Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@argumate

Yes, they’re going to fight over abortion, since it involves terminating human life.  You can argue whether it constitutes “persons” - which is indeed my position, not having a brain means something can’t be a person even if it’s otherwise human - but you can’t argue that a fetus is not human.

Other than that, no, it’s not going to get rolled back barring a major reduction in material prosperity.  Not unless something really dumb happens, like one of the nastier forms of Islam taking over - which, I might add, the same Social Justice activists that say they are in favor of women’s liberation, effectively insist we do nothing to stop.

The reduction in child mortality due to advanced medicine and household labor due to automation basically guarantees that the old order won’t really return. 

Who is going to cause it to return?  Social conservatives?  They’ve been losing the battle for social conservatism for at least a century.  The definition of what counts as “social conservative” is still shifting leftwards.  

“Patriarchy” such as it was arose out of material conditions, including kids dying at a ridiculous rate, so unless we’re dumb enough to bring those material conditions back, the support for it is just not going to be there.

[invertedporcupine]

The definition of what counts as “social conservative” is still shifting leftwards.  

Someone should inform the Georgia primary electorate.

[mitigatedchaos]

I don’t know what they’re doing, but from your comment, I’d say they’re fighting a losing battle.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

A gauntlet is a piece of armor, used for defense. A better metaphor would be a bludgeon.

You say this, but what happened to those without states capable of enacting powerful force?  They were, in general, destroyed.

It is neither the bludgeon, nor the sword, but the armored hand that wields them.  The power of the knight, the army, and the sovereign.  The power of command, backed by violence.  Something we wear or put on.

The state is not so constrained in its capabilities as a sword or bludgeon would imply, but neither is it so gentle, nor does it exist in such a softer world, as an ordinary hand would imply.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

The Israelis have damn good desalination tech, IIRC. Per wiki, they get 50% of their water from artificial means and have capacity to spare. Energy concerns still stand, of course, but that's a general problem, so assuming civilisation survives fresh water is a problem that we can solve (ignoring Vegas-style "why did you build a city in the middle of a damn desert" problems of course).

I am so glad I don’t own any property in Las Vegas.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

You, a Neoconservative who unironically supported the Iraq War while complaining about “Liberals clamping down on our freedoms”: 

“Nanny State”

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:

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

How about that GOP debate huh.

I see absolutely no price movement on the market, implying that no one has learned anything new from it whatsoever.

http://argumate.com/market/

[argumate]

explodingbat said: i am absolutely not going to start paying attention to american politics — horrible toupée man will win and things will keep getting worse until the water wars begin

you heard it here first folks

and they say prediction markets are useless

[argumate]

12 months on and horrible toupée man is still hanging in there, water wars may yet arrive on schedule.

[mitigatedchaos]

Water wars are actually a real risk unless better desalination tech exists or energy can remain cheap enough, particularly in the less developed countries, as we enter the mid-century.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[youarenotthewalrus]

This post is interesting, because it is going “csa/nazi victories are racist, what if something Woke™ happened instead, like a native american victory,” but the reblogger preemptively notes the problem with it, that is, the writers would portray the natives as being just as bad. Such a portrayal is characterized as racist. This is dumb, but it does gesture at a point: no well-realized Native American victory scenario could please the kinds of people calling for one. The Aztecs and the Inca were both very unpleasant empires that engaged in human sacrifice and were defeated in part because their Spanish conquerors had ready-made allies in the form of the tribes they had subjugated and mistreated. The history of a native-run North and South America would be a history of emergent states fighting and conquering both their less sophisticated neighbors and each other. To say nothing of the fact that no polity grows into a global superpower without doing horrible, horrible things. All the great global empires–Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the US, Russia, Germany, Japan–gained their power through violence, at home and abroad. An Inca superpower, an Aztec superpower, a Mississippian superpower: all these countries would gain and keep their power through the exact same imperialistic methods Europe and its settler states are denounced for. To explore a scenario in which the indigenous populace of the Americas get to run their continents more or less unmolested is to call attention to the fact that this means that while some people are going to win (ex. the Inca), other people are still going to lose (ex. the Mapuche). It is to acknowledge that scalping wasn’t just something inflicted on white settlers, that the difference between oppressor and oppressed is a matter of historical circumstance, that one world’s Poor Marginalized People of Color are another’s Imperialist Oppressors Living on Stolen Land, that a noble savage is only noble because he does not have the power to be wicked, and that, in gaining civilization, he gains that power. And that’s all a bit too much to handle for someone who thinks “I’m gonna write a story about members of the underground resistance in a world where Nazi Germany won” is racist.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

connard-cynique asked:

Do you accept of deny that the extermination of non-whites will greatly reduce crime and improve white countries way of life?

libfas answered:

Exterminating millions of people might spike the crime rate a little. You know, murder being kind of a crime and all …

[mitigatedchaos]

Look, Connard, honey, darling, pal,

There are things between “arrest man and send him to prison for putting bacon on a mosque door, where he dies, while ignoring child-grooming gangs” and “exterminate everyone that isn’t white.”

Things like “make a sex-trafficking RICO act” or even “actually enforce the law against sex offenders and don’t overlook their actions and give them only short sentences because of their ethnicity.”

I think, perhaps, this says a bit more about the failure of your imagination - including your imagination of libfas’s motivations - than libfas.

[the-grey-tribe]

“make a sex-trafficking RICO act”

Is it not already? Holy fuck this is such a common-sense bipartisan idea that I am not at all surprised this is not a thing already. After all, how can you score victories in the political theater if your opponents will completely agree that this is an obviously good idea?

[poipoipoi-2016]

One of the more interesting things that @Slartibartfastibast had been beating down is exactly this.  

Rotherham is a small industrial city of about a quarter million people, of whom ~7,000 are Pakistani.  The last count I had heard was 2,000 child sex slaves from this one small city, which, loosely eyeballing a UK population pyramid, gives me 1 in ~10-12 girls who were sex-trafficked.  Throw on modifiers like “working-class” and it’s probably somewhat higher.  (Albeit, you know, I’d love better numbers on this).  

Oh, and the last time I had looked this up, the wiki page for Rotherham had lost the “See Also“ section because it was getting too embarrassing thanks to all the OTHER nationwide child sex trafficking scandals.

---

So they finally charged one of the gangs and sent them to prison.  And it only took a year and half a million pounds to do so.  

---

And so Slart’s interesting point here was that 

1. This is not a sustainable prosecution model
   
2. One way or another, these child rape gangs are going down.  
3. If “The people in charge” don’t resolve #1, the way that #2 gets resolved is something that the British people are likely to deeply, deeply regret the very second they’ve finished the job and no sooner.  

[mitigatedchaos]

To expand or elaborate, it’s important to understand that hard right ethnonationalist movements do not arise spontaneously.  The conditions for them to do so must first exist in order to expand beyond the fringe levels of background racism radiation.

One key way to avoid giving them the opportunity to expand is to be actually virtuous.  Not “progressive virtue,” the counter-part of right-wing Christianity’s failures, but,

Rotherham graduated from just being “Neo-Nazi propaganda” to something a lot more.  This could have been prevented, by preventing, or prosecuting for, a bunch of sex crimes.

Ostensibly, we don’t like sex crimes and want them prohibited no matter which ethnicity engages in them.

So by doing what should normally have been done, a right-wing talking point and recruiting tool could have been denied.  

Yes, the hard fringe would have remained, but marginal recruitment would be down.