the camgirl discourse is interesting because it bumps into all these subterranean intuitions about women lacking power and moral agency which date back to when women were explicitly denied power and moral agency, plus the usual slut-shaming which typically lies beneath a thin veneer of weak sex positivity.
so when women choose to do sex work as independent operators without the traditional threat of male violence (pimps, street harassment, cops) and use the internet to cut out the middleman and simultaneously keep their customers at a safe distance, it completely upsets the apple cart.
the result tends to be discourse flailing around trying to find a patriarchal reason for why they feel compelled to engage in sex work in the first place, instead of doing something more meaningful and rewarding and yes less slutty dammit
I hope you don't mind if I crop that picture of the guy inhaling The Idea That Liberal Democracy Is The Natural Moral Order Of The Universe, because it's so good.
Knock yourself out, Anon-kun.
Not literally, though, of course. If you huff too much from that inhaler you’ll have an overdose and start believing American newsmedia, so only inhale just the little bit that you need to keep your soul alive.
I hope you don't mind if I crop that picture of the guy inhaling The Idea That Liberal Democracy Is The Natural Moral Order Of The Universe, because it's so good.
Knock yourself out, Anon-kun.
Not literally, though, of course. If you huff too much from that inhaler you’ll have an overdose and start believing American newsmedia, so only inhale just the little bit that you need to keep your soul alive.
Nothing says hyperatomization like an "ownership model" of parent-child relationships or a "trustee model" of parent-child relationships. To think these things are somehow more elemental in the construction of society than just having a "parent-child model" itself! (Not that I necessarily even disagree... just an observation.)
Ah, but for whom is the trustee model written?
Not for those who have a healthy parent-child model, which is difficult to explain and loaded with intuition, but for those who do not.
The trustee model is presented for those who can only see things as “the parent owns the child” or “the state owns the child”, with no in-between or drift from the axis, including various hypercapitalists. It is a framework to grasp at which is either safer for the children if they stop there, or allows a departure from that mindset altogether.
America: *destroys a country* America: Damn…this country needs some help. these poor people…. America: *destroys it again* America: Yikes, there’s no helping here
Magneto is an ethnic separatist and all of y'all’s political analyses of X-Men are horrible
I haven’t read any comic books but in the movies he literally tries to exterminate all humans on several occasions. I get that he has understandable motivations or whatever but like, genocide is bad even when it’s retaliatory genocide.
plus there are mutants with the literal power of killing everyone around themselves with no control whatsoever, of course that shit should be regulated
Nice to see someone else admitting that human rights are contingent on certain facts about humans.
honestly the more time i spend on tumblr and especially in discourse hell, the more i appreciate the simple ass allies whose only opinion is “being gay isnt wrong” its so refreshing to remember that most people irl have no idea what 90% of all yalls made up nonsense means
from someone who does have a niche identity, for the purposes of this conversation: no, niche identities aren’t made up, what’s made up is acting like every identity has its own specific and separate set of needs and oppressions, then trying to implement that needlessly and super complicated tangle of demands as a coherent political programme, instead of working on having a good lgbt coalition and fighting for specific rights that many different groups are missing. or even worse, giving up completely on having a coherent set of goals like this arrogant arse:
and to think i used to like calling myself queer …
That quoted passage reads like someone who wrapped all things they don’t like up into one big ball, thus forgetting that social hierarchies are not only caused by Capitalism.
Sometimes I wish tumblr had a downvote option to allow me to go hog-wild in fucking over fascist / anti-sjw / 4chan blogs.
Right, because that works so well on reddit…
Haha, in about ten minutes, downvotes would become a badge of pride, showing how successful the blog was at annoying people like OP. Plus the dumb call-out posts would immediately begin downvoting random fifteen year old girls into oblivion for not liking the right SU ship.
In a world of superpowers, you are the anomaly. After years of being bullied and being called ‘freak’, you finally can’t take it anymore and reveal your immensely powerful superpower
I looked at him as he picked up the phone. This hadn’t been the first time I’d used my powers, and it wouldn’t be the last, but usually I’d used them sparingly, it at all.
“What have you done, boy?” A man’s voice cracked out of the phone.
“What- Dad, what happened?” The boy asked.
“The house, boy! The house is gone! Big fence around the whole lot, they won’t even let us in, they’re saying the city has rezoned it as a toxic waste dump! Who did you piss off, son?” The man said.
The boy looked back at me.
Junior Municipal Master. The city itself - its concrete, its steel, its trees, and its zoning ordinances, bent to my will as easily as other people could throw fire or fly.
And he knew. The few who could knit the cities back together into something approximating housing and industry, after all the combat tore them up each day, well. The government needed them more than just another boy who could fight.
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Wishing to extend their knowledge, they first started browsing Tumblr.
The Great Learning except the intro is replaced with LISTEN UP BITCHES TIME TO LEARN YOU SOME FACTS
apricops said: Wishing to be unproblematic, they first sought to be woke. Wishing to be woke, they first sought to be bae
“rectify your blog” should be the new “pee your pants”
Why do you think it is that the discourse in general talks about economic inequality from technology driven labor obsolescence as a force of nature? We can, it seems, make pretty good predictions with how technology will advance over time but a lot of people seem to think certain social effects are inherently tied to them when we are the ones who will be deciding what moves to make next aside from unexpected events i.e. a massive earthquake disrupts infrastructure in a huge way or something
I mean “we” decide but in a distributed and uncoordinated way that feels like an unstoppable force of nature.
Did “we” decide to redesign our entire lives around car transport at an official meeting in the early 20th century, for example.
“How many layers of soulless, commodified and forced cultural and religious amalgamation are you on?” “idk, like maybe 3 or 4?” “You are like a little baby. Watch this”
Why can not these people just start a religion, so i can hate it and i dont need to describe them every time i hatepost about them?
shit man a dream catcher and a yin yang, we’re RUINING THE AMERINDIANS AND ASIANS
When what you’re fighting for is so ridiculous you talk shit about a cheap novelty gift most likely made in China.
Inb4 she blocks you.
So this post has been tagged as “#sjw” by the usual suspects, showing once more that this site continues to be tone deaf across the entire political spectrum. Perhaps the strangest, but not uncharacteristic response to this post was the unwarranted speculation that I’m somehow fighting for anything. My post contained no calls to action or even the suggestion of politics. I’m not part of the cultural appropriation hysterics crowd, and consistent with that I’m not calling for anything to be forbidden or sanctioned or to be racially or culturally policed. Perhaps we can focus on the things I wrote in the fairly short post, which shouldn’t be a challenge to read and digest, or so one would assume. I pointed out what I called “soulless, commodified and forced cultural and religious amalgamation“. Each of those words is important, more so than buzzwords that I didn’t use. The example should serve to illustrate all of those. First of all, that it’s a cheap novelty gift item is part of the issue. Both the tajitu symbol (often known as “a yin yang” among people who have a surface level of engagement and interest in Chinese culture) and the dreamcatcher are meaningful items that derive their meaning from associated spiritual beliefs. The tajitu illustrates the (primarily) Daoist concept of metaphysics, the idea that all apparent dualities emerge from one monadic principle. Dreamcatchers are tied to Ojibwe religion and are a concrete manifestation of a protective deity (the Spider Woman). You might notice that we’re not talking about the proverbial sausage added to mapo dofu, the strawman employed to imply that the opponent thinks culture will be destroyed if it’s combined with something foreign. Not a profane item like food or casua clothes or technology, each of these items has a specific, self-contained meaning, and each of them is tied to the spiritual beliefs of a specific group. Fact aside that these hence sacred and meaningful objects have been turned into “cheap novelty gifts” (hence, commodified), by combining them for aesthetics they lose their meaning. How is this object still a Daoist religious item? How is it still an Ojibwe cultural item? The only meaning and message this item conveys now is that of a commodified aesthetical item that is mainly meant to signal its owners attachment to non-western (and this is why whether the item carries Chinese or Ojibwe cultural connotation is moot) New Age liberal conceptions of harmonic and enlightened Others. Hence, it’s soulless - the two original items have lost their meaning, their potential for people to meaningfully relate to them, and have become a product that has a limited, commodified, self-masturbatory message. Finally, this item is a forced amalgamate because it is not the result of genuine, authentic cultural innovation and interplay and bricolage. You have been spending too much time arguing with fourteen year olds socialized in a hysterical, authoritarian environment, who might have made you believe that the only opposition to cultural syncreticism and innovation are leftist kids who want ethnocultural safe spaces. This is likely why you did not address the points in my post and went straight for the “SJW” arguments you brought with you. Consequently, you are uncritical about the fact that his is indeed a wholesale enterprise that is marketing these products because they know that in the US and elsewhere, enough green tea-drinking “spiritual but not religious” sufferers of colonial cringe desperate for an identity or two will buy the idea of a mystical, enlightened Other that is vaguely defined (Chinese? Indian? Native American? all the same, right?) but if at all then from western ideas of progressivism.
In closing I would like to stress that if I did not suggest this should be banned or forbidden or at all acted against, I do very explicitly say that this kind of uncritical and callous display of neutered, meaning-bereft symbols applies to the lowest common denominator and is helpful in marking individuals who you might otherwise have wasted time on socializing with. It is in this spirit that I would like to share the link to the item in question as well as the store (in Delhi, India) so that you can buy those, and maybe epically spite some top kek SJWs along the way.
Parting words: I’m a dude, but you do you when it comes to your likely logicd/mrcappadocian line of thought that someone who raises a point agsint the commodification of culture, be it from the left or the right, can only possibly a woman.
The only meaning and message this item conveys now is that of a commodified aesthetical item that is mainly meant to signal its owners attachment to non-western (and this is why whether the item carries Chinese or Ojibwe cultural connotation is moot) New Age liberal conceptions of harmonic and enlightened Others.
I wouldn’t put it past the Americans to institute public healthcare by way of compulsory military service so that everyone is nominally a veteran.
Making welfare programs politically legitimate through national service is an idea that gets floated around everyone once in a while. Also as a way to allow welfare for immigrants while also allowing free movement.
This blog is in favor of both welfare and national service.
"I think the key problem is the idea of ownership of the child." I see what you're getting at here, but I think it's pretty heavily misguided. Insofar as children can't take care of themselves, *someone* has to own them, and I trust the average parent to do that significantly more than I trust the state to do that - the state being the de facto owner of the child if parents are cut out of the picture.
I don’t think the concept of complete ownership of the child, or any human, is necessary. It is enough that parents bear full responsibility for the child and all of their actions. For example, death due to malnourishment because the child refused to eat would still be the fault of the parents.
Remember, it used to be legal and within the window for parents to make their children get a job (labor, not chores) while being entitled to all of its profit.
Remember how I wrote about “mommy makes me go to church” implying a history of abuse? Remember what I said about Russian communists being very concerned that the state will come in and take their children away just because they abuse them?
We need better orphanages and social services, not more locked down families. Jesus, everyone except triggeredmedia figured out that divorce is good because it gives failing families an out. Juvenal justice is the same thing.
If this sounds like some bullshit they’d pull in Singapore, that’s not an accident.
Sovereignty is won by force. Every murder, every bombing, every acid attack undermines the legitimacy of the government. Why listen to the government when someone else could kill you just as easily?
The mighty iron hand of the Singaporean state would not let such a thing go so easily. It would seek to crush such opposition.
These behaviors can be stopped at the margins, if they are stopped now. Otherwise, this is the future you choose.
I think white supremacists lean really hard on the framing that they’re not destroying peaceful integrated multicultural societies, they’re just noticing that those never existed anyway or are about to collapse anyway.
And of course it’s a transparent lie. There are lots and lots of societies that have had successful peaceful integration. Racists and xenophobes are the force making integration difficult and dangerous and fragile; there’s not some other force that they are just innocently noticing. (Bad economic conditions and weak governments and violence all contribute to making racist and xenophobic movements more appealing. But it’s important to observe that the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ is still caused by the racists and xenophobes acting, it’s not something that happens separately from them.)
Look, it’s true that Europe is not on the verge of a race war. They are not one more bombing away from all the white people mysteriously obtaining guns and launching a new “crusade” against the “saracens” amongst them. (They might be on the verge of the breakup of the EU.)
On the other hand, just because there is relative order does not mean things are as safe as they could be. What’s going on right now looks more like “ethnic tension.” When open Atheists get killed by vigilantes in Islamic countries it isn’t something you encounter on the street, usually. Likewise, when you see low-level violence it’s often going to be in low-SES areas, not where the tourists are. And, of course, that white guy making a van attack against seven random Muslims in response to van attacks by Muslims is more like an ethnic revenge killing in less-developed nations than a declaration of war.
And yes, it’s statistically improbable that you will be killed in the next concert bombing, and technically people should be more worried about falling furniture or whatever, but… The marginal costs are totally out of whack here, everyone knows these bombings are entirely unnecessary while it is pretty much inevitable that some people will die in furniture accidents no matter how hard you try.
Plus we all know that if the terrorists get their hands on an atomic bomb, they will vaporize New York. Furniture would never do this.
(We can also tell that the terrorism either isn’t really about stopping interference in the middle east, or that the terrorists are literally too stupid or ideological to realize what they’re doing isn’t working, because it has been very, very ineffective at that goal. Like, “the Bush Administration was able to get the American public to back the Iraq War” spectacularly ineffective. So “tolerate harder” is unlikely to stop it.)
Here is the problem. Multiculturalism as ideology makes for weak governments.
Wanting to maximize diversity is a non-sensical goal that should result in trying to create as many ethnic groups as there are people. All this “we need more diversity” and “celebrate diversity” stuff is like a religious law that was adaptive and then lost its usefulness but continued on because people didn’t follow it for its adaptiveness.
The real purpose of tolerance as a construct was to prevent continued justifications of war in Europe along religious lines, or something of that kind. It’s a social technology, not a virtue.
It is necessary to recognize the differences among cultures, and act accordingly. Liberalizing social atomization can only occur naturally if cultural forces/practices create the necessary environment.
With its “antiracism” and “decolonization” and opposition to assimilation, multiculturalism as ideology is actively preventing this.
You have to consider how different cultures propagate and support themselves. So that means, if you want to end this nonsense, well…
Ban cousin marriage, out to the second or even third degree. How exactly do these families keep such tight control on “their” women that they think that they own them? Well, being able to arrange marriages without even leaving the family might have something to do with it! Having to marry farther out means women must be given more freedom in practical terms, which will loosen and help eventually destroy their grasp.
Refuse to accept the legalization of polygamy. Polygamy is actually polygyny in practice usually, particularly in the countries these groups are coming from. The child marriage, patriarchal control of women, all of that flows from the gender ratio imbalance under polygamy. Polygamy is bad for women, it is bad for children, it is bad for wealth and for education. Even in the West.
Execute honor killers. Yes, I know, but we want to put the brakes on this now before it sticks. The key is to flip the social status of honor killers from “something those oppressive ethnic majority members stop us from doing and which we will resist” to “you’d have to be a fucking idiot to kill your sister and get executed for it.”
Make killing anyone for leaving a religion a hate crime. Again, it’s a method of control that prevents liberalizing atomization. If that isn’t enough, if people still kill others for leaving Islam, execute them.
Stiffer penalties for FGM and acid attacks. Not only are these methods that those communities use to reinforce their control and prevent atomization, but acid attacks have started catching on among the natives. Political pressure not to crack down on FGM must be stopped in its tracks before it can reach the critical theshold to be co-opted by political parties.
I’m going to start a new political party. It’s the Human Rights Abuses Are Bad party, and our platform is that we don’t like human rights abuses. I understand from this election cycle that this is a controversial opinion but I think it has a lot of merit
if you vote for the Human Rights Abuses Are Bad party then people will die
Actually, politics pretty much always involves deciding who is going to die.
That might be violent criminals, that might be cops, that might be dudes who are not violent criminals that get killed by cops anyway. That might be cancer patients who die because you didn’t immediately seize all wealth to use for treating cancer. That might be future patients that die because you seized all wealth, undermining new treatment development.
Even if you get rid of the state, that, too, is a decision about who will die.
Relating to the Japanese kimono issue, a surprisingly thorny topic is Chinese traditional dress from Qing dynasty (1644-1912).
This is the most recent “old China” costume available, and is seen in many iconic movies and TV dramas. But occasionally people object to it being worn in public, eg. for ceremonial purposes, due to all the awkward associations it has.
Firstly, the Qing dynasty was Manchu, not Han. This really should not matter, as in theory China includes dozens of distinct ethnic groups, and anyway Manchu is practically indistinguishable from Han at this point. But still, Qing is a foreign dynasty, much like Yuan (Mongols), and insufficiently Chinese.
Secondly, the later Qing dynasty was an era of humiliation for China, when the weakened empire was carved up by European empires and Japan, losing a lot of wars and signing a lot of unequal treaties under duress. So it’s a historical period that does not appeal to many nationalists.
Thirdly, the Qing dynasty is “old China”, feudalism, the bad old days, everything that new China got away from. There can’t be anything good about it, otherwise what would that say about new China. The younger generation might not feel this message as strongly, but it’s instructive to look at the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, which featured a historical retrospective which jumped from the Ming Dynasty to the 1990s, consigning the Qing, Nationalists, and Mao all to the memory hole.
So what is a nationalist cosplayer to do? Revive Hanfu, of course!
“A necessary departure point for such an examination is to apply a historical lens in order to construct a teleology whose endpoint is the emergence of neoliberalism. Subsequently, it will be shown here how WoW exists as a mechanism by which the neoliberal subject is interpellated (following Louis Althusser’s formulation) and thereafter recognizes itself as enfolded within the neoliberal schema. One can imagine this as the gamic process by which an individual creates a character, enters Azeroth (the world in which WoW is set) and brings themselves to the market, as represented by WoW’s auction house, ‘AH’ (a centralized location for players to buy and sell items). The character is subject to the rules of the game in a way that mirrors the player’s subjection to the neoliberal mode. Consequently, the player fully identifies with the on screen character such that the former derives pleasure from the latter’s actions and accomplishments. WoW conflates the on-screen avatar, the player and the neoliberal subject for ideological ends, as shall now be elucidated further.”—Neoliberal cyborg Science: World of Warcraft as gamic vehicle - 3:AM Magazine (via the-grey-tribe)
They could try arguing that someone with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome has a “genetic sex” of female, since they didn’t say “chromosomal sex” - if they were smart. But if they were smart, the party would look rather different.
@ranma-official some (most?) of the private prisons are actually state-level prisons.
I don’t think they have the legal authority to tell the court it can’t do its job, but you know how these things are - the plan is to increase the difficulty/cost by inserting some huge court case in the middle.
It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?
The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society.
This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.
Suppose we took this seriously - that we decided monolingual white children weren’t gaining a sufficient intuitive understanding of language as a generalized concept, because their households were too monolingual.
What, then, could be done about it?
Children across America are made to learn foreign languages throughout their schooling, but it rarely sticks. Why?
Insufficient density.
Quite simply, there just aren’t enough speakers of the language per population in a given area to support conversing with it regularly. It becomes useless, and the brain does what it always does with information that doesn’t get used - purge it.
Any response focused on a great diversity of languages, then, would be ineffective. There are simply too many different languages. If we limit instruction to only those languages with at least one million speakers, and keep children in school eight hours per day, each language will have just over one minute of instruction devoted to it.
To truly grasp the idea of language on a deeper conceptual level, fluency and depth of understanding would be required.
To create the number of speakers required to sustain fluency, then, we must pick one second language per geographic area, then make it mandatory in school.
I propose this be done at the regional level.
Mandarin Chinese or Japanese for the West Coast. German for the Midwest. French for the East Coast and New England. Spanish for the South and Southwest.
Not only will this bring about regional cultural differentiation which will increase the cultural diversity of America and support for later Regional Federalism (instrumental for unification with Canada and Mexico to form the North American Union and ensure continued dominance into the late 21st century), but it will add truly exciting new slang to the language.
Yes, the resulting drift will make old documents harder to understand, but the insistent descriptivists have already thrown that out the window as unimportant, so why stop there?
Often (Rarely) my heart (brain) is filled with love (certain neurotransmitters) for everyone (a group smaller than my Dunbar number) and everything (the set of objects and ideas I actually like). I want (say that I want in order to score social points) nothing more than (along with many other things) happiness in the world (for those people who will thereby make me happy). I don’t know what the meaning of life is (strongly suspect life is meaningless) but if it isn’t based in universal compassion I don’t need it (cling to the possibility I’m wrong).
So, is this a new filter that we can apply to all Tumblr posts?
You don’t already have it on? What’s wrong with you??
“Male-dominated video games become spectator e-sports for predominantly male viewers because they sustain a different project than celebrating physical excellence. They don’t showcase a specific form of male-bodied performance so much as support a specific sort of male spectator: a straight middle-class boy full of resentment and patriarchal rage. This is and has been the sports fan par excellence.”—
Every nation longs to be an empire. Every culture has tried to force itself on the unwilling at one point or another. What is the statute of limitations on imperialism? Are there varying legally distinct degrees, like with murder versus manslaughter, and murder one versus murder two? Who among us shall pass judgement, when everyone is guilty if you only go back far enough? And who is in a position to carry out the sentence, but another empire in its own right?
And more importantly, who among us can ask rhetorical questions? :)
I think “Japan” as a nation and culture got off lightly; the emperor was retained, as was the flag and other symbolism. Because it’s an island nation, the borders remained unchanged besides the loss of overseas colonies, which European empires also lost shortly afterwards anyway.
But the opposition to cultural appropriation that spawned this thread is mostly coming from young Japanese-Americans, not older Japanese nationals, and is driven by American/Western political concerns in the first place, which leads to an amusing clusterfuck of intersecting memes; for example:
- The idea that only “pure” Japanese people can ever wear a kimono, which sounds awfully like something you would hear in the 1930s.
- The idea that wearing a kimono will offend Japanese people, when in practice it’s more likely to offend Chinese people as a reminder of Japanese imperialism!
- Referring to Japan in the context of decolonisation, when Japan was an actual colonising nation and was never occupied by Western nations until after WWII.
- Many Japanese people teach classes in traditional arts of tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the rest. I’m sure they would be absolutely thrilled if all their customers stayed away for fear of appropriating their culture.
Anyway, activists gonna act; it could be worse.
As someone with, hm, let’s say historical ties to both Britain and Japan, I, for one, welcome their defense of the Britain of the East.
Just kidding, this is probably going to get me in trouble.
Actually I’d like the kimono industry to stay afloat as its customer base has been shrinking, and that means selling to nerds in America. They want to do it. The Japanese who live in Japan think it’s okay. First-generation immigrants think it’s okay. And if anyone owns the cultural rights to Japanese culture, then surely it must be Japanese people who live in Japan.
A number (though not all) of the people criticizing are not only not Japanese born in Japan, not nisei born of first-generation Japanese immigrants in America, they are other kinds of Asians by ancestry, some of them mixed, or else just plain old White People™.
And, like, the Japanese would likely actually object to the idea that the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese own the cultural rights to Japanese culture. That is probably like seven different flavors of problematic.
Probably this relates to how Japan became the Default Asian Culture in the eyes of the West, which… in some ways it kinda was before, but also China could have become that in this century if it didn’t go Communist.
Anyhow, these dust-ups are really about racial and ethnic identity in America. It’s true that people still make fun of Asians, because children are cruel and commit status war and looks are easy to attack. Also, having a sanctioned monopoly on some kind of foreign culture is important to have power under identity politics, like the legitimacy of royalty.
However, it’s also possible that if the rate of mixture increased, eventually people would forget their lineages, much like Italians and Irish forgot who they “were” and became “white.” The question is whether the visual difference is an insurmountable barrier. If I were the Republican Party, I’d be asking myself if there were some way I could cause this forgetting of lineage on purpose.
I’ve seen some people using the words “centrist” and “moderate” interchangeably, but I view them very differently.
To me, a centrist is someone who determines the ideal political positions via triangulation. I view this very negatively, both because it has no good ethical or meta-ethical underpinning, and because it is naive, being both easily gamed by extremists pushing on the Overton window and, in fact, adding additional incentives for extremists to be even more extreme, for that reason.
A moderate, but contrast, is to me more what “conservative” (as opposed to “reactionary” was supposed to mean, but has failed to mean in practice) – favoring gradual rather than revolutionary change to avoid major downside risks.
I also think less moderate people incorrectly assume that their exact constellation of issues are inherent in the nature of the universe rather than contingent on the nature of society, and conclude that anyone who doesn’t share all of the most left/right possible positions just hasn’t thought it through enough and is being in consistent. It’s quite possible to hold a moderate mix of views for well thought out reasons, consistent with a philosophical underipinning; it’s just that philosophy is something other than superficial leftism/rightism.
I see “centrist” not as a label of the method of finding policy, but as a label for anyone who has positions near the center, regardless of how they got there.
Because, in practice, that is how the word is used. You will be accused of being a Clueless Triangulator or wishy-washer regardless of whether you ever actually triangulate.
You don't have to read the whole of unsong to get at the bit relevant to your concept of omnibenevolence, as the author of the book posted it before the book started as a separate post google "slate star codex answer to job"
Yeah, I’ve read that one.
There are probably other ways to go about it as well. The point is less about that specific way, and more that “omnibenevolent” can be rescued, but only if it looks like something other than what religion says it looks like.
In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.
Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.
Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.
If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.
Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.
The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.
I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).
Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.
In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.
(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)
A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.
(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)
The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.
When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.
This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.
The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.
“This bill will reduce gun crime.” “By how much?” “Uh… a, uh, lot.”
Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.
DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.
Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.
The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.
Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.
Think you need to take a closer look at Robin Hanson, something I thought I’d never say
Specifically, the problem is that predicting the results isn’t the issue, it’s predicting the change in results given some policy change
I think Hanson has people bet on outcome both with and without policy
I may have to look into that, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Betting for outcomes based on whether the bill passes or fails to pass certainly provides more information for our voters/etc.
One big problem is that people are going to use this not to predict, but to hedge
It will be financialized
If you believe Hanson that markets are perfect, that’s not a problem it will all work out
if you haven’t had your skull smashed with a brick every day for the past 20 years or worked in the econ dept at GMU, you should be skeptical.
Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear in my intentions earlier.
While the probability estimates produced by the prediction market are interesting, the real purposes are more like:
1. Punish politicians that are actively at odds with the truth/reward those who have some idea what they’re doing, so that eventually the system is dominated by more clueful politicals who spend less time huffing ideology. Hopefully, this will result in more effective policy which is more aligned with reality.
(I’m of the opinion that there are many policies that it’s said you can’t do, because markets etc, but which you could do if you were smart about it. So I want those to come up, actually testing some of these policies before they come up, etc.)
2. Make politicians be more specific and truthful about the outcomes of policies in measurable ways, making it more difficult to do one thing and say another.
3. Track the effectiveness of policies over time so that better policy can be created in the future (through the metrics gathered to feed the market, not the market itself).
Would hedging interfere with those? I’m not so sure. It is, itself, information. It may also depend on the market’s design itself.
i really don't understand your focus on percentile rankings of prediction market performance rather than the raw results. it adds a distortion to the incentives of whatever underlying prediction market system you use and LMSR and such are designed to have incentives for accuracy already.
I want the DCOs hungry enough for money to [edit: make better policy], but not so ludicrously hungry that they’ll work hard to sabotage all the metrics and cause the state itself to become delusional.
Does that make sense?
Therefore, while their pay must be coupled to their performance, it needs a layer of indirection. They bet with a fake currency that can’t be directly converted into real money, and they are paid based on their overall performance over multiple bets, which is unlikely to rise or fall quite so sharply that one of their personnel will freak out and cause an incident of corruption.
But the bright side is that natural processes beyond our control can still be understood and accounted for! E.g., studying earthquakes can help you figure out the warning signs (potentially helping people to get to safety), discover where they're likely to occur, and develop less susceptible architecture. We cannot make the universe care for us, but we can adapt to it and care for each other.
