Corvos
2hr ago
Fair enough. So in your proposed libertarian world, you would not automatically have the right to sue for breach of contract, damages, or debt? Unless these things turned out to be foundational.
Fair enough, I thought those things were more central to libertarian ideology.
Corvos
2hr ago
Is it possible that they worked with government to produce this? As you say, it allows the activists to perpetuate themselves but it also produces sympathy and understanding for the government. More reasonable proposals might have been harder to scotch.
Corvos
10hr ago
Four: Enforcing contracts, right?
the idiots don't realize that they need to allow my social project or society will of course collapse
What if some of the people saying this are right, though? That is, excluding the American frontier, which I think was historically unprecedented and will not be repeated, what if a stable society really does need a social code enforced by the state or an entity with equivalent power? I guess that would then pass your bar?
This is a fun story, and I apologise for the coming less-fun response. From where I'm standing, this is the story of how you and your friends lied and abused the trust of others in order to get things you knew you weren't entitled to. Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.
I'm not saying this just to be a miserable scold (though I probably am that) but because when people talk about rebuilding virtue in society and upholding social trust, this is what they mean. I know that you're an upstanding citizen in many ways and that you work for various nonprofits etc. as well but why are people of a lesser standing going to do the hard, thankless work of keeping up their end when they know that this kind of thing is going on behind their back? Hearing stories like this just makes people feel like suckers for holding to the rules and trying not to trouble others.
I am reminded of a quote from SSC:
On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.
But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
You're not that, most of the time, but it seems to me that this is a little bit of that. Especially when you’re intentionally putting staff in a difficult spot, where they may well be in for professional consequences, so that you can get what you want:
The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in [...] meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.
Corvos
1d ago
Given that the 30% wages essentially work due to relative purchasing power and / or arbitrage between a Third World childhood and a First World adulthood, isn’t this global laissez faire approach basically poison for long-term economic growth?
If it becomes widely accepted that economic growth means an increased quality of life here and now, but that the window of opportunity only lasts maybe 1.5 generations before your (grand)children are priced out of the global market, that seems to make growth and laissez faire economics a much tougher sell.
And you will encounter no politics at all during, say, Black History Month?
How do you differentiate 'people who talk about witchcraft are witches, so they're tabooed' vs. 'if you taboo any discussion of witchcraft, only maniacal Satanists will talk about it'? See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
Or, alternatively, ‘racism’ is deployed as a pejorative to prevent white people from finding common ground in the same way that people from every other race are exhorted to do on a constant basis.
Very clearly people are not allergic merely to race-consciousness or even racial hatred on a platonic level, or they would object strongly to it when black people (sorry, Black people) do it. Such genuinely principled race-blind people exist, of course, but I do not see them in sufficient numbers to account for the taboo.
I think it's sort of different in that the accusations that Darwin threw around were much more inflammatory than in the 2A hypothetical: 'JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people' is much more strong than 'Biden wants to take your guns'. He used to use words like 'eradicate', 'racist', etc. a lot. Saying transphobic or racist things, or performing transphobic or racist acts, is literally illegal in Rowling's and my country. Those are strong accusations to throw around!
In that context, it's really pretty bad to throw that heat when you have no evidence, the existing evidence is exactly contra-indicative (Rowling had been reasonably supportive of trans people at the start) and you openly admit you have no interest in actually looking through what she said.
Then moving to 'people like Rowling' as in the quote "people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people" strikes me as broadening that brush rather than narrowing it.
Corvos
1d ago
No, I mean that it’s going to make it much harder to get any democratic buy in if people who have already experienced growth think that you’re dooming them to decline, people in third world understand that they’re going to get at best two generations of growth and then decline, etc.
I.e. it’s poison for the idea of economic growth, which up until now was mostly regarded positively.
Corvos
3d ago
If the victim did not object to such things, they would not have hired staff to prevent it and said staff would not be in danger of getting faired for failing to prevent it. If they wanted local notables, they would have invited some.
How does the good-fun principle generalise? People have fun jumping turnstiles and prank-calling and shoplifting and getting drunk & disorderly in a public park in the middle of the day. Not to mention all sorts of antisocial but not actually illegal stuff.
It seems to me that you can oppress the worst behaviour of the bottom 10% without too many complaints, but beyond that you either have to allow ‘good-fun’ exemptions for 90% of the population, resulting is an adversarial and low-trust society, or else say that the rules are different for gentlemen, which I regard as being immoral and long-term corrosive to society, or else be clear that ‘local notables’ are required to model good behaviour for everyone else.
Corvos
2d ago
I would be very surprised if Microsoft, a massive and bloated multinational corporation, switches to having one third of its programming done by AI in the near future. I don’t think it’s that nimble. I suspect the figure is a guesstimate to sound impressive and that the layoffs are Twitter-style bloat removal / offshoring.
People can defect in various ways to each other all the time; I think we can regard these as fungible to a reasonable degree. It seems weird to say that I am free to punch other people (who don’t want to be punched) any time I like since they can always get their own back by slugging me in return.
You seem to be gesturing at a system of tacit acknowledgement where it’s okay for me to sometimes take apples from your garden because I let you sometimes take peaches from mine, but such an understanding requires prolonged contact in a stable society and also agreement on both sides, which seems to be lacking here.
If what goes around comes around as you suggest, shouldn’t we make sure that what is going around is largely respect and cooperation, rather than deceit and defection?
Forgive me, but could you clarify a bit? Are you saying:
- You literally feel absolutely no repugnance / negative valence whatsoever at somebody buying lots of helpless creatures purely because they find it fun to kill them.
- You have some kind of negative emotional response to it, but for intellectual reasons you have decided not to indulge that response. E.g. you rationalise that no actual harm has taken place to anything with moral weight / man is master of the animals and therefore has the right to do such things even if you don’t find it tasteful.
- You feel a negative response that is weak enough that, to you, it can be rounded down to zero in mildly hyperbolic fashion on the internet.
Corvos
1d ago
An excellent post, I didn’t think of this. Should have taken the female half of the deal more seriously. Mea culpa.
Find a bike shop or rental and borrow a ladies sit-up bike for a couple of hours, see what you think. Yes, they’re theoretically meant for girls, but they’re a lot more comfortable and more stable, and you can go from riding to standing safely in a fraction of a second just by lowering your feet. Plus you get a basket to put your stuff in :)
The idea that bicycling should involve spending hours in a weird tantric sex position mystifies me.
Corvos
1d ago
Specifically it argues that the worms all boil to death as the compost heats up.
Corvos
1d ago
this is more of a work with what I have situation
Fair enough, though I think renting one for a day would benefit you by giving you a better idea of what difficulties are coming from you vs your bike.
effeminate for a man to spread his legs to "mount" and "straddle" a men's bicycle
I’ll admit that putting a long, hard object between my thighs to get pounded repeatedly isn’t my idea of a fun time ;)
Do you think employers and employees have any moral obligations to each other beyond those dictated by law and contract?
I was raised to believe that employers should be loyal to, and supportive of, their staff. It seems to me that this leads to a better world than a world where employers can be as fickle and unreasonable as they like as long as they pay enough, and happily fire their staff for failing to anticipate their whims.
Corvos
1d ago
I don’t think it’s the case that, under the near-100% global fluidity you seem to be arguing for, the west will continue to remain ahead. That is, I don’t necessarily see why economic growth should be sticky under conditions of high global fluidity.
At the moment, Britain (say) is in relative decline. Because we once had a very large market and because companies serving that have mostly been staffed by British people for various reasons, that decline has been slow. Say, Toyota sets up a car factory in Sunderland to build cars for the British market; that factory is mostly staffed by British people by virtue of being in Britain and because of various employment laws, meaning that a decent number of British people are earning a decent salary, meaning that the market for Toyota cars in Britain is still decently sized, etc. But the decline is still present because (among other things) Britain is expensive and therefore British workers require global-market-beating salaries to live well.
Under conditions of maximal global liquidity, I would expect to see accelerated growth and decline, with some countries entering into the India/Taiwan/China/Japan role of ‘cheap country where multinationals can get decent work for low prices’ and other countries declining to that point or past that point and waiting for their time to get back in the spotlight.
(Countries might decline past the ‘spotlight point’ because factories etc. benefit from synergy and investment tends to cluster, so even if several countries have favourable economic conditions only one of them might win the prize at any given time.)
In short, to my mind, the maximally fluid world looks like it would accelerate boom and bust for any given country (or its native population) rather than lead to ratchet growth spread globally. I think it would be hard to get public support for that - first world countries wouldn’t want to sign up for accelerated decline from their current position, and third world countries want to be able to protect their economic growth once they have it.
Corvos
5d ago
All bugman references aside, I think the point is that Asian societies are more conformist, so everyone sends their children to the same (public) schools and then quietly to cram school out of sight.
Weird tech nerds are more likely to brag about sending their children to an experimental school, whereas in Japan this is kind of like saying ‘I’m an enemy of society and I don’t want my children to be brought up in the normal way’. There are special schools for diplomats’ children etc. but not enough to matter at scale.
Corvos
1d ago
I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”
Corvos
5d ago
I would say Pratchett did so well because his books are almost unique in his genre for clearly not being slop. Agree with him or disagree, but he has a very particular perspective that he’s coming from and you’re going to end up grappling with his philosophy one way or another.
The IRA is listed there too, but they were not enemies of America and indeed were partly funded by American groups.
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