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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
collapsedsquid
mitigatedchaos

I reasoned the PC stuff was like antibiotic resistance in bacteria.  It doesn’t matter today, it doesn’t matter tomorrow, but one day, 30 years from now, multi-drug-resistant TB develops and the problems pile on and on from there.  

…but if you can keep developing new antibiotics fast enough to keep up with it, you can sort-of ignore your bad practices and the collateral damage they cause.  

I thought that’s what was happening, and that the reckoning wasn’t going to be until 2028, as the result of a slowly building fire of, well, various mens’ movements refusing to comply with male gender roles (something already in progress at the fringes).  Instead the tension was lurking beneath the surface across multiple axes, but the media didn’t want to talk about it and people would be socially punished for talking about it sometimes, so it wasn’t as visible.

I’d like to think there is some new path where the word “Racism” can be made powerful again, but I cannot find it.  It would require socially punishing false accusations of racism, which simply isn’t feasible under the current ideological framework.  I’m not one to buy into the “Contradictions of $Ideology” idea much, (since most of the people pushing it are Communists ignoring the ‘contradictions’ essentially inevitable to their own system,) but I think this is partially a case of that.

In some ways I welcome the Populism, though.  My estimate of corporate oligarchy and permanent majority has declined significantly.

politics trump identity politics
wirehead-wannabe

Lipservice to big boobs

loki-zen

This is something I might write a longer more thought-out thing about later

But did anyone else (especially girls with big boobs) feel like, throughout your childhood and teen years, everybody was always saying guys were into big boobs and that conventionally attractive girl = girl with big boobs, but this never actually seemed to be the case?

Like girls in real life and in teen books would be all bemoaning their flat chests and wishing they had big boobs so guys would be into them, but then in real life, the popular girl the guys were all into was some skinny thing with C-cups at best, and the media-sanctioned epitome of female beauty was people like Keira Knightley and Rosario Dawson.

I just got reminded of this hard when I was re-watching Galavant. Madalena is initially the hero’s love interest and she’s always positioned by the show as super sexy and irresistible. Here’s how she’s described:

Long legs and perfect skin
A body built for sin
With cleavage you could hold a whole parade in!

…and here’s that ‘cleavage’ in action:

What’s with this? Why is this a thing?

earnest-peer

I feel like I have a hunch as to some reasons, but it’s hard to put a finger on.

- “Big tits” is just a really easy description, and that should never be underestimated as a cause for overuse.

- It is a positive that’s correlated with negatives (it’s very obvious although rarely said that big tits on fat women don’t really count).

- Modeling has more specific demands than just “being hot to men”, and these anticorrelate with big breasts somewhat, and modeling is really influential.

- The first point also might work against women with big breasts (esp. in settings where other women are involved), as it is also really easy to go “people only like you for your tits”, and/or big tits are seen as kind of crude (c.f. girls in American schools being told they’re dressed provocatively for clothes that would be utterly normal on smaller-breasted girls).

loki-zen

I don’t really see how any of those explain it? I mean, ‘thin’ is an even easier description. The influence of modelling can make the Keira Knightley figure mainstream-attractive, but doesn’t explain why people would keep talking as if big tits were what everyone was into. 2 and 4 explain some degree of animosity toward women with big tits, but not how the world would settle on this bizarre convention of talking as if they are considered attractive but acting as if pretty much the opposite is true.

Also with the modelling thing, I understand that the convention for modelling is that models should avoid having curves at all costs, and that once something is the done thing it can stay that way just because that’s the way we do things. I don’t buy that there’s any reason why it necessarily should be that way. I mean even if you buy the argument that it’s easier to do cool and elaborate things with clothes when you don’t have to worry about making it work around curves, high-end fashion is ostensibly about showing off that you are the best at designing clothes. One can easily imagine a world where runway models had to have the most extreme curves you could find, because if that makes it harder, then clearly the curvier your models, the more skilled you must be to make your clothes work on them.

chroniclesofrettek

Kira Knightly has ~100k followers on Instagram, a place you can get lots of pics of her. Kim Kardashian has 100M followers.

loki-zen

Throughout my childhood and teen years, Kim Kardashian was not a thing.

chroniclesofrettek

Kim Kardashian (who has a D cup and is very curvy) has been a thing since 2007. Before that you had women like Jessica Simpson (D cup) and Pamela Anderson (whose implants were famous) and Angelina Jolie (who has an hourglass figure 36-23.5-35). 

Mainstream American culture considers a few body types as “beautiful” but large breasts are “sexy.” Women with smaller breasts who want to be seen as “sexy” (on the national level) either need to dress in a way to make it seem like they have big breasts (photo shoots from certain angles, clothing designed for this effect), or find some other method to get that association in people’s mind (having a sex tape leak or whatever Miley Cyrus did both come to mind). Whereas (relatively skinny) women with larger breast have a hard time not being seen as “sexy” by mainstream society. 

wirehead-wannabe

Also “big boobs” often means “big boobs relative to BMI”, so a thinner woman can be considered busty even if her actual breast volume is below average.

mitigatedchaos

Also also, because it’s seen as sexual/sexy, liking big boobs is seen as crass and objectifying, or low class(?), particularly for heterosexual men.  It’s basically assumed that it’s all the guy likes about the woman if he acts like that.

Source: loki-zen body image cw boobs discourse
collapsedsquid
collapsedsquid

Really says something that now I sort all political commentary I read into  “Pre-Trump“ and “Post-Trump.“

collapsedsquid

mitigatedchaos said: Did you at least give Trump a 15%+ chance of winning the election?                            

I hate to give odds on stuff like that because it drives me nuts, but to me the “Trump era” starts well before the election. I’m defining it as the moment when we knew that “Trumpism” was something that existed and was more than marginally popular in the US.

Even if Hillary had won or probably even if Cruz had squeaked out the nomination, it would have changed shit.  The political writing reflects that.

argumate

What about all the people who were going nuts for Palin in 2008?

collapsedsquid

Palin didn’t go through the primary.  We could all say that she basically didn’t matter. She was just this weird VP that McCain chose and didn’t take seriously.  Trump was chosen directly by primary voters, the fact that he could win says something.

mitigatedchaos

I would tend to agree on Palin.  I haven’t seen excitement for Palin like I have for Trump.

There are so many things that allowed this to happen, and I think many of them would have been preventable if people, uh, behaved better.  I don’t mean this as a virtue critique of the Trump voters, but rather the opposite.  Overuse of terms like “racism”, ignoring the plight of American workers, not reaching out to areas outside the cities, focusing primarily on minority demographics, talking about “demographic destiny” with glee, and so on.

@collapsedsquid My question was mostly to ping whether you were aware of these looming things beforehand, and if so, for how long.  While I saw “sexism” being overused as a term, I didn’t really realize just how thin it had worn outside of internet communities.  However, the further they got into the primary, the more I said “this is unpredictable, so I’m revising the chance of a Trump win upwards”.

politics trump
sinesalvatorem

Something To Live For

sinesalvatorem

Human psychology continues to be basically what I’d predict - while still being startling at the same time. Specifically, getting people to settle down in families is a shockingly good way to make them stop being dangerously antisocial:

It was the most elite unit we [ie: The Palestinian Liberation Organisation] had. The members were suicidal – not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.

“My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.

Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.“

“So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.

Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.”

I’m a crazy romantic and even I didn’t expect that tying guys like these down with wives and kids would have such a radical civilising effect. I wonder if this has any implications for gangs or other violent pests?

mitigatedchaos

If that’s the case though, then polygyny is a bad thing unless you want large numbers of risk-tolerant men.

politics religion
wirehead-wannabe
wirehead-wannabe

To the more hardcore libertarians in the audience ( @oktavia-von-gwwcendorff, @voximperatoris ):

How should doctors and hospitals act with regards to emergency care, assuming an inability to tell for sure whether or not someone has insurance at the time treatment is given and an inability to shop around for hospitals during an emergency? What should happen when I call 911 as a patient? What about as a bystander?

It seems to me that you essentially have to choose between (A) inventing a more-or-less foolproof system of verifying that people have insurance, then letting everyone else die in the gutter (B) refusing emergency treatment to a lot of people who do have insurance but can’t prove it because they’re having a stroke © some sort of class profiling being rampant, with all the negative effects and bad incentives that brings, or (D) treating everybody regardless of ability to pay. If we choose (D), then that seems to lead almost inevitably to state-subsidized or funded preventative care, unless we want to deal with hospitals and state budgets going bankrupt.

sadoeconomist

Until EMTALA in 1986 we got along without hospitals being forced to provide emergency care for everyone and somehow society was able to function, but that requirement is to a significant degree responsible for the massive rise in health care costs since then, and the failed attempt to force everyone onto insurance that was Obamacare was essentially a way of attempting to deal with the severe negative consequences of EMTALA, which has forced many hospitals to stop providing any emergency services whatsoever.

The libertarian thing to do would be to go back to how it was before Congress intervened in 1986, and let hospitals decide for themselves how to provide care and to whom, as is their right. Then if your top priority is making it so that poor people are treated regardless of ability to pay, organize a charity and pay for them yourself, don’t push it onto hospitals as an unfunded mandate that messes up the entire health care system.

wirehead-wannabe

So before EMALTA, how was it determined whether someone would be treated? Did hospitals turn people away if they didn’t have insurance cards? If they did, would the ambulance keep on going from hospital to hospital until they found someone who would treat the patient? How often were people with insurance accidentally turned down? If the passage of EMALTA caused prices to rise as much as you say it did. Then obviously there had to have been a lot of people who used to be turned away but now are not. What do the profiles of these marginal people look like?

sadoeconomist

Hospitals did turn people away if they thought they wouldn’t be able to get them to pay for care, yeah, but I think that’s rational and defensible. Insured people accidentally getting turned down didn’t seem to be a significant problem - if you have insurance you’ll probably always have your insurance card or at least an ID with you out in public, and if you’re having an emergency at home you’ll probably get brought in by someone who knows who you are. And I think hospitals were more focused on denying care to people they were already certain wouldn’t pay than unidentified unconscious people in urgent need.

A lot of the people who would have been turned down before EMTALA are people with non-life-threatening conditions who go to the emergency room knowing they can’t be turned down for treatment and then disappear without paying. I used to date a girl whose job it was to try to bill those people for the care they received at her hospital - less than half of emergency care in the US now actually gets paid for, they wind up just having to write most of it off and the rest of us pay for it through higher insurance premiums, ultimately. It’s a significant component of why health insurance has become so unaffordable.

Her hospital at least worked with charities to try to make sure the true charity cases got paid for, and some people who had the means but refused to pay were sued or referred to collections agencies so ultimately the hospital would receive pennies on the dollar. Poor US citizens are covered by Medicaid. This was in California, so the real problem was illegal immigrants - they couldn’t get insurance but they couldn’t be made to pay for anything either, so hospitals are just forced to give them unlimited free care and they jam up emergency wards with non-urgent problems because they have no other place to go. It’s not their fault, really, but the inefficiency of this system is mind-boggling, the waste of medical resources is immense, and it generates a lot of animosity against illegal immigrants. California passed a ballot initiative in the 1990s that would have allowed hospitals to deny emergency care to anyone in the country illegally but it was struck down as going against federal law.

In Libertopia there’d be no such issues with citizenship status preventing people from getting insurance or simply paying for care on a fee-for-service basis, which would likely be much more common without the tax incentive for employer-provided health insurance, one of the other big problems ruining US health care. Costs would drop massively and I think it’d bring guaranteed life-saving emergency care (within reason) for almost everyone within the range of things that could easily be accomplished through voluntary charity in a developed country.

oktavia-von-gwwcendorff

It’s the discrimination problem once again; if you make decisions on the hospital level you can turn away the people who are obviously Not Going To Pay without causing more than a few highly-visible false positives (and even there making it possible to create better commitments like “I know my situation looks sketchy but if I skip paying you’ll just contact my Dia group and they’ll pay you okay” would make it easier to discriminate accurately), but if you’re trying to make sweeping policy-level decisions you inevitably have to discard massive amounts of information, rendering the bureaucracy necessarily stupid. Then economic incentives lead to people capitalizing on that enforced information asymmetry.

Additionally, you can use modern technologies to create robust reputational systems that reward hospitals that deliver care for true emergency cases (= actual unanticipated emergencies, not “this known but untreated condition has gotten worse over time and it was inevitable that it would cause an Expensive Crisis at some point”) regardless of immediate ability to pay. If customers prefer hospitals that do provide such care, that’s effectively an indirect subsidy for privately socialized emergency care.

As a patient I’d prefer to have some more specialized number than 911 for contacting my own emergency health provider. Additionally I’d probably be totally fine with an rfid chip linked to a blockchain identity smart-contracted to my insurance subscription (= subscription and payment status verifiable by anybody with internet access) assuming I had actual control over it and could wipe+reprogram it at will whenever I want to use a different identity for whatever purpose.

wirehead-wannabe

I mean, the advantage of 911 is that it’s a universally known “OH SHIT FUCK HELP” button that even a five year old can understand how to use. Complicated setups with rfid chips make that harder. Same problem with private solutions to policing, really. People need simple, universal, easy to understand panic buttons that will put them at least somewhere close to the right track. Like, police aren’t ideal, but I feel like there has to be SOME kind of publicly run organization that handles emergencies or things-that-vaguely-seem-like-they-might-turn-out-to-be emergencies, and unless that organization asks for upfront payment on a per-call basis it’s gonna be a public good. (Yes we need to make the cops not be the default responders, but I’m not convinced that this necessarily involves getting rid of 911).

mitigatedchaos

I don’t know what you were expecting. Privatizing everything based on assuming the rationality of economic actors is kinda the ‘thing’ of the ideological group you reached out to.

Some answer where some regulations are loosened while others are strengthened is not what you’re going to get. And if you’re going to have generic emergency responders in America that aren’t cops, then they’ll need guns.

But here, let me throw in an oddball solution. Have multiple competing police agencies - but under the government, contracted at the municipal level.

Edit: Actually, let me throw a more serious one out here. People are bloody irrational, so I don’t care if they want to spend it on something else: tax everyone and give them an $X,000 healthcare voucher which can either be spent on insurance, or a health savings account. Take money out of it for unpaid emergency care at some rate over time. Maybe allow the HSA to be inherited.

politics
argumate

Anonymous asked:

are maoists bad people or good people that are wrong ?

afloweroutofstone answered:

Bad people.

blackblocberniebros

Cmon Brett. I hate tankies as much as the next guy but some Maoists are just misguided but with their hearts in the general vicinity of the right place.

argumate

yes I think it is stupid to accuse people of being inherently good or bad based on some kind of nominal political association; one might as well replace “Maoists” with “Liverpool supporters” or what have you.

mitigatedchaos

“How much Maoism did you drink?”

“*hic* Sparrows are a tool of the oppressive Capitalist class.”

“You need to stop drinking that stuff, man. You get evil when you’re drunk.”

“Shutup… Liverpooool. You jusht can’t handle… a little Communishm.”

Source: afloweroutofstone politics shtpost
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