brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?
tumblr friendships are hard to maintain like im sorry i know i havent talked to you in 5 months but you’re still super rad and i still consider us friends im just dumb
#if you’re wondering if this is for you #it’s probably for you
If I have ever messaged you or messaged me and never heard from me again, I still consider us friends. I just suck
(via rusalkii)
1 month ago · tagged #it me #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 737,199 notes · source: tittytron · .permalink
Y'all might like to know that LW user pinkgothic has won the game as an AI, and has released the logs. (Albiet with a gap in the middle.)
I think I skimmed them a while back, but I don’t remember any details.
duuuuuuuuuuuuuude
Oh wow neat!
OMFG WOW
(via ozymandias271)
1 month ago · tagged #wetware hacking #life goals · 114 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink
Now, all is clear.
What turned the egalitarian instinct into Jantelaw? What transformed revolutionary inspiration into resigned determinism? What replaced aspiration with fatalism? What turned celebration of life into an embrace of death? What lets Sandifer scorn Moldbug’s idea that force is justified simply by its usage, while himself performing a cynical power grab to protect his class interests as a holder of some petty social capital? What transformed Moldbug’s rejection of the absurd lie of equality into barbaric racism? What broke Land when he saw the end of the world?
The Basilisk.
What leads Sandifer to deny the possibility of significant, meaningful, fundamental differences between people; differences that aren’t reducible to anything fully within his comprehension and thus give birth to the dogma of Mandatory Comprehensibility to maintain his position in the world? What obligates him to redefine all human action into a meaningless manifestation of historical forces, to scorn the idea that anyone (an exclusive anyone, not an inclusive one, Basilisk) might have an impact on the world? What forces the mind that wishes we were equal to deny the existence of anything on which we could be unequal, except for the axis where the mind itself is most comfortable in?
The Basilisk.
The alien and the different are not the basilisk, but the basilisk forces Sandifer to deny their very possibility of existence, in which he destroys that which he considers fundamental to his humanity. His critique of the trio’s empathy reveals a glaring flaw in his own: he cannot see his own limits but instead considers them the limits of the world itself. Yudkowsky treats empathy as peering into black boxes, for he knows that he is not all of the world and even another who may highly resemble himself might still be in many ways beyond his comprehension.
Indeed, my thesis is complete, manifest not only in the work alone, but in all the context and meta.
I set out to demonstrate that there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in his philosophy, and to force us all to recognize our limits. Everything Sandifer had done, had been from the perspective of assuming that the world ultimately operates according to his rules, rules which were different from the rules of those who disagreed with him. I took everything he was criticized of, and turned it against him.
He broke the rules of yudkowskian rationalism and turned himself incomprehensible to it by taking a completely different approach. I knew I could not defeat him in his own game, so instead of trying to play it like @psybersecurity, I applied his meta-rule instead: take the game away from the territory the opponent is comfortable in. The only rules I played by were my own, to demonstrate that who defines the rules gets to arbitrarily define the winner.
I was incomprehensible because I ignored any rule that was inconvenient to me, thus rendering myself utterly alien to anyone else, to make that exact argument. I rejected my opponent’s conventions to create something that made perfect sense to myself, and via the illusion of transparency should have been completely obvious to anyone else.
All the hints about the context of the Matrix being itself a part of the best message the movie could be interpreted as having; autistic mentally ill trans girls tending to be a dramatically different neurotype from median people; the contrasting of the fractal pattern of pre-colonial african cities to the straightforward sensibilities of 19th century europeans; the black holes and event horizons, beyond which information may not be gathered; my fix fic of Manhattan focusing on the fundamental alienness of the psychology of another; my meta-paranoid AU interpretation of Yudkowsky becoming a leader of a cult that is about not being a cult; my comments about my own crank-brain jumping into conclusions because they are interesting, not because the filling-in of the gaps in my comprehension of Sandifer is correct; my exaggerated misunderstanding of Sandifer’s talk about the erotic to highlight the difference in what things mean to different people (because for all of his talk about “But let’s skip the easy masturbation metaphor and try instead to genuinely use the erotic as a launchpad, seeing how far we can actually go towards escaping the jaws of the fast-approaching monstrous end. Not sex, but what sex represents. After all, the transgressive brilliance of Blake is hardly restricted to his more overtly erotic moments. It is his entire vision that compels. What shines and animates the work is its furious insistence of it all; those parts that fall under the straightforwardly erotic are, in the end, merely the domain of one Emanation of one Zoa. All of it demands to be seen, and Blake, ever the good prophet, obliges. Perhaps, then, not so much a decision to look within or without as around. Behind, above, down, a direction that is not forward. We know what’s there, after all.” I still hear simply “basically pusseh, or something” because I am not Phil Sandifer and Phil Sandifer is not promethea and despite superficially sharing a language the worlds we use that language to express and communicate about are worlds apart and, to borrow a metaphor from @nostalgebraist (whose approach to empathy is a thousand times more honest and humble in the face of the barely comprehensible cosmos), an empathic bridge cannot be constructed if you reject the possibility that the other side might be genuinely unlike your own.); all that was building to the conclusion which is patently obvious to me, but utterly unfair to someone starting from a different place. Just like Sandifer’s book itself.
Furthermore, I did not let facts get in the way of a good story. I set out to play a different game (to pay a visit down below and set the world in flames), and misrepresent, distort, misunderstand, and if necessary even fabricate whatever needed to create the thing I wanted to have. Just as Sandifer’s book has an abundance of nits to pick, so has my review been, but of course factual accuracy was never the point.
I made a shameless grasp for attention by riding the controversy. I would write basically unrelated shit, tenuously connect it to a work on a polarizing figure, and reap the rewards when his detractors would cheer a snarky takedown and his supporters would be outraged at all the things they wanted to take apart. Cheap jabs at Sandifer’s marxism provided lolz for those predisposed to accept them, and fuel the flames of those who weren’t. The work would’ve been so much better if I had done it differently, but it wouldn’t have received the visibility.
In short, I set out to do a Sandifer to Sandifer himself. And the response elicited could hardly have been more perfect for my first (and probably last) venture into this territory. I sought to place Sandifer, for a moment, in the position he has placed others.
“And what if the true sneer culture was ourselves all along?”
“#the only way to defeat a dragon is to have a dragon of your own”
To defeat the sneer, I first had to become the sneer.
So basically I kind of totally just made the longest, most convoluted argument just to say “it’s sneer culture.”, by trying to show Sandifer what it’s like to be the target of sneer culture as much as I could.
The offer also applies to Yudkowskian rationalists, but you have to promise to say more than just “it’s sneer culture.” It’s totally sneer culture, and you can point that out, but that can’t be the main thrust.
Sue me.
Now, shall we sneer no more?
And the basilisk?
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”
It is not the basilisk, but it’s the closest hint I’m willing to give. The rules of the Game say that saying too little is incomprehensible, and saying too much is embarrassing; the rules never promised there would be anything but the Basilisk between them. Thus, I’m erring on the side of the incomprehensible.
And yes, I’m indeed unironically quoting Ayn Rand. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw #unleashing my inner randroid · 10 notes · .permalink
I just learned that now, when I unplug my laptop, it dies.
Even though it’s supposed to be mostly charged.
I didn’t know this was a type of problem that could happen.It’s probably not battery overuse because, until today, the battery could last for about 5 hours.
I was using the laptop, while charging it, for about three hours now (after having used it chargerless right before that).
Then I pulled the plug, because the battery was mostly full anyway, and it died.Then I tried turning it on chargerless and it wouldn’t responded. I started it up while plugged in, then unplugged it again, and it died again.
I tried this three more times with minor variations before concluding that, yes, it’s a problem.
So now I’m running it while it’s “”“charging”“”.This is an Acer Aspire running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which I bought in September 2015.
The battery is not easily removable, otherwise I’d remove it and put it back, since that works well for some other things.Does anyone know what I should do?
Ohhhhhhh…. thissssss…..
Lithium batteries are temperamental, and there are sometimes various controls to treat them in different ways such as “do not charge more than 80 percent, or discharge less than 20 percent, or whatever arbitrary limits you choose”.
This is most common on business style laptops but yours might have it too.
On Linux, the control of these may be broken or you might have set it accidentally. Do you have any battery buttons on your keyboard? I had this problem with the Dell they gave me at my old job which had an unlabelled button for “just don’t charge the battery ever” for some reason.
As far as actually solving your problem, I can’t help. It’s a rabbit hole. Possibly @thirqual may have ideas. But it’s a place to look.
(Oh, and this may not instantly recover if you boot with a linux thumb drive.)
try “acpi -b” in the terminal when the charger is in place; copypaste results below
>alison@alison-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ acpi -b
>Battery 0: Unknown, 76%…I am not sure what to do with this.
Okay, that is weird.
next: “dmesg | grep -i battery”
That “76%” is strange as I’d have expected it to be something like “0%” in the most simple possibility (not charging because of a software setting) but the “Unknown” is, well, an unknown.
>ailson@ailson-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ dmesg | grep -i battery
>[ 1.423993] [Firmware Bug]: battery: (dis)charge rate invalid.
>[ 1.424033] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)(Bold is from the original)
Did you have a software update at the time this change happened?
Specifically: which bios version are you using? Because this seems to be linked to the bios sending garbage to acpi and a similar problem has been observed elsewhere associated with the 1.10 bios version.
The Arch linux wiki suggests that the bios in legacy instead of uefi mode is Problematic, are you able to check which one it’s operating in?
Now, I don’t really know how to fix this (or to be specific, I’m not comfortable trying to suggest the fixes I’d do to my own machine via this kind of remote control) but at least this would suggest something about the origin of the problem.
ETA: here is a similar situation caused by bios telling the lid is closed when AC is unplugged; it might be solvable by telling UPower to ignore lid close events. This instruction seems safe enough and regardless of the outcome it would provide more Evidence.
How do I check BIOS version?
When I close the lid, it hibernates. When I unplug the AC power, it cuts off completely. It doesn’t shut down - it immediately dies. I doubt my OS thinks I’m closing the lid here.
When booting up, press F2 and observe the bios. Esc should exit without changes.
This observation would somewhat favor the hypothesis that the battery simply died instead of a software issue, in which case having the device repaired would be the only successful solution, but some kind of a power management problem cutting out juice on loss of AC could fit it as well. I’ll try to locate information on that one.
1 month ago · 32 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
I just learned that now, when I unplug my laptop, it dies.
Even though it’s supposed to be mostly charged.
I didn’t know this was a type of problem that could happen.It’s probably not battery overuse because, until today, the battery could last for about 5 hours.
I was using the laptop, while charging it, for about three hours now (after having used it chargerless right before that).
Then I pulled the plug, because the battery was mostly full anyway, and it died.Then I tried turning it on chargerless and it wouldn’t responded. I started it up while plugged in, then unplugged it again, and it died again.
I tried this three more times with minor variations before concluding that, yes, it’s a problem.
So now I’m running it while it’s “”“charging”“”.This is an Acer Aspire running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which I bought in September 2015.
The battery is not easily removable, otherwise I’d remove it and put it back, since that works well for some other things.Does anyone know what I should do?
Ohhhhhhh…. thissssss…..
Lithium batteries are temperamental, and there are sometimes various controls to treat them in different ways such as “do not charge more than 80 percent, or discharge less than 20 percent, or whatever arbitrary limits you choose”.
This is most common on business style laptops but yours might have it too.
On Linux, the control of these may be broken or you might have set it accidentally. Do you have any battery buttons on your keyboard? I had this problem with the Dell they gave me at my old job which had an unlabelled button for “just don’t charge the battery ever” for some reason.
As far as actually solving your problem, I can’t help. It’s a rabbit hole. Possibly @thirqual may have ideas. But it’s a place to look.
(Oh, and this may not instantly recover if you boot with a linux thumb drive.)
try “acpi -b” in the terminal when the charger is in place; copypaste results below
>alison@alison-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ acpi -b
>Battery 0: Unknown, 76%…I am not sure what to do with this.
Okay, that is weird.
next: “dmesg | grep -i battery”
That “76%” is strange as I’d have expected it to be something like “0%” in the most simple possibility (not charging because of a software setting) but the “Unknown” is, well, an unknown.
>ailson@ailson-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ dmesg | grep -i battery
>[ 1.423993] [Firmware Bug]: battery: (dis)charge rate invalid.
>[ 1.424033] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)(Bold is from the original)
Did you have a software update at the time this change happened?
Specifically: which bios version are you using? Because this seems to be linked to the bios sending garbage to acpi and a similar problem has been observed elsewhere associated with the 1.10 bios version.
The Arch linux wiki suggests that the bios in legacy instead of uefi mode is Problematic, are you able to check which one it’s operating in?
Now, I don’t really know how to fix this (or to be specific, I’m not comfortable trying to suggest the fixes I’d do to my own machine via this kind of remote control) but at least this would suggest something about the origin of the problem.
ETA: here is a similar situation caused by bios telling the lid is closed when AC is unplugged; it might be solvable by telling UPower to ignore lid close events. This instruction seems safe enough and regardless of the outcome it would provide more Evidence.
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
1 month ago · 32 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
I just learned that now, when I unplug my laptop, it dies.
Even though it’s supposed to be mostly charged.
I didn’t know this was a type of problem that could happen.It’s probably not battery overuse because, until today, the battery could last for about 5 hours.
I was using the laptop, while charging it, for about three hours now (after having used it chargerless right before that).
Then I pulled the plug, because the battery was mostly full anyway, and it died.Then I tried turning it on chargerless and it wouldn’t responded. I started it up while plugged in, then unplugged it again, and it died again.
I tried this three more times with minor variations before concluding that, yes, it’s a problem.
So now I’m running it while it’s “”“charging”“”.This is an Acer Aspire running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which I bought in September 2015.
The battery is not easily removable, otherwise I’d remove it and put it back, since that works well for some other things.Does anyone know what I should do?
Ohhhhhhh…. thissssss…..
Lithium batteries are temperamental, and there are sometimes various controls to treat them in different ways such as “do not charge more than 80 percent, or discharge less than 20 percent, or whatever arbitrary limits you choose”.
This is most common on business style laptops but yours might have it too.
On Linux, the control of these may be broken or you might have set it accidentally. Do you have any battery buttons on your keyboard? I had this problem with the Dell they gave me at my old job which had an unlabelled button for “just don’t charge the battery ever” for some reason.
As far as actually solving your problem, I can’t help. It’s a rabbit hole. Possibly @thirqual may have ideas. But it’s a place to look.
(Oh, and this may not instantly recover if you boot with a linux thumb drive.)
try “acpi -b” in the terminal when the charger is in place; copypaste results below
>alison@alison-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ acpi -b
>Battery 0: Unknown, 76%…I am not sure what to do with this.
Okay, that is weird.
next: “dmesg | grep -i battery”
That “76%” is strange as I’d have expected it to be something like “0%” in the most simple possibility (not charging because of a software setting) but the “Unknown” is, well, an unknown.
>ailson@ailson-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ dmesg | grep -i battery
>[ 1.423993] [Firmware Bug]: battery: (dis)charge rate invalid.
>[ 1.424033] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)(Bold is from the original)
Did you have a software update at the time this change happened?
1 month ago · 32 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
Before getting deeper into the open borders debate I’ve found that there are at least five end goals different people have that need to be distinguished:
1. Closed borders, strong states based on ethnic groups.
2. The status quo with slightly higher or slightly lower skilled migration quotas.
3. Open borders while preserving the welfare state.
4. Open borders while destroying the welfare state.
5. Open borders while destroying the entire concept of states.
The “preserve/destroy the welfare state” binary must also be queered as I could see myself pragmatically taking either 3 or 4 depending on what “the welfare state” is interpreted to mean. The idealist side of my anarcho-pragmatism (queer all the binaries!) really really wants 5 because no governance without consent and no gods no masters, but only if we can invent a better solution than states; and I seem to be prone to interpreting cautious approaches towards 3 as instances of 2 instead. But yes, trying to figure out one’s position on this helps understand the debate better.
1 month ago · 31 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
I just learned that now, when I unplug my laptop, it dies.
Even though it’s supposed to be mostly charged.
I didn’t know this was a type of problem that could happen.It’s probably not battery overuse because, until today, the battery could last for about 5 hours.
I was using the laptop, while charging it, for about three hours now (after having used it chargerless right before that).
Then I pulled the plug, because the battery was mostly full anyway, and it died.Then I tried turning it on chargerless and it wouldn’t responded. I started it up while plugged in, then unplugged it again, and it died again.
I tried this three more times with minor variations before concluding that, yes, it’s a problem.
So now I’m running it while it’s “”“charging”“”.This is an Acer Aspire running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which I bought in September 2015.
The battery is not easily removable, otherwise I’d remove it and put it back, since that works well for some other things.Does anyone know what I should do?
Ohhhhhhh…. thissssss…..
Lithium batteries are temperamental, and there are sometimes various controls to treat them in different ways such as “do not charge more than 80 percent, or discharge less than 20 percent, or whatever arbitrary limits you choose”.
This is most common on business style laptops but yours might have it too.
On Linux, the control of these may be broken or you might have set it accidentally. Do you have any battery buttons on your keyboard? I had this problem with the Dell they gave me at my old job which had an unlabelled button for “just don’t charge the battery ever” for some reason.
As far as actually solving your problem, I can’t help. It’s a rabbit hole. Possibly @thirqual may have ideas. But it’s a place to look.
(Oh, and this may not instantly recover if you boot with a linux thumb drive.)
try “acpi -b” in the terminal when the charger is in place; copypaste results below
>alison@alison-Aspire-ES1-511:~$ acpi -b
>Battery 0: Unknown, 76%…I am not sure what to do with this.
Okay, that is weird.
next: “dmesg | grep -i battery”
That “76%” is strange as I’d have expected it to be something like “0%” in the most simple possibility (not charging because of a software setting) but the “Unknown” is, well, an unknown.
1 month ago · 32 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
(@voximperatoris, @neoliberalism-nightly, @socialjusticemunchkin)
Most people agree that open borders is a desirable end state for humanity, as being able to maintain it is strong evidence of an absence of war and famine and reduced global inequality.
Most people also agree that throwing open the borders overnight would have catastrophic consequences, following which the borders would immediately be closed again.
(The best example of open borders we have in the world today is the EU, and even moderate refugee flows have been sufficient to destabilise this project).
However there are plenty of obvious compromises that could be made, such as increasing immigration quotas by 50% each year, greatly increasing migration while giving plenty of time for societies to adjust and absorb the flow. Or going for easy wins, like opening the border between the US and Canada.
That said, I still can’t help feeling that proponents of open borders are downplaying the changes involved, and the possible consequences.
I mean, @voximperatoris is referencing the Jim Crow south in what appears to be a positive example of a society with a racial underclass employed as servants with lynchings “on a very small scale in the grand scheme of things”. Like, I’m not trying to be snarky but that sounds like something someone might write if they were attempting to satirise the open borders position.
And @socialjusticemunchkin talking approvingly of the improved aesthetics of local inequality compared with global inequality; again, not everyone is going to share that particular aesthetic.
There are also questions of whether increased inequality within a particular society ends up causing more problems (for that society) than increased inequality globally; eg. North Sentinelese appear happier living their current lives than as servants in Silicon Valley, despite the latter being “less unequal”.
Many proponents of open borders have suggested introducing a dual track concept of citizenship, where immigrants would not gain access to the full range of social services available to current citizens. I think this also needs to be taken into account when considering what open borders would do to inequality.
So, to take a slightly different position: if seeking to move towards the abolition (as much as possible) of borders as soon as possible (leaving the obviously superior option of the Archipelago untouched as an even less realistic option: I have a marvellous plan for such an utopia this margin is too narrow to contain) is not desirable, why stop at national borders?
After all, the national borders are highly suspiciously sized. If a peaceful person with no ill intent may not migrate from Morocco to Spain, why should one be allowed to migrate from West Virginia to San Francisco?
The United States is larger than most combinations of two to numerous neighboring countries, and the differences inside the nation are staggering. The borderer regions in the Appalachia are practically third world compared to the city-state opulence of the Bay Area; and the values of the populations could hardly be more different. If poor people with backwards values being theoretically able to immigrate to the places where rich people with modern values live, shouldn’t we be more worried about the fact that any West Virginian who can purchase a plane ticket and find themselves housing and work is allowed to come to San Francisco and even vote in elections, with no border controls and centralized planning and immigration quotas to prevent the undesirable masses from flowing in without restraint? Surely Californian values and the riches and job markets of California are the fruits of the Californians’ labor, not something an Appalachian borderer may come to feast on whenever they feel like?
But furthermore, even within California we see stark differences! One does not need to venture too far inland to find different cultures and economies. Even if we build a wall around California, the problem persists; the Six Californias plan would have created both the richest and the poorest state of the Union, right next to each other! And indeed we are seeing the phenomenon of Central Californians flocking in to the Bay Area in search of work, the inevitable shantytowns kept away only by regulations that make it illegal for outsiders to ever have affordable housing. Surely it would be better to constrain this perversion and inequality machine, and establish a national border between the regions so that Silicon Valley may use 0.7% of is GDP in foreign aid to its impoverished neighbor and the shantytowns stay in Central California where they belong!
Yet even this is not enough! The neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point is notorious for being a honest-to-azathoth shantytown, with a racial distinction as sharp as it can ever be, right next to San Francisco itself. And indeed the denizens ever seek opportunities in the city proper, bringing their shantytownness and cheap labor downtown, driving down the wages of the hard-working residents of SoMa who, without this artificial mobility benefiting only the tech elite, could otherwise be making $50k a year even from burger-flipping! Not to mention all the services that fall under the general category of “servants to software developers” which would not be worth the genuine fair living wage of $30 an hour; the existence of this underpaid underclass allows the software developers to avoid doing their own shopping and driving and cooking and such things and instead use their time for the thing that is their comparative advantage, further driving up inequality when the equalizing effect of inefficient non-division of labor is reduced!
Indeed I say; let us restore all the borders! Back before this “enlightenment” and “emancipation” and such things, people knew their place and they would die on the same plot of land they were born onto. Let each family be bound to their own turf, never even imposing on their neighbor! Let us be truly honest in what we seek and end this charade; bring back serfdom! For only with the complete immobility of the populace, can a truly stable and equal and peaceful society be established. In our village, everyone is equal, looks the same and shares the same customs; and while we know that not every village is as prosperous as ours, we dutifully kind of pay our 0.7% of indulgences I mean aid to the Catholic Church which surely distributes it fairly to the poorest of the world instead of building a golden toilet for the pope; we have not verified this for only the Baron may ever leave this territory, but surely the virtous Church has the interests of all of us in mind!
Yes this is amusing, but it would be more amusing if China didn’t already have controls over household registration limiting internal migration and leading to a situation of illegal migrant workers within the country moving from one province to another.
Most nations aspire to free movement of people within the national borders by having an economy resilient enough to handle such movement and consider it a flaw if it cannot be achieved.
Similarly, the lack of open borders in the world is clearly a flaw that would be rectified if conditions were better.
So, to make a more sincere argument; the whole issue would seem to basically boil down to “will assholes stop us from having the utopia we deserve, and if so, how to manipulate the assholes to stop stopping it?”
Morally I support drastic increases in mobility immediately simply because I’m viscerally offended that someone’s birth should determine their fate (and as someone who was born in Shitholeston, FI, EU, I consider it an extremely natural entitlement that I personally can “just leave” and go wherever the fuck I please because I’ve had a lot of reason to “just leave” everywhere; I can’t stand the idea that I would not be allowed to do it, I can’t stand the idea that unlike me, others wouldn’t be allowed to do it, thus there is only one option left) and there is a certain inhuman brutality inherent in policing borders. Just like the drug war boils down to kidnapping poor people, closed borders boils down to shooting at poor people for the crime of not wanting to be where The Powers That Be have determined is their Proper Place, and any and all subversive activities to undermine this structure are emotionally laudable and a triumph of the human spirit against attempts to shackle it to the mob’s oppressive whims. (Aaand I noticed that “illegal” immigrants are Formidable in the “Formidable-Pitiful; Good-Evil” alignment system my brain apparently operates on)
And China is basically The failure mode; as an evil authoritarian superpower of a billion people it’s the epitome of treating people as product, and it’s optimizing for the State, not for the people. (insert comment about “future society: thought control” instead of “future society: eudaimonic”) It is a Violation! Of! Liberty! (and fairness, and my brain believes that in aggregate of harm too; screw the dark moral foundations) to tell anyone that they may not go where they want because the State has decided they are, via the guilt of association, Undesirable.
Obviously, I’d like to be a Fnargl who can just be so absolutely unchallengedly sovereign that what the xenophobic assholes think doesn’t matter a single bit, but since I’m not a Fnargl (YGM) the need for pragmatism is obvious. And pragmatically I’d support a diversity of approaches to see which one of them works the best; we should implement a more liberal approach in some places and a more conservative approach in others. For the immigration experiment the US is an obvious location for erring on the side of openness while the EU is a more natural candidate for a more restrictive approach (mostly because this goddamn continent is built on the values of shameless xenophobia and parochialism).
1 month ago · tagged #this goddamn continent #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 73 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
Obviously, once you’ve decided to go out and do something, you have to then figure out what you are going to do before you can even make a plan to do it. Since the goal is to bring about a certain state of affairs in the future, we must then look at what we want, and what is not up to that standard in the present day, and focus our efforts there.
One of the bigger concerns is morphological freedom. This has been used variously in my experience to refer to both the state of being technologically able to decide that one’s body is whatever they want it to be, and also the political state of being sovereign over one’s body. To remove confusion, I will use the phrase “bodily autonomy” to refer to the latter, which obviously is something we will want if we get the former as it is hard to enjoy technologies one is not permitted to have because they are banned from civilian usage.
There are many sub-categories of this, but I will try to focus on things that are immediately relevant to our modern society and also will benefit a more free future when that technology becomes relevant. In the broadest terms there is the matter of what one is allowed to put in one’s body, what one is allowed to take out of it or replace, and the matter of not being socially punished for those decisions, even if you are not per se legally punished.
So what falls under these three parts? Obviously, in the matter of “putting things in,” we have the issue of various kinds of drugs which are heavily regulated. As far as taking things out, surgical measures immediately come to mind, and how it is very difficult to get a doctor to perform a surgery you consent to but is not strictly “required” even if you are both aware of the risks involved (unless, perhaps, it is cosmetic). But perhaps for one of these you were thinking of genetic editing, which can put things in to and take things out of people’s DNA sequences? Or perhaps children, who come and go from the mother’s womb, but not without frankly creepy levels of rules on how that is supposed to occur?
And obviously, the last concern of escaping more nebulous social punishment touches on all of these, but goes double for any “merely” cosmetic option which is unlikely to be restricted legally but may be severely punished socially if you decide to modify your body in a way people don’t like, or perhaps is considered “unprofessional.” Likewise encompassing, also, is the freedom to choose to not take on a popular modification, which, is… well, equally likely to get one socially ridiculed if you refuse.
I will go in to greater depth for these categories in my next few posts on this subject, but I felt it worth the time to explain my reasons for selecting those subjects. If you look in to any of these subcategories it’s plain to see that we aren’t really all that free. You may luck out and none of the existing social or legal pressures happen to be at odds with your personal desires, but those laws and organizations are still there, waiting for you to go against them – and as long as those restrictions are in place, they will be the model for future laws on the matter. We need to improve on the present if we want a better future.
(via ozylikes)
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #fuck the natural order #nothing to add but tags · 20 notes · source: 2centjubilee · .permalink