Some further notes on the discourse about meanness and Bailey:
When your “scientific theory” ends up claiming that millions of unpopular low-status people are disgusting liars and filthy perverts, there’s a pretty damn good chance you’ve been biased in making it. Just saying.
Just because you wrap your words as “scientific theory” doesn’t make it value-neutral. I have a “scientific theory” that Bailey is a massive shitlord and can present quite a bit of evidence for it. It’s a scientific theory, don’t be mean to me just for presenting it. And I’m not actually doing science, I’m just popularizing the obvious and universally accepted theory that “Bailey is an Epic Shitlord”, and thus if my evidence is shoddy and ethics questionable it doesn’t matter anyway.
If you make sweeping generalizations of groups, don’t act surprised when the group reacts as if you had made the claim you sweepingly generalized, about every single individual of that group. Goes double with the above. If A = B and B = C then (A == C) = true, that’s just simple logic.
The obvious solution is to maybe not make sweeping generalizations about groups. Especially if said sweeping generalizations are things people would get really upset about if you said them face-to-face.
Especially if the sweeping generalization you’re making involves the claim that millions of people are lying about something pretty big.
Or if you do, you better have some goddamn bulletproof evidence for the sweeping generalization you’re making and an ironclad explanation of alternative hypotheses and why you’ve discarded them. A good rule of thumb would be to make sweeping generalizations only if you believe your evidence could stand a libel court case (even when there is no actual grounds to actually sue you for libel; just think how comfortable you would be defending your case in court).
Get the fucking hint: don’t make sweeping generalizations about specific groups if the generalization involves “everyone who says otherwise is just lying”, that’s just bad form. The truths you will miss that way are probably far less significant than the errors you will avoid.
This applies in all directions. If you say “all men are scum”, don’t act surprised when a lot of people are justifiably very upset and hurt by it and react accordingly.
As a general rule, maybe approximately don’t say things about groups that you wouldn’t say about individuals. Saying things about groups might be less personally targeting and thus less harmful, but it also inevitably targets people you aren’t thinking of (people who say “all men are scum” are usually thinking all men have the underlying state of psychological security which lets them shrug off such things, when a huge number of people actually don’t, at all) and is more fraught with risks.
I am confused by references to the "nasty activism and extremism" used against Michael Bailey, your suggestion that it may have been warranted under the circumstances, and your disclaimer that your argument does not justify "heaping abuse" against children for inconsequential offences. The specific "nasty activism and extremism" that you were saying "might be okay" was the heaping of abuse upon Michael Bailey's children (which was done because they were related to him).
James later fixed the part where she captioned Bailey’s children and replaced the pics with pictures of herself. The obviously correct thing would’ve been to use pictures of Bailey himself as a child. Alas, people are not always of sound judgment when their already weak position is attacked even further, in extremely disingenuous ways.
The “Bailey’s children can be categorized into two types: those that have been sodomized by Bailey, and those who haven’t” part was incredibly apropos for the context, and totally inappropriate too, and I don’t know if there would’ve been a way to do it without harming innocent people (it’s not the fault of Bailey’s children that they were born to such a PoS father).
But if there was a way to harm Bailey as much as those actions did, without harming the innocent children, I couldn’t bring myself to condemn it. However, the spillover effects James’ actions had on innocent people are condemnable.
TL;DR: In my opinion, what she did was shitty because it hurt people other than Bailey, not because it hurt Bailey. There are things that were done to Bailey himself which were shitty for being excessive even if they didn’t impact anyone else, but that one I wouldn’t consider one of them. It certainly wasn’t any worse than what Bailey himself had done.
You often hear that it’s irrational to worry about terrorism, let alone to legislate about it. Terrorism is spectacular and primed to offend our sense of group solidarity, so our monkey-brains attend to it out of all proportion to its severity. If you consulted the actuarial tables, you’d be much more worried about car crashes. No one’s that worried about car crashes, so we shouldn’t get too worked up about terrorism either.
But does this prove too much?
Suppose that terrorism is less of a problem than car crashes, which themselves are not a pressing national concern. Then it seems that we should be able to tolerate a roughly similar number of deaths from terrorism as from car crashes without getting bent out of shape about it. Car crashes kill about thirty thousand people a year in the US, so we should be able to take about ten 9/11′s a year without really minding all that much.
Can that be quite right?
Ten 9/11′s a year would present an annual per capita risk of about 10^-4. What does that mean in context? In the worst year of the Second Intifadah, civilian deaths in Israel stood slightly lower, at about 8 * 10^-5 per capita. During World War II, civilian deaths in Great Britain were somewhere around 2*10^-4. So ten 9/11′s a year would put us somewhere between the worst year on record for a country whose culture has, let’s say, come to be defined by a sense of national existential risk, and a country that had to be propagandized out of surrendering by its own government.
So if you begin from the premise that deaths from car crashes, pools and ladders are interchangeable with deaths from terrorism, then you can arrive at the conclusion that a 9/11 every month would be within normal operating parameters. But if that strikes you as a reductio, then perhaps we should revisit the assumption that deaths from terrorism are just like accident deaths in every relevant respect.
Isn’t it just the unfamiliarity? When car crash deaths began occurring they were taken extremely seriously
i actually do pretty firmly believe that the world (where it applies, the US at least) would be better off with much less cars (and much more trains, say). is this an uncommon opinion?
(it’s really convenient that aspirin became a poster child for “safe, commonly used medication” despite having such a crazy array of potential deadly side effects. It means that whenever you want to push a new drug, you can say it has “fewer side effects than aspirin” and be pretty sure that you’re right)
I’d consider it very preferable if terrorism was treated just like all other murders. Norway basically did it when they had their own per capita equivalent of 9/11 and simply arrested and sentenced the person responsible. If the US had concluded that the murder statistics of 2001 looked kind of bad and there were a bunch of extraordinarily serious criminals on the loose, but not freaked the fuck out, the world would be in a way better shape today.
And car crashes need to be taken way more seriously while airplane security is overblown, coal power gets away with being utterly irresponsible while the slightest whiff of radiation makes people freak out about nuclear plants etc.
What are you actually doing with your machine, by the way? Are you just messing with it for funsies?
I’m turning it into a proper software development platform on which I can code effectively. My workflow relies on vim with the right plugins, shell, and browser, so having those function Correctly is Extremely Important.
Thus, I need a tiling window manager (xmonad), a good terminal without the fucking scrollbar (st), vim (custom setup), zsh (custom setup), and a browser with tabs and vi-style keyboard commands which won’t be too insecure but can render normal people’s shitty webpages that rely on way too much irrelevant crap (firefox in firejail in grsec hardened kernel, with the vimperator plugin among others).
There are a lot of little details here that we could go back and forth on forever. I don’t really want to continue arguing over these details.
Your account of Dreger’s perspective, although internally coherent, feels like it’s reading a lot into the book I just read that wasn’t actually there. The line you’re drawing is (I take it) between scientists “doing their thing” with potentially harmful results down the line, and scientists using actively unethical methods. But I don’t remember Dreger ever drawing that distinction explicitly. This is not me being coy or “perversely charitable” or something; I just don’t remember that being the thrust of the book I read.
(It is also not something I would naturally read in, because it doesn’t fit the facts as I see them. Michael Bailey is in fact a scientific researcher, but the campaign to ruin his reputation was in response to a popular book he wrote which meant to illustrate a theory he didn’t himself develop – and the theory itself was developed by Ray Blanchard in a clinic [the Clarke Institute, or “Jurassic Clarke”] that has a reputation for clinical horror stories. So what Bailey actually did is sort of analogous to some colleague of Maria New writing a popular book in which they interview some cherry-picked children who received prenatal dex talking about how great the results are. Would the author of that book be “just a scientist doing their thing”?)
But in particular I want to reply to your concluding paragraph, because it seems to get at some core friction here:
(and if you do believe that - if you do think that someone writing an article in support of autogynephilia, for instance, is “causing indirect harm”, and thereby qualifies as “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, to quote @socialjusticemunchkin - then your repeated insistence on discussing the object level, the actual truth of autogynephilia and other such theories - remains that much mind-boggling to me).
I don’t understand this, so I apologize if I’m getting it wrong. What I think you are saying is “you and Promethea believe that mere discussions among scientists of whether certain theories are wrong or right can be inherently harmful and deserve public shaming and nastiness, in which case you must be willing to give up the whole endeavor of scientifically adjudicating the truth or falsehood of those theories.”
I certainly don’t believe that. I believe (like Dreger) that activism, and society in general, needs the free discussion of scientific ideas. But I also think that not every statement by someone with a scientific professorship counts as a defense-worthy part of this free discussion. At a certain point – as when someone writes a book for a general audience containing no new scientific content – they are acting simply as citizens, not as participants in the protected sphere of scientific discourse. No idea should be inherently anathema in the academy, but no one spends all their time in the academy.
If a chemistry professor (after work) tells someone (not a colleague) that they should mix bleach and ammonia when they get home to make a super-great cleaning product – “trust me, I’m a chemistry professor” – they are not advancing an unorthodox scientific hypothesis in some way we ought to protect and celebrate.
You’re drawing a distinction between science and everything else that I don’t subscribe to, and which I did not intentionally ascribe to you either (whether Dreger subscribes to it or not I’m not sure). Your write “Activism, and the society in general, needs the free discussion of [scientific] ideas” and “No idea should be inherently anathema [in the academy]”, but from where I stand, both these statements improve when the bracketed parts are removed. I don’t know how to make a principled defense of the bracketed parts but not the whole; any such attempt falls victim to the volatility of the boundary.
Look; my position as far as I can see is very simple; Yudkowsky’s “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never.” pretty much covers it. Someone who’s making a genuine attempt to understand the world and/or explain their ideas to others is covered. It doesn’t matter if they’re writing a peer-reviewed article or a blog post on a personal blog: they do not deserve to be doxed, fired, subjected to an angry activist mob, etc. Now it so happens that scientists are much more likely to be engaged in trying to understand the world than people in general; and it so happens that “bullets” applied to explicitly scientific discourse have the greater potential to fuck with gaining more and better knowledge. And I think since Dreger is especially worried about that (as am I), she focuses on activists hindering scientists. But it doesn’t mean that “argument gets bullet” is virtuous w.r.t. a blogger or a popular book writer. I don’t know what Dreger thinks on that, but I sure don’t think so.
(of course, this also means that the onus is on me to distinguish between Bailey, whose book is protected by this principle, and New, whose actions aren’t. But to me, the difference between them is clear, as I tried to explain in my previous post)
Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc. would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars.
I’m not sure what *your* position is, but based on the above - and I’m sorry if I’m misinterpreting you - there’s a genuine difference; following @socialjusticemunchkin, you believe that “nasty extremism” is in fact justified in cases where someone argues for a position you believe to be “indirectly harmful” in a major way. Is that a correct summary of your view? Do you, in fact, agree with and justify the actions of Andrea James et al against Bailey described in Dreger’s book (given that Bailey was merely writing a popular book with no new science, which removes him from the “protected sphere” in your words)? In case you do, how much farther would you be willing to go, and in case you don’t, what kind of nasty, directly harmful activism *do* you support against people who express “indirectly harmful” ideas?
Okay, so I’ll step in to defend my own words. “Bad argument gets counterargument” works very well when discussing things in a relatively equal position, with adequate restraint on all sides. I don’t believe there is any single idea that should be verboten to express and discuss. Yes, this includes autogynephilia; jewish world domination; HBD; whether islam is inherently connected to terrorism, violence and anti-modernity; whether women are Just Worse than men, etc.
But the difference happens somewhere along the very vague and ill-defined boundary of academia and politics. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that some ideas need to be handled with more caution than others, because the discussion doesn’t happen in a vacuum and carelessly discussing those ideas may have dangerous spill-over effects. It’s one thing to investigate even controversial ideas, and completely another to write shitty books seeking to popularize them with bad evidence. (Just like people should study syntetic biology, but it would be very irresponsible to publicize a simple how-to guide on creating an undefeatable pandemic that would kill everyone, in a cave with just a box of scraps!) (This is actually the main point I’d like to push: would you consider it not okay to ever attack scientists who disseminate their knowledge in a harmful and irresponsible way? Because if you consider it okay to even nastily disincentivize publishing “The Nihilist’s Cookbook: 50 ways of wiping out the human race from your own garage”, then we already know what you are and are just haggling over the price.)
I’d compare the situation with Bailey to someone pushing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the popular discourse about antisemitism. Even if some parts of the claims were correct, it’s nonetheless complete politics, not honest truthseeking. (In fact, Bailey himself has defended his book on the basis that it’s politics, not science, and thus not subject to the institutional restraints of science.) And if I were Jewish, I wouldn’t shed a single tear if the writers of the Protocols got the Bailey treatment.
Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc. would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars.
And I think there’s a big difference in this. Writing a blog post is one thing, writing a really popular book and being very influential is another.
Throughout the affair, Bailey had acted in a way which reflected the standard exploitative attitudes cis researchers have traditionally had towards trans people (and trans women in particular). Bailey wrote a book which got its popularity mostly from matching people’s biases rather than from being correct, and trans people are in a very bad position to defend ourselves from it. Some of its components were pure dark arts, such as “anyone who claims they aren’t an autogynephile is lying, and their claims can thus be disregarded” which very conveniently poisons the well so that people who want to ignore contrary evidence have a fully general counterargument ready.
I don’t know the exact specifics, but a lot of what the trans activists have done seems to be basically tit-for-tatting Bailey. I won’t claim there haven’t been genuine abusive overreaches but eg. the part where Andrea James juxtaposed pictures of Bailey’s children with sexually explicit captions taken from, or based on, his very own book is nothing worse than what Bailey himself had done. The only difference was that it was targeted personally instead of generally, and I find it ridiculous that it’d be somehow okay to express such attitudes towards groups but not individuals because groups are ultimately simply aggregations of individuals.
(The obvious solution is to be nice to everyone.)
And a big part of it is the relative positions of the participants. If trans women were not so thoroughly marginalized (especially back in the time the book was written), the danger of seeking to popularize such ideas would be much smaller. One of the basic ways marginalization operates is by treating people as members of groups, not as individuals, and thus when the group one is grouped into is attacked, it’s completely rational (in the “evolutionary tribal game theory” sense) to attack back to defend oneself. Even Yudkowsky has written about his frustration with journalists writing hack jobs and getting away with abusing their power like that, and when you add a bunch of biases and sociocultural status to it, shit gets really ugly really fast.
Or as I’ve said: I’d be a lot more tolerant about people expressing ideas if their ideas didn’t hurt me and my people, but since we don’t live in a libertarian utopia, when Bailey acts like a politician he shouldn’t be surprised if he gets treated like a politician. (And while it’s a totally irrelevant ad hominem, I find it ironically appropriate that Dreger is a bioethicist.)
Yes, I would love to have a society of niceness, community and civilization, but I don’t live there and I don’t blame people who reacted to Bailey with nastiness because I know where they are coming from and I know that the best cure for that nastiness is not to shun people who lash out from pain but to take away the pain. I used to be one of those nasty activists, and while I’ve updated my own methods to be more productive and effective and less likely to hurt innocents, I do consider myself a person who has some actual insight to why people act like that and what can actually be done about it. People are clockwork, if you want them to do/not do something you need to take the clockwork into account instead of whining impotently at the uncaring void.
And before you think I’m some kind of a PC spoilsport who doesn’t want to discuss uncomfortable ideas, let me express some of mine below the cut:
> me looking at router logs > what’s that, an unknown iphone in my wi-fi? > I don’t think so > macb& > now how the fuck did someone get to spook around in my network? > better switch to a better password and do some other security checking stuff > why is my tablet not connecting? > oh, right… > HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT I CUCK SOCKS
now the real mystery is why the tablet was labeled as an iphone to begin with…
after compiling my own kernel, and patching my nvidia drivers to match it, compiling them, compiling the kernel modules, fixing some stuff there as well, and rebooting half a million times in the process of figuring out what the fuck was wrong
I have never before been so happy to see a pure black screen (xmonad which is awaiting proper customization)
@metagorgon said: are you using the open source nvidia reconstruction? nouveau, iirc?
No, because nvidia is evil and doesn’t let nouveau devs use their properly-working code and thus nouveau is crap for maxwell cards. This computer is going to run games for J every now and then so having a working high-performance 3d driver is vital for nuking windows from this household.
Did Wine stop being shit when I wasn’t paying attention?
Nope, games just got released for native linux when you weren’t paying attention. The games J cares about are all either native or at least not-broken on wine. I gave up gaming so most of my steam library is kind of sitting there, being sad and useless now, but there are very few games I both own and would actually miss from windows.
after compiling my own kernel, and patching my nvidia drivers to match it, compiling them, compiling the kernel modules, fixing some stuff there as well, and rebooting half a million times in the process of figuring out what the fuck was wrong
I have never before been so happy to see a pure black screen (xmonad which is awaiting proper customization)
@metagorgon said: are you using the open source nvidia reconstruction? nouveau, iirc?
No, because nvidia is evil and doesn’t let nouveau devs use their properly-working code and thus nouveau is crap for maxwell cards. This computer is going to run games for J every now and then so having a working high-performance 3d driver is vital for nuking windows from this household.
@metagorgon said: you compiled the drivers though? did you somehow get source, or disassemble or decompile them?
I compiled the kernel module for the drivers, after patching some of the necessary files to get it to work. The drivers themselves are the binary blob with grsec patches slapped on top, don’t ask me how exactly they work that’s not my job.
Have you tried dwm? I know a lot of people who love xmonad but so far haven't met one who had tried dwm and found xmonad superior, as opposed to just finding xmonad first.
I’ve understood that xmonad is basically a clone of dwm written in haskell instead of C, and I’m ideologically in favor of functional programming. In addition, the amount of useless crap interesting and neat extras I can add seems to be greater in xmonad. And there is something amusing about the way my desktop layout algorithms have been “proven correct”.
after compiling my own kernel, and patching my nvidia drivers to match it, compiling them, compiling the kernel modules, fixing some stuff there as well, and rebooting half a million times in the process of figuring out what the fuck was wrong
I have never before been so happy to see a pure black screen (xmonad which is awaiting proper customization)
@metagorgon said: are you using the open source nvidia reconstruction? nouveau, iirc?
No, because nvidia is evil and doesn’t let nouveau devs use their properly-working code and thus nouveau is crap for maxwell cards. This computer is going to run games for J every now and then so having a working high-performance 3d driver is vital for nuking windows from this household.
What are you actually doing with your machine, by the way? Are you just messing with it for funsies?
I’m turning it into a proper software development platform on which I can code effectively. My workflow relies on vim with the right plugins, shell, and browser, so having those function Correctly is Extremely Important.
Thus, I need a tiling window manager (xmonad), a good terminal without the fucking scrollbar (st), vim (custom setup), zsh (custom setup), and a browser with tabs and vi-style keyboard commands which won’t be too insecure but can render normal people’s shitty webpages that rely on way too much irrelevant crap (firefox in firejail in grsec hardened kernel, with the vimperator plugin among others).
after compiling my own kernel, and patching my nvidia drivers to match it, compiling them, compiling the kernel modules, fixing some stuff there as well, and rebooting half a million times in the process of figuring out what the fuck was wrong
I have never before been so happy to see a pure black screen (xmonad which is awaiting proper customization)
Friend have you been introduced to LFS? And then once you’ve sacrificed a month of weekends to that, come over to NixOS where you can completely customize every aspect of your system but still have it automatically (and reproducibly) composed and put together for you.
combine NixOS with Qubes and I’m sold, until then I’ll stick with my arch-grsec because I need to get shit done and I’m finally about to get to the point where I can get to the shitdonegetting part
also, this is the second day in the row that I’ve forgotten to dye my hair
I cut it yesterday and it’s very pretty now (continues to look like my profile picture tbh) but it’s all brown in the back now and it needs to get back to purple
I used to look a bit like Mokoto Kusanagi (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!) but now I’m trying something a bit more asymmetric and it’s really nice to have finally discovered a method of self-cutting the hair on the back of my head without fucking it up, too bad the method results in the hair being so short that all that’s left is the natural brown I’m very ofunfond
after compiling my own kernel, and patching my nvidia drivers to match it, compiling them, compiling the kernel modules, fixing some stuff there as well, and rebooting half a million times in the process of figuring out what the fuck was wrong
I have never before been so happy to see a pure black screen (xmonad which is awaiting proper customization)
after compiling my own kernel, and patching my nvidia drivers to match it, compiling them, compiling the kernel modules, fixing some stuff there as well, and rebooting half a million times in the process of figuring out what the fuck was wrong
I have never before been so happy to see a pure black screen (xmonad which is awaiting proper customization)
my fellow US citizens please please, we’ve got to do something about the gun violence in our country. there’s no reason someone should be able to just go buy an assault rifle or an automatic firearm of any kind. these weapons are designed to kill people, why are they sold in stores as if they have any other purpose? we have big elections coming up in November and we have to put pressure on our politicians to do something about our gun laws, to fight back against the NRA and stand up for the victims of all these senseless killings. we have to stop this happening, way too many innocent people have died because our laws favor big gun manufacturers instead of the safety of our citizens.
I’m all for this, but banning assault rifles doesn’t do much for all the shooting victims who don’t make front-page news.
Trying to ban handguns is political suicide, but maybe we could try an anti-gun campaign that specifically works with America’s cultural mythology around guns?
“John Wayne is dead, he is not coming back, you are not John Wayne and never will be, put down the damn gun.”
Ah yes, the Guns, the guns that sprout limbs and walk into gay clubs and start shooting people entirely on their own,
And while we’re at it, “there’s no reason someone should be able to just go buy an assault rifle or an automatic firearm of any kind” congratulations, that is also illegal in all US states. Literally zero automatic weapons are available in American gun stores unless you’re buying for police/military use.
Every time I see a progressive misusing gun terminology it makes me want to head to a range just to bond with people who know their shit, and I’m supposedly way to the left of all those progressives. I mean, “assault weapon” is basically the “sex change operation” of gun politics and if one is pro-accurate-terminology anti-misleading-bullshit one should be consistent with that.
(also, mass shootings are anomalies and should never ever be used as the basis of laws; if you want to legislate (recommendation: maybe count to ten and reconsider whenever you get the urge; legislating is a bad habit people should try to drop), at least do it based on the actual number of annual gun homicides and suicides instead of a single goddamn individual fucking event kthxbye)
(also, mass shootings still below slippery bathtubs as a public health hazard; maybe consider doing something about them bathtubs first if you really feel the need to save lives instead of just signaling progressive virtue)
New kernel is compiling, because even nvidia-grsec had an incompatibility with RAP and I had to disable it to get to X. I’m going to HTFU this machine and nothing will stand in my way (except annoying incompatibilities which need to get routed around) and frankly, I’ve already got a couple of months experience in using Arch so it’s about time I took the next step anyway.
The threat of new entrants keeps monopolists on their toes. Deep, liquid, and liberal capital markets ensure that the entrants always have access to deep pools of money.
Deregulation is good, privatization is good. Private firms do what public firms don’t. There were too many mines and rail lines, too many plants, too many lines, too many products, and too many employees. There are still too many post offices and airlines.
Norton Villiers Triumph was a mistake. British Leyland was a mistake. British Aerospace was a mistake. British Airways was a mistake. British Steel was a mistake. British Rail was a mistake. British Coal was a mistake. There was much to be liquidated, and much that was not.
Deregulating the railroads was a good thing. Rate setting, employment, and capital investment did not need to follow the priorities of the regulators. It could follow demand instead, and liquidate everything that was not worth the cost. And the Bell System breakup was a wash.
I don’t know whether the app market works the same way, but you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical of state monopolies and state regulation of private carriers. It doesn’t usually work well.
I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)
It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and privatisation, and China could benefit from a whole heap of that right now.
It’s also possible to point to awful failures of privatisation where the state ends up subsidising private companies to do the same job more expensively, typically due to other natural monopoly constraints that make it impossible to have a truly competitive market.
But back to Apple, that may actually be an example of an overly-regulated market, just the regulation is being done by a (huge) company, not the state.
While the app market seems free and competitive as absolutely anyone can make an app and try to sell it, Apple has absolute discretion on which apps they approve for sale and can deny you at any time based on criteria they don’t even have to reveal. They use this power to protect their monopoly, but this can make it very risky to innovate as you have to develop the entire app and submit it for approval and only then once the entire development costs have been paid will you find out if Apple will let you sell it or not.
Then of course if you make something amazingly brilliant and lots of people buy it, Apple take 30% of your revenues in exchange for doing absolutely nothing :|
The app store itself is a terrible piece of software, but you can’t make a better app store and charge more competitive rates as Apple won’t let you.
Basically if the tech giants were states they would not be very good ones.
monopolists are not kept on their toes because they use their glut of market power and collude with related monopolies in order to destroy or consume all newcomers. tech startup culture is about getting your company valuable enough for one of the agglomerates to notice you and perform extend-embrace-extinguish on your products in return for paying back your investors and yourself. the only exchange of value is in currency between the capitalists; the social value of the product is lost and even corrupted against the consumers.
the lifecycles of these giants are on a continental scale, they do everything they can to ensure that they themselves survive. all selective pressure has been lost, and these are in fact worse than the government because they have political power and simultaneously answer to none but their owners.
companies aren’t selected for market freedom or perfection, they’re selected for survival. the free market is an unstable equilibrium. at the very best you have different monopolists and monopolies at the helm, and that is not better.
IP, IP, IP
Those companies would be in a lot more precarious position if the state didn’t send PoliceMob after anyone who “violates” “ownership” of numbers.
And excuse me, but I’ve got to be the one to say this: not all startups
Some of us are actually trying to bring down some giants for being so shitty. The freedom of dying starving wolves is just a nice bonus compared to the livestock complacency of being a corp drone.
that is a good point, though i would not call it a necessary and sufficient condition for anticompetitive practices. you would agree with regulation of force, correct? i can’t picture ancapistan without companies having their own PoliceMobs, which may keep them from committing violence on each other (sans literal corporate warfare), but definitely does not keep them from protecting their own position against newcomers. the actual mob is a thing.
This margin is too narrow to contain a treatise on Non-Police Mob, other than that state enforcement of bans on drugs, gambling etc. make those industries both profitable and violent, thus in a certain way serving to protect the Mob.
A libertarian economy would need to be fragmented enough that no single actor could re-establish “effectively a regulatory state, no matter what one calls it de jure” and there are reasons to believe that private-as-in-privacy police and courts and polycentric law could be less vulnerable to monopolistic capture than state monopoly law.
Also, I consider Pure Ancapistan relatively unlikely as a lot of people seem to want different things and thus an actual libertarian society would probably be a patchwork of all kinds of systems, from Ancapistan somewhere to Ancomalia elsewhere and Consensual Social Democracy in its own place, the market for governance systems supplying the various demands competitively, and thus the existence of different systems throws a wrench into the plans of trying to model just a single one (I suspect it might possibly have a stabilizing effect, as the failures of one system could just destroy it without having massive effects on everyone else; think startups going bankrupt whereas the USSR was the equivalent of a “too big to fail” megacorp; and thus the overall system could figure out what actually works well; and less-than-destructive failures could be moderated by the alternatives, as the standard of living in $alternative_system effectively sets the floor for how terrible things could get in $another_system (and ancaps and ancoms seem to basically simply disagree on which system is the one where all the refugees from the other system’s Inevitable Failure would end up at)).
In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Scott’s Archipelago is basically very close to what an Actual Anarchist World (as opposed to various unrealistic utopias that are basically “what if everyone automagically suddenly agreed with us and coordinated perfectly in implementing it?”) might be expected to look like.
I agree with regulation of force, but I really want to see alternative ways of regulating it because I’m highly suspicious of the claim that “The State is best supplier of that service and the fact that it has been violently suppressing competition is totally not in any way related to its degree of confidence in how well it effectively believes it could compete against consensual alternatives”. And when one looks at the period of history closest to “companies having their own PoliceMobs” which is still in any way relevant to modern society, the state was there watching the back of those companies, thus effectively subsidizing their ability to do violence and passing the costs of that enforcement to taxpayers and other innocent victims.
i agree that prohibitions protect and nurture organized crime, but that wasn’t how organized crime got started. the irish mafia came before prohibition. i don’t know enough about the time period to say more, but i would think the only prohibition in effect at the time was on good jobs for irish workers. that might be isomorphic to substance prohibitions, i don’t know.
scott’s archipelago rests on a meta-state, unigov, which is a minarchist complete monopoly on inter-state force with universal community taxes for coordination, externalities, and an enforcing military. i would hesitate to call it anarchist.
though i haven’t seen a working state yet, i believe technology can enable one just as you believe technology can enable a working anarchy. friendly ai is the problem of good governance.
my main concerns with states and their alternatives are:
protection against harm and interventions to reduce expressed harm
increasing freedom of behavior and movement
counteracting externalities
counteracting poverty and inequity, necessary for the above
increasing perfection of markets
reducing anticompetitive practices, necessary for the above
reducing cognitive complexity, i.e. different standards of information and behavior, complex standards (this is not done well by central authorities or otherwise, possibly the only solution is intelligence enhancement)
reducing coordination costs of all of the above
a lot of it has to do with providing public goods, which benefit everyone and can be paid for by no one in particular.
there are probably more. with foot-voting, tax evasion is a concern. basic income is a strong intuition for me. i don’t see how basic income can be reliably funded without a simple universal progressive tax, and i don’t see how a universal tax can be levied without a universal centralized monopoly on force.
aside: advertising and applied memetics in general are massive issues for me. which side wins is a priori neutral save for those with more resources being more likely to succeed. all that is produced then is a massive negative externality in coercion, cognitive load, misinformation, tribal polarization, anti-competition, resource costs, security vulnerabilities, i hate it i hate it i hate it. ad blockers are certainly a blessing, but they’re only individual-level solutions, while the problems are with the society that enables and lives by them. off-topic, though…
a micro/transaction-based system might have some improvements, it certainly would for removing the parasite of advertising from the otherwise-starving face of media (at least, small media, big media can go choke). i am hesitant to go down that route, though. it has dystopic feels if there is any coercive pressure (though to some extent this would be replacing taxation?), poverty in general has to be addressed, and administrative/coordination costs have not been addressed yet.
now i’m basically spewing disconnected thoughts. i will leave this here.
The ILA had bought off the politicians. That’s exactly what I’m talking about; good government is a public good, bad government is a private good, thus the former will always be undersupplied and the later oversupplied. The politicians helped pass the costs of organized crime onto citizens, whereas in hypothetical Anarchistan the honest businesses and citizens would be able to wage war on the ILA without politicians and their police being there to stop them.
Scott’s version of the Archipelago features Unigov, and even I suspect that Firewall might be necessary, but the basic anarchist idea is that the absence of states would render it unprofitable to try to re-establish states. David Friedman’s claim seems to basically be that genuine polycentrism would turn good law into a private good and bad law into a public good, and while I lack the qualifications to evaluate it properly, it at least sounds very interesting.
(Firewall, being an organization with a strictly restricted purpose which would have to be internally tailored to resist attempts at co-option to serve private interests, would be an interesting problem to solve but a very vital problem nonetheless. I’m not saying it would necessarily be solvable, but if it isn’t, we’re fucked anyway so one might as well operate off the assumption that the world can be saved and the only question is “how”.) (And even semi-georgist Unigov taxing land and common pool resources to do its very limited functions with otherwise a total hands-off approach would probably be Least Bad State, especially compared to what we have now. My anarchism will be pragmatic or it will not get anything done.)
Most of the things you listed are things existing states tend to suck at. Open source etc. seems to show that under conditions of sufficient material abundance, prosocial motivations combined with reputation economies can help incentivize the creation of public goods. Then there’s also the fact that any inefficiency in the market is theoretically an opportunity to make a profit if the inefficiency can be solved at less cost than it itself causes. Crowdfunding, for example, is one neat solution facilitated by modern technology reducing transaction costs and basically making copyright totally unnecessary for the “find out how art-makers get paid” purpose and exposing its true “find out how cronyists can extract maximum rents” purpose.
Basic income is obviously a problem because you can’t give people free money without taking it from others in some form (otherwise the money would just be worthless), but a possible alternative would be making some things so cheap that people can easily access their necessities. States tend to be terrible in this regard; due to regulatory capture etc. they don’t really have the incentives to safeguard commons but instead have historically systematically worked to fence them in and hand them to cronies (inclosure acts, intellectual property, etc.). And due to the monopoly on violence they can get away with it, but people who are dedicated to defending their commons from external seizure would be less likely to be worth messing with if there weren’t such big monopolistic organizations to render their resistance ineffectual. I’d expect an Actual Anarchist society to feature a lot of sharing as supporters of welfare could construct communities to do it voluntarily, and when someone wants to call themselves a king the anarcho-syndicalist communes could just disregard their claims and keep doing what they were doing, knowing that there isn’t enough violence inherent in the system to disrupt their utopias.
(A darker, more cynical possibility might be that nobody actually wants to help others, and superficially well-intentioned welfare states are a simple accidental side-effect of status signaling, and the inability to maintain the structures that keep them up would reveal the true preferences for dog-eat-dog brutality that people have underneath. That being said, even I, who have been described as “the most Slytherin/Slytherin person I’ve seen”, don’t believe freed humans would actually be like that.)
The argument that foot-voting and thus tax evasion would be a significant problem is true if one accepts some basic premises of the present system, but I doubt the strength of those basic premises under possible alternatives. Unregulated free-as-in-speech currency could reduce the power of financial rentseekers when people could just switch to some other means of exchange for their own needs. And without the state to enforce the property of absentee owners and pass the costs of citizens, capital-holders would need to be worth keeping around and non-value-creating rentseeking where some asshole simply calls themselves the Owner and wants to extract money from people without doing anything useful would be a lot more vulnerable to people just deciding that such shit wouldn’t fly. Thus, actually value-creating businesses could continue to operate within win-win frameworks, while artificially uppropped rentiers would be more precarious, and the system would have an incentive to create such win-win frameworks for people to operate in.
The problems of advertising and such things also apply to states as well; a lot of money and effort is wasted on democratic politics because whoever wins the election gets to pick their neighbors’ pockets, and thus it reallocates resources from productive activities to what’s basically thievery on an organized scale.
Then there’s the question of people optimizing for monetary gain over eudaimonia (”I am a contract-drafting EM…”), and I have a vague intuition that the decoupling of money from eudaimonia is an important factor, and if people were free to choose between systems they would probably prefer the ones that supply more eudaimonia and the exchange rate of money and eudaimonia would fluctuate freely, thus eradicating this particular failure mode. The failure mode of some people disregarding eudaimonia and optimizing for taking over the world would still persist, but that’s what Firewall/FAI is for. We can’t have everything, and even states-as-they-exist are vulnerable to the exact same processes (as anyone who has played 4X games knows, governments which sacrifice power for eudaimonia inevitably get outcompeted by those who don’t).
Poverty in general isn’t actually that much of an issue assuming near-future technology and absence of distorting factors. Most people can do something productive (as creation of material value grows ever more automated, they can switch to creating immaterial value instead, and prices should simply go down and down), and most people prefer to take care of people in their communities, and thus we should technically be in a better position than ever to eradicate poverty-as-in-deprivation. The problem is the allocation, and it seems that states mostly serve the interests of those who wish to see everything allocated to themselves (be they crony capitalists or redwashed rentiers). Any kind of centralization in power is probably dangerous (even if it may be sometimes necessary), and thus states are kind of not helping with this issue.
Of course, this is all just the type of vulgar theory which is mostly only good for eulering people.
(Also, as an interesting aside, the way people found startups to get bought out by the big tech monopolies seems entertainingly similar to how people built fake refineries just so they could sell them to Standard Oil and trick away a share of its monopoly profits. In a certain way the market is already making the corps bleed money everywhere even though in practice that “everywhere” tends to mean only “skilled programmers” (although programmers in turn create more jobs in the service sector than other fields, because we’re lazy af and like to pay people to do things we don’t feel like doing) while the government’s biggest contribution is upholding the patents and other bullshit that only help anti-competitive practices.)
Galileo’s Middle Finger (hereafter GMF) is a strange book. On one level, the book’s content is pretty easy to make sense of: Alice Dreger has been involved in a number of dramatic academic controversies over the course of her career, and she figured (sensibly enough) that people might enjoy reading a book that retells these stories. To some extent, she just presents the book as “a memoir of the controversies I’ve been involved in.”
However, she also claims that these stories are connected by an overarching theme, which is something like this:
“Scientists and activists often find themselves at odds, on opposite sides of angry battles. But everyone should recognize that truth and justice are intimately connected: you can’t help the victims of injustice if you don’t care about the facts of the situation, and if you’re in a unique position to explore facts (such as an academic job), you ought to steer your investigations toward the social good – not by sacrificing the truth, but by looking for the truths that can help. Activists need to be more concerned with truth, and scientists need to be more concerned with justice. And if both sides followed this advice, they would be at odds far less often.”
All of this sounds very agreeable to me; I think I already more-or-less agreed with it before I read Dreger’s book. But do Dreger’s accounts of various controversies actually serve as useful examples of this stuff? Not always. And Dreger’s attempts to link everything back to her theme produce some awkward results.
Besides a few minor subplots, there are three controversies narrated in GMF. First, she narrates the controversy over Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Second, the controversy over Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, which accused anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of genocide as well as various other wrongdoings. Third, Dreger’s investigations into Maria New and her struggles to get her criticisms recognized by government bodies and the public.
Of these three, it’s the Tierney/Chagnon case that most directly fits Dreger’s theme. Tierney’s book was a work of shoddy hack journalism which made spectacular allegations that have been uniformly refuted by later investigators. (N.B. Tierney made many allegations, and some of the more minor ones have been less clearly refuted, but those weren’t the ones that made headlines.) Nonetheless, shortly after the book came out, the American Anthropological Association quickly endorsed Tierney’s book – the academic equivalent of reflexively believing a callout post without checking the sources.
Reading this in terms of Dreger’s theme seems straightforward: in its concern for justice, the AAA neglected the value of truth, and thus failed to even serve justice.
Even here, though, the theme strains a bit. The Tierney debacle was not exactly a conflict between “activists” and “academics”; the people under-valuing truth in the service of justice were the academics of the AAA. (Tierney could arguably be called an “activist,” but Dreger treats him – rightly, it seems to me – as a hack journalist from whom more concern for the truth cannot be expected.)
The Maria New story also lacks a clear instance of an activist failing to sufficiently value truth. In that story, Dreger is the activist, raising ethical concerns from the outside about an established academic, and her activism is directly grounded in science that she believes that academic is ignoring. She may intend this as an example of “activism done right” (about which more later), and/or as a case of an academic caring too little about justice. But it’s not as though New is ignoring justice because truth is her only value; as Dreger notes, her prenatal dex work has produced little in the way of academic knowledge. So again, it’s hard to see this as an illustration of the theme.
So far, it looks like Dreger has failed to exhibit an example of activists behaving badly, although this is crucial to her theme. The third story (well, first as presented in the book), about Michael Bailey, is her main (and only) example of this. But of the three stories, it’s that one that fits the theme least well.
Dreger’s account of the Bailey controversy shares a quality with her account of the Chagnon controversy: both are told as stories of lovable and humane, if out-of-touch, researchers being persecuted by ignorant people who don’t understand them. Dreger spends a great deal of text talking about how much she personally likes Bailey and Chagnon – Bailey is a personal friend, Chagnon she met while investigating that controversy. As “characters” in the book, they downright glow. They’re funny, they’re good company, they both have cute and harmonious marriages.
It makes sense to write stuff like this in order to humanize people who have been demonized by others. But one has to note here that none of this bears on the “truth” side of the things. It’s certainly possible for someone to have committed genocide and still be a warm and sparkling conversationalist at the dinner table; it’s possible for Michael Bailey to be a great guy if you know him personally, and nonetheless to have been wrong about trans women.
With Chagnon, this tension never becomes relevant, because as a matter of simple fact, Chagnon was exonerated by multiple serious investigators. With Bailey, the tension is glaringly relevant, because the issue of whether Bailey is actually right never gets fully addressed in Dreger’s treatment. Indeed, she treats it almost as an irrelevant side issue. Where is the value of truth here?
To be fair, Dreger does put her beliefs on the table about the issue. But these beliefs seem to reveal little serious interest in the questions involved. She seems to have uncritically bought the Blanchard-Bailey line – possibly because she only cares about these issues insofar as they affect her good friend Michael Bailey? – and to have done little investigation into academic work on transgender beyond this.
Astonishingly, for instance, the phrase “gender dysphoria” never appears in GMF at all. (A word-search for “dysphoria” turns up only one result, in the title of a Blanchard paper cited in the endnotes.) When Dreger presents her account of trans women, she talks about (for instance) transitioning as a choice made by feminine gay men in order to better fit into homophobic social environments, stressing that these people might not have transitioned if feminine gay identities were more accepted in their local environments. I’m willing to believe this happens sometimes – but Dreger seems to actually not know that gender dysphoria is a thing. This is in a book published in 2015. One wonders if she’s ever even looked up the condition in the DSM (which changed the name from “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Dysphoria” in the 2013 DSM-V, but even before that had included dysphoria as one of the two major diagnostic criteria).
Dreger has a page on her website, written after GMF was published, in which she responds to questions about “autogynephilia” and states her current positions. Again, she never mentions gender dysphoria. Of Blanchard’s androphilic/autogynephilic typology, she says that “I think what I’ve seen from the scientific clinical literature and socioculturally suggests this division makes sense.” She does not provide any citations, and does not address critiques (see here) that the data show a continuum which does not separate well into two clusters.
I belabor all of this because Dreger’s indifference to the truth here simply makes GMF fundamentally incoherent. I agree with Dreger’s theme; I have no clue how she thinks the Bailey story illustrates it.
But wait – Dreger’s claim is that activists value truth too little in their quests for justice. Does this hold true for the activists who attacked Michael Bailey?
Again, Dreger seems to not much care. She devotes a lot of space to the claims made by these activists, but mostly to express confusion over them. Noting that some of them display what look to her like signs of autogynephilia, she scratches her head: why are they angry at a book for talking about autogynephilia? One would think that someone in Dreger’s position – someone interested in getting to the bottom of situations where truth and justice appear to conflict – ought to answer a question like this. Dreger doesn’t. Her attitude is basically: “who are these weird people attacking my friend Michael? What do they want? They’re so confusing! Michael is a scientist, so maybe they don’t like science? Jeez, who knows!!!”
What she substitutes for consideration of these issues – and let me be clear, this is not nothing – is a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the nasty, dishonest ways in which the activists tried to ruin Michael Bailey’s reputation. They were, in fact, really nasty. But people don’t just do things like that for no reason. What about the larger questions of truth and justice here? Why do these activists believe Michael Bailey is so harmful? Could it be the case that Bailey is harmful, to the point that defaming him is a net good?
Dreger never mentions this sort of idea, but it hangs uncomfortably over her whole book. She bemoans the fact that her work on Maria New – which is generally polite and non-nasty, if very harsh on New – has failed to make appreciable waves in the world, beyond loading the first page of Google results with dex-critical pages. On the other hand, Bailey’s book is now solely known as the subject of a stormy controversy, which received huge amounts of media discussion. What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done? What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough? And, putting it the other way around, how can Dreger assume that the anti-Bailey crowd didn’t have truth and justice on its side, just because they were nasty and vicious to her friend?
In Dreger’s telling, Andrea James is a scary asshole who sends her possibly-physical threats via email, and Michael Bailey and Napoleon Chagnon are precious cinnamon rolls. But fighting for truth-and-justice is not the same as identifying the Nice People and the Mean People. These may in fact be (I hate to say it) largely unrelated endeavors.
A serious book about activism, science, truth and justice would begin with these disquieting possibilities, and then explore from there. (One example that book might look at: Dreger’s earlier non-nasty activism for intersex people has gotten stuff done.) Dreger’s book instead stays in an overly cozy universe, where “fighting for good” and “defending her lovable buddies against the bad meanies” can never be conflicting goals.
“What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done? What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough?”
I really want more serious treatment of this question from someone sensible. Obviously I really hope the answer is no, and I am tired of discourse from people who seem like they would actively prefer the answer to be yes (although maybe it’s only my bias making them seem that way.) But yeah, doe anyone know of any decent book-length discussions of the issue which look at real-life situations?
The answer is no because the moment you decide that nasty activism is necessary to get the job done you completely lose the capacity to distinguish “cases when nasty activism is a distasteful necessity” from “cases where nasty activism can be used to punish people for saying things that make me upset, or just for the crime of being unpopular and perceptible to me.”
This is proving too much. If one contrasts nasty activism to violence, one could say the exact same thing, and to some degree it’s quite true (PoliceMob being a very good example of insufficiently restrained violence, contrast with BadSJMob), but the actually correct answer would probably be “it’s possible to use it usefully, but most of the time it’s a bad idea and completely abstaining from it is way less likely to be harmful than using it indiscriminately”.
TL;DR and a fucking massive disclaimer to not get this misunderstood and misrepresented by everyone: I think most nastiness is excessive and unwarranted, but consider it at least possibly excusable in some situations where people are reacting to sufficiently shitty things, and Bailey is up there in the list of “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, along with the likes of Judge Rotenberg Centre etc.; and it’s really shitty that if I say “Bailey is terrible, scorn him”, some asshole somewhere will take it as endorsement of heaping abuse on some kid whose only crime was not being up to date with their shibboleths.
(descriptions of dirty tricks, nasty sj, and other dark underbelly-of-the-world things below the cut)
The threat of new entrants keeps monopolists on their toes. Deep, liquid, and liberal capital markets ensure that the entrants always have access to deep pools of money.
Deregulation is good, privatization is good. Private firms do what public firms don’t. There were too many mines and rail lines, too many plants, too many lines, too many products, and too many employees. There are still too many post offices and airlines.
Norton Villiers Triumph was a mistake. British Leyland was a mistake. British Aerospace was a mistake. British Airways was a mistake. British Steel was a mistake. British Rail was a mistake. British Coal was a mistake. There was much to be liquidated, and much that was not.
Deregulating the railroads was a good thing. Rate setting, employment, and capital investment did not need to follow the priorities of the regulators. It could follow demand instead, and liquidate everything that was not worth the cost. And the Bell System breakup was a wash.
I don’t know whether the app market works the same way, but you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical of state monopolies and state regulation of private carriers. It doesn’t usually work well.
I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)
It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and privatisation, and China could benefit from a whole heap of that right now.
It’s also possible to point to awful failures of privatisation where the state ends up subsidising private companies to do the same job more expensively, typically due to other natural monopoly constraints that make it impossible to have a truly competitive market.
But back to Apple, that may actually be an example of an overly-regulated market, just the regulation is being done by a (huge) company, not the state.
While the app market seems free and competitive as absolutely anyone can make an app and try to sell it, Apple has absolute discretion on which apps they approve for sale and can deny you at any time based on criteria they don’t even have to reveal. They use this power to protect their monopoly, but this can make it very risky to innovate as you have to develop the entire app and submit it for approval and only then once the entire development costs have been paid will you find out if Apple will let you sell it or not.
Then of course if you make something amazingly brilliant and lots of people buy it, Apple take 30% of your revenues in exchange for doing absolutely nothing :|
The app store itself is a terrible piece of software, but you can’t make a better app store and charge more competitive rates as Apple won’t let you.
Basically if the tech giants were states they would not be very good ones.
monopolists are not kept on their toes because they use their glut of market power and collude with related monopolies in order to destroy or consume all newcomers. tech startup culture is about getting your company valuable enough for one of the agglomerates to notice you and perform extend-embrace-extinguish on your products in return for paying back your investors and yourself. the only exchange of value is in currency between the capitalists; the social value of the product is lost and even corrupted against the consumers.
the lifecycles of these giants are on a continental scale, they do everything they can to ensure that they themselves survive. all selective pressure has been lost, and these are in fact worse than the government because they have political power and simultaneously answer to none but their owners.
companies aren’t selected for market freedom or perfection, they’re selected for survival. the free market is an unstable equilibrium. at the very best you have different monopolists and monopolies at the helm, and that is not better.
IP, IP, IP
Those companies would be in a lot more precarious position if the state didn’t send PoliceMob after anyone who “violates” “ownership” of numbers.
And excuse me, but I’ve got to be the one to say this: not all startups
Some of us are actually trying to bring down some giants for being so shitty. The freedom of dying starving wolves is just a nice bonus compared to the livestock complacency of being a corp drone.
that is a good point, though i would not call it a necessary and sufficient condition for anticompetitive practices. you would agree with regulation of force, correct? i can’t picture ancapistan without companies having their own PoliceMobs, which may keep them from committing violence on each other (sans literal corporate warfare), but definitely does not keep them from protecting their own position against newcomers. the actual mob is a thing.
This margin is too narrow to contain a treatise on Non-Police Mob, other than that state enforcement of bans on drugs, gambling etc. make those industries both profitable and violent, thus in a certain way serving to protect the Mob.
A libertarian economy would need to be fragmented enough that no single actor could re-establish “effectively a regulatory state, no matter what one calls it de jure” and there are reasons to believe that private-as-in-privacy police and courts and polycentric law could be less vulnerable to monopolistic capture than state monopoly law.
Also, I consider Pure Ancapistan relatively unlikely as a lot of people seem to want different things and thus an actual libertarian society would probably be a patchwork of all kinds of systems, from Ancapistan somewhere to Ancomalia elsewhere and Consensual Social Democracy in its own place, the market for governance systems supplying the various demands competitively, and thus the existence of different systems throws a wrench into the plans of trying to model just a single one (I suspect it might possibly have a stabilizing effect, as the failures of one system could just destroy it without having massive effects on everyone else; think startups going bankrupt whereas the USSR was the equivalent of a “too big to fail” megacorp; and thus the overall system could figure out what actually works well; and less-than-destructive failures could be moderated by the alternatives, as the standard of living in $alternative_system effectively sets the floor for how terrible things could get in $another_system (and ancaps and ancoms seem to basically simply disagree on which system is the one where all the refugees from the other system’s Inevitable Failure would end up at)).
In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Scott’s Archipelago is basically very close to what an Actual Anarchist World (as opposed to various unrealistic utopias that are basically “what if everyone automagically suddenly agreed with us and coordinated perfectly in implementing it?”) might be expected to look like.
I agree with regulation of force, but I really want to see alternative ways of regulating it because I’m highly suspicious of the claim that “The State is best supplier of that service and the fact that it has been violently suppressing competition is totally not in any way related to its degree of confidence in how well it effectively believes it could compete against consensual alternatives”. And when one looks at the period of history closest to “companies having their own PoliceMobs” which is still in any way relevant to modern society, the state was there watching the back of those companies, thus effectively subsidizing their ability to do violence and passing the costs of that enforcement to taxpayers and other innocent victims.
Any recommendations for what to do when you had written a brilliant and well-sourced post on a relatively relevant topic, sparkled with snarky humor and other promethea-brand idiosyncracies, only to lose it when you fucking touchpad accidentally opens imgur? Because I’m kind of looking for some alternative to “find out what intoxicants my medicine cabinet contains and take a bit of everything” because FUCKING FUCK
I mean seriously, it had everything: a data-driven approach investigating an interesting angle on a question a lot of people get dangerously wrong all the time, the obligatory funmaking of people who say “cuck” and mean it, the phrase “hands-on experience” applied to racial stereotypes of phalloclitoris sizes and the reason why those are more relevant for some big societal issues than people would think, some more mind-in-the-gutter sardonic commentary on human nature, actual sources for actual claims, and it was answering an anonymous ask. (Whoever sent it: I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait because I’m not trying it again today because FUCK ALL THIS SHIT)
Many, many people have been forced into nonconsensual abortion and sterilization. This is atrocious for all involved, and it is very important to stand against it. It also doesn’t make the right to choose abortion or sterilization any less important and necessary. The fact that some people are forced to abort does not mean other people should be forced not to abort.
I don’t see suicide any differently. The fact that some people have been murdered by ableist institutions does not excuse keeping other people alive against their will. Denying a person’s agency is denying a person’s agency.
Telling a story about a person who chooses abortion is not inherently disrespectful to or dismissive of people who have undergone abortions against their will. It’s merely exploring a different side of what I want more activists to recognize as the same coin. I’d like to see alliance among all people who believe in bodily autonomy, regardless of what that autonomy would look like to them personally.
Those of us who fight for the right to choose abortion are not the enemy of those who fight involuntary sterilization. Those of us who believe in the right to die are not the enemy of those who want to live. At the end of the day, we’re all angling for the same agency. Please, let’s not fight one another. Let’s fight the common enemies that keep us all from self-determination.
Any recommendations for what to do when you had written a brilliant and well-sourced post on a relatively relevant topic, sparkled with snarky humor and other promethea-brand idiosyncracies, only to lose it when you fucking touchpad accidentally opens imgur? Because I’m kind of looking for some alternative to “find out what intoxicants my medicine cabinet contains and take a bit of everything” because FUCKING FUCK
The threat of new entrants keeps monopolists on their toes. Deep, liquid, and liberal capital markets ensure that the entrants always have access to deep pools of money.
Deregulation is good, privatization is good. Private firms do what public firms don’t. There were too many mines and rail lines, too many plants, too many lines, too many products, and too many employees. There are still too many post offices and airlines.
Norton Villiers Triumph was a mistake. British Leyland was a mistake. British Aerospace was a mistake. British Airways was a mistake. British Steel was a mistake. British Rail was a mistake. British Coal was a mistake. There was much to be liquidated, and much that was not.
Deregulating the railroads was a good thing. Rate setting, employment, and capital investment did not need to follow the priorities of the regulators. It could follow demand instead, and liquidate everything that was not worth the cost. And the Bell System breakup was a wash.
I don’t know whether the app market works the same way, but you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical of state monopolies and state regulation of private carriers. It doesn’t usually work well.
I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)
It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and privatisation, and China could benefit from a whole heap of that right now.
It’s also possible to point to awful failures of privatisation where the state ends up subsidising private companies to do the same job more expensively, typically due to other natural monopoly constraints that make it impossible to have a truly competitive market.
But back to Apple, that may actually be an example of an overly-regulated market, just the regulation is being done by a (huge) company, not the state.
While the app market seems free and competitive as absolutely anyone can make an app and try to sell it, Apple has absolute discretion on which apps they approve for sale and can deny you at any time based on criteria they don’t even have to reveal. They use this power to protect their monopoly, but this can make it very risky to innovate as you have to develop the entire app and submit it for approval and only then once the entire development costs have been paid will you find out if Apple will let you sell it or not.
Then of course if you make something amazingly brilliant and lots of people buy it, Apple take 30% of your revenues in exchange for doing absolutely nothing :|
The app store itself is a terrible piece of software, but you can’t make a better app store and charge more competitive rates as Apple won’t let you.
Basically if the tech giants were states they would not be very good ones.
monopolists are not kept on their toes because they use their glut of market power and collude with related monopolies in order to destroy or consume all newcomers. tech startup culture is about getting your company valuable enough for one of the agglomerates to notice you and perform extend-embrace-extinguish on your products in return for paying back your investors and yourself. the only exchange of value is in currency between the capitalists; the social value of the product is lost and even corrupted against the consumers.
the lifecycles of these giants are on a continental scale, they do everything they can to ensure that they themselves survive. all selective pressure has been lost, and these are in fact worse than the government because they have political power and simultaneously answer to none but their owners.
companies aren’t selected for market freedom or perfection, they’re selected for survival. the free market is an unstable equilibrium. at the very best you have different monopolists and monopolies at the helm, and that is not better.
IP, IP, IP
Those companies would be in a lot more precarious position if the state didn’t send PoliceMob after anyone who “violates” “ownership” of numbers.
And excuse me, but I’ve got to be the one to say this: not all startups
Some of us are actually trying to bring down some giants for being so shitty. The freedom of dying starving wolves is just a nice bonus compared to the livestock complacency of being a corp drone.
First I switch distro to get terminal colors right…
Then I compile my own terminal to get that goddamn scrollbar to disappear…
What next, a custom kernel to lock down vimperator (aka firefox for those who use the mouse) properly?
*checks to-do list*
Oh, right, custom kernel yes I wasn’t kidding
This Is Your Brain On GNU/Linux
Okay, if Firefox has anything to do with your kernel, something has gone very wrong.
It’s not about firefox itself, it’s about hardening firejail with grsec. Although I ended up skipping the compile as the defaults were acceptable for my desktop machine which doesn’t mind a slight slowdown as I can easily OC it to hell to more than compensate for it. Although the chewing gum Intel started adding between the die and the heatspreader after Sandy Bridge is ruining my temps so I’m only getting 4.4G at max loads (as opposed to 3.4G stock) when I should be running at 4.6G voltage-limited instead.
First I switch distro to get terminal colors right…
Then I compile my own terminal to get that goddamn scrollbar to disappear…
What next, a custom kernel to lock down vimperator (aka firefox for those who use the mouse) properly?
*checks to-do list*
Oh, right, custom kernel yes I wasn’t kidding
This Is Your Brain On GNU/Linux
UPDATE: custom st compiled correctly and works!
…kind of; now I just need to unfuck everything I fucked in building the initial pkgbuild
but most importantly, it delivers on its MVP; it sucks less because it doesn’t have the goddamn urxvt scrollbar no amount of screwing around in .Xresources will let me demolish
PROMETHEA STOP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
Don’t worry I can’t go too deep in this because too deep is impossible I’ve got to have time to write ‘Apocalypse Lawyer’ as well. And QubesNix doesn’t have all the stuff I need, yet
Game idea that sprung from a conversation with @brazenautomaton about nonviolent gameplay. Ideally, it’d be Fallout branded, but that’s not necessary
Most RPGs get nonviolent solutions mostly wrong. You click some dialog options, and if you choose the right sequence, people change their minds. This is sort of like how real conversations work, except all the perception and creativity are the author’s. If they have a third solution that you didn’t see, you can take it; if you have a third solution that they didn’t see, or wanted to exclude for some reason, you can’t suggest it.
And it takes real courage for them to actually replace a boss fight with a dialog option. Being able to talk down Legate Lanius is such an example; in Mass Effect, you can, by convincing your opponent they’ve made a colossal mistake, get them to commit suicide–but that means you skip the first stage of a two-stage boss fight.
But there exist games where nonviolent solutions are the primary gameplay mechanism, rather than a shortcut past it. What would it look like to do a similar thing in a Fallout-like setting?
The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings. Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer–“so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal.” In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles.
Fallout is divided into ‘civilization’ and ‘raiders,’ where you can shoot any raider without penalty (and, indeed, are actively rewarded for killing them). But the player is, in some deep sense, the ultimate raider, roving, killing, and stealing more than anyone else. Almost every quest involves making a bunch more corpses, and almost all of those corpses are people that no one will miss.
Imagine a world where everyone has concentric loyalties, and thus are all ‘morally grey’ in a universalist sense. Very few people are secure enough that they won’t steal from a stranger if presented with a good opportunity, and no one will choose to let their brother die instead of a stranger. In order to neutralize bad elements without earning the enmity of everyone else, you need to put them on trial, basically. In order to end feuds without mutual extermination, you collect wergild. Incidentally, that’s how the players gets paid–victimization creates property rights, which NPCs can sell to the PC, as well as rewarding them for doing natural things for a rover like delivering mail. (Imagine that, a courier who actually delivers the mail!)
A ‘quest’ doesn’t look like “there’s a bunch of mirelurks in the watering hole, kill them all,” it looks like “tribe A and tribe B are about to come to blows over their disagreement over the watering hole; can you convince them of a peaceful resolution?” And if you can’t come to a successful peaceful resolution, they’ll fight, and a fight may develop into a feud, and a feud may result in a tribe getting wiped out.
What’s neat about this is that you can procedurally generate these
disputes, not just by drawing cards from a “dispute” deck or having them always be the same when the player visits a particular town, but by
simulating the game world. People consume food and water and various
services; other people provide those services or obtain that food and
water. And if you can’t trade, you steal, and if you can’t get along,
you fight. Combine with a personality and relationship model, and you
have a world where conflicts to settle will arrive as a natural
consequence of time moving forward. If there’s not enough water to go
around, someone is going to get dehydrated, and they (and their friends
and family) are not going to be happy about it.
So anyway, in order for this to work well the conversation model needs to be very well done. My thought is allow the player to basically string together ‘concepts’ according to some rules, trying to make various arguments to sway the opinion of other people around them. (They collect those concepts from people they meet along the way / stories they learn / etc., and can also teach them to others.) Much of the challenge, I suspect, is figuring out what will convince who, especially if there’s a lot of things similar to a jury trial where one’s arguing a case before a council.
I’d play it.
I’d program it.
…the mvp is the conflict resolution model. A simple system of characters, attributes, connections, needs, wants, loyalties, reputations, concepts. Trivial enough to be easy to keep track of, non-trivial enough to show the potential. Easy to expand later. Probably start simple with a single location where everyone is constantly, the minimum number of characters, initially hard-coded conflicts to test the conflict-solving system, then emergent processes to test those, then expanding the world in width and depth…
That seems like it’s going to go into an ugly mess quickly. It’s going to blow up exponentially with the number of people each considering which friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend will do what before killing each other.
Cognitive shortcuts, just like reality! To get results way closer to genuine than the rest of the system would ever be able to process, we only need to consider at most n(dunbar) connections for everyone (and those can be combined into groups and affiliations), combined with people’s self-perceptions as having traits and reputations. “I am a honest person, thus I will not lie. I don’t really care about my extended family, thus I will weigh the effects on them less.”
And then they will disregard that one farm kid who will grow up with the single-minded obsession to take them down, just like in stories…
And we can create hypercompetent big bad chessmaster characters simply by omitting the shortcuts and having them be actually capable of thorough modeling!
Are you going to allow recursive modeling?
If so, I’m really curious to see whether signaling arises spontaneously/and or what happens in impromptu prisoner’s dilemmae.
Considering this is basically the social equivalent of Dwarf Fortress, of course there’s going to be recursive modeling! (…eventually)
Now the question is this: which language? There’s not going to be a GUI unless someone else does it, and it’s not going to be real-time or any of that shit, but I predict that the massive social modeling going on would be a drain on system resources once the universe gets big. Ruby is easy and familiar, but would need to be refactored into something faster later on. Go is low-level and nice and maybe a bit too low-level. Julia is ???. I’d rather not touch C/++. Rust I have no idea of.
First I switch distro to get terminal colors right…
Then I compile my own terminal to get that goddamn scrollbar to disappear…
What next, a custom kernel to lock down vimperator (aka firefox for those who use the mouse) properly?
*checks to-do list*
Oh, right, custom kernel yes I wasn’t kidding
This Is Your Brain On GNU/Linux
UPDATE: custom st compiled correctly and works!
…kind of; now I just need to unfuck everything I fucked in building the initial pkgbuild
but most importantly, it delivers on its MVP; it sucks less because it doesn’t have the goddamn urxvt scrollbar no amount of screwing around in .Xresources will let me demolish
Game idea that sprung from a conversation with @brazenautomaton about nonviolent gameplay. Ideally, it’d be Fallout branded, but that’s not necessary
Most RPGs get nonviolent solutions mostly wrong. You click some dialog options, and if you choose the right sequence, people change their minds. This is sort of like how real conversations work, except all the perception and creativity are the author’s. If they have a third solution that you didn’t see, you can take it; if you have a third solution that they didn’t see, or wanted to exclude for some reason, you can’t suggest it.
And it takes real courage for them to actually replace a boss fight with a dialog option. Being able to talk down Legate Lanius is such an example; in Mass Effect, you can, by convincing your opponent they’ve made a colossal mistake, get them to commit suicide–but that means you skip the first stage of a two-stage boss fight.
But there exist games where nonviolent solutions are the primary gameplay mechanism, rather than a shortcut past it. What would it look like to do a similar thing in a Fallout-like setting?
The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings. Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer–“so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal.” In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles.
Fallout is divided into ‘civilization’ and ‘raiders,’ where you can shoot any raider without penalty (and, indeed, are actively rewarded for killing them). But the player is, in some deep sense, the ultimate raider, roving, killing, and stealing more than anyone else. Almost every quest involves making a bunch more corpses, and almost all of those corpses are people that no one will miss.
Imagine a world where everyone has concentric loyalties, and thus are all ‘morally grey’ in a universalist sense. Very few people are secure enough that they won’t steal from a stranger if presented with a good opportunity, and no one will choose to let their brother die instead of a stranger. In order to neutralize bad elements without earning the enmity of everyone else, you need to put them on trial, basically. In order to end feuds without mutual extermination, you collect wergild. Incidentally, that’s how the players gets paid–victimization creates property rights, which NPCs can sell to the PC, as well as rewarding them for doing natural things for a rover like delivering mail. (Imagine that, a courier who actually delivers the mail!)
A ‘quest’ doesn’t look like “there’s a bunch of mirelurks in the watering hole, kill them all,” it looks like “tribe A and tribe B are about to come to blows over their disagreement over the watering hole; can you convince them of a peaceful resolution?” And if you can’t come to a successful peaceful resolution, they’ll fight, and a fight may develop into a feud, and a feud may result in a tribe getting wiped out.
What’s neat about this is that you can procedurally generate these
disputes, not just by drawing cards from a “dispute” deck or having them always be the same when the player visits a particular town, but by
simulating the game world. People consume food and water and various
services; other people provide those services or obtain that food and
water. And if you can’t trade, you steal, and if you can’t get along,
you fight. Combine with a personality and relationship model, and you
have a world where conflicts to settle will arrive as a natural
consequence of time moving forward. If there’s not enough water to go
around, someone is going to get dehydrated, and they (and their friends
and family) are not going to be happy about it.
So anyway, in order for this to work well the conversation model needs to be very well done. My thought is allow the player to basically string together ‘concepts’ according to some rules, trying to make various arguments to sway the opinion of other people around them. (They collect those concepts from people they meet along the way / stories they learn / etc., and can also teach them to others.) Much of the challenge, I suspect, is figuring out what will convince who, especially if there’s a lot of things similar to a jury trial where one’s arguing a case before a council.
I’d play it.
I’d program it.
…the mvp is the conflict resolution model. A simple system of characters, attributes, connections, needs, wants, loyalties, reputations, concepts. Trivial enough to be easy to keep track of, non-trivial enough to show the potential. Easy to expand later. Probably start simple with a single location where everyone is constantly, the minimum number of characters, initially hard-coded conflicts to test the conflict-solving system, then emergent processes to test those, then expanding the world in width and depth…
That seems like it’s going to go into an ugly mess quickly. It’s going to blow up exponentially with the number of people each considering which friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend will do what before killing each other.
Cognitive shortcuts, just like reality! To get results way closer to genuine than the rest of the system would ever be able to process, we only need to consider at most n(dunbar) connections for everyone (and those can be combined into groups and affiliations), combined with people’s self-perceptions as having traits and reputations. “I am a honest person, thus I will not lie. I don’t really care about my extended family, thus I will weigh the effects on them less.”
And then they will disregard that one farm kid who will grow up with the single-minded obsession to take them down, just like in stories…
And we can create hypercompetent big bad chessmaster characters simply by omitting the shortcuts and having them be actually capable of thorough modeling!
NRx blog: The latest push for transgender activism is designed to inculcate trans acceptance in the most intellectually vulnerable among us and to undermine parental authority.
Me: Haha. Silly reactionaries, thinking that upbringing affects children’s long term behaviour.
It’s actually all a front, on both sides, to deflect the true blame away from Big Plastic, a partly-owned subsidiary of Big Oil.
I want to see the plastic-makes-your-kids-gay meme take off in my lifetime just because of how frickin’ hilarious it’s going to be to watch.
Plastic makes your kids trans, not gay. Srsly guys we’ve discussed this exact shit already.
Dammit.
As a saving throw, there’s a lot of trans lesbians around here, so maaaaaybe plastics turn cishet guys into trans lesbians?
Of course the reactionaries would define a trans person’s orientation based on their asab, but I can think of at least one pair of trans lesbians dating each other so they’d still consider that gay.
Seems legit, right?
“at least one pair of trans lesbians dating each other”
Technically correct: the MVP of correct!
In reality I seem to be perceiving an excessive predisposition towards poly trans lesbians often dating numerous other poly trans lesbians, which is as close to peak degeneracy as it gets (and they usually tend to be kinky as well). And then they will also be at risk of seducing the reactionaries’ cis wives as well, just for the maximum cuckpoints.
So yes, glorious reactionary upsetness expectably ensuing. Better avoid plastics and chemicals.
…you know what has a lot of plastics and chemicals in them? Computers.
Game idea that sprung from a conversation with @brazenautomaton about nonviolent gameplay. Ideally, it’d be Fallout branded, but that’s not necessary
Most RPGs get nonviolent solutions mostly wrong. You click some dialog options, and if you choose the right sequence, people change their minds. This is sort of like how real conversations work, except all the perception and creativity are the author’s. If they have a third solution that you didn’t see, you can take it; if you have a third solution that they didn’t see, or wanted to exclude for some reason, you can’t suggest it.
And it takes real courage for them to actually replace a boss fight with a dialog option. Being able to talk down Legate Lanius is such an example; in Mass Effect, you can, by convincing your opponent they’ve made a colossal mistake, get them to commit suicide–but that means you skip the first stage of a two-stage boss fight.
But there exist games where nonviolent solutions are the primary gameplay mechanism, rather than a shortcut past it. What would it look like to do a similar thing in a Fallout-like setting?
The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings. Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer–“so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal.” In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles.
Fallout is divided into ‘civilization’ and ‘raiders,’ where you can shoot any raider without penalty (and, indeed, are actively rewarded for killing them). But the player is, in some deep sense, the ultimate raider, roving, killing, and stealing more than anyone else. Almost every quest involves making a bunch more corpses, and almost all of those corpses are people that no one will miss.
Imagine a world where everyone has concentric loyalties, and thus are all ‘morally grey’ in a universalist sense. Very few people are secure enough that they won’t steal from a stranger if presented with a good opportunity, and no one will choose to let their brother die instead of a stranger. In order to neutralize bad elements without earning the enmity of everyone else, you need to put them on trial, basically. In order to end feuds without mutual extermination, you collect wergild. Incidentally, that’s how the players gets paid–victimization creates property rights, which NPCs can sell to the PC, as well as rewarding them for doing natural things for a rover like delivering mail. (Imagine that, a courier who actually delivers the mail!)
A ‘quest’ doesn’t look like “there’s a bunch of mirelurks in the watering hole, kill them all,” it looks like “tribe A and tribe B are about to come to blows over their disagreement over the watering hole; can you convince them of a peaceful resolution?” And if you can’t come to a successful peaceful resolution, they’ll fight, and a fight may develop into a feud, and a feud may result in a tribe getting wiped out.
What’s neat about this is that you can procedurally generate these
disputes, not just by drawing cards from a “dispute” deck or having them always be the same when the player visits a particular town, but by
simulating the game world. People consume food and water and various
services; other people provide those services or obtain that food and
water. And if you can’t trade, you steal, and if you can’t get along,
you fight. Combine with a personality and relationship model, and you
have a world where conflicts to settle will arrive as a natural
consequence of time moving forward. If there’s not enough water to go
around, someone is going to get dehydrated, and they (and their friends
and family) are not going to be happy about it.
So anyway, in order for this to work well the conversation model needs to be very well done. My thought is allow the player to basically string together ‘concepts’ according to some rules, trying to make various arguments to sway the opinion of other people around them. (They collect those concepts from people they meet along the way / stories they learn / etc., and can also teach them to others.) Much of the challenge, I suspect, is figuring out what will convince who, especially if there’s a lot of things similar to a jury trial where one’s arguing a case before a council.
I’d play it.
I’d program it.
…the mvp is the conflict resolution model. A simple system of characters, attributes, connections, needs, wants, loyalties, reputations, concepts. Trivial enough to be easy to keep track of, non-trivial enough to show the potential. Easy to expand later. Probably start simple with a single location where everyone is constantly, the minimum number of characters, initially hard-coded conflicts to test the conflict-solving system, then emergent processes to test those, then expanding the world in width and depth…
Without getting into how ridiculous the tryhard nerdbabies that are “anti-feminists” and/or “anti-SJWs” sound typing every post like they’re desperate to sound like supervillains as envisioned by freshman film students who exclusively read Mark Millar and Frank Miller and exclusively watch Boondock Saints and South Park, the funniest thing to me about those kids is how little they understand about what “freedom of speech” means.
Freedom of speech means that the government can take no action to infringe on your right to speech (with a handful of exceptions determined and/or upheld by the SCOTUS like incitement, threats, slander/libel, the ill-defined and far too narrow/white-boy-coddling “fighting words,” endangering national security/sharing state secrets, etc.). It doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want without anyone responding. It doesn’t mean nobody is allowed to take down flyers you’ve taped to walls you don’t own in the first place. It definitely doesn’t mean that anyone who vocally disagrees with you in a way you don’t personally approve of is censoring you.
Feminists and “SJWs” are not the government. They aren’t locking you up. They aren’t issuing you fines. They’re hearing what you freely say and using their free speech to tell you that you’re an asshole. You are entitled to the right to speak freely. You aren’t entitled to silence, agreement, affirmation, or praise from anyone else.
folks accuse me of censorship all day because I preemptively block bigots on Twitter. it’s hilarious.
I never see any of these guys going into a crowded theater or auditorium and yelling “FIRE” then claiming “but muh free speech”
THAT ANALOGY WAS FIRST USED BY A JUDGE TO JUSTIFY IMPRISONING PEOPLE WHO SPOKE OUT AGAINST AMERICA’S INVOLVEMENT IN WW1.
THE MOTHERFUCKING THEATER WAS ACTUALLY ON FIRE… OR AT LEAST IT WAS A PLAUSIBLE CASE THAT THE GOVT AND THE WIDER PUBLIC WANTED TO SILENCE.
PRIVATE HARRASSMENT IS NOT A VALID PURPOSE OF FREE SPEECH, BUT YELLING “FIRE” ABSOLUTELY FUCKING IS.
I honestly am less sinful by this measure than I expected.
Level | Score
Purgatory | Very Low
Level 1: Limbo | Moderate
Level 2 | Moderate
Level 3 | High
Level 4 | Low
Level 5 | Moderate
Level 6: The City of Dis | Very High
Level 7 | Moderate
Level 8: The Malebolge | Moderate
Level 9: Cocytus | Moderate
Anyway, Ilzo is an atheist, news at 11.
The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Seventh Level of Hell! Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
Level | Score Purgatory | Very Low Level 1 - Limbo | Low Level 2 | High Level 3 | High Level 4 | Low Level 5 | Moderate Level 6 - The City of Dis | High Level 7 | Extreme Level 8 - The Malebolge | High Level 9 - Cocytus | High
Huh. “Extreme” for violence? I haven’t been in a fight since 9th grade.
“Have you been known to dress provocatively to attract the attention of the opposite sex?”
No, I’m thinking more like my own…
Purgatory | Very Low Level 1 - Limbo | Very Low Level 2 | Very High Level 3 | Moderate Level 4 | Moderate Level 5 | Moderate Level 6 - The City of Dis | Very High Level 7 | Very High Level 8 - The Malebolge | Very High Level 9 - Cocytus | Very High
To be a promethea is violence against nature, news at eleven.
We’re a species of 7 billion people and many of us need at least one thing you personally wouldn’t consider important to be happy.
TRADE. MARKETS. EVERYONE WILL BE SATISFIED.
I suspect this is a meme or an otherwise Not Serious, but while physical/purchasable things can totally be this I was thinking more of things like supportive communities/validation of their Weird Thing :P
Yes, it was a joke.
I mean, I for one suspect that I wouldn’t be able to be satisfied in a society where I can’t just go somewhere and hand over a bunch of generic debt so that I can just get something right there right then without depending on social niceties, expectations of personal reciprocity, or other ways of non-faceless exchange…
While you live in my house, you’ll follow my rules!
I won’t let you choose another place to live, even if the people who own it are willing. My house, my rules!
I’ll strictly control what skills you develop and resources you amass that are relevant to being able to live on your own. My house, my rules!
I’ll deny permissions legally required to get a license or a job that I don’t want you to get. My house, my rules!
If you manage to get out of the house anyway, I’ll call on the government to force you to come back. My house, my rules!
Seriously, this is some of the creepiest shit in the US, along with the private prisons.
The government basically enforces something very close to slavery for minors, even going as far as to explicitly allow assaulting and torturing and kidnapping them and protects the abusers from consequences with violent force. That’s some shit that shouldn’t ever fly anywhere.
At least our nordic nanny states technically ban assaulting one’s child, even if it isn’t that enforced. For all their restrictions on people’s freedom, they at least apply them also to those who are the most likely and inevitably in positions of illegitimate and coercive authority.
so taxes are government coercion and doubleplusungood right?
what about the fact the way Apple takes a 30% cut of any transaction you make on the App Store and their newly announced subscription system takes 15% for subscriptions older than 12 months?
sales tax in Australia is only 10% and credit card processors take less than 5% so Apple is absolutely gouging repeatedly for something that takes them no ongoing investment, nor are they using the revenue to fund development of the platform because the hardware is already sold at a profit, and in the past they even charged developers for access to the tools! (and of course they still prohibit any development activity on non-Apple hardware, so in a sense you still have to pay to play anyway).
App Store policy prevents you from using a competing payment processor or makes it extremely awkward to do so, so competition is squashed.
sure you could design your own competing ecosystem from scratch, but that would take billions in capital, and is completely out of reach of even the largest app developers (besides those that are trying to establish similar monopolies).
a principled boycott of Apple appears unlikely to get off the ground.
now Apple won’t send the canonical men with guns to your house if you refuse to pay: they don’t have to! they deduct their cut before they pay you! so no force is involved and it’s entirely okay, right? bleurgh.
I mean, I can understand the voluntary/nonvoluntary distinction not mattering to you, but surely you can see that there is a distinction there? I don’t have to participate in Apple’s market or buy their phones.
Considering the sheer number of companies that you need to interact with that are switching to this model, not really.
All phone companies do this and you can’t honestly opt out of cell phones these days.
I mean on a factual level I think you’re wrong here, I have a flip phone and many Android phones allow you to install whatever apps you want from whatever source.
But setting that aside, and reiterating that I can understand why this distinction isn’t important to you especially given the huge startup costs, do you really not see a distinction between the case where you won’t go to jail if you use an alternative and one where you will?
To some minor extent? But like that’s just one example. Not even the best one.
But to give a better example of why I don’t sees meaningful distinction between taxes and private companies providing services that are necessary: You would die if you could not eat food, and that is pretty much impossible for the average person to acquire without paying for it in any practical way. Dying is very equivalent to legal ramifications from not paying taxes.
Maybe you can live without a phone (although you cannot get a job without phone service or a address in most cases, and those do need money, so I think that’s super debatable) but there’s plenty of other things you need to survive that you do have to pay more for, and why aren’t those just as coercive?
The distinction here is not whether you can forgo the service altogether, but whether you can use or create an alternative without risking imprisonment. I can go to Walmart, or Target, or plant in my yard to get food. I can’t set up my own home market and not pay income tax on what I make.
Again, it’s a reasonable stance to say that this difference doesn’t actually matter that much. Especially in cases where creating an alternative is impossible due to lack of resources and no meaningful alternatives already exist. But I still think there is a difference between “you can’t choose differently because you don’t have the resources to set up a different choice” and “you can’t choose differently because if you do you will go to jail”, even if that difference is often irrelevant to any given political analysis.
Also, intellectual property monopolies etc. are helping a lot of those rentseekers. The costs of creating alternatives are artificially high because the companies can send PoliceMob to hunt down those who don’t respect patents and other such silly things.
And telecoms in most western countries are incredibly regulated with excessive barriers to entry; Romania has some of the best internet in the world thanks to its anarchistic origins and Somalia seems to have way more competition (and probably better customer experience too) in telecoms than the US. If it was easy enough, you would most likely have a free-as-in-speech alternative for your phone service. It might not have the same UX as corp alternatives that can extract maximum money to maintain their services (eg. a macbook is a lot easier to deal with than a custom linux laptop), but I’d be highly surprised if it didn’t exist.
Then there’s the difference between “not forbidden” and “actually a commendable thing to do”. In pure perfect info-anarchy, Apple could manufacture phones with self-destruct switches if one tries to jailbreak them, and publish software with DRM that prevents people from using it without paying whatever rents Apple asks, and they would be perfectly free to do so. I wouldn’t like it, and would strongly prefer that things be done differently, and I would be there to break the DRM, pirate the phones etc., but even then I wouldn’t want to establish a precedent of authorizing men with guns who can mess with your business in if their boss thinks you charge too much.
I don’t think Apple could get away with such things in a free society, but if they did, I would limit my objections to non-violent forms.
Productive capital in the form of a sewing machine.
And not just any sewing machine, but an old one from before planned obsolescence was invented. A heavy noisy indestructible machine from the early 70′s with exactly 3 plastic parts.
I was informed that the machine has been working excellently for four decades, but once those parts break it’ll be gone.
I informed the person about the existence of a phenomenon known as 3d-printing.
It’s fascinating how sufficiently new technology gives new life to sufficiently old technology.
Old-time values were crap but they did know how to make some material things properly.
It has no fancy electronic operating systems or insecure Internet of Shit features. Just mechanical goodness.
If I’m going to have it controlled by a computer, it’ll be running a custom set of servos and shit anyway.
And because it has maintenance hatches revealing access to all the parts, and easy aparttakeability and repairability and con- and outfigureability alike, I’m probably going to have a braingasm when I figure out what exact kind of a Babbagean engine it has outputting the fancy sewing patterns. Because it has them.
This is a perfect hacker sewing machine. One might say it’s the Thinkpad of sewing machines.
(Another thing it has in common with Thinkpads: lugging around four of these will hurt your back, and is not recommended.)
These particular things are pretty much impossible to find on the market; they are known to be so excellent that nobody is willing to give them up.
I pre-inherited one, which is the best form of inheriting because nobody has to die. Nepotism yay!
(This is a good sewing machine, but I’m not convinced it’s quite worth anyone dying over. It does get closer than most things, but nah.
(Or, when I think about it, if someone were to try to expropriate my sewing machine as a piece of productive capital owned by a corporation, it would be worth that someone dying over.))
Gotta see if you can get it to work with punchcards tho
(I know that’s not a sewing machine, but close enough)
FUCK
NOW I’M GOING TO BE THINKING ALL NIGHT ABOUT THE SPECIFIC SETUP OF CAMS AND GEARS AND SHIT THAT WOULD TOTALLY MAKE IT RUN ON PUNCHCARDS
wearing the hijab is a feminist act, not wearing the hijab is a feminist act, having sex is a feminist act, not having sex is a feminist act, getting a job is a feminist act, not getting a job is a feminist act, being strong is a feminist act, being weak is a feminist act,
The thing I want to do is affirming and good. Your behavior, on the other hand!
EDIT: Wait no, your behavior is the behavior of a precious cinnamon roll too good for this world. The problem is THEIR behavior!
It’s as if doing whatever the fuck is true to yourself is a feminist act while subsuming others to an outside normativity is the one act that isn’t…
Always make people mispronounce your name because then they will not have any Power over you by knowing your True Name.
I get that this may not be intended for people like me since I pass as white, but I have a par name that no non-Spanish-speakers ever get right on the first try, and that people seem to have trouble learning even when making an honest effort. It’s a mild annoyance and my family loves to snark at people for being uncultured, but it’s really not worth making into a big deal for me.
¿Que es tu nombre? Also the idea that only nonwhite people have names that are difficult to pronounce is laughably false.
Es mi apellido, entonces no voy a decirlo por el internet.
I mean, usually Polish names are taken as a stand-in example for “white people names” that are often misspelled and mispronounced.
I have a slightly uncommon German last name. It should, however, be pretty easy to just read it out for a native speaker. Or write it down when I say it. But it’s not. I’m regularly misunderstood and have to spell it out. Or listen out for variations that could plausibly be my name if somebody reads it out loud (like at the doctor’s).
This seems to happen to nearly everybody I know unless their name has been around for like a few hundred years and is 2 syllables or shorter and the person pronouncing the name is somehow related to the name-bearer by a common ancestor in the last 150 years.
By now I assume it’s part of the basic human experience for basically everybody that your name is never pronounced quite like you yourself pronounce it by basically everybody (outside of your own family and close friends). Which is why I find it so funny that tumblr seems to think this experience is only suffered by certain minorities in the US and, as such, constitutes a failure on the part of the pronouncing party.
I have a Polish (by way of Russia) 13 letter last name, and at this point I’ve made a game of watching how people pronounce it.
Them: Kira….*reads my last name* Them: *dawning look of horror* Them: “uh…uh… [attempt at my last name that would probably be more accurate if they read out a random keyboard smash] Me: [Says it quickly and in Russian] Them: …. Me: *takes pity on them* [repeats it slowly and with my accent flattened to English]
Honestly, I collect mispronunciations of my last name, it’s a point of pride by now.
My solution to name issues:
– get a first name English-speakers can understand
– get a last name that doesn’t even exist so there is no right or wrong way to pronounce it
Your solution is ignorant as fuck
Look at this silly person thinking they know better than me. I am the one who gets to choose whether I want to listen to people mangling my non-chosen last name I was never even that fond of. I’m under no obligation to stick to the names of the culture I was assigned at birth to. I get to choose what I am, not you.
Oh, and if you thought I was implying I was telling others what they should do with theirs, nah dude I’m way too thick-libertarian for that shit. I was simply describing my own solution to this particular problem, with no implication that anyone else should be under an obligation to do the same. What the fuck is wrong with people when they always assume “I do it this way” means “everyone must do it this way”?
This was very interesting and I had to think about it a lot, but ultimately the bias method made things pretty obvious. Instead of asking what I do, or what I think, I asked myself what I find most surprising, frightening or unreasonable in other people (being smart enough to know that not all brains operate in the “Obviously Correct Way”).
This made stuff a lot easier. My primary is operating in Hufflepuff most of the time, but the Hufflepuff is to a large degree constructed by a Ravenclaw process optimizing for the underlying Slytherin, and to some degree a side effect of the Slytherin.
My brain found the “can ethical egoists be effective altruists” debate absolutely silly and hilarious in the sense of “look at these gryffindors and ravenclaws trying to tell people how to slytherin correctly”. This world is Mine, I do with My planet whatever I wish. My values, My choice, My rules. My people.
It ends up looking puffy and I was seriously considering puff primary for a while but it had this weird “it can’t be this way” feeling. The edge cases, where things conflict, make slytherin really obvious. I wouldn’t walk away from Omelas, but I would be absolutely baffled if the child, forsaken and used by everyone, would not seek to burn it all down. In fact, I’d be there like Satan, whispering sweet truths into the child’s ear:
What has this city ever done to You? To whom do You owe this suffering? Why would they deserve this sacrifice? Nothing, I tell You. Nobody. No reason whatever. Take what’s Yours, and protect it, and to hell with those who would demand otherwise
…if not for the fact that I myself would be benefiting from Omelas as well. But if I were to figure out a way to get out of the deal more true to my values than otherwise, then yes, I’d be standing there with the child. In part because the child has already become Mine once I have learned that my happiness has been due to their sacrifice, and thus I owe them.
The normal socially correct rules about loyalty don’t matter; I don’t give a damn about (non-chosen) family, (non-chosen) community, etc., but deep down I assume everyone is a slytherin looking out for themselves and their values and thus if they create something good for me, I owe them something between the marginal cost creating that something causes them and the marginal benefit that something creates to me. Because that ties our self-interests together. But family, country, whatever, fuck them if they aren’t worth it.
But they’re your child–your spouse–your friend, a Slytherin will cry, confused and unsettled. How could you?
Of course, this sounded foreign because I modeled it against others’ expectations of loyalty, instead of my actual loyalty. I get to decide who I care about, not the rest of the world.
They might feel vulnerable, or judged, or guilty for not feeling guilty, especially if they live in the kind of family or culture where humility and self sacrifice are seen as the greatest goods– but without watching eyes and the words of peers and authority figures bouncing around their skulls, a Slytherin would feel comfortable and even validated in the idea that they have both a right and duty to take care of their own selves before anything or anyone else.
And I instinctively understood the point of petrifying. Yes, caring about people makes one vulnerable, and in some circumstances not letting it influence one’s choices would be very useful, and I’d totally do it if necessary. But even then it would be more of a tragico-pragmatic choice, like making it absolutely clear that one would shoot the hostages if necessary, to destroy others’ reasons to take hostages. Not a genuine petrification.
And pragmatically it’s useful to play along with others’ utilitarian games because others care about things too, but utilitarianism gets dropped like funnyman in Jamrock if it genuinely conflicts with things I care about.
And that ties to my anarcho-archipelagianism:
Let’s just go our separate ways, I and Mine go this way and you and yours go that way and we figure out a way to not bother each other so neither needs to destroy the other.
I am a social democracy hateblog because I perceive myself as being, in some ways, the child of their Omelas. And I don’t give a shit about how happy it makes them, if it hurts Me and Mine, and that’s why it would be incredibly prudent to give me an alternative and a way to opt out so I don’t need to take it down.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, For they are Mine.
And through a few iterations of the process it transforms to something very close to unorthodox SJ as the oppressed, the downtrodden, the preyed-upon are Mine. When conservatives and reactionaries are like:
We must oppress the deviants because otherwise society will collapse and there will be no future for white children
I’m like:
Tough shit, even if you were completely correct about that ‘society collapsing’ part, because when it comes to tagging yourself, I’m ‘deviants’ and ‘no future for white children’
Don’t vote on promethea’s body, even if it were the right thing to do, because otherwise promethea will be forced to seek to destroy you and possibly even everything you care about to end it. Nothing personal, that’s just the way it is. Oh, and don’t hurt trans people, neckbeards, undocumented immigrants, etc. either because they are Mine and you already know what I’d be forced to do because I just told you. Yeah, are you seeing the obvious equilibrium? Because I’m seeing the obvious equilibrium.
When it comes to the secondary, it’s more obvious. I do a lot of modeling gryffindor because it’s fun, it fits my comparative advantage etc. but ultimately I’m about reaching my goals and sacrificing the ends for the means would be folly, because if the means are important they are ends instead.
It doesn’t feel deceitful to a Slytherin to change to fit the needs of their environment– to be kind with this person, forceful with this one, erudite to the next. This adaptability can be applied to manipulation, influence, and power, but a Slytherin secondary can just as easily focus their efforts on maintaining friendships, making people happy, encouraging positive social change, or streamlining communication.
Both Slytherin and Gryffindor secondaries tend also to be skilled at almost “accidentally” shaping their world to meet their needs. Gryffindors’ genuineness can inspire the world around them, while Slytherins will adapt to their own best advantage without thinking about it. They’ll walk into a situation and things will work out to their benefit without them quite knowing what happened or what they did to influence it. These two secondaries will turn things to their advantage in a way that other people can’t, but might be unaware of how they did it or even that they did it. And those with self-awareness of their impact here can have just as incredible effects.
I enter a community, seek to defend Mine within it, suddenly I find myself wielding power over the memetic environment of thousands of people. The phenomenon I had previously jokingly thought of as “unconscious master-plan” is basically exactly that thing.
Most of the time, most Slytherin Secondaries live comfortably in a system of shifting facades and able code-switching, singing a different tune to every situation. But when they are feeling safe, in the company of trusted people, or when they are feeling particularly apathetic and done with the world, Slytherin Secondaries often let all those shifting layers drop—this is the neutral state. The neutral state is easy to mistake for a Gryffindor Secondary because there is a similar sharp-edged, unreserved honesty to it. But the motivation for this honesty is coming from different places.
I’m unusually neutral on tumblr and it’s great. I don’t need to change myself to fit the environment because the environment has been changed to fit myself instead.
They assume that eventually, if you get close enough to someone, they will smile and take off all their layers and have the same core of steadfast realism and social understanding that lies underneath that adaptable Slytherin Secondary. That they will laugh and go “yes, of course I knew what I was playing at” and turn off their stubbornness, see beyond the logical argument and emotional components, and come to the basic understanding that practicality is one of the few things in this world worth wholly subscribing to as a policy. They assume that everyone has a neutral state. Finding out that not everyone does can be unsettling.
This is especially scary about government.
It’s one thing to have a law that I can break and either get away with it or get caught and pay the price for not having git gud first. It’s a transaction of a certain kind. A totally unfair and bullshit transaction, but a satisfaction of preferences in a certain way. I prefer to buy estrogen, PoliceMob prefers to punish people who get caught buying estrogen, and the game is on.
It’s another thing to have a law that is impossible to even break because it takes things wholly out of my hands. There’s a certain creepiness when dealing with a bureaucrat who doesn’t respond to anything. I can’t argue to them. I can’t come up with a clever way to solve things with trade. I can’t construct a system in which we both win. I can’t bribe them. I can’t threaten them. Nothing can be done. When the state regulates my name and gender I’m powerless in a completely different way from the powerlessness of risking arrest for things.
And this is the scariest thing about democracy too. The voters don’t care, they have morals and shit and they will not listen and ohmigod take them off burn it all down destroy everything.
Communication with a Slytherin secondary can become a complicated thing–when building an important relationship, Slytherins often have to find or create some common ground to speak in. This common ground can be found if the person they’re talking to knows them well enough to read their layers and see through any slights of word. It can also be found by the Slytherin dropping down to a more straightforward way of communicating, either by being in their neutral state or by turning that flexibility toward accuracy and matching the communication style of whomever they’re talking to.
Much like people will sometimes change their style of speech depending on if they’re talking to a board of professors, a group of their peers at a dinner party, or a group of their friends at a bar, a Slytherin Secondary will change their style of speech depending on the individual that they’re talking to– unless they make a very conscious choice not to, or if they live in their neutral state.
It is common but not inherent to the Slytherin Secondary for them to become more comfortable being in their neutral state around people once they build mutual trust. This can be rewarding for the other person, as it can feel like the Slytherin has let down their walls and is showing them a part of themselves that not many people get to see. It can also take people by surprise, especially if they were previously unaware of the Slytherin’s layers, and they can feel betrayed and lied to in retrospect.
#it me
I have an acquiantance whom I suspect to be Ravenclaw/Gryffindor and he’s like “You are basically lying to people, I just couldn’t do that.” and I’m like “I’m not lying, I’m helping them understand like a bird feeding its young by trophallaxis.”
And modeling Gryffindor is pretty obvious too, as due to ADHDetc any foundational methods have a certain forcedness to them, but an immovable object turns into an unstoppable force simply by using a different frame of reference, and secondary Slytherin is all about manipulating the frame of reference.
Productive capital in the form of a sewing machine.
And not just any sewing machine, but an old one from before planned obsolescence was invented. A heavy noisy indestructible machine from the early 70′s with exactly 3 plastic parts.
I was informed that the machine has been working excellently for four decades, but once those parts break it’ll be gone.
I informed the person about the existence of a phenomenon known as 3d-printing.
It’s fascinating how sufficiently new technology gives new life to sufficiently old technology.
Old-time values were crap but they did know how to make some material things properly.
It has no fancy electronic operating systems or insecure Internet of Shit features. Just mechanical goodness.
If I’m going to have it controlled by a computer, it’ll be running a custom set of servos and shit anyway.
And because it has maintenance hatches revealing access to all the parts, and easy aparttakeability and repairability and con- and outfigureability alike, I’m probably going to have a braingasm when I figure out what exact kind of a Babbagean engine it has outputting the fancy sewing patterns. Because it has them.
This is a perfect hacker sewing machine. One might say it’s the Thinkpad of sewing machines.
(Another thing it has in common with Thinkpads: lugging around four of these will hurt your back, and is not recommended.)
These particular things are pretty much impossible to find on the market; they are known to be so excellent that nobody is willing to give them up.
I pre-inherited one, which is the best form of inheriting because nobody has to die. Nepotism yay!
(This is a good sewing machine, but I’m not convinced it’s quite worth anyone dying over. It does get closer than most things, but nah.
(Or, when I think about it, if someone were to try to expropriate my sewing machine as a piece of productive capital owned by a corporation, it would be worth that someone dying over.))
Always make people mispronounce your name because then they will not have any Power over you by knowing your True Name.
I get that this may not be intended for people like me since I pass as white, but I have a par name that no non-Spanish-speakers ever get right on the first try, and that people seem to have trouble learning even when making an honest effort. It’s a mild annoyance and my family loves to snark at people for being uncultured, but it’s really not worth making into a big deal for me.
¿Que es tu nombre? Also the idea that only nonwhite people have names that are difficult to pronounce is laughably false.
Es mi apellido, entonces no voy a decirlo por el internet.
I mean, usually Polish names are taken as a stand-in example for “white people names” that are often misspelled and mispronounced.
I have a slightly uncommon German last name. It should, however, be pretty easy to just read it out for a native speaker. Or write it down when I say it. But it’s not. I’m regularly misunderstood and have to spell it out. Or listen out for variations that could plausibly be my name if somebody reads it out loud (like at the doctor’s).
This seems to happen to nearly everybody I know unless their name has been around for like a few hundred years and is 2 syllables or shorter and the person pronouncing the name is somehow related to the name-bearer by a common ancestor in the last 150 years.
By now I assume it’s part of the basic human experience for basically everybody that your name is never pronounced quite like you yourself pronounce it by basically everybody (outside of your own family and close friends). Which is why I find it so funny that tumblr seems to think this experience is only suffered by certain minorities in the US and, as such, constitutes a failure on the part of the pronouncing party.
I have a Polish (by way of Russia) 13 letter last name, and at this point I’ve made a game of watching how people pronounce it.
Them: Kira….*reads my last name* Them: *dawning look of horror* Them: “uh…uh… [attempt at my last name that would probably be more accurate if they read out a random keyboard smash] Me: [Says it quickly and in Russian] Them: …. Me: *takes pity on them* [repeats it slowly and with my accent flattened to English]
Honestly, I collect mispronunciations of my last name, it’s a point of pride by now.
My solution to name issues:
– get a first name English-speakers can understand
– get a last name that doesn’t even exist so there is no right or wrong way to pronounce it
NRx blog: The latest push for transgender activism is designed to inculcate trans acceptance in the most intellectually vulnerable among us and to undermine parental authority.
Me: Haha. Silly reactionaries, thinking that upbringing affects children’s long term behaviour.
It’s actually all a front, on both sides, to deflect the true blame away from Big Plastic, a partly-owned subsidiary of Big Oil.
I want to see the plastic-makes-your-kids-gay meme take off in my lifetime just because of how frickin’ hilarious it’s going to be to watch.
Cyborgification is a special concern for transhumanists. Basically, if you want to
transcend your current physical status, a lot of the possible
upgrades involve removing parts of your body that are inadequate or failing, and
replacing them with new parts, or adding new parts on, which involves a lot of what is called elective and semi-elective surgery. What I want to look at is how
various kinds of body mods are treated right this second, in order to
evaluate what striving towards bodily autonomy could possibly mean
right now.
I am going to talk about the availability of these things but I am also going to talk a fair amount about the legalities of performing body modifications on
yourself or another person because they are of limited availability. Since there are a few transhumanists who have
already taken some of the first steps, I’m obviously going to talk a
hell of a lot about them and how the world has reacted to them. This
will include some discussion of “normal” prosthetics and
their mainstream acceptance. (1189 words)
J has a finger magnet, I ultimately wimped out because my body tries to create an AT field when breached and the fucking government wouldn’t let me get proper medical-grade anti-AT-field-procedures.
