ＲＥＶＯＬＵＴＩＯＮ ＩＳ ＯＶＥＲＲＡＴＥＤ
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
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Yeah, you could probably get away with that until some proposal came up regarding abortion, immigration, or some other wedge issue.
On a side note, I remember reading something once about a Republican mayor who, as a partial solution for homelessness, gave every homeless person who wanted one an above-minimum-wage job cleaning parks or picking up garbage on the highway and painted it as a program in line with the conservative emphasis on work ethic. Like, that’s literally just a universal job guarantee painted as a conservative program. It’d probably be pretty surprising what you could get a lot of conservatives to approve if you frame it right
You know what’s going to happen the instant that becomes widespread is that they’re going to try to prove that the government is paying for people to slack off.
Universal Basic Income as the Liberal/Leftist threat/Overton shifter, Employee Wage Subsidies as the Conservative-compatible Compromise for a post-trucking world.
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism
I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
It’s certainly possible to try avoiding these bugs, or dramatically improve the current social order, or to try and build some other system entirely, but then/instead you get people like @redbloodedamerica openly celebrating fucked up shit because capitalism is good and cool and therefore bonded labor is good and cool also, hence, tankies but for capitalism.
Anarchists say they’re against it, but I’ve never seen them lay out how they would prevent it from happening except to claim they wouldn’t have a state - but Catalonia had death squads, perhaps not Stalin-tier death squads, but apparently it did have them. I think the way to socialism now, the way to actually convince people, is to stop telling people to embrace a Communist revolution and instead buy up a huge tract of land in a country with a weak central government and demonstrate a real, working, unoppressive, prosperous model.
I don’t actually think they have that model, so I don’t see myself supporting Communism over Boring Welfare Capitalism any time soon.
I’m working on a higher quality blog post for the main site on this, but for right now I’d like to point out a novel idea. Consider this quote from the article
A single-payer system likely “would be more efficient in delivering health care,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (California Healthline is produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)
But the proposal expands coverage to all and eliminates premiums, copayments and deductibles for enrollees, and that would cost more money, Levitt said. “You can bet that opponents will highlight the 15 percent tax, even though there are also big premium savings for employers and individuals,” he added.
We always hear this. “Single payer health care will save so much money because of all the efficiencies that you can get from central management”
Is this true? Well it just so happens we have a real-world example: HMOs. For example, Kaiser Permanente, the entity referenced in the above quote.
(an aside for non-US readers: in the US, health care is generally privately provisioned, and fee-for-service. That is, if you want a doctor to do a thing, you give them money, and they do the thing. Most people have some kind of health insurance, and this tends to take one of two forms: HMO or PPO.
PPOs are standard, and flexible. In a PPO, the insurance company develops a “network of providers”, a set of doctors who have agreed to work with the insurance company. You are strongly encouraged to go see one of these doctors. If you choose to see a different doctor, “out of network”, your insurance will cover a smaller fraction of the cost. This remains fee-for-service, it’s just that insurance pays.
HMOs, on the other hand, take a very centralized approach. They are one large company responsible for catering to your health needs. In an HMO, you can only go to doctors at facilities run by the HMO. If you need a specialist, you must get a referral to a specialist who works for the HMO. Since everything is integrated, it’s easier for multiple doctors to coordinate and work together. However, your choice of doctor is severely limited. With a PPO, if you don’t like your doctor you can get a new one. Under HMOs, your choices are limited)
The description of HMOs sound a lot like single-payer health care writ small. You give lots of money upfront to an organization like Kaiser (you pay lots of money in taxes to the government to support health care), and in return you go to Kaiser-affiliated facilities (government-funded hospitals) where all of your care is provided to you by one entity. The centralization facilitates efficiencies as bureaucracies are cut, and your needs are taken care of as best they can.
So, approaching the problem from a different point of view: Single-payer government-provided health care is more-or-less the same as if everybody signed up for Kaiser.
This gave me a deliciously trollish idea, an argument to bring out whenever relevant. Let’s say you’re arguing with some commies who insist that single-payer is the best/only solution. Pose to them this hypothetical:
“Would you be in support of a law that gave $HEALTH_INSURANCE_COMPANY a legally-mandated monopoly in health care, at the cost of forcing them to become a non-profit organization?”
Imagine one way to implement single-payer government-provided universal health care:
1) Give Kaiser a legal monopoly on health insurance
2) Legally require Kaiser to be a non-profit.¹
I suspect that most of your commie friends would be incredibly opposed to this idea, and yet it is fundamentally the same thing as a state-run single-payer health, with two caveats
a) You aren’t legally required to opt-in. You can still pay expenses out-of-pocket instead.
b) Instead of the health system being run by whoever is friendliest with our elected representatives, it’s run by people with a proven track record of success in that field.
I suspect this argument generalizes, too. You could apply it to any realm of government service provision that you can think of. It might help a handful of the smarter, more intellectually ethical folks see things from a different perspective.
1. Kaiser IS ALREADY A NON-PROFIT. So much for “greedy health insurance corporations ruining everything in their greedy corrupt quest for more profit”
The way single payer works is that it negotiates prices with providers which it can do because it’s the only buyer. It’s the same way Singapore does it, it’s just there they set legally prices but don’t pay them. Maybe you should look at how this shit works instead of just imagining how it works.
I doubt it’s regulation. Probably people just don’t want to buy misshapen bananas when there are prettier ones right next to them.
I’d like to see OP’s proposed solution here. Tell grown adults, “You’re going to eat this ugly banana whether you like it or not!” and send government thugs to beat them up if they disobey?
I mean a simple solution is have companies buy them for a reduced price, have them sell for a reduced price Then people who are poorer can eat more fruits and veggies and others who dont care how they look can get a deal 👍👍 and companies can make some profit too
That’s exactly what you’d expect to happen. For some reason, it didn’t. I was speculating that there might be some weird psychological effect making it impossible to sell ugly bananas in the same room as pretty bananas for a profitable price.
But fortunately, @americansylveon came back with a source. Apparently EU regulations require that bananas be “free of malformation or abnormal curvature”, but then specifies that class 1 or class 2 bananas are allowed to have “slight defects of shape”, or “defects of shape”. Presumably that’s interpreted as a relaxation of the minimum standards? IDK how much of a defect is allowed.
Then they go so far as to regulate the number of bananas in a bunch. To which I can only say, “I hate the fuck government.”
Keep in mind that in this case the cost of transportation may not make it economical to even ship the malformed bananas if flooding the supermarket results in a really high price reduction.
What I’m perplexed about is why no one builds a processing plant close to the growers and uses it to process the excess bananas into various banana products that don’t care about presentation. Banana flavoring, banana puree, etc. As I understand it this is what happens to second-grade fruit in most industries. Why not here?
Speaking of governments and Africa and development, this presents an opportunity for a government or NGO to buy the misshappen bananas and distribute them to poor people in other countries who won’t give a damn about the shape, bringing money into the source nation’s economy. EA might want to look at this.
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.
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.
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.
You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in
which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in
choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means
using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low
performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that
had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning
efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in
fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in
removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state
and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent
newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not
unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation
has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic
penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when
a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with
a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages
and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements
and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social
comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in
China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in
middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel
(including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable -
892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790
in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by
international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual
cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost
two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income
developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares
with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’tsocialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
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.
Even HPMOR points out that people who obsess over avoiding death are typically considered evil, and Peter blood-of-the-youth Thiel isn’t really doing anything to counter that impression, is he.
I kinda hope someone shoots Thiel, not just because he deserves it, but also because it would be so great for all his research into human longevity to go to waste. You might be able to outrun telomere decay or whatever, but you can’t outrun hot lead.
unless I’m woefully misinformed about the level of his crimes against humanity, I’d be extremely hesitant to endorse murdering the man as I think any grounds on which to do so would apply to way too many people.
Being a billionaire in and of itself constitutes an extremely serious crime. One cannot possess that level of power and influence over other people’s lives without, not even intending to, carelessly harming and killing people.
There’s a reason people use the word “obscene” to describe extreme wealth. Because that’s what it is, disgusting, brutal, bloody, destructive.
does it make a difference if his billions are invested in shares of publicly traded companies, US government bonds, or cash stashed in a storage locker?
if you divided the ownership of his wealth between ten people, but they kept it in the exact same form as he has it now, would that make them each 1/10 as evil as he is, even though the net effect of the wealth on society hasn’t changed?
…why do I suddenly find myself rooting for Peter Thiel to become immortal, and not just discover life extension technologies that can eventually be extended to most of humanity?
Anyhow, what difference does it make if it’s a person that has that power, versus vast, impersonal forces? Vast, impersonal forces carelessly harm and kill lots of people as well, but their perceived liability is spread so wide that it’s hard to see - and composed of the same personal failings but spread out over a lot of smaller and imperfect humans.
….vast, impersonal forces that could easily exist, or have equivalents, under other economic modes.
For instance, if we executed all the billionaires, how many people would die due to subsequent lack of technological progress and making that technology cheap enough to be widely accessible?
It seems to me like the pro-guillotine camp here would deny any moral liability for these after-effects.
I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.
It’s about 158 to 161 million.
Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started.
We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?
Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.
Like
others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the
Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a
sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels”
attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the
conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it
has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to
attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most
authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the
Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention
when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.
Writing
in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He
attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of
adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s
totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a
serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from
opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger
and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).
The
example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian
Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment
we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which
somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He
observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite
striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death
rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and
longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India”
(in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of
mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems
to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China
put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).
In
both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological
predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable
distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public
distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the
downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly
reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.
Overcoming
amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its
reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We
therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist
“experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire
history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism
everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more
since, in India alone.
The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.
We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
