Oceans Yet to Burn

Anonymous asked:

Assuming I can shatter China, too (for the sake of sidestepping questions of likelihood-of-success, let's make that "assuming I can shatter China *first*"), any objection to me cracking the US into a few more drownable-in-a-bathtub sized chunks?

Drownable-in-a-bathtub is too small for any reasonable national government, but setting that aside…

How perceptive.

That the dominant hegemony is a democratic republic founded on liberal and enlightenment values, human rights, and democracy as ideology has some advantages. For instance, it likely plays a part in just about every autocrat having to pretend to democratic legitimacy. But those advantages are pretty intangible, so we’ll set those aside as well.

And let’s assume a breakup of Russia and India as well.

Sometimes I oppose things not just because I disagree with them on values, but because I think they won’t even work for the stated goal. (Doesn’t everyone?) So a lot of the opposition to American power wants to supplant America with Communism, or Anarchism, or smash it to bits, or dissolve it into global capitalism, or install a world government.

And while often this is based on ideological values about how people should live,

it’s also based on “OH FUCK GEORGE BUSH COULD JUST RANDOMLY INVADE SOMEWHERE AND NO ONE COULD STOP HIM.”

But while knowledge is knowing that America has hegemonic power, wisdom is knowing that that level of relative power isn’t entirely unique to America.

So not only will those ideas, like turning America Communist, be undesirable in themselves, but they will fail to actually abolish hegemony. They won’t even work for that stated purpose that was supposed to justify such a radical course of action.

For someone like me, this is a terrible deal.

So as long as anyone else has a continent-spanning superstate, I and the other American nationalists have no reason to dismantle ours.

But this question posits that a breakup of the other 9 million square kilometer nations has already happened.

At that point, I don’t really need a continent-spanning superstate. It has certain advantages, but the pressing need, to avoid living under someone else’s hegemony, is gone.

And I’m willing to make weird ideological trades. (I may be a lot less pro-immigration than most of the ratsphere, for instance, but there are conditions where I’d be willing to add all of Mexico to the United States.)

It may surprise you to learn this, but I’ve periodically thought about breaking the United States into a new level of “Regional Federalism” to deal with the increased political polarization. It wouldn’t work as well as we might like for that, due to the primary divide being urban/rural, so some other designs might have to be investigated, but I’m not as opposed to the idea as some readers may expect.

So let’s suppose we take the idea of a North American Union. There’s a sort of slider on a continuum of being more like a unified central government towards being a bunch of barely-connected separate nations. We’ll put the slider more towards the latter.

The American states are too small to be effective countries in the way that we’d like, and many of them are landlocked - very unfair! So we break America into 3-6 countries, based on the regions. Each one has some coastline of its own (if 3-4 countries), or else, through the NAU, the Great Lakes Region gets prenegotiated access to the sea.

This gives us a group of countries which each have a power level somewhere between that of France and that of Japan.

Minimum military development spending is pegged by the NAU to some % of the GDP and is shared between all of them. Actual militaries are individual to each country. There is a mandatory mutual defense pact, and a military coordination center, but pre-emptive wars and the like are optional. If Texas decides to invade Iran, New York does not have to pay for it. Outside of this, minimum military % GDP spending is tagged to 2.5%, and NAU members can sue each other if they fail to meet it.

The US Dollar is not abolished, but becomes a basket currency based on the currencies of each of the new NAU member countries. New currencies are issued for the new countries so that their economies don’t have currency problems like the EU does.

The official language of the NAU is American English. Proficiency in English must be taught in every NAU member country. There is no prohibition on adding other languages at the member country level.

The Bill of Rights is kept.

Other than this, since we’re looking for a dismantling, the power of the NAU government is pretty limited. The number of representatives for each member country is not proportional to population.

For the individual countries, I think multi-party parliamentary systems might result in a bit less infuriating dipolar partisanship. However, to be more decisive, each should have a President elected by Approval Voting.

That’s all pretty radical, and it’s more of a rough sketch than anything, but I am willing to make ideological trades with people that are primarily anti-nationalist because of things like the Iraq War - they’re just trades that no one can realistically offer.

Then again, by the mid-century, who knows?

anons asks policy politics flagpost tired north american union

Cultural Transmission

Screw it. I was going to make a more detailed piece, but this will have to do for now.

Cultural transmission is more similar to a weighted, directed graph than to some other models.

We can think of agents as the nodes, and their modes of interaction and communication as the edges.

Cultural norms reinforce themselves through interactions and use, creating an environment where they are dominant.

Key for assimilation is cultural pressure to conform. If all interactions are with the host culture, the pressure to conform is enormous and there is no reinforcement to support resisting it.

This is partially based on the dispersal of agents and their interactions within the environment, but it is also based on relative size.

Any given nation therefore has both a maximum theoretical and a practical assimilatory capacity. This can be altered by a number of factors, including policy, dominant ideology, and geographical and cultural distribution.

Of course, in the modern world, the number of potential cultural transmission vectors is much larger (particularly including the Internet).

flagpost the culture war nationalism

Logarithmic Policing

@collapsedsquid

That’s basically just secret police
of a totally ordinary sort
that then indulge in kickbacks and protection rackets

Yeah, I realized I forgot to tag that #half shtpost, as I wasn’t being entirely serious. It’s a bit of wishful thinking.

The thing is, I don’t think we adequately police the police. We need cop cops. Metacops, if you will.

The disutility of a crime can be modeled as the risk of getting caught times the penalty for getting caught. Thus, a crime with a 5% chance of getting caught, times a 20 year sentence as penalty, is then modeled with an effective disutility of a one year sentence.

However, people tend to time discount and so on, so you might not get much more out of a 40 sentence than you would out of a 20 year sentence. They’re both “a long time.” This means that you can get more oomph out of increasing the capture & conviction rate.

Regular people, despite not being police, commit crimes for some reason. Cops, who we send to increase the chances of catching them, also commit crimes. However, since they’re the ones that we typically send to stop crimes, it’s harder to deal with this, especially when prosecutors have to work with the same police to prosecute normal cases, and thus can’t afford to anger the larger police force.

So we should have a dedicated force to investigate, police, and prosecute police misconduct. “Sting operations all the way down,” so to speak. Of course, we’ll need to have someone keep an eye on them, too.

…but won’t that result in endless layers of bureaucracy?

Not necessarily.

Just as we only need some limited factor number of police for a given population size, we only need some limited number of metaⁿ-cops to police the cops.

We can model the required number of layers of metaⁿ-cops as log_{cop_ratio}(num_cops). With a cop_ratio of 2, for instance, our total number of all metaⁿ-cops is roughly the same as our total number of non-meta cops. A more reasonable cop_ratio of 10-20 gets us a more affordable ~5-11% for a city with 10,000 cops.

The purpose of each layer is to increase the uncertainty of successfully getting away with a crime at the layer below through arrest and conviction through multiple means, including informants, patrols, sting operations, reports of suspicious activity, investigations, etc.

This would be in addition to other means, such as introducing randomness to make various forms of corruption more difficult, moving people around to prevent building up loyalty between layers, etc. We want any corrupt personnel to always have to act very carefully and in the face of a great deal of uncertainty, as anyone they are interacting with could be one of our meta-cops.

We’d have to trim some of the other laws before we enact this, though, or else be careful just what policies we’re enforcing. Some laws currently not being enforced should just not exist, and we don’t actually want them enforced.

politics policy flagpost

Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).

Huh.

policy flagpost the iron hand the invisible fist

mitigatedchaos

Anonymous asked:

What seriously separates cosmopoli from ethnonational states? And what seriously makes them worse? Their lifetimes seem comparable to me, especially given that most countries didn't experience a national awakening until kings started consolidating feudal conglomerations towards the dawn of capitalism.

mitigatedchaos answered:

You don’t need a pure ethnonational country, though that can cut down on certain bullshit like what’s happening between the Buddhists and the Muslims in Myanmar. (Hint: It isn’t solely a story of purely poor, innocent Muslims, but one of those cases of cyclical retaliatory ethnic violence.)

The chief question is, are you willing to do what it takes to make that cosmopolitan polity not descend into retaliatory ethnic violence, potential ethnic predation, and ethnicity-aligned political parties?

Like, if you’re not willing to do that, then what you get is ethnic violence.

If you look over at what’s happening in the British cities, with the child sex trafficking, and grooming, and so on, and not only are you not willing to slam down the iron hand of the state to stop it dead in its tracks, but you won’t even stop them from marrying their cousins at rates way above what is normal or even healthy, then you don’t really have what it takes to make a cosmopolitan polity work.

And if you don’t have what it takes to make a cosmopolitan polity work, then an ethnic polity is a safer choice.

This is somewhat disguised by the fact that not all cultures are equally destabilizing. You can pretend, for a while, if the underlying conditions are right, and succeed by accident.

Additionally, cosmopolitan vs ethnonationalism is a continuum, not a binary. Well actually it’s a multidimensional space, not a continuum. But you get the idea.

mitigatedchaos

Anything that promotes cultural unity over cultural diversity, even shared experiences, heads in the direction of ethnonationalism, even if it may be far from reaching it. Having one shared language, or having a required period of civil or military service, head in that direction. Even soft unifying forces such as television can count, without any force of arms in backing.

Cultures have more than one layer. American food court multiculturalism, in which deep differences are stripped away while surface differences, like cooking, remain, moves positively along the axis of ethnonationalism, even though many people will object that “American” is not ethnicity.

A theoretical total cosmopolity, in its maximal diversity, has one language for each inhabitant. A theoretical total ethnopolity borders on hivemind.

nationalism politics flagpost

The proper role of the state, I believe, is most often (though not always) to establish frameworks for private action.

Macro-information vs micro-information. Macro-coordination vs micro-coordination. Flexible hierarchies. Coordination of rules for predictability and thus lowered computational and compliance cost.

my politics national technocracy politics flagpost

slartibartfastibast

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

But What About the Right?

There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too. Does it not backfire for them? Why do right-wingers get a pass?”

And, in fact, it does backfire for them. It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars. Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment. It’s a price paid in National Will.

What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War? What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on? There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.

How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?

To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control. One must be worthy.

The Right, in many ways, has not been. And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.

politics flagpost

Rhyme of the Sixth Child

@shieldfoss

Can’t get your core mind thread remotely hacked if it’s not wired to an antenna

Everyone, sing along:

The inputs aren’t together with the outputs
And the outputs aren’t together with the inputs
For each task a dedicated subsystem
You are the network,
You are the tree
The display is for displaying
The arm for throwing
The display doesn’t choose
Where the arm is going
Memories are their own network
Stored inside your brain
Hardlink only can dive your memory
Dead or dying in crimson rain
You are the network
You are the tree
What’s you is you,
and what’s me is me
Firmware is manual update only
The touch of the cord inside,
Validated and crypto-signed
Is the only right way for parts to sing
The songs of the aether are broken
A great storm that seeks to consume all it sees
Broken hearts and broken minds
If thy let it in to thee
You are the network
You are the tree
What’s you is you,
and what’s me is me

I mean, admittedly I kind of left out the rhythm entirely in translating it, but you get the idea. Every good child, raised by high-aptitude-scoring parents, is taught this at age 6.

chronofelony shtpost mitigated future mitigated fiction augmented reality break flagpost what even is this blog

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

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

Cultural Transmission

Cultural transmission is more similar to a weighted, directed graph than to some other models.

We can think of agents as the nodes, and their modes of interaction and communication as the edges.

Cultural norms reinforce themselves through interactions and use, creating an environment where they are dominant.

Key for assimilation is cultural pressure to conform. If all interactions are with the host culture, the pressure to conform is enormous and there is no reinforcement to support resisting it.

This is partially based on the dispersal of agents and their interactions within the environment, but it is also based on relative size.

Any given nation therefore has both a maximum theoretical and a practical assimilatory capacity. This can be altered by a number of factors, including policy, dominant ideology, and geographical and cultural distribution.

Of course, in the modern world, the number of potential cultural transmission vectors is much larger (particularly including the Internet).

Logarithmic Policing

But What About the Right?

Rhyme of the Sixth Child