1.5M ratings
277k ratings

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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
the-grey-tribe

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

thathopeyetlives

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible. 

Today things are… different. 


It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution: 

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody. 

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology


I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on. 

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last. 

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)


If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure. 


I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags. 

rendakuenthusiast

Endorsed.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics the invisible fist mostly endorsed the red hammer

Look, I get that some people find religion more than just a little helpful, but extremely helpful, something that prevents their lives from falling apart.

And so I get concerned about the “we need to purge all religion everywhere” position, since I worry that it might accidentally break something that we won’t even realize is broken for some time, and then it will take a lot of time and effort to fix.

However, having experienced pretty directly that our control of ourselves is partially indirect, including ways in which personality is biologically-rooted, I cannot endorse infinite moral liability for finite moral flaw.

That’s also one of my oppositions to Anarcho-Capitalism.  None of us truly have the agency to agree to an infinite deal, much less to be threatened into one.

politics perpendicular wood the invisible fist
argumate
napoleonchingon

With businesses as well as employers as well as landowners, large entities are better at ruthlessly maximising profit and also are better at responding to regulations. Whereas small entities often go for something other than maximising profit, and if it’s “being decent”, great, but then for some reason sometimes it’s “being pointlessly petty and cruel”. So you get a situation where large entities are often worse on average in very specific ways, but the very very worst and most unfathomable are the small ones.

Source: napoleonchingon the invisible fist queue
argumate
argumate

Even HPMOR points out that people who obsess over avoiding death are typically considered evil, and Peter blood-of-the-youth Thiel isn’t really doing anything to counter that impression, is he.

blackblocberniebros

I kinda hope someone shoots Thiel, not just because he deserves it, but also because it would be so great for all his research into human longevity to go to waste. You might be able to outrun telomere decay or whatever, but you can’t outrun hot lead.

argumate

unless I’m woefully misinformed about the level of his crimes against humanity, I’d be extremely hesitant to endorse murdering the man as I think any grounds on which to do so would apply to way too many people.

blackblocberniebros

Being a billionaire in and of itself constitutes an extremely serious crime. One cannot possess that level of power and influence over other people’s lives without, not even intending to, carelessly harming and killing people.

There’s a reason people use the word “obscene” to describe extreme wealth. Because that’s what it is, disgusting, brutal, bloody, destructive.

argumate

guess Jack Ma is ten times as bad, then

does it make a difference if his billions are invested in shares of publicly traded companies, US government bonds, or cash stashed in a storage locker?

if you divided the ownership of his wealth between ten people, but they kept it in the exact same form as he has it now, would that make them each 1/10 as evil as he is, even though the net effect of the wealth on society hasn’t changed?

mitigatedchaos

…why do I suddenly find myself rooting for Peter Thiel to become immortal, and not just discover life extension technologies that can eventually be extended to most of humanity?

Anyhow, what difference does it make if it’s a person that has that power, versus vast, impersonal forces?  Vast, impersonal forces carelessly harm and kill lots of people as well, but their perceived liability is spread so wide that it’s hard to see - and composed of the same personal failings but spread out over a lot of smaller and imperfect humans.

….vast, impersonal forces that could easily exist, or have equivalents, under other economic modes.  

For instance, if we executed all the billionaires, how many people would die due to subsequent lack of technological progress and making that technology cheap enough to be widely accessible?

It seems to me like the pro-guillotine camp here would deny any moral liability for these after-effects.

the invisible fist the red hammer politics
argumate
argumate

“Movies will be free after the revolution!”

Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?

shlevy

Centralized committee!

argumate

Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!

mitigatedchaos

shtpost visual shtpost the mitigated exhibition what even is this blog the invisible fist the iron hand the red hammer
xhxhxhx
xhxhxhx

Syntelligence ran into its own hurdle when it came to choosing a problem to solve with artificial intelligence. It began work on a product that would give expert investment advice to financial firms. The idea was to incorporate the expertise of Wall Street luminaries like Henry Kaufman, the former Salomon Brothers chief economist. But the company discarded the project because it determined that there were not any real experts when it comes to investment decisions.

tfw there are no experts for your expert systems

the invisible fist
corporateespionage
tranarchist

Day 1: Read Settlers

Day 30: Amish Genocide

thathopeyetlives

What the?

isaacsapphire

Amish are landowners. Actually pretty substantial land owners.

thathopeyetlives

Yeah, they are.


The “joke” is more on the spectacularly totalizing ideology, inability to tolerate wierd random sects even in theory, general “yikes” factor.

isaacsapphire

I’m actually currently considering using, “what does your ideology/you think of the Amish?” As a stock useful question to extract a lot of information that I care about fast.


Because you get this kind of thing, where inability to tolerate cultural/economic/religious differences is illustrated. You also get people who fall over themselves to say how wonderful the Amish are and how they are a good example of what they want to make all of society look like.

mitigatedchaos

My belief: Transhumanism is actually Good, but we need to establish areas and precedents such that things like Amish communities can still exist and be totally unaugmented, not just on a “legally permitted” level, but on an “economically feasible” level.  (And not necessarily sharing in truly spectacular levels of wealth of the rest of society - the key thing is not desperate enough that they gradually have to give up or disappear.)

squareallworthy

“The state is obligated to maintain the economic feasibility of every community’s chosen lifestyle” is a pretty deep hole to dig yourself into.

mitigatedchaos

Not so much the Amish specifically, as I believe that Transhumanism should be voluntary.

And voluntary for real, not “it’s technically voluntary, but if you don’t engage in it, you starve to death.”

Also maintaining low-tech farming communities somewhere probably hedges against some kind of disaster.

pissbabyanarchist

Ok, but at what level (of wealth presumably?) do you reject the “legitimacy” of their cultural free zone.

mitigatedchaos

It’s a tough question since it requires an effective subsidy, but it’s not something you can give a hard answer to because it’s situational.

An uncontacted tribe was recently wiped out by gold miners (unconfirmed).  That subsidy could be in the form of preventing them from getting wiped out, but it’s still a subsidy.

The thing is that one thing that really scares people about Transhumanism is that it could become economically mandatory.

pissbabyanarchist

It’s hard to answer because central planning is fundamentally flawed.

You have to either be okay with destroying communities like the Amish or you have to allow markets to exist in some communities.

Which begs the question, at what level of wealth are they no longer culturally significant enough to be left alone? Why does wealth make a community less culturally significant?

mitigatedchaos

Look, what “The Market” wants WRT Transhumanism is potentially fucking terrifying.

Just having people be healthy all the time isn’t enough for “The Market”.  It’s ludicrously productive relative to the current day, but market forces don’t have a nice stopping point unless acted on by non-market forces.

Are you willing to modify yourself into a workbot whose preferences are only to fiercely and competitively work, eschewing basically everything else human?

If the answer is “no,” then “The Market” will allow you to be outcompeted for scarce resources by someone who will.  Previously, this wasn’t as dangerous because basically no one could actually do that, and people could not replicate themselves.

The only way to avoid it is to tamper with the market instead of declaring that the market is morally inviolable.

The simple way to do that is something like just cutting everyone a check such that basic needs are met.  That probably isn’t enough by itself, but it takes us a lot of the way there.  It’s also most of the help those kinds of communities will need in the… let’s call it the medium term.

Anyhow, that’s only “markets don’t exist” if you think taxes negate the existence of “markets” - and since I view markets as purely a tool to be cynically used, and not morally binding, then if that’s the cost, then that’s the cost.

Do we crack open the land or cut off checks if other conditions get bad enough?  We might have to.  After all, groups like the Amish, and others who are, for lack of a better word, “weak”, depend for defense on the surrounding country or other stronger agents.  It isn’t something we want to do, but it’s a chance greater than zero.

Pragmatics, dude.  It doesn’t have to all be universals.

Edit: Or, to put it another way, relative to other goals I want to accomplish, and the means I want to accomplish them by, keeping the Amish around and Amish doesn’t really cost that much, marginally.

I mean, what, I have to keep high-on-self-righteousness Progressive Communists from killing them all due to “Settler Colonialism”?  In any scenario like that, I have to oppose the Communists anyway.  Someone could invade the country and seize the Amishlands?  I have to prevent or repel the invasion of the country anyway.  Plague of robot locusts?  Well, that isn’t only a problem for the Amish, now is it?

So you’re imagining some sort of huge commitment, probably, but it isn’t.  Inertia and cultural things and so on will probably keep them Amish for some time without requiring that much energy that wasn’t already going to be spent anyway.  And if it doesn’t, and they just all spontaneously decide not to be Amish, not out of desperation, but just because they got tired of it and wanted hovercars more or something, then it’s not what I was looking for as a hedge anyway, so you know, let them.

Source: tranarchist the invisible fist
Top Photos