Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

California Just Threatened To Stop Paying Taxes If Trump Cuts Federal Funding Over Sanctuary City Status

[fromacomrade]

http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/01/29/california-just-threatened-stop-paying-taxes-trump-cuts-federal-funding-sanctuary-city-status/

The State of California’s elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump’s Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump’s sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.

California’s Democratic leaders believe there are numerous federal programs receiving state funds as well, which they will seek to cut, to make up for anything Republicans siphon out of their budgets. San Francisco’s CBS affiliate reports that the federal government only spends 78 cents in California for every tax dollar sent from that state to Washington:

The state of California is studying ways to suspend financial transfers to Washington after the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal money from sanctuary cities, KPIX 5 has learned. “California could very well become an organized non-payer,” said Willie Brown, Jr, a former speaker of the state Assembly in an interview recorded Friday for KPIX 5’s Sunday morning news. “They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”

http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/01/29/california-just-threatened-stop-paying-taxes-trump-cuts-federal-funding-sanctuary-city-status/

[michaelblume]

Isn’t most of the transfer from CA to the federal government in the form of individual Californians having their wages garnished by the IRS? Is Sacramento just going to suggest that Californians stop paying their income taxes and promise to protect us somehow?

[oktavia-von-gwwcendorff]

“They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”

This sounds like a “yes” to me. The IRS can’t arrest thirty million people who have the state government on their side, so this is pretty much the exact one way a tax resistance could work effectively. If enough Californians simply stop paying their federal taxes (especially big corporations) it would quickly clog the ability of the feds to respond in any meaningful manner apart from rolling in tanks like the USSR.

[sadoeconomist]

DO IT

[mitigatedchaos]

Stop California paying taxes, or rolling in the tanks?  At this point I could go for either one.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

azcapitoltimes.com

Arizona Senate votes to seize assets of those who plan, participate in protests that turn violent

Claiming people are being paid to riot, Republican state senators voted Wednesday to give police new power to arrest anyone who is involved in a peaceful demonstration that may turn bad — even before anything actually happened.

Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

[thathopeyetlives]

Yikes

[wirehead-wannabe]

In all seriousness, isn’t this a violation of the right to assemble?

[mitigatedchaos]

Dammit, this isn’t Singapore.  One can’t just restrict protest in America like this without leading to bad things happening.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[justsomeantifas]

when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.

[mitigatedchaos]

Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.

Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man.  He killed people that didn’t need to be killed.  He dropped people out of helicopters.  He used methods of great violence.  No one should imitate him.

But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.

So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

My concern about Anarchism is that it will just replace formal power with social power, and I don’t think that’s really a step up.

[isaacsapphire]

Yuuuup. I started getting suspicious about how many Anarchists are people who (think they) have social power but lack formal power.

[bambamramfan]

Since you mentioned this in the other thread, I thought I should round up some of my comments and thoughts on anarchism.

Whenever you have a highly controversial word, go to the root. Anarchy means “without hierarchy.” It should not be about the lack of government, but about the lack of levels of power altogether.

Some anarchists do just see it as a lack of government (or rather, the State.) I think they are blisteringly wrong. This would be particularly dumb for anyone who shares normal social justice concerns, because can’t they see right now that women and racial minorities have formal equality before the government, but massively lack social and soft power, such that they get exploited? For all the many problems with the current Left, it is at least aware of the existence of social power in most of its critiques. I can’t see why they’d simply want to do away with the cops and laws and hope… everything works out.

I guess it makes sense for the AnCaps, but they’re just really wrong and would make a Hellworld.

Lack of hierarchy would be better than that, and address the concerns in my Unfreedom essay.

However, I subscribe to anarchism as a lack of coercion, where no one is coerced to do something they don’t want to by any means (well, socially at least.) Coercion is still possible under flat, egalitarian systems after all, and so are many problems of the state, like a cruel justice system. 

It’s a long way to get there, which involves everyone’s norms getting on the page of genuinely caring about the well-being of others (and not throwing a wrench in the works of every consensus because of self-interestedness or fear), but I think it’s possible and better than any of the alternatives. Coercion is just terrible, and begets terribleness.

Right now of course in social terms, anarchist is just an edgelord word for social justice liberals who found their own intentional communities and political action groups, suffused with a great deal of judgmentalism and disregard for the cultural norms of society around them. This disregard includes norms like “Christian charity” and “innocent until proven guilty” so I don’t really give two fucks about them as allies.

[mitigatedchaos]

Simply: I don’t think this alternative is possible, and the path attempting to get there will just result in social power dominating.

I don’t think it’s actually feasible to get everyone to care about each other like that without massive violations which involve large amounts of coercion to begin with.  Brainwashing techniques and probably literally mind-altering invasive procedures would be required.  Social power is natural and organic, and will arise in almost any system among humans.  People are born unequal before society even gets its hold on them.

Like, are you just going to cancel introverts or something?  Or are you going to get rid of extroversion?  Because if you don’t unify the preferences, then extroverts will have more social power even if they have equal material resources, without even attempting to do so.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ranma-official]

@mitigatedchaos

There’s no logical proof that they can declaw all religions equally, or that the distribution of violence is the same at the tails of all otherwise-declawed religions, though.

Religions are declawed in a secular society naturally as long as no deliberate action (that ensues resistance) is taken. Christianity is very heavily fragmented and society in general has done a really good job declawing it. We are at a “you can’t even prove if God exists or not” level right now. That’s an absurd step down from the absolute majority of humanity’s history

[slartibartfastibast]

What if your religion expressly forbids secular government/society?

[ranma-official]

Gets declawed and settles down. Most religions are against any government ever overriding religious laws.

[mitigatedchaos]

What if it has standing kill orders against people who leave it? What if it starts demanding concessions like being able to have its own courts, so loudly to the point that people overestimate its presence in the country by a factor of three?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Of course people won't stop making art if you took out copyright! It'd just be harder for anyone to be a *professional* artist, who makes art full-time, in any format that's easily copyable and time-intensive. So, you're left with 1)people who can get patrons to support them, 2)people who can do it full-time because they don't have to work, and 3)amateurs/hobbyists (there's nothing wrong with art as a hobby! but typically skill has some correlation with amount of practice).

argumate answered:

Yes. And coordinating large groups of people to make art that requires significant investment (say, movies) would become substantially more difficult.

(Which isn’t necessarily a downside, arguably movies don’t make our lives any better, especially those that require immense budgets. But still).

[ranma-official]

“The only way anyone can ever be a professional artist is if they can own other people’s ideas and force them to not have them! Otherwise they will all go bankrupt! Bankrupt, I say!”

I see that your anons are especially stupid today

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s a pretty uncharitable reading.  The issue with copyright isn’t that it exists at all, thus allowing a shift in the risk for the creation of the work from some parties to other parties (how many kickstarters have failed to deliver?), but that it doesn’t reflect more organic uses such as fanworks - and that it has been extended indefinitely.

In a copyright system, some of the burden of risk can be shifted from the consumer to the publisher, since the consumer can purchase the work after it has already been completed with a near-100% confirmed chance of the work existing.

In a no-copyrights system, the cost of creating the work is shifted to before the work’s creation or completion, as there is no way to be sure that donations will match anywhere near the amount of money from payments/purchases.  (And let’s be honest, here, donations will not match the amount of revenue from payments/purchases.  Less revenue brings up opportunity costs, the money for resources has to come from somewhere, and thus less time since it has to be spent on earning money via other means.)  That puts the risk of the work primarily on the consumers dedicated enough to fund its creation.

In some cases that’s going to be crowdfunding, but in many cases it’s going to be wealthy patrons - the opposite of democratization.

Speaking of owning other people’s ideas, works can already be willingly released into the public domain.  For some reason, that mode of production doesn’t appear to be dominating.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

or maybe just take the Civilization premise seriously and make it that you’re an honest to god immortal born into the world in 4000 BC and obsessed with micromanaging your people to greatness.

[mitigatedchaos]

I could go for this.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

I wonder how feasible it would be to have a human population on a planet in the same system as a super-earth ocean planet by growing food on the super-earth, then transporting it to the inhabited planet.

[mitigatedchaos]

Wouldn’t it always be cheaper to build algae bioreactors than pay the launch costs for the food?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[xhxhxhx]

I had no idea anti-Italian racism was so prevalent in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s

[deusvulture]

I wonder why!

I keep hearing people use this as an analogy to anti-muslim/arab sentiment, and I don’t think they realize that they’re needlessly shooting themselves in the foot. The most law enforcement officers to die in a single attack before 9/11, by *far*, was when Italian anarchists blew a police station to hell (unlucky accident - they were aiming for a less-crowded *church*!).

The fact that kids in school have to learn ad nauseam about Sacco and Vanzetti, and yet no one ever mentions (say) the Wall Street bombing of the same year, is simply nuts.

I’m not saying that prejudice against Italians was “justified” in some metaphysical sense; they’re a plenty successful immigrant group these days. I’m just saying that you wouldn’t have to be a crazy racist to want to stay out of Little Italy at night, or tell a policeman if you saw a Sicilian-looking guy leave his bag on a train seat.

This is all a little tangential to your point, maybe. I guess I’m just sick of seeing references to anti-Italian prejudice in United States history tossed around as if it was a persuasive historical analogy to present situations. There are better ones!

[ranma-official]

Allow me to disagree. While there are many other immigrant groups that have achieved success afterwards, many of them fall under the “model minority” umbrella. Italians are a useful example because of this objectively existing violent sub-culture. The sentiment was that, remember, while this country is one of opportunity, these guys are the exception, they are uniquely bad, they are inherently criminals incompatible with our polite society, and if we keep allowing them then our civilzation will just drown in crime over time.

The most law enforcement officers to die

I don’t agree with this criterion due to the fact that most terrorists simply didn’t target police stations with intent to kill a lot of police, which includes this one.

[mitigatedchaos]

Keep in mind, though, that “Italian” is not an ideology with a well-defined(ish) book detailing exactly what one must do to be Italian - and what one must do to those who fail to uphold the True Principles of Italy.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

how's it imperialism if there's nobody on the planet

gayasscommie-deactivated2017090 answered:

IDR the specific arguments about that but an inter-stellar coalition of planets replicating imperialized relations between the home planet and the colonies does seem like it’d b very feasible

[whitemarbleblock]

I don’t see how. Even traveling at the speed of light, a colony forty light years away from Earth will take, you know, forty years to travel to, and it’ll be another forty years before you find out what the immediate response was, let alone the long term results. At more reasonable speeds, all of this will take even longer (you might be able to still send messages at the speed of light, but given that it’ll be eighty years before you hear back, there’s really no way to unilaterally enforce your will).

I don’t see how an interstellar government could hold up under those conditions.

[bambamramfan]

It seems pretty plausible. Like an colonial  government is not metaphysically linked to its sponsors back home, there’s already always a disconnect (which was very noticable in the heyday of the old British Empire.)

Given an initial allotment of force and control over resources, some small elite positions themselves in control of the colony (well, at least the normal sort of hegemonic limited control a government has.) They then justify this rule with an ideology based on the right of Earth’s rule, so they portray themselves as closer to Earth and following their guidance. You can totally keep up this illusion, even with a 40 year lag.

In practice it might resemble a theocracy more than an imperial government. But like, the central administration feeling separate from the colonial administration and going “what are they even doing there in our name???” is not really an unheard of phenomenon.

[mitigatedchaos]

Mostly only makes sense if the rate of technological development is notably lopsided and lifespans are increased dramatically. Otherwise over generational transition new groups of challengers will rise up to challenge the rulers over that 80 year period. But if Earth is the primary source of all high technology (or at least the schematics) then the rulers can maintain their technological edge and thus power and position of “wisdom”.