promethea.incorporated

ilzolende:

dagny-hashtaggart:

eversolewd:

yxoque:

pirozhok-s-kapustoj:

myshipsailson:

pirozhok-s-kapustoj:

pix3lsqu1d:

do you have a “religion” class in your school system

germany:
youp, though it becomes nonmandatory at some point pretty early on (i wouldn’t know when because i went to a catholic school with religion classes all the way) and you can elect sth like “ethics” or “philosophy” instead.

In Bavaria it’s mandatory until you graduate. There’s an “ethics” class if you’re not catholic or protestant and some schools offer an islam class as well.

Well, it is the same here, it is also ethics/philosophy or catholic/protestant/sometimes muslim religious classes, you have to go to one of these.

Yes. Belgium has this. Technically not mandatory, but I went to a Catholic school that offered no other options.

Nope to American public schools. Not even as an elective for my (poor, small, and rural) school.

Public schools (usually the wealthier ones) will occasionally have religious studies/history of religion classes, but the law frowns pretty seriously on anything that appears to be favoring or attacking any particular religion. In private schools it’s pretty much anything goes as long as they meet certain basic educational standards.

I had one in Denmark. It was mostly Protestant, IIRC? I was in the 6th whatever and it seemed mandatory.

Finland, yes, it’s either religion or ethics and members of the Church aren’t allowed to take ethics instead of religion even though it’s way more Actually Useful.

In addition, iirc they’re going to make it so that in high school the only class of a certain category that must be offered to people is religion; everything else is optional. Yes, screw things like history, psychology, economics and government, etc. because ~religion~ is the one that’s vital to know!

ilzolende:

themightyglamazon:

ladynyoko:

hermioneofvulcan:

noraestheim:

listen. i know jk rowling knows absolutely nothing about america but for the entire country to only have a single wizarding school there must be either 200 professors working at this place or you get to your first potions class and it’s held in a fucking baseball stadium.

#[megaphone voice] and now-now-now put your hands together for the DRAUGHT OF LIVING DEATH-eath-eath#[sound of a crowd screaming]#[fireworks]#[indistinct question from the eighty-third row]#[megaphone voice] YES THIS WILL BE ON THE TEST  (via transhansolo)

SO A FRIEND AND I ACTUALLY JUST DID THE MATH ON THIS.

Between 1972-1979 there were 5,802,282 live births in the United Kingdom. These live births account for the roughly 600 Hogwarts students during Harry’s first year, and would make the birth rate of Wizards approximately 0.01% of the population.

The population of the United States in 2014 was 318.9 million -  23.1% of which were children 0-17. That would mean there were 73,665,900 children in 2014. Checking live births from a time period of 1997-2003 (which would account for children aged 11-17) gives us 27,978,287 children. If 0.01% of them were magical, we’re left with 27,978 school age magical children in the United States in 2014.

If we wanted school sizes similar to Hogwarts - 600 children to a school - we would need at minimum 47 magical schools. If we wanted it more comparable to our own schooling - with an average student body size of roughly 1,430 students combined between middle school and high school during the 2009-2010 school years - we’re down to a minimum of 20 magical schools.

So, long story short. It is statistically impossible for there to be a single magical school in the United States.

It’s far more likely there is at least one school in each state, possibly more than one in much larger states like Alaska, Texas, and California while a single school could feasibly serve the clustered smaller states like Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

HUNDREDS OF WIZARDING SCHOOLS IN THE VAST STRETCHES OF UNPOPULATED WESTERN AMERICAN WILDERNESS

PUT THEM ALL IN ALASKA! THEY’D FIT!!!!

Magic is heritable. While spontaneous Muggleborns might have the same prevalence everywhere, I see no reason why that would hold for other wizard types.

Off by an order of magnitude, even if assuming the same prevalence of magic (although, by historical patterns, one could argue that magic-users could be extra-likely to emigrate to the colony/country that isn’t chock full of nosy muggles poking into things they shouldn’t be poking into, and thus the prevalence of magic would be, if anything, higher in the US (especially if muggleborns were to flee discrimination to the frontier, knowing that it’s the place where magic-users are disproportionately other muggleborns and even the purerbloods would be less likely to have a stick in their posterior)).

The US would actually need only 5 Hogwartses or 2 average-sized schools, or one which is way smaller than a reasonably-sized university.

Assuming 2 times higher number of wizards per capita because immigrants, that would be one school ten times the size of Hogwarts which is only implausible culturally, not demographically. The problem is not that there would be too many people, but that the people would be scattered all over.

I find it utterly absurd that a single institution would be able to monopolize everything. Sure, The Big School would be bigger than Hogwarts, but the ~american way~ would be to also have numerous small schools scattered all around, people teaching their children, etc. (I’m assuming no Federal Agency of Magic tracking unauthorized sorcery either, stuff being dealt with in a far more ad hoc fashion when something actually comes up) and probably entire communities with their own culturally distinct traditions and knowledge.

ozymandias271:

sinesalvatorem:

If I were officially made Queen of Social Engineering tomorrow I would designate one accessory that men aren’t allowed to wear (ribbons in hair?) and one that women aren’t allowed to wear (skullcaps?) and make it very clear that violating the rule is not done and basically amounts to forfeiting your gender.

Then I would walk around in public with hair ties and everyone would unambiguously read me as female.

petition: can you add one that only nonbinary people are allowed to wear

maybe we can be the only ones allowed to have undercuts?

Well, actually this would end up being freedom-maximizing in the pragmatic sense because the outcome of having one quite thoroughly consensual and relatively strongly gender-correlating signal would be objectively far less bullshitty than the current state of affairs where people care about gender a lot but refuse to have an unambiguous protocol for positioning oneself within it and thus end up having massive systems of bullshit instead.

It’d be very effective gender harm-reduction.

(Also, is wearing a skullcap with ribbons in your undercut the one which you use to signal “agender” because you’d be forfeiting all genders?)

ilzolende:

nostalgebraist:

Future societies will look back on economics as a kind of foolish male mysticism, and Marçal’s book anticipates the tone of their laughter.

Decided to read the article being quoted. The article itself is fine, but it makes the book sound very unappealing.

• We actually mentioned “GDP doesn’t cover unpaid within-household labor” and “GDP is weird about natural resources” in econ class, and this was a 1-semester Econ For Normal People class.
• “Is that what humans are: Homo Economicus?” No? That’s a name that’s different from “Homo sapiens” for a reason.
• I dislike the idea that my gender is fundamentally linked to collectivism and dependency. If this is what it means to be female, then send me testosterone pls.

The obvious solution is to abolish marriage as an institution where some people are expected to perform labor without compensation, and all other such institutions as well. Every worker deserves their reward, in whatever means of exchange they agree to with the person who benefits from their work.

And the book sounds sexist and gender-essentializing and while probably taking apart some stuff that needs to be taken apart, also grotesquely mischaracterizes a lot of stuff. It is also misgendering me as a “man” to which I will take exceptional levels of offense to.

Another article about it doesn’t help. Straw everywhere. Sounds like sneer culture. It seems to be approximately getting at the root of the problem (the working woman doesn’t get her pay because reasons) and shies off from the obvious implications (eradicate reasons, have the value-creators receive their pay) in favor of something vague which I’m worried would end up being “let’s use the state apparatus of violence to hurt promethea because money don’t real and economy don’t matter”.

There always seem to be undertones of “introduce mandatory maternal leave and make the ~employers~ pay for it” because what women need is totally a violently enforced structure making it economically rational to discriminate. But wait rationality don’t real so that’s why ~just commanding~ people to pay workers who don’t work will obviously work and it’s not like such laws have created a situation where asking people whether they are planning to have children is illegal and thus employers just discriminate indiscriminately against anyone who’s younger than 40 and looks like they might have a uterus.

exsecant:

light-rook:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

ilzolende:

For the record: I know there’s this idea that infodumping at people is bad, but I am definitely interested in being infodumped at about economics, history, linguistics, and probably lots of other things.

Yes, send me your infodumps.

This is a pro-infodump blog.

Infodump at me about anything and everything. I (a person who writes and memorizes lists of weird animal facts as conversation starters) can return the favor.

Also: it is impossible to derail my posts, because they are all way off the rails and miles from the nearest train track to begin with. If you think something is worth commenting, comment. I promise I’m not going to randos-in-my-activity you.

Another infodump enjoyer reporting in.

ozymandias271:

speakertoyesterday:

jadagul:

alexyar:

@nonternary reblogged your post and added: “jadagul: alexyar: @jadagul replied to your post:I can’t believe…”

#sure there’s the T#but has any of you ever needed to go anywhere the T goes

yes?!!! the T is perfect and I will hear nothing against it

wait nonternary, do you live in Pittsburgh?

I mean, I guess if you have a house in the suburbs then maybe, but T’s destination are in the exact opposite direction of where the actual city is

See, this is it exactly!

“Cities with good public transit” are cities where the trains connect the places the people who are talking want to go. That is, a train line that connects the suburbs where (those) people live to the city where they work.

Like, the Bay Area has a reputation for really good public transit. And this is totally undeserved. It’s spread out and comprises multiple totally distinct systems that don’t even connect up.

Unless you only want to see the airport, the SF city center, and possibly Berkeley. If those are your destinations it’s great. So it has a good reputation.

See also how cities are often judged by how easy it is to take the train from the airport into the business or academic areas. Despite the fact that even if you’re trying to hook up to the airport, on a per-trip basis it’s way more useful to connect the airport to the places where the workers live than to the places where the business travelers live. Or stay.

What? The Bay does not have a good transit reputation. Planners look at and maximize trip share, and here the Bay falls short because of Silicon Valley commuting being a mess. Downtown SF is a jobs center, but it isn’t the only one in the Bay Area.

I am SO ENTHUSIASTIC about Bay Area transit because I CAN LEAVE MY HOUSE

IF I WISH TO GO SEE A FRIEND, I CAN TAKE PUBLIC TRANSIT AND WIND UP NEAR WHERE MY FRIEND IS

as someone who spent the first twenty-three years of my life in Florida and Assend of Hell, Michigan, this is A M A Z I N G

I’m from Europe and the transit in the Bay Area is ~almost adequate~!

It’s like “you tried to code your program and it doesn’t catch fire and panic the kernel on every run, now make it actually do the thing it was supposed to do”. It’s like babby’s first mass transit in Cities Skylines. It’s like “I can’t think of any European city that would be relevant enough that anyone would know where it is and have worse mass transit but that doesn’t mean it’s the worst in the world, it’s just worse than any of the actually not-shitty ones”.

It’s like “I have no fucking clue why your local trains use diesel engines that sound like helicopters and can’t accelerate worth shit, but at least you have trains and that’s good by American standards”. It’s like “your metropolitan area of 8 million has almost as many light rail lines as a town of a quarter million in Europe, that’s not utterly horrible”. It’s like “your trams from the 1890s’ Europe are not horribly disgraced by giving dramatically worse service than they gave in the 1890s”.

collapsedsquid:

invertedporcupine:

Unsurprisingly, I’ve seen a uptick in complaints about nationalism lately.  I’d like to take a bit to defend it here, which you might not expect given my liberal-to-liberaltarian leanings.  (The following is mostly not original thought, but it’s not clear to me that many people have actually read Ernst Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Mill v. Acton, etc.)

I think people make a mistake when they conflate “nationalism” with “blood-and-soil ethnic chauvinism”.  If you take a minimal functional definition of nationalism (in the way that a state can do many things, but the definition of what it is is just the monopoly on the legitimate use of force), nationalism is just the principle that “political boundaries should coincide with national ones,” whether the later be ethnic, cultural, or civic in nature.  In this sense (putting aside anarchism), your only two choices are to be a nationalist or an imperialist, since not accepting the nationalist principle implies belief that a central state can have legitimate political authority over peripheral territories that don’t constitute the same nation as the center.

I don’t mean to say here that I think the choice of nationalism over imperialism is the obvious one; only that these should be the terms of the actual debate over what is at stake: is the freedom of the citizenry/the utility of the population inside and outside of one’s own national boundaries maximized by drawing the political lines in the same place as the national ones, or not?

What the defining characteristics of the nation should be is a separate, arguably subordinate debate.  As a liberal, civic nationalist, it pains me to see my center-left fellows ceding the theoretical ground to the uglier elements of the right, allowing the latter to define nations in ethnic terms, and embracing imperialism, if only by default and by accident.  This is how you end up with liberal internationalists who become difficult to distinguish from neoconservatives.

@deusvulture @argumate

The issue here applies within nations as well.  Nations will do things that affect other nations, and as long as that’s the case, there’s going to be some way of settling disputes between them.

And, I mean, this sort of thing is meant to basically be federalism, and I’m not sure how your framework interprets, say, the role of California in the United States and then maybe the role of San Fransisco in California. Is it imperialist to have California governed by the United States? This seems to reduce to calling any government at all imperialist, which makes it not really distinguishable from nationalism apart from what arbitrary level you assume governance should happen in.

In this sense (putting aside anarchism), your only two choices are to be a nationalist or an imperialist, since not accepting the nationalist principle implies belief that a central state can have legitimate political authority over peripheral territories that don’t constitute the same nation as the center.

Is it imperialist to have California governed by the United States? This seems to reduce to calling any government at all imperialist, which makes it not really distinguishable from nationalism apart from what arbitrary level you assume governance should happen in.

And then there are us who consider this a feature, not a bug; the most vulnerable minority being the individual and all that. It doesn’t stop being external imposition by aliens with a foreign culture and foreign values just because they are spatially and genetically closer than other aliens. Recognizing that all government is inherently imperialism in this sense goes a long way in the harm-reduction department. And thus nationalism is evil because it privileges a certain level of imperialism as pure and good and commendable.

shieldfoss:

I should perhaps add that I read @socialjusticemunchkins original post as freeform poetry rather than a as a specific policy paper, and I read @thathopeyetlives‘ reply in the same vein - I know from her history that SJM isn’t as uncharitable as it was necessary to be to write that piece with such a sense of righteousness. True righteousness is - unfortunately - in short supply in the real world, so you have to paint in unrealistically vivid colors to summon it in text.

This is mostly correct, although the specific policy of “let’s split Britain into Scotland, unified Ireland, London and England” (Wales can choose independence or England) is something I actually would endorse. It would make people live in countries that are more likely to be a good fit for them culturally and in terms of policy; it would also reduce the power of nationalism by opening the doors for all other European major cities’ secessions as well, which is something I do find a good idea overall as the tribes U and R are too different from each other to be forced to share a polity.

shieldfoss:

socialjusticemunchkin:

rocketverliden:

thathopeyetlives:

socialjusticemunchkin:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

socialjusticemunchkin:

What if Brexit is the true end of the 20th century? What if instead of a resurgence of atavistic nationalism, this was the beginning of its final death throes?

Imagine Brexit tearing apart Britain as Scotland and Ireland separate into their own countries, London turns into a city-state like a (marginally less totalitarian) Singapore of Europe, hopefully also taking Oxford and Cambridge with it out of the rotten husk of an empire England has turned into.

It would suck horribly for innocent people in England, but it would have a certain spiteful sense of justice and vindication; the R tribe tried to impose its values on tribe U, but instead only managed to destroy its country in the name of making it great again. Nationalism dealing the killing blow to the empire which once ruled half the world. The R tribe relies on looting U regions with its “democracy” to fund the imposition of its reactionary worldview and there could be nothing better than for tribe U to turn R’s tricks against it by showing that exit is a two-way street.

Scotland becoming independent seems like almost a given; Irish unification is promising but London is the truly interesting one. If London were to secede, it would show that the nation-state is powerless in the face of global power. The old borders wouldn’t be safe anymore. If the City’s loyalty lies with the rest of the world instead of people sharing some superficial genetic and cultural characteristics, it might open the floodgates everywhere else as well and slay the 19-20th century leviathan for good.

A lot of people have expressed worry that this would be the resurgence of the nation-state and the end of the internationalist project.

I think this might just as well be the end of the nation-state instead.

The age of the nation-state began at the end of the medieval free cities, as cannons allowed kings of the countryside to enforce their rule on cities as well. The social-cultural construct of the nation-state happened in earnest when the nations began shedding their kings and unifying themselves, and it’s easy to see why people might then conclude that the nation-state is the natural endpoint of history to which things will always revert…

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

There is no inherent reason why nation-states would be the natural division of people.

Sure, when one looks at the maps, one can clearly see how Scotland is a naturally different polity than England and trying to forcibly keep them together is just asking for trouble.

But London is naturally different too. What does Sadiq Khan’s city have in common with the English UKIP-voting hordes who were willing to ruin their country because they hate brown people? A language, but San Francisco speaks the same language as London. Geographical location, but Ulster managed to stay separate from Ireland for a long time, and Singapore hasn’t been annexed by Malaysia. Political entity, but brexit has shown that polities can be reshaped by the will of the people constituting them.

Nation-states haven’t been a constant in history, but cities have. Every time it has been technologically and societally possible, humans have flocked together and increased each other’s prosperity with trade and cooperation. Democratic nation-states are economically artificial, kept together by barely disguised force; the Paris Commune was brought down by the king’s cannons, not by its own economic infeasibility. The history of the nation-state can be seen as the countryside gaining a capability to loot the cities, and constructing fictions to support this; now what happens if that capability is gone?

When one looks at the data, cities are clearly a different animal from the countryside. Wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist. London has far more things in common with Amsterdam and New York than with the English countryside, and in a sense the relationship between the city and the countryside leeching off it via the nation-state is always inherently under a certain tension; now what happens if this is the last straw?

Why should London be loyal to England, when England has shown itself able and willing to only ever take and take? When Scotland tears apart from the union, London’s northern ally in internationalism will be gone and it will be ever more isolated, surrounded by people who are all too willing to enjoy the fruits of London’s prosperity yet completely unwilling to contribute to it, even the bare minimum amount of not actively sabotaging the things that make such prosperity possible in the first place. The story of Atlas Shrugged is naive in its individualistic hero-worship, but replace the few greater-than-life personalities with millions of people, and Galt’s Gulch with London and it starts making a strange amount of sense.

If London were to leave England to the mess of its own making, it would deal a humiliating blow to the countryside, itself grown fat off the loot from the cities and fearful of immigrants and foreigners, the exact people who created the riches the countryside has for so long been stealing through the ballot box. And it’s not like the cities are even unwilling to share their riches; and it certainly might be different if all the countryside asked for was some money so it doesn’t starve, but the countryside is not satisfied with material sharing; what it truly wants is submission.

Like a classical abusive partner, the countryside has always been telling the city it cannot survive alone, yet in reality only the threat of violence is the only thing maintaining the relationship. The countryside stays at home, growing ever more unemployed and useless, while the city is working hard to feed them both. The countryside continuously stalks the city whenever it leaves the house, suspicious of everything the city is doing with foreigners, prone to jealous fits of anger whenever the city doesn’t submit sufficiently to its will. “What are you doing with those foreigners and immigrants? Do you not love me? I am your only one, nobody else may have you!”

Why doesn’t the city just leave?

As usual, the immediate reason is that the dangers of leaving are greater than the dangers of staying. “Sure, the countryside is under a lot of stress but deep down it loves me and after all, it’s not that bad, at least compared to what it would do to me if I tried to dump it; remember what happened to poor Paris?” But if the countryside grows abusive enough, its threats empty enough, the city’s allies strong enough to protect it from its ex, would the city still stay?

I hope the answer is no, and I hope the last straw will be here and now.

If the countryside is so blatantly willing to impose its rottenness on the cities, let it rot away. If democracy creates reactionary atavistic nation-states, to hell with democratic states then. Tribe R doesn’t create the wealth, yet it will always demand its share. “Buy American!” “Britain first!” “Auslander raus!” “Rajat kiinni!” Tribe R will happily take tribe U’s money, but it will reject its values and seek to impose its own. Via the democratic majority rule of the nation-state this strategy has always seen a degree of success; the amount of liberty that’s legal in cities has always been constrained by the conservative countryside. This is clearly an abusive relationship, now what if the cannon marriage of city and country were finally broken?

If London said “no”, would 2016 idly watch by like 1871? What rhetorical pretzels would the nationalists tie themselves into as “fellow brits” rejected their nightmarish utopia? “But you were supposed to be one of us” they would say, and London would whisper “no”. What if the reactionary populism was shown to be the blatant robbery it is? What if England was left to its own devices, without London’s money and influence? The populists could not make Britain great again; they would trash their own country and come begging for foreign aid at London’s doorstep. Without tribe U, tribe R is nothing but a raving bunch of barbarians. A country made solely of Clinton’s voters would still be a global power; a country made solely of Trump’s voters would be a backwards hellhole.

And if tribe R is willing to tear apart political structures at its whims, I say let them have a taste of their own medicine. If they would split the “artificial fiction” of the EU, let us split the artificial fiction of Britain! Let us leave them to their own devices, wallowing in a misery of their own creation. They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of the IWW or Adam Smith. Decent people who believed in the common good of international cooperation without borders. Instead they followed the droppings of demagogues and populists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole Europe stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those reactionaries and nationalists and rabble-rousers… and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.

Call their bluff. Show them what they are made of. Show them that the world has new rules now, and new rules. That the mob of the nation-state cannot impose its terms upon the cities any longer. That we would’ve been willing to share our riches if that had been the only thing they asked for, but of course it never truly was about the riches in the first place; no, it was jealousy and fear over our way of life, something they wanted to extinguish just as much as to simply loot.

Let this be the end of the EU, but not the new dawn of the nation-state. Instead…

The end of the nation-state and the new dawn of the free city.

London, be our Lucifer, our morningstar, to bear the light to a brighter future free from the oppression of democratic nationalism, nationalistic democracy!

So you still believe you are superior?

What odds do you put on Scotland getting independence within the next five years?

What’s your distribution over the GDP of the UK in the next ten years?

Also I think you are massively mischaracterizing Tribe R, in a totally unfair and honestly kind of mean-spirited way. I’ve met Trump voters. I don’t think they would turn the country into a backwards hellhole. Trump might, but whether his voters would is less obvious. You seem to think that everyone who might vote for Trump (or BREXIT) must be as bad a Trump or Nigel Farage. Tribe R is not made of evil mutants! They’re not going around, scheming about how to mug cities! They’re scared, and frustrated, and maybe ignorant, but they aren’t evil. 

Sure, you pay lip service to the “innocent” ones, but then you spend a dozen paragraphs talking about how awful the countryside is. It’s like when SJs go on a long rant about how all men are dangerous and uncontrolled, but they add a little note saying “Oh, but if you’re not like this then you’re fine and this doesn’t apply to you, teehee.”

This whole thing is just… really vindictive. I’m not sure I even disagree with your policy proposals (I have no idea what would happen if London seceded). But, like, the point of London leaving isn’t to punish those stupid poor people for daring to stand up for themselves. 

I know I’m being totally mean and petty and vindictive in this; if I hadn’t been totally fed up with nation-state democracy already Brexit would’ve been a pretty clear last straw. National democracy doesn’t work. This is what happens when you put people of starkly different tribes together and tell them the majority gets to decide. You get populists, looting, reactionaries, cronyism, and all kinds of bullshit.

I’m not from the UK, but Finland has a similar situation with tribe R as well. Why the fuck are they voting on my life? Why the fuck are a bunch of poor people from the provinces voting on my cosmopolitan urbanist opportunities? I’m not against sharing some of the wealth (although even in that department there’s way too much misspending; Finland could literally completely eradicate poverty with UBI and still cut its public sector by 6% of GDP) but I will not. fucking. submit.

The “poor people standing up for themselves” are doing it in a really shitty way. Trump might ruin the country, and he’s exactly the guy those people voted for, so “trump voters would ruin the country” is imo relatively justified considering that they’re voting for the guy who might ruin the country. They want protectionism, they want to reduce immigration, they want subsidies, they want all kinds of evil things.

Why would I owe them anything I don’t owe to a fruit peddler in Accra, or an assembly-line worker in Shenzen? Why would I owe them submission to their parochial values in addition to a huge share of the money they wouldn’t even allow me to make? Why would I owe them my life?

They protest that they are my compatriots, yet I am not anyone’s patriot. They yell that I’m from the same town; yes, they are the people who made a living hell of my childhood. I’m not even seeking to collect reparations for that; all I want is my freedom. All I want is for one country on this polished turd of a planet to not fall for the reactionary horde. One place where I could live free, among people who are not hostile to my very existence. I’m immigrants, I’m foreigners, I’m degenerates and queers and decadence and international trade and unregulated everything and all the things tribe R stands against everywhere. They would be so much happier amongst themselves, and so would I. Why on earth must everyone be locked into these nonconsensual hellholes of nation-states. The language is interesting but in the same way Quenya is; nothing that would entitle anyone to a piece of me. I’m expunging the names and places from my life; and even the accent I want to lose. Any ties they wish to enforce I’m willing to cut as soon as I can. Why would I owe them my life?

Why do we have to get along on pain of violence instead of going our own ways peacefully?

I might say that I’m triggered, if it wasn’t such a massive trivialization of triggers. I’m content-ed, perhaps. This shit. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and their demands will not stop. They will never be satisfied until everything that makes my life possible is destroyed. They will pile on with endless demands that I must buy domestic pork instead of bolivian beans; that I should stay in my own country; that I owe everything to them; that they should be given the final say in everything about my life; that I have to beg them for mercy and permission alike for the sin of being different; the shadow over finnsmouth is hanging on my life and I’m afraid I can’t escape it before I can get off this planet altogether. Even then the leeches and moochers and bucketcrabs and poppycutters and redwashed rentiers might try to hang on, imposing space regulations from their strongholds on the old planet. And although I’m complaining about leeches and moochers I’d be more than thrilled to give them half of all the money I’ll ever make if that was the only thing they asked for in exchange for my freedom but they are never satisfied with just money no it’s my life they want and freedom must be extinguished.

If the world is so willing to hurt me, why would I owe it anything? My slytherin primary is flaring up really strongly and I’m in full self-defense panic mode. Me and Mine; destroy everything that tries to hurt these. Nothing personal that’s just the way it is just like everyone else “oh you’re harmed so massively by our well-meaning rules well too bad sucks to be you then it’s for the Greater Good and we know what it is not you” and I don’t even seek to destroy them all I want is to escape or fight with the viciousness of a cornered beast until I can yet I can’t because they control the whole world and they have the guns and the ballot boxes and the airwaves and the wiretaps in the backbone and they will keep coming and coming always demanding for more never satisfied while anything is still escaping their grasp and people are lucky to only lose their money for their only sin is having some but no such luck for my kind we are abominations and we must be eradicated for god and country and make everything great again

so yes I’m petty and vindictive because I’m fucking afraid of the normies and there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide

FINALLY SOME BREXIT DISCOURSE THAT DOESN’T MAKE ME CRINGE. 

Thank you…

Most honorable of enemies. 

And I will go back to the land. 

(Somewhat… angry scheming below cut)

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Uh…okay…

I dunno, I’m not actually all for the post-apocalyptic traveling from township to township thing. I mean, if that happens, then good fucking luck with gun control at that point, for one thing. If anything, you’ll need guns in case Toecutter’s gang rolls into town looking to make a mess.

Plus, Oda Nobunaga and Jenghiz Khan were things. Eventually a new emperor may rise. America was born from 13 colonies. We may even yet see a true Earth Federation/New World Order established in our lifetimes even in spite of this. Point is, sometimes people cooperate and gain an advantage.

I do find it surprising that farmers and country people are apparently able to exert such influence on cities. I’d have assumed it was the other way ‘round: the city needs things like food and water to come from lands that aren’t paved over with concrete. Unless London plans to become a Hive City real soon with vertical farming.

City people can buy food and water, that’s not a problem (unless the country people spitefully besiege the city to loot it). The problem is politics; London has something like 7 million people while the rest of the country has over 45 iirc (I’m already counting out Scotland etc.). Thus the 45 million will vote to take not only London’s money but its freedom as well. Replacing the political relationship with an economic relationship would mean that the country (including all of the lesser cities as well) would only receive what it’s worth; London would choose where it buys its food from, and the maximum price of water would be limited to the cost of London achieving self-sufficiency.

Furthermore, this would mean that neither needs to impose its values upon the other. The Midlands don’t need to have free immigration or trade if they don’t want it, while London could open its borders for people and goods alike. London would grow richer, the Midlands would grow poorer, and that would be their own choice, not an external imposition. Or if I am wrong, the Midlands would prosper and London would fall. And as such I’d place my money where my mouth is, in a material statement of “I believe this will lead to good” and those who disagree could make their own claim and as long as neither imposes itself forcibly upon the other, the claim that is true will win and the claim that is false will lose, and thus both would perceive themselves as the winning side. The Midlands could protectionize their own industries and jobs as much as they want, but they could not use the threat of violence to force London to buy their inferior products over international ones.

And in the modern day cities are increasingly something that cannot truly be conquered; if someone were to invade London, all they could achieve would be the destruction of what made London an attractive target of invasion in the first place. The more the value of cities is volatile and immaterial, not tied to the land, the less sense it makes to conquer them. Bankers would flee, industries would be ruined, and the people under occupation who didn’t manage to escape don’t generate great entrepreneurial wealth to their occupiers. Both Nobunaga and Genghis were lords from the countryside, and all their kind would gain from invading London would be the ruins of one of the world’s greatest cities, ground to dust under their jackboots as the citizens of London would resist with drones, minifactured guns, and every kind of urban guerrilla warfare the deviousness of the modern day is able to come up with. They would invade London, and they would conquer Aleppo.

But what I don’t understand is why I would send inspectors to the hidden chapels? If you aren’t scheming to construct missiles to bring down our orbital cities, or dealing in the slavery of unwilling sapients, or tampering with things that could bring forth the destruction of the entire world, what reason would I have to intrude upon your peaceful ways? All I could ask for is that you let My People go, and like the God of Moses I would rain down wrath until they were freed, but anything more and I would be a tyrant myself. If those whose true happiness lies elsewhere are free to leave without you standing violently in their way, there would be need for nothing more, save for my sincere well-wishes for this new species which is obviously not mine yet deserving of sapient dignity and freedom to create its own fate without terror and tyrants just the same.

what I don’t understand is why I would send inspectors

I think a lot of the rural folk are asking that question too, but evidently, the fact that your inspection makes no sense hasn’t stopped you yet.

(Yes, yes, I know, you AnCap, but for the purposes of this post you are The Urban Populus)

While I cannot speak for neither Finland nor the country that @thathopeyetlives comes from, I will say that priests of the Danish People’s Church have, in fact, been sanctioned because their rural Christianity did not align with the dictates of the urban Ministry of the Church, and Muslim schools everywhere have been criticized for - shock - actually teaching the tenets of Islam.

You note - correctly - that rural people have been using the power of the state to impose on others - on foreigners and those who would trade freely with foreigners, on racial and sexual minorities, on everybody who would not fit adequately into their tiny worlds, but I think you know as well as I that the opposite happens too - it is the urban populace, not the rural, that restricts gun rights, that imposes a thousand pages of regulations on Johnson’s still before any alcohol can be sold to others, taxes gasoline and cars because nobody needs a car to get around in the town. It is the poor - found more often in the countryside than the city - who are hit the hardest when VAT is imposed, and the UK has a 20% VAT on standard goods like, say, jeans, hardly a luxury item.

Don’t get me wrong: Voting to leave the EU if you don’t like competing with foreigners when I’m hiring new staff? Dick move. Those foreigners have just as much a right to work for my money as you do. But there are real grievances, the power of the state, and the EU, is a heavy yoke on the countryside as well.

Yeah, those are very legit grievances, and ones which would be at least somewhat addressed by urban secession so that my fellow citi-zens don’t mistakenly meddle in the lives of people they don’t understand. Independent London wouldn’t be able to bother England’s people that way; thus, both sides win.

Also, Finland has a VAT of 24% and omfglol yes it’s as horrible as it sounds; americans with single-digit sales taxes: you have no idea.

(Also, for any reader who might be confused on this: not an ancap. At most I’m anarcho-capitalism’s far-left enbyfriend. It sure is a credit to Rothbard that he was able to figure out the legitimacy of land ownership distribution in the third world, or the correct procedure for privatizing-as-in-privacy both state-owned and state-uppropped businesses, and I do think that an ancap society wouldn’t be capable of certain kinds of horribleness a right-libertarian minarchy might be (specifically, related to passing the costs of policing to people who don’t use it; I’ve seen some libertarians advocate a flat poll tax for policing and my market intuitions are just screaming “distortion” as it could end up as a pretty literal police state when the users of the police’s services (eg. people with a lot of stuff the legitimacy of the having-of-which others disagree on) wouldn’t pay for the costs of incurring the need for the police’s services but instead make everyone else pay for it); but I don’t exactly consider myself an ancap. I recognize that my political views will one day end up misrepresented in a call-out post as “promethea is an ancap” and I’m resigned to this inevitable fate but I do want to pre-empt the credibility of such accusations and I also wanted to use “anarcho-capitalism’s far-left enbyfriend” just because.)

injygo:

socialjusticemunchkin:

rocketverliden:

thathopeyetlives:

socialjusticemunchkin:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

socialjusticemunchkin:

What if Brexit is the true end of the 20th century? What if instead of a resurgence of atavistic nationalism, this was the beginning of its final death throes?

Imagine Brexit tearing apart Britain as Scotland and Ireland separate into their own countries, London turns into a city-state like a (marginally less totalitarian) Singapore of Europe, hopefully also taking Oxford and Cambridge with it out of the rotten husk of an empire England has turned into.

It would suck horribly for innocent people in England, but it would have a certain spiteful sense of justice and vindication; the R tribe tried to impose its values on tribe U, but instead only managed to destroy its country in the name of making it great again. Nationalism dealing the killing blow to the empire which once ruled half the world. The R tribe relies on looting U regions with its “democracy” to fund the imposition of its reactionary worldview and there could be nothing better than for tribe U to turn R’s tricks against it by showing that exit is a two-way street.

Scotland becoming independent seems like almost a given; Irish unification is promising but London is the truly interesting one. If London were to secede, it would show that the nation-state is powerless in the face of global power. The old borders wouldn’t be safe anymore. If the City’s loyalty lies with the rest of the world instead of people sharing some superficial genetic and cultural characteristics, it might open the floodgates everywhere else as well and slay the 19-20th century leviathan for good.

A lot of people have expressed worry that this would be the resurgence of the nation-state and the end of the internationalist project.

I think this might just as well be the end of the nation-state instead.

The age of the nation-state began at the end of the medieval free cities, as cannons allowed kings of the countryside to enforce their rule on cities as well. The social-cultural construct of the nation-state happened in earnest when the nations began shedding their kings and unifying themselves, and it’s easy to see why people might then conclude that the nation-state is the natural endpoint of history to which things will always revert…

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

There is no inherent reason why nation-states would be the natural division of people.

Sure, when one looks at the maps, one can clearly see how Scotland is a naturally different polity than England and trying to forcibly keep them together is just asking for trouble.

But London is naturally different too. What does Sadiq Khan’s city have in common with the English UKIP-voting hordes who were willing to ruin their country because they hate brown people? A language, but San Francisco speaks the same language as London. Geographical location, but Ulster managed to stay separate from Ireland for a long time, and Singapore hasn’t been annexed by Malaysia. Political entity, but brexit has shown that polities can be reshaped by the will of the people constituting them.

Nation-states haven’t been a constant in history, but cities have. Every time it has been technologically and societally possible, humans have flocked together and increased each other’s prosperity with trade and cooperation. Democratic nation-states are economically artificial, kept together by barely disguised force; the Paris Commune was brought down by the king’s cannons, not by its own economic infeasibility. The history of the nation-state can be seen as the countryside gaining a capability to loot the cities, and constructing fictions to support this; now what happens if that capability is gone?

When one looks at the data, cities are clearly a different animal from the countryside. Wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist. London has far more things in common with Amsterdam and New York than with the English countryside, and in a sense the relationship between the city and the countryside leeching off it via the nation-state is always inherently under a certain tension; now what happens if this is the last straw?

Why should London be loyal to England, when England has shown itself able and willing to only ever take and take? When Scotland tears apart from the union, London’s northern ally in internationalism will be gone and it will be ever more isolated, surrounded by people who are all too willing to enjoy the fruits of London’s prosperity yet completely unwilling to contribute to it, even the bare minimum amount of not actively sabotaging the things that make such prosperity possible in the first place. The story of Atlas Shrugged is naive in its individualistic hero-worship, but replace the few greater-than-life personalities with millions of people, and Galt’s Gulch with London and it starts making a strange amount of sense.

If London were to leave England to the mess of its own making, it would deal a humiliating blow to the countryside, itself grown fat off the loot from the cities and fearful of immigrants and foreigners, the exact people who created the riches the countryside has for so long been stealing through the ballot box. And it’s not like the cities are even unwilling to share their riches; and it certainly might be different if all the countryside asked for was some money so it doesn’t starve, but the countryside is not satisfied with material sharing; what it truly wants is submission.

Like a classical abusive partner, the countryside has always been telling the city it cannot survive alone, yet in reality only the threat of violence is the only thing maintaining the relationship. The countryside stays at home, growing ever more unemployed and useless, while the city is working hard to feed them both. The countryside continuously stalks the city whenever it leaves the house, suspicious of everything the city is doing with foreigners, prone to jealous fits of anger whenever the city doesn’t submit sufficiently to its will. “What are you doing with those foreigners and immigrants? Do you not love me? I am your only one, nobody else may have you!”

Why doesn’t the city just leave?

As usual, the immediate reason is that the dangers of leaving are greater than the dangers of staying. “Sure, the countryside is under a lot of stress but deep down it loves me and after all, it’s not that bad, at least compared to what it would do to me if I tried to dump it; remember what happened to poor Paris?” But if the countryside grows abusive enough, its threats empty enough, the city’s allies strong enough to protect it from its ex, would the city still stay?

I hope the answer is no, and I hope the last straw will be here and now.

If the countryside is so blatantly willing to impose its rottenness on the cities, let it rot away. If democracy creates reactionary atavistic nation-states, to hell with democratic states then. Tribe R doesn’t create the wealth, yet it will always demand its share. “Buy American!” “Britain first!” “Auslander raus!” “Rajat kiinni!” Tribe R will happily take tribe U’s money, but it will reject its values and seek to impose its own. Via the democratic majority rule of the nation-state this strategy has always seen a degree of success; the amount of liberty that’s legal in cities has always been constrained by the conservative countryside. This is clearly an abusive relationship, now what if the cannon marriage of city and country were finally broken?

If London said “no”, would 2016 idly watch by like 1871? What rhetorical pretzels would the nationalists tie themselves into as “fellow brits” rejected their nightmarish utopia? “But you were supposed to be one of us” they would say, and London would whisper “no”. What if the reactionary populism was shown to be the blatant robbery it is? What if England was left to its own devices, without London’s money and influence? The populists could not make Britain great again; they would trash their own country and come begging for foreign aid at London’s doorstep. Without tribe U, tribe R is nothing but a raving bunch of barbarians. A country made solely of Clinton’s voters would still be a global power; a country made solely of Trump’s voters would be a backwards hellhole.

And if tribe R is willing to tear apart political structures at its whims, I say let them have a taste of their own medicine. If they would split the “artificial fiction” of the EU, let us split the artificial fiction of Britain! Let us leave them to their own devices, wallowing in a misery of their own creation. They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of the IWW or Adam Smith. Decent people who believed in the common good of international cooperation without borders. Instead they followed the droppings of demagogues and populists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole Europe stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those reactionaries and nationalists and rabble-rousers… and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.

Call their bluff. Show them what they are made of. Show them that the world has new rules now, and new rules. That the mob of the nation-state cannot impose its terms upon the cities any longer. That we would’ve been willing to share our riches if that had been the only thing they asked for, but of course it never truly was about the riches in the first place; no, it was jealousy and fear over our way of life, something they wanted to extinguish just as much as to simply loot.

Let this be the end of the EU, but not the new dawn of the nation-state. Instead…

The end of the nation-state and the new dawn of the free city.

London, be our Lucifer, our morningstar, to bear the light to a brighter future free from the oppression of democratic nationalism, nationalistic democracy!

So you still believe you are superior?

What odds do you put on Scotland getting independence within the next five years?

What’s your distribution over the GDP of the UK in the next ten years?

Also I think you are massively mischaracterizing Tribe R, in a totally unfair and honestly kind of mean-spirited way. I’ve met Trump voters. I don’t think they would turn the country into a backwards hellhole. Trump might, but whether his voters would is less obvious. You seem to think that everyone who might vote for Trump (or BREXIT) must be as bad a Trump or Nigel Farage. Tribe R is not made of evil mutants! They’re not going around, scheming about how to mug cities! They’re scared, and frustrated, and maybe ignorant, but they aren’t evil. 

Sure, you pay lip service to the “innocent” ones, but then you spend a dozen paragraphs talking about how awful the countryside is. It’s like when SJs go on a long rant about how all men are dangerous and uncontrolled, but they add a little note saying “Oh, but if you’re not like this then you’re fine and this doesn’t apply to you, teehee.”

This whole thing is just… really vindictive. I’m not sure I even disagree with your policy proposals (I have no idea what would happen if London seceded). But, like, the point of London leaving isn’t to punish those stupid poor people for daring to stand up for themselves. 

I know I’m being totally mean and petty and vindictive in this; if I hadn’t been totally fed up with nation-state democracy already Brexit would’ve been a pretty clear last straw. National democracy doesn’t work. This is what happens when you put people of starkly different tribes together and tell them the majority gets to decide. You get populists, looting, reactionaries, cronyism, and all kinds of bullshit.

I’m not from the UK, but Finland has a similar situation with tribe R as well. Why the fuck are they voting on my life? Why the fuck are a bunch of poor people from the provinces voting on my cosmopolitan urbanist opportunities? I’m not against sharing some of the wealth (although even in that department there’s way too much misspending; Finland could literally completely eradicate poverty with UBI and still cut its public sector by 6% of GDP) but I will not. fucking. submit.

The “poor people standing up for themselves” are doing it in a really shitty way. Trump might ruin the country, and he’s exactly the guy those people voted for, so “trump voters would ruin the country” is imo relatively justified considering that they’re voting for the guy who might ruin the country. They want protectionism, they want to reduce immigration, they want subsidies, they want all kinds of evil things.

Why would I owe them anything I don’t owe to a fruit peddler in Accra, or an assembly-line worker in Shenzen? Why would I owe them submission to their parochial values in addition to a huge share of the money they wouldn’t even allow me to make? Why would I owe them my life?

They protest that they are my compatriots, yet I am not anyone’s patriot. They yell that I’m from the same town; yes, they are the people who made a living hell of my childhood. I’m not even seeking to collect reparations for that; all I want is my freedom. All I want is for one country on this polished turd of a planet to not fall for the reactionary horde. One place where I could live free, among people who are not hostile to my very existence. I’m immigrants, I’m foreigners, I’m degenerates and queers and decadence and international trade and unregulated everything and all the things tribe R stands against everywhere. They would be so much happier amongst themselves, and so would I. Why on earth must everyone be locked into these nonconsensual hellholes of nation-states. The language is interesting but in the same way Quenya is; nothing that would entitle anyone to a piece of me. I’m expunging the names and places from my life; and even the accent I want to lose. Any ties they wish to enforce I’m willing to cut as soon as I can. Why would I owe them my life?

Why do we have to get along on pain of violence instead of going our own ways peacefully?

I might say that I’m triggered, if it wasn’t such a massive trivialization of triggers. I’m content-ed, perhaps. This shit. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and their demands will not stop. They will never be satisfied until everything that makes my life possible is destroyed. They will pile on with endless demands that I must buy domestic pork instead of bolivian beans; that I should stay in my own country; that I owe everything to them; that they should be given the final say in everything about my life; that I have to beg them for mercy and permission alike for the sin of being different; the shadow over finnsmouth is hanging on my life and I’m afraid I can’t escape it before I can get off this planet altogether. Even then the leeches and moochers and bucketcrabs and poppycutters and redwashed rentiers might try to hang on, imposing space regulations from their strongholds on the old planet. And although I’m complaining about leeches and moochers I’d be more than thrilled to give them half of all the money I’ll ever make if that was the only thing they asked for in exchange for my freedom but they are never satisfied with just money no it’s my life they want and freedom must be extinguished.

If the world is so willing to hurt me, why would I owe it anything? My slytherin primary is flaring up really strongly and I’m in full self-defense panic mode. Me and Mine; destroy everything that tries to hurt these. Nothing personal that’s just the way it is just like everyone else “oh you’re harmed so massively by our well-meaning rules well too bad sucks to be you then it’s for the Greater Good and we know what it is not you” and I don’t even seek to destroy them all I want is to escape or fight with the viciousness of a cornered beast until I can yet I can’t because they control the whole world and they have the guns and the ballot boxes and the airwaves and the wiretaps in the backbone and they will keep coming and coming always demanding for more never satisfied while anything is still escaping their grasp and people are lucky to only lose their money for their only sin is having some but no such luck for my kind we are abominations and we must be eradicated for god and country and make everything great again

so yes I’m petty and vindictive because I’m fucking afraid of the normies and there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide

FINALLY SOME BREXIT DISCOURSE THAT DOESN’T MAKE ME CRINGE. 

Thank you…

Most honorable of enemies. 

And I will go back to the land. 

(Somewhat… angry scheming below cut)

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Uh…okay…

I dunno, I’m not actually all for the post-apocalyptic traveling from township to township thing. I mean, if that happens, then good fucking luck with gun control at that point, for one thing. If anything, you’ll need guns in case Toecutter’s gang rolls into town looking to make a mess.

Plus, Oda Nobunaga and Jenghiz Khan were things. Eventually a new emperor may rise. America was born from 13 colonies. We may even yet see a true Earth Federation/New World Order established in our lifetimes even in spite of this. Point is, sometimes people cooperate and gain an advantage.

I do find it surprising that farmers and country people are apparently able to exert such influence on cities. I’d have assumed it was the other way ‘round: the city needs things like food and water to come from lands that aren’t paved over with concrete. Unless London plans to become a Hive City real soon with vertical farming.

City people can buy food and water, that’s not a problem (unless the country people spitefully besiege the city to loot it). The problem is politics; London has something like 7 million people while the rest of the country has over 45 iirc (I’m already counting out Scotland etc.). Thus the 45 million will vote to take not only London’s money but its freedom as well. Replacing the political relationship with an economic relationship would mean that the country (including all of the lesser cities as well) would only receive what it’s worth; London would choose where it buys its food from, and the maximum price of water would be limited to the cost of London achieving self-sufficiency.

Furthermore, this would mean that neither needs to impose its values upon the other. The Midlands don’t need to have free immigration or trade if they don’t want it, while London could open its borders for people and goods alike. London would grow richer, the Midlands would grow poorer, and that would be their own choice, not an external imposition. Or if I am wrong, the Midlands would prosper and London would fall. And as such I’d place my money where my mouth is, in a material statement of “I believe this will lead to good” and those who disagree could make their own claim and as long as neither imposes itself forcibly upon the other, the claim that is true will win and the claim that is false will lose, and thus both would perceive themselves as the winning side. The Midlands could protectionize their own industries and jobs as much as they want, but they could not use the threat of violence to force London to buy their inferior products over international ones.

And in the modern day cities are increasingly something that cannot truly be conquered; if someone were to invade London, all they could achieve would be the destruction of what made London an attractive target of invasion in the first place. The more the value of cities is volatile and immaterial, not tied to the land, the less sense it makes to conquer them. Bankers would flee, industries would be ruined, and the people under occupation who didn’t manage to escape don’t generate great entrepreneurial wealth to their occupiers. Both Nobunaga and Genghis were lords from the countryside, and all their kind would gain from invading London would be the ruins of one of the world’s greatest cities, ground to dust under their jackboots as the citizens of London would resist with drones, minifactured guns, and every kind of urban guerrilla warfare the deviousness of the modern day is able to come up with. They would invade London, and they would conquer Aleppo.

But what I don’t understand is why I would send inspectors to the hidden chapels? If you aren’t scheming to construct missiles to bring down our orbital cities, or dealing in the slavery of unwilling sapients, or tampering with things that could bring forth the destruction of the entire world, what reason would I have to intrude upon your peaceful ways? All I could ask for is that you let My People go, and like the God of Moses I would rain down wrath until they were freed, but anything more and I would be a tyrant myself. If those whose true happiness lies elsewhere are free to leave without you standing violently in their way, there would be need for nothing more, save for my sincere well-wishes for this new species which is obviously not mine yet deserving of sapient dignity and freedom to create its own fate without terror and tyrants just the same.

The aesthetic of this post pleases me greatly, but as a useless poor queer city-dweller I have to say that if you expect London’s secession to get rid of all disabled people mooching off social services, you’re dreadfully mistaken.

I am specifically not seeking to get rid of disabled people and social services. I have quite abundantly expressed everywhere that sharing the wealth is not a problem, and personally volunteered to pay a tax of 50% for such purposes if that was the thing that guaranteed freedom (in other words, enough for an absurdly huge UBI and targeted services to special groups who have extra-expensive needs they couldn’t afford otherwise).

My issue is with the people who try to do things that I see as 1) destroying the possibility of that wealth being created in the first place, as there can’t be sharing if there’s nothing to share (protectionism, excessive regulations, anti-immigration etc.; while getting rid of the EU is technically also ridding of a lot of those two I don’t think the nationalistic mood would be favorable for a true free-trade welfare minarchy) and 2) destroying the freedom of those who create the wealth; this reactionary populism harms great numbers of people and I don’t consider it at all okay that people come for my wallet *and* then also have the gall to tell me how to live. With violence. I don’t tell them how to live, I just want to give people the UBI and eradicate all the humiliating inhuman workfare and other evil things, but I want them to similarly stay out of my life just as I stay out of theirs.

Also, I don’t consider anyone who’s subsisting with less than a reasonable UBI a moocher; the thing that delivers them the money is highly sub-optimal but it’s not their fault. Moochers are those who want more than that despite not creating value to match; the protectionists who want to force me to buy their inferior products instead of better and cheaper things, just because they share some superficial genetic and cultural characteristics with me, the bureaucrats who want me to pay them money to meddle in my life, etc.

somecunttookmyurl:

somecunttookmyurl:

somecunttookmyurl:

somecunttookmyurl:

Hi there. If you’re just waking up

• Brexit won
• The £ plummeted to a 30-year low
• Japan has stopped trading
• Scotland is pushing for independence
• Ireland is considering re-unification
• The Dutch Freedom Party are calling for their own EU referendum

Originally posted by giphy

Well, this took off whilst I went to sleep for a couple of hours.

An update:

• David Cameron has resigned, a fact I’d never thought I’d be sad about
• Donald Trump just landed in Scotland, because we haven’t suffered enough
  
• Nicola Sturgeon says EU folk are “still welcome in Scotland” and “their contribution is valued”
• She’s thrown down the gauntlet re: staying in and is petitioning the EU for membership. The result is “democratically unacceptable”
• “I intend to take all possible steps to give effect to how Scotland voted. In other words, to secure our place in the EU”
• Statement officially made that second independence referendum “highly likely”
• The financial markets are a shitshow
• Vote Leave have ALREADY backtracked on their two defining campaign promises (more money for the NHS, less immigration)
  

• A motion of No Confidence has been leveled at Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who honestly lasted longer than I thought he would
• The UK have lost £350 billion so far
  

• Spain could re-take Gibraltar if they wanted to make a move
  
• Morgan Stanley have started the process to move 2,000 investment banking staff from London to Dublin/Frankfurt
• EU leaders are calling on the UK to get out ASAP
• The New York stock exchange is down 500 points
• From the amount wiped off shares, so far, divided by 32m voters… the cost is already at £6,000 per voter
• Donald Trump has come out in support of the decision to leave, which is how you know we messed up real bad
• Everything is fucked
• I’m so sorry
  

rocketverliden:

thathopeyetlives:

socialjusticemunchkin:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

socialjusticemunchkin:

What if Brexit is the true end of the 20th century? What if instead of a resurgence of atavistic nationalism, this was the beginning of its final death throes?

Imagine Brexit tearing apart Britain as Scotland and Ireland separate into their own countries, London turns into a city-state like a (marginally less totalitarian) Singapore of Europe, hopefully also taking Oxford and Cambridge with it out of the rotten husk of an empire England has turned into.

It would suck horribly for innocent people in England, but it would have a certain spiteful sense of justice and vindication; the R tribe tried to impose its values on tribe U, but instead only managed to destroy its country in the name of making it great again. Nationalism dealing the killing blow to the empire which once ruled half the world. The R tribe relies on looting U regions with its “democracy” to fund the imposition of its reactionary worldview and there could be nothing better than for tribe U to turn R’s tricks against it by showing that exit is a two-way street.

Scotland becoming independent seems like almost a given; Irish unification is promising but London is the truly interesting one. If London were to secede, it would show that the nation-state is powerless in the face of global power. The old borders wouldn’t be safe anymore. If the City’s loyalty lies with the rest of the world instead of people sharing some superficial genetic and cultural characteristics, it might open the floodgates everywhere else as well and slay the 19-20th century leviathan for good.

A lot of people have expressed worry that this would be the resurgence of the nation-state and the end of the internationalist project.

I think this might just as well be the end of the nation-state instead.

The age of the nation-state began at the end of the medieval free cities, as cannons allowed kings of the countryside to enforce their rule on cities as well. The social-cultural construct of the nation-state happened in earnest when the nations began shedding their kings and unifying themselves, and it’s easy to see why people might then conclude that the nation-state is the natural endpoint of history to which things will always revert…

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

There is no inherent reason why nation-states would be the natural division of people.

Sure, when one looks at the maps, one can clearly see how Scotland is a naturally different polity than England and trying to forcibly keep them together is just asking for trouble.

But London is naturally different too. What does Sadiq Khan’s city have in common with the English UKIP-voting hordes who were willing to ruin their country because they hate brown people? A language, but San Francisco speaks the same language as London. Geographical location, but Ulster managed to stay separate from Ireland for a long time, and Singapore hasn’t been annexed by Malaysia. Political entity, but brexit has shown that polities can be reshaped by the will of the people constituting them.

Nation-states haven’t been a constant in history, but cities have. Every time it has been technologically and societally possible, humans have flocked together and increased each other’s prosperity with trade and cooperation. Democratic nation-states are economically artificial, kept together by barely disguised force; the Paris Commune was brought down by the king’s cannons, not by its own economic infeasibility. The history of the nation-state can be seen as the countryside gaining a capability to loot the cities, and constructing fictions to support this; now what happens if that capability is gone?

When one looks at the data, cities are clearly a different animal from the countryside. Wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist. London has far more things in common with Amsterdam and New York than with the English countryside, and in a sense the relationship between the city and the countryside leeching off it via the nation-state is always inherently under a certain tension; now what happens if this is the last straw?

Why should London be loyal to England, when England has shown itself able and willing to only ever take and take? When Scotland tears apart from the union, London’s northern ally in internationalism will be gone and it will be ever more isolated, surrounded by people who are all too willing to enjoy the fruits of London’s prosperity yet completely unwilling to contribute to it, even the bare minimum amount of not actively sabotaging the things that make such prosperity possible in the first place. The story of Atlas Shrugged is naive in its individualistic hero-worship, but replace the few greater-than-life personalities with millions of people, and Galt’s Gulch with London and it starts making a strange amount of sense.

If London were to leave England to the mess of its own making, it would deal a humiliating blow to the countryside, itself grown fat off the loot from the cities and fearful of immigrants and foreigners, the exact people who created the riches the countryside has for so long been stealing through the ballot box. And it’s not like the cities are even unwilling to share their riches; and it certainly might be different if all the countryside asked for was some money so it doesn’t starve, but the countryside is not satisfied with material sharing; what it truly wants is submission.

Like a classical abusive partner, the countryside has always been telling the city it cannot survive alone, yet in reality only the threat of violence is the only thing maintaining the relationship. The countryside stays at home, growing ever more unemployed and useless, while the city is working hard to feed them both. The countryside continuously stalks the city whenever it leaves the house, suspicious of everything the city is doing with foreigners, prone to jealous fits of anger whenever the city doesn’t submit sufficiently to its will. “What are you doing with those foreigners and immigrants? Do you not love me? I am your only one, nobody else may have you!”

Why doesn’t the city just leave?

As usual, the immediate reason is that the dangers of leaving are greater than the dangers of staying. “Sure, the countryside is under a lot of stress but deep down it loves me and after all, it’s not that bad, at least compared to what it would do to me if I tried to dump it; remember what happened to poor Paris?” But if the countryside grows abusive enough, its threats empty enough, the city’s allies strong enough to protect it from its ex, would the city still stay?

I hope the answer is no, and I hope the last straw will be here and now.

If the countryside is so blatantly willing to impose its rottenness on the cities, let it rot away. If democracy creates reactionary atavistic nation-states, to hell with democratic states then. Tribe R doesn’t create the wealth, yet it will always demand its share. “Buy American!” “Britain first!” “Auslander raus!” “Rajat kiinni!” Tribe R will happily take tribe U’s money, but it will reject its values and seek to impose its own. Via the democratic majority rule of the nation-state this strategy has always seen a degree of success; the amount of liberty that’s legal in cities has always been constrained by the conservative countryside. This is clearly an abusive relationship, now what if the cannon marriage of city and country were finally broken?

If London said “no”, would 2016 idly watch by like 1871? What rhetorical pretzels would the nationalists tie themselves into as “fellow brits” rejected their nightmarish utopia? “But you were supposed to be one of us” they would say, and London would whisper “no”. What if the reactionary populism was shown to be the blatant robbery it is? What if England was left to its own devices, without London’s money and influence? The populists could not make Britain great again; they would trash their own country and come begging for foreign aid at London’s doorstep. Without tribe U, tribe R is nothing but a raving bunch of barbarians. A country made solely of Clinton’s voters would still be a global power; a country made solely of Trump’s voters would be a backwards hellhole.

And if tribe R is willing to tear apart political structures at its whims, I say let them have a taste of their own medicine. If they would split the “artificial fiction” of the EU, let us split the artificial fiction of Britain! Let us leave them to their own devices, wallowing in a misery of their own creation. They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of the IWW or Adam Smith. Decent people who believed in the common good of international cooperation without borders. Instead they followed the droppings of demagogues and populists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole Europe stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those reactionaries and nationalists and rabble-rousers… and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.

Call their bluff. Show them what they are made of. Show them that the world has new rules now, and new rules. That the mob of the nation-state cannot impose its terms upon the cities any longer. That we would’ve been willing to share our riches if that had been the only thing they asked for, but of course it never truly was about the riches in the first place; no, it was jealousy and fear over our way of life, something they wanted to extinguish just as much as to simply loot.

Let this be the end of the EU, but not the new dawn of the nation-state. Instead…

The end of the nation-state and the new dawn of the free city.

London, be our Lucifer, our morningstar, to bear the light to a brighter future free from the oppression of democratic nationalism, nationalistic democracy!

So you still believe you are superior?

What odds do you put on Scotland getting independence within the next five years?

What’s your distribution over the GDP of the UK in the next ten years?

Also I think you are massively mischaracterizing Tribe R, in a totally unfair and honestly kind of mean-spirited way. I’ve met Trump voters. I don’t think they would turn the country into a backwards hellhole. Trump might, but whether his voters would is less obvious. You seem to think that everyone who might vote for Trump (or BREXIT) must be as bad a Trump or Nigel Farage. Tribe R is not made of evil mutants! They’re not going around, scheming about how to mug cities! They’re scared, and frustrated, and maybe ignorant, but they aren’t evil. 

Sure, you pay lip service to the “innocent” ones, but then you spend a dozen paragraphs talking about how awful the countryside is. It’s like when SJs go on a long rant about how all men are dangerous and uncontrolled, but they add a little note saying “Oh, but if you’re not like this then you’re fine and this doesn’t apply to you, teehee.”

This whole thing is just… really vindictive. I’m not sure I even disagree with your policy proposals (I have no idea what would happen if London seceded). But, like, the point of London leaving isn’t to punish those stupid poor people for daring to stand up for themselves. 

I know I’m being totally mean and petty and vindictive in this; if I hadn’t been totally fed up with nation-state democracy already Brexit would’ve been a pretty clear last straw. National democracy doesn’t work. This is what happens when you put people of starkly different tribes together and tell them the majority gets to decide. You get populists, looting, reactionaries, cronyism, and all kinds of bullshit.

I’m not from the UK, but Finland has a similar situation with tribe R as well. Why the fuck are they voting on my life? Why the fuck are a bunch of poor people from the provinces voting on my cosmopolitan urbanist opportunities? I’m not against sharing some of the wealth (although even in that department there’s way too much misspending; Finland could literally completely eradicate poverty with UBI and still cut its public sector by 6% of GDP) but I will not. fucking. submit.

The “poor people standing up for themselves” are doing it in a really shitty way. Trump might ruin the country, and he’s exactly the guy those people voted for, so “trump voters would ruin the country” is imo relatively justified considering that they’re voting for the guy who might ruin the country. They want protectionism, they want to reduce immigration, they want subsidies, they want all kinds of evil things.

Why would I owe them anything I don’t owe to a fruit peddler in Accra, or an assembly-line worker in Shenzen? Why would I owe them submission to their parochial values in addition to a huge share of the money they wouldn’t even allow me to make? Why would I owe them my life?

They protest that they are my compatriots, yet I am not anyone’s patriot. They yell that I’m from the same town; yes, they are the people who made a living hell of my childhood. I’m not even seeking to collect reparations for that; all I want is my freedom. All I want is for one country on this polished turd of a planet to not fall for the reactionary horde. One place where I could live free, among people who are not hostile to my very existence. I’m immigrants, I’m foreigners, I’m degenerates and queers and decadence and international trade and unregulated everything and all the things tribe R stands against everywhere. They would be so much happier amongst themselves, and so would I. Why on earth must everyone be locked into these nonconsensual hellholes of nation-states. The language is interesting but in the same way Quenya is; nothing that would entitle anyone to a piece of me. I’m expunging the names and places from my life; and even the accent I want to lose. Any ties they wish to enforce I’m willing to cut as soon as I can. Why would I owe them my life?

Why do we have to get along on pain of violence instead of going our own ways peacefully?

I might say that I’m triggered, if it wasn’t such a massive trivialization of triggers. I’m content-ed, perhaps. This shit. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and their demands will not stop. They will never be satisfied until everything that makes my life possible is destroyed. They will pile on with endless demands that I must buy domestic pork instead of bolivian beans; that I should stay in my own country; that I owe everything to them; that they should be given the final say in everything about my life; that I have to beg them for mercy and permission alike for the sin of being different; the shadow over finnsmouth is hanging on my life and I’m afraid I can’t escape it before I can get off this planet altogether. Even then the leeches and moochers and bucketcrabs and poppycutters and redwashed rentiers might try to hang on, imposing space regulations from their strongholds on the old planet. And although I’m complaining about leeches and moochers I’d be more than thrilled to give them half of all the money I’ll ever make if that was the only thing they asked for in exchange for my freedom but they are never satisfied with just money no it’s my life they want and freedom must be extinguished.

If the world is so willing to hurt me, why would I owe it anything? My slytherin primary is flaring up really strongly and I’m in full self-defense panic mode. Me and Mine; destroy everything that tries to hurt these. Nothing personal that’s just the way it is just like everyone else “oh you’re harmed so massively by our well-meaning rules well too bad sucks to be you then it’s for the Greater Good and we know what it is not you” and I don’t even seek to destroy them all I want is to escape or fight with the viciousness of a cornered beast until I can yet I can’t because they control the whole world and they have the guns and the ballot boxes and the airwaves and the wiretaps in the backbone and they will keep coming and coming always demanding for more never satisfied while anything is still escaping their grasp and people are lucky to only lose their money for their only sin is having some but no such luck for my kind we are abominations and we must be eradicated for god and country and make everything great again

so yes I’m petty and vindictive because I’m fucking afraid of the normies and there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide

FINALLY SOME BREXIT DISCOURSE THAT DOESN’T MAKE ME CRINGE. 

Thank you…

Most honorable of enemies. 

And I will go back to the land. 

(Somewhat… angry scheming below cut)

Keep reading

Uh…okay…

I dunno, I’m not actually all for the post-apocalyptic traveling from township to township thing. I mean, if that happens, then good fucking luck with gun control at that point, for one thing. If anything, you’ll need guns in case Toecutter’s gang rolls into town looking to make a mess.

Plus, Oda Nobunaga and Jenghiz Khan were things. Eventually a new emperor may rise. America was born from 13 colonies. We may even yet see a true Earth Federation/New World Order established in our lifetimes even in spite of this. Point is, sometimes people cooperate and gain an advantage.

I do find it surprising that farmers and country people are apparently able to exert such influence on cities. I’d have assumed it was the other way ‘round: the city needs things like food and water to come from lands that aren’t paved over with concrete. Unless London plans to become a Hive City real soon with vertical farming.

City people can buy food and water, that’s not a problem (unless the country people spitefully besiege the city to loot it). The problem is politics; London has something like 7 million people while the rest of the country has over 45 iirc (I’m already counting out Scotland etc.). Thus the 45 million will vote to take not only London’s money but its freedom as well. Replacing the political relationship with an economic relationship would mean that the country (including all of the lesser cities as well) would only receive what it’s worth; London would choose where it buys its food from, and the maximum price of water would be limited to the cost of London achieving self-sufficiency.

Furthermore, this would mean that neither needs to impose its values upon the other. The Midlands don’t need to have free immigration or trade if they don’t want it, while London could open its borders for people and goods alike. London would grow richer, the Midlands would grow poorer, and that would be their own choice, not an external imposition. Or if I am wrong, the Midlands would prosper and London would fall. And as such I’d place my money where my mouth is, in a material statement of “I believe this will lead to good” and those who disagree could make their own claim and as long as neither imposes itself forcibly upon the other, the claim that is true will win and the claim that is false will lose, and thus both would perceive themselves as the winning side. The Midlands could protectionize their own industries and jobs as much as they want, but they could not use the threat of violence to force London to buy their inferior products over international ones.

And in the modern day cities are increasingly something that cannot truly be conquered; if someone were to invade London, all they could achieve would be the destruction of what made London an attractive target of invasion in the first place. The more the value of cities is volatile and immaterial, not tied to the land, the less sense it makes to conquer them. Bankers would flee, industries would be ruined, and the people under occupation who didn’t manage to escape don’t generate great entrepreneurial wealth to their occupiers. Both Nobunaga and Genghis were lords from the countryside, and all their kind would gain from invading London would be the ruins of one of the world’s greatest cities, ground to dust under their jackboots as the citizens of London would resist with drones, minifactured guns, and every kind of urban guerrilla warfare the deviousness of the modern day is able to come up with. They would invade London, and they would conquer Aleppo.

But what I don’t understand is why I would send inspectors to the hidden chapels? If you aren’t scheming to construct missiles to bring down our orbital cities, or dealing in the slavery of unwilling sapients, or tampering with things that could bring forth the destruction of the entire world, what reason would I have to intrude upon your peaceful ways? All I could ask for is that you let My People go, and like the God of Moses I would rain down wrath until they were freed, but anything more and I would be a tyrant myself. If those whose true happiness lies elsewhere are free to leave without you standing violently in their way, there would be need for nothing more, save for my sincere well-wishes for this new species which is obviously not mine yet deserving of sapient dignity and freedom to create its own fate without terror and tyrants just the same.

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

socialjusticemunchkin:

What if Brexit is the true end of the 20th century? What if instead of a resurgence of atavistic nationalism, this was the beginning of its final death throes?

Imagine Brexit tearing apart Britain as Scotland and Ireland separate into their own countries, London turns into a city-state like a (marginally less totalitarian) Singapore of Europe, hopefully also taking Oxford and Cambridge with it out of the rotten husk of an empire England has turned into.

It would suck horribly for innocent people in England, but it would have a certain spiteful sense of justice and vindication; the R tribe tried to impose its values on tribe U, but instead only managed to destroy its country in the name of making it great again. Nationalism dealing the killing blow to the empire which once ruled half the world. The R tribe relies on looting U regions with its “democracy” to fund the imposition of its reactionary worldview and there could be nothing better than for tribe U to turn R’s tricks against it by showing that exit is a two-way street.

Scotland becoming independent seems like almost a given; Irish unification is promising but London is the truly interesting one. If London were to secede, it would show that the nation-state is powerless in the face of global power. The old borders wouldn’t be safe anymore. If the City’s loyalty lies with the rest of the world instead of people sharing some superficial genetic and cultural characteristics, it might open the floodgates everywhere else as well and slay the 19-20th century leviathan for good.

A lot of people have expressed worry that this would be the resurgence of the nation-state and the end of the internationalist project.

I think this might just as well be the end of the nation-state instead.

The age of the nation-state began at the end of the medieval free cities, as cannons allowed kings of the countryside to enforce their rule on cities as well. The social-cultural construct of the nation-state happened in earnest when the nations began shedding their kings and unifying themselves, and it’s easy to see why people might then conclude that the nation-state is the natural endpoint of history to which things will always revert…

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

There is no inherent reason why nation-states would be the natural division of people.

Sure, when one looks at the maps, one can clearly see how Scotland is a naturally different polity than England and trying to forcibly keep them together is just asking for trouble.

But London is naturally different too. What does Sadiq Khan’s city have in common with the English UKIP-voting hordes who were willing to ruin their country because they hate brown people? A language, but San Francisco speaks the same language as London. Geographical location, but Ulster managed to stay separate from Ireland for a long time, and Singapore hasn’t been annexed by Malaysia. Political entity, but brexit has shown that polities can be reshaped by the will of the people constituting them.

Nation-states haven’t been a constant in history, but cities have. Every time it has been technologically and societally possible, humans have flocked together and increased each other’s prosperity with trade and cooperation. Democratic nation-states are economically artificial, kept together by barely disguised force; the Paris Commune was brought down by the king’s cannons, not by its own economic infeasibility. The history of the nation-state can be seen as the countryside gaining a capability to loot the cities, and constructing fictions to support this; now what happens if that capability is gone?

When one looks at the data, cities are clearly a different animal from the countryside. Wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist. London has far more things in common with Amsterdam and New York than with the English countryside, and in a sense the relationship between the city and the countryside leeching off it via the nation-state is always inherently under a certain tension; now what happens if this is the last straw?

Why should London be loyal to England, when England has shown itself able and willing to only ever take and take? When Scotland tears apart from the union, London’s northern ally in internationalism will be gone and it will be ever more isolated, surrounded by people who are all too willing to enjoy the fruits of London’s prosperity yet completely unwilling to contribute to it, even the bare minimum amount of not actively sabotaging the things that make such prosperity possible in the first place. The story of Atlas Shrugged is naive in its individualistic hero-worship, but replace the few greater-than-life personalities with millions of people, and Galt’s Gulch with London and it starts making a strange amount of sense.

If London were to leave England to the mess of its own making, it would deal a humiliating blow to the countryside, itself grown fat off the loot from the cities and fearful of immigrants and foreigners, the exact people who created the riches the countryside has for so long been stealing through the ballot box. And it’s not like the cities are even unwilling to share their riches; and it certainly might be different if all the countryside asked for was some money so it doesn’t starve, but the countryside is not satisfied with material sharing; what it truly wants is submission.

Like a classical abusive partner, the countryside has always been telling the city it cannot survive alone, yet in reality only the threat of violence is the only thing maintaining the relationship. The countryside stays at home, growing ever more unemployed and useless, while the city is working hard to feed them both. The countryside continuously stalks the city whenever it leaves the house, suspicious of everything the city is doing with foreigners, prone to jealous fits of anger whenever the city doesn’t submit sufficiently to its will. “What are you doing with those foreigners and immigrants? Do you not love me? I am your only one, nobody else may have you!”

Why doesn’t the city just leave?

As usual, the immediate reason is that the dangers of leaving are greater than the dangers of staying. “Sure, the countryside is under a lot of stress but deep down it loves me and after all, it’s not that bad, at least compared to what it would do to me if I tried to dump it; remember what happened to poor Paris?” But if the countryside grows abusive enough, its threats empty enough, the city’s allies strong enough to protect it from its ex, would the city still stay?

I hope the answer is no, and I hope the last straw will be here and now.

If the countryside is so blatantly willing to impose its rottenness on the cities, let it rot away. If democracy creates reactionary atavistic nation-states, to hell with democratic states then. Tribe R doesn’t create the wealth, yet it will always demand its share. “Buy American!” “Britain first!” “Auslander raus!” “Rajat kiinni!” Tribe R will happily take tribe U’s money, but it will reject its values and seek to impose its own. Via the democratic majority rule of the nation-state this strategy has always seen a degree of success; the amount of liberty that’s legal in cities has always been constrained by the conservative countryside. This is clearly an abusive relationship, now what if the cannon marriage of city and country were finally broken?

If London said “no”, would 2016 idly watch by like 1871? What rhetorical pretzels would the nationalists tie themselves into as “fellow brits” rejected their nightmarish utopia? “But you were supposed to be one of us” they would say, and London would whisper “no”. What if the reactionary populism was shown to be the blatant robbery it is? What if England was left to its own devices, without London’s money and influence? The populists could not make Britain great again; they would trash their own country and come begging for foreign aid at London’s doorstep. Without tribe U, tribe R is nothing but a raving bunch of barbarians. A country made solely of Clinton’s voters would still be a global power; a country made solely of Trump’s voters would be a backwards hellhole.

And if tribe R is willing to tear apart political structures at its whims, I say let them have a taste of their own medicine. If they would split the “artificial fiction” of the EU, let us split the artificial fiction of Britain! Let us leave them to their own devices, wallowing in a misery of their own creation. They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of the IWW or Adam Smith. Decent people who believed in the common good of international cooperation without borders. Instead they followed the droppings of demagogues and populists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole Europe stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those reactionaries and nationalists and rabble-rousers… and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.

Call their bluff. Show them what they are made of. Show them that the world has new rules now, and new rules. That the mob of the nation-state cannot impose its terms upon the cities any longer. That we would’ve been willing to share our riches if that had been the only thing they asked for, but of course it never truly was about the riches in the first place; no, it was jealousy and fear over our way of life, something they wanted to extinguish just as much as to simply loot.

Let this be the end of the EU, but not the new dawn of the nation-state. Instead…

The end of the nation-state and the new dawn of the free city.

London, be our Lucifer, our morningstar, to bear the light to a brighter future free from the oppression of democratic nationalism, nationalistic democracy!

So you still believe you are superior?

What odds do you put on Scotland getting independence within the next five years?

What’s your distribution over the GDP of the UK in the next ten years?

Also I think you are massively mischaracterizing Tribe R, in a totally unfair and honestly kind of mean-spirited way. I’ve met Trump voters. I don’t think they would turn the country into a backwards hellhole. Trump might, but whether his voters would is less obvious. You seem to think that everyone who might vote for Trump (or BREXIT) must be as bad a Trump or Nigel Farage. Tribe R is not made of evil mutants! They’re not going around, scheming about how to mug cities! They’re scared, and frustrated, and maybe ignorant, but they aren’t evil. 

Sure, you pay lip service to the “innocent” ones, but then you spend a dozen paragraphs talking about how awful the countryside is. It’s like when SJs go on a long rant about how all men are dangerous and uncontrolled, but they add a little note saying “Oh, but if you’re not like this then you’re fine and this doesn’t apply to you, teehee.”

This whole thing is just… really vindictive. I’m not sure I even disagree with your policy proposals (I have no idea what would happen if London seceded). But, like, the point of London leaving isn’t to punish those stupid poor people for daring to stand up for themselves. 

I know I’m being totally mean and petty and vindictive in this; if I hadn’t been totally fed up with nation-state democracy already Brexit would’ve been a pretty clear last straw. National democracy doesn’t work. This is what happens when you put people of starkly different tribes together and tell them the majority gets to decide. You get populists, looting, reactionaries, cronyism, and all kinds of bullshit.

I’m not from the UK, but Finland has a similar situation with tribe R as well. Why the fuck are they voting on my life? Why the fuck are a bunch of poor people from the provinces voting on my cosmopolitan urbanist opportunities? I’m not against sharing some of the wealth (although even in that department there’s way too much misspending; Finland could literally completely eradicate poverty with UBI and still cut its public sector by 6% of GDP) but I will not. fucking. submit.

The “poor people standing up for themselves” are doing it in a really shitty way. Trump might ruin the country, and he’s exactly the guy those people voted for, so “trump voters would ruin the country” is imo relatively justified considering that they’re voting for the guy who might ruin the country. They want protectionism, they want to reduce immigration, they want subsidies, they want all kinds of evil things.

Why would I owe them anything I don’t owe to a fruit peddler in Accra, or an assembly-line worker in Shenzen? Why would I owe them submission to their parochial values in addition to a huge share of the money they wouldn’t even allow me to make? Why would I owe them my life?

They protest that they are my compatriots, yet I am not anyone’s patriot. They yell that I’m from the same town; yes, they are the people who made a living hell of my childhood. I’m not even seeking to collect reparations for that; all I want is my freedom. All I want is for one country on this polished turd of a planet to not fall for the reactionary horde. One place where I could live free, among people who are not hostile to my very existence. I’m immigrants, I’m foreigners, I’m degenerates and queers and decadence and international trade and unregulated everything and all the things tribe R stands against everywhere. They would be so much happier amongst themselves, and so would I. Why on earth must everyone be locked into these nonconsensual hellholes of nation-states. The language is interesting but in the same way Quenya is; nothing that would entitle anyone to a piece of me. I’m expunging the names and places from my life; and even the accent I want to lose. Any ties they wish to enforce I’m willing to cut as soon as I can. Why would I owe them my life?

Why do we have to get along on pain of violence instead of going our own ways peacefully?

I might say that I’m triggered, if it wasn’t such a massive trivialization of triggers. I’m content-ed, perhaps. This shit. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and their demands will not stop. They will never be satisfied until everything that makes my life possible is destroyed. They will pile on with endless demands that I must buy domestic pork instead of bolivian beans; that I should stay in my own country; that I owe everything to them; that they should be given the final say in everything about my life; that I have to beg them for mercy and permission alike for the sin of being different; the shadow over finnsmouth is hanging on my life and I’m afraid I can’t escape it before I can get off this planet altogether. Even then the leeches and moochers and bucketcrabs and poppycutters and redwashed rentiers might try to hang on, imposing space regulations from their strongholds on the old planet. And although I’m complaining about leeches and moochers I’d be more than thrilled to give them half of all the money I’ll ever make if that was the only thing they asked for in exchange for my freedom but they are never satisfied with just money no it’s my life they want and freedom must be extinguished.

If the world is so willing to hurt me, why would I owe it anything? My slytherin primary is flaring up really strongly and I’m in full self-defense panic mode. Me and Mine; destroy everything that tries to hurt these. Nothing personal that’s just the way it is just like everyone else “oh you’re harmed so massively by our well-meaning rules well too bad sucks to be you then it’s for the Greater Good and we know what it is not you” and I don’t even seek to destroy them all I want is to escape or fight with the viciousness of a cornered beast until I can yet I can’t because they control the whole world and they have the guns and the ballot boxes and the airwaves and the wiretaps in the backbone and they will keep coming and coming always demanding for more never satisfied while anything is still escaping their grasp and people are lucky to only lose their money for their only sin is having some but no such luck for my kind we are abominations and we must be eradicated for god and country and make everything great again

so yes I’m petty and vindictive because I’m fucking afraid of the normies and there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide

mugasofer:

socialjusticemunchkin:

What if Brexit is the true end of the 20th century? What if instead of a resurgence of atavistic nationalism, this was the beginning of its final death throes?

Imagine Brexit tearing apart Britain as Scotland and Ireland separate into their own countries, London turns into a city-state like a (marginally less totalitarian) Singapore of Europe, hopefully also taking Oxford and Cambridge with it out of the rotten husk of an empire England has turned into.

It would suck horribly for innocent people in England, but it would have a certain spiteful sense of justice and vindication; the R tribe tried to impose its values on tribe U, but instead only managed to destroy its country in the name of making it great again. Nationalism dealing the killing blow to the empire which once ruled half the world. The R tribe relies on looting U regions with its “democracy” to fund the imposition of its reactionary worldview and there could be nothing better than for tribe U to turn R’s tricks against it by showing that exit is a two-way street.

Scotland becoming independent seems like almost a given; Irish unification is promising but London is the truly interesting one. If London were to secede, it would show that the nation-state is powerless in the face of global power. The old borders wouldn’t be safe anymore. If the City’s loyalty lies with the rest of the world instead of people sharing some superficial genetic and cultural characteristics, it might open the floodgates everywhere else as well and slay the 19-20th century leviathan for good.

A lot of people have expressed worry that this would be the resurgence of the nation-state and the end of the internationalist project.

I think this might just as well be the end of the nation-state instead.

The age of the nation-state began at the end of the medieval free cities, as cannons allowed kings of the countryside to enforce their rule on cities as well. The social-cultural construct of the nation-state happened in earnest when the nations began shedding their kings and unifying themselves, and it’s easy to see why people might then conclude that the nation-state is the natural endpoint of history to which things will always revert…

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

There is no inherent reason why nation-states would be the natural division of people.

Sure, when one looks at the maps, one can clearly see how Scotland is a naturally different polity than England and trying to forcibly keep them together is just asking for trouble.

But London is naturally different too. What does Sadiq Khan’s city have in common with the English UKIP-voting hordes who were willing to ruin their country because they hate brown people? A language, but San Francisco speaks the same language as London. Geographical location, but Ulster managed to stay separate from Ireland for a long time, and Singapore hasn’t been annexed by Malaysia. Political entity, but brexit has shown that polities can be reshaped by the will of the people constituting them.

Nation-states haven’t been a constant in history, but cities have. Every time it has been technologically and societally possible, humans have flocked together and increased each other’s prosperity with trade and cooperation. Democratic nation-states are economically artificial, kept together by barely disguised force; the Paris Commune was brought down by the king’s cannons, not by its own economic infeasibility. The history of the nation-state can be seen as the countryside gaining a capability to loot the cities, and constructing fictions to support this; now what happens if that capability is gone?

When one looks at the data, cities are clearly a different animal from the countryside. Wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist. London has far more things in common with Amsterdam and New York than with the English countryside, and in a sense the relationship between the city and the countryside leeching off it via the nation-state is always inherently under a certain tension; now what happens if this is the last straw?

Why should London be loyal to England, when England has shown itself able and willing to only ever take and take? When Scotland tears apart from the union, London’s northern ally in internationalism will be gone and it will be ever more isolated, surrounded by people who are all too willing to enjoy the fruits of London’s prosperity yet completely unwilling to contribute to it, even the bare minimum amount of not actively sabotaging the things that make such prosperity possible in the first place. The story of Atlas Shrugged is naive in its individualistic hero-worship, but replace the few greater-than-life personalities with millions of people, and Galt’s Gulch with London and it starts making a strange amount of sense.

If London were to leave England to the mess of its own making, it would deal a humiliating blow to the countryside, itself grown fat off the loot from the cities and fearful of immigrants and foreigners, the exact people who created the riches the countryside has for so long been stealing through the ballot box. And it’s not like the cities are even unwilling to share their riches; and it certainly might be different if all the countryside asked for was some money so it doesn’t starve, but the countryside is not satisfied with material sharing; what it truly wants is submission.

Like a classical abusive partner, the countryside has always been telling the city it cannot survive alone, yet in reality only the threat of violence is the only thing maintaining the relationship. The countryside stays at home, growing ever more unemployed and useless, while the city is working hard to feed them both. The countryside continuously stalks the city whenever it leaves the house, suspicious of everything the city is doing with foreigners, prone to jealous fits of anger whenever the city doesn’t submit sufficiently to its will. “What are you doing with those foreigners and immigrants? Do you not love me? I am your only one, nobody else may have you!”

Why doesn’t the city just leave?

As usual, the immediate reason is that the dangers of leaving are greater than the dangers of staying. “Sure, the countryside is under a lot of stress but deep down it loves me and after all, it’s not that bad, at least compared to what it would do to me if I tried to dump it; remember what happened to poor Paris?” But if the countryside grows abusive enough, its threats empty enough, the city’s allies strong enough to protect it from its ex, would the city still stay?

I hope the answer is no, and I hope the last straw will be here and now.

If the countryside is so blatantly willing to impose its rottenness on the cities, let it rot away. If democracy creates reactionary atavistic nation-states, to hell with democratic states then. Tribe R doesn’t create the wealth, yet it will always demand its share. “Buy American!” “Britain first!” “Auslander raus!” “Rajat kiinni!” Tribe R will happily take tribe U’s money, but it will reject its values and seek to impose its own. Via the democratic majority rule of the nation-state this strategy has always seen a degree of success; the amount of liberty that’s legal in cities has always been constrained by the conservative countryside. This is clearly an abusive relationship, now what if the cannon marriage of city and country were finally broken?

If London said “no”, would 2016 idly watch by like 1871? What rhetorical pretzels would the nationalists tie themselves into as “fellow brits” rejected their nightmarish utopia? “But you were supposed to be one of us” they would say, and London would whisper “no”. What if the reactionary populism was shown to be the blatant robbery it is? What if England was left to its own devices, without London’s money and influence? The populists could not make Britain great again; they would trash their own country and come begging for foreign aid at London’s doorstep. Without tribe U, tribe R is nothing but a raving bunch of barbarians. A country made solely of Clinton’s voters would still be a global power; a country made solely of Trump’s voters would be a backwards hellhole.

And if tribe R is willing to tear apart political structures at its whims, I say let them have a taste of their own medicine. If they would split the “artificial fiction” of the EU, let us split the artificial fiction of Britain! Let us leave them to their own devices, wallowing in a misery of their own creation. They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of the IWW or Adam Smith. Decent people who believed in the common good of international cooperation without borders. Instead they followed the droppings of demagogues and populists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole Europe stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those reactionaries and nationalists and rabble-rousers… and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.

Call their bluff. Show them what they are made of. Show them that the world has new rules now, and new rules. That the mob of the nation-state cannot impose its terms upon the cities any longer. That we would’ve been willing to share our riches if that had been the only thing they asked for, but of course it never truly was about the riches in the first place; no, it was jealousy and fear over our way of life, something they wanted to extinguish just as much as to simply loot.

Let this be the end of the EU, but not the new dawn of the nation-state. Instead…

The end of the nation-state and the new dawn of the free city.

London, be our Lucifer, our morningstar, to bear the light to a brighter future free from the oppression of democratic nationalism, nationalistic democracy!

So you still believe you are superior?

I’m not wholly opposed to the idea, but what happens to all the stuff that’s currently controlled by the (wholly notional) “nation-state”? What happens to the armies? What happens to the nukes?

This would be really solid idea if you pound the enormous kinks out of it.

I’d like to give the nukes to London because England would be way too volatile and aggressive, but splitting the nukes and other military materiel according to GDP (yes I’m evil) is pragmatic. As a primary rule, both sides could otherwise mainly keep the stuff falling on their side of the border. Voluntary population transfers should obviously be arranged for those who don’t want to be stuck on the wrong side. The overseas territories could choose which polity they want to belong to: London, England, or independence.

hungerhell:

So they added a new “digital adult content” drop-down item to select in your Paypal business options but when you choose it your account will immediately be closed down. Just letting everyone know so they don’t get tricked! Even though this is a selectable item IT IS STILL ILLEGAL AND AGAINST PAYPAL POLICY TO SELL “SEXUALLY ORIENTED MATERIALS OR SERVICES”

asfdgsafsh

somebody outcompete the prudes and regulators of this pos corp

oh wait they can’t it’s probably illegal

somebody outcompete the prudes and regulators of this pos gov

ozymandias271:

elefantnap:

house-carpenter:

eoskara:

musicalfirefighting:

responsible-reanimation:

eoskara:

When you think about it, what was the motivation for kinks in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness? 

Dunno, but I think that “virile, manly strangers impregnating your spouse” was only added in as a hilarious curveball.

(Terrible ass-pull theory: it’s good to spread your genes far and wide, and therefore good to be attracted to a range of weird stuff?)

I suspect that it’s a consequence of complex intelligence that isn’t strongly enough selected against for it to evolve out of the human population.

It also makes me wonder what kinks existed in ancient times that have now almost completely disappeared because we’ve lost all the requisite social gears to connect the dots…(seamstress fetish in ancient greece?? the seamstress=sex workers connection was so strong that archeologists will pinpoint women on pots who are spinning as sex workers, that’s Cohen (2015). Where are the seamstress fetishists now? In a three-person group on dA somewhere whose moderator abandoned it in 2013?)

Well, if you want an example of a really bizarre kink that somehow became normative among the entire population of one of the world’s greatest civilizations for a time (though it was always somewhat controversial, as I understand it), there’s foot-binding.

Uniform fetishes are evergreen, but uniforms changed, so there probably aren’t many tricorn hat kinksters around

To be fair, a parsimonious alternate explanation for sex workers being depicted as seamstresses is that a lot of brothels doubled as places where clothing was manufactured so the women would have something to do between customers.

Victorians had a really common fetish for women slaughtering ducks iirc; won’t see much of that around these days

ilzolende:

speakertoyesterday:

sdhs-rationalist:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

another-normal-anomaly:

dagny-hashtaggart:

showerthoughtsofficial:

If we truly are characters in a video game being played by an advanced civilization, the one controlling me is a noob.

Mine is fairly skilled, but resolutely refuses to consult strategy guides and FAQs under any circumstances.

Mine did some clever minmaxing at character design but has been playing half-assedly ever since.

Mine needs to stop fucking around on side quests. Do they not see the dragon right over there?

Mine definitely somehow found some combination of skills in character design that allllllmost gives psionics but not quite, and has just been trying to level into psionics ever since.

Mine decided to be a wizard, in a world with no magic, and took some disadvantages that make the character specific goals of finding a companion hard because they really liked the sound of “read 5x faster” and “develop random obsessions so that you don’t need to take a break”. Also found the best tumor disorder in the world to have to get the points for the disadvantage.

Mine seemed to have accidentally skipped the “physical traits” segment (you know, the one where you can spend skill points and acquire disadvantage points) entirely? I’m just glad the devs don’t seem to treat typing as a separate skill from the base computer use skill.

They clearly spent advantage points on opportunities to meet lots of powerful potential friends and then forgot to create any character drives to interact with people who didn’t have inherently compatible personalities.

Also, I still don’t know why they thought executive function issues were an acceptable source of disadvantage points. That was a bad decision. I get it, you get extra realism points for picking conditions that your character’s family members have, but what did you even spend those points on …

Hair. You spent the points on having the kind of loosely curled hair that makes people ask if I have a perm or use special products, when I don’t. I don’t even find this experience enjoyable. Some of the more popular character hairstyles are locked, and all the prettier ones require at least 10 minutes of game time each day anyway. This is ridiculous.

I think my player just took an idea of a really cool high-level character and didn’t consider how to actually get there and after character creation was like “oh fuck" when the result was actually nigh unplayable and had to spend in-game years just figuring out how this weird mess of a minmax even works.

When your character concept relies on certain drugs 24/7 to be functional you should really have a plan for starting with them instead of heading into the game world with a broken build and barely any way to fix it, no matter how clever your “let’s bump cognition and intuition and run everything else off those instead of their normal base stats” trick is. It’s totally clever though; when you can beat trained competitors by just defaulting on your aptitude rolls you know you’re doing something right but nonetheless one should consider the consequences of starting with basically no skill points in anything. I know the base aptitudes can’t be increased in-game anywhere as easily as skills (especially with that “fast learner” trait) but making the early game utterly torturous for theoretical potential later on might not be the best idea anyway.

And I get it, those special traits and combinations are Expensive, but I’m not sure piling on all kinds of mental health disadvantages is the best source for the points (I know, “with optimal play and migitating them with in-game actions this is a really OP combination” or whatever that strategy guide said, or no it actually wasn’t even a strategy guide it was an off-hand speculation on IRC about how such-and-such combination would be totally exploitable; but then the ‘optimal play’ part is actually really relevant); I know the “badbrains trans girl programmer” is kind of an unbalanced template and a popular FotM for a reason but you should remember the disadvantage points actually do come from somewhere especially if you intend to take the basic idea of the template to absurd extremes.

I guess my player hangs out in the same experimental munchkin channel as sdhs’s because that “almost gives psionics” thing is clearly observable in this build too although my player isn’t trying to push into that direction (it’s certainly interesting how minmaxing and exploiting produces something that basically seems to be trying to route around hardcoded features of the game engine itself as a side effect and probably shows the degree of fucked-upness in my player’s ideas (it’s a very admirable form of fucked-upness though)).

TL;DR my player just skimped on all the skill points and threw in a fuckload of disadvantages to max out on some aptitudes and pile on all the exploitable traits in combinations that are basically “haha look guise: in extremely specific circumstances I can get +omfglolwtfbbq modifiers to these of throws” at the cost of making the combination actually completely unplayable by traditional strategies and is now figuring out the “oh dog wat done” part of actually using it.

canonicalmomentum:

ajax-daughter-of-telamon:

So if curative fandom fought transformative fandom, who would win?

curative fandom makes an enormously detailed case with hundreds of citations for why they would win.

tranformative fandom produces emotionally compelling accounts of just about every possible outcome of the fight and then some. most of the stories end in sloppy makeouts.

curative fandom reads these stories, and starts wondering…

transformative fandom reads the detailed case that curative fandom has made and works it into their stories. curative fandom is delighted that their hard work is being read and used.

curative fandom experiments with writing fanfic. their work is dry and sometimes gets bogged down minutia, but it stands out as different. they are encouraged by kudos and positive comments, and start trying out new interpretations of the characters and events of the fight they laid out.

transformative fandom has a go at summarising and breaking down the fight for new and old readers. the casual humour of their presentation, and focus on character tropes over the details of the fight, is strangely compelling to curative fandom.

one day transformative fandom shyly approaches curative fandom. would you go out with me, says transformative fandom.

curative fandom has been imagining this moment a lot. they have precisely delineated every scenario and how it leads to their victory. but they have no idea what to do.

awkwardly, they say yes. they go to see a movie together.

afterwards they are both overwhelmed with excitement. they argue about what the movie got wrong. they both agree: it sucked!

let’s fix it, says transformative fandom.

…ok, says curative fandom.

they work on a fanfic together. curative fandom makes sure it all hangs together, perfect to the lore, and after a while suggests changes to the characterisation. transformative fandom develops the story arcs, and the shipping, and starts offering different interpretations, and pointing out connections that curative fandom missed.

they publish their fanfic. it’s popular! there’s argument in the comments about what they got wrong. curative fandom wants to shut them down, but transformative fandom jumps in to suggest writing more fanfiction with the other interpretations. soon their fic has a thick cluster of fic of its own, and they complicate it by writing fic of fic of their fic. curative fandom is getting a headache, but then transformative fandom suggests they set up a meta-timeline and work out all the different details, and they take to it with gusto.

the fanfics start crossing over and cross-pollinating, but through curative fandom’s efforts, consistency is maintained. curative fandom maintains a detailed wiki provides newcomers with directions and places to start, and takes care of keeping the tags and ship names and AUs consistent.

one day, curative fandom is reading one of transformative fandom’s old fics about their supposed battle. they’re blushing.

what are you reading, says transformative fandom. curative fandom sends them the link.

oh my god what was i thinking this is so bad! says transformative fandom. no no no says curative fandom. i really like it. especially the scene when Curie kisses Tran in the submarine. i had so many feels!

wait what did i just say, says curative fandom.

no go on, says transformative fandom, edging closer. tell me what you liked about that scene.

well, says curative fandom. you got it so right, that’s exactly how they would kiss, I love how you included the detail about Curie’s missing tooth. most authors would forget that. but i was just… i was so happy for curie. they finally got to be with tran, even though it was forbidden and could only happen in a submarine!

transformative fandom smiles. curative fandom looks at them.

oh. says curative fandom.

AND THEN THEY SMOOCH THE END