Open Borders
argumate:
socialjusticemunchkin:
argumate:
(@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
Towards Political Transhumanism - Bodily Autonomy
2centjubilee:
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
argumate:
@neoliberalism-nightly:
Um, a lot of people are already rankled at not letting refugees escape war or famine. Some of them are just regular liberals who don’t care about skilled immigration at all.
I’m not sure what you mean by economically? Are we talking about maximizing world utility or utility of the current citizens of the developed country in question?
Most people are incoherent on the refugee issue. I mean sure, you can welcome the ones that manage to survive the incredibly dangerous journey. But true compassion for victims of war or persecution would involve buying them airline tickets on the first flight out, or chartering a ship.
Some economists have pushed for open borders on the grounds that it would boost GDP by allowing cheap labour to move to expensive locations.
How exactly is cheap labour going to afford to live in San Francisco?
So you allow shanty towns to spring up around the major cities so that poor people have somewhere to live and they can take the bus to their jobs working as servants for software developers and this two-tier society will over time become less unequal instead of more? It just sounds somewhat optimistic.
The other problem is that it leaves open the problem of how to deal with weak states, rogue states, and civil wars, which will remain troublesome even if some fraction of the population manages to escape them.
If there are places in the world that are horrible places to live, maybe we can consider doing something about that, since we’ll have to eventually anyway.
Obviously we need to upzone the regions around San Francisco very hard. If we don’t want people to live in shantytowns, we should do the thing which makes them not live in shantytowns instead of the thing that makes the shantytowns keep away from us.
If we remove the option of “make them live in shantytowns in Guatemala instead”, the only solution to “people living in shantytowns in the US” is “give them something better than shantytowns”.
That, in turn can be pursued by liberalizing urban planning (and I don’t mean fire codes and earthquake resistance, but the pointless regulations that mainly just subsidize rich people and make poor people keep away; for example I was utterly astonished that in some places it’s illegal to build houses that are smaller than 100m2 because they wanted all people to be able to afford properly sized houses or something and I’m like what the fuck; poor people who can’t afford non-shitty housing are inevitably going to live in some kind of shitty housing, and if you ban all the shittiness that isn’t location (such as smaller homes, families living together, creative ad hoc arrangements) then congratulations, achievement unlocked: shitty ghettos) and doing some deliberate social engineering to ensure that the poor and the rich mix as much as possible, because empirically living in an area with rich people is better for poor people (who could’ve guessed that having access to the quality of services that is considered adequate for rich people, instead of that which is considered adequate for poor people, would be beneficial? and considering that most of the US is the product of deliberate or incompetence-induced social engineering in the other direction I don’t think reversing the process a bit would be any worse than stealing from a thief).
Now, phrasing it as “servants to sofware developers” is rightfully ugly and I agree that we should seek a society with no servants, but the reality is that with the inequality we already have “servant to software developers” is a pretty damn good deal to the people we are talking about. Software developers are lazy af and thus are v willing to pay other people to do stuff they don’t want to do, which is an opportunity for other people to acquire currency. If I had to be poor af I’d very much prefer to be poor af in a place where I can be a servant to software developers instead of something even worse.
And empirically, the answer to “would they magically become less unequal over time?” seems to be: yes. San Francisco and San Jose have some of the highest social mobility for poor people in the country, so this would suggest that being a servant to software developers gives better prospects to one’s children than flipping burgers to other poor people in a place with only poor people in it.
Furthermore, visible inequality is a very big thing. I knew that gig contractors often were in a shitty situation, but actually hearing a Lyft driver tell he doesn’t really have any dreams was a very visceral gut-punch over the society we’ve allowed to form because we hadn’t been giving af and I couldn’t receive the emotional effect from just reading thinkpieces. Personally knowing someone who was hurt by a tropical disease I had never even heard of before made me emotionally acutely motivated to do EA in a way soulless statistics alone never could. Having to walk around a roma beggar on my way to buy groceries reminds me that the world is broken and needs to be fixed immediately because this was the best this person could do for themselves; if they had stayed in Romania they wouldn’t have been cold, poor and miserable on a sidewalk on the 60th latitude N, they would’ve been something even worse and I just wouldn’t have seen it.
(On a darker and more cynical side, I just love the aesthetic of local inequality and global equality over local equality and global inequality. Every location I find instinctively appealing to myself is characterized by a comparatively “v”-shaped distribution of rich and poor people, while homogenous locations are not my taste. If a place is like “/” you get smug self-congratulatory assholistan that’s detached from reality; if it’s a “" you get a shitty slum; if it’s a ”^“ you get boring ‘burbs. Thus, open borders would replace inequality across borders with inequality inside borders, which is the prettier kind of inequality and if there must be inequality at least let it be pretty.)
In addition, I’d expect open borders to help with failed states and other such problems too. Tyrants can’t stay in power as easily if their subjects can just pack up and leave, and local tragedies get more attention in the west if the tragedy shows up on the west’s own doorstep wearing rags. (Of course, it’s usually the educated middle class which brain-drains and leaves the strongest, but emprically the educated expatriates seem to be pretty good at helping their countries and hurting their governments.)
The west is already v v good at completely ignoring the problems of Shitholistans, or if it intervenes, intervening badly; but I’d trust people from Shitholistan to have a bit of a better idea on what their country of origin needs. For example, I don’t think Somalia would be any better off if the diaspora hadn’t been able to get money and degrees in the west which they could then use to reconstruct their country and institutions; and if some place is creating massive refugee flows, taking away the easy option of just keeping the refugees away would be a powerful incentive for the west to actually do something about the thing which creates the refugees in the first place.
We’ve been trying the "borders closed, [pretend to] help them where they are” option for decades and it hasn’t been achieving shit because with closed borders it’s way too easy to “”“forget”“” to do the “help them where they are” part; then we got globalization and stuff basically FOOMed. Furthermore, I just don’t think it’s okay to let people’s accident of birth determine their status in the world for the rest of their lives; we were supposed to have gotten over this serfdom/caste system/aristocracy deal in the 19th century already. It’s nonconsensual and monopolistic to force people to live under a shitty government they didn’t get a choice in (or if they did, only the “”“choice”“” of a democracy which was probably corrupt and controlled by some foreign cronyist imperialists or local robber barons, or usually both).
TL;DR: if you want global equality you must first redistribute the inequality equally.
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 157 notes · source: scabphobic · .permalink
collapsedsquid asked: I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
oligopsony-deactivated20160508:
socialjusticemunchkin:
oligopsony:
socialjusticemunchkin:
collapsedsquid:
socialjusticemunchkin:
oligopsony-deactivated20160508:
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
Those who see voting as expressing the “consent of the governed”, maintain that voting is able to confer legitimacy in the selection. According to this view, elected officials can act with greater authority than when randomly selected.[55] With no popular mandate to draw on, politicians lose a moral basis on which to base their authority. As such, politicians would be open to charges of illegitimacy, as they were selected purely by chance.
I don’t see the downside.
The issue is when lack of agreed-upon and enforceable methods for resolving disputes leads to terrible outcomes when disagreements do occur, such as
mob violence or all-out war.
I think “avoiding mob violence or all-out war” or “let’s pay everyone the same reasonable amount of universal basic income for their basic needs, funded with a universal flat tax without loopholes or deductions or favoritism to special interests, and a land value tax based on the market value of the land in question” or “let’s ensure that people can’t pass the harms of their actions onto non-consenting third parties” requires way less legitimacy than “let’s ban e-cigs, unprescribed estrogen, transgenic food, sex workers, and black people” or “let’s arbitrarily intrude into the private lives of people so we can know how much exactly to rob them for the purpose of subsidizing cronies while simultaneously treating the poor with degrading paternalism” or “let’s decide (primarily based on whose special interests are the best in lobbying and arranging favors) the ~exact specifics~ of the future of energy, transportation, jobs, and other big parts of the economy and rob the public to pad the pockets of our buddies” and thus reducing the government’s legitimacy on the margin would primarily impact the latter before adversely impacting the former.
Welfare minarchism is a far more stable and less-legitimacy-requiring equilibrium than statist micromanagement, and people are far more likely to start asking questions about the latter while the former can defend itself with substance so it doesn’t need to resort to style by pleading to the vox populi.
The trust I need to let someone engage in a legal and low-value commercial transaction with me is far lower than the trust I need to let someone run my life for me, and attempting to run my life for me and failing at it reduces my trust for commercial transaction purposes as well, so at least I would consider a government that was only allowed to eg. set the tax rate, use 25% of the collected taxes to run a justice system, science, public-goods-kind-of research, and all the Institutes of Specific Study and Standardization that make basically a rounding error of the government budget and are actually useful or at worst just a harmless hobby for some nerds, and divide 75% equally to everyone, far more legitimate than a government that is allowed to define poker, vote on my body, require permits for fortune-tellers, socially engineer the entire nation into car dependency as an anti-communist conspiracy, socially engineer the entire nation into chemical moralism as an anti-hippie-and-black-people conspiracy, take some money from me to subsidize some asshole’s weapons manufacturing business to ~create jobs~ (something I could do perfectly well on my own thank you very much, by paying people who create value to me in proportion to the value they have created and thus incentivizing people to do positive-sum things to each other; who does the government think pays the wages of workers, the boss? okay actually please don’t answer that question oh god), kidnap poor people for trivial and victimless things (or socially engineer a situation which makes some poor people do more victimful things than they’d have otherwise done) so it can ~create jobs~ by paying other poor people (and their rich cronyist bosses and investors) to watch over and abuse the first set of poor people, etc.
#the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #seriously tho if the government was simply banned from doing any #~job creation~ #it would already be a massive improvement#because it would have to give money to people if it wanted to be keynesian #and thus people could use the money on the things they actually need #not things assholes think other people need to have imposed upon them #and the same thing goes for food stamps etc. #if you want paternalism you can buy paternalism on the market #yes this is what a promethea actually believes #basic income would enable life management businesses #that take people’s money and pay their bills for them #so they can’t drink or gamble themselves into trouble even if they have low conscientiousness #and the users of the service would be the payers of the service so the business would be incentivized to serve them #instead of the moralism of the voters
I think you’re underestimating the amount of overhead that would be required to prevent these from evolving into feudal statelets. Cultural individualism is mostly a side effect of central state power destroying local paternalisms.
…I don’t think a service of “we’ll take your paycheck/basic income and pay your bills and give the rest minus fees to you for spending in a gradual manner so you don’t waste it all immediately and end up begging on the streets later in the week/month/year” would be particularly likely to devolve into feudal statelets?
Because that’s what I was thinking. If Johnny is the rare poor person who actually would be worse off not being paternalized by an authority (because surely such ones do exist somewhere in very slight numbers even though the vast majority I’d trust to make better decisions for themselves than bureaucrats do (and most importantly I’d trust Johnny to determine for himself whether he’s a Johnny or not better than I’d trust myself let alone anyone who is not me)), for example if he would waste all his available money on gambling unless he was provided food stamps that permit only the purchase of approved kinds of food, or if he would not remember to pay his rent from the basic income, he could buy the service of someone who prevents him from wasting his money and ensures his bills get paid, without everyone else being bothered and paternalized by the state just because Johnny exists.
Okay, I had assumed you meant, like, agencies that have the power to kidnap you if you break the contract. Bundling services seems less objectionable, and indeed everybody wants some paternalism in that sense.
In general I should say that arguments to the effect of “well maybe some people need paternalistic restrictions but that doesn’t mean everyone else should be forced to abide by it” seem Pareto-efficient on the surface but are extremely dangerous insofar as they make malicious paternalism more politically viable. Sometimes people benefit from restrictions being placed upon other people, and if the meta-rule is that restrictions must apply to everyone, then people will only prefer those restrictions being in place iff the benefit of others being restricted outweighs the inconvenience of being restricted themselves. For an obvious example I don’t think that the drug war would be politically viable if eg whites were policed to the same extent as blacks. (This is why “the drug war is racist” is a coherent critique even without nonracism as a terminal value.)
Now of course the situation might be different in a welfare minarchist world where paternalism is voluntary and UBI means nobody has to answer to an employer or paterfamilias if they don’t want to. We can’t know all the politics that would exist in such a world. I just don’t think that argument in the general case is reliable.
Well obviously my answer is that any non-consensual paternalism may be resisted with whatever force a person can be bothered to use.
And right now there is already a lot of paternalism the mob is willing to impose on everyone because it doesn’t feel personally bothered by it; I’m a convicted criminal for buying estrogen because the rest of the population are okay with losing their choice to buy unprescribed estrogen because they aren’t actually impacted by it at all. As long as there are differences between people, those who aren’t unpopular thing X feel no burden whatsoever from a prohibition on X and will impose it forcibly if they can and feel like doing it, and empirically the answer to the latter one is practically always “yes”. If it’s not okay to disproportionately target black people, why would it be okay to disproportionately target gamblers, smokers, trans people, nootropics users, sex workers, bitcoin users, etc.?
Thus bodily autonomy and consent is an incredibly beautifully good bright line, to be broken only in extremely serious situations, because then paternalism will mostly only happen if its every single recipient believes they personally benefit from it. Obviously this will result in an undersupply of paternalism as not all will know they would benefit from it but oh how I long for such a world where insufficient paternalism would be our primary problem.
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 23 notes · .permalink
collapsedsquid asked: I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
collapsedsquid:
socialjusticemunchkin:
oligopsony-deactivated20160508:
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
Those who see voting as expressing the “consent of the governed”, maintain that voting is able to confer legitimacy in the selection. According to this view, elected officials can act with greater authority than when randomly selected.[55] With no popular mandate to draw on, politicians lose a moral basis on which to base their authority. As such, politicians would be open to charges of illegitimacy, as they were selected purely by chance.
I don’t see the downside.
The issue is when lack of agreed-upon and enforceable methods for resolving disputes leads to terrible outcomes when disagreements do occur, such as
mob violence or all-out war.
I think “avoiding mob violence or all-out war” or “let’s pay everyone the same reasonable amount of universal basic income for their basic needs, funded with a universal flat tax without loopholes or deductions or favoritism to special interests, and a land value tax based on the market value of the land in question” or “let’s ensure that people can’t pass the harms of their actions onto non-consenting third parties” requires way less legitimacy than “let’s ban e-cigs, unprescribed estrogen, transgenic food, sex workers, and black people” or “let’s arbitrarily intrude into the private lives of people so we can know how much exactly to rob them for the purpose of subsidizing cronies while simultaneously treating the poor with degrading paternalism” or “let’s decide (primarily based on whose special interests are the best in lobbying and arranging favors) the ~exact specifics~ of the future of energy, transportation, jobs, and other big parts of the economy and rob the public to pad the pockets of our buddies” and thus reducing the government’s legitimacy on the margin would primarily impact the latter before adversely impacting the former.
Welfare minarchism is a far more stable and less-legitimacy-requiring equilibrium than statist micromanagement, and people are far more likely to start asking questions about the latter while the former can defend itself with substance so it doesn’t need to resort to style by pleading to the vox populi.
The trust I need to let someone engage in a legal and low-value commercial transaction with me is far lower than the trust I need to let someone run my life for me, and attempting to run my life for me and failing at it reduces my trust for commercial transaction purposes as well, so at least I would consider a government that was only allowed to eg. set the tax rate, use 25% of the collected taxes to run a justice system, science, public-goods-kind-of research, and all the Institutes of Specific Study and Standardization that make basically a rounding error of the government budget and are actually useful or at worst just a harmless hobby for some nerds, and divide 75% equally to everyone, far more legitimate than a government that is allowed to define poker, vote on my body, require permits for fortune-tellers, socially engineer the entire nation into car dependency as an anti-communist conspiracy, socially engineer the entire nation into chemical moralism as an anti-hippie-and-black-people conspiracy, take some money from me to subsidize some asshole’s weapons manufacturing business to ~create jobs~ (something I could do perfectly well on my own thank you very much, by paying people who create value to me in proportion to the value they have created and thus incentivizing people to do positive-sum things to each other; who does the government think pays the wages of workers, the boss? okay actually please don’t answer that question oh god), kidnap poor people for trivial and victimless things (or socially engineer a situation which makes some poor people do more victimful things than they’d have otherwise done) so it can ~create jobs~ by paying other poor people (and their rich cronyist bosses and investors) to watch over and abuse the first set of poor people, etc.
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #seriously tho if the government was simply banned from doing any #~job creation~ #it would already be a massive improvement #because it would have to give money to people if it wanted to be keynesian #and thus people could use the money on the things they actually need #not things assholes think other people need to have imposed upon them #and the same thing goes for food stamps etc. #if you want paternalism you can buy paternalism on the market #yes this is what a promethea actually believes #basic income would enable life management businesses #that take people's money and pay their bills for them #so they can't drink or gamble themselves into trouble even if they have low conscientiousness #and the users of the service would be the payers of the service so the business would be incentivized to serve them #instead of the moralism of the voters · 23 notes · .permalink
collapsedsquid asked: I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
oligopsony-deactivated20160508:
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
Those who see voting as expressing the “consent of the governed”, maintain that voting is able to confer legitimacy in the selection. According to this view, elected officials can act with greater authority than when randomly selected.[55] With no popular mandate to draw on, politicians lose a moral basis on which to base their authority. As such, politicians would be open to charges of illegitimacy, as they were selected purely by chance.
I don’t see the downside.
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 23 notes · .permalink
left formalism: an extremely short manifesto
oligopsony:
1) authority should correspond to stakeholding
2) but everyone an institution exercises power over is a stakeholder in it
3) ergo, all institutions should be democratic
4) ergo, abolish all the non-consensual institutions you can because democracy is just a terrible hack to use in desperate situations
(via oligopsony-deactivated20160508)
1 month ago · tagged #don't vote on promethea's body #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 23 notes · .permalink
reform-by-riot:
fiercefatfeminist:
The FBI actively sabotaged and dismantled the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Movement, and the Black Power movement but the KKK is still alive and well today.
So actually I’ve seen this go around enough that it bears pointing out. The FBI actually did infiltrate and sabotage the KKK in the 1960s and 70s, and the huge number of informants and infiltrators is the main reason the Klan is so splintered today into like a dozen groups, most of which hate and denounce each other. Furthermore the KKK is not really alive and well at all. It was on a steady decline into total obscurity until 2009 when Obama took office and there was an explosion of right-wing extremist activity, including a surge in the number of Klan groups and membership in such groups.
That being said, the level of violence was nowhere near the same. Afaik the FBI never killed any KKK people but they straight up murdered several people in the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers. Plus the KKK was still lynching plenty of people at this time and the AIM and Black Panthers hadn’t hurt anyone. The FBI’s priorities were totally fucked. J Edgar Hoover had to be convinced to go after the Klan.
The Government Is Your Friend. Move On Citizen. This Information Is Above Your Security Clearance. The State Is Good For Marginalized People. Freedom Is Slavery.
(via oligopsony-deactivated20160508)
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 77,564 notes · source: fiercefatfeminist · .permalink
chroniclesofrettek:
nezumiko:
kgfibrostuff:
The CDC can suck my ass
For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.
Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.
Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.
Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.
The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.
The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.
It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)
It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.
The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.
Chronic Pain is the worst thing, on par with depression. When my foot was in chronic pain I was literally making plans to cut it off so I wouldn’t hurt anymore. Give people in Chronic Pain what they need. Fuck the drug war.
(via wirehead-wannabe)
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #drugs cw · 7,834 notes · source: kgfibrostuff · .permalink
wirehead-wannabe:
@poshuman @neoliberalism-nightly @collapsedsquid
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issue of anti-discrimination laws, I get the sense that they were more about creating a cultural norm of “racism is bad m'kay,” in the same way that gay marriage and transgender restroom right are really just the legal battlefields we’ve chosen to fight culture wars on. I’m personally convinced that anti-discrimination laws are a reasonable infringement on liberty for the greater good, but if I’m honest the real reason I see them as a victory is for cultural reasons. I don’t know whether I like the trend of making laws into cultural proxy battlegrounds, but I’m sorta stumped about how else to go about fighting culture wars in a reasonably civilized way that everyone will see as legitimate and meaningful.
Well yes; if the state has previously worked to socially engineer a system that fucks over $group, it’s certainly understandable that social engineering might be used to try to reverse that.
But I really would prefer to reach an equilibrium where the state won’t try to regulate morality in any direction, as each incremental liberation nonetheless always leaves people outside it.
Sure, there might be gay marriage now, but we don’t have poly marriage; privatizing marriage would abolish these issues. (And wow it’s really fucked up that the word for “let’s not intrude onto these matters from outside” has turned to often mean “let’s hand this over for cronyist corporations to make a cash cow out of”. I feel kind of silly in having this realization right here right now but I guess it tells something about our society that we only have words for “the state” and “the state’s buddies”.)
Sure, binary trans people might have legal gender recognition, but enbies are screwed as usual; not having the state regulate gender in the first place would have made the question utterly immaterial in the first place.
And we wouldn’t need to worry about bathroom laws if the state had no right to intrude into bathrooms in the first place.
And hate crime laws are a joke when the same system that enforces them systematically engages in racially selective mass incarceration exceeding the Soviet Gulags in scope.
In a civilized system, we should see the culture wars engaged on a private level. Instead of the state setting bathroom policies for all from up above, we would be doing advocacy on the streets and in the businesses, and perhaps even humanizing the sides for each other when the outcome isn’t enforced by scary men with guns, but rather the result of negotiation with These Actual Real People Right Here. The heavy lifting happens outside the government anyway, and the way I see it taking away the main weapon of my enemy is worth an insignificant disarmament for myself. No advance in civil rights has ever happened before it had been created and popularized privately, and the state has only pushed hard on the brakes. Take away the brakes, we don’t need the mostly entirely hypothetical gas pedal.
2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 14 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink