Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
“Externality” is not just a word that means “bad thing” you buffoon, you fool,
Ssssh, I’m trying to sneak ultracaps into admitting employment laws may potentially be Good.
Anyhow, the purpose of this hot take is to point out that while it is in the interests of every company to induce burnout and risk death if they can pass the costs of dealing with that onto someone else to get more productivity - families, society, the state, other future companies - much like it is in the interests of every company to emit pollution if they can do the same, it is in fact economically destructive in ways that may not be adequately represented, and, while not an explicit subsidy, could have effects like one.
If one dude would generate three million dollars in economic activity over his life but dies one third of the way through his career, two million dollars of economic activity is not generated. This is very often due not to being genuinely suicidal for the job but due to a mismatch in negotiating leverage.
Considering what a spectacular waste of resources this is, it could make sense to require employee death insurance to ensure that the costs - to everyone else - of getting dudes killed is reflected in the price of goods and services. (After all, the State spent a lot of money educating that guy, his family spent a lot of money raising him, humans depend on generations, etc, so goods from Sparky’s McDeath Factory should only be chosen over Reasonably Cautious Joe’s Factory goods if they really do present enough of an advantage to outweigh this.)
It also matters why people get killed. Some jobs are just more risky, but without labor protections it’s likely often because some power-tripping bastard did something stupid and ignored obvious warning signs.
People might die but at least let’s not be stupid about it.
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
“Externality” is not just a word that means “bad thing” you buffoon, you fool,
Ssssh, I’m trying to sneak ultracaps into admitting employment laws may potentially be Good.
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
Yes I know I’m releasing what seems like DLC for Alt Right, but I swear I’m not the original developer - these are just free, optional mods you can install on your personal AltRighter or friends’ AltRighters! Neo-Chinese Ethnic Nationalism and Koreans Will Retake Europe for Christ are just my takes, as a modder and an artist, on the potential of the original game.
The reason the conservatives do not support a gun registry, which would otherwise be an entirely sane idea, is that it’s the first step in “round up all the guns.”
There is no “round up all the guns” without first knowing their locations. Going house to house doing a deep search is prohibitively expensive.
They’ll just hide them. There are so many guns in this country, the round-up won’t even get half of them.
Any event dramatic enough to make the current crop of conservatives agree to round up all the guns isn’t going to be small, either, and most of them would involve said conservatives not wanting to give up their guns.
Mass shootings? Mass shootings by Muslims? Not enough. The response has been to want guns even more in order to shoot back.
You’d need something bordering on an ethnic armed insurrection, at which point many of them would want guns to fight against the ethnic armed insurrection.
It’s true that this hasn’t always been the case in the past, that previous gun control laws were deliberately racist.
However, the clock ticks Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. Do the GOPpers trust that the following Democratic President will have their best interests in mind once the guns are gone? I’m guessing no.
So the kind of event we’re talking about, the one that convinces the current conservatives in this country to yield their firearms (and not bury them in boxes in their back yards) is likely one where Leftists start talking about how they need guns…
Trump’s election made a lot of leftists start talking about how they need guns, although I suspect that group of leftists wasn’t the same group that strongly cared about gun control previously.
Grotesque fantasies about how leftist radicals could “turn gun-ism upon itself” are definitely a thing that exists.
Some forms of the unpleasant “urban containment doctrine” would benefit from some kinds of “gun control” though the idea would be to deny guns from enemies.
So….it’s claimed that it’s really really easy to get a gun from a shady source, that laws against guns wouldn’t matter.
Why then don’t those people just deny they have guns an go buy from those so easy to get criminal access places, if gun control did get passed? That’s exactly the fantasy they have in their “I need my gun against the gubmint” rhetoric.
Well it’s claimed that it isn’t that difficult to buy a black market gun in Europe, but then I’m not the black market type and neither are most of them. But where this falls apart from their perspective should be obvious - why go buy a gun on the black market and depend on the black market when you can just not have gun control? They don’t have criminal contacts, they don’t want criminal contacts, and all those guns have to come from somewhere anyway so what benefit do they get out of it?
And what’s more, the kinds of people that bring up gun control after every mass shooting insist that the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is too small to justify stricter limits on immigration, even though mass shootings, the kind that make the news, are also fairly rare on a per-capita basis, and so it makes sense from their perspective to guess another motive is at work.
I was aiming for “if it’s not going to affect it then why bother”, the same reasoning they use to argue against gun control. They say it won’t affect mass shootings, they say it won’t affect availability, it won’t affect anything. If it won’t affect anything, then we can do it.
Idk Europe, but the shootings in USA are like 98% born citizens, white guys. Not immigrants, not even POC citizens.
Because they could still get arrested or hassled, they explicitly say it will only effect legal gun owners. They say “if you outlaw guns then only outlaws will have guns” repeatedly, frequently. It’s like their official slogan.
You are way off on those stats, dude. Waaaaaay off. Setting aside that even PoC mass shooters make the news sometimes, like the VT shooter, the racial rates for shootings are far more balanced than 98% white guys. I’m not at a computer, so I can’t fetch the stats for you, but if someone told you it was 98% white they were either lying or exaggerating. And if you think America is 98% white, then frankly you don’t live here.
The reason the conservatives do not support a gun registry, which would otherwise be an entirely sane idea, is that it’s the first step in “round up all the guns.”
There is no “round up all the guns” without first knowing their locations. Going house to house doing a deep search is prohibitively expensive.
They’ll just hide them. There are so many guns in this country, the round-up won’t even get half of them.
Any event dramatic enough to make the current crop of conservatives agree to round up all the guns isn’t going to be small, either, and most of them would involve said conservatives not wanting to give up their guns.
Mass shootings? Mass shootings by Muslims? Not enough. The response has been to want guns even more in order to shoot back.
You’d need something bordering on an ethnic armed insurrection, at which point many of them would want guns to fight against the ethnic armed insurrection.
It’s true that this hasn’t always been the case in the past, that previous gun control laws were deliberately racist.
However, the clock ticks Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. Do the GOPpers trust that the following Democratic President will have their best interests in mind once the guns are gone? I’m guessing no.
So the kind of event we’re talking about, the one that convinces the current conservatives in this country to yield their firearms (and not bury them in boxes in their back yards) is likely one where Leftists start talking about how they need guns…
Trump’s election made a lot of leftists start talking about how they need guns, although I suspect that group of leftists wasn’t the same group that strongly cared about gun control previously.
Grotesque fantasies about how leftist radicals could “turn gun-ism upon itself” are definitely a thing that exists.
Some forms of the unpleasant “urban containment doctrine” would benefit from some kinds of “gun control” though the idea would be to deny guns from enemies.
So….it’s claimed that it’s really really easy to get a gun from a shady source, that laws against guns wouldn’t matter.
Why then don’t those people just deny they have guns an go buy from those so easy to get criminal access places, if gun control did get passed? That’s exactly the fantasy they have in their “I need my gun against the gubmint” rhetoric.
Well it’s claimed that it isn’t that difficult to buy a black market gun in Europe, but then I’m not the black market type and neither are most of them. But where this falls apart from their perspective should be obvious - why go buy a gun on the black market and depend on the black market when you can just not have gun control? They don’t have criminal contacts, they don’t want criminal contacts, and all those guns have to come from somewhere anyway so what benefit do they get out of it?
And what’s more, the kinds of people that bring up gun control after every mass shooting insist that the number of deaths from terrorist attacks is too small to justify stricter limits on immigration, even though mass shootings, the kind that make the news, are also fairly rare on a per-capita basis, and so it makes sense from their perspective to guess another motive is at work.
So what should be done with regards to immigration?
Annex everything down to Tierra Del Fuego and turn it all into US states and give everyone living there, or who comes from there, US citizenship. I’m serious.
(Annex Canada too at this rate because screw Canada, Canada is evil.)
It’s a defacto empire as is and formalizing this stuff is always good, but the genuine benefit is that as citizens, they get more legal protections and have to be paid proper wages, they can’t be screwed over and underpaid like a lot of immigrant workers currently are – presuming they actually stay here and aren’t temp workers that is. I have noticed Trump’s administration going after H2-B visas lately, that’s interesting.
Have you ever actually met immigrant and temp workers? I have, lots due to where I live. It’s a worst-of-both-worlds situation, for them and for citizens due to labor pressure being undone.
Also, if there are still people who want cheap labor that badly, we’ll see literal boatloads of people coming in from Africa, and boy howdy that’s been a familiar sight before in American history that just about everyone here won’t want to see repeated again, and rightfully so.
ironically the recycling plants catch fire so frequently that they are essentially just incinerating the waste instead of recycling it.
Post-consumer recycling of most non-metallic resources is just pointless.
There is a point, but it’s not obvious. There’s a good article on this on Cato Unbound here. The unseen benefit of recycling is to divert material away from landfills, which are expensive. So expensive, in fact, that if we charged people the true cost of landfill disposal, they would resort to illegal dumping. We don’t want that, so we subsidize garbage disposal at the consumer level, and post-consumer recycling programs are an attempt to mitigate the cost of that subsidy.
It’s putting the charge at the wrong end of the system. Put a landfill deposit on new products based on their rough contents, use the principal to buy the land and the interest to operate the landfills. Pay out money from the fund when recycling firms permanently recover waste from the landfill, based on rough contents.
Efficient land and resource usage, recycling, purchasing of used goods thereby incentivized.
The year is 2064. Having given up on America and Europe, the last remaining members of the Alt Right undergo racial alteration surgery and genetic splicing to join Chairman Liu’s Neo-Chinese Empire, a governmental franchise operating seven megacities on the Asia-Pacific rim.
As a security officer at the front of the Empire’s fight against the Pan-Islamic Caliphate, a sort of distributed theocratic government with enclaves throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Victor Fang (born Richard Spencer, many years ago) is returned to Hong Kong after being injured by an IED, but he’s about to find out just how deep the Caliph’s conspiracies run…
Discourse Questions
What is the value, positive or negative, of a racial ethnostate in a world where race is mutable?
Do the Alt Right and White Nationalists value whiteness as a terminal value, or merely as a means to other ends? If they could, would they abandon it for some other race to obtain racial solidarity? Would they adopt another heritage, just to have one?
Will governance become something marketable, that can be purchased by democratic polities and multinational conglomerates?
Could enclaves of Islamic Law form in Europe in order to try and maintain Liberalism? The idea of sub-groups with their own laws is not unprecedented, after all.
What are the implications if jurisdictions break down into various self-governing ethnic groups, united not by the larger territories they live in but through religion and ethnicity as experienced over the Internet?
Can Richard Spencer ever be redeemed? What would it take to redeem him?
Write a 5-page call-out blog post based on answering one of these six topics and submit it to Tumblr Dot Com.
The submission form for your callout post can be found at http://argumate.tumblr.com. For full credit, please address your callout to a hypothetical Tumblr user named “Argumate” for disagreeing with whatever your opinion may be. Remember to refuse to read or respond to any counter-arguments, and instead double down on refuted positions and behave like someone with zero reading comprehension, becoming increasingly irate as it turns out the callout subject did not say what you claimed they did.
person who literally forgot about the sun and the water cycle: uhhhh we need to go back to nature. back to our roots, is where we need to go to. the basics
I can’t wait to have a powered rolling metal box carry me 100km closer to where I want to go in 60 minutes. Maybe it will happen one day, in convenience and comfort.
it’s intriguing to imagine the myths you could tell an Iron Age tribe that would actually be correct as well as sounding awesome, like:
humans and apes share a common ancestor, and further back share an ancestor with all mammals, bird, reptiles, fish, and ultimately all living things.
the Earth is over four billion years old.
each of the fixed stars in the sky is another sun like our own.
This is actually something I think about periodically. If religion is true, why doesn’t it contain some scientific fact that couldn’t be proved for another 1,000-2,000 years? Why push only the faith element so hard in a world where spiritual experiences aren’t limited to your religion?
I think that’s yet another unanswerable objection to religion - it would be very simple for anyone in the ancient world who was actually omniscient to demonstrate that they knew things that couldn’t possibly be known by people of that time and place, and since they are already trying to provide direct proof of the supernatural to a limited audience with miracles it doesn’t really make sense for them not to do it in an effective way that’d silence the skeptics everywhere.
Imagine if Muhammad had carved a map of the dark side of the Moon into the Kaaba
Imagine if we sequenced the human genome and discovered that what we thought was junk DNA was actually the text of the Book of Mormon
Actually what if both of those things happened would that be fucked up or what
Ancient people: “I’ll believe in your god if you can show me the miracles.”
Modern people: “If we had evidence, it wouldn’t be true faith.”
muhammad supposedly did do a bunch of stuff like that, and you occasionally see muslim articles like ‘look at all these scientific miracles in the qur’an that we didn’t know about til recently!‘ or prophecies etc.
when you look into it it turns almost always turns out either it WAS known by people at the time, or it’s not true, but a lot of people just believe it without looking into it.
(e.g. muhammad supposedly split the moon and reattached it at one point, and theres a thing going ‘when they went to the moon they found a massive crack running through it’ or stuff about stages of fetal development).
Lots of people in the Christian world believe that women have one more rib than men.
i believed that for ages even after i stopped believing. i assumed people had noticed women have an extra rib and included that in the creation story as an explanation way back when, rather than just ‘no one bothered to check and count the number of ribs in x thousand years’. it’s not like rib counting technology is super advanced.
Does it even explicitly say in the Bible that all men since Adam have one fewer rib?
I don’t really know one way or the other. Just that it says God took one of Adam’s ribs to create Eve. Unless you believe in Lamarckian inheritance, I’m not sure why that implies all his descendants have one fewer as well.
I wonder where that belief originated…
The story I saw on here about that a while back was that what gets translated as ‘rib’ actually is a euphemism for baculum (penis bone!) and that bit of Genesis is a just-so story explaining why humans don’t have one, unlike the herd animals Bronze Age shepherds would be familiar with, who were created male and female to begin with
Oh, spare me the argumentum ad baculum!
Reblogged for Crom’s comments and also “Actually what if both of those things happened would that be fucked up or what”
Last year, two of my friends were falsely accused of rape.
One of them was lucky enough to have evidence - texts from the girl expressing enthusiasm about the experience and agreeing that she had initiated and expressed implicit consent (like getting a condom, putting it on him, and asking him to fuck her harder) - but that didn’t stop rumors spreading. It turns out she had a boyfriend, and probably fed him a different story in order to prevent him being mad at her.
My friend got uninvited from parties and had people warning his friends about his sexual offense. Eventually the story morphed into the rumor that he had assaulted two people, but when he asked the supposed second person, she had no idea what he was talking about.
My other friend wasn’t lucky enough to have direct evidence. He never found out who was accusing him - an image began circulating virally with his face, name, where he lived, and a long description of his supposed ‘violent assault.’ People he didn’t know started contacting all his facebook friends and warning them that he was a violent rapist. He received threats and hate mail.
He didn’t have any absolute proof that he was innocent, but his reputation was solid. I saw messages from previous casual sexual partners (who’d been contacted by friends of the accuser) saying the accusations were strange because he’d only ever been respectful and they couldn’t imagine him doing something like that. He lived in a house with roommates, and his roommates had met all his sexual partners, and they said all of them had seemed happy to be there and fine when they left. Everyone who knew him was confused by the accusations. He was a close, old friend of mine. I’d had seen him interact with many casual sexual partners during our friendship, and he had always been consent-oriented and not pushy. He refused to have sex with people who were intoxicated.
I suspect it might have been a similar circumstance to my first friend - he had sex with someone who had a boyfriend, and then she’d lied about it in order to avoid telling her boyfriend that she’d cheated.
It’s also possible that it wasn’t even anyone who had sex with him, but just anyone who disliked him and wanted to hurt him.
–
Neither of the accusers went to the police, probably because their claims were false. They stayed out of the legal system and proceeded to destroy my friends’ reputations on a social scale. I suspect false rape accusations are more common than we think, mainly because false accusers have a special incentive not to report to the police.
And even if they are rare, the power to destroy lives is incredibly serious. One of my friends became suicidal and went on medication to keep himself from self harming. The mental distress he underwent from the false accusation seemed comparable to that of a rape victim.
The problem is that people have the power to do this to each other, and we don’t have any social system in place for preventing this. I don’t think we should believe all victims absolutely - we should ascribe probability to their stories, and be far more cautious before we take actions to socially punish the accused.
I want to help rape victims, but I can’t justify it when it’s at the expense of other victims.
–
Also, there are shitty people in the world, shitty enough to hurt other people for any reason - feelings of power, personal gain, revenge - and if a woman can ruin a man’s life by falsely accusing him of rape, without having to go to the police - shitty women will absolutely take this route. They have nothing to lose if they’re in a culture of ‘never question a rape victim.’
There are people out there that have the capacity to do it and the motivation, much as is the same with actual rapists. I don’t really understand the argument that false accusations are implausible or extremely rare. “Someone shitty has something to gain by hurting another person” is not exactly a rare scenario.
Too often the response is to blame any system with exploitable reporting on the people who abuse that, as if a gun should be left lying around a crowded room because only bad people would misuse it. It’s the system, not the “bad apples.”
(And it must be kept in mind, despite agreement with the above, harassment and stalking of women who have no idea how to respond because official channels are not proportionate to the offense are also still serious problems. I know victims of stalking. I know targets of witch hunts. Yes, in our cosmopolitan social bubble, yes in the very recent past. It’s a messy, complicated world out there.)
I’ll just note that “if you find yourself alone in on a room with a really bad person in a sexual context they can seriously mess up your life and get away with it because there were no witnesses” was the status quo for women before circa 1990. Rape is a crime that almost always happens in a situation where there is no convincing physical evidence, where it is plausible that no crime occurred at all, where a material part of the crime is the effective communication of an inner mental state of the victim.
Given all that, a system that only relied on the legal system with its high burdens of proof, particularly when combined with rampant misogyny, means that rape accusations succeeded in only the most brazen and obvious circumstances. It meant men could hurt women with impunity.
I’m not saying the right answer is jus to flip things around and make men as vulnerable as women used to be, but honestly unless you start fucking in semi-public spaces like responsible degenerates I have no idea how to make this not zero sum.
Attention to the truth is not zero-sum. People should act on what they truly believe is accurate.
What we see in these accusations, and most crimes tied to ideology (ie, the belief that rape is part of rape culture is part of the patriarchy is part of conservatism, and thus that fighting sexual assault has a political component) is the desire to disavow your own judgment. You may personally be unsure a rape did not take place, but for the sake of the political project you must act as if you did.
(Additionally in these social witch hunts, the problem is rarely disagreement over the facts of what happened. It’s more about the interpretation of those facts, and things like, as you say, someone’s internal mental state.)
In the past we had the reverse of this, where you might believe a man did something heinous, but were pressured to pretend nothing bad happened so the town could continue on in peaceful harmony. So you keep him away from your daughters, but otherwise ignore the victim. That too was disavowal.
You must take responsibility for your own judgment. This includes what you think of the accused, and of the victim, and of the context, and their other relationships with people, and of moral questions like forgiveness and justice. (Very, very often in the modern context that conclusion will be: I think the accused did not mean to hurt anyone and is safe for others to be around, but the victim is hurt and needs space to feel safe now.)
It’s terrifying because people will call you all sorts of terms coded with political betrayal. But to give in and claim what you do not believe is true, is the cowardice that condemns people to silence and lies.
The good news here is that we’ve enjoyed so much social progress that Ourobouros is starting to eat his own tail, and we’ll soon be back to the symmetrical, Victorian-era standard of “never be alone in a room with someone of the opposite sex unless they’re your spouse, because it will cause Rumor and Scandal.”
aka, you won’t get accused because she cheated on her boyfriend if you are the boyfriend
Yes, this is by no means foolproof, but it is wise to reduce one’s potential attack surface.
The risk of false accusation is probably weighted more heavily on a per-partner basis, longer dating makes hiding two-timing proportionally more difficult, allows better anticipation of hangups and other risk factors, etc.
I’ve never really been a “social model of disability” kind of person but boy howdy am I becoming one
I could get along just fine without all the neurotypicals constantly going “just remember: you’ll never actually be normal!”
@faeline said: Honestly, I’d be a lot more okay with
that model if it allowed for my actual problems functioning. People are
shitty but that doesn’t explain why sometimes I don’t eat until 3PM.
Agreed. It’s not society’s fault that my brain sometimes short-circuits. I dislike the idea that you can just handwave away the actual symptoms. But my internal symptoms don’t have to inhibit my getting along in the world as much as they currently do. When a not-autistic person and I have a problem communicating, I wish the fault weren’t automatically assumed to be mine. I wish they were encouraged to speak my language a little bit, given that I spend 99% of the time trying to speak theirs.
The City of Autismburg, founded in 2022 as a haven for autistic individuals,
The interesting thing about the deceased wife’s sister debate and the more recent same sex marriage debate is that they dragged on for ages as people told horror stories about the collapse of civilization that would ensue if they were recognised, then after the law was changed people immediately lost interest and never mentioned it again.
Like, seriously? No follow up? No re-evaluation of the argument after the law has been in place for a few years and the sky remains unfallen? We all just scoot on to the next flamewar about trans bathrooms or whatever the fuck.
Prediction: when bathrooms are all unisex, everyone will immediately forget that this once used to be intensely controversial.
Okay, but some practices are way more likely to cause complex damage than others, and unisex bathrooms are probably not one of the ones likely to cause (that much) complex damage.
No. Bathroom laws will be questioned for years after, if they are made coed, because shit like this will continue to happen now and then, because shit like that happens now and then https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Alexandra_Zapp
In this case I mean it won’t flip society patriarchal, like polygamy would.
“Male-dominated video games become spectator e-sports for predominantly male viewers because they sustain a different project than celebrating physical excellence. They don’t showcase a specific form of male-bodied performance so much as support a specific sort of male spectator: a straight middle-class boy full of resentment and patriarchal rage. This is and has been the sports fan par excellence.”—
The interesting thing about the deceased wife’s sister debate and the more recent same sex marriage debate is that they dragged on for ages as people told horror stories about the collapse of civilization that would ensue if they were recognised, then after the law was changed people immediately lost interest and never mentioned it again.
Like, seriously? No follow up? No re-evaluation of the argument after the law has been in place for a few years and the sky remains unfallen? We all just scoot on to the next flamewar about trans bathrooms or whatever the fuck.
Prediction: when bathrooms are all unisex, everyone will immediately forget that this once used to be intensely controversial.
Okay, but some practices are way more likely to cause complex damage than others, and unisex bathrooms are probably not one of the ones likely to cause (that much) complex damage.
Buzzfeed is an entertainment website that collects an enormous amount of information about its users. Much of the data comes from traditional Internet tracking, but Buzzfeed also has a lot of fun quizzes, some of which ask very personal questions. One of them – “How Privileged Are You?” – asks about financial details, job stability, recreational activities, and mental health. Over two million people have taken that quiz, not realizing that Buzzfeed saves data from its quizzes.
I read this in Bruce Schneier’s “Data and Goliath” and thought “oh my god, ‘Buzzfeed sells mental health information from privilege quizzes to insurance companies’ would be the most horribly believable 2010s internet thing,” but the source he cited was merely an article (see also here, here) saying that Buzzfeed could conceivably do this (of course they can) but there is no evidence they actually are
“Supporting Putin against imperialism is the best thing I can do for myself as an advocate of the working class” is one of the most nuclear hot takes in internet history and we owe Minisoc a lot of credit for making this website entertaining
horseshoe theory tho, this is what a lot of the alt-right actually believes
On the one hand, I am disappointed (but not necessarily surprised) that we’ve reached a point where expressing vitriol over an eleven-year-old unpublished first draft is, like, a fun weekend activity,
but on the other, nothing else has so elegantly illuminated that performative dragging is not actually about justice of any sort.
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
“If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party”
We can hope!
Hey, we can also hope on the effects of inbreeding
Because I agree. Marrying your cousin is terrible, doing it for multiple generations is worse, not just with health risks, but also socially as support for extreme patriarchal norms. It doesn’t magically become good just because isolated, low-income, lower class white residents of rural Appalachia do it.
“Christianity went through a process of modernization during the 20th century. As new norms replaced old ones. But churches are emptying because of the loss of authentic faith.
The left will come to realize that Islam is not going to tow the line of homosexual acceptance nor will it promote feminist values. They’re valiant defenders of Islam now. But they won’t be if they become 30-40% of the religious population in the United States of America.”
“The soft populist-nationalism of Donald Trump is bulldozing through the neo-liberal headquarters. Illegal immigration is down. He’s pushing for merit-based immigration. He’s questioning affirmative action. He’s laying the foundation for a larger movement that is currently in it’s adolescence.
Capitalism and mass immigration have destroyed traditional norms, faith, and proper birthrates. A rejection of modern capitalism would do plenty for societies around the world. In terms of reviving older cultural and political norms. I’m quite fond of distributism, capitalist protectionism, and a rightist variant of Kropotkinism as alternatives to the current system.”
I have various disagreements, but the real biting one is this:
It fails to account for Transhumanism.
For many years, opponents of Transhumanism have described it as techno-utopian fantasy that will never come to pass, and maybe the brain uploading part and the Singularity are, but they’ve been getting a lot quieter about the rest of it recently.
These aren’t science fiction. Only their economic viability is - for now.
Recently mouse lifespans were increased by 10-15% with stem cells in the brain, and studies on blood health with mice have also been promising (inspiring all those jokes about Vampire Peter Thiel).
There is a point where lifespan begins to increase more quickly and healthcare costs start to come back down again, where screening out genetic diseases and selecting for higher performance first hits the wealthy and then everyone else. This starts to undermine the effects of lowered fertility on more left-wing social configurations.
It undermines race, it undermines social darwinism, it undermines demand for religion.
You can ban it in Europe, you can ban it in America, but if you do, then the research will merely continue in Asia.
You might get a shift rightwards socially, but I don’t think it will look like what you expect. It will probably be in the form of a more holistic view of society where it is acknowledged that we can only afford to be kind if we’re careful not to increase the situations that required us to be kind in the first place. All the bitching about gays is a sideshow.
I don’t know what policies Mark Zuckerberg is going to run on (well, I mean I kinda do) but I don’t really care, I am already very dedicated to not voting for him
I very much do not put it beyond the democratic party to nominate The Zuck for President. But I don’t think he’ll actually win if they do.
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
“If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party”
We can hope!
I love when conservatives implicitly admit that too much of their ideology is racist or xenophobic to ever appeal to enough people of color to sustain them.
I’m not really a Conservative, or at least Conservatives would not consider me a Conservative, I voted for the Clintontron 3000 last election and I support the establishment of a national wage subsidy program for low-income workers.
Apparently it takes multiple generations for “desired level of government interference” (or whatever it was) to revert to the national mean, and apparently most incoming groups from most countries have a higher level of it than the current national mean.
So if you’re the “less government interference except for abortions and military spending” party, then, logically…
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
“If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party”
We can hope!
#change their policies to attract different voters
Yes, yes, very funny.
The Republicans should clearly support expanded welfare, mass migration, and culture war against the country’s ethnic majority. That won’t upset their base at all and just make them a more sucky version of the Democrats.
Honestly, if they actually started changing policies to appeal outside their party in a way that wasn’t stupid… they’d be looking to pick up Asian voters by expanding the definition of white to include them. There are already risk factors for this in the current environment, it just remains to be seen if the visual difference is too much of a leap.
And if that happened, the democrats would quickly throw Asians under the bus. Socially, I mean. Apparently it isn’t mostly white people that are displaced by Affirmative Action, etc. There have been lawsuits about this.
Of course they won’t actually do this, because both the Republican and Democratic parties are never going to actually get smarter. Maybe if we didn’t have FPTP.
“Culture war against the country’s ethnic majority” is a fucking nuclear take. As if every poltical institution in this country doesn’t uphold white supremacy. what world are you living where the democrats pose a threat to whiteness?
Their goal seems to be:
“You can’t have oppression by an ethnic majority if you don’t have an ethnic majority.”
So not immediately, no. After all, Hillary Clinton was their presidential candidate. But it does seem like the plan is “let’s defeat white supremacy by making the whites a minority,” which might work, or might not work.
I live in a world where democrats periodically talk about how eventually all those darn old racist white redneck men will die off and America will be significantly more racially diverse, and the GOP needs to “get with the times, grampa”, so to speak. It’s also a world where the democrats describe opposition to immigration as fundamentally rooted in racism, and just last week I was arguing with someone I knew IRL that said America has an obligation to take in all peoples because it is on land stolen from Native Americans (and therefore not only can immigration not be decreased but we can’t even have limits on countries which lack functioning governments to vet newcomers).
This is, of course, ignoring all the various other progressive leftists grouped in with the democrats that are much less, hm, “gentle” and just looking at the mainstream of the party. (Again, Hillary “super predators” Clinton was their candidate, not their opinion columnists.)
Anyhow, “mass migration” is also a bit of an overstatement regarding current immigration policies, so “culture war against the country’s ethnic majority” is also a pull in the other direction for contrast with where they are right now, depending on just how you define culture war.
Though… once the demographics change, do you think they’ll actually stop trying to fight white supremacy? Or will they just change focus, like how women are the majority of undergraduate university students, but we mostly hear about how STEM needs more women (even though the fields of biology also flipped majority women recently, IIRC)?
And perhaps more importantly, do the Republican Party and their voters believe it will stop?
How do you feel about what is currently happening in Venezuela? I heard that a new communist dictatorship might be in power but am not sure how trustworthy any information about this is.
I think the sources on the effects of the last decade on Venezuela’s economic situation seem pretty reliable - that is, they are using statistics that existed long before the crisis, the statistics paint a consistent picture, that picture matches what I’ve seen written by people currently living there, and I haven’t seen them seriously contested. So, yeah, it looks like the last few socialist/communist governments of Venezuela have been steadily consolidating power by murder where necessary, have destroyed the country’s health system, access to food, and access to necessities, and are tightening their dictatorial death grip on the country they steered off a cliff.
The leftists I’ve seen defending this seem to fall back to ‘well, it’s this or allowing U.S. imperialism and U.S. imperialism is even worse’, but I find this amazingly callous and horrible - if the best alternative your ideology can offer to U.S. imperialism is ‘wait in line for ten hours for inadequate amounts of basic necessities, sham elections where even though people are shot for not voting turnout is basically nothing, massive human rights catastrophe and desperate poverty for everyone’, then your ideology is terrible and should die. And the thing is, I do not actually think that that is the best alternative the left can offer - so for the love of g-d offer a better one, instead of doubling down on the insistence that this is all you’ve got!
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
“If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party”
We can hope!
#change their policies to attract different voters
Yes, yes, very funny.
The Republicans should clearly support expanded welfare, mass migration, and culture war against the country’s ethnic majority. That won’t upset their base at all and just make them a more sucky version of the Democrats.
Honestly, if they actually started changing policies to appeal outside their party in a way that wasn’t stupid… they’d be looking to pick up Asian voters by expanding the definition of white to include them. There are already risk factors for this in the current environment, it just remains to be seen if the visual difference is too much of a leap.
And if that happened, the democrats would quickly throw Asians under the bus. Socially, I mean. Apparently it isn’t mostly white people that are displaced by Affirmative Action, etc. There have been lawsuits about this.
Of course they won’t actually do this, because both the Republican and Democratic parties are never going to actually get smarter. Maybe if we didn’t have FPTP.
Remember when Republicans pretended they were fine with legal immigration
If they don’t do something, then there is no future for the Republican party.
But don’t worry. In about ten years I’m going to be asking “remember when the democrats made fun of marrying your cousin instead of calling all objections racist?”
Maybe Dems shouldn’t brag about Demographic Destiny™ next time.
Gentle reminder that I don’t think that men are bad or that women are bad, but the discourse around them dating is bad:
Some women often hold other men and women to patriarchial gender standards
Other people act like nobody adheres to rigid gender roles any more and there is no cost to breaking them
Straight women suck at understanding what dating a woman is like
People don’t grow up right when they turn 18
Most people gradually do grow up around 22-25
Dating experiences carry over from your time as a teenager or a self-conscious adult, even though they don’t apply any more
Dating advice is dependent on lots of context, but if you are the kind of person who needs advice, you likely cannot tell what is relevant and which kind of advice applies to you
surely human relationships are the most difficult thing people ever attempt.
Hot take: making human procreation depend on human relationships was a bad idea.
Ice cold take! You are like 85 years late at least!
I was gesturing towards arranged marriages more than eugenics and artificial wombs, but either way I was hoping that this take was so cold it became hot again.
Sterilize everyone and have the State raise all children from embryos!
… h-hey! p-put down those torches and pitchforks!
Ice cold take! You are like 85 years late at least!
You’re talking about a right-wing blogger and a blogger that synthesizes right-wing ideas. Maybe we just like our takes Traditional™ and Culturally Authentic™*. How could you not have considered this?
What if we turned facile pop culture comparisons back onto shallow centrist ideology, much like Harry killing Voldemort by deflecting his own Killing Curse?
To rely on elections alone is to use a powerful magical spell to seal away the ancient evil; it will inevitably break loose and terrorize the people again. Only a sustained campaign against the roots of evil ideology will allow us to “gather and level up our party” so we can use Omnislash on - hgk - [swallows the bile rising in my throat] ugh - on the Dark Lord Chee'toragas.
*reblogs disapprovingly*
Have you even looked at popular media?
Villains are the only ones with the ambition, the will, and the plans to drive the world forward.
Villains act, heroes react. It is only by the actions of villains that the plot is driven forward. Heroes are nothing more than abominable tools of the status quo and every hierarchy that exists within it.
What has fighting for democracy gotten us in the past fifty years? Nothing but more pointless wars. The vain idealism of this country is nothing more than hollow self-gratification. It must be eliminated or transformed into something far greater.
We must immediately instate mandatory National Military Service for the nation’s youth. An assault rifle and a kukri for every able-bodied-and-minded American citizen. War production levels. Total national mobilization.
It’s time for America to go heel for real.
We will abolish the legislature and replace it with personnel from the RAND Corporation betting on outcomes of their new legislation, with a twenty billion dollar machine learning project at their fingertips intercepting information from all over the world. The cruelest and most frighteningly competent tech CEO will be chosen as the new Central Director for the North American Union, real identity concealed, and tasked with world dominion. The vast majority of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border. It will not be difficult to sweep them into the new project.
A reformed DARPA will be issued megaproject funding levels for geoengineering, exoskeletal powered armor, and cybernetic enhancement projects. The North American fleet will be outfitted with new hypervelocity railguns that cannot be stopped by mere Chinese missile intercept systems. The government will fund mass selective IVF to screen out genetic defects, and then full-on genetic engineering. “Naturals” will be made a special, separate insurance category so as not to drag on the state’s new unified military service based insurance program.
The power of eminent domain will be expanded dramatically. Old slums will be torn down and replaced with defensible, militarized housing complexes with dense public transportation and on-site commercial and light industrial complexes. Cities will be designed for high survivability in the event of nuclear war, and civil defense stations will be positioned throughout the country with multiple months of freeze-dried reserve foods in addition to water filtration systems and heavier weaponry required foreign land-based counter-invasion.
All convicted of murder, sex trafficking of minors, or unlawful sale of hard drugs will be summarily executed. Corporal punishment will be reintroduced and prison sentences will be halved or reduced to a third. The punishments for repeated offenses will square.
No longer will America engage in the half-hearted “regime change” of knocking over some pathetic middle eastern country with an illiteracy rate approaching 60% and then imagining that Liberal Democracy will instantly take root. Now, we play for keeps. Any country invaded will be subjected to a 20 year military governorship overwriting whatever aspects of the culture must be overwritten for the territory to be permanently held in the American sphere. No international apologies will ever be made. For anything.
New full-body armor with face-concealing helmets will be designed for our new heavy infantry units, including built-in augmented reality battlespace software. It is important that we provide a unique look to the faceless wall of power.
Then, and only then, having become a true sci-fi empire, can the 21st Century Protagonist emerge to instill real Freedomocracy™.
I wish I could enjoy Rick and Morty more but it’s just so incredibly mean-spirited it makes me sad
it thinks it’s about the “happy, liberating” sort of nihilism but it’s not, it’s about the sort of nihilism where you spread nothing but ruin and death and sorrow because if nothing matters that means it’s okay to hurt people endlessly
I watched a good chunk of it…
But that was always there, underneath. I do not share the morality of the creators, and I would not show this show to children.
Nah. It's usually fairly offensive and coming from the sort of people who say things like "the blacks" or call all latinxs "hispanics". Personally, I'll only accept it from older trans people since that (and transexual) was what was used during their youth).
(re: “transgendered”)
I don’t know. The events of the last few weeks are starting to make me really feel like I’d much rather have “I support the transgenders! Transgendereds are just people trying to live their lives!” over the sort of people who use absolutely perfect up-to-the-minute gender studies terminology but don’t actually like anyone.
(I mean, not that those are the only two groups, obviously someone can use correct terminology and be supportive and that’s great, but if they’re not willfully misgendering an individual, terminology is like 0.5% of someone’s Trans-Friendliness Score in my book.)
Maybe the difference is whether someone’s just unfamiliar, or whether they’ve been told “transgender is an adjective” and doubled down on “I’ll call you what I want to call you!” But I see the mere-unfamiliarity more often, and I don’t have a problem with that–it means they’re a new supporter, and new supporters are good and valuable to have.
I’ve seen some quips like “TERFs claiming that ‘TERF’ is a slur is a hilarious self-own,” which is true and all, but I think it’s a bad idea to ignore how plenty of literally-true descriptors can be caustic insults
“chinaman” always baffled me
well done, these sure are two words
slurs are ordinary words, you just curl your lip when you say them.
(if you read the wrong blogs, you’ll see them use “Mexican” as a slur)
that’s quite a thing for an avian to say. maybe you should think before opening your beak. wouldn’t want to ruffle any feathers would you?
reading up on the Ethereum / DAO hack and good lord is there some bad code out there in the world
“But what if there’s a bug and my code doesn’t do what I intended, letting someone take my money via means I didn’t expect?”
“Well, then you deserve to lose your money for your poor decision-making. Plus all the benefits of a process beyond human influence are worth making it so human judges and laws and fuzzy ideas of fairness can’t fix things. Besides, those fuzzy ideas do more harm than good.”
“There’s a bug in your code.”
”Okay, so let’s do a soft fork of the network in the short term to prevent the money from being spent, get the exchanges to freeze withdrawals, and then review what code changes we can make to give the money back to its proper owners.”
(This is a Plato’s chicken thing; if they truly deferred to the concept of ownership they’ve encoded into the software, the reaction would be “Yes, it’s the hacker’s money now, what of it?”)
Good ol’ fiat currency with fiat decision making remains the most reliable way for anyone with any grasp of the bounds of their own rationality, anyone who thinks the concept of an “unconscionable” contract has some value to them, to keep a balance.
Geeks love technology problems and hate people problems, so they try and convert every people problem into a technology problem.
Money is inherently social, because it’s merely a system for keeping track of how much you owe each other. Taking people out of the equation renders it absolutely useless, as the whole system only works by mutual agreement.
"environmental extremist, notorious hacker, and tumblr teen Argumate is taking the meaning of 'going green' literally with this exciting new genetic modification" - HuffBuzz, 2032
in the transhuman future, everyone will be a Teen!
