Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Do you think a restriction on visual, technological media would be an effective way to prevent children from being "conditioned" into developing shorter attention spans? Do you see positivity in giving children access to computers or tablets for pleasure or in learning environments?

kissingerandpals answered:

I guess this is where the issue gets political, doesn’t it.

I’m inclined to believe in a sort of Pandora’s box view of history, one of technological determinism. Our world will adapt itself to our short attention span, there will be no going back. Audio-visual media have a content bias for brevity in expression, they demand an immediate emotional response from their audience, they present information through iconography and dramatics, and they present information disjointedly in a sort of “peek a boo” fashion: this happened, then this happened, then that happened, here’s a jeans commercial. If an entire culture is raised on such a medium, the cognitive biases the media develop will not be exclusively limited to that medium. We have been conditioning ourselves to favor brief, iconographic, and contextless forms of communication for decades, it’s no wonder we progressively are getting sillier and sillier by the minute. In what world is Twitter a surprise when we have been conditioned to accept 15 second commercials as normal forms of communication for decades? In what world is our tribalized political life a surprise when our primary forms of communication can only communicate symbolically, in tribal signalling messages, when our dominant forms of advertising sell us unconscious images of ourselves?

Anyway, my point is that a world which has given reign to this sort of media atmosphere can go no direction but forward. Accelerationism is inevitable. State sanctioned censorship will not reverse this process. Information incoherence is useful for the powers that be, anyways. Bread and circus has never been easier.

There is beneficial use in teaching kids responsible uses of technology and media. I can see “media literacy” being an acceptable use of having kids use computers and tablets in class. I personally think this is a crutch though and would never promote regular usage of electronic media in a class. Tablets and computers are really an entirely different level of concentration killers and conditioners, ones that deserve their own posts tbh.

Really the only option you have is to exercise proper judgement as a parent. The Luddite position is impossible, the Chinese position sucks, all you can do is get a sense of what’s healthy for you and what’s not, and do and all you can to pass that on to your child. A smart phone probably isn’t the best thing to give a kid. Using the TV as an instant babysitter isn’t a good idea. Let them use the computer but obviously make sure they aren’t going on weird fucking websites. Reading to your child if they’re young is probably beneficial for developing aural concentration. I don’t know. It’s all about judgement, I guess.

[mitigatedchaos]

I take it you disagree with my plan to quit dabbling around the edges and unlock the true power of computer-based education, then?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Assuming I can shatter China, too (for the sake of sidestepping questions of likelihood-of-success, let's make that "assuming I can shatter China *first*"), any objection to me cracking the US into a few more drownable-in-a-bathtub sized chunks?

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.

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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.

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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?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[quoms]

For it is said that Bernie never truly died, but only lies sleeping in a cave somewhere in Vermont, with Ben on his left and Jerry on his right, and resting alongside him a great army of campaign microdonors; and that in America’s hour of greatest need he will awake and come thundering down from the Green Mountains to lead a successful presidential campaign. I do not know of its truth myself, but so it is spoken.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I'm the anon who sent the path to permanent residency ask and I wanted to thank you for your answer. I chose 'undocumented immigrant' because I wanted a neutral term that wouldn't get caught up in nitpicking the term instead of the policy idea; I actually do believe that nations are more than lines on a map. I see I should have considered my audience better though :)

It’s a controversial term, it’s just controversial in the opposite direction.

Of course, it would be far less controversial among most of the ratposters than it is to me, specifically.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

mitigatedchaos

And by the way?  World government is what shouldn’t exist.  Nations are the real alternative to that, and it takes more than being a difference in paperwork to fuel it enough for that.  Things like communes aren’t a real alternative.

@obiternihili

I don’t know if you saw my opinions on what to do about border disputes. But I also said I wanted that principle used to create a number of interlocking EU-like-but-less-bad-monetary-policy superstates. No world government, no real need for nationalism.

I don’t think that has the necessary power level to prevent world government.  

There are two outcomes if you let a situation like the EU go on for too long.  Either Europe will itself become a nation, as cultural borders dissolve under the force of internal migration, and power will centralize; or, they’ll forget who they are and, lacking the will to resist, there will slowly be the formation of a world government under people who ask why there should be such antiquated things as borders around the EUs.

Right now, Europe seems to be shearing itself apart over the friction of not being a true Federation.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[kissingerandpals]

Memes as ritual

[mitigatedchaos]

Memes as spells

[thathopeyetlives]

No!

They already did that!

It’s not a good idea!

[mitigatedchaos]

THYL discusses the terrifying truth behind America’s first Meme-American President.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Also, regarding the phrase “undocumented immigrants,”

Since the deliberate implication is that there is no issue, these people are merely missing some paperwork, like an accident where an ID was not delivered through the mail,

This is very much a “nations are only lines on a map” style of thinking.

So let’s give a “nations are only lines on a map” style of answer.

If national citizenship is so meaningless that not having it is merely equivalent to not having a few papers, that it’s irrelevant what historical experience one has, or education, or national loyalty, because nations are social constructs and don’t really exist, right?

Then one agrees that the “United States of America” cannot hold any moral liability, on account of being a few lines on a map, or a few pieces of paper.

So every war, every coup, every conquest, every civil rights violation, and so on, the “United States of America” is not responsible for and owes, in itself, absolutely nothing.

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If you do think the United States of America as a geopolitical entity is more than just a few lines on a map or a few pieces of paper, then the term you can use if you feel “illegal immigrant” is too dehumanizing, because “no person is illegal” (even though by that same logic there can be no such word as “trespasser”),

is “unauthorized migrants”.

Apparently that’s the “in” neutral word now.

I find it remarkable just how quickly the Democratic Party re-learned that a distinction exists when Trump got into motion.

[obiternihili]

> because nations are social constructs and don’t really exist, right?

Wrong. Social constructs exist. Genders exist, the patriarchy exists, capitalism exists, nations exist. It’s just that, with social constructs whatever they are, you can’t use them in naturalistic arguments when the argument itself isn’t subject to dismissal by the naturalistic fallacy.

It’s not that nations don’t exist, it’s that they shouldn’t exist in the way they do in this world, and that international solidarity should trump nationalistic allegiances. Borders tear us apart, it’s not that we aren’t torn apart.

Maybe the best dialectical reality towards reconciling nationalism and internationalism currently in the world is the EU, whereby in many ways the differences between a Frenchman and a German really is a bunch of paperwork. Of course with that there’s a rise in a appropriated European nationalism following the migrant crisis, so obviously from a leftist standpoint it’s not ideal.

But you’ve misunderstood the core argument and because of that the foundations of your arguments are gone from under you.

[mitigatedchaos]

It’s still binding even if the argument is “nations shouldn’t exist”.

And by the way?  World government is what shouldn’t exist.  Nations are the real alternative to that, and it takes more than being a difference in paperwork to fuel it enough for that.  Things like communes aren’t a real alternative.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Also, not doing global warming is probably a great way to avoid mass migration.

Too bad too many of the right-wingers have hyped themselves, not into thinking that we just don’t need to do anything about it, but into believing that it doesn’t exist.

Because I could use “but this will cause mass migration” on them as leverage to cut CO₂ emissions.  Or “but China will engage in geoengineering,” or “but this will fuck up your hunting and fishing,” possibly even.  The original conservationism was apparently supported by hunters, seeing as one needs animals in order to have animals to hunt.

[slartibartfastibast]

Yep. It’s a pickle.

[mitigatedchaos]

They think it’s a left-wing plot to scare people into going along with a global system of governance, restrict access to resources as a form of rationing, and satisfy lefties’ desires to be self-righteous blah blah etc.

In other words, a lot of their hesitation is one meta-level up.

…and I’m not really sure how to address it.  I can’t convince them that the leftists and progressives don’t really want Social Democracy because, uh, they kinda do want Social Democracy.  And I can’t convince them that they wouldn’t be hype for a global carbon emissions trading regime and attempt to weaponize it because, well, lots of them would be hype for it and political operatives would intend to weaponize it.  Political operatives do that.

We’re lucky solar is improving at the rate that it is, and also that fission power still exists.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@theunitofcaring:  it does not have anything to do with ‘nations don’t real’ and is mostly used by people who think that they are (and that immigration restrictions are good, just shouldn’t apply to sympathetic people who’ve lived here for twenty years without trouble working hard)

It’s a tough question, because I don’t want to let the Democrats subvert the immigration system, and through it, democracy and de facto ownership of the state/country.

And I don’t think immigration is the solution to global poverty.

So if it were up to me, I’d probably pick some combination of all four of the alternative policies WRT to immigration at the bottom of this ask, simultaneously.

[its-okae-carly-rae]

Is your objection to migration as part of a solution to global poverty because you think it wouldn’t actually have positive economic effects or because you think the social costs are too high?

[mitigatedchaos]

More the latter, but I’m going to be honest with you, I’m very suspicious of the former.

There are a variety of policies and tradeoffs that could convince me to support higher immigration, but most progressive liberals - or at least the ones in power - won’t like any of them, or else the policies just won’t get enough overall political backing.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Also, not doing global warming is probably a great way to avoid mass migration.

Too bad too many of the right-wingers have hyped themselves, not into thinking that we just don’t need to do anything about it, but into believing that it doesn’t exist.

Because I could use “but this will cause mass migration” on them as leverage to cut CO₂ emissions.  Or “but China will engage in geoengineering,” or “but this will fuck up your hunting and fishing,” possibly even.  The original conservationism was apparently supported by hunters, seeing as one needs animals in order to have animals to hunt.