michaelblume:
I’m starting to come around to something like anti-horseshoe theory, where the US is in an uncanny valley between two different ways of ordering a society and they’re both better than what we’ve got.
Take schools. In libertarian utopia, everybody pays whoever they want to to educate their kids. In socialist utopia, everybody in the state pays into a general fund, which funds a bunch of schools, with all of them receiving equal resources. In America, each school is funded by the property taxes of the people immediately surrounding it. People who can afford to pay lots of property tax don’t want to live in districts where other people can’t, so they set up lots of zoning barriers to turn “public” schools into effectively private schools. And in doing so, they don’t just fuck up schools, they fuck up the housing market, they fuck up ease of relocation, they fuck up the national economy.
Or take medicine. My girlfriend needs to get a doctor to blast ultrasound at her kidney stone, but she’s between jobs. In libertarian utopia, she goes to a urologist today, pays them some money, and the kidney stone goes away. In socialist utopia, she’s already gone to her doctor, been referred to a urologist, and had the kidney stone destroyed. But as it is, she has no coverage, and has to wait weeks to find a way to see a urologist.
The uncanny valley is really wide though, as even a “scandinavian socialist utopia” in which it’s supposed to be the latter of those two cases (with a strong emphasis on the ‘supposed’ because the de facto ends up being closer to the middle) falls deep into it when it comes to a lot of things.
Take my life situation. In socialist utopia, I’d be having a basic income I could easily live off while growing my skills, and when I’m making wicked $$$$ I’d pay taxes to fund the system. In libertarian utopia, I’d enter an agreement with my bank/insurance company that they lend me $600 a month to cover my basic living expenses and help me acquire marketable skills, and once I’m selling those the bank would be entitled to some fraction of my income, lessening over time and increasing as my income increases to incentivize them to train me to be really profitable really fast. In the social democratic mess of a means-tested illfare state, I’m literally told by the state to live off my friends or stop training my skills and get a bullshit mcjob instead because without the right paperwork and studying stuff the right and correct and Officially Approved™ and not-promethea-compatible way I’m ineligible for any support at all. Nonetheless I’m obligated to pay obscenely high taxes, to support a system that has mostly just thrown me under the bus repeatedly, unless I route around them which I’m technically not supposed to do even though the state is really wink-nudgeing when it says so.
In fact I suppose this describes my political leanings pretty well; my ideology is something like 90% either-of-those-instead-of-this-bullshit-we-have-now-ism.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 47 notes · source: michaelblume · .permalink
I am literally a corporation
…soon!
Got denied every single form of personal welfare because the social bureaucratic illfare state is unable to comprehend my situation (come on, I’m simply learning skills while ignoring credentialist bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand even for socdems), and the advice at the social security agency was literally “beg from friends, then take your tax money somewhere more deserving when you start making it”.
The obvious solution is to register myself as a corporation, because corporate welfare is far more generous than personal welfare around here (it wouldn’t be too much of a simplification to say that every single cent collected in corporate taxes goes back to politically favoured businesses in subsidies and deductions; this is defended as “keeping the important sectors afloat” aka they are literally and blatantly taking money from the successful entrepreneurs and businesses and distributing to cronies and unsuccessful ones who serve the bureaus instead of the markets).
If I start a holding company that sells my “unpaid” labour to other businesses and creates profit to its owners, I can not only apply for startup subsidies (basically a modestly-but-sufficiently-sized basic income for 6-18 months!) but also avoid a lot of taxes later on when I actually start earning money and routing it as dividends instead of wages (no payroll taxes for pensions, unemployment insurance etc. for redwashed rentiers; this worker won’t let the holders of political capital steal their surplus value). The risk is simply that entrepreneurs are totally and utterly ineligible for any personal benefits at all (save for rent subsidies which simply mean I’m paying effectively 95€ a month for housing instead of the nominal 320€), which is already exactly my situation so I have literally nothing to lose here (except some money for the paperwork).
In addition, it’s so unbelievably the æsthetic.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #future precariat billionaire #i am worst capitalist · 6 notes · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
I am all for basic income, I think it’s a great thing, the “non-reformist reform” that leftists ought to embrace. But.
I’ve been hanging out mostly with techno-libertarian types for a good while now - all wonderful folks, yes, I mean you, y’all just great -
- and I increasingly cannot shake the impression that propping up empty talk of ~basic income~ to every instance of economic oppression and misery is a lot like the internet bolshevik staple of ~we won’t have this problem after the Revolution~. And meanwhile, in the here and now, it is very easy to use it to brush aside lesser, economically Bad suggestions, dismiss ongoing workers’ struggles as misguided, etc, etc.
Like, tell me I’m just being uncharitable and gloomy and ideologically obsessed here. But seeing one post after another ending with “maybe, some indeterminate time in the blissful future, We shall be able to dole out enough for everyone to survive on - after scrapping every current social program everywhere and attaining efficiency and getting rid of Crony Capitalism” - well, it’s enough to see a pattern. I don’t know what it means, but it’s vaguely alarming.
And also… there is never a roadmap or even the most vague sense of how to get from here to there. How to deal with elite resistance to redistribution and capital flight, how to square it with another professed (and likewise worthy) techno-libertarian goal of open borders, etc, etc. There’s rarely anything at all written on this. Again, this is why ~basic income~ alarmingly resembles a hand-wave more than a goal.
@theunitofcaring @tropylium @socialjusticemunchkin
After? Who said “after”? The way I use it is as a perfect bargaining chip: You want to scrap the minimum wage? okay sure, as long as we get basic income as a replacement, not as a vague future speculation. Bust the regulatory capture of corporatism (HAVE I MENTIONED IT’S ILLEGAL TO HIRE ANYONE IN FINLAND FOR LESS THAN WHAT THE UNIONS AND BIG BUSINESSES HAVE AGREED AMONG EACH OTHER, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THE WORKER WOULD PREFER A LOWER WAGE TO UNEMPLOYMENT THIS IS A SOCDEM HATEBLOG AFTER ALL)? yeah, we could look at that once we have our UBI. Stop paying people welfare to get rid of incentive traps? a marvellous idea, only when accompanied with the basic income to replace the welfare.
It’s not like we need to attain magical future hypercapitalist efficiency to sustain it; in Finland all it would take is to stop playing the fucking musical chairs with the half a million different forms of welfare (all implications intended) and just give everyone a seat on the couch (THIS IS A SOCDEM HATEBLOG, REMEMBER) and the remaining need for adjustment of the national budget would be smaller than the cuts the current PM is doing. And it needs to be done alongside the other things, not left as a vague promise for the future, and that’s why we’re so noisy about it because it needs to be done RIGHT NOW before the sinking illfare state takes any more people with it. And in a staggeringly surprising display of competence from the normally witless cronyists in our government they’re actually preparing to test basic income soon™ and I’m just chewing through my teeth in anticipation of how they will fuck that one up because so far everything else the government has done has been a gigantic fuck-up (except deregulating the opening hours of grocery stores because even stopped clocks and so on…).
The Greens (basically the coalition of SWPL blues and the local equivalent of SV technolibertarian greys alike, which results in some weird things) have a roadmap. The Party Formerly Known as the Communist Party (after the Communist Party lost all its money speculating in the stock market) has a roadmap. The libertarian wing of the Crony Capitalist Party (because they were left without a political home after the Liberal Party joined the Redneck Party and had to choose the least disagreeable alternative) has a roadmap. Even the Redneck Party (which is nominally a liberal party and don’t ask me why because it hates free markets and gays, loves agricultural and regional subsidies and conservative values, and is like half controlled by a cult which forces women to be baby-making machines by banning contraception and stigmatizing singles, gays, trans people and anything else that stands between them and paperclipping the universe with white assigned-christian-at-birth babies (unsurprisingly, they tend to drop out of the cult just as fast as the cultmothers drop out more so no demographic takeover has happened in the last two centuries but they certainly have been trying)) wants it. Pretty much the only thing stopping it from happening is (aside from the question of how exactly the Popular Front of Judea is going to be named) the Social Bureaucratic Party (THIS IS WHY THIS IS A SOCIAL DEMOCRACY HATEBLOG) which loves equality and therefore is very invested in maintaining the means-tested welfare systems and redwashed rentiers establishing an ironclad class division between the middle class and the precariat.
So if basic income is the equivalent of “after the revolution”, we’re realistically at “red guards, stockpile weapons and ammo; Lenin is returning from exile and the german armies are keeping the state occupied” instead of “the revolutionary club of Berkeley celebrates its fiftieth year of talking enthusiastically about the imminent overthrow of the bourgeois devils”.
Basic income is no more subject to resistance to redistribution than the unholy mess we have now. It’s no more subject to capital flight. Those are completely orthogonal problems, all basic income would be is allocating the tax money the state already takes a lot better in ways which both the (actually value-creating instead of rentseeking) businesses and the (actually value-creating instead of rentseeking) workers would both find preferable, and it would also help those who can’t provide for themselves on the market far better than the bullshit we have now.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #win-win is my superpower · 103 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink
Convincing social democratic artists whose ingroup and paycheck literally depend on tax-funded subsidies that a libertarian market-based approach is the only truly egalitarian way of funding art and avoid contributing to marginalization. How troll can one get?
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #the answer is obviously ubi #the answer to pretty much everything is either ubi or privatizing the atmosphere #libertarianism in my far left? #it's more likely than you think #control the framing of the discussion and you control the outcome #also calling it anarchism instead of libertarianism helps #because the pragmatic forms of those two can really travel as fellows most of the way #and the point where they'd have to go their separate ways would already be quite an utopia compared to what we have now · 2 notes · .permalink
World federalism?
ilzolende:
theungrumpablegrinch:
drethelin:
academicianzex:
It seems kinda odd to me that I haven’t heard anything about world federalism or unification from rationalists. Given the concern about solving coordination problems and preventing existential risk it seems like a perfect fit. The thing that makes me most pessimistic about solving X-risk problems is our history of dealing with near X-risk; we basically blundered through the cold war and survived out of luck, and climate change efforts are irrevocably hampered by international coordination efforts. Going forward, the lack of an international body with regulatory powers makes AI X-risk much more scary to me. It’s going to be a difficult enough problem to solve without China or the US creating an AI without taking the proper safety precautions because they’re in a race with each other, or with some seasteading genius cracking the code.
I guess it’s just not popular because the solution seems insoluble? I certainly used to think about it a lot in my more idealistic younger days. AI X-risk you can create MIRI, and if you’re good enough plausibly you make a difference. You can even lobby national governments for space settlement, or whatever. But world federalism is all or nothing, and much more likely to be nothing because you’re weird anyway. Or maybe it’s just that I’m way out on the far end of rationalists into politics. Still, I think it’s odd that I’ve never even heard the concept here in rationalist-land.
“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
Problem is intractable, likely to corrupt those who work on it, does not assure a good outcome, requires incredible resource investment if a tractable approach is found.
And the optics are horrible.
I think some of the overly ambitious and mostly joking rationalist teenagers are working on that.
@sinesalvatorem @sdhs-rationalist?
[epistemic status: mostly a feverish and visceral reaction to scary! bad! no! go away!, but there’s some substance as well]
World federalism is such an ugly idea. Its proponents strike me as exactly the kind of naive utopians deathspiraling around democracy I want to stay as far away from as possible, and its actual realization would be way more likely to be just a scaled-up version of the EU and the US federal government, possibly doing some useful coordination stuff while simultaneously enabling absolutely horrible conformity pressures with its political power, subject to democratic distortion of incentives.
I don’t think a world federation would be in any way able to limit itself to x-risks (and in fact x-risks would probably be on the agenda only way after all the bullshit), and instead would act as some kind of a mostly unfriendly singleton. Just looking at the things we have now makes me scream in horror internally at the thought of having more of the same, except there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We have drug laws, we have corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies, we have regulatory capture, we have morally backwards and intellectually bankrupt groups looting and bossing around people who could do way better than that if they were allowed to, and worst of all there’s no simple answer to all of that.
It’s obvious that the Bay Area is horribly dragged down by being subject to a government Alabama has any influence in and the excesses of each (one tending positive, another negative) are dramatically tempered by the influence of the other. The scary part is that it’s not obvious that having them go their separate ways would be a net positive because a lot of innocent people live in Alabama and having the federal government limit the abyssal depths their polity could otherwise plunge into might actually be worth the way it restricts the heights other places could reach. Everywhere I look it’s the same story; the enlightened areas altruistically trying to drag the backwards ones kicking and screaming into at least yesterday if not the proper present, even if their own situation suffers. The Obviously Correct way to do things would be to let the Bay Area influence Alabama, but not vice versa, and letting Iceland boss around Poland without the latter having a say in the former’s affairs but there’s just no way to ever make that happen.
In the absence of magical one-way unfairness of exactly the right kind all the remaining options are horrible; naive pro-secessionism sounds alluring until one remembers that the US literally fought a war within itself to stop one part of it from doing nasty and nonconsensual things to some of its population and is still wrangling with versions of those exact same issues to this day (and other very similar ones), but the only viable solution allows that one part to try to do nasty and nonconsensual things to the other parts’ population as well, and the world is just not ready (if it ever will be) for the level of individual liberation that would allow such horrors to be eradicated with a consistent meta-level rule without opening the door to different horrors.
And horrors there would be. I don’t believe for a second that actually existing world federalism could end up as the one type I just might find bearable (a global minarchy that’s basically x-risk management along with the UN’s most fundamental human rights treaties enforced with actual muscle behind them, and stopping people who try to start wars, and erring on the side of caution on these because even the most fundamental human rights treaties are prone to having glaring flaws, and then using that as an excuse to erode nation-state sovereignty enabling individual liberation) but instead there’s talk of all sorts of scary things. There’s world democracy, democracy for this, democracy for that, democracy for everything, economic democracy etc. which is basically the political equivalent of seeing a big and really impressive spaceship having some really important part of it held together with duct tape because nobody found anything better for the job, and thinking “you know what would make this spaceship even better? making it totally out of duct tape!”.
Democracy is to politics what duct tape is to engineering; something that’s occasionally really useful for patching things over with but never ever a terminal value and anyone who tells you otherwise should never be responsible for designing or maintaining anything important. Unfortunately, these world federalists seem to be exactly that kind of people. I suspect it’s some kind of a psychological thing. A certain kind of person who’s fundamentally agreeable to the majority might easily fall prey to the idea that the things that are wrong in the world are all the result of a minority imposing its will on the majority, but I’m minoritarian enough to recognize that the majority is actually really fucking scary and hostile and would destroy me the instant it had the opportunity to do so and is in fact constantly trying to make it happen even right now, and giving it any more power to do so is the exact last thing I want.
In fact, I’m pretty sure something like that is behind my desire to get really rich not-just-for-EA-purposes; in the unfair world we have now I could at least buy myself some degree of freedom, impunity and existential security when I’m definitely not guaranteed such things anywhere near to the same degree majority-agreeable people are, and anything that tries to take that opportunity away or even diminish it a little bit must be opposed at all costs unless it seriously gives me those things some other way. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a lot of strongly libertarian people were fundamentally weird and at least partially driven by a fear of the mob, and thus anyone who seriously wants to address economic inequality should address that thing as well, instead of just spouting the standard socialdemocratic jantelaw rhetoric that comes off as “we’re coming for not just your money but your lives and fundamental aspects of your identities as well”.
In the absence of such credible guarantees, a world federation would probably start accumulating unnecessary powers in exact the same ways national governments have done, and do all kinds of evil stuff like banning GMOs altogether, regulating sex work, crabbucketing economies, creating more market distortions for crony capitalists to capture and enforcing all kinds of oppressive shared sensibilities of dominant groups. It’s bad enough when the Swedish model of suppressing sex and drugs can be lobbied for internationally, and it would be even worse if they could just vote for it and enforce it everywhere. The vast majority of the global population is not WEIRD bonobo rationalists and even the present degree of subjecting the latter to the rule of the former is unbearable. At least now it’s possible (if rich and resourceful enough) to move somewhere else if the rule of one polity becomes too overbearing, but unifying a strong global government would make it all too likely to turn it into an unescapable situation.
This not the peace you had in mind? The one you waited for?
There is no land beyond this law, there is no place to go
(But it’s not like the standard opponents of world federalism are any better, national sovereignty is just as ugly and disgusting and oppressive with the way it always seems to repeat the same pattern of forcing extremely different cultures under the control of each other; prosperous cosmopolitan urban enlightened libertines really shouldn’t have to share polity with reactionary rural xenophobic conservatives who mostly mooch off the previous ones’ money while hypocritically espousing economic rightism themselves, but nation-states love to put boundaries in silly locations. It would be way better for places like Stockholm and Amsterdam to be together and separated from their spatially neighboring but culturally worlds-apart regions; nations are far less of a natural joint in reality than whatever-it-is that’s underlying the difference that seems to be popping up everywhere in extremely replicable ways. And the Bay Area should be independent even from the ‘better-than-most-but-still-not-the-bay-area’ places just to make sure its special nature stays as untarnished and incorruptible as possible.)
(via ilzolende)
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 30 notes · source: academicianzex · .permalink
Sleeping at the triage…
2/5 not recommended. Better than sleeping outside at -10 degrees but substantially less comfortable than the benches of Arlanda airport or an actual bed. Especially uncomfortable if the reason you’re doing it is that you ended up de facto homeless after returning to Finland because your apartment turned out to have massive air quality issues that make it impossible to live there, and the triage apparently diagnosed you with an ableist slur despite all your protestations of “would I be at the goddamn triage at 3 in the morning complaining that I can’t breathe and have nowhere to go, if just opening the fucking window helped?” and you decided to sleep in the waiting room so that if you die from asphyxiation at least the right people would be blamed for it. On the other hand I did think the public healthcare would actually help instead of just making things worse so I kind of see why they’d treat me as someone who is terminally incapable of making decisions for oneself.
Now the interesting part is figuring out how to talk the rental agencies to giving me a new place to live at despite having pretty much none of the papers they ask for, but just some money of dubious origin and an absolutely unbelievable story.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 1 note · .permalink