Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
The formal specifications for the Ideocube™ Ideology Partition System™ call for the “C” symbol to be rotated 90° degrees counter-clockwise, with its side components straightened vertically, and written with the new unicode codepoint “rotated straightened latin capital C”, rendered as “U”.
I know it seems absurd to a lot of the people within Liberalism and on Tumblr, that anyone could be against allowing the football players to kneel for the national anthem.
The performative flag-wavers surely are just using this as an opportunity to cover up racism, and “how dare they?” And so on.
However, the thing about performative flag-waving tribalistic Nationalism is that it has an intuitive basis.
It is necessary to maintain sufficient loyalty to maintain a coherent polity. For any ideology to exist in this world, it must be backed by those who are willing to kill or to die. In some states, voluntary military recruitment has fallen so low, relative to geopolitical necessity, that they are now reinstating conscription.
Fighting over the national anthem at football games spends an intangible resource.
America has a large reserve of this national will, larger than many other countries, so the cost seems small. However, it is always being chipped away at in small amounts from multiple directions at once.
And the thing is, the opposition has many people that are opposed to the existence of nation-states in general, and America as a political entity in particular.
Since there is no reason for the performative flag-wavers to believe that granting this concession will do anything but accelerate the demands for the next one, it’s incentivized for them to fight it rather than give in, even though it’s otherwise rational.
Also, what Scott said in his Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments posts. It isn’t really about the issue itself, it’s about symbol-power.
Is this an argument that one should openly advocate in favor of the performative flag-wavers and against the antiracist protesters because performative flag-waving is itself useful? Is it an argument that you should begin performative flag-waving, even if you were not doing so before?
It’s an argument that the performative flag-wavers are not as dumb as they seem to the outsiders. Normie intuitions are okay about a lot of things a lot of the time.
Performative flag-waving is tier 0, unreconstructed Nationalism, with many of the problems that brings. It’s, hm, a bit unenlightened, I would say.
One level of contrarianism up, it starts getting deconstructed, but that isn’t actually complete or good, either. You start doing this “lol, no nations” thing, and then problems that you can’t address within your conceptual framework begins cropping up.
A more enlightened form of Nationalism is higher up the contrarianism hierarchy. It is necessary to reconstruct Nationalism and synthesize in new information for better and more accurate performance.
To put it another way, you can use performative flag-waving Nationalism to fight Nazi Germany, but you can also use it to launch the Iraq War. Anti-nationalism messes with your ability to do either. Higher forms of Nationalism which enable fighting Nazi Germany but not launching the Iraq War, but which can pull from the same powerful emotions and intuitions, should be designed and deployed.
Of course, my personal opinion is that I don’t care if they kneel for the national anthem - but then, I don’t watch football, so what does that matter?
Besides, there’s no way that agreeing to this will save the next Googlebro. As a coordination problem, you can’t pact for it.
it’s not about saving google bros
it’s about freedom of speech
It actually is about saving the Googlebros, and it’s about freedom of speech. It’s just that it’s about the spirit rather than the letter of free speech.
The NFL is their job, this is something they are doing on their time at their job. The NFL would be within their letter-of-free-speech to fire them.
Either both factions get to not be fired, or neither does. If they hate having this sort of thing enforced on them, then they shouldn’t be so excited to force it on others.
A lot of the dumbest rationalizations, both in the bad forms of Nationalism, and in bad forms of Social Justice, are all about “but it’s different when we do it” which can be true sometimes but often isn’t.
Man, imagine if I had to cram all this information into Twitter.
I mean, you think I’m esoteric now… lol
Also, the ensuing accusations of “manthreading.”
Of course, my personal opinion is that I don’t care if they kneel for the national anthem - but then, I don’t watch football, so what does that matter?
Besides, there’s no way that agreeing to this will save the next Googlebro. As a coordination problem, you can’t pact for it.
Whig History implies that right-wingers should never, ever concede or give up ground, since they will not be able to reclaim it.
I know it seems absurd to a lot of the people within Liberalism and on Tumblr, that anyone could be against allowing the football players to kneel for the national anthem.
The performative flag-wavers surely are just using this as an opportunity to cover up racism, and “how dare they?” And so on.
However, the thing about performative flag-waving tribalistic Nationalism is that it has an intuitive basis.
It is necessary to maintain sufficient loyalty to maintain a coherent polity. For any ideology to exist in this world, it must be backed by those who are willing to kill or to die. In some states, voluntary military recruitment has fallen so low, relative to geopolitical necessity, that they are now reinstating conscription.
Fighting over the national anthem at football games spends an intangible resource.
America has a large reserve of this national will, larger than many other countries, so the cost seems small. However, it is always being chipped away at in small amounts from multiple directions at once.
And the thing is, the opposition has many people that are opposed to the existence of nation-states in general, and America as a political entity in particular.
Since there is no reason for the performative flag-wavers to believe that granting this concession will do anything but accelerate the demands for the next one, it’s incentivized for them to fight it rather than give in, even though it’s otherwise rational.
Also, what Scott said in his Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments posts. It isn’t really about the issue itself, it’s about symbol-power.
While this may not be the Perfect Policy That Would End All Badness Forever, a large part of my… not ideal world, but at least “world where things are mostly okay from a system one perspective” is just “competition and violence exist, but everyone is honorable and plays by the rules.” Like, where CEOs do their thing and make as much profit as possible, but are honest negotiators, don’t collaborate to raise prices, etc, and where war exists, but everyone follows the Geneva Conventions.
It’s weird to me that this isn’t a more popular position. In particular, it seems like “bring back honorable warfare, real men don’t torture children or use chemical weapons” should be prime neoreactionary territory, and yet somehow it isn’t.
I think the Neoreactionaries would welcome it - if they thought it were remotely possible.
I certainly find something… hmn, I’m not sure what the right word is for it, but I appreciate that CEOs in Japan still experience shame as an emotion.
And I probably shouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t be satisfied that someone embezzling ten million dollars would throw themselves into the sea, never to return, out of such a deep sense of shame.
Maybe it’s because one of our weapons against embezzlement is the stripping of social status - and if someone has no shame, it’s a sign that their social status hasn’t been stripped and can’t be used against them. And then what is there to stop them embezzling? White collar jail? House arrest? Not very effective.
[soon your askbox would be full of shitpost asks like Argumate’s and] you’d be tempted to make an ms paint collage for every single one.
This television show blog doesn’t have that kind of animation drawing budget.
But don’t worry. Most anons on this blog do not get a Full Custom™ MS Paint.JPG for their asks. It’s just the rate of images per ask that would reduce.
But yeah, I probably missed an ask some time in the last 9 hours, so if you sent one, you can send it again.
Also if you didn’t send one you can send one anyway. I tend to leave my askbox out in the open where just anyone could stuff asks in it.
Based on previous relationships, my ‘type’ is subbish bisexual nerd women who I can talk to for hours on end (at least at the beginning).
My first girlfriend and I spent a lot of time together, hmn, let’s call it developing video game content piecemeal. Also worldbuilding. Lots of worldbuilding. And various other things.
But that isn’t necessary in specific. That’s just something that happened.
Like, I could name out an exact list of traits and so on, but these things aren’t usually cut and dry like that. They have to be felt out a little.
Again left unsure on whether I received a new ask, since the notification said ‘1′ but nothing new showed up in the askbox.
Maybe this is related to using the mobile website?
There is a popular myth, spread by my enemies, that I am a robot and never sleep, existing only to spread political ideology at all hours of the day.
This is, of course, nothing more than propaganda. Like any normal human (and most mammals in general), I must undergo a process of prolonged stillness, unconsciousness, and vivid hallucinations, for repair and maintenace purposes, for multiple consecutive hours during each solar cycle.
I know what your eyes look like, under those sunglasses. Your real ones.
I can tell.
This was for you all along. I knew you would send this post in the future, so it was just a matter of making it, so you would send this post, so you could receive it.
I will never submit to Hyperpatriarch One, or his mind control. I’ll flip my banshee switch before I allow that to happen, and my body will keep fighting until it’s rendered completely inoperable.
B-but A-Anon-sempai, what if the other b-bloggers find out about our illicit love?
Oh no! I just blogged about it! Now everyone will know!
Daily reminder no one cares that you have dark hair or dark eyes or slightly ethnic features you are still white and your culture is still as milquetoast as the others
It’s funny, I hear that border patrol cares and my Jewish friend who has the aforementioned complexion has specifically been identified as someone who will get special attention from law enforcement in the South West.
So IDK about “no one”, if it’s reasonable to expect racist law enforcement attention for a slightly darker phenotype within the range of “White”.
Just no one on the Left…
We have developed the ultimate form of Whiteness, a kind of Hyper-Albinism in which the subject exudes a soft glow,
(I misread #whither whiteness as #whiter whiteness.)
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
assimilatedAmericanized, they are a legit American food.I anticipated and deflected your all too obvious reaction before you had it
https://argumate.tumblr.com/post/162887407519/yes-yes-i-know-but-come-on
blue pill: Americans eating Mexican food is cultural appropriation.
grey pill: There has been a mixing of cultures along the border and with migration, in addition to new developments within America (including new ingredients), and therefore Americanized Mexican food is rightfully a kind of American food, much like Americanized Chinese food, Americanized Indian food, and so on.
“red pill”: Mexican food is foreign degeneracy, like the Irish.
orange pill: Mexican food is delicious, this proves I don’t hate Mexicans, vote for me.
radiant orange pill: All Mexican land is rightful territory of the United States of America, and therefore all Mexican food is American food by definition.
I don’t understand how people can read all the way through articles like this and think that the human experience is somehow overall worth it, hedonically speaking. When you’re being tortured and abused, what’s the point in ever hoping for escape if all you have to look forward to is a lifetime of mental health issues and never getting your life back, all while knowing that the world is always filled with people who have it even worse than you and abusers who live long, happy lives filled with praise and without a shred of guilt because of, not in spite of, what they do to their victims?
Like, we spend our whole lives being unhappy over minor things and happy over similarly minor things. And maybe most people manage to stay in the black, but then there are so many Sufferring Georg’s in the world with no positive counterpart.
The road to paradise lies through Hell, WW, and our armored convoy must continue to press on until victory is achieved, scavenging what we can as we go.
I have no idea what the fuck this is supposed to mean but this is a fully general argument in favor of doing almost anything unpleasant that looks vaguely helpful.
Early agriculture sucked, the bronze age sucked for most people, the iron age sucked for most people, and so on and so forth.
In global terms, absolute poverty is actually down even now, despite population growth. Violent crime is still down in this country, relative to previous decades.
We’ve developed democracy, and air conditioning, and justice systems, and so on.
We’ve been chipping away at crippling-for-life issues much faster now than we did before.
Eventually we’ll be able to repair mental health issues at a level that we can’t right now, much like we can repair hernias at a level that we couldn’t many years ago. Maybe with stimulated neurogenesis, maybe with epigenetic changes. We’ll be able to, in much larger part, undo what these people have done. (“But you can’t undo time-” so what? If we extend the lifespan, even the cost of lost time is significantly diminished.)
It’s a crime that damage done to bodies can be permanent, now. But that won’t hold in the future.
And the flipside to your fears of surveillance is that when everyone has cameras for eyes, this sort of thing becomes far more difficult.
Also, if we play our cards right, we’ll have so much economic production that we can just pay people to take six or ten years just recovering from trauma.
But, to get there, as a species, we must endure. As our ancestors endured, and their ancestors endured.
The “people won’t be able to get a way with violent crime when everyone has cameras” thing is a lot less significant when video evidence of crimes can be easily, reliably, and convincingly forged, which I feel is likely to happen soon.
It’s in real time. Not only recording, but transmission and tracking, allowing deployment of LEOs in response, or simply locating the exact position where someone went missing.
A price to pay, to be sure, but it does create these capabilities.
I don’t understand how people can read all the way through articles like this and think that the human experience is somehow overall worth it, hedonically speaking. When you’re being tortured and abused, what’s the point in ever hoping for escape if all you have to look forward to is a lifetime of mental health issues and never getting your life back, all while knowing that the world is always filled with people who have it even worse than you and abusers who live long, happy lives filled with praise and without a shred of guilt because of, not in spite of, what they do to their victims?
Like, we spend our whole lives being unhappy over minor things and happy over similarly minor things. And maybe most people manage to stay in the black, but then there are so many Sufferring Georg’s in the world with no positive counterpart.
The road to paradise lies through Hell, WW, and our armored convoy must continue to press on until victory is achieved, scavenging what we can as we go.
I have no idea what the fuck this is supposed to mean but this is a fully general argument in favor of doing almost anything unpleasant that looks vaguely helpful.
Early agriculture sucked, the bronze age sucked for most people, the iron age sucked for most people, and so on and so forth.
In global terms, absolute poverty is actually down even now, despite population growth. Violent crime is still down in this country, relative to previous decades.
We’ve developed democracy, and air conditioning, and justice systems, and so on.
We’ve been chipping away at crippling-for-life issues much faster now than we did before.
Eventually we’ll be able to repair mental health issues at a level that we can’t right now, much like we can repair hernias at a level that we couldn’t many years ago. Maybe with stimulated neurogenesis, maybe with epigenetic changes. We’ll be able to, in much larger part, undo what these people have done. (“But you can’t undo time-” so what? If we extend the lifespan, even the cost of lost time is significantly diminished.)
It’s a crime that damage done to bodies can be permanent, now. But that won’t hold in the future.
And the flipside to your fears of surveillance is that when everyone has cameras for eyes, this sort of thing becomes far more difficult.
Also, if we play our cards right, we’ll have so much economic production that we can just pay people to take six or ten years just recovering from trauma.
But, to get there, as a species, we must endure. As our ancestors endured, and their ancestors endured.
I don’t understand how people can read all the way through articles like this and think that the human experience is somehow overall worth it, hedonically speaking. When you’re being tortured and abused, what’s the point in ever hoping for escape if all you have to look forward to is a lifetime of mental health issues and never getting your life back, all while knowing that the world is always filled with people who have it even worse than you and abusers who live long, happy lives filled with praise and without a shred of guilt because of, not in spite of, what they do to their victims?
Like, we spend our whole lives being unhappy over minor things and happy over similarly minor things. And maybe most people manage to stay in the black, but then there are so many Sufferring Georg’s in the world with no positive counterpart.
The road to paradise lies through Hell, WW, and our armored convoy must continue to press on until victory is achieved, scavenging what we can as we go.
I have significantly fewer reservations about labeling myself / my politics as feminist than I do about labeling myself / my politics as rationalist.
I guess it all boils down to the question “Would you oppress women in a hypothetical world in which oppressing women was the right thing to do“
Your answer to this question is irrelevant, what matters is what you think the question means, and how you think other people want you to answer it.
We could oppress straight women less by legalizing polygam- wait, why are the men suddenly acting all desperate and trying to take permanent ownership of women at the earliest time possible? Why are women’s mental health and education outcomes declining?? Why is civil order decreasing???
Yes, they’re going to fight over abortion, since it involves terminating human life. You can argue whether it constitutes “persons” - which is indeed my position, not having a brain means something can’t be a person even if it’s otherwise human - but you can’t argue that a fetus is not human.
Other than that, no, it’s not going to get rolled back barring a major reduction in material prosperity. Not unless something really dumb happens, like one of the nastier forms of Islam taking over - which, I might add, the same Social Justice activists that say they are in favor of women’s liberation, effectively insist we do nothing to stop.
The reduction in child mortality due to advanced medicine and household labor due to automation basically guarantees that the old order won’t really return.
Who is going to cause it to return? Social conservatives? They’ve been losing the battle for social conservatism for at least a century. The definition of what counts as “social conservative” is still shifting leftwards.
“Patriarchy” such as it was arose out of material conditions, including kids dying at a ridiculous rate, so unless we’re dumb enough to bring those material conditions back, the support for it is just not going to be there.
The definition of what counts as “social conservative” is still shifting leftwards.
Someone should inform the Georgia primary electorate.
I don’t know what they’re doing, but from your comment, I’d say they’re fighting a losing battle.
Yes, they’re going to fight over abortion, since it involves terminating human life. You can argue whether it constitutes “persons” - which is indeed my position, not having a brain means something can’t be a person even if it’s otherwise human - but you can’t argue that a fetus is not human.
Other than that, no, it’s not going to get rolled back barring a major reduction in material prosperity. Not unless something really dumb happens, like one of the nastier forms of Islam taking over - which, I might add, the same Social Justice activists that say they are in favor of women’s liberation, effectively insist we do nothing to stop.
The reduction in child mortality due to advanced medicine and household labor due to automation basically guarantees that the old order won’t really return.
Who is going to cause it to return? Social conservatives? They’ve been losing the battle for social conservatism for at least a century. The definition of what counts as “social conservative” is still shifting leftwards.
“Patriarchy” such as it was arose out of material conditions, including kids dying at a ridiculous rate, so unless we’re dumb enough to bring those material conditions back, the support for it is just not going to be there.
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.
Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?
You could do it in far fewer generations, but you’d have to install a 20-year military governorship, still ban cousin marriages out to the third degree, enforce village exogamy, and seize total control of the educational system to wipe out non-trivial parts of the culture and replace them with ideology necessary to support Liberal Democracy.
That’s a pretty big ideological price, and it would require a long troop presence to enforce.
It’s hardly impossible. Afghanistan was liberalizing at one point. But if you’re too hooked on the ideology that democracy flowers in all soils, it isn’t possible for you to carry it out.
That actually kinda sounds like “the last few hundred years of Japanese history, but faster”.
In the collection of rhetorician Richard Weaver’s essays entitled In Defense of Tradition, Weaver describes the different forms which propaganda can take and their intended effects. Type 1 Propaganda is the “Big Lie” of the Soviet Union or Orwell’s 1984. The nature of the “Big Lie” is that the lie should be so big and so obvious that no sane person could believe it.
Superficially, this form of propaganda would be similar to the Chinese loyalty test referred to as “Point Deer Make Horse.” The difference is how the lie is used. As a loyalty test, the “Big Lie” is meant to distinguish those who will lie from those who will not lie for the authorities. As a form of propaganda, the loyalties of the targets are already known: they are enemies. Instead, the lie is a form of psychological torture meant to degrade and demean members of the opposition. Consider the following quote from Theodore Dalrymple:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
Weaver explains that this form of propaganda is aimed at demeaning, humiliating, and eroding the self-respect of those who oppose the regime. It is an expression of pure power, in that the propagandist can force the victim to repeat a doctrine that both people know is untrue. There is no potential gain for the propagandist except insofar his enemy is psychological broken and defeated. There is no intention for the “Big Lie” to have any effect outside the torture chamber.
*sideye at organized religion*
@squareallworthy This might be the quote you were looking for in regards to Hillary Clinton.
So, nobody clicked through to the article I’m thinking.
The title is “Transgenderism Is Propaganda Designed To Humiliate And Compel Submission”
Basic upshot of it in quotes:
“…left-wing signaling is an arms race in which leftists are trapped by the terms of their religious status system in an escalating spiral to see who can find the most radical, most irrational expression of egalitarian ideas…
Cathedral elite know full well that transgender individuals are mentally ill and have chosen to embrace this cause for ulterior motives, as there is something inherent in the issue that provides them an advantage… this form of propaganda is aimed at demeaning, humiliating, and eroding the self-respect of those who oppose the regime. It is an expression of pure power, in that the propagandist can force the victim to repeat a doctrine that both people know is untrue. There is no potential gain for the propagandist except insofar his enemy is psychological broken and defeated…
…this propaganda is aimed at religious and socially conservative or moderate individuals who are politically centrist or center-right. The threat is implicit: either admit that the man in a dress is a woman, or we will take away your job, take away your respectability in the community, send CPS after your children, and otherwise destroy your life… examine the various media pieces about how straight men are bigots because they won’t have sex with transsexual “women:” the implicit threat here is chilling. The message from the Cathedral mouthpieces is that the time is coming when dissenters will be told that they must copulate with a transgender or be punished by the regime. What could be a greater exercise of pure power than forcing your opponents to participate in soul-destroying sexual depravity and to pretend to enjoy it?
…Transgender individuals are puppets of his system. Their ultimate fate is irrelevant to the question at hand, and any discussion on the right about “compassion” or “understanding” is a non sequitur… acting like transgenderism has anything to do with helping actual transgender individuals makes one a participant in propaganda and a willing dupe…
How many genders am I holding up, Winston?”
Great….
This is definitely what some conservatives actually believe.
Their understanding of gender is attributed to “genes,” but it’s actually skin deep. They either cannot accept that hormones could go wrong at the brain sexing process even though they believe brains are sexed, or they see the phenotype as dominant and morally binding over the neurotype.
Though of course, this is shaped in part by the fact that some people just don’t pass, and barring new medical technology, never will. Even with those that pass better, there can still be brain systems that are going “THAT IS [SEX]” subconsciously which are in conflict with hetero- (or more rarely, homo-) monosexuality.
Of course, some of the gender people are baffled by this, because they’re at least weakly bi- or pansexual, so what’s a deal-breaker for someone who is Very Straight seems like a fake concern to them, and if it’s a fake concern, then it must exist to further oppression, right?
Twitter just went to 280 characters?
Woah, maybe it will be less toxic and stupid now?
I fear that the resulting reduction in perceived inconvenience will actually make tweet-threads longer, as measured by both character-count and number of tweets.
Possibly. It depends in part on the metaphorical compression ratio.
Twitter just went to 280 characters?
Woah, maybe it will be less toxic and stupid now?
Can I just take a moment to state how much I hate everyone everywhere on every political axis, except for the exact point where I reside?
Cool.
fite me u coward
You say this, but what happened to those without states capable of enacting powerful force? They were, in general, destroyed.
It is neither the bludgeon, nor the sword, but the armored hand that wields them. The power of the knight, the army, and the sovereign. The power of command, backed by violence. Something we wear or put on.
The state is not so constrained in its capabilities as a sword or bludgeon would imply, but neither is it so gentle, nor does it exist in such a softer world, as an ordinary hand would imply.
But yes, for new readers wondering why there’s a “#the iron hand” tag, it’s because my visual metaphor for state power is literally a steel gauntlet.
It’s important to remember that state power is ultimately rooted in military strength, and that while state interference is powerful, it can ultimately be clumsy and inexact, and forceful.
And I say this as someone who is often in support of state interference.
I am so glad I don’t own any property in Las Vegas.
You, a Neoconservative who unironically supported the Iraq War while complaining about “Liberals clamping down on our freedoms”:
Me, completely unapologetic about the existence of a progressive income tax, flirting with the reintroduction of corporal punishment as an alternative to lengthy prison sentences, plotting the introduction of mixed martial arts to high school curricula as part of national civil defense infrastructure, and planning the partial legalization of some soft drugs in order to disrupt the cartels:
How about that GOP debate huh.
I see absolutely no price movement on the market, implying that no one has learned anything new from it whatsoever.
explodingbat said: i am absolutely not going to start paying attention to american politics — horrible toupée man will win and things will keep getting worse until the water wars begin
you heard it here first folks
and they say prediction markets are useless
12 months on and horrible toupée man is still hanging in there, water wars may yet arrive on schedule.
Water wars are actually a real risk unless better desalination tech exists or energy can remain cheap enough, particularly in the less developed countries, as we enter the mid-century.
A lot of the leftist anti-techie/anti-brogrammer sentiment is just a resurgence of old-school taylorist notions of management.
Dilbert, Hacker and Painters, How Software Companies Die, Managing Humans and similar works were about nerds being managed by people who did not understand their work, and about creative, exploratory or otherwise highly nonlinear projects doomed by the Waterfall Model and taylorism.
Suits, MBAs and Management Consultants have been reasserting themselves, but this time, they are #woke.
This post is interesting, because it is going “csa/nazi victories are racist, what if something Woke™ happened instead, like a native american victory,” but the reblogger preemptively notes the problem with it, that is, the writers would portray the natives as being just as bad. Such a portrayal is characterized as racist. This is dumb, but it does gesture at a point: no well-realized Native American victory scenario could please the kinds of people calling for one. The Aztecs and the Inca were both very unpleasant empires that engaged in human sacrifice and were defeated in part because their Spanish conquerors had ready-made allies in the form of the tribes they had subjugated and mistreated. The history of a native-run North and South America would be a history of emergent states fighting and conquering both their less sophisticated neighbors and each other. To say nothing of the fact that no polity grows into a global superpower without doing horrible, horrible things. All the great global empires–Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the US, Russia, Germany, Japan–gained their power through violence, at home and abroad. An Inca superpower, an Aztec superpower, a Mississippian superpower: all these countries would gain and keep their power through the exact same imperialistic methods Europe and its settler states are denounced for. To explore a scenario in which the indigenous populace of the Americas get to run their continents more or less unmolested is to call attention to the fact that this means that while some people are going to win (ex. the Inca), other people are still going to lose (ex. the Mapuche). It is to acknowledge that scalping wasn’t just something inflicted on white settlers, that the difference between oppressor and oppressed is a matter of historical circumstance, that one world’s Poor Marginalized People of Color are another’s Imperialist Oppressors Living on Stolen Land, that a noble savage is only noble because he does not have the power to be wicked, and that, in gaining civilization, he gains that power. And that’s all a bit too much to handle for someone who thinks “I’m gonna write a story about members of the underground resistance in a world where Nazi Germany won” is racist.
Football Man can kneel if he wants. You, on the other hand, BuzzPo, are banned from Football House for this take.
(Did I write that correctly? I’m not very familiar with American Football.)
“but it is unrealistic for a male and a female to just be friends! for if they spent time together alone, surely the female would simply consume the male to gain strength to protect her young, and- what, why do your eyebrows ascend”
NEVER DATE ALIENS
That’s basically just secret police
of a totally ordinary sort
that then indulge in kickbacks and protection rackets
Yeah, I realized I forgot to tag that #half shtpost, as I wasn’t being entirely serious. It’s a bit of wishful thinking.
The thing is, I don’t think we adequately police the police. We need cop cops. Metacops, if you will.
The disutility of a crime can be modeled as the risk of getting caught times the penalty for getting caught. Thus, a crime with a 5% chance of getting caught, times a 20 year sentence as penalty, is then modeled with an effective disutility of a one year sentence.
However, people tend to time discount and so on, so you might not get much more out of a 40 sentence than you would out of a 20 year sentence. They’re both “a long time.” This means that you can get more oomph out of increasing the capture & conviction rate.
Regular people, despite not being police, commit crimes for some reason. Cops, who we send to increase the chances of catching them, also commit crimes. However, since they’re the ones that we typically send to stop crimes, it’s harder to deal with this, especially when prosecutors have to work with the same police to prosecute normal cases, and thus can’t afford to anger the larger police force.
So we should have a dedicated force to investigate, police, and prosecute police misconduct. “Sting operations all the way down,” so to speak. Of course, we’ll need to have someone keep an eye on them, too.
…but won’t that result in endless layers of bureaucracy?
Not necessarily.
Just as we only need some limited factor number of police for a given population size, we only need some limited number of metan-cops to police the cops.
We can model the required number of layers of metan-cops as logcop_ratio(num_cops). With a cop_ratio of 2, for instance, our total number of all metan-cops is roughly the same as our total number of non-meta cops. A more reasonable cop_ratio of 10-20 gets us a more affordable ~5-11% for a city with 10,000 cops.
The purpose of each layer is to increase the uncertainty of successfully getting away with a crime at the layer below through arrest and conviction through multiple means, including informants, patrols, sting operations, reports of suspicious activity, investigations, etc.
This would be in addition to other means, such as introducing randomness to make various forms of corruption more difficult, moving people around to prevent building up loyalty between layers, etc. We want any corrupt personnel to always have to act very carefully and in the face of a great deal of uncertainty, as anyone they are interacting with could be one of our meta-cops.
We’d have to trim some of the other laws before we enact this, though, or else be careful just what policies we’re enforcing. Some laws currently not being enforced should just not exist, and we don’t actually want them enforced.