Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
Wrapping up this weekend of posts talking about the future, I’d like to ask a question.
A few weeks ago someone pointed out that the anti-SJW crowd is so cavalier towards Trump because they can’t really imagine our country ending up anywhere to the right of where we currently are. There might be some policy change in the tax rate, but fundamentally, campus activists will be arguing for corporations and the US government to stop oppressing numerous identities, and corps and the gov will condescendingly humor them.
Which sounded accurate (especially as rightists would argue I was wrong about things, but not actually deny that particular mindset,) but it raised a broader question - can any of us imagine a significantly different future than now?
Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global [liberal democratic capitalism] is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in [liberal democratic capitalism] . - Zizek
So what does everyone reading this think things will look like ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? Yes we can joke a lot about potential disaster scenarios (apocalypse, Big Brother, fast takeoff, the Social Justice Internationale) but uh, seriously, what do you think that will look like? What would living in it be like?
Do you think a fascist takeover no-for-real is likely? Will there be an underground? What will happen to the internet? Will we go backwards on racial justice and if so in what ways?
On the other side, does anyone think the forces of progressivism can win? Not just keep their head above water, but actually establish enough equality to make racism and sexism less pressing issues? What the hell does that look like?
Or even if your a techno-utopian who thinks some of these life changing developments (immortality, super AI, brain upload) will happen within 30 years, what will that uptake practically look like? Will everyone in the world get it on day 1? If not, how will it be distributed? How long will it take before more than the 10% richest people in the world benefit from it? 50%? Everyone? In the interim what does a world with radically powerful technologies in only the hand of a few look like to you?
I want to be more imaginative, and have at least some idea of what a medium-term future is that isn’t just more “Democrats and Republicans without progress fight and young people whine about it on the internet.” But do we even have the capability to take it seriously?
If you like, I could brainstorm some more exotic alternate futures.
In practical terms, however, I think the tech won’t be addressed until it is closer and looms in the public imagination. Same with lots of other issues.
We must preserve the US Second Amendment so that the people will be able to buy the near-military-grade augmentations that make them remain a non-trivial threat.
Like, the obvious question is: will the price you’re willing to pay be a price you can pay? The institutions of society (including authoritarian restrictions on reproduction, if any) are going to be designed for the service of the most powerful, and agelessness will considerably widen the gap between the most and least powerful (a stricter immortality such as through hand-waving “backup” technology is actually even worse).
There’s little reason to think that there is a fundamental physical cost that is highly expensive, like with flying cars.
The rules for agelessness cannot openly be designed so that only the wealthy benefit because people have accepted democratic principles. They’ll revolt if that happens. The powerful will have to make concessions whether they like it or not.
and the “being dead is terrible in principle” element is unconvincing to me simply because we’re all still going to die in an ageless world, or even an “immortal” one, and it’s not at all clear that we’d even die later than we would in this world.
Considering that the world is still getting safer overall, I’m not sure how reasonable that projection really is.
Additionally, postponing death by 10 or 50 or 100 years is still a very big deal, and here you’re treating it like “well you’re still going to die eventually, so it’s irrelevant.” Like another 50 years to know your loved ones or fulfill your potential (with things like art) is irrelevant.
and there’s a good chance that the quality of life we’d have in that world would be drastically worse overall, because society is made for the powerful and on average the powerful now live 100 times longer than everybody else and that will have really significant effects on how society, law, and work are structured.
Your argument hinges on this, but I feel it’s overstated and don’t find it compelling.
How hard would people be willing to fight if they knew it meant a lot more than just their ordinary limited lifespan?
And how do the powerful justify and maintain their power?
Political support for things like basic income are growing. If there is a big wave of mass displacement by automation, I think it will even go through, even though it would have been unthinkable ten years ago. The reason people aren’t thinking about these problems in the mainstream is that the technology doesn’t seem plausible yet. The political landscape will change as it does.
In other words, I expect the boring liberal democracies to essentially remain as such, with some set of politically-palatable compromise solutions. Some of the elites will even believe these solutions are good ideas.
Well yes, the economic argument isn’t the strongest one. The strongest argument is that the alternative is becoming weak, helpless, and mad, followed by literal involuntary permanent nonexistence. There are very few arguments that would convince me that we should not develop immortality technology when I have a metaphorical gun to my head that can only be moved farther back by immortality technology.
You don’t find the economic argument compelling, I don’t find “really, death isn’t that bad” plus all the other arguments compelling. The price I am willing to pay for this technology is very high. My enjoyment of the future beyond the end of my lifespan is literally zero or null if it is not developed.
That price includes authoritarian restrictions on reproduction.
I can on conscious level sort of understand that some people aren’t bothered by the fact that they’re gonna die, and can even sort of understand their reasoning (and I do believe in the right of people to make choices that I consider to be shitty), but on the intuitive level this is just incomprehensible for me. But then I remember that there are plenty of women who don’t just totally buy the idea that only young attractive thin women have value and deserve respect, and everyone else must be constantly shamed into “knowing their place,” but also enthusiastically and aggressively perpetuate it. That is despite the fact they’re basically guaranteed to sooner or later enter the category of people they worthless and deserving shame. And presumably the project of stopping appearance-based shaming or at least changing your own beliefs and finding yourself an accepting community is easier than eradicating death. So defending mortality makes at least as much sense - if not more - than defending old-unattractive-shaming, and evidently people can be extremely enthusiastic about the latter.
I’m definitely in the “death is preferable to no-death” camp, and while I can’t speak for others, I can maybe do a bit to try to explain my own position. The first thing I should emphasize is that “not being bothered by the prospect of your own death" and “in favour of mortality as a thing” are not as tightly coupled as you’re probably supposing. As with many issues, it’s often necessary to separate large-scale social policy from personal interests. It’s also important to distinguish between death by accident, trauma, or illness and death by aging, because they’re very different things. I don’t know anyone who’s against eliminating the former, but a lot of people (including me) are wary of tinkering with senescence. Futurist critics tend to frame this as a kind of superstitious nature worship, a slavish fixation on the moral supremacy of What Is, but I find that dismissal a bit too pat.
(cut bc long)
There’s more to it, but you even if you set aside the fact that not dying is actually very, very valuable, you also have to account for the disadvantages of the current system.
For instance, it is extraordinarily expensive to raise an entire generation of people, during which time they can’t really be part of the workforce without compromising their later effectiveness, have them work for a limited time as their bodies and minds slowly degrade, spend even more money as their bodies start to fall apart all at once, then discard them and bury their bodies.
Then we do it all over again. Only it’s worse, because they have to spend one quarter of their lifespan raising children to keep this going. This not only limits investment in children, but limits time in the workforce.
The stickiness of scientific theories might be related to health degradation and loss of neuroplasticity over time.
As for social change, I’m not sure that more is always better. We’re still wrestling with changes in incentives from the sexual revolution, and while LGBTs are only a small fraction of the population and were never a threat to society to begin with, polygamy has a lot more practical trouble associated with it (like decreases in the psychological health of women and children, and incentives that lead to very early or even child marriage) and is probably next on the Progressive schedule after Transgenderism, even though normalizing polygamy is probably not a good idea. (It’s different when it’s just a few nerds doing it.)
Actual supporters of Trump correct me if I’m wrong but I think they’d say “you’re afraid because the left has deliberately promoted hysteria and fear; the things you’re afraid of aren’t going to happen”. Like, I think they legitimately do not believe that someone could be scared of Milo because they are scared he’ll say their name on stage and then they’ll be beaten or strangled or deported or murdered over it, I think they model fear of Milo as ‘the left has deliberately self-modified to find anyone who is not cowed by leftist orthodoxy terrifying’.
So yeah, they don’t believe you (or they believe that your being scared has almost nothing to do with their behavior). Unless you or your loved ones are an undocumented immigrant or a refugee, in which case I think they’d say ‘well yes I am endangering your family but I don’t have an obligation to endanger my family to protect your family”.
This is not exactly encouraging but I think it’s roughly a description of the thing.
I feel like I’m the most “AFA/classical anarchist/radical socialist/murder the 1%’ers and topple their thrones” of all the tumblr rationalists/lesswrong diaspora…
Everywhere I look are libertarians aka greywashed neo-liberalists. And I appreciate that US is a lot different from Denmark, but I have yet to hear a solid refutation of Medications on Moloch.
Things which aren’t really refutations, but may be relevant: If you think that things, while in many ways bad, are mostly getting better, and most potential bad futures are bad in either apolitical ways (or in the case of nuclear war generic instability ways), you’ll probably think that the current status quo shouldn’t be altered very much. As far as I can tell, the standard rationalist EA position is “things are mostly improving, the obvious improvements look more like ‘make more malaria nets’ than ‘bloody revolution now’, and everyone in a first-world country is baaasically the 1% anyway”.
I’d be willing to discuss this more if you like, but I’m not really sure where to start.
Edit: Also, as far as I can tell, I am not the only person with the vague uncharitable impression that “the left” is mostly “a scary threatening group that is weirdly powerful in all the IRL communities that I tend to end up interacting with”.
That seems like a good way of characterizing the situation, actually.
What I feel that I guess most others don’t, is the fact that we’re playing 1930′s musical fascism chairs again. Denmark, as you might know, was under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945, and it is still very much a facet of our cultural identity.
While it is true that things are mostly going forwards, I feel that shrugging and focusing on malaria nets commits what I like to call the “Karkat Vantas’ predeterminism fallacy:”
CCG: EVERYBODY, DID YOU HEAR THAT?? SUPERFUTURE VRISKA HAS AN IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON FOR US ALL.
CCG: WE DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT OUR PRESENT RESPONSIBILIES AND OBLIGATIONS!
CCG: BECAUSE AS IT TURNS OUT, IN THE FUTURE ALL THAT STUFF ALREADY HAPPENED. WE’RE OFF THE FUCKING HOOK!Basically, the reason why it is getting better is that people are fighting!
And one of the things to fight for, is civil rights and liberties, and welfare, and protection of the weak, and your right to party.
So, yeah. You can save a lot of lives right now by donating to fight malaria; but if you play the apolitical game and hope for the best, Plato already schooled you on what is going to happen:
The price good men pay for indifference in public affairs, is to be ruled by tyrants.
That is, roughly, my position.
PS. Notice how “things are mostly improving, the obvious improvements look more like … than …” is one of those dangerous snow-clone type sentences. I could use that argument against malaria as well, urging people to invest in… Greenpeace campaigns against animal abuse, to name a particularly nasty example.
I appreciate your attempt at synthesis, but as a factual matter I do not think things are getting better primarily because of the efforts of activists we are sympathetic to. Whatever improvement there is in the human condition, is coming from many disparate sources.
However, I do think you hit upon the very important question that a lot of reformist vs radical discussions can reduce to: do you think things are getting better?
I can admit there are some compelling reasons to feel things are getting better. Whig History says they’ve been getting better for hundreds of years, and this should continue. We have more technology to aid us than ever before. As an aggregate matter, lives over the entire world are in a better material position than ever before. If you think the current (liberal capitalist) system is stable, then there’s a lot of reason to go with the Alexandrian stance of improve, iterate, and don’t fuck things up. The radicals are just wrong then.
… The issue is that the radicals don’t think things are getting better. As you point out we may be on the verge of a fascist takeover (perhaps leading to World War), which is probably a result of decades of neoliberal inequality heightening. I’m not sure the immediate political situation of the rise of far-right parties is the only problem, but it’s suggestive of the many problems that out of control inequality will continue to throw out until everything collapses.
And of course, if you’re willing to look outside “post Renaissance Western Europe” there are many times in human history when civilizations took prolonged steps backwards, both in terms of technology and respect for human rights. “Ever forward” is not guaranteed in the human condition.
Zizek lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to “postmodern” capitalism: “The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”
Maybe you think that’s nonsense, but it’s a belief structure people can attach to. And under that logic, changing the fundamental rules of our society (not being certain what will replace them) is entirely reasonable.
One need only look at previous Leftist revolutions without adequately-tested plans for society afterwards, as well as prior predictions of total system collapse by Leftists to see that this probably isn’t the greatest idea. One can even see that the Capitalists did better on the environment than the Communists, even despite their systemic design towards resource consumption. So while radicals may think this is a good viewpoint, I think it’s pretty easy to conclude that without an adequately planned and tested system already prepared for after The Revolution, a revolution will just kill a whole bunch of people and significantly damage the economy without improving governance at all or helping the environment very much. Also a revolution is not going to install mere social democracy, since it has to be sufficiently radical just to be effectively carried out.
Leukemia is not actually a good thing, anon. If your blood is over-saturated with white cells then please seek medical assistance.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
To my followers,
I apologize for that recent rash of dash-clogging posts arguing on that AnCap thread.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I’ve been reading right-wing media - not all the time, because the point of the exercise is understanding and past a point it just breeds exhaustion. But my impression is that the way right-wing media interprets the protests and the outrage and the fear and anger at Trump’s presidency is something like this:
The left won a lot of battles in a row, and they got used to winning every fight they got into, so they picked fights that they couldn’t possibly really care about, just to grind our faces in the dirt. And then they lost! And we won! And they are handling this with immature hysteria and obstructionism and riots, and we basically have to wade through them to put the country back on the rails, and where we fail it’s their fault and where we succeed it proves that they’re ineffectual and intellectually bankrupt and have no tactics beyond crying and complaining and calling people racist. And they’re complaining about things they were fine with under Obama so they’re not actually sincere anyway. And they still have a stranglehold nearly everywhere, but maybe now people’ll start to see through them and we’ll have a chance to roll it back.)
(Some examples of fights we ‘couldn’t possibly really care about’: making employers cover health care plans that included contraception coverage, making bakers bake wedding cakes for gay people, letting trans people use restrooms of their choice.)
And the presence of the narrative imposes a sort of filter, where things you do that make sense within it, or reinforce it, don’t get seen by half the country. Sometimes that doesn’t matter. But sometimes it really does; sometimes I want to be able to talk to the people who voted for Trump and be heard and be understood to be saying what I’m actually saying and not just ‘blah blah liberals won and won and won and can’t handle losing and are going to call you racist no matter what racist racist racist’.
So, obviously, I think this narrative is unfair in many, many ways. But what I’m really interested in right now is, what could a person do or say in order to slip past the narrative? Because it’s, well, encompassing - narratives usually are. Peaceful protests fit into the ‘the left is all bluster and whining’ arm of it and violent protests fit into ‘the left is a danger’ arm of it and no protests fit into the ‘we are the silent majority’ arm of it. And there are battles which really are worth fighting but which are trivial and silly to people sufficiently removed from them, like fights over letting trans people use public restrooms.
But narratives are not all-encompassing - the vocal opposition of Senator McCain to Trump’s conduct doesn’t fit into it at all, the conservative judges overturning Trump’s executive orders doesn’t fit into it very well, the testimony of veterans about why their translators saved their lives and deserve the opportunity to live here which they were promised doesn’t fit into it.
Those are, of course, all examples of conservatives who can challenge the narrative by already having credibility within it. I can’t think of a great way for a liberal to establish that credibility - emphasizing that you understand why they believe the things they believe was tried very loudly during the campaign, and I think it mostly totally failed (both at establishing that, and at going from ‘we understand each other’ to ‘the filter you’re seeing me through isn’t capturing what I want and what I actually want is reasonable and comprehensible and human’.)
I feel like one important project of the next few months is figuring out how to communicate past the filter, how to say things that aren’t easily sorted into the narrative, and how to build from there enough trust that our concerns and fear and anger are heard as concern and fear and anger, instead of being easy to round off as ‘they lost and they’re sore losers’. I want past the filter. I want to be able to make myself understood. And I do still think that there’s some way that can be achieved.
I know that you mean what you say, even though I disagree on a number of key policies. They don’t. There is a risk that any way of bypassing the filter will get seen as cynical political manipulation - or will end up that way since politicals will start abusing it just like they abused the term “racist”. But then, I knew about you well before the election.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
why does every discussion circle back to utilitarian robots with you people
Because we like to talk about ourselves.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
@remedialaction: Attempting to use property that is not yours is a violation, be it by seizure, trespass, violence, or the like.
is the radio spectrum property? how about the ionosphere? global fish stocks?
Can you contain and mix your labor with it?
this a perfect setup for the most epic your mum joke of all time
Property is like free will: no internally coherent model of it is possible, because it exists only in the form of a confusion of locally-meaningful but globally-incoherent arbitrary rules, but the various rules associated with the concept have been useful enough that we get rid of it entirely at our peril.
In this way, it also resembles your mom.
really we need a cool name for the political ideology of “taking the democratic institutions that we have and reforming them in the direction of producing better outcomes and increasing the popular legitimacy of the system, probably via some form of basic income guarantee and more flexible way of expressing voting preferences but other options may also be worth investigating”.
This isn’t exactly what I’m after, but it isn’t that far off.
I think we can improve the organizational technology and incentives of government itself, probably through a new sort of multidisciplinary behavioral game-theory-like field.
Also prediction markets, if we can fix the holes in them.
@remedialaction: Attempting to use property that is not yours is a violation, be it by seizure, trespass, violence, or the like.
is the radio spectrum property? how about the ionosphere? global fish stocks?
The oxygen in the air, water in the sea, rain from the sky? Wild animals in nature, with migration patterns that cross multiple boundaries?
How is it claimed? If part of something is disposed, do the atoms still belong to someone?
my gut feeling is that ancapistan quickly reverts to a regular capitalist state or in the worst case feudalism, while the ancoms end up in an authoritarian state of the usual variety, although this may be avoided if the scale is very small; eg. most families, tribes, and villages are run on ancom principles already.
I think most people have this gut feeling. At least, most people who are aware these two ideologies exist.
Since 2002, the survey has also asked questions designed to tease out respondents’ nationalism, including the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the following standard measures of nationalist sentiment: “Even if I could choose any other country in the world, I would prefer to be a citizen of China than any other country”; “In general, China is a better country than most others”; and “Everyone should support their government even when it is wrong.”
The paper’s headline result suggests that nationalism among Beijing’s residents has not increased over time. On the contrary, the proportion of survey respondents strongly agreeing with the first and third statements decreased sharply from 2002 to 2015, while the number of those who agreed “somewhat” rose. Those strongly agreeing with the second statement, about China being “a better country,” did increase slightly — perhaps an understandable finding given that personal incomes and infrastructure in Beijing both improved significantly over the survey period.
The results not only show a drop in sentiment resembling nationalism; they strongly suggest that Chinese youth, at least those in China’s capital, are less nationalistic than their elders, belying notions of growing numbers of internet-addled youngsters ready to take the government to task for any perceived failure to defend the national honor. In each instance of the survey since 2002, respondents born after 1978 were markedly less likely to “strongly agree” with any of the nationalist survey prompts than were their older peers. Perhaps most striking, by 2015, the proportion of older Chinese strongly agreeing to support their country “even when it is wrong” was more than twice the proportion of youth who felt that way.
While it often looks like nationalism is ascendant now, sometimes it looks like it’s a last desperate gasp of a vanishing way of thinking. Can nationalism survive a population that grew up in a globally connected world?
As a Nationalist, a last, desperate gasp isn’t the way I’d put it. But then, I wouldn’t call it ascendant, either. Nationalism will fall in and out of favor as the consequences of Anti-Nationalism become apparent and then wane.
For China’s case, though, you have to consider that the PRC is incompetent, corrupt, and authoritarian. In the presence of international information, it’s going to be more difficult to cultivate Nationalism when the state, which is a key organ of Nationalism, is so highly at odds with the needs of the people.
blue-rondo said: This anon thinks that Marxist leftists aren’t also subverted by the CIA lol. Wait til these people discover who funded and backed Marx to begin with.
please don’t tell me the Soviet Union was a CIA plot to conquer Europe
For a short while, I and a few friends of mine joked that Communism was a Western plot to destroy Asia.
The left is terrible, the right is terrible, libertarianism is terrible
I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.
One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“ Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.
Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.
don’t ancoms need a way to “unenforce” property rights? why is that less powerful than a state?
The vibe I got was that this would be done by The Community somehow. …which basically means it is the state, only power will be more evenly distributed or something and it will dissolve afterwards when not needed?
Of course there’s a reason I’m a Nationalist not any kind of Anarchist. Naturally I don’t expect that to work. At least it’s better than Tankies though.
I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.
One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“ Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.
Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.
I really don’t understand white nationalists who think antebellum slavery was a good idea - even from a self-interest perspective.
Like, you guys do realise how the people you hate so much got to the Americas, right?
For people who say blacks can’t swim, you seem surprisingly convinced that we crossed the Atlantic without help.
The first White Nationalist I’ve met in a while does indeed think that the Atlantic Slave Trade was a bad idea, and roughly for that reason.
From a regular Nationalist perspective racializing slavery was also a dumb idea since it essentially created a separate ethnicity in a group that could have been fully integrated, causing expensive and politically-divisive rifts in society that last to this day, undermined the nation’s moral character, undermined national morale, etc. And that’s before even accounting for the ordinary moral damage it did in terms of unnecessary human suffering, which was enormous.
Of course if one is the kind to practice mass racialized slavery, one may not be the kind to give thought to the long term implications of mass racialized slavery on others in general.
The emoji? Uhhhhhb
nostalgebraist said: i don’t understand these two sentences – if they couldn’t reach him, how do they know what he said? – “Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon.”
blatant bullshit Kremlinology, I just like the fact that Americans spend so long vetting their presidential candidates (over a year!) then once elected they immediately install a cabal of incredibly shady characters to run everything.
“oh I’d have a beer with Dubya!”
*cue Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz striding into Whitehouse in slow motion like world’s worst boyband*
Some dark part of me longs for Technocratic Dictatorship.
*hugs*
I know how you feel. I’m terrified. But I think in the coming months it’ll settle down a little as the left realises that Trump isn’t going to run away scared and the Administration realises that people are actually going to resist if they do anything egregious, and we’ll reach a lower-energy-if-still-unstable equilibrium.
I’m still not happy about anything that’s happening, though. You have all of my sympathy. Feel free to message me any time.
Unpopular opinion: intersectional feminism is responsible for a lot of collateral damage that it is becoming increasingly urgent to address. It presents itself as comprehensive in its revelatory powers re: marginalized experience even though it actually enables silencing and reinforced marginalization of the most marginalized of such experiences by virtue of its very theoretical structure. Its ideals are not practically supported by its theoretical tools due to their own structural flaws.
In brief, upholding positionality as a criterion of discourse and ultimately decentering privileged commentary in attempt to define narrative authority ends up fostering oppressive dogma and suspension of necessary critical inquiry in the very attempts to do the opposite, and in ways that large-scale matter to the lives and plights of the most marginalized. […]
This may be a relatively digestible bit of expansion copied from another thread. For context, someone was musing about how third wave feminism seems to have a severe problem recognizing issues like misogyny and homophobia and generally identifying social conservativism within Muslim communities:Honestly I think this is partially wrought by intersectionality theory itself. It tries to unravel and juxtapose nuanced experiences within marginalized groups, but is absolutely ill equipped to do so because it falls into the trap of crystallizing identities and experiences to the testimony of visible community voices without interrogating those voices to begin with, because its very model undermines interrogation. It hinges on mechanisms like positionality to center the voices and experiences of oppressed people, such that representatives of those people are granted authority and outsiders are considered incapable of accessing the knowledge and experience to challenge that.
Except when those representatives given authority by virtue of their positionality are themselves bound to a conservative institution and dedicated to a cultural zeitgeist that is at odds with the values underlying intersectional theory to begin with, while intersectionality itself put roadblocks against any capacity to question or challenge such positionality and upholds a model of specifically decentering critique from outsiders, you get people who believe they are being the most authentic and supportive they can by refusing to extend models of critique that are not necessarily limited by their position as outsiders by sheer virtue of how they are positioned. So they eat all the BS up and the Linda Sarsours of marginalized communities continue to be upheld as representatives beyond reproach. And that’s third wave feminism ‘done right’.
There’s something perversely lacking in self awareness about the very theoretical models people take as authoritative right now precisely because they attempt radical self awareness.I think a symptom of is that the moral and epistemic clarity of posts like http://nothingismere.tumblr.com/post/154828689842/ozymandias271-questions-that-will-apparently-be is weirdly uncommon. Like, this is such a bizarre exchange:
Querent - “How can I figure out what I should be doing to fight racism without burdening people of color by constantly asking them what I should do?”
@ozymandias271 - “You have a brain? Presumably you can use it to assess the quality of information yourself? Why are you making people of color do this for you?”
It’s one thing to recommend a debiasing intervention (e.g., ‘people under-weight evidence in the form of self-reports of others’ experiences when those people have lived very different lives; assign more weight to compensate’), and another thing to act as though the debiasing intervention replaces normal weighing-of-the-evidence altogether.
First-hand accounts from the disprivileged are a weight on the scale, not a qualitatively higher form of evidence/argument; obscuring that fact and talking in non-quantitative terms encourages epistemic learned helplessness like in Ozy’s post.
I mean, the exchange makes perfect sense once you take into account that Querent readers are trying first and foremost to ensure that they don’t get yelled at, and that openly admitting to that would get them yelled at. Ozy’s approach is the one that actually works better for everyone in the absence of any risk of yelling.
I just encountered a tweet with a gif that showed a woman in a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat being blindsided and pepper-sprayed by some guy, with a reply saying “you dont often see female nazis getting what they deserve”
Originally, a “Nazi” meant someone who wanted to create a fascist state and commit genocide. Any decent person would hate these guys, so we all understood that Nazi=Evil.
Then “Nazi” meant someone who endorsed racist beliefs, regardless of policies. This was transparently diluting the meaning from its original form, but we didn’t really mind, because racists suck and we were going to be pissed at them anyway.
Then “Nazi” meant someone who supported Donald Trump for any reason. ie: Over a third of the USA.
Now “Nazi” means someone who wears ~edgy~ hats supporting bitcoin.
And, regardless of your opinion on genocide - or literally anything else, for that matter - in a month, “Nazi” is going to mean you.
It literally does not matter what you believe. Not a single bit. You could be the most fervent anti-racist in the world. You could hate Hitler with all your heart. You could have been completely certain that no one in their right mind would call you a Nazi.
And then someone wearing a dumb hat got pepper-sprayed.
So, the next time you see the punching discourse, remember this: All of those arguments in favour of punching Nazis are encouraging people to punch anyone in a silly hat. Even if the person making the argument doesn’t endorse punching people in stupid hats, this is where it leads. And saying “But I thought they’d only punch the real Nazis!” is no excuse.
Saying “You can punch Nazis” means “You can punch people you call Nazis”. Simple as that. There is no ledger in the sky listing the True Nazis and distinguishing them from the Fake Nazis. If there was, people in stupid hats wouldn’t be pepper-sprayed. Any and all endorsement of punching Nazis on sight is an endorsement of “Use your judgement to decide who to punch, because no one’s judgement is ever flawed”.
And then people wearing the wrong hat will be punched. And people wearing the wrong shoes will be punched. And people eating the wrong food will be punched. And people listening to the wrong music will be punched. And you will be punched. You will always be someone’s Nazi, and this is the political climate in which they will feel justified in assaulting you.
So, if being a fucking decent person who doesn’t attack strangers based on their hat doesn’t compel you, at least let a little self-interest do it. Do you want a jacked up whiteboy with a saviour complex to beat your ass for walking down the street the wrong way? No? Then don’t contribute to the culture that wants to make that happen.
Because when you ride with the disintegration of the social order, you ride with Hitler. ///
Ayup.
Why do we not like Nazis? Because they want to use violence on the people they don’t like. What normalizes Nazis? Using violence on the people we don’t like.
“You will always be someone’s Nazi, and this is the political climate in which they will feel justified in assaulting you.”
This is exactly the sort of thing that’s a counterpoint to everyone I’ve seen whining about how slippery slopes don’t apply to nazis.
I disagree. I don’t have to worry about being someone’s nazi. There are actual emboldened or recently converted nazis out there who worry me more. But stepping away from the element of personal preservation, let me argue more objectively.
You don’t like the argument that punching fascists, assaulting nazis, is categorically different from other violence. OK. Then let’s perceive the phenomenon dimensionally. Everyone can be placed on a scale of 0-100 in terms of nazi quintessence. Public outcry for and against violence done to a fairly high level nazi is a known value: lots of approval, some guilty appreciation, lots of moderate condemnation, and some nazi response. Someone is lower on the nazi scale? Radicals still cheer, but the guilty appreciation and moderate condemnation factions grow. Nazi response is a constant, because they’re nazis. This pattern continues until the majority of society sort of agrees that no, this particular act of violence is not meme-worthy. The market speaks, and our collective decision tree reaches a conclusion - level 69 nazis are not nazi enough to punch, or whatever the needle lands on. People won’t keep slapping level 12 nazis, because the blowback will be huge. It will get no likes.
I trust this system. It will never bite me in the ass. Under no circumstances will I ever be anywhere near the margins of maybe-punchable. Which is as it should be, because nazis are inherently the worst sort of extremists. Avoiding this ideology should be political easy mode. If this social wayfinding violence convinces a few people to maybe shift a little down on that scale, away from the 60-70 splash zone, forgive me for not stepping up to protect their collective right to be dill holes.
So, I have three problems with this:
The first is that the Nazi scale is not consistent or predictable. Lots of people think the scale is in a completely different place from other people. I’m not saying some people want to punch level 50 Nazis, while others only punch 80 and up, and the former is willing to defer to the latter to avoid backlash.
I mean people who actually don’t realise that other people might see the person they’re calling a 90 as being a 20. I have encountered people who are honestly confused that someone on the left might think they’re an asshole if they punch anyone registered to the Republican party, regardless of how or whether they voted. There are people who don’t understand that there might be backlash from all quarters - not just the administration - if Trump’s grandchildren were kidnapped.
There are people whose scales look nothing like anyone else’s, and I don’t even want them to hear “punching level 90 Nazis is OK” because then they’ll punch people no reasonable person would count. I want a blanket injunction because it’s the only thing that’ll stop the paranoiacs who twist everything into Nazis under the bed.
But even beyond that - even if we granted the idea that the perception of the Nazi scale was consistent across everyone - I still don’t want violence to slide further down it. Do we want to to go from punching 80s to punching 60s to punching 40s to the breakdown of civil discourse (to the extent that we still have any)? This is why I want people to stop calling for violent escalation. I want to at least arrest the decline of civil society.
Furthermore, even with a consistent scale, there are outliers. Even if, by some miracle, we could get most people to agree on 60, there would still be people who’ll punch at 30 and damn the consequences because they’re ~saving the world~. Like, if there are already people at the “pepper spray silly hats” level of nonsensical extremism, do we really want the situation to deteriorate? Do we want to lower the average and let the outliers get worse?
Seriously though, I’m not someone’s nazi, I’m someone’s oven joke, I’m literally not allowed to be someone’s nazi, They wouldn’t let me if I tried,
I’m in the same position, mate. I’m Black and Jewish and gay. Any true Nazi would triple-oven me in a heartbeat, so I am fully motivated to track and shame and discredit them.
But some people just don’t fucking get that. I have been called a Nazi on several occasions by obvious idiots. These are the “someones” I mean when I say “someone’s Nazi”. Luckily, none of the people who’ve called me that would have been willing to punch me for it. But that’s the thing: I don’t want that to change. This safety margin is important.
I want the people stupid enough to believe in gay black Jewish Nazis to keep their hands in their fucking pockets. I do not want them to be in an environment where they feel like this is at all justifiable, because those people cannot be trusted to know who to punch. And I have enough on my plate without having to watch my back from so-called allies.
Just to pile on top of this, right wing actions do not occur in a vacuum. Right-wingers are often oversensitive to threats. As the punching spreads, because some people are out there enough to combine “we should punch white supremacists” with “all white people have internalized white supremacy”. Right-wingers are going to respond to that sort of thing by either punching equally unrelated people or going after Leftists. …and they have about as much justification to go after tankies as Leftists have to go after Nazis.
Thanks! That’s not really a question though. And mostly that makes me wonder “why?”
(Also I guess, why is this anonymous? Is liking my blog some dark secret?)
Which reminds me, why do people follow without liking or reblogging some posts. It always makes me curious “what did I just say to make you follow me now?” Instead they just seem to spontaneously come out of the aether.
The situation I’m imagining that brings about massive technological unemployment is one in which most workers’ marginal value contains both a positive and negative component. If the net is positive, then the concept of comparative advantage applies and there is always something that they have comparative advantage at that they can trade with the people who own and operate robots, and still come out ahead. This is the standard rebuttal to the claim that technological unemployment is even possible in a decently free economy.
But given that there is a negative component, this does not follow, because it is enough for automation to reduce the positive component to a sufficiently small (but still positive, by comparative advantage) level that it cannot compensate for the negatives of dealing with them and their marginal value as employees becomes zero or negative if you have access to robots instead, which is not a situation normally dealt with in analysis that assumes that the median worker’s marginal productivity is always positive, even if small.
(If we’re opening up net marginal productivity into a positive and negative component, then robots have their negatives to, of course. But I don’t think this affects the point.)
My worry has long been that their marginal productivity is positive (because I’ve made the exact mistake you point out) but that it wasn’t positive enough.
My “comparative advantage” doesn’t matter if it’s small enough that my resulting gain from trade isn’t enough to live on.
Now that you mention it, the concept of comparative advantage only guarantees that you will always be better off under trade than you would be under self-sufficiency. (Except the unlikely situation where you are inferior at everything by the exact same factor, in which case you are still not worse off.)
But a worker is already involved with trade when they sell their labor to an employer. Comparative advantage itself says nothing whatsoever about what might happen to your position when new traders appear in the market to compete with you.
So if your “self-sufficiency” is below sustenance, then comparative advantage, even where it’s assumptions are valid, only guarantees that trade will at worst leave you just as dead but will most likely let your live slightly longer. There is no guarantee that it can raise you above sustenance if you don’t have anything valuable enough on offer.
I’m puzzled that I’d never realized this before. Apparently the main concept used to argue that technological unemployment is impossible doesn’t actually apply to the situation at all? Maybe I’m missing something.
I thought this was reasonably obvious, and was continuously surprised on people not noticing this.
See also, my recent post about the issue with the idea of the cost of goods going towards zero.
Moving this off the reblog chain with @rustingbridges
Yeah, property is violence. I don’t disagree with you. What’s plan b, though? I want something and you want something, how are we going to settle this? Negotiation when it’s most advantageous and violence when it’s not.
One of the hopes of the ancap system (and most other systems of government) is to incentivize conflict resolution in a way that reduces the creation of negative externalities.
Democracy is how we deal with this type of decision. At the very least, accepting that property is coercion means that we should reject totally the idea of democratic “interference“ in property as being inherently incorrect.
No, I agree that the anarcho capitalist future probably doesn’t end particularly well (but then, I feel that way about most (all?) potential systems). Claiming that homosexuals, feminists and minorities must be expelled ignores history though (they had to pass laws to keep market competition from reducing segregation).
Alright, so the problem here comes with the larger issue. As minorities, feminists, and others gained power, they change society in a social democratic direction. If you reason like this, the empowerment of minorities becomes an externality, it can be good for the person involved but is catastrophic for the greater society. It’s very similar to when Peter Thiel said we lost the ability to be a free society when we let women vote.
And this connects with the other point, political stability is the greatest externality there is, and we know in regimes where property rights are supreme how it gets resolved. Reactionary militias and death squads are used to enforce the will of the property owners. Sometimes this is through the state, but the state is by no means required.
These ideas of private security forces is laughable, why would you hire purely for profit mercenaries that will run away when instead you get cheaper and more dedicated reactionaries to do the job as long as you let them let them torture some feminists and minorities.
Of course things won’t work out exactly like he imagines.
But the unimaginable catastrophe is ongoing. How many millions died without need in 2016? How many will die this year?
And many of the libertarian policy proposals are actually plausible, in that there are people who would stand to benefit if they came in place. Even with that, it’s hard enough to get anything political done.
And why do you think this would be better? How good did the “liberalization“ of Russia work? What happened in Greece when they had their “free market reforms” after the crash, did that work better? Do you really think that things today can’t get much much worse? This is peak interventionists fallacy here.
Democracy is how we deal with this type of decision. At the very least, accepting that property is coercion means that we should reject totally the idea of democratic “interference“ in property as being inherently incorrect.
I’m no monarchist, and I don’t entirely reject the idea of democracy (ask me about land value taxes! (actually don’t internet, I don’t know anything, tell me about them if you have strong opinions. but it sounds like a good idea.))
But the issues of rampant democracy are well known. The common decency of man works to limit the rate of the damage - just as most won’t steal a phone off the ground, neither will most support a law of blatant robbery. But the moral hazard is very real.
And the moralizers are even worse! Someone with no real stake in the matter has decided that selling marijuana ought to be punished by jail time. So that they could feel better about themselves (at best) or enrich their crony friends (at worst) many people have suffered (and so has my paycheck, as with every other working american).
Alright, so the problem here comes with the larger issue. As minorities, feminists, and others gained power, they change society in a social democratic direction.
I don’t believe this at present.
If you reason like this, the empowerment of minorities becomes an externality, it can be good for the person involved but is catastrophic for the greater society.
That is an excellent case for putting it to individuals who might pursue a self interested course, rather than putting it up to a mechanism that a majority can use to violently enforce discriminatory norms against a minority.
It’s very similar to when Peter Thiel said we lost the ability to be a free society when we let women vote.
Well, if peter thiel wants to spend more money to be without women, let him. Good riddance and we’ll be alright without him.
And this connects with the other point, political stability is the greatest externality there is, and we know in regimes where property rights are supreme how it gets resolved. Reactionary militias and death squads are used to enforce the will of the property owners. Sometimes this is through the state, but the state is by no means required.
Political stability is valuable. And once we have that I think the best you can hope for from government is to limit the misgovernance.
These ideas of private security forces is laughable, why would you hire purely for profit mercenaries that will run away when instead you get cheaper and more dedicated reactionaries to do the job as long as you let them let them torture some feminists and minorities.
This is just as true for publicly provided mercenaries as it for private. You can’t dodge this sort of problem by publicizing it.
There are more private security personnel in the united states than there are police officers. And in my experience they’ve generally been more courteous and less bloodthirsty than their public counterparts.
It probably helps that they can actually be held liable for murder.
Do you really think that things today can’t get much much worse? This is peak interventionists fallacy here.
Of course things can get much worse than they are. That seems a distinct possibility. The traditional lever for making things much worse is a powerful centralized government. As such, I see it as being in my self interest to bind the hands of any future tyrant as much as possible.
Does that mean we should overthrow the government today? No, if you want that sort of radicalism you’ll have to look elsewhere. I want to sell the detritus of the state until we stop getting a good deal.
Do you want to keep up the drug war?
Do you want another land war in the mid east?
Do you want it to be illegal to build housing near to jobs?
Do you want billions of dollars to be wasted on signature campaign projects rather than meaningful public transit?
I don’t.
Does that mean we should overthrow the government today? No, if you want that sort of radicalism you’ll have to look elsewhere. I want to sell the detritus of the state until we stop getting a good deal.
I mentioned Greece and Russia before, so let me mention them again. This does not actually work.
Look the problem here is that you can’t just assume away the need to get approval. The need to get public approval doesn’t go away. I think you vastly underestimate the amount of government that is need to do this for a modern society.
In the current system you can blame government for all the sins, because it that carries out the jobs nobody wants to admit to needing. You abolish government, you don’t abolish the desire for cheap oil and the desire to keep wealth through housing or the desire of some people bust heads, You just abolish democracy and accountability. You just get nasty politics. You get the authoritarian leaders who promise you those things. And in your desire to bind tyrants you just create them as the rules you choose become unbearable for the people living in them.
The state is not the cause of sin, it is just it’s bearer.
The Paperwork Reduction Act was enacted in 1980 to require federal agencies to fill out paperwork in order to request permission to require citizens to fill out paperwork.
phrased this way it sounds like a great idea
you can’t inflict it on others until you suffer it yourself, and maybe you realize how awful it is and stop yourself
This is why I want many policies by Politicals to apply to the same Politicals that propose them even when it otherwise would seem wasteful. Inflicting costs on others needs to have a cost in itself.
A number of the “No Robot Jobpocalypse” arguments seem to hinge on the idea that as productivity increases, the costs of goods and services will approach zero.
But this seems based on the assumption that resources are effectively a function of labor. However, if base resources are largely fixed after some level of labor (e.g., there are only so many iron atoms in a volume of dirt), and there are other potential uses for those resources than feeding the proles, then the laborers must competitively bid for the resources.
In that bidding, they may have to bid with someone several orders of magnitude more productive than they are (either due to owning the robots or just being that much more skilled/productive). What guarantee is there that, even as the price of goods produced from the resources decreases overall, they are not bid out of the reach of the low-marginal-production workers?
AKA: Michael Pettis has been saying this for 2 decades, Mark Blyth’s been on the train since… at least 2012, and now we’re finally catching up.
Free Trade doesn’t work.
(via poipoipoi-2016)
Heck, Keynes said it in the 1940s and gave the solution.
(via collapsedsquid)
If this is doing what I think it’s doing, a single country could get part of the way there by having its own currency and applying tariffs at a rate based on its trade balance. I was kind of hoping the Orange Man might do something like that, but it looks like he won’t and will do per-country punitive tariffs instead.
I think we can guess a few things - I think Hillary won in 2016-α against Jeb, who was weakened in our timeline by the changes made to the Republican primaries after 2012 (which were influenced by Trump through Reince Priebus, another possible time traveler, judging solely by his name), as well as early targeted attacks from Trump himself. But Trump had a strong strategy in mind for beating Hillary, which he was absurdly confident in as far back as 2012 - and I think it’s possibly because he saw it work already. I think he might have copied his style, key elements of the campaign (the MAGA hats? the critical Rust Belt working class focus? his Twitter media manipulation? maybe the hacking of the Hillary campaign was accomplished using Trump’s foreknowledge?) from someone else who ran against Hillary in 2020-α, who was possibly even more of a strident nationalist than Trump and was riding an even greater populist backlash against Washington DC.
Perhaps this was one of the things Trump came back to prevent - something that became much more worthy of being called a fascist takeover of the US. And he did it using their methods because he knew they worked. Maybe the hats originally just said ‘Make America Great’ and Trump added ‘Again’ because for him, it’s the second time.
I’m not sure who this mysterious nationalist candidate could have been, but maybe Andrew Breitbart survived in the original timeline (did a time-traveling Trump orchestrate his mysterious death?). Maybe it was actually Richard Spencer? Maybe it was a reality TV host, which would explain why he did The Apprentice. Or possibly Steve Bannon - that would explain Bannon’s position in the Trump administration, perhaps.
Trump being a time traveler might explain his odd organizational structure, too - the handful of insiders who run everything and report directly to him could be the only people who know he’s from the future and can understand what he’s actually trying to do. And all the people who are otherwise unknown/from humble backgrounds but have been given a large degree of authority - it could be that Trump knew them in the future of the alpha timeline. I think one could argue that the way Trump does things is exactly how one would expect a time traveler to run an organization. Especially if that organization is inexplicably effective for how small and ad-hoc it seems - like if it can run a successful presidential campaign and manage billions in assets with just a few not-that-competent-or-qualified-seeming people.
If we assume that Trump’s major policy initiatives are anticipating the problems he’s seen the US run into in the alpha timeline, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. I think his seeking detente with Russia and attempt to weaken Chinese industrial power and enhance America’s domestic industrial base suggests that in the alpha timeline, the US faced a strong Russo-Chinese alliance in some manner of conventional conflict - perhaps a new cold war, with many proxy conflicts around the world? Maybe a direct conflict in the South China Sea?
His rhetoric around Israel is basically ‘I’m going to be amazing for Israel’ with few explicit stated benefits - maybe in the alpha timeline, Israel suffered a great deal and possibly was destroyed, but Trump is confident he can prevent that? Maybe that has something to do with his similarly sketchy but apparently powerful hatred for Obama’s Iran deal? And the Wall - what did Trump see happen to Mexico that he’s so keen on building it so quickly? A natural disaster, a plague?
Perhaps also there was a terrorist attack early in 2017-α and Trump’s seemingly hamfisted immigration order was designed to disrupt it in our timeline - there’s a lot about the order that doesn’t add up unless there’s something bizarre like that going on. And tonight he made it obvious that he already knew the outcome of the Super Bowl, of course. Anyway, I think as his administration goes on, we’ll see more signs of the future Trump came back to prevent. Keep watching!
This is not the first time Trump has come back. Perhaps this is his fitfh attempt, or his fiftieth. He communicates in Tweets because he’s sick of long professional speeches, he’s memorized them by now and boiled them down to their 140-character essence. They haven’t saved us from nuclear war in any previous timeline, but maybe now… if he can just grab enough global attention, knock fate off its path by any means necessary… we may yet be saved.
What if a (new) city kept all land as municipal property, but auctioned n-year ground leases. Furthermore, bids could have conditions on them, such as public availability of amenities like bathrooms, amount of commercial storefront space available, etc. Other parties, such as neighbouring leaseholders or residents, could contribute to bids that provided benefits to them, and avoid contributing to bids that were harmful, to help internalize those sorts of externalities.
To ensure compensation for improvements on the land, on lease expiry, run two sets of auctions, one with all bids conditional on demolishing the existing improvements, and the other without that restriction. The demolition-conditional amount goes to the city, and the difference between that and the most successful bid that doesn’t condition on demolition goes to the previous leaseholder.
I haven’t checked this for exploits, like, at all, and my intuition says there probably are some. Also, allowing conditional bids would end up being complex and combinatorial; I’m not volunteering to write the software for that sort of auction system. But it seems like it’s potentially neat.
centralised zoning by a non-state entity that owns all the land; and I heard a sound as of a million Libertarians screeching
Daily reminder that in the highly capitalist and efficient city-state of Singapore, over 80% of residents live in housing leased from the state.
(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)
The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state
You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).
History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.
I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.
The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.
I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.
I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.
One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.
See, I think incentives are the problem with their system. One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world. The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power. The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.
I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider. It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions. These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these toy problems are used to show how great their system is.
I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want. People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power. These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives. You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality. Much better to observe what people actually do.
So, friedman again, both because he’s the author I’m most familiar with and mainstream enough that I don’t think this is cherrypicking. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of a chapter he spends arguing against unsophisticated strains of libertarianism:
Many libertarians appear to believe that libertarianism can be stated as a simple and convincing moral principle from which everything else follows. Popular candidates are ‘It is always wrong to initiate coercion’ and ‘Everyone has the absolute right to control his own property, provided that he does not use it to violate the corresponding rights of others.’
…
My purpose is to argue that libertarianism is not a collection of straightforward and unambiguous arguments establishing with certainty a set of unquestionable propositions. It is rather the attempt to apply certain economic and ethical insights to a very complicated world. The more carefully one does so, the more complications one is likely to discover and the more qualifications one must put on one’s results.
I think if you look at the stronger versions of these claims, rather than j random tumblr ancap’s retelling of them, you’ll find that they are mostly close examinations of real situations. There’s still plenty to disagree with, but ignorance of the idea that society is governed by power is not one of them. One of the goals of libertarian policy is to limit the extent to which that power can coerce.
Friedman’s text in particular is full of historical observations and precedents that support many of his arguments, and almost all of his practical ones.
His section on a hypothetical ancap future is just that, hypothetical. But that has no bearing on his practical policy claims.
In his section on reform, he often starts with something along the lines of “let us suppose”, but for the most part he merely wants you to suppose things that have really happened.
You see, I reject his entire framing. I go with the legal realist point of view here, property is coercion. Property is permission to do violence.
So, you could regard this as a bit of rhetorical irrelevance, but it’s not. You can recreate horrible government systems using libertarian ideas. I know this because one libertarian has, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He suggests that in a libertarian system, most people will exist as tenants on the property of rich people, there will be no free speech and no rights apart from that the landlord gives you, and leftist, homosexuals, feminists, and minorities must be expelled. Libertarianism is quite compatible with genocide in that way, you just starve people. When you get to how people in an actual “libertarian“ system might act who aren’t bound by postulates like theoretical people, it can get even worse.
Property is power, there’s no getting around that. They have to do this “non-coercion“ bit to dodge that, but ultimately it is power and generally what the rich say goes. The game of closing your eyes and pretending that this isn’t power is ridiculous. And then he imagines that these powerful people will play even by the rules he sets?
His historical arguments are, as in other other article, cherry-picked examples he uses to suggest that things will work the way he intends. Because something happened once in one context he doesn’t fully understand and in fact nobody does, he suggests that it definitely will happen that way this time. It’s wishful thinking on an extreme scale, and as stated in that other article when he is wrong it will cause unimaginable catastrophe for everyone except possibly him and his rich friends.
And the “let us suppose“ bullshit not only allows you to phrase questions to get the answer you want, it also allows you to ignore certain causes that you may judge as irrelevant. It’s all about phrasing shit in the way of high-school math problems that we’re all trained to just accept and not question the premises or results to get out the “correct“ answer.
“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.
it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”
Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.
I’m not convinced that it says something about Muslims that similar circumstances wouldn’t say about other groups. (Having conveniently used the term “similar circumstances” in such a way that I’m not sure that similar circumstances exist for any other group, rendering my claim suspiciously difficult to disprove). It seems to just say that this course of action will have the effect of non-negligibly increasing the very small proportion of Muslims who think that All Americans Deserve to Die, on account of this being a course of action that will likely (and not with maximal inaccuracy) paint us as Bad People who Must Be Destroyed.
What I mean is what it says about left-wing opinion of them. “Oh those poor Muslims, they’re so easy to rouse to violence. They can’t help it, so be nice to them!” It’s a form of special treatment that would not have been given to other religions, and it isn’t a form of respect.
But of course, the Left already doesn’t want real cultural diversity on this matter. They don’t want, for example, the Jizya. They want a watered-down version of the religion that is compatible with Western Secularism.