"Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers"... appears to be a bad enough idea that it was more or less consciously implemented as a wild primary accumulation grab in Soviet Russia. Vouchers...
Yes, I’m quite aware of the failure of the soviet voucher program, and that’s why I wouldn’t do it that way. I’d expect that turning public assets into cooperatives of the smallest functioning size (single clinics instead of county hospital systems; buses given to individual drivers instead of city bus corporations, etc.) would be far less vulnerable to outside capture away from ill-informed and desperately poor owners.
If one believes that workers who cooperatively own their workplace would be willing to sell their ownership and mutual autonomy to some external capitalist for way too little without an authority to keep them in line, then I’d suppose that it’s their property and they’re free to do what they want, but I don’t think that would be such a massively high risk.
The actual problem I’d anticipate for the newly created free cooperatives is that many of them would have no sustainable business plan.
While some, like clinics and schools, have an obvious source of value-creation and would only require an administrative adjustment to become well-functioning businesses (or non-profits, or whatever the workers want to turn them into), some ex-bureaucracies such as the National Pension Agency (whose function is to simply gatekeep welfare instead of doing anything useful) would be in really deep shit without the state apparatus of violence creating artificial use for their “services”. They would still have their offices though, and the workers would be able to scramble to figure out some kind of a productive use for them, or simply abandon the sinking ship and go find real jobs instead.
Some, like social services offices, would be somewhere in between; they would have counselors who could sell their services on the market for people who need help (and can easily afford to buy it with the 15k€), but they would need to shed their artificial make-work parts.
Obviously this isn’t equal in any meaning of the word; someone whose comfy office bureaucrat job turns into a glass parking lot would be in a really unfair position compared to another office drone who happened to be in a really well-functioning hospital, but tough shit, maybe they should’ve gone to the private sector in the first place if they didn’t want to be dependent on arbitrary state policy (oh, wait…), but that’s what the floor of 15k€ is for. It’s still way more than what they themselves dispensed to the poor while they were doing their own coercive state job.
Furthermore, the capital that actually makes people rich obviously belongs in the national investment fund instead, generating revenue and growing itself so that taxes could be eventually, if not abolished outright, at least drastically lowered when the publicly owned capital would be enough to pay for the basic income or a substantial fraction of it. And if someone were to buy up the welfare gatekeepers and somehow turn them into a profitable business on the free market, then that would be quite an amazing feat of value-creation and I wouldn’t be too bothered with such a genius becoming a billionaire. This mutualization plan would mostly be about “carving up the beast” so that whatever productive can be salvaged from the “expenses” column of the national budget would not concentrate too much in the hands of a few while still being able to reap the rewards of eliminating bureaucratic control of things that do have a way of functioning on markets.
And most importantly, it would be way too hilarious to see the CEO of the postal office (salary: ~500 000€/yr, a lot more than most executives on the private sector) sweating in front of The Owners, aka. mostly the previously precarious postal drones whom the executives had just recently been thoroughly kicking (wages: ~12 000€/yr at the lowest). And the same for all the other state monopolist cronies. I’d expect that this would be a pretty big redistribution from useless executives and bureaucrats to nurses, teachers and other Actually Value-creating public sector employees, who have been unfairly screwed over by the parasites way too much for way too long.
“It’s not only undesirable but *literally impossible* to afford basic social infrastructure or redistribute basically anything, so suck it up” is perhaps the most amazing article of faith I’ve seen among US-style libertarians.
Yup, it’s like Western Europe does not exist.
What if EU implodes and Western EU except Germany just go into full crisis?
You have to admit that the fiscal situation in most of Western Europe is not pretty and Brexit, Greece and peripherals really could be ticking time bombs. You can say money are just numbers on paper, but they really do reflect something fundamental even if non-obvious and distorted.
Like I don’t think I need to say that it’s entirely plausible that by making today nice it could make the future a lot worse, since that’s what more or less Greece did. In this case whoever they imported stuff that they can’t make easily stopped giving them imports because they can’t come up with those numbers in their bank account.
It’s easy to say pretty words, and I’m sure rich people as a whole are incredibly good at that. But if they are really less charitable than the average person, from that article I saw floating around, then probably you (idk what’s your objective, but just a reasonable guess xD) need to be careful there. Since we also can agree they are probably very good at dodging bills too. And just let you know I want those skills too for obvious reasons because I believe with good faith and careful consideration that it’s in my best interest to do so.
“We” might not be able to resist completely, but we are really good at it!!! And our resistance makes us less productive and also incidentally salt the earth for the rest of you as well. And who knows, I feel maybe, just maybe you people here actually will be pursuing your objective better if you kept us around and just tried to focus on structuring things better than to trying to take more and more blindly without focusing on the logistics. But then again this is like the whole strategy from a subgroup of us who’s politically connected. Because I’m pretty sure bureaucratic power must stroke someone’s fetish out there as well.
And honestly my charitable mood from my childhood over the years gradually turned sour from seeing how entitled people can be, so who knows. I don’t think I’m the only one here who might put up extra effort into resisting just because ~feelings~ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Greece? You want to invoke Greece in the last 6 years to caution against the successes of Western Europe since 1950 (arguably, since Bismark in the German Empire) ?
A crisis which was in part due to corruption, widespread tax evasion and financial advisors from Goldman Sachs advising the Greek government to misreport their level of debt ?
Where did the economic crisis began by the way¹ ? Oh yeah, a boom-and-bust cycle in the USA.
And then you want to argue why it is desirable for you to acquire those ‘skills’ ?
“Take more and more blindly” does not represent the reality. Increasing volumes of tax evasion, weaker enforcement of tax laws, greater sophistication of tax avoidance, on the other hand…
Nice veiled threats too and spite against the “entitled”. Thanks for reminding me why I am for very large punitive damages for tax evasion.
(note: even the IMF says that only in extreme cases redistribution lead to bad growth outcomes)
¹not that the Greek situation was stable, mind you.
Yep, the veiled threats and the laughable… petulant tone really got me as well. Also, nice passive-aggressive essay in the tags there…. Pretty words this ain’t.
Tagged with: politicsreference for discussioni honestly think with existing revenue you people already can do a lotyou also can reform god dam corporate tax and stuffand that will raise revenue and growthand you can reform welfareand bite the fking bullet and end protectionismmaybe if you people even did a bit rather than exacerbating it more I wouldn’t have gone to the other campbut I’m deep in there now and you won’t ever get me back except make me disinterested in topics like thiswhich is what I’m trying to do because I want $$$$$$$$$$
Okay seriously, I do agree with NN on a lot of this. The socialdemocracies of Western Europe are not in trouble because of the inaffordability of redistribution, they are in trouble because of the inaffordability of all the bullshit they’ve tacked onto the redistribution.
Finland could pay every single person a basic income of 15 000€ a year without increasing taxes a single cent. That’s almost double the minimum pension, nearly three times the spending money people on welfare get (along with rent, and significantly more than the highest amount welfare pays out even with rent included), and more than what tens of thousands of working poor earn. And as a result poor people’s effective marginal tax rate would go way down from the 50-100% it’s now.
And this includes children. Right now the state pays, at most, 4000€ per child; free education, healthcare and childcare would end but the extra 11 000€ a year would go a long way in letting poor families access the services they need. Or if we want to account for the fact that not all families would know to purchase the right insurance etc. and spend 5000€ per child per year in providing vital services to them we would “only” up the money children directly get to 10 000€ a year.
And obviously this massive basic income would render pretty much any tax scheme progressive, so we could drastically simplify the tax code. I don’t even know what the true transparent flat tax level would be because the system is so complicated with all kinds of hidden fees and multi-level taxes, but it would make things simpler. If one assumes that, after privatizing all other forms of social security (15k€ is already more than a lot of people make even from the income-dependent benefits) the income tax level would end up a transparent 40%, someone earning another nominal 15k€ on top of the basic income would get to keep 24k€ to themselves. Easy, simple, not hard to calculate. (And if it sounds ridiculously high, one should note that currently around 25% of people’s wages goes straight to pensions but it’s hidden so they only see 7% as “”“the employer pays”“” the rest (they buy it because most people cannot into math))
But the tax system itself could use some (and by “some” I mean “an awful lot of”) change; property taxes should be replaced with land value taxes, income taxes could be shifted onto consumption, a revenue-neutral carbon tax should be instituted, corporate taxes taken only from dividends to owners, etc.
And we could end so many laws. Who needs regulations on working hours, minimum wages and benefits when one has the 15k€ option to simply tell the boss to screw themselves if a job offer is unacceptable? (only statists) Ending corporatism and freeing both employers and unions to negotiate without external coercive intervention would make the economy a lot more responsive to changes, and everyone has that 15k a year to fall back on even if they end up without work (and a lot of bureaucrats rightfully would), along with any savings they have. That’s a lot more than what most working-class people currently would get from unemployment insurance.
Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers; so schools would be owned by parents and teachers, universities by students and professors, buses by drivers, etc.; this would prevent a massive transfer of wealth and capital from the state to cronyist oligarchs while allowing all service providers to participate equally on the markets. Finland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world because of its absolutely bloated pension funds (in fact, to such an extent that the national debt is effectively -80% of its nominal value) and this money could be either used as the basis of a post-labor universal capital fund, or immediately redistributed to everyone as an investment account of 15 000€ while keeping enough in reserve to cover the national debt (of course, paying out the debt would be folly when the interest rates are around zero but the return on investments is several percent; any sane corporation would borrow and invest on such terms).
Furthermore, this would completely decimate the non-productive parts of the economy, freeing both labor (which is not desperate and exploitable because remember that 15k€ a year?) and money to productive things (of course, ex-bureaucrats would be so pissed at having to learn how to do good things to people, but you know what scorn dem).
The private sector would be almost as dramatically rearranged as the previously public sector, as artificial industries such as agriculture (where something like 50% [fucken sic] of revenue comes from subsidies instead of selling things people want to buy) and exploitation of forced labor (the current welfare system is inhumane and there are basically sweatshops where disabled people work for 1,5€/h [fucken sic] making scarves rich ~designer~ assholes sell for 300€ a piece, pocketing the difference) would be flattened into the economic equivalent of a glowing glass parking lot. The ensuing stimulus of domestic demand and the abolition of many cumbersome regulations would open up massive opportunity for people to make a value-creating living while reducing the economy’s dependence on big businesses. The abolition of regional subsidies and artificial limits on the housing supply of Helsinki would trigger a significant movement into the big cities where jobs are available, workers productive, and services cost-efficient.
And if one wants to get really hardcore, abolishing patents and copyrights would be a pretty huge move. Suddenly obscene barriers on innovation would be wiped away and people wouldn’t need to waste time figuring out whether they need to push lots of paper just because someone else “owns” a number, and drugs and many other things would get dramatically cheaper.
And they should totally build the hyperloop between Turku and Stockholm.
Without an increase of a single cent in taxes.
Yeah, it would be quite a drastic shock doctrine. A glorious, magnificent shock doctrine leaving behind only the ashes of the old system. Ashes which the seeds of freedom and poor people finally not being treated shittily could blossom from. A beautiful, terrifying cataclysm of creative destruction. The value-destroyers and parasites would feel the pain of righteous vengeance, a pain which would be far less than what they had previously imposed on others because 15k€ a year.
But instead, we have some “”“engineer”“” who got lucky and became a millionaire prime minister despite having no economic or political savvy whatsoever, and whose dream seems to be to become the Thatcher of Finland; a dream he pursues mainly by trying to become as widely hated as Thatcher was/is, and assuming the rest follows on its own.
Got sucked down the Red Pill rabbit hole because of that post Rob and Esther were hatereading. It’s crystallized an idea that I hadn’t quite been able to articulate until now:
PUA culture cares more about embodying a certain ideal of masculinity than it does about winning. Even if we accept their idea that social relations are fundamentally adversarial, their recommendations for getting ahead in an adversarial system are pretty dubious. I can’t help but notice that “weak and effeminate men,” a category this Illimitable Men article mocks relentlessly, includes the majority of the most powerful people in the world. If your model for acquiring power places the last half dozen US presidents among those who are too emotive, concerned with being liked, and willing to engage in vapid pleasantries to get anywhere in life, maybe devote some time to thinking on the phrase “Procrustean Bed.”
The point that really made it click was this one: “Psychologically and symbolically, folding means you have ‘lost control and given up’ in the way that a player folds when they surrender in a game of poker.”
Okay, I get it, poker is the metaphor of choice for people who want to signal a certain sort of hard-nosed, pragmatic intelligence. But to do that, it helps to have a basic understanding of poker. You know what the best poker players do all the time? If you guessed “fold,” then congratulations, you know more about poker than Illimitable Men does. Stone-cold bluffs aren’t actually all that common outside of the movies. They’re often good drama, rarely good poker: your opponents are not idiots, and while it may make you feel very manly to raise big on every shit hand you draw, it will also make you predictable, not to mention committing you to throwing away substantial amounts when your opponent clearly has a hand that will trounce yours.
It’s not hard to see how this applies to the life philosophy of this crowd. Not only is cutting your losses clearly the right choice in many situations, surrendering can have strategic value even in cases where one isn’t clearly going to lose. Unpredictability is an asset. Commitment of resources to the areas in which they’ll provide the most benefit is important. The Red Pill philosophy is fixated on winning every battle, and that leads to a lot of lost wars.
Oh my god, that poker analogy is an exquisite self-own
For the record – do not give me the One Ring. Do not give me the Death Note. Do not give me the Left Hand of God.
Because I will be as beautiful and terrible as the Morning and Night, 私は新世界の
神
となる, and the hand of Providence shall deliver the weak from their suffering.
I won’t stoop as low to say that you should give them to me, but admit it, you guys would totally give them to me just to see what I’d do
Proposal: require Everest climbers to have already made the summit of at least three mountains over 4000m in height, so they have some idea of what they are getting themselves into.
Alternate Proposal: rename Everest to Death Mountain to get the point across.
You think giving it a badass name like \m/ DEATH MOUNTAIN \m/ will keep people away?
Don'tgonearthe Castle, we call it. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it?’ ‘It’s a strange name.’ ‘Oh, he used to laugh about it. The local coachmen used to warn visitors, you see. “Don’t go near the castle,” they’d say. “Even if it means spending a night up a tree, never go up there to the castle,” they’d tell people. “Whatever you do, don’t set foot in that castle.” He said it was marvellous publicity. Sometimes he had every bedroom full by 9 p.m. and people would be hammering on the door to get in. Travellers would go miles out of their way to see what all the fuss was about.
fine, call it Tax Mountain
i feel like that might still be too interesting
@sinesalvatorem, for one, seems likely to be interested in Tax Mountain
ALISON IS AN OUTLIDER ADN SHOULD ONLY BE COUNTED AFTER YOU HAVE TAKEN THE PROPER RITUAL PRECAUTIONS
Hello I heard there was an Economics Geographical Location…
Anyone know any good, fun personality, political, ethical, and/or other self-reporting tests?
I’ve done the ones at OKCupid years ago (an example of pretty low-quality tests).
Of course I’ve done the Myers-Briggs test and the Big 5 test.
The ones at YourMorals are really interesting. But I finished all the best ones a while ago.
The coolest ones I’ve run across recently are the ones at Philosophy Experiments. They’re fun because they try to test you on the internal consistency of your positions, e.g. on religion and philosophy of mind. I highly recommend them.
There were some weird ones like “Our nation should eliminate all foreign aid and spend that money on other things.” Ideally they wouldn’t pay the foreign aid and also not spend it on something else.
You are a: Left-Leaning Anti-Government Non-Interventionist Nativist Fundamentalist
candidates: Bernie Sanders and a bunch of libertarians around 90%
parties: green, libertarian, socialist and democrat all basically tied within the margin of error
parties by issues: basically all either libertarian or socialist
ideology: left-wing libertarian
themes: Privacy, Populism, Tender, Decentralization, Globalization, Multiculturalism, Small Government, Isolationism, Progressive, Pacifism, Laissez-Faire, Collectivism, Deregulation (from strongest to weakest)
feelings: I think I broke the test and made it give a spiteful “lol screw you weirdo, good luck trying to differentiate the results” (seriously, they are all utterly bunched up around the same scores)
5-Dimensional Compass:
You are a: Left-Leaning Anarchist Interventionist Bleeding-Heart Libertine
Most people agree that open borders is a desirable end state for humanity, as being able to maintain it is strong evidence of an absence of war and famine and reduced global inequality.
Most people also agree that throwing open the borders overnight would have catastrophic consequences, following which the borders would immediately be closed again.
(The best example of open borders we have in the world today is the EU, and even moderate refugee flows have been sufficient to destabilise this project).
However there are plenty of obvious compromises that could be made, such as increasing immigration quotas by 50% each year, greatly increasing migration while giving plenty of time for societies to adjust and absorb the flow. Or going for easy wins, like opening the border between the US and Canada.
That said, I still can’t help feeling that proponents of open borders are downplaying the changes involved, and the possible consequences.
I mean, @voximperatoris is referencing the Jim Crow south in what appears to be a positive example of a society with a racial underclass employed as servants with lynchings “on a very small scale in the grand scheme of things”. Like, I’m not trying to be snarky but that sounds like something someone might write if they were attempting to satirise the open borders position.
And @socialjusticemunchkin talking approvingly of the improved aesthetics of local inequality compared with global inequality; again, not everyone is going to share that particular aesthetic.
There are also questions of whether increased inequality within a particular society ends up causing more problems (for that society) than increased inequality globally; eg. North Sentinelese appear happier living their current lives than as servants in Silicon Valley, despite the latter being “less unequal”.
Many proponents of open borders have suggested introducing a dual track concept of citizenship, where immigrants would not gain access to the full range of social services available to current citizens. I think this also needs to be taken into account when considering what open borders would do to inequality.
So, to take a slightly different position: if seeking to move towards the abolition (as much as possible) of borders as soon as possible (leaving the obviously superior option of the Archipelago untouched as an even less realistic option: I have a marvellous plan for such an utopia this margin is too narrow to contain) is not desirable, why stop at national borders?
After all, the national borders are highly suspiciously sized. If a peaceful person with no ill intent may not migrate from Morocco to Spain, why should one be allowed to migrate from West Virginia to San Francisco?
The United States is larger than most combinations of two to numerous neighboring countries, and the differences inside the nation are staggering. The borderer regions in the Appalachia are practically third world compared to the city-state opulence of the Bay Area; and the values of the populations could hardly be more different. If poor people with backwards values being theoretically able to immigrate to the places where rich people with modern values live, shouldn’t we be more worried about the fact that any West Virginian who can purchase a plane ticket and find themselves housing and work is allowed to come to San Francisco and even vote in elections, with no border controls and centralized planning and immigration quotas to prevent the undesirable masses from flowing in without restraint? Surely Californian values and the riches and job markets of California are the fruits of the Californians’ labor, not something an Appalachian borderer may come to feast on whenever they feel like?
But furthermore, even within California we see stark differences! One does not need to venture too far inland to find different cultures and economies. Even if we build a wall around California, the problem persists; the Six Californias plan would have created both the richest and the poorest state of the Union, right next to each other! And indeed we are seeing the phenomenon of Central Californians flocking in to the Bay Area in search of work, the inevitable shantytowns kept away only by regulations that make it illegal for outsiders to ever have affordable housing. Surely it would be better to constrain this perversion and inequality machine, and establish a national border between the regions so that Silicon Valley may use 0.7% of is GDP in foreign aid to its impoverished neighbor and the shantytowns stay in Central California where they belong!
Yet even this is not enough! The neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point is notorious for being a honest-to-azathoth shantytown, with a racial distinction as sharp as it can ever be, right next to San Francisco itself. And indeed the denizens ever seek opportunities in the city proper, bringing their shantytownness and cheap labor downtown, driving down the wages of the hard-working residents of SoMa who, without this artificial mobility benefiting only the tech elite, could otherwise be making $50k a year even from burger-flipping! Not to mention all the services that fall under the general category of “servants to software developers” which would not be worth the genuine fair living wage of $30 an hour; the existence of this underpaid underclass allows the software developers to avoid doing their own shopping and driving and cooking and such things and instead use their time for the thing that is their comparative advantage, further driving up inequality when the equalizing effect of inefficient non-division of labor is reduced!
Indeed I say; let us restore all the borders! Back before this “enlightenment” and “emancipation” and such things, people knew their place and they would die on the same plot of land they were born onto. Let each family be bound to their own turf, never even imposing on their neighbor! Let us be truly honest in what we seek and end this charade; bring back serfdom! For only with the complete immobility of the populace, can a truly stable and equal and peaceful society be established. In our village, everyone is equal, looks the same and shares the same customs; and while we know that not every village is as prosperous as ours, we dutifully kind of pay our 0.7% of indulgences I mean aid to the Catholic Church which surely distributes it fairly to the poorest of the world instead of building a golden toilet for the pope; we have not verified this for only the Baron may ever leave this territory, but surely the virtous Church has the interests of all of us in mind!
Obviously, the tail end of this is extreme (and simply dumb in various particular details), but as far as the start of this goes, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens: I think that modern states are overwhelmingly too big, and not just as a result of there being too many humans on Earth in total. Ideally we should return to the basic unit of society being communities whose size is on the same order of magnitude as Dunbar’s number, perhaps loosely associated into small city-states (composed of Dunbar-sized neighborhoods) and their respective hinterlands (composed of Dunbar-sized villages).
As for cities the size of San Francisco, they shouldn’t be their own nations; they should not exist at all.
That’s quite an extreme opinion. Obviously, people who wish to live in dunbar-communities should be able to live in dunbar-communities (as long as they accept the limitations that come from dunbar-communitarianism), but dunbar-communitarians should not attempt to pry metropolises away from metropolitanians’ hands.
The problem is that the current westphalian system of nation-states allows neither when we should be having both
“I have borderline personality disorder, I have several anime characters living in my head!!”
lmao ok
When It’s Completely Obvious You’re Faking A Mental Illness for Notes and/or Sympathy
Usually this is a comorbidity thing. Or a coping mechanism thing. Or both.
This is a bit of a delicate subject. There’s no way to say this without outing myself, so: hi! I have tulpas. Of the “unintentionally formed, probably caused by mental illness” variety. So I’ve got some personal experience with this.
Now, here’s the thing. A lot of the time, BPD is comorbid with other stuff. It presents a lot of the same symptoms as things like bipolar disorder, and a lot of people with BPD also tend to have autism (autistic people are way more likely to have other psych disorders than the general population) and/or some kind of trauma disorder. Trauma disorders can give someone multiplicity, and autistic people frequently have “imaginary friends” long after the age they’re “supposed” to grow out of it. So, yeah, someone with BPD could have alters or headmates because they’ve got something else going on.
Someone with BPD could also develop headmates as a coping mechanism thing. BPD can be scary. You’ve got a lot of emotions all going really fast, all at once, and you don’t feel like you’ve got a coherent personality. Sometimes having someone else around to ground you can help. And if you don’t have someone in your life who’s there to help you- which is a pretty frequent thing, no one can do the job of helping you stay safe and on an even keel 24/7- sometimes your brain spits someone out to do the job. This can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on the people involved and their relationship dynamic. Sometimes the person your brain makes is just a manifestation of your badbrains, (And in that case, you do really need to get help, because having your badbrains nag at you in quasi-human form? Bad idea.) Sometimes it really is like having a supportive friend around most of the time.
Alternately- and this is a bit controversial, ask two systems and you’ll get sixteen different ideas about this- some people are naturally multiples. Some people just have other people in their head and have for as long as they can remember. For them, it’s normal. Most of them tend to be real quiet about it, because you get flak from all sides for that. But someone with BPD might just be naturally multiple, too.
“But- why anime characters? That’s stupid. Those characters might not even have existed until two weeks ago.”
Whether you take the natural tack or a more metaphysical one- headmates tend to take the path of least resistance. Mine are old OCs of mine who took on a life of their own- in a very real sense.They take forms that match what you need. I needed a protector; I got the swaggering vampire nerd who treats me like a kid brother and raises his hackles when he sees someone who wants to hurt me. I kind of trusted him even before he showed up, because he was my character.
I knew who he was. I knew he’d keep me safe.
Someone else who needs a big brother might pull Kamina or Dean Winchester out of the aether. Someone who needs a warm, comforting motherly presence might grab at Toriel or Square Mom. Someone who needs a protector might get some kind of huge hulking knight. You get what you need.
TL;DR: Someone who has one mental illness and expresses symptoms of another mental illness is not necessarily faking; multiplicity is not necessarily a mental illness thing and is not necessarily fake; people’s headmates taking the form of cartoon characters does not make them fake. Thank you for your time.
….. ok anyway stop faking bpd cus u think u have ur shitty ocs/anime characters living in ur head :)
Your reading comprehension is bad, and you should feel bad.
…wow.
I’ve said before I have a lot of conflicting thoughts on this whole phenomenon, but even with that…
I’m really starting to hate this Tumblr trend of responding to someone who writes a careful, well-thought-out, and detailed post about something they experience with “I am Sarcastic, and you are Wrong.”
Dissociative identity disorder and BPD are linked to the point that some researchers have suggested they’re the same thing but yeah, okay, sure, I’m going to take my medical advice from randos on the Internet who like making fun of special snowflakes
I agree with @fierceawakening, and also would like to note that dreams demonstrate that many human brains can run simulations of multiple personalities.
Also, it’s highly suspiciously coherent that some descriptions of “demonic possession” would match malignant non-intentionally formed tulpas (or whatever one wishes to call them) so well. And it doesn’t really seem like it would take that much of things going off the reference blueprints for a brain to start consistently using its ability to simulate other personalities to, well, simulate other personalities consistently.
Furthermore, the heuristic of “people are probably bad at describing their stuff so you’d understand it” seems rather embarrassingly obvious compared to “lol, people are [slur redacted]”, so naturally people often prefer the latter one when someone is being weird. The Dogma of Mandatory Comprehensibility at action.
Would you say yes to get the power to make laws, and if anyone breaks them they get smited
Absolutely. The first law would be that anyone who tries to launch a nuclear weapon gets smited. Or even that anyone who tries to commit mass murder gets smited. (I imagine you’d have to craft the laws very carefully to keep them from being gamed. Like, you wouldn’t want someone to set it up so that their being smited is what causes other people to die.) Also, perhaps a law protecting me from assassination attempts. It’s a powerful enough ability to conquer the world I think, but I’d do my best to use it in a very limited capacity, since it’s a rather blunt instrument to change behavior. I’d try to reduce existential risks and end wars, but that’s probably it.
I’d have to think about how much I’d want to cooperate with the international community.
The
enforcement of conformity is so important for young children that
5-year-olds have more positive feelings toward a norm enforcer (even
though he is acting aggressively) than they do toward someone who simply
lets a norm violation go (even though he is behaving in a neutral
manner; Vaish, Herrmann, Markmann, & Tomasello, 2016).
Yet more reason to shed the evolutionary baggage ASAP.
Egalitarianism vs neutrality towards hierarchy vs hierarchy being a positive good Cosmopolitanism vs nationalism Individualism vs communitarianism Economic efficiency is good vs economic efficiency is dehumanizing Nature is a resource vs nature should be protected for its own sake vs we belong to nature Importance of tradition Importance of “order” Importance of autonomy Belief in the availability of positive-sum improvements Belief in the degree of coordination necessary to achieve/prevent positive/negative-sum changes Belief in collective responsibility Acceptability of coercion Acceptability of violence in general
On a more serious note, I always liked the three-axis chart from the online game NationStates (though the game itself has a very left-wing bias).
Okay, this chart is actually not that good. First of all, it undercounts the significance of economic freedom; and second, it truncates it into a single axis while I’d argue that a two-axis (at least) model of economy would be better.
Economic freedom is inevitably tied to personal and political freedom, as human behavior is economic behavior. There is no magical boundary between economic and personal. These are probably obvious, but I’m just making the background assumptions clear.
For example, how does sex work work in a “Scandinavian Liberal Paradise”? It supposedly has high personal freedom, but as sex work ties the personal to the economic very tightly I highly suspect that SLP wouldn’t have the Obviously Correct policy of decriminalization and non-regulation; instead it’d be likely to have a lot of licensing and regulation schemes intruding on sex workers’ bodily autonomy (if they’re at all legal in the first place).
Or drugs. If you can use drugs, but only if you buy them from Systembolaget, and they must be manufactured by licensed businesses, and they must have been approved by the state regulatory apparatus, it’s not such a high level of personal freedom.
Or in the different direction: “Corporate Police State”. Economic “freedom”? I don’t think so. Trans people can’t buy estrogen, people can’t trade anti-government material, Sex work is B&, drug users get V&.
And what exactly is “Benevolent Dictatorship”? The government rules with an iron fist, but it doesn’t actually do much? Emperor Norton? Distributed power is distributed power and jure isn’t magic.
The personal and political are tied as well, but at least the political axis makes a bit more sense; “Conservative Democracy” vs. “Tyranny by Majority” vs. “Authoritarian Democracy” are distinctions I can intuitively grasp from this model.
But “Economic Freedom” is my favorite axis (because I’m really boringly consistent on “Personal”, and “Political” is mostly “could we just please make it go away somehow”) so I want to focus more on that one, and this assumes that there’s a simple unidirectional form. In other words, a society with heavy state intervention in the economy to reduce inequality would be basically the same as a society with heavy intervention to preserve inequality. That doesn’t make much sense.
A more meaningful distinction would be to divide the economic axis by that one. Thus, we get a two-dimensional graph which could be said to roughly resemble the traditional Political Compass (which is a shitty test with shitty questions and shitty background assumptions) or the Nolan Chart (which similarly confuses two drastically different forms of economic intervention into a less-than-useful mess):
(one could add a third dimension for public goods and other utilitarianisms but that’s basically “how smart is the implementation of this particular location on the 2D grid”)
In the bottom right quadrant is non-intervention regardless of its direction. Libertarian, classical liberal, ancap, etc.
The bottom left only has intervention to seek equality; pure redistribution, regulations that try to level society, eliminating the hierarchies that would naturally result from differences between people. Anarcho-communist, liberal socialist, etc.
The top right only seeks to keep hierarchies intact and deepen them, to maintain the position of those at the top and prevent challenges to their status. Crony capitalism, slavery, feudalism, state-sponsored cartels, corporate welfare, and all forms of nonproductive rentseeking with the guns of PoliceMob.
And the top left combines both; one might cynically say that efforts towards equality help legitimize efforts towards hierarchy, and efforts to maintain hierarchy help secure elite acceptance for redistribution.
And if one were to redefine the NationStates examples to this, one could get the sorts of results I’ve located as examples on the grid.
Basic income is perhaps the biggest example of a bottom-left policy, while regular forms of welfare establish hierarchies between the eligible and ineligible, the “deserving” and “undeserving” and so on, and are more top-left instead. Closed borders and protectionism are topwards, and the rhetorical swindle that gets people to support them paints them as leftwards instead. And patents and copyrights are classic topwards examples.
The most important thing in this is that the axes aren’t what they are traditionally thought to be; the Political Compass is shitty because it bundles them into one single axis as a result of its creators’ biases (its economic axis is all over the place; some questions are bottom-left vs. top-right, others are top-left vs. bottom-right, some implicitly present a false dilemma between top-left and top-right, etc.), and a lot of valid complaints ensue. The most simple formulation would perhaps be: “should redistribution happen downwards, upwards, or both, or not at all?” (Although when presented this way most people would shy away from admitting the positions their policies reveal a preference for)
This is illuminating of the tensions in state intervention to the economy and also perhaps helps understand different perspectives better. The left is suspicious of “economic freedom” because they’re used to it meaning top-right (because statist politicians are usually only offering a choice between top-right and top-left), and the top-left is a really profitable place for huge numbers of people with powerful special interests. And when leftists say “not the Soviet Union” they often mean “bottom-left, not top-left”. And when the Political Compass™ sorts Kevin Carson at the “same” “economy” score as statist corporatists, this model illustrates the massive difference.
(Of course, it gets weird at the edges but works reasonably well at the centre region; and these kinds of simplified models are always only useful around the centre)
And while this seems to resemble the traditional Political Compass™, the “Social” score is nowhere near 1:1 to this. A centrist position on this model of economic axes can encompass quite an astonishing variation in moral and cultural policy, although as they aren’t quite orthogonal either it’s impossible to be politically authoritarian at the bottom right, or genuinely socially permissive at the top left.
Watchmen analogies seem to be kind of a thing in the rationalsphere, and yet for a community that I like and engage with in large part because it takes not only ideas but narratives seriously, that’s willing to consider something like Cognitive Trope Therapy, a lot of them are pretty bad. But then, Watchmen is a deconstruction of the kinds of tropes Yudkowsky based his model of therapy on. It’s a work that asks how those tropes would play out in the real world, which is, on the other hand, sort of the same thing HPMOR purported to do. The rubric of “rationalfic” as an attempt at a more serious, analytical take on the characters and rules of genre is not that much different from the kind of deconstruction Watchmen pioneered, which would explain its popularity… and also make rationalists’ inability to engage with this major antecedent rather interesting. For example…
~
Ozymandias is obviously the figure of smart, edgy utilitarian heroism for… well, Ozy, and I’ve seen him invoked as such on the Dank EA Memes Facebook group. That’s what he presents himself as, when he’s introduced to us as a zillionaire philanthropist (EA?) and deep thinker. His entire narrative arc consists in his being exposed as a straight up egomaniac: the comic is pretty unambiguous on this point, even as it’s ambiguous about the ultimate value of his actions. There’s no utilitarian value to killing all your employees in imitation of an Egyptian pharaoh you felt a wishy washy spiritual connection to on a drug trip. His goal is “conquest not of men, but of the evils which beset them” - conquest is still the defining term here, insofar as one gets the sense that he’d be down for conquest of men if it was still like, a thing civilized people did.
Rationalists reading this will no doubt remember “the Rule of Three…. that any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life”. Ozymandias’ plan requires way more than that. It requires national governments to reach a conclusion about the nature of the thing that materialized in New York at least resembling the one he intended, despite the lack of any indication as to what the fuck it even is. It requires American intelligence to get accurate information that it’s not a superweapon from the Soviets; for them to believe the information is accurate; for military top brass and politicians to believe them; for arms manufacturers and lobbyists not to smell trillions of dollars and convince the highest-level decision makers to ignore the intelligence and start building their own alien psychic bomb; for America and Russia’s co-operation to be at least partly honest in the ensuing prisoner’s dilemma - we’ve had the chance to watch for almost two years now how this plays out in real life, and while it seems to have worked (for the moment) the fact that it took that long for American and Russia to get out of each other’s hair (sort of), and during that time several international incidents that could have provoked WWIII occurred as a result of rival superpowers/proxies fighting in the same area on the same side, makes the whole gambit, to the reader in 2016, look a lot less foolproof. Maybe there’s steps he didn’t tell us about but he seems to have no idea what to do when the rest of the nonexistent invasion force just… doesn’t show up. And it requires that no hint of this vast conspiracy involving some of the most famous people and superpeople in the world, innumerable labourers, and obscene amounts of money get out to the public, which is what might be about to happen in the last panel of the entire book.
Ozymandias is supposed to be a failure whose edgy utilitarian calculations are undermined by the book’s central theme of the unpredictability and complexity of human existence. I mean, it’s right there in the name. And that brings us to…
IMO, Promethea @socialjusticemunchkin is expecting Doctor Manhattan’s behaviour here to be usual, intuitive and unproblematically representative of Doctor Manhattan as a fixed type of consciousness, when what they’re describing is precisely his arc as a character and the transformation of that consciousness. You don’t have to agree with what Moore says about Doctor Manhattan here, but the objections raised here don’t just pwn him by themselves, because he expects the reader to make them and in that divergence from the concept of Doctor Manhattan as we understand it at the very outset of the book, lies the entire depth and narrative purpose of these events. Moore is staking a particular set of claims on this storyline; he needs to tell the story to demonstrate them precisely because they are counterintuitive.
Here’s Promethea’s “so much better” response:
“In this event, nothing was technically beyond my understanding. I could see the neurons, the axons, the transmitter chemicals, down to every single quark, with perfect clarity and the inevitability was obvious. Yet there is one thing I couldn’t know: the subjective experience of having this happen. This neuron sends this signal to that one, and it outputs actions, speech, thoughts, but I was not her, and from my own position I could never truly comprehend what was going through her head in that moment. Humans are the only thing in this universe that I can’t understand, they are way too fascinating for me, doc out.”
When I read Watchmen, I assumed that was exactly what Moore meant here. I’ll admit that was a kind of interpretive leap of faith I have a tendency to make at least with authors I like: that the literal, statistical unlikeliness of the events in question would sway Doctor Manhattan is every bit as absurd as Promethea observed, to the point that it ceases to be a question of making “a move that vaguely seems like a move AlphaGo might make” so much as making a move that would not even fool an amateur. It violates not even the “underlying logic” but the visible logic of Doctor Manhattan’s superintelligence as set out at the beginning of the book. As Sherlock Holmes says, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. Assuming even a baseline of formal coherence for Doctor Manhattan as a character, a literal reading of this passage is impossible. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be narratively satisfying. It wouldn’t indicate anything having changed in how he applies his superintelligence, how he relates through it to others and the world, as a character, albeit a super-one.
Doctor Manhattan doesn’t say the mere fact of Sally Jupiter having a child with the Comedian is so improbable it made him reassess his opinion of humans: it’s just the catalyst to a longer reflection:
“….in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter, until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.”
That “you” means precisely “the subjective experience of having [you] happen”. None of that makes any sense except in relation to subjectivity. Obviously, the chances of a sperm reaching an egg are hella good; that’s why that whole system evolved, its redundancies being a plus. In relation to what does the specificity of one sperm against the other even become a meaningful thing to calculate? I mean, Laurie calls Promethea’s exact point here when she says by this standard anyone’s birth could be a “thermodynamic miracle”; but not just people, literally anything happening could be if you jiggle the parameters of what you’re calculating for enough, which would bring us right back around to where we started if subjectivity were not introduced. Experience is introduced in a relation of its own, to a totality - “Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive” is almost Hegelian. Subjectivity is so overdetermined it can’t be thought without dragging in, and simultaneously negating, everything else; operations which, expressed mathematically, soon surpass the astronomical. This may or may not be true but it’s an expression of Promethea’s headcanon more than their strawman.
So what do the circumstances of Laurie’s birth - or any of the events of the story - have to do with this realization? Promethea seems to have forgotten another crucial point in their reading of this passage - Doctor Manhattan already knew who Laurie’s real father was. He more or less brings it to her attention: “I think you’re avoiding something”. When her reaction to this information differs from his, throwing her entire security of self and sense of meaning out of whack while he had long since logically deduced the insignificance of human life from a broad analysis in which this tiny fact meant next to nothing, it does the opposite for him as he is forced to confront precisely why it means so much to her: that her mother (her fragile genetic link to the totality of humanity as a species) “loved a man she had every reason to hate”: a subjective state unimaginable from another state of subjectivity, a gap that cannot be bridged by any higher plane of analysis.
So, I basically agree with the explanation proposed here. But my point is that Moore wrote it badly. The “Assuming even a baseline of formal coherence for Doctor Manhattan as a character, a literal reading of this passage is impossible. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be narratively satisfying. It wouldn’t indicate anything having changed in how he applies his superintelligence, how he relates through it to others and the world, as a character, albeit a super-one.” is precisely what I’m talking about. “Thermodynamic miracle” is a cargo-cult AlphaGo move, but I’m pretty sure that someone with Moore’s writing skills and my “emulate such a mind” skills combined would be able to output a far better string literal to refer to the mindstate object.
“…events with odds so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.”
It’s a credit to Moore’s skills as a writer that he’s mostly managed to keep the illusion up except for the part about “thermodynamic miracles” which is even more unsatisfying as it reveals that he’s been basically bluffing his way through. Bluffing well, but still bluffing.
Furthermore, it seems that he’s overreaching, trying to make Manhattan unnecessarily alien, because the correct version is closer to human and there’s basically no reason to do something that makes less sense to him (because “thermodynamic miracles” are bad physics) and Laurie (because a more human-focused approach would be obviously easier to understand). It’s a Spock-type mistake.
Now, one could attempt a saving throw by appealing to the observable phenomenon that a certain type of mind (reporting in myself, among others) reverts to a more mechanical-sounding speech under emotional duress etc. because that’s the native language of that mind, but then there’s the problem that “thermodynamic miracles” is really really unsatisfying as an example of such. It’s not plausible; I can’t see someone who knows their physics that well making such an error.
What I can see is someone trying to emulate such a mind and mistakenly thinking it would output such a thing, because their own understanding of the things behind the statement is un-solid enough to think it would be credible. Which is exactly the thing that ties to my deeper argument; that bridging human mindstates and subjectivities is not trivial, that one risks pretty embarrassing failures if one ignores this and just assumes that different minds must be comprehensible from within the framework of thinking oneself is used to, and that the reviewed book is falling prey to said phenomenon really really hard.
i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, buti would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that.
*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.
Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.
Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.
it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.
perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.
I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.
No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.
My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.
If you make me a different gender you make me a different person. I would very much prefer not to be killed and replaced with another person, even if they are happier.
I mean I get why people would want to be gay but why on earth would you want to be trans. It’s the worst. Instead of being unhappy that you can’t be X gender, you could not be unhappy. Not being unhappy is good. Like, maybe you can make the case that it’s better for you to be a cis woman than a cis man but I don’t get what could possibly be better about being a trans woman in particular. Queer cred can’t be worth THAT much.
No. Unless “cis enbie” means “I get to have all the cool bodymodding actually bodymodded instead of being boringly born with it” which once again wraps right back to transfeminine enbie.
No matter how much the world hates me for it, or how much harder it has made things, or how much ridicule I have to endure, I know that when I really needed to, I was able to draw a line that I wouldn’t allow the outside world to cross, I was able to assert that ultimately I am myself and make my own decisions, and there are some things I’m just not going to give up or sacrifice.
…
‘They’ do everything in their power to deprive us of the ability to define our genders for ourselves, and to make our own decisions about our bodies. I can certainly say that although abortion is perhaps one of the feminist issues that has the least direct impact on my own personal life, the concept of being in possession and determination of your own body, and how disgusting it is to see people try to take that away from you, is something I know very intimately.
But the thing is, at this point, it would be really difficult for anyone to ever take this away from me. And with every step forward one makes in transition, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to ever undo your decision. It claims your body as definitively your body. It’s no longer the body that just happened to be assigned to you, it is the body you chose.
…
When I used to look at myself naked I always felt heartbroken, defeated, hopeless and deeply sad. Now I can look at myself and feel proud of who I am and what I’ve made of myself. Proud of having claimed this little collection of flesh and muscle and bones and blood and stuff as my own to be what I want it to be, proud to have defined it rather than letting it define me.
And ultimately I know that nobody else but me is ultimately in possession of it, or the identity I use it to express. If they were, my body would not be what it is.
People who either don’t know or don’t care about the scientific consensus have often claimed that our bodies are normal and healthy, so being trans isn’t something that should be treated physically. But what if we could be more than just normal? Why should we settle for what’s supposed to be good enough, when we have the option to become something even better? Others may see this as choosing to reject what’s “normal”, and in doing so, relegating ourselves to being abnormal. But I don’t see this as a choice between normal and abnormal. I see it as a choice between average, and awesome.
…
Some people might look at my patchwork self of hormone pills and mix-and-match anatomy, and call it monstrous, freakish, an abomination. You know what I call this?
Upgrades.
Since the dawn of humanity, there have been certain features of our existence that were considered fundamental, unchangeable, and definitive of what it means to be human. For almost all of history, it was an unavoidable fact that those who were born a certain sex would remain that sex. Sure, living as another gender had sometimes been feasible in a social sense. But bodily? That was simply impossible – until it wasn’t. Now, that assumption has been pulled out from under us, and some people aren’t happy about that. They want us to go away. They want to be able to go on assuming that every woman they see is a cis woman, regardless of what the reality may be. They want us to deny ourselves this life-affirming treatment for the sake of some empty platitudes about “nature”.
…
Even just a few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Now, I have the ability to choose this for myself, for no reason other than that this is what I want out of my life. I once called this “a taste of apotheosis”, and that’s exactly what it is. We stand at the frontier of transhumanism, where what was once dismissed as mere futuristic fantasy is now realized in the present via technology. I saw myself growing up into a man, and I did what I had to do to wrench my destiny away from the blind whims of biology. Some people might call this “defying nature”. But that’s not a problem – it’s exactly the point. That option was there for me when I needed it, and I’m not letting it pass by. If they really think that’s an abomination, then I’ll be their abomination. I’ll be their monster. And I’ll know that it was worth it.
And then I also must add that my gender isn’t separable from my general transhumanism, so one would basically have to propose being cis-posthuman (which, frankly, starts to be a deal I’d actually take) as I simply. just. don’t. get. why estrogen would be different from ritalin would be different from provigil, or why orchidectomy would be different from direct neural interfaces would be different from anti-aging. One doesn’t get to call one set of things qualitatively different for me from the other in any justifiable way that doesn’t rely on “one is considered weirder than the other”.
And the bad feeling from not having feature X in my morph is pretty identical now that the most serious parts of firmware incompatibility are sorted out. To me, there is no “gender”; only bodymodding to be more me.
i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, buti would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that.
*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.
Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.
Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.
it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.
perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.
I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.
No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.
My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.
If you make me a different gender you make me a different person. I would very much prefer not to be killed and replaced with another person, even if they are happier.
I mean I get why people would want to be gay but why on earth would you want to be trans. It’s the worst. Instead of being unhappy that you can’t be X gender, you could not be unhappy. Not being unhappy is good. Like, maybe you can make the case that it’s better for you to be a cis woman than a cis man but I don’t get what could possibly be better about being a trans woman in particular. Queer cred can’t be worth THAT much.
No. Unless “cis enbie” means “I get to have all the cool bodymodding actually bodymodded instead of being boringly born with it” which once again wraps right back to transfeminine enbie.
No matter how much the world hates me for it, or how much harder it has made things, or how much ridicule I have to endure, I know that when I really needed to, I was able to draw a line that I wouldn’t allow the outside world to cross, I was able to assert that ultimately I am myself and make my own decisions, and there are some things I’m just not going to give up or sacrifice.
…
‘They’ do everything in their power to deprive us of the ability to define our genders for ourselves, and to make our own decisions about our bodies. I can certainly say that although abortion is perhaps one of the feminist issues that has the least direct impact on my own personal life, the concept of being in possession and determination of your own body, and how disgusting it is to see people try to take that away from you, is something I know very intimately.
But the thing is, at this point, it would be really difficult for anyone to ever take this away from me. And with every step forward one makes in transition, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to ever undo your decision. It claims your body as definitively your body. It’s no longer the body that just happened to be assigned to you, it is the body you chose.
…
When I used to look at myself naked I always felt heartbroken, defeated, hopeless and deeply sad. Now I can look at myself and feel proud of who I am and what I’ve made of myself. Proud of having claimed this little collection of flesh and muscle and bones and blood and stuff as my own to be what I want it to be, proud to have defined it rather than letting it define me.
And ultimately I know that nobody else but me is ultimately in possession of it, or the identity I use it to express. If they were, my body would not be what it is.
People who either don’t know or don’t care about the scientific consensus have often claimed that our bodies are normal and healthy, so being trans isn’t something that should be treated physically. But what if we could be more than just normal? Why should we settle for what’s supposed to be good enough, when we have the option to become something even better? Others may see this as choosing to reject what’s “normal”, and in doing so, relegating ourselves to being abnormal. But I don’t see this as a choice between normal and abnormal. I see it as a choice between average, and awesome.
…
Some people might look at my patchwork self of hormone pills and mix-and-match anatomy, and call it monstrous, freakish, an abomination. You know what I call this?
Upgrades.
Since the dawn of humanity, there have been certain features of our existence that were considered fundamental, unchangeable, and definitive of what it means to be human. For almost all of history, it was an unavoidable fact that those who were born a certain sex would remain that sex. Sure, living as another gender had sometimes been feasible in a social sense. But bodily? That was simply impossible – until it wasn’t. Now, that assumption has been pulled out from under us, and some people aren’t happy about that. They want us to go away. They want to be able to go on assuming that every woman they see is a cis woman, regardless of what the reality may be. They want us to deny ourselves this life-affirming treatment for the sake of some empty platitudes about “nature”.
…
Even just a few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Now, I have the ability to choose this for myself, for no reason other than that this is what I want out of my life. I once called this “a taste of apotheosis”, and that’s exactly what it is. We stand at the frontier of transhumanism, where what was once dismissed as mere futuristic fantasy is now realized in the present via technology. I saw myself growing up into a man, and I did what I had to do to wrench my destiny away from the blind whims of biology. Some people might call this “defying nature”. But that’s not a problem – it’s exactly the point. That option was there for me when I needed it, and I’m not letting it pass by. If they really think that’s an abomination, then I’ll be their abomination. I’ll be their monster. And I’ll know that it was worth it.
I think effective social justice would focus much more than conventional social justice on
1) cause prioritization: there are lots of oppressive power structures and lots of people impacted by them. It seems like the kinds of oppression that get the most attention are going to be those that impact relatively privileged people (because they’re best at discussing in social justice terms the ways that they’ve been harmed, they have access to SJ discourse and SJ spaces, etcetera). See in particular the underdiscussion of class and education privilege in SJ communities. But it’s not as simple as ‘which oppressive system does the most harm’ because of:
2) tractability: A big effective altruist principle is that you don’t tackle the problem that kills the most people, you tackle the problem where you can take strides most rapidly. That often means looking at underserved groups and understudied problems. Heart disease kills tons of people, but it’s not a good EA cause because it mostly affects older Western adults and as a result already has lots of money being thrown at it. Schistosomiasis mostly affects poor children in Asia, Africa and South America, so there’s not much money being spent on it.
Similarly, in social justice, some problems seem much more tractable than others. Abortion is an incredibly important problem, but a very intractable one - we’ve been fighting for fifty years and the landscape has barely changed. Gay rights affects fewer people but turned out to be way more tractable - we’ve achieved a mass shift in public opinion. Which causes are tractable and which aren’t, and how does this affect where we ought to spend our energy? I don’t know, but I’d be really excited for some people to start researching/thinking/writing about this.
3) healthy community norms: when you’re trying to change the world, it’s worth explicitly building a community you expect to be strong enough to handle the blowback, support and protect its own members, and learn from and correct its own mistakes. Effective altruism tries to do this by talking about what has worked for us in building successful communities, practicing good discourse habits and by rewarding and circulating good criticisms of effective altruism. Some ways in which we fail to do this, I think, are by expecting very high standards of argumentation from critics, by getting tied up in nonproductive discussions, and by politicizing some disagreements.
I think effective social justice would need drastically different community norms from standard social justice. It would need to find the balance between welcoming people who disagree with it on some points while also being a space whose members don’t feel like their right to exist is questioned. It would need to figure out how to exclude the toxic and abusive people who thrive in tumblr social justice while not ostracizing anyone who makes a mistake. It would need to manage lots and lots of competing access needs. The best way to do this would be to start small, with communities aspiring to being kinder, intellectually careful, effective spaces, and to report back frequently on what challenges we’ve encountered and how we’ve reasoned about them and how we expect to learn and improve.
4) checking whether what you’re doing works: A while ago, when the protests were happening in Baltimore, several of my friends posted that they felt helpless and were wondering ‘what works?’ I didn’t have anything to tell them. Because the thing is, we don’t really know. Do TV ads change minds? Does door-to-door canvassing? Does confronting your bigoted friends and relatives? Sharing information on Facebook? Donating directly to people in need? We don’t know. All of these things are good, but if you’re poor or have limited free time and want to do the thing that matters most, we have no idea where you can make your voice heard the loudest.
Effective altruists are currently conducting a mass double-blind randomized trial on the effect of Facebook ads on changing peoples’ behavior and beliefs. I want to see effective social justice doing the same thing. I want to be able to say, “the best thing you can do if you live in the U.S. is show up in your Senator’s office” or “we expect that if you share this on your Facebook feed, ten more people will read this article and people who read this article express, a month later, 5% more support for anti-discrimination laws”.
“Frankly, I don’t see why we should subsidize sexless men that women don’t like. If you’re that much of a loser and you’re going to try to hold the world hostage with threats of violence if you can’t get a date, we should probably execute you or at least do everything possible to make sure you can’t reproduce.”—
To be fair, I very much doubt that billions of men would ever wind up involuntarily celibate.
On the other hand, this seems… incredibly unsympathetic to involuntarily celibate people? I do not think it is kind to refer to involuntarily celibate people as “losers” or “men that women don’t like” (IME, most involuntarily celibate people’s problem has nothing to do with attractiveness and is mostly the product of shyness). Threats of violence do not lead to the death penalty in any civilized country. While some involuntarily celibate people are obnoxious, it’s important to note that long-term loneliness fucks people up. Humans are social animals; a fulfilling social life– which the obnoxious involuntarily celibate people do not have– is a basic need as much as food. They deserve our sympathy, not our condemnation. The whole thing smacks of hurting people because they’re weak and I don’t like it.
Endorsed. Also, OP? Literally every expression of Objectivism like this makes people like it less. Whether it’s poor people as in your usual schtick, lonely people as perhaps less expected, etc. Notice the parallels. Maybe, just maybe there are better responses then smugly going, “None of my business la la la”.
Of course, there is a perfectly consistent position that just because we shouldn’t oppress poly people doesn’t mean that it’s not a tragedy that a lot of people end up incel.
For example, homelessness. I don’t think there is anything wrong in using the lowest necessary amount of force to evict a homeless person who tries to nonconsensually place themselves as one’s roommate, or that a homeless person shouting “someone who doesn’t want to be my roommate become my roommate anyway or I will do violence to innocent people aka. anyone except me” deserves a roommate (if anything, I’d bump them down on the waiting list really hard), or that we should scorn people who have five roommates but don’t take a single homeless person to live with them; but I do think that we should try to minimize homelessness in ways that don’t coerce people to be roommates with people they don’t want to be roommates with, such as by replacing bullshit welfare with UBI, reducing artificial limits on the housing supply that render housing inaffordable, etc.
An autonomy-respecting response would be “no, you don’t get to institute monogamy; if you want people to have partners, figure out a way to make them attractive to partners so you don’t need to coerce anyone to be their partners as people would partner with them voluntarily”.
If the PUA and redpill movements were fixed into “a social skills, self-respect, and better ability to satisfy one’s preferences for shy men movement” without the “women are shitty people, scorn dem” part, it would be a very good development. If mainstream feminists stopped ignoring the fact that there are a lot of “incels” who aren’t the shitty people they think of when they hear “incel”, it would be a very good development. If we managed to break down the expectations of hegemonic masculinity that render men who fail at them insecure, low-self-esteemed, and unattractive, it would be a very good development. Breaking down ableism, classism, heterosexism, and other unjust social biases and normativities; and decriminalizing sex work so that people who only want sex don’t need to hoard the relationship opportunities so much, etc. would be very good developments.
Of course, such ways of addressing the issue require thinking while coercive ways (such as “let’s just scorn non-monogamous people” or “let’s just scorn involuntarily celibate people because it’s not like "policy debates shouldn’t appear one-sided” is a Thing in the diaspora or anything" because most coercion is not state coercion) are easy; just take away other peoples’ choice until you get the result you want. And that’s why I have way more respect for someone trying to figure out a clever way to fix social problems with voluntary action, than for the person advocating a coercive solution.
Be trans. Slay God. Ascend to your rightful throne over all Creation.
If the death penalty is acceptable for any crimes it’s got to be acceptable in this case.
We find you guilty of torturing billions of people for millennia. Your sentence is death by increased acceptance of trans people.
(I suppose there are some jurisdiction issues, and IDK much about international law.)
Anyway, apparently supporting my awesome girlfriend also helps kill bloodthirsty tyrants, so keep that in mind!
Are their jurisdiction issues? Given that they had to declare space to be neutral territory, I think until anyone claims otherwise unexplored territory such as the metaphysical domain of God isn’t under ANY jurisdiction… no? Do we have any space lawyers around?
The rules are that states may not own stuff that they haven’t constructed themselves, but national laws apply to the activities of each nation. So basically if God falls under any specific jurisdiction on Earth, the same would be expected to apply everywhere else as well.
Given that many states’ laws also apply to foreigners who have committed crimes on the state’s soil against the state’s citizens, and that citizens of state A aren’t entitled to any special protections over citizens of state B regarding crimes they have committed under state B’s jurisdiction; I think we can make the case that if we are able to execute God, we’re totally within our rights to do so.
“If you do talk about [Rojava’s] politics, misrepresent them as a Kurdish nationalist movement fighting to establish a Kurdish state. Because of course a neoliberal “democratic” state is what any freedom loving people would want. Ignore the fact that while mostly Kurds, there’s a variety of ethnicities, religions, and languages in Rojava. Absolutely do not mention words like “democratic confederalism,” “direct democracy,” “anticapitalist,” “feminism,” “social ecology,” or “libertarian socialism”. Remember, according to Fukuyama we’ve reached the “end of history.” And according to Thatcher, “there is no alternative.” That depends on you not talking about the alternative.”—
This is your daily reminder that there is a Problematic oligopoly in governance and attempts to supply alternative products to the Marketplace Of Ideas That Actually Get Implemented Somewhere should be protected at, not all because that would be dangerous, but significantly more costs than they are currently protected at.
Furthermore, this should be an agreeable meta-level policy regardless of what one thinks of any particular implementation; how else are we supposed to figure out which exotic form of more-consensual-than-currently governance would actually work the best? A world with both both seasteaders and Rojava getting to try out their systems without authoritarians fucking with either should be preferable to all varieties of freedom-appreciating people over a world without such experiments. There is a natural coalition waiting to be built is what I’m saying.
Large portions of our economy would grind to a halt [sic] if the government did not grant patents and copyrights. Without this massive intervention into the free market, the drug, music, publishing, and software industries could not exist. [sic] Bill Gates likes to think of himself as a self-made man, but he would not be one of the richest men in the world if the government did not make it illegal for anyone but Microsoft to copy and sell Windows. [implication: this is somehow supposed to be a “good” thing]
We can see this in their findings summarized in Table 1. Both public and private service providers received consistently high scores from people who had recently used their services. On a scale of 0-100, the public agencies averaged a score of 73.5 for customer satisfaction, while the private businesses averaged 73.9 – a negligible difference. Clearly, people’s actual experiences and evaluations of public agencies runs directly contrary [sic] to the negative stereotype that government organizations consistently provide inferior service to that available in the private sector.
Service Ratings by Recent Customers
U.S. Postal Service 76.1
Public health clinics 74.4
(...)
Private mail carriers 84.5
Private doctors' offices 80.6
Government also helps you own your house in more than the legal sense. On a more practical level, the federal government actually gives you money every year to help pay for your house. It’s called a mortgage interest tax deduction and it is one of the larger benefit programs run by the federal government – amounting to over $60 billion dollars a year. You can also deduct any real estate taxes you pay. These largely overlooked subsidy programs have enabled millions of people to buy their first home or to move up to a larger home than they could afford otherwise. [but when the private sector does it, it’s called irresponsible]
How could [anti-poverty programs] possibly be considered a success [sic] when the poverty rate is essentially the same as it was thirty years ago? The answer is that most of the policies aimed at the poor in the U.S. were never intended to get them out of poverty.
One business sector that benefits tremendously from government R&D is the drug industry. Our government conducts fully half of the research and development of new drugs – the economic benefits of which are then largely captured by pharmaceutical companies. [once again, this is supposed to be a “good” thing]
You wouldn’t self-diagnose yourself with cancer. So why are these teens online self-diagnosing themselves with severe psychiatric disorders? And why are we allowing and encouraging it as valid?
this post gave me self-diagnosed cancer
the most epic softball I have ever seen on this site
“Why are we allowing.”
Ah yes, that old canard. I agree with communismkills: Teenagers who self-dx and subsequently post about it online need to be punished by PoliceMob.
Considering:
the size of the tumblr teenager self-dx crowd
the fact that they’re hiding behind false names
the additional anonymity of IP addresses and the fact that any single IP address might belong to a household with several teenagers or possibly even an adult who pretends to be a self-dx teenager online
the difficulty of asserting jurisdiction over possible foreign teenagers
and other issues (margin too small etc.)
I predict that the costs of a thorough purge will run into no more than $50 billion - a steal compared to the War on Drugs - so we should definitely stop allowing teenagers to self-diagnose online.
Adults can continue to do so - they, after all, have rights.
“Noooooooooo…” Carmen whines helplessly. “Look, this is only indirectly my forte. My father is the one with a special interest in economics, and he raised me to respect the power of the field. He made me watch every episode of My Little Factory: Markets Are Magic when I was a kid. He made my brother and I bid on where we’d go on the weekends to clearly signal how much we wanted it, because money is the unit of caring. He devised a game in which I traded a stipend of imaginary currency for goods and services at home, and gradually increased the complexity until there were financial derivatives. So, even if this isn’t my special interest, I still feel comfortable saying this: If someone gave me a loan and a decade, I could own your island. Please: markets. That is all.”
[OOC: Both my parents are econ/finance people and ex-central bankers. The game about trading currency for household goods was an actual thing they did with me from seven to nine years old. I had a unique childhood.]
This was my character’s reaction to being told by a noble woman that her country had a command economy, because using money for important services was undignified.
It’s all fun and games until someone organizes the peasants into an anarcho-syndicalist commune.
Actually…
If the peasants’ lands don’t get forcibly seized by ex-aristocrats, anarcho-syndicalist communes are a very good thing for free markets.
First of all, they reduce the vertical nature of a feudal society by undermining the aristocrats’ power and distributing power horizontally, which in turn is useful for making markets adequately reflect people’s preferences and not just the aristocrats’.
Second, they allow the peasants to pool their capital for more intensive technologies of production and economies of scale, while having an incentive structure that supports value creation as people work for their own benefit instead of some asshole over there. Voluntary collectivization has often been favored over involuntary collectivization or tenant farming for a reason.
Third, the existence of a sufficient amount of anarcho-syndicalist communes effectively sets a reasonable floor for how horrible industrialization can be. Historically the inclosure acts and the poor laws and all that bullshit made the opportunities for the proletariat way lower than they would’ve otherwise been, thus rendering it artificially exploitable in the dark satanic mills. If peasants can anarcho-syndicalist-communize instead of working in horrible factories and mines, the factories and mines will be substantially less horrible or they will simply not exist on a free market.
Forth, land is fundamentally much more zero-sum than other forms of productive capital, and thus a lot of what aristocrats do is inevitably just unproductive rentseeking which anarcho-syndicalist communes would redistribute to the creators of value, disincentivizing unproductive activities such as aristocratizing and other forms of mooching off others’ labor. On the other hand, anarcho-syndicalist peasant communes can’t (unless they totally dominate society and ostracize everyone who wants to use currency and markets so thoroughly that social pressures prevent economic efficiency) destroy the markets’ ability to create value as they would still be incentivized to trade with outsiders where trade is beneficial.
I was more riffing on the “Venture Capitalist” thing, rather then the markets. And it all works very well apart from dealing with the violence inherent in the system, as you alluded to.
…strange women something something something distributin’ loans is no basis for a system of government!
“Noooooooooo…” Carmen whines helplessly. “Look, this is only indirectly my forte. My father is the one with a special interest in economics, and he raised me to respect the power of the field. He made me watch every episode of My Little Factory: Markets Are Magic when I was a kid. He made my brother and I bid on where we’d go on the weekends to clearly signal how much we wanted it, because money is the unit of caring. He devised a game in which I traded a stipend of imaginary currency for goods and services at home, and gradually increased the complexity until there were financial derivatives. So, even if this isn’t my special interest, I still feel comfortable saying this: If someone gave me a loan and a decade, I could own your island. Please: markets. That is all.”
[OOC: Both my parents are econ/finance people and ex-central bankers. The game about trading currency for household goods was an actual thing they did with me from seven to nine years old. I had a unique childhood.]
This was my character’s reaction to being told by a noble woman that her country had a command economy, because using money for important services was undignified.
It’s all fun and games until someone organizes the peasants into an anarcho-syndicalist commune.
Actually…
If the peasants’ lands don’t get forcibly seized by ex-aristocrats, anarcho-syndicalist communes are a very good thing for free markets.
First of all, they reduce the vertical nature of a feudal society by undermining the aristocrats’ power and distributing power horizontally, which in turn is useful for making markets adequately reflect people’s preferences and not just the aristocrats’.
Second, they allow the peasants to pool their capital for more intensive technologies of production and economies of scale, while having an incentive structure that supports value creation as people work for their own benefit instead of some asshole over there. Voluntary collectivization has often been favored over involuntary collectivization or tenant farming for a reason.
Third, the existence of a sufficient amount of anarcho-syndicalist communes effectively sets a reasonable floor for how horrible industrialization can be. Historically the inclosure acts and the poor laws and all that bullshit made the opportunities for the proletariat way lower than they would’ve otherwise been, thus rendering it artificially exploitable in the dark satanic mills. If peasants can anarcho-syndicalist-communize instead of working in horrible factories and mines, the factories and mines will be substantially less horrible or they will simply not exist on a free market.
Forth, land is fundamentally much more zero-sum than other forms of productive capital, and thus a lot of what aristocrats do is inevitably just unproductive rentseeking which anarcho-syndicalist communes would redistribute to the creators of value, disincentivizing unproductive activities such as aristocratizing and other forms of mooching off others’ labor. On the other hand, anarcho-syndicalist peasant communes can’t (unless they totally dominate society and ostracize everyone who wants to use currency and markets so thoroughly that social pressures prevent economic efficiency) destroy the markets’ ability to create value as they would still be incentivized to trade with outsiders where trade is beneficial.
it is highly amusing to mess around with my i3 window color scheme, only to go afk and see the exact same colorscheme in the bathroom mirror
yes, I empirically seem to be very much about the purple, black, grey and white
im shocked by this. shocked i tell u
…right. I have it there as well.
I didn’t even consciously realize that part.
Now, I probably shouldn’t start thinking of ways to implement a grey background/dark text colorscheme to create the æsthetic because I finally managed to make a black background color scheme that looks good and even matches my language synesthesia reasonably…
The answer is: I managed to screw around so much I don’t even want to tell it all publicly on tumblr. The point where I’m executing arbitrary code around the filesystem really makes me hope their VM is secure.
i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, buti would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that.
*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.
Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.
Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.
it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.
perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.
I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.
No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.
My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.
If you upload a raven (or some other corvid with problem-solving ability) and use copies of the resulting postcorvid entity to pilot, eg, trash cleanup drones, what moral responsibility do you have to them?
Uploads count Obviously the same as biologicals (or more if they’re uplifted in the process) so I’d argue that such postcorvids need to be treated pretty well. Piloting the drones should be sufficiently stimulating that they aren’t getting bored, they shouldn’t feel pain except where reasonably justified as a self-protective measure against damage (and if the drone is rendered inoperable the upload process should be frozen immediately), they shouldn’t be having urges they are unable to satisfy, etc.; basically treat the mechbirds the same you’d treat biobirds with equivalent minds.
And fully uplifted neo-avians should get the same rights as humans. No questions about it.
Wellll… I mean, the ability to do things like pause and copy should change some of the treatment-for example, if I procrastinate on letting the uploaded bird go fly a drone and it just stays on the hard drive a bit longer that is rather different from leaving a biobird in a cage. The mechbird won’t notice. The biobird will get bored. Uploads generally require less things. This is one of the advantages of uploading.
Still, this is all implementation details: Mechbirds and biobirds are both ethically equivalent, even if the details of ‘how do you fulfill the needs of this creature’ varies.
Yes, obviously. That’s why you always suspend the mechbird except when its garbage collector needs to run.
…I’m not idly curious-what sort of psychological downtime do ravens need? Because only ever existing when you have a job to do also sounds questionable.
Of course, we can just go with the simplest example: For exactly one of (bioraven/mechraven) is it ethical to plug it into a power grid. In fact, ethically required. For the other one it is unethical.
Ideally the downtime would be built in to the “job” itself so that it doesn’t feel like “work”, but instead like “life”.
I’ll just quote this anti-work anarchism AMA I randomly found because it has a relevant TL;DR on what it’s about and someone asked about leftist work-abolitionist perspectives a few months ago or something like that and if that person sees this one it could be relevant:
The anti-work anarchist solution is to abolish work either through productive play or automation. Productive play is the process of turning certain tasks into play. Abolishing work does not mean doing nothing. It means creating a new way of life, a ludic existence. Automation could also play a role and work could be abolished through the automation of all dirty, dull and dangerous tasks. I personally think automation is extremely important for abolishing work. Everything mundane, from cleaning toilets to mining should be automated. This would finally free us from toil and allow us to truly live spontaneously.
So basically the mechraven would feel like it’s living to the fullest, while picking up trash as a side effect.
If you upload a raven (or some other corvid with problem-solving ability) and use copies of the resulting postcorvid entity to pilot, eg, trash cleanup drones, what moral responsibility do you have to them?
Uploads count Obviously the same as biologicals (or more if they’re uplifted in the process) so I’d argue that such postcorvids need to be treated pretty well. Piloting the drones should be sufficiently stimulating that they aren’t getting bored, they shouldn’t feel pain except where reasonably justified as a self-protective measure against damage (and if the drone is rendered inoperable the upload process should be frozen immediately), they shouldn’t be having urges they are unable to satisfy, etc.; basically treat the mechbirds the same you’d treat biobirds with equivalent minds.
And fully uplifted neo-avians should get the same rights as humans. No questions about it.
Wellll… I mean, the ability to do things like pause and copy should change some of the treatment-for example, if I procrastinate on letting the uploaded bird go fly a drone and it just stays on the hard drive a bit longer that is rather different from leaving a biobird in a cage. The mechbird won’t notice. The biobird will get bored. Uploads generally require less things. This is one of the advantages of uploading.
Still, this is all implementation details: Mechbirds and biobirds are both ethically equivalent, even if the details of ‘how do you fulfill the needs of this creature’ varies.
Yes, obviously. That’s why you always suspend the mechbird except when its garbage collector needs to run.
The answer is: I managed to screw around so much I don’t even want to tell it all publicly on tumblr. The point where I’m executing arbitrary code around the filesystem really makes me hope their VM is secure.
If you upload a raven (or some other corvid with problem-solving ability) and use copies of the resulting postcorvid entity to pilot, eg, trash cleanup drones, what moral responsibility do you have to them?
Uploads count Obviously the same as biologicals (or more if they’re uplifted in the process) so I’d argue that such postcorvids need to be treated pretty well. Piloting the drones should be sufficiently stimulating that they aren’t getting bored, they shouldn’t feel pain except where reasonably justified as a self-protective measure against damage (and if the drone is rendered inoperable the upload process should be frozen immediately), they shouldn’t be having urges they are unable to satisfy, etc.; basically treat the mechbirds the same you’d treat biobirds with equivalent minds.
And fully uplifted neo-avians should get the same rights as humans. No questions about it.
i have had some extraordinarily interesting thoughts about chickens, including, but not limited to:
the trolley problem but with chickens
chickens in gimp suits
masses of chickens being spontaneously created and destroyed
every chicken on earth being replaced with something that is almost but not quite like a chicken
a chicken spa with rows of chickens being massaged
an infinite amount of chickens
chicken upload
cyborg chickens
becoming a chicken
and a poor family watching in horror as their chickens disappear one by one.
Oh no, chicken politics:
Capitalism: You have two chickens. The chickens have planned obsolescence built in so you have to repurchase them every few years. The chickens are classified as software and you don’t really own them but simply license a right to use them, and thus PoliceMob will hunt you down if you try to breed more chickens or CRISPR away the self-destruct genes.
Social democracy: You have two chickens. The state takes one of your chickens. You spend several weeks filling forms to qualify for the Chicken Investment Subsidy Program, after which you can get your chicken back. If you didn’t do this, your neighbor would be the one to get your chicken instead. The website www.governmentisgood.com explains how great it is that the state gives free chickens to people.
Statist socialism: You have two chickens. The state takes both; slaughters one and gives the meat to its voters; sends the other to the president’s offshore bank account in Panama; sets a price ceiling on eggs; and declares you a class enemy for not being able to produce eggs under that price. You buy eggs from the black market for twenty times the official price.
Anarcho-capitalism: You have two chickens. After your regular payments to Dawn Defense to make sure that your chickens aren’t stolen and that any rooster you would hypothetically buy in the future would actually be a rooster and that you are protected against all the things you couldn’t possibly anticipate, you can save a few satoshis each day. But one day you will surely have saved enough to purchase a rooster and hire your own servants.
Anarcho-communism: You have two chickens. PoliceMob shows up and shoots them because fuck you that’s why. The mainstream media says the chickens must have deserved it because surely PoliceMob wouldn’t do such a thing without a very good reason.
Mutualism: You have two chickens. You keep your chickens in your living room so that they remain unambiguously in your possession. You spend every waking hour doing something vaguely chicken-related so you can claim your daily production of eggs are worth 16 work-hour-units.
Utilitarianism: You have two chickens. You slightly inconvenience yourself to increase their welfare substantially.
Postmodernism: You have two chickens and absolutely no clue how to produce eggs. You invent ever more complicated constructs to try to stop anyone from noticing that material chickens in the material world actually do produce material eggs, no matter how clever your arguments are.
Steel postmodernism: Chickens are a social construct. You can’t eat social constructs, but the social construct “egg” usually refers to something that can be eaten so you use it as a convenient shorthand to conceptualize reality. You laugh at people who seriously ask questions like “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Anarcho-communism is reality?
Every time someone attempts anarcho-communism a lot of angry authoritarians with guns show up and fuck things up, without exception. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a demonstration in ‘016 or Catalonia in '36; someone is going to fuck the anarchists’ shit up.
i have had some extraordinarily interesting thoughts about chickens, including, but not limited to:
the trolley problem but with chickens
chickens in gimp suits
masses of chickens being spontaneously created and destroyed
every chicken on earth being replaced with something that is almost but not quite like a chicken
a chicken spa with rows of chickens being massaged
an infinite amount of chickens
chicken upload
cyborg chickens
becoming a chicken
and a poor family watching in horror as their chickens disappear one by one.
Oh no, chicken politics:
Capitalism: You have two chickens. The chickens have planned obsolescence built in so you have to repurchase them every few years. The chickens are classified as software and you don’t really own them but simply license a right to use them, and thus PoliceMob will hunt you down if you try to breed more chickens or CRISPR away the self-destruct genes.
Social democracy: You have two chickens. The state takes one of your chickens. You spend several weeks filling forms to qualify for the Chicken Investment Subsidy Program, after which you can get your chicken back. If you didn’t do this, your neighbor would be the one to get your chicken instead. The website www.governmentisgood.com explains how great it is that the state gives free chickens to people.
Statist socialism: You have two chickens. The state takes both; slaughters one and gives the meat to its voters; sends the other to the president’s offshore bank account in Panama; sets a price ceiling on eggs; and declares you a class enemy for not being able to produce eggs under that price. You buy eggs from the black market for twenty times the official price.
Anarcho-capitalism: You have two chickens. After your regular payments to Dawn Defense to make sure that your chickens aren’t stolen and that any rooster you would hypothetically buy in the future would actually be a rooster and that you are protected against all the things you couldn’t possibly anticipate, you can save a few satoshis each day. But one day you will surely have saved enough to purchase a rooster and hire your own servants.
Anarcho-communism: You have two chickens. PoliceMob shows up and shoots them because fuck you that’s why. The mainstream media says the chickens must have deserved it because surely PoliceMob wouldn’t do such a thing without a very good reason.
Mutualism: You have two chickens. You keep your chickens in your living room so that they remain unambiguously in your possession. You spend every waking hour doing something vaguely chicken-related so you can claim your daily production of eggs are worth 16 work-hour-units.
Utilitarianism: You have two chickens. You slightly inconvenience yourself to increase their welfare substantially.
Postmodernism: You have two chickens and absolutely no clue how to produce eggs. You invent ever more complicated constructs to try to stop anyone from noticing that material chickens in the material world actually do produce material eggs, no matter how clever your arguments are.
Steel postmodernism: Chickens are a social construct. You can’t eat social constructs, but the social construct “egg” usually refers to something that can be eaten so you use it as a convenient shorthand to conceptualize reality. You laugh at people who seriously ask questions like “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”
My wife and I went through
several IVF rounds, and our doctor even indicated that we could have our
embryos genotyped to select for certain traits. We didn’t, but we could
have. The phrase, “Their doing some very interested research in China
right now” was said during one of our consultations.
I have no
illusions that in 10-20 years, I could have an embryo not only selected
for traits I’m interested in, but the embryo edited using CRISPR if
necessary to express the traits wanted if not already present.
I imagine most people will find these scenarios grotesque.
n_arguments_against_popular_rule += 1
By contrast, the liberal yet strict regulatory environment of the UK, administered by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has made ours a widely envied model of how to foster a productive and responsible research climate that can supply valuable benefits for human health.
Pls no
If we want to avoid this, we had better renegotiate, rather urgently, the priorities of childrearing, so that parents cease to feel a duty (whether they like it or not) to wring every presumed ounce of potential from their offspring.
…wait, perhaps this isn’t so terrible after all. This doesn’t sound like bioethics, this sounds like a reasonable attempt to make the culture less horrible to people.
Beyond the valuable ability to avoid certain severely debilitating illnesses, genetic selection of embryos for a “better child” is no more likely to deliver than is the fantasy that cloning will somehow make us immortal. But what it would do is distract from the value of love and nurture, and of making the most of what you have, in favour of crude biological determinism. Which is why I hope that, in the end, most folks will look at themselves and think: “Well, sex never did me much harm.”
Remember that thing some acquiantances of mine were doing a few months ago? Yeah, this thing which is on BBC now. The only proper use of IP law: trolling violent extremists who are way too close buddies with PoliceMob to have a fair and level playing field with their opponents sans unfair and utterly hilarious tricks. (I hear that at least glittery Sleipnicorn t-shirts and other utterly n e o t e n i c products can be expected.)
(And a context note for people who might want to be spoilsports about the superiority of Our American Principles about free speech etc.: I agree with said superiority and would very much prefer see said Principles applied here as well; the US has Skokie, we have PoliceMob shooting people in the eyes with FN 303s and forcibly removing absolutely nonviolent demonstrators (such as a priest simply holding up a sign about loving thy neighbor) because they present an eyesore to the fash on their parades. The only thing the anarchists (disclaimer: the person named is not known to be an anarchist, I’m talking about the demonstrators who regularly get brutally suppressed) are asking for is the same treatment the nazis get.)
IMO Our American Principles about free speech suggest that making glittery neotenic T-shirts about fascists is exactly what we should do. Everyone gets a right to say their piece, and everyone gets a right to be made fun of. EQUALITY.
OBVIOUSLY
But bringing IP law to it is unfair and has a potential chilling effect on legit politics and basically what was done should not be able to be done in a fair world and it is absolutely hilarious nonetheless.
IP law is evil and horrible and just because it can occasionally be used for good ends doesn’t mean it stops being evil and horrible. Just like that cheap sneering on the sneerers can feel good doesn’t mean a situation where people are able to get away with cheap sneering is good.
If these guys had been silly ineffectual nazis (like Pekka Siitoin whose disciple tried to hijack a plane in the 80s using a “hypnotic-magnetic gaze” learned from Siitoin’s batshit occult stuff) trademarking their shit and pursuing it with legal means would’ve set a worrying precedent in suppressing political opponents, but in a situation where those guys have the second-biggest parliamentary party and one of the most popular national medias unambiguously on their side, with PoliceMob playing blatant favorites, and when the SOO started it by threatening legal action on the Loldiers of Odin, they were really really asking for it.
“Vimes is fundamentally a person. He fears he may be a bad person because he knows what he thinks rather than just what he says and does. He chokes off those little reactions and impulses, but he knows what they are. So he tries to act like a good person, often in situations where the map is unclear.”—
Terry Pratchett, describing Sam Vimes in a Usenet post back in 2004.
Okay, so this is what I love about Samuel Vimes as a Heroic figure.
Sometimes you get Heroes who are paragons of virtue. Even if you see their internal monologues, their mindset is pure and virtuous. Sometimes, they’re tested and you get a Big Moment where they have to choose whether or not to stick to their principles or give in to temptation and expediency.
And then you’ve got the more “Pragmatic” anti-hero types, who do some nasty things in pursuit of the greater good, and who might struggle with the things they’re doing, but they do it anyway because the world is not black and white.
And then you’ve got Sam Vimes, who is dragging himself kicking and screaming into being Lawful Good. Sam Vimes would not beat a suspect into confessing, but NOT because Sam Vimes is an innocent soul who finds the idea abhorrent. Not because he dosn’t think there are some scumbags who deserve to be separated from their teeth. Sam Vimes won’t beat a suspect because that’s not what a good man would do. Sam Vimes is understanding with others, but totally uncompromising when it comes to his own behavior.
Vimes isn’t a “Good Person” by nature, but by choice. By constant, uncompromising choice.
I think this is the only way to be a decent person.
Remember that thing some acquiantances of mine were doing a few months ago? Yeah, this thing which is on BBC now. The only proper use of IP law: trolling violent extremists who are way too close buddies with PoliceMob to have a fair and level playing field with their opponents sans unfair and utterly hilarious tricks. (I hear that at least glittery Sleipnicorn t-shirts and other utterly n e o t e n i c products can be expected.)
(And a context note for people who might want to be spoilsports about the superiority of Our American Principles about free speech etc.: I agree with said superiority and would very much prefer see said Principles applied here as well; the US has Skokie, we have PoliceMob shooting people in the eyes with FN 303s and forcibly removing absolutely nonviolent demonstrators (such as a priest simply holding up a sign about loving thy neighbor) because they present an eyesore to the fash on their parades. The only thing the anarchists (disclaimer: the person named is not known to be an anarchist, I’m talking about the demonstrators who regularly get brutally suppressed) are asking for is the same treatment the nazis get.)
@socialjusticemunchkin, did you coin the phrase “dogma of mandatory comprehensibility” for your NAB review, or does it have some earlier provenance, in your writing or somewhere else? It’s a phrase that captures something that has frustrated me about deconstructionist (and similar) criticism in the past, and it’d be nice to be able to use it without referring people back to this particular kerfuffle.
Specifically, the frustration I have is that in order to identify “holes” in a text, places where a text “undermines itself,” or the like, it seems to me like you first need to ask the usual questions like “does this make more sense in historical context?” or “does it work to read this as meant ironically?” I.e. the kinds of questions you usually find non-deconstructionist critics asking when confronted with aspects of a text that confuse them.
And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go. (I wonder if Foucault ever got on the deconstructionists’ case about this?)
(Note: I have a rule of not talking about NAB, but this post doesn’t count as talking about NAB by my standards)
As far as I know it’s my OC, and fresh to this particular incident.
The basic idea has been bugging me longer though, tying to the more general pattern I’ve observed of people yelling about things because they don’t realize they don’t speak the same language and thus assume that an expression in rationalist!english means what the same words mean in liberalartist!english, give a reasonable response to their misconception in liberalartist!english and speakers of rationalist!english are like “lol wtf are these guys talking about”, and in the end both sides hate each other for the horrible sin of speaking the Wrong Dialect.
(And the general pattern kind of applies in a lot of uncharitable readings; most snarky nitpicking would lose its effect if one were to read things in the writer’s dialect instead of one’s own; and no matter how much fun said snarky nitpicking is, it’s not at all fair. (Yes, I sometimes do it myself too, feel free to yell at me if you catch me doing it unless I’m clearly aiming for a non-serious&honest approach.))
Thanks for the fast response.
IMO, “liberal arts” is not a very useful term here. In modern usage it tends to refer to types of education which in some way hark back to the old quadrivium/trivium and the notion of a “broad education” they represented. The quadrivium/trivium had no “humanities as opposed to STEM” focus – you can sort of break it down (imprecisely and misleadingly) as “trivium is (premodern) humanities, quadrivium is (premodern) STEM,” but logic is one-third of the trivium, so if you count that as “premodern STEM” you’ve got 5 of 7 “premodern STEM” subjects.
(The quadrivium included music, because this was thought of as the study of “number in time,” to go along with arithmetic (number), geometry (number in space), and astronomy (number in space and time, i.e. something like physics).)
Hardly anyone actually uses the original trivium/quadrivium anymore, but modern “liberal arts education” tends to aim for the same breadth. For instance, at the “liberal arts college” I attended (where I got a physics degree), all students were required to take at least two classes in each of four “groups,” one of which was natural science (and there was nothing like “physics for poets” – everyone had to take the same intro science classes that the science majors were taking, which were taught with appropriate rigor), and one of which was something like “syntactic systems” (it included math, symbolic logic, foreign language courses excluding those classed as “literature courses,” and linguistics).
(Also, the “liberal arts college” as a a subtype of American colleges has a bunch of other characteristics, like being expensive, having small class sizes, and holding many classics as Socratic-ish discussions rather than lectures. None of these have much to do with the distinction I think you’re drawing.)
“Humanities” I think is a term that works strictly better than “liberal arts” here, because in the modern university it tends to mean stuff that isn’t “natural science” or “social science,” e.g. literature and history. Still, even this is way too broad, since the “dialect” of a history department, say, will be different from that of a literature department, and even literature departments with different focuses will have different “dialects.” (There’s been a fair amount of friction involved in the attempt to bring things like deconstruction into the discipline of classics, which tends to be old-school about most things, including literary analysis.)
What I think you’re pinpointing is something like “the most commonly used intellectual dialect in modern university literature departments, excluding classics.” Although that isn’t a very snappy phrase. “Talking like an English major,” although crude-sounding, is actually pretty close, but is likely to make you sound like don’t know whereof you speak (cf. the reaction to @theungrumpablegrinch‘s review of NAB). I’d love to find a phrase here that is readily and mutually intelligible.
Okay, the concept I’ve been trying to translate has been, in my brain, defined by a Finnish word which basically means “not STEM” and I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the word ‘humanities’. That specific dialect is a subtype of it, but there seems to be a general pattern of “humanist” vs. “mechanist” language and thinking which this dialect, the postmodernist “reality don’t real” meme, the “scientists are soulless, understanding destroys wonder” meme, the idea that science has difficulties modeling fluid dynamics because our systems of knowledge are founded on patriarchal rigidity [sic], etc. are extreme edge cases of.
The thing isn’t limited to English as eg. gender studies tends to feature the same thing to some degree as well; whatever the fuck CrimethInc. is its “Eight Reasons Why Capitalists Want to Sell You Deodorant” is exactly that thing(“Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.”); the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is also partially about that thing; I’ve seen many humanities people comment on issues of science with an embarrassing unawareness of the actual mechanisms of how things operate (because the broader version of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility lets them believe things are way simpler than they actually are (and it obviously operates in reverse too with naive STEM people on humanities questions causing enough facepalms to extract all the world’s cooking oil needs from)); the people who stop treating others as humans if they say the word “rational” are that thing; etc.
(And similarly the “mechanist” edge case would be the stereotypical weakman “soulless” engineer who thinks emotions don’t matter and Spock is something to emulate instead of an embarrassing failure of a humanist attempt to cargo-cult rationality, identifies as Objective Rational Thinker™, uses models derived from physics to explain all human behavior and forgets that they are crude simplifications at best, etc…)
