Everyone likes fast cars, but why is it that when I propose a new class of police “super interceptors” powered by retired attack helicopter turbines as the new primary response to illegal street racing, in order to boost advancement in the automotive industry, I’m the bad guy??
seriously though it’s way past time for you Americans to fix your political system
Trump isn’t the problem, just a symptom of your two-party insanity
Not going to happen. They’ll not agree to the constitutional revisions necessary to install a multi-party system.
Anonymous asked:
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?
Anonymous asked:
I’m really tired right now, and should probably let this ask sit, but if I do the knowledge of it just resting there in my askbox, waiting, will nag me.
There are a few big implications.
Of course, a major part of why there is illegal immigration into the country is because you can exploit them in ways that you can’t exploit the natives - not just because the natives can vote, but because people who violated immigration law have to stay under the radar to avoid potential deportation/etc, and so will have to be much more desperate before turning to law enforcement.
The businesses supporting this out of a desire for cheap and exploitable labor do not actually want these people properly naturalized, because then they’d have to pay them more, so they’d tend to just import more unauthorized labor.
It’s important to remember that a pathway to citizenship does nothing to stem the flow that caused this in the first place, and is thus not a real solution.
Immigration cannot solve global poverty while the rate of new people created each year massively exceeds the capacity of developed nations to take them in.
Only developing the countries of origin economically, such that they are wealthy enough that people mostly don’t want to leave, can truly solve global poverty.
There are also other policy alternatives.
learn-tilde-ath asked:
This seems reasonable to me on first reading.
My late night tired concern is that the census might not update the house seats fast enough to account for changes in policy or something.
It could act as a pressure against the politicians to be Tough On Crime, or at least for them to use whatever means they can to try to strip their opposition from voting. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want certain convicted criminals voting until they are, at least, out of prison again.
I may return to this later.
A. Outwards-spiraling iterative development across multiple successive levels.
Among key factors is that the experiments must have ways for experiment members to act contrary to the wishes of the pro-policy members, or to move sideways within the model as it were. Additionally, experiment members should be rewarded with real-world money to drive an incentive other than just appearing nice/virtuous. To achieve this adversarial nature, the anti-policy forces must be involved in planning or approving the experiment.
A framework of methods for game-theoretical defections (or however you want to put it) could be developed, since in the real world, “cheat and kill the guy” is an option in many scenarios.
While not strictly going to capture every way that a policy could go wrong, this should act as a series of sanity checks for preventing some of the worst policies, and highlight promising policies.
B. Proportional Block Grant Committee.
Have the national government collect some share of national tax revenue for conducting policy experiments. Since most experimental policies would be de facto subsidies relative to other states, issue it to states proportional to some factor like population or size (or maybe population times size). This means all the states are subsidized about the same, at least in terms of the policy spending, depending on implementation.
Use block grants awarded in such a way as to make it difficult to just use the money to offset tax cuts. Generally, give experiments to the subnational governments that most want to attempt them, since those same governments will be less likely to sabotage the experimental policies.
C. Internal migration is an experimental result.
Yes, putting a UBI in a province might result in people migrating to that province to freeload off it. Or it might result in taxpayers fleeing. Alternatively, it might not.
However, unless your country is going to ban emigration and immigration, this is actually important information, as are shifts in jobs, building, etc across the economy so long as your country must compete in the global economy.
None of this will be perfect, but it should be feasible to gather a good harvest of information.
1. Guns are indeed totally banned. Swords are now completely legal, and are normalized to the point that if many private-public places want to prohibit them (and don’t have excellent security plus lockers for you to use) they would be considered the weird ones.
2. Eliminationist gun buyback program, at the actual market value, which starts off fairly low and eventually rises towards “have me set up to be a rich man for life” as supply falls below demand and fewer and fewer people are willing to give up assets they know they would never be legally allowed to replace.
3. Guns are indeed totally banned for ordinary people. Everybody now is allowed to hire armed private security with special licensing and regulation – people with said armed private security licences make up around 20 percent of the population, with a pretty even cross section between race, class, etc.
(one of the biggest talking points in the gun lobby is the hypocrisy of politicians who are protected by security, though I suspect that they overestimate how heavy security for politicians below the level of the President is.)
4. The federal government forms the American Home Guard. All gun owners are required to be members in good standing of this national militia, which can be called on in the event of either natural disaster or the invasion of the American homeland. After an initial training period of six weeks and clearance for membership, there is one week of follow-up training each year with a payment of $500-800 as compensation. Membership status must be renewed each year. Guns may be owned and traded, but not in unsupervised personal possession (thus at gun storage facilities) if no valid membership is held.
Various things, including crimes, can disqualify future membership in the Home Guard. Members receive a card that they can carry with them for law enforcement to see when inspecting guns, each year.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.
But I was half-serious as well.
Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.
Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)
The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.
This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)
How to interweave them?
Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.
You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.
Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.
In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.
Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.
The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.
Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.
(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)
It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.
The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.
Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.
There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.
rocketverliden asked:
Nah, actually I was thinking that there are lots of other southerners we could choose from for replacement statues, specifically ones that weren’t all “rah rah slavery” and so on. Some of them could be a lot more modern, others from before the war, and so on. U.S. founding fathers from those states would be the ideal option for many of them - it reaffirms membership in the US, still has lots of historical weight, and so on.
They shouldn’t be more black than the proportional share of the population, though.
The goal here is to provide an alternative, positive regional identity for the white southerners that is not rooted in the racism inherent to the Confederacy. (And the racism was inherent - at least one governor or whatever went on about how yeah, this was about slavery, and yeah, this was about “the inferiority of the negro race” and so on.)
History is big. There is a lot that can be chosen from when we decide what to emphasize. There are many people, with many stories. With this, we could step sideways.
(The exception is generic confederate soldier statues, which should stay. After all, the side that wins the war usually thinks it’s the ethical side, since most factions fighting a war think they’re the ethical side, so removing them just means legitimizing the idea of removing monuments to soldiers of losing sides in general.)
However, I don’t think the capital-L Left, in broad strokes, wants the southern whites to have a positive southern identity. I think it wants to crush them in order to celebrate itself and its righteousness.
It doesn’t like the founding fathers, either. It doesn’t like the United States of America.
It could celebrate the power of the very ideals this nation’s founders espoused as the source of some of the very power that overturned the cruelty they allowed at this nation’s founding. But most of those people were white men, so they won’t.
if u accept the idea that the porn industry is toxic bc of how they treat the actors then hentai is basically veganism for porn
Now see, this makes for a very interesting screening question.
Is someone actually arguing due to the treatment of women in the porn industry, or are they arguing to reduce sexual alternatives to straight women for straight men, relatively increasing straight womens’ sexual power/negotiating leverage? Or, are they arguing for women (or rather their faction) collectively owning the cultural intellectual property of the idea “women”?
Etc.
See, um, there’s one other reason that you guys are kinda missing, I think, and it’s the idea that porn isn’t actually bad in and of itself, but that virtually all porn is bad because it teaches bad, um, morals? And you can, like, say that these morals are, um, inherent to the pornographic medium or just, like, products of our, uh, patriarchal society, but, like, people are definitely anti-porn on the assumption that they’re there.
Obviously, the solution is to mandate multiple age grades for pornography starting with simple nudity and progressing through “sex within the context of a healthy relationship between two consenting adults,” before getting on to the weirder and more extreme stuff, thus setting up sensible expectations for future relationships, like alcohol laws in Europe.
This isn’t a shitpost, by the way. Depending on the country and its legal and political environment, I think this could potentially be a good policy.
(Edit: Also, to a degree this “bad morals” explanation falls under “ownership of [the idea of women] as intellectual property.”)
How do you keep kids from getting into the real bad stuff, though? I mean, porn’s digital. Are you going to have, like, DRM on porn?
It depends on the country and its legal environment.
The country I originally developed this idea for was a hypothetical one which had a more cryptographically-rooted internet, where each citizen was issued multiple pseudonymous identifiers that the government could track back if needed, but which corporations were prohibited from tracking in some of the ways they currently track identity in the United States.
However, the political and technical landscape of the various real countries is much different.
In this case, while we already have mechanisms that somewhat limit the sale of pornography by age, especially in physical stores, people can get around that with the Internet if they know the right keywords.
What I’m wondering about is if a limited lifting of some restrictions in combination with the imposition with new ones would create a new market. The sheer amount of, uh, let’s call it sexual energy present in humanity is what drives the demand that creates oceans of pornography. Like, Rule 34 exists not because of some 4Chan cult but because of the demand plus available infrastructure. Trying to end it all because it ‘teaches bad morals’ is practically impossible short of the introduction of a far more totalitarian state.
So instead of abolishing it, channel some of that energy and adjust the ease of access such that rates of exposure to healthy vs unhealthy versions, especially at key times, shift.
Contextualize sex.
