Oceans Yet to Burn

rocketverliden

express.co.uk

Denmark's right-wing anti-migrant leader Pernille Vermund 'polling well ahead of election' | World | News | Express.co.uk

slartibartfastibast

Stupid Danes just don’t understand how all that rape helps their economicses. Everyone needs to have lots of economicses. Rape isn’t very quantifiable (because that would be offensive) and therefore doesn’t exist. But economicses exist. There are courses in school about them. Have you raised all your boat sails with my Keynesian theories of human trafficking? If you sell one child per family you can fund AI research. People aren’t real. When do I get my hedonium implants? Why are people so mad about rape when we will all soon get hedonium implants?

How many utilons can be exchanged for one rape?

isaacsapphire

This is a mindset that I’m finding very frustrating, in that I’m having difficulty categorizing it. Is it a reasonable, rational understanding of actual conditions? Is it xenophobic dog whistles, predictable playing on the existing memes of “furiners gonna rape our women”/miscegenation threat?

What are the underlying issues here? Increased pressure from refugees/migrants from the Middle East (not all of whom are Muslim)? The impending population decline? A sudden rise in giving a shit about rape?

WTF is actually going on? Because everyone seems to be going around with blinkers on, cherry picking and building echo chambers and rubbing themselves with factually incorrect memes.

slartibartfastibast

Memes about how everyone is biologically identical and culture is arbitrary reached peak signalling potential and then the same portable media tech that motivates opportunist migrants also made it impossible to cover up the horrifying consequences of importing them (we used to be able to nip those stories in the bud, or obfuscate perp details).

Also, Merkel lost her mind and imported a million and a half people that immediately started raping the locals.

Rotherham also hit the news in 2014, so that didn’t help.

rocketverliden

Okay.

Look, I get you have this whole…complex about the migrant question in Europe. I get it. You think the truth’s been buried all this time and now people are getting their comeuppance for the folly of trying to be humane to others.

But I also see you like to conflate rationalist/transhumanist language with memes about “liberals,” and at this point, I think it’s clear that you’ve become so jaded that you might as well be a full-fledged member of the alt-right, because only alt-right people do shit like that.

“How many utilons can be exchanged for one rape?“ I dunno, but it costs $0.00 to not be an asshole, so there’s that

slartibartfastibast

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/child-sex-abuse-gangs-could-5114029

I’d rather be an asshole than enable a bunch of violent child rape through ironic detachment. Stop defending the priesthood in the 80s. You’re a religious zealot…

rocketverliden

I’d also recognize that if I became a wonk about Catholic priests molesting children, I’d probably look like one of those asshole atheists, and to be quite honest, that’s not a look I’d like.

You fall into the trap of believing that stopping one piece of the problem will backsolve and fix everything, when, no, actually, the solution might be to instead to remind migrants that Westerners are strange people with strange customs and to enforce the same laws you’d enforce on a white man (or enforce on the white man the same laws you’d enforce on a non-white non-male).

mitigatedchaos

The political will for your proposed solution does not appear to exist, and multiculturalism seems as though it will actively fight to stop your solution from being implemented. How will you create the political will for this? If it fails, what is your backup plan?

School vouchers have political momentum in the US now because it’s cheaper politically to use them to route around the fact that schools can neither effectively punish problem students, nor exclude them, preventing the other students from getting a good education. It probably isn’t the best solution, but it may actually be politically feasible. It seems some kind of intelligent immigration and law enforcement policy isn’t actually on the table, so using right-wing populists to slow immigration to levels more in line with rates of assimilation and undermine the cultural left, Globalism, and multiculturalism itself seems more feasible.

Source: slartibartfastibast politics

argumate

Remember: capitalism and white male supremacy go hand in hand.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to push back on this statement every time I see it, but I guess maybe because it’s irritatingly wrong?

Presumably capitalism has been in steady decline since the emancipation of women and the civil rights act and the end of apartheid and

mitigatedchaos

Capitalism is nothing but a tool of the Chinese to suppress ethnic Malaysians! It is absolutely inherent that it happens to favor that racial group specifically! There can never be such a thing as Capitalism that doesn’t favor the Chinese!

Uh, I mean, uh, white people, right…

politics shtpost

slartibartfastibast

express.co.uk

Denmark's right-wing anti-migrant leader Pernille Vermund 'polling well ahead of election' | World | News | Express.co.uk

slartibartfastibast

How many utilons can be exchanged for one rape?

isaacsapphire

WTF is actually going on? Because everyone seems to be going around with blinkers on, cherry picking and building echo chambers and rubbing themselves with factually incorrect memes.

slartibartfastibast

Also, Merkel lost her mind and imported a million and a half people that immediately started raping the locals.

Rotherham also hit the news in 2014, so that didn’t help.

mitigatedchaos

Additionally, while conservative types may not want to pay the price of shifting the burden of evidence on rape cases, lowering the number of immigrants from high risk populations for it is a very cheap price to pay for them. After all, they don’t need to bring in huge populations while ignoring cultural differences just to show how fiercely not-racist they are.

And, while Marxists may use the language of ideological contradictions, they aren’t the only ones who can notice them. Setting aside the whole issue of genetics, as I think culture is sufficient and I’m committed to a multiracialist civic nationalism anyway: Liberals/Leftists have been treating culture as not mattering at all (when they import foreigners) yet mattering a lot when they fight to change it locally (eg, quit oppressing the gays)! This is accomplished in part by pretending the host nation’s majority culture isn’t actually a culture (“white ppl don’t have a culture”) including the meta-culture use to assimilate immigrants into American-style Food Court Ethnicity! …and then they attack the engine of assimilation, insisting that it’s unfair to demand people give up parts of their culture. But if culture doesn’t actually matter, as the earlier positions imply, then there is no reason to seek “diversity” in the first place. It’s incoherent.

…but people were socially prohibited from noticing it was incoherent, until the weight of the contradictions was enough under the mass migration in the EU that people couldn’t stand to pretend that all cultures are equal anymore. It’s perhaps a close enough fit for Western Europe, but it sure isn’t one globally. And since noticing it was suppressed before, and they’re still trying to suppress it now, there is a backlash.

politics rape cw

argumate

the weirdness of people buying tons of vitamins and other health supplements to take back to China is something I still can’t get over; talk about market failure!

argumate

godeepforme said: you mean state interference?

both state interference and a lack of state interference (states create markets!)

for example without enforcement of various consumer protection laws, IP laws (trademarks), and product safety regulations, you end up with a market for lemons where premium products cannot easily gain consumer trust, and people would rather fly to another country and raid the supermarkets there.

politics economy

the-grey-tribe

alternativemediasyndicate.com

Republicans Propose Bill Making it LEGAL for Police To Shoot and Kill UNARMED Protesters

A bill that would require public officials in Indiana to dispatch law enforcement swiftly to remove any protesters blocking traffic by “any means necessary” prompted [...]

ranma-official

Explain this obsession with murdering people who block traffic. People e-brag about shooting them with shotguns or more commonly just plowing into them at full speed on their cars.

mitigatedchaos

Not sure. I’ve seen people joke about it at least. Maybe because it’s the only way protesters practically interfere with the daily functioning of their lives? At least one ambulance has been blocked, though the use of lethal force to disrupt traffic-blocking protests would almost certainly increase net casualties.

I still contend that America is simply not competent enough to enact (as in justify) restriction policies on the level of soft authoritarian countries in Asia.

the-grey-tribe

What’s soft authoritarian? Singapore? Hongkong?

mitigatedchaos

Something along those lines, yes. Caning for vandalism, death penalty for smuggling drugs, dominant party since the nation’s founding with a habit of suing its opponents into submission, that sort of thing.

I can be pretty freakin’ Statist. People get offended over banning chewing gum. Me? When I looked up the reason why they did it, I might well ban it too. And that’s just a ‘silly’ example. There are some much more extreme policies I might go along with if I trusted the government enough.

…which I don’t, especially not the American government, which is rife with incentivization problems, lobbying, and shear incompetence at every level. For example, Illinois had to amend their state constitution to get their politicians to actually spend the state transportation funds on transportation.

Singapore has the kind of government that freaks out when they go from 70% of the vote to 60% of the vote, which in any other country would be considered a landslide victory, then managed to get back up to 70% of the vote.

America has the kind of government that needs the occasional large-scale protest because the guys in charge are either dishonest, stupid, or both.

And quite frankly, there is no path to the formation of an American Action Party which then obsoletes one or both of the existing parties and rules America with a studious technocratic fist.

Edit: China, of course, also an authoritarian country in Asia, but they flat-out don’t deserve it.

Source: justsomeantifas politics

ranma-official

alternativemediasyndicate.com

Republicans Propose Bill Making it LEGAL for Police To Shoot and Kill UNARMED Protesters

A bill that would require public officials in Indiana to dispatch law enforcement swiftly to remove any protesters blocking traffic by “any means necessary” prompted [...]

ranma-official

Explain this obsession with murdering people who block traffic. People e-brag about shooting them with shotguns or more commonly just plowing into them at full speed on their cars.

mitigatedchaos

I still contend that America is simply not competent enough to enact (as in justify) restriction policies on the level of soft authoritarian countries in Asia.

Source: justsomeantifas politics

isaacsapphire

thetrippytrip

This is disgustingly ableist. Disabled people have worth, their labor has value, they’re working just like everyone else so they should get paid as much as everyone else. Why are we debating this??? It’s common sense!

doctorcassherlockedfromtheimpala

I’m so salty about this i have to reblog it again. WE’RE TALKING ABOUT A HUMAN BEING WORKING FOR A LIVING. NO YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO PAY THEM LOWER THAN MINIMUM WAGE. WHAT THE FUCK.

agingwunderkind

workers of the world, be against this shit in particular

jumpingjacktrash

if someone is ‘allowed’ to work for less than minimum wage, they will be forced to work for less than minimum wage.

vastderp

i just found out our cleaners make below min wage, and are paid different amounts according to how much they can do…

jumpingjacktrash

yet another fucked up thing about your building management, jeez

i wonder if we can pester the city about that

fierceawakening

Iirc that is actually how subminimum wage works. It’s based on the idea that a disabled worker is less productive than a nondisabled one, so they only get paid a portion of the money, based on their productivity compared to the standard.

bittersnurr

Yeah that is generally how it works I think.

I have no idea how they would measure that either like, I feel like some of the “lack of productivity” is “we are too lazy to accommodate you so you can work at normal speed even if it’s literally GIVING YOU A STOOL or something that costs us basically nothing so here’s some spare change”.

fierceawakening

Mm, I do think it’s possible for disability to affect productivity. I just don’t think “not paying people minimum wage” is a solution to that issue.

isaacsapphire

I’d like to have a better understanding of this issue. The disabled people that I’ve known to be involved in work programs, they weren’t hirable by regular employers, and they were not capable of working at the speed that is expected of abled minimum wage workers.

The Walmart I worked at had a mentally disabled girl working in the department next to mine, because they had a program with a local idk what the proper term is, it was a kind of adulthood transition halfway house type thing. And Walmart actually hired on permanent, for regular wages, some of the disabled people, because they were perfectly good workers at particular jobs (cart pusher is a big one, and the community at that Walmart, back in the good times, they loved and protected our cartpushers. Everybody was very upset when somebody did a hit and run on one of them. Thankfully no permanent injuries, but still!) But the girl in the department next to mine, she couldn’t focus well enough to do the work, so they didn’t hire her permanently.

Also, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who was actually expected to support themselves on subminimum wage: they’re always on government assistance and usually have family support of some kind, and their “work” seem to be more of an enrichment program than a job.

mitigatedchaos

You’ve probably seen me blogging about this before, @isaacsapphire, but… wage subsidies.

This all becomes way less of an issue with direct-to-employee hourly wage subsidies, enabling us to have a whole lot of things like high employment, job choice (actual job choice), and livable income for those low on the income scale at the same time.

If it’s cheap enough, someone will be able to find something productive for them to do, and with the subsidies this won’t mean scraping by on the bottom of the barrel.

Source: spectator.co.uk politics

What happens if people can’t own nations?

What’s the plan here for open borders, dissolution of nations stuff?

I mean, let’s stop and think about this for a minute.

Presumably, open borders will still be accompanied by democracy by geographical area. In the interests of fairness, voting will also be extended to migrants.

However, there is no limit on the number of people that can move into an area in a given timeframe, as this would end up being considered some form of discrimination. This means that in any year, the people living somewhere could effectively have themselves replaced with a migrant population that then changes all the laws to suit them.

Since the residents lack the ability to exclude people from the government, they lack the ability to control it, and thus don’t effectively own it, since the ability to exclude is one of the core things that ownership is about.

Which, sure, people have been saying “it’s not YOUR government!” and talking about how people don’t have the right to exclude those of other cultures (while either letting cruelties like FGM off the hook, or pretending it isn’t cultural).

But if they don’t own it, why in the world would they fight for it? Why would they fight to defend a government that doesn’t belong to them, doesn’t care about them, and at any time could be taken away from them and looted by others? In a war, why wouldn’t they just leave the territory? If environmental issues become a problem, why not just contribute to them until it’s unprofitable, and then flee?

Some modern countries are already having problems getting enough personnel to staff their armies as it is, and we’re not even halfway this far into Globalism.

Who will fight and die to protect their access to consumer products? Who will fight to protect the rights of others that don’t care about them or their values at all? For a territory that isn’t even really theirs?

All you’re left with are mercenaries. And mercenaries are a terrible option, known all the way back in the days of Machiavelli.

But there are other group memberships that people might be willing to fight for. Ethnic groups, as have been a source of fighting for dominance throughout the ages. Religions, which promise eternal reward after death. Drug cartels and other criminal organizations, with the promise of great payout for the desperate in this life, regardless of whether it’s true. Right-wing and left-wing paramilitaries that are dedicated to ideology.

And, as this starts spiraling out of control, sub-national organizations that, ostensibly, originated for mutual defense.

Having defeated the nation-state, the monopoly on violence loosens, and the fighting shifts to the sub-national level.

politics nationalism flagpost

brazenautomaton

okay so someone tell me why this won’t work

transgender people should get to use the correct bathroom and not be misgendered, and it is an issue of basic rights. and trans people are not going into bathrooms to commit sex crimes, that whole idea is absurd

but the conflict is not relevant to most people in the country and they view it as either a distraction, or just more culture war or at worst an attempt to sexually threaten precious and vulnerable women. pushing on the issue almost unavoidably creates disproportionate blowback because to the majority of people, the issue is being given a disproportionate focus and that means it must be nefarious

so why haven’t we, instead of saying “we keep pushing in exactly the same way, casting it as an issue where everyone who opposes us is ideologically befouled and deserving of punishment, thus getting disproportionate blowback and alienating people who we should not be alienating because that leads to a loss of our political power”, and instead of saying “we get so much blowback from how we present this issue as one where people must bend the knee to us or be cast out of respectable society, so we should give up on trying to secure rights for trans people as it’s not convenient for us to do so any more”

why don’t we make the law “people are allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but if someone is convicted of sexual assault in a bathroom that they entered by pretending to be a different gender, their sentence is more severe”?

like from our point of view, we’re not losing anything. we know trans people are far less likely than baseline to commit sex crimes and bathroom access is not about enabling sex crimes. but for the people who don’t already agree with us, it looks like we’re both taking measures to deter the thing they don’t want to happen, and putting our money where our mouth is, instead of telling them “this is how things are you are not allowed to notice otherwise now bow to our worldview”. by making it a sentencing rider, we don’t increase the ability of transphobes to frame trans people for sex crimes – if we are afraid this law would encourage them to do so we should be exactly as afraid of them doing so without this law.

like if your position is “we should allow X because it is just, and will not allow Bad Thing Y at all” and your opposition says “we should not allow X because it will just promote Bad Thing Y”, it seems to me that “How about we allow X, but punish Bad Thing Y more harshly if it gets promoted by X, so people don’t do it?” is pretty much the easiest compromise ever.

so why won’t that work?

earthboundricochet

I imagine people would just say it’s already creating a dangerous situation where sexual assault is more likely to happen and reject it. They will say you are already allowing a risk and that in itself is unacceptable. (Same reasoning why same sex parents adopting kids is not allowed here, even when there is heaps of data showing kids elsewhere are fine, they insist we cannot put children at such a risk not knowing the consequences (even if we DO know!) and it’s too much of a gamble.)

Also we both know cases of fake sexual assault stories, who are widely believed even when there is plain evidence of the contrary, exist. What makes you think it would not happen in this case, when trans women are seen as even more inherently predatory than men?

brazenautomaton

If they say “Punishing people more won’t deter them from doing bad things” then we just won a huge victory and we get to reduce all the Draconian sentences for all this other shit, since they are the exact people who say we need to have incredibly harsh sentences to prevent people from doing bad things. But I doubt they’ll say that.

And yes, we do know cases of fake sexual assault stories exist. The point is that by being a rider on a sexual assault conviction instead of a crime in and of itself, it does not increase the ability of anyone to frame trans people for sexual assault. It doesn’t even increase the incentive to do so, as it isn’t like the utility of framing someone for being trans is correlated with the number of years they serve is convicted.

We keep saying that there’s no reason to be afraid because letting trans people use the right bathroom is not exposing anyone to danger. If we won’t do this, then either

A: we believe that trans people will commit enough sexual assault in bathrooms that this will be a problem and that means we have been lying this whole time, or

B: we believe that trans people using the right bathroom in transphobic areas will lead to a rash of them being falsely accused of sexual assault, in which case why the fuck are we trying to push this law on transphobic areas when we believe it will just lead to trans people being falsely accused?

right-wingers keep saying “The left wants to let people into the women’s room to assault them because they can claim they ‘identify’ as a woman! It’s just a way for perverts to threaten (precious, wonderful) women!”

we keep telling them “That isn’t what this law is about and that isn’t a thing that happens anyway, the thing you are concerned with is not an event that occurs, you are imagining it, this is only about not harming people for being trans”

if the slightest token effort to put our money where our mouth is and say “this is so much not about letting people attack women in the bathroom that if anyone actually tries to do that we’ll come down way harder on them, because we want to show that we are not about letting women get attacked, and because we don’t think trans people being allowed to use the right bathroom will cause them to attack women” gives us pause, then we need to stop and figure out how we have fucked up because we have fucked up very very very badly.

mitigatedchaos

I am all about this kind of ideological trade.

politics gender politics

discoursedrome

So this came up and, like, I have mixed feelings about means testing but this is the worst argument against it. People aren’t advocating for means testing because they resent wealthy people getting social benefits, they’re doing it because there’s a finite, usually too-small budget, and there’s an obvious appeal to spending $2000 a person on the bottom 25% of earners instead of spending $500 a person on everybody, many of whom can the same service out-of-pocket. It’s commonly the case that the amount of service you could provide with the budget you have is so low that if you extend it to everybody it won’t actually serve the needs of the people it’s intended for, and the most common way of addressing this is “make the service so terrible that everyone who can afford it pays for something else”, which is not that far from means testing.

The better objection to means testing is that it creates a marginal tax on earning more income, and it stigmatizes the benefit in question. People will be more likely to want to retool or repeal it if it’s overtly redistributive rather than being pitched as a “dividend of citizenship.” I practice I don’t think this usually overcomes the practical benefit of having four to ten times as much money to work with, but it’s something.

mitigatedchaos

Well, the idea with these universal programs, such as some kind of healthcare voucher or a universal basic income, is that you just tax more to make up for it. If it’s well-designed, then it will add on to the rich people’s personal spending rather than attempting to replace it with sub-par service, but they’ll still not come out ahead due to the higher taxes.

I would think this is sort of implicit in these kinds of arguments. Maybe not, though?

Source: berniesrevolution politics

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

Denmark's right-wing anti-migrant leader Pernille Vermund 'polling well ahead of election' | World | News | Express.co.uk

Denmark's right-wing anti-migrant leader Pernille Vermund 'polling well ahead of election' | World | News | Express.co.uk

Republicans Propose Bill Making it LEGAL for Police To Shoot and Kill UNARMED Protesters

Republicans Propose Bill Making it LEGAL for Police To Shoot and Kill UNARMED Protesters

What happens if people can’t own nations?