I mean, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous to suggest that the proper answer to “too many Chinese buyers are holding empty apartments in our country as a store of value” is “remove the state’s monopoly on the enforcement of property laws” instead of the far less difficult and less likely to break every thing “change the laws so that so many housing units can be built that holding these empty apartment buildings is no longer economically sensible.”
The number of empty housing units acting as a real asset store of value for Chinese money fleeing capital restrictions is also probably quite small relative to the market size, much like those expensive apartments in London that people were complaining should be socialized, even though in practice it wouldn’t make much difference in the price.
Suppose there is a girl who was born when her mother was sixteen. And her mother was born when her grandmother was sixteen. And suppose this burden of caring for a child at the age of 16 has contributed to an intergenerational cycle of poverty that has harmed her family and her education.
A boy of sixteen comes to her and says (roughly translated),
“Hey girl, your mother recklessly had a kid at age 16, and her mom recklessly had a kid at age 16, so you should get with me and recklessly have a kid at age 16! After all, if they didn’t do the same thing, you wouldn’t exist!”
Is this a good idea? I mean, after all, if they didn’t do it, she wouldn’t exist.
No, it is not a good idea. In fact, this argument does not make sense…
unless, implicit in the argument, you have access to a time machine and can change the past.
However, if one did have a time machine, that opens up an entirely different bucket of ethics which this argument completely fails to address.
This applies to abortion regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if your mother aborted you…” implies time travel.
This applies to immigration, regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if immigration laws were different…” implies time travel.
Anonymous asked:
collapsedsquid answered:
Standard answer is that don’t perceive it so much as rich v poor as educated coastal vs uneducated inland. He sells himself as an uneducated inlander, so that’s what think of him as.
Or to put it another way, every time a newspaper writes an article bitching about Donald Trump putting ketchup on a steak, he gets more powerful.
Ah yes I’m sure your working class ideological forefathers would totally agree with all the shit you currently shill for. Like why the fuck can’t people admit that shit mutates and changes and that only the names and the most bare bones of beliefs tie current movements to those they claim to continue the legacy of.
You see Octopi, it turns out Leftists still want to tie themselves to history, to weave themselves into a tapestry of narrative connecting the past to the future.
The past still grants political legitimacy, even to those who would overthrow it.
Anonymous asked:
Contrary to conspiracy theories circulating in some parts of this website, I am not secretly an official within the Japanese government, nor the child of any such official, nor a contractor hired on their behalf, my darling Anon. (I consider myself an American. This nation’s fate is my fate.)
So let’s go farm Wikipedia:
In 1873, following the Meiji Restoration, the ban was rescinded, freedom of religion was promulgated, and Protestant missionaries (プロテスタント Purotesutanto or 新教 Shinkyō, “renewed teaching”) began to proselytise in Japan, intensifying their activities after World War II, yet they were never as successful as in Korea.
Today, there are 1 to 3 million Christians in Japan, most of them living in the western part of the country, where the missionaries’ activities were greatest during the 16th century. Nagasaki Prefecture has the highest percentage of Christians: about 5.1% in 1996.[39] As of 2007 there are 32,036 Christian priests and pastors in Japan.[26] Throughout the latest century, some Western customs originally related to Christianity (including Western style weddings, Valentine’s Day and Christmas) have become popular among many Japanese.
About 2.3% of Japan identifies as Christian.
A number of Asian-Americans within America are Christian, but that does not necessarily apply to the ancestral countries.
Korea, on the other hand, is far more Christian for some reason.
According to the national census conducted in 2015, 19.7% of the population belongs to Protestantism, 15.5% to Buddhism (Korean Buddhism), and 7.9% to the Roman Catholic Church; in total Christianity is the religion of 27.6% of the Korean population.
I can’t pretend to see inside the minds of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, but apparently, while it is showing signs of strain, the LDP is in a coalition with another party closely aligned with a Buddhist religious movement…
So I’m going to guess that no, they won’t push Catholicism to try to increase birthrates, that it isn’t really part of the vision of Japanese national identity the ruling classes in Japan have.
But someone currently living in Japan would be better to ask.
With that said, given the outcomes for Protestant countries vs Catholic countries, that certainly isn’t a tradeoff I’d make until after I’d exhausted other options, like getting Japanese people to spend less time at work so they can actually meet members of the opposite sex and form families.
Re: http://afloweroutofstone.tumblr.com/post/164602028137/id-like-to-thank-everyone-who-provided-me-with
Am I crazy, or do post-pile-on, post-death-threat “I’m so so so sorry and promise to make myself as small as possible and defer to my betters” posts sometimes sound like the statements they make hostages read in front of the cameras?
A bit. Hadn’t realized before this that the OP had blocked me, had to do my usual work around to see if they’d deleted or blocked.
Honestly, these sort of gushing “I’m sorry for not being sufficiently woke” posts gives me some degree of schadenfreude, though it is a little bit sad that people seem to be afraid to take the Michael Tracey/Fredrick DeBoer route in terms of not backing down in the face of public pressure.
Is it really the correct route? I’m unsure.
Maybe the correct route is to bow and scrape, wait several months, then go back to doing exactly what you were doing before.
In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.
whoever drank that particular flavour of neoliberal koolaid deserved it
Oddly I haven’t missed them. Hell, I didn’t even notice their absence.
I noticed they were gone because Mic actually had me blocked here
Every so often I’d try to comment on some long discussion and I couldn’t because the OP was a shitty Mic article
I was blocked also, but their pandering shit kind of blended into the rest of tumblr I guess.
In a sense Tumblr stole their thing because any self-loathing hubris filled tween could write for them.
Wait a second don’t bury the lede, Mic blocked people on tumblr (as a way of making sure the reblog chains of their official ports-to-tumblr never went through ancaps and were more hugboxy) ??
One more thing I didn’t realize could happen until someone broke a norm and it looked obvious in retrospect. 2017!
Yes, this is fascinating! And I say this as someone quite averse to Anarcho-Capitalism.
I just read the newest of the recurring Bleeding Hearts Libertarian “Say, it is really awkward that so many neo-confederates and Nazis are connected to the libertarian movement, isn’t it?“ article.
These articles are almost always really bad, the poster doesn’t even approach the connection, saying the standard “libertarians believe in cosmopolitanism“ line. I can see that some of them in the comments
(Protip: never read the comments) think the connection is the free speech thing, I will say that the free speech thing can annoy some leftists and there’s always a suspicion of hypocrisy there but it’s not the core connection leftists see between libertarians and fascists.
The best short version of that core reason is expressed ,“Libertarians become Alt-Right at the moment they realize that maintaining present property relations in the future will require genocide.” (And some shit about being able to exclude races/sexualities you don’t like) I can see people dance around it in the comments with the usual Charles Murray shit and implying that libertarianism is dead once the US becomes truly multiracial.
What bugs me is that him and so many of the bigwigs can’t even approach the refutation of the real connection, he says some “oh we’re not the same” shit but he totally fails to distance himself from the actual problem. It gets to the point that I’m not even sure they can conceive of it. If I was an asshole, I would say that this is why he’s not alt-right yet.
I would say that’s roughly the relation, although Libertarianism/Anarcho-Capitalism aren’t really the current property relations - they aspire to become the property relations.
And they don’t actually require genocide, but they would require closed borders or separatism. Libertarianism and Anarcho-Capitalism fundamentally require sufficient cultural belief or social power mass in order to be implemented.
Forbidden racepol writers have analyzed how long it takes immigrant groups to go from wanting higher state intervention than the local mean to wanting something closer to the local mean in America, and from what I recall, we’re talking generations. (Cultural, not genetic.)
So the hard economic rightist has two options - create or modify a state such that the population is majority economic rightist and stays majority economic rightist (strict borders), or abandon democracy.
Of course, I’m not a Leftist so I don’t see it in some of the same collective intergenerational ethnic justice terms about the evils of Capitalism. Collective intergenerational ethnic justice, after all, is the basis of many an “ethnic tension” random violence feud.
Fortunately I’m not a Libertarian, either. I want better government intervention.
