ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1d ago
I agree that those communities are kind of counterexamples. The reason for "kind of" is that they didn't emerge through any intentional action or planning, and attempts to replicate them through a plan have all failed AFAICT. Any attempt in contemporary times to recreate their success will end up co-opted and corrupted. They're more historic relics that occupy niches that so far have been resilient to capitalism.
Though, perhaps they'll survive and out reproduce us all, and capitalism can be retried on a more resilient culture.
ThenElection
1d ago
I am not at all a socialist or any other -ist, btw; my comment was meant as descriptive, not polemical.
to what extent you think culture and local community degeneration are responsible?
Entirely responsible; all of capitalisms' ill-effects are mediated through how it hollows out culture and local communities. Capitalism delivers massive material improvements to society through whatever ways its able to find to deliver those improvements. One way that's been very effective is by mining and hollowing out local communities, customs, traditions; turning the sacred profane. Socialism and various other -isms have their own issues: capitalism's genius is in allowing its participants to make that trade (of community for self-interest) in the most effective way possible.
My solution, or, the idea for it, has always been that local first communities work to support the stragglers and that things like family formation and, especially, extended family mutual reinforcement would do a good job of evening out the rough edges of capitalism for all who aren't repetitively highly anti-social (i.e. criminals and drug abusers).
It's a romantic vision, and probably the best option we have on an individual basis. But I don't believe it can amount to much, collectively; capitalism is too good at harnessing our energies to its own ends.
I'm not sure Dinergoth is a useful category, outside of designating an aesthetic. There's a broader issue--the listlessness and demoralization of youth--and the Dinergoth is a good example of affliction by it. But it's shared across pretty much every youth subculture. Hustler, incel, NEET, based tradcath, femcel, influencers. To the extent any of them are political, it's an identity-defining gesture. Even antifa is just a bunch of young men wanting to break shit for an adrenaline rush.
A more provocative take: what is the cause? "Capitalism." Or, more precisely, capitalism as implemented on actual humans. Humans are wildy disparate in their capabilities and intelligences, and capitalism, by flattening the world in its relentless pursuit of legibility and information, has identified the weak and dumb and deterritorialized them from the structures that once protected them. When they previously would have found refuge in burrows or bramble, now they're easy prey on the open savannah. And a caste of strivers are the predators here, who bloodlessly condemn millions to a debased state with new, maladaptive structures that are more easy to exploit and are delivered over technology that was supposed to liberate us.
Gen Z and, to an extent, millennials are just the leading edge of it. They won't ever snap out of it, because they don't even know of any other way to live.
ThenElection
3d ago
us new world peasants won't pay the King's Tax
We do, though. In 2024, US tech companies paid more in fines alone (€3.8 billion) than the income tax revenue of the entire European tech sector (€3.2 billion).
ThenElection
14d ago
Yeah, it's not realistic to think labor costs would literally go to zero. Did some research and public transit labor and associated costs in the US are likely around 50B annually; for comparison, Alphabet's workforce is around 100B (though of course the vast majority aren't working on AVs).
LIDARs are expensive, but probably a lower proportion of the cost of the vehicle for a bus than for a regular car (even if buses require more sensors).
ThenElection
14d ago
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?
When something bad happens, it allows the organization responsible to say, "well, we have a training program in place, so we did our due diligence and are not responsible." See also diversity and sexual harassment training sessions. At worst the organizational fix is to just hire a new set of training consultants to revise the training program.
ThenElection
14d ago
Something like 2/3 of operating costs of public transit in the USA is labor costs. If you can replace most of those with AVs, you can get more bus routes, without any radical assumptions or requirements for the broader transit system.
ThenElection
14d ago
My suspicion is that the issue is less about how an actual, well-constructed UBI would be corrupted/abused (as you say, it's difficult), but in that most actual "UBI" programs wouldn't be an actual, well-constructed UBI. In practice, it wouldn't be rolled out universally (even if universality was a genuine aspiration), and that would allow for politicians to pick and choose the constituencies that benefit. And so you get the government creating a "UBI" targeting black pregnant trans artists.
ThenElection
14d ago
Citation needed for inflammatory claim
Sure.
https://sftransitriders.org/on-mayor-luries-plan-to-allow-waymo-on-market-street/
ThenElection
14d ago
One of the weird things about American politics is that "public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles. This is despite the fact that AVs would allow running far more bus routes, more cheaply, than today.
I can't decide if this is because public transit advocacy today is mostly about an aesthetic aversion to cars and roads, or if it's because coalitional politics demands that public transit advocacy simultaneously look to protect make work union jobs.
ThenElection
14d ago
One thing that makes it a bit worse than regular make work corruption: public transit is useful in a place like DC. WMATA's existence makes it so a more reliable, cleaner, effective replacement can't take its place. Just handing out bags of cash to favored groups would in some ways be better, because at least private companies could run the existing profitable routes.
ThenElection
15d ago
"Actually Indian" can be your new tag.
ThenElection
15d ago
UBI is definitionally giving income to people without conditions. Requiring them to work an (even fake) job is a very different thing, proponents of which (a "Job Guarantee") have a long history of feuding with UBI advocates. You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.
ThenElection
15d ago
Vietnam is also right next door to a regional hegemon (which has invaded it, in living memory) which also has the ability to immiserate it and militarily dominate it. And although it avoids poking the dragon when it can, it still is able to maintain real and significant independence.
I don't doubt that the US could turn Canada into a frozen hellscape if it were sufficiently motivated. But that threat isn't enough to get infinite pliability from Canadians, just as the Chinese threat of the same isn't enough to get infinite pliability from the Vietnamese. Both middle powers perceive that their respective hegemons are balancing multiple objectives and believe (correctly, in the Viet case) that the costs to other objectives prevent the maximal response.
ThenElection
15d ago
A theory I played with was that it was intended as a distraction from Venezuela. Greenland is far more ridiculous than Venezuela, so you make a bunch of noise about it and then later walk it back, and everyone's forgotten about Venezuela.
The issue with that theory is that... Venezuela seems like a success? Why would you want to distract from it? It can be a feather in your cap, not something to bury with the next noise cycle.
ThenElection
15d ago
What would the US do to stop them? Mass seizure of financial assets? A blockade? Decapitation strike? Invasion?
There is still an order, which is the order of reality. And although the US is very powerful, it's not infinitely powerful. All of those would rapidly result in the whole world looking for a better deal with a new protector.
ThenElection
16d ago
Storm Horncastle. She appears to be Norwegian; not an adopted name.
ThenElection
16d ago
I have lived in China, and I like it a lot. Some of its tier 1 cities are quite livable, and there are smaller towns that are also quite nice as well.
The core issue is that... It's not a democracy. Not in a moralistic sense, but it ends up making bad decisions, and then follows through with them come hell or high water. It was genuinely impressive how they marshalled society to get to (near) zero COVID for years, but it was a stupid goal that hurt its economy. It could similarly do something really stupid re:Taiwan, and it can persist in that decision for years.
It also has severe fertility issues, but that seems a broader issue affecting all the East Asian countries. You might hope that its authoritarianism would give it more capability to address that issue, but so far we're not seeing anything too effective coming out of it.
ThenElection
16d ago
Shapiro, when asked about Harris:
"Kamala Harris? Who's that? Oh yeah, I think we might have met at a fundraiser once, didn't leave much impression. Did she ever end up getting that job she was applying for?"
ThenElection
20d ago
When I think back to what was the first step for me off the progressive reservation (this was back in 2013 or so), a coworker of mine was arguing that I (a man) was privileged compared to her. This is a woman who went to boarding school at Andover, spent most of her high school and college years snorting coke, and had parents who bought her a condo in SF as a graduation present. While I literally grew up on food stamps.
ThenElection
20d ago
Going by the digging ditches comparison, it's also pointless and stupid, but for many kids it would be genuinely more fun and engaging. That's because it has the possibility of a positive reward signal: finishing the ditch. But the quadratic formula is something many genuinely are just not capable of: there is no final "get shit done" point for it.
ThenElection
22d ago
LBJ won a Nobel Prize for inventing the free lunch.
LBJ never won a Nobel Prize. He was nominated in 1964, but even that nomination was for steering American foreign policy toward international cooperation.
ThenElection
26d ago
It's a shared culture of narcissism. People look for identity and meaning in stupid acts of protest, and they imagine what the government does is provide the stage for it. Totalitarian symbolically, but it will never engage in any kind of violence at all against you personally, which would interfere in your bragging rights about how righteous and badass you are.
ThenElection
26d ago
I don't think it's incoherent to say that protesting an evil regime is good and protesting a holy regime is evil, which seems to be the reason for the split view. It's even my view and likely the majority view: although it might be unwise to publicly fight against Hitler/Stalin, I'd definitely be rooting for someone who does. Where I'd differ is in not judging either administration as calling for unmanaged or badly managed protest.
The issue is that maintaining public order inherently involves violence, and both Babbitt and Good (and their supporters) thought that they were somehow exempt from facing violence when they were protesting (ironic, since they probably think of the respective administrations as closer to Communist/Nazi than I do).
Spectacular wealth and corrupt hedonism. The masses of people in their state-provided goonboxes, with a small elite caste engaging in their own particular kind of debasement except with spectacular wealth, with an AI zookeeper watching over us all. And, in an accelerationist sense, I think it's inevitable, unless the AI decides to put us out of our misery.
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