Oceans Yet to Burn — @collapsedsquid Wage subsidies can’t cover 65%...

collapsedsquid

mitigatedchaos

Wage subsidies can’t cover 65% of poor people because they are effectively not eligible for employment.

That’s true, but it doesn’t make wage subsidies bad policy, just not the only policy. (You’d also find some people could work, but normally couldn’t survive on the money offered - something a wage income subsidy program is intended to address.)

I mean, the poor would likely be better off if, tomorrow, minimum wage cut to $3/hr, with an $8/hr declining subsidy up to 40 hrs/wk, or something along those lines.

Source: discoursedrome the invisible fist

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the-grey-tribe

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

thathopeyetlives

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.

Today things are… different.

It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology

I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)

If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.

I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.

rendakuenthusiast

Endorsed.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics the invisible fist mostly endorsed the red hammer

“Capitalism with a Human Face”

shtpost politics the invisible fist

collapsedsquid

stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com

Economic roots of post-truth politics

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization. What I mean is that...

collapsedsquid

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization.
What I mean is that in manufacturing, facts defeat emotions and opinions. If your steel cracks, or your bottles leak or your cars won’t start, all your hopes and fancy beliefs are wrong. Truth trumps opinion.
Contrast this with sales occupations. In these, opinion beats facts. If customers think a shit sandwich is great food, it’ll sell regardless of facts. And conversely, good products won’t sell if customers think they’re rubbish. Opinion trumps truth.
(Finance is a mix of these. In trading and asset management, beliefs are constantly defeated by cold hard facts. In asset gathering, sales and investor relations, however, bullshit works.)
Isn’t it therefore possible that a shift from manufacturing to other occupations will contribute to a decline in respect for facts and greater respect for opinions, however ill-founded? In 1966 – when employment in UK manufacturing peaked – 29.2% of the workforce were in manufacturing. This meant that millions more heard tales from fathers, husbands and friends about how brute facts had fouled up their day. A culture of respect for facts was thus inculcated. Today, however, only 7.8% of the workforce is in manufacturing and many more are in bullshit jobs. This is an environment less conducive to a deference to facts.

Hot take on how method of labor influences mode of thought.

mitigatedchaos

I hereby award this take one pepper for spiciness.

I can think of two supportive facts. One is that post-truth politics seems (I might be wrong) to be less strong in countries where manufacturing still looms large in culture if not in economics, such as in Germany or Japan.

However, many of the people decrying Post-Truth Politics don’t particularly care for the policies of Japan, and Japan’s politics are quite different from Germany’s.

the invisible fist the culture war

argumate

The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.

mitigatedchaos

All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.

argumate

I can actually see a possible argument here:

“War destroys an enormous amount of value in the form of lives wasted, resources burned, and infrastructure destroyed, but it can also break a political deadlock and allow reallocation of production within the economy that leads to increased efficiency after the war, as well as smoothing the way for redistribution programs to ex-soldiers that reduce inequality and boost demand.”

Like, maybe? But the fuckin’ annoying thing is that killing a few million people and sending millions of tons of shipping to the bottom of the Atlantic is a very indirect way of passing legislation and it would be nice to just do it directly.

mitigatedchaos

Actually I meant that America was one of the very few countries with significant industrial capacity that had not been hit by strategic bombing campaigns reducing major cities to rubble. As such, it had a major competitive advantage in the aftermath of the war.

Most of the rival countries destroyed were already economically developed beforehand, so the survivors were able to reconstruct their advanced economies, which represented monumental growth - but only relative to the conditions caused by the war.

politics the invisible fist

argumate

what I’m trying to do is end the dominance of capital over all our lives, end the endless wars for profit, the system of white supremacy and settler colonialism that has resulted in generations of suffering, and end the actual destruction of our ecosystems. and since the only alternative to capitalism is communism,

I see this conflation all the time and I’m compelled to be bugged by it every time.

There just haven’t been that many wars for profit lately relative to historical standards, the ideology of white supremacy has little to do with adoption of capitalism across non-white nations, settler colonialism is orthogonal to all of these issues, and destruction of ecosystems is a side effect of industrialisation and ballooning population growth that needs to be addressed in similar ways regardless of economic system.

politics the invisible fist the red hammer

the-grey-tribe

argumate

the idea that Trump/Brexit are purely a racism thing disregards the angst about globalisation that is taking place across the globe, not just in Anglo nations.

sure, people are racist, that’s unsurprising, but people are also exposed to economic dislocations without any sugar coating justification or vision of a hopeful future to come, it’s no surprise that they react with fear and anger.

Source: argumate politics the invisible fist

argumate

Now I’m wondering what if students could spend student loans on other things, like starting businesses.

voxette-vk

So you’ve come around to the radical libertarians calling for voluntary slavery?

argumate

Just highly suspicious of the American student loan system! Like most American institutions it seems to neatly combine the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. Why not just have regular loans (allow bankruptcy etc.) or just socialise the system entirely like a sensible country??

mitigatedchaos

The money must be laundered through the private sector to prove that it isn’t Socialism™.

Nevermind that either doing it in a more capitalist, more socialist, or just straight-up better national centrist way would be more effective.

American dysfunction politics the invisible fist

theunitofcaring

Anonymous asked:

Again, people googling randos they've never heard of before is not evidence that they become Nazis themselves. You know what stops Nazis? Ten million communists with weapons. You know what would have helped? Liberals. Fucking. Helping. I know you like fascists way too much to defend the oppressed, but AT LEAST DO NOT INTERFERE.

theunitofcaring answered:

If your plan only works if no one ‘interferes’ by arguing on the internet that your efforts are observably counterproductive and unhelpful, then your plan is a colossal failure.

But, seriously, the ‘should you no-platform speakers at colleges’ debate isn’t the ‘punch Nazis’ debate and I think it’s really unhelpful to conflate them. Someone might believe that it’s right to pull fire alarms, scream at the top of your lungs, block cars, etc. in order to make sure that, say, trans-exclusionary feminists can’t give a talk at their college, while also believing that bludgeoning purported Nazis is a terrible idea. “Does suppressing speeches on college campuses and in other public arenas by having violent demonstrations against them work?” is the question I am discussing in that post, and as you correctly observe, “no, that fails to suppress the speech” is not an answer to a wide variety of unrelated questions.

When I write posts about whether punching Nazis is a good idea then you are welcome to spam me with hysterical anons claiming that I love Nazis, am personally a liberal fascist, am responsible for the rise of the Third Reich, etcetera etcetera, but when that’s also your response to ‘no-platforming fails because of the Streisand effect’ then someone might conclude that’s just your default response to literally any dissent, you know?

As always I am proudly and openly committing to interfering with street violence against unarmed people, organized brutality of every kind, and the spread of dishonest, misguided, and nonsensical information about how a society can fight violent extremism. Yes, I will interfere. Yes, I do interfere. Yes, I will persuade everyone that I possibly can to interfere alongside me.

mitigatedchaos

In today’s news, aggrieved Communist Anon unaware of difference between no-platforming, street violence, and war, as well as Lend-Lease Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#US_deliveries_to_the_Soviet_Union

politics the red hammer the invisible fist

bambamramfan

collapsedsquid

I was doing semi deep dive into Orion’s Arm after @immanentizingeschatons reminded me of it, and it got me thinking about post-scarcity and politics.

Specifically, I was comparing it to some of the other post-scarcity settings I’ve seen, like Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer, and Nova Praxis. One thing that all of these have in common is that the politics presented in the game seems off.

Nova Praxis and Mindjammer to my mind don’t really have political conflict. They try to describe some of the political units, but they seem to be stereotypes masquerading as politics or and otherwise just poorly described. Eclipse Phase and Orion’s Arm do have political units, but they’re fairly obviously based on the political viewpoints favored in the demographic and seem kind of goofy and impossible because of that.

And it strikes me that to some level this is an impossible problem. If you think there won’t be real politics in the post-scarcity future, I’m going to very much doubt that. But if you think that you can predict the nature of political conflict in the post-scarcity future, I’m also going to very much doubt that. So, either way, you’re stuck with writing a political scene that’s weird.

mitigatedchaos

But really, can there truly be post-scarcity? Maybe with magic violating conservation of matter-energy, but without it, someone is going to want to use the mass of your asteroid to build their habitat to replicate their ideology.

collapsedsquid

I consider “post-scarcity” as describing when technology has advanced to the point where the common material desires like food, housing, and entertainment of any person are trivially easy to fill.

isaacsapphire

Then aren’t we there already in some countries?

bambamramfan

Indeed. “Post scarcity” more refers to “when people believe there is not a scarcity of stuff.” And as the discourse over the $500,000 New York family shows, it is unrealistic that that would ever happen no matter how many resources our society generates.

mitigatedchaos

The year is 3122. Transhumanity has colonized the entire solar system. The total GDP of mankind and its descendant species long ago exceeded its 2340 high of 14 quadrillion US2016 dollars. A new discourse arises.

PRIVATIZE THE SUN

Source: collapsedsquid shtpost the invisible fist

slartibartfastibast

Source: resistdrumpf the invisible fist the iron hand flagpost policy my politics national technocracy politics

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

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You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

Economic roots of post-truth politics