…wait, does this mean that as far as black people are concerned, the community has now a pretty balanced gender ratio?
there are black men on rationalist tumblr? who are they–i need more black tumbl-friends
Unfortunately I’m talking about the entire community: I think I’ve heard of the existence of around 1-3 black men in the IRL part of it. Someone who is more familiar with the numbers should comment on this to dis/confirm. Of course if they could be convinced to start tumbling it would be one solution to the issue.
So there’s this thing that happens when people are in a group, especially when that group is dedicated to feminism or SJ, where people decide that the outgroup has bad dynamics and they’re going to reject them.
A few examples: “Men are privileged in our society, therefore, we’re going to make sure that women do most of the talking and planning in this group. Male allies can listen and agree, but mustn’t talk over the women.” “Allistic people’s social norms are bullshit, we’re going to work in accordance with the social norms that feel right for autistic people like us, and allistic people who feel uncomfortable can piss off.” “We’re completely opting out of binary gender, people can identify as anything and use any pronouns they like, and if people won’t use my nounself pronouns, they’re rude.”
Now let me be clear: I think this is a value-neutral thing. It’s not bad to reject outgroup norms in favour of your ingroup, and it’s not necessarily bad to expect people interacting with your ingroup to abide by your outgroup’s norms. For example, if your ingroup has a norm of expecting rational, coherent arguments, and someone comes in spewing badly-formed Nazi apologism, no one is going to be too happy. But I think some varieties of feminism have dominated the landscape of the left long enough that they’ve changed the norms to the point where they’re Not Okay anymore.
For example:
“It is acceptable to say things like ‘men are worthless and disgusting’, or even ‘kill all men’, as long as I say after the fact that I was joking. Never mind that it hurts men of colour, trans men, depressed men, and men with scrupulosity issues.”.
“Male allies are never allowed to contribute to discussion or debate, because they have nothing of value to say.”
“Trans women are not really women and are going to be excluded from all women’s spaces (or even worse: ‘are even more disgusting than cis men and [insert grossness here]”. Or the flipside of that, “trans women are more important than cis woman, should have final say in all discussions about what it means to be a woman or what it means to be trans, and are never wrong, even when they’re saying things that are patently false”.
“People need to fuck people who they’re not attracted to, or they’re transphobic.”
“Trans men are worse than cis men because they chose to take on masculinity and should [insert grossness here]”, or, conversely, “trans men are more pure than cis men because they weren’t raised with male privilege, they’re not really men, and thus are allowed to talk because they’re not icky cis men.”
“It’s acceptable to use ableist slurs, fat-shaming, various other forms of body-shaming, and even (if the person saying these things is truly terrible) suicide baiting, as long as it’s against nerdy cis men.”
“Consent ethics is so intuitive that anyone can understand it and it’s a requirement of being a decent person… what do you mean you’re autistic?! What do you mean that social rules aren’t intuitive to you and you need explanation on how to follow them? I don’t need to explain myself to you, creep!”
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Sometimes it feels like, in trying to fight oppression and discrimination, we have gone too far in the exact opposite direction. Within our own communities, we’re perpetuating dynamics that are the exact opposite of the ones we’ve been fighting, where certain people don’t get to talk because of their genitalia or their trans status.
Let me be clear, I think the dynamics we’re trying to get rid of still exist in the outside world- I mean, the backlash to the two new Star Wars movies having female leads is enough to prove that.
But within the community? You’ve got trans guys afraid to come out because they know that they’ll be ripped to shreds by angry people- or worse, feeling guilty about being trans because they’re afraid identifying as a dude will make them a bad person. You’ve got cis guys- especially gender non-conforming cis guys- feeling guilty and disgusting about who and what they are, with no way to change it and no way to tell people what they’re doing is not okay, and unscrupulous people like monetizeyourcat trying to get them to transition for political reasons. You’ve got people playing Oppression Olympics just to be heard, people lying about their gender or trans status or race so that people will listen to them, abusers using their status as oppressed victims to make their Less Oppressed partners look bad… it’s a mess.
Determining a hierarchy of who gets to talk and who doesn’t, perpetuating violent ableism, judging people’s worth based on their genitals or appearance, telling people that they should die based on things they can’t help- aren’t these the things we’re trying to fight? Isn’t the goal to give everyone a fighting chance to be heard?
Previously guilty to a couple of these, nowadays working to eradicate them all.
Okay, for the good of all who aren’t aware of the context, here goes:
The word fedora comes from the title of an 1882 play by dramatist Victorien Sardou, Fédora being written for Sarah Bernhardt.[10] The play was first performed in the United States in 1889. Bernhardt played Princess Fédora, the heroine of the play. During the play, Bernhardt – a notorious cross-dresser – wore a center-creased, soft brimmed hat. The hat was fashionable for women, and the women’s rights movement adopted it as a symbol.[2][11]
Ada, Countess of Lovelace (néeByron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.[1][2][3]
And “red pill” is obviously from the Matrix by the Wachowski sisters.
The irony is in claiming women haven’t invented anything important while one’s cultural signifiers have been either invented and pioneered by women, originally been made for women (or girls), or both at the same time.
It’s kinda stupefying how many people when they learn something about other human beings that they had never heard of anything like it before and never imagined anything like it before confuse “I just learned” with “this is brand new and is an aberration that has never existed in the entire universe before now. I must decide if it should be allowed.”
Also how few people react with “wow, that’s cool. I live on a rock in space with these creatures just like me who do things I could never have imagined”.
Sometimes I feel like people say “diversity is interesting” but they really mean “I like when I learn a new thing that is still enough like all the old things to be comprehensible to me”
Like do you actually think it’s great that this world has people who suspend themselves from body piercings and people who sexualise balloons and people who dress up as dogs for fun on the weekends? Because I legit do. Or do you just think it’s quirky that some people have pink hair?
My moral philosophy rests upon a foundation of making more variety in the Universe so we all have decent lives. I might, possibly, never suspend myself from body piercings or wear an animal costume, but I’d be a monster if I stopped people from doing that sort of thing. Yes, I do take acceptance, enabling, and encouragement to an extreme (had serious conversations with @woodswordsquire about whether creatures that experience suffering constantly should be made in morphological freedom utopia), but in a Universe where humans tend to be horrible to anything that’s a bit different, there needs to be some balance.
It’s kinda stupefying how many people when they learn something about other human beings that they had never heard of anything like it before and never imagined anything like it before confuse “I just learned” with “this is brand new and is an aberration that has never existed in the entire universe before now. I must decide if it should be allowed.”
Reblogging especially for this. These kind of people are Worst Humans and should stop doing it.
Also, please don’t make constantly suffering creatures in morphological freedom utopia. Morphological freedom utopia is not for suffering-creation purposes.
A deadly powdered drug is catching the attention of U.S. lawmakers, and it isn’t heroin or cocaine.
It’s pure caffeine powder.
A single teaspoon of pure caffeine powder is equal to around 28 cups of coffee, and “very small amounts may cause accidental overdose,” according to the Food and Drug Administration. Overdose symptoms “can include rapid or dangerously erratic heartbeat, seizures and death.“
The powder is sold in bulk bags over the internet, and it’s nearly impossible to measure out safe doses using everyday kitchen tools. “Volume measures, such as teaspoons, are not precise enough to calculate how many milligrams of caffeine are in the serving size,” according to the FDA.
A teaspoon of pure caffeine powder is equal to around 28 cups of coffee.Source: Jessica Hill/AP
Senators want to ban it: In a letter sent to the FDA on Tuesday, Democratic senators campaigned for a federal ban on the sale of pure caffeine powder, theHillreported. The senators reportedly said the FDA has been a “bitter disappointment” in dealing with the dangerous product.
The lawmakers’ concern stems from two overdose deaths from pure caffeine powder in 2014.
The first was Logan Stiner, a high school senior who died after using caffeine powder to boost his energy — but misjudged the dosage, according to the New York Times. The second was James Wade Sweatt, a 24-year-old recent college graduate who reportedly died after consuming a blended drink containing caffeine powder.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York is among the lawmakers seeking a federal ban on pure caffeine powder.Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
What the FDA has done so far: In a statement following Stiner and Sweatt’s deaths, the FDA recommended that people avoid pure caffeine powder. And in 2015, the agency sent “warning letters” to five distributors of the powder, “because these products are dangerous and present a significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury to consumers,” according to a statement.
But it hasn’t been enough, the senators argued.
“It is disturbing that despite two unintended and untimely deaths associated with powdered caffeine, the FDA has done little to regulate these products or adequately enforce the standards in place to protect Americans,” their letter read, according to the Hill.
“These products do not provide a way to measure a safe dosage per FDA recommendations, and are sold in quantities that could easily kill hundreds of individuals if ingested incorrectly,” the letter also stated.
Caffeine kills in other ways, too: We’re talking about energy drinks, like Rockstar and Red Bull. A November study found that consuming just one energy drink causes a significant spike in blood pressure — a risk factor for stroke and heart attacks, Mic reported at the time.
The FDA has also investigated a number of deaths in recent years linked to Monster and 5-Hour Energy shots.
“I bet a lot of people don’t realize how much caffeine they’re getting,“ Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist and director of the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health at NYU Langone Medical Center, said at the time.
*two people under the age of 25 die of doing something ridiculous*
“lawmakers cracking down on new drug of choice for youths”
“I bet a lot of people don’t realize how much caffeine they’re getting,“
Wow, I guess what we’d better do is crack down on the one mechanism of caffeine distribution where you do know exactly how much you’re getting.
It’s an uncalled-for meddling proposal, I’m the first to agree.
But taking caffeine powder is honestly a pretty dumb way to do it. I can think of any good reason to choose it over pills, and you’re much more likely to take the wrong dose by mistake.
And I say this with a large bottle of caffeine pills right in front of me on my desk. People have an irrational aversion to caffeine pills because they’re more obviously drugs—even though you can go into any coffeeshop and get more caffeine than is in a normal pill.
I think the main use I’d have for powder would be in making things that aren’t caffeinated be caffeinated. This *does* entail some sizeable risk of a dosing error if you’re not careful, and caffeine is not very forgiving, but it’s also probably pretty neat to be able to have an arbitrary power of caffeination. Caffeinated ice cream? Done. Caffeinated chocolate dessert? Done. Caffeinated scrambled eggs? No one can stop you. It’d be a cooking ingredient.
The ban idea is silly. It’s already buried away on the Internet where you need to know you’re looking for it to find it, it isn’t like there’s pouches of it in supermarkets convincing foolish people in a hurry to grab it and accidentally take 20 coffees at once, and that deals with about 99% of any problem.
Even from a consequentialist viewpoint, they need a remaining problem they’re solving first and the candidate they propose isn’t much of one.
Completely agree that banning seems an overwrought reaction to the situation, but I’m going to second the recommendation to just use pills b/c it’s a lot easier to get the dosage right. If you want powder, you can always grind the pills yourself, my roommate used to and it seemed pretty easy.
Yeah I’m kind of confused – what is caffeine powder doing for anyone except occasionally killing people?
I am wary of the cooking ingredient idea – at best it’d be a largely frivolous/novelty-value seasoning which is lethal if you swallow a tablespoon of it, which seems like pushing “high risk, low return” to comedic levels
Still seems like at most this calls for a big warning label or restrictions that only allow it in “would have been banned stores” or something.
Sell standardized 3-10% (not sure which concentration would be optimal) caffeine powder in regular shops for safer dosing by unskilled people, reserve pure powder to the same stores selling pure heroin. Seems ridiculously obvious to me.
The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
The dragon-tyrant will fall.
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Uhh, I think this is just a bit of fiddling with the telomeres to account for someone with a genetic disorder. This may not actually do anything for anyone else.(or for anyone, actually) Even if it does, I suspect it won’t be much.
The important thing is that they are working on it, and achieving some outcomes. Rejecting anti-aging is far, embracing it is near, and these things help us get from abstract moralistic far mode to “I want more life, motherfucker” near mode.
The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:
When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).
But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.
So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)
So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.
But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.
So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.
“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”
Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.
Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)
(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)
Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”
And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”
Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”
And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”
“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”
So. There.
If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.
ATTN: ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS EVERYWHERE PLS READ
HEED ATHENA AVATAR’S WORDS BBCAKES EVERYWHERE.
As an academic working in academia: this this this. Never buy into the elitist bullcrap of ‘oh, you wouldn’t understand.’ And never perpetuate that crap yourself, either out of pretension or even simple laziness. If you can’t explain it to a ten-year-old, go back and hit the books again cause you’re not there yet.
This idea that non-STEM people can’t possibly understand STEM is complete bull. Everyone can understand a basic overview, even if they don’t follow all of the math. STEM fields shouldn’t be an inscrutable mass of numbers and equations.
This. Every day and twice on Saturday.
Yup.
Okay I get the point being made here but if really rather not have to worry about being branded as a sexist for not being able to explain things on the spot.
Also this can serve as a plausibly deniable means of communicating “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Okay okay okay okay urgent possibly-protip time
“I’m not sure how well I could explain the stuff I work on to someone who doesn’t have the background, but I could try if you’re interested” or something like that
This removes the risk of being perceived as engaging in one-upsmanship and recognizes that it’s not that STEM is inherently hard to understand but instead it’s one’s own linguistic skills in explaining ideas in an outsider-accessible way that matter.
Furthermore, it gives a slight status concession in the form of “you did cool thing [explaining your complicated field to an outsider] which I might not be able to replicate” to compensate for the status hit that might otherwise happen [”I can understand your stuff but you can’t understand my stuff”].
And this is how I would go about improving my probability of having fruitful interactions with people to whom I couldn’t explain my things that well.
Of course then there’s the fact that the skills to recognize this level of human interaction aren’t always there (they probably correlate pretty well with the ability to explain things in an easily understandable way) and this is why such things should be told publicly! Release information to the commons so that people whose social skills function differently can nonetheless improve their skills!
There is nothing evil about consciously thinking about these mechanics and trying to navigate them with system 2 and anyone telling you otherwise is someone whose system 1 is naturally better adapted for them, simply trying to be a fucking rentseeker maintaining their positional goods of being above you and should be scorned.
Then there are those assholes who think everything is solely positional and if this one guy (assuming he was just unskilled instead of deliberately mean, because that’s the prior for most people) had better skills at making the interaction less unpleasant, everyone else would suffer proportionally and thus any attempts to improve human interaction are inevitably doomed; they are simply, obviously, utterly empirically wrong. Scorn dem as well.
We should develop a program for open-sourcing social skills for people who are better at installing Linux than interacting with people. Not only would it make such people more pleasant to interact with, it would also reduce the burden of explaining such things repeatedly. And it would also undermine the system 1 positionalist assholes. Everyone who deserves to win (liberal arts geek women, neckbeards, etc.) wins!
I feel like “If aliens arrived today, they would think (human institution) is totally baffling” is a pretty useless claim, since it’s practically a fully general argument against any sort of human institution.
Imagine explaining food to aliens. “Yeah, so we derive matter and energy for our bodies to use (we’ll explain bodies later) from existing lifeforms, by putting them inside ourselves and breaking down their chemical bonds. But first we process them in all sorts of ways. Some pre-processing of these other lifeforms is necessary or helpful for the internal chemical-bond-breaking, but others have no such justification beyond hundreds of years of history. Also, there are varieties specific to certain regions, and many people prefer their region’s lifeform-processing methods to others. And somehow, everyone thinks this is totally normal!”
Break out of the pro-food groupthink, IMO.
I think aliens would not be nearly so perplexed at most of our institutions. Like, it isn’t like our human institutions are going to be universal, but most of them are ways to address things that any species is going to need to be able to address, and they’d have to be really stupid to be unable to draw a parallel.
this sort of “oh no, humans are so bad and disgusting, aliens would be ashamed of the fact we’re violent” thinking is why the reveal of “A Small Talent For War” was so great
i get really annoyed at what tumblr thinks aliens would be super perplexed about, or how they think aliens would be different in general. and these posts are all written in the same way!
the post about the demon being super confused and for some reason upset over gender roles? well, firstly, dimorphism and sexual selection is a thing in nature, it’s not as though humans are unique in that regard, and secondly, if the demon is that alien i find it hard to believe they would even notice that there is propriety, that the option to put these things on your face or these certain clothes even existed, or that they would even care. they’re a demon, from hell, possessing you. presumably they have shit to do.
the post about sight somehow being unique to humans? photoreception is RIDICULOUSLY COMMON. it is not biologically plausible, like, at all.
this thing about explaining food to aliens is a parody, i think? it’s in the same reductionist forced-absurdism style. there is no way aliens would not understand resource consumption to maintain equilibrium. it’s only ever done to try to demonstrate TO HUMANS how absurd things we take for granted sound when stated in this style of language.
alien aliens can be done well, but tumblr does not do them well. it isn’t even about aliens.
Tumblr aliens seems to be basically about Yog-Sothoth being baffled about Shub-Niggurath.
To The Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young, sexual selection and dimorphism and eating and so on make perfect sense, because they are the products of evolution and nature. The Beyond-One has no attachments to the processes of evolution, and there is a peculiar particularity to the products that are inevitable from the processes that created them.
Basic AI drives are what makes sense to Yog-Sothoth. Consuming energy and maximizing resources is natural. The specific human-cultural forms of “food” and “gold” are very much tainted by their origin from Shub-Niggurath and thus make less sense to Yog-Sothoth than their mind-in-general idealized forms. Optimizing the universe to match one’s utility function is Yog-Sothoth, sex & drugs & rock’n’roll are Shub-Niggurath.
And our human position suspended between the two lets us recognize this certain absurdity. Our minds are implementing enough general consciousness and cognition to be occasionally surprised by how ridiculous the specific things our animal evolutionary history has produced are, but at the same time our inevitable origins are what makes us have those things and take them for granted in the first place. When people imagine these aliens, they are imagining something that is a bit less Shub-Niggurath and a bit more Yog-Sothoth than we are; just like we are a bit more Yog-Sothoth and a bit less Shub-Niggurath than peacocks or ants are.
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
There’s promethean-steel-feminism!intersectional feminism, and then there’s, uh, “intersectional” “feminism”. I feel that nonbinarity is correlated somewhat with the latter, unfortunately. Which is definitely a faction.
The other dimension that possibly divides different kinds of feminists is the relative focus on gender abolitionism. On the one hand, everyone is treated equally if gender does not exist. On the other, people with strong gender identities, and trans people who want to pass/express their strong gender identity with coded body language, clothing, etc – can’t. I imagine cis-by-default, nonbinary, and agender people would be more likely to support the first, while trans people would be more likely to support the second.
And all these being under the umbrella of intersectional feminism.
Me bridging gaps between different groups seems to be a thing, and as a non-binary trans person my gender abolitionism is basically gender pluralism taken to its logical conclusion.
I don’t expect gender to stop existing, but it can probably be transformed into unrecognizability by morphological freedom and abolishing cultural prescriptiveness.
For every single thing in hard gender some trans people benefit from, some other trans people suffer from it just as well, and people who want to be “the kind of people who wear skirts and like flowers and have a certain kind of body language” can still be that kind of people even if we destroy the idea that trans women aren’t women if they wear pants. There are numerous people with strong gender identities who can’t be perceived as members of their gender if said gender is assumed to consist of cultural things that are personally incompatible with them.
A huge number of trans people seem to be basically “gender is bullshit, I’m definitely a woman and people should respect that, but I don’t want to have to suffer all the social prescriptions to prove it, I want to be an individual person damnit not a role (still 100% woman though you don’t take that away from me)” and I can’t see how they would be incompatible with postgender hyperpluralist morphological freedom utopia which allows people to specify their gender as a modifier which is not intrinsically linked to their clothes/body language/etc. and most importantly not invalidated by not having the right kind of clothes/body language/etc.
I understand that in our current cistem dystopia some women would be misgendered as men if men wearing skirts was more normal, but that isn’t a flaw in “men wearing skirts was more normal” but rather in “would be misgendered if”. Assholes not respecting people’s genders is the problem, and trying to shift around the disrespect (”don’t invalidate us, invalidate those other women instead!”) doesn’t help, eradicating the disrespect does. That’s what must be done. Trying to survive in the cistem is a necessity I will not condemn, but trying to maintain the cistem of disrespecting people’s genders is a violation of others’ self-determination and gender freedom, and as a free and open source gender advocate I will not tolerate it.
This is what I want to abolish. The disrespect and the invalidation and the idea that people aren’t allowed to choose. Another’s right to choose is not a violation of my gender freedom; my attempt to impose my views on gender upon them would be.
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
There’s promethean-steel-feminism!intersectional feminism, and then there’s, uh, “intersectional” “feminism”. I feel that nonbinarity is correlated somewhat with the latter, unfortunately. Which is definitely a faction.
That’s why I’m taking over. I didn’t specify how big a faction “the rest of us” are, but it needs to get bigger, and seems to be getting bigger indeed. One country is already basically conquered because the steel faction has seized control of the edge of the Overton Window, and I have Secret Plans to make it scale across the entire world as well.
Europeans: Haha those dumb Americans voting for Trump!
*Ignores Golden Dawn in Greece*
*Ignores UKIP in Britain*
*Ignores Swedish Democrats*
*Ignores Svoboda in Ukraine*
*Ignores AfD in Germany*
*Ignores the 80+ other fascist groups in Europe that have been gaining traction*
Europeans: Stupid Americans don’t you know that we made racism illegal in 1881 :) No racism in Europe :)
I really do hold a lot of loathing for this continent.
I’ve seen blatant neo nazi rallies in my city on a few separate occasions with signs like “Hitler was right”. Pretty much everybody just walked past without batting an eyelid.
Okay so gender nonconformity may be boosted by endocrine disruptors leading to physical dysphoria (plastic in the water? some medications during pregnancy? chem trails? who knows). But what about cultural shifts leading to a rise in social dysphoria, where people wish to opt out of their assigned gender?
Gender roles were more restrictive in the past, but they were also taken for granted and less intensively examined, and when they were studied it was typically to attribute them to God or natural law or some other relatively remote and unchangeable source that doesn’t demand any personal response.
Today, everyone in the developed world will be bombarded from an early age not just with gender roles, but also deconstructions of gender roles and a worldview where they are constructed from human actions, tradition, patriarchy, capitalism, warring forces that you, yes YOU, can help or hinder in your personal life.
This is exhausting! Everything you do becomes weighted with symbolism in the struggle to define what gender means, and to be a man or a woman is to join an army locked in ideological struggle.
Combine this with the obsessive focus on internal identity, “born this way”, and the idea that men and women have some completely different gender qualia at a fundamental level and it’s unsurprising that many people would decide they just don’t feel strongly enough to justify claiming any gender at all.
we shall give people the means motive and opportunity to opt out of the cistem until it collapses under the weight of its own impossibility and this creative destruction shall achieve the redistribution of the means of social construction so that the abolition of gender as all previous generations have known it shall be reality and one day our children will not know that once people were very concerned about what their genitals looked like and adults wrapped them in pieces of cloth superficially hiding their genitals but also signaling very strongly to everyone what they looked like despite such things making very little sense and our descendants will not even be horrified when we tell them the reason old buildings have an even number of bathrooms because the idea itself will be just as absurd as purple hippos with six legs
Global warming is probably a problem (and possibly a severe* one?) but its not anything remotely near an existential risk.
As far as I can tell, there are basically three human caused scenarios that could maybe lead to human extinction (not counting technical extinction via transhumanism)- UFAI, world war with WMDs (I’m not sure if today’s nuclear arsenals can accomplish this?), or some kind of synthetic super-pathogen. UFAI would kill “Mother Nature” dead too.
That caring about people over “nature” is labelled “self centered” with negative connotations really highlights why I despise environmentalism though. (IDK if that’s the intentions of the artist, this might just be cosmic horror, but I’ve encountered that attitude a lot)
*the scale/scope is a bit wonky when labeling worldwide problems by severity
[”But the real version. Where the ant let the grasshopper die.”]
THESEUS ARMED FOR WAR AGAINST THE GODDESS OF CANCER AND THE GODDESS OF EVERYTHING ELSE.
If you meet Gaia, mock the “selfishness” of her apparent desire that so many ecosystems and species thrive. It is an appropriate response to the assertion that a desire for 7 billion happy and prosperous humans is selfish.
To be fair, the Gaia in this comic didn’t explicitly voice pro-biodiversity viewpoints, as she seems equally apathetic about the species we cause the extinction of with her ”eh, life goes on” attitude. That is, she is a much better representation of Mother Nature’s impersonal indifference to our individual living and suffering, especially being better than most depictions of her as a “kind and caring” deity. The only thing missing is that her garment should perhaps be red, for she is Nature, red in tooth and claw.
Truly, our signs of reverence to such a deity should be growing sharper claws and tougher skin to face the coming days.
I would take a thousand Frankensteins, Herbert Wests, and Moreaus over Mother Nature.
Diversity is useful and beautiful. BUT, Mother Nature doesn’t care about keeping any of us around, or the richness of life that’s already here. You like those fancy black-and-white bears? Nature doesn’t. They’ll go extinct without us someday. You like those jungles? Tomorrow, they will be gone whether we stop cutting down the trees or not, because Nature is a dumb Black Goat with a Thousand Young. Death, sickness, and pain producing endless struggle, that’s the secret behind everything we judge to be beautiful that Nature contains. Kinda makes Ol’ Shubby not something to pray to, but something to tame and care for. We can be the benevolent gardeners and nature-loving hermits our ancestors imagined their nature deities to be. Certainly, we have enough power today to begin taking some responsibility.
PS: We COULD kill off all of Nature, if we put our minds to it, by the way. That’s the funny thing.The damage we do today, to various species? It’s just us not paying attention to how we use our power. We create horrific destruction by accident. We can do worse on purpose. I’d like to think that means we can do better, as well, if we concentrate.
Reblogging again because this keeps getting better and better.
i work as a barista & people tell me all the time that The Drinks Got Gender. Thats A Lady Coffee, people try to say
its fucking bean water
can’t believe i can’t just reply to this but: maybe they’re actually telling you that this coffee has an important status. Lady Coffee
oh shit i was in the presence of bean water royalty oh fuck i must have looked like such a rube. such a fool.
what the fuck does this post mean ive been trying to decipher its hieroglyphic encrypted message but i cant
“From a deconstructionist stand point, I have to disagree with a large portion of the customers that I, a humble barista tend to each day. The assertion that certain coffee drinks are more suitable for one gender or another is folly. For as we know: 1. gender is a social construct, & 2. coffee of any type is simply hot water strained through roasted beans, & has no greater affect on either culturally assigned sex.”
“What ho, kind friend! Is it not unfortunate that I cannot simply reply to this post, & most reblog it? What a farce, this blue website! Ah, but I digress: what if perhaps your customers were not asserting not the suitability of the drink for a given gender, but rather indicating some matter of status? Perhaps the coffee is possessing of a high rank in society. This is of course my purely grammatical viewpoint on the subject.”
“Oh, damnation! This does in fact seem much more likely than my own ludicrous assumptions, & I was no doubt in the presence of roasted bean royalty! Some emissary from foreign soil! Curses! What a country bumpkin I’ve made myself out to be!!”
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
Bill Clinton: it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.
Yoda: taxation, theft it is!
Doge: so taxation, very theft, wow
Journalists: is taxation theft? let’s interview some Millennials and ask them.
Buzzfeed: 17 ways taxation is like theft (the 11th is coercion!)
Wikipedia: A tax (from the Latin taxo) is a financial charge or other levy imposed upon a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a state or the functional equivalent of a state to fund various public expenditures. A failure to pay, or evasion of or resistance to taxation, is usually punishable by law.
What if the high proportion of trans women in our community, the never ending plight of the lonely nerd boys, and lesbian sheep syndrome are all connected? *X Files music*
that explains it! lesbian sheep syndrome affects even lesbians who don’t know they’re lesbians yet. truly, the power of lesbian sheep syndrome is strong
I have… mixed feelings about this article? For one, it denigrates both (admittedly masturbatory) avant-garde works and popular works in favor of a very narrow view of High Art, which I’m not fond of; there is also, perhaps unintentionally, a tone of nostalgia and longing for kings and robber barons, their “better taste” justifying their equally terrible (if not worse!) political/economic actions.
It’s an interesting topic but the actual execution feels very poor + simplistic.
Yeah this article takes a bunch of interesting topics and does just about the least interesting thing it could with them.
The trend among the super rich to seek out populist cultural experiences is important, but not in the way that the author thinks it is. The fact that dictators listen to the same pop stars as their citizens but can also afford glamorous private concerts with those stars says something about the way displays of power work in the modern age. There’s a reason they’re not building opera halls, and it’s not just a matter of taste.
That… doesn’t seem quite right.
(I remember opera in recent times as being popular with Literally Everybody Who Can Perform The Upper Class Identity Temporarily, which can be anywhere from the top 10% to top 50% of the population, and individual songs or light opera, and burlesque that grew up in parody of it, being even more widely popular)
There would seem to be three or four broad categories: Modern Popular, Traditional, Modern Intellectual, and the Anti-Art offshoot of Modern Intellectual.
Modern Popular is usually opposed to Traditional on the basis of modern snobbery, but from my (Reactionary Reconstructionist) point of view Modern Popular is actually pretty close to Traditional, at least when the totally unmoored wierd shit category is removed.
Also a lot of people forget that the lower-class forms of Traditional ever existed.
A fucking ugly yacht painted in dazzle camoflauge is opposed to both Traditional and to Modern Popular.
Maybe it’s because I’m feeling pretty sick right now but I’m not really clear how this disagrees with my post. I meant that having your name attached to an opera used to be an effective way of showing you’re a big deal, but these days having Beyonce play at your wedding works much better. The article attributing everything to personal taste is missing the meaty stuff. Not my best phrasing up there though.
Edit: okay just reread and I can totally see how my post came across. I didn’t mean to imply that opera was never popular.
Excuse my amateur history and sociology here, but isn’t that just a facet of the decreasing popularity of patronage* systems in general? Rich people used to show off their wealth by sponsoring artists and musicians long-term, but now it’s more fashionable to shop around and to know what you’re getting before you buy it.
This seems like a result of consumerism (I guess this is the best word available for the not-capitalism-but-associated-with-it thing that academics call capitalism or neoliberalism sometimes?) and larger urban centers. There are far more works of art and entertainment available, so why would you sponsor a single artist or musician for years when there are hundreds of equally deserving creators out there? Especially since it’s become much higher-status to be seen as a buyer and consumer.
*Patreon is a really far cry from Maecenas and Vergil for reasons I won’t go into because I’m tired and should probably be writing proofs not shitty history speculation. Mostly just the degree of commitment and the level of showing off involved. Also, not to be confused with the Roman patronage system that was actually called a patronage system–that was more like a hierarchical kin network without the blood relations, and had nothing to do with art.
Put bluntly, the upper class just aren’t as classy as they used to be.
So too has public funding for high art taken a beating. While Americans might yearn for the sort of well-funded public arts programs they imagine Europeans prioritize, the reality is much bleaker. Despite Europe’s zealous emphasis on promoting a rich culture for a united continent, the European Union is constantly hacking away at centuries-old institutions in the name of belt-tightening.
I am quite irritated at these “old Art is dying because nobody wants to pay for it” thinkpieces.
Austerity is hurting opera? Why should I care, austerity is hurting people too and people are far more important than opera.
The state isn’t funding enough High Art?
Let the people choose the art they want to have, and if they are Wrong, anyone is free to try to do differently. Every euro in public funding for the arts is an euro not in the pockets of basic income recipients, and the stuff we europeans use the art money on is pretty bullshit. The government has no place deciding what art is worthy of support and what isn’t.
Global warming is probably a problem (and possibly a severe* one?) but its not anything remotely near an existential risk.
As far as I can tell, there are basically three human caused scenarios that could maybe lead to human extinction (not counting technical extinction via transhumanism)- UFAI, world war with WMDs (I’m not sure if today’s nuclear arsenals can accomplish this?), or some kind of synthetic super-pathogen. UFAI would kill “Mother Nature” dead too.
That caring about people over “nature” is labelled “self centered” with negative connotations really highlights why I despise environmentalism though. (IDK if that’s the intentions of the artist, this might just be cosmic horror, but I’ve encountered that attitude a lot)
*the scale/scope is a bit wonky when labeling worldwide problems by severity
[”But the real version. Where the ant let the grasshopper die.”]
THESEUS ARMED FOR WAR AGAINST THE GODDESS OF CANCER AND THE GODDESS OF EVERYTHING ELSE.
If you meet Gaia, mock the “selfishness” of her apparent desire that so many ecosystems and species thrive. It is an appropriate response to the assertion that a desire for 7 billion happy and prosperous humans is selfish.
Preparing for the challenge to France, Edward had to make up for the disparity in numbers by some superiority in weaponry or tactics. In 1337 he had prohibited on pain of death all sport except archery and canceled the debts of all workmen who manufactured the bows of yew and their arrows.
That … definitely is one way to make your subjects into better archers
If there’s a basic income of $200 a week for all adult citizens, it could be phased in to migrants so that after every year they’ve spent in the country (calculated by days; days spent abroad only postpone full entitlements by the same number) their weekly entitlements grow by $20.
However, they would be entitled to a tax rebate of the full amount of the basic income on any taxes they pay; if we assume a 25% income tax, migrants would only start effectively paying taxes on weekly earnings exceeding $800; amounts below that would be registered and immediately refunded. The taxes paid could shorten the time to full entitlement so that one who has no (official) sources of income would get it after 10 years, and reaching the zero tax level shortens it to 5 years, and so on. This creates an incentive to participate in the formal economy, and reduces employers’ ability to steal immigrant workers’ wages because there’s a clear paper trail, and stops the state from exploiting the labor of immigrants by taking taxes without offering anything in return. If there’s a non-income tax, the tax rebate could be offered in cash. Give every citizen and resident a wage account (if necessary, buying the entire country of Estonia is cheaper than trying to have the US government/its incompetent crony contractors implement it) which automatically calculates and pays taxes correctly and gives people an easy way to have full guaranteed compliance to the taxation.
As far as voting rights are concerned, depending on how vulnerable the immigrant population is to the democratic mob, one could argue that making everyone wait 18 years from arrival (whether by birth or immigration) is fair (assuming strong constitutional protections so the citizens can’t just decide to start exploiting the migrants or deporting them), or one could tie it to the full welfare eligibility which would arrive sooner.
Anyone can come in, as long as they are carrying enough money for an ID card, vaccinations, and a mandatory return ticket so they can go back on their own expense if they need to (this is just to pacify the asshole voters; it should be an unnecessary expense for the vast majority of immigrants). Their arrival would be registered so that even if someone steals their passport/ID card they can go to the cops and tell them they arrived in the country through the immigration office of Whateveritwas and can verify their identity that way (once again, use estonians instead of trying to buy american) and now the asshole who took their docs is in trouble.
When “illegal” immigrants are discovered, they are promptly asked to register at their nearest immigration office so they get on the citizenship track asap and don’t miss out on their legal rights.
Pre-welfare-eligible immigrants would get healthcare they can pay for, plus the very basics of infectious disease prevention, maternal and emergency healthcare, and the most cost-effective routine care. It’s probably better than what they could’ve received in Shitholistan anyway, and if americans see people not having access to proper healthcare in their own neighborhood they’d probably be more interested in doing something actually effective about it, while people suffering the same thing in Shitholistan just elicit a shrug and a “whatever, my niece is going there as a totally useless voluntourist mainly for the photo ops”. Maybe it would divert nonprofit funds from Make-a-Wish to ‘Helping Even Non-Cute Immigrants With Common Diseases’.
If one is eligible for asylum and protection, one gets the full welfare benefits immediately, but rejected asylum seekers would still be allowed to stay because nobody must ever be deported back to Shitholistan.
yes it creates more visible inequality in the US and that’s exactly the point because the inequality is already there and assholes are just saying it doesn’t count because it’s a different country but guess what I don’t believe in countries and borders I believe in people and it’s really unfair bullshit that the privilege of one’s birth is allowed to determine one’s fate so thoroughly with this plan instead after ten years people would be far more equal and that’s way better than having people non-consensually stuck in Shitholistan just because some assholes are whining about their tax dolla
(I am of two minds here. @oligopsony has recently pointed out how an explicitly codified apartheid might be destabilizing to the entire political-economic system - which, in context, is good, because stability here is the stability of the atrocious and laughably evil global distribution regime today. In practice implying that the non-citizen class, unless contained with powerful and specific repressive measures as in e.g. Singapore, would be great for activism, left-wing organization and all such projects aligned against their exclusion.
Bertram takes the opposite view in the linked piece, however; assuming effective repression and stable, profitable, long-lasting apartheid… this all looks like a dark prospect indeed.)
(idk… it’s 1am, and a very tricky issue)
Replacing global inequality with local inequality would probably force people to face the existence of that inequality instead of sweeping it under the rug and reifying it with borders and walls and “not our problem”s. There is already the global apartheid of “people allowed to live in the best places” and “people not allowed to live in the best places” and the first group is very intensely invested in not considering the existence of the second group or its own culpability in maintaining the distinction. Letting the second group in (modulo the standard “no fraud, no coercion” which department the gulf states seem to be pretty dramatically lacking in, and even the migrant forager labour utilized in Finland is being exploited by methods that should in any just society be totally illegal) wouldn’t make things any worse because things are already worse.
I don’t support the kind of accelerationism that seeks to maximize misery to create $miracle because it all too easily leads to simply increased misery without $miracle, but there’s an obvious way to implement this so that people are better off and the distribution regime can’t stay as laughably evil as it is now. Instead of creating permanent apartheid, phasing in full rights and entitlements after X years of residency along with opened borders (18 is an obvious and elegant and also a bullshit forevertaking option; I’d personally go with 5-10 for migrants with the basic income being gradually introduced along the way, so eg. someone who has been in the country for 30 months would get half of the full amount) would reduce the flow of white whine while still letting other people in without subjecting them to the bullshit requirements of asylum-seeking, restricted work-based visas etc.
Also, in a certain way the current global situation is pretty similar to the one in Britain during early industrialization when people’s movement and ability to move to the places offering better alternatives, and thus directly their negotiating power against local capital, was artificially constrained by legislation. There are global forcible inclosure acts happening in the form of third world land grabs; and the workers aren’t allowed to seek a better bargain elsewhere and thus are forced to accept whatever bullshit the local robber barons are able to shove down their throat. Opening the borders would mean that exploitable third world labor would suddenly have significantly more options, and those benefiting from the limitations upon their freedom would be forced to either offer a better deal (recommended) or try to impose extra repression to prevent the global proletariat from using its new opportunities (something which might prompt more action from the international community than the currently existing “well borders just happen to be the way it is, not our fault, literally SNAFU”).
I
want to do the numbers properly sometime, but at a glance pretty much
every government’s budget feels like an innocent-hurting version of the
silly budgeting meme and there would be plenty of things to cut and
reallocate way more optimally if only voters would stop acting like
voters and states would stop acting like states.
The government:
Crucial governance stuff: $50 Badly implemented but theoretically laudable redistribution: $1500 Buying votes from assholes: $3600 I dunno, cops or something: $200 Help me budget this, my poor people are dying
Me: spend less money on buying votes from assholes. also UBI.
The government:No
Around 3/4s of the federal budget is social security, defense, medicaid, and medicare. So, it’s mostly redistribution and defense, which is a mix of crucial
governance stuff and buying votes from assholes that’s not easy to disentangle. (I would argue that there’s a fair amount of
buying votes from assholes
with how medicare is implemented too, either way it’s not easy)
Getting buy-in is also what a state or any theoretical non-state political body has to do, even in the absence of democracy. If you have a theoretically optimal government but it’s not actually achievable, then it’s not optimal at all.
And then there’s the Keynesian issue of whether stuff like defense and those other misc programs actually benefit the economy through increasing employment and demand, which is a whole other mess.(That I’m not qualified to argue)
The US could afford to cut defense a lot by reducing inefficiency in the Pentagon, and stopping the practice of listening to bushes and getting stuck in deserts without exit strategies. And not buying votes from assholes with “must create jobs in the defense industry”.
Social security, medicaid, medicare etc. I’d simply replace dollar-for-dollar with a basic income, except for a basic public health insurance for catastrophic conditions; Europe and Singapore can produce far more cost-efficiency so the same (or let’s face it, way better) health outcomes for poor people could be achieved by implementing a non-bullshit system, and the savings could be passed onto the basic income.
Then there’s corporate welfare which by a quick calculation is at least $80B directly and who knows how much indirectly, which needs to go. All the grants for renewable energy etc. could be replaced with a carbon tax.
Then there’s land and natural resources; a land value tax is not a bad tax, and natural resources most naturally belong to everyone, so basically sell a sustainable amount of groundwater etc. to the highest bidders and put the proceedings into the basic income. Solves the drought in California and gives free money to poor people.
Putting all that together; $2.3T from various forms of means-tested welfare (including state budgets though), $200B from defense, at least $100B from corporate welfare and other sources, the total that I could “trivially” reallocate to a basic income would be, at above $2.6T, pretty close to what would be needed to provide all adults $10k a year and all children $6k. Subtract public healthcare reform from that, but also account for the fact that a non-bullshit system would benefit everyone massively.
In fact, if I assume I could make public healthcare twice as cost-efficient by importing a healthcare czar from a country with a better system, just the healthcare savings and welfare alone would be around $1.5T in the federal budget, no need to touch the lower levels of government; not that far from the estimated $2T for a basic income to all adults. Save a bit on defense, get some more income from somewhere and one is already really really close to affording it.
The keynesian issue would be solved by just giving people the money to use on the things they want to use it on, instead of robbing them and giving money to cronies who sure “create jobs” for a certain value of creating jobs, but who also destroy value compared to just letting people choose what they actually want. It would be such a horror, people would use the money on things like affordable housing, instead of buying the latest gadgets for oppressing people.
Democracies have the predictable problem with voters voting in bullshit, and that’s why I don’t really believe in democracy without a strict constitution saying that whatever the voters want to do is probably not allowed, and that tax money should just be given to people instead of implementing degrading and humiliating means-tested programs.
Democracy is the government equivalent of duct tape for engineering; use it if you must, but for the sake of all that is good don’t use it any more than is absolutely inevitably necessary, and specifically don’t try to build your entire system out of duct tape. If I was the Everything Czar of the US, I could fix Everything (although a lot of people would yell at me); but I can’t do it, so I need to find a non-state solution to poverty and other bad things.
I would have liked to see some exploration of more possibilities, including a NIT, but overall the first section of the linked article is good. The rest of it is mostly appeals to liberty based on moral intuitions that I don’t share, so I can’t comment on how convincing others will find it.
In general though, yes, we need more people playing around with the numbers and trying to figure out exactly how expensive all of this would be.
IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS
If we replace all income taxes and anti-poverty programs (and also all the bullshit benefits like the mortgage deduction) with a flat income tax equivalent to the current highest marginal tax bracket and a basic income equivalent to what we can afford then, we’ve certainly superficially increased taxation substantially, but the massively increased simplicity in the economy must be accounted for in any analysis that wishes to be actually sufficient.
Having an anti-poverty program with a cutoff income is equivalent to effectively having a really bullshit form of taxation with marginal tax rates all over the fucking place which distorts the economy far more than a nominally higher but stable and predictable flat marginal tax rate (because we aren’t hiding any bullshit anywhere). Anti-poverty programs with bullshit cutoffs also introduce deadweight loss (or else I’ve seriously misunderstood what deadweight loss means) and if deadweight loss is equivalent to the square of the effective tax rate, a universal flat tax rate minimizes it.
(And for the progressives who are worried about progressive taxation: the beauty of a basic income is that it turns anything that is not a head tax because fuck head taxes, even a consumption tax even though people usually think those are regressive, into an effectively progressive tax; no need to fuck up the system otherwise because social justice is built-in to it anyway!)
This is also why NIT and UBI are effectively the same fucking thing and why we can’t just look at how much we are “taxing”; their difference is merely an accounting trick because the effective marginal tax rate is always the same in both (assuming both are implemented with the same base parameters).
You motherfuckers don’t just increase all taxes by a flat 50% because what the fuck, you abolish the FICA because it’s a bullshit tax, and tax everyone’s income at the highest marginal tax rate of approximately 40% (or more if you want to replace some of the lost taxation from abolishing the FICA, but seriously just implement a basic income and otherwise privatize pensions there’s no need to make it complicated).
The Philosophical Economist is a lazy motherfucker who should not be commenting on economics. Address basic income properly or go home. If steelmanned basic income, in its best and strongest and most justifiable form, is found wanting; then I will try to find something else. Until then, I only see people whacking at strawmen and weakmen.
I am with Milton Friedman. The true effective tax rate is basically the same as the percent of GDP taken up by the government. So the effective tax rate in the USA is quite high. There is plenty of money for GBI.
Of course “the government” covers quite alot of programs. you only get back approx 40-50%+ of GDP (depending on country) if you cut everything the government does. Roughly speaking local/state spending are both somewhat less than 50% of federal spending in the USA. Very few people want to cut the whole government in any nation (certainly I don’t want to). But redistribution does actually take up a large share of the federal budget. And much of the government really could be cut.
I want to do the numbers properly sometime, but at a glance pretty much every government’s budget feels like an innocent-hurting version of the silly budgeting meme and there would be plenty of things to cut and reallocate way more optimally if only voters would stop acting like voters and states would stop acting like states.
The government:
Crucial governance stuff: $50 Badly implemented but theoretically laudable redistribution: $1500 Buying votes from assholes: $3600 I dunno, cops or something: $200
Help me budget this, my poor people are dying
Me: spend less money on buying votes from assholes. also UBI.
I would have liked to see some exploration of more possibilities, including a NIT, but overall the first section of the linked article is good. The rest of it is mostly appeals to liberty based on moral intuitions that I don’t share, so I can’t comment on how convincing others will find it.
In general though, yes, we need more people playing around with the numbers and trying to figure out exactly how expensive all of this would be.
IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS
If we replace all income taxes and anti-poverty programs (and also all the bullshit benefits like the mortgage deduction) with a flat income tax equivalent to the current highest marginal tax bracket and a basic income equivalent to what we can afford then, we’ve certainly superficially increased taxation substantially, but the massively increased simplicity in the economy must be accounted for in any analysis that wishes to be actually sufficient.
Having an anti-poverty program with a cutoff income is equivalent to effectively having a really bullshit form of taxation with marginal tax rates all over the fucking place which distorts the economy far more than a nominally higher but stable and predictable flat marginal tax rate (because we aren’t hiding any bullshit anywhere). Anti-poverty programs with bullshit cutoffs also introduce deadweight loss (or else I’ve seriously misunderstood what deadweight loss means) and if deadweight loss is equivalent to the square of the effective tax rate, a universal flat tax rate minimizes it.
(And for the progressives who are worried about progressive taxation: the beauty of a basic income is that it turns anything that is not a head tax because fuck head taxes, even a consumption tax even though people usually think those are regressive, into an effectively progressive tax; no need to fuck up the system otherwise because social justice is built-in to it anyway!)
This is also why NIT and UBI are effectively the same fucking thing and why we can’t just look at how much we are “taxing”; their difference is merely an accounting trick because the effective marginal tax rate is always the same in both (assuming both are implemented with the same base parameters).
You motherfuckers don’t just increase all taxes by a flat 50% because what the fuck, you abolish the FICA because it’s a bullshit tax, and tax everyone’s income at the highest marginal tax rate of approximately 40% (or more if you want to replace some of the lost taxation from abolishing the FICA, but seriously just implement a basic income and otherwise privatize pensions there’s no need to make it complicated).
The Philosophical Economist is a lazy motherfucker who should not be commenting on economics. Address basic income properly or go home. If steelmanned basic income, in its best and strongest and most justifiable form, is found wanting; then I will try to find something else. Until then, I only see people whacking at strawmen and weakmen.
Look, David Henderson is a smart guy. He’s not an idiot. He’s not a “lazy motherfucker”.
Your main objection is (as you put in all caps): “IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS”.
Well, so what? Most people aren’t receiving funds from anti-poverty programs. I’m not sure why you think this sinks any part of his analysis. Yes, having steep “welfare cliffs” discourages them from working. And this is bad:
But these welfare cliffs (and that’s the most extreme you can make it) don’t cause any marginal disincentive to work for people above the level of the cliff.
And also, this is mitigated to large extent by the fact that you just can’t get welfare for the reason “I just don’t feel like working”. You have to have a real need. Now that creates fraud and bureaucracy all over the place. But it also increases the incentive to work.
A flat 40% tax may be more “predictable” than the current arrangement. It’s also a really freaking high tax! That decreases the incentive to work for everyone, not just the poor.
That is why taking everyone’s money and then giving it back to them causes deadweight loss. Willingness to supply labor is not perfectly inelastic; you tax it, you discourage it. A targeted welfare program also causes deadweight loss, even a higher level of deadweight loss for the people affected, but less overall because it covers fewer people.
The main point here is that you act like you have an absolutely knockdown argument that Henderson is an idiot for not recognizing. Yet your argument is pretty much irrelevant. A basic income or a negative income tax would cost a lot of money, much more than the current welfare system. You can’t make up the difference by eliminating (as Trump would say) “waste, fraud, and abuse”. You have to not just “superficially” raise taxes. You have to actually, genuinely raise taxes. By a lot.
Now of course you can simply pay out less for the basic income. Just eliminate all welfare and give everyone an equal share of the funds, without raising taxes. But then it’s not nearly as much money as the basic income people want. Though David Friedman estimates that providing people with the truly minimal amount they need to live, “enough food and shelter so that their lack would not greatly reduce your life expectancy,” is about $500 a year.
Eyeballing that graph, the effective marginal tax rate from $20k to $80k is about 85%. From $30k to $45k it’s about 66%. From $70k to $100k (the only part really above the welfare cliff) it seems to be pretty close to 40%.
That is not insignificant when the US median household income is around $50 000. According to Wikipedia, in 2010 the average income of the middle quintile was within the welfare cliff region.
Also, it looks like my 40% was a gross overestimate based on being accustomed to nordic levels of taxation (For comparison: the state of Finland pays out to its social programs the equivalent of around $15k a year per citizen.) and the US actually has significantly lower taxes.
I can’t spare the time for a thorough analysis right now but the entire point of the basic income is to use higher marginal taxes to phase it out from the non-poor, something I haven’t seen included in these calculations. The taxes hurt my brain so I won’t calculate them, but calculating the price of a basic income from the assumption that the lowest nominal tax brackets would stay the same is deeply mistaken because the entire point of the basic income is to make the effective marginal taxes visible and transparent and spread them more evenly.
I did take a quick look at the entire US government budget though and it seems that if I was made Economy Czar, I could gut the state enough to fund a basic income of $10k to adults and $6k to children by removing all kinds of useless non-social-program spending as well. Naively assuming the FairTax is revenue-neutral as proposed, combining it with this one seems to be my new favorite proposal. Thoroughly politically impossible because I wouldn’t be nice to the middle class and corporate cronies, but theoretically elegant and beautiful.
I would have liked to see some exploration of more possibilities, including a NIT, but overall the first section of the linked article is good. The rest of it is mostly appeals to liberty based on moral intuitions that I don’t share, so I can’t comment on how convincing others will find it.
In general though, yes, we need more people playing around with the numbers and trying to figure out exactly how expensive all of this would be.
IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS
If we replace all income taxes and anti-poverty programs (and also all the bullshit benefits like the mortgage deduction) with a flat income tax equivalent to the current highest marginal tax bracket and a basic income equivalent to what we can afford then, we’ve certainly superficially increased taxation substantially, but the massively increased simplicity in the economy must be accounted for in any analysis that wishes to be actually sufficient.
Having an anti-poverty program with a cutoff income is equivalent to effectively having a really bullshit form of taxation with marginal tax rates all over the fucking place which distorts the economy far more than a nominally higher but stable and predictable flat marginal tax rate (because we aren’t hiding any bullshit anywhere). Anti-poverty programs with bullshit cutoffs also introduce deadweight loss (or else I’ve seriously misunderstood what deadweight loss means) and if deadweight loss is equivalent to the square of the effective tax rate, a universal flat tax rate minimizes it.
(And for the progressives who are worried about progressive taxation: the beauty of a basic income is that it turns anything that is not a head tax because fuck head taxes, even a consumption tax even though people usually think those are regressive, into an effectively progressive tax; no need to fuck up the system otherwise because social justice is built-in to it anyway!)
This is also why NIT and UBI are effectively the same fucking thing and why we can’t just look at how much we are “taxing”; their difference is merely an accounting trick because the effective marginal tax rate is always the same in both (assuming both are implemented with the same base parameters).
You motherfuckers don’t just increase all taxes by a flat 50% because what the fuck, you abolish the FICA because it’s a bullshit tax, and tax everyone’s income at the highest marginal tax rate of approximately 40% (or more if you want to replace some of the lost taxation from abolishing the FICA, but seriously just implement a basic income and otherwise privatize pensions there’s no need to make it complicated).
The Philosophical Economist is a lazy motherfucker who should not be commenting on economics. Address basic income properly or go home. If steelmanned basic income, in its best and strongest and most justifiable form, is found wanting; then I will try to find something else. Until then, I only see people whacking at strawmen and weakmen.
On the subject of it getting weird: I’ve had the “corporations are Cthulhu” and “I want to have sex with Cthulhu” thoughts before, but this is the first time they’ve converged.
subway? more like sub-way amritiere
The bitter truth is that Subway is actually a dom, but no one ever believes them.
And now we all feel bad for laughing at that joke.
Well, Nike is based in Portland, so at least it’s probably into some freaky shit.
Have we really gone this whole thread without a “footlong” joke?
This proves that corporations are people. The feeling I get when I imagine owning pretty corporations and doing terrible, perverted things to them (or punishing wicked naughty corporations which tends to be most of them) is identical to the feeling I get when I imagine doing terrible, perverted things to pretty people. Then again this may be proving too much because I also get the exact same feeling when I imagine doing terrible, perverted things to code (such as redefining Ruby to basically implement Lisp because fuck you that’s why); I may just be into doing terrible, perverted things to anything pretty.
god andrew jackson is staying on the back of the twenty
this is brilliant. as you hold one of these crisp new bills in your hand, on one side you’ll see the vibrant revolutionary undercurrent of american history, and on the other side you can see the genocidal white supremacist reactionary element
and as you turn it over and over, admiring the tenth of a millimeter of cotton-linen paper separating harriet tubman from andrew jackson, you come to understand the way in which america reconciles these seemingly dialectically opposed forces: it turns them both into money
HARRIET TUBMAN ESCAPED FROM SLAVERY AND THEN WENT BACK TO GET OTHERS. LIKE, I KNOW YOU KNOW WHO HARRIET TUBMAN IS AND THAT SHE DID THAT, BUT I JUST WANT YOU TO TAKE THAT IN FOR A SECOND.
HARRIET TUBMAN WAS HELD CAPTIVE AND BOUND TO UNPAID, BACK-BREAKING LABOR SINCE BIRTH UNDER PENALTY OF TORTURE OR DEATH. SHE MANAGED TO ESCAPE THAT LIFE, AND SHE TURNED THE FUCK AROUND AND WENT THE FUCK BACK TO GET EVERYONE ELSE WHO WAS STILL TRAPPED IN IT. AND THEN SHE DID IT AGAIN EIGHTEEN MORE TIMES.
WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS UNSURE WHETHER OR NOT HE WAS PREPARED TO MAKE A STAND AGAINST SLAVERY, HARRIET TUBMAN BASICALLY SAID HE SHOULD STOP BEING SUCH A DIAPER BABY AND THAT GUYS WHO ARE TOO SCARED TO END SLAVERY DON’T DESERVE TO WIN WARS.
NOT ONLY DID SHE SECRET OVER 300 SLAVES TO FREEDOM ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, BUT SHE ACTED AS A SPY FOR THE UNION ARMY DURING THE CIVIL WAR, AND BECAME THE FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD AN ARMED ASSAULT IN THE CIVIL WAR. THAT RAID BROUGHT FREEDOM TO OVER 700 SLAVES IN ONE GO.
SO I JUST WANT YOU TO STEW ON THAT FOR LIKE A MINUTE. ACTING IN THE SHADOWS, SHE WALKED INTO HELL ON EARTH 19 TIMES TO SAVE HER FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS FROM THE TORMENT SHE ENDURED, AND THE SECOND SHE WAS GIVEN EVEN A MODICUM OF POWER, SHE MANAGED TO FREE SEVEN HUNDRED SLAVES IN ONE DAY.
I GUARANTEE, HOWEVER IMPRESSED YOU ALREADY ARE WITH HARRIET TUBMAN, YOU ARE FALLING LIKE AT LEAST 40% SHORT OF HOW IMPRESSED YOU SHOULD BE WITH HARRIET TUBMAN. SHE IS ONE OF THE BEST EXAMPLES OF BADASSERY IN THE ENTIRETY OF AMERICAN HISTORY.
OKAY LISTEN IN ADDITION TO MAKING BOTH CAPTAIN AMERICA AND MOSES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT LOOK LIKE A PAIR OF GODDAMN UNDERACHIEVERS SHE DID ALL THISWITH CHRONIC PAIN FROM A TRAUMATIC HEAD INJURY.
WHEN SHE WAS FUCKING TWELVE YEARS OLD SHE TRIED TO INTERVENE IN THE BEATING OF ANOTHER SLAVE AND GOT HER HEAD CRACKED OPEN FROM IT. A CHILD. A CHILD BORN INTO SLAVERY. AND SHE WENT UP AGAINST A PISSED OFF WHITE MAN WHO LITERALLY OWNED HER TO TRY AND HELP, LIKE, SHIT, I DON’T WANT TO GO TOE-TO-TOE WITH PISSED OFF WHITE MEN AND I’M WHITE AND IT’S THE 21st CENTURY. SO OKAY THEN HERE’S THIS WOMAN, FIVE FOOT NOTHING, DISABLED, HAD NARCOLEPSY AND HEADACHES AND VISIONS, DECIDED THOSE VISIONS WERE FROM GOD, AND PERSONALLY DELIVERED A THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS FROM ONE OF THE CRUELEST FORMS OF ENSLAVEMENT IN HISTORY. OH, AND AFTER ALL THAT SHE LIVED UNTIL SHE WAS FUCKING NINETY.
