Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[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.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[afloweroutofstone]

If you believe in a massive and active military, militarized borders and restrictive immigration policies, support for law enforcement as they currently exist, traditional family values, and the need to preserve a national culture, you’re not a libertarian. You’re not fooling anyone. You want a highly ordered and hierarchical society enforced by state coercion, just give us all a break and stop pretending like your beliefs about taxes and firearms make you a freedom fighter

[collapsedsquid]

Way I think this argument is justified by those types is that because we don’t have Freedom where businesses or even towns are allowed to discriminate, the government needs to do it instead.

To me that result has a very different takeaway though.

[mitigatedchaos]

While OP has a point, there’s also the issue that Libertarianism has to have political support (including within that culture) in order to be maintained, and mass migrations can change the political environment of a territory pretty substantially.

It makes more sense if you assume it’s fragile rather than the default to which all societies will gradually slide.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mutant-aesthetic]

the biggest problem with libertarians is that they want freedom but also want to keep morality still around

there’s no point to freedom if the majority of the population is still obsessed with “right” and “wrong” and want to enforce that to some degree

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, but it is only if the majority of the populace is still obsessed with right and wrong that Libertarianism can be maintained.  Otherwise, the political will that created it will deteriorate until the physical realization of the ideology can no longer be supported.

It’s only feasible so long as only few enough people take advantage of the freedom it grants them.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[balioc]

Riiiiiiight.  Everyone rallies the core voters by demonizing some of their hated outgroups.  But only the Dems have to deal with the fact that all of their core voters’ hated outgroups consist of other voters. 

[mitigatedchaos]

Still, don’t trust the Republicans not to be so incompetent as to screw up derailing the Democrats’ Demographic Destiny™ that they want so much.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[taxloopholes]

libertarians: there’s a small elite class of people that shouldn’t have such a huge amount of control over the economy

me: yah

libertarians: it’s only the public sector

me: nah

[triggeredmedia]

Have you ever met a libertarian?

You are describing liberals. They believe public sector rules and we need more govt.

[taxloopholes]

…that’s not what this means. i explained it here: http://taxloopholes.tumblr.com/post/160617784322/the-libertarian-transhumanist-the-only

[triggeredmedia]

So you are against wealth?

Do you believe someone else being rich prevents you from being rich?

Do you believe their is any govt regulations that help people gain wealth?

Do you believe people do not have a right to be wealthy?

[taxloopholes]

that’s not what I said.

I’m pointing out that the argument from libertarians that it’s governments making corporations push their interests against the public good is bullshit because it disregards how and what brought about basic regulation in the first place and what corporations do overseas WITHOUT regulations protecting workers.

I also said it’s ridiculous that just 8 people have more wealth than 3.6 BILLION people is a bit ridiculous, especially considering Western corporations rely on global poverty for cheap labor. so yes I have a problem with multi billion dollar corporations paying people starvation wages and pushing the narrative that they earned that money without exploitation. even billionaires admit to this which is pretty ironic.

if you already disagree there’s not much I can do to change your mind, though.

[ranma-official]

The “8 people have more wealth than X billion” statisic is a bit disingenuous if I’m right about the exact statisic you’re citing.

It’s not that we can just redistribute that wealth amongst these X billion and fix poverty, because these X billion actually have zero or negative net worth, meaning it won’t even make a dent. So that’s a completely different problem that needs a completely different solution.

I’m not sure what kind, though.

[mitigatedchaos]

Only what is produced can be consumed. Need to keep teching up and expanding production.

Were I in charge I might also pursue development programs in stable militarily-allied countries in order to build a high-powered international bloc, transforming the national interest into one that could justify this kind of investment, buuut much of the Left would despise me.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[thathopeyetlives]

I wonder if there’s possibly any way of imposing symmetry on the whole open borders thing, in a way that would matter.

[mitigatedchaos]

If you decide to split the difference and make some areas open borders and other areas closed borders to that closed-borders people can live by themselves while open borders people benefit or suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then open borders people will come back six months later and demand the closed borders areas be opened immediately as a moral demand.

If you decide to make open borders contingent on paying off closed borderers with money, the open borders crowd will decry this as immoral and unfair to the global poor.

If you make anyone who comes in via open borders the financial responsibility of open border-supporters, they will decry this as immoral and unfair, because they are individuals and the people they are bringing in are individuals, and culture has nothing to do with their behavior and this is all the fault of those dity closed borderers.

However, it isn’t actually possible to solve global poverty with open borders.  To meet the carrying capacity, the nations themselves must be made significantly more productive, and that means greater infrastructure and fewer children in order to concentrate parental investment.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I think the most glaringly naive and myopic part of ancaps ideal worldview is the fact they think collusion amongst organizations wouldn't take place to the point where states would emerge. Hell, there are modern corporations right now that are more powerful than many smaller nation states and if it was just a matter of sheer resources and manpower they'd absolutely get their own military companies like coca cola have even conspired with paramilitary organizations

argumate answered:

I think any serious anti-state ideology acknowledges that it requires constant vigilance to prevent the emergence of another state, which requires viewing any sufficiently large organisation with extreme suspicion, as well as the constant propagation of memes warning against the perils of statehood (statedom?)

This fucks up freedom of association to an absurd degree, but you can get out of it by being okay with a state being established “without coercion”, eg. you’re born into a world where you have to explicitly sign the social contract or starve, unlike our current world where you implicitly sign the social contract or starve.

[mitigatedchaos]

この地は帝王の地です。

Ｔｈｉｓ　ｌａｎｄ　ｉｓ　ｔｈｅ　ｌａｎｄ　ｏｆ　ｔｈｅ　Ｅｍｐｅｒｏｒ．

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Yeah, but you could take measures to ameliorate the long commute for employees--for example, running a high-speed train line there for their particular use. (If the commute is long even then, you could make that commute time paid--have people punch in/out as they get on/off the train, or just add a set amount per day.) Of course, that's expensive.

argumate answered:

Airports and sewage treatment plants have other constraints on their locations (flat land, downstream) and it’s not just the employees who have to travel to reach them but every construction vehicle, delivery truck, etc.

But eh infrastructure is hard, Melbourne doesn’t even have a regular train line to the airport yet.

[mitigatedchaos]

“It’s expensive” is such a big deal that often doesn’t get weighed in public arguments correctly.

If the train is twice as expensive, then society itself can afford half as many trains, and when you’re making the decision to buy that train, you are necessarily giving up an entire train’s worth of resources that not only could be spent on a train, but could be spent on something else instead (like hospitals, schools, or golf courses).

So yeah, “NIMBY” is getting used to criticize people who are opposing things society needs.  However, because there are costs and they’re not currently dealt-with well, instead of doing something stupid like building a train line to no where, might I suggest insuring them for the difference in property values caused by the NIMBY item.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Why is the historical entrenchment of property ownership never touched on by libertarians? I think the overwhelming majority of landholdings were acquired through what they define as theft and then passed on. And even if we started from scratch in ancapistan utopia you'd have to deal with the issue of already existing public infrastructure and how even the most basic infrastructure would require cooperation that is coerced on some level

argumate answered:

That recent essay went over this, the fact that if you freeze property rights in their current state you may be condoning stolen property, yet Libertarians typically shrink from a large-scale one-off redistribution that would cancel out earlier thefts and allow everyone to start fresh.

Ultimately much of the Libertarian concept is based on an aesthetic of a small landholding being worked by a rugged freeman mixing his labour with the soil (but like, not in a kinky way).

In practice this falls apart: the rugged freeman is either standing over the body of the guy he just killed to take the land in the New World or is bound by a complex web of mutual obligations and tradition and common law in the Old World, both of which are far removed from Libertarian paradise.

[mitigatedchaos]

The world is already ludicrously morally impure on property terms, so why not abandon the purity of property in favor of something that values peoples’ wellbeing instead?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@remedialaction​ Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough - 

I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack.  My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.

I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible.  I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs.   Revolution is, after all, overrated.

It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.  

It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.