ＲＥＶＯＬＵＴＩＯＮ ＩＳ ＯＶＥＲＲＡＴＥＤ
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
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If the 51% decided they were going to make murder legal, and there was some sort of check on that, like say a Constitution, that check would be, by definition, undemocratic. Respecting the will of the people is great, but the people are by and large stupid, so leaders need to know when to deviate from what’s popular to what’s right.
This is why the founders took out the mob rule. The majority doesn’t always win, it’s the will of the people. People are stupid, a person is smart (most of the time). Hence the way we elect a President, electoral collage. You win the popular vote in that state you get the votes from the collage, but you have to win the majority of the States not the people. This gives low population states an equal footing against high population states. While it’s not truly equal it does allow a person to gather enough small states to overcome large ones. Popular vote doesn’t matter. It’s the States that matter. If it was done by popular vote then NY & Ca would rule us all.
@moosemarine, this is a concept I am constantly reminding people… We’ve never been a democracy. Every time Obama used the word democracy my skin would crawl. In a democracy 49 are made slaves by 51. This experiment in absolute Liberty gave the world a light on a hill, a beacon of hope to look to for inspiration. The problem with being a beacon….people gun for it. Evil hates a republic. It can manipulate a democracy, but a republic - a true republic, stands a Bulwark fortifying the free. Its my right to be free. If you dont like that, its your right to go fuck yourself….
taxloopholes
things are getting heated in the right authoritarian fandom
If the 51% decided they were going to make murder legal, and there was some sort of check on that, like say a Constitution, that check would be, by definition, undemocratic. Respecting the will of the people is great, but the people are by and large stupid, so leaders need to know when to deviate from what’s popular to what’s right.
This is why the founders took out the mob rule. The majority doesn’t always win, it’s the will of the people. People are stupid, a person is smart (most of the time). Hence the way we elect a President, electoral collage. You win the popular vote in that state you get the votes from the collage, but you have to win the majority of the States not the people. This gives low population states an equal footing against high population states. While it’s not truly equal it does allow a person to gather enough small states to overcome large ones. Popular vote doesn’t matter. It’s the States that matter. If it was done by popular vote then NY & Ca would rule us all.
@moosemarine, this is a concept I am constantly reminding people… We’ve never been a democracy. Every time Obama used the word democracy my skin would crawl. In a democracy 49 are made slaves by 51. This experiment in absolute Liberty gave the world a light on a hill, a beacon of hope to look to for inspiration. The problem with being a beacon….people gun for it. Evil hates a republic. It can manipulate a democracy, but a republic - a true republic, stands a Bulwark fortifying the free. Its my right to be free. If you dont like that, its your right to go fuck yourself….
taxloopholes
things are getting heated in the right authoritarian fandom
racoontrash
I like how the right thinks letting someone else decide how free you should be is the best way to defend freedom.
They’ve got collective intelligence literally backwards. Statistics show that a person is measurably less rational and intelligent than a group of people. I’m on mobile but here’s a source: http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/07/14/wisdom.crowds/
reactionaries are dumb as shit, they’ll quote that stupid “a *person* is smart, *people* are dumb panicky animals” shit at you and then when I’m like “hey you know there are scientific studies which suggest that may not be true” they get all “UHHH WHO DO YOU THINK I’M GOING TO TRUST, SOME “SCIENTISTS,” OR WILL SMITH ACTION/COMEDY BLOCKBUSTER ‘MEN IN BLACK’?“
referendums are rare instances of pure democracy, and brexit won by a sliver.. didnt see many non-populist leftists particularly happy with that outcome even though it was the “rational will of the people”
or how the introduction of democracy in egypt for the first time in it’s entire history resulted in the immediate election of a theocratic leaning organization and their puppet, who instantly set in motion, policies to undermine that democracy and disempower political, gender and ethnic minority opponents, requiring a coup d’etat by the secular army. The majority population marched and protest and instigated hate killings and revenge against the minority copts of their society in response.
When the majority of a population is intensely conservative (by western standards) and so wishes to impose oppression on minorities of that country with regards to the laws in their personal faith, is that fair to the minority?
Alot of anarchists and communists in the west are fortunate to live in a place of high literacy, liberal education, intense privilege and mostly homogenous societies where you don’t have to worry about your majority population trying to kill you for millennia long religious and culturally programmed hatred. Otherwise, considering white racism, it should be obvious, the perils of yielding to the opinion and sensibilities of the majority. aren’t microaggressions and hate crimes a thing?
Statistics show that a person is measurably less rational and intelligent than a group of people.
There are whole populations who regard female genital mutilation as the rational and intelligent thing to do, and are supported by the majority of their peers.
What is rational is entirely subjective with regards to the demos.
I think these people need to either accept that interracial marriage was wrong by their definitions until like 1995, or that sometimes the will of the people really is inferior.
Wisdom of Crowds type stuff, last time I checked, gets it big advantage from a crowd of like, three.
You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in
which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in
choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means
using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low
performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that
had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning
efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in
fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in
removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state
and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent
newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not
unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation
has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic
penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when
a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with
a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages
and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements
and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social
comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in
China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in
middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel
(including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable -
892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790
in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by
international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual
cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost
two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income
developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares
with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’tsocialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’m going to even bother voting in the next election. I mean probably, civic duty and all that, rah rah USA, but I’ve seen nothing to convince me that the DNC isn’t a popularity-devoured ideology-huffing institution that will throw me under the bus the first chance it gets.
The political currents are defined by larger groups of people, but we can reason about “what would we want someone like us to do in our place?” If there are enough people similar to us, then it makes sense to prefer marginal action, even if it’s statistically unlikely that any of our individual actions will produce enough change by themselves.
Economists say voting is not a rational behavior, but that fails to take this into account.
The political currents are defined by larger groups of people, but we can reason about “what would we want someone like us to do in our place?” If there are enough people similar to us, then it makes sense to prefer marginal action, even if it’s statistically unlikely that any of our individual actions will produce enough change by themselves.
Economists say voting is not a rational behavior, but that fails to take this into account.
How not to incite the End War with Moscow by going to war in Syria, staging an intervention only blood eagles and fools wanted, to deliver a country from the hands of a tyrant into the hands of monsters. (This one weird trick improves your property values by over 100,000% compared to post-nuclear apocalypse prices!)
Little known fact - Obama would actually wear smart contacts while speaking with interviewers, allowing him to directly control drones with his mind while simultaneously discussing the benefits of diversity. Very efficient.
Giving the Cosmopolitan Liberal Globalists a number of cities to practice their immigration policies in isn’t such a terrible idea. Cosmopolitan Liberal Globalists love cities.
I cannot trust it will actually turn out like that at all due to how this has gone previously.
Why I specified “agreement to execute anyone who commits an honor killing” is that it’s an ideological sin to do that, and thus serves as a costly signal that they actually care and aren’t just trying to pull one over like they have previously, when they promised this stuff would not happen.
(Also it would de-normalize honor killings, but you get the idea.)
anaisnein
It brings in the whole existing orthogonal discourse over the death penalty and complicates the already complicated debate terrain. Also, summary execution is more of a What’s Wrong With Those Others thing and less a What’s Right About Us Here thing and I would think you wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that, it instantiates the cultural decay you’re postulating.
Well, let’s assume that the plan is to create an international-thinking city-state that values this free migration.
Right off the bat, the existing high-immigration city-state that does not have an issue with honor killings is Singapore, where the sentence for murder is death by hanging. Until 2012, this was mandatory. So flat out, if you engage in an “honor killing” in Singapore, they will kill you.
But of course, we don’t have to just copy-paste Singapore.
Cultural practices have inertia. Apply that inertia to Italian cuisine and you get Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Apply that inertia to throwing acid on women to control them, and you get acid attacks by British gangs.
They have to be stopped before that inertia can take hold.
And since we’re being so heavily about freedom of movement, we want to put the brakes on this within one generation, since we can’t necessarily rely on other methods, like limiting the maximum size of one incoming ethnic group and where they live in order to fragment them such that their number of cultural graph edges is insufficient to sustain their culture.
That leaves responding to barbarism and medieval behaviors, to some degree, with medieval means.
To some degree you can rely on liberal atomization, but only if the conditions are right for that atomization to have an effect, which means no cousin marriages or other barriers that honor-killers and the like can use to stop their families from atomizing. (And note that banning all new cousin marriages is, itself, not without controversy.) It also takes a while.
The sharper the change, the greater the degree of braking force necessary. It must be communicated not just to the men involved, but to the entire community they are a part of that this activity is not just socially disapproved of by the ethnic majority (who they may not care about), but that it is bullshit for chumps that only an idiot would engage in.
Getting executed because your took up arms against the state might be martyrdom, but getting executed because you honor-killed your sister is just stupid (and therefore low-status).
Otherwise you risk a long-burning change that could ride under the surface until it obtains enough political support (which may not be legalization, but just deliberately ignoring the problem).
If 5% of your population cousin marry, it takes a congressman to end it. If 10% of your population cousin marry, it takes a President. If 30% of your population cousin marry, it takes a King. The right time to end it, then, is before it cracks 6%.
