Oceans Yet to Burn

mitigatedchaos

Anonymous asked:

How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.

theunitofcaring answered:

1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’

2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.

3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.

4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.

mitigatedchaos

What violent leftists think will keep housing affordable: using mob violence to physically prevent outsiders from moving in to a neighborhood.

What would actually make housing affordable: Japanese Zoning Laws

philippesaner

What are Japanese zoning laws?

mitigatedchaos

They have a maximum zone type instead of strict limitations of one type for one zone.

Click that link. Look at how smart their plan is.

As a result of this and other policies, their booming metropolitan areas see no significant increase in housing prices relative to American cities and the UK. I had a chart I saved for this but it’s elsewhere. Basically, London prices have gone up like 500% without anywhere near a 500% increase in population, while Tokyo prices are up less than their % rise in population.

mitigatedchaos

oh hey look it’s that graph

Source: theunitofcaring

argumate

not like other girls who say they’re not like other girls.

greencerenkov

contrarian/metacontrarian position: I am exactly like other girls. I am near the median of the normal distribution of girls

argumate

“I’m not the boy your mother warned you about; in fact I’m not sure why I even brought that up.”

darthsquidious

I’m the girl your mother warned you would claim to be the girl your mother warned you about.

argumate

what if the girl your mother warned you about… was yourself

mitigatedchaos

Argumate was the Most Dangerous Girl all along?

I’m really not sure how I feel about this.

shtpost except that i need to practice anatomy visual shtpost the mitigated exhibition i guess

ranma-official

thivus

ive never actually seen one with my name on it but i think im probably on one of those “BAD PEOPLE:BLOCK IMMEDIETELY” lists somewhere and thats why people ive never interacted with have me blocked

ranma-official

ngl like 80% of people you hang out with either are already literal nazis or defend nazism at every single opportunity

mitigatedchaos

> tags

Here’s a post from recent memory, but I’m not sure how much of it is memeing.

Source: thivus

spillywolf

Source: comcastkills

rocketverliden asked:

Okay, the ESF part of your blog description bugs me not just because of the ideological signifier, but also because I'm both a Gundam fan and a pedant. The Federation in UC was just the "Earth Federation." The ESF is from Gundam Wing, however, and it was formed after the brutal war between thbe Earth-based Romefeller Foundation and the Barton Foundation-backed colony forces. This probably changes the context of its usage in your blog desc.

Actually, I used it in my blog description without originally intending it to refer to Gundam, as it quickly denotes “a federation controlling the entire Earth sphere”.

But now that I’ve engaged in Gundamposting, I should change it!

Also I think they called it the ESF in Gundam 00 too.

luchadoreofliberty

a libertarian who likes fascism or nationalism was never a libertarian to begin with. they were conservatives using the label much like the libertarian party is just about weed and cia shill coporation

gospel-panacea

This is ideology, not religion. People’s minds are capable of evolution.

luchadoreofliberty

how is fascism evolution? are you high on meth?

gospel-panacea

9 out of 10 ideologies are better than libertarianism, the other is communism.

luchadoreofliberty

Future purged brown shirt found.

gospel-panacea

We’ll be doing the purging actually.

luchadoreofliberty

You don’t get it. You all be purged by your own fascist leaders or left for dead in the next Stalingrad. You are a moron. Every fascist state lead to self implosion and lost every war. You are a dumb ass.

libertarianskelly

So nationalism of any kind, including liking living in Texas rather than California is bad?

luchadoreofliberty

Name one instance where nationalism has not led to war or state violence.

mutant-aesthetic

This is a bad point because even without nationalism there is still war and violence

blaming nationalism for violence is like blaming religion for violence

luchadoreofliberty

Wrong. Nationalism emphasizes conflict, the other, and war. It can only survive on external and internal threats

mitigatedchaos

Name one instance of immune system function that has not lead to microscopic violence.

To put it simply, in this world, an ideology can only be physically instantiated if a sufficiently large, well-armed, well-organized, and well-resourced group are willing to literally fight to the death to ensure it is so. They may not actually have to fight to the death, but the credibility of the threat must be there.

Libertarianism will not be instantiated if the culture does not support it. It doesn’t matter how “objectively moral” it is. If people with the means to enforce their views do not want it, it will not happen.

I don’t particularly care for Libertarianism except as a counter-weight, but it’s easy to see that some Libertarians have noticed that the cultural demographics matter when it comes to whether or not there will be Libertarianism.

politics

argumate

but in this year of our lord 2k17 I’m actually genuinely uncertain as to whether describing Japan’s schoolgirl obsession as “kinda messed up” counts as woke or reactionary.

mitigatedchaos

Publicly, woke so they won’t decide to Normalize Schoolgirlhoodphilia or something just to spite reactionaries. Privately? Reactionary.

gender politics

ranma-official

Source: robin-musubi

drethelin

mitigatedchaos

@drethelin

It isn’t just government subsidies that are in effect when a company doesn’t pay enough to keep workers alive.

The company can also be indirectly subsidized by draining the social and other capital of families, relatives, kind strangers, and whoever keeps those employees alive.

This is “efficient,” not actually efficient.

The alternative is to openly embrace social darwinism, which also deprives society and the economy in general all future value of the worker based on what their feasible value is right now, which may cause a rather significant net loss.

( @collapsedsquid may know if someone has explicitly studied this )

Making it impossible to fire people isn’t a good idea, but letting companies free ride on society’s / the country’s generosity isn’t such a great idea, either.

Now, you may say that direct wage subsidies have to come out of taxes, but those taxes likely aren’t going to come from the scarce poor-families-capital currently subsidizing Walmart, and it significantly reduces the competitive advantage of such behavior. Additionally, with more jobs profitable for more workers, there is more competition between employers to quit being jerks to the working class, which is currently distorted by the massive power imbalance between the working class as individuals and corporations with their collective bargaining power. It’s also less expensive than welfare since it stacks public funding with private funding, instead of running a straight loss, and if structured correctly, it still strongly incentivizes these workers to pursue higher-paying, more economically valuable work.

Or we could start billing Walmart for the billions of dollars in public assistance their workers receive, but that would be a much less efficient solution with similar effects to raising the wage floor.

drethelin

If walmart vanished, those workers would still be getting public assistance. They are purely making the situation better. If there was anyone around who would be paying those workers better, or enough to NOT need public assistance, they would be working there instead. This is a common progressive instinct: Making the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s far far better that walmart exists and pays the wages it does than if it didn’t. And the most important beneficiaries of Walmart’s low wages aren’t even Walmart’s profits: It’s everyone, primarily poor people, who shops there.

drethelin

By subsidizing Walmart’s cheap goods and convenience (having a huge selection and being open 24 hours), the USG is actually helping out the poor people a lot!

mitigatedchaos

If you put a bomb in someone’s skull, you have a lot of leverage and can get them to do just about anything, up to the point that they are willing to die to refuse your demands.

And if they’ll merely be homeless? Well that’s not quite as much leverage, but it’s still a lot of leverage. Walmart can walk away with only a few less hours served, but the workers may not necessarily be able to. This imbalance in the amount of skin in the game may mean that Walmart wages are artificially low, even without Medicare preventing their employees from dying of medical conditions.

In this case, I feel it would be better for the workers and their working conditions if we made the subsidies more explicit, so Walmart and everyone else could stop pretending they aren’t being effectively subsidized. And while the effective hourly wages might not rise as much due to not generating that much value, the influx of competing job options into the marketplace would likely result in competition over working conditions, which are one of the things that makes life for the working class so unbearable.

Source: mitigatedchaos the invisible fist

theunitofcaring

The form of direct action against abusive employers that I personally find the most tempting (this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or anything, just that I daydream about it):

Employees often don’t file legal complaints about wage fraud and illegal conditions because they can’t afford to lose the job because they’re living paycheck to paycheck. I expect that many people in this situation would quit their horrible job and file a legal complaint if they would be given like $1200 to tide them and their family over while they found a new job.

So here’s what I’d be tempted to do: ask people online to tell you about a business that’s engaging in wage and hours violations/otherwise really shitty but still its employees’ best option. Find one with like 10-15 employees. Fundraise money within your activist group and online to get enough money for every single employee to walk away.

Then the employees go to their boss and say ‘the next time you take half our tips even though you’re not legally allowed to take any/make us come in when we’re really sick/deduct damaged merchandise from our paychecks/etc, we all walk away. We have filed a wage claim in court. If you retaliate for that, we all walk away.’

And then, you know, next time the employer breaks the law, any employee who wants to follow through on the threat gets $1200 to support them once they’ve quit. And then you publicize the heck out of it, and scare other shitty employers, and hopefully the wage claim is successful and your employees get recompensed the money they were owed. And you open online applications for the next place.

You’d have to be very careful to go after places with real, documented, verified workplace conditions violations, because most of the benefit is in the publicity and the scaring other employers into shaping up. And you can’t scare people into shaping up if they don’t know exactly what they need to do (meet their legal obligations). You could only go after small places, because you need most of the employees on the same page and because fundraising larger sums of money would be harder.

But with the right fundraising and PR team, I bet you could create conditions under which employers are way more scared to cheat their employees.

mitigatedchaos

Because employees lack negotiating leverage, the government should have a network of secret labor law informants, such that no business can be entirely sure they won’t get smacked down hard for flagrant violations. Simultaneously, the labor laws could be simplified.

policy the invisible fist the iron hand

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.