Thanks to this healthcare debacle I’m feeling slightly vindicated in my feeling from last year that while Trump might be unprecedented in some ways as a presidential candidate let alone president, the sheer institutional inertia of the state and the gloriously recalcitrant nature of American politics would stymie his ability to radically reshape the nation. I mean it’s still early days, but yeah.
“I’m against immortality, no matter how far into the future it is, because it will be distributed only to millionaires, which is bad” actually says “we’ll literally solve mortality before anyone makes communism work”, but I’m not sure they realize it yet.
can someone please explain to me what the heck is going down in Russiatown
1) Small-time opposition politician Navalny spends years campaigning against corruption. No one cares. Politician is written off, albeit harried by frivolous cases.
2) Navalny uncovers a massive corruption and theft scheme Medvedev (premier and party leader) is involved in, shows his wineries and castles. Billions are stolen from the budget. Makes a documentary and a webpage. It goes viral.
3) Navalny organizes protests. Protests are banned almost everywhere in the country.
4) At least a hundred thousand people goes out into the streets to a complete media silence. Some are arrested.
This is on Putin’s anniversary (inauguration on 27 March 00)
5) Navalny gets arrested again, police immediately caught in making fraudulent documents.
6) People are openly discussing this in the street. Pictures go viral. The Streisand effect kicks into gear.
The revolution will not be televised. It will be snapchatted live.
> The revolution will not be televised. It will be snapchatted live.
It pleases me to see frivolous American social media technology put to some kind of actually-meaningful use. It makes me feel like maybe we’re not just burning big piles of cash for no reason.
Why does my theory of gender need to explain camgirls? Unless I'm operating on a different definition of that term.
Why is camgirl a viable career? Why are there so many camgirls? Why are there so few camgirls? Why are there almost no camboys, and those that do exist are mostly patronised by gay men? What are the demographics of camgirls and their customers, and why? And so on.
What do people think of the “Trump Humiliated By Health Care Failure” and “Health Care Rejection Shows Trump Is Already Lame Duck” and “Paul Ryan: Worst Speaker Of All Time?” discourse?
Most people I trust seem to think the health care bill was crap. Blaming people for writing a crappy health care bill seems fair enough.
But there seems to be more of an element of picking on them for being too weak to pass the bill, as if now they’re losers and we can never respect them again.
Can we just say something like “Elected officials should propose bills that they and their constituents want, give the rest of the country a chance to weigh in, and if the rest of the country says no, that means democracy is working and they should come back with something better”?
Like, this is complicated because I don’t want Republicans to pass a health care bill right now. But if this were actually important legislation, I would want the government to say “Good thing the American people made their voices heard,” roll up their sleeves, and then write a better bill.
Whereas now it seems like the incentive is to never propose anything that doesn’t have a 100% chance of getting passed the first time. And the other incentive is to desperately try to steamroll your legislation over everyone’s opposition and never admit you’re wrong, because if it fails (even for good reason) everyone will make fun of you.
Or am I missing something important here?
Bro, it’s the Orange Capitalism Man. Anything that can be used to verbally attack him will be.
Why are you expecting good faith or actually caring about long-term incentives on the meta? Neglecting long-term incentives on the meta is how we got here in the first place.
Why does my theory of gender need to explain camgirls? Unless I'm operating on a different definition of that term.
Why is camgirl a viable career? Why are there so many camgirls? Why are there so few camgirls? Why are there almost no camboys, and those that do exist are mostly patronised by gay men? What are the demographics of camgirls and their customers, and why? And so on.
just wanna clarify, i am susanr this is just a sideblog because i dont want all of the clown-names stuff on my main for cleanliness,
i’ll start from when i first met roxy (owner of clown names) because itll give you a better idea of my opinion of her
the first incident i remember with her is her using greentext arrows, ironically or not it was in a public group chat and it made people uncomfortable, and when people asked her to stop she kept doing it. this issue still hasnt been resolved and even though its minor it pretty much sums up roxy as a whole
a couple of people and i have actually confronted roxy in my public server, which has been archived and screenshotted, if you want i’ll give you links to both. basically it all boils down to: Roxy does bad thing -> doesnt apologize -> us telling her about it -> her still refusing to apologize and her pretty much… exaggerating what were doing, ie she says that theres a “witchhunt” or that were “attacking” her, this is still before clown-names by the way, which is saying something.
ever since that dragon maid anime came out her and her friends have been obsessed with it, and when people told them its bad, they pretty much blew it off, even though the show has major themes of pedophilia in it, and even her friend/mod of her server otend turned out to be pretty bad, i dont really know much of the details myself because i never joined her server, but that situation itself is a whole other story.
this is very broad and not very detailed but i hope it gives you an idea
ok maybe the owner is just an asshole….so what?
Making a call out post because someone is ‘mean’ to you is very petty- by your approach in life people might as well write hundreds of call out posts towards assholes they have interacted with
Is there any proof that she’s an actual pedophile sympathizer because from the information i’ve gathered thus far all I see is claims and not actual evidence.
this too
first incident i remember with her is her using greentext arrows, ironically or not
joke: calling out people for doing serious crimes like abuse
woke: calling out people for greentexting and liking dragon maid
Hey remember when people insisted that anyone who said callout culture is bad was just a guilt ridden apologist
How does using > get you in trouble anyway. That standard comes from email.
Normies have found out about it and are putting it in their videos and talking about it online. The fad is done. Choking is out. It’s over. It’s so 2016.
Alright, so here’s the new thing:
So during the middle of sex, you are going to pick up your girlfriend (or hookup partner), okay, lift her over your head, and throw her.
She’ll never see it coming, and the glorious rippling of your manly muscles as she falls from your show of brute strength will turn her on even more and help establish your masculine dominance.
“Look, all transhumanists want is Mercy but for real, and Iโm pretty sure YOUR dream is to date Tracer so you canโt talk”—(via rationalists-out-of-context)
❤
Like many here, I am followed by pornbots because I post quality content.
Now I know some of you are thinking, reading this, “Miti, honey-dear, baby-darling, pornbots don’t follow people for their outspoken Nationalism.” And you know, I know that.
You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.
To prevent social collapse, people individually enforce the old ways by shaming and ostracising individuals who have not paid their share, and over time this spreads to become an ironclad system where no one will employ you or trade with you if you haven’t made your (entirely voluntary!) tax payments.
Amazingly, this decentralised coordination arrangement produces identical results to our current system, only it is Philosophically Pure as the essential virtues of liberty and freedom are not compromised by men with guns, etc.
Then the people realise all this shaming and ostracising is a lot of effort to go to, and decide to coordinate the enforcement of the tax code in a central authority- oh no, they’ve relapsed into a state of sin! Despite absolutely nothing changing, their community is now Impure and they have all become Slaves once more.
Perhaps this can be called the P-slave hypothesis, for philosophical slaves who will swear up and down that they are not slaves despite clearly living in a world with an income tax code.
You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.
To prevent social collapse, the government fired corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats by the thousands, and consolidated the services they provide to be more efficient and offered them at a reasonable price.
Amazingly, the services offered were hot in demand, and the RGDP grew by 4% the next year even though there was some mild deflation. People brought more and more services for a while until for and not-for profit competitors started to emerge.
Then the government decided that they can better benefit the livelihood of their customers by split themselves into several smaller entities operating in smaller geographical regions, demutualizing into common stock corporations and spinning off some of their assets such as their road portfolio into a REIT.
Is this before or after the Communist revolution that occurs because all of a sudden entire classes of people cannot afford basic Sovereign Services, or find that suddenly Hyper-Platinum™ GovCorp members are immune to prosecution for murdering their servants for sport?
although I do feel that there is some rhetorical space for a hypothetical Ancap nation that isn’t currently occupied, namely turning a jaundiced eye to all forms of organisation: the state, corporations, familial clans, tribes, and telling them all to go to hell lest they institute oppression.
while this isn’t a super realistic scenario, in the context of ancap debates I feel it’s actually not that outlandish!
a society that wants to avoid being dominated by organisations that restrict freedom needs to institute hardcore anti-organisation memes, even to the point of inhibiting freedom of association if necessary; a truly individualistic society deserves nothing less.
Technically speaking I guess you can just view any given political system as an ancap framework in which all property is already owned by Westphalian states and all other laws are just conventions they’ve established since you have a right to decide how to treat people on your own property.
Yes, the ground state that we are likely to collapse back into.
But the states-as-people-in-ancapistan concept works well, it even has polycentric law, multiple defense organisations (NATO, Warsaw Pact, alliances) and bilateral and multilateral agreements of all kinds without any top-level state that holds a monopoly on violence (as much as the US would like to play this role).
And you can see the downside, it’s the one that Hobbes talked about and is formalized in the realist school of IR. Because it’s an anarchistic, in order to survive you have to be constantly worried about the power of other players and in many cases you damage them to maintain your survival.
Don’t worry m8, we can just replace it with one World Government to resolve these competitions and then-
No, stop killing each other over ideology! We can’t turn the entire world Communist!
A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders’ Twitter account Tweeted one of its true-but-repetitive bumper sticker slogans: “If all of you stand up and fight back against corporate greed, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish.” A number of liberals responded saying that this was totally irrelevant to current affairs. One person smugly replied: “We’re dealing with Russians and traitors today, not corporate greed. Do try to keep up.”
That speaks volumes. The suggestion that we shouldn’t be talking about corporate greed right now because our real enemies at the moment are the Russian government and people in our government with personal connections to them, as though corporate power is an occasional blip on our radar we can afford to ignore sometimes, is absurd. Furthermore, if you think foreign governments are more of a problem than America’s own wealthy and powerful, your worldview may not be quite as far away from Trump’s as you think.
Democrats are the dumbest people on earth
Russia is also a plutocracy using nationalism to distract from this insight. The fact that the two countries can point at each other means they mutually benefit from keeping up this charade.
The leader of our ruling party is a billionaire who owns castles and wineries and likes to pretend being a duke, all of our natural resource reserves were plundered by oligarchs, all of this was done with aid of the Clintons, and the democrats dare call Russians and not corporate greed the real problem?
ranma-official
The leader of our ruling party is a billionaire who owns castles and wineries and likes to pretend being a duke, all of our natural resource reserves were plundered by oligarchs, all of this was done with aid of the Clintons, and the democrats dare call Russians and not corporate greed the real problem?
Well see, you’re foreigners, but -
Dammit I can’t bring myself to say it even as a joke. : /
Either way, from what I can see there are many people the narrative isn’t working on, at least on the Russia angle, though corporate greed is still ignored. Still, I think I prefer this to the Clinton timeline.
is anyone else getting the feeling that we’ll never have a better chance at breaking up the democrat/republican stranglehold than immediately after this trump clusterfuck plummets off the cliff its headed towards? what’s our plan
Realistically, step one is a constitutional convention. Our system was accidentally designed to fall into a two-party system automatically.
Or you could just have another party realignment but that’s not quite the same thing.
I’m legit hoping the Looming Party Realignment happens, with the Republicans becoming Populist Nationalists and the Democrats becoming Globalist Technocrats. It would be an improvement for both of them, IMO.
This has to be the world’s most annoying thread; cousin marriage is actually really common!
In south India, where I’m from, cousin marriage has always been really common, till the recent past when some combination of Brit control, north Indian cultural dominance and urbanisation changed the norms.
I know people whose grandparents married their cousins. And, surprises galore, these people are not possessed by a singular will to always be eating.
I mean, come one guys, find it icky as you want, norm-mandated gut reactions aren’t subject to reason, but at least open the wikipedia page before prophesying the death of society.
Something doesn’t have to result in the total death of society to be a bad idea.
According to that same Wikipedia page, Europe banned cousin marriage as a continuation of Roman law. What are the GDP/caps of nations with low cousin marriage rates vs high cousin marriage rates? Why did studies find an inverse relation between cousin marriage and Democracy?
Then, of course, there is the Genetics section of that same page, which, while it might not have much issue with the first generation of cousin marriage, makes it clear that it can become a problem if it’s ongoing in a population.
I mean seriously man,
The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with [recessive] genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability.
Do you have any idea how much money that costs? And more importantly, the wealth that money represents? We might as well create ten thousand tons of steel and throw it into the sea.
It’s noted that it could be due to other factors of population-limited breeding, but that means those other population-limited breeding norms should also be removed.
I’m just not seeing how social advantages outweigh it at the current genetic technology level. It seems much wiser to head off these problems before they start than to spend tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars on medications and possibly later cybernetic prostheses.
And I can’t leave it as an individual choice due to political reasons - the dominant Western morality won’t allow increased medical fee taxes on the child for something the parents did. If it’s allowed and becomes widespread, somehow I am going to have to end up paying for it.
I don’t actually care to heap scorn on Darwin. That isn’t the point. I don’t trust people to be judicious without the taboo, and the taboo cannot be restored once it’s gone.
Like if you have a consensus that everyone should commit $X for common good but it’s not enforced, then each individual has temptation to withhold their own contribution, knowing that it won’t count for much in the scheme of things.
If only the morally virtuous contribute and the rest do not, then over time the morally unvirtuous end up controlling most of the assets in society. Great!
Yeah, this was my argument, but they didn’t accept it.
As far as I can tell, the far-right holdouts on the health care bill actually have a really legitimate demand.
So, like, there are a couple ways you can do health care. One is ‘the government decides which services are basic human rights and pays for them’, which is how most countries do it. That’s not happening in the U.S. any time soon. The debate is more between flavors of ‘the government decides which services are basic human rights and then requires insurance companies to cover them and then helps you pay for them with subsidies’.
And the Republicans are offering shit subsidies. So if they have a long list of which services are basic human rights - if they demand that all insurance plans offer genuine comprehensive coverage - then there will not be any health care plans on offer that aren’t obscenely expensive, and most poor people will have to just skip getting health care altogether.
The numbers are all made up, but imagine the Republicans give every person an $800 health care subsidy annually. Then imagine that insurance companies are willing to offer catastrophic coverage - insurance against cancer and heart attacks and getting hit by a bus and being diagnosed with a rare condition whose medications cost $10k a month - which doesn’t cover any routine expenses like wellness checks and dental, doesn’t cover therapy, doesn’t cover addiction programs - for $800/year. And they’re prepared to offer actually decent health insurance - which has minimal co-pays and covers therapy and wellness checks and vaccines and therapy and so on - for $6000 a year.
Right now, by law, they can’t offer the $800 plan, because therapy and addiction programs and wellness checks are things the government considers basic human rights and you are not allowed to offer health insurance that doesn’t cover them. So the only plan you’d be offered is the $6000 one, and if you’re a poor person, you probably can’t make that work, so you don’t buy health insurance at all.
The far-right caucus wants to make it legal to sell the very restricted $800 plan, which doesn’t cover anything close to everything you need but which is, with the subsidy, free. That’s better than no insurance and no subsidy, which is what unmodified Trumpcare gets you.
You’re welcome to be like ‘okay but the government messed up appallingly for this to even be a choice we have’, and you are 100% right. But I’d rather have a bad cheap plan than nothing.
They could have gotten away with healthcare vouchers, but they were too ideological to do it.
Trump pushed hard for a bill which failed in a way that made him look weak; sometimes mistakes aren’t evidence of a deeper plan, just regular incompetence.
I don’t disagree, but I can believe that Trump believes what he told Robert Costa when he pulled the bill:
“As you know, I’ve been saying for years that the best thing is to let Obamacare explode and then go make a deal with the Democrats and have one unified deal. And they will come to us; we won’t have to come to them,” he said. “After Obamacare explodes.”
“The beauty,” Trump continued, “is that they own Obamacare. So when it explodes, they come to us, and we make one beautiful deal for the people.”
It’s easier to walk away when you believe you can hold the Democrats hostage to their own failure. If the health exchanges fall apart, the Republicans have more leverage. They probably won’t happen – and its wrong to expect that the Republicans won’t take any blame if it does – but it’s not an outlandish belief. Paul Ryan might believe it.
The argument around homosexuality used rights (which don’t exist) vs sin (which also doesn’t exist at least in the sense they say it does). There were also lots of complaints that it is “unnatural”, which was nonsensical. That’s the level of debate by the normals. I watched it happen.
A nuanced position based on the actual benefit to society did not occur.
If the ideology of rights wins, then people have a right to cousin marriage and it is perceived as immoral for villainous consequentialist Nationalists (comme moi) to demand that the State should have an interest in not creating generations of new higher-genetic-risk children for very little gain, which it will then have to subsidize.
to be fair, our society at present has a deeply confused idea of what marriage is for, and this can be seen as a symptom of that
(I don’t particularly care what marriage is for. Expression of
romantic love, or child-having, or some package of legal rights,
whichever is fine. I’m just annoyed we can’t pick. Do one thing and do
it well, y'kno)
and now for the hot read as: unnecessarily disagreeable
take: in a world where the government (and a large tax base) pays the
floor healthcare costs of random persons, it’s totally reasonable for
them to be interested in banning things that will increase their costs.
If these things have sufficiently few supporters and many detractors,
guess which way we’re going to go in a democracy?
There’s definitely a legal argument for banning cousin marriage – @mitigatedchaos also touches on that in their reply here, for instance, and they’re not wrong per se. I’m skeptical that this sort of law does enough good to justify the loss of liberty, given that most people have a natural aversion to the behaviour in question and it’s the sort of thing that mainly becomes a problem when a lot of people do it over time, but certainly the state gets up to worse things for worse reasons.
But that doesn’t make a case that it’s less moral than anything with similarly deleterious effects – even from the most interventionist angle it’s, at best, an argument about picking your battles. My objection is that arguments against incest tend to be built around the idea that it’s a unique moral evil in a way that can’t really be supported by arguments from health or genetics. If people want to make pragmatic cost/benefit arguments that’s worth doing, but they need to get down off their high horse on the topic and onto a smaller horse that’s more within their means.
You spend how many hours talking with rationalists and public policy theorists about the nature of morality, evidence based interventions, and not shaming people for having politically unpopular beliefs.
Then someone brings up a taboo sexual activity, and it’s all “well if they had kids that might be bad so it seems proportionate to say anything romantic or sexual they do should be shamed. I mean just think of the medical bills for their hypothetical kids they never considered having.”
The challenge isn’t getting uninformed people to have good principles, it’s getting even thoughtful people to apply them instead of knee-jerk rationalizations.
This depends heavily on one’s opinion of the general population and their susceptibility to complex memes that depend on a careful analysis of information.
If one is optimistic, switching to the “it’s okay not to taboo this kind of incest socially, even if we will argue to them not to have kids” seems reasonable.
If one is pessimistic, then tearing away the current taboo won’t result in proportionate response, but rather no response.
An optimal political response isn’t actually available, and the odds that someone will be foreveralone if they can’t be with their cousin are pretty low, just leaving the taboo for now seems prudent, with the time limit of the next generation of genetic repair/enhancement technology.
Also we’ve had experiments with “societies that allow cousin marriage”, and it doesn’t look good.
This is an argument that we can’t have nuanced or moderate norms, because people will only listen to extremes.
It’s also an argument that our concern is “someone being forever alone”, and not “having the freedom to choose whatever they want romantically so long as its consensual.”
I’m not particularly invested in defending the rights of cousin-daters, so much as I am utterly flabbergasted at how people would never use this sort of logic in a serious debate, let alone tolerate it from their ideological opponents, but bring it up in taboo situations to justify feelings of ickyness.
It’s the damn Electoral College argument all over again. Yes, you are clever. All of rattumb is very clever. You can come up with nominal arguments against anything. Are they good arguments? Should they be taken as the same weight as the default ethical principles like “the person with more votes wins” and “let people do what they want.”)
Like imagine you wanted to date someone of the same sex, and a conservative was using the arguments of the form presented in this thread, as reasons you can’t. How upset would you be.
You haven’t noticed how opening the floodgates on gender many decades ago is already leading us in this direction? There is no stopping point - which might be okayish once we hit the Transhuman era and most of the negative consequences are removed, but before then there will be consequences and not all of us support atomistic individualism.
At issue is that rightists cannot tell what isn’t a risk and leftists cannot tell what is a risk.
Homosexuality is not contagious and isn’t particularly harmful. It also doesn’t make children. It doesn’t even really alter the dynamics of the straight dating market much. However, it would be a problem if it hit 20-40% of the population because as a species we depend on reproduction. (So if the situation were different then I would have a different opinion. But it isn’t, so gay marriage promotes membership in society, family, etc.)
But I will hold the line on polygamy, which is really the harmful polygyny when normalized, and we can see what happens in countries where it is common. I will hold the line on cousin marriage, which not only increases genetic risks but undermines nations. And of course, the taboo must be held on pedos.
These things have consequences far beyond the individual, and if your response on cousin marriage is “oh we’re going to make it legal but don’t worry, no one will use it anyway”, then why make it legal in the first place?
The ideological tools used to break down the barrier will prevent us from doing anything about it, like banning cousin marriages from producing children. On some level you must know that.
Sometimes I still think about that time that someone submitted to a confessions blog that they were scared of being called racist because of their faceblindness, and the mod responded “trying to opt out of being called racist is privileged and you should feel bad”
like
what must your mindscape look like if that seems like an appropriate response
…did the mod not know what “faceblind” means?
I think the logic was “you may not be racist because you’re faceblind, but you’re probably racist anyway, so fuck you”
At some point the correct response is that you don’t care whether others will call you racist, and you reject their authority to apply the label. While not SJ ideal, one simply cannot trust randoms to apply the racism label correctly or even consistently, which has contributed to its erosion in recent years.
how do marxists account for conflicts that are clearly fought along ethnic/national or religious lines? It feels like they make the almost trivial observation of "class conflict" ad-hoc with everything
do they need to account for them? I mean “nationalism and religion are bad” would seem to be sufficient.
AI as an existential threat i.e. some robot going on a killing spree is blown way out of proportion, but the social, political, and economic upheaval that will be caused by types of software getting more and more advanced and efficient i think is definitely downplayed and i think with enough concentration of resources and power in a small group of corporations or military organizations i think the goal of a conscious godlike ai or whatever could become essentially superfluous
yes.
this latter scenario gets less nerd attention because it’s politics and can’t be solved by programmers.
to be fair, our society at present has a deeply confused idea of what marriage is for, and this can be seen as a symptom of that
(I don’t particularly care what marriage is for. Expression of
romantic love, or child-having, or some package of legal rights,
whichever is fine. I’m just annoyed we can’t pick. Do one thing and do
it well, y'kno)
and now for the hot read as: unnecessarily disagreeable
take: in a world where the government (and a large tax base) pays the
floor healthcare costs of random persons, it’s totally reasonable for
them to be interested in banning things that will increase their costs.
If these things have sufficiently few supporters and many detractors,
guess which way we’re going to go in a democracy?
There’s definitely a legal argument for banning cousin marriage – @mitigatedchaos also touches on that in their reply here, for instance, and they’re not wrong per se. I’m skeptical that this sort of law does enough good to justify the loss of liberty, given that most people have a natural aversion to the behaviour in question and it’s the sort of thing that mainly becomes a problem when a lot of people do it over time, but certainly the state gets up to worse things for worse reasons.
But that doesn’t make a case that it’s less moral than anything with similarly deleterious effects – even from the most interventionist angle it’s, at best, an argument about picking your battles. My objection is that arguments against incest tend to be built around the idea that it’s a unique moral evil in a way that can’t really be supported by arguments from health or genetics. If people want to make pragmatic cost/benefit arguments that’s worth doing, but they need to get down off their high horse on the topic and onto a smaller horse that’s more within their means.
You spend how many hours talking with rationalists and public policy theorists about the nature of morality, evidence based interventions, and not shaming people for having politically unpopular beliefs.
Then someone brings up a taboo sexual activity, and it’s all “well if they had kids that might be bad so it seems proportionate to say anything romantic or sexual they do should be shamed. I mean just think of the medical bills for their hypothetical kids they never considered having.”
The challenge isn’t getting uninformed people to have good principles, it’s getting even thoughtful people to apply them instead of knee-jerk rationalizations.
This depends heavily on one’s opinion of the general population and their susceptibility to complex memes that depend on a careful analysis of information.
If one is optimistic, switching to the “it’s okay not to taboo this kind of incest socially, even if we will argue to them not to have kids” seems reasonable.
If one is pessimistic, then tearing away the current taboo won’t result in proportionate response, but rather no response.
An optimal political response isn’t actually available, and the odds that someone will be foreveralone if they can’t be with their cousin are pretty low, just leaving the taboo for now seems prudent, with the time limit of the next generation of genetic repair/enhancement technology.
Also we’ve had experiments with “societies that allow cousin marriage”, and it doesn’t look good.
In a sense Khan and Valls are correct. Terror is indeed something that the residents of London, Paris, Antwerp and many other cities are going to have to learn to live with. In the same way that the residents of Istanbul, Beirut and Islamabad have had to learn to live with the same.
Yet why it might be that London, Paris and Antwerp are having to accustom themselves to the security status of Istanbul, Beirut and Islamabad is a question that nobody in any position of power seems keen to ask.
The Blitz was a war between states. The IRA had tactics that involved scaring people out and then blowing up expensive empty buildings. Both of them have potential off-switches long before “our religion takes over the world”.
A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.
“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”
This is a very strange cyberpunk future
No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas in the cyberpunk future.
No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas regardless of the cyberpunk future.
How can they get away with this? Do they have a monopoly on tractors? Are their tractors just so much better that people will buy them even with this bullshit in place?
Patents ensure that any tractor by a start-up competitor will likely be 20 years out of date, making a small run of new tractors you aren’t sure people will buy is prohibitively expensive, but also Capitalist competition isn’t as powerful as Hard Capitalists say it is or should be. Partially this is because Hard Capitalists assume that state interference is deeply unnatural and non-Capitalist, when in reality the state is necessary for Capitalism to exist, and the market incentivizes corporations to attempt to establish control of the state.
If there are few enough major tractor manufacturers, and tractors are absolutely vital to farming, then they can all start using restrictive EULAs all at the same time. As long as they limit their rent-seeking to something less than the cost of a whole extra tractor, they can all benefit from it without engaging in tight collusion. Farmers looking to violate the situation would have to do something like import tractors from Japan or Russia or something.
One other contributing factor is a feeling of groundbreaking, rule-shirking and recreating the rules from ideology and first principles. There is less consensus of what the rules are, and when they are broken.
But this company definitely falls under “activist circles“, and they framed the lack of boundaries as breaking with oppressive convention.
Yada yada social technology
Okay this article is hilarious. Tremendous sympathy for the employees who were stuck there, but you really should read it yourself. I went in expecting some exaggeration and sensationalization of some dumb behavior in an attempt to show a female CEO what sort of lines a male CEO has to watch. No, this is way more along the lines of “female liberated version of Donald Trump.” Like the climax of the story is when the Board asks for people to volunteer concerns about working with the CEO… and almost every employee comes with stories, going over the time available for the meeting.
Which makes it sound like “activists or startup culture” is a bad fall-guy for this. There is a tyrannical boss with no sense of professional boundaries. They have the power to fire you, and also to set up status-shame where you live in fear of firing, or are denied bonuses which are a large part of your salary. They opposed creating an HR department and threatened to blacklist any quitters. They have their own sense of reality.
What the hell is anyone, even a culture, supposed to do? Life under them is just hellish, and the easiest way is to go along. It does not appear that most other employees actually thought Agrawal’s behavior was acceptable. There just was no other option.
Now, this is not to fault individual idiots like Agrawal. There will always be idiots. The problem is any capitalistic culture that thinks one person having this much power over other humans is acceptable.
I did not intend to blame any one factor. I tried to do the opposite, as this company has ALL the factors at work: Startup culture, using SJ language as a shield, a creepy pushy boss, peer pressure, all came together to reinforce a climate of fear.
There is the detached culture warrior idea that it’s okay when we do it, and you better not say anything because you hurt our side if you go public, combined with blurring of boundaries in activist circles, isolated startup culture, vesting cliffs, all the other power a CEO at a BigCo has.
This situations is the synthesis of the tyranny of the structureless with the SNAFU principle in hierarchical organisations.
It is atypical in its terribleness, but you can see the patterns in their purest form.
So this isn’t to pick at the theory too much, because your thoughts about how callout culture thrives (which I reblogged earlier) capture a legit phenomenon. But it’s important that we be rigorous in our applications of patterns, or otherwise we become the same as people going “conservative racism is a problem some places, therefore it’s the problem in all places that look similar.”
The dynamic that makes social-justice-liberalism so scary is not just that activists, or some self-serving people, say bad things (like “a woman boss can’t harass” or “there’s nothing a defendant could say that would matter”) but that people cooperate with these suppositions. After all, people also say just as cruel and dumb things from the right, or from even weirder more insular culture, but the difference is those perspectives don’t have power in our circles. It’s the reasonable people who give a pass to poor logic and meanness as long as its phrased appropriately, that make callouts into a culture.
In this case, from that article at least, no one was buying her defenses. To some degree she was groping in a way that would be harder for a man to get away with, but I think that sort of assumed non-sexualization among females was widespread before and outside any activist circles. And it did not take much more at all from Agrawal before her employees thought her behavior was inappropriate and hostile. There doesn’t seem to be any culture justifying this, just her spouting a lot of delusional defensive BS, and people going along with it because they had no job prospects and she was the hyperactive CEO. And other than a Board who could fire her, there wasn’t anything to stop her. The same sort of thing can replicate at any company that’s the private fiefdom of the president, and no one ever does stop it… till he ends up getting elected President.
Callout culture seems much more an issue where everyone is kind of involved in it, and ends up buying into fairly terrible beliefs just to keep going on. Like the disaster over at Amherst. There’s no one “crazy” person at the heart of those problems.
(Though the article claims Agrawal would be on a panel talking about the line between harmless and harassment at some conference. That would indeed be some toxic cultural effects, however I don’t see her anywhere on the website so I would imagine they cut her.)
She seems to have confused her workplace for an erotic roleplay of a workplace. While it’s true that the financial dominance of conditions allowed this, I do think it’s still partially driven by the idea that women have no agency and are harmless. I’m not sure she would have done the same if it were widely recognized that women are not, in fact, harmless.
A continent-spanning superstate controlled by a network of computers implementing the thing that comes after the thing that comes after prediction markets over a vast and inscrutable state bureaucracy physically realizing a National Utility Function, attacking enemy nations in ways they don’t even understand, its terrifying efficiency only truly understandable as a creeping horror to the very few.
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.
