Historically, I’ve considered myself more center-left or centrist. I disagree with much of the economic and social dogma of the American right.
Before coming to Tumblr, I devised a fictional prototype National Technocratic country, which helped shape some of my new ideas as an exercise, but in that country, I deliberately fucked with things to change what it meant to be reactionary. I changed the conditions in such a way that precursors to certain modern practices were thousands of years old, while others had little to no influence.
Admittedly, foreign communists would have sneeringly described it as a right-wing dictatorship, but I promise you that American conservatives would also regard it as a sinister rival left-wing state. (At least after the Cold War.)
Why do the autistic rationalists get an exception from "poly is bad"?
When normies practice polygamy, what actually happens is polygyny. It is from polygyny that many of the worst consequences of polygamy arise. The domestic violence, the crowds of unwanted young men with no future and inadequate ties to society, and so on are what happens when polygamy is applied to ordinary gender stuff.
Autistic rationalists do not necessarily conform to the same gender conditions, being a bunch of (lovable!) weird nerds. (I am also a weird nerd, as evidenced by this very blog.)
It is important to understand thresholds of social behavior, which means that weird nerds practicing something does not have the same impact on society as everyone practicing something.
Likewise, exclusively gay men practicing polygamy would not create a mass gender imbalance in the dating ‘market’ that incentivizes bad behavior (including child marriages as desperate straight men try to secure access to women), because they are all gay, so they would not have dated women in the first place.
However, it isn’t politically possible to have “polygamy, but only for LGBTs and weird nerds”, so multiple marriage must remain banned at least until people have the ability to change their sex/sexual orientation cheaply and with few side effects.
Also, the situation where one man has eleven children by eight different women has enormous costs to society and must be discouraged.
Outright stopping poly people from engaging in non-marriage relationships, however, would be much more harmful than beneficial.
In the Transhuman Space Future, some of these conditions will no longer apply, and polygamy is much less of an issue.
There this rightist thing that keeps fucking infuriating me more and more, where they won’t state outright whether their bundle of policy and norm and social technology proposals is supposed to help everyone or whether it’s supposed to help the ingroup. Like, is this whole localism-ingroupism thing supposed to be pursuing the utilitarian optimum, or is it supposed to be pursuing ingroup benefit at the expense of everyone else, or is it supposed to be giving up on the rest of the world and saving yourselves or or or or or or I’ve never found any socially conservative rhetoric that didn’t leave me ruminating for hours on end trying to extract something coherent and driving myself insane trying to articulate what specifically it even is that’s nothing me.
How much freedom should others have?
It isn’t a trick question.
The reason it doesn’t seem like localism-ingroupism is either trying to completely solve for global utility optimum or global freedom or fuck-everyone-else-ism is because it’s trying to find a balance between competing concerns.
If I am responsible for the well-being of everyone, then I become obligated to destroy their cultures and replace them with something more effective/efficient, because I am not interested in paying for the side effects of their dumb cultural policies.
If there is total freedom, then like Hell am I paying for everyone else’s dumb decisions, because there will be no end, ever, to the subsidy. And if it ever seems like my shining army of economic robots has finally defeated the scarcity and delivered the desired level of wealth at the same time as full freedom? They’ll just have more kids and push the per-capita wealth right back down again.
This localism-ingroupism places non-absolute limits on freedom and non-absolute limits on obligation, making it feasible to transfer wealth to the worse off by limiting the effects of cultural policies that would destroy or overwhelm the ability to create that wealth in the first place.
And, it says “well if you want to do something that stupid, then go do it over there and don’t make me pay for it”, so there is still even more freedom, but it’s decoupled from obligation.
And, if every country works for its own benefit but without randomly trainwrecking other countries in the manner of the Bush Administration, then the effect is somewhat akin to the invisible hand - different climates, economies, and populations have different needs, so it makes sense for those close to these needs who are acquainted with them to make the law.
(Thus I oppose a number of measures which various right-wing or more dominance-focused nationalists would support. Seeing as I’m trying to summon a new ideology from beyond the veil, I’m not necessarily a representative sample.)
Why do the autistic rationalists get an exception from "poly is bad"?
When normies practice polygamy, what actually happens is polygyny. It is from polygyny that many of the worst consequences of polygamy arise. The domestic violence, the crowds of unwanted young men with no future and inadequate ties to society, and so on are what happens when polygamy is applied to ordinary gender stuff.
Autistic rationalists do not necessarily conform to the same gender conditions, being a bunch of (lovable!) weird nerds. (I am also a weird nerd, as evidenced by this very blog.)
It is important to understand thresholds of social behavior, which means that weird nerds practicing something does not have the same impact on society as everyone practicing something.
Likewise, exclusively gay men practicing polygamy would not create a mass gender imbalance in the dating ‘market’ that incentivizes bad behavior (including child marriages as desperate straight men try to secure access to women), because they are all gay, so they would not have dated women in the first place.
However, it isn’t politically possible to have “polygamy, but only for LGBTs and weird nerds”, so multiple marriage must remain banned at least until people have the ability to change their sex/sexual orientation cheaply and with few side effects.
Also, the situation where one man has eleven children by eight different women has enormous costs to society and must be discouraged.
Outright stopping poly people from engaging in non-marriage relationships, however, would be much more harmful than beneficial.
In the Transhuman Space Future, some of these conditions will no longer apply, and polygamy is much less of an issue.
I have proposed Regional Federalism for the US previously, but it’s becoming clear that the divide is less along state lines and more along urban/rural lines. I’ll have to devise something new.
Ok, broad question, feel free to answer with a couple links rather than an effortpost but... why are nations a desirable end state? They seem like a piece of legacy infrastructure, a chesterton's fence not to be too quickly destroyed, but hardly good in and of themselves. I feel far less fraternal affection with most co-nationalists than I do with say argumate, even though he's behind a different border.
I’ve been planning a longer post on this that I just haven’t gotten around to.
Meandering rant/textwall incoming. TL;DR readers: just skim the bolds.
1. The thing to understand is that ingroup/outgroup is actually to do with incentives and information cost. It’s a successful heuristic, rather than some huge irrational distortion that needs to be answered with “why can’t we just all get along?”
- When an outsider comes to our community, we lack information about them. Obtaining this information has a cost, whether we or others bear it. Part of that is time - getting to know others requires effort and time, and as mortals, we could easily spend those scarce resources on something else. As that information is obtained, the outsider can become more of an insider.
- Bad people do actually exist, whether created by conditions or born predisposed that way. (And sometimes, we are the bad people.) The benefit of a new community member is good, but the cost of letting in a bad apple is much more extreme. It could be discord which breaks the community apart. It could be theft. It could be murder. Each of these erodes trust significantly in addition to being harmful, and trust, when not abused, is extremely resource-efficient, so this is even more costly than it first appears.
Losing $5 in cookies to theft doesn’t seem like much, but it will cost a lot more than $5 in the end.
(Resident adjacent guru Slartibart would probably link you to that video showing that all the tail risks we accumulate over a lifetime add up to a much bigger risk than they are individually, so minimizing them is rational.)
- There is significantly less leverage over outsiders, since a considerable portion of our soft leverage is in the form of social sanction. This must be spend wisely, for it can be squandered. So if there is a bad apple within our community, this may be more manageable.
- Ultimately, for any of this to work, there must be either punishment or exclusion. We must be able to either punish the thieves or keep them out of the community. If we can do neither, the community will gradually disintegrate in cohesiveness as trust evaporates.
2. But even that assumes roughly similar preferences that could all be met by one community.
Let us suppose there are the Billys and the Sarahs, who are fans of the obscure Australian faux-anime Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San (or “Emoji Girl Unicode-san” for our American viewers).
(This example may seem a bit contrived, but I’m avoiding picking a real ethnicity here.)
Billys and Sarahs are rather dorky people with a low average level of social skills. Some have higher social abilities, but the median level for the community sets the expectations, and these expectations are comfortable for the Billys and Sarahs, who do not find them emotionally taxing.
At this point, wearing an Emoji Girl t-shirt isn’t just a sign of having watched the show. It’s also a proxy for being a Billy or Sarah. A cultural signifier that, out in the wild, lets them know they’ve found someone they could connect with. That’s actually a really big benefit! It reduces the social risk of approaching someone to create a connection significantly!
One day, internet celebrity, ironylord, and athlete Bruno Pauerlifter features Emoji Girl on his podcast, and many Chads and Staceys begin to pour into the community.
The Chads and Staceys like to enjoy Emoji Girl on multiple levels of irony, and are suave socially adepts.
Soon they outnumber the “natives.” The median social skill goes up, and with it, the expectations. The level of irony goes up as well.
The Billys and Sarahs do not enjoy the new level of social expectations, and like to enjoy Emoji Girl unironically.
The Chads and Staceys haven’t done anything wrong, per se. They’re not actively trying to exclude others with their irony. They just really like irony, and the others, well, don’t.
The usefulness of Emoji Girl t-shirts as identifiers for Billys and Sarahs is obliteratedwithout anyone even trying to obliterate it.
And that’s how you get gatekeeping behavior on things as “trivial” as video games, anime, and so on.
Now imagine a preference clash over something that actually matters.
3.People will thus ingroup/outgroup automatically. Putting everyone into one big ingroup is not actually possible.
And because it isn’t possible, trying is only going to fail while creating side effects.
4. The idea of multiple overlapping governments in the same area administering different laws to different individuals is a fantasy, because not only will they disagree on externalities, but some externalities are social.
Is it absolutely proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that polygamy must result in worse mental health outcomes for women and children, fewer rights for women, more social control of women, and expelling lower-status men?
No.
But considering that many of these are still issues with polygamist communities in developed countries, it’s likely it does, and it makes sense given the incentives of polygamy. This includes things like child marriages.
Now, suppose a culture decides to have polygamy in the same geographic area as me, backed by their particular overlapping government.
Could their pool of undereducated, unattached, desperate “surplus” young men become my problem? Very much yes.
And this isn’t anywhere near the only social issue with externalities.
5. Satisfying preferences has economies of scale.
The easiest way satisfy the people who want to live among Parisian architecture, and not some mish-mash of ugly whatever in the name of freedom, is to have a city or city district where all other building styles are prohibited.
(The above isn’t secretly about race. I literally mean architecture.)
This applies to many, possibly most, preferences.
6. People will therefore act to rule over others and enforce their preferences wherever they must live with the consequences.
They may not even do this legally.
7. The natural boundary in the absence of nations is around religion, ethnicity, race, class, or clan, not “human.”
Religion is a natural boundary for reasons that should be obvious. Also, many adherents ACTUALLY BELIEVE religion and are NOT SECRETLY JUST LIBERALS FAKING IT UNDERNEATH.
Race forms a natural boundary because it’s a team you can’t quit and you’re stuck with the actions of others in the same race whether you agree with them or not.
Ethnicity is a bit of a mashup between the two, but a bit less strong.
Clan, of course, genetic relations, etc.
All of these subgroups are going to be more likely to back you up in a conflict than the unified “Earth ingroup”, and organizing around them presents negotiating advantages.
Removing the nation will not remove armed conflict. It merely moves it inwards one step.
Like, say, a white man ramming unarmed Muslims exiting a mosque with a van as an ethnic revenge killing in retaliation for van attacks by other Muslims.
8. The nation is an engineered pseudo-ethnicity.
This is GOOD, because we can use it to create a bigger ingroup (as it still has exclusion, punishment, and shared traits for cohesion) and overpower lesser subdivisions that might normally cause issues.
Additionally, because people are more likely to help the ingroup than the outgroup, by putting them in a cross-class ingroup like this we might be able to actually fund welfare programs.
It’s also necessary to defend territory, and by God can nations defend territory. (And no, you’re not going to be able to just stop defending territory.) People feel like they own the nation. That matters. A lot.
Each nation can then be specialized, with different rules to fit different preferences, and limited cross-border migration which does not exceed assimilation levels.
9. Open Borders has bad incentives.
- Extract the maximum value from your area of residence, then leave before the bad side effects catch up with you, moving out to an area that excludes by pricing the poor out of the market.
- Don’t bother helping the poor outside your immediate group, since you have no connection to them and can replace them with new immigrants at a moment’s notice.
- Prohibited from excluding trouble-makers by any other means, pricing is again used to keep out both the regular poor and the criminal poor. (Any sufficiently large area exclusionary private-buyout counts as “creating borders/nations again” and will be legally destroyed for ideological reasons.)
- The way to deal with poverty in foreign territories is for those areas to PRODUCE MORE. You can help them produce more, but only what is produced can be consumed. Everyone talented who can leave escaping will not accomplish this.
And so on.
But it gets a lot worse.
10. Open Borders means World Government.
Someone has to track criminals across the opened borders.
And people aren’t going to sign up to fight and die for territories they don’t really own - and if they can be swamped with migrants that can vote at any moment, they don’t really own the territory.
This means the creation of a world police.
The creation of a world police requires the creation of a world law.
Power flows upwards and centralizes. As the national governments degrade under open immigration, power will shift upwards towards what little world government there is, which will gradually expand.
US Federal power expanded. EU power expanded. This is the natural course of things.
11. World Government is very, very bad.
11.A. The larger the pot, the bigger the spoils.
This means that every political and ethnic faction has near-maximum incentive to subvert control of the world government because it controls all of humanity and the entire economic output of Earth.
Almost any price is worth paying to a political faction to take over Earth and permanently enshrine their ideology or religion as a global dictatorship.
Likewise, the government won’t allow any breakaways, since that would cause a chain reaction that would destroy it. This includes space colonies and any infrastructure on the Moon.
So if you make an Earth Sphere Federation, don’t be surprised when you get Gundam-tier interstellar colony-drop war bullshit. Just, you know, with power armor, because mobile suits are too large to be practical.
11.B. The larger the pot, the less your chip matters.
Meanwhile, individual voters have little incentive to pay close attention, because their vote is marginally worthless.
This means the quality of the world government will be terrible. In fact, the median government on Earth is probably much closer in quality to Brazil than it is to the United States of America.
And it plays into 11.A above, since that makes more extreme actions more cost-effective versus worthless voting.
11.C. There is nowhere to flee to if it fucks up.
Seriously.
Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like weaving an environment that people can put themselves in and have some semblance of identity, forms a perimeter for arguing against bad social effects in general, and so on and so forth.
But I should probably be more surprised no one is noticing that eliminating nations is the clearest pathway to a world dictatorship.
Also, while we’re on the topic of annoying conservative rhetoric, let’s talk about Rotherham. I agree that it happened, and that it was bad, and that people covered it up for ideological reasons. The unspoken assumption that I don’t agree with and that people seem to keep trying to sneak in here is that it happened because Muslims are inherently more evil than the rest of us. Like, this fits the narrative of “social progressives sometimes behave like ideologues-in-the-pejorative-sense and cover up scandals to avoid making their side look bad just like other ideologues do” but not “social progressives are automatically wrong because of this.”
Sunni Islam actually is worse than other religions. (Maybe not Scientology.) There is no rule that says that all religions have to suck equally. Religions are part of the same general space as political ideologies, and you will acknowledge that not all political ideologies suck equally.
However, the child sex trafficking appears to be more of a regional thing, like the FGM is more of a regional thing, and it could be eradicated if the suitable ideological price were paid.
Ok, broad question, feel free to answer with a couple links rather than an effortpost but... why are nations a desirable end state? They seem like a piece of legacy infrastructure, a chesterton's fence not to be too quickly destroyed, but hardly good in and of themselves. I feel far less fraternal affection with most co-nationalists than I do with say argumate, even though he's behind a different border.
I’ve been planning a longer post on this that I just haven’t gotten around to.
Meandering rant/textwall incoming. TL;DR readers: just skim the bolds.
1. The thing to understand is that ingroup/outgroup is actually to do with incentives and information cost. It’s a successful heuristic, rather than some huge irrational distortion that needs to be answered with “why can’t we just all get along?”
- When an outsider comes to our community, we lack information about them. Obtaining this information has a cost, whether we or others bear it. Part of that is time - getting to know others requires effort and time, and as mortals, we could easily spend those scarce resources on something else. As that information is obtained, the outsider can become more of an insider.
- Bad people do actually exist, whether created by conditions or born predisposed that way. (And sometimes, we are the bad people.) The benefit of a new community member is good, but the cost of letting in a bad apple is much more extreme. It could be discord which breaks the community apart. It could be theft. It could be murder. Each of these erodes trust significantly in addition to being harmful, and trust, when not abused, is extremely resource-efficient, so this is even more costly than it first appears.
Losing $5 in cookies to theft doesn’t seem like much, but it will cost a lot more than $5 in the end.
(Resident adjacent guru Slartibart would probably link you to that video showing that all the tail risks we accumulate over a lifetime add up to a much bigger risk than they are individually, so minimizing them is rational.)
- There is significantly less leverage over outsiders, since a considerable portion of our soft leverage is in the form of social sanction. This must be spend wisely, for it can be squandered. So if there is a bad apple within our community, this may be more manageable.
- Ultimately, for any of this to work, there must be either punishment or exclusion. We must be able to either punish the thieves or keep them out of the community. If we can do neither, the community will gradually disintegrate in cohesiveness as trust evaporates.
2. But even that assumes roughly similar preferences that could all be met by one community.
Let us suppose there are the Billys and the Sarahs, who are fans of the obscure Australian faux-anime Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San (or “Emoji Girl Unicode-san” for our American viewers).
(This example may seem a bit contrived, but I’m avoiding picking a real ethnicity here.)
Billys and Sarahs are rather dorky people with a low average level of social skills. Some have higher social abilities, but the median level for the community sets the expectations, and these expectations are comfortable for the Billys and Sarahs, who do not find them emotionally taxing.
At this point, wearing an Emoji Girl t-shirt isn’t just a sign of having watched the show. It’s also a proxy for being a Billy or Sarah. A cultural signifier that, out in the wild, lets them know they’ve found someone they could connect with. That’s actually a really big benefit! It reduces the social risk of approaching someone to create a connection significantly!
One day, internet celebrity, ironylord, and athlete Bruno Pauerlifter features Emoji Girl on his podcast, and many Chads and Staceys begin to pour into the community.
The Chads and Staceys like to enjoy Emoji Girl on multiple levels of irony, and are suave socially adepts.
Soon they outnumber the “natives.” The median social skill goes up, and with it, the expectations. The level of irony goes up as well.
The Billys and Sarahs do not enjoy the new level of social expectations, and like to enjoy Emoji Girl unironically.
The Chads and Staceys haven’t done anything wrong, per se. They’re not actively trying to exclude others with their irony. They just really like irony, and the others, well, don’t.
The usefulness of Emoji Girl t-shirts as identifiers for Billys and Sarahs is obliteratedwithout anyone even trying to obliterate it.
And that’s how you get gatekeeping behavior on things as “trivial” as video games, anime, and so on.
Now imagine a preference clash over something that actually matters.
3.People will thus ingroup/outgroup automatically. Putting everyone into one big ingroup is not actually possible.
And because it isn’t possible, trying is only going to fail while creating side effects.
4. The idea of multiple overlapping governments in the same area administering different laws to different individuals is a fantasy, because not only will they disagree on externalities, but some externalities are social.
Is it absolutely proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that polygamy must result in worse mental health outcomes for women and children, fewer rights for women, more social control of women, and expelling lower-status men?
No.
But considering that many of these are still issues with polygamist communities in developed countries, it’s likely it does, and it makes sense given the incentives of polygamy. This includes things like child marriages.
Now, suppose a culture decides to have polygamy in the same geographic area as me, backed by their particular overlapping government.
Could their pool of undereducated, unattached, desperate “surplus” young men become my problem? Very much yes.
And this isn’t anywhere near the only social issue with externalities.
5. Satisfying preferences has economies of scale.
The easiest way satisfy the people who want to live among Parisian architecture, and not some mish-mash of ugly whatever in the name of freedom, is to have a city or city district where all other building styles are prohibited.
(The above isn’t secretly about race. I literally mean architecture.)
This applies to many, possibly most, preferences.
6. People will therefore act to rule over others and enforce their preferences wherever they must live with the consequences.
They may not even do this legally.
7. The natural boundary in the absence of nations is around religion, ethnicity, race, class, or clan, not “human.”
Religion is a natural boundary for reasons that should be obvious. Also, many adherents ACTUALLY BELIEVE religion and are NOT SECRETLY JUST LIBERALS FAKING IT UNDERNEATH.
Race forms a natural boundary because it’s a team you can’t quit and you’re stuck with the actions of others in the same race whether you agree with them or not.
Ethnicity is a bit of a mashup between the two, but a bit less strong.
Clan, of course, genetic relations, etc.
All of these subgroups are going to be more likely to back you up in a conflict than the unified “Earth ingroup”, and organizing around them presents negotiating advantages.
Removing the nation will not remove armed conflict. It merely moves it inwards one step.
Like, say, a white man ramming unarmed Muslims exiting a mosque with a van as an ethnic revenge killing in retaliation for van attacks by other Muslims.
8. The nation is an engineered pseudo-ethnicity.
This is GOOD, because we can use it to create a bigger ingroup (as it still has exclusion, punishment, and shared traits for cohesion) and overpower lesser subdivisions that might normally cause issues.
Additionally, because people are more likely to help the ingroup than the outgroup, by putting them in a cross-class ingroup like this we might be able to actually fund welfare programs.
It’s also necessary to defend territory, and by God can nations defend territory. (And no, you’re not going to be able to just stop defending territory.) People feel like they own the nation. That matters. A lot.
Each nation can then be specialized, with different rules to fit different preferences, and limited cross-border migration which does not exceed assimilation levels.
9. Open Borders has bad incentives.
- Extract the maximum value from your area of residence, then leave before the bad side effects catch up with you, moving out to an area that excludes by pricing the poor out of the market.
- Don’t bother helping the poor outside your immediate group, since you have no connection to them and can replace them with new immigrants at a moment’s notice.
- Prohibited from excluding trouble-makers by any other means, pricing is again used to keep out both the regular poor and the criminal poor. (Any sufficiently large area exclusionary private-buyout counts as “creating borders/nations again” and will be legally destroyed for ideological reasons.)
- The way to deal with poverty in foreign territories is for those areas to PRODUCE MORE. You can help them produce more, but only what is produced can be consumed. Everyone talented who can leave escaping will not accomplish this.
And so on.
But it gets a lot worse.
10. Open Borders means World Government.
Someone has to track criminals across the opened borders.
And people aren’t going to sign up to fight and die for territories they don’t really own - and if they can be swamped with migrants that can vote at any moment, they don’t really own the territory.
This means the creation of a world police.
The creation of a world police requires the creation of a world law.
Power flows upwards and centralizes. As the national governments degrade under open immigration, power will shift upwards towards what little world government there is, which will gradually expand.
US Federal power expanded. EU power expanded. This is the natural course of things.
11. World Government is very, very bad.
11.A. The larger the pot, the bigger the spoils.
This means that every political and ethnic faction has near-maximum incentive to subvert control of the world government because it controls all of humanity and the entire economic output of Earth.
Almost any price is worth paying to a political faction to take over Earth and permanently enshrine their ideology or religion as a global dictatorship.
Likewise, the government won’t allow any breakaways, since that would cause a chain reaction that would destroy it. This includes space colonies and any infrastructure on the Moon.
So if you make an Earth Sphere Federation, don’t be surprised when you get Gundam-tier interstellar colony-drop war bullshit. Just, you know, with power armor, because mobile suits are too large to be practical.
11.B. The larger the pot, the less your chip matters.
Meanwhile, individual voters have little incentive to pay close attention, because their vote is marginally worthless.
This means the quality of the world government will be terrible. In fact, the median government on Earth is probably much closer in quality to Brazil than it is to the United States of America.
And it plays into 11.A above, since that makes more extreme actions more cost-effective versus worthless voting.
11.C. There is nowhere to flee to if it fucks up.
Seriously.
Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like weaving an environment that people can put themselves in and have some semblance of identity, forms a perimeter for arguing against bad social effects in general, and so on and so forth.
But I should probably be more surprised no one is noticing that eliminating nations is the clearest pathway to a world dictatorship.
I still want people to be free to make bad decisions after being properly informed of the consequences. I still want to balance said freedom against efforts to minimize suffering. I still want different groups of people to get along (without raping each other). Nothing has changed, value-wise. Y'all just signalled yourselves off a fucking cliff one day, and now I’m expected to be as willfully and openly retarded as Rational Wiki just to keep up.
And now you’re hanging out with people that would threaten the Earth with mobile suits, waiting to be reclassified as a reactionary for thinking genes have an impact on development.
“Well if you dirty statists just let us sell rotten food there wouldn’t be a hunger issue”
Government is just another word for the bleach we pour over donated food so the homeless can’t eat it together.
very interesting
anyway remember when in grapes of wrath they poured kerosene on oranges to not reduce prices as people starved
Yes I do remember the part in Grapes of Wrath where the farmers followed the legally empowered Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s directives to destroy food.
“The Roosevelt Administration was tasked with decreasing agricultural surpluses,” to quote Wikipedia quoting Douglas.
Huh, it turns out that that act was forced into existence by large farmers and food processors, who financially benefit from people starving! All while these people horribly exploited their workers to the point of starvation and viciously rebelled against the “socialistic” resettlement program!
Turns out that these bastards love to see people die. Huh.
I have absolutely no idea how this is an argument against free market policies.
Companies will bribe politicians and distort the market if they are not actively prevented from doing so through state interference. Free markets are not a perfectly stable equilibrium and competition requires effort - and state interference - to maintain.
“Well if you dirty statists just let us sell rotten food there wouldn’t be a hunger issue”
Government is just another word for the bleach we pour over donated food so the homeless can’t eat it together.
very interesting
anyway remember when in grapes of wrath they poured kerosene on oranges to not reduce prices as people starved
Yes I do remember the part in Grapes of Wrath where the farmers followed the legally empowered Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s directives to destroy food.
“The Roosevelt Administration was tasked with decreasing agricultural surpluses,” to quote Wikipedia quoting Douglas.
Huh, it turns out that that act was forced into existence by large farmers and food processors, who financially benefit from people starving! All while these people horribly exploited their workers to the point of starvation and viciously rebelled against the “socialistic” resettlement program!
Turns out that these bastards love to see people die. Huh.
It’s important to remember that the Market™ pays people to subvert public ownership of the State.
This demand originates within the market and then subverts any state not adequately designed to resist it. Paring back the state doesn’t actually get rid of the demand, and may, depending on circumstances, make the problem worse.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
When will they realize the Russians don't want a puppet trump they are just chaos magicians
yeaahh… after my effort post, ive been dwelling on the situation all day
for a moment it crossed my mind today, that Trump Jr. posting the email was reminiscent of some insane Vladislav Surkov style non-linear warfare power move, whether or not the collusion allegations are real. The effect of posting it being unsurprisingly stunning and confusing to the effect of disorienting everyone and uh.. and it got me thinking
My thoughts are now, as Russia has always been involved, Russia wouldn’t actually be colluding but potentially sowing hints of it (if at all) particularly to produce chaos and turmoil the way Putin’s government has done on the regular in Russia to suppress opposition. Hell. Similarly to how Russia actively supports california’s leftist separatists as well as America’s far right, why not play America’s media and mainstream factions against eachother?
Because there is nothing. No collusion. There is a tremendous amount of smoke, but no fire… but what if Russia helped produced or fans the smoke particularly to send the Americans into an endless search for fire? All there really needs to be is someone with a russian name and a basic affiliation to Russian “officials” to step in and say “Здравствуйте” and the americans will do the rest of the work.
Russia doesn’t need to actively collude or “hack” an election, but be present enough to keep Americans paranoid and confused, especially in light of wars in the ukraine and Syria that Russia doesnt want the west focused on.
It’s the psychological equivalent of how the USA conducts war in the middle east. Because that the goal is not to beat, but destabilize your opponent with minimal involvement… The difference between ground invasion in Iraq and the no fly zone in Libya to accomplish a similar regime change… Because the American military has evolved, pushing America’s enemies to seek other means to mitigate american strength, tactics… and the USA’s political system is the country’s glaring weakness in light of this.
(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)
I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.
How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.
Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?
I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.
Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.
The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.
Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.
That’s terrifying.
I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.
The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.
In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.
Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.
But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening. And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.
Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message? Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?
Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.
And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of? Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided. She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.
1. I don’t claim to understand Trump voters, in fact my post is about how I don’t understand them.
2. The politically correct left does I think have real problems, as illustrated by Rotherham or the naivete of not being worried about Germany taking in so many Syrian refugees. But, with respect to America, they are basically correct. Immigrants to the US have lower crime rates than natives, largely assimilate by the third if not second generation, and you almost certainly won’t be killed in a terrorist attack.The fact that half the country would never believe this is attributable to the intellectual rot in right-wing news sources.
3. On foreign policy, I don’t love those “very serious people” either (or Hillary on foreign policy, way too hawkish), but they wouldn’t be completely destroying America’s leadership position and credibility, thus ceding it to authoritarian states, and they would possess much less of a long-tail risk of a true foreign policy catastrophe that Trump does. Also, I strongly doubt foreign policy had much to do with Trump’s success.
But, with respect to America, they are basically correct.
And you can’t even envision the mental state of someone who doesn’t believe this?
And you can’t even imagine a person who has noticed “Hey, they acted exactly the same way they did here, exactly the same way in every possible respect, as they did in Rotherham, and the things those people are telling me about how I’m a terrible bigot who is only driven by bigotry are exactly the same things they said about Rotherham, and all of the statistics they wave in my face are made and controlled by the same people as made the statistics that proved Rotherham wasn’t happening”?
You think it’s “intellectual rot” in right-wing news sources to not roll over and admit defeat and adopt your ideology. You keep admitting that there are horrific, soul-deep problems in Your Ideological Tribe and that they keep lying and they keep maliciously trying to hurt people, but you just act incredibly perplexed when someone actually notices those things, and then acts like a person who noticed it. When someone notices the politically correct left never stops lying to them and about them, they act like people who noticed that, and they stop believing the things the politically correct left demands they believe.
Your continued inability to understand conservatives is seriously because you aren’t trying.
So, in addition to what BrazenAutomaton says, which gets at why the Conservatives don’t trust “well okay, they lied that time, but overall they’re right.” (And why I didn’t respond earlier, since what I would have said would not have been so different.)
There are policies you can use to bring a Rotherham-like situation under control.
They are not nice policies. They are not kind policies.
This kind of price must be paid in pain or blood.
It will have to be very firmly established to not only these men, but the communities in which they reside, that this behavior is utterly unacceptable and intolerable. No excuses just because they are foreign. Child sex trafficking isn’t littering.
There are solutions to other problems as well, that are forbidden from consideration, because we are simultaneously too soft and too tough in all the wrong ways at once.
Some of them should be very stupidly obvious, like banning first and second cousin marriage, but oh, we can’t even admit there is a problem.
The plan to have nations match up to preferences doesn’t work if there is either no migration or fully open borders. It depends on friction, thresholds, cultural assimilation/conversion rates, infrastructure construction rates, and so on.
When will they realize the Russians don't want a puppet trump they are just chaos magicians
yeaahh… after my effort post, ive been dwelling on the situation all day
for a moment it crossed my mind today, that Trump Jr. posting the email was reminiscent of some insane Vladislav Surkov style non-linear warfare power move, whether or not the collusion allegations are real. The effect of posting it being unsurprisingly stunning and confusing to the effect of disorienting everyone and uh.. and it got me thinking
My thoughts are now, as Russia has always been involved, Russia wouldn’t actually be colluding but potentially sowing hints of it (if at all) particularly to produce chaos and turmoil the way Putin’s government has done on the regular in Russia to suppress opposition. Hell. Similarly to how Russia actively supports california’s leftist separatists as well as America’s far right, why not play America’s media and mainstream factions against eachother?
Because there is nothing. No collusion. There is a tremendous amount of smoke, but no fire… but what if Russia helped produced or fans the smoke particularly to send the Americans into an endless search for fire? All there really needs to be is someone with a russian name and a basic affiliation to Russian “officials” to step in and say “Здравствуйте” and the americans will do the rest of the work.
Russia doesn’t need to actively collude or “hack” an election, but be present enough to keep Americans paranoid and confused, especially in light of wars in the ukraine and Syria that Russia doesnt want the west focused on.
It’s the psychological equivalent of how the USA conducts war in the middle east. Because that the goal is not to beat, but destabilize your opponent with minimal involvement… The difference between ground invasion in Iraq and the no fly zone in Libya to accomplish a similar regime change… Because the American military has evolved, pushing America’s enemies to seek other means to mitigate american strength, tactics… and the USA’s political system is the country’s glaring weakness in light of this.
the purpose of nationalism is to convince you the ruling class are on your side.
World government is even worse when it comes to having an indestructible ruling class, and world government, not happy liberal communes or whatever, is the real alternative to nations.
Ok, broad question, feel free to answer with a couple links rather than an effortpost but... why are nations a desirable end state? They seem like a piece of legacy infrastructure, a chesterton's fence not to be too quickly destroyed, but hardly good in and of themselves. I feel far less fraternal affection with most co-nationalists than I do with say argumate, even though he's behind a different border.
I’ve been planning a longer post on this that I just haven’t gotten around to.
Meandering rant/textwall incoming. TL;DR readers: just skim the bolds.
1. The thing to understand is that ingroup/outgroup is actually to do with incentives and information cost. It’s a successful heuristic, rather than some huge irrational distortion that needs to be answered with “why can’t we just all get along?”
- When an outsider comes to our community, we lack information about them. Obtaining this information has a cost, whether we or others bear it. Part of that is time - getting to know others requires effort and time, and as mortals, we could easily spend those scarce resources on something else. As that information is obtained, the outsider can become more of an insider.
- Bad people do actually exist, whether created by conditions or born predisposed that way. (And sometimes, we are the bad people.) The benefit of a new community member is good, but the cost of letting in a bad apple is much more extreme. It could be discord which breaks the community apart. It could be theft. It could be murder. Each of these erodes trust significantly in addition to being harmful, and trust, when not abused, is extremely resource-efficient, so this is even more costly than it first appears.
Losing $5 in cookies to theft doesn’t seem like much, but it will cost a lot more than $5 in the end.
(Resident adjacent guru Slartibart would probably link you to that video showing that all the tail risks we accumulate over a lifetime add up to a much bigger risk than they are individually, so minimizing them is rational.)
- There is significantly less leverage over outsiders, since a considerable portion of our soft leverage is in the form of social sanction. This must be spend wisely, for it can be squandered. So if there is a bad apple within our community, this may be more manageable.
- Ultimately, for any of this to work, there must be either punishment or exclusion. We must be able to either punish the thieves or keep them out of the community. If we can do neither, the community will gradually disintegrate in cohesiveness as trust evaporates.
2. But even that assumes roughly similar preferences that could all be met by one community.
Let us suppose there are the Billys and the Sarahs, who are fans of the obscure Australian faux-anime Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San (or “Emoji Girl Unicode-san” for our American viewers).
(This example may seem a bit contrived, but I’m avoiding picking a real ethnicity here.)
Billys and Sarahs are rather dorky people with a low average level of social skills. Some have higher social abilities, but the median level for the community sets the expectations, and these expectations are comfortable for the Billys and Sarahs, who do not find them emotionally taxing.
At this point, wearing an Emoji Girl t-shirt isn’t just a sign of having watched the show. It’s also a proxy for being a Billy or Sarah. A cultural signifier that, out in the wild, lets them know they’ve found someone they could connect with. That’s actually a really big benefit! It reduces the social risk of approaching someone to create a connection significantly!
One day, internet celebrity, ironylord, and athlete Bruno Pauerlifter features Emoji Girl on his podcast, and many Chads and Staceys begin to pour into the community.
The Chads and Staceys like to enjoy Emoji Girl on multiple levels of irony, and are suave socially adepts.
Soon they outnumber the “natives.” The median social skill goes up, and with it, the expectations. The level of irony goes up as well.
The Billys and Sarahs do not enjoy the new level of social expectations, and like to enjoy Emoji Girl unironically.
The Chads and Staceys haven’t done anything wrong, per se. They’re not actively trying to exclude others with their irony. They just really like irony, and the others, well, don’t.
The usefulness of Emoji Girl t-shirts as identifiers for Billys and Sarahs is obliteratedwithout anyone even trying to obliterate it.
And that’s how you get gatekeeping behavior on things as “trivial” as video games, anime, and so on.
Now imagine a preference clash over something that actually matters.
3.People will thus ingroup/outgroup automatically. Putting everyone into one big ingroup is not actually possible.
And because it isn’t possible, trying is only going to fail while creating side effects.
4. The idea of multiple overlapping governments in the same area administering different laws to different individuals is a fantasy, because not only will they disagree on externalities, but some externalities are social.
Is it absolutely proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that polygamy must result in worse mental health outcomes for women and children, fewer rights for women, more social control of women, and expelling lower-status men?
No.
But considering that many of these are still issues with polygamist communities in developed countries, it’s likely it does, and it makes sense given the incentives of polygamy. This includes things like child marriages.
Now, suppose a culture decides to have polygamy in the same geographic area as me, backed by their particular overlapping government.
Could their pool of undereducated, unattached, desperate “surplus” young men become my problem? Very much yes.
And this isn’t anywhere near the only social issue with externalities.
5. Satisfying preferences has economies of scale.
The easiest way satisfy the people who want to live among Parisian architecture, and not some mish-mash of ugly whatever in the name of freedom, is to have a city or city district where all other building styles are prohibited.
(The above isn’t secretly about race. I literally mean architecture.)
This applies to many, possibly most, preferences.
6. People will therefore act to rule over others and enforce their preferences wherever they must live with the consequences.
They may not even do this legally.
7. The natural boundary in the absence of nations is around religion, ethnicity, race, class, or clan, not “human.”
Religion is a natural boundary for reasons that should be obvious. Also, many adherents ACTUALLY BELIEVE religion and are NOT SECRETLY JUST LIBERALS FAKING IT UNDERNEATH.
Race forms a natural boundary because it’s a team you can’t quit and you’re stuck with the actions of others in the same race whether you agree with them or not.
Ethnicity is a bit of a mashup between the two, but a bit less strong.
Clan, of course, genetic relations, etc.
All of these subgroups are going to be more likely to back you up in a conflict than the unified “Earth ingroup”, and organizing around them presents negotiating advantages.
Removing the nation will not remove armed conflict. It merely moves it inwards one step.
Like, say, a white man ramming unarmed Muslims exiting a mosque with a van as an ethnic revenge killing in retaliation for van attacks by other Muslims.
8. The nation is an engineered pseudo-ethnicity.
This is GOOD, because we can use it to create a bigger ingroup (as it still has exclusion, punishment, and shared traits for cohesion) and overpower lesser subdivisions that might normally cause issues.
Additionally, because people are more likely to help the ingroup than the outgroup, by putting them in a cross-class ingroup like this we might be able to actually fund welfare programs.
It’s also necessary to defend territory, and by God can nations defend territory. (And no, you’re not going to be able to just stop defending territory.) People feel like they own the nation. That matters. A lot.
Each nation can then be specialized, with different rules to fit different preferences, and limited cross-border migration which does not exceed assimilation levels.
9. Open Borders has bad incentives.
- Extract the maximum value from your area of residence, then leave before the bad side effects catch up with you, moving out to an area that excludes by pricing the poor out of the market.
- Don’t bother helping the poor outside your immediate group, since you have no connection to them and can replace them with new immigrants at a moment’s notice.
- Prohibited from excluding trouble-makers by any other means, pricing is again used to keep out both the regular poor and the criminal poor. (Any sufficiently large area exclusionary private-buyout counts as “creating borders/nations again” and will be legally destroyed for ideological reasons.)
- The way to deal with poverty in foreign territories is for those areas to PRODUCE MORE. You can help them produce more, but only what is produced can be consumed. Everyone talented who can leave escaping will not accomplish this.
And so on.
But it gets a lot worse.
10. Open Borders means World Government.
Someone has to track criminals across the opened borders.
And people aren’t going to sign up to fight and die for territories they don’t really own - and if they can be swamped with migrants that can vote at any moment, they don’t really own the territory.
This means the creation of a world police.
The creation of a world police requires the creation of a world law.
Power flows upwards and centralizes. As the national governments degrade under open immigration, power will shift upwards towards what little world government there is, which will gradually expand.
US Federal power expanded. EU power expanded. This is the natural course of things.
11. World Government is very, very bad.
11.A. The larger the pot, the bigger the spoils.
This means that every political and ethnic faction has near-maximum incentive to subvert control of the world government because it controls all of humanity and the entire economic output of Earth.
Almost any price is worth paying to a political faction to take over Earth and permanently enshrine their ideology or religion as a global dictatorship.
Likewise, the government won’t allow any breakaways, since that would cause a chain reaction that would destroy it. This includes space colonies and any infrastructure on the Moon.
So if you make an Earth Sphere Federation, don’t be surprised when you get Gundam-tier interstellar colony-drop war bullshit. Just, you know, with power armor, because mobile suits are too large to be practical.
11.B. The larger the pot, the less your chip matters.
Meanwhile, individual voters have little incentive to pay close attention, because their vote is marginally worthless.
This means the quality of the world government will be terrible. In fact, the median government on Earth is probably much closer in quality to Brazil than it is to the United States of America.
And it plays into 11.A above, since that makes more extreme actions more cost-effective versus worthless voting.
11.C. There is nowhere to flee to if it fucks up.
Seriously.
Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like weaving an environment that people can put themselves in and have some semblance of identity, forms a perimeter for arguing against bad social effects in general, and so on and so forth.
But I should probably be more surprised no one is noticing that eliminating nations is the clearest pathway to a world dictatorship.
the funny thing about that David Brooks piece is an uneducated lower class person having a crisis over deli food with fancy immigrant names like “baguette” and going to normal honest American food, like tacos and burritos instead
Argumate, have you seen what we do to foreign food?
Now that tacos and burritos have been assimilated Americanized, they are a legit American food.
only tangentially related but I really wish there was a code equivalent of like… deviantART.
people sometimes talk shit about the way programmers can’t give advice without insulting people who ask questions and it’s kinda true? But with only a few exceptions most of them still kinda have their heart in the right place just wanting to help people write better code.
but like… the #1 thing that makes people better at stuff isn’t critique, it’s practice. being guided helps but it’s mostly about raw output at first, and then seeking guidance when you get stuck or hit a plateau and are looking for a way up.
what I want from the world of programming even more than a kinder place to get beginner’s advice (because those are thankfully popping up already) is a place where people can just… output absolute MOUNTAINS of shit garbage and socialize
without even necessarily worrying about feedback at all.
[this post partially made because i hope i’m wrong and code dA does exist and i want someone to point me there so i may join IMMEDIATELY]
deviant code, except that sounds too much like debian code
It’s called github and everyone is already using it. In fact I’m gonna start referring to github as code deviant art from now on.
Okay, but it isn’t really devianArt if it doesn’t have the equivalent of furry inflation porn.
can’t have viciously genocidal warfare between the tribes if you’ve already eradicated all the other tribes, tapping head meme etc.
Dude,
Do you realize what the optimal strategy strategy is under the Collective Intergenerational Justice certain political factions love so much?
Total extermination. There is no giving all the land back if there is no one left to give it back to.
There is another optimal strategy: total interbreeding. There are no reparations if everyone is the descendant of natives, slaves, immigrants, oppressors,
Prop 98. Like it or not, California has a school funding law put in place years ago by Proposition 98. It’s insanely complicated, but basically requires that 40 percent of the state budget go to K-12 schools. Using round numbers, if the state budget is $100 billion, school spending has to be at least $40 billion. If state spending goes up to $300 billion, school spending has to be at least $120 billion. Aside from being ridiculous, it also leaves only $120 billion for the health care bill. Oops.
It’s a fertile coastline of the most powerful nation on Earth, with amazing weather. (At least, that was my conclusion to this same question.) It would have to try hard to fail.
Which it apparently is.
I think I’ll stick to the Midwest and the East Coast.
“That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality.”
In the future, all women are autistics on testosterone, and the global GDP per capita exceeds $120,000. Conventional gender as we know it has dissolved and been replaced by a neurotype inventory dynamically read from the global hypergrid.
That first bit would affect childbearing.
Does that stat hide a planet full of impoverished depth grovelers mining for nuggets of neoplasm, offset by a small cabal of multi-trillionaires?
Edit: shit, you ninja-edited in another sentence. I do that a lot. Is this hypergrid capable of sustainably manifesting unenumerably vast continuums of juvenile rage and fear?
An astute observation!
Childbearing has been replaced with artificial wombs in order to fine-tune the characteristics of neural development and orientation the future-market (not the same as the “future market”) demands. And yes, the cost of these systems and state-sponsored child raising is reflected in the GDP, and it is quite extensive, though hardly limited to multi-trillionaires.
Those territories with no state-sponsored child raising glitter spectacularly, but of course they are always on the brink of collapse. You know how it is.
As for the hypergrid, it depends on just how deeply you want to entertain the emotions of others in your hardware. I recommend not diving /r90k/. Oneness with the Universe is a little more difficult there.
“That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality.”
In the future, all women are autistics on testosterone, and the global GDP per capita exceeds $120,000. Conventional gender as we know it has dissolved and been replaced by a neurotype inventory dynamically read from the global hypergrid. The largest political bloc is controlled by a rocky alliance between the National Globalists, the Post-Salvation Abrahamic Spiritualists, and the Small Animals subreddit.
All kinds of pop culture concepts cross the Atlantic Ocean and I’m fine with that. Some stay where they are and never make it here. I don’t think buying milk in 3.78 litre jugs will ever become the norm here.
Political science and activism concepts are constantly exported from the US. People here start to think in these concepts. Academics in the US get feedback about the situation here and interpret it through the lens of the status quo in the US.
I used to get exasperated at people using identity politics from the US without adapting the terminology (calling Frenchmen of Algerian descent African-American for example). I used to get exasperated at people assuming that health insurance was the most pressing concern in every country, or that any EU country could learn anything from Obamacare.
People are starting to assimilate Trump’s Mexican Border Wall Discourse in the context of the refugee crisis in Europe. For once I wish it was the other way round. I wish people in the US would say that immigration from Mexico is primarily a humanitarian concern, because of ISIS, but many “Mexicans” are actually from Morocco and Afghanistan. This is how it feels.
I wish people would sometimes act as if the main problem in US politics right now is too many parties in parliament, haphazard privatisation of state-run heavy industry, too much cheap but empty housing, organised crime in local government, or austerity measures imposed on the US by Germany, France and Britain.
Americans are acting like WE elected Trump TOO. Some of this might be in order to act as if THEY TOO elected Macron.
An Englishman is in the process of moving to Australia. The customs officer asks, "Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offence?" He says, "Oh, sorry! I didn't realise that was still a requirement!"
Later the Englishman joins the army and is sent to fight on the Western Front. After being wounded terribly in an assault, he is rescued by an Australian unit and taken to a field hospital where he drifts in and out of consciousness. Unable to stand the pain any longer he cries out “was I brought here to die??” only to hear “nah mate, you was brought here yesterday.”
But also, like, @collapsedsquid, if you don’t intuitively trust the other direction because it can be supported by the “Capitalism is Perfect and Good Forever” crowd, I get that.
I also want to, like, specifically say that employers are not cutting hours to be jerks, employers are cutting hours because it’s not profitable to have the doors open for more hours. If you think of the problem as ‘employers jerkishly don’t want to pay employees well’ you’ll be very confused by behavior like ‘keep hours at this franchise, close this one on weekends, close this one on Wednesday afternoons’, yet those are the sort of decisions actually being made.
I think something a lot of people are ignorant of which would be helpful when it comes to a lot of these kind of conversations is the actual margins in the businesses they view as the enemy. Walmart has a 3-5 percent profit margin. Oil companies make around 6 percent. Health insurance profit margins are around 4 percent. Fast food franchises can range from near zero to over 10 percent. Thanks to the cutthroat nature of capitalism in many industries, businesses run along the very edge of existing at all. You can’t mandate any significant savings to the consumer or increased payment to employees without actually making those businesses fail.
Not unless you’re very clever about it, and most of these plans are not.
(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)
I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.
How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.
Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?
I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.
Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.
The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.
Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.
That’s terrifying.
I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.
The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.
In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.
Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.
But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening. And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.
Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message? Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?
Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.
And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of? Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided. She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.
