What kind of place is this when service doesn’t even guarantee citizenship anymore?
I don’t approve cutting or cancelling this program. “Willing to fight, potentially to the death, to defend the national interest” is one of the exact sorts of immigrants you should want. I’m disappointed by this development, thought they realized this.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.
If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.
Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.
The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.
You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
luckily policy success or failure has no relation to politics anyway
This will sound weird, but a lot of Trumpers don’t actually care about the wall, per se.
The Trump administration is looking to reduce and change legal immigration, in some ways making it more like it has been previously or like other countries. (Immigration levels have not always been this high in America.)
This makes a lot of sense from a “keep Republicans able to get elected over the next five decades” perspective, as, as we all know, Republican outreach to other minority races has mostly flopped. Also, views change the more generations that immigrants are in the country. (I talk about them flipping the Asians, but it’s a bit harder than flipping the Irish since there is a greater visual difference with whites, and so there are limits to how far racism will dissolve.)
The Democrats were celebrating an inevitable demographic tide that would deliver them permanent electoral majority. However, that tide is not actually inevitable. On some level, Trumpers can probably sense that the plan is to replace or outnumber them, but America does have immigration as part of its national mythos so this is not as well-supported.
The Wall is, to a degree, just a hammy metaphor for actually enforcing immigration law, and to a lesser degree, changing immigration rules. If he changes immigration / enforces immigration law in other ways, his voters will be satisfied even without him actually building it.
if copyright was abolished in Libertarian Paradise, it could be quickly replaced by an equivalent contractual scheme whereby major conglomerates require you to enter into an agreement before accessing their products, with penalties for breaking the agreement.
anyone who wished to access Star Wars, Pokemon, Harry Potter, or any other popular franchise would need to agree to copyright or find someone willing to break it, and experience suggests that most people would go along with it.
Depends.
To start with, I will say that I agree with the general gist of your post. However, I suspect we would still end up with a licensing scheme much different from current IP law.
Imagine going into a store to buy a CD with software (I know, so nineties, I work with what I know) and at the cashier, before paying, you’re handed a 200-page contract (That is, the EULA plus all currently applicable IP law) that you must (a) read and (b) agree to before they will take your money.
A couple of things would happen
1) Some people would not purchase the software
2) Others would purchase equivalent but license-free software from your competition
3) In an effort to capture some of that market, publishers would create an extremely streamlined contract; the main difference - looking at what has happened in other fields - would generally be that a lot of cruft would get cut out.
3A) The hard-to-enforce cruft (E.g. “not allowed to resell”) would be cut out because: If the state subsidizes your enforcement you might as well have as many terms as possible and put the burden on the customer - they cannot really go to a competitor because that competitor will have the same burdens because it is law. If you have to pay for your own enforcement, you might as well cut it out - the contract will be less confusing to your customer and that might give you a leg up over the competition.
3B) The hard-to-understand cruft would also be cut. E.g. “Not allowed to modify this software” You see this in e.g. the CC license - in an effort to make people use that license, it is very easy to understand. A private court of arbitration could create an equivalent Easy To Understand IP Contract, a service they do not provide today because they’re in direct competition with the government enforcement monopoly.
You’d end up with licenses that individual people could make educated decisions about. You’re absolutely right that people would still agree to these contracts, but I expect the contracts to be much better. And it is easier to explain to the customer “you’re not allowed to sell or give away copies of this because we needs to get paid” than “you aree allowed to create copies of this for backup purposes only unless we have used copy-protection, unless that copy protection is easily automatically circumvented by standard software in which case it doesn’t count” which is the current state.
I expect that a proliferation of licenses would quickly congeal together into a single conglomerate, which you could opt into once via an easy process.
Then you really would just walk into the store, pay your money, and walk out.
People negotiating hundreds of little contracts on an individual basis seems much less likely than the convenience of a standardised option, much in the same way as you would expect people to standardise on a small number of currencies and other common standards.
Honestly, I find ShieldFoss’s response here to be a bit naive.
If all the record companies and movie studios get together (and it makes sense for them to do so), they can make their standard contract include those supposedly-hard-to-enforce clauses, and their standard contract will be harsher than real IP law.
They simply setup the situation such that any breach which would cause the copyrighted item to escape the containment field means someone violated the contract, and pursue people the few who didn’t and who did not immediately turn over who was responsible under the contract for some kind of conspiracy.
They don’t need to enforce it perfectly, just enough to scare people, and they can flat-out specify the prices in ways that courts will not dispute.
“This contract says you agreed to pay a $1,000 fee for every song you copied,” and oh hey, it’s civil court, so the standard of evidence is still not “beyond reasonable doubt”.
And since everyone will have to sign the contract to participate, it doesn’t really matter if a few copyright freegans on the edges of society don’t.
So no, the contracts will not be much better. In fact, they will be worse.
Anonymous asked:
elementarynationalism answered:
I’m not doing a fucking exam. I’d need more than just this and more sentences.
Perhaps unreasonable as an ask, but in some ways I think it’s suitable as an exercise.
The government should solve coordination problems to increase the efficiency and satisfaction of society using a variety of tools, securing the safety and well-being of the populace. Its existence is justified by its effectiveness at achieving this goal, not democratic norms, but democratic norms can help achieve it.
World War 2 seems to have resulted in a rebuilding of all the national mythologies in the West. The figures in the war aren’t viewed historically, but as characters in a grand moral fable about who we are, who our enemies are, and why we’re better than them.
Anonymous asked:
mutant-aesthetic answered:
“Venezuela no longer has the money to fund its lavish social programs because their oil isn’t worth what it used to be and they have nothing anywhere else” isn’t a terribly controversial take though.
Also, at least one alternate source of someone living there corroborates that the whole country is running out of money. Communists can sometimes have like this whole alternate reality thing going where they are terrified that “oops we fucked up Socialism” is not that uncommon of an outcome and has happened multiple times before.
I don’t want to touch Venezuela specifically bc I don’t know enough about it.
But I see this broader shorthand argument from anti-socialists a lot, and this seems as good a moment as any to point out that it’s never going to persuade anyone who doesn’t already reflexively oppose socialism, because it’s built on a sort of dishonest gerrymander intended to leverage outgroup homogeneity.
In order to be like “socialism always screws the pooch!“ you have to bundle a lot of diverse heterogeneous examples together under the “socialism” umbrella, while excluding a lot of others that also look pretty darn socialist yet have not devolved into mass starvation and atrocity. Defining “socialism” as inclusive of peak Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship due to its having a nominally socialist mythos, but exclusive of Scandinavian-style social democracy despite its possessing overt functional and operational socialist features, just seems like you’re playing dodgy semantic games. And it’s not like capitalism has never screwed the pooch. Capitalism isn’t one homogeneous model, either. It too is a cluster with many diverse variations and bastardizations and multiple failure modes that can do and have done terrible large-scale damage.
At this point, you could get into the sort of atrocity Olympics squabble where you merrily fling body counts at one another that you sourced by cherry-picking the most damning data cuts you could find on the worst historical fuckups you can plausibly ascribe to the other side. But that’s boring, and it doesn’t accomplish anything, because tactically everyone’s metrics in that type of volley are suspect and overall the entire structure of the debate is ultimately ahistorical. Besides which, it’s sidestepping my point, which is that shit is hard and nobody has the one true magical blessed ideology guaranteed proof against catastrophic failure when live human beings actually try to operationalize it. Your opponents are most likely not malevolent exponents of evil in that they do not actually want things to end up with millions dead and everything in shambles,* and you should give them the fundamental benefit of the doubt in that regard, and not just be like “But $YOURIDEOLOGY kills! Look at history! Q.E.D.”
*Maybe a few extremists on each side really do want that kind of outcome, but fuck those guys, we don’t dignify them by taking them seriously, and we certainly don’t anoint them as the avatars of their entire wings because this is extremely bad for the discourse and also? it empowers the assholes. ffs do not do this.
Unfortunately, people do routinely acknowledge that European democracies have well-working socialist features, and thus paint this notion of Europe as a horrifying, completely failed, starving hellhole full of rabid rape apes that is completely reliant on America for military protection. I think @this-is-cthulhu-privilege made this point, which was parroted by other fascists, and I think that he still owes me an explanation of his picture of horrors of socialist healthcare and proof that people routinely receive death sentences for things that are cured for free in the US and not the other way round, or proof of literal millions of terrorists moving into the UK on a yearly basis (total population of ISIS territories doesn’t exceed 6 million), or an apology i suppose.
Of course, in this case, when saying “Communists sometimes seem to live in an alternate reality”, I’m referring to the kind of people that think the conditions in Venezeula right now are a vile Capitalist lie, and that the conditions in North Korea are a vile Capitalist lie, and before that that the conditions in the Soviet Union and Maoist China were vile Capitalist lies.
The European countries do have slower economies as a result of their socialist-leaning policies, and unemployment issues, which could be solved in part by doing wealth transfers much more intelligently… but we don’t see them undergoing mass famine or on the verge of collapse. (Also their health services are pretty reasonable in terms of performance/$.)
And I think that this represents not only a quantitative difference but also a qualitative one. One of these involves expropriating entire industries and purging “counter-revolutionaries”. The other involves a relatively capitalist economy issuing welfare checks and having labor laws, and having a handful of natural monopolies or natural resources under state control.
a libertarian who likes fascism or nationalism was never a libertarian to begin with. they were conservatives using the label much like the libertarian party is just about weed and cia shill coporation
This is ideology, not religion. People’s minds are capable of evolution.
how is fascism evolution? are you high on meth?
9 out of 10 ideologies are better than libertarianism, the other is communism.
Future purged brown shirt found.
We’ll be doing the purging actually.
You don’t get it. You all be purged by your own fascist leaders or left for dead in the next Stalingrad. You are a moron. Every fascist state lead to self implosion and lost every war. You are a dumb ass.
So nationalism of any kind, including liking living in Texas rather than California is bad?
Name one instance where nationalism has not led to war or state violence.
This is a bad point because even without nationalism there is still war and violence
blaming nationalism for violence is like blaming religion for violence
Wrong. Nationalism emphasizes conflict, the other, and war. It can only survive on external and internal threats
Name one instance of immune system function that has not lead to microscopic violence.
To put it simply, in this world, an ideology can only be physically instantiated if a sufficiently large, well-armed, well-organized, and well-resourced group are willing to literally fight to the death to ensure it is so. They may not actually have to fight to the death, but the credibility of the threat must be there.
Libertarianism will not be instantiated if the culture does not support it. It doesn’t matter how “objectively moral” it is. If people with the means to enforce their views do not want it, it will not happen.
I don’t particularly care for Libertarianism except as a counter-weight, but it’s easy to see that some Libertarians have noticed that the cultural demographics matter when it comes to whether or not there will be Libertarianism.
Anonymous asked:
theunitofcaring answered:
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
What violent leftists think will keep housing affordable: using mob violence to physically prevent outsiders from moving in to a neighborhood.
What would actually make housing affordable: Japanese Zoning Laws
What are Japanese zoning laws?
They have a maximum zone type instead of strict limitations of one type for one zone.
Click that link. Look at how smart their plan is.
As a result of this and other policies, their booming metropolitan areas see no significant increase in housing prices relative to American cities and the UK. I had a chart I saved for this but it’s elsewhere. Basically, London prices have gone up like 500% without anywhere near a 500% increase in population, while Tokyo prices are up less than their % rise in population.
