Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@the-grey-tribe

Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas should be kept in their ivory towers where they belong.

@argumate

I dreamt I was a superhero could fly etc. but I kept getting captured and killed by gangsters so I got irritated and started pushing a drug decriminalisation slash harm reduction program to destroy their business and I got so bored I woke up so I guess they won this round

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[bunjywunjy]

someone created a random generator that creates randomized inspirational quotes overlaid on random images in a soothing fashion and each and every image is comic gold

it’s pretty much the best thing ever and here are some of my favorites so far

so good

I’m getting this one made into a motivational poster for my home office

PLEASE GO MAKE SOME OF YOUR OWN RIGHT NOW

[mitigatedchaos]

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[der-prinz-aus-stahl]

I leave the jeans I’m going to wear on my bed a few hours in advance of getting ready so that my cat will sleep on them and make them warm for me when I go out to brave the harsh Australian winter.

[argumate]

call them daks instead of jeans and make it a kangaroo instead of a cat and this would be a quality Strayan post to go viral on tumblr dot com

[der-prinz-aus-stahl]

You’re so painfully unfunny that I’m certain you’re actually an American.

[argumate]

no wound ever cut so deep.

[mitigatedchaos]

Somewhere on Earth, an Australian woman cries, because she is too stereotypical for people to believe she’s real.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

how do I sign up for your politics

If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done.  These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.

The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics.  Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.

Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government.  To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.

Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments.  Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable.  Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.

---

Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[voximperatoris]

The idea that there are no innate differences between men and women is really freaking weird! At least it’s internally consistent as a TERF narrative.

But it’s especially weird when I hear it out of the mouths of transgender people. There are no differences between men and women—but I’m really a woman!

[argumate]

honestly it would be better if everything Bad about men/women was innately biological, because it’s trivial to manufacture hormone supplements compared with trying to shift culture.

[argumate]

mautlyn said: can’t tell whether or not you agree with OP but like there are extensive studies showing that there are no brain differences between males & females

which is weird, because at least some people I know taking hormones report changes they’ve personally experienced.

but “no brain differences” is doing a lot of work in that sentence; if taken literally it would suggest that men and women are indistinguishable statistically, which is far from the truth (eg. why do men take more risks if their brains are no different to women?)

[nicdevera]

why do men take more risks if their brains are no different to women?

Cultural conditioning. I remember when people said “Men dominate at chess, that’s just biology, man.” Then Laszlo Polgar raised 3 female chess Grandmasters.

[argumate]

cultural condition implies resulting brain is different to women, is my point.

[mitigatedchaos]

Did I not just reblog a link to a study in which each brain is unique and yet there are statistical distributions in structure which are overlapping but not uniform? Plus a lack differences in physical layout may not correspond to a lack of difference from the effect of hormones! “We are all neurologically the same” is liberal blank-slate wishful thinking, and, from progressive news outlets, a deliberate misrepresentation.

I know previously “but there may be differences” has been used to defend unjustified policy, the problem is that just because it was used to defend unjustified policy doesn’t mean it is false.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ Values, Efficacy ]

To jump off of @the-grey-tribe‘s joke post:

I think one of the key discoveries of the 20th century that has not yet been realized is that, contrary to the beliefs of many factions, including the globalist liberals and the Communists, there is not one right way to live, one set of laws which is the correct one for all people and all groups, and that all alternatives must fall away and either die off or be destroyed.  

We must recognize that political policy is not a strict hierarchy of better/worse left/right, but a vector with two components - values (or terminal goals), and the means or effectiveness of means by which those values are to be realized or achieved.

Often, the failures of politics are not the result of terrible values, but ones of effectiveness.  And some of the failures of modern, “rational” planning would be mitigated by the recognition and inclusion of alternate values, alternate ways to live.

If we design the political system from this perspective, I believe we could create substantial improvements, and also, perhaps ironically, a diversity of communities which are specialized according what best fits given populations without trying to transform them all into one homogeneous mass.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[the-grey-tribe]

Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas should be kept in their ivory towers where they belong.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, but by becoming World Emperor you already broke the first condition holding back those ideas - the inability to designate successively larger geographical areas to test them on live populations before larger-scale rollouts, arising from the necessities of political rivalry.

Victory for National Technocracy begins in the town of Whozawhatsit, Arkowa.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[thathopeyetlives]

Urrrgghhh

They killed him. Nothin
North Korea killed him.

What now? Probably nothing, which is exactly the problem!

[mitigatedchaos]

The prisoner that came back in a coma?

Because Hope my man, we are not going to war over one guy.  You’ve seen where that World Policeman beat goes.

[thathopeyetlives]

Yeah, I nether expect nor desire that to happen over one guy. 

And yet the obscurantist state of North Korea continues to maintain its wretched position, oppressing its own citizens and threatening foreigners, because the alternative does not serve either of its neighbor’s self-interest. Time is being made to stand still.

Suffice it to say that I am frustrated and I think it would be better for time to stop standing still. Ideally the USA would be either minimally involved, or provide only muscle. 

[the-grey-tribe]

Warmbier probably got the same treatment as a hundred thousand North Koreans.

West Germany basically bought East Germany from the Soviets when they ran out of money.

I wish this was possible for Korea. North Korea does not even care when they run out of money or rice. I fear they just go on forever like this.

[mitigatedchaos]

We gave up the money, blood, and political capital to just go to Korea flat out when we went to Iraq.

I’m sorry.  It would have been far more justified.  Maybe, in some other timeline, somewhere, there is no ISIS and Samsung’s heavy industry division is building power plants on the outskirts of Pyongyang.

I’m not sure that the national policy establishment have even learned that when you decide to play world policeman, you must play to win.  The Neocons loved the idea of American Empire, but they weren’t willing to pay the ideological price it takes to do it for real.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Sweating Obama Admits Drone Strikes Have Been Happening On Their Own

Honestly, that’s kind of like how a subset of American voters experience this.  The immense political and bureaucratic inertia seems to turn every President into part of the war machine, no matter what they promised before.

But like many policies that are bad, many of these military actions just don’t work for their ostensible goals.