When the odds of successful revolution are low, the revolutionaries will tend to be stupid, incompetent, crazy, or ideology-huffed compared to when the odds of successful revolution are high. Smart, competent, sane people would benefit more by doing something else with their time.
AU in which Trump is a smart authoritarian & Bannon is still in the White House:
Trump condemns white supremacists, denounces both violence and “free speech”, asks for emergency government powers to crack down on Nazis, and enlists Silicon Valley to block extremist speech in a PRISM-like program with an API the government can use to blacklist extremist phrases.
dreamed last night the president died by driving his golf buggy into the the sea because someone on twitter dared him to. 2017 is surreal enough, but not merciful enough,for this to really happen.
Jealous liberal media publishing FAKE NEWS that I won’t drive into the sea. They will change their tune tomorrow in Atlantic City!
if you could recommend one book to Donald Trump and Theresa May, what would it be and why?
I’d pick a few choice articles from Slate Star Codex and a few other sites have them bound as a book. Something short enough that it wouldn’t lose Trump’s attention.
You’re assuming, I think, that I am virtuous like these other ratsphere members and read lots of books. I’m not virtuous in that way (which brings me a long-running sense of shame). I have some formal education in Political Science, Economics, etc, but what you’re seeing on this blog is leaning more on intuitive synthesis from articles on the internet, observations, and so on.
So, when I suggest replacing the legislature with think-tank-parties or reorganizing school around spaced repetition using computers, which are both outside the envelope of what people are thinking about right now in terms of reforms, it isn’t because I’m some deep, learned expert at organizational engineering (which is a field that doesn’t even exist yet), but because I’m extrapolating various limited information and experience in novel ways to reach out farther into the policy space.
The awkward issue is that if I were the kind of deep-reader person and not the novelty-craver person I am, I would not have gained the necessary experiences / ways of thinking / depth of search in order to escape the existing envelope with proposals anyway, probably. I wouldn’t be writing a blog of half politics and half futurist shitposting designed to make readers think about possible futures. Said blog wouldn’t have the Union Girl branding associated with it. There would be no video game potentially in the works because I would either lack coding or 3d artist ability or both.
What reading I have done gets pruned of its, for lack of a better word, citations, and instead updates an intuitive base. There are probably books I would want them to read, but instead of remembering what they are, I changed and moved on.
I'm concerned that the current trend of punching/killing nazis discourse, the growing categorization of 'nazi adjacent', and the use of the Gadsden flag among certain political groups will lead to Leftist groups symbolically going around stepping on snakes. Protect the noodles! D:
in Australia the noodles are quite capable of protecting themselves tbh
“One can only imagine what it is like to be a straight white male. To go to the movies, enjoy the story fully, and then leave without the necessity to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters. Why would they? They will find themselves perfectly represented all over again in the next movie they decide to watch, whichever it might be, and the next one, and the next one. Representation to them is not a luxury, it’s a given right.”—
possibly one of the stupidest things ever written? we may never know. (via argumate)
In which the grass is always greener on the other side of the thinkpiece writer.
One thing I really love about you weird internet nerds here on Rationalist Tumblr is your lower-than-average level of hypocrisy.
Basically all of you who would be skeptical about granting legitimacy to right-wing vigilantes in the after-effects of politically-motivated vehicular homicide by one of the right’s outgroups are also skeptical about granting legitimacy to left-wing vigilantes in the aftermath of politically-motivated vehicular homicide by one of the left’s outgroups.
You are all doing much better than what I’m seeing on Facebook right now.
you know that facebook post that goes like ‘this is why white culture doesn’t exist and i can trace my heritage back to europe so i’m (specific country)-culture and not (white)-culture’?
like i don’t want to shit on the author because its not that important, but it’s such a stupid approach? only an american would think that. white americans are not white irishmen, or white dutchmen, or whatever, they are white americans. white americans with dutch heritage are so different from white dutch people, so saying that white americans don’t have a white american culture but instead some sort of weird? european thing? its just bullshit. i mean, americans go to shopping malls and eat a lot of sugar and smile all the fucking time and are very enthusiastic? and care about some weird form of football for some reason. i’m not saying that the author can’t take pride in their heritage or can’t go to cultural parties or anything, i’m just saying that its not the same
I was thinking of posting something like ‘Daddy, what was the Statue of Liberty like?’ ‘Oh, it was beautiful and inspiring, but we had to blow it up because the French gave it to us, and the French Third Republic was racist’ ‘I wish I could have seen it’ ‘Wow, you support the French Third Republic, what are you, some kind of Nazi?’
But I know better than to use the word ‘daddy’ on this website
You’re ignoring the 1:5,400,000 timelines where I come to power and her glowing laser eyes gaze endlessly out over the sea, ready to guard the Union with hundreds of megawatts of star-searing power at a moment’s notice.
Dammit if you aren’t an obvious supervillain, but I’ll be damned if I don’t want to vote for you anyway. I would definitely support any candidate whose slogan was “Put lasers in Lady Liberty”.
I guess I just love grandiose symbols. (Please tell me you’d also upgrade Mount Rushmore. And build some monument to humanity’s might on the moon.)
While other parties believe in vague rhetoric like “Making America Great Again” and “bringing harmony to our divided nation”, the National Technocratic Party believes in specific, measurable, achievable policy goals, such as those outlined in our Enhanced Civil Defense Plan for the Weaponization of National Monuments, our whitepapers on lunar war, and in the 2028 Prediction Budget produced by the Central Committee.
I was thinking of posting something like ‘Daddy, what was the Statue of Liberty like?’ ‘Oh, it was beautiful and inspiring, but we had to blow it up because the French gave it to us, and the French Third Republic was racist’ ‘I wish I could have seen it’ ‘Wow, you support the French Third Republic, what are you, some kind of Nazi?’
But I know better than to use the word ‘daddy’ on this website
You’re ignoring the 1:5,400,000 timelines where I come to power and her glowing laser eyes gaze endlessly out over the sea, ready to guard the Union with hundreds of megawatts of star-searing power at a moment’s notice.
"Are Memes Getting Too Dangerous? - Elusive Australian Tumblr teen Argumate found dead at age of 78 from acute meme poisoning, coroner finds, blames sudden outbreak of bad 'thrussy' memes" - the news, probably
So in the discussion over whether internet companies can deny hosting to Nazis (such as here and here), I admit I see both sides. I understand the concerns that this grants too much discretionary power to large establishments about what speech is allowed on the internet, and I understand that “Nazis marching in the streets with torches and the organizing thereof is different and inimical to civil society.”
My question is, can anyone offer an argument for why private companies should get to choose this?
Like on the anti-Nazi side, everything they say makes a case for why it should just be illegal to host this violent, reactionary rhetoric.
And on the pro-free-speech side, everything they say makes a case for why no gatekeeper is pure enough to decide who does and doesn’t get to speak.
But what’s the logic for “maybe Nazis get to organize online, maybe they don’t, and that decision should be up to the rich people who control internet companies?”
It goes like this:
“Nazis can do whatever they want on their own time but this is my server that I’ve purchased with my money so therefore it’s me that gets to decide what pages are hosted on it.”
It becomes significantly more cloudy when we get to registrars like godaddy. They are a government-monopoly-by-proxy through ICANN.
Okay so I thought people weren’t going to take the naively deontic argument here, which is why I skipped it. But very well.
One, as @mitigatedchaos these aren’t really about “your property,” in as much as the CEO’s making these decisions often are not the shareholders, but managers entrusted to make the shareholders money (or other complicated legal entities”. These people have a ton of leniency in those decisions, but “what speech should be expressed” is generally not in the CEO job description. Maybe they make good decisions or bad, but I have trouble seeing fundamental property rights being worked up for the managers making these decisions. If it was a vote of shareholders that would be different.
But two, more importantly, I assume I am talking with people who think the internet should be largely content neutral. People who do not want Google to stop listing supporters of Bernie Sanders. People who don’t want Twitter blocking any criticism of feminism. People who’d be afraid if TWC stopped delivering content about either the Democratic or Republican parties. Maybe you wouldn’t be sure such actions are illegal, but you sure as hell would feel they are unethical.
Most people who are comfortable with Nazi’s getting deplatformed this way are so because they believe Nazi’s (or at least their current rioting actions) are different than just another point of view.
If you think a web company should continue to host political opinions they disagree with, but not that of Nazis organizing armed rallies, which I really do think is a reasonable point of view, then why do you think that question should be up to the CEO of the company?
(Or, to avoid the hot button topic of government regulation - I can see the argument for all hosts are open to Nazis, and the argument for no hosts being open to Nazis, what’s the argument for some hosts being open to Nazis?)
I’m not sure I would agree even if it were a shareholder vote.
Limiting legal liability is an absolutely extraordinary concession on the part of the state, not only to CEO but also to shareholders. The ability to even get the right-of-ways necessary to even construct those cable lines also depends on state power.
Especially as institutional size increases, the potential damage from legal liability also increases.
Therefore, in my opinion, “but it’s my server” has only fairly weak standing as a moral argument for large or even mid-size corporations.
(There are, of course, other considerations, too. Corps resisting warrantless surveillance of customers in the US is overall a good thing, for instance.)
So in the discussion over whether internet companies can deny hosting to Nazis (such as here and here), I admit I see both sides. I understand the concerns that this grants too much discretionary power to large establishments about what speech is allowed on the internet, and I understand that “Nazis marching in the streets with torches and the organizing thereof is different and inimical to civil society.”
My question is, can anyone offer an argument for why private companies should get to choose this?
Like on the anti-Nazi side, everything they say makes a case for why it should just be illegal to host this violent, reactionary rhetoric.
And on the pro-free-speech side, everything they say makes a case for why no gatekeeper is pure enough to decide who does and doesn’t get to speak.
But what’s the logic for “maybe Nazis get to organize online, maybe they don’t, and that decision should be up to the rich people who control internet companies?”
It goes like this:
“Nazis can do whatever they want on their own time but this is my server that I’ve purchased with my money so therefore it’s me that gets to decide what pages are hosted on it.”
It becomes significantly more cloudy when we get to registrars like godaddy. They are a government-monopoly-by-proxy through ICANN.
Limited Liability Corporations are government constructs that receive very powerful special protections (it’s in the name), and thus I don’t see it as the same as a personal server.
“Nearly 70 percent of children – all of whom suffered from peanut allergies –treated with a combination of probioticsand small doses of peanuts could safely consume the legume, even four years after receiving the eight-week-long treatment. Comparatively, only four percent of the children who received no treatment could eat peanuts without a reaction in the same timespan.
Lead researcher Mimi Tang pioneered the dual-therapy approach to treating peanut allergies, and she posits that probiotics – Lactobacillus rhamnosus was used in the study – increase the chances of cells responding to the immunotherapy.”
So in the discussion over whether internet companies can deny hosting to Nazis (such as here and here), I admit I see both sides. I understand the concerns that this grants too much discretionary power to large establishments about what speech is allowed on the internet, and I understand that “Nazis marching in the streets with torches and the organizing thereof is different and inimical to civil society.”
My question is, can anyone offer an argument for why private companies should get to choose this?
Like on the anti-Nazi side, everything they say makes a case for why it should just be illegal to host this violent, reactionary rhetoric.
And on the pro-free-speech side, everything they say makes a case for why no gatekeeper is pure enough to decide who does and doesn’t get to speak.
But what’s the logic for “maybe Nazis get to organize online, maybe they don’t, and that decision should be up to the rich people who control internet companies?”
How do you like the idea of global government? I have a bunch of socialist friends who are super into it. But man, as somebody from a collapsing AND post-Soviet country who was taught "immigrate from this shit pit whenever possible" since he was born, the question I'm intuitively gravitating towards is "what's the escape route if shit breaks down". Really, what is it? Flinging myself into space? Or am I being overly paranoid in assuming the global government might get fuckt.
I don’t like global governments because people in different countries have genuinely different cultures and mentalities and the exact same economic policy would not make much sense and will likely reduce efficiency
“Right-wing author to discuss new book - Eat, Sleep, Marry and Reproduce.”
silver-and-ivory said: marriage is natural! it’s a part of evolution
For a social species, there is always a great deal of room to argue over what counts as natural and what does not, but marriage customs definitely influence the gene pool and can therefore be considered part of evolution.
Speaking of which, if housing is cheap and public transit is good and cheap, and healthcare vouchers are issued, you don’t need a $15 minimum wage. However, suppose every worker must own a car, and the insufficient number of housing units constructed has resulted in massive bidding wars for the few units close to the city center…
This dual-citizenship debacle in the Australian parliament demonstrates how hard it can be to maintain a true rule of law, as formulating a set of rules that is both complete and consistent is impossible.
You might have a rule saying “members of parliament must renounce citizenship of any other countries” or words to that effect, but then you also need to have rules for what happens when they don’t renounce it, or think they’ve renounced it but actually haven’t, or it turns out that they have been dual-citizens and never realised and they’ve been in parliament for decades and passed tons of laws.
If it was a database you might try rolling back to a previously valid state, but a real world organisation faces the problem that there probably is no previous state that was ever truly valid, and that maintaining stable governance and predictable outcomes is considered more important than technical adherence to rules which can generate unpredictable behaviour.
This is why every practical organisational ecosystem needs to have a system like the courts for interpretation, mediation, and finding ad hoc fixes to problems that can’t be resolved any other way, while always doing their best to maintain adherence to precedent and being careful when establishing new precedent.
There are obvious ramifications to this for decentralised systems and those that attempt to make rule of law absolute, by baking it into (hopefully perfect) code.
I was going to make a joke about the issues of a computer law system having someone not fitting the code considered not to exist being an anime, but uh, such an anime already exists.
I mean, I’d prefer to address things by restricting reproduction rather than withholding life-saving treatment, but apparently that makes me Literally Hitler.
the politics of any country would be vastly improved if politicians were forced to commit seppuku in shame when they fuck up
The politics of any country would be greatly improved if the politicians had such a sense of shame when they fucked up that they committed seppuku on their own.
But if they had shame, would they still be politicians?
"Ruined communities": the communities are already ruined. They're shot through with gang violence and crime. Even the girl in that first video admits her neighborhood is a shithole. The gentrifiers may have cringy hipster culture that isn't as cool and authentic as black culture, but once they come, buildings get fixed, and people stop dying in the street.
once they come, buildings get fixed, and people stop dying in the street
They stop dying in the street in that neighbourhood, while people in another begin dying.
The process of pushing a group of people from one area to the next doesn’t eliminate the problems that created that blight in the first place. It just becomes another, usually less equipped and more unprepared community’s problem. Gentrification isn’t an all-in-one solution, otherwise if it were, we wouldn’t be talking about it as some generally understood negative phenomenon. It is inherently exploitative and harms more than just the area of gentrification itself.
Even the girl in that first video admits her neighborhood is a shithole.
My personal living space is a shithole but it’s still home. similarly, this is why she is distraught at the changes to her home and the cultural force that is pushing her out.
cringy hipster culture that isn’t as cool and authentic as black culture
i try not to see things in terms of what’s “authentic” or “cool,” because at the very least, it commodifies tradition and culture as something to consumed or visited as part of a social trend.
people who are like “but what if people decide I am a Nazi and punch ME”:
this is literally not how antifa works. there are not roving gangs of antifa traveling around being like “do you ship white-dude slash ships? PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE”
antifa do sometimes punch people who are not Nazis! specifically, if you are at a riot where antifa and nazis are fighting each other, some antifa might confuse you for a nazi and punch you. your political opinions LITERALLY DO NOT MATTER. antifa sometimes punch other members of antifa.
you can eliminate your risk of being punched by antifa to zero by avoiding riots. this is inconvenient for people who want to go to protests and for UC Berkeley students, but for most people this is not actually something you need to be worried about.
this post is intended to defend a specific claim not to go ANTIFA YAY. I am saying this because many people have responded by defending the claim ANTIFA BOO rather than arguing with anything in my post, and this is mildly annoying.
if we must know my opinion on ANTIFA BOO OR YAY I suppose I am on the BOO side, mostly because I prefer the sf bay area to be riot-free
Epistemic status: Too angry, I know.
One: Antifa (over here) have every incentive to make violence easier to use. They decrease accountability and seek plausible deniability. They legitimise violence as political discourse. They don’t incite violence for the thrill of it, but they actively recruit thrill-seekers, because squeamish, conscientous nerds don’t make for great rioters or street fighters.
Two: Have you ever missed work because somebody tampered with the railways? Have you ever missed work because somebody wanted you to miss work, because anti-capitalism? Has your little sister ever missed a doctor’s appointment in the city because anti-capitalists cut the power lines to the railway signals and she had to sit in the train for three hours? Has anybody ever lit your roommate’s car on fire parked two meters on front of your kitchen window?
Three: Miss me with that George-Bush-League collateral damage rhetoric.
Oh, hey, and they apparently did cut someone that was friendly to them and not at a riot recently.
Plus they try to get people that aren’t at riots, and in fact have no connection to WNs, fired.
So “not being at a riot” is insufficient to protect one from Antifa.
y’know it’s probably a good thing that hot takes/the discourse/outrage culture/that thing almost never picks up on an actually important issue because it means my web of denial about whether people I know support atrocities can remain unpunctured
bluepilled: Believing the presence of xenoestrogens has had no impact whatsoever on the human population.
“redpilled”: Believing that xenoestrogens have created a generation of pathetic, wimpy, unmanly men, undermining the masculine dominance of Western society.
redpilled: Injecting testosterone into the water supply to turn the population more right-wing and manly, including the women.
I have to ask: is it intentional that Greater Rock Springs has the same acronym as Genital Reassignment Surgery, and also, that the logo looks like a massive red-tipped dick
Uh-oh, Anon is at their peak hormones today!
Honey darling, almost anything looks or sounds sexualized if you’re horny enough, so 90% of the time accusations that some random non-sexual object is sexual it’s just bullshit that’s in the eyes of the beholder.
I mean come on, how else do you think some of the fringeiest types started concluding that towers, concrete pillars, everything was “phallic” or phallocentric? I mean aside from that company selling those products.
@nihilsupernum wrote about what I call “#identity confusion“ (I should tag this more consistently) from the perspective of a Jew visiting Tasmania.
As a non-American, I see this kind of discourse coming from the US all the time: White people are a melting pot, white people have no culture, why are you talking about different shades of Mayonnaise?
Next thing you know, they apply the same framework to European countries, as if Spain and Denmark are the same because both are “white”.
Even “white“ Americans fall into this trap when they embark on their Grand Tour, a three-week trip to “Europe“ at age 21.
To me, this view of culture and ethnicity is quintessential American-Tourist-ism.
No terrible race politics but American race politics.
The whole “white people have no culture” thing is really just a weapon, though. It’s a noise, not a critique.
I agree with my mind, but my heart trilled at the idea of protesters rediscovering basic military tactics.
Soon, Antifa discovered the technology of the piss-bottle spear.
I had the same thought, and then extrapolated all the way.
They’re not discovering basic tactics.
They’re discovering what tactics the police will let them get away with.
Because otherwise, they’d just put fireteams in hidden positions and have the whole thing over and done with.
You are correct. My contention is that the police need to step in as the arrival of shield formations is a sign that they aren’t adequately doing their jobs and is eroding confidence in the state’s ability to maintain order.
Why on Earth would Tumblr recommend me a blog that has me blocked?
Yes, Voxette-san is part of the ratsphere, but if “You cannot reblog this post” is any indication, she’ll never be on board with Victory for National Technocracy.
(And if it isn’t a block, then it’s recommending me a blog it’s glitched me out of reblogging. Very hypocritical, Tumblr!)
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
This guy has managed to combine “we need to think ASAP about the kind of precedent we’re setting with decisions like this” and “but for the moment, let’s fuck over Nazis,” two sentiments that are seem like no-brainers but which you somehow don’t expect anyone with Newsworthy Opinions to be able to hold in their mind simultaneously without exploding
“The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
That actually seems like a reasonable boundary there. Claiming endorsement is not quite the same thing as just being hosted.
What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority
has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of
white identity politics.
Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized
electoral politics.
saw a white woman wearing a black lives matter t-shirt the other day, with a nearby Indian family throwing suspicious glances at her; it felt incongruous
They were probably scanning her WokeScore™.
Mine is, uh, negative. Like really, really negative.
Anyhow, it’s considered a bit of a faux pas for a white woman to wear a shirt like that unless her WS is over 500. (The formal definition is 506.)
Of course, if you don’t load the WS app on your phone so it can’t monitor your behavior, you only get what others observe, which makes it a lot harder to buff with like, anti-racist meditation and stuff. Doubly so if you publicly associate with people with low WSs, show up to flag rallies, etc.
tbh after a while I started to lower mine on purpose.
Idea: take one of the big square states, carve it into itty bitty ethnostates (with easy entry but difficult exit), put a fence up on the state border, auction the TV rights to the highest bidder. Call it, idk, Warlords of Wyoming or something. No more (literal) impact on the rest of america from the fighting,but all the politics fans still get something to watch and cheer their team in. Everybody wins!
Now we’re bordering on NationStates.net territory, my dear Anon.
I, for one, back the Techno-Principality of Greater Rock Springs.
Their combination of Neoreactionary, Demi-Confucian, Muskian, and PAP principles, fused with a synthetic Sino-Japano-Anime-American metaculture and corporate backing practically assures their success against the bio-primitivists and the Communist Block.
What I really want to know is who @xhxhxhx is betting on.
Who are you betting on? Answer in the comments below.
