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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

The issue with racism is that it violates the principle of justice as individual. Someone is being made to suffer for something someone else entirely did, united only by surface characteristics. (E.g., being black is not an ideology and does not cause behavior in the absence of a cultural context which makes it ideological/cultural/political.)

So breaking the principle of individual justice to combat racism probably isn’t such a great idea.

However, while race does not intrinsically alter behavior, culture, ideology, and religion do. Some of this is mostly just aesthetics, like architecture or food. But some of it has much deeper consequences, like multigenerational cousin marriage, or “honor” killings.

However, unlike race (currently), culture is fortunately somewhat mutable. There are limits, however, particularly with regard to ideology.

I guess what I’m saying here is that America should limit the number of North Korean refugees it takes after the War, until it can be determined how safe former adherents of Juche coming over in one mass are, but should be willing to take many thousands of refugees from South Korea after Seoul is destroyed. In-kind aid should be delivered instead, and infrastructure reconstruction should proceed with more funding than originally scheduled.

discourse preview 2019 politics race politics chronofelony but actually a serious post this time
libfas

Anonymous asked:

Letting your pig followers know before entering Dubai read the fucking rules, the ones who are in Dubai are actually white decent humans beings I'm guessing it's the Canadians their always so friendly shocking cause their white but anyways YOU get caught making fun of Islam just ONCE in Dubai or disturbing people in the mosque while they are praying you get deported within minutes and won't get to ride in the Lamborghini's with the cheetahs🌹💓XO

libfas answered:

>Arab anon is a racist piece of shit that lives on double standards and thinks the world is desperate to spend time in their sandy hell-hole.

Huh, what a surprise…

mitigatedchaos

Wait wait wait libfas-Anon - are you saying ejecting someone from the country for disrespecting the dominant ideology is a good thing? ‘cause I’m confident you won’t like where that goes…

politics
ranma-official
argumate

so Hillary vs. Trump, is that it then?

argumate

‘fraid so

ranma-official

Somehow it still is

mitigatedchaos

They want to enforce moral liability for Trump voters, but that only makes sense within the context of the possible alternatives. As such, “Hillary would likely have got the US into a war with Syria right now instead of just doing one missile strike, and the Media would all be cheering her on, further expanding the migrant crisis in Europe” is a valid response. (And I didn’t even vote for Trump, actually.)

Source: argumate politics
argumate
argumate

blue-komrade said: But where is the line between ethnocentric nation states and empire anyway. The major european nations all descend from multi lingual, multi ethnic empires… Or is that your point?

yes, the construction of a homogeneous French identity, German identity, Italian identity, etc.

pushing common languages and suppressing dialects, as happened more recently in China and Indonesia.

and forcible movement of people to line up with national borders, as took place at various intervals throughout the 20th century.

mitigatedchaos

Sometimes this is used to argue that nations aren’t really real in any valuable sense, but once you go up enough contrarianism levels from the normies you wrap around and say “actually, constructing nations is Good.”

argumate

regardless of whether it’s good or bad, it’s certainly powerful, and the original debate was whether anyone has a more powerful meme for cohesion, and so far the answer is no:

 - international community of workers (Great War says no)

 - religion (Henry VIII says no)

 - united in joyful acclamation of the marriage of our beloved king (hell no)

 - neoliberal technocracy (nationalism kicks its teeth in)

mitigatedchaos

I think that last one is arguable.  The fighting is going on right now, and Neolib Tech and its global finance isn’t licked yet for sure.

(Admittedly, I’m disappointed that the other Techs are so Neolib, but National Technocracy is always going to lack some appeal in the West.)

Edit: Well, for the meme staying dominant and having power.  Cohesion, admittedly, not so much.

politics
argumate

Anonymous asked:

*squints* wait what does communism have to do with not "liv[ing] in a secluded home with their one marriage partner" though

argumate answered:

all bad things are related and all good things are related.

this is why ending capitalism (a bad thing!) will also end racism, homophobia, the nuclear family, child abuse, exploitation, climate change, and death itself.

(if it turns out that some people have different opinions on which things are good and which things are bad then you just repeat it louder).

but more specifically some people are pining for an aesthetic of communal living and believe that everyone else is too or are willing to force it upon them if not.

mitigatedchaos

all bad things are related and all good things are related.

this is why ending capitalism (a bad thing!) will also end racism, homophobia, the nuclear family, child abuse, exploitation, climate change, and death itself.

Ugh this happens so fucking often.

(Just for the record, upping levels of Nationalism won’t fix everything, it has to be part of an overall plan that will have to include a lot of different elements. - this National blog)

politics
collapsedsquid
anosognosic

Someone posted this on facebook and I sort of can’t stop thinking about how bad it (and the report it’s based on) is. Not in an it’s-wrong-about-literally-everything way, but in the conceptual and mathematical dog’s breakfast of a calculation that is the hook of this article.

Anyway, I suspect some of my mutuals might enjoy tearing it apart.

collapsedsquid

I was expecting generic anti free trade stuff, but the article I’m reading here is about tax dodging, noxious debt practices, and outright theft. 

anosognosic

“Theft” is hyperbole. Tax dodging and predatory lending are legit problems where foreign interests are at fault. Others are problems that are not fully or at all attributable to “us.”

There are some more particular issues with the analysis, but the general point is that the calculation is pseudomercantilist nonsense, confusing currency with wealth.

For instance, it puts direct investment on one side of the ledger, and profit repatriation on the other, notes that the profit is greater than the investment, and calls that theft. But, like, that’s what capital is–you put in some, you get more out. Anything else is not capital, it’s aid.

The neoliberal point is that investment creates wealth, much of which will stay in Africa. That wealth is hard to quantify, but includes money paid to local employees and that money’s movement in the local economy, the resulting upward pressure on salaries, the provision of necessary products and services, the multiplying effects that these products and services might have on the local economy (e.g. IT, transportation, automation), the know-how that foreign companies bring into the local market, and quite a bit more. I can’t speak for Africa in particular, but I’ve seen it happen in Brazil.

(The same logic works for loans–you pay more than you take. And while some of those are in fact abusive, there’s no inkling in the paper of the idea that loans are not universally abusive and might have a role in creating wealth.)

Not to mention that much of what is lost is not about outside powers but rather the failure or nonexistence of local institutions. Leftist analysis of how foreign economic interests have undermined the formation of these institutions is important, but insufficient. 

Overall, I’m against the simplistic but pervasive idea that all that needs to happen for countries to develop is for foreign “plunder” to stop. Foreign powers can help by policing tax evasion, by policing the trade of illegal extractivism, by policing damage to the environment and by providing fair loans, sure. But most of the work is internal–in the development of local institutions and economy.

collapsedsquid

When I say ‘theft’ I am referring to their complaint of “illegal logging, fishing and trade in wildlife.“

And your description of “profit“ works equally well for theft‘ or fraud, you get more money out than you put in for those as well. They are describing how wealth can leave in that amount, and you have to ask. “Is ordinary profit sufficient to get that level of return?“ Or is it theft and fraud going on there?

And loans can create wealth, but one of the nice things about ordinary lending is bankruptcy.  With sovereign debt it’s a bit harder, and the US has a whole industry talking foreign leaders into large debts that cannot be repaid and cause crisis, and can end with IMF programs that force reforms on countries that they are now admitting do not work. 

And is this debt used to finance productive investments? A lot of these projects are not.  A lot of these are the product of bribery and fraud.  But that’s OK, because then you or the next dude can sell off bits of the country to pay them off.  That’s how this type of debt can work.

They need more to develop than the stoppage of plunder, yeah, but it’s hard to do that when you’re being plundered.

anosognosic

Calling illegal logging, fishing and poaching “theft” is exactly what I was referring to as hyperbole. The harm is in lost tax revenue and environmental damage–there is no outright theft going on.

(Also, most products of illegal extractivism, by far, go to China. Does that make it less “our” fault?)

The issue is that the logic of the calculation is that all loans and all investment are going to be net-negatives. The only logical conclusion is that Africa is better off with zero debts (business and sovereign) and zero investment.

Taking this further–let’s talk a little about Brazil, because it’s a case I know well. Brazil basically eliminated its foreign debts. It did this essentially by converting that debt into government bonds. By all accounts, this has worsened the situation. The financial market is far less forgiving–defaulting would tank the economy, no relief of forgiveness programs possible because the bonds are distributed, so there’s no single entity to negotiate with.

We’re embroiled in a historic corruption scandal that involves the President, most of his cabinet, the leaders of both houses of Congress and most of the congresspeople therein. This involves extensive graft schemes, largely connected to a meat conglomerate, a construction giant and a publicly-administered oil and gas company–Brazilian-owned and -run companies all.

Where I’m trying to get at is this: a kleptocracy is a kleptocracy. If foreign companies are knee-deep in corruption, then local companies and politicians are chin-deep. Africa is not poor because it’s being plundered, Africa is poor because Africa does not have the institutions and local conditions to be rich. Forgiving debts and policing corruption in foreign multinationals will help, but will not lift Africa out of poverty.

(The study points to a yearly deficit of $41 billion, which sounds like a lot, until you realize that’s less than 40 bucks per person per year. Even if those figures made any kind of sense, this is definitely not what is impoverishing Africa.)

What else can help? Exporting Western institutions is called colonialism and it’s a bad scene. What we have left apart from aid (much of which is counter-productive) is loans and investment, while hoping for the best as institutions develop locally.

collapsedsquid

“Removing without the permission of the legal authority“ is the goddamn definition of theft. You can argue that it’s not the government that’s being stolen from, but rampant theft tends not to improve the economy even when it’s not the government’s property being stolen. And those resources are what those governments could use to get capital rather than loans.

You are arguing that kleptocracy retards development.  I can argue that it’s development that retards kleptocracy.  While the US was developing we were a massively corrupt nation, we had whole political systems based on giving political jobs to friends and the transcontinental railroad was an amazingly corrupt endeavor from start to finish.  But we developed, and now we are less corrupt.

The thing about debt is that, it can prevent development.  It prevents it because instead of building schools and roads or even just pay off troublemakers to shut up, you have to scrape together everything you can sell for foreign exchange.  It means that, rather than attract kleptocrats who benefit from a growing pie, you attract kleptocrats who extract and cheat to get money.  And you get your country taken over, previously by armed forces, now by the IMF.  Then the measures they need to take to develop become even more impossible.

Given the poverty that many people in Africa are living under 40 bucks per person per year ain’t nothing, that’s a good start on roads and school that they can then use to make more money to build more roads and schools.  I don’t claim that that they’ll instantly industrialize, but I think it would help.

And the argument is not so much that loans are net-negative, but that loans should pay for themselves.  The fact that those countries remain creditors suggests that they are not.  You may believe this is the result of good faith attempts at investment, I think that’s bullshit.

mitigatedchaos

I think it’s both kleptocracy and lack of development that empower each other.  Low trust society is a sort of local stable equilibrium that makes everything more expensive at once.  Suggesting that it’s just lack of development is reducing humans to economybots.  It also suggests that societies with lower levels of technology - basically every society before 1950 - must necessarily have been more and more corrupt, and that managing corruption was something essentially impossible in some place like ancient China or feudal Japan.  

Within this consideration, I’m not sure on how to manage this.  I have some ideas that a more ideal nation could execute, but hooooo boy most modern Liberals and Leftists would not like it.

Source: anosognosic politics the invisible fist
steelwoolcomesfromsteelsheep
leftistparasite

“A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe ‘Communism was or is a problem.’  The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin.”

steelwoolcomesfromsteelsheep

mitigatedchaos

Side effect of the Republicans calling everything to the Left of Thatcher “Socialism” tbh.  It was bound to have consequences eventually.

politics chopper meme cw?
cromulentenough
cromulentenough:
“ mitigatedchaos:
“ collapsedsquid:
“ collapsedsquid:
“The recent UK polls are killing me, because despite the surge in labor, the fact that UKIPers are now voting Tory and their districts are first-past-the-post means that the...
collapsedsquid

The recent UK polls are killing me, because despite the surge in labor, the fact that UKIPers are now voting Tory and their districts are first-past-the-post means that the Tories are likely going to win.  (Labor, the libdems and the SNP together get >50% of the vote in some polls.)

collapsedsquid

raginrayguns:  i was telilng some europeans that having > 3 parties was dumb but they werent buying it

It’s a good idea if you have an electoral system set up to support it properly.  If we had a proper system we could have a Trump party separate from the republicans and a Bernie party separate from the dems.  Then maybe people would be a little less insane because they’d have parties that represent them.

mitigatedchaos

I would actually like for both the Bernie and Trump parties to exist, since they might actually do something about the trade balance and conditions for American workers, tbh.  I wonder if they might have less regulatory capture, too, but I’d have to check that against foreign countries where multiple parties are the norm.

cromulentenough

FPTP is basically the worst system for anything with more than 2 choices. there’s pro’s and cons of the other types (AV, instant runnoff, proportional etc.) among each other, but they’re pretty much all better than FPTP.

mitigatedchaos

It’s always bothered me, TBH, and then I learned there are other voting methods that could break it and haven’t been the same since.  I would like seven parties of incompetent politicians to vote for, please, so I can pick the flavor of stupidity that most closely matches my own.

Source: collapsedsquid politics policy
mitigatedchaos
mitigatedchaos:
“ Ah, yes, let’s turn the Fundamental Attribution Error into a political weapon.  That will certainly go well. No way it’ll be used for more purity policing.
I recommend being careful on whose allegiances you force.
”
Ah, here we...
mitigatedchaos

Ah, yes, let’s turn the Fundamental Attribution Error into a political weapon.  That will certainly go well.  No way it’ll be used for more purity policing.

I recommend being careful on whose allegiances you force.  

mitigatedchaos

Ah, here we go.  

@collapsedsquid Imagine Rush Limbaugh, speaking into his microphone:

Fundamental attribution Error has this virtue: it makes it easy to identify which tribe a pundit or commentator really feels they belong to.

Profess your independence all you want.  If it’s always Americans *deciding* to do things & foreigners (especially Muslims) involuntarily and passively responding to them, you’ve declared your allegiance.

(Ignore for a moment that Limbaugh would never use the words “fundamental attribution error”, heh.)

Source: collapsedsquid politics