Capitalism benefits from patriarchy, white supremacy, rape culture. These divide the working class, produce markets, etc. So capitalism cannot effectively end them.
I hear this a lot and I can’t help but notice that white supremacy and patriarchy have taken a lot of hits over the past 50 years or so and I don’t see anyone describing this period as being a setback for capitalism in fact the contrary
But have you noticed that right-wing political parties often have to lean on patriarchy and white supremacy to maintain their position? Do parties that purely push free-market policies without the rest of that stuff do well?
If you are forced to divide every possible political issue between two sides then you’re going to get incoherent results, so don’t do that.
Technically under Anarcho-Capitalism, it isn’t against the rules to create a really elaborate Communism theme park.
there isn’t anything in the rules that says a dog can’t be General Secretary of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, President of the People’s Republic of China, 1st-ranked member of Politburo Standing Committee,
Comrade Barx’s Communist Funland is a jointly-owned subsidiary of the Northern Arizona Mutual Assistance Association (NAMAA). By entering, you agree to waive liability against Comrade Barx’s Communist Funland, its employees, and owners, including the Northern Arizona Mutual Assistance Association, in accordance with the Standard Voluntary Commercial Code.
Please act reponsibly, have fun, and remember: the dream of Socialism begins with you!
Technically under Anarcho-Capitalism, it isn’t against the rules to create a really elaborate Communism theme park.
(disclaimer: am not an economist, middleish epistemic status, etc.)
Indeed, and this is a common argument used in their favor, which fair enough, but the problem is socialism is expensive, and unless they start out in control of a very large chunk of wealth and resources after the Revolution, they are not going to be able to accumulate enough to help everyone, like they could if they could redistribute property- after all, nothing like this has formed already, and AFAICT there is no law against it, atleast not everywhere…
Honestly, I was just joking about how hilarious it would be to find Marxland™ in Ancapistan, complete with ironic Stalin posters and Modernist/Brutalist architecture.
I don’t actually want to live in or anywhere near the nightmare that Ancapistan would be. I don’t even want to live in the society AnCaps think Ancapistan would be.
I like how the literal symbol of communism is actually two pieces of physical capital.
the workers own their own personal possessions and small tools, while tractors and the fields themselves are owned by the state on behalf of the workers.
How big can a tool be before it is state property?
Hand Drills?
Electric Drills?
Drill Presses?
Milling Machines?
It’s determined dynamically according to the total capital of the commune, where the tool’s value is determined by a system of dynamic bidding split amongst the participants in order to determine the opportunity cost of the time and resources used to create and maintain it and -
oops.
additional hammers and sickles can be exchanged for marxbucks!
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Located only ten miles south of the Samsung-Sony Freedom Arcology in the area formerly known as New York City, Marxland brings the values of the past to life in the relatable, old-fashioned manner of direct physical experience. Harvest live Monsanto Simulcorn™ in the fields, share property communally, or engage in numerous classic human activities such steelworking and fishing right here in our scenic historical compound…
I like how the literal symbol of communism is actually two pieces of physical capital.
the workers own their own personal possessions and small tools, while tractors and the fields themselves are owned by the state on behalf of the workers.
How big can a tool be before it is state property?
Hand Drills?
Electric Drills?
Drill Presses?
Milling Machines?
It’s determined dynamically according to the total capital of the commune, where the tool’s value is determined by a system of dynamic bidding split amongst the participants in order to determine the opportunity cost of the time and resources used to create and maintain it and -
I reasoned the PC stuff was like antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It doesn’t matter today, it doesn’t matter tomorrow, but one day, 30 years from now, multi-drug-resistant TB develops and the problems pile on and on from there.
…but if you can keep developing new antibiotics fast enough to keep up with it, you can sort-of ignore your bad practices and the collateral damage they cause.
I thought that’s what was happening, and that the reckoning wasn’t going to be until 2028, as the result of a slowly building fire of, well, various mens’ movements refusing to comply with male gender roles (something already in progress at the fringes). Instead the tension was lurking beneath the surface across multiple axes, but the media didn’t want to talk about it and people would be socially punished for talking about it sometimes, so it wasn’t as visible.
I’d like to think there is some new path where the word “Racism” can be made powerful again, but I cannot find it. It would require socially punishing false accusations of racism, which simply isn’t feasible under the current ideological framework. I’m not one to buy into the “Contradictions of $Ideology” idea much, (since most of the people pushing it are Communists ignoring the ‘contradictions’ essentially inevitable to their own system,) but I think this is partially a case of that.
In some ways I welcome the Populism, though. My estimate of corporate oligarchy and permanent majority has declined significantly.
This is something I might write a longer more thought-out thing about later
But did anyone else (especially girls with big boobs) feel like, throughout your childhood and teen years, everybody was always saying guys were into big boobs and that conventionally attractive girl = girl with big boobs, but this never actually seemed to be the case?
Like girls in real life and in teen books would be all bemoaning their flat chests and wishing they had big boobs so guys would be into them, but then in real life, the popular girl the guys were all into was some skinny thing with C-cups at best, and the media-sanctioned epitome of female beauty was people like Keira Knightley and Rosario Dawson.
I just got reminded of this hard when I was re-watching Galavant. Madalena is initially the hero’s love interest and she’s always positioned by the show as super sexy and irresistible. Here’s how she’s described:
Long legs and perfect skin A body built for sin With cleavage you could hold a whole parade in!
…and here’s that ‘cleavage’ in action:
What’s with this? Why is this a thing?
I feel like I have a hunch as to some reasons, but it’s hard to put a finger on.
- “Big tits” is just a really easy description, and that should never be underestimated as a cause for overuse.
- It is a positive that’s correlated with negatives (it’s very obvious although rarely said that big tits on fat women don’t really count).
- Modeling has more specific demands than just “being hot to men”, and these anticorrelate with big breasts somewhat, and modeling is really influential.
- The first point also might work against women with big breasts (esp. in settings where other women are involved), as it is also really easy to go “people only like you for your tits”, and/or big tits are seen as kind of crude (c.f. girls in American schools being told they’re dressed provocatively for clothes that would be utterly normal on smaller-breasted girls).
I don’t really see how any of those explain it? I mean, ‘thin’ is an even easier description. The influence of modelling can make the Keira Knightley figure mainstream-attractive, but doesn’t explain why people would keep talking as if big tits were what everyone was into. 2 and 4 explain some degree of animosity toward women with big tits, but not how the world would settle on this bizarre convention of talking as if they are considered attractive but acting as if pretty much the opposite is true.
Also with the modelling thing, I understand that the convention for modelling is that models should avoid having curves at all costs, and that once something is the done thing it can stay that way just because that’s the way we do things. I don’t buy that there’s any reason why it necessarily should be that way. I mean even if you buy the argument that it’s easier to do cool and elaborate things with clothes when you don’t have to worry about making it work around curves, high-end fashion is ostensibly about showing off that you are the best at designing clothes. One can easily imagine a world where runway models had to have the most extreme curves you could find, because if that makes it harder, then clearly the curvier your models, the more skilled you must be to make your clothes work on them.
Kira Knightly has ~100k followers on Instagram, a place you can get lots of pics of her. Kim Kardashian has 100M followers.
Throughout my childhood and teen years, Kim Kardashian was not a thing.
Kim Kardashian (who has a D cup and is very curvy) has been a thing since 2007. Before that you had women like Jessica Simpson (D cup) and Pamela Anderson (whose implants were famous) and Angelina Jolie (who has an hourglass figure 36-23.5-35).
Mainstream American culture considers a few body types as “beautiful” but large breasts are “sexy.” Women with smaller breasts who want to be seen as “sexy” (on the national level) either need to dress in a way to make it seem like they have big breasts (photo shoots from certain angles, clothing designed for this effect), or find some other method to get that association in people’s mind (having a sex tape leak or whatever Miley Cyrus did both come to mind). Whereas (relatively skinny) women with larger breast have a hard time not being seen as “sexy” by mainstream society.
Also “big boobs” often means “big boobs relative to BMI”, so a thinner woman can be considered busty even if her actual breast volume is below average.
Also also, because it’s seen as sexual/sexy, liking big boobs is seen as crass and objectifying, or low class(?), particularly for heterosexual men. It’s basically assumed that it’s all the guy likes about the woman if he acts like that.
Really says something that now I sort all political commentary I read into “Pre-Trump“ and “Post-Trump.“
mitigatedchaos said: Did you at least give Trump a 15%+ chance of winning the election?
I hate to give odds on stuff like that because it drives me nuts, but to me the “Trump era” starts well before the election. I’m defining it as the moment when we knew that “Trumpism” was something that existed and was more than marginally popular in the US.
Even if Hillary had won or probably even if Cruz had squeaked out the nomination, it would have changed shit. The political writing reflects that.
What about all the people who were going nuts for Palin in 2008?
Palin didn’t go through the primary. We could all say that she basically didn’t matter. She was just this weird VP that McCain chose and didn’t take seriously. Trump was chosen directly by primary voters, the fact that he could win says something.
I would tend to agree on Palin. I haven’t seen excitement for Palin like I have for Trump.
There are so many things that allowed this to happen, and I think many of them would have been preventable if people, uh, behaved better. I don’t mean this as a virtue critique of the Trump voters, but rather the opposite. Overuse of terms like “racism”, ignoring the plight of American workers, not reaching out to areas outside the cities, focusing primarily on minority demographics, talking about “demographic destiny” with glee, and so on.
@collapsedsquid My question was mostly to ping whether you were aware of these looming things beforehand, and if so, for how long. While I saw “sexism” being overused as a term, I didn’t really realize just how thin it had worn outside of internet communities. However, the further they got into the primary, the more I said “this is unpredictable, so I’m revising the chance of a Trump win upwards”.
It was the most elite unit we [ie: The Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had. The members were suicidal – not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.
“My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.
Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.“
“So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.
Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.”
I’m a crazy romantic and even I didn’t expect that tying guys like these down with wives and kids would have such a radical civilising effect. I wonder if this has any implications for gangs or other violent pests?
If that’s the case though, then polygyny is a bad thing unless you want large numbers of risk-tolerant men.
How should doctors and hospitals act with regards to emergency care, assuming an inability to tell for sure whether or not someone has insurance at the time treatment is given and an inability to shop around for hospitals during an emergency? What should happen when I call 911 as a patient? What about as a bystander?
Until EMTALA in 1986 we got along without hospitals being forced to provide emergency care for everyone and somehow society was able to function, but that requirement is to a significant degree responsible for the massive rise in health care costs since then, and the failed attempt to force everyone onto insurance that was Obamacare was essentially a way of attempting to deal with the severe negative consequences of EMTALA, which has forced many hospitals to stop providing any emergency services whatsoever.
The libertarian thing to do would be to go back to how it was before Congress intervened in 1986, and let hospitals decide for themselves how to provide care and to whom, as is their right. Then if your top priority is making it so that poor people are treated regardless of ability to pay, organize a charity and pay for them yourself, don’t push it onto hospitals as an unfunded mandate that messes up the entire health care system.
So before EMALTA, how was it determined whether someone would be treated? Did hospitals turn people away if they didn’t have insurance cards? If they did, would the ambulance keep on going from hospital to hospital until they found someone who would treat the patient? How often were people with insurance accidentally turned down? If the passage of EMALTA caused prices to rise as much as you say it did. Then obviously there had to have been a lot of people who used to be turned away but now are not. What do the profiles of these marginal people look like?
Hospitals did turn people away if they thought they wouldn’t be able to get them to pay for care, yeah, but I think that’s rational and defensible. Insured people accidentally getting turned down didn’t seem to be a significant problem - if you have insurance you’ll probably always have your insurance card or at least an ID with you out in public, and if you’re having an emergency at home you’ll probably get brought in by someone who knows who you are. And I think hospitals were more focused on denying care to people they were already certain wouldn’t pay than unidentified unconscious people in urgent need.
A lot of the people who would have been turned down before EMTALA are people with non-life-threatening conditions who go to the emergency room knowing they can’t be turned down for treatment and then disappear without paying. I used to date a girl whose job it was to try to bill those people for the care they received at her hospital - less than half of emergency care in the US now actually gets paid for, they wind up just having to write most of it off and the rest of us pay for it through higher insurance premiums, ultimately. It’s a significant component of why health insurance has become so unaffordable.
Her hospital at least worked with charities to try to make sure the true charity cases got paid for, and some people who had the means but refused to pay were sued or referred to collections agencies so ultimately the hospital would receive pennies on the dollar. Poor US citizens are covered by Medicaid. This was in California, so the real problem was illegal immigrants - they couldn’t get insurance but they couldn’t be made to pay for anything either, so hospitals are just forced to give them unlimited free care and they jam up emergency wards with non-urgent problems because they have no other place to go. It’s not their fault, really, but the inefficiency of this system is mind-boggling, the waste of medical resources is immense, and it generates a lot of animosity against illegal immigrants. California passed a ballot initiative in the 1990s that would have allowed hospitals to deny emergency care to anyone in the country illegally but it was struck down as going against federal law.
In Libertopia there’d be no such issues with citizenship status preventing people from getting insurance or simply paying for care on a fee-for-service basis, which would likely be much more common without the tax incentive for employer-provided health insurance, one of the other big problems ruining US health care. Costs would drop massively and I think it’d bring guaranteed life-saving emergency care (within reason) for almost everyone within the range of things that could easily be accomplished through voluntary charity in a developed country.
It’s the discrimination problem once again; if you make decisions on the hospital level you can turn away the people who are obviously Not Going To Pay without causing more than a few highly-visible false positives (and even there making it possible to create better commitments like “I know my situation looks sketchy but if I skip paying you’ll just contact my Dia group and they’ll pay you okay” would make it easier to discriminate accurately), but if you’re trying to make sweeping policy-level decisions you inevitably have to discard massive amounts of information, rendering the bureaucracy necessarily stupid. Then economic incentives lead to people capitalizing on that enforced information asymmetry.
Additionally, you can use modern technologies to create robust reputational systems that reward hospitals that deliver care for true emergency cases (= actual unanticipated emergencies, not “this known but untreated condition has gotten worse over time and it was inevitable that it would cause an Expensive Crisis at some point”) regardless of immediate ability to pay. If customers prefer hospitals that do provide such care, that’s effectively an indirect subsidy for privately socialized emergency care.
As a patient I’d prefer to have some more specialized number than 911 for contacting my own emergency health provider. Additionally I’d probably be totally fine with an rfid chip linked to a blockchain identity smart-contracted to my insurance subscription (= subscription and payment status verifiable by anybody with internet access) assuming I had actual control over it and could wipe+reprogram it at will whenever I want to use a different identity for whatever purpose.
I mean, the advantage of 911 is that it’s a universally known “OH SHIT FUCK HELP” button that even a five year old can understand how to use. Complicated setups with rfid chips make that harder. Same problem with private solutions to policing, really. People need simple, universal, easy to understand panic buttons that will put them at least somewhere close to the right track. Like, police aren’t ideal, but I feel like there has to be SOME kind of publicly run organization that handles emergencies or things-that-vaguely-seem-like-they-might-turn-out-to-be emergencies, and unless that organization asks for upfront payment on a per-call basis it’s gonna be a public good. (Yes we need to make the cops not be the default responders, but I’m not convinced that this necessarily involves getting rid of 911).
I don’t know what you were expecting. Privatizing everything based on assuming the rationality of economic actors is kinda the ‘thing’ of the ideological group you reached out to.
Some answer where some regulations are loosened while others are strengthened is not what you’re going to get. And if you’re going to have generic emergency responders in America that aren’t cops, then they’ll need guns.
But here, let me throw in an oddball solution. Have multiple competing police agencies - but under the government, contracted at the municipal level.
Edit: Actually, let me throw a more serious one out here. People are bloody irrational, so I don’t care if they want to spend it on something else: tax everyone and give them an $X,000 healthcare voucher which can either be spent on insurance, or a health savings account. Take money out of it for unpaid emergency care at some rate over time. Maybe allow the HSA to be inherited.
Goldwater’s also somewhere you can look to understand how far right we’ve come. He was considered so extremely, radically conservative in 1964 that his defeat was one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. Yet, if I remember correctly, in “Conscience Of A Conservative” I think he says something along the lines of “many unions are good and do important work, I’m just opposed to the huge ones and the radical ones.”
When was the last time you remember any Republican saying anything good about any unions? Like, even if he didn’t actually believe that, the fact he even felt the need to make that qualification speaks legions to the power and acceptance of labor unions in America at the time.
I feel like the loss of the communist bloc as a looming threat went a long way toward radicalizing American capitalism. There was a long period there where communist revolution was understood to be “plan B” for the working public, which meant the powers that be had a strong interest in making plan A look appealing. After the fall of the USSR the capitalist argument drifted toward “you’ll take what you get because you’ve seen the alternative,” and it’s not a coincidence that the upper crust became a lot more extractive over that period.
Of course this is the thing that leftists always complain about – how market socialism was guided by the CIA, how labour reforms were a sop to protect capitalists – and there’s room to criticize, in that the earlier concessions facilitated an exclusionary guildism that maintained the existence of an (especially black) underclass. On the other hand, I do like leverage and I don’t think the loss of it has been good for American workers or for the “first world” generally.
The leftist criticism is that these concessions stole momentum from an unborn revolutionary movement that could have fixed everything if only it had been brought to term, but I have no expectation that it would actually have worked out that way, so I’d be plenty happy to have a movement like that back again even if only for the express purpose of stealing momentum from it.
On the other hand, pressure for automation has pushed the UBI from the fringes to slowly creeping into the mainstream, and with the new President rising on Populism, we may see the emergence of a new equilibrium.
People’s Action Party (SG):* wins election with 60% of the vote, down from 70% last time around *
People’s Action Party (SG): This is a rebuke of our governing performance! We need to reconnect with voters and do more things that people want!
Democratic Party (USA):* loses election by narrow margin *
Democratic Party (USA): We lost because our opponents are racist, sexist, xenophobes! We need to call them out repeatedly on their lack of virtue! No mercy and no deals for Fascists!
Mum, Dad, I’m not sexually aroused by Japanimation.
No, it doesn’t do anything for me at all.
Don’t cry, I’m still the child you always knew, I just don’t crank it to cartoons.
I’ll explain to Grandma next time I see her, she’ll understand.
The year is 2078, a group of owls congregate in cyberspace…
Argumate Jr, your mother and I are worried that you’re getting too close with those Normies.
No, your other mother.
That isn’t the point. These are the kinds of people that want to ban bishounenification surgery. What if you start kinkshaming? What if you start bodyshaming?
They tried to ban something as harmless as moe overlays. Do you really think they’ll treat you like - they are not your friends! Hey, don’t you -
It is vitally necessary to defend him because the attack on communism begins with the argument that communism leads to genocide. Rehabilitating Stalin would very definitely improve the cause of socialism worldwide.
X implies Y is a problem because X is good and Y is bad, therefore X does not imply Y.
It is vitally important to defend Chernobyl because the attack on Nuclear Power begins with the argument that Chernobyl killed people and caused large amounts of radioactive contamination. Rehabilitating Chernobyl would improve the cause of Nuclear Power worldwide.
I mean, I suppose we could alternatively argue that Chernobyl was managed terribly (which has the advantage of being true), and alternative plants with containment domes and different reactor designs don’t have the same safety record (also true), and commercial nuclear reactors generate utterly enormous amounts of economically-valuable electricity with a long-lasting power source, low area footprint, and low carbon output. And we could devise and test better methods to make nuclear plants safer. We might do that.
And if we did that, people wouldn’t find out that we were lying about Chernobyl being this great thing that never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, since we didn’t go the route of trying to “rehabilitate Chernobyl”…
Also let’s please not act like minisoc’s antisemitism is in any way unique. Other tankies on here like marxism-leninism-memeism have said worse things, like that Jewish people ought to be thanking Stalin for saving them from the Holocaust.
Let’s eradicate this preposterous notion that you can be a defender of Stalin and not simultaneously be a raging antisemite racist homophobe. There are no non-problematic tankies. If you defend Stalin, you defend ethnic cleansing, the arrest, enslavement, and murder of gay men, antisemitic purges, and a million other atrocities.
Tankies like to pretend that Stalinist mass murders and systems of forced labor camps were substantially different and in no way comparable to the Nazis because the Stalinists at least on the surface espoused the values of internationalism and anti-racism. But in practice the gulags and the purges were systems of racist terror. Hitler killed more people but Stalin sure gave him a run for his money.
I can’t wait for people to performatively denounce the ““““tankies”“““ for five seconds while doing literally zero self-reflection
Wasn’t that called McCarthyism?
Stan’s body count is miles higher than Hitler’s last I checked. Unless I’m having a moment of bad memory at 430AM
If you compare intentional murders, Hitler’s is higher. Famine deaths were definitely caused by Stalin’s policies, and the word genocidal certainly qualifies in the case of the Ukrainian famine, but I think it’s not quite the same to say that famine deaths should count equally as people being rounded up and arrested, and then shot or gassed to death or killed from overwork and brutal conditions in a prison camp.
Still though, counting only intentional murders, Stalin’s death toll easily makes it into the 7 figures.
the key difference here imo is that both angles are incorrect: Nazism inherently leads to mass murder as per Generalplan Ost, since the whole plan is to lebensraum new territories and get rid of or enslave the population there, however, communist governments ended up with such an enormous death toll because the countries where communism was enacted were so big. so this implies three things: authoritarianism equals mass murder even if you are the “””good guys”””, communism doesn’t scale well at all, and “hey you thought my ideology murders the most people in history, whereas it only murdered the second most people in history” does not sound enticing
I feel like
If you take somebody’s food
That they say they need
And then they starve to death
That’s murder, even if you didn’t believe them when they said they needed the food.
Yes but if you do that you have to start accounting for capitalism’s death toll too. But no one wants to say it’s the government’s fault that a bunch of people without money starved when the crops failed, that was just like, completely external or something.
It’s one thing to have people suffer in a famine, it’s another thing to cause one that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
Anyhow, suppose there is some baseline level of famine that occurs in any country as a result of environmental conditions, and some minimum number of people who will die from it. Ideologies/economies are judged by how far above that number they come in. Does Capitalism do better on that metric? Does it do better than Feudalism?
But if we’re going for this level of detail, then slow economic growth counts against Communism, too. How many have died because of less wealth for healthcare, or for safety procedures? How many have died due to a slower pace of technological development? How many have died because Communist governments were so bad that they created massive amounts of corruption that persist to this day?
I guess I’m just annoyed with that comic with a Communist sitting on a tiny hill of skulls while a banker stands next to a small mountain of them. Even after you account for, for instance, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which can be attributed to Capitalism, Communism is still going to end up responsible for more net deaths, and yet so many people smart enough to know better want to try it again.
TIL, secondhand, that some people won’t accept the earned income tax credit (a US federal tax credit for people with low/moderate income, especially ones with kids. As income increases the credit amount increases, then flattens, then decreases) because they think it’s “welfare” or “political control of their lives”, or that it’s somehow wrong to accept help from anyone other than family or church. What can you even do. :|
Anyway, I guess the lesson here is it’s only okay to receive government assistance if it’s very heavily disguised as being something else, preferably through an unrelated third party (such as a corporation that’s being “incentivized” to build factories near you or whatever). Sort of like money laundering, in concept.
yes, one of the downsides of basic income that I think about a lot is that it’s going to piss some people off to think of themselves as dependent on others unless they can reframe how they spend their life as providing some vital function that everyone else benefits from.
Isn’t that rather easily solved by making it something you apply for, and automatically granting it to those who apply?
My feeling here, as all such similar questions that devolve to “would you tell this to a 55 year old Walmart stocker that (we wont give her free money to live on because her job gives life value)(her job has no value)?” is to ask the people involved. We should like, poll some working class people and ask them which system they’d prefer.
If it’s significantly split, well you’re fucked no matter which policy you go with. But you know, you asked, rather than played some thought experiment about What The Middle America In My Head Wants.”
(Not faulting anyone in this thread for this, just, the dynamic shows up in way too many discussions about UBI)
Unfortunately, I think your proposed (reasonable, common-sense) approach fails on basic predictable human-psychology grounds. In this case, anyway, and cases like it.
Like…I’m pretty sure we know what most people’s first-best choice here is. “I want a job that rewards me both with a substantial wage and a substantial status boost, in which I provide a needed good or service to the world, demonstrating that I am a worthy worthwhile person deserving of pride and also that I am better than all those lazy unskilled slobs who might have some use for welfare.” We could run a poll to see whether that’s actually the outcome that people would prefer, if you believe it valuable, but I’m really quite confident in it. It is the ideal promulgated by pretty much every facet of American culture, and if it’s not your first-best choice, it means that you’re some kind of weirdo who’s broken away from your cultural training.
But of course that doesn’t get you very far, because that option is Definitely Not Available for many many many people. The real choice is often between, say, Welfare or Subsidized Makework Job or Poverty. (Or something like that.) That’s the polling data you actually want.
Except that…
A. It is really hard to get people to believe that their first-best choice (to which they feel entitled) is unavailable and that they have to consider second-best options. If it is at all possible for them, they will find a way to delude themselves into believing that one of the proffered options will lead to the thing they actually want.
B. It is really really hard to get people to believe this when “your first-best choice is unavailable” continues into “…because you have no presently-desirable skills and the free market has no use for you as anything more than a warm body.”
C. It’s especially really really hard to get people to believe this when you have malicious actors actively lying to them about it. And make no mistake, that is a thing that is happening, and will continue to happen. Someone is going to be pushing the line that the Republicans are pushing right now: “as soon as we gut the welfare state and free the market, all those Real Jobs that gave you Real Dignity will come roaring back!”
I am strongly of the belief that there are many people for whom decent welfare would be much better than any job they could ever get (or at least “extremely desirable as a supplement to wages”), but who will never ever admit this even to themselves, because they are strongly invested in not being the sort of losers who would need to think that way.
In short: poll all you want, but good luck getting people to face up squarely to the question long enough to give you a genuine answer.
While hourly direct-to-employee wage subsidies would still have some of these marketing problems, the massive cuts to the minimum wage (with no loss in living standards) they would allow one to make can at least create lots and lots of jobs that don’t look entirely makework since someone in the economy is at least willing to pay some amount for them.
One side effect is that it could make a lot of people feel more in demand, since there would be so many job offers going unfilled.
“That’s funny. Your side are the ones covering their faces as they stifle free speech, destroy property, and attack innocent civilians. Maybe, just maybe, you guys are the bad ones…”
OR… WAIT FOR IT… YOU’RE A FUCKING NAZI THAT WANTS ALL OF AMERICA’S RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS FOR YOURSELF BUT NOT FOR OTHERS <insert race that isn’t white trash here>
So #1 Go Fuck Yourself and #2 Go Get Me a Sandwich Bitch
It’s all fun & Nazi punching until you pepper-spray a woman wearing a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat and attack an immigrant in a business suit. (That actually happened, by the way.)
Because when you encourage “punching Nazis”, that’s what actually happens, because lots of people love punching more than they care about figuring out whether who they are punching is an actual Nazi.
You could have had Nazi punching if the Nazi punchers were the kind of person that didn’t support punching Nazis, since they tend to do a better job figuring out who is and isn’t a Nazi.
But now people that aren’t Nazis have to defend the physical security of Nazis because Tumblr thinks the proper answer to “but what if I thought I was punching a Nazi but it was just a white guy with a shtty haircut” is “run” and not “don’t be a dumbfk that punches people without checking whether they’re actual Nazis first”.
That doesn’t even get into what happened with the actual Nazis and street violence (it didn’t stop them), or the threat level they represent right now (fairly low), or whether they can be won over by other means (one black man got some huge number of dudes to quit the KKK by befriending them), or ideological consistency (you also have to punch Tankies), or whether there will be retaliatory violence (oh Nazis would love that) or whom that retaliatory violence would fall on (hint: usually people more marginalized and vulnerable than the punchers).
While I don’t agree with much of it, it occurred to me that anyone engaging in these debates about “what the Democratic party should focus on” and ideology in general, should at least be familiar with this post from David Chapman.
Haha, fun read. It occurs to me that in some worldbuilding I’ve been doing, I already split the cultural functions of government off from the boring policy functions, divided between royalty made of formally-recognized national heroes and a subtly, quietly terrifying postcyberpunk state bureaucracy that had what we would think of as prediction markets in the 1980s, and is now using what comes beyond that.
Jesus this is the most frustrating thread ever. I get banning guns and knives, but who in their right fucking mind would ban goddamn pepper spray? What the fuck do they think people are gonna do if they’re allowed to have it? I keep seeing people talk about how the need to defend yourself is rare and letting people have weapons would make things worse but I don’t see how that applies to mace at all.
I’m so glad the 2nd Amendment covers my right to military-grade prosthetic limbs.
Edit: More seriously, erosion in this direction is what they’re worried about.
I feel like you could very easily make things like “does this cause permanent harm” or “is it useful in muggings” as your criteria, though. The thing that makes pepper spray good from a societal standpoint is the fact that it’s significantly more useful defensively than offensively.
That is not the logic under which weapons are restricted, though. I suppose things would be better if it were.
Very very few people are actually anti-immigration. It’s the ILLEGAL part that people don’t like.
seriously tho? a shit-ton of people are actually anti-immigration, this is hardly a fringe view, jesus.
I’ve never inderstood why the legality or not of immigration is supposed to have moral force. a) Its pretty commonly agreed that hte current immigration laws arent fit for purpose, and are only that way due to political deadlock. b) The moral obligation to obey a law comes from being part of the country/community that sets the law, if you are not an american citizen you have no obligation to obey US law.
A) Just ignoring them is almost equivalent to Open Borders, which if you’re a Nationalist, is something you don’t want. (Maximum rates of assimilation, wanting to be allowed to have a country of your own to at least some level culturally, effects on wages, effects on crime, etc.) Ignoring them isn’t really a compromise, either, it’s basically just giving the Leftists what they want.
What they really want is more complicated, but using legality as a fence is much simpler and faster to communicate, and is part of expressing that they are not-racist.
B) You should really be careful with that knife since it has a two-sided blade. If they don’t have any obligations, then they don’t have any rights, either. Furthermore, isn’t that like saying a trespasser has no obligation to obey the property owner when they aren’t even supposed to be trespassing in the first place?
Jesus this is the most frustrating thread ever. I get banning guns and knives, but who in their right fucking mind would ban goddamn pepper spray? What the fuck do they think people are gonna do if they’re allowed to have it? I keep seeing people talk about how the need to defend yourself is rare and letting people have weapons would make things worse but I don’t see how that applies to mace at all.
I’m so glad the 2nd Amendment covers my right to military-grade prosthetic limbs.
Edit: More seriously, erosion in this direction is what they’re worried about.
superheroes only work because they are given perfect information; even when the Avengers screw up they never seem to screw up in ways that would get them fired, like accidentally mistaking some normie for a supervillain and punching their head right off.
Well, that’s a good reason for superheroes to have no-kill policies, even when it sometimes seems obvious that they should just kill the villains that keep coming back every few episodes and endangering the city, since one failure could cost thousands of lives.
Usually superheroes find criminals in the act, but even so, tying them up and leaving them for the cops after beating them up has a much better failure mode, limited in part by the quality level of local law enforcement.
The problem is not that the Onceler is morally bad, but that he is rationally responding to bad incentives which lead to bad outcomes: he is indeed “doing what comes naturally” in the current (lax) regulatory environment.
If the only way to avoid bad outcomes is for everyone in your society to be morally virtuous and to have access to perfect information then you have a problem!
A better way would be to pay attention to outcomes and have a system of checks and balances that provides a feedback loop to correct the incentives that led to them, combined with an enforcement mechanism to punish violators.
My my, Argumate, what a novel idea.
Are you suggesting that perhaps we should also judge the rule systems themselves by their outcomes?
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.
I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.
Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.
I think it runs afoul of so many measurement, externality, long tail, and other issues that what you’re going to get is a mess, especially if you try it on everything at once.
It’s part of a general vein of policies that don’t have to be implemented all at once.
For instance, we could start by requiring legislators to make non-binding predictions about the legislation they pass when it’s passed, with specific, measurable outcomes, like “the annual murder rate will decline by 3-5% with 80% confidence”. No differences in pay, no firing, just a formal record to compare to. It might not sound like much, but it’s a step towards explaining the expected outcomes of massive bills in clearer language that can be verified.
Then if that works, we can expand it and start awarding compensation based on the outcomes. (Although I admittedly have been thinking about a far deeper version where percentile score in a legislative outcome prediction market is part of a formula that determines public funding of parties, with lots of delegated voting and other things.)
Other options to improve governance include automatically putting sunset provisions in bills and various regulations so that they don’t just keep accumulating and accumulating if they aren’t actually that politically important. Again, small step that can be reversed.
If people weren’t such idiots, we could get cities to volunteer to test various policies like basic income or wage subsidies before national rollouts instead of just kinda assuming they’d work because it’s morally virtuous without successively larger scales of testing.
We could probably also pay more to legislators, like they do in Singapore. It was only about $250 million or something to give all the congressmen $500k-$1M salaries, plus another $30M for the President. For a bit more, we could pay them significant pensions and forbid them from working for anyone but the government afterwards. If it saves the US economy well under 1% of GDP (0.0014%?) due to getting a better quality of legislator, it comes out to a net gain. The exact numbers here are less important than the orders of magnitude. Congress has an enormous amount of power over the economy, but they aren’t paid based on that. However, they can use that power to get wealth by converting it via corruption.
There have got to be a hundred things we could do better.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.
I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.
Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Right, but one might want organizations to make decisions based on more accurate information, not just individuals, and measuring the rate of underground bunker construction doesn’t tell you which apocalyptic scenario is most likely - and thus needs to be most addressed.
The following assume the prediction markets are being used to help evaluate the standing of government bureaucrats or employees in another very large organization. In this instance, the resource being bet is not currency per se, but a “credibility score” used in hiring and other decisions.
Reselling Shares of Predictions
One issue with making bets is that they may take longer than your lifespan in order to pay out. Shares of bets on, for example, global temperature in the year 2100 should be something that can be traded by itself. In this sense these kinds of bets become a long-term investment that can be used to hold one’s credibility score, particularly if bet payoffs are indexed to prediction market inflation.
Catastrophe Bets Reserve Catastrophe Goods
A basket of catastrophe goods are held in reserve for those who make predictions of incidents which would cause the prediction market to end. This might include gold, guns and ammo, priority access to bunkers, and so on. These would be distributed by the market operator in preparation for the event, but are only held by the bettor unless the actual catastrophe kicks in.
Prohibition of Close Involvement
Based on the level of control someone has over the outcome of a scenario being bet on (1/N?), they may be prohibited from betting on it.
Alternatively,
Prohibition of Betting Against Own Success
If you’re on a project, you can only bet on it succeeding, not coming late or failing. Colluding with outsiders to get payment for the project failing is a punishable offense, and these will be monitored and punished.
Alternatively,
Randomization of Selection of Betting Participants with Self Recusal
Spread bets over the organization at random to lower the probability that any participant has too much control over the outcome and is thus able to sabotage it. This may result in a hit to accuracy, depending on the estimating capabilities of your organization.
There are probably other mechanisms that can be added to try and get better / less corrupt behavior from the prediction markets.
to add to this “humans are weird” thing did you know that humans are the only species on earth with the ability to throw things with any significant degree of accuracy and force (apes can throw with about the force of a human ten year old, but cant lock their wrists well enough for accuracy)
and we just never really think about it bc its so easy and simple to us that pretty much all of our sports are based around the concept of throwing things accurately
so what if the concept of projectile weapons takes most species FOREVER to get the hang of, or even come up with in the first place. a human goes onto a ship and throws some trash into the nearest reclaimer, shouts “kobe!” and all the other aliens on board absolutely LOSE THEIR MINDS
I definitely didn’t know this about humans but it’s actually really neat
We have a bunch of very weird traits that aren’t found in taxonomically nearby species. It’s really blatantly obvious that we’re eusocial or otherwise superorganismic. But EO Wilson got a mountain of shit for pointing this out in 2011, so the status quo is still basically that Ayn Dawkins’ discrete genome sequence proves that everyone should eat the poor because Hamilton’s rule says we’re all equal in the eyes of a dead God.
So hyped to watch as our future becomes so crazy that intellectuals now would be hostile if you even suggested it as a possible future
I propose a new form of measurement of how interesting the times you live in are - the amount of days you’d need to travel backwards in time until the average person would refuse to believe you and perhaps think you were joking/insane/trying to start a fight for describing to them the major historical events that happened between their time and yours. Let’s call the unit of measurement the cassandra.
For example, on the day after the 2016 election, you’d only need to travel back a single day and tell them that Trump won to get that reaction. November 9th was a 1-cassandra day. Since Trump has taken office I think we’re averaging about 7 cassandras. But I estimate most of my lifetime has averaged in the hundreds of cassandras at least. And throughout most of history I’d estimate the cassandra level has been in the thousands, easily.
“Communism will be a system of workers’ councils or it will not exist. The “association of free and equal producers;’ which determines its own production and distribution, is thinkable only as a system of self-determination at the point of production, and the absence of any other authority than the collective will of the producers themselves. It means the end of the state, or any state-based system of exploitation. It must be a planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitudes of the market system.”—
Difficult for the workers councils over here and the workers councils over there to coordinate their production to ensure that there are no shortfalls or gluts without an effective way of allocating targets and determining the most efficient ways of reaching them.
it sounds like this “association of free and equal producers” includes all producers, hence an authority that rests with the “collective will of the producers themselves” and a concept of “planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitude of the market system,” which is only thinkable as a comprehensive system of allocative planning
it doesn’t really sound like “the end of the state,” though; it’s just that here “the state” has been replaced by the TUC/AFL-CIO
Cyberpunk dystopia where mega-unions for the largest producers dominate the Central Council by having the largest number of employees, obtaining the most resources for themselves by controlling the planning process.
concept: feminists should encourage straight women to attempt to initiate more relationships with men instead of waiting for men to initiate.
I thought this was the case already, no?
I could be wrong, but at based on my observations there are at least ten thinkpieces recommending men should make fewer approaches for every one suggesting that women should make more.
At least based on a simple monogamous relationship model where both sides desire to find a partner, women are going to have to expect to tolerate a lot more approaches unless they’re willing to make a lot more approaches.
(Note that this model can break down if one gender is more eager to trade up than another or more interested in non-monogamous relationships or whatever).
“I don’t think there’s a young person, a woman, a Democrat, independent or a diverse voter that will stay home.” Stephanie Cutter, Democratic strategist, on the impact of a Republican decision to not nominate a supreme court justice, as quoted in the NYT.
Just one question comes to mind: how does a voter become diverse?
idk about you man but I am diverse as FUCK
American racial euphemisms are so frickin’ cringey
White people, particularly white men, know that they will never be counted as “diverse”, further increasing their incentive not to support “diversity”.
