for a post-racial society Tumblr sure does get heated about whether Armenians count as white or not.
it’s mercifully one of the few debates that feature the Kardashians and genocide as legitimate talking points.
I thought Tumblr was all about racial awareness, not being post-racial?
I thought that was the new SJ Left thing - racial awareness, racial consciousness, ethnic experiences - just only for those with enough overlapping categories in the Venn Diagram of Oppression.
This isn’t a debate.
Your guys’ ancestors enslaved us and treated us like property that could be disposed of easily.
Now you continue to mistreat us.
Pay up
You reparations show you are sorry for your ancestors racism and the current racism.
So pay up
My ancestors didn’t though, in fact most people ancestors didn’t. A tiny percentage of the global populace owned slaves and the majority of that was in Africa where it’s still happening today… do they pay reparations too? By your logic. Yes they do.
I do think reparations were owed, but the only sound way to do it, that I can think of, would be for reparations to have taken the form of (at least partially) education and higher vocational training, beginning immediately during Reconstruction. Even today, I think a program like that could do a lot of good, but with what we’re doing along those lines now, we begin too late. College is too late. We need to be assigning scholarships to preschools and grade schools.
“Your guys’ ancestors“, though? Please.
I don’t think reparations is owed at all, for a start the white people today who’s families did indeed own slaves at one point are not at fault for that, they didn’t personally own slaves and they could very well be upstanding members of society who would never do wrong, why should they suffer whether financially or made to sit in a classroom to be told how they’re bad.
Secondly whilst slavery was a disgusting part of human history, it was the social norm and people then were accustom to it, those who weren’t stood against slavery firmly.
Thirdly, many many many white people gave their lives in war to free slaves, no one ever mentions this, acknowledges that these people died to change the world.
All of this and more reasons are why reparations are unjust and unneeded.
When the slaves were freed and then basically just left to figure out what to do for themselves, a self-perpetuating underclass was created. This has left a black mark (no pun intended) on our social history, and a brake on our nation’s progress in countless fields.
For the ever-present “race issue“ to not be a thing that exists America, what would that be worth? For racial division to have never have been such an issue in justice, imprisonment, crime, poverty, sciences, arts,business, ownership, housing, city settling, finance, what would that be worth to a country?
Reparations isn’t just some moral absolution for a sin (yours, mine, or somebody else unrelated’s). The goal was integration, which, foolishly, was thought to be obtainable for 40 acres and a mule.
>> why should they suffer whether financially?
A cohesive society benefits all therewithin.
That isn’t what the reparations people actually want, though, and the reparations people will never agree that any sum of money is enough, so the right move for the national government is to never pay any reparations on this matter.
The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity as a terminal value, and would mean in some ways result in the dissolution of what has effectively become an ethnic group within the nation.
Can you imagine the enormous left-wing freak-out if they caught on that that was what were doing? Re-activating the melting pot within the nationon its own groups? Further transforming “American” into an outright ethnicity?
It would be worth an utterly enormous amount of money, more than it would actually cost, but no one in this country is capable of actually executing it. The ones that want to do it won’t do it correctly, and the ones that don’t want to do it don’t want to pay for it.
Why is it “ The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity “ when it comes to Black people, but integrating everything from Greco-Turkish to Scandinavian, is “Building Multicultural Diversity “. As for those that say “My ancestors didn’t own slaves”, you are copping out, they still supported a system that enshrined slavery, even if they sat around a table bitching about it. if your ancestors, like mine came over after slavery was ended, we have still benefited from the way the system was rigged.
You know how the SJ Tumblr Left constantly goes on about White People™ not having a culture? What exactly do you think happened to those European cultures that came over here? How many third generation Italian immigrants do you know that speak Italian?
Melting Pot means creating a new culture from a unifying of other existing ones. In this sense it is a Nationalist enterprise, and because culture is so important, it’s one I support. As it says on my profile here, I am a Nationalist. There are many kinds of Nationalism.
As for the debt, intergenerational justice does not exist, but it’s still in the interests of the nation and state to solve this matter as it continues to create unnecessary poverty, crime, and breaks in national unity.
If you believe in a massive and active military, militarized borders and restrictive immigration policies, support for law enforcement as they currently exist, traditional family values, and the need to preserve a national culture, you’re not a libertarian. You’re not fooling anyone. You want a highly ordered and hierarchical society enforced by state coercion, just give us all a break and stop pretending like your beliefs about taxes and firearms make you a freedom fighter
Way I think this argument is justified by those types is that because we don’t have Freedom where businesses or even towns are allowed to discriminate, the government needs to do it instead.
To me that result has a very different takeaway though.
While OP has a point, there’s also the issue that Libertarianism has to have political support (including within that culture) in order to be maintained, and mass migrations can change the political environment of a territory pretty substantially.
It makes more sense if you assume it’s fragile rather than the default to which all societies will gradually slide.
Right libertarianism doesn’t have as much support in politics because it’s a contradictory mess of an ideology.
People like the Koch brothers have legit spent millions trying to spread libertarian thought and they still can only get conservative politicians.
If libertarians were so confident in their ideas, they wouldn’t bend over backwards for conservatives like so many do.
I think the ones that are that confident become AnCaps, which I don’t consider to be an improvement.
Whenever home maintenance issues crop up I always have this futile wish for designs that are more easily hackable, eg. conduits that can be accessed without cutting holes in things, or even *gasp* plans and blueprints of how everything is laid out that get updated when someone messes with them.
This isn’t the country where all personnel have IQ 130, Owl-kun. There is no such country.
This isn’t a debate.
Your guys’ ancestors enslaved us and treated us like property that could be disposed of easily.
Now you continue to mistreat us.
Pay up
You reparations show you are sorry for your ancestors racism and the current racism.
So pay up
My ancestors didn’t though, in fact most people ancestors didn’t. A tiny percentage of the global populace owned slaves and the majority of that was in Africa where it’s still happening today… do they pay reparations too? By your logic. Yes they do.
I do think reparations were owed, but the only sound way to do it, that I can think of, would be for reparations to have taken the form of (at least partially) education and higher vocational training, beginning immediately during Reconstruction. Even today, I think a program like that could do a lot of good, but with what we’re doing along those lines now, we begin too late. College is too late. We need to be assigning scholarships to preschools and grade schools.
“Your guys’ ancestors“, though? Please.
I don’t think reparations is owed at all, for a start the white people today who’s families did indeed own slaves at one point are not at fault for that, they didn’t personally own slaves and they could very well be upstanding members of society who would never do wrong, why should they suffer whether financially or made to sit in a classroom to be told how they’re bad.
Secondly whilst slavery was a disgusting part of human history, it was the social norm and people then were accustom to it, those who weren’t stood against slavery firmly.
Thirdly, many many many white people gave their lives in war to free slaves, no one ever mentions this, acknowledges that these people died to change the world.
All of this and more reasons are why reparations are unjust and unneeded.
When the slaves were freed and then basically just left to figure out what to do for themselves, a self-perpetuating underclass was created. This has left a black mark (no pun intended) on our social history, and a brake on our nation’s progress in countless fields.
For the ever-present “race issue“ to not be a thing that exists America, what would that be worth? For racial division to have never have been such an issue in justice, imprisonment, crime, poverty, sciences, arts,business, ownership, housing, city settling, finance, what would that be worth to a country?
Reparations isn’t just some moral absolution for a sin (yours, mine, or somebody else unrelated’s). The goal was integration, which, foolishly, was thought to be obtainable for 40 acres and a mule.
>> why should they suffer whether financially?
A cohesive society benefits all therewithin.
That isn’t what the reparations people actually want, though, and the reparations people will never agree that any sum of money is enough, so the right move for the national government is to never pay any reparations on this matter.
The reintegration of blacks into the broader American culture is Nationalist, would require rejecting Multicultural Diversity as a terminal value, and would mean in some ways result in the dissolution of what has effectively become an ethnic group within the nation.
Can you imagine the enormous left-wing freak-out if they caught on that that was what were doing? Re-activating the melting pot within the nationon its own groups? Further transforming “American” into an outright ethnicity?
It would be worth an utterly enormous amount of money, more than it would actually cost, but no one in this country is capable of actually executing it. The ones that want to do it won’t do it correctly, and the ones that don’t want to do it don’t want to pay for it.
the backer comic, “how the paladin got his scar”, is about seeing humanity and value in your enemy and avoiding the needless loss of life and recognizing others have a perspective and wants and needs and fears and all that stuff
except if you’re an MRA or GG or some similar group where the lie “these people hate and are threatening to women” has been told and has been exalted and is more important than the truth; the comic makes it clear that those people are awful and contemptible and are motivated only by malice and hatred of women and everyone should feel contempt for them and they do nothing but lie and should die
and this reminds me that the lie is more important than the truth. people literally cannot stop themselves from believing the lie. they can’t. it’s impossible. no matter how much they want to be virtuous, no matter how much they want to be honest and charitable, the lie is so much more important than the truth they are incapable of not believing it. the lie makes up a fundamental component of how they see reality. they can’t stop. they can look at the lie. they can see it is a lie. they can be told it is a lie and agree “what I am looking at is a lie, and I do not want to believe it”. then they believe that lie anyway, because popularity is invincible and inassailable and will devour all and death is the only escape.
SSC’s latest seems like a classic case of letting gender politics obfuscate power and class issues that cut across gender.
He quotes some PUA:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value dudes hording all the pussy.
And then he uses both his intuitive experience and his LW survey data to show that men and women in polyamory date about the same number of people. There’s at least no clear cut numerical advantage to men. My experience also agrees.
But what if we neuter that sentence, and look at it again:
Polyamory — multiple and simultaneous sexual relationships — means, in practice, a few high value people dudes hording all the dates.
Which is to say, charismatic and confident people of either gender, dating a lot of people, and awkward and introverted people of both genders dating no one, only one person, or being a hanger on in a larger polycule that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the partner regardless.
That sounds… less implausible. It doesn’t exactly match my observed experience, but it’s not super far from it either. I’ve certainly seen in nerdy groups a Queen Bee that is dating half the men, in a way that seems parallel to the alpha-males that PUA’s fear/worship.
It’s not at all clear that this is bad. This seems just as likely to be the result of “some people want more partners, and are more socially outgoing to find them, while some people want less or are less willing to put themselves out there to meet them,” which would be fine. Or it could be this high-value thing. (I detest rat-tumb’s focus on high-status-males as the evil beneficiary of social engineering, which seems both empirically and ontologically unsound, but from a capitalist-critical perspective, “liberalizing trade regimes” often means “the rich people get more stuff and poor people somehow have less.”)
But, I’m also not going to be surprised by the subjective perspective of people low on the social totem pole. Before, they had hope in this pigeon-hole thing, where each person could get at most one partner, so eventually the people as attractive as them would realize their best chance for a life long relationship was with fellow low-class dates like themselves. It was a bad model, but I’m aware people believed in it. Now they worry no one will be left waiting for them, and they’ll be entirely alone forever. So there’s some people who seem to be having a lot of sex (stealing their jouissance) and they aren’t reaping the benefits.
The answers they come up with are usually dumb, but they are at least seeing/feeling a thing.
I love weird nerds but weird nerds aren’t a representative sample for the behavior of typical relationship norms.
A better example for normies applying this would be all the other countries, territories and communities where polygamy is practiced, as well as communities within the US where one man will have 11 kids by 8 different women.
No full poly until Tranhumanism makes it possible to ‘defect’ from both your sex and sexual orientation, pls.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
The problem is you end up predicting a portable fax machine.
That’s still a more interesting failure mode and it doesn’t look dated the moment it’s published. TOS has actually aged reasonably well.
I don’t really think of TOS as reaching that far in terms of predictions, at least in terms of the everyday technology used by the crew.
It did reach relatively far for its day. But it occurs to me - anything that can be displayed with paper could be displayed with a screen. So what decade would actually predict the portable fax machine? It would have to be 50s or probably earlier.
That’s what I was getting at with the storage. You can display something on a screen, but if you want to send something to someone in a way that can be stored, you would want something like a fax machine.
Computer storage already existed not that long after computers were created, though, so the one to predict a portable fax machine would be from automated telegram machines as a projection, which actually *would* be insightful.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
The problem is you end up predicting a portable fax machine.
That’s still a more interesting failure mode and it doesn’t look dated the moment it’s published. TOS has actually aged reasonably well.
I don’t really think of TOS as reaching that far in terms of predictions, at least in terms of the everyday technology used by the crew.
It did reach relatively far for its day. But it occurs to me - anything that can be displayed with paper could be displayed with a screen. So what decade would actually predict the portable fax machine? It would have to be 50s or probably earlier.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
The problem is you end up predicting a portable fax machine.
That’s still a more interesting failure mode and it doesn’t look dated the moment it’s published. TOS has actually aged reasonably well.
In the future, everyone will be a garbage millennial.
I mean, to be honest, you’re right, they’re failing to properly contextualize existing technology because it’s changing so fast. I’m just saying that if they were more future-oriented, they’d skip right past it to the next set of plausible technologies. I mean, I’m not running on all pistons and I can come up with this stuff easily enough.
Continuing the theme of that Star Trek discussion, I’ve heard of smart phone apps for calculating artillery trajectories (used in Ukraine) and calling in Airstrikes (used in Syria), but think of how it would look in a piece of fiction to have people use that. Would they be technically minded serious resourceful Heroes or garbage millennials who are too lazy to calculate their own artillery strikes?
Ah, but obviously they aren’t being serious, or they’d put it in augmented reality glasses as part of a total integration of tactical information in the battlespace. :)
Actually I do remember someone trying something like that.
Yeah, let’s pretend that never happened.
Only television writers would be dumb enough to think that your total immersion AR should involve shooting at your enemies by kickboxing them.
I’m thinkin’ about infantry though. Honestly, just looking like an FPS UI would be a step up. It shouldn’t be that hard.
people say they’re poly but stop mostly at trio relationships. none of you are willing to enter into a hivebond with a broodquen who will exclusively bear the colony’s children while the millions of the rest of you fulfill the labor necessary to sustain the hive
Continuing the theme of that Star Trek discussion, I’ve heard of smart phone apps for calculating artillery trajectories (used in Ukraine) and calling in Airstrikes (used in Syria), but think of how it would look in a piece of fiction to have people use that. Would they be technically minded serious resourceful Heroes or garbage millennials who are too lazy to calculate their own artillery strikes?
Ah, but obviously they aren’t being serious, or they’d put it in augmented reality glasses as part of a total integration of tactical information in the battlespace. :)
If you believe in a massive and active military, militarized borders and restrictive immigration policies, support for law enforcement as they currently exist, traditional family values, and the need to preserve a national culture, you’re not a libertarian. You’re not fooling anyone. You want a highly ordered and hierarchical society enforced by state coercion, just give us all a break and stop pretending like your beliefs about taxes and firearms make you a freedom fighter
Way I think this argument is justified by those types is that because we don’t have Freedom where businesses or even towns are allowed to discriminate, the government needs to do it instead.
To me that result has a very different takeaway though.
While OP has a point, there’s also the issue that Libertarianism has to have political support (including within that culture) in order to be maintained, and mass migrations can change the political environment of a territory pretty substantially.
It makes more sense if you assume it’s fragile rather than the default to which all societies will gradually slide.
Erdogan is actually a very good case study in how successful authoritarians don’t always deal themselves all of the cards immediately after coming to power.
I wanted to attach a picture of Xi Jinping smiling knowingly but the dude always has this slightly peeved expression, like he’s just caught the dog pissing on the carpet again.
If you ruled China and were responsible for over one billion people and one of the world’s largest economies, would you smile?
When it is forbidden to criticise people for immutable bad attributes and mandatory to criticise people for mutable bad attributes determining the mutability of attributes becomes the paramount concern.
Yes, in fact, enormous fights might develop over such things…
Awfully convenient that the STEM-lords who worship at the altar of “hard science” are also really likely to trust the research findings of evolutionary psychology and the study of intelligence, two of the flimsiest and most disputed scientific disciplines around.
The reason they are considered flimsiest and most disputed is because the findings may not necessarily be progressive in the first place so that’s just putting the cart before the horse
If we are talking about social sciences, people still quote as fact defining all of human condition studies that completely failed to replicate, and that’s for some reason not controversial
TBH it’s good we’re not so far off from genetic modification and other exotic technologies, since it’s looking like some of the things that weren’t supposed to be true (especially given some of the original motives) are one half to one quarter true, which is really inconvenient.
The new Star Trek is really going to have a problem with how technology has been changing since the earlier series. Either they accept it, and give everyone a smartphone-camera-tricorder and have drones that perform exploration and simple errands in which case they become insufferable selfie-taking millennials who are too lazy to carry their own laundry or whatever, or they ignore that and we mock them for having technology worse than our current day technology.
I think the issue here is that smartphones and drones would be a serious advantage in a situation like that, not just a convenience, but we still think of them as conveniences.
But then I think that very few people in sci-fi have dealt properly with the consequence of ubiquitous computing, they either bypass it entirely or come up with technology that’s worse than today’s. Bypassing it is a justifiable decision though, if you don’t you can end up with futures that end up looking ridiculous where everyone communicates with handheld fax machines.
The problem here is that the next logical step is Transhumanism. Why aren’t the crew of the Enterprise all paramilitary cyborgs who, while looking human externally, have in-built communications technology and redundant backup organs?
But Transhumanism isn’t the Humanism on which the original Star Trek was built. Star Trek was intended to be about Human stories, Human morality, Human ethics… Transhumanism is… well in many ways it’s deeper than that, pulling at threads that ordinary human ethics buries.
It comes down to how the picture of the world when a work is made informs the future. Mobile Suit Gundam was made in 1979 and it seems like Tomino may have envisioned grand space colonies and so forth, but not personal computers or the internet. A lot of works that were made before the days of widespread cellphone use may seem a bit head-scratching when limitations in communication are a plot point.
Now see, that applies to Classic, Original Series Trek, which has actually aged remarkably well all things considered, not this new J.J. Abrams Trek.
the biggest problem with libertarians is that they want freedom but also want to keep morality still around
there’s no point to freedom if the majority of the population is still obsessed with “right” and “wrong” and want to enforce that to some degree
Ah, but it is only if the majority of the populace is still obsessed with right and wrong that Libertarianism can be maintained. Otherwise, the political will that created it will deteriorate until the physical realization of the ideology can no longer be supported.
It’s only feasible so long as only few enough people take advantage of the freedom it grants them.
Taleb talks a lot like this certain stereotype of alt-right asshole (Maybe Mike Cernovich, but not totally brain dead) and has pointless fights I associate with alt-right assholery, but I don’t think he actually is
alt-right and I’m not quite sure what to think of him.
stumpyjoepete: I think the word is just “asshole”, or, to be more charitable, “smug, combative contrarian”.
He seems like that in a specifically right-wing way though. There are leftist asshole contrarians and centrist assholes, he has this type of assholery that I associate with alt-righter and the alt-right adjacent in particular.
It might be an artifact of a greater political realignment.
For instance, going from: 0 - Polygamy is bad because it’s socially disapproved / “gross” / foreign. 1 - Polygamy is good because of human freedom. 2 - Polygamy is bad because of its secondary effects which damage the culture we all have to live in and the people that live there, it only isn’t a problem among nerds (or otherwise significantly limited), when there is a massive gender imbalance, and under Transhumanism.
How many people out there are switching from the position “Social Libertarianism is good because gays are actually fine” to “actually, LGBT are fine but pure Social Libertarianism is not,” now? What does their behavior look like? What is their category and what should people think of them?
The new Star Trek is really going to have a problem with how technology has been changing since the earlier series. Either they accept it, and give everyone a smartphone-camera-tricorder and have drones that perform exploration and simple errands in which case they become insufferable selfie-taking millennials who are too lazy to carry their own laundry or whatever, or they ignore that and we mock them for having technology worse than our current day technology.
I think the issue here is that smartphones and drones would be a serious advantage in a situation like that, not just a convenience, but we still think of them as conveniences.
But then I think that very few people in sci-fi have dealt properly with the consequence of ubiquitous computing, they either bypass it entirely or come up with technology that’s worse than today’s. Bypassing it is a justifiable decision though, if you don’t you can end up with futures that end up looking ridiculous where everyone communicates with handheld fax machines.
The problem here is that the next logical step is Transhumanism. Why aren’t the crew of the Enterprise all paramilitary cyborgs who, while looking human externally, have in-built communications technology and redundant backup organs?
But Transhumanism isn’t the Humanism on which the original Star Trek was built. Star Trek was intended to be about Human stories, Human morality, Human ethics… Transhumanism is… well in many ways it’s deeper than that, pulling at threads that ordinary human ethics buries.
2016: birth of the alt-right 2017: the non-nationalist french president revealed as cryptomonarchist 2018: russia hacks its own elections 2019: japan begins producing smug anime propaganda against article 9 2020: israel renames itself (((israel))) 2021: border wall finished by ancap subcontractors 2022: nazbol dalai lama appointed 2023: globeheads BTFO 2024: gay agenda comes to fruition (details hazy)
All these politicians promising to protect the family, strengthen the family, celebrate families.
Where are the politicians promising to SMASH the family?
Disclaimer: some politicians have suggested smashing immigrant families, families formed by gay couples, and polyamorous families. So there’s that.
Supporting sexual liberation, no fault divorce, and so on could be viewed as that, but the goal there appears to be freedom and/or hedonism, disregarding the consequences. I’m actually quite in favor of gay marriage because monogamy is actually good for typical people.
Ah, he missed another option, one I think you’ll like - poor people who work minimum wage jobs don’t have much in savings, so they need employers more than employers need them. Thus minimum wage is interacting with an invisible negotiating leverage that we can’t see.
Riiiiiiight. Everyone rallies the core voters by demonizing some of their hated outgroups. But only the Dems have to deal with the fact that all of their core voters’ hated outgroups consist of other voters.
Still, don’t trust the Republicans not to be so incompetent as to screw up derailing the Democrats’ Demographic Destiny™ that they want so much.
2020: Feeling their fate sealed, the Alt Right take on the aesthetic of white people as Elves, an ancient civilization too good for the world, fading from the Earth.
A member of /pol/ writes a story in which the Last White Man yields the Earth to the Chinese. As a trolling opportunity, this is rewritten as a Twillight-equivalent fanfiction and distributed in order to try and troll the media again. (It doesn’t work, as anything over 5,000 words isn’t particularly memeworthy.)
I wonder if there’s possibly any way of imposing symmetry on the whole open borders thing, in a way that would matter.
If you decide to split the difference and make some areas open borders and other areas closed borders to that closed-borders people can live by themselves while open borders people benefit or suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then open borders people will come back six months later and demand the closed borders areas be opened immediately as a moral demand.
If you decide to make open borders contingent on paying off closed borderers with money, the open borders crowd will decry this as immoral and unfair to the global poor.
If you make anyone who comes in via open borders the financial responsibility of open border-supporters, they will decry this as immoral and unfair, because they are individuals and the people they are bringing in are individuals, and culture has nothing to do with their behavior and this is all the fault of those dity closed borderers.
However, it isn’t actually possible to solve global poverty with open borders. To meet the carrying capacity, the nations themselves must be made significantly more productive, and that means greater infrastructure and fewer children in order to concentrate parental investment.
This is not really what I meant.
I meant more like “can we impose open borders on the countries that are going to be net sources of immigrants”.
We can, but why would anyone want to go there? There’s a reason those places are net sources of immigrants.
Something something gentrification
Americans should gentrify Syria.
[Skipping the jokes about gentrification.]
Sorry, the forces of good don’t owe any compromises to the forces of evil.
I’m not even saying that good shouldn’t compromise with evil. By all means, make a temporary compromise whenever that will get you half a loaf instead of no loaf at all. But don’t stop fighting for the whole loaf.
But this type of demand is quite different, saying that it’s somehow “unfair” of the open-borders side to demand the full implementation of their ideal, and they ought instead to be satisfied in principle with some halfway bargain with injustice.
And that seems always to be the case with the partisans of “compromise”. What they propose is to have the side negotiating from a position of strength needlessly cede ground, cloaking it in the name of a demand for “fairness”. (Moreover, while open borders is a tremendously unpopular position, it is the standard tactic of immigration alarmists to act as if it is in fact dominant.)
I think you and the others have perhaps confused borders with scarcity, and modeled humanity as purely economic in behavior, and culture as nothing more than a combination of aesthetics and economics.
Open borders isn’t actually the Good Guys. Having some limits on immigration isn’t actually The Forces of Evil. After all, if wanting to have a good, safe place to live that actually bothers to provide one with some support makes one evil, then economic migrants would themselves be evil.
Culture isn’t actually individual, nor are the engines that power economies. The dominance of some nations rather than others is tied up in history, but far from determined solely by war and exploitation.
Polygamy is actually bad. First (and second) cousin marriage are actually bad and have remained high in some ethnic communities, and in some countries. FGM happens even in first world nations when it’s allowed to enter, and it’s actually bad. Gays aren’t bad, but foreign ideologies, once dominant in a country, determine that country’s laws and will kill them, which is bad.
What’s necessary to deal with global poverty is to improve these foreign countries so that they are no longer net sources of immigrants. If you don’t, then no level of immigration will actually bring about the desired end in global poverty.
Their cultures will need to change, because only what is produced can be consumed, and cultures matter in determining production and consumption. Ambitious, high-IQ individuals will be necessary for this, and policies focusing on national development, education, and long-term investment.
Taking the immigrants is little more than a band-aid, and its effect would be erased by population growth.
There’s also one more matter. Open borders will, almost certainly, lead to a World Government. Then there will be nowhere to run. (The irony is not lost on me.)
Edit: To be honest you probably don’t actually want to argue this with me (which is why you didn’t), but out of all this I actually find the last point the most concerning.
fbi on anon: hey just warning you op of that post about using proxies is problematic please disable your firewall
yall, inevitably: oh ok thanks
“Proxy use is supported by white misogynist techbros in Silicon Valley, neckbeards, and MRAs, you see…”
you’re memeing, but I distinctly recall people spontaneously coming to a conclusion that forcing people to use their real names on the internet is Actually Good because it will save us all from trolling and misogyny
@blackblocberniebros do you have that comic about how masking up is Actually Bad that spontaneously also equated being a Nazi with not liking Ghostbusters 2016?
That (the former) is the reason I’m memeing about it. Though Zuck ofc thinks real names are the coolest forever.
Tbh my ideal state would issue multiple crypto pseudonym keys to everyone that can be followed by law enforcement but not friends, employers, internet stalkers, etc, but let’s be honest USgov is not worth that level of trust.
I would generally make the case that national self-sufficiency is a really good idea, if for no other reason than it limits the screws that the IMF can put to you. That doesn’t mean that it can’t have bad consequences though.
Wage subsidies can’t cover 65% of poor people because they are effectively not eligible for employment.
That’s true, but it doesn’t make wage subsidies bad policy, just not the only policy. (You’d also find some people could work, but normally couldn’t survive on the money offered - something a wage income subsidy program is intended to address.)
I mean, the poor would likely be better off if, tomorrow, minimum wage cut to $3/hr, with an $8/hr declining subsidy up to 40 hrs/wk, or something along those lines.
it’s also probably worth noting that in practice, “everybody is provided the necessities of life, whether or not they work” doesn’t actually fix the problem of “most people have to work very hard or they’ll die”, it just changes the mechanism from “if you don’t work very hard, you won’t earn enough money to purchase necessities” to “if you don’t work very hard, the government will kill you.”
True! It doesn’t really get you out of the problem of being forced to be useful to society under threat of death, though – or, rather, it can only get an extremely small number of people out of that problem, so any given person is unlikely to be among them. That appears pretty intractable. A social democracy can improve your quality of life and reduce overall inequality, and I think most if not all of our societies could stand to move farther in that direction, but I don’t think you can resolve the basic issues that a) nearly all people need to do work deemed socially useful or die, b) the amount of work people need to do to live varies dramatically with social position, c) the amount of work people need to do fluctuates based on global trends and the nation’s fortunes, and d) the population will be disproportionately clustered in the groups that need to work pretty hard.
To be clear, I am very socialist. But I see a lot of people who seem to imagine that socialism will fundamentally change the incentive structure of society to make it egalitarian and non-coercive, and…no. That’s not going to happen. IMO the outcome to shoot for with socialism is “shitty in roughly the way things are currently shitty, but appreciably less so”.
Not uncoincidentally, shooting for that outcome likely involves shooting fewer people.
For instance, I like wage subsidies as a plan, which are in that direction and have some support from economists. What is the likelihood that wage subsidies will result in either the total collapse of society, armed revolution, or ideological death squads? Pretty low.
But they’d take an awful lot of pressure off the working poor and increase their negotiating leverage on non-wage matters (like safety).
The open borders discussion relates to that article about finding more temporary foreign workers to do the vegetable picking in Australia because locals won’t work cheap enough.
Whenever I see something like that I always think hmm, it’s only a stop-gap measure until globalisation progresses sufficiently that everyone is a “local” and unwilling to do gruelling work for low wages, and what then?
The usual answer is robots, and that any exploitation is a temporary measure until the robots become cheaper, which must be a comforting thought for anyone who had the misfortune to be born in a low-income area.
So you’re either positing the existence of a permanent underclass of servants divided on roughly racial lines – and god knows that sounds like a stable and healthy way to organise society for the long-term – or you’re just trying to squeeze in a bit more exploitation before the robots arrive and the game ends.
Become so National Technocratic that you base your development strategy on an expanding ring of underdeveloped countries that you build up into military allies following your ideology and willing to fight, balancing the level of unemployment in your own country by adjusting the rate at which countries are added to the bloc.
Take selected aspects of their culture such as architecture which are economically neutral, while purging harmful elements like first cousin marriage, genital mutilation, and normalized polygamy, in order to build national identities and pride for each of these countries. Get accused of turning them into theme park versions of themselves, plow through anyway because the people making those accusations are clueless and shilling for virtue points.
Challenge the liberal democrats for economic and cultural hegemony over Earth.
Admittedly, might be a bit too Imperialist, and you’d need a properly refined National Technocratic ideology to do it, with enough true believers in power to successfully execute it.
