Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@txwatson

But there’s a real, and significant, segment of his supporters who voted for him because of, not in spite of, the racism, misogyny, and fascist policy.

Do you know the logic behind the US government releasing Tor to the public?  It’s along the lines of the following - if the only people that use Tor are American spies, than any US agent found using onion routing software will be outed.  If many people use Tor for a variety of activities, then the presence of onion routing software could mean anything from ordinary local black market dealings to just being paranoid.

The signal is hidden in the noise.

Well, congratulations, because that can also happen unintentionally as a Tragedy of the Commons with words such as “racism” and “misogyny”.  People were told to be careful with overusing the terms, but haha, like that was going to happen.  Besides, the people questioning the use of such terms were the Oppressors, right?  They should be mocked for “freeze peach”, right?

Now the overuse of antibiotics has created a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  Oops.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

(1/2) A little while ago, you said: "I can’t think of a great way for a liberal to establish that credibility - emphasizing that you understand why they believe the things they believe was tried very loudly during the campaign ...". You were probably much more in tune with the campaign than I was, but this really isn't what I remember. I recall hearing a lot of "Trump is crazy and so are his policies; it's obvious and he can never win."

theunitofcaring answered:

(2/2) There’s the Michael Moore speech, but I’m not sure what (if anything) he was advocating there. There was also Obama’s thing, but that was at a Clinton rally with Clinton supporters, not an outreach event. Can you point to some examples of Clinton supporters trying to convey understanding to Trump supporters?

I’m thinking mostly of the deluge of articles like these:

Listening to Trump voters

This is who votes for Donald Trump

What a liberal sociologist learned from spending five years in Trump’s America

Who are Donald Trump’s supporters and what do they want?

Understanding the undecided voters

I feel like this was much much more of a genre in the media I was consuming this election compared to any previous election. Of course, maybe all of these attempts at credible empathy were just really bad, because they failed to capture what Trump voters actually cared about or just seeded their characterization with enough “but of course Trump’s still terrible” that it couldn’t resonate with the people it was supposed to describe, but I definitely saw a lot of ‘let’s understand Trump supporters!’

[mitigatedchaos]

The Trump supporters don’t trust the Left/Globalists.  Globalist types held power, and future Trump supporters’ jobs got outsourced, and it wasn’t as easy as economists abstractly imagine it as to get new jobs that paid enough.

In order to get through to them, those against Trump would have had to sacrifice something big and expensive to signal that yes, they really do care, and aren’t just going to throw the Trump supporter-types under the bus the moment they get power, in favor of Multiculturalism, Diversity™ and Globalism.  Hilary Clinton could not credibly send that signal.

Bernie might have, perhaps, but it wasn’t his “turn.”

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

A Calexit would cost the country an enormous amount of money, it’s true, and weaken Trump as well.

But if you’re worried about the most powerful country in the world being too right-wing, removing a large portion of the left-wing population from the voter base seems like the exact opposite of what you should want to do.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

azcapitoltimes.com

Arizona Senate votes to seize assets of those who plan, participate in protests that turn violent

Claiming people are being paid to riot, Republican state senators voted Wednesday to give police new power to arrest anyone who is involved in a peaceful demonstration that may turn bad — even before anything actually happened.

Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

[thathopeyetlives]

Yikes

[wirehead-wannabe]

In all seriousness, isn’t this a violation of the right to assemble?

[mitigatedchaos]

Dammit, this isn’t Singapore.  One can’t just restrict protest in America like this without leading to bad things happening.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[justsomeantifas]

when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.

[mitigatedchaos]

Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.

Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man.  He killed people that didn’t need to be killed.  He dropped people out of helicopters.  He used methods of great violence.  No one should imitate him.

But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.

So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

My concern about Anarchism is that it will just replace formal power with social power, and I don’t think that’s really a step up.

[isaacsapphire]

Yuuuup. I started getting suspicious about how many Anarchists are people who (think they) have social power but lack formal power.

[bambamramfan]

Since you mentioned this in the other thread, I thought I should round up some of my comments and thoughts on anarchism.

Whenever you have a highly controversial word, go to the root. Anarchy means “without hierarchy.” It should not be about the lack of government, but about the lack of levels of power altogether.

Some anarchists do just see it as a lack of government (or rather, the State.) I think they are blisteringly wrong. This would be particularly dumb for anyone who shares normal social justice concerns, because can’t they see right now that women and racial minorities have formal equality before the government, but massively lack social and soft power, such that they get exploited? For all the many problems with the current Left, it is at least aware of the existence of social power in most of its critiques. I can’t see why they’d simply want to do away with the cops and laws and hope… everything works out.

I guess it makes sense for the AnCaps, but they’re just really wrong and would make a Hellworld.

Lack of hierarchy would be better than that, and address the concerns in my Unfreedom essay.

However, I subscribe to anarchism as a lack of coercion, where no one is coerced to do something they don’t want to by any means (well, socially at least.) Coercion is still possible under flat, egalitarian systems after all, and so are many problems of the state, like a cruel justice system. 

It’s a long way to get there, which involves everyone’s norms getting on the page of genuinely caring about the well-being of others (and not throwing a wrench in the works of every consensus because of self-interestedness or fear), but I think it’s possible and better than any of the alternatives. Coercion is just terrible, and begets terribleness.

Right now of course in social terms, anarchist is just an edgelord word for social justice liberals who found their own intentional communities and political action groups, suffused with a great deal of judgmentalism and disregard for the cultural norms of society around them. This disregard includes norms like “Christian charity” and “innocent until proven guilty” so I don’t really give two fucks about them as allies.

[mitigatedchaos]

Simply: I don’t think this alternative is possible, and the path attempting to get there will just result in social power dominating.

I don’t think it’s actually feasible to get everyone to care about each other like that without massive violations which involve large amounts of coercion to begin with.  Brainwashing techniques and probably literally mind-altering invasive procedures would be required.  Social power is natural and organic, and will arise in almost any system among humans.  People are born unequal before society even gets its hold on them.

Like, are you just going to cancel introverts or something?  Or are you going to get rid of extroversion?  Because if you don’t unify the preferences, then extroverts will have more social power even if they have equal material resources, without even attempting to do so.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Of course people won't stop making art if you took out copyright! It'd just be harder for anyone to be a *professional* artist, who makes art full-time, in any format that's easily copyable and time-intensive. So, you're left with 1)people who can get patrons to support them, 2)people who can do it full-time because they don't have to work, and 3)amateurs/hobbyists (there's nothing wrong with art as a hobby! but typically skill has some correlation with amount of practice).

argumate answered:

Yes. And coordinating large groups of people to make art that requires significant investment (say, movies) would become substantially more difficult.

(Which isn’t necessarily a downside, arguably movies don’t make our lives any better, especially those that require immense budgets. But still).

[ranma-official]

“The only way anyone can ever be a professional artist is if they can own other people’s ideas and force them to not have them! Otherwise they will all go bankrupt! Bankrupt, I say!”

I see that your anons are especially stupid today

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s a pretty uncharitable reading.  The issue with copyright isn’t that it exists at all, thus allowing a shift in the risk for the creation of the work from some parties to other parties (how many kickstarters have failed to deliver?), but that it doesn’t reflect more organic uses such as fanworks - and that it has been extended indefinitely.

In a copyright system, some of the burden of risk can be shifted from the consumer to the publisher, since the consumer can purchase the work after it has already been completed with a near-100% confirmed chance of the work existing.

In a no-copyrights system, the cost of creating the work is shifted to before the work’s creation or completion, as there is no way to be sure that donations will match anywhere near the amount of money from payments/purchases.  (And let’s be honest, here, donations will not match the amount of revenue from payments/purchases.  Less revenue brings up opportunity costs, the money for resources has to come from somewhere, and thus less time since it has to be spent on earning money via other means.)  That puts the risk of the work primarily on the consumers dedicated enough to fund its creation.

In some cases that’s going to be crowdfunding, but in many cases it’s going to be wealthy patrons - the opposite of democratization.

Speaking of owning other people’s ideas, works can already be willingly released into the public domain.  For some reason, that mode of production doesn’t appear to be dominating.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[xhxhxhx]

I had no idea anti-Italian racism was so prevalent in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s

[deusvulture]

I wonder why!

I keep hearing people use this as an analogy to anti-muslim/arab sentiment, and I don’t think they realize that they’re needlessly shooting themselves in the foot. The most law enforcement officers to die in a single attack before 9/11, by *far*, was when Italian anarchists blew a police station to hell (unlucky accident - they were aiming for a less-crowded *church*!).

The fact that kids in school have to learn ad nauseam about Sacco and Vanzetti, and yet no one ever mentions (say) the Wall Street bombing of the same year, is simply nuts.

I’m not saying that prejudice against Italians was “justified” in some metaphysical sense; they’re a plenty successful immigrant group these days. I’m just saying that you wouldn’t have to be a crazy racist to want to stay out of Little Italy at night, or tell a policeman if you saw a Sicilian-looking guy leave his bag on a train seat.

This is all a little tangential to your point, maybe. I guess I’m just sick of seeing references to anti-Italian prejudice in United States history tossed around as if it was a persuasive historical analogy to present situations. There are better ones!

[ranma-official]

Allow me to disagree. While there are many other immigrant groups that have achieved success afterwards, many of them fall under the “model minority” umbrella. Italians are a useful example because of this objectively existing violent sub-culture. The sentiment was that, remember, while this country is one of opportunity, these guys are the exception, they are uniquely bad, they are inherently criminals incompatible with our polite society, and if we keep allowing them then our civilzation will just drown in crime over time.

The most law enforcement officers to die

I don’t agree with this criterion due to the fact that most terrorists simply didn’t target police stations with intent to kill a lot of police, which includes this one.

[mitigatedchaos]

Keep in mind, though, that “Italian” is not an ideology with a well-defined(ish) book detailing exactly what one must do to be Italian - and what one must do to those who fail to uphold the True Principles of Italy.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

unpopular opinion: what if globalisation was fuckin’ awesome

[mitigatedchaos]

Argumate, I didn’t realize you were on the Clinton campaign staff.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[multiheaded1793]

What the European left/center-left needs to do yesterday is to hire the best damn PR people and spin a massive bipartisan thing about integrating immigrants better - something that’s both massively important as a long term policy and to move away from the awful no-win one-dimensional debate, “holy shit just let people in” vs. “they are scum and should keep languishing Over There”.

Jesus fuck. Integration needs INVESTMENT. You don’t just fucking dump people on the ground, give them meager welfare and expect most of them them to adapt somehow. The horrible flaw of liberalism appears to be the unwillingness to convince people that investing in migrants is both better and safer, and instead ending up with a compromise that might well blow up in their faces.

Yes, immigrant crime/etc is not statistically That Bad, but still there’s no way to win on it when your position is not having a position + vague appeals to humanitarianism. If you could outflank the Right on “oh yes, we agree, better law and order, better employment programs, strong communities”, then you’d have something to go on without actually being horribly evil.

Immigration is *not*, historically, a threat to nations - the Goths being an exception that proves the rule. And Europe is wealthy and stable and powerful. This fucking shit should be easy.

Instead, we’ll most likely get a creeping compromise with the Right: less access *and* less funding for helping migrants already here. Which is fucked up.

(p.s. I’ve seen so much concern trolling along the lines of “like it or not, this nice bleeding-heart liberal experiment is something people hate, and it’s with a heavy heart that I call for more barbed wire”. I fucking hate that. The Left needs to save open borders, and the only way to do that is to improve/reframe the whole toxic debate. Not just fucking capitulate.)

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m sorry, but integrating immigrants is White Western Cultural Imperialism.

I mean, I’m joking, but good luck getting the Left to abandon that kind of thinking, and without abandoning that kind of thinking, good luck getting them to support integration.