From a European perspective, you can see that the police will get worse if you have
But the woke USA tumblr response could just be “You have fewer black people for the police to be racist at“.
But yes, for new readers wondering why there’s a “#the iron hand” tag, it’s because my visual metaphor for state power is literally a steel gauntlet.
It’s important to remember that state power is ultimately rooted in military strength, and that while state interference is powerful, it can ultimately be clumsy and inexact, and forceful.
And I say this as someone who is often in support of state interference.
If this sounds like some bullshit they’d pull in Singapore, that’s not an accident.
Sovereignty is won by force. Every murder, every bombing, every acid attack undermines the legitimacy of the government. Why listen to the government when someone else could kill you just as easily?
The mighty iron hand of the Singaporean state would not let such a thing go so easily. It would seek to crush such opposition.
These behaviors can be stopped at the margins, if they are stopped now. Otherwise, this is the future you choose.
I’m going to start a new political party. It’s the Human Rights Abuses Are Bad party, and our platform is that we don’t like human rights abuses. I understand from this election cycle that this is a controversial opinion but I think it has a lot of merit
if you vote for the Human Rights Abuses Are Bad party then people will die
Actually, politics pretty much always involves deciding who is going to die.
That might be violent criminals, that might be cops, that might be dudes who are not violent criminals that get killed by cops anyway. That might be cancer patients who die because you didn’t immediately seize all wealth to use for treating cancer. That might be future patients that die because you seized all wealth, undermining new treatment development.
Even if you get rid of the state, that, too, is a decision about who will die.
You, a Neoconservative who unironically supported the Iraq War while complaining about “Liberals clamping down on our freedoms”:
Me, completely unapologetic about the existence of a progressive income tax, flirting with the reintroduction of corporal punishment as an alternative to lengthy prison sentences, plotting the introduction of mixed martial arts to high school curricula as part of national civil defense infrastructure, and planning the partial legalization of some soft drugs in order to disrupt the cartels:
If this sounds like some bullshit they’d pull in Singapore, that’s not an accident.
Sovereignty is won by force. Every murder, every bombing, every acid attack undermines the legitimacy of the state. Why listen to the government when someone else could kill you just as easily?
@wirehead-wannabe I’m still not sure why you’d read this blog as seeming right-wing. Sounds pretty improbable to me.
It’s not just this, it’s a fundamental inability to *identify* with other people and realize that *that could be me*.
Today I am 31 and healthy and always exercise regularly and eat well so why should I pay for other people’s expensive preexisting conditions and disabilities? Because obviously it’s not possible that when I’m 34 I might get diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic leukemia and need expensive meds forever. Or that when I’m 36 I might have a child with cerebral palsy who is able to live a full, rich, happy and ~productive~ life but will need expensive healthcare and ongoing assistance to do so. Or that when I’m 48 I might get hit by a car and be left unable to work full time, in need of assistance, etc, myself. Or that when I’m 53 I might get some random-bad-luck cancer (let’s make it easy: not even talk about how lung cancer does in fact happen to nonsmokers or how in any case it’s disgusting to call it “fair” when it happens to a smoker because that punishment doesn’t fit the crime you sadists; instead, let’s consider one of the myriad cancers that hits at genuine fucking random or by some familial genetic vulnerability the individual can’t affect) for which a curative treatment actually exists but it costs $260,000 and without it the prognosis is eighteen months.
Same applies to poverty. (And for some of the same reasons as already sketched, as well as economic cycles and industrial shifts and automation and so on.)
It’s this pervasive prosperity-gospel belief that bad things by definition only happen to the undeserving and trying to help people who experience misfortune is hubris and interfering with the will of the great gods Natural Selection and The Market and doomed to create more problems than it solves because fate favors the lucky because the lucky are deserving because Gnon because *blithering evil*.
I don’t know how to explain thermodynamics and free lunch stuff to people who don’t already have some acquired grounding in physical reality. I also keep saying that caring about other people isn’t the problem (Richard Spencer would probably say he “cares about people”). It’s caring about systems, some of which take care of people (and in a catastrophic failure would become unable to take care of people at all) that’s the problem. If you’re too nihilistically individualized, you’ll apparenrly fail to notice how systems fit together (and don’t). Screaming about it doesn’t seem to help, because systems still fail even when you scream at them. I don’t have an easy answer, but if the most widespread centrist position means ignoring Rotherham-type stuff, then fuck that too.
The economy is like the tyranny of a rocket equation. You only have so much fuel, the gravity between the worlds is already there and you can’t change it.
It is physically impossible to meet all the goals - there just aren’t enough resources (natural resources * capital * labor * technology) to accomplish them all.
American GDP-per-capita is above $50,000. Foreign GDPs outside of a few hyper-efficient places like Hong Kong or Singapore are lower.
If one person takes $3,000,000 to keep alive, you have effectively consumed the complete economic output of one person’s whole entire life.
But it’s worse than that, because our worker had to pay for housing, for food, for transport, for education, and taxes to support all the secondary systems required, and also raise a child to perpetuate the system. If all that’s leftover after all that is $10,000 per year, then any $3,000,000 case consumes the total lifetime surplus resources of five workers.
And I look at many of these cases and do think “fuck, that could be me” - which is part of why I suggested a wage subsidy program!
But a lot of Leftist or Liberal language wants to allow people to create unlimited burdens on society. They want us to pay for treatment while not allowing us to prohibit people from doing things that would require more treatment, or creating people that require more treatment.
You can’t have both! You can’t have both!
The fewer the number of people that require expensive treatment, the more resources you can spend on them. The more that need expensive treatment, relative to the size of the productive economy, the less you can spend on each one, until it falls below the level required for them to survive.
If is vitally important that society become more efficient and more technologically advanced. We must produce more, and more efficiently.
And we can’t just throw aside social technologies. If broken homes fuck people up, statistically, and cause them not to do well in the labor force, then the cost of that comes out of liver transplants, not just ferraris.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
look man, all I’m saying is I want a semi-secret anti-corruption unit to rope in and either get cooperation from or impersonate various businesses and offshore banks so that my politicians never know whether any kickback/bribe attempt is actually an elaborate sting operation,
and make my politicians pseudonymous so that would-be kickbackers can’t be sure who they’re dealing with is the real legislator they wanted to bribe or a member of the anti-corruption task force impersonating one as part of an elaborate sting operation, or replace them with think tanks which cost more money to bribe
I’m really a very reasonable person
And then he’s shocked and horrified when people accuse him of being a reacto
The head-slapping part of this is that it assumes that the difficult part about running a government is all the gosh-darned records processing, and not the bit about maintaining the consent of the governed.
States don’t fail because they can’t process paperwork efficiently enough, they fail because the people decide that an alternative offering is more compelling.
(or more uncharitably: this is the most ignorant post X has ever made, and will remain so until X posts again).
Oh, Eliezer, honey kun,
Culture is a wave, government is a wave, nations are a wave, and they’re all a web.
Libertarianism is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted. Democracy is not the default policy position into which society falls if it isn’t interrupted.
They are both high-level ideological constructs that require constant reinforcement and social, cultural, and material support to maintain.
All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.
While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!
Nah it’s alright fam,
If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.
Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will. Quite remarkable, really. So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.
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.
