thus ingroup/outgroup automatically. Putting everyone into one big ingroup is not actually possible.
And because it isn’t possible, trying is only going to fail while creating side effects.
4. The idea of multiple overlapping governments in the same area administering different laws to different individuals is a fantasy, because not only will they disagree on externalities, but some externalities are social.
Is it absolutely proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that polygamy must result in worse mental health outcomes for women and children, fewer rights for women, more social control of women, and expelling lower-status men?
No.
But considering that many of these are still issues with polygamist communities in developed countries, it’s likely it does, and it makes sense given the incentives of polygamy. This includes things like child marriages.
Now, suppose a culture decides to have polygamy in the same geographic area as me, backed by their particular overlapping government.
Could their pool of undereducated, unattached, desperate “surplus” young men become my problem? Very much yes.
And this isn’t anywhere near the only social issue with externalities.
5. Satisfying preferences has economies of scale.
The easiest way satisfy the people who want to live among Parisian architecture, and not some mish-mash of ugly whatever in the name of freedom, is to have a city or city district where all other building styles are prohibited.
(The above isn’t secretly about race. I literally mean architecture.)
This applies to many, possibly most, preferences.
6. People will therefore act to rule over others and enforce their preferences wherever they must live with the consequences.
They may not even do this legally.
7. The natural boundary in the absence of nations is around religion, ethnicity, race, class, or clan, not “human.”
Religion is a natural boundary for reasons that should be obvious. Also, many adherents ACTUALLY BELIEVE religion and are NOT SECRETLY JUST LIBERALS FAKING IT UNDERNEATH.
Race forms a natural boundary because it’s a team you can’t quit and you’re stuck with the actions of others in the same race whether you agree with them or not.
Ethnicity is a bit of a mashup between the two, but a bit less strong.
Clan, of course, genetic relations, etc.
All of these subgroups are going to be more likely to back you up in a conflict than the unified “Earth ingroup”, and organizing around them presents negotiating advantages.
Removing the nation will not remove armed conflict. It merely moves it inwards one step.
Like, say, a white man ramming unarmed Muslims exiting a mosque with a van as an ethnic revenge killing in retaliation for van attacks by other Muslims.
8. The nation is an engineered pseudo-ethnicity.
This is GOOD, because we can use it to create a bigger ingroup (as it still has exclusion, punishment, and shared traits for cohesion) and overpower lesser subdivisions that might normally cause issues.
Additionally, because people are more likely to help the ingroup than the outgroup, by putting them in a cross-class ingroup like this we might be able to actually fund welfare programs.
It’s also necessary to defend territory, and by God can nations defend territory. (And no, you’re not going to be able to just stop defending territory.) People feel like they own the nation. That matters. A lot.
Each nation can then be specialized, with different rules to fit different preferences, and limited cross-border migration which does not exceed assimilation levels.
9. Open Borders has bad incentives.
- Extract the maximum value from your area of residence, then leave before the bad side effects catch up with you, moving out to an area that excludes by pricing the poor out of the market.
- Don’t bother helping the poor outside your immediate group, since you have no connection to them and can replace them with new immigrants at a moment’s notice.
- Prohibited from excluding trouble-makers by any other means, pricing is again used to keep out both the regular poor and the criminal poor. (Any sufficiently large area exclusionary private-buyout counts as “creating borders/nations again” and will be legally destroyed for ideological reasons.)
- The way to deal with poverty in foreign territories is for those areas to PRODUCE MORE. You can help them produce more, but only what is produced can be consumed. Everyone talented who can leave escaping will not accomplish this.
And so on.
But it gets a lot worse.
10. Open Borders means World Government.
Someone has to track criminals across the opened borders.
And people aren’t going to sign up to fight and die for territories they don’t really own - and if they can be swamped with migrants that can vote at any moment, they don’t really own the territory.
This means the creation of a world police.
The creation of a world police requires the creation of a world law.
Power flows upwards and centralizes. As the national governments degrade under open immigration, power will shift upwards towards what little world government there is, which will gradually expand.
US Federal power expanded. EU power expanded. This is the natural course of things.
11. World Government is very, very bad.
11.A. The larger the pot, the bigger the spoils.
This means that every political and ethnic faction has near-maximum incentive to subvert control of the world government because it controls all of humanity and the entire economic output of Earth.
Almost any price is worth paying to a political faction to take over Earth and permanently enshrine their ideology or religion as a global dictatorship.
Likewise, the government won’t allow any breakaways, since that would cause a chain reaction that would destroy it. This includes space colonies and any infrastructure on the Moon.
So if you make an Earth Sphere Federation, don’t be surprised when you get Gundam-tier interstellar colony-drop war bullshit. Just, you know, with power armor, because mobile suits are too large to be practical.
11.B. The larger the pot, the less your chip matters.
Meanwhile, individual voters have little incentive to pay close attention, because their vote is marginally worthless.
This means the quality of the world government will be terrible. In fact, the median government on Earth is probably much closer in quality to Brazil than it is to the United States of America.
And it plays into 11.A above, since that makes more extreme actions more cost-effective versus worthless voting.
11.C. There is nowhere to flee to if it fucks up.
Seriously.
Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like weaving an environment that people can put themselves in and have some semblance of identity, forms a perimeter for arguing against bad social effects in general, and so on and so forth.
But I should probably be more surprised no one is noticing that eliminating nations is the clearest pathway to a world dictatorship.
I still want people to be free to make bad decisions after being properly informed of the consequences. I still want to balance said freedom against efforts to minimize suffering. I still want different groups of people to get along (without raping each other). Nothing has changed, value-wise. Y'all just signalled yourselves off a fucking cliff one day, and now I’m expected to be as willfully and openly retarded as Rational Wiki just to keep up.
And now you’re hanging out with people that would threaten the Earth with mobile suits, waiting to be reclassified as a reactionary for thinking genes have an impact on development.
“Well if you dirty statists just let us sell rotten food there wouldn’t be a hunger issue”
Government is just another word for the bleach we pour over donated food so the homeless can’t eat it together.
very interesting
anyway remember when in grapes of wrath they poured kerosene on oranges to not reduce prices as people starved
Yes I do remember the part in Grapes of Wrath where the farmers followed the legally empowered Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s directives to destroy food.
“The Roosevelt Administration was tasked with decreasing agricultural surpluses,” to quote Wikipedia quoting Douglas.
Huh, it turns out that that act was forced into existence by large farmers and food processors, who financially benefit from people starving! All while these people horribly exploited their workers to the point of starvation and viciously rebelled against the “socialistic” resettlement program!
Turns out that these bastards love to see people die. Huh.
I have absolutely no idea how this is an argument against free market policies.
Companies will bribe politicians and distort the market if they are not actively prevented from doing so through state interference. Free markets are not a perfectly stable equilibrium and competition requires effort - and state interference - to maintain.
“Well if you dirty statists just let us sell rotten food there wouldn’t be a hunger issue”
Government is just another word for the bleach we pour over donated food so the homeless can’t eat it together.
very interesting
anyway remember when in grapes of wrath they poured kerosene on oranges to not reduce prices as people starved
Yes I do remember the part in Grapes of Wrath where the farmers followed the legally empowered Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s directives to destroy food.
“The Roosevelt Administration was tasked with decreasing agricultural surpluses,” to quote Wikipedia quoting Douglas.
Huh, it turns out that that act was forced into existence by large farmers and food processors, who financially benefit from people starving! All while these people horribly exploited their workers to the point of starvation and viciously rebelled against the “socialistic” resettlement program!
Turns out that these bastards love to see people die. Huh.
It’s important to remember that the Market™ pays people to subvert public ownership of the State.
This demand originates within the market and then subverts any state not adequately designed to resist it. Paring back the state doesn’t actually get rid of the demand, and may, depending on circumstances, make the problem worse.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
When will they realize the Russians don't want a puppet trump they are just chaos magicians
yeaahh… after my effort post, ive been dwelling on the situation all day
for a moment it crossed my mind today, that Trump Jr. posting the email was reminiscent of some insane Vladislav Surkov style non-linear warfare power move, whether or not the collusion allegations are real. The effect of posting it being unsurprisingly stunning and confusing to the effect of disorienting everyone and uh.. and it got me thinking
My thoughts are now, as Russia has always been involved, Russia wouldn’t actually be colluding but potentially sowing hints of it (if at all) particularly to produce chaos and turmoil the way Putin’s government has done on the regular in Russia to suppress opposition. Hell. Similarly to how Russia actively supports california’s leftist separatists as well as America’s far right, why not play America’s media and mainstream factions against eachother?
Because there is nothing. No collusion. There is a tremendous amount of smoke, but no fire… but what if Russia helped produced or fans the smoke particularly to send the Americans into an endless search for fire? All there really needs to be is someone with a russian name and a basic affiliation to Russian “officials” to step in and say “Здравствуйте” and the americans will do the rest of the work.
Russia doesn’t need to actively collude or “hack” an election, but be present enough to keep Americans paranoid and confused, especially in light of wars in the ukraine and Syria that Russia doesnt want the west focused on.
It’s the psychological equivalent of how the USA conducts war in the middle east. Because that the goal is not to beat, but destabilize your opponent with minimal involvement… The difference between ground invasion in Iraq and the no fly zone in Libya to accomplish a similar regime change… Because the American military has evolved, pushing America’s enemies to seek other means to mitigate american strength, tactics… and the USA’s political system is the country’s glaring weakness in light of this.
(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)
I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.
How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.
Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?
I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.
Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.
The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.
Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.
That’s terrifying.
I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.
The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.
In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.
Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.
But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening. And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.
Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message? Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?
Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.
And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of? Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided. She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.
1. I don’t claim to understand Trump voters, in fact my post is about how I don’t understand them.
2. The politically correct left does I think have real problems, as illustrated by Rotherham or the naivete of not being worried about Germany taking in so many Syrian refugees. But, with respect to America, they are basically correct. Immigrants to the US have lower crime rates than natives, largely assimilate by the third if not second generation, and you almost certainly won’t be killed in a terrorist attack.The fact that half the country would never believe this is attributable to the intellectual rot in right-wing news sources.
3. On foreign policy, I don’t love those “very serious people” either (or Hillary on foreign policy, way too hawkish), but they wouldn’t be completely destroying America’s leadership position and credibility, thus ceding it to authoritarian states, and they would possess much less of a long-tail risk of a true foreign policy catastrophe that Trump does. Also, I strongly doubt foreign policy had much to do with Trump’s success.
But, with respect to America, they are basically correct.
And you can’t even envision the mental state of someone who doesn’t believe this?
And you can’t even imagine a person who has noticed “Hey, they acted exactly the same way they did here, exactly the same way in every possible respect, as they did in Rotherham, and the things those people are telling me about how I’m a terrible bigot who is only driven by bigotry are exactly the same things they said about Rotherham, and all of the statistics they wave in my face are made and controlled by the same people as made the statistics that proved Rotherham wasn’t happening”?
You think it’s “intellectual rot” in right-wing news sources to not roll over and admit defeat and adopt your ideology. You keep admitting that there are horrific, soul-deep problems in Your Ideological Tribe and that they keep lying and they keep maliciously trying to hurt people, but you just act incredibly perplexed when someone actually notices those things, and then acts like a person who noticed it. When someone notices the politically correct left never stops lying to them and about them, they act like people who noticed that, and they stop believing the things the politically correct left demands they believe.
Your continued inability to understand conservatives is seriously because you aren’t trying.
So, in addition to what BrazenAutomaton says, which gets at why the Conservatives don’t trust “well okay, they lied that time, but overall they’re right.” (And why I didn’t respond earlier, since what I would have said would not have been so different.)
There are policies you can use to bring a Rotherham-like situation under control.
They are not nice policies. They are not kind policies.
This kind of price must be paid in pain or blood.
It will have to be very firmly established to not only these men, but the communities in which they reside, that this behavior is utterly unacceptable and intolerable. No excuses just because they are foreign. Child sex trafficking isn’t littering.
There are solutions to other problems as well, that are forbidden from consideration, because we are simultaneously too soft and too tough in all the wrong ways at once.
Some of them should be very stupidly obvious, like banning first and second cousin marriage, but oh, we can’t even admit there is a problem.
