ＲＥＶＯＬＵＴＩＯＮ ＩＳ ＯＶＥＲＲＡＴＥＤ
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
Not all content will have sufficient warning tags.
The sad part is, once that little ideology-huffing guy leaves my image like the Anon asked, it will one day end up as part of a boomerpost on Twitter, where the ideology label is replaced with “DEMOCRAT PROPAGNDA”.
Its true use as a memetic ordnance does intend the first panel as a key part of the payload, but it lacks the full subtext without the rest of it:
The idea that Liberal Democracy is the natural moral order of the universe enables the very imperialism that people complain about, fucks up the countries that could have been made into real liberal democracies by that very imperialism, and gets people killed.
Against truth, we spread this idea of liberal democracy and human rights as the end of history, the final triumph of the Enlightenment ideals that reshaped our civilizations, out of fear that to do otherwise would result in a war of all against all. But this, too, had its consequences.
If this sounds like some bullshit they’d pull in Singapore, that’s not an accident.
Sovereignty is won by force. Every murder, every bombing, every acid attack undermines the legitimacy of the state. Why listen to the government when someone else could kill you just as easily?
@wirehead-wannabe I’m still not sure why you’d read this blog as seeming right-wing. Sounds pretty improbable to me.
If this sounds like some bullshit they’d pull in Singapore, that’s not an accident.
Sovereignty is won by force. Every murder, every bombing, every acid attack undermines the legitimacy of the government. Why listen to the government when someone else could kill you just as easily?
The mighty iron hand of the Singaporean state would not let such a thing go so easily. It would seek to crush such opposition.
These behaviors can be stopped at the margins, if they are stopped now. Otherwise, this is the future you choose.
I think white supremacists lean really hard on the framing that they’re not destroying peaceful integrated multicultural societies, they’re just noticing that those never existed anyway or are about to collapse anyway.
And of course it’s a transparent lie. There are lots and lots of societies that have had successful peaceful integration. Racists and xenophobes are the force making integration difficult and dangerous and fragile; there’s not some other force that they are just innocently noticing. (Bad economic conditions and weak governments and violence all contribute to making racist and xenophobic movements more appealing. But it’s important to observe that the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ is still caused by the racists and xenophobes acting, it’s not something that happens separately from them.)
Look, it’s true that Europe is not on the verge of a race war. They are not one more bombing away from all the white people mysteriously obtaining guns and launching a new “crusade” against the “saracens” amongst them. (They might be on the verge of the breakup of the EU.)
On the other hand, just because there is relative order does not mean things are as safe as they could be. What’s going on right now looks more like “ethnic tension.” When open Atheists get killed by vigilantes in Islamic countries it isn’t something you encounter on the street, usually. Likewise, when you see low-level violence it’s often going to be in low-SES areas, not where the tourists are. And, of course, that white guy making a van attack against seven random Muslims in response to van attacks by Muslims is more like an ethnic revenge killing in less-developed nations than a declaration of war.
And yes, it’s statistically improbable that you will be killed in the next concert bombing, and technically people should be more worried about falling furniture or whatever, but… The marginal costs are totally out of whack here, everyone knows these bombings are entirely unnecessary while it is pretty much inevitable that some people will die in furniture accidents no matter how hard you try.
Plus we all know that if the terrorists get their hands on an atomic bomb, they will vaporize New York. Furniture would never do this.
(We can also tell that the terrorism either isn’t really about stopping interference in the middle east, or that the terrorists are literally too stupid or ideological to realize what they’re doing isn’t working, because it has been very, very ineffective at that goal. Like, “the Bush Administration was able to get the American public to back the Iraq War” spectacularly ineffective. So “tolerate harder” is unlikely to stop it.)
Here is the problem. Multiculturalism as ideology makes for weak governments.
Wanting to maximize diversity is a non-sensical goal that should result in trying to create as many ethnic groups as there are people. All this “we need more diversity” and “celebrate diversity” stuff is like a religious law that was adaptive and then lost its usefulness but continued on because people didn’t follow it for its adaptiveness.
The real purpose of tolerance as a construct was to prevent continued justifications of war in Europe along religious lines, or something of that kind. It’s a social technology, not a virtue.
It is necessary to recognize the differences among cultures, and act accordingly. Liberalizing social atomization can only occur naturally if cultural forces/practices create the necessary environment.
With its “antiracism” and “decolonization” and opposition to assimilation, multiculturalism as ideology is actively preventing this.
You have to consider how different cultures propagate and support themselves. So that means, if you want to end this nonsense, well…
Ban cousin marriage, out to the second or even third degree. How exactly do these families keep such tight control on “their” women that they think that they own them? Well, being able to arrange marriages without even leaving the family might have something to do with it! Having to marry farther out means women must be given more freedom in practical terms, which will loosen and help eventually destroy their grasp.
Refuse to accept the legalization of polygamy. Polygamy is actually polygyny in practice usually, particularly in the countries these groups are coming from. The child marriage, patriarchal control of women, all of that flows from the gender ratio imbalance under polygamy. Polygamy is bad for women, it is bad for children, it is bad for wealth and for education. Even in the West.
Execute honor killers. Yes, I know, but we want to put the brakes on this now before it sticks. The key is to flip the social status of honor killers from “something those oppressive ethnic majority members stop us from doing and which we will resist” to “you’d have to be a fucking idiot to kill your sister and get executed for it.”
Make killing anyone for leaving a religion a hate crime. Again, it’s a method of control that prevents liberalizing atomization. If that isn’t enough, if people still kill others for leaving Islam, execute them.
Stiffer penalties for FGM and acid attacks. Not only are these methods that those communities use to reinforce their control and prevent atomization, but acid attacks have started catching on among the natives. Political pressure not to crack down on FGM must be stopped in its tracks before it can reach the critical theshold to be co-opted by political parties.
I’m going to start a new political party. It’s the Human Rights Abuses Are Bad party, and our platform is that we don’t like human rights abuses. I understand from this election cycle that this is a controversial opinion but I think it has a lot of merit
Actually, politics pretty much always involves deciding who is going to die.
That might be violent criminals, that might be cops, that might be dudes who are not violent criminals that get killed by cops anyway. That might be cancer patients who die because you didn’t immediately seize all wealth to use for treating cancer. That might be future patients that die because you seized all wealth, undermining new treatment development.
Even if you get rid of the state, that, too, is a decision about who will die.
You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in
which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in
choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means
using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low
performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that
had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning
efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in
fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in
removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state
and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent
newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not
unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation
has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic
penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when
a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with
a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages
and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements
and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social
comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in
China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in
middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel
(including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable -
892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790
in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by
international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual
cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost
two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income
developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares
with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’tsocialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
I view welfare spending not so much as a matter of rights, but as something you get away with.
If you have enough money, and you’re clever enough about it, you can get away with spending money on people who are not net economically productive members of society. This is good if you can manage it, since people don’t really deserve to suffer for not being very economically productive, but you have to keep in mind the underlying economic reality - only what is produced can be consumed.
And if you’re smart about it, then you can set the situation up so you have more production relative to the people that need welfare over the long term, and you can then either increase the welfare (or send it to more people) or reduce its (per capita) effective burden.
The form of direct action against abusive employers that I personally find the most tempting (this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or anything, just that I daydream about it):
Employees often don’t file legal complaints about wage fraud and illegal conditions because they can’t afford to lose the job because they’re living paycheck to paycheck. I expect that many people in this situation would quit their horrible job and file a legal complaint if they would be given like $1200 to tide them and their family over while they found a new job.
So here’s what I’d be tempted to do: ask people online to tell you about a business that’s engaging in wage and hours violations/otherwise really shitty but still its employees’ best option. Find one with like 10-15 employees. Fundraise money within your activist group and online to get enough money for every single employee to walk away.
Then the employees go to their boss and say ‘the next time you take half our tips even though you’re not legally allowed to take any/make us come in when we’re really sick/deduct damaged merchandise from our paychecks/etc, we all walk away. We have filed a wage claim in court. If you retaliate for that, we all walk away.’
And then, you know, next time the employer breaks the law, any employee who wants to follow through on the threat gets $1200 to support them once they’ve quit. And then you publicize the heck out of it, and scare other shitty employers, and hopefully the wage claim is successful and your employees get recompensed the money they were owed. And you open online applications for the next place.
You’d have to be very careful to go after places with real, documented, verified workplace conditions violations, because most of the benefit is in the publicity and the scaring other employers into shaping up. And you can’t scare people into shaping up if they don’t know exactly what they need to do (meet their legal obligations). You could only go after small places, because you need most of the employees on the same page and because fundraising larger sums of money would be harder.
But with the right fundraising and PR team, I bet you could create conditions under which employers are way more scared to cheat their employees.
Because employees lack negotiating leverage, the government should have a network of secret labor law informants, such that no business can be entirely sure they won’t get smacked down hard for flagrant violations. Simultaneously, the labor laws could be simplified.
Yes I do remember the part in Grapes of Wrath where the farmers followed the legally empowered Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s directives to destroy food.
“The Roosevelt Administration was tasked with decreasing agricultural surpluses,” to quote Wikipedia quoting Douglas.
Huh, it turns out that that act was forced into existence by large farmers and food processors, who financially benefit from people starving! All while these people horribly exploited their workers to the point of starvation and viciously rebelled against the “socialistic” resettlement program!
Turns out that these bastards love to see people die. Huh.
It’s important to remember that the Market™ pays people to subvert public ownership of the State.
This demand originates within the market and then subverts any state not adequately designed to resist it. Paring back the state doesn’t actually get rid of the demand, and may, depending on circumstances, make the problem worse.
The solution to this, of course, is to just give low-wage workers money instead of making laws that try to force their employers to do it. No one should have to live on the money they can bring home from $9/hour? Agreed! Give them money.
What will happen as a result is, of course, that companies will routinely underpay their employees, effectively outcompeting companies that pay fair wages purely on the taxpayer’s dime, which is by the way what already happens when people who work are paid low enough to be eligible for welfare.
When companies underpay the employees and you pay those employees instead, you reward companies for underpaying employees.
The correct course of action is to force companies to pay fair wages to employees. The incorrect course of action is to provide companies with more market incentives for not doing so.
That is a factual statement also.
A value judgement would be if you’d disagree with me that people like me are not literal subhumans (which is by the way the universal opinion of people who endorse underpaying as much as possible).
It depends - do we have individuals paying the low wage workers and not a subsidy to all low wage workers by the State? Then the problems with the libertarian plan will ruin it, that’s how the economics works. Do we have state action instead? Then the leverage of all low wage workers will be increased by other economic effects.
