The NYT: We should import millions of immigrants a year, and anything other than open (or at least unenforced) borders is a tremendous moral failing.
Also the NYT: But if anyone ever builds a housing unit anywhere, this is evil.
Me: Uh guys, how exactly is this supposed to work?
Also also the NYT: Oh by the way, we should just deport millions of Americans
Me: Ohhhh…
Me: Trump is totally winning in 2020, isn’t he?
I guess if you find yourself saying “history will judge me harshly for this, but-” there better be a damn good ending to that sentence
History can judge you harshly for something it shouldn’t if the future is stupid, cruel, or alien.
it’s disturbing how well PUA concepts apply to business and sales negotiations where you typically have two entitled assholes employing peacocking, negs, shittests, last minute resistance, the whole nine yards.
Yeah, I’ve talked about this before elsewhere – IMO this is actually the central insight of PUA: it’s an attempt to apply salesmanship techniques to courtship and flirting. People often dislike that definition because they want to emphasize how “rapey” PUA is and how it treats other people’s boundaries and wishes as desires to be overcome, but, like, that’s exactly how sales and negotiations work. The fact that we consider it unacceptable when it comes to sex is a rare example of us actually having a high degree of scruples about the matter.
In the context of a business deal, though, there’s rarely an underlying threat that the other party is going to beat, forcibly rape, or even kill you if you don’t comply with what they want. Also I do in fact dislike pushy attempts to get me to buy shit, it’s just not socially acceptable to be rude to salespeople in the way that one might be rude to catcallers.
This is definitely a subtext underlying a lot of sexualized interactions, but I don’t think it explains the attitudes toward PUA specifically, because they really don’t seem to be about this. PUA “game” is about sales tricks, not force, and I get the sense that even a totally misogynistic pick-up artist would disdain relying on the threat of force to achieve success, if only because it demonstrates a lack of skill.
What criticism I’ve seen mostly seems to emphasize that hard-sell techniques and emotional manipulation undermine the legitimacy of consent, violate boundaries, and push people into agreeing to things they might regret later. Those are completely legitimate objections, but they do apply to sales generally.
Most sales decisions are reversable in a way that sex isn’t.
Also, its less tied to people’s particular identities. The quality of a product and the needs of a customer are separate from the person, so people are not as emotionally invested.
Also we have pretty strong norms about where and how it is appropriate to sell things, you can do a hard sale technique at a car dealership or in finance, but you couldn’t o it in a lot of industries, and you certainly can’t do it to random friends and family. (Indeed the stereotype of MLM scams is people selling in inappropriate situations )
This is true, but a lot of the mitigating factors in sales were put there by the government against the wishes of the people doing the selling, and in many cases they’ll go to considerable lengths to prevent people from reversing their decisions. Moreover, I’d say it’s probably easier to wreck your life by buying the wrong thing in the wrong way than it is by fucking the wrong person in the wrong way – unquestionably that’s the case if you discount STD’s. Destroying people’s lives, intentionally violating their boundaries, and otherwise harming and parasitizing the vulnerable in the pursuit of profit is a core component of sales as a field, even though any given sales job may not involve it. This bothers people less than I think it probably should.
With small-scale sales that happen in a designated selling place, I’m much less troubled by it, but there are a lot of sectors of sales where making a bad decision could ruin a person’s life and everything is optimized to make sure that as many people as possible do so. The industries where it’s most acceptable to be predatory are also the ones where it’s most destructive to the mark – car sales and finance are big ones, as you note in your examples. And while things like door-to-door and street sales are stigmatized, they’re certainly not stigmatized anywhere near as much as the equivalent style of flirting. So I think it’s fair to say that there is an actual double standard here, particularly in light of the fact that most PUA stuff seems to happen at places where flirting is considered appropriate.
I don’t exactly know where I’m going with all of this, admittedly. I wouldn’t say salespeople should be viewed as negatively as pick-up artists, or that both are benign. But I will say this much: I think that viewing consent and coercion as topics predominantly related to sexuality and the politics of sex – or of having a completely different standard when applied to those fields – warps our ability to think and talk about them.
It’s sort of weird sometimes seeing how cyberpunk works dealt with the relationship between people, corporations, and government. I always figure it say some interesting things about people’s politics when you see how they construct their cyberpunk world.
One of the weird things I always notice is the status of the government? Do they still exist? Are they overtly weaker than the corporations? Being your marxist inspired leftist, I always sort of feel a failure of verisimilitude when corporations overtly take over. The corporation doesn’t want to do the things that government has to do. It’s great when the government breaks up a riot or strike and the corporation can have clean hands, publicly chastising the government while benefiting from the social order it creates.
Then there’s the issue of mercenaries, the corporate security forces that are ubiquitous in these settings. I always figure them as having the same problems that Machiavelli identified, namely that mercenaries are shit that will desert you if things go bad and you really need them. They’re fine for quashing protests, but if it’s devolved to the point of full-scale war, I wouldn’t count on them. To have them be dominant or unstoppable just seems strange.
Finally, there’s the old joke about sufficiently large corporations becoming central planning. If it’s large enough it conducts a lot of it’s business itself, it basically becomes a command economy with all the interesting issues that has. That’s especially the case for some works where basically everyone works for one corporation.(Although that’s more in weird dystopia than cyberpunk per se.)
But, those issues at one point made me think of something that I can only describe as a syndicalist-inspired megacorporate cyberpunk world. It’s what you might get as corporations realize they have to take up the slack of governments fully. You can think of it as if, rather than “Germany”, the region becomes “United German Carmakers” and the ideology and culture of the entire country are bent towards car production. It would control the ideological institutions, having media and schools tell people that prosperity of the entire nation/corporation is dependent on making cars, basically an attempt to build actual loyalty to a company rather than just the corporation being something you join to pick up some cash. It could have elections, perhaps using a principle like employee-ownership model but with the problems of
bourgeoisie
democracy heightened, as your prosperity is linked to that of your department and boss and those are manipulated to keep certain policies on top. It could become regionless, where you live next to citizens of other corporation/nations and yours basically negotiates the status of citizen-employees with other corporations in a sort of polycentric legal order.
You would be born into the corporation and would be expected to die there. I could expect something like a jobs-guarantee, although the jobs at the bottom will probably be shit. There are all sorts of weird things that you can see as corporations have to take control of issues of legitimacy and defense rather than just inheriting them from the government. I would expect the corporation itself to become more democratic, even though there may be less democracy in total due to the lack of external government.
And the thing is, I sort of see shades of this in our world. I chose German carmaking for a reason, Germany’s national pride and economic future is tied to it’s cars at this point and it is very defensive of this industry. And corporations do try and build loyalty beyond simply paying people, I’ve seen retail establishments do what basically amount to loyalty chants and pledges of allegiance, and it was in the news awhile ago that Amazon was basically doing self-criticism sessions that were likened to Maoism.
I sometimes see bits and pieces of everywhere, and actually the real “Cyberpunk” works seems to have bits and pieces of this type of thing. It’s actually the cyberpunk-adjacent works that are the worst, those that use a generic corporate future merely as set dressing for their story. But I still see this type of work do things that just seem wrong or impossible, and I do a double-take.
cyberpunk, cyberfolk, cybernumetal
By total coincidence, this squidpost happens to be relevant to what I’m up to now.
Unfortunately, I cannot go into more detail, as segments describing more of the workings of the Pacific Metropolitan Collective Corporation, Outer Hong Kong Metropolity have yet to be posted. However, I do believe that some of those workings would satisfy @collapsedsquid, at least in terms of not being just “lol corps took over k”.
Anonymous asked:
This is interesting, since it means that people without Tumblr accounts are either following my blog or being referred to Whiteout, and I have no way to gauge the number of them.
I’ll keep that ranking site in mind, Anon.
So there’s been this interesting pattern where the places that are habitable after global warming are also the places with housing restrictions.
At which point everyone despairs of ever living in the 80 degree parts of LA and moves to 120 degree Vegas at a tenth the price. (Or at least the 109 degree parts of LA a couple mountain ranges away).
And right now, it sure looks like the fastest growing cities and regions in the country are either the sort of place where an extra 5F gets people killed or the sort of place where you get semi-regular hurricanes.
So uh… what happens when people try to flee north and can’t?
I think the distinction that people don’t make is that…
So if you have a high stress situation consisting only of women, isolated from society and from men, it may well get violent.
Do we have any actual statistics on rates of violence in all-female societies?
All girls schools seem the obvious test case. A quick google gives me one article saying that violent bullying is worse in all femae schools, but other studies say the opposite. Confounders are a problem obviously. But at the very least the numbers are close enough that there isn’t conclusive evidence. There’s some interesting stuff saying that bullying for not conforming to gender stereotypes is less bad in single sex environments, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about the total levels
That, and of course, one must notice that selling to China often results in knock-offs or even the business shifting over entirely to China and being replaced in the long run. I believe there are already aircraft appearing that are suspiciously similar to Boeings.
like if all you had to do was make a one-time payment to get someone who will do all of the most menial labor possible for you for the rest of their existence in this mortal coil I bet virtually every single one of you fuckers would be on board
y’all just too pussy to admit it
It’s called an androgynoid and you can buy one from Mitsubishi Heavy Industr-
*ahem* Sorry, my information is out of time. Please ignore this message.
