Oceans Yet to Burn

discoursedrome

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.”

discoursedrome

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”.

mitigatedchaos

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).

argumate

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.

mitigatedchaos

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.

sinesalvatorem

Anime was a mistake

mitigatedchaos

When your anime augmented reality filter creates the perception of large eyes, but does not dynamically resize your perception of contact lenses to match.

Random Contact Girl honey it’s the year 2048 you should really consider corrective surgery, it doesn’t count as augmentation, really!

shtpost mitigated fiction mitigated future

Every day that the Earth Sphere Federation does not exist is a better day for it.

mitigated future mitigated fiction chronofelony but still the truth

oktavia-von-gwwcendorff

Open Borders

argumate

(@voximperatoris, @neoliberalism-nightly, @socialjusticemunchkin)

Most people agree that open borders is a desirable end state for humanity, as being able to maintain it is strong evidence of an absence of war and famine and reduced global inequality.

Most people also agree that throwing open the borders overnight would have catastrophic consequences, following which the borders would immediately be closed again.

(The best example of open borders we have in the world today is the EU, and even moderate refugee flows have been sufficient to destabilise this project).

However there are plenty of obvious compromises that could be made, such as increasing immigration quotas by 50% each year, greatly increasing migration while giving plenty of time for societies to adjust and absorb the flow. Or going for easy wins, like opening the border between the US and Canada.

That said, I still can’t help feeling that proponents of open borders are downplaying the changes involved, and the possible consequences.

I mean, @voximperatoris is referencing the Jim Crow south in what appears to be a positive example of a society with a racial underclass employed as servants with lynchings “on a very small scale in the grand scheme of things”. Like, I’m not trying to be snarky but that sounds like something someone might write if they were attempting to satirise the open borders position.

And @socialjusticemunchkin talking approvingly of the improved aesthetics of local inequality compared with global inequality; again, not everyone is going to share that particular aesthetic.

There are also questions of whether increased inequality within a particular society ends up causing more problems (for that society) than increased inequality globally; eg. North Sentinelese appear happier living their current lives than as servants in Silicon Valley, despite the latter being “less unequal”.

Many proponents of open borders have suggested introducing a dual track concept of citizenship, where immigrants would not gain access to the full range of social services available to current citizens. I think this also needs to be taken into account when considering what open borders would do to inequality.

socialjusticemunchkin

So, to take a slightly different position: if seeking to move towards the abolition (as much as possible) of borders as soon as possible (leaving the obviously superior option of the Archipelago untouched as an even less realistic option: I have a marvellous plan for such an utopia this margin is too narrow to contain) is not desirable, why stop at national borders?

After all, the national borders are highly suspiciously sized. If a peaceful person with no ill intent may not migrate from Morocco to Spain, why should one be allowed to migrate from West Virginia to San Francisco?

The United States is larger than most combinations of two to numerous neighboring countries, and the differences inside the nation are staggering. The borderer regions in the Appalachia are practically third world compared to the city-state opulence of the Bay Area; and the values of the populations could hardly be more different. If poor people with backwards values being theoretically able to immigrate to the places where rich people with modern values live, shouldn’t we be more worried about the fact that any West Virginian who can purchase a plane ticket and find themselves housing and work is allowed to come to San Francisco and even vote in elections, with no border controls and centralized planning and immigration quotas to prevent the undesirable masses from flowing in without restraint? Surely Californian values and the riches and job markets of California are the fruits of the Californians’ labor, not something an Appalachian borderer may come to feast on whenever they feel like?

But furthermore, even within California we see stark differences! One does not need to venture too far inland to find different cultures and economies. Even if we build a wall around California, the problem persists; the Six Californias plan would have created both the richest and the poorest state of the Union, right next to each other! And indeed we are seeing the phenomenon of Central Californians flocking in to the Bay Area in search of work, the inevitable shantytowns kept away only by regulations that make it illegal for outsiders to ever have affordable housing. Surely it would be better to constrain this perversion and inequality machine, and establish a national border between the regions so that Silicon Valley may use 0.7% of is GDP in foreign aid to its impoverished neighbor and the shantytowns stay in Central California where they belong!

Yet even this is not enough! The neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point is notorious for being a honest-to-azathoth shantytown, with a racial distinction as sharp as it can ever be, right next to San Francisco itself. And indeed the denizens ever seek opportunities in the city proper, bringing their shantytownness and cheap labor downtown, driving down the wages of the hard-working residents of SoMa who, without this artificial mobility benefiting only the tech elite, could otherwise be making $50k a year even from burger-flipping! Not to mention all the services that fall under the general category of “servants to software developers” which would not be worth the genuine fair living wage of $30 an hour; the existence of this underpaid underclass allows the software developers to avoid doing their own shopping and driving and cooking and such things and instead use their time for the thing that is their comparative advantage, further driving up inequality when the equalizing effect of inefficient non-division of labor is reduced!

Indeed I say; let us restore all the borders! Back before this “enlightenment” and “emancipation” and such things, people knew their place and they would die on the same plot of land they were born onto. Let each family be bound to their own turf, never even imposing on their neighbor! Let us be truly honest in what we seek and end this charade; bring back serfdom! For only with the complete immobility of the populace, can a truly stable and equal and peaceful society be established. In our village, everyone is equal, looks the same and shares the same customs; and while we know that not every village is as prosperous as ours, we dutifully kind of pay our 0.7% of indulgences I mean aid to the Catholic Church which surely distributes it fairly to the poorest of the world instead of building a golden toilet for the pope; we have not verified this for only the Baron may ever leave this territory, but surely the virtous Church has the interests of all of us in mind!

osberend

Obviously, the tail end of this is extreme (and simply dumb in various particular details), but as far as the start of this goes, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens: I think that modern states are overwhelmingly too big, and not just as a result of there being too many humans on Earth in total. Ideally we should return to the basic unit of society being communities whose size is on the same order of magnitude as Dunbar’s number, perhaps loosely associated into small city-states (composed of Dunbar-sized neighborhoods) and their respective hinterlands (composed of Dunbar-sized villages).

As for cities the size of San Francisco, they shouldn’t be their own nations; they should not exist at all.

oktavia-von-gwwcendorff

That’s quite an extreme opinion. Obviously, people who wish to live in dunbar-communities should be able to live in dunbar-communities (as long as they accept the limitations that come from dunbar-communitarianism), but dunbar-communitarians should not attempt to pry metropolises away from metropolitanians’ hands.

The problem is that the current westphalian system of nation-states allows neither when we should be having both

mitigatedchaos

Let’s not pretend for a moment that non-open communities would be allowed to exist under Open Borders. The same ideological framework required to create Open Borders, including the beliefs that culture doesn’t actually matter and everyone can be reduced to just economics, that we need to allow access to the global poor, that this would somehow fix global poverty, plus Leftist reasoning, would demand that those communities be effectively obliterated.

And supposing for a moment that some holdouts, some people who still believe in Nationalism, in not destroying the cultural means that created the economic power that is so desperately coveted, seceded and created, once again, a nation-state, forming its own ethnicity from a mix of fellow believers, open borderers would immediately demand that it be torn down.

I have to wonder just how many of their sacred beliefs open borderers are willing to sacrifice to achieve their goals. Are they willing to destroy Islam, if it comes to that? Build a global government (as would almost inevitably occur)?

Source: argumate

argumate

In the afternoon the internet disappears for me and I feel its absence like phantom pain in a limb long removed, an itch that can never be scratched. Absolutely barbaric, etc.

ranma-official

quasi-normalcy

Petition to not only rip down every Confederate monument in the USA, but to grind them into gravel and sell them as kitty litter. Every time you’re mucking out your cat’s box, you can imagine urine stained clumps of Robert E. Lee falling into the garbage.

mitigatedchaos

Might I suggest literally any confederate statue other than Robert E. Lee?

Otherwise you might as well just knock over every military statue in general.

ranma-official

The whitewashing of Lee’s views on slavery is pretty much one of the core pillars of Lost Cause.

mitigatedchaos

Hmn, I decided to double-check it after your post, and it’s as messy as I should have expected from typical history, and the AU fiction writers mentioned at the bottom were a bit too optimistic. Rather, popularizing the fact that the mainline Southern government officials at the time explicitly said it was about slavery seems far more important.

What are your standards on tearing down historical statues, generally?

Source: quasi-normalcy

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

Open Borders

Most Australians failing to meet dietary guidelines, new research shows