conductivemithril:

socialjusticemunchkin:

wirehead-wannabe:

neoliberalism-nightly:

shkreli-for-president:

91625:

aprilwitching:

91625:

samaaron:

91625:

soycrates:

Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.

An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.

Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.

What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.

Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.

And that’s why immigration is bad.

??? immigrants aren’t the ones gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the lower class, what are you talking about

gentrifiers:neighbourhoods::immigrants:nations

#approximations #semi-endorsed

i can’t believe i’m even entering this conversation, but you do realize that (at least in the context of the united states, canada, and western europe), most immigrants are….uh, not wealthy people who would be totally fine staying in their nations of origin and are just swapping countries for funsies, or so they won’t have to pay as much for rent, or what have you? & if there are immigrants who fit that description, they certainly aren’t the immigrants anyone on the anti-immigration side of The Discourse is scaremongering about. like, make an anti-immigration argument if you want, but comparing it to neighborhood gentrification is really odd and off-base.

 i get how it could seem like a tempting analogy– you might think “well, from my perspective it sounds like these are both cases of people barging in where they don’t really belong and **~*changing the culture and environment*~** over the objections of the people who already live there– BUT WAIT!!! most leftists think gentrification is BAD and immigration is GOOD (or at least OKAY). ha ha, CHECKMATE, LEFTISTS~~”

like if you only think about it for a few seconds, it’s a pretty good rhetorical “gotcha”

unfortunately, whether you are pro- or anti- immigration, it falls apart after more than a few seconds of thought, especially when it comes in response to a post like this, which emphasizes that the main problem with gentrification isn’t some vague “people moving in where they Don’t Belong” or “neighborhoods Changing Over Time and becoming demographically/culturally different”– it is specifically that upper middle class and wealthy people, who could live almost anywhere they wanted, are displacing poor and working class people, who do not have many options as to where they can go. this particular post is saying that the rich are coming into poor neighborhoods and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with frivolous luxury and leisure businesses and features that the original residents of the neighborhood can’t even afford. they aren’t just “moving in” and “changing things” or using the resources a place already had to offer– they’re turning a neighborhood/community into a “theme park”, a “luxury” playland for tourists/hipsters.

the immigrants people are arguing about– again, at least in the context of immigration discourse where i live, in the united states– are not people who are wealthy or privileged compared to the vast majority of the country’s actual citizens, and literally no one is claiming that the problem with them is that they’re replacing necessary things with glitzy tourist-trap stuff almost no native-born citizen cares about or can afford. the power dynamic is completely different; the socio-economic implications are completely different, the things people who worry about or dislike immigration fear will happen If This Is Allowed To Continue are completely different. it just isn’t an analogy that holds up, and it makes you sound kind of like you are either embarrassingly ignorant or trolling people when you pull it out, especially without any sort of attempt at justification or extrapolation.

 sorry. 

but it does.

I did say it was an approximation :)

But I think it holds up better than you say, for two reasons:

1. Immigrants have, almost by definition, a lot more freedom of movement than the native-born working class. They already have some experience of international travel, there’s likely another country where they have citizenship, they rarely have obligations which tie them to a single city or region, and so on. This isn’t the same as the agency granted by huge pots of cash, but it’s more than the native poor have.

2. Immigrants become a lot better off as a result of immigration, while native workers become worse off (although the degree to which this is true is debatable, yes, and may be less important than other factors). Poor people getting richer at the expense of other poor people isn’t unfair in the same way as rich people turning the lives of poor people into theme parks, but that doesn’t automatically make it okay.

Immigrants are coming into native neighborhoods (which to them are abstract entities consisting of some number of their own people and some amount of economic advantage for them, certainly not, you know, neighborhoods, each with its own unique social context, history, set of traditions, etc.) and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with businesses targeted at immigrants, which the original residents of the neighborhood have no need for, and often can’t even make use of, because the signs aren’t in English and the employees don’t speak English. The natives these immigrants are replacing, however, are almost always working-class, which is why it’s standard for wilfully ignorant, status-signaling Brahmins – note that the person you’re arguing with here has posts about getting art commissions and rejection letters for poems – to concoct a supposedly clear-cut moral distinction between immigration and gentrification.

Tbh some chinese supermarket are kind of a nice innovation for poor people provided it doesn’t displace too much other types of supermarkets.

Yeah and from a purely economic standpoint the incentives to create businesses targeted at english speaking residents is still there in a way that isn’t true with gentrification. Immigrants and natives don’t have the same disparity in terms of ability to influence the market.

I buy a shitload of my food from immigrants’ shops, despite being whitest and nativest native who ever whited, because the immigrant shops sell better and cheaper stuff than the white people shops. And the æsthetic is less corp-y and more human too. And who cares if the employees speak Arabic, and even if they couldn’t speak Finnish (although the ones working the front-end alway can), if they speak €€€.

My favorite snack bar in the Helsinki Railway Station is an immigrant place; the last time I was there the vendor was east asian, there was a sheet of paper scotch-taped on the wall saying in Arabic that someone has a van for rent, I don’t even know what half the foods were, I suspect their compliance of regulations is best described as “creative”, and yeah it’s cheap. Not too far from it there are the corp chain cafes, the finnish equivalents of Starbucks or whatever.

That’s basically the exact inverse of gentrification. Gentrification smells like corp, immigration has the æsthetic of freedom.

And who cares if the employees speak Arabic, and even if they couldn’t speak Finnish (although the ones working the front-end alway can), if they speak €€€.

Beautiful. Case in point: I initially read it as $$$, but whatever goes.

Also, spot the libertarian.

Oh, and srsly, the immigrant places are beautiful. There’s one ex-down-the-street (I recently moved from the downtown muslim quarter to an old shipyard area) which advertises money remittance services and phone calls to Somali telecoms. On Fridays brown-skinned men in not-strange-anymore clothes gather around it and talk to each other about everyday things I don’t understand the language of but feel the inherent human connection to.

My usual immigrant grocery store sells big huge sacks of rice, hookahs, prayer rugs, rose water fragnances, care products for black people’s hair, legumes where the origin labeling is like an obnoxious hipster: “oh, it’s a really obscure country, you wouldn’t have heard of it” (except that I have because I’m a nerd) and which cost a fraction of what they would in Finnish Whole Foods (which is the only other place even selling them), fresh chili for a quarter of the price elsewhere, etc.

Then there’s the chinese supermarket with ridiculously cheap tofu (although I’d need to figure out how to cook it for my tastes because its consistency is different from corp tofu), fucken MSG (yummy), intriguing frozen veggies in simple transparent plastic bags instead of flashy packaging because they know their customers know what they are and that they are good and they don’t need to waste money trying to advertise them on the shelves, a dozen different varieties of soy sauce, all as inexpensive as the cheapest store label bulk product in the white people supermarkets.

Then there’s the anarchist cafe, which triggers the exact same sensibilities in my brain. Gluten flour in plain brown paper bags, labeled with black marker on masking tape and probably not weighed according to regulation precision, prices more than competitive with the corp stores selling the exact same product, the only difference being that the corp stores are more shiny. The (all-vegan) food items on sale have only allergens labeled, to an extent way exceeding official requirements. There’s a selection of radical subversive reading material to buy, worn-out board games to play, a free book exchange, gender-free toilets.

And on the outside there’s a thin string across the courtyard with a sign hanging from it: “no alcoholic drinks outside the marked area” because finns believe that this small piece of string, mandated by alcohol regulations, is the only thing keeping society from collapsing into Mad Max.

Apart from that string, this is what liberty looks like. Private as in “privacy”, not “privatized profits and socialized risks”. The vibrancy of people doing good for themselves and for each other, not the sterile emptiness of corps, fueled by regulatory limits on options and alternatives and the complacency of the crowd that prefers them (…and I’ll just cut here, you can read the rest from Ayn Rand Walks Into a Coffee Shop)

3 weeks ago · tagged #unleashing my inner randroid #specifics possibly slightly modified for privacy reasons #or because i've forgotten the details #but the spirit is true · 30,310 notes · source: soycrates · .permalink

The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 10

Denouement

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

ilzolende:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

ilzolende:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/should-parents-of-severely-disabled-children-be-allowed-to-stop-their-growth.html

Bioethicists: Life extension is evil.
Bioethicists: Rendering disabled kids permanently prepubescent? No biggie.

> “I’ve been shocked by how the disabled community has reacted to it,” she says. “These people speak of the ‘perspective of the disability community’ as though we are not part of it. It makes us feel disenfranchised by the very organizations that were put in place to protect Jessica and our family.”

Gee, neurotypical physically-abled woman, I can’t imagine why that would be.

> She finally brought it up with her husband, Matt, when Ricky was about 2.

So, you’ve determined with a two-year-old that they’ll almost certainly never be capable of wanting puberty. Gee, that sounds reliable.

> Like Ashley’s parents, she believed that if her daughter had no breasts, she would be less likely to be a target of sexual abuse.

…okay, I can follow the reasoning, but gah.

original post

Why do you think bioethicists think life extension is evil? Obviously there are individual bioethicists who do, but is there a reason to think the majority does?

“ is there a reason to think the majority does?” Not that I know of, I’m just being unfair.

The only reason bioethicists would exist is to express that life extension is evil. If someone does not wish to exert control upon another’s body, they don’t need to make up a profession to write long and elaborate arguments on the topic, they just refrain from using coercion and fraud against them or advocating for the use of such by someone else. Thus, bioethicists commenting on what people do to their own bodies can only have emerged from a desire to prevent, to stop, to crush, to destroy those who dissent against the herd, for no other motivation necessitates their existence, and therefore it is imperative for any self-respecting autonomous human being to scorn dem like the oppressive moochers and parasites they are, feasting on the lifeblood and suffering of innovative value-creators, early adopters, biohackers, and transhumanists.

(via wirehead-wannabe)

3 months ago · tagged #shitposting #unleashing my inner randroid · 20 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink