Of course memoguy isn’t going to issue lots of citations. Feminists control the academy and do things like classify “forced envelopment” as something other than rape.
“men and women are exactly the same in every regard, and we need to even out the gender distribution in every male-dominated field so women can improve it with their exact sameness.”—@garmbreak1 (via argumate)
The purpose of BigCorp diversity training is to show where the lines are that you aren’t supposed to cross, and nerdboi crossed them, openly, then said loudly why do we even have those lines.
The purpose of BigCorp diversity training is to limit legal liability and quiet down outside politicals that might protest BigCorp.
Look, I know I’m not an economist, but even I know buying secondhand goods drives up their price, making people more likely to buy new, since the difference in price between new and used shrinks, making the difference in quality (in terms of wear) more relevant.
(from my current understanding of the situation) the drawback of solar and wind power is less that it’s more expensive than coal, and more that it’s *cheaper.* Cheap energy is an unfortunate prospect for energy companies because it’s one big game of chicken: as soon as one company starts switching to solar power and energy costs pennies on the dollar, suddenly every energy company is making pennies when they used to make dollars.
I think this is part of the issue, but @xhxhxhx did a good effortpost about alternative energy a while back that I felt left me a better understanding of some of the other issues involved. I won’t just reiterate the same thing worse, but from the sounds of it, a lot of the problem is the way supply tends to fluctuate independently of demand. It seems like there’s a lot of potential for a big breakthrough in power storage at this point, though I am also kind of terrified of the failure states of something capable of storing that kind of energy.
The difficulty of the transition factors into that theory, if it were extremely easy, there would be no stopping it. Instead, there can be this situation where someone is going to have to spend a lot of money discovering how to solve the storage problem, then have that process immediately taken and used by others and therefore make none of that money back.
I dunno, I think whoever invented better storage tech would make bank. Power companies would pay, electric car companies would pay, those goofy people trying to sell consumer solar stuff (presumably made possible by govt subsidy or something) would pay. Storage technology is pretty bad today, and it would be huge if we made major advances in it.
They would pay whoever produces the machines. That doesn’t have to be the one who developed it.
I mean, there are patents and shit. And if there isn’t any such protection, it’s pretty much orthogonal to the energy sector and more a general condition of the country/legal system you’re operating under. I don’t actually think that it’s likely to be a power company that would develop or produce better storage tech, but I do think they’d pay whoever did.
There are patents, but like you said, they can be tricky to enforce. There’s the the problem that someone can come up with a competing technology right after you come up with yours, or that you can spend a lot of money and develop nothing.
You want to think of this as an allocation issue. The rewards from this technology can go to consumers, capital, or labor. Consumers can make out like bandits here. I think the people who work on it can cash out in their next job. But the person who paid for the development? They might get a small piece, could cover their actual development costs before risk-adjustment, but not enough to make it worth the risk.
Depends on what tech it is. Super Ultimate Pumped Storage would have trouble, some battery tech probably not so much.
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.
Alright, then you’re gonna have the problem of “who gets to decide what comes up for prediction and how?” with the various possibilities for manipulation.
Yes, a challenge in itself. My opinion is that it must be easier to get stuff into the prediction pool than it is to pass the legislation. Otherwise, it just degrades to normal legislature with some fluff on top.
So, off the top of my head, it may require 30-40% approval to get an item into the prediction pool, perhaps with a limit on the number of items each DCO can put into the pool.
Second and related is that you can basically rewarding people who are connected rather than accurate
To some extent, this doesn’t matter, connections are a part of effective policy too, much as I wish they were not
But it comes down to who can manipulate the outcomes and who has the inside track on what people will do.
- court will be needed so they can sue each other when they cheat
- baskets of metrics harder to game than single metric, so all metrics must be baskets
- hard to actually game some of the more challenging ones by outside interference if metric collection is at all accurate, simply too costly, borders on cost of actually fixing the problem
I’ll expand on this when I have access to an actual computer, which will be a while.
The Rand Corporation has done more than basically any group in the twentieth century to shape what kind of world we’re living in now, and they’re weirdly unrecognized for that
the fact they’re responsible for the MAD nuclear deterrence doctrine alone is mind boggling
Did you know they were aware that the Iraq War would be, well, more like it actually was and less lile the Bush administration thought it would be? Which is less impressive by itself, but more impressive relative to the cluelessness of various other US government institutions.
After that, I began to wonder if government quality could be improved by replacing the legislature with think tanks.
at the same time, RAND also made a doctrine for waging a “victorious” thermonuclear war against the Soviets. A large number of think tanks also pushed for a war with Iraq, which is why Gore was hore hawkish compared to Bush on this.
Tom Schelling, who’s undoubtedly a genius, is responsible in part for the Vietnam war.
National Review, Heritage Institute and a bunch of Kochtopus’s tentacles that all shill for the “global warming doesn’t exist because there was winter once” meme are technically think tanks as well.
Replacing the legislature with think tanks would delegitimize their rule in the eye of people (which is the primary reason for democracy, the idea of legitimate control) while these tanks are frequently wrong and not free of bias.
That’s why you make them bet on the outcomes of their legislation. Some think tanks are significantly more ideology-huffing than others, so you have to weed out the weak “this liberal democracy thing will totally work out in a nation with such high illiteracy” ones. Eventually what you’ll have left, after they all lose huge standing in the market or massively adjust policy to actually fit the situation (oh hey let’s try a 20yr mil governorship to actually make the necessary conditions for democracy before doing the democracy) will be less stupid.
And actually my plan is for elected thinktankparties, see my National Delegation post.
The Rand Corporation has done more than basically any group in the twentieth century to shape what kind of world we’re living in now, and they’re weirdly unrecognized for that
the fact they’re responsible for the MAD nuclear deterrence doctrine alone is mind boggling
Did you know they were aware that the Iraq War would be, well, more like it actually was and less lile the Bush administration thought it would be? Which is less impressive by itself, but more impressive relative to the cluelessness of various other US government institutions.
After that, I began to wonder if government quality could be improved by replacing the legislature with think tanks.
I kinda don’t know how to react to that.
The first problem is believing that the Bush administration actually believed their own PR. The second problem is not assuming that Rand wasn’t working hand in hand with the administration. The third problem is believing government institutions are clueless. The fourth is not acknowledging that think tanks already have more de facto control than most official government positions, hence the origin of the term “deep state”.
They probably didn’t believe their nonsense about WMDs, they probably did believe they wouldn’t make a clusterfuck that would ruin the Republican brand for many people and lead to ISIS.
From what I’ve heard, the admin basically ignored any naysayers, so if RAND told them how it would go, that doesn’t mean they listened to them.
Honestly, there is a lot more incompetence than scheming a lot of the time. Also incompetent scheming. But it’s like assuming Trump is playing 4D chess, when it seems in reality there is no Trump Master Plan. Also lots of individuals working locally at cross-purposes.
Think tanks have some control over legislation because legislators are lazy, but most legislation that actually gets passed is worse than what the think tanks come up with.
The Rand Corporation has done more than basically any group in the twentieth century to shape what kind of world we’re living in now, and they’re weirdly unrecognized for that
the fact they’re responsible for the MAD nuclear deterrence doctrine alone is mind boggling
Did you know they were aware that the Iraq War would be, well, more like it actually was and less lile the Bush administration thought it would be? Which is less impressive by itself, but more impressive relative to the cluelessness of various other US government institutions.
After that, I began to wonder if government quality could be improved by replacing the legislature with think tanks.
the billion dollar app idea is to make a virtual friend you care about more than anything else in the world, then charge you a monthly fee to keep it alive.
waifu hostages are an illegal industry, Argumate, even I agree with the World State on this one
I think I understand why nrx essays are always at least 10000 words long now.
Themes and Influences
Counterintuitive Insight Porn: The Last Psychiatrist, Hotel Concierge, Malcolm Gladwell
Gratuitous Longposts: Steve Yegge, Scott Alexander, (maybe Oswald Spengler)
Going out of your Way to Appear Like More of a Dick: Zed Shaw, Jim Goad, Friedrich Nietzsche, (maybe Nydwracu)
Giving Catchy Names to Patterns: Paul Graham, Big Yud, Robin Hanson, Richard Dawkins, Venkatesh Rao, David Chapman, Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, Friedrich Nietzsche, (maybe Oswald Spengler)
Reading Old Books: Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler
Not mentioned above: Hannah Ahrendt, Robert Jay Lifton, Eric Hoffer, Jane Jacobs
Style
A good way to get a feel for the style of an artist and why it works is to look at what happens whenotherstry tocopy him and to see what works and what doesn’t.
Darkly Hinting at the Fridge Horror is definitely the theme that ties them all together in Moldbug’s writing. But his essays don’t start out that way.
The Blueprint
Like an old The Simpsons episode, which starts out with a simple problem and its zany solution to set up the main plot of the episode, these essay start out with the description of a historical situation, or a very technical/procedural/non-ideological problem of modern society. The digression into history allows the author to set up the mental stage in a way that does not immediately raise ideological shields, activate old thought patterns and fall victim to cognitive dissonance. If I write about Kings, Jacobins and Girondists, you are much more likely to pay attention than if I wrote about Democrats and Bernie Bros.
In this historical situation, you start the narrative. You explain the problems of the common man, based on the contents of this old book you read about the man who you assume was quite common and typical for his era. This might even be a great idea to counteract your biases. The biases that colour your perception of history are not so much your own, as they are the biases of historians who tried to fit long-term historical trends into neat theories of historical development. In hindsight, the right side of history is curiously always the one that won in the end. Isn’t that neat? The older a book is, the more time was there in the meantime for written history to congeal into an overarching narrative.
After you have used the old book to start the historical narrative, you can extrapolate into later eras and today. Viewed from the past, the present looks not inevitable, but terrifying, and the future will be as terrifying!
Now, you need to go back into the past. Do not dwell too much on the present - yet! Start with another anecdote or statistic about New England in 1850. You must let the first anecdote percolate in the mind of the reader. If you let them think about the present again, they might reject everything you said based on tribalism, ideology or wishful thinking. The past is a place where intuitions don’t apply and we can examine situations on an intellectual level. (If not: Abraham Lincoln was a Republican! The Progressive Era was kind of racist!)
Repeat this a couple of times, so that the reader can form new intuitions based on these examples. Now tie this back into your Big Buzzword Theory! Give a catchy name to the pattern, and link back to an earlier post where you explained the pattern and its implications in more general terms.
Now, the the takeaway: Apply the theory to he present situation by showing how the situation fits into it and how it is similar to the earlier instances of the pattern, but don’t draw the conclusions explicitly! You can darkly hint, and leave it to the reader to figure it out. You must end the essay now.
When he walks away to the next tab, the epistemic fridge horror will slowly thaw and make him realise: “Oh my god! I don’t believe in democracy any more!” That feeling fades after a couple of hours.
TBH I think it’s pretty fucked up that boys get circumcised in America but it really isn’t something to have a super strong principled position on
It just seems like a really weird topic to fixate on
When it goes bad… well, worse, I guess… it can cause some pretty serious damage. Assuming all the people that reaaaally get into the Discourse against it are those dudes, can you say you wouldn’t do the same?
Meat industry has major global warming issues, but meat an important source of nutrients. Should work to help global warming by accelerating vatmeat development. Also valuable for vegans, vegetarians, some kinds of Consequentialists.
Here’s a fun question I got asked during a job interview. (I will not, of course, say where.)
Ten prisoners are going to be executed at dawn. The executioner gives them one chance at survival. In the morning, the prisoners will line up in single file, and the executioner will place a white or black hat (randomly selected) on each prisoner’s head. He will then ask each prisoner the color of the hat they are wearing, starting at the back of the line. The prisoners can only respond with “white” or “black.” If the prisoner is correct, they will go free; if they are wrong, they will be executed.
Each prisoner can see all the hats in front of them, but not their own hat or the hats behind them. Each prisoner can hear everything; they know the responses of the prisoners behind them and whether or not they were executed.
The prisoners can meet beforehand to decide on a strategy.
What is the maximum number of prisoners you can guarantee will be saved, and with what strategy?
Hint #1 [rot13]: Gurer vf n jnl gb thnenagrr gung avar bs gur gra cevfbaref jvyy fheivir.
Hint #2 [rot13]: Vs avar bs gur gra ner thnenagrrq gb fheivir, gurve nafjref zhfg or qrgrezvarq ol gurve bja ungf. Bayl gur svefg cevfbare pna neovgenevyl pubbfr jurgure gb fnl “juvgr” be “oynpx.” Jung fbeg bs vasbezngvba pna ur pbairl hfvat bayl bar ovg?
There is a real-world technical problem that can be solved using a similar strategy.
you know what would have been cool is if, given that it was a job interview, they’d asked the question in the context of the real-world technical problem that resembles it
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
neoliberalism-nightly said: consider this. the state would like this to happen in order to prevent a fiscal crisis
That only works if you kill them near the end of their career, not near the beginning and while they’re still raising children, and it’s a dumb plan relative to alternatives.
neoliberalism-nightly said: well, why can’t it
It costs a lot of money to raise and educate a kid. If the fiscal crisis is a rising portion of elderly retired relative to workforce, reducing the size of the workforce or destroying your investment before the costs can be repaid is not what you want to do.
...Huh, it just came to me, with a burst of clarity as I read that #reblog2016 "youth pastor" post, why the whole Hello Fellow Teens I Am Here To Relate To You bit is so risible and cringey. It just has "what makes an adult cool in the eyes of teens" exactly backwards: cool isn't acting like YOU, an adult, are a fellow teen; it's acting like THEY are fellow adults. At least to the extent of not talking down to them--which putting on a weird act about how you are With It is.
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
neoliberalism-nightly said: consider this. the state would like this to happen in order to prevent a fiscal crisis
That only works if you kill them near the end of their career, not near the beginning and while they’re still raising children, and it’s a dumb plan relative to alternatives.
Sometimes right-wingers must be really kicking themselves for denouncing the term ”micro-aggression“ instead of co-opting it.
Nah, right-wingers can’t co-opt that, that isn’t how it works. You have to wait for the kinds of violence and broken promises you can associate with careless previous rhetoric, then use it ironically. Like “cultural enrichment”.
Like “Happy Holidays”
It’s not “PC gone mad”. It’s a *micro-aggression*
Nah, Happy Holidays can’t be used ironically politically in that way.
Left-wing people don’t treat socon offendedness seriously and in fact revel in it. They can’t win by co-opting microaggression, progressives will just argue white people aren’t allowed to use it so it doesn’t count blah blah blah. It’s not even a very powerful word.
I mean you’re probably mostly joking, but the alt right and some of the other right wing shitposters are a lot better at this weaponized language thing. You have to either offend the lefties or use language that makes them look bad to others even if they aren’t offended - like “cuck”. (And I know rattumb thinks it’s lame, but as an insult it’s brilliant.)
But don’t offend the normies. It’s a careful balance.
I now have a Twitter (which is to say, I remembered the e-mail for my old Twitter), and I don’t understand how to use it.
do i just… start posting things no one has any capability of seeing in the first place? i replied to people, but it doesn’t show on my timeline and “joins in on already existing twitter war” is a niche clearly filled
I thought you enjoyed yelling at people that you think are doing politics stupidly, as a recreational activity? Wouldn’t Soldier in the Great Twitter War be perfect?
Sometimes right-wingers must be really kicking themselves for denouncing the term ”micro-aggression“ instead of co-opting it.
Nah, right-wingers can’t co-opt that, that isn’t how it works. You have to wait for the kinds of violence and broken promises you can associate with careless previous rhetoric, then use it ironically. Like “cultural enrichment”.
I know some super-edgy far-leftists who are kind of assholes online but are the sweetest people in person. In person they’re willing to show more compassion, discuss more nuanced details, and express more uncertainty–while online, they easily get pulled into macho woker-than-thou posturing. I imagine a lot of the people responsible for Bad SJ Discourse are kind of like that.
A lot of internet people who are jerks and upset me are probably people I’d like if I talked with them in person. This does NOT justify this sort of online behavior. But thinking about it this way helps me find it less upsetting.
Sometimes the person is an asshole whose real self comes out only online. But some people are also really nice, and their real self gets masked online. And of course, in some ways, the in-person self and the online self are both the real self (as well as a masked self)–and it is an entity whose quality is very mixed.
If being mean comes naturally that’s one thing. If you have to put effort into being mean, whyyyy?
eXCUSE ME but being mean to the outgroup is completely morally justified, you aren’t some secret outgroup member …R U?
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
“Externality” is not just a word that means “bad thing” you buffoon, you fool,
Ssssh, I’m trying to sneak ultracaps into admitting employment laws may potentially be Good.
Anyhow, the purpose of this hot take is to point out that while it is in the interests of every company to induce burnout and risk death if they can pass the costs of dealing with that onto someone else to get more productivity - families, society, the state, other future companies - much like it is in the interests of every company to emit pollution if they can do the same, it is in fact economically destructive in ways that may not be adequately represented, and, while not an explicit subsidy, could have effects like one.
If one dude would generate three million dollars in economic activity over his life but dies one third of the way through his career, two million dollars of economic activity is not generated. This is very often due not to being genuinely suicidal for the job but due to a mismatch in negotiating leverage.
Considering what a spectacular waste of resources this is, it could make sense to require employee death insurance to ensure that the costs - to everyone else - of getting dudes killed is reflected in the price of goods and services. (After all, the State spent a lot of money educating that guy, his family spent a lot of money raising him, humans depend on generations, etc, so goods from Sparky’s McDeath Factory should only be chosen over Reasonably Cautious Joe’s Factory goods if they really do present enough of an advantage to outweigh this.)
It also matters why people get killed. Some jobs are just more risky, but without labor protections it’s likely often because some power-tripping bastard did something stupid and ignored obvious warning signs.
People might die but at least let’s not be stupid about it.
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
“Externality” is not just a word that means “bad thing” you buffoon, you fool,
Ssssh, I’m trying to sneak ultracaps into admitting employment laws may potentially be Good.
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
Yes I know I’m releasing what seems like DLC for Alt Right, but I swear I’m not the original developer - these are just free, optional mods you can install on your personal AltRighter or friends’ AltRighters! Neo-Chinese Ethnic Nationalism and Koreans Will Retake Europe for Christ are just my takes, as a modder and an artist, on the potential of the original game.
The reason the conservatives do not support a gun registry, which would otherwise be an entirely sane idea, is that it’s the first step in “round up all the guns.”
There is no “round up all the guns” without first knowing their locations. Going house to house doing a deep search is prohibitively expensive.
They’ll just hide them. There are so many guns in this country, the round-up won’t even get half of them.
Any event dramatic enough to make the current crop of conservatives agree to round up all the guns isn’t going to be small, either, and most of them would involve said conservatives not wanting to give up their guns.
Mass shootings? Mass shootings by Muslims? Not enough. The response has been to want guns even more in order to shoot back.
You’d need something bordering on an ethnic armed insurrection, at which point many of them would want guns to fight against the ethnic armed insurrection.
It’s true that this hasn’t always been the case in the past, that previous gun control laws were deliberately racist.
However, the clock ticks Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. Do the GOPpers trust that the following Democratic President will have their best interests in mind once the guns are gone? I’m guessing no.
So the kind of event we’re talking about, the one that convinces the current conservatives in this country to yield their firearms (and not bury them in boxes in their back yards) is likely one where Leftists start talking about how they need guns…
Trump’s election made a lot of leftists start talking about how they need guns, although I suspect that group of leftists wasn’t the same group that strongly cared about gun control previously.
Grotesque fantasies about how leftist radicals could “turn gun-ism upon itself” are definitely a thing that exists.
Some forms of the unpleasant “urban containment doctrine” would benefit from some kinds of “gun control” though the idea would be to deny guns from enemies.
So….it’s claimed that it’s really really easy to get a gun from a shady source, that laws against guns wouldn’t matter.
Why then don’t those people just deny they have guns an go buy from those so easy to get criminal access places, if gun control did get passed? That’s exactly the fantasy they have in their “I need my gun against the gubmint” rhetoric.
Well it’s claimed that it isn’t that difficult to buy a black market gun in Europe, but then I’m not the black market type and neither are most of them. But where this falls apart from their perspective should be obvious - why go buy a gun on the black market and depend on the black market when you can just not have gun control? They don’t have criminal contacts, they don’t want criminal contacts, and all those guns have to come from somewhere anyway so what benefit do they get out of it?
And what’s more, the kinds of people that bring up gun control after every mass shooting insist that the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is too small to justify stricter limits on immigration, even though mass shootings, the kind that make the news, are also fairly rare on a per-capita basis, and so it makes sense from their perspective to guess another motive is at work.
I was aiming for “if it’s not going to affect it then why bother”, the same reasoning they use to argue against gun control. They say it won’t affect mass shootings, they say it won’t affect availability, it won’t affect anything. If it won’t affect anything, then we can do it.
Idk Europe, but the shootings in USA are like 98% born citizens, white guys. Not immigrants, not even POC citizens.
Because they could still get arrested or hassled, they explicitly say it will only effect legal gun owners. They say “if you outlaw guns then only outlaws will have guns” repeatedly, frequently. It’s like their official slogan.
You are way off on those stats, dude. Waaaaaay off. Setting aside that even PoC mass shooters make the news sometimes, like the VT shooter, the racial rates for shootings are far more balanced than 98% white guys. I’m not at a computer, so I can’t fetch the stats for you, but if someone told you it was 98% white they were either lying or exaggerating. And if you think America is 98% white, then frankly you don’t live here.
The reason the conservatives do not support a gun registry, which would otherwise be an entirely sane idea, is that it’s the first step in “round up all the guns.”
There is no “round up all the guns” without first knowing their locations. Going house to house doing a deep search is prohibitively expensive.
They’ll just hide them. There are so many guns in this country, the round-up won’t even get half of them.
Any event dramatic enough to make the current crop of conservatives agree to round up all the guns isn’t going to be small, either, and most of them would involve said conservatives not wanting to give up their guns.
Mass shootings? Mass shootings by Muslims? Not enough. The response has been to want guns even more in order to shoot back.
You’d need something bordering on an ethnic armed insurrection, at which point many of them would want guns to fight against the ethnic armed insurrection.
It’s true that this hasn’t always been the case in the past, that previous gun control laws were deliberately racist.
However, the clock ticks Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. Do the GOPpers trust that the following Democratic President will have their best interests in mind once the guns are gone? I’m guessing no.
So the kind of event we’re talking about, the one that convinces the current conservatives in this country to yield their firearms (and not bury them in boxes in their back yards) is likely one where Leftists start talking about how they need guns…
Trump’s election made a lot of leftists start talking about how they need guns, although I suspect that group of leftists wasn’t the same group that strongly cared about gun control previously.
Grotesque fantasies about how leftist radicals could “turn gun-ism upon itself” are definitely a thing that exists.
Some forms of the unpleasant “urban containment doctrine” would benefit from some kinds of “gun control” though the idea would be to deny guns from enemies.
So….it’s claimed that it’s really really easy to get a gun from a shady source, that laws against guns wouldn’t matter.
Why then don’t those people just deny they have guns an go buy from those so easy to get criminal access places, if gun control did get passed? That’s exactly the fantasy they have in their “I need my gun against the gubmint” rhetoric.
Well it’s claimed that it isn’t that difficult to buy a black market gun in Europe, but then I’m not the black market type and neither are most of them. But where this falls apart from their perspective should be obvious - why go buy a gun on the black market and depend on the black market when you can just not have gun control? They don’t have criminal contacts, they don’t want criminal contacts, and all those guns have to come from somewhere anyway so what benefit do they get out of it?
And what’s more, the kinds of people that bring up gun control after every mass shooting insist that the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is too small to justify stricter limits on immigration, even though mass shootings, the kind that make the news, are also fairly rare on a per-capita basis, and so it makes sense from their perspective to guess another motive is at work.
So what should be done with regards to immigration?
Annex everything down to Tierra Del Fuego and turn it all into US states and give everyone living there, or who comes from there, US citizenship. I’m serious.
(Annex Canada too at this rate because screw Canada, Canada is evil.)
It’s a defacto empire as is and formalizing this stuff is always good, but the genuine benefit is that as citizens, they get more legal protections and have to be paid proper wages, they can’t be screwed over and underpaid like a lot of immigrant workers currently are – presuming they actually stay here and aren’t temp workers that is. I have noticed Trump’s administration going after H2-B visas lately, that’s interesting.
Have you ever actually met immigrant and temp workers? I have, lots due to where I live. It’s a worst-of-both-worlds situation, for them and for citizens due to labor pressure being undone.
Also, if there are still people who want cheap labor that badly, we’ll see literal boatloads of people coming in from Africa, and boy howdy that’s been a familiar sight before in American history that just about everyone here won’t want to see repeated again, and rightfully so.
ironically the recycling plants catch fire so frequently that they are essentially just incinerating the waste instead of recycling it.
Post-consumer recycling of most non-metallic resources is just pointless.
There is a point, but it’s not obvious. There’s a good article on this on Cato Unbound here. The unseen benefit of recycling is to divert material away from landfills, which are expensive. So expensive, in fact, that if we charged people the true cost of landfill disposal, they would resort to illegal dumping. We don’t want that, so we subsidize garbage disposal at the consumer level, and post-consumer recycling programs are an attempt to mitigate the cost of that subsidy.
It’s putting the charge at the wrong end of the system. Put a landfill deposit on new products based on their rough contents, use the principal to buy the land and the interest to operate the landfills. Pay out money from the fund when recycling firms permanently recover waste from the landfill, based on rough contents.
Efficient land and resource usage, recycling, purchasing of used goods thereby incentivized.
The year is 2064. Having given up on America and Europe, the last remaining members of the Alt Right undergo racial alteration surgery and genetic splicing to join Chairman Liu’s Neo-Chinese Empire, a governmental franchise operating seven megacities on the Asia-Pacific rim.
As a security officer at the front of the Empire’s fight against the Pan-Islamic Caliphate, a sort of distributed theocratic government with enclaves throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Victor Fang (born Richard Spencer, many years ago) is returned to Hong Kong after being injured by an IED, but he’s about to find out just how deep the Caliph’s conspiracies run…
Discourse Questions
What is the value, positive or negative, of a racial ethnostate in a world where race is mutable?
Do the Alt Right and White Nationalists value whiteness as a terminal value, or merely as a means to other ends? If they could, would they abandon it for some other race to obtain racial solidarity? Would they adopt another heritage, just to have one?
Will governance become something marketable, that can be purchased by democratic polities and multinational conglomerates?
Could enclaves of Islamic Law form in Europe in order to try and maintain Liberalism? The idea of sub-groups with their own laws is not unprecedented, after all.
What are the implications if jurisdictions break down into various self-governing ethnic groups, united not by the larger territories they live in but through religion and ethnicity as experienced over the Internet?
Can Richard Spencer ever be redeemed? What would it take to redeem him?
Write a 5-page call-out blog post based on answering one of these six topics and submit it to Tumblr Dot Com.
The submission form for your callout post can be found at http://argumate.tumblr.com. For full credit, please address your callout to a hypothetical Tumblr user named “Argumate” for disagreeing with whatever your opinion may be. Remember to refuse to read or respond to any counter-arguments, and instead double down on refuted positions and behave like someone with zero reading comprehension, becoming increasingly irate as it turns out the callout subject did not say what you claimed they did.
person who literally forgot about the sun and the water cycle: uhhhh we need to go back to nature. back to our roots, is where we need to go to. the basics
I can’t wait to have a powered rolling metal box carry me 100km closer to where I want to go in 60 minutes. Maybe it will happen one day, in convenience and comfort.
it’s intriguing to imagine the myths you could tell an Iron Age tribe that would actually be correct as well as sounding awesome, like:
humans and apes share a common ancestor, and further back share an ancestor with all mammals, bird, reptiles, fish, and ultimately all living things.
the Earth is over four billion years old.
each of the fixed stars in the sky is another sun like our own.
This is actually something I think about periodically. If religion is true, why doesn’t it contain some scientific fact that couldn’t be proved for another 1,000-2,000 years? Why push only the faith element so hard in a world where spiritual experiences aren’t limited to your religion?
I think that’s yet another unanswerable objection to religion - it would be very simple for anyone in the ancient world who was actually omniscient to demonstrate that they knew things that couldn’t possibly be known by people of that time and place, and since they are already trying to provide direct proof of the supernatural to a limited audience with miracles it doesn’t really make sense for them not to do it in an effective way that’d silence the skeptics everywhere.
Imagine if Muhammad had carved a map of the dark side of the Moon into the Kaaba
Imagine if we sequenced the human genome and discovered that what we thought was junk DNA was actually the text of the Book of Mormon
Actually what if both of those things happened would that be fucked up or what
Ancient people: “I’ll believe in your god if you can show me the miracles.”
Modern people: “If we had evidence, it wouldn’t be true faith.”
muhammad supposedly did do a bunch of stuff like that, and you occasionally see muslim articles like ‘look at all these scientific miracles in the qur’an that we didn’t know about til recently!‘ or prophecies etc.
when you look into it it turns almost always turns out either it WAS known by people at the time, or it’s not true, but a lot of people just believe it without looking into it.
(e.g. muhammad supposedly split the moon and reattached it at one point, and theres a thing going ‘when they went to the moon they found a massive crack running through it’ or stuff about stages of fetal development).
Lots of people in the Christian world believe that women have one more rib than men.
i believed that for ages even after i stopped believing. i assumed people had noticed women have an extra rib and included that in the creation story as an explanation way back when, rather than just ‘no one bothered to check and count the number of ribs in x thousand years’. it’s not like rib counting technology is super advanced.
Does it even explicitly say in the Bible that all men since Adam have one fewer rib?
I don’t really know one way or the other. Just that it says God took one of Adam’s ribs to create Eve. Unless you believe in Lamarckian inheritance, I’m not sure why that implies all his descendants have one fewer as well.
I wonder where that belief originated…
The story I saw on here about that a while back was that what gets translated as ‘rib’ actually is a euphemism for baculum (penis bone!) and that bit of Genesis is a just-so story explaining why humans don’t have one, unlike the herd animals Bronze Age shepherds would be familiar with, who were created male and female to begin with
Oh, spare me the argumentum ad baculum!
Reblogged for Crom’s comments and also “Actually what if both of those things happened would that be fucked up or what”
Last year, two of my friends were falsely accused of rape.
One of them was lucky enough to have evidence - texts from the girl expressing enthusiasm about the experience and agreeing that she had initiated and expressed implicit consent (like getting a condom, putting it on him, and asking him to fuck her harder) - but that didn’t stop rumors spreading. It turns out she had a boyfriend, and probably fed him a different story in order to prevent him being mad at her.
My friend got uninvited from parties and had people warning his friends about his sexual offense. Eventually the story morphed into the rumor that he had assaulted two people, but when he asked the supposed second person, she had no idea what he was talking about.
My other friend wasn’t lucky enough to have direct evidence. He never found out who was accusing him - an image began circulating virally with his face, name, where he lived, and a long description of his supposed ‘violent assault.’ People he didn’t know started contacting all his facebook friends and warning them that he was a violent rapist. He received threats and hate mail.
He didn’t have any absolute proof that he was innocent, but his reputation was solid. I saw messages from previous casual sexual partners (who’d been contacted by friends of the accuser) saying the accusations were strange because he’d only ever been respectful and they couldn’t imagine him doing something like that. He lived in a house with roommates, and his roommates had met all his sexual partners, and they said all of them had seemed happy to be there and fine when they left. Everyone who knew him was confused by the accusations. He was a close, old friend of mine. I’d had seen him interact with many casual sexual partners during our friendship, and he had always been consent-oriented and not pushy. He refused to have sex with people who were intoxicated.
I suspect it might have been a similar circumstance to my first friend - he had sex with someone who had a boyfriend, and then she’d lied about it in order to avoid telling her boyfriend that she’d cheated.
It’s also possible that it wasn’t even anyone who had sex with him, but just anyone who disliked him and wanted to hurt him.
–
Neither of the accusers went to the police, probably because their claims were false. They stayed out of the legal system and proceeded to destroy my friends’ reputations on a social scale. I suspect false rape accusations are more common than we think, mainly because false accusers have a special incentive not to report to the police.
And even if they are rare, the power to destroy lives is incredibly serious. One of my friends became suicidal and went on medication to keep himself from self harming. The mental distress he underwent from the false accusation seemed comparable to that of a rape victim.
The problem is that people have the power to do this to each other, and we don’t have any social system in place for preventing this. I don’t think we should believe all victims absolutely - we should ascribe probability to their stories, and be far more cautious before we take actions to socially punish the accused.
I want to help rape victims, but I can’t justify it when it’s at the expense of other victims.
–
Also, there are shitty people in the world, shitty enough to hurt other people for any reason - feelings of power, personal gain, revenge - and if a woman can ruin a man’s life by falsely accusing him of rape, without having to go to the police - shitty women will absolutely take this route. They have nothing to lose if they’re in a culture of ‘never question a rape victim.’
There are people out there that have the capacity to do it and the motivation, much as is the same with actual rapists. I don’t really understand the argument that false accusations are implausible or extremely rare. “Someone shitty has something to gain by hurting another person” is not exactly a rare scenario.
Too often the response is to blame any system with exploitable reporting on the people who abuse that, as if a gun should be left lying around a crowded room because only bad people would misuse it. It’s the system, not the “bad apples.”
(And it must be kept in mind, despite agreement with the above, harassment and stalking of women who have no idea how to respond because official channels are not proportionate to the offense are also still serious problems. I know victims of stalking. I know targets of witch hunts. Yes, in our cosmopolitan social bubble, yes in the very recent past. It’s a messy, complicated world out there.)
I’ll just note that “if you find yourself alone in on a room with a really bad person in a sexual context they can seriously mess up your life and get away with it because there were no witnesses” was the status quo for women before circa 1990. Rape is a crime that almost always happens in a situation where there is no convincing physical evidence, where it is plausible that no crime occurred at all, where a material part of the crime is the effective communication of an inner mental state of the victim.
Given all that, a system that only relied on the legal system with its high burdens of proof, particularly when combined with rampant misogyny, means that rape accusations succeeded in only the most brazen and obvious circumstances. It meant men could hurt women with impunity.
I’m not saying the right answer is jus to flip things around and make men as vulnerable as women used to be, but honestly unless you start fucking in semi-public spaces like responsible degenerates I have no idea how to make this not zero sum.
Attention to the truth is not zero-sum. People should act on what they truly believe is accurate.
What we see in these accusations, and most crimes tied to ideology (ie, the belief that rape is part of rape culture is part of the patriarchy is part of conservatism, and thus that fighting sexual assault has a political component) is the desire to disavow your own judgment. You may personally be unsure a rape did not take place, but for the sake of the political project you must act as if you did.
(Additionally in these social witch hunts, the problem is rarely disagreement over the facts of what happened. It’s more about the interpretation of those facts, and things like, as you say, someone’s internal mental state.)
In the past we had the reverse of this, where you might believe a man did something heinous, but were pressured to pretend nothing bad happened so the town could continue on in peaceful harmony. So you keep him away from your daughters, but otherwise ignore the victim. That too was disavowal.
You must take responsibility for your own judgment. This includes what you think of the accused, and of the victim, and of the context, and their other relationships with people, and of moral questions like forgiveness and justice. (Very, very often in the modern context that conclusion will be: I think the accused did not mean to hurt anyone and is safe for others to be around, but the victim is hurt and needs space to feel safe now.)
It’s terrifying because people will call you all sorts of terms coded with political betrayal. But to give in and claim what you do not believe is true, is the cowardice that condemns people to silence and lies.
The good news here is that we’ve enjoyed so much social progress that Ourobouros is starting to eat his own tail, and we’ll soon be back to the symmetrical, Victorian-era standard of “never be alone in a room with someone of the opposite sex unless they’re your spouse, because it will cause Rumor and Scandal.”
aka, you won’t get accused because she cheated on her boyfriend if you are the boyfriend
Yes, this is by no means foolproof, but it is wise to reduce one’s potential attack surface.
The risk of false accusation is probably weighted more heavily on a per-partner basis, longer dating makes hiding two-timing proportionally more difficult, allows better anticipation of hangups and other risk factors, etc.
I’ve never really been a “social model of disability” kind of person but boy howdy am I becoming one
I could get along just fine without all the neurotypicals constantly going “just remember: you’ll never actually be normal!”
@faeline said: Honestly, I’d be a lot more okay with
that model if it allowed for my actual problems functioning. People are
shitty but that doesn’t explain why sometimes I don’t eat until 3PM.
Agreed. It’s not society’s fault that my brain sometimes short-circuits. I dislike the idea that you can just handwave away the actual symptoms. But my internal symptoms don’t have to inhibit my getting along in the world as much as they currently do. When a not-autistic person and I have a problem communicating, I wish the fault weren’t automatically assumed to be mine. I wish they were encouraged to speak my language a little bit, given that I spend 99% of the time trying to speak theirs.
The City of Autismburg, founded in 2022 as a haven for autistic individuals,
