Oceans Yet to Burn

Anonymous asked:

Do you honestly think there's any chance that your very intellectual approach to politics will ever translate into a movement radical enough to mobilize people to implement it?

“Very intellectual”

Heh.

Could someone start a knock-off of Singapore’s People’s Action Party and get any seats for it?

Not under the current electoral system in America, though we see elements, bits and pieces can sometimes get through, such as Maine adopting a kind of preference voting for the governor’s seat.

The polarization into two parties is the natural state of the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system - you want exactly 51% of the vote in order to have the minimum amount of compromise. This creates a lot of dumb politics.

There is, after all, no place for me in the Republican Party, nor in the Democratic Party.

However, while a unified party powerful enough to take power may not emerge, some ideas, elements, and legislative reforms could get through. And if there are subtle changes to the system, then a more unified platform could become viable.

Some of these elements which escape to be adopted by others may be ideological in nature. Some of my posts on Nationalism have caused some local Rationalists to scratch their heads, wondering “wait, why isn’t that the argument actual American nationalists, in the form of the GOP, actually make?” Or otherwise they simply have never been exposed to an argument for Nationalism that is more than performative flag-waving, by the kind of person who believes that nations are both real and fake at the same time, that can see them as constructs, but still considers them desirable. Also, many may not have been exposed to the idea that open borders may be a pathway to an incompetent yet oppressive world government (gradually, over time).

Likewise, in constructing a kind of Social Centrism, most people do not currently have access to arguments against the most liberal positions (on e.g., polygamy) that are rooted in secular considerations and which also take in mind future developments (e.g., Transhumanism).

There is a question - when GOP members exit their current ideological basis, what will they exit to?

By making these arguments, which then are shared, I create a more defensible ideological position of retreat other than just crossing over entirely to the other side.

The ideal body for my politics right now, given conditions, would be a think tank that could conduct research and produce ready-to-sign legislation along pathways that the existing political parties are not currently setup to defend against (insufficient pre-built memetic barriers - battles they don’t even realize they are or will be fighting). This does not require a mass movement, but rather a fairly good-sized chunk of funding and a core of intelligent and motivated contributors.

On a more mass basis, once a more clear ideology is produced, I think it can be simplified in a way that is more easily communicated…

…though that may still have issues generating sufficient excitement.

anons asks politics national technocracy victory for national technocracy flagpost

xhxhxhx

deusvulture replied to your photo: why would you hurt me like this, Amazon

they know you

in my worst nightmares, I wake up and I am Milo

mitigatedchaos

Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.

It isn’t just about protecting a baby industry in your country while it develops, but *also* there is the matter of retaining a network of industry necessary to achieve economies of scale in the first place, which may also have an impact on other industries. The marginal cost of the first auto factory is much higher since it includes the entire rest of the supplier network!

Motorola’s attempt to build a phone in the US did not fail due to insufficient virtue of the American worker (“shame on you for not living in a company barracks! lazy! so lazy!”), but rather the lack of this network, and we must also NOT ignore the political and geopolitical environment, where a slight marginal cost may be worth paying in order to avoid strengthening major ideological and political rivals.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalism-nightly

um, you mean that the virtue of the american worker was insufficient to overcome the apparent lack of the relevant supply chains. you could change either of them, or some combination, and other variables that are unspecified but yet still exogenous.

In this case, I am not praising American workers as exceptionally virtuous. (Though they do work long hours by the standards of developed economies in Europe, our colleagues in Japan and Korea are very busy people indeed.)

Rather, there is an implicit argument that, in order to compete with China, America must go to the level of the Industrious Chinese Laborers living in company barracks, and remove its environmental tyranny and let the rivers run red with nickel processing runoff. That the failure to do so is a moral failure of the American people to compete adequately in the global economy.

I think, instead, that it is possible for America (and the other developed nations) to have some of these industries without doing so, assuming the correct policies are in play.

Speaking of environmental tyranny, undermining the ability of companies to engage in environmental arbitrage which allows them to get away with not paying the true costs of their environmental externalities would be one method to push for this in terms of policy vectors.

the invisible fist

Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.

the invisible fist

(There are liberals that are consistent about these matters. Some of them post to Rattumb.)

slatestarscratchpad

everything-narrative

Hot take: the LessWrong community is doomed to fail, because it’s original memetic code is written by a libertarian individualist. Yud focuses on rationalism as a singular activity of debiasing oneself, which is ultimately doomed to yield astonishingly diminishing results.

Modern theories on the origins of reason pose that the purpose of reason is not to independently find truth, but to evaluate and author arguments in debate. Hence, much like pair programming makes better code, pair reasoning ought to be a discipline. Indeed academic debate is a very natural medium for creation of good ideas.

A much better saying that “what do you think you know and how do you think you know it” would be “who did you hear it from and who benefits from you believing it.” A philosophy of truth-as-social-construct both ties into the paradigmatic theory of science and the skepticism of accepted truths that is crucial to good social idea generation.

In fact, science is a poor fit for a prototype of rationalism, since science is a highly involved and highly specific process of discerning the mechanics of reality in a way that makes it very easy to profit of (c.f. the practice of engineering) and therefore hard to question w.r.t. truth-as-social-construct (give or take global warming denialists.)

A much better prototype for rationalism is an unholy union of mathematics and postmodern philosophy, favoring discourse and communal creative problem solving over solitary reasoning. An idea-economy based on social deconstruction, rather than derision of one’s intellectual forbearers and lessers.

Also, queers and unashamed socialism (c.f. who told you socialism was bad and who benefits from you believing it?,) because it scares off the undesirable crypto-fascists and ancaps.

Discuss.

plain-dealing-villain

You’re making the ‘natural things are good’ mistake.

The evolutionary origin of reason is probably from the value of winning arguments, but that does not imply anything about what it is most useful for now.

Truth as social construct is toxic to anyone trying to exert their will upon reality, which is the universal goal.

millievfence

I’m a libertarian individualist but I think OP might be onto something with the paired reasoning thing, it’s something I’m exploring.

slatestarscratchpad

> Invite crypto-fascists and ancaps to scare off the SJWs and commies.

> Invite socialists and queers to scare off the crypto-fascists and ancaps.

> Invite economists and meta-contrarians to scare off the socialists and queers.

> Invite bobcats and bears to scare off the economists and meta-contrarians.

> Invite tigers to scare off the bobcats and bears.

> Rationality overrun by tigers, all Less Wrong posts are just the word “GRRRRRRRRR” hundreds of times.

Source: everything-narrative laugh rule

discoursedrome

washingtonpost.com

Perspective | Corporations are cracking down on free speech inside the office — and out

When your boss can fire you for what you say, are you really free?

bambamramfan

This Wapo op-ed by deBoer is worth reading, but in his eagerness to prove his point (that employer power over your speech is traditionally bad for the Left) he conflates two very different things.

I think most every liberal and leftist agrees that routine monitoring of employee communications is threatening. And while we may disagree on whether there should be laws against it, we would rather employers not fire people just for saying who they want for President or talking about controversial issues on Facebook.

However, that’s not what happened in any of the high profile cases he mentioned (google, Sacco, Eichs, etc) and it’s foolish to pretend it is. A large, loud mob formed threatening bad publicity and boycotts for the company, unless they fired someone who had become a public fixation (half through error, half through random chance.)

To talk about employer “rights” here is silly. It’s not like the employer innately wants to fire this person (and in most of these cases the employer knew about the offense well before it became public.) They will however, react to the demands of the mob, unless an even stronger force prevents them.

On cases like these, there are the more fundamental ethical questions of “How do we respond to mob demands? How do we respond when we agree with the point of the mob? When we disagree? Do we want a legal framework that limits what responses companies can have?”

It’s true that if we set a norm of “companies should fire someone when the mob finds them objectionable” then that can bleed into your employer monitoring your Facebook at all times “just in case.” But that’s not the only issue at play here.

For instance, I found these tweets by Popehat, a legal explainer who leans hard on “rights have legal meaning but free speech is not freedom from consequences” hilarious:

What what… thousands of people can yell about a person, and that’s fine, but if an institution wants to act on that yelling? Heaven forbid. You fully expect small institutions are gonna be happy keeping around someone who is “shunned and reviled by everyone?” No, that doesn’t work. If you make someone into a public humiliation, and tar everyone they are associated with, those organizations will seek to disassociate themselves. If that’s not a result you want, don’t publicly pile on someone.

(I’m not really trying to defend Peter here. He’s literally in a mob with torches, so if anyone is guilty of mob tactics, its him. Just you can’t really wish for the world where rogues are widely known and intensely mocked and villified by the masses, but they don’t lose their job or school position or anything else. You gotta choose.)

discoursedrome

For me, the most exhausting thing about the “why can’t we fire someone for having terrible opinions / it’s overkill to starve people or expel them from society for their terrible opinions” dichotomy is that it feels like it’s really a debate about rights and social support and who is obligated to provide them, but that aspect never gets foregrounded. Like, if we don’t want to force institutions to employ or support pariahs at their own expense, and we don’t want to completely destroy pariahs on principle, the obvious solution is to reduce the extent to which people are dependent on the support of institutions and employers, particularly private ones. People care a lot about school and jobs because those things are crucial to life in our society, and I don’t think there’ll be a satisfactory solution to the shunning issue as long as that stays the case.

Of course, the other part of the problem I guess is that it’s hard to maintain a space between “this person is somewhat unpopular and often criticized” and “this person is universally loathed as an enemy of society” – shunning seems to be a taboo designed that a situation doesn’t decay toward the former equilibrium, not because the latter is correct but because it’s, I guess, closer? Social sanction is not a fine instrument.

Source: bambamramfan the culture war

brutereason

“You liberals and your safe spaces/trigger warnings/elitism/anti-fascist protests are the reason we have the alt-right” isn’t wrong just because it’s cruel and victim-blaming. It’s wrong because…well, follow that to its logical conclusion.

Suppose you’re right. Suppose we live in a world where a group of overeager progressive students demanding trigger warnings can actually cause large groups of Nazis to march with assault rifles and elect a leader who promises to bankrupt, deport, imprison, assault and/or kill millions of people. Suppose we live in a world where one punch thrown by an Antifa protester naturally and rightly leads to mass curtailment of civil rights for everyone.

Suppose we live in a world where those on the side of justice have to be perfect, have to moderate our language and keep our voices down, have to assemble politely and calmly, or else we can and should expect violent repression.

What kind of world is that?

If we live in a world where overeager college kids naturally provoke Nazi aggression, then the Nazis have already come, and the college kids and the Antifas and whoever else you want to blame today are just convenient targets.

mitigatedchaos

“On the side of justice” - Hint, not everyone agrees that your faction is “on the side of justice,” especially when that faction is willing to do things like overlook sex crimes for ideological reasons. (“But right-wingers ignore sex cri-” right, but you’re implicitly claiming that you are better than them. If you aren’t really, why bother with you?)

Look, there can be dustups without it escalating so much. White nationalists were fringe earlier.

But there is support on the Left for demographic replacement, combined with an implicit belief in ethnonationalism for everyone except white people.

Every time some progressive talks about how “we are the guests of the native tribes here in Michigan,” it supports collective ethnic ownership of the land, which is a core component of ethnonationalism.

You cannot have collective ethnic justice and not have white nationalism.

Either you have civic nationalism without white nationalism, or you have individualism without white nationalism, but you cannot have racial consciousness without white people having racial consciousness, too.

And yeah, historically, white nationalism has been bad. So maybe I don’t appreciate people running around specifically making white people aware of their race and how it’s “problematic” all the time making them identify harder with whiteness.

Spencer’s rally wasn’t even that big! They had to truck people in from all across the country! That whole “anti Nazis” rally in Boston or whatever dwarfed the KKK that were said to be planning to arrive by orders of magnitude.

There might be ways to have ethnic consciousness without causing white ethnonationalism, but they are ideologically prohibited to you, and would probably look more like the behaviors of East Asian soft authoritarian low-democracy city-states than anything you’d see in a diversity seminar.

grumpy uncharitable racepol

wirehead-wannabe

glumshoe

Casually talking about adult female friends is tricky business. Calling them “guys” can be considered misgendering. Calling them “girls” could be disrespectful. Calling them “women” is bizarrely formal and impersonal. “Ladies” is formal and/or condescending. Calling them “females” is TERF-y and makes you sound like a goddamn Ferengi posting on /r/incels.

Does this… does this mean “dames” should make a comeback? It’s vintage and a little slang-y, but also implies that you’re hanging out with a bunch of knights.

wastedarkcell

Ship, this will usher in a new form of noir talking.

I need this.

glumshoe

shit! you ascertained my not-so-subtle agenda!

Source: glumshoe

argumate

xhxhxhx:

During the Second World War, the Japanese Canadian population of coastal British Columbia was divided and resettled across the Canadian interior.
The Japanese Canadians did not concentrate anywhere. There were no resettled communities, only families and individuals. They did not live close to one another. They did not make new communities, out of a fear that they might once again become public enemies.
A few thousand left for Japan after the war was over. Those who stayed in Canada did not usually return to their homes in the Pacific exclusion area, which had been sold by civilian authorities at a profit.
The resettled families did not keep their language. They did not keep their culture. They kept friends among themselves, but they did not do it in public, and they did not pass it on to their children. Their children went to Anglophone schools. They made Anglophone friends.
And as the older generation died, it forgot. Their children grew up in a community that was not their own. But, for those children, it was different. This was their home now. This was their community.
Almost. They felt apart from it, somehow. Sometimes, by a word or a look, they felt as though they did not belong. They felt as though there was something missing. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know where they had come from. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know who they were.
They felt as though their parents had taken something from them. They had done it out of fear, or out of hope. The children had not understood what they were missing. Their parents understood it much too well.
As adults, they talked to one another, those with the same skin, with the same names, about that feeling of absence. Not often, but sometimes.
But they forgot those feelings, and those moments, most of the time. They lived and worked in a world that told them this was their community, and these were their people, and this was where they belonged.
Until it isn’t.
Until, suddenly, they remember.

mitigatedchaos

Doesn’t this suggest Ethnic Nationalism, though?

ethnopol racepol culturepol politics

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

Perspective | Corporations are cracking down on free speech inside the office — and out