MIRI and the Rationalists worked hard to guard Humanity from the threat of Unfriendly AI. Nobody thought to expect the Scrupulosity Bomb - a first-of-its-kind engineered supervirus designed to modify humans with the genetic vulnerability to scrupulosity - would be deployed first, rapidly spreading first from North America and then to the world. As the social structures of the old world melted away, a new world order of "hyperpoliteness" emerged. It turned out we were the space elves all along.
among historians, it’s still debated whether the Scupulosity Bomb was justified as part of an effort to stop the incessant rationalist whinging about dust specks, freedom of speech, and, most damningly, Harry Potter,
Sigmund Freud is given a printout of my blog. This is the first thing he sees:
Like, I’m sorry bro, but my internal simulation of Freud just throws an exception error.
I imagine he might say something like “This blog is a reflection of miti’s parents getting divorced and the resulting disruption imprinting on an impressionable child”. Clearly, when you noticed their breakup process, you started coming up with increasingly wild schemes to keep them together, or bring them together again after they divorced. Ever since, you have been afflicted with a permanent mania for grandiose plans to reorganize society that stems from this displaced desire to reorganize things so that only your parents could get back together again, which you subconsciously imagine they would do if you flicked all the right switches.
昔々 (a long time ago),
In a country not entirely unlike Japan, there was an old city called 古い市. And in this city there was the dojo of the Shinkansen School of Martial Arts. So powerful was the Shinkansen School that that it dominated the entire region, and no other schools were practiced.
Among the masters of the Shinkansen school was a great blind monk. So familiar was he with the Shinkansen School that he could anticipate the moves of any student through a combination of sound and kbowledge of Shinkansen Martial Arts alone.
One day, a challenger from some place that is definitely not the Ryukyu Islands appeared and challenged the blind master.
The challenger took but one step. The blind master, used as he was to the patterns of the Shinkansen school, tripped without the expected counterweight of his opponent, fell off the platform, hit his head on a rock, and immediately died.
The blind master is the simulated Freud of the above post, as my parents never divorced, nor were they ever close to divorce.
"You can't outrun hot lead" isn't even true (metaphorically speaking, still waiting for the cybernetics to hit transsonic sprint times ofc) at our current medical ability. Survival rate for GSW patients is something like 66%, rising to 90% if you're conscious on arrival at hospital. It's not the best odds, but it's a lot better than the mythology around guns makes it out to be.
He’ll really need that blood transfusion then, eh?
Too bad that blood might’ve gone to someone else who wasn’t him, resulting in a net loss of resources. But how could an Anarchist shooting people be responsible for such a thing?
I’ll be honest, I’ve seen at least one line of posts before in which someone argued that political operatives assassinating people aren’t in any way morally liable for any resulting civil war.
There are arguments for going after billionaires, but the one provided wasn’t a very good one.
“They could warp the political system to their own ends using ‘campaign contributions’” is a far better one.
Seems like a shitty thing to do; if they wanted to get rid of the money there are plenty of worthwhile charities out there. As an art project or statement... sheesh.
it’s just paper, man.
although later of course their kids were old enough to hear about it and say what the fuck dad, why
Even HPMOR points out that people who obsess over avoiding death are typically considered evil, and Peter blood-of-the-youth Thiel isn’t really doing anything to counter that impression, is he.
I kinda hope someone shoots Thiel, not just because he deserves it, but also because it would be so great for all his research into human longevity to go to waste. You might be able to outrun telomere decay or whatever, but you can’t outrun hot lead.
unless I’m woefully misinformed about the level of his crimes against humanity, I’d be extremely hesitant to endorse murdering the man as I think any grounds on which to do so would apply to way too many people.
Being a billionaire in and of itself constitutes an extremely serious crime. One cannot possess that level of power and influence over other people’s lives without, not even intending to, carelessly harming and killing people.
There’s a reason people use the word “obscene” to describe extreme wealth. Because that’s what it is, disgusting, brutal, bloody, destructive.
guess Jack Ma is ten times as bad, then
does it make a difference if his billions are invested in shares of publicly traded companies, US government bonds, or cash stashed in a storage locker?
if you divided the ownership of his wealth between ten people, but they kept it in the exact same form as he has it now, would that make them each 1/10 as evil as he is, even though the net effect of the wealth on society hasn’t changed?
…why do I suddenly find myself rooting for Peter Thiel to become immortal, and not just discover life extension technologies that can eventually be extended to most of humanity?
Anyhow, what difference does it make if it’s a person that has that power, versus vast, impersonal forces? Vast, impersonal forces carelessly harm and kill lots of people as well, but their perceived liability is spread so wide that it’s hard to see - and composed of the same personal failings but spread out over a lot of smaller and imperfect humans.
….vast, impersonal forces that could easily exist, or have equivalents, under other economic modes.
For instance, if we executed all the billionaires, how many people would die due to subsequent lack of technological progress and making that technology cheap enough to be widely accessible?
It seems to me like the pro-guillotine camp here would deny any moral liability for these after-effects.
at least I can claim to have consistently opposed the idea of invading Iraq since before it was even suggested, on the following eminently sensible grounds:
- you know Bush will fuck it up - and whoever replaces Bush won’t do it any better - seriously the only way to make Iraq a worse place would be to bomb it - no it won’t make a wave of progressive democracy sweep across the region - you idiot
I was too young to be all that politically conscious at the time.
I realized what a mistake it was by the time I could vote, and voted accordingly, though I didn’t participate in any sort of anti-war protests. The anti-war protesters are not my people.
Of course, then the guy after him allowed the destabilization of Libya and undermined the idea of the U.S. making agreements that offer any protection if one doesn’t have nuclear weapons.
“Socialism“ has had a lot of connotations over it’s history and I see all sorts of representations of what it means in fiction and I just saw one that combined both “Brainwashed Soviet Drone stereotype“ with “Trigger-warning SJW stereotype“ and that’s a real WTF moment.
EDIT: And they even kept the labor element where it was a bunch of ex-cons who formed a labor union. I expect the critique of socialism to be that these are contradictory elements, but this is just so weird.
The labor connection is where it really breaks, since actual labor types don’t seem to go in for SJWness from what I’ve seen.
The wannabe revolutionaries in this country these days, who talk about how they want to “smash homophobic islamophobic capitalist patriarchy” do seem to be the SJW types, with lamentations among some of the older, more labor-focused types that this idpol is a form of ideological capture/misdirection by the Capitalists.
Unrelated to you; was just venting because I figured you'd understand.
The ambiguity is why half the responses were jokes, really.
I haven’t encountered much in the way of people that seemed too much like broken mirror detailed satires of what I believe, at least not for the past few years.
There are probably people out there that are like versions of that for what I believed at 18.
Current feeling: the slow-onset realization that a well-written insight porn blog vaguely in line with your ideology is in fact in a quantum superposition of passing and failing the Intellectual Turing Test: either they're legitimate, but they're literally insane and believe in a fundamentally broken and incomplete version of your ideology, or they are a hatefully-but-painstakingly-crafted satirical troll persona of someone on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from you.
Pick the response you prefer the best:
You see, that’s the secret, anon, my dear. We all believe in fundamentally broken and incomplete versions of ideology, for we are all broken and incomplete people. As for those fortune favors, we heal our wounds with gold.
If this blog is of a broken and insane version of an ideology, just what ideology is its complete spiritual whole?
I have valid release forms for all the models that appear in my insight porn blog.
My lawyer has advised me not to say any more on the matter.
Weaponizing the Statue of Liberty as a political policy is just a discourse lightning rod to distract the Media while the real work of altering zoning laws at the national level is undertaken. Also remember to check for the #shtpost tag on any post on this blog.
At any rate, I lack the energy to craft an entire blog out of spite. Usually, on an emotional level, I take anyone seriously until they piss me off enough, at which point I just don’t care about their opinions anymore. Grudges take too much energy.
silver-and-ivory said: between high status men who get away with everything
silver-and-ivory said: and low status men who get arrested for, idk, wearing a shirt crooked or some shit
yessish, but I’m not sure if that’s the best framing for it as it offloads the difference onto vague notions of status instead of institutional position.
While a prison guard may be “low status” relative to a movie producer or a member of congress, they can still get away with very creepy and exploitative behaviour towards prisoners, sometimes even up to the point of torture and murder without repercussions.
Michael Bay didn’t have that kind of power over Megan Fox, but he still had some power that say a Citibank executive wouldn’t have had, in that his position includes the right to decide who has a career and who doesn’t, with no real oversight or feedback on how he makes that decision.
“you can’t avoid the guy, have to work with him, have to be nice to him, and can’t complain to anyone about his behaviour” is a toxic combination anywhere.
Status is also a factor beyond just institutional power.
People will let popular and attractive people get away with doing things that they would never let an unpopular, unattractive person do, and they’ll make excuses for them that they wouldn’t make for an unpopular person.
I don’t agree with BA that it’s all-consuming, there are things that can pierce and overcome it, but it’s definitely a factor.
Most non-AnCap Anarchists I’ve seen don’t seem to have anything to stop weaponized popularity, except that the communes are limited in size.
do you make the drawings yself (they’re actually really good)
Yeah, I draw the stuff in the #the mitigated exhibition tag. I use my old tablet and CS4.
It’s not my primary specialization. Regular artists, with another thousand hours of practice or more, can do a lot more a lot faster. I could produce some of what others produce as speed paintings or similar, but it would take me about 10-20x as long, possibly longer.
Then again, do I even have a primary specialization?
Anyhow, I recommend that everyone practice drawing a little, as it’s a useful tool for self-expression and communication.
It would be interesting to see other artist takes on the Union Girl character.
Do you think a restriction on visual, technological media would be an effective way to prevent children from being "conditioned" into developing shorter attention spans? Do you see positivity in giving children access to computers or tablets for pleasure or in learning environments?
I guess this is where the issue gets political, doesn’t it.
I’m inclined to believe in a sort of Pandora’s box view of history, one of technological determinism. Our world will adapt itself to our short attention span, there will be no going back. Audio-visual media have a content bias for brevity in expression, they demand an immediate emotional response from their audience, they present information through iconography and dramatics, and they present information disjointedly in a sort of “peek a boo” fashion: this happened, then this happened, then that happened, here’s a jeans commercial. If an entire culture is raised on such a medium, the cognitive biases the media develop will not be exclusively limited to that medium. We have been conditioning ourselves to favor brief, iconographic, and contextless forms of communication for decades, it’s no wonder we progressively are getting sillier and sillier by the minute. In what world is Twitter a surprise when we have been conditioned to accept 15 second commercials as normal forms of communication for decades? In what world is our tribalized political life a surprise when our primary forms of communication can only communicate symbolically, in tribal signalling messages, when our dominant forms of advertising sell us unconscious images of ourselves?
Anyway, my point is that a world which has given reign to this sort of media atmosphere can go no direction but forward. Accelerationism is inevitable. State sanctioned censorship will not reverse this process. Information incoherence is useful for the powers that be, anyways. Bread and circus has never been easier.
There is beneficial use in teaching kids responsible uses of technology and media. I can see “media literacy” being an acceptable use of having kids use computers and tablets in class. I personally think this is a crutch though and would never promote regular usage of electronic media in a class. Tablets and computers are really an entirely different level of concentration killers and conditioners, ones that deserve their own posts tbh.
Really the only option you have is to exercise proper judgement as a parent. The Luddite position is impossible, the Chinese position sucks, all you can do is get a sense of what’s healthy for you and what’s not, and do and all you can to pass that on to your child. A smart phone probably isn’t the best thing to give a kid. Using the TV as an instant babysitter isn’t a good idea. Let them use the computer but obviously make sure they aren’t going on weird fucking websites. Reading to your child if they’re young is probably beneficial for developing aural concentration. I don’t know. It’s all about judgement, I guess.
Assuming I can shatter China, too (for the sake of sidestepping questions of likelihood-of-success, let's make that "assuming I can shatter China *first*"), any objection to me cracking the US into a few more drownable-in-a-bathtub sized chunks?
Drownable-in-a-bathtub is too small for any reasonable national government, but setting that aside…
How perceptive.
That the dominant hegemony is a democratic republic founded on liberal and enlightenment values, human rights, and democracy as ideology has some advantages. For instance, it likely plays a part in just about every autocrat having to pretend to democratic legitimacy. But those advantages are pretty intangible, so we’ll set those aside as well.
And let’s assume a breakup of Russia and India as well.
Sometimes I oppose things not just because I disagree with them on values, but because I think they won’t even work for the stated goal. (Doesn’t everyone?) So a lot of the opposition to American power wants to supplant America with Communism, or Anarchism, or smash it to bits, or dissolve it into global capitalism, or install a world government.
And while often this is based on ideological values about how people should live,
it’s also based on “OH FUCK GEORGE BUSH COULD JUST RANDOMLY INVADE SOMEWHERE AND NO ONE COULD STOP HIM.”
But while knowledge is knowing that America has hegemonic power, wisdom is knowing that that level of relative power isn’t entirely unique to America.
So not only will those ideas, like turning America Communist, be undesirable in themselves, but they will fail to actually abolish hegemony. They won’t even work for that stated purpose that was supposed to justify such a radical course of action.
For someone like me, this is a terrible deal.
So as long as anyone else has a continent-spanning superstate, I and the other American nationalists have no reason to dismantle ours.
But this question posits that a breakup of the other 9 million square kilometer nations has already happened.
At that point, I don’t really need a continent-spanning superstate. It has certain advantages, but the pressing need, to avoid living under someone else’s hegemony, is gone.
And I’m willing to make weird ideological trades. (I may be a lot less pro-immigration than most of the ratsphere, for instance, but there are conditions where I’d be willing to add all of Mexico to the United States.)
It may surprise you to learn this, but I’ve periodically thought about breaking the United States into a new level of “Regional Federalism” to deal with the increased political polarization. It wouldn’t work as well as we might like for that, due to the primary divide being urban/rural, so some other designs might have to be investigated, but I’m not as opposed to the idea as some readers may expect.
So let’s suppose we take the idea of a North American Union. There’s a sort of slider on a continuum of being more like a unified central government towards being a bunch of barely-connected separate nations. We’ll put the slider more towards the latter.
The American states are too small to be effective countries in the way that we’d like, and many of them are landlocked - very unfair! So we break America into 3-6 countries, based on the regions. Each one has some coastline of its own (if 3-4 countries), or else, through the NAU, the Great Lakes Region gets prenegotiated access to the sea.
This gives us a group of countries which each have a power level somewhere between that of France and that of Japan.
Minimum military development spending is pegged by the NAU to some % of the GDP and is shared between all of them. Actual militaries are individual to each country. There is a mandatory mutual defense pact, and a military coordination center, but pre-emptive wars and the like are optional. If Texas decides to invade Iran, New York does not have to pay for it. Outside of this, minimum military % GDP spending is tagged to 2.5%, and NAU members can sue each other if they fail to meet it.
The US Dollar is not abolished, but becomes a basket currency based on the currencies of each of the new NAU member countries. New currencies are issued for the new countries so that their economies don’t have currency problems like the EU does.
The official language of the NAU is American English. Proficiency in English must be taught in every NAU member country. There is no prohibition on adding other languages at the member country level.
The Bill of Rights is kept.
Other than this, since we’re looking for a dismantling, the power of the NAU government is pretty limited. The number of representatives for each member country is not proportional to population.
For the individual countries, I think multi-party parliamentary systems might result in a bit less infuriating dipolar partisanship. However, to be more decisive, each should have a President elected by Approval Voting.
That’s all pretty radical, and it’s more of a rough sketch than anything, but I am willing to make ideological trades with people that are primarily anti-nationalist because of things like the Iraq War - they’re just trades that no one can realistically offer.
For it is said that Bernie never truly died, but only lies sleeping in a cave somewhere in Vermont, with Ben on his left and Jerry on his right, and resting alongside him a great army of campaign microdonors; and that in America’s hour of greatest need he will awake and come thundering down from the Green Mountains to lead a successful presidential campaign. I do not know of its truth myself, but so it is spoken.
Considering that most of the time that my posts gets more than a few notes, it is because @argumate reblogged them, I wonder if my niche in the Tumblr ecosystem is “argumate feeder blog“.
wisdom is knowing that all of Tumblr is argumate feeder blogs
Is your centrality due to joining Tumblr especially early, or to monopolizing the US nighttime posting, or some other reason?
merely because of the anthropic principle, by which I assume that any blog I don’t personally follow can’t actually exist.
It’s true - if you check the followers on any given Tumblr blog, you’ll find that Argumate is the first. This is because the blog did not exist until Argumate visited it.
Proof:
This image was taken from a blog titled @strawberryrationalistgirl just moments ago, which is also the first time it has appeared on the Internet. It hasn’t even been indexed by Google yet.
you’re too orthogonal to me to be my political opposition
I follow you for weird ms paint comics and the futurist pseudo-history. moar of both pls
Also if I’m being honest, I’m pretty sure the latter ask is what the AnCaps are following for.
I for one like the ms-paint comics.
The year is 2042. Following the election of Elon Musk to the office of Hyperpresident, the Mitigated Chaos blog drops text-primary political content entirely and becomes a slice-of-life webcomic about the relationship of two married lesbian cops and their robotic AI dog, Sgt. Sparkums.
Tumblr wanderers sometimes stumble into the distant archives from a time before they were alive, posting callout posts against the ultra-reactionary politics of the year 2018.
@theunitofcaring:
it does not have anything to do with ‘nations don’t real’ and is mostly used by people who think that they are (and that immigration restrictions are good, just shouldn’t apply to sympathetic people who’ve lived here for twenty years without trouble working hard)
It’s a tough question, because I don’t want to let the Democrats subvert the immigration system, and through it, democracy and de facto ownership of the state/country.
And I don’t think immigration is the solution to global poverty.
So if it were up to me, I’d probably pick some combination of all four of the alternative policies WRT to immigration at the bottom of this ask, simultaneously.
OK this is a bit of a tangent, forgive me:
One thing I find bothersome about the “Democrats importing people to win elections” narrative – setting aside the fact that immigrants primarily settle in Democratic strongholds as it is – is that it sort of assumes that being against whatever new people show up is a terminal value of the Republicans, which is silly. The American right does pretty well with people who emigrated from the Communist bloc, for instance, but it’s not that those people are inherently more “right-wing” in an objective sense, it’s that the American right has defined itself in a way that offers them more. It could easily do the same for later waves of immigrants, if only it could wrestle down the xenophobic portion of its base. They fucked it up about as hard as possible, but that GOP postmortem that determined they needed to win over Hispanic voters and were in a position to do so was correct – ICE can’t kick down enough doors to reverse that demographic trend.
There’s a common reactionary concern that the influx will fundamentally reshape the culture of America, but I’m pretty skeptical. America has had comparable waves of immigration in the past, and they did have some effect, but that effect is generally considered positive or neutral now, and none of them did nearly as much to change the nature of the country as WW2. Over the kind of timeframe where demographic shifts become an issue, most of the current batch of migrants will assimilate and shift rightward, and if the world hasn’t blown up by then, in a hundred years people will be pointing to them as examples of the “good” kind of immigrant to contrast with the hordes of unamerican degenerates pouring in from, I dunno, let’s say Aragon.
The uniting factor that makes immigrants more likely to vote Democrat is that the Democrats have less of an active interest in screwing them, and the Republicans are only interested in screwing them because they’re them, so it’s really a self-inflicted wound. Even the much-feared Radical Islamists are closest ideologically and politically to hard-line localist fundamentalist types who are die-hard Republican voters.
I don’t know enough about the history to say whether the Democrats actually were the ones who made xenophobia vs. xenophilia into a party-lines issue, but it’s definitely the Republicans who kept it there, and that tactic had at least as much effect on the resulting consequences as the original immigration reforms and the civil rights movement.
It’s actually related to the selectiveness of immigration, the rate of immigration, and so on.
The Republicans need less immigration because they need time for that rightward shift to occur.
Most of the immigrant groups, especially ones coming in in numbers, are apparently more in favor of government intervention than the mean US voter. If you’re a Republican, this is bad. If you’re a Republican, catering to that means becoming a not-Republican.
Could that be due solely due to Republican opposition? Possibly, but if you’re a Republican and your outreach has failed (perhaps in part because of racially-correlated wealth inequality - which again, dealing with is at odds with your whole Republican thing), is that a chance you want to take?
(Edit: Also, the list of proposals by Trump, offhand, sounded like it was designed to pull more of the Anti-Communist, Republican-voting immigrants in. Naturally it was rejected as being evil, but of course it would be as a political tactic, GOP are known to do similar.)
When Obi-Wan Kenobi wants to disable the tractor beam, he goes to find the tractor beam settings, which are a physical part of the Death Star (conveniently located above an abyss with no hand-rail) not a panel in some dialog box.
When Jyn has to realign the antenna to transmit the plans, the controls for doing so are a physical part of the tower (conveniently located on a windswept gantry jutting out into space) and are specific to that task alone.
Star Trek may have its tricorders and iPads, but Star Wars doesn’t even have text messages! If you want to send a message, you record a hologram of yourself and give it to a droid to deliver to the recipient.
Humanity has a hundred thousand years experience with carefully constructed special purpose tools, while general purpose software has only become a thing in our lifetimes; we still don’t know how to integrate it with our mythmaking, and perhaps we never will.
Using the manual override is what you do if you don’t have legitimate access credentials.
And if you have some piece of big, heavy equipment like a starship, then you want a manual override, right?
I'm the anon who sent the path to permanent residency ask and I wanted to thank you for your answer. I chose 'undocumented immigrant' because I wanted a neutral term that wouldn't get caught up in nitpicking the term instead of the policy idea; I actually do believe that nations are more than lines on a map. I see I should have considered my audience better though :)
It’s a controversial term, it’s just controversial in the opposite direction.
Of course, it would be far less controversial among most of the ratposters than it is to me, specifically.
And by the way? World government is what shouldn’t exist. Nations are the real alternative to that, and it takes more than being a difference in paperwork to fuel it enough for that. Things like communes aren’t a real alternative.
I don’t know if you saw my opinions on what to do about border disputes. But I also said I wanted that principle used to create a number of interlocking EU-like-but-less-bad-monetary-policy superstates. No world government, no real need for nationalism.
I don’t think that has the necessary power level to prevent world government.
There are two outcomes if you let a situation like the EU go on for too long. Either Europe will itself become a nation, as cultural borders dissolve under the force of internal migration, and power will centralize; or, they’ll forget who they are and, lacking the will to resist, there will slowly be the formation of a world government under people who ask why there should be such antiquated things as borders around the EUs.
Right now, Europe seems to be shearing itself apart over the friction of not being a true Federation.
Also, regarding the phrase “undocumented immigrants,”
Since the deliberate implication is that there is no issue, these people are merely missing some paperwork, like an accident where an ID was not delivered through the mail,
This is very much a “nations are only lines on a map” style of thinking.
So let’s give a “nations are only lines on a map” style of answer.
If national citizenship is so meaningless that not having it is merely equivalent to not having a few papers, that it’s irrelevant what historical experience one has, or education, or national loyalty, because nations are social constructs and don’t really exist, right?
Then one agrees that the “United States of America” cannot hold any moral liability, on account of being a few lines on a map, or a few pieces of paper.
So every war, every coup, every conquest, every civil rights violation, and so on, the “United States of America” is not responsible for and owes, in itself, absolutely nothing.
If you do think the United States of America as a geopolitical entity is more than just a few lines on a map or a few pieces of paper, then the term you can use if you feel “illegal immigrant” is too dehumanizing, because “no person is illegal” (even though by that same logic there can be no such word as “trespasser”),
is “unauthorized migrants”.
Apparently that’s the “in” neutral word now.
I find it remarkable just how quickly the Democratic Party re-learned that a distinction exists when Trump got into motion.
>
because nations are social constructs and don’t really exist, right?
Wrong. Social constructs exist. Genders exist, the patriarchy exists, capitalism exists, nations exist. It’s just that, with social constructs whatever they are, you can’t use them in naturalistic arguments when the argument itself isn’t subject to dismissal by the naturalistic fallacy.
It’s not that nations don’t exist, it’s that they shouldn’t exist in the way they do in this world, and that international solidarity should trump nationalistic allegiances. Borders tear us apart, it’s not that we aren’t torn apart.
Maybe the best dialectical reality towards reconciling nationalism and internationalism currently in the world is the EU, whereby in many ways the differences between a Frenchman and a German really is a bunch of paperwork. Of course with that there’s a rise in a appropriated European nationalism following the migrant crisis, so obviously from a leftist standpoint it’s not ideal.
But you’ve misunderstood the core argument and because of that the foundations of your arguments are gone from under you.
It’s still binding even if the argument is “nations shouldn’t exist”.
And by the way? World government is what shouldn’t exist. Nations are the real alternative to that, and it takes more than being a difference in paperwork to fuel it enough for that. Things like communes aren’t a real alternative.
What kind of place is this when service doesn’t even guarantee citizenship anymore?
I don’t approve cutting or cancelling this program. “Willing to fight, potentially to the death, to defend the national interest” is one of the exact sorts of immigrants you should want. I’m disappointed by this development, thought they realized this.
Reblog since apparently tonight is Immigration Discourse Night.
Also, not doing global warming is probably a great way to avoid mass migration.
Too bad too many of the right-wingers have hyped themselves, not into thinking that we just don’t need to do anything about it, but into believing that it doesn’t exist.
Because I could use “but this will cause mass migration” on them as leverage to cut CO2 emissions. Or “but China will engage in geoengineering,” or “but this will fuck up your hunting and fishing,” possibly even. The original conservationism was apparently supported by hunters, seeing as one needs animals in order to have animals to hunt.
Yep. It’s a pickle.
They think it’s a left-wing plot to scare people into going along with a global system of governance, restrict access to resources as a form of rationing, and satisfy lefties’ desires to be self-righteous blah blah etc.
In other words, a lot of their hesitation is one meta-level up.
…and I’m not really sure how to address it. I can’t convince them that the leftists and progressives don’t really want Social Democracy because, uh, they kinda do want Social Democracy. And I can’t convince them that they wouldn’t be hype for a global carbon emissions trading regime and attempt to weaponize it because, well, lots of them would be hype for it and political operatives would intend to weaponize it. Political operatives do that.
We’re lucky solar is improving at the rate that it is, and also that fission power still exists.
@theunitofcaring:
it does not have anything to do with ‘nations don’t real’ and is mostly used by people who think that they are (and that immigration restrictions are good, just shouldn’t apply to sympathetic people who’ve lived here for twenty years without trouble working hard)
It’s a tough question, because I don’t want to let the Democrats subvert the immigration system, and through it, democracy and de facto ownership of the state/country.
And I don’t think immigration is the solution to global poverty.
So if it were up to me, I’d probably pick some combination of all four of the alternative policies WRT to immigration at the bottom of this ask, simultaneously.
Is your objection to migration as part of a solution to global poverty because you think it wouldn’t actually have positive economic effects or because you think the social costs are too high?
More the latter, but I’m going to be honest with you, I’m very suspicious of the former.
There are a variety of policies and tradeoffs that could convince me to support higher immigration, but most progressive liberals - or at least the ones in power - won’t like any of them, or else the policies just won’t get enough overall political backing.
Also, not doing global warming is probably a great way to avoid mass migration.
Too bad too many of the right-wingers have hyped themselves, not into thinking that we just don’t need to do anything about it, but into believing that it doesn’t exist.
Because I could use “but this will cause mass migration” on them as leverage to cut CO2 emissions. Or “but China will engage in geoengineering,” or “but this will fuck up your hunting and fishing,” possibly even. The original conservationism was apparently supported by hunters, seeing as one needs animals in order to have animals to hunt.
@theunitofcaring:
it does not have anything to do with ‘nations don’t real’ and is mostly used by people who think that they are (and that immigration restrictions are good, just shouldn’t apply to sympathetic people who’ve lived here for twenty years without trouble working hard)
It’s a tough question, because I don’t want to let the Democrats subvert the immigration system, and through it, democracy and de facto ownership of the state/country.
And I don’t think immigration is the solution to global poverty.
So if it were up to me, I’d probably pick some combination of all four of the alternative policies WRT to immigration at the bottom of this ask, simultaneously.
n.n.: For practical purposes I agree, except ~institutions~
In my opinion, nations are something like waves - an emergent phenomenon that exists on a substrate of people, institutions, culture, land, physical infrastructure, and so on.
And as such, while it’s difficult to determine what, exactly, the moral liability or capability of “the United States of America” is, or that of any particular American within the system or as a share of the USA’s burdens, it’s a real entity or thing that exists and has causal power.
If we define nations out of existence, to some degree, I think we also risk defining people out of existence.
Also, regarding the phrase “undocumented immigrants,”
Since the deliberate implication is that there is no issue, these people are merely missing some paperwork, like an accident where an ID was not delivered through the mail,
This is very much a “nations are only lines on a map” style of thinking.
So let’s give a “nations are only lines on a map” style of answer.
If national citizenship is so meaningless that not having it is merely equivalent to not having a few papers, that it’s irrelevant what historical experience one has, or education, or national loyalty, because nations are social constructs and don’t really exist, right?
Then one agrees that the “United States of America” cannot hold any moral liability, on account of being a few lines on a map, or a few pieces of paper.
So every war, every coup, every conquest, every civil rights violation, and so on, the “United States of America” is not responsible for and owes, in itself, absolutely nothing.
If you do think the United States of America as a geopolitical entity is more than just a few lines on a map or a few pieces of paper, then the term you can use if you feel “illegal immigrant” is too dehumanizing, because “no person is illegal” (even though by that same logic there can be no such word as “trespasser”),
is “unauthorized migrants”.
Apparently that’s the “in” neutral word now.
I find it remarkable just how quickly the Democratic Party re-learned that a distinction exists when Trump got into motion.
What would be the impacts of a path to permanent residency (rather than citizenship) for undocumented immigrants?
I’m really tired right now, and should probably let this ask sit, but if I do the knowledge of it just resting there in my askbox, waiting, will nag me.
There are a few big implications.
It prevents, limits, or slows attempting to subvert democracy by sabotaging (or ““sabotaging,”” depending on your morality) the immigration mechanism. “Just bring in millions of people who will vote for my party” is a potentially exploitable flaw in conventional democracy which could, potentially, result in an unstoppable feedback cycle.
In this vein, it dis-incentivizes political parties from deliberately bringing in “undocumented” immigrants because they have far less to gain from it.
It also disincentivizes the immigrants themselves from coming somewhat relative to a pathway citizenship, although I suspect most are chasing money rather than political voice.
It risks creating a long-term, permanently-disenfranchised underclass who cannot vote in their own interests. This depends significantly on the implementation.
Relative to current policy, it accomplishes some of the same goals as a pathway to citizenship, but changes the voting demographics more slowly (one generation vs more-or-less immediately). So if you were hoping to reduce criminal activity and exploitation through naturalization, you could do most of that with permanent residency.
Of course, a major part of why there is illegal immigration into the country is because you can exploit them in ways that you can’t exploit the natives - not just because the natives can vote, but because people who violated immigration law have to stay under the radar to avoid potential deportation/etc, and so will have to be much more desperate before turning to law enforcement.
The businesses supporting this out of a desire for cheap and exploitable labor do not actually want these people properly naturalized, because then they’d have to pay them more, so they’d tend to just import more unauthorized labor.
It’s important to remember that a pathway to citizenshipdoes nothing to stem the flow that caused this in the first place, and is thus not a real solution.
Immigration cannot solve global poverty while the rate of new people created each year massively exceeds the capacity of developed nations to take them in.
Only developing the countries of origin
economically, such that they are wealthy enough that people mostly don’t want to leave, can truly solve global poverty.
There are also other policy alternatives.
Issuing a large number of long-term work permits (8-20 years) based on the number of unauthorized migrants currently in the country. This would allow some of the same effects of bringing people up to the surface, but without the same commitment as permanent residency or citizenship. However, it is sorta kicking the can down the road.
Allow the individual states to issue a number of permanent residency permits proportional to their population, at their discretion. I have joked about this, but it’s actually an option worthy of consideration.
Implement hourly wage-subsidies for low-wage American workers, but only for citizens. While this is useful for the poor, and may significantly increase their negotiating leverage, it may even have some business backers. Driving down the de facto wages for all non-citizens, who are not eligible for the subsidy, makes coming and staying far less profitable (and thus desirable) for unskilled labor.
Allow more immigration above current regular levels, but all of these additional immigrants must be sponsored and insured by specific American citizens/charitable organizations, including any education they may require to meet basic levels. (aka “if you want this so badly, you pay for it”)
whenever I see a shop or product branded as Noun Heaven I wonder if that implies the existence of Noun Hell.
dagny-hashtaggart said: There is a hell for nouns, and I can take you there
my vocabulary is ready
Pizza Haven, Pizza Refuge, Pizza Internment Camp
Pizza Special Economic Zone, Pizza Autonomous Region, Pizza Killing Fields
Pizza Dimension, Pizza District, Pizza Prefecture, Empire of Pizza, Pizza County, Pizza Inc., Pizza State of Mind
Pizza Co-Prosperity Sphere
Did you mean Large Pizza Co-Prosperity Sphere?
Hold it right there.
I’ve already trademarked Greater North American Pizza Co-Prosperity Sphere for my new line of pizza dealershipsstores franchises.
I don’t want you interfering before I can even have my first experimental prototype hexagonal tiling pizza printed, much less before I can complete the baking instructions for the Cheesy Icosahedron Crust pizza.
the boy scouts should accept girls because boy things are cool and it would be discrimination to keep them out, whereas the girl scouts don’t need to worry about accepting boys because lol
this is misandry (not letting boys do stuff) + misogyny (not valuing stuff girls do)
this combination is often called transmisogyny but in this case I don’t think that makes sense
Columnists Question New “Gender Neutral” Scouting Organization
“To bring any ideology into this world, it must have followers who are willing to die,” declares enigmatic leader of NAU Youth Corps
While orienteering, first aid, cooking, and survival “useful skills,” many commentators question the group’s mysterious leader, whose true identity is a mystery
Choice of uniforms, paramiltary-style training exercises also points of concern
@kontextmaschine wanna help me understand what the hell is going on here?
I agree with another poster - this may actually be for right-wing purposes, and thus subversive. (Yes, subversive.)
…which has me quietly laughing behind my screen.
I heard about it offhand, and was thinking maybe I didn’t approve because more and more, there aren’t male spaces anymore, while female spaces are allowed to exist with questioning only from the fringes.
But a long time ago, I did think they should be unified. After all, we aren’t getting a national youth corps anytime soon that will teach American children leadership skills, first aid, and knot tying while stuck in real-time and unconnected to the Internet.
Noting that this may be to undermine the left/liberalism of the Girl Scouts has me thinking that on net, I approve. The Feminist groups that are acting unsure about this can probably sense that their power is being attacked, but probably don’t fully understand how.
Scouts Canada has been unified for some time, IIRC.
But where will boys get those single-gender development experiences now? Hmn.
If you would, could you please say some thoughts (even yay/nay/mu) on this policy proposal? : When taking the census in order to determine the number of house seats for each state, people who the state has revoked franchise/voting-rights from (as part of result of being convicted of a crime) don't count towards the population of the state for the purpose of determining number of house seats.
This seems reasonable to me on first reading.
My late night tired concern is that the census might not update the house seats fast enough to account for changes in policy or something.
It could act as a pressure against the politicians to be Tough On Crime, or at least for them to use whatever means they can to try to strip their opposition from voting. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want certain convicted criminals voting until they are, at least, out of prison again.
Should a man living alone with a robot be able to adopt a child?
Submit your answer as a reblog of this post. For full credit, write at least 800 words in double-spaced format, then discard the double-spacing by posting it to Tumblr. Remember, plagiarism is against Tumblr University’s Academic Integrity Policy.
According to National Geographic,
the researchers, from Arizona State University, analyzed minerals in
fossilized ash from the most recent mega-eruption and found changes in
temperature and composition that had only taken a few decades. Until
now, the magazine reported, geologists had thought it would take
centuries for the supervolcano to make the transition.
The discovery, which was presented at a recent volcanology conference,
comes on top of a 2011 study that found that ground above the magma
reservoir in Yellowstone had bulged by about 10 inches in seven years.
Maybe it can blow up just enough to cool the planet a few degrees.
Not even joking, “if you don’t knock it off with the global warming, the Chinese may blow up a supervolcano without your approval to try to cool the planet” is a tack I have tried using on some right-wingers.
I sort of want to argue with you about your recent quoting of the Second Amendment, but first I think I should know with what mindset you're quoting it. Principle of extrapolation? Restriction to be worked around? Law? Representation of certain mindset? Something else?
Shitposting.
Well, not entirely shitposting.
Let’s be honest. That policy is not going to happen.
Most Americans don’t care enough about civil defense, the gun owners will fight it out of fear that lefitsts will try to use it to take all their guns, groups of leftists will try to use to take all the gun owners’ guns, and so on.
Yes, it’s intended to take a touch of the spirit, of a militia for defense of the country, the distribution of power among the people…
But mostly it was just to be a wacky compromise proposal under Nationalist terms to present what such an alternative might look like. …if it wouldn’t be immediately expanded to try and seize the guns. And for comparison with the Swiss.
Although I’m not joking that I’d like to see martial arts as part of high school curricula in other posts.
