Oceans Yet to Burn

mailadreapta

But What About the Right?

mitigatedchaos

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.

mailadreapta

All this talk of “becoming worthy” makes you sound like NRx, my bro.

mitigatedchaos

If I recall correctly (and I may not), one of the most famous emperors of China used deception and murder to achieve his rule - but under him, the people and the Empire prospered.

Less dramatically, and far more modern, Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party have used lawsuits and other means to suppress their political opposition. But what have they achieved? Did they exercise virtue in statecraft? Did the people under their rule prosper?

(Though even that modern example has had its risks - there is some worry that with LKY no longer at the helm, there may have been mismanagement of government funds at the very top.)

Not only must the people be worthy, but the structure and ideology must be worthy, too. Systems, interlocking, that must find those who are worthy and elevate them, reward virtue, and minimize vice.

The Neoreactionaries are wrong, though that does not mean their opponents are right.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics philo the iron hand

mitigatedchaos

But What About the Right?

mitigatedchaos

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.

mitigatedchaos

What did the Nazis do for eugenics?

They utterly destroyed its public legitimacy until the present day.

Now, some people might say “but what if they won?”, but a lot of why they sucked had to do with what made them Nazis. Generic renegade German Ultranationalists waging a war of conquest might have been bad by many standards, but they would not have been as bad as the Nazis - and they would have wasted fewer resources on genocidal extermination.

What have Stalin and Mao done for Communism? What was won with blood was stripped away.

And yes, sometimes you can get away with it. Force is a real and basic nature of this world. Sometimes you can have such overwhelming power that you can seize a whole continent and reduce the original natives, and their petty wars with each other, to a marginal force or even a distant memory.

But then, what happens afterwards? In ten years? In one hundred or two hundred or more?

Where are the Mongols now?

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

bpd-anon

argh my dad believes the parties never switched and also hitler was a leftist

cookingwithroxy

Well, the parties switched plenty of times in the past, but Hilter was a socialist. Like he’s the best example that ‘working for the common good’ doesn’t mean you can’t be evil. He was working for the common good! of those he considered to be human. Which wasn’t most people.

Or maybe he’s a good example of ‘politics is more messy than left/right’.

idontevenknowfriend

A defining characteristic of the left is working towards a bigger government. It’s pretty much what originally separated the left and the right.
Any authoritarian regime, be it fascist or communist or something else, is inherently left-leaning on at least one of the political axes

bpd-anon

Explain the following policies backed pretty much exclusively by right wingers in the modern day:

1. The government getting involved in whether women can have abortions

2. The government getting involved in whether gay people can marry

3. The government getting involved in what bathroom trans people go to

4. The war on drugs

These sure sound like bigger government things to me

mitigatedchaos

It turns out that no one actually supports smaller government.

politics

I actually suspect that the switch to identity politics over class politics may have been based on a growing ineffectiveness of class politics.

“BUT THE POOR!” lost ground as more cached arguments were built up against it, even if it wasn’t entirely justified.

“BUT RACISM!” still had a lot of bite and could circumvent some of those cached arguments. So, it’s natural to shift to it and build the platform around it.

It had a lot of bite, anyway.

There was always the focus on what was morally right, even in the minds of people who claimed they didn’t believe in morality, over what was effective policy, so now we get a lot of talk about guilt, or about pie in the sky ideas of “dismantling the systems of X oppression requires dismantling capitalism” (and people remember how “we need to dismantle capitalism” went last time), and not so much about “we should distribute multivitamins to the poor.”

I mean, that does sometimes get through, but the zeitgeist doesn’t seem to care about it as much as it cares about language policing and thinks that beneficial policies will just naturally unfold once everyone acknowledges their sin.

politics

Memetic Immune Systems

To expand on that jargon-post…

We can model ideas and ideologies as existing in an environment of evolution, much like creatures (not a new idea - this is the basis of meme theory AFAIK).

In so doing, we can model them as having various components that suit different purposes, like viruses. Metaphorically.

There may be parts evolved to cause people to adopt the idea, parts to cause people to spread the idea, parts to prevent people from giving up on the idea, and so on.

If a human wants to stay aligned with the truth, they need to process and filter out harmful or dangerous idea complexes, because like viruses in nature, the only hard rules that prevent them from being too dangerous is that they don’t kill their hosts too quickly to spread.

And so humans reason about ideas, and have intuitions about bad ideas, and have various layers of defenses to protect themselves from bad ideas.

Now, if you’re making idea and don’t care that much about truth or whatever but want it to spread, what could you do to increase its chances of replication?

Demand that it not be scrutinized (so more of it gets through and it isn’t rejected)
Demand that it must be followed and copied EXACTLY (so more of it gets through)
Demand to punish anyone that gives up on it
Demand to punish anyone who doesn’t adopt it

Etc.

So, in the discussion of Bad Social Justice rhetoric, we sometimes see something come up about standpoint theory (or whatever the formal name is), the idea being that privileged people such as whites, men, white gay men, etc, cannot truly know the experiences of oppressed groups.

They must “sit down and listen”, to use the vocabulary.

Criticism of the ideology is then rejected (on the grounds that they cannot ever truly have the proper knowledge). The full content must be accepted, acted upon, and spread. No stopping to consider whether it’s healthy or safe or anything else.

The problem is that, like a rootkit that gets direct access to the core of a computer system, this leaves a giant, exploitable hole.

This is not the only group, ideology, or movement to do or have done this.

It’s way more common than it should be.

politics meme warfare

mitigatedchaos

The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School

@silver-and-ivory

…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.

Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.

Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”

Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.

I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.

So here’s my proposal:

1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.

2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.

3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.

4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.

5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.

6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.

7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.

8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.

The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.

9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.

10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.

mitigatedchaos

Reblog for context for new readers.

Source: silver-and-ivory politics policy national technocracy

But What About the Right?

But What About the Right?

But What About the Right?

Matt Corbett on Twitter

McDonald’s Says its Wage Hikes Are Improving Service

Memetic Immune Systems

This is not the only group, ideology, or movement to do or have done this.

The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School

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

But What About the Right?

But What About the Right?

But What About the Right?

Matt Corbett on Twitter

McDonald’s Says its Wage Hikes Are Improving Service

Memetic Immune Systems

This is not the only group, ideology, or movement to do or have done this.

The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School