Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[elementarynationalism]

Honestly if the Indian government buying the bullet train off of the Japanese in the hopes it repeats its zero-accident track record in Delhi isn’t the most ingenious experiment in human biodiversity theory, please find me a better one.

Wait until Dinesh decides the bolts don’t really need to be screwed on as tight as Takashi told him and we’ll see if they match that record.

[mitigatedchaos]

Bro, m8, buddy, pal,

We don’t have a non-corrupt India with which to separate out biological factors, including environmental ones (such as poor nutrition), so “does India fuck up the bullet train” does not work as an experiment for your hypothesis.

[elementarynationalism]

You’re not dealing any more in the scientific method than I am. You hazard to bet the fact that bullet trains won’t work in India is down to something intangible like “corruption” and I’m suggesting it’s got more to do with human capital.

People who shit in the street and ride on the top of freight trains aren’t doing so because of poor nutrition, fam.

[mitigatedchaos]

But they might out of cultural factors.  (Also, poor nutrition, in the aggregate, could harm national IQ and mental health, among other things.)

Corruption is a norm, it can be removed (Singapore) by sufficiently-determined group of actors passing and enforcing the right laws.

The trick is that it’s based on expectations about others engaging in corruption and expectations of getting caught.  It also arises when it’s impossible to function without violating the rules.

When corruption rates are high, there is not only a social expectation that one will get away with it, but there’s also the effect of “but everyone else is doing it - why do they get to benefit, but not me?”  Additionally, there are networks of corruption that can be relied on.

Increasing the odds of getting caught and punished above a certain level eradicates the pro-corruption network effects.  (This could be achieved with a series of sting operations all unleashed at once as a form of shock therapy.)  At that point, corrupt officials become isolated individuals with far less expectation of getting away with it.

After a while, the next generation of bureaucrats rises in which the default is that corruption is almost unthinkable, and the relative rarity at that point makes it much less costly to police.

Under Communism, because it’s so at odds with reality, arresting the corrupt officials won’t work as well because they may have to lie and be corrupt to survive, normalizing corruption.  Similarly, some cultures with a strong external locus of control or other elements may be prone to corruption.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

This is not intended to be as condescending a question as it reads, but I was wondering if you've studies public policy in university or if you have any qualifications relating to policy or political theory?

My major in university was originally Political Science, and then Political Science/Philosophy/Economics, before I switched to Computer Science, after I started selling some software/3D trinkets, so to speak.  I’ve taken classes in international law, comparative politics, intellectual property, economics, and so on.

But my education in those fields is incomplete, and I’m not entirely well-suited to them.  

This is a wildcat politics blog.  I have no blogging license, nor sanction from the establishment.

I’m not approved by your mother, your progressive liberal friends, or the New York Times.  I’ve been compared to Neoreaction, I cannot be cited in arguments, and even if you wanted to cite me, my identity is a deliberate mystery - though I suppose that last part isn’t new in politics.

Of course, what did the Establishment get us?  The Iraq War?  Meddling in Libya and in Syria?  Migration crisis in Europe, and then refusing to acknowledge the issues it causes?  Housing shortages paired with high immigration?  And what advice do they offer the cities of the interior, but to wither and die?  

Some benefit, they may have gotten us, but something better than them must exist somewhere, or some time in the future.  Liberal Democracy, in its modern incarnation, is not the end of history, but Democracy means that we all practice politics.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[shlevy]

If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?

[shlevy]

Also, these arguments usually suffer from the same flaw as “atheism is just another religion”: they are almost always part of a call for more physical force, but if you’re cool with that what exactly is your objection in the first place?

[argumate]

there are no economic incentives that aren’t ultimately backed by force, in any system

[mitigatedchaos]

Exactly.

And the objection isn’t so much “but they use force,” but rather “you’re claiming your system is Special and therefore should be treated differently.  It is not Special, and therefore it lacks moral weight to prohibit us from altering it.”

Typically, it’s in response to bitching about “how dare there be taxation!  commerce is freedom!”, when someone suggests some redistributive program.  But if it’s work-or-starve, then this whole “commerce is freedom” thing is fundamentally undermined, and you don’t get to claim you avoid any responsibility just because you’re not the one holding the metaphorical gun.

Property, as it exists in nature, is not morally binding, and that’s the only sense in which it exists independently of malleable human construction.

Property might be useful as a concept, but that’s very different from it having inherent rather than instrumental moral binding.

(tired in writing this, maybe a bit confusing.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[shlevy]

If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?

[discoursedrome]

Hmm, I dunno. Pretty much all states forbid some kinds of physical force but not others, and some kinds of economic incentives but not others. This is especially true when looking at de facto rather than de jure enforcement. In the eyes of the institution, I’d say that the kinds of economic incentives that are banned are more like the kinds of physical force that are banned than they are like the kinds of economic inventives that are permitted. “Is this permitted or not” is just about the most institutionally-salient quality.

Thus, I’m not sure any actually-existing systems really are built on a clear differentiation between those two categories. They tend to be grouped as distinct species in the sense that, say, bribery is distinct from assault, but this seems more like statutory syntactic sugar than the kind of substantive qualitative difference that the “physical versus and economic coercion” distinction is purported to represent under liberalism. It seems like more of a rhetorical distinction than one that people actually build societies around.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).

Huh.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[anarchyinblack]

In honor of the brave men and women of Loss Prevention, who work tirelessly and thanklessly as gainfully employed workers of the private sector, and protect the many goods we enjoy from being stolen by looters and parasites, I’m promoting this, the Thin Yellow Line flag.

These men are on the front lines every single day, preventing communists and advocates of alternative lifestyles from stealing makeup and other luxury goods ostensibly in the name of worker liberation, preventing their fellow workers from bearing the costs in the form of shortened hours and layoffs, and keeping prices low for the rest of us in society who actually produce utility for others.

When you see these private security enforcers at your local Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, or Macy’s, salute them, because they are the line between civilization and barbarism, and they do it without extorting the taxpayer or murdering innocent people in the street.

[mitigatedchaos]

This works both with a sincere and an ironic reading.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@feotakahari

In other words, the core of the problem is that women would choose the “wrong” people to marry, so they should be forcibly restricted in who they can marry for the good of society.

That is fucked up.

Given that we already live in a monogamous society, and 1) the Middle East is significantly more fucked up than our society, and 2) the proponents for polygamy will not make the necessary ideological trades in order to avoid the outcome of becoming more fucked up like the Middle East?

It doesn’t bother me.

Because the argument is generally based on “rights” and “freedoms,” the option “only let men marry stacks of women in proportion to the rate that women marry stacks of men" is not really on the table.

Oh, and, if I were in charge of the country, I would tax junk food.  For your “how anti-freedom is Mitigated Chaos” calibration purposes.  Additionally, I would ban new cousin marriage out to the second or third degree.

Edit: Oh, and I suppose you don’t support racial anti-discrimination laws, do you?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@poipoipoi-2016

In response to that last, I’ve heard enough stories about my paternal grandparents to really want divorce to be a thing that happens more often, but at the same time, I heard enough stories about Grandma and her six husbands to be deeply suspect of divorce.

I realized that something related showed up in my life. There was a guy I knew online. Black guy living in a city. His step dad had him working at his small business, and it interfered with his ability to complete school. Then he was of age, and the step dad tried to kick him out, but he didn’t have a job, so he was sneaking into the house to avoid ending up homeless. His resume was terrible, just a few cobbled-together, unformatted paragraphs. I would say “shouldn’t they teach resume writing in school?” but even if they did, the terrible step dad might have had him working or something so that he wasn’t able to attend or complete that! But he was a decent guy, and had a good work ethic, so I went through carefully building a resume with him, and he got a job soon enough after and was able to move out. It’s no wonder he had been depressed earlier! And, like, in between then, we got advice from my ex-girlfriend’s partner, who has lived the low-class life, on how to try to keep him out of the street at night until he could move out.

But how many guys like him are out there, even in this country, you know? Who don’t have a hand-me-down laptop and a connection to a bunch of random nerds who know how to write a resume for him so he can get a stable income?

So I can’t really be a true GOPper, but also the risk with the step parents stuff is real.

[mitigatedchaos]

@neoliberalismnightly

still though, aren’t libraries a thing?

1. Is the library going to let him stay overnight?
   
2. Is the library going to tell him what he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know?
3. Is the library going to think to ask him to look at his resume to try and find out why he’s having so much trouble getting a job?
4. Is the library going to carefully go over his first draft at a new resume according to an intuition on writing these things by someone who can speak a bit of corporatese?
5. How fast can the library improve his professional (not casual, which in this case was fine due to his communicating on the internet a lot before) writing skills?  Is it fast enough?
6. Is the library going to help him filter the information he does receive in case some of it is junk?

Having libraries is good in part for these reasons, but it isn’t really enough.

[its-okae-carly-rae]

Does the US have anything equivalent to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau? They can probably help with 2, 3, maybe 4, maybe 5, and 6, and they’re in at least some of the libraries here. 

[mitigatedchaos]

I’ve literally never heard of such a thing.  It might be a suitable use of government funds.  After all, markets don’t function correctly without information, right?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[anaisnein]

It’s not just this, it’s a fundamental inability to *identify* with other people and realize that *that could be me*.

Today I am 31 and healthy and always exercise regularly and eat well so why should I pay for other people’s expensive preexisting conditions and disabilities? Because obviously it’s not possible that when I’m 34 I might get diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic leukemia and need expensive meds forever. Or that when I’m 36 I might have a child with cerebral palsy who is able to live a full, rich, happy and ~productive~ life but will need expensive healthcare and ongoing assistance to do so. Or that when I’m 48 I might get hit by a car and be left unable to work full time, in need of assistance, etc, myself. Or that when I’m 53 I might get some random-bad-luck cancer (let’s make it easy: not even talk about how lung cancer does in fact happen to nonsmokers or how in any case it’s disgusting to call it “fair” when it happens to a smoker because that punishment doesn’t fit the crime you sadists; instead, let’s consider one of the myriad cancers that hits at genuine fucking random or by some familial genetic vulnerability the individual can’t affect) for which a curative treatment actually exists but it costs $260,000 and without it the prognosis is eighteen months.

Same applies to poverty. (And for some of the same reasons as already sketched, as well as economic cycles and industrial shifts and automation and so on.)

It’s this pervasive prosperity-gospel belief that bad things by definition only happen to the undeserving and trying to help people who experience misfortune is hubris and interfering with the will of the great gods Natural Selection and The Market and doomed to create more problems than it solves because fate favors the lucky because the lucky are deserving because Gnon because *blithering evil*.

[slartibartfastibast]

I don’t know how to explain thermodynamics and free lunch stuff to people who don’t already have some acquired grounding in physical reality. I also keep saying that caring about other people isn’t the problem (Richard Spencer would probably say he “cares about people”). It’s caring about systems, some of which take care of people (and in a catastrophic failure would become unable to take care of people at all) that’s the problem. If you’re too nihilistically individualized, you’ll apparenrly fail to notice how systems fit together (and don’t). Screaming about it doesn’t seem to help, because systems still fail even when you scream at them. I don’t have an easy answer, but if the most widespread centrist position means ignoring Rotherham-type stuff, then fuck that too.

[mitigatedchaos]

The economy is like the tyranny of a rocket equation.  You only have so much fuel, the gravity between the worlds is already there and you can’t change it.  

It is physically impossible to meet all the goals - there just aren’t enough resources (natural resources * capital * labor * technology) to accomplish them all.

American GDP-per-capita is above $50,000.  Foreign GDPs outside of a few hyper-efficient places like Hong Kong or Singapore are lower.

If one person takes $3,000,000 to keep alive, you have effectively consumed the complete economic output of one person’s whole entire life.

But it’s worse than that, because our worker had to pay for housing, for food, for transport, for education, and taxes to support all the secondary systems required, and also raise a child to perpetuate the system.  If all that’s leftover after all that is $10,000 per year, then any $3,000,000 case consumes the total lifetime surplus resources of five workers.

And I look at many of these cases and do think “fuck, that could be me” - which is part of why I suggested a wage subsidy program!

But a lot of Leftist or Liberal language wants to allow people to create unlimited burdens on society.  They want us to pay for treatment while not allowing us to prohibit people from doing things that would require more treatment, or creating people that require more treatment.

You can’t have both!  You can’t have both!

The fewer the number of people that require expensive treatment, the more resources you can spend on them.  The more that need expensive treatment, relative to the size of the productive economy, the less you can spend on each one, until it falls below the level required for them to survive.

If is vitally important that society become more efficient and more technologically advanced.  We must produce more, and more efficiently.

And we can’t just throw aside social technologies.  If broken homes fuck people up, statistically, and cause them not to do well in the labor force, then the cost of that comes out of liver transplants, not just ferraris.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

But What About the Right?

[mitigatedchaos]

There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too.  Does it not backfire for them?  Why do right-wingers get a pass?”

And, in fact, it does backfire for them.  It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars.  Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment.  It’s a price paid in National Will.  

What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War?  What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on?  There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.  

How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?

To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control.  One must be worthy.

The Right, in many ways, has not been.  And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.

[mailadreapta]

All this talk of “becoming worthy” makes you sound like NRx, my bro.

[mitigatedchaos]

If I recall correctly (and I may not), one of the most famous emperors of China used deception and murder to achieve his rule - but under him, the people and the Empire prospered.

Less dramatically, and far more modern, Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party have used lawsuits and other means to suppress their political opposition.  But what have they achieved?  Did they exercise virtue in statecraft?  Did the people under their rule prosper?

(Though even that modern example has had its risks - there is some worry that with LKY no longer at the helm, there may have been mismanagement of government funds at the very top.)

Not only must the people be worthy, but the structure and ideology must be worthy, too.  Systems, interlocking, that must find those who are worthy and elevate them, reward virtue, and minimize vice.

The Neoreactionaries are wrong, though that does not mean their opponents are right.