promethea.incorporated

argumate:

reform-by-riot:

obiternihili:

reform-by-riot:

zanabism:

zanabism:

swiss schools are forcing muslim boys to shake hands with women teachers or face a fine like what a barbaric country and culture 

(1, 2, 3) 

It’s a strange hill to die on, some weird teacher hand-shaking ritual. But honestly, how much longer are we going to pretend religious teachings that restrict women from touching men even just to shake hands are anything but massively sexist?

Personally I’m conflicted. Not because the religious excuse is tolerable. Because I don’t like the idea of forcing anyone to touch someone they don’t want to or be touched by someone they don’t want to in any situation that isn’t urgently serious. Won’t allow a heimlich is one thing, won’t allow… something as stupid as a handshake? What hill am I willing to die on?

Yeah I’m all for abolishing this mandatory handshake crap, especially if it’s one of those creepy authoritarian rituals meant to symbolize “I am the teacher, you are the pupil, you will prostrate yourself before me and accept my authority.”

Growing up I had some friends who transferred to my school from a private school, and they had to do humiliating shit like that.

But this clearly isn’t about that.

The tricky thing is that neither side is framing it as a matter of individual rights, but as preserving cultural integrity.

Then there’s us steel feminists who actually frame it as a matter of individual rights, bodily autonomy and the right to have whatever boundaries one wishes to have. We might criticize the structures that lead to people having widespread norms of such segregation in their physical contact (but also recognize that it’s not a clear-cut case of “white people’s arbitrary rules are Just Better™”), but the hill we are fully intending to die on is “boundaries matter, respect them no matter how silly you think they are”.

First they came for the muslims and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t want to get labelled a sexism apologist

Then they came for the neurodivergent and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t want to get labelled a creep apologist

Then they came for me, and other people didn’t speak out because we had already established firm precedent that the will of the mob overrides bodily autonomy

1 month ago · tagged #steel feminism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 5,467 notes · source: zanabism · .permalink

multiheaded1793:

thirqual:

neoliberalism-nightly:

thirqual:

multiheaded1793:

“It’s not only undesirable but *literally impossible* to afford basic social infrastructure or redistribute basically anything, so suck it up” is perhaps the most amazing article of faith I’ve seen among US-style libertarians.

Yup, it’s like Western Europe does not exist.

What if EU implodes and Western EU except Germany just go into full crisis?

You have to admit that the fiscal situation in most of Western Europe is not pretty and Brexit, Greece and peripherals really could be ticking time bombs. You can say money are just numbers on paper, but they really do reflect something fundamental even if non-obvious and distorted.

Like I don’t think I need to say that it’s entirely plausible that by making today nice it could make the future a lot worse, since that’s what more or less Greece did. In this case whoever they imported stuff that they can’t make easily stopped giving them imports because they can’t come up with those numbers in their bank account.

It’s easy to say pretty words, and I’m sure rich people as a whole are incredibly good at that. But if they are really less charitable than the average person, from that article I saw floating around, then probably you (idk what’s your objective, but just a reasonable guess xD) need to be careful there. Since we also can agree they are probably very good at dodging bills too. And just let you know I want those skills too for obvious reasons because I believe with good faith and careful consideration that it’s in my best interest to do so.

“We” might not be able to resist completely, but we are really good at it!!! And our resistance makes us less productive and also incidentally salt the earth for the rest of you as well. And who knows, I feel maybe, just maybe you people here actually will be pursuing your objective better if you kept us around and just tried to focus on structuring things better than to trying to take more and more blindly without focusing on the logistics. But then again this is like the whole strategy from a subgroup of us who’s politically connected. Because I’m pretty sure bureaucratic power must stroke someone’s fetish out there as well.

And honestly my charitable mood from my childhood over the years gradually turned sour from seeing how entitled people can be, so who knows. I don’t think I’m the only one here who might put up extra effort into resisting just because ~feelings~ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Greece? You want to invoke Greece in the last 6 years to caution against the successes of Western Europe since 1950 (arguably, since Bismark in the German Empire) ?

A crisis which was in part due to corruption, widespread tax evasion and financial advisors from Goldman Sachs advising the Greek government to misreport their level of debt ?

Where did the economic crisis began by the way¹ ? Oh yeah, a boom-and-bust cycle in the USA.

And then you want to argue why it is desirable for you to acquire those ‘skills’ ?

“Take more and more blindly” does not represent the reality. Increasing volumes of tax evasion, weaker enforcement of tax laws, greater sophistication of tax avoidance, on the other hand…

Nice veiled threats too and spite against the “entitled”. Thanks for reminding me why I am for very large punitive damages for tax evasion.

(note: even the IMF says that only in extreme cases redistribution lead to bad growth outcomes)

¹not that the Greek situation was stable, mind you.

Yep, the veiled threats and the laughable… petulant tone really got me as well. Also, nice passive-aggressive essay in the tags there…. Pretty words this ain’t.

Tagged with: politicsreference for discussioni honestly think with existing revenue you people already can do a lotyou also can reform god dam corporate tax and stuffand that will raise revenue and growthand you can reform welfareand bite the fking bullet and end protectionismmaybe if you people even did a bit rather than exacerbating it more I wouldn’t have gone to the other campbut I’m deep in there now and you won’t ever get me back except make me disinterested in topics like thiswhich is what I’m trying to do because I want $$$$$$$$$$

Okay seriously, I do agree with NN on a lot of this. The socialdemocracies of Western Europe are not in trouble because of the inaffordability of redistribution, they are in trouble because of the inaffordability of all the bullshit they’ve tacked onto the redistribution.

Finland could pay every single person a basic income of 15 000€ a year without increasing taxes a single cent. That’s almost double the minimum pension, nearly three times the spending money people on welfare get (along with rent, and significantly more than the highest amount welfare pays out even with rent included), and more than what tens of thousands of working poor earn. And as a result poor people’s effective marginal tax rate would go way down from the 50-100% it’s now.

And this includes children. Right now the state pays, at most, 4000€ per child; free education, healthcare and childcare would end but the extra 11 000€ a year would go a long way in letting poor families access the services they need. Or if we want to account for the fact that not all families would know to purchase the right insurance etc. and spend 5000€ per child per year in providing vital services to them we would “only” up the money children directly get to 10 000€ a year.

And obviously this massive basic income would render pretty much any tax scheme progressive, so we could drastically simplify the tax code. I don’t even know what the true transparent flat tax level would be because the system is so complicated with all kinds of hidden fees and multi-level taxes, but it would make things simpler. If one assumes that, after privatizing all other forms of social security (15k€ is already more than a lot of people make even from the income-dependent benefits) the income tax level would end up a transparent 40%, someone earning another nominal 15k€ on top of the basic income would get to keep 24k€ to themselves. Easy, simple, not hard to calculate. (And if it sounds ridiculously high, one should note that currently around 25% of people’s wages goes straight to pensions but it’s hidden so they only see 7% as “”“the employer pays”“” the rest (they buy it because most people cannot into math))

But the tax system itself could use some (and by “some” I mean “an awful lot of”) change; property taxes should be replaced with land value taxes, income taxes could be shifted onto consumption, a revenue-neutral carbon tax should be instituted, corporate taxes taken only from dividends to owners, etc.

And we could end so many laws. Who needs regulations on working hours, minimum wages and benefits when one has the 15k€ option to simply tell the boss to screw themselves if a job offer is unacceptable? (only statists) Ending corporatism and freeing both employers and unions to negotiate without external coercive intervention would make the economy a lot more responsive to changes, and everyone has that 15k a year to fall back on even if they end up without work (and a lot of bureaucrats rightfully would), along with any savings they have. That’s a lot more than what most working-class people currently would get from unemployment insurance.

Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers; so schools would be owned by parents and teachers, universities by students and professors, buses by drivers, etc.; this would prevent a massive transfer of wealth and capital from the state to cronyist oligarchs while allowing all service providers to participate equally on the markets. Finland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world because of its absolutely bloated pension funds (in fact, to such an extent that the national debt is effectively -80% of its nominal value) and this money could be either used as the basis of a post-labor universal capital fund, or immediately redistributed to everyone as an investment account of 15 000€ while keeping enough in reserve to cover the national debt (of course, paying out the debt would be folly when the interest rates are around zero but the return on investments is several percent; any sane corporation would borrow and invest on such terms).

Furthermore, this would completely decimate the non-productive parts of the economy, freeing both labor (which is not desperate and exploitable because remember that 15k€ a year?) and money to productive things (of course, ex-bureaucrats would be so pissed at having to learn how to do good things to people, but you know what scorn dem).

The private sector would be almost as dramatically rearranged as the previously public sector, as artificial industries such as agriculture (where something like 50% [fucken sic] of revenue comes from subsidies instead of selling things people want to buy) and exploitation of forced labor (the current welfare system is inhumane and there are basically sweatshops where disabled people work for 1,5€/h [fucken sic] making scarves rich ~designer~ assholes sell for 300€ a piece, pocketing the difference) would be flattened into the economic equivalent of a glowing glass parking lot. The ensuing stimulus of domestic demand and the abolition of many cumbersome regulations would open up massive opportunity for people to make a value-creating living while reducing the economy’s dependence on big businesses. The abolition of regional subsidies and artificial limits on the housing supply of Helsinki would trigger a significant movement into the big cities where jobs are available, workers productive, and services cost-efficient.

And if one wants to get really hardcore, abolishing patents and copyrights would be a pretty huge move. Suddenly obscene barriers on innovation would be wiped away and people wouldn’t need to waste time figuring out whether they need to push lots of paper just because someone else “owns” a number, and drugs and many other things would get dramatically cheaper.

And they should totally build the hyperloop between Turku and Stockholm.

Without an increase of a single cent in taxes.

Yeah, it would be quite a drastic shock doctrine. A glorious, magnificent shock doctrine leaving behind only the ashes of the old system. Ashes which the seeds of freedom and poor people finally not being treated shittily could blossom from. A beautiful, terrifying cataclysm of creative destruction. The value-destroyers and parasites would feel the pain of righteous vengeance, a pain which would be far less than what they had previously imposed on others because 15k€ a year.

But instead, we have some “”“engineer”“” who got lucky and became a millionaire prime minister despite having no economic or political savvy whatsoever, and whose dream seems to be to become the Thatcher of Finland; a dream he pursues mainly by trying to become as widely hated as Thatcher was/is, and assuming the rest follows on its own.

1 month ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #i am worst capitalist #win-win is my superpower #this is a social democracy hateblog · 37 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink

princess-stargirl:

worldoptimization:

prophecyformula:

shkreli-for-president:

jenlog:

voximperatoris:

fatpinocchio:

voximperatoris:

@eccentric-opinion / @amakthel / others:

Anyone know any good, fun personality, political, ethical, and/or other self-reporting tests?

I’ve done the ones at OKCupid years ago (an example of pretty low-quality tests).

Of course I’ve done the Myers-Briggs test and the Big 5 test.

The ones at YourMorals are really interesting. But I finished all the best ones a while ago.

The coolest ones I’ve run across recently are the ones at Philosophy Experiments. They’re fun because they try to test you on the internal consistency of your positions, e.g. on religion and philosophy of mind. I highly recommend them.

Any other recommendations?

iSideWith, World’s Smallest Political Quiz, 5-Dimensional Compass, Ideology Selector

iSideWith is pretty good, the second and last one are kind of…bad.

The 5-Dimensional Compass was a little bit interesting. My score:

You are a: Conservative Anarchist Interventionist Cosmopolitan Libertine

Collectivism score: -67%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: 33%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 100% 

Kind of bizarre they they apparently use “conservative” to mean “individualist”. And I’m not actually that much of a “libertine”.

Objectivist Anarchist Total-Isolationist Cosmopolitan Progressive

Collectivism score: -83%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: -100%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 67%

There were some weird ones like “Our nation should eliminate all foreign aid and spend that money on other things.” Ideally they wouldn’t pay the foreign aid and also not spend it on something else.

You are a: Left-Leaning Anti-Government Non-Interventionist Nativist Fundamentalist

Collectivism score: 33%
Authoritarianism score: -33%
Internationalism score: -17%
Tribalism score: 67%
Liberalism score: -83%

ＣＯＭＢＡＴ　ＬＩＢＥＲＡＬＩＳＭ

You are a: Right-Leaning Non-Interventionist Traditionalist

Collectivism score: -33%
Authoritarianism score: 0%
Internationalism score: -17%
Tribalism score: 0%
Liberalism score: -33%

pat buchanan 4 god-emperor

You are a: Socialist Pro-Government Cosmopolitan Liberal

Collectivism score: 50%
Authoritarianism score: 17%
Internationalism score: 0%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 17%

You are a: Centrist Anarchist Non-Interventionist Nationalist Liberal 

Collectivism score: 0%
Authoritarianism score: -83%
Internationalism score: -33%
Tribalism score: 17%
Liberalism score: 33%

iSideWith:

candidates: Bernie Sanders and a bunch of libertarians around 90%

parties: green, libertarian, socialist and democrat all basically tied within the margin of error

parties by issues: basically all either libertarian or socialist

ideology: left-wing libertarian

themes: Privacy, Populism, Tender, Decentralization, Globalization, Multiculturalism, Small Government, Isolationism, Progressive, Pacifism, Laissez-Faire, Collectivism, Deregulation (from strongest to weakest)

feelings: I think I broke the test and made it give a spiteful “lol screw you weirdo, good luck trying to differentiate the results” (seriously, they are all utterly bunched up around the same scores)

5-Dimensional Compass:

You are a: Left-Leaning Anarchist Interventionist Bleeding-Heart Libertine

Collectivism score: 17%

Authoritarianism score: -83%

Internationalism score: 17%

Tribalism score: -83%

Liberalism score: 100%

feelings: utterly unsurprised

1 month ago · tagged #politics cw #i am worst capitalist #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 49 notes · source: voximperatoris · .permalink

shieldfoss:

argumate:

aceofsnakes:

communismkills:

You wouldn’t self-diagnose yourself with cancer. So why are these teens online self-diagnosing themselves with severe psychiatric disorders? And why are we allowing and encouraging it as valid?

this post gave me self-diagnosed cancer

the most epic softball I have ever seen on this site

“Why are we allowing.”

Ah yes, that old canard. I agree with communismkills: Teenagers who self-dx and subsequently post about it online need to be punished by PoliceMob. 

Considering:

• the size of the tumblr teenager self-dx crowd
  
• the fact that they’re hiding behind false names
  
• the additional anonymity of IP addresses and the fact that any single IP address might belong to a household with several teenagers or possibly even an adult who pretends to be a self-dx teenager online
• the difficulty of asserting jurisdiction over possible foreign teenagers
• and other issues (margin too small etc.)

I predict that the costs of a thorough purge will run into no more than $50 billion - a steal compared to the War on Drugs - so we should definitely stop allowing teenagers to self-diagnose online.

Adults can continue to do so - they, after all, have rights.

(via ilzolende)

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 438 notes · source: communismkills · .permalink

metagorgon:

i’ve never been so happy with a use and possible abuse of federal power.

Both corporations and the State have been seriously trying to turn themselves into problematic faves for me as well. But I see through this trickery and know that they are still evil underneath.

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 5 notes · source: metagorgon · .permalink

ilzolende:

chroniclesofrettek:

another-normal-anomaly:

chroniclesofrettek:

Controversial positions I had to defend on facebook: “Involuntary servitude is bad” and “I can be against foreign wars AND trade wars.”

WTF happened with the involuntary servitude thing?

Someone linked an image of Jon Stewart saying everyone should have to work a year doing military/infrastructure building/whatever to build national sense of togetherness.

I have heard that a lot.

Mostly from middle-aged people saying it should be imposed on people when they graduate from HS.

Methinks they want the work to be done without them having to pay for it, and have noticed that they can set things up such that when the proposal is voted on, it will only apply to people unable to vote in that election.

Yes, that’s usually exactly how it works. A shameless power grab and piece of oppression, and also economically really fucking inefficient.

If I were to spend a year doing something 80% of the population is able to do, society doesn’t get the benefit of me instead doing something 1% of the population is able to do, and the people who can only do well things 80% of the population is able to do will find their jobs being taken away by hipsters which as I’ve understood usually upsets the hard-working salt-of-the-earth people pretty badly, and for a good reason.

And if we simply set up a system where everyone does what their comparative advantage is, but without pay, we get the perverse incentives of nobody being interested in doing it. A more rational way of doing it would be to divide the non-being-paid-ness as evenly as possible across people’s careers so instead of people working one year out of 40 without pay, they get 97.5% of their pay every year.

Of course, now we’ve simply reinvented income taxes and the marvellous technology of buying the work we need on the free market. Naturally this isn’t the favored option of the middle-aged people because it wouldn’t let them oppress and boss people around, but instead forces them to pay people a fairer price for their labor. If middle-aged people want more infrastructure builders than the market is currently supplying, they should pay for it so that more people can be infrastructure builders. And I’m pretty sure there isn’t a deficiency of workers because last time I heard we had a lot of unemployed people who would love to find honest physical work for a fair pay but just can’t so they are voting for Trump instead. It would be really really unfair for them if middle-aged assholes were to create a program to increase the amount of the kind of work those people could do that gets done, and then instead of giving those people jobs they would fill in the vacancies with unwilling hipsters.

(via ilzolende)

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #win-win is my superpower · 22 notes · source: chroniclesofrettek · .permalink