unpopular opinion: what if globalisation was fuckin’ awesome
Argumate, I didn’t realize you were on the Clinton campaign staff.
Richard Spencer got thrown out of the fucking libertarian conference. if you can’t hold a table at a libertarian convention, you’re having a bad year.
from what i’m reading he never had a table to begin with, he just kind of set one up in the lobby
he taped a poster board with his name written in marker onto a table in the lobby outside the conference. people filmed the exchange leading up to him being ejected from the hotel. at one point he said “america is a european country” and a bunch of libertarians laughed at him. an anarcho capitalist asked him if he knew what hemispheres were
imagine getting owned by an ancap of all people
it’s not slavery if it’s voluntary, and he definitely walked straight into that one :^)
What the European left/center-left needs to do yesterday is to hire the best damn PR people and spin a massive bipartisan thing about integrating immigrants better - something that’s both massively important as a long term policy and to move away from the awful no-win one-dimensional debate, “holy shit just let people in” vs. “they are scum and should keep languishing Over There”.
Jesus fuck. Integration needs INVESTMENT. You don’t just fucking dump people on the ground, give them meager welfare and expect most of them them to adapt somehow. The horrible flaw of liberalism appears to be the unwillingness to convince people that investing in migrants is both better and safer, and instead ending up with a compromise that might well blow up in their faces.
Yes, immigrant crime/etc is not statistically That Bad, but still there’s no way to win on it when your position is not having a position + vague appeals to humanitarianism. If you could outflank the Right on “oh yes, we agree, better law and order, better employment programs, strong communities”, then you’d have something to go on without actually being horribly evil.
Immigration is *not*, historically, a threat to nations - the Goths being an exception that proves the rule. And Europe is wealthy and stable and powerful. This fucking shit should be easy.
Instead, we’ll most likely get a creeping compromise with the Right: less access *and* less funding for helping migrants already here. Which is fucked up.
(p.s. I’ve seen so much concern trolling along the lines of “like it or not, this nice bleeding-heart liberal experiment is something people hate, and it’s with a heavy heart that I call for more barbed wire”. I fucking hate that. The Left needs to save open borders, and the only way to do that is to improve/reframe the whole toxic debate. Not just fucking capitulate.)
I’m sorry, but integrating immigrants is White Western Cultural Imperialism.
I mean, I’m joking, but good luck getting the Left to abandon that kind of thinking, and without abandoning that kind of thinking, good luck getting them to support integration.
Anonymous asked:
chroniclesofrettek answered:
The wonder of a post scarcity society is that it some people can have this without the rest of us needing to be communist catgirls. Also, aren’t most catgirls ancaps? or is that just my bubble?
Man, like…
*inhales*
What if we were, like, the catgirls all along.
the issue here is that the “prominent person” in question has no intrinsic value, thus strip-mining them for news leaves them with nothing left.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have each said a host of problematic things over the course of their lives, yet strangely they haven’t been abandoned by everyone yet.
Trump was elected because of this and actively exploited it on purpose, a move most others cannot safely execute.
Intrinsic value isn’t the actual defense against it. It’s more about a sort of social or political power.
Sometimes, a prominent person P says something ambiguous and weird on TV. It can be pre-taped, but it has to be “live” like an interview or a late night talk show. The statement is possibly problematic when taken out of context, and only a small point in support of the main thesis.
For example: “If you don’t know what the candidates stand for, maybe don’t vote” or “Women’s child rearing work is important and should be valued”or “Black men have big penises”.
The talk show host asks next question. Someone tweets this sentence in isolation.
“P said racist/sexist/fascist thing”
“Other people react to thing said by P“
“What twitter users think of P’s latest gaffe“
“Former friend condemns P”
“People distancing themselves from P”
Now our protagonist clarifies that they meant what they said, but they meant it in an innocuous, literal way.
“P doubles down on racist/sexist/fascist comments”
“P still not apologising”
“Right-wing weirdos agree with P“
Now P must clarify that he really didn’t mean it like that. He does not agree with the weirdos at all and regrets any offense he may have caused. He clarifies his original statement to eliminate any confusion.
“P offers non-apology, repeats offending statement”
“We decided not to give P a platform any more”
“Has racism/sexism/fascism re-entered the mainstream? A political scientist explains, also P is terrible“
At this point, the actual statement by P is buried three clicks deep in these news articles. P thinks the original offhand statement was blown out of proportion. He tries one more time.
“P: Concerns about racism/sexism/fascism blown out of proportion“
“P goes on offensive in racism/sexism/fascism row“
Q, a friend of P, tries to give a sympathetic account of the original statement.
“Q: P was misunderstood“
“Q defends P’s racist/sexist/fascist outburst“
“Q’s defense of P proves old boys networks still at work“
“P’s employer has still not fired racist/sexist/fascist P“
After Q, nobody wants to stick their neck out for P now, and nobody wants to be seen talking to P. People who defend P mostly do so anonymously.
“People need to stop defending P“
“Stop saying racism/sexism/fascism is no big deal“
“Waffling about giving racist/sexist/fascist people a platform hurts marginalized people the most“
The media realise that there is nothing more to say, and smaller outlets/latecomers try to milk the issue one last time. Nobody wants to talk to P any more, and P is wary of any journalist who contacts him.
“The privilege of P-supporters“
“We’ve had it with pro-P trolls in our comment section“
“Why we don’t talk to P and why people like P do not deserve a right of reply“
P tries to find somebody who wants to talk to him, somebody sympathetic. He does not want to talk to anybody who previously painted him as racist/sexist/fascist.
“P sets record straight“
“P shows true colors, talks to far-right ‘newspaper’ “
Repeat until so many people get fed up with racism accusations / fear unfounded racism accusations that a living meme gets elected President by showing he doesn’t care about racism accusations and plows through them like fresh fallen snow.
(via Bill Gates: We Should Tax Robots That Take Jobs | Observer)
Are you going to tax my lawnmower, washing machine, or car because they do the work that people used to perform?
STUPID
What’s amazing about this logic is that he closes by saying, “I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It’s okay.” Says the guy who has made billions through the luxury of selling software that is so high and demand and with a high barrier of entry from competition. Not to mention the high level of human capital it takes to create his products. His market doesn’t have to worry a lot about automation and manufacturing, especially since they moved away from physical packaging software; but just imagine those businesses that have a low margin of profit but need to heavily invest in cost-cutting labor supplied by automatic production equipment. Those businesses would get hosed because they are not only getting taxed on the mass amount of labor they still need to employ but now also on the equipment itself.
I’d like to think that Bill Gates is just being a sympathetic sycophant to manufacturing laborers here but I believe he is smarter than that. He is blatantly advocating for redistributing wealth by not only taxing labor but now taxing capital goods as well. You would not only be taxed for the purchase of this equipment, you would then also be taxed on its perpetual use as well. You may as well be renting it directly from the government.
This is just one more step towards the government controlling all private property. If they can’t seize it outright, they will tax every aspect of its worth to redistribute as they deem fit.
It’s far from stupid, it’s downright devious.
If robots are going to be so heavily taxed, then wont employers just keep hiring humans?
I suppose it would depend on how much the tax would be. If it is the same progressive income tax as employees have to pay then you would have to weigh the production output compared to manual labor along with the new added tax costs compared to what it would it would cost for actual employee costs like wages, benefits, and payroll taxes. I still believe the employer would go with automation all the same.
I’m not sure how they would calculate a tax based on the theoretical amount of profits they generated from the automated production. What if the business does not reap a profit? Do they just not pay their robot tax? Doubtful. The government always gets its cheese.
Personally, I don’t think that ai and automation will ever be sophisticated enough to truly replace human labor,
But it seems like no one has a viable solution to the problem. The republicans want to institute a base national salary, and the democrats want ever more bureaucracy.
They said AI would never win at Go, either, but we all see how well that’s worked out. It’s all but guaranteed that if civilization doesn’t collapse, AI will replace human labor. The question is when.
But let me throw an alternate, mid-term solution at you that wouldn’t crash the economy: wage subsidies.
If you lower the minimum wage, then make up the difference with direct-to-employee wage subsidies that decline as employer wages increase, you can accomplish multiple things.
And so on and so forth.
The program can be implemented and tested incrementally. It can be rolled back if it doesn’t work, or expanded if it does. It will be less expensive since it displaces some welfare spending, and it multiplies the effect of money spent with private spending.
The main limitation I would put is that the subsidies are only available for goods and services produced for domestic and not foreign consumption. The bureaucracy required shouldn’t be too bad, otherwise, since this isn’t an approach targetted at specific industries, districts, or means levels.
#SuckerThoughts
a joke i was going to make about this was ‘if i recognise the state’s right to imprison and kill me, doesn’t that basically make me the state’ but that’s actually exactly how liberal democracy is supposed to work
Thing is, you can make capital from scratch.
I mean, in a free society you can go fishing, catch some fish, and then trade them for cash and now you’ve got capital to invest.
People act like capitalist principals are something that only apply to some guy in a silk tophat somewhere. But in fact these are basic functional agreements that allow society to function.
Except that someone owns the lake you’re fishing in - either a private individual, or others indirectly through the State. And if no one owns it, such as schools of fish in the open, then, based on how things are going in the real world, overfishing happens.
So this doesn’t really work as an example. Creating capital requires either land or stuff taken from land, for the most part, which is a challenge if all land is owned - as it would be expected to be if owning land is profitable.
Now, granted, it’s less likely to have huge problems under some boring liberal democratic capitalist government than under a Communist dictatorship or botched attempt at Communism, where the lakes will be poisoned with industrial waste because there are neither property rights nor enforced environmental rules to stop it, but unless you want everyone to own all the land in a trust, this doesn’t really work.
When a university student living in the Philippines uses American Black lingo like “fam,” am I supposed to criticize his cultural appropriation or celebrate his multicultural diversity?
Anonymous asked:
memecucker answered:
yeahh like the fact that the author of that quote is a white man who says he was born in a rural ohio town makes it really transparent that he was speaking from a “fish dont know water” angle
“We don’t have culture, I know because all the weird shit everyone else does is culture and this normal stuff is just stuff”
When a male of the Mandan Indians fasts for three days, shaves his head, and hangs from splints pushed through his skin to prove his manhood to the universe he is not thinking of traditional Mandan culture. He is becoming a man.
Nor is the Mexican Catholic, crawling on her hands and knees to venerate an image of the Blessed Mother, “participating in traditional Mexican culture” by way of “religious activity”. She is crawling on her hands and knees. It’s the touristing graduate of World History II who — grimacing over his tequila like a pansy — scoops the value from her act and labels it a “cultural phenomenon”.
From the anecdotes to the point:
To speak about something is to assume a place outside of it, referring to reality as an objects perceived. But culture is that lens of tradition and value by which we perceive reality, and a man cannot perceive a lens any more than he can his corneas. Thus nobody living their culture refers to it as “culture”, and you’ll seldom hear an Italian say “let’s be real Italians and eat tortellini” except in reflection, jest, or to white people. From curry to bar-mitzvahs, cultural things are things done, not labeled, lived, not spoken of, real, not reflected on.
