I hate the needless moralism with incest on this site. I don't mean with legit concerns about consent and power dynamics but posts going "COUSIN MARRIAGE IS ICKY!!". I mean, this site is gung ho about animal abuse and killing but suddenly something where absolutely nobody is hurting nothing is considered totally wrong. Sorry, it just irritates me.
one million notes but it’s just people going “I know right!!!” instead of dating this person
That makes me wonder who I’d get if I updated my dating profile with my blog description.
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist. Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People’s Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the Earth Sphere Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Would it be the mad? Those with strange humor? Aspiring science fiction writers?
Oh who am I kidding, I don’t have the time/energy for a romantic partner right now.
real question is how you would react to an equivalent profile
Boring answer: Depends on the context in the rest of the profile.
Fun answer: Send an opening message in-character. You humans like that kind of thing, right?
Sidereal answer: I don’t date time paradox duplicates. I mean, if you think ordinary genetic risks are bad…
Old: A white man goes to Asia and learns their mystical art of kung fu. He becomes better than all the students that have lived there their whole lives, then returns to America to seek vengeance for his dead buddy cop.
New: A white man goes to Asia and learns their mystical art of sushi. He becomes better than all the students that have lived there their whole lives, then returns to America to open an Asian Fusion restaurant to seek vengeance against GMO food.
one million notes but it’s just people going “I know right!!!” instead of dating this person
That makes me wonder who I’d get if I updated my dating profile with my blog description.
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist. Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People’s Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the Earth Sphere Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Would it be the mad? Those with strange humor? Aspiring science fiction writers?
Oh who am I kidding, I don’t have the time/energy for a romantic partner right now.
This is not a place of honor. We buried a ton of useless poison sludge here. It shoots invisible death rays that kill you slowly, so don’t dig it up or you’ll die.
why don’t we just surround it with something even more toxic that kills people quickly; a few dead explorers could save a village from radiation poisoning
Booby traps just signal that there’s something valuable being protected.
reverse psychology: surround it with huge advertising signs that visibly reek of desperation
I mean, we aren’t opening up Qin Shi Huang’s underground Mercury (and possibly crossbow) funhouse so maybe explorers in the future would indeed be deterred
only because he made sure that legends of his House Of Fun And Pain were passed down the generations for us to receive!
which is really the lesson here; if you don’t want people to be harmed by your nuclear waste dumps after the collapse of civilization, maybe you could try avoiding the collapse of civilization.
I brought this up with the Central Committee and said we should reprocess the spent fuel for a 300-400 year storage time instead.
They rejected my proposal on the grounds that the collapse of civilization would inherently involve the destruction of the United States of America as a political entity, and therefore anyone harmed by digging up a ten thousand-year-old radioactive waste dump under such conditions would, almost by definition, not be an American citizen.
Sometimes I think the decision to put that Kissinger-Trump bot in charge of the DoE was a mistake.
Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.
This entire situation happened because people were unwilling to pay for content. Your plan for this is… to not pay for content.
This seems akin to the, “why do you make me hurt you” defense.
If Eve attempts to derive revenue from manipulating Alice into spending her money unwisely, thereby deriving less benefit from it than she could otherwise, it is bad for Eve to succeed, and it is good for Eve to fail and starve in the street.
Advertisers deserve to be given long prison sentences. I don’t want to do that, because it would violate their freedom of speech. However, they do deserve it.
“Content” that cannot survive without advertising doesn’t deserve to exist.
Remember that time when Google took over the government and forced everyone to connect to websites that had advertising at gunpoint?
Well you probably don’t because we’re not in that timeline. As for myself, I still haven’t forgiven GDN, but fortunately it doesn’t exist yet, and it may never exist.
Look I’m not gonna wring you out for using an ad blocker just because you don’t like ads, but don’t style yourself as a morally superior revolutionary over it. You aren’t. This “content that’s supported by ads doesn’t deserve to exist” thing is ridiculous posturing, and on some level you know it.
Internet advertisements are a form of microtransaction payment that exists due to coordination problems, partially because the value of one read of a webpage is both low and unknown before reading it. A proper alternative system would be a form of widely-accepted digital currency that made it cheap and easy to send very small amounts of money, perhaps backed by the State if you’re into that sort of thing.
Suggesting that paying money, which is a direct and very expensive signal about not wanting advertisements, is unacceptable, is basically the exact opposite of solving the problem.
Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.
This entire situation happened because people were unwilling to pay for content. Your plan for this is… to not pay for content.
selfreplicatingquinian said: $10/month for no ads and the ability to play videos in the background or with the screen off turned out to be totally worth it for me. You can even just subscribe to Google Music and get the YouTube sub free
hmm there’s the instinctive revulsion at paying for what used to be free, but honestly this makes so much economic sense; if you want to be catered to you need to be the customer, not the product.
arguably I should pay for youtube or stop using youtube, much as I stopped using Netflix when I judged the payment wasn’t worth it.
I’d love to pay youtube
Of course, youtube would love for me not to, on account of I’m in a country not on their list yet.
So I keep using ublock origins.
Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.
Incentives though! What if the monthly fee disables other Google ads and also disables their tracking service; how much do they even make per user per month? Maybe this would be more profitable for them, then they could tell the advertisers to go to hell and not need to worry about the ever imminent collapse of the online advertising market.
Danegeld.
Not a good analogy. The Danes aren’t offering an actual service. YouTube, however, is an actual service on offer and costs money to run, like various other websites.
diogenesvonneumann said: Alawites are about 10% of the Syrian population, fighting a war to maintain their dominance over the majority Sunnis is pretty close to imperialism. And Russia supporting Assad in that war to maintain access to their naval base definitely is. On the other hand the other aspiring rulers of Syria are probably even worse.
If a sufficiently nasty war broke out in the Middle East that resulted in forced ethnic relocation similar to what happened in Europe at the end of WWII and the Yugoslav Wars resulting in relatively monolithic ethnostates, would that make the situation more fucked up or less fucked up or just a different variety of fucked up.
(Because as people keep pointing out, Europe has been suspiciously peaceful since right-wing nationalists achieved their dream of neatly reshuffling all the people and borders to line up, barring some over enthusiasm where they mistakenly thought the German border might extend a thousand miles into Russia).
While I genuinely like the idea of allowing different ethnic groups to have their own laws (providing Exit is still an option, etc, etc) to a degree and nation-states are a way to do that, I suspect that the sectarian religious divisions might cause them to constantly bristle at each other.
It might not be enough. But then again, maybe that war would bring about an Islamic Reformation.
I hope the corrupt officials of the Earth Sphere Federation throw every Globalist in jail for meaningless political crimes. Because that’s where this ends. But they’ll throw me in instead. If there is one world government, there can be no place for me.
An Earth Federation will not allow cultural enclaves that might challenge its power, that exclude people it politically favors. It won’t allow that kind of gated community, much less a full-blown city-state. And there will be nowhere to go except Space.
Claiming you don’t need or want a safe space of any kind because “life isn’t safe” is the most obnoxious kind of bravery debate.
Life as an entity/overarching concept isn’t safe, sure, but we’re not talking about safety from random happenstance; we’re talking about things we can control. You could get hit by a car tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you should take a bath with your toaster. Similarly, the fact that some people out there in the world might be callous and cruel is no reason not to avoid callousness and cruelty when you have the option. On the contrary: it’s a reason to insist on more exacting standards when you have the chance to do so.
Part of the opposition to safe spaces is driven by two things:
1. Attempts to turn entire institutions into “safe spaces” are undertaken by SJ advocates, even when making a space safe for one group means making it unsafe for another group, and this can be used as a means of political control.
2. The opposition knows darn well that they aren’t allowed to have their own spaces, therefore they want to deny every other group their ability to make an exclusive space. Part of the reason for this is that SJ tends to make excuses for why their own policies should not apply to themselves.
Combine these together, and “the world isn’t a safe space” becomes a suitable rhetorical weapon - after all, they aren’t allowed a space so they have nothing to lose by it.
The average hackathon environment makes for a hard place for coding females–let alone noncoding ones–to feel comfortable but is deeply necessary, Ali says: “Having that diversity is actually a huge asset.”
Each of the women were adamant about not letting biases become an excuse for them. And none is apologetic for not having prior coding knowledge. They do, however, ask for a level playing field–in all positions technical or not. “Noncoding women’s voices and ideas matter,” Ahmad says. “It doesn’t matter if they [women] don’t know how to code, because that’s a teachable skill, but passion isn’t. Hustle isn’t.”
“There’s not enough tech diversity because programming companies won’t hire women who can’t code.”
This is a pattern that crops up again and again. From a certain angle, it’s obvious why it happens: It alienates competent menand women. And it gives professional diversity consultants a foot in the door.
Full-time culture warriors can be the “idea guy“, but not the coder/engineer/manager. So this move gives activist a way to weasel their way in without having to invest time into skills and without being accountable when the implementation sucks.
The other part of the strategy, drawing a line between sub-groups and declaring one more female or more feminist, gives you an easy rallying flag, a motte, a bailey, and a group to blame.
I was scrolling through Tumblr and saw a vintage photo of a pretty woman saying ‘I hate men. if one of them touch me I will bite his hand off.“
I assumed this was posted by someone who thought it was funny or relatable. There are lots of images and messages on Tumblr like this - light hostility towards men, from attractive women.
I didn’t even notice my anticipation that this was done by someone approving, for an approving audience - until I imagined reversing the genders. If there was an image of a handsome man demonstrating light hostility towards women, I would anticipate that it is done by a radical or tiny group, for a largely disapproving audience. I would be much more shocked.
I don’t like the general social acceptance of hostility towards men, is my point. It’s hypocritical, because that same social acceptance vanishes if the hostility is towards women.
Men are in the process of noticing this, which is why male gender movements (distinct from the movement that is actively opposed to notice this) are popping up.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.
It’ll be great.
Make America Confused Again
Ranma m8 all I’m saying is that the RAND Corporation knew that the Iraq War wouldn’t go at all as well as planned, so an entire legislature composed of them and a bunch of other think tanks might reasonably outperform politicians.
Now I know what you’re thinking - Americans are too stupid to use a delegated voting system where the top 100 delegates by delegated vote count form the legislature, much less navigate a ballot of over 500 registered delegate candidate organizations - but I have an answer to this. The first page of the ballot will just have the top five by previous vote count in the last election times percentile standing in the legislative prediction market. They don’t need to know what that means, just click one of the five big buttons.
…Actually nevermind this will somehow get accused of racism within about five days of going into effect.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.
You say that now, but once I enact 7-part Regional Federalism in order to ease the introduction of Mexico and Canada into the NAU, your opinion on Vice Director Kanye and I may change.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.
I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.
So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.
what does America spend on defence, $600 billion a year?
I’ve seen costs for the Iraq war being bandied about in the trillions.
difficult to turn off the tap, I think.
I’ve been infuriated by the shear cost of the Iraq War simply in economic terms since around 2008. Either they’re looters or they’re freakishly incompetent, and I don’t like either. I’m really hoping this whole Trump thing works out. He’s at least smart enough to realize that you can’t just export democracy to other countries like it was done to Japan - or that you have to actually stay there and make it stick, like Japan.
Of course if you actually notice that not all cultures can support democracy and that hey, you’re going to have to do some real proper imperialism to make it stick and overwrite non-trivial chunks of the local culture, that marks you as right-wing these days…
Maybe I am right wing now. I did, after all, say that if a Communist Revolution emerged, I’d have to back the Anti-Communists. (Struggle sessions and famines aren’t really my thing.)
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
Christopher Balding has described significant accounting weirdness around these funds, where the numbers just don’t add up:
I’m not qualified to investigate these claims (or indeed any claims) but given the level of corrupt investment money flowing from Malaysia and Singapore into Australia recently I would certainly not take any government figures for granted.
Thank you for this information. The last time I read about this, it was just noticing the discrepancy between GIC and Temasek growth (7-16%) and the CPF payout (2.5-4%), making it seem that the Dark Open Secret was that the government bureaucrats were using the population’s savings for cheap capital which they could then out-earn on and give themselves handsome salaries. But if the actual growth is not that strong, it could be a big problem.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.
Edit: The zoning laws aren’t going to be fixed. The law enforcement is not going to be fixed. We aren’t going to pay our politicians an amount which actually reflects how dangerous/important they are to the economy, and we’re going to get a higher minimum wage and higher unemployment and a trash fractional UBI rather than wage subsidies. Cities will go bankrupt and urban sprawl will drain our energy. Money for clean energy will be invested into solar walkways that don’t even work.
I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.
So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.
I was doing semi deep dive into Orion’s Arm after @immanentizingeschatons reminded me of it, and it got me thinking about post-scarcity and politics.
Specifically, I was comparing it to some of the other post-scarcity settings I’ve seen, like Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer, and Nova Praxis. One thing that all of these have in common is that the politics presented in the game seems off.
Nova Praxis and Mindjammer to my mind don’t really have political conflict. They try to describe some of the political units, but they seem to be stereotypes masquerading as politics or and otherwise just poorly described. Eclipse Phase and Orion’s Arm do have political units, but they’re fairly obviously based on the political viewpoints favored in the demographic and seem kind of goofy and impossible because of that.
And it strikes me that to some level this is an impossible problem. If you think there won’t be real politics in the post-scarcity future, I’m going to very much doubt that. But if you think that you can predict the nature of political conflict in the post-scarcity future, I’m also going to very much doubt that. So, either way, you’re stuck with writing a political scene that’s weird.
But really, can there truly be post-scarcity? Maybe with magic violating conservation of matter-energy, but without it, someone is going to want to use the mass of your asteroid to build their habitat to replicate their ideology.
Good points but I take issue with "Because game journos are not real journalists and will praise you if you, like, give them a free Nexus 7" A 4-pack of chicken nuggets would suffice, you don't have to buy them a whole Nexus 7.
Is there any way to get Muslim immigrants to Western countries to integrate better, or are the cultures just totally incompatible?
I don’t think they can integrate and stay substantially Muslim, no, but I think they can integrate just fine if they drop Islam or water it down into meaninglessness like most Christians and Jews in the West have with their religions. And for that to happen I think people need to be way less *socially* tolerant of sincere Islam and recognize it as the enemy of any free society instead of virtue-signaling about how they’re not racist against a religion. Like, on the basis of how badly its claims have been debunked and how immoral its teachings are, I’d put Islam well below even Mormonism and Scientology on the religion tier list, it’s somewhere swimming in the deep abyss along with the Christian Identity Movement and Aum Shinrikyo. That’s how you should treat serious Muslims - their ideas are worthy of nothing but mockery, the principles they teach are vile, their religious traditions absurd. If you made it to the West, you’re free, you don’t have to pretend you believe in that self-contradictory nonsense any more, and you shouldn’t be bringing it with you. Ex-Muslims, though, should be especially praised and respected, like people who grew up in a cult but were strong enough to free themselves from it as adults. And beer-drinking bacon-eating cultural Muslims should just be shrugged at.
The alternative to integration, though, would be having distinct Muslim residential enclaves like Muslim Chinatowns, and I think that could also be somewhat practical - but Western states would have to allow voluntary self-segregation and greatly increased local autonomy for communities to make that happen, and they’ve spent the last half-century forcibly integrating and atomizing everyone and centralizing power. You’d need to let them enforce their abhorrent religious laws at the local level to keep them from forcing them on the country at the national level - I’m not sure that that’s something that should be tolerated, either, though.
If not either of those voluntary-leaning solutions you’d have to start doing serious 180s on a lot of the Western democratic consensus and start stripping voting rights from them, or expelling them from the country by force and becoming explicitly nationalist, or just banning Islam, if you didn’t want to wind up being reduced to dhimmi status by the inevitable consequences of the combination of democracy and a Muslim majority.
The Bible posits that the circumference of a circle in the Temple was three times its diameter, but π≈3.14,
tired: therefore gods don’t exist
wired: therefore circles were smaller back then
This is just a statistical error. The circumference of the median circle is
π times its diameter. The Cosmic Negacircle which rests in the Vaults Beyond Time and has a circumference of -1*(10^2470) times its diameter is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Why do communists seem to think that competitive markets and providing a standard of social welfare for people are mutually exclusive?
Well, not all of them do, see market socialism, but there are aesthetic and political yearnings for a more communitarian approach which run much deeper.
There’s an interesting dichotomy between the “in a capitalist system, you can do whatever you want“ and a “The capitalist system will optimize everything for maximum efficiency“ lines. It’s one of the things that I think of whenever I see sharing economy stuff, I’ve seen the occasional quip mentioning old complaints about how in a communist system you wouldn’t have a car, you’d have to share one, which is totally unlike our current system with uber.
That baugruppe discussion reminded me of it, it’s an attempt by libertarian-leaning people to build a commune to solve problems they have with the housing market. Feels like it really should be built at sea though.
Do you support the President's relocation of Oprahists that violate the National Freedom Policy to the California Special Autonomous Region? (I think it's a bit heavy-handed, tbh, but good luck getting the AFP to reconsider it.)
I like the old liberties, but we have to admit that the Oprahists have provided aid and comfort to the insurrections in our cities and the rural rebellion in the Deep South – so the old liberties are no protection of our first freedom – freedom from fear
that said, I prefer the old policy of tracking, monitoring, and punishing individuals, and suppressing the uprisings when they come; collective punishment seems like a return to the dark old days, led by the worst elements in America – the cruel irony of ‘American Freedom’ isn’t lost on anyone now, I hope
when peace returns, we’ll look back on this in shame
Harem anime is like reverse birds: the females are colorful and competitive creatures full of life and personality, and the male is an indistinct grey blob that goes flying sometimes.
And myself, if you don’t mind sifting through the dross of complete shitposts and Maleficent fanart for the occasional gold of a real post.
omg thank <3
what really annoys me is when people to about the subreddit tumblrinaction and are like ‘i liked it when it was just making fun of otherkin,now it’s all about SJWs’
really? the ONLY bit you were ok with was making fun of the people pretty much trying to do their own thing and even if misguided weren’t harming anyone?
When it was a baby subreddit (i remember those times) it was way less mean-spirited and we were even fans of some otherkin bloggers (but also, I’m going to note that a lot of otherkin bloggers were super vile for no reason)
What’s the SJ value if I think Otherkin is ridiculous and undermining transgender people, but also support their morphological freedom in the awe-inspiring/terrifying Transhuman future?
There is an idea, in some circles, that parents effectively own their children. This risks leading to various abuses, and also doesn’t line up with all moral intuitions. On the other hand, most children do not have the capabilities, including executive function, to adequately evaluate and act on long-term preferences that will become important when they become adults.
I propose a rather simple-but-vague model that has no doubt been proposed before. The child is effectively held in a trust owned by their future self. The duty of the parents, therefore, is to safely deliver a well-developed adult to be inherited at the point of hand-off. They are the trust’s operators, not the trust’s owners, and thus they have a variety of duties, abilities, and limitations.
A parent can have vaccines administered. They can’t remove a significant portion of the child’s body, or demand a tattoo of their choice. They can enact ordinary disciplinary measures, but not abusive ones. They can require that the child attend school and do well at it, but they are not allowed to engage in pure ideological indoctrination. And, if they fail to meet the terms, they can be removed from administration of the metaphorical trust.
The exact details might vary. In many ways this is what people are acting on already - thus why Child Protective Services exists in the first place - but it isn’t explicitly specified. I outline it here mostly so that it can be brought up as a counter-model when people suggest either ownership of children, or treating children as atomistic adults with fully-formed executive functioning and experience.
In practice, the child wouldn’t be held in trust by the future adult, but in trust by society at large. What counts as ordinary vs abusive discipline and education but not indoctrination is inevitably defined by the local monopoly on force, because they’re the ones with the ability to remove the child in cases of breach of trust. This feels like it would gravitate towards parents being contracted childcare for the state, and a too empowered CPS could greatly restrict the space of valid parenting styles without huge outcry because they’re “protecting the children”. To some extent this is already happening e.g. the Maryland parents who almost had their kids taken away for letting them walk to school.
I’m not proposing this as a formal legal model, but rather an intuitive moral one, and mostly to counter the two other models I mentioned, which could result in child abuse or exploitation.
… anyone have foreseen the tragedy that awaited them? The 20th century (Old Calendar) reification of a rough gender binary had reached its apotheosis and like all such apogees it was soon to be riven, split by the seeds that had fallen into the hidden cracks of its apparently pristine edifice. Things had reached such a state that even cheap intoxicants were divided between mascul [Text missing] While scholars differ on whether the introduction of intoxicants aimed at gendfugees (an anachronism - the term used at the time was ‘enbies’) was originally satirical in intent, what is certain [Text missing] ‘cultural appropriation’. Thus, as the number of gender identities soared into the tens of millions, the culturally condoned ‘ownership’ of a specific, subtly different intoxicant was a badge of great honor, not to be trifled with except at great risk of sanction. Distillation was a rite both sacred and fractious, [Several pages missing] final triumph of the Individualists. Ten billion people, ten billion genders, ten billion nanobreweries. Time spent in one’s distillery pursuing a unique perfection led to loneliness which led to drinking. The civilization’s nadir was at hand. Thankfully, [Text missing] still be found, in the hidden places of the world, corroded metal reminders of a past now almost lost to cyberhuman understanding.
Lets say no one used nukes or chemical weapons, how devastating would a world war on the same scale as the previous 2 in numbers be but with modern weaponry?
Lets say no one used nukes or chemical weapons, how devastating would a world war on the same scale as the previous 2 in numbers be but with modern weaponry?
Now consider the consequences if this is relatively common - or at least if men believe it is relatively common.
Would male gender norms, with all their fear of deviation, and desire to be high-status and dominant and on top of a hierarchy of masculinity, look like they do today? Would the norms be seemingly stubbornly resistant to change in ways that can’t be adequately explained by Feminist theories about gender?
I’m not sure how to untangle it, and how much is cultural vs deeper human psychology.
“Yes,” said the technician. “We got the test results back, and well…” The look on her face was very grim.
Bernstein was aghast. They had all agreed to pass the law. They had all agreed that it was wrong and immoral to have sexual thoughts about others who didn’t want to be thought of sexually.
And, since one couldn’t know who was or was not okay with being thought of sexually beforehand, it was a moral necessity that humanity should default to asexuality. Gender discrimination and sexual crimes had dropped off significantly. Only an underground of resentful dissidents had refused to comply.
“Surely it can’t be,” said Bernstein. “She couldn’t be that reckless. It’s impossible.” He let out a second “impossible” under his breath, just barely audible, as he stared at the technician.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bernstein,” said the technician, “she’s sex-positive.”
There’s this…. aesthetic? I don’t know if that’s the right word. It’s this “style” that pops up in certain internet communities or forums or chatrooms. This style features things like:
* Using lots of action-emoticons like *blushes and nibbles on lip* * Using cutsey words like “glomp” and “snuggle” * Innocence and child-like aesthetics, word usage, and attitudes * High overlap with the kink community, so familiarity or references to things like dom/subbyness. * Strong affiliation with anime, with avatars and shared images being almost entirely anime. * High and dispersed “slutty”(?) affectionateness. Anyone may be glomped or tickled, with naughtiness being an assumed hidden but universal trait. Reminds me of the feeling of cuddle parties. * High sexual undertones, although this generally exists on a spectrum depending on the community. Can range from “innocent” flirting to full on cybering. * Association with the queer community
I have questions about this but I don’t even know exactly what I want to find out.
Why the high overlap with anime? Why the babylike combination with sexual promiscuity? I feel like I understand “littlespace” kinks, but this seems different for some reason. Why so much glomping, blushing, and arm pinning? And more importantly, why do they all happen together at the same time so often?
It’s such a heavy and permeating style. I’ll see regular chatrooms that operate pretty normally, except everyone talks like that and has anime avatars. Why? I can’t think of any comparable instance where other “regular chatrooms” operate under an aesthetic so pervasive. I’m assuming engaging in this…. not-quite-roleplay? gives some sense of validation or excitement or security or something, but I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out what it is. Can someone help explain?
I mean, I’m assuming your avatar is a picture of you. So you’re attractive and female, which means that:
Your advances will, more often than not, be wanted.
Your advances will usually not be perceived as threatening, even when they aren’t wanted.
Your advances will raise, rather than lower, the social status of the person you approach, unless they’re already very high social status.
These groups are going to involve people whose affection is usually treated as unwanted, undesirable, oppressive, or even evil. But they still have that drive for affection, to want to be loved, to be desirable. A lot of what you’re probably seeing is that the left half of the bell curve for gender presentation for men has been reserved only for gay men, combined with the side effects of (low-status) men being seen as disgusting and a threat.
I’m actually expecting pretty substantial defections from having male or purely male bodies in the early transhuman era, until masculinity performance is so utterly broken by transhuman body choice and bi/pansexuality becomes so normal that the threat narrative collapses and it returns to a more even distribution.
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xhxhxhx said: I’m delighted to see you subtweeting Stalinists
I’m going to start posting videos of happy Americans dancing, solid evidence that they are content with their government and have not been brainwashed by the finance capital that oppresses them.
Well, while I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with Voxette, I still think it’s misguided. The economies with more restricted worker hours below 40 seem to be underperforming and have lower employment, basic income plus fewer work hours simultaneously will cause a bigger hit on the economy, basic income (or other alternatives) already creates more worker leverage to negotiate for fewer hours and safer conditions, and slashing everyone’s Mondays across the board will hit a lot harder than alternatives, because not every worker’s time is equally valuable. Also, I don’t think it will sell well politically - and business will fight like dogs to prevent it from happening.
Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.
Additionally, just on shear economic cost vs efficiency, I can’t see a reason to prefer a combination of 4-day workweek + basic income in the short-medium term, given that the level of automation in the future is uncertain, over a low minimum wage plus direct-to-employee declining hourly livable wage subsidies.
Wage subsidies + low minimum wage would create lots of new jobs, which is a good sell politically, while also taking a lot of pressure off the poor and lower classes and giving them a lot more leverage. Businesses won’t fight it as hard, even though it will need a tax increase, since they’ll benefit from lower labor costs at the low end. It multiplies government spending with private spending for a larger potential effect. It can also be rolled out incrementally in different amounts to test out just how much economic efficiency is lost.
There are other potential advantages, I really should write a post on it specifically, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage vs UBI. I think the Republicans might support it as their alternative to UBI come 2024/2028.
There’s a few points I could make, but one of the great things about giving people time off is that it doesn’t affect the value of time off, and it’s not something that can just cause a decrease in employer contribution leaving people no better off. Giving money, that’s not as straightforward.
Considering it hasn’t seemed to perform well in other countries, I’d rather make simpler overtime rules, then crack down hard on those that don’t follow them.
Anyhow, as part of how I’d sell this, I’d set the starting wage with subsidies higher than the current minimum wage, and since it would make labor relatively cheaper, there’s not much reason to expect a decrease in hours at the low end.
In addition to the risks involved with yanking 20% of the work hours out of the economy, killing Monday also incentivizes workers to work under the table in violation of the employment law in order to get enough money, since the employers can actually cut their salaries to compensate, either directly or through attrition.
With state-backed wage subsidies, there’s no incentive to work under the table, because if the income isn’t reported, you don’t get the subsidy. Though, it is key for this plan that subsidies taper off more slowly than employer wages increase, but that’s how it should be to prevent a new Welfare Trap.
