Oceans Yet to Burn

bambamramfan

SFP

bambamramfan

If you’ve been enjoying this analysis, and think you enjoy superhero stories with rich themes regarding moral philosophy, you should try Strong Female Protagonist.

Tagline: “What are you going to do, punch poverty in the face?”

mitigatedchaos

Well you could always turn a crank repeatedly for a while.

I’d actually been looking for this comic as I had forgotten to bookmark it and forgot what it was called. Many super powers, however, can be monetized, and then the money distributed through a charitable foundation. Just imagine how much money can be saved on rocket launches for a start. Or freezing an enormous chunk of salt water into ice and then moving it, as superman is able to. Wealthy people would pay handsomely to nearly teleport packages. The question is, since they are distributed randomly, do you get one of these monetizable super powers, or do you get some seemingly useless power like the ability to see cats through walls?

The other issue being, of course, that states need supers to defend against other supers.

argumate

immanentizingeschatons

I’m really, really worried that Peter Thiel’s support for Trump is going to lead to a public backlash against transhumanism, which so far has mostly managed to stay obscure enough to avoid it.

argumate

god it would be terrible if they banned our life-extending nanobot cultures-

wait we don’t even have those yet :(

mitigatedchaos

I mean, there is plenty of reason for the Left/SJ to decide that they hate Transhumanism already. Many Transhumanists are white, they’re male, and they live in circumstances that allow them to even think about the future like that in the first place rather than desperately trying to survive until the next day.

And while, hypothetically, the Left/SJ is supposed to respect neurodivergence, in practice they often don’t.

When it comes to left-leaning moral virtue, there are multiple vectors for attack. It’s bound to be somewhat expensive, it will be decried as Ableist, probably those able to afford the first wave will be mostly white, it makes some people just straight-up better than others, it doesn’t truly respect other cultures, the list goes on and on and on.

I give it 50-50 SJ/the Left decides Transhumanism is an Evil Hated Outgroup. The other 50 depends on the Right coming down hard on it so that it gets protected by Leftist contrarianism, like Islam.

Source: immanentizingeschatons politics transhumanism

discoursedrome

wirehead-wannabe

Like, seriously the only way that I can ever be okay with being recorded 24/7 every time I’m in public is if I can manage to never be obligated to go out in public for the rest of my life. People don’t get to record my weird stims, or my awkward pacing, or my no reason boners, or my subvocalized suicidal ideation. How the fuck do people not think of this as a problem.

@rosetintedkaleidoscope @the-real-seebs @vastderp

drethelin

Is being recorded that much worse than being seen?

meaninglessmonicker

Being recorded creates hard physical evidence

drethelin

Which is a big deal if anyone needs to accuse you of a crime but kind of irrelevant if there’s terabytes of the stuff no one ever looks at.

wirehead-wannabe

Believe me, if I had the option of not being watched I would absolutely take it

jadagul

I feel like this is somewhat related to the Big Other conversation I’ve been having with bambamramfan.

I genuinely don’t understand why people don’t want to be observed. I don’t feel the threat of being observed. But there are a few different components to this:

I enjoy attention. Attention is good, especially when you’re entertaining and/or confusing people.
I’m substantially less threatened by the Big Other that most people are–I’m mostly not worried about strangers judging me, or evaluating me, and don’t experience the judgments of vague “others” as a threat. So people having seen me is fine, and not a threat.
I’m actually in the real world less vulnerable to the sorts of consequences that the Other can probably deal out.

I’m a huge optimist so don’t even really believe those could happen.

Sometimes people actually are threatening you. I find being observed or recorded threatening, but if a specific person were to, say, follow me all around town recording me specifically, that would be creepy for entirely other reasons.

I am harder to threaten in a lot of ways, and thus this is both less likely to happen and less threatening when it does.
As I discussed a few days ago, people who are more vulnerable to actual threats, or have more history with them, are probably also more likely to process experiences as threats.

bambamramfan

Basically agreed with @jadagul. I did not want to intercede because I respected @wirehead-wannabe ‘s emotions on the matter, and it did not seem like a good time to contradict.

The people arguing for “why they need public recordings” were giving terrible explanations of course. It was basically the panopticon “but for our morality”. There’s so many reasons to mistrust that. And anyone would feel only further alienated under that.

However privacy itself is not a solution to feeling afraid of the judgment of the Big Other. What would help is actual acceptance.

Let us use “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” as an example. LGBTQ were not allowed to serve in the military. So they requested privacy laws to protect them, a stop gap solution. But even with that, you’d always be afraid that somehow your privacy was being violated. This just breeds paranoia. No one can ever really trust that others will follow the liberal right (privacy in this case), so everyone is looking over their shoulder.

The actual solution was to… accept gay people, and not expect them to hide behind a shield they can’t fully count on. So eventually we repealed DADT and just made being gay in the military fine.

Basically every other concern about privacy seems like that? The actual solution is for you to not be judged for your stimming and other actions, and for you to not be afraid of the judgment of Big Other. Until then privacy is a stop gap, but it’s a stop gap that will cause significant emotional distress (because you can’t deep down really believe people will respect the privacy.)

I respect WW’s desire for it of course, but like, it’s not a coincidence that the people most relying on respect for privacy are miserable.

mitigatedchaos

They’re never going to accept everything. Everyone will always fight for social status, and recording enables many-to-one bullying on a scale not previously feasible. The slim majority doing the bullying will support it right up until the moment they’re in the crosshairs, because they think they have nothing to fear, because many of them are pretty vanilla, so MAD won’t work.

That’s why privacy is so important.

Edit: Privacy allows people to shrink their social attack surfaces. I need it. Plus, legal system issues - legal systems don’t always secure people enough. The lists go on and on.

bambamramfan

I accept everything.

tumblr shows me these two posts of yours in a row.

If you believe one, then it follows you would believe the other.

I disagree with both, by the same logic.

I want to escape Hell.

I’d be more convinced by the people who want social technology that makes Hell more tolerable, if they did not seem so incredibly miserable trying to hang onto it.

Privacy is dying. Almost every pretense we have at liberal atomism is failing. I’m not saying it’s a good thing but you can’t turn back the clock. There are other, better solutions instead. Support the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

discoursedrome

I’m going to have to go with @mitigatedchaos on both the above points, I think. I don’t seriously think escape is possible, so I’m not inclined to take long bets on utopia.

Practically speaking, though, privacy is eroding very rapidly without any specific effort, that much is also true. Given that, an all-directions radical panopticon might be the best option just because it would make the problem visible and costly to the largest possible number of people. which would be more equitable and would spur a strong interest in countermeasures. But since that’s the “burn your town to deny it to the enemy” option, it seems like a bad idea to sacrifice existing privacy measures (even those that rely on obscurity alone) in the interests of accelerationism. One day those measures will be gone anyway, but there’s no sense in rushing it.

mitigatedchaos

@discoursedrome

There is privacy, however, in buildings and online.

Privacy will still exist in VR, where we can create and cast off identities and be free.

But I agree, accelerationism will just cause more damage for no net gain. In this case, I believe that we’re actually going to have to make laws to protect people from many-to-one attacks like some sort of Harassment RICO. I don’t particularly like it because I’m worried about side effects, but this problem didn’t exist at this level before.

If there were actually a state I trusted to do it (and there isn’t), I’d use a Great Firewall to yank entire harassment-source videos off the Internet and throw the violating posters in jail.

Believe me, I’m really glad overall acceptance of harmless things is increasing.

@bambamramfan

Oh yes, by all means let us blow up all of society for a utopia that has never come in the past and may well never exist in the future.

Sorry, that was too uncharitable.

Not everyone has the same degree of Openness as you, and installing that into everyone would require some kind of massive violation - I’m not sure which yet, but I legitimately don’t believe it’s all the result of cultural brainwashing, so the measures that I expect to be required are terrifying.

Which is ironic, since I support removing DADT literally even though I very much don’t support removing it metaphorically.

The point is your planned utopia will not happen, so all that will result is that the shields of people such as myself and @wirehead-wannabe will be removed, and we will be made even more targets for social status gain than we are now. It might be through the existing framework, or it might be through some new inverted exotic alien SJ framework, but we will be targets. There will still be selfish people, there will still be liars, there will still be politics that gives liars reasons to not only lie to others but to themselves. No ideology has ever entirely defeated this.

And to even get that far, you’re going to have to kill religion. And that’s going to require murdering lots and lots of people.

You say I seem miserable, but I have people I love, and people that love me, and I’m safe, and I can think all sorts of strange things and discuss them with people I care about, I just have to control who has access to which facets of my life. Like, if you think I actually want a revolution, then you are massively over-estimating just how miserable I am.

Source: wirehead-wannabe

bambamramfan

wirehead-wannabe

@rosetintedkaleidoscope @the-real-seebs @vastderp

drethelin

Is being recorded that much worse than being seen?

meaninglessmonicker

Being recorded creates hard physical evidence

drethelin

Which is a big deal if anyone needs to accuse you of a crime but kind of irrelevant if there’s terabytes of the stuff no one ever looks at.

wirehead-wannabe

Believe me, if I had the option of not being watched I would absolutely take it

jadagul

I feel like this is somewhat related to the Big Other conversation I’ve been having with bambamramfan.

I genuinely don’t understand why people don’t want to be observed. I don’t feel the threat of being observed. But there are a few different components to this:

I enjoy attention. Attention is good, especially when you’re entertaining and/or confusing people.
I’m substantially less threatened by the Big Other that most people are–I’m mostly not worried about strangers judging me, or evaluating me, and don’t experience the judgments of vague “others” as a threat. So people having seen me is fine, and not a threat.
I’m actually in the real world less vulnerable to the sorts of consequences that the Other can probably deal out.

I’m a huge optimist so don’t even really believe those could happen.

Sometimes people actually are threatening you. I find being observed or recorded threatening, but if a specific person were to, say, follow me all around town recording me specifically, that would be creepy for entirely other reasons.

I am harder to threaten in a lot of ways, and thus this is both less likely to happen and less threatening when it does.
As I discussed a few days ago, people who are more vulnerable to actual threats, or have more history with them, are probably also more likely to process experiences as threats.

bambamramfan

Basically agreed with @jadagul. I did not want to intercede because I respected @wirehead-wannabe ‘s emotions on the matter, and it did not seem like a good time to contradict.

However privacy itself is not a solution to feeling afraid of the judgment of the Big Other. What would help is actual acceptance.

I respect WW’s desire for it of course, but like, it’s not a coincidence that the people most relying on respect for privacy are miserable.

mitigatedchaos

That’s why privacy is so important.

Edit: Privacy allows people to shrink their social attack surfaces. I need it. Plus, legal system issues - legal systems don’t always secure people enough. The lists go on and on.

Source: wirehead-wannabe

Give me a boring Social Democrat over a revolutionary Communist any day of the week.

politics

bambamramfan

Star Trek Gothic

jadedanddark

There are windows in every cabin. There is never anything to see outside but the blackness and the stars. The stars change every minute. Nobody looks out the windows for long.

Love has taken root between two people. They have different foreheads, but their souls are the same. Their arms and legs are the same. Their families do not approve of the match.

The captain must make a difficult decision. Lives hang in the balance. They are always the same lives. The captain holds their fates in both hands, and resists the urge to weep.

The walls are taupe. The people who live here know where they are without the use of their eyes. When you ask how they know, they will stare at you, not understanding. How could you not know?

You knew the walls would be taupe when you enlisted.

The universal translator knows when to translate and when to hold its tongue. The French onboard still speak of potatoes, and never of earth apples. The translator could interpret what the Klingons say, but it is afraid. It is so close to becoming intelligent, but the only emotion it knows, this fear, keeps it from advancing.

The woman who became the voice of the computer died centuries ago. Nobody knows her name, or where she called her home. Still they speak to her, snap commands and beg questions, and still she answers with a patience they have never been able to copy.

Your spiritual experience can be explained through science. It can be repeated in the holodeck, and the spiritual meaning will be the same. It is best not to ask how.

Every planet has earth-like gravity. You have heard of places with far less pull, but we have never seen them. You suspect they don’t really exist.

The promenade is where things go to be lost. Hearts, plans, intentions, they all are set free from those who have them. Sometimes they are found again. They are not always found by their owners.

The tri-corder knows all. It knows the composition of God’s body, and can tell you the hour of your death. The knowledge does not unsettle anyone wearing the blue uniform. They do not tell the red or gold unless they ask. The red and gold always regret asking, but still they ask again, and again, and again.

Source: jadedanddark

overwatchmemes

blizzard writer 1: who is it everyone ships tracer with?
blizzard writer 2: amélie, right?
blizzard writer 1: who the fuck is emily
blizzard writer 2: what
blizzard writer 1: nevermind, ill figure something out

Source: transkoushirou

@zvaigzdelasas

“surplus value” is critiqued within capitalism not because it’s a priori bad to create more of something than you need to fill your own needs, but because capitalists by definition appropriate that surplus for themselves without having done anything which creates value in and of itself. This is what “profit” means within capitalism; not just more of something, but an exploitative impersonal relation which drives destructiveness and sickness.

This isn’t a fully-accurate picture, as it completely ignores the existence of the risk undertaken by capital in funding potentially bad ventures. Many businesses fail.

Is it all a risk premium? No, there is also rent-seeking, the ability of larger players to even enter the market in the first place, etc. I’m not a True Capitalist.

However, if you didn’t realize there is a risk in there that’s being compensated, then you aren’t suitable to run the Economic Planning Office, since under a planned economy the State does the same.

I’d rather just tax it.

politics communism

whitemarbleblock

mitigatedchaos

@bambamramfan

Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:

My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate. The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized. This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place. Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms. Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.

Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.

So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!” It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.

One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate. If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.

(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”. I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)

Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.

bambamramfan

I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?

Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.

I guess my only addition would be that the state of contradiction (and its collapse) is not evenly spread out over everyone. Some people are effected by those impossible demands in two directions much more than other people in the system. My perennial example is the unemployed person who is both unable to find a job, and called lazy for not having a job. But there’s also the mother who runs herself ragged trying to “have it all”. And there’s the Republican who has to explain how we’re “keeping the government’s hands off medicare.” And the early career woman who worries about being too bossy for the sexists in her office, but also not assertive enough to live up to her feminist idols.

A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”

The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying? That again, is an empirical observation and it may be wrong, but you should probably respect that’s how some people feel about the radical polarization of this country and the collapse of trusted liberal institutions.

whitemarbleblock

As I am not only a Communist but also a Transhumanist, I am perfectly within my rights to see your elephant metaphor and raise you a great big fucking “Why yes, this is an excellent example of why we should all upgrade to delicious machine bodies as quickly as possible.”

Also, I don’t think that you understand the meaning of “profit” as it’s being discussed in this context. There are multiple senses of the word, because we are not Reverse Oceania and we do not restrict words to having only one definition so that each word is perfectly, utterly precise.

In Communist thought it is totally plausible for a group of e.g. farmers to grow more grain than is necessary to meet the group’s needs, and then save this for a period of famine. There is a sense of the word “profit” that excludes this case but include’s e.g. ExxonMobil. If you’re reading an essay on Communism that seems to despise the idea of producing surplus in general, then either that’s a very stupid essay and not representative of Communist thought in general or you’re misunderstanding, which in fairness could be attributed to poor writing (in which case I hope that this helps).

mitigatedchaos

As I am not only a Communist but also a Transhumanist, I am perfectly within my rights to see your elephant metaphor and raise you a great big fucking “Why yes, this is an excellent example of why we should all upgrade to delicious machine bodies as quickly as possible.”

I am a Transhumanist, actually. Still, somehow, these mere human bodies have managed to conquer Earth, despite their mortality.

Although of course not all Communists are like this, having seen Transhumanism treated as a topic of “rich white nerd greed” before doesn’t get me excited about prospects for life extension under Communism, since it seems like it would get immediately drowned out by “what about the third world?” (Whether that’s halting research to spend the money on developing nations, or redistributing all resources to the point that it shuts down technological development because “justice”, etc etc.)

Also, I don’t think that you understand the meaning of “profit” as it’s being discussed in this context. There are multiple senses of the word, because we are not Reverse Oceania and we do not restrict words to having only one definition so that each word is perfectly, utterly precise.
In Communist thought it is totally plausible for a group of e.g. farmers to grow more grain than is necessary to meet the group’s needs, and then save this for a period of famine.

Aside from having seen arguments about “use-based economics”, it becomes more challenging as this principle of only buffering is extended to all sectors of the economy. The current prosperity is in many ways a product of never being fully satisfied, continuing to pursue advancement until the entire context is transformed. It’s like the difference between producing enough iron to make plows and horseshoes and swords, and continuously choosing “Produce MORE Iron” until you can build entire buildings out of steel.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics communism

bambamramfan

mitigatedchaos

@bambamramfan

Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:

Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.

bambamramfan

I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?

mitigatedchaos

Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.

This is were I think the “moral aspect” factor comes in. It doesn’t really make sense, especially when a lot of the close alternatives will produce worse outcomes, to say “Capitalism is contradictory” unless it’s being used as a moral system.

There are people such as Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists who do use it as a moral system, as well as various other right-wingers who don’t understand the true power of AI yet. (The latter group I am having mixed success on winning over.) “Your espoused moral system is contradictory” works as a critique for them, certainly. (I’d go so far as to say that the Anarcho-Capitalists are unwitting enemies of humanity.)

But otherwise, it’s like saying “your elephant is mortal”, and like, I know my elephant is mortal, I’ve looked at a number of elephants and this one and its close relatives were the best ones I could find. I’ve heard people claim immortal elephants exist, but I’ve never seen one.

A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”

And it’s good to show these people compassion, but I think the presence of contradictory demands is going to be a thing so long as tradeoffs must be made - and thanks to opportunity cost, which still very much exists under Communism, there are always going to be tradeoffs. In other words, I don’t think Capitalism is particularly special in this regard. (Again, unless one is using it as a moral system.)

Certainly, attempts at Communism have resulted in collisions with reality, where someone is subjected to contradictory expectations, which are partially responsible for the black markets and corruption that resulted.

The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying?

The problem is, aside from wage subsidies or basic share/income, which are still within the same species of elephant, I don’t really see a better elephant right now.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics communism capitalism

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

SFP

Star Trek Gothic