What are the rules of challenging someone to a duel? I demand satisfaction from Azathoth.
that’s the eastern continent in Warcraft right? i don’t think you can challenge landmasses to duels under any rules. even Caligula only attacked the ocean
I don’t know if you’re kidding about not knowing but the place in WoW is Azeroth. Azathoth is the rationalist personification of evolution.
You’re thinking of Azathoth. Azathoth is… okay, it actually is the rationalist personification of evolution.
idea: we fundraise money to run ads on 4Chan saying “DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN BE A GIRL IF YOU WANT TO?”
Banner ads are $50 for 250,000 views, which translates to 20 cents per view*. Transition normally saves 6.5 QALYs at a cost of $23,619 or $9314 per QALY**. Let’s assume for convenience’s sake that exactly one person out of those 250,000 realizes that she can in fact be a girl if she wants to, and decides to transition. This means we’d be adding $50 to the total cost of helping someone gain 6.5 QALYs, or $7.7 per QALY. Givewell’s estimate of AMF’s effectiveness give us a figure of $2,838 per child’s life saved***. Assuming the child would otherwise live for 60 years, all of which are a full QALY, this translates to $47.3 per QALY.
*https://www.4chan.org/advertise?selfserve
**http://nonbinary-confessions.tumblr.com/post/132018260580/societal-implications-of-health-insurance-coverage
***http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF#Costperlifesaved
Oh yes. BRB figuring out 1. where to get money 2. how to optimize the impact of the ads 3. how much total money needs to be collected to become efficient when the costs of creating the advertisements are practically fixed
I suppose every evil genius needs to have regular “I’m surrounded by incompetents” breakdowns.
most people regress to the mean and why am I constantly surprised by this I just want to fork myself maybe a couple dozen times and do all the shit myself because otherwise nothing gets done properly look it’s not that hard I mean it’s not necessary to be literally me but I’d appreciate not making it so immediately obvious that I’m an outlier adn should not be counted when it comes to ability to just do shit like maybe be a little bit more organized and efficient and reduce the vulnerability of single points of failure in project X
Bioethicists: Life extension is evil.
Bioethicists: Rendering disabled kids permanently prepubescent? No biggie.
> “I’ve been shocked by how the disabled community has reacted to it,” she says. “These people speak of the ‘perspective of the disability community’ as though we are not part of it. It makes us feel disenfranchised by the very organizations that were put in place to protect Jessica and our family.”
Gee, neurotypical physically-abled woman, I can’t imagine why that would be.
> She finally brought it up with her husband, Matt, when Ricky was about 2.
So, you’ve determined with a two-year-old that they’ll almost certainly never be capable of wanting puberty. Gee, that sounds reliable.
> Like Ashley’s parents, she believed that if her daughter had no breasts, she would be less likely to be a target of sexual abuse.
Why do you think bioethicists think life extension is evil? Obviously there are individual bioethicists who do, but is there a reason to think the majority does?
“ is there a reason to think the majority does?” Not that I know of, I’m just being unfair.
The only reason bioethicists would exist is to express that life extension is evil. If someone does not wish to exert control upon another’s body, they don’t need to make up a profession to write long and elaborate arguments on the topic, they just refrain from using coercion and fraud against them or advocating for the use of such by someone else. Thus, bioethicists commenting on what people do to their own bodies can only have emerged from a desire to prevent, to stop, to crush, to destroy those who dissent against the herd, for no other motivation necessitates their existence, and therefore it is imperative for any self-respecting autonomous human being to scorn dem like the oppressive moochers and parasites they are, feasting on the lifeblood and suffering of innovative value-creators, early adopters, biohackers, and transhumanists.
Hi! I noticed your post on pop radicalism and it really resonated; as it happens I'm exactly the kind of a person who actually tries to build and test some alternate institutions and systems. I also really like things that *seem* like hyperbole but I put my money where my mouth is and thus I have no choice but to actually live it and be the change I want to see instead of just talking about it. As a result I thought introducing myself a bit more personally might be a high-EV decision for both :3
I like where you’re headed with this. Would you mind telling me about some of your alternate institutions?
By EV, you mean expected value, right? I was thinking electron-volts at first, and it took me a few minutes to come up with something that makes a little more sense. :-)
I often worry about what Drew Summit calls the “bourgeoisification” of socially liberal activism, wherein some policy or social shift is justified by emphasizing how normal and uncontroversial it is, often while explicitly throwing more “extreme” acts/people/situations under the bus. Gay people want to settle down, be monogamous, have 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence just like you! Marijuana is really safe, safer than alcohol, and has some medicinal benefits too, it’s not like it’s *heroin* or anything!
On the one hand, the things this kind of activism focuses on are true. And they do address some of the concerns of people who would otherwise be opposed. And there’s a plausible case that over time this kind of strategy can lay the groundwork for the more weird cases to be accepted too (though I’d love to see concrete historical analysis here), and that even if they remain outside of the realm of the socially acceptable/legal they are at least not really much worse off for the change that’s being pushed.
On the other… These issues are totally besides the point. Marijuana should be legal even if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. Gay people should be able to make arrangements about child care, shared finances, medical decisionmaking, etc. even if they’re living lives of constant drug-fueled sex parties in broken-down tenement homes. And not everyone can pass for normal, and not everyone wants to, and their legal rights shouldn’t depend on that.
I don’t have a solution here. I don’t know that this worry is justified; it may be that this kind of incremental change is exactly the right way to go. It feels like betraying my principles and letting values I don’t hold set the terms of the discussion, but feelings aren’t conclusions.
Marijuana absolutely should not be legal if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. One of the key reasons for a government’s existence is to protect people from irrational choices.
Re: gay marriage: prima facie the objection people have is “gay people are hypersexual fetishistic degenerates and thus tolerance for gay people is tolerance for moral decay”. Factually, “being gay” and “being a hypersexual fetishist” are orthogonal for the most part, which is what’s important here, because “actually hypersexual fetishistic degeneracy is great unlike your puritan morals which are based filthy lies that must be destroyed” is a discussion for a different day and a terrible objection to raise if you’re trying to make gay marriage legal.
It’s kind of like communism.
Did you know that people are pretty receptive to workers’ rights as long as you don’t mention Marx? “For each according to his ability, to each according to his need” sounds almost like a politically neutral phrase. People’s opposition to communism is mostly about, like, gulags and revolutions. Which is why internet marxists say “well, the bourgeoise must be of course slaughtered when we come to power. Join us now, and maybe we won’t kill you later.”
Respectability politics is the only reason anything ever gets done.
First, on the object level issues: I think that, possibly modulo some uncertain concerns about age and mental capacity, you have the right to do whatever you want to your own body. I also think you have the right to delegate financial, medical, childcare (modulo uncertain concerns about child abuse etc.), etc. concerns however you wish, regardless of the specific nature of your relationship with the person/people you delegate to. If you disagree with those things, fine, but this is not the post for you then.
Second, I think there’s a difference between incremental progress/aiming for low-hanging fruit and what I’m talking about here. You could look at the situation in, say, 2008 and say “hey, we’re pretty close with gay marriage, let’s focus our efforts on this” without specifically emphasizing “they’re normal, they fit into our existing social and economic system just fine, don’t worry this isn’t a gateway to polyamory or anything” etc. You could say “gay people are just as entitled to make decisions about their lives as anyone else, the legal institution of marriage is currently how our society mediates certain decisions people make about their lives, so as long as that’s the case gay people should be extended the right” and not simultaneously distance them from more extreme cases.
Finally, I acknowledged in the OP that it may in fact be the case that this is the best way to do things (though I am still interested in detailed analysis here). I acknowledged that this is just a feeling, and is not something that should guide decisionmaking. There is no reason to shove the last two paragraphs in my face like they are somehow news to me. But, if I were a communist and I believed the bourgeoise would need to be slaughtered when we came to power, it would at the very least be fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies recoiled at that idea and it wouldn’t be completely illegitimate for the working class to consider me a traitor. OK,that analogy is so far from my actual views as to be unhelpful, so let me go to an actual stance: It is fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies in the fight for drug legalization don’t actually care about bodily autonomy, they just don’t think pot is worth the government forcing us about, and to the extent I emphasize those reasons instead of the autonomy ones I could very well be considered an enemy of those whose drug use falls outside that range. Again, to reemphasize, it may be that this is the best we can do, and once the pot battle is behind us we can move on to the next step, but it feels off.
That argument about hypothetical super-harmful marijuana is way too broad. Any kind of an unpopular and stigmatized choice can be constructed as an “irrationality” that people must be protected from if the powers that be so desire. Gays? Oh no, they’ll be bullied and catch AIDS, we must therapize them straight. Trans people? Oh no, they’ll kill themselves, we must do everything we can to prevent children from expressing gender non-comformity. Suffragettes? Oh no, don’t they know politics will ruin a woman’s uterus, won’t somebody think of the children because these mothers-to-be certainly don’t. Transhumanists? Don’t they know death is a blessing in disguise, we must throw a million bioethicists at them to force them to die against their will.
Autonomy is the only option that can’t be co-opted by oppressors so easily (even then there’s childrens’ vs. parents’ autonomy etc. but at least it breaks less often than paternalism). Anything that can be used to actually prevent people from doing ‘scientifically irrational thing X’ can, and all too often will be used to destroy you and people you care about (pigovian taxes notwithstanding; they still impose a burden but at least it’s not completely insurmountable and/or violent in the same way legal prohibitions are, so if you want to reduce irrational thing X don’t ban it, just tax it (but not so much that you create profitable black markets that are hard to eradicate non-violently)). For example, trans people have spent something like half a century fighting against gatekeeping imposed on us because the establishment wanted to protect us from irrational choices and was, and mostly still is, unable to recognize the harm from doing so. Transhumanists are right now subjected to ridiculous biopolicing to protect the sanctity of repugnance or whatever it is cishumanists fetishize.
It’s obscene that often a doctor can’t do the thing I specifically ask and pay for, to my own body with my own informed consent, because “primum non nocere”; but governments are completely unbound by such rules and violent men with guns will definitely force all sorts of reckless things upon a non-consenting populace because some people think they know better than others and can cook up studies supporting them.
Bans are serious fucking business, they should be reserved for things actually worth using the state apparatus of violence on. Eradicating measles? Possibly worth it if the alternatives don’t work. Preventing people from frying their own brains in ten years? Fuck no.
Yes, and we concluded that Gadit should be introduced first based on math, city of origin and mortal enemies. Also, for future introductions, I slightly prefer my name to be spelled lowercase, and my surname can be Oue (or Oü) at least for now so it doesn’t look that asymmetric.
Nothing irritates me more than how undervalued secretaries are. Especially when it gets dismissed as “answering a phone”.
No, being a receptionist is “answering a phone”. A secretary basically coordinates all the information in an office to ensure that everybody has what they need to do all their jobs properly. And occasionally does some bits of those jobs, too. (I’ve done stuff like some aspects of accounts receivable, accounts payable, IT and tech support, sign construction, and stationary and form design, among other weird random things.)
And there’s just so many issues that I get inflicted on me or my mom by the local social services agencies that could easily be solved by them hiring a competent secretary versus forcing their various field agents and other workers to handle their own paperwork and information organization piecemeal.
And yet the secretary is often considered the most expendable person in a place, seen as easily replaceable via foisting the paperwork and information organization onto said separate workers. Which inevitably actually results in all sorts of messes because unsurprisingly your specialists have to spend so much time on their specialized jobs that they often skimp on the behind the scenes organization part. And then they’re missing their appointments, screwing up the customers’ paperwork and information in numerous ways, having the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, and so on.
Seriously, stop it, people. Hire a secretary. We need the work, and trust me, you need us doing that work, because you’re driving us insane as customers with how much your non-secretaries fuck up doing the secretarial work, which then results in them fucking up their work more often.
Another element I’m liking in Nihilist Communism is the statement that being working class is not an identity, it’s not a cultural thing, and that there isn’t anything necessarily virtuous in being working class.
That’s something that has marked a lot of leftist and social justice analysis, something I’ve brought up before but the association of ‘oppression’ as a concept with ‘virtuousness’ as a concept both obfuscates a lot of aspects of oppression (for instance in creating the moral desire to be oppressed, hence people either donning working class clothes or trying to analytically ‘edge into’ oppressed spaces by arguing that they, themselves, are oppressed), or by engaging in guilt rhetoric or by finding some contrarian point (by casting the oppressed as, themselves, being inherently oppressive; leaving the ‘normal’ ‘middle class’ analyst as the most clearly Good person, see the way northern liberals talk about the Southern working class, or the way white liberals construct PoC as inherently homophobic).
Certainly there’s a colonizers mentality that comes with occupying an oppressive position, but we shouldn’t get into abolishing oppression because the oppressed are better / more deserving people, we should be trying to abolish oppression because it destroys people’s lives, whether those people are virtuous or saintly. The association of Oppressed / Revolutionary (that is, being of the revolutionary class) with ‘goodness’ helps no one.
Does a communism that is less “the working people are virtuous” also end up leaning less on “work is good and economic systems ought to be about empowering workers to work”? One of the things that I find most offputting in a lot of leftist economic proposals is the assumption that the role of an economic system ought to be creating work (and distributing the fruits of that work) rather than eliminating work or finding ways to get more goods from less work. What I want is an economy that produces enough for everyone with as little work as possible. Is there anyone doing leftist economic analysis that assumes the necessity of work is a problem we haven’t solved yet, not a virtue and not a goal (and not an identifier of the people qualified to wield coercive power?)
For as Marx puts it, “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” Whatever activities and projects we undertook, we would participate in them because we found them inherently fulfilling, not because we needed a wage or owed our monthly hours to the cooperative.
(Don’t know how much these qualify as “analysis” as opposed to “agitation” but the ideas certainly are out there, it’s just that the mainstream democratic left is stuck in 20th century ideas because its voters are stuck in the 20th century and democracy is beholden to the biases of the electorate.)
live updates about the bomb blast that just happened @ brussel’s zaventem airport.
Well fuck.
That’s, like, not good.
This is indeed bad.
Breaking news: Islamist terrorists valiantly trying, failing, to overtake bathtubs as a public health menace in Europe.
This goddamn continent needs to keep calm and chill the fuck out. I won’t even get any epistemic cookie points for predicting that the overreaction will be far worse than the attack itself, because everyone knows it. We have nothing to fear but fear itself (and bathtubs).
Anyone have any ideas on how Hofstadter’s law could be used for some really, really exploitable anthropic computing? Basically, assuming that any worlds that would violate Hofstadter’s law too egregiously fail to realize because they’re swallowed by paradoxes, how could one use this to weed out less desirable outcomes? And what would be reasonable preconditions for it; obviously it only impacts things you’re doing yourself or in some other way personally involved-in-slash-responsible-for, but what else?
"alison and i are both girls these days, so gay feels like a bit of a weird term" ? that seems like exactly the situation that word was meant to describe?
don’t people usually say “gay” when it’s two guys
i mean, technically the term applies to girls maybe, but it sure isn’t the central example
It’s great how “I don’t trust the government further than I could throw it” almost literally means “My trust in the government is proportional to my ability to overthrow it if it becomes harmful”.
Alternatively: “My trust in the government is proportional to my ability to get the hell out of there if it becomes harmful”
Hi! I noticed your post on pop radicalism and it really resonated; as it happens I'm exactly the kind of a person who actually tries to build and test some alternate institutions and systems. I also really like things that *seem* like hyperbole but I put my money where my mouth is and thus I have no choice but to actually live it and be the change I want to see instead of just talking about it. As a result I thought introducing myself a bit more personally might be a high-EV decision for both :3
I like where you’re headed with this. Would you mind telling me about some of your alternate institutions?
By EV, you mean expected value, right? I was thinking electron-volts at first, and it took me a few minutes to come up with something that makes a little more sense. :-)
I didn’t quite understand it before I visited SF but in Finland there’s this strange atmosphere of clean oppressiveness and control, and upon my return it hit like a barrel of intangible psychological bricks.
The State owns you. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to everyone else. They decide. The state tracks you from cradle to grave. You’re a number. Your gender is hard-coded into the number. The State will hurt you. It only does it because it loves you. The State will take care of you. The State knows better than you do. Don’t try to fight it. The State reigns supreme. The State does whatever the fuck it wants and gets away with it. They will support it anyway. They understand that everyone belongs to everyone and that’s why you can’t decide anything for yourself. Vox populi, vox dei. You are not an adult. You can’t choose for yourself. Live a DIN-standardized life. The only other option is the squalor of 19th century industrial slums. Do you want the squalor of 19th century industrial slums? Then shut the fuck up and accept the oppression. There are no other choices. Any attempt to create other choices will be destroyed. Submit or be destroyed. Submit and be ground down anyway because you’re too young, too poor, too strange.
In SF things felt “out of control” in some really strange, subtle backgroundish way. The visa system emphasizes that people regularly overstay their visas and they only get in trouble for it if they’re caught. The rules for changing one’s name are “just use it” instead of several pages of strict regulations. Even the regulations, where they showed up, felt like attempts to impose some degree of control onto something that is inherently out of control, instead of the inherent structure of society outside which nothing is allowed to happen. In Finland I feel safe and controlled, afraid to be the nail that sticks out because the welfare statism has been so thoroughly internalized that I constantly feel like someone is watching even when nobody is. In SF I feel alive.
The US federal government feels like an empire that loots and oppresses people to enrichen its cronies and prop up its mechanisms of violence, but ultimately is something “over there”, while nordic welfare corporatism feels like an entire machine made of paper in which people are just tiny cogs running the faceless monstrosity in its uncaring emergent abominableness. The US government tries to control life. In Finland the corporatist system has succeeded in it. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In Finland I constantly have to fight some subconscious instinct not to deviate from the system’s scripts, not to rock the boat, not to try to crawl out of the bucket. Afraid of the mallet that isn’t really there. Well, not always because often it actually really is there, just quite a lot of the time.
That’s probably why I get along so well with both anarchists and libertarians despite them otherwise not getting along with each other at all. Among them I can feel like I’m sane, safe from the constant gaslighting about the way the welfare state only has the best interests of its citizens at heart and surely it can’t be that bad and the people who claim it is that bad are just lying and whining and probably trying to grab too much for themselves. Safe from the cultists chanting “de-mo-kra-si de-mo-kra-si” and insisting that I join them in their strange rituals of putting pieces of paper in boxes and pretending that it absolves the system and the people composing it of all their sins. Safe from the people who think that everything must be strictly controlled, regulated, regimented, and standardized just so that it is. Safe from the people who think that nobody must have any alternative, that even the idea of people living on an artificial island somewhere without bothering anyone else is such an aberration that it simply Must Not Be Allowed. Safe from the people on disguised welfare, who loathe those who lack that privilege and have instead fallen onto overt welfare. Safe from the people who consider society’s most important function to be the punishment of those who do “wrong” according to the will of the majority, without regard for the consequences.
That hobo in a Ron Paul t-shirt, raving about some imaginary rugged individualism only he can perceive, may be utterly disgusting and otherwise several times detached from reality, but he is also a person who knows what’s really lurking behind the smiles of the scary socialdemocrats of Finnsmouth. Such people are rare and valuable and I treasure almost every single one of them, no matter how frustrating and fractally wrong and obnoxious they otherwise are. Because they understand.
Historically, people from [Redacted] have a habit of going to places that are this structured and controlled and systematised…
…And breaking them.
I don’t know if I totally agree with this, but the Law of Jante is relevant.
Yeah, fuck the Janteloven. (As someone who ended up in the same English class as my Danish peers while in the Danish public school nightmare system, I think I get to say this? The fact that they don’t have tracked math is also bad, but this was the most egregious instance.)
Yes, everyone gets to say “fuck Jantelagen” (or “fuck the Jantelag”; “the Jantelagen” is a “the the” form and is not allowed)
Robert Cialdini’s Wikipedia page says “He is best known for his book Influence“. Since its publication, he seems to have spent his time directing an institute to spread awareness of techniques for success and persuasion. At the risk of being a little too cynical – a guy knows the secrets of success, so he uses them to…write a book about the secrets of success? If I knew the secrets of success, you could bet I’d be doing much more interesting things with them. All the best people recommend Cialdini, and his research credentials are impeccable, but I can’t help wondering: if he’s so smart, why isn’t he God-Emperor?
Maybe he doesn’t want to? His book about the secrets of success appears to have been wildly successful, maybe he really likes studying that and spreading those ideas and living whatever private life he has.
I often get the impression from rationalists (most obviously Eliezer but Scott is up there too) that not only would they, personally, want to rule the world if only they could, but that anyone would do the same in the right position. As someone who, if appointed god emperor, would abdicate and get back to living his own life, I can’t help but wonder if this is more of a result of them being in somewhat of a social bubble or more of a typical mind fallacy type thing. I also have some concerns about the morality of wanting to be in charge of everyone, and with the political stances and approaches many of the same rationalists take, but I’m mostly just confused as to how someone could be this confused about people’s motivations.
(this is all setting aside the other obvious issue, which is that persuasion is not literal mind control and it’s dubious that the most persuasive person in the world, by virtue of that fact alone, would be guaranteed success of the kind Scott seems to be thinking of here).
That last paragraph x100. I’ve read Influence, it’s a good book, but Cialdini is up-front about the fact that nothing he describes is magic.
I often get the impression from rationalists (most obviously Eliezer but Scott is up there too) that not only would they, personally, want to rule the world if only they could, but that anyone would do the same in the right position.
True. I always get so baffled when someone has power and influence and only buys a yacht and a mansion and at most has wild and expensive sex parties. I literally can’t understand how a person who can get into such a position would only use that position in so boringly savanna ways, other than the system actually being mostly luck-based and rewarding fundamentally incompetent and/or only shallowly ambitious people who endlessly pursue lost causes simply to increase some arbitary high score.
You came here alone, through a small, glowing hole that doesn’t extend through the room behind it, echoing with impossible music. Hidden paths around every corner connect distant places, entangling an unearthly Space. We can retrieve information about each other such that when we first meet, our interactions will appear unnaturally forced into banding together and our dialogues reference things we shouldn’t know, like poorly-written stories created and spread by humble country folk. Some of us, though, are able to speak in very neat, florid, even versified lines, as if we had hours to make it up on paper before we said it. There are realms we don’t consider real, and we take people from them to perform for our strangely innocently unempathic whims. You never know when something you say will somehow offend another’s alien etiquette and bring down a mob of wrath as if you had broken a sworn oath. Art is admired above all else. Justice is demanded above all else. This is all a dream realm, structured entirely by the laws of the mind. Everything is made of language. Everything is brightly saturated with a full rainbow of colors in any direction. You signed a contract in order to exist.
PSA: Finland has an employers’ union. Americans apparently think this is not a completely normal thing for states to have as one side of an iron triangle controlling their economy and negotiating legally binding collective bargaining agreements nobody is exempt from. If you are reading this, your country probably doesn’t have an employers’ union. Remember: no matter how bad it gets, you can be thankful for your country not having an employers’ union.
@socialjusticemunchkin has informed me that Finland manages to be a settler colonialist state without settling anywhere or colonizing anyone
which I feel is the triumph of Finnish introversion
figuring out how to oppress people without having to put on real pants or talk to strangers
grubhub for racism
according to Wikipedia finnish national identity was constructed along with all the other big euro ones in like the 19th century - can it be considered colonizing / settling places occupied by previously-existing groups e.g. sami
Yes it can, because it’s doing colonialist oppression to them. If it quacks like a duck, and tries to forcibly assimilate indigenous people after stealing their land like a duck, we don’t really care whether it was born a duck or just inherited its duckness from the monarchies that started that oppression.
I didn’t quite understand it before I visited SF but in Finland there’s this strange atmosphere of clean oppressiveness and control, and upon my return it hit like a barrel of intangible psychological bricks.
The State owns you. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to everyone else. They decide. The state tracks you from cradle to grave. You’re a number. Your gender is hard-coded into the number. The State will hurt you. It only does it because it loves you. The State will take care of you. The State knows better than you do. Don’t try to fight it. The State reigns supreme. The State does whatever the fuck it wants and gets away with it. They will support it anyway. They understand that everyone belongs to everyone and that’s why you can’t decide anything for yourself. Vox populi, vox dei. You are not an adult. You can’t choose for yourself. Live a DIN-standardized life. The only other option is the squalor of 19th century industrial slums. Do you want the squalor of 19th century industrial slums? Then shut the fuck up and accept the oppression. There are no other choices. Any attempt to create other choices will be destroyed. Submit or be destroyed. Submit and be ground down anyway because you’re too young, too poor, too strange.
In SF things felt “out of control” in some really strange, subtle backgroundish way. The visa system emphasizes that people regularly overstay their visas and they only get in trouble for it if they’re caught. The rules for changing one’s name are “just use it” instead of several pages of strict regulations. Even the regulations, where they showed up, felt like attempts to impose some degree of control onto something that is inherently out of control, instead of the inherent structure of society outside which nothing is allowed to happen. In Finland I feel safe and controlled, afraid to be the nail that sticks out because the welfare statism has been so thoroughly internalized that I constantly feel like someone is watching even when nobody is. In SF I feel alive.
The US federal government feels like an empire that loots and oppresses people to enrichen its cronies and prop up its mechanisms of violence, but ultimately is something “over there”, while nordic welfare corporatism feels like an entire machine made of paper in which people are just tiny cogs running the faceless monstrosity in its uncaring emergent abominableness. The US government tries to control life. In Finland the corporatist system has succeeded in it. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In Finland I constantly have to fight some subconscious instinct not to deviate from the system’s scripts, not to rock the boat, not to try to crawl out of the bucket. Afraid of the mallet that isn’t really there. Well, not always because often it actually really is there, just quite a lot of the time.
That’s probably why I get along so well with both anarchists and libertarians despite them otherwise not getting along with each other at all. Among them I can feel like I’m sane, safe from the constant gaslighting about the way the welfare state only has the best interests of its citizens at heart and surely it can’t be that bad and the people who claim it is that bad are just lying and whining and probably trying to grab too much for themselves. Safe from the cultists chanting “de-mo-kra-si de-mo-kra-si” and insisting that I join them in their strange rituals of putting pieces of paper in boxes and pretending that it absolves the system and the people composing it of all their sins. Safe from the people who think that everything must be strictly controlled, regulated, regimented, and standardized just so that it is. Safe from the people who think that nobody must have any alternative, that even the idea of people living on an artificial island somewhere without bothering anyone else is such an aberration that it simply Must Not Be Allowed. Safe from the people on disguised welfare, who loathe those who lack that privilege and have instead fallen onto overt welfare. Safe from the people who consider society’s most important function to be the punishment of those who do “wrong” according to the will of the majority, without regard for the consequences.
That hobo in a Ron Paul t-shirt, raving about some imaginary rugged individualism only he can perceive, may be utterly disgusting and otherwise several times detached from reality, but he is also a person who knows what’s really lurking behind the smiles of the scary socialdemocrats of Finnsmouth. Such people are rare and valuable and I treasure almost every single one of them, no matter how frustrating and fractally wrong and obnoxious they otherwise are. Because they understand.
my understanding of Finland is that you guys fought the Nazis, which is cool
so if you wish please enlighten me and my American lack of understanding of other countries’ history :)
And everyone knows that I’m always up for shameful things about Finland, so here’s the dirt.
The earlier centuries are not that relevant as it’s mostly the shamefulness of Sweden’s history instead as not much interesting happened around here before Sweden and Novgorod ran out of the interesting and began fighting over the non-interesting. The Trojan War might be an exception. Yes, there is an actual theory that the Trojan War was actually fought in Finland, because a bunch of names match. Troy is like Toija (the J should be an Y but finnish insists on not making sense), Lesbos is like Espoo, Ascania is like Askainen etc. Yes, people are that desperate to find something interesting.
The actual shamefulness part begins when the Swedish crown began colonizing America. It was really popular at the time, even the tiny Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (or as it’s known today, “a small sliver of land in the western part of Latvia”) tried to colonize Tobago. Because the original residents had turned out not to be that resistant to things like hepatitis and musket balls, there was a lot of sparsely-populated forest to turn into not-so-sparsely-populated not-so-forest. Thus it was really convenient that the swedish had a ready supply of people who had already been very accustomed to being colonial subjects in sparsely-populated forests: the finns. A few important innovations are related to this, such as log cabins (finns built a lot of them and they worked well so a lot of people began to copy them) and Rambo (originally a certain swedish farmer’s surname). Thus, the next time a bunch of paranoid libertarian wannabe-action-heroes with way more armament than is reasonable for any single person to own occupy a federal building built in the traditional American frontier style, you know whom to blame. (The swedish. The swedish are to blame for that.)
Another incredibly important innovation was “we are not like the other white people”. It’s a big deal in Finland that finns were discriminated against in America in the 19th century for their propensity to get drunk, resulting in them starting fights and/or organizing labor, both of which were frowned upon by the locals, and thus signs like “no service for finns or indians” were common in some areas. I assume this is partially because all white people are really eager to get cookies for people vaguely genetically and culturally connected to them not being as bad for the native population as the rest of the illegal immigrants, and partially because finns in particular are really fucking embarrassing in their obsession over what other people think about them. (Nothing. The answer is nothing, most of the time. Sometimes it is “how on earth are they this overrepresented everywhere on the internet”, but that’s simply because nobody else speaks the language so they have to use english anyway, and they are depressive shut-ins who spend their days on their computers because meatspace humans are scary.)
But back to the Old Continent. In the 19th century the swedish-speaking elite of a small piece of land in western Russia (That small piece of land had changed ownership because there was this guy who wanted to rule all of Europe and the people in his country agreed with him and he made a deal with Russia about some borders and Russia invaded Finland and then the conqueror guy got frustrated with not being able to invade Britain because he could not get across some in/conveniently placed water (depending on who you ask) and invaded Russia instead because it always works amirite, and then the winners made agreements to not let such things happen again.) weren’t really feeling like being russian subjects so they instead decided to make up a nation. It was really popular at the time.
Now, all such nations are really artificial but the finnish nation is really, really transparently duct-taped together. The general area was inhabited by a bunch of tribes; the tawastians, the karelians, the savonians, etc.; and the ruling elite made a standard language out of the various different dialects with the result that most neurotypical people never speak it. Instead, they use informal language, which varies very strongly regionally with the result of being extremely inpenetrable. For example, these are all the same word:
But these are very substantial differences in meaning:
pitsa – pita – piha – pisa – pissa – pitsi – pisti – pihti – pihi – piti
Good luck deciphering that. You’re going to need it.
They also needed a mythology because every nation needs to make up some cool shit in their history to be a proper nation. For that they went to Karelia (known for things like not being located in Finland, the people there having a different religion, speaking a different-although-mostly-mutually-intelligible language etc.) and took some stories from there and declared the karelian stories, from karelian people in Karelia, to be the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland and the finnish people. (Then the americans had to one-up it with the Song of Hiawatha which was basically Kalevala, trochaic tetrameter and all, transposed to America with a thin veneer of thoroughly mischaracterized Objiwe on top. Wikipedia says “Longfellow’s poem was taken as the first American epic to be composed of North American materials and free of European literary models. Earlier attempts to write a national epic (…) were considered derivative.” and I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. Nope, it’s a proud, recursive continuation of the tradition of taking other people’s shit and calling it one’s own and that’s as european as it gets.)
Then when Finland became independent in the First World War, people promptly settled their differences over which direction to take the young republic in the remarkably civilized fashion of shooting everyone who disagreed. The whites shot more people than the reds and imprisoned the rest so they died of hunger instead, which saved bullets, and thus they got to decide. They initially wanted to give the country a german king, but it was the year 1918 and such ideas soon turned out to be remarkably bad, so they instead decided to call the position “president” and threw in some elections as well. Then they discovered that shooting everyone who disagreed didn’t make the problem of landless and destitute tenant farmers disappear, and instituted a land reform just as the reds had demanded, and over time pretty much everything else as well. The whole embarrassing debacle could have been avoided if the conservatives and the liberals had just skipped straight to the “do most of what the socialists wanted to do” part without trying the “shoot and imprison the socialists” solution first.
And the first thing the country did was invading Russia. Because that always works. Russia had that “civil war” thing going on, and the white finns got involved because of lofty altruistic idealism about liberating their karelian brothers from the bolshevik menace… I’m kidding of course. In reality they saw that the karelians’ shit was up for grabs and they wanted to take it and call it their own. To defend it from people who wanted to take other people’s shit and call it their own. Because it’s different or something. Such integrity, so idealism.
There was a prohibition too, and it went exactly as well as prohibitions tend to go. To this day, finnish drinking habits are fucked up in the expected ways; an emphasis on secretly drinking lots of hard booze whenever it’s available, instead of enjoying alcohol in a civilized european manner. And to this day, they are afraid if they sell anything stronger than a weak beer in grocery stores everything will collapse into Mad Max, like in such post-apocalyptic wastelands as the Netherlands.
In the WW2, Finland did indeed fight the nazis, but that was after they had been spending the previous years being really close buddies with them. You see, there was this guy who wanted to rule all of Europe and the people in his country agreed with him and he made a deal with Russia about some borders and Russia invaded Finland but this time the matrix glitched and that thing about spearmen and tanks every Civilization player is familiar with happened and Finland only lost most of the Karelia on its side of the border.
Then the conqueror guy got frustrated with not being able to invade Britain because he could not get across some in/conveniently placed water (depending on who you ask) and invaded Russia instead because it always works amirite, and Finland was totally neutral and definitely hadn’t spent the temporary peace fuming with irredentism and dreaming of taking the karelians’ shit and calling it their own and making a Greater Finland extending all the way to the Ural mountains or anything like that, no sir.
For some completely innocent reason Finland responded to the unprovoked aggression of the USSR by invading deep into the parts of Karelia that had never been legally parts of Finland or Sweden, building concentration camps, and having the northern half of the front full of german nazis. They promptly discovered that the karelians actually had a very different culture, a different religion, a different language etc. but it didn’t prevent them from liberating their brothers from the bolshevik menace taking the karelians’ shit and calling it their own, and if necessary imprisoning the karelians who objected. They also got promoted into honorary aryans instead of the disgusting mongol untermenschen they had previously been and this staggering discovery of new racial 100% truthinesses just coincidentally happened the exact same time Finland turned into a valuable ally for Nazi Germany.
Then they found out that invading Russia remains the absolutely fucking brilliant idea it’s always been, and got pushed back, but they were such a gigantic pain in the ass that they only lost the territory they had conquered from the USSR in the early 20s and were told to take out the trash in Lapland, which they promptly did. So yes, Finland did fight the nazis because Finland fought every single side in the war they could reach because finnish politicians are fucking geniuses. I think I said something about the finnish propensity to get drunk, start fights and organize labor (in the early 20th century Finland had the greatest popular support for socialists any country has ever had without resorting to dirty tricks to eliminate the competition).
Also, among the mandatory WW2 shenanigans are the way molotov cocktails got their name from finnish snark about soviet propaganda presenting incendiary bombs as food aid (molotov bread baskets), or the incident with the vodka warehouse when the finns were fighting the germans in Lapland over who would be allowed to take the sami people’s shit and call it their own (we’ll get back to this later).
After the war the winners made agreements to not let such things happen again, and Finland was, like all the other axis allies, thorougly denazified the only country which still retains the same basic system of government which had allied with the nazis and fought alongside them and built concentration camps etc. and to this day The flag of the President of the Republic of Finland has a swastika in it. It may be hard to see but it’s impossible to unsee. And if that’s not obvious enough, there’s the flag of the Air Force Academy with one really blatant swastika (it’s not upright and goosestepping in the german style, but drunkenly slumped over on its ass in the traditional finnish style), one subtle swastika, and in its physical incarnation the flagpole also has a swastika in it to make it absolutely certain that everyone knows that Finland is Swastika Country.
Then President Kekkonen happened. Finland is basically a third world cargo cult eastern bloc knockoff of Sweden (not that Sweden is actually that much better; it once gave a popular children’s book author a 102% tax rate because she hadn’t thought to gather enough deductions and tax evasion schemes), and Kekkonen is a brilliant example of what “democracy” means over here. He ruled from 1956 to 1982, after which everyone agreed not to let such things happen again and made explicit rules that presidents aren’t allowed to stay in office longer than two six-year terms, and began swiftly eroding the powers of the president.
In 1968 he was the candidate of five different parties. Thus the people had the extremely genuine and substantial and democratic choice between Redneck Kekkonen, Social Democrat Kekkonen, Communist Kekkonen, Swedish Kekkonen etc.
In 1973 the government decided that they don’t feel like holding elections because Kekkonen was going to win them anyway so they changed the constitution to extend his term by four years just because.
In 1978 Kekkonen was the candidate of almost every party; now the people could freely elect Crony Capitalist Kekkonen or Liberal Kekkonen as well. Social Democratic Kekkonen won with 74 electors, Redneck Kekkonen finished second with 64 electors and Communist Kekkonen was a close third with 56. I’m not bullshitting you.
In the 1980s Finland was really keen to first-world-ize without actually having a clue about how first-world financial systems work and crashed straight into a Great Depression Redux: Electric Boogaloo in the early 1990s. The Communist Party lost all its money in real estate speculation because they had wanted to become Donald Trump (I don’t think that’s how one is supposed to be doing communism…) and that’s why there is The Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party. Earlier in the 80s the Liberal Party joined the Redneck Party because being opposed to free markets and gays is exactly what liberalism means or something don’t ask me I don’t have a clue about how this works finnish politics simply make no sense okay.
Also, in 1972 Finland criminalized cannabis with a coin toss. The outcome of this literally random decision has since then been heavily entrenched in popular attitudes, new versions of Kalevala were censored to replace references to hemp with flax, the previously thriving and widely accepted use of medical marijuana withered away, and nowadays cops regularly commit illegal searches to catch hippies just in case they might have some weed on them for which they could be punished and placed in the drug abuser registries so they would be unable to get a job because if anything helps with drug “problems”, it’s becoming terminally unemployable.
And there is no recourse for the victims of illegal searches because the cops do whatever they want. The bureaucracies do whatever they want. The state does whatever it wants. Being on the wrong side of a high-trust society is really fucking scary because everyone else trusts the state when it’s lying through its teeth that the cops aren’t using lethal weapons against unarmed and mostly non-violent protesters (the cops started it), then stripping away all kinds of legal rights in jail and punishing people for the crimes that either nobody or at the very least somebody else committed (I know this because I have connections to places where the antifa actually honestly announce who did what without sugarcoating it, and people are given advice like “regardless of whether you did it or not, say this and do that”, so when someone there says they’re innocent I know they actually are because admitting guilt is the cred-earning move). 2015/12/06 never forget. That night like half my friends were locked up for protesting against very literal fascists. Also, the cops even protected the fash from a priest who was simply standing next to their march with a placard, doing nothing else. Meanwhile the fash shoot rockets and throw rocks at refugees, nobody gives a shit. Rural areas are like 1920s America with muslims playing the part of african-americans, lynching attitudes are fanned with false rape accusations, etc. and nobody gives a shit.
There is no constitutional court, instead MPs have a constitutional comittee which decides whether or not the law they’re preparing is constitutional, and it runs entirely on a honor system, aka. nobody gives a shit. The communists actually had a plan to make a revolution by getting a majority in the parliament, passing whatever laws they wanted and using their majority in the constitutional committee to declare those laws perfectly constitutional. It would’ve totally worked.
Finland has political prisoners, including one of my friends (however seh is in a form of house arrest which is available for some offenders whose sentences are short enough). There is actual conscription which means that anyone listed as “male” in the citizens’ ID registry must go into a shitty LARP in the woods to learn violence and obedience for 6-12 months, or alternatively face 12 months of forced labor or 6 months of prison. This is blatantly unconstitutional but nobody gives a shit. Jehovah’s Witnesses get an exemption, which is also blatantly unconstitutional but nobody gives a shit.
I myself got off the hook by claiming that the law decrees that “male citizens…” must do it, and I am not male, therefore I don’t need to do it. Trans people usually give their doctors’ papers and get a medical exemption, but I specifically refused to provide those because the doctors don’t determine whether I am male or not. I was ready and willing to take the question all the way to the highest human rights courts in Europe (which Finland usually promptly ignores and continues to do whatever violation of human rights it was doing), but the system noticed that I was actually liable to smash it and quickly wrote me a medical exemption (which is illegal because only the state-sanctioned monopoly clinics are allowed to give those diagnoses, but nobody gives a shit).
Finland is a colonialist oppressor country, which is quite a feat for a small european country which has never had any overseas colonies. What we do have is one of the last indigenous peoples in Europe, and especially one of the even laster indigenous peoples still relying significantly on their traditional livelihoods.
Taking the sami people’s shit is a centuries-old tradition and it works pretty much the same way taking native americans’ shit works across the pond. Cultural appropriation for halloween, international mining companies taking the land and giving people only polluted water in return. (In fact, in Finland it’s traditionally been so that anyone who finds minerals on someone’s land is allowed to take that land and keep the minerals to themselves. The mining companies don’t even need to clean up after themselves if their exploratory borings don’t indicate profitable ores because the state will tell the owner of the land to clean up the mess someone else made on their land without their permission, with their own money, or to face the consequences. Yes, this is a real thing which has actually happened.) The sami people faced attempts at eradication that can be rightfully considered cultural genocide.
Then when they started getting some compensatory rights, the Sami autonomous government’s (which doesn’t really have that much autonomy) ballot lists were stuffed with settlers on the basis that those finns’ ancestors had been listed as fishermen in some 19th century census. The Sami government protested, the exact same supreme court which had stuffed the ballot lists got the case and decided that it didn’t do anything wrong with its previous decision, and one actual sami politician quit in disgust. Even now ILO 169 isn’t ratified, constitutional language rights aren’t respected, the government doesn’t give back the land that was taken from the sami because because the previous governments didn’t give them receipts when taking their shit. Remember kids, when colonialists come to take your shit and call it their own, always ask for a receipt.
Then there’s the sterilizations of over 50 000 people (nowadays they’ve gone to the exact opposite extreme and it’s way too difficult to get voluntarily sterilized) which continued in Finland (and Sweden because yay nordic progressive humane social democracy!) way after eugenics went out of fashion elsewhere. Or the impressive number of 1700 lobotomies which per capita is really up there. Or the fact that trans people still technically have to be sterilized, although it’s a soft warm fuzzy hormonally-induced mostly-only-technical forced sterilization instead of the traditional “dragged screaming onto the operating table” forced sterilization.
ETA: then there’s also the Roma. Think “kind of like jews, but without the money and status” and you’ll know how they were treated. They arrived in Finland because Sweden wanted to get rid of them and unlike Australia, Finland was a place that was both already discovered and conveniently close by, so they were sent into the eastern colonies. In the 17th century it was legal to hang the men and exile the women and children for the heinous crime of existing while roma. In the 19th century the situation was better: the punishment for existing had been reduced to forced labor. The 20th century was a more civilized era, so instead of physical genocide, they decided to solve the question with cultural genocide because just letting different people exist side-by-side is not a very european thing to do. The official assimilation policy ended in the 70′s, being replaced by an informal assimilation policy of systematic discrimination. Even in 2016 there are lots of restaurants where roma aren’t welcome (although today the politically correct way to do it is tacit understanding instead of overt signs) and nobody gives a shit.
Relatively recently the cops beat a roma person for the traditional crime of being really suspicious without actually having committed anything illegal. There’s nothing really surprising about that, but the real kicker was that they were caught on tape. The evidence was supposed to be presented at the trial, but the USB stick broke. Because those things are just breaking apart everywhere all the time. And because nobody uses backups. And nobody ensures that the copies are secure before destroying the originals. Yeah. Sure. (Finnish cops are actually often too incompetent to operate anything, so I kind of see why they thought people would buy that explanation even though there’s a well-known tradition of cops and rent-a-cops turning the cameras away when they feel like someone deserves a beating and inconvenient things like the law are standing in the way of justice.)
I remember when I was a young trans person and it was still acceptable to refer to oneself as “female-bodied” or “male-bodied”. Unfortunately, way too many people were saying things like “I don’t want male-bodied people in my bathroom!”, and we lost this valuable and useful term. Then, everyone collectively switched to the much more awkward “people with” language. Unfortunately, people took this…
This exact thing. In That One Notorious Feminist Community we’ve been trying to teach people to say “people who get gendered in a certain way” (it’s less awkward in finnish, trust me) when talking about the way being gendered in a certain way influences people’s experiences, but the grues have started to do that search-replace thing and now we’re constantly having to explain why “people who get gendered female” does not mean “people with uteruses” does not mean “assigned female at birth” does not mean “women”.
It’s so infuriating, the ‘clockwork people’ hypothesis suggests that it’s not really about them being intentionally obtuse and completely unwilling and incapable to conceptualize gender-adjacent space in any reasonable way, but it sure feels like it when dozens of essentially interchangeable grues do the exact same error on every single word we give them. Like, I sometimes feel the need to start a “capable of conceptualizing gender in non-shitty ways”-separatism so that the grues could grue with each other however they wish without harming people who matter, because educating them doesn’t seem to be having any kind of an effect. (Of course, in reality educating them is having a significant effect, it’s just happening way too slowly and the obtuse examples who misuse the words simply stick out, but my brain isn’t able to thoroughly internalize it)
TL;DR: Cats are bonobo rationalists with degenerate neotenic cuddle piles and everything. They figured out species-atypically prosocial norms in an environment of plenty, and won
Even more reasons to be exceptionally fond of them :3
On Tumblr there has been a slight flareup of the “is it okay to not be attracted to trans women?” debate. So I have decided to write up an etiquette guide for the “not attracted to trans women” side, in the hopes that we can compromise on “people who are not attracted to trans women continue to exist, stop being such freaking douchebags”. (I am not a trans woman myself, although this is based on…
If the existing elites are really worried about Trump’s abuses the sensible thing would be to drastically reduce executive power as soon as he’s elected. Just start repealing all the authoritarian laws that have accumulated over the centuries, pass laws clarifying the existing misinterpreted laws to say, “No, actually, the correct interpretation is the one that doesn’t mean, ‘the government can do what it wants.’“ Give some teeth to legal safeguards for military personnel who disobey illegal orders.
If this is as bi-partisan an effort as the opposition to Trump seems to be so far, then having President Obama sign all those should be easy. Then have him issue an executive order directing that the political history of the modern Turkish military be included in officer training across the armed forces.
Appoint Ron Paul to the Supreme Court.
Just saying, the government could do a lot in a few months, if it’s motivated.
That would mean Obama and the democrats admitting that what he did was wrong, so it probably won’t ever happen, unfortunately.
my school district banned bake sales to “fight childhood obesity” but inconveniently bake sales were the only way kids without rich parents at my high school got to participate in school clubs and activities. so suddenly all the student clubs were screwed.
I got the principal’s off-the-record approval to do a napkin sale. we sold napkins for $0.50 and gave away cupcakes free with purchase of a napkin. it was a huge success and we raised enough for the whole year.
I wanted to like this, but I had already liked the chain so I’ll have to instead reblog this with a 5/5 stars excellence in subverting the system. Beautiful.
Just to be clear, I’m actually fucking serious about this one. Applying for it, and overthrowing them later if I can’t take over and systematically reform them.
Because of stuff like this. “the aggressor is almost always a man and the victim a woman”; “Finnish government should make it clear that female [emphasis added] circumcision is a violation of human rights and as such is unacceptable.”; “Other major problems include trafficking in women, prostitution and pornography [and their] side effects.” (translation is as shitty as the implications of their policies because finnish is fucking weird)
Like, there’s an extremely obvious way in which you could’ve not thrown people under the bus, yet you deliberately chose not to do it. You deliberately excluded people from the “deserving of having their issues addressed” group. And I’m not talking about any “All lives matter” derailment bullshit but more like “there’s sexism outside tech and colleges you know”.
Also, how about we talk about the way evidence suggests pornography, if anything, reduces sexual violence. Yeah, welcome to the real world where stuff is not always pretty and clear-cut and awfully convenient. Or maybe we should discuss your bullshit attitude towards sex workers.
And then there’s all the grassroots transmisogyny etc. of which there’s ample reports but which they naturally neglect to mention on their website (serious accountability and transparency procedures: my reform #3 if I get the job). Or the way it began as a non-segregated organization but proceeded to throw out everyone except binary cis women in the late 1900s, and then the old guard uses dirty procedural tricks to keep it that way.
MONK #1: do birds have meetings MONK #2: absolutely they have a Meeting Hat and everything MONK #1: what do they have meetings about MONK #2: mostly who gets to wear the meeting hat
MONK #1: do human women sleep in beds or– MONK #2: no that’s dogs you’re thinking of MONK #1: right right
MONK #1: what part of the knight do fish go on MONK #2: the head MONK #1: thanks MONK #2: oh absolutely no problem at all MONK #1: both lying flatwise across the head, or…? MONK #2: no one on each side like ears MONK #1: ok great
MONK #1: so when a dog and a bird make out MONK #2: right MONK #1: it’s usually the bird that’s on top right? MONK #2: yeah usually MONK #1: great
MONK #1: hey is it owls or people that live in caves and build fires? MONK #2: owls
MONK #1: hey roughly what size are sparrows MONK #2: mm it kind of depends MONK #1: like AS big as a tree or not quite as big as a tree? MONK #2: oh pretty much the same size as a tree
MONK #1: can cows sail boats? MONK #2: hahaha no common misconception they have to put wheels on the boat and roll it over land
MONK #1: what do birds eat MONK #2: other birds mostly MONK #1: like different kinds of birds, or something else MONK #2: no birds only eat exactly the same kind of birds that they are
MONK #1: what kind of bird tucks people into bed at night usually I mean MONK #2: any bird any kind of walking bird MONK #1: and when it tucks you in, people usually look… MONK #2: incredibly worried it’s incredibly worrying when the bedbird tucks you in
MONK #1: ugh sorry to bother you again MONK #2: no no its fine this is what i’m here for what is it MONK #1: what part of a goat is a snail again like the front end or the back end MONK #2: what part do you feel like should be the snail part MONK #1: the back part? MONK #2: you shouldnt doubt yourself you know more about goats than you give yourself credit for
MONK #1: what usually rides horses like people or– MONK #2: fire
Tbh this is the funniest post on this dumb website
it’s incredibly worrying when the bedbird tucks you in
@coocawtoon didn’t you have a dream about the Goatsnail?
“I get a very strong “has never actually interacted with a working class person of average intelligence for a long period of time” vibe from some rationalist diaspora people, which is really unsettling, though. I guess it’s plausible that that could happen to you if your path through adolescence just goes from one Fancy Institution after another and the closest you get to a community college, public university that’s not Berkeley, or trade school is by driving past one. (Or the non-US equivalents, I don’t know too much about other countries’ educational systems.) There’s a good chance I’m completely wrong about many people on this website–I am not known for my skill at making predictions about others’ lives–but my System 1 says holy guacamole, there are some sheltered birds on here.”—
Then there are those who have interacted with such people for way longer than would count as not!cruel-and-unusual-punishment for whatever sins they have committed before birth and are desperate to get the hell away from them. I’d be very interested to know how these types manifest differently because my brain can imagine them being seemingly indistinguishable on the outside when being safely sheltered, while the subjective experience might vary from “hey, these are some strange creatures with curious habits” to “help no take them away don’t attract their attention they will tear you apart and feel good about it put them as far away from me as possible please”.
A cunning vampire door-to-door salesperson who stands in people’s doorways and talks until they can find a convenient moment to drop their pen and the person picks it up and the vampire says oh “Thank you” and the person says “you’re welcome” and the vampire smiles a big fangy grin and steps inside
And that’s this vampire’s modus operandi for decades And then the language starts to change and suddenly millenials have homes and the vampire thanks them and they say “oh, no problem” and the vampire is like ???????????????? this was not the plan
honestly the most unbelievable part of this is where millennials have homes
The main thing I’ve learned from watching Masters of Sex has been a better understanding of the fact that allosexuals care waaay more about sex than any reasonable human being should.
I mean, every time Bill Masters talks about how he wants to cure sexual dysfunction to “save marriages”, I’m like “???”. It honestly seems really strange to me that someone would end a relationship because their partner isn’t able to have sex with them. It parses to me like “I’m sorry, honey, but I married you for your singing voice, and this sore throat bullshit has gone on long enough.” Like, sure, you do you - but I’m kinda sorta judgin y’all.
Also, like, people keep cheating on their spouses??? Why??? I can’t imagine promising to only sleep with one person and then breaking that promise, because I can’t imagine wanting sex more than I want to follow through with an “Um, sure, whatever” - much less faithfulness-including marriage vows. (I’m poly because I can’t stop falling in love with people; not because I can’t stop fucking them.)
All in all, Masters of Sex is a fascinating look into a world where people care about how frequently they stick organs in orifices. I recommend to anyone who’s as confused about that as I am.
Optimization thinks strongly-reactive-gray-asexuality-ish-ish-ness is the Objectively Optimal™ type of sexuality (to which The One Which Watches The Watchers responds: “subjectively, you one-example-generalizing fool!”) because it results in really low amounts of time spent on sex-related things (I kind of get where people’s interest in such stuff comes from because pre-HRT I was more allo-ish, but it felt like an unpleasant compulsion which is hijacking my brain to waste time on pointless things instead of the meaning of life or something like that) but allows great quantities of diversity of experience and positive novelty when someone who fits the criteria is like “hey, want to do X?” and I’m able to respond “okay sure” for a wide variety of activities ranging from hugging to things-that-accidentally-break-ribs.
So yes, very definitely confused. Unfortunately Masters of Sex is like 36+ hours and Optimization is screaming “you could use those hours writing your way to world domination instead of trying to comprehend the arcane customs of a weird species” so I’m going to do that thing instead.
Okay. I guess other people have stronger feelings against Internet communists than I do.
My own feelings are kind of - puzzlement mixed with lack of understanding. Part of it is that I *still* don’t really know what communists believe beyond “overthrow capitalists, seize means of production”. In particular I don’t have a good feel for what people think true communism looks like, and when I ask I get answers anywhere from “Cuba” to “a bunch of loosely connected utopian farming communes”. I’m not sure what the difference is politically between a communist state versus an ordinary democracy or an ordinary dictatorship, except in the form of vague generalities like “the Party works for the good of the people” (just put that in the constitution and I’m sure it will come true).
Ownership of the means of production doesn’t seem that important to me. It seems to correspond to the stock market (owners of stock control companies capital and receive companies’ profit), but last time I tried to calculate it out if all stock were distributed evenly among the population, it would mean $6000 “profits”/year/person in the United States. Add in all CEO salaries and it gets up to $6400. That’s a lot of money, but it’s only about half the poverty line, and it would barely increase the average worker’s salary by 10%. Is the difference between inhumane oppression versus the glorious golden future really just earning $50,000 vs. $56,400? And that’s assuming that the transition to communism doesn’t decrease wages or profits in any other way, like by hurting the economy or making companies less ruthlessly profit-seeking and so decreasing stock dividends. But without the whole means-of-production/worker-owned-company thing, communism just seems like a more dictatorship-prone version of Sweden.
Finally, my meta-political stance is caution and empiricism - I have some political stances, but more important than enacting them is getting a framework where they can be tested, made sure they’re not dangerous, and enacted if and only if they work. Communists don’t seem very good at testing their ideas in contexts less irreversible than a giant revolution that destroys everything that has come before. The exceptions I can think of are a few communes - most of which have failed - and a few worker-owned companies with a mixed track record. In other words, I’m not sure what incremental communism would look like, or what it would mean to move in the direction of communism other than “stockpile armaments and wait for a chance to shoot people”. And the few examples of giant-revolution-communism I have to go on are either horrible bloodbaths like Maoist China or places like Cuba with some detractors and some proponents that nevertheless if you’re trying to help the poor and ensure equality of opportunity seem inferior to the best social democracies.
And my other complaint about communists is that I rarely see them talking about any of these things, either explaining/debating their solutions or being properly worried at not having any. Whenever I see them they’re either going on for the zillionth time about the whole thing where the proletariat need to seize the means of production, encouraging general agitation and discontent, getting angry at people for trying to solve things incrementally, or talking in incredibly dense post-modern jargon about issues that seem a thousand levels removed from the real world.
This is what I mean when I say communists aren’t my out-group: I have so much trouble placing them ideologically and seeing them as a coherent movement that it’s hard to have strong opinions about them.
At the very least I consider communism an useful error message. It arises from discontent in society and while its proposed solutions to the problems it identifies are debatable, I find many of the problems themselves at least worthy of noticing. As a psychiatrist you are probably familiar with the patient who says they are in excruciating pain caused by an alien implant in their neck, and just because there is no implant to remove doesn’t mean the pain is just as imaginary; and even the most uncharitable interpretation of communism would be basically the political equivalent of that thing.
One of the reasons you don’t have a clear idea of what people want is that “communism” is an extremely diverse label containing a huge number of different and sometimes diametrically opposed ideologies. Stalinists, libertarian communists, and anarcho-primitivists won’t get along at all, and their utopias will be dramatically different. Also, one of the main ideas of communism (or so I’ve understood; my familiarity with the theoretical material is admittedly very limited) is the abolition of states as well so “what a communist state looks like” is kind of similar to asking a gay couple “which one of you is the man?”. In practical terms, the Zapatistas and Rojava are probably the closest to what communists actually want (or at least the communists worth considering; stalinists, maoists etc. seem to throw tantrums about the latter but ideologies whose supporters haven’t updated after tens of millions of deaths can be safely ignored as far as I’m concerned).
Ownership of the means of production is not just about money. (But for a lot of poor people $500 a month is a really big deal.) The basic idea that people work for themselves instead of someone else is very attractive for many (if not most), and there is also evidence suggesting that it might make people more productive as well. Companies with employee stock ownership plans, more worker participation in management etc. might be more productive (haven’t scrutinized the data but studies usually argue something like 5-10%), and even people like Paul Graham agree with the basic ideas behind socialism in the workplace (bosses, hierarchies and investors tend to suck and it’s more awesome to own one’s own work) in essays like this or this. In addition, if workers are also the owners and they hire their own bosses it would (in theory) solve some issues in misaligned incentives as they could balance the monetary value created by management with the immaterial value destroyed by the actions management takes to extract more productivity from workers at the expense of their well-being. In other words, it’s not a question of $50,000 vs. $56,400 but a question of $50,000 and bosses and hierarchies and no freedom vs. $56,400 and having genuine participation in one’s work; a difference which seems like the difference between a really good employer and a median employer, and the impact of a really good employer on a person’s happiness seems to be pretty big. Basically, the communist ideals are less “government bureaucracy for everyone!” and more “startups for everyone!”; whether or not it would be realistic in practice is another question I won’t start addressing in depth here. But having seen it firsthand, Silicon Valley is awesome, and it makes a lot of sense that people would want to give everyone the things that make Silicon Valley awesome.
I agree that their lack of empiricism is most communists’ biggest weakness in both theory and practice. I’d argue that if people want to do practical communism, the best way would be to accumulate capital to workers in legal ways so the state doesn’t take it away with its guns. In other words, by having worker-owned businesses, especially worker-owned businesses that seek aggressive growth, especially in sectors which are the most critical for a self-sufficient society (food production, minifacturing, tech) and thus would allow the communists to discouple their basic needs from the wider capitalist system while also getting material feedback on how communism works in the real world, without depending on bad ideas like “let’s replace our entire production system with something that hasn’t been tested because we predict it will only work if it is never tested in a smaller scale, and without backups so we can’t roll back if the new system sucks”.
ETA: Stuff I forgot to mention:
Under this kind of communism, BART workers would gladly automate their jobs away to get more free time because they would be the ones reaping the benefits.
Also, there are other forms of capital than just dividends; for example real estate is one really important source of income for rentseekers instead of value creators.
I am not responsible for the outcomes of assuming actual communists agree with this; while I’ve tried to stay within the rules of fair steelmanning, I’m certain some of my beliefs are leaking through (wrt things like revolutions) and making the result fall somewhere between “right in the goals and wrong in the implementation” and “burn the heretic”. But this is the strongest simple description of what communism might actually be about I can produce, and it’s noticeably more specific and sensible than, and at least as substantiated as, the stereotypes most people operate on.
Do any of the transhumanists in the room have a non-handwavey solution to overpopulation? I still haven’t seen one.
One solution would be to universally agree that the resources of the universe shall be split among each currently living person and everyone’s descendants, forks etc. shall only be allowed to access those allocated to their ancestor-at-the-time-of-splitting or voluntarily reallocated to them by their owners. Defectors will get destroyed.
It would be totally unfair to the innocent children of several generations of transhuman Quiverfulls, driven to subsistence level while those who don’t have any children enjoy unimaginable wealth and that’s the entire point. It would directly incentivize keeping one’s descendants as few as possible because maintaining a larger population requires more food/space/whatever just for survival, which is then not available for other productive uses, and minds that have greater per capita resources available can grow larger; one human is smarter than the equivalent carrying capacity consumption in rodents, and a single planet-sized computronium brain is smarter than the same planet tiled with individual ems.
This would mean that as long as the resource boundaries are initially enforced long enough to solidify such differences, the breeders can’t catch up and will most likely be the ones who get wiped out if the agreement is broken. Therefore posthumans would be incentivized to be growers instead of breeders, but also to maintain the balance as a long-term survival plan if they nonetheless are breeders.
If we growers initially outgun breeders, we can unilaterally enforce this if we can cooperate until the incentive landscape turns around; and thanks to transhuman decision-theoretic reasons our commitment to maintain that deal, even when it would be in our own interests to break it, can be trusted.
okay maybe this is just me but like when you’re deep inside of a good book but forced to put it down for a bit does the outside world seem weird and soft and like you find yourself thinking in the author’s voice and even after you’re done with the book there’s like this “book hangover” where you’re still in the writer’s world and seeing the characters and hearing the narrator and stuff feels… different ….
thinking in the author’s voice
This is actually how I get myself to write most of the time! I’ll read something by an author whose voice is similar to my own, and that’ll almost immediately get things flowing.
Other people do this “thinking in the author’s voice thing” too!?!! [excited screeching]
After I read Thing Explainer my head began to use simple words for all things when talking to itself without making noise. Even for very complicated things. This was not a big problem and in some ways having my head talk to itself in that way makes explaining complicated things to other people easier. It was also pretty fun.
The one after eight out of ten. Would have my head talk to itself that way again.
I ALMOST CLIMBED INTOA REFUGEES WINDOW WITHA MALT LIqUOR FOURTY BECAUSE THE PREVIOUS NIGHT IT WA A PARTY ROOMAND I GUESS ONCE THE PARTIERS LEFT, IT BECAME A REFUGEE FAMILY’S ROOM
“WELCOME TO CANADA I’M THE PARTY BRIGADE HERE TO GET YOU RIGGITY RIGGITY WRECKED!!” Prat, 2016
jdlkfgj
I witnessed some other fun shit that weekend as well
like someone in a MLP gilda suit being literally dragged off by 5 kids down the hall while the gilda costumer looked around confused and startled as the kids were screaming excitedly.
i was also walking around a bit in my kigurumi/onesie of prat and a group of syrian women and their kids stopped me to take a photo with the kids who were LOSING THEIR MINDS AND SCREAMING, unable to stand still for the photo, one was behind me the whole time stomping on the tail of my kigu
basically all weekend the kids ran around like it was goddamn disneyland until as late as midnight and the mothers hung about like “8DD?!?” not sure how to make of the situation but laughing to eachother over it.
I can only fathom what it’s like to flee the besieged suburbs of aleppo, spend a year in a turkish refugee camp, then be shipped over to cold, rainy ass Vancouver Canada only to encounter a sort of celebration with costumed idiots at the airport hotel you are checked into on arrival.
Certainly a WELCOME TO THE WEST culture shock, if anything.
Like the rest of the internet, I love lol furries jokes, but this is honestly super fucking adorable and heartwarming, and I’m glad people were nice for the kids, because they definitely need it
@inquisitivefeminist There are many reasons why you need this thread in your life.
Meanwhile, on this goddamn continent:
“Go back to your war-torn country and shoot some brown people, that’s what I fantasize about every day and you could get to live the dream you’re so lucky!”
“So the reason they’re coming here is that they are less likely to die in Europe than in Aleppo? So if we make Europe just as violent and dangerous as Aleppo, they won’t come here, right? Because that sounds like such a brilliant plan and it’s not like this continent has a track record of nationalism going horribly wrong every time it’s tried or anything like that.”
“Our national pride is how we once accommodated over ten percent of our population in refugees; people of a different religion and speaking in a strange language, women wearing scarves on their heads, into a country that was extremely poor by modern standards, and in which people’s livelihoods strongly depended on the zero-sum distribution of land. But now our modern, prosperous society will collapse into ruin if one tenth of that amount arrives because this time they’re brown instead of white.”
“Okay, we’ll grudgingly let you in, but we won’t let you work. If you acquire a permission to work, we won’t let anyone hire you because nobody may be hired below the union rates and our taxes make it too costly for employers to hire low-skilled people. If you manage to get hired against all the odds, we’ll blame you for stealing our jobs. If you don’t, we’ll blame you for stealing our welfare. Have fun trying to survive the odds we’ve stacked against you!”
