Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:
My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate. The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized. This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place. Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms. Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.
Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.
So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!” It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.
One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate. If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.
(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”. I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)
Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.
I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?
Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.
I guess my only addition would be that the state of contradiction (and its collapse) is not evenly spread out over everyone. Some people are effected by those impossible demands in two directions much more than other people in the system. My perennial example is the unemployed person who is both unable to find a job, and called lazy for not having a job. But there’s also the mother who runs herself ragged trying to “have it all”. And there’s the Republican who has to explain how we’re “keeping the government’s hands off medicare.” And the early career woman who worries about being too bossy for the sexists in her office, but also not assertive enough to live up to her feminist idols.
A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”
The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying? That again, is an empirical observation and it may be wrong, but you should probably respect that’s how some people feel about the radical polarization of this country and the collapse of trusted liberal institutions.
Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.
This is were I think the “moral aspect” factor comes in. It doesn’t really make sense, especially when a lot of the close alternatives will produce worse outcomes, to say “Capitalism is contradictory” unless it’s being used as a moral system.
There are people such as Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists who do use it as a moral system, as well as various other right-wingers who don’t understand the true power of AI yet. (The latter group I am having mixed success on winning over.) “Your espoused moral system is contradictory” works as a critique for them, certainly. (I’d go so far as to say that the Anarcho-Capitalists are unwitting enemies of humanity.)
But otherwise, it’s like saying “your elephant is mortal”, and like, I know my elephant is mortal, I’ve looked at a number of elephants and this one and its close relatives were the best ones I could find. I’ve heard people claim immortal elephants exist, but I’ve never seen one.
A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”
And it’s good to show these people compassion, but I think the presence of contradictory demands is going to be a thing so long as tradeoffs must be made - and thanks to opportunity cost, which still very much exists under Communism, there are always going to be tradeoffs. In other words, I don’t think Capitalism is particularly special in this regard. (Again, unless one is using it as a moral system.)
Certainly, attempts at Communism have resulted in collisions with reality, where someone is subjected to contradictory expectations, which are partially responsible for the black markets and corruption that resulted.
The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying?
The problem is, aside from wage subsidies or basic share/income, which are still within the same species of elephant, I don’t really see a better elephant right now.
If you are a Christian trying to respect the dehumanized subject, then locking them up for 60 years and forgetting about them is not an ethical way to go about it. This makes disavowal easy, which is the heart of liberal ideology.
At least with the death penalty, society has to make a conscious choice about what to do with this person. We should choose rehabilitation and redemption much more often than we usually do of course, but it’s better to decide between rehabilitation vs death, than blithe imprisonment where we get to pretend we are respecting human rights but don’t ever have to deal with the murderer’s inhuman excess.
(that’s from me, not Zizek.)
A reminder because of the Dylan Roof case.
(demonesss’s comment is also good and she’s a good user to follow on reddit if you want to understand more Zizek)
Empirically, I don’t think abolishing the death penalty does lead to harsher sentences and de-emphasising reformative justice.
If anything, the opposite seems to be true.
Frankly, if you force “society” (i.e. people) to “decide between rehabilitation vs death” in specific cases rather than the general case, they will say “the guy murdered nine people in order to start a race war, fry him”.
Deliberately forcing people to focus on the specific, abhorrent crimes of an individual - rather than the abstract question of whether mercy is good, the fact that the death penalty ensures innocent people will be killed, what kind of society we want to be etc. - makes it easier for them to argue “some people are an exception to the general rule that killing is bad, fry the fucker.”
Well we can use today’s example. We are talking about Dylan Roof. The various recent shooters who just got jailtime, the media is not discussing. And yet, if you throw them away for decades, then we are committing social death to them. I do not feel hugely morally superior for “suffer the rest of your life behind bars” than I do for “the body dies immediately.” I honestly don’t know which one I would choose personally, but both sound utterly terrible. And I’m glad we are at least talking about one convict this week. Death forces us to confront the choices of our justice system. (Much like the argument for, say, using soldiers over drones.)
Mostly though, a lot of the liberal arguments against the death penalty, especially the more principled ones, don’t really hold weight. Some people justify it with “the government shouldn’t hold power over life and death,” but that sounds like avoiding the fact that the government does hold power over life and death. The idea “well if it’s a mistake then you can still fix it” should be weighed against “and how many mistakes do we ever catch? How many lives does that save?” And is a life really not ruined after years behind bars, even if you fix the mistake?
I distrust our desire not to take the full account of our actions. Events that make us say “Do we really want to do this, as a people?” seem like good discussions to have.
You might not know whether to pick death or life imprisonment, but I suspect many others would pick life imprisonment with a slim possibility of release over death. I certainly would.
Death is extremely final. There are no libraries in death. There are no thoughts, no dreams - nothing. There is a very large difference between life in prison and death. Calling it “social death” obscures the issue.
I agree that forcing the issue - by say, eliminating prison sentences beyond 20 years and replacing them with death - would tend to reduce empathy for prisoners rather than increase it. There are a lot of people that people just won’t feel safe around, so now they’re going to be coming up with excuses to dehumanize criminals so they can justify executing them. It’s not going to suddenly make them reason more clearly about the side effects.
I’m not so sure this idea that forcing people to confront things will actually change their behavior the way you want, rather than causing them to double down. Is there any evidence for it working previously?
Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:
My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate. The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized. This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place. Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms. Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.
Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.
So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!” It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.
One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate. If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.
(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”. I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)
Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.
i’m worried about the future of humanity because of Trump, but not, like, in the usual way.
labor’s going to keep being more and more automated. right now, i’m working on writing medical records and appointment scheduling software, which will reduce the need for bookkeeping personnel at my aunt’s general practice. she has expressed excitement about how she’ll finally be able to fire all these people*.
*(because she is delusional, she’s managed to twist herself into thinking it’ll be good for them, because they’ll be able to get a better job with this on their resume, and hasn’t considered the myriad reasons why they don’t just leave right now if that’s actually the case. in her defense(?) she hasn’t had to apply for any kind of work since presumably residency after medical school, and hasn’t experienced financial insecurity in thirty years, and is just generally disconnected from reality in a lot of ways.)
my job right now is to eliminate the jobs of as many people as possible. in like a month when i’ve finished the project i’m working on, i’ll have gotten at least two people fired as the explicit aim of my employment. this isn’t unusual, it isn’t part of some sci-fi future, it’s a real trend that is actively and earnestly being pursued by every company out there.
this ought to be a good thing. instead of this work taking up hours and hours of people’s time that they could be spending on other things, it gets done automatically. at least two people who get to now live lives of self-actualization!
except instead the result is now that the expired caviar rotting in the back of my aunt’s fridge is going to be moderately fancier.
which, okay, whatever. in principle, there’s nothing wrong with investing in a thing and profiting from it. she doesn’t owe those people anything, they didn’t pay me to build the software, she did. sure. this is just one sorta delusional old lady using her power greedily and wastefully.
my aunt is motivated by an unnecessary sense of frugality borne of an impoverished childhood, by a tragic susceptibility to marketing for fancy gourmet premium rich people food, and by a disconnect from the economic reality of what she’s doing to her workers. she’s not one of the better human beings, but she’s human.
but this isn’t the usual case.
the usual case is a manager needs to protect the bottom line or he’ll get fired, by another manager who needs to protect the bottom line or he’ll get fired, by […] fired, by a CEO who takes orders from a board of directors (or he’ll get fired) who need to protect the bottom line or else investors will panic and they’ll lose all their money and the company will collapse and die because it was outcompeted by a company that did ruthlessly automate as much labor as possible. the obscene profits companies are pulling in aren’t going into the pockets of wealthy CEOs, they’re being fed into the desperate struggle to keep their numbers going up as fast as is theoretically possible because only the companies with the highest numbers escape destruction.
the human race is currently ruled by the blind desperate “greed” of people who need to do what it takes to survive (plus governments that are basically the same thing except instead of shareholders with money it’s an increasingly unstable mix of lobbyists with money and taxpayers with votes.)
we’re going to reach a point, eventually, where enough labor is automated that the value of most human labor is going to plunge beneath subsistence. it’s already happening, with the whole $15 minimum wage controversy. it’s only going to get worse- working two or three minimum-wage jobs at once is going to go from barely enough to live on to just plain NOT enough to live on, and eventually the unemployed aren’t just going to be a tiny unskilled underclass that looks at a glance like it’s basically the same economic entity as the historical unemployed class.
it’s going to be a voting bloc, and then we’ll have to fall back on Democracy, our last flimsy line of defense that keeps the inhuman, perfectly efficient optimizer that is the Market at bay. we’ll have one last chance to say “we, as humans, are going to decide what human civilization is going to look like.”
i don’t know if we’re going to win that battle.
the inhuman perfectly efficient optimizer doesn’t sit idly by when it’s threatened by democracy. voters can be fooled, can be bought, can be intimidated into silence. Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson is the United States president-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State. said president-elect is- i mean, it’s Donald god damn Trump, aka the media’s poster child for cartoonish fat cat excess and ruthless profit-optimizing for the past thirty fucking years. the opponent he barely defeated was Hillary Clinton, who’s not exactly known for being tough on big business. the runner-up hail mary third option that gets laughed out of the polls for caring too much about human freedom is the Libertarian Party.
that’s not the end of the world right now, we’re not quite at the stage where we need to once and for all decide whether to be ruled by Moloch… but the fact that it happened is a terrible terrible omen, when it comes to how we’re going to fare in that final fight.
i don’t know how it’s going to go down. i don’t know, once more than half the voting populace is reduced to below subsistence, what the Market is going to pull out of its sleeve to somehow defeat Democracy in its own most desperate hour. i can’t imagine what it could possibly come up with, when backed against the wall and forced to make the tiniest space for the happiness of the human race.
i can’t imagine it, because i’m one guy whose family isn’t about to starve if he doesn’t imagine up with a way to subvert democracy and have it on the boss’s desk by yesterday, dammit.
I think a lot of people just plain don’t realize this yet. They should realize it, but it takes a certain amount of imagination applied to come up with it on one’s own.
This is why I shove the existence of robot cars into every fiscal conservative’s face whenever I get the chance and try to convince them that it won’t end there. Some of them say “well we shouldn’t develop AI then”, so I tell them that the Chinese will regardless. It seems to be kind of sinking in so far - they haven’t yet realized that Capitalism isn’t a moral system.
Wearing augmented reality goggles so that everyone you interact with is furry
i enjoy video games because they let me live out my wildest fantasies, like being assigned a task and then completing that task
it has been pointed out to me that I’m the only white guy left at this party but honestly I’m used to it
she read the replies to this post and didn’t get either of them and tbh neither do i
I will avoid the temptation to double down on being confusing. Your post can either be read as about a literal party, or as a metaphorical party, which could include a town, a political party, a team, a heist, a situation, a final last desperate stand against the iron hand of the state, etc. (“White guy” can also be read metaphorically.) Plus it implies this is normal for your life.
For a long time, I’ve thought that capitalism would not work if people screwed each over as much as was economically and self-interestedly rational, and Matt Yglesias just pointed out that Donald Trump is basically living proof that most people are far too generous in that they actually pay their suppliers instead of just cheating them.
“Reputation“ don’t do jack shit, and whenever people propose make economic arguments using reputation, I’m gonna be very doubtful.
“Reputation” is more of an honor culture thing. If it works, it works because of a fairly small market and good communication.
It’s not that “reputation does work because if you don’t pay them it will bite you in some way eventually” or “reputation doesn’t work because you can still get elected goddamn President even if you never pay them” but rather reputation is a bad pillar to rely on because you will never know how effective reputation is. It’s not like if Hillary had gotten a few thousand more votes in midwestern swing states, the entire mechanism of capitalism would have shifted from effective to ineffective. There’s just uncertainty.
Suppliers can also adapt to more uncertain markets where payment is less guaranteed, either by raising rates, charging halfway through completion, having the money put in a mediator’s account, or through other methods.
All of these options are less efficient than if the purchaser pays the vendor like they are supposed to, because security spending preserves value rather than creating it. However, the word is that companies working with Trump started to charge more money as a risk premium for this sort of thing.
When I was working on projects, I charged payment in stages. The goods were transferred following a live demonstration for the client.
Something I’ve been thinking towards lately is that the benefits of a free market economy are actually side effects.
For example, the general idea of “competition-driven constant innovation in the form of amazing new products” (ideal outcome) or “marginally improved products at the same prices or the same quality at lower prices”. It appears to me that it’s merely one of the many ways to get market leverage rather than the desired outcome, and at some point it hits diminishing returns pretty hard.
I have a lot of experience dealing with ISPs and saw the mechanism first hand. First we have the amazing benefits of a de facto monopoly who could get away with shit like $100 for dial up speeds in ADSL era being forced to offer cheap fast internet, fast forward a year and we descend into shit like shady under the table deals, dishonest marketing, and guys cutting our fiber to create an impression of unreliable service.
And that’s internet. You can take it or leave it. If you knew what goes on with food you’d never want to eat again.
Try applying it to labor and it becomes obvious why politicians have so much trouble “creating jobs”. Capitalism hates “creating jobs”. Jobs are a cost. “Job creators” do not want to “create jobs”. They want to make money. The jobs are, to them, an undesirable side effect.
I thought that much was obvious from the term “job makers”. The claim that job makers make jobs out of the goodness of their heart implies that they don’t like doing so.
I don’t think the people using it (or rather, the target audience of the people using it) really understand the full implications that the jobs aren’t something that’s wanted by the incentives in the system itself. I think how they understand it is that if only the government would stop punishing these “valuable job creators”, then the job creators would create jobs.
Something I’ve been thinking towards lately is that the benefits of a free market economy are actually side effects.
For example, the general idea of “competition-driven constant innovation in the form of amazing new products” (ideal outcome) or “marginally improved products at the same prices or the same quality at lower prices”. It appears to me that it’s merely one of the many ways to get market leverage rather than the desired outcome, and at some point it hits diminishing returns pretty hard.
I have a lot of experience dealing with ISPs and saw the mechanism first hand. First we have the amazing benefits of a de facto monopoly who could get away with shit like $100 for dial up speeds in ADSL era being forced to offer cheap fast internet, fast forward a year and we descend into shit like shady under the table deals, dishonest marketing, and guys cutting our fiber to create an impression of unreliable service.
And that’s internet. You can take it or leave it. If you knew what goes on with food you’d never want to eat again.
Try applying it to labor and it becomes obvious why politicians have so much trouble “creating jobs”. Capitalism hates “creating jobs”. Jobs are a cost. “Job creators” do not want to “create jobs”. They want to make money. The jobs are, to them, an undesirable side effect.
kula:
I just found the stupidest peak white moderate thing ever
how to be a white ally: be a useless weak ass bitch who only knows how to ‘check privilege’
The white moderates are starting to couch their arguments in ‘more SJ than thou’ lingo. They’re evolving
Uwu violent resistance kills people. You should be killed without fighting back while waiting for the Tides of Progress to set you free. You’re not morally dying otherwise.
HAHA it was deleted
John Brown, original brocialist, manarchist, Berniebro, privileged white First World leftist,
“These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!”
“Excuse u, u don’t speak for all poc”
“There is no way that celebrating, or getting excited about, killing people could go wrong. The only reason it ever went wrong in the past is that it was our enemies doing it. We will have complete control over who takes our ideas and decides to kill people. Killing people will also be a highly-effective tool of our resistantance which will not be used as proof by our enemies to undecided people that they were right all along, resulting in a brutal crackdown that hits people that weren’t even involved in our actions. Our killing will also be highly-organized and directly serve our goals. We will never accidentally kill the wrong people, or kill people for other purposes related to our internal politics or because we warped the idea of killing up to kill people who are down.”
I’m not going to go into how to effectively use political violence, but I have no reason to believe most people in this chain would accomplish anything with it rather than, say, killing a few random people and becoming fodder for white nationalist news sites.
You can pay back money. You can fix or rebuild a building. You can let people out of prison. Sometimes, people will even heal from being beaten. But you can’t un-kill someone. There is no making it right if you screw up.
There’s a huge difference between arguing about political violence in the times where we have no clear enemies and talking about how John Brown is a problematic white berniebro.
I should have been more specific, I was responding to what insurrectionarycompassion said. (I’m still not 100% used to the Tumblr interface. I can’t find some obvious way to quote just a chunk of something.)
I’m dubious about the idea of trying to shame neo-nazis by accusing them of being involuntarily celibate losers who can’t get a date, one reason being that the tactic fails to work on anyone who can get a date.
Now, you might say this tactic is still useful anyway on others, and for reinforcing the social perception of neo-nazis as losers that no one should date, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But it still seems to be focusing the attack on a fairly non-central part of the question at hand. The reason to oppose neo-nazi ideology is because it’s terrible, not because its proponents struggle on the dating market.
I know it’s considered pretty paternalist by some to give people stuff rather than money that they could spend on what they desire, but I think free food, free housing, and free healthcare should just be a thing. It really wouldn’t even be very disruptive to integrate all that into an existing capitalist society. Turn restaurants into people’s kitchens where food is served buffet style, for free, to all. Socialize housing and build some skyscrapers where the poor can live for free. And most rich and semi-rich countries already have that free healthcare thing down already. Only barbarian nations like the US are easily able to pay for it but don’t have it.
Free healthcare might be the easiest part of that actually, as barring a few pathological cases people generally don’t enjoy spending more time in hospital.
Free food incentivizes ways to exploit it in a way that just giving people money to buy food does not, and makes it harder for other food production services to compete by offering better products or service.
Some level of socialised housing may be necessary, but if you overdo it you end up creating crime ridden ghettos that no one actually wants to live in, bringing you back to square one.
Where should the people live? What food should they eat, and how much?
For the majority of cases, the individual has more information about this than the central planner. A housing voucher or a food voucher, if one insists on something more like an in-kind transfer, is still a better option than direct food and housing, because it can adapt to individual and local conditions.
neoliberalism-nightly said: man argumate u can do better than this
Do I have to, though? Seems like without basic income you have to bite at least some of these bullets:
1. Existing welfare systems deliver better outcomes more efficiently.
2. Some people will starve and that’s okay.
3. Automation won’t inevitably increase unemployment.
4. People will never rebel if forced into menial labour to survive.
5. Society without basic income will involve less suffering over all.
That just seems unlikely to me.
What happens when people squander the basic income and then need additional assistance to avoid starving (or “starving” in the sense of not having an acceptable first-world standard of living)?
I don’t know enough about the history of it to say whether it was justified or not, by that sort of consideration is the main reason why welfare has historically shifted from cash grants to in-kind aid.
Pay it on a daily basis.
It can be put on a card system actually, for efficiency. Then they don’t even need to have a check or mailing address, visit an office, or so on.
Regardless, this will need to be tested by experiment.
@voximperatoris: Also, you keep saying you don’t like prediction markets, but I’ve never seen you make a decent argument why not. Clearly, on a small and illiquid market (or one with fake money), quality will generally be poor. But that is reason to expand their use.
All prediction markets will be small and lack liquidity, as the range of things people want to predict is very broad but the number of people able or willing to get involved is very limited.
Robin Hanson often suggests that corporations should use prediction markets to predict the outcome of various internal projects, which would limit the number of participants to dozens or hundreds of people at best, require the company to provide liquidity, be confounded by all kinds of internal politics, and is really just a clumsy way of providing random bonuses to lucky employees.
Large scale real money prediction markets have to compete with all the other places people might want to invest, many predictions are very long-term, and it’s very difficult to nail down exactly how to judge a prediction, even for something as structured as a US election (eg. consider electoral college shenanigans).
Hanson’s futarchy is particularly ridiculous. Say you have a poorly designed government program like cash for clunkers to get old cars off the road and reduce pollution and CO2 emissions. The limited reach and high overhead means it’s going to have no effect or even be counterproductive, and you bet accordingly. Then the global financial crisis hits, economic growth stalls, and CO2 emissions actually decline, unexpectedly. Nothing to do with the policy you thought was bad, but how is that handled? Do you have a panel of experts to carefully go through all these issues and pronounce a verdict on each one?
There are already ways to use predictions to profit. If you think that Trump will be elected and pivot towards Russia, that has implications for energy markets and Eastern Europe and the Middle East and currencies. If you think that China will enter an economic slump you can take advantage of that. If you think that a particular movie will fail at the box office you can short the studio. If strong AI will be developed earlier or later you can invest accordingly.
People who have good ideas about the future already have plenty of options!
Prediction markets may be useful in certain fairly limited situations, but it is necessary to actually demonstrate that on a case by case basis; mostly it just seems to be the equivalent of averaging a bunch of guesses, which typically outperforms a single guess but isn’t some radical new way to structure society.
These are all good criticisms; I’ve torn into UNU elsewhere for this sort of stuff. (Their pitch is swarm intelligence, but check out their pictures. It’s just an overhyped prediction market with low stakes, plus they’ve added some totally novel bugs like letting people spread vote between certain pairs of outcomes, but not others.)
Futarchy has some way bigger problems, though. I think the common rebuttal to the things you cited is “all our existing systems suck too, so this might still beat them”. I’m not convinced by that, but I certainly think we can avoid the argument by citing more severe problems.
One is that futarchy can’t effectively deal in long-odds or long-timescale events. Black swan reasoning is always a bitch, but wisdom of the crowds is a particularly awkward way to approach it. And handling things like “global warming with lead to > 2°C of temperature rise by 2100″ has all kinds of secondary problems where running a bet that long is basically a nonstarter no matter how you assess results.
Another, which I think dooms the project, is that futarchy is catastrophically unable to reason about its own existence. If I propose a betting topic of “the prediction market will be dissolved and replaced with a dictatorship which cancels all bets”, there’s no way to coherently bet true and get profits.
If people think too big to fail is a serious issue with the stock market, they ought to be screaming in terror at the thought of futarchy. Because the equivalent faulty-downside predictions there are things like “let’s do nuclear brinkmanship with Russia to improve our economic standing when they back down”. The failure case doesn’t pay out, so it must be a good idea!
I’m being glib here, but I’ve seen this issues raised before and I’ve never seen even an attempt at a rebuttal. If someone has addressed things like “how to prediction market about 100 year x-risk issues”, I’d love to read it.
like an assassination market, but for the entire planet.
Perhaps payouts along the way based on the estimated probability for long-term bets - I guess that would be Prediction Derivatives? That allows people to profit if the estimate of high global warming increases. However, I’m not sure on how it incentivizes holding the prediction in the first place.
If we allow selling the shares of your position in the market, then people could hold long-term positions speculatively. For instance, I estimate a good chance that high global warming will happen, and that it will become more obvious in the intervening time, then I can buy low now and sell later.
“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.
They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”
So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?
It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.
This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.
These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”
The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.
The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.
In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”
That’s a good note. Though, since you mentioned the getting yelled at theory in other places: no one will fight you for buying fair trade quinoa, but political opposition increases almost proportionately to involvement, and any talk about foreign working conditions already has pre-cached arguments to stop it. Individuals have made some changes en masse even if they are not sufficient to make all of them, making it more tempting. Of course, it might have been sold to Trumpers on the grounds of “fair competition”. They know they can never compete with firms that house people in dorms and dump industrial waste into the ocean. Forcing the matter makes outsourcing less competitive which helps them last a bit longer.
> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.
Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.
I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?
In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.
If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it.
Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.
Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.
I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.
Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.
I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.
That’s not a real solution. The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.
Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer. Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.
[Catholic screaming]
If $Deity prohibits the use of birth control under Catholicism, then surely altering one’s genome to live past the normal maximum age of 120 years would be an even greater violation of the divine will?
I would expect the Catholic church to come out against human genetic augmentation, and thus life extension, even though I don’t expect them to come out against, for example, curing blindness.
> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.
Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.
I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?
In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.
If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it.
Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.
Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.
I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.
Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.
I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.
That’s not a real solution. The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.
Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer. Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.
Note: Continued discussion of this topic.
The entire point was to avoid shooting, starving, or forcibly sterilizing people. And, if it turns out to be unnecessary, it decays to “everyone who asks gets more baby tickets than they can even use.”
It seemed a better choice than allocating a set pool of resources which is based on one’s ancestors from the time that life extension hits. (ie, each person gets X resources which are split by their descendants, recursively) Maybe you would prefer that instead, but I felt it punished the descendants unfairly.
What if I told you that they don’t use lightsabers because they’re good.
The argument “if you like taxes then simply go donate money to the government. You don’t? Then stop being a hypocrite and talking about how taxes are good” seems a bit silly to me. Sure, if you believe that any centralized taxation and spending is bad, then there’s no reason to support taxation. But if you do think that centralized spending can in certain situations outperform a free market, then you see taxes as a prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone cooperates, and voluntarily donates to the government, then everyone would be better off, but this is not a stable equilibrium, and every individual agent can benefit from defecting, and then everyone is much worse off, but trying to unilaterally start cooperating and donating money would make you even worse off. So you employ a very common way to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas: elect a guy with a gun who shoots at defectors. In this situation you end up being better off than without this guy, but your incentive structure changes only by the amount of shooting, and it’s still rational to not cooperate by any amount higher than what is being enforced. It is rational to want to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas this way, and it’s also rational to not be a cooperate-bot in dilemmas that aren’t being resolved.
> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.
Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.
I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?
In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.
If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it.
Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.
Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.
I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.
Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.
I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.
That’s not a real solution. The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.
Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer. Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically a theoritical end of the world, in which self aware AI happens in a paperclip factory. The machine, without hard coded ethics, hits on a runaway recursive-self improvement loop, transforms the planet into the most efficient paperclip factory in history, exterminating humanity in the process - to use the iron in our blood for more paperclips.
And I can’t help but think that we’ve already created a self-aware machine without hard coded ethics that’s optimizing for a fundamentally anti-human goal: and it’s capitalism.
Capitalism is the software running on industrial hardware, and it is maintained by wetware (humans). The only goal of it is maximizing profit, for which it needs constant growth. Everything else is a marginal benefit of it - say, innovation. And the problems are increasingly acknowledged as not bugs but features of the system: that it can produce well enough, but it doesn’t care about distributing well enough, because loss is acceptably within the margins (or it’s calculated as not-yet-realized profit).
And it’s fascinating how the AI skepticism / doomsday scenarios come so close to self-awareness, but by some perverted twist of thought we’re not collectively realizing that we’re already there. Time has stopped, we’re in an endless loop of self-destruction, and the wetware is screaming in horror, unable to articulate properly its unfreedom, as the machine has stomped out the thoughts and language and power necessary to do so.
Until now.
people rediscover the capitalism was the paperclip maximizer all along! idea every couple of months, then life goes on
I mean, wasn’t that essentially what the Communists were thinking, before they went and got millions of people killed trying to replace it?
I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.
When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you. This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them. Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).
Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages. Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter. That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident. Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community. Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.
With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude. If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.
This seems like treating a symptom of the real problem, which is needing to know and get along with the people you happen to live near, and is the opposite of “high-trust.”
Low-trust vs high-trust is about how you have to deal with strangers. If tight-knit communities are required to form connections or even so much as not expected to get attacked or ripped off, then that is a failure of civil society and a damage-control motivated return to the tribalism and provincialism that modernity is an effort to solve/depends on already being solved.
And we certainly have at out disposal far greater tools for creating shared context and trust between unrelated strangers than has perhaps ever existed, if there existed the will to use them. (And certainly, if you’re entertaining a scenario where the pursuit of your goals can affect the direction of urban planning, then you’re already imagining the use of a lot of political will!)
I consider that much of what gets called “alienation” is a feature. It would be worth fighting for as a goal rather than fought as a problem, even absent its economic benefits.
I would consider that in high-crime areas, civil society has in fact failed to some degree and that a return to a more structured form of community as a method of preventing it from getting even further off the rails can be considered justified. Preventing and policing crime and misbehavior are both quite challenging tasks on their own.
What I have proposed does not undermine modernity any more than the existence of suburban towns does. (Though, perhaps you wish to abolish suburban towns as well for some reason.) Specifically, it’s also primarily for residential areas. It isn’t as though you can’t just walk right off the block and be back in the rest of the city.
As for political willpower, something not so different from what I have proposed already appears to exist in Singapore. I once thought that cop cameras, while a good idea, weren’t politically tractable, but that situation changed and they began to emerge in various cities. I wouldn’t expect this idea to take off for another 20 years, anyway.
I probably have different values from you, since I believe that human beings are social creatures and function best if they have at least some social context and support network, people that they know they can depend on (which, absent some pretty powerful culture, is not something that can be counted on from strangers).
What are these methods that people lack the political will to use, that are only as difficult as urban planning?
I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.
When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you. This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them. Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).
Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages. Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter. That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident. Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community. Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.
With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude. If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.
Or, what happens when your faction finally wins the revolution.
you literally have no idea how into this I would be
“if Trump won then that means anyone more to the left of the Democratic establishment is unelectable” is the stupidest argument ever bc if you pull your head out of your ass you’d notice that if you wanted to be consistent with that logic then it shouldve been impossible for Trump to win considering that he’s further to the right than McCain and Romney
“democrats lost because they are too far left and therefore need to swing right on stuff like lgbt rights and environment” is a sentiment that’s hilariously false but also convincing enough for certain bubbles that it can do a lot of damage
In case one of those bubbles happens to be reading this:
It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t do much complaining about LGBT rights himself, even if he’s let the Republican party adopt a harder stance than he has. He wasn’t elected to Crush the Gays. And the Environment does need its protection.
The real questions are things like Nationalism vs Globalism, concerns about terrorism, immigration, culture war speech-policing, and the people left behind by Globalization.
If the Left didn’t shift an inch on LGBT rights, but started saying “you know, maybe we should impose tariffs proportional to our trade deficits with other countries so we don’t have net capital outflow” or “you know, maybe keeping high-risk refugees from active war zones outside of our country and just sending them heaps of supplies instead isn’t diabolical racism” and stopped saying “lol dey tuk er jerbs” when someone complained about it… then they could grab some of these people that the Democrats lost.
Of course, that won’t actually happen. Instead they’ll keep stubbornly exposing people to the same stimulus that has shocked the far right back from the dead in Europe.
I mean Donald Trump has married a succession of models, just sayin’.
So either he’s not a true asshole or “assholes don’t get dates” has a ton of mitigating factors, as assholes are well aware.
wasn’t it more like “assholes get all the dates”?
The people who use shaming for people who don’t get dates don’t believe that. They frequently denounce anyone who does. This is the problem with applying moral weight to whether someone is dateable. Even Adolf managed to have dates, but the average dateless slob that is complained about is multiple orders of magnitude less evil. This is because attraction is nearly orthogonal to whether someone is a good person.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
Endorsed
If large corporations had to carry insurance which paid out in the event of a security breach exposing users’ data, they might take it more seriously. It converts the small annual risk of such a breach, which managers can gamble on, into a measurable monthly or annual cost which can be lowered through preventative measures.
Oh wow.
I want to be clear that I think I’d be a pretty bad president. I wouldn’t be worse than Donald Trump, admittedly, but I think being president is legitimately a really hard job which you can kill billions of people by screwing up badly enough and kill millions of people just by not thinking to ask the right questions or appoint the right people. And I don’t know the right questions or the right people. I don’t even necessarily know how to find them, it’s not like ‘interviewing people and determining whether they are competent at federal policy’ is a skillset I have.
I think like @ozymandias271 I probably call Obama and explain what has happened and ask him for suggestions and take them unless they involve bombing people, which I am not going to do even though becoming president seems to mysteriously make people conclude it’s a good idea. And instead of spending our foreign aid bribing people we should probably spend it stamping out malaria and neglected tropical diseases. And maybe I could try to wiggle Trump’s position on immigration around to the stance that we should have an arrangement like Canada’s where communities can raise money to sponsor a refugee and help their integration.
And of course throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture and developing carbon sequestration and so on and so forth (how much power does the President actually have to do this?) and bringing in people to have debates over things like the minimum wage and healthcare where the end result of the debates will not be ‘I know what to do’ but just ‘I remain horribly uncertain what to do, and I feel terrible about myself for not being smart enough to have it figured out’. Meanwhile I desperately try to replace the VP with someone who will be a good president. As soon as this person is secured I step down.
- to, uh, be a seventy year old man? The rest of my life sounds super unpleasant tbh. I will feel uncomfortable around all of my friends who have made cracks about how ugly Donald Trump is (moral: you shouldn’t body-shame people because what if a random blogger is bodyswapped with the sitting president and feels bad about themself as a result?), and most people I interact with will think I have a long history of sexual assault and this will be, like, incredibly unpleasant and terrifying and make me feel constantly disgusting. And I’ll have a ten year old who thinks I’m his dad, though maybe improving on Trump’s parenting would be as easy as improving on his presidency.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
Endorsed
This is why one third of my online thought is devoted to a blog trying to figure out how tribalism works and whether it can be used to good ends.
Either we can make a society with Universal Justice that does not have systematic problems that turn person against person… Or we can’t.If we can’t, we should find the second best alternatives, and investigate them even when they perpetuate some injustice (since in such a case, it’s impossible not to.) I think there’s a good chance such a “second best” resembles tribalism more than liberalism, and at least this question needs to explored seriously.
nationalism. the concept you are looking for is nationalism
this is confused by the fact that people use ‘nationalism’ to refer to nationalism, the thing one meta level up from zionism, ethnopolitics in any form including merely engineering an ethnicity-specific culture, debates over immigration policy, and whatever dumbass shit jasbir puar tortured the word into
imo the important question that falls out of this is roman empire ‘civic nationalism’ vs the thing i’d call metazionism except back when moldbug’s comments section was relevant handle went and called it multizionism instead – if civic nationalism (which in the US would require a lot of engineering, both in the style of the ‘60s ‘black nationalists’ – or for that matter the finnish nationalists who went out and made the kalevala a thing – and in the form of redrawing the flows of information and people that give rise to shared context) is viable it’s obviously preferable, but what if it’s not
christmas eve what about christmas adam
happy christmas adam to all men’s rights activists
Please stop pestering us with things like this. This has nothing to do with men fighting for their rights. Eve is short for ‘evening’. Please don’t turn activism into a joke. Thanks.
Someone isn’t having a good christmas adam
Christmas Adam: December 23rd. Comes before Christmas Eve and is generally unsatisfying.
Christmas Adam is like so many other jokes and “jokes” - it’s only funny when someone you know isn’t saying it as an attack is saying it. Otherwise it’s no better than… honestly I can’t think of a good gender-flipped example right now. Same thing with 95% of X Tears memes. If it’s a demographic being targetted and not something like “Console Peasant Tears”, then it isn’t really “ironic”, it’s just a flat-out attack against which they are permitted to defend themselves.
@wirehead-wannabe: Wait, does tumblr hate sriracha now?
I think when people hate X it’s more they hate people banging on about X
Might be that new Wendys ad campaign.
in order for the media to actively marginalise white supremacist groups they need to adopt a classically liberal posture, eg. that there are universal values, that ethnoracial solidarity is bad and cosmopolitanism good, and that some cultures deserve to be squashed because they suck.
Good luck with that.