Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@mailadreapta liked your post

Don’t get too excited, bro.

A lot of my thinking on what counts as actually-degenerate now, vs what could count as that in the future, depends significantly on available medical and legal technology.

• Keeping birthrates steady is key in a society where lifespan has not been radically extended.
  
• The lack of artificial wombs makes it far more difficult for the state to, if necessary, raise children to make up for population shortfalls.
• STDs still exist, some of them are becoming antibiotic-resistant, some of them are permanent.
• Most radical body modifications just aren’t feasible right now without dramatically risking the health of the subject.
• Difficult-to-impossible for most people to exit their sexuality means that most people are locked in as heteros so gender ratios matter a lot.
• Difficult-to-impossible for most people to remain young in appearance, and healthy beyond current healthspans.  Long-term irreparable deterioration inevitable.
• Cannot adequately repair DNA damage accrued through having children while of too great a genetic similarity.
• Heritable diseases largely incurable, cannot be simply edited out.
• Can’t repair brain damage beyond some minimum natural level at current tech level, including psychologically-induced trauma.
• Can’t repair limbs effectively, replacement prosthetics are of substandard performance.

I’m not against a future of immortal cyborg mermaids polyamorously dating cyborg vampires while engaging in extreme Martian exosports per se, but I am against picking the policies that make sense for that future long before they make sense for our present moment.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[immanentizingeschatons]

My stretch goal is basically to reconcile LessWrongian high rationalism, hyper-individualistic social liberalism, socialism (or at least something that might be called that), degeneracy, and being really, really autistic into a stable totalizing* ideology, and then use it to overthrow the old world order, reeducate the normies, and hold off the dark forces of GNON until we can ascend to heaven.

Everyone needs a little hubris in their life.

*totalizing is not the same thing as totalitarian

[sinesalvatorem]

It’s really interesting to see a list of all the things I used to idolise and now find eh, unpleasant, or horrifying all in one place like this.

It’s like imagining living in a utopia designed by a younger me and then immediately searching for a rope to hang myself.

[mitigatedchaos]

I wouldn’t find a utopia designed by a younger me all that terrifying.

On the other hand, I’ve been getting more extreme over time, not less.

And now, since my political prescriptions vary by time, resources, technology level, and so on, the question of “what does my utopia look like?” depends on just which decade or century it’s proposed for, and for which country.

It’s funny, because I’m the opposite of OP on a number of these.

1. Integration of intuition over purist high rationalism.
   
2. Recreation of stabilizing and mutually-supporting communities over hyper-individualism, even if the borders of those communities are porous.  Pragmatic social centrism oriented towards social welfare and economic production over radical social liberalism.
3. Something most people would consider to be a variety of Capitalism, even if the nation-state is considered more important than capital, and even though it includes substantial welfare-type payments.
4. The anti-incentivization of actually-degenerate behaviors.  (”Being gay” doesn’t count.  Cousin marriage does.)
5. Increased respect for the viability of basic normie intuitions such as relationship jealousy as, while not being right 100% of the time, being right for most normies most of the time.
6. The prevention of the emergence of a world government, and instead the instantiation of a new order of cooperating groups of Nationalists.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[nocherrybombs]

Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.

[mitigatedchaos]

Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.

[nuclearspaceheater]

I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?

[mitigatedchaos]

You could do it in far fewer generations, but you’d have to install a 20-year military governorship, still ban cousin marriages out to the third degree, enforce village exogamy, and seize total control of the educational system to wipe out non-trivial parts of the culture and replace them with ideology necessary to support Liberal Democracy.

That’s a pretty big ideological price, and it would require a long troop presence to enforce.

It’s hardly impossible.  Afghanistan was liberalizing at one point.  But if you’re too hooked on the ideology that democracy flowers in all soils, it isn’t possible for you to carry it out.

[isaacsapphire]

That actually kinda sounds like “the last few hundred years of Japanese history, but faster”.

[poipoipoi-2016]

I mean, if you believe Clark, it sounds like the last thousand years of Western European history, only faster.

[mitigatedchaos]

“The Development of Advanced Industrial Civilization, But Faster” 

A plan for the Middle East from Award-Winning¹, Internationally-Published² Politics Blogger Mitigated Chaos

¹ Winner of first annual Rationalist Adjacent Award for Blog Most Resembling Mitigated Chaos
² Blog available in all jurisdictions where Tumblr is accessible

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedextras]

This is my blog right now.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[cptsdcarlosdevil]

I am ANNOYED by people who are like “yay moderation boo extremism ~radical centrism~”

the centrist American position is that powerful people can commit crimes against humanity without ever facing trial, while poor people go to prison for being drug addicts

I hold extremist opinions like “the rule of law is a good idea” and “unchecked executive power is bad” and “people should respect the constitution” and “STOP COMMITTING WAR CRIMES”

[mitigatedchaos]

I don’t think that kind of Centrism counts as Radical™.

My Centrism, on the other hand…

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Although, if anything, that post about healthcare costs is perhaps a better summary of my current politics than any.

Efficiency - in government, in the private sector, anywhere - doesn’t just mean some nice bonus that lets rich people we don’t care about have more sports cars.  

As efficiency and production increase, you stop having to triage.  If one unit of sovereign services costs $1.00 to deliver and you have $1.00, then you can purchase only one unit.  If one unit of sovereign services costs $0.50, then you can purchase two.  

If there were two of you and you collectively only had one dollar to spend, then in the first case you have to fight about who gets that one unit of sovereign services, and in the second case you don’t.  

The adequate planning of cities and efficient distribution of resources are absolutely vital.  Surplus regulations don’t just have a cost in corporate bureaucrat annoyance, but in bus stops.  

Private property, government regulations, wealth redistribution… these are tools, not moral imperatives.

Now I know many people would say “sure, but my politics is about using them correctly as tools,” and for some people that’s true.  But a lot of the time that’s not what we see in practice.

So the great question, I think, is how we can make systems of governance better, to promote better and more accurate approaches to policy that more effectively accomplish what will benefit people.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[anaisnein]

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*.

[slartibartfastibast]

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.

[mitigatedchaos]

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.