Tree
1yr ago
Nowhere have I ever claimed that War Communism or National Socialism aren't totalitarian ideologies.
So both lion regimes and fox regimes result in totalitarianism? Which is more totalitarian? Those two, or liberal democracy, or late soviet union?
Morocco, Belarus, Oman, Cuba
I see, the apathetic kind of shit government. What I’ve noticed is the people want to get out of there.
I'm not quite making up one of the most influential sociology works of all time but so what if it is?
It’s likely nonsense, that’s all. Freud wrote influential books around that time, too.
If there is a superior enemy then you are not the ruling class because you have already been circulated.
No true scotsman. Elites can never really lose, because if they’re beaten, you just mint new elites and call it circulation, say the old elites weren’t really elites, or imagine they could have fought harder. The circular logic of circulated elites theory.
Consider Louis XVI or Nicholas II, striking examples of this behavior.
Nicholas killed 15,000 in 1905, that was a bloodbath. Charles I fought two civil wars. I don’t think you can say he gave up a winning position because he was demotivated.
Tree
1yr ago
Of course Hitlerism and Stalinism are lion regimes, and the late Soviet Union a fox regime. Your mistake is assuming that just because I'm providing a criticism of foxes, there aren't any of lions.
No, it just seemed even sillier to me to recategorize the founding examples of totalitarianism as not totalitarian. Plus I seem to remember some neoreactionary stuff about "demotism", which put those regimes in the same category as liberal democracy.
But okay, your choice. So in nazi germany, where every civil association was forcibly absorbed into a nazi church, a nazi youth group, a nazi union; where every film and radio was spewing pure nazi propaganda, that regime did not care about public opinion, and wasn't totalitarian?
However, it turns out that, much to the dismay of mediocre political analysts everywhere, politics is more complicated than good vs evil dualism.
That's lame. Politics is more complicated than "Politics is more complicated than good vs evil dualism".
You'll be able to get a good feeling for this by discussing with people who live in despotic nations.
What despotic nations are you talking about? Africans? I think even the dictators don't care about politics in africa. China? The rulers care what the people think.
I hold that legitimacy is a phenomenon that doesn't happen in the masses, but in the mind of the elite. Legitimacy is what we call the Ruling Class's ability to retain will to power and organization by telling itself a convincing enough story about how its power is legitimate.
Sounds like a made-up pseudo-freudian theory.
I believe this because the only examples of circulation of elites available in all of history involve the ruling elite willingly letting go of their power, or rather not having the will to cling onto it at the price of incredible bloodshed.
But if they thought they were going to lose to a superior enemy, wouldn't they "let go of their power willingly"?
Approximately 99% of defeated nations do not fight to the last man in war. Does that mean that they are in fact the stronger party, and only a weak will can make them lose?
Tree
1yr ago
For instance, a common criticism of fox regimes is that they, by nature, have to be totalitarian.
I think a reality check is enough to disabuse people of that theory, if ‘totalitarian’ is to keep any meaning.
I take it you categorize the ur-totalitarian communist, and nazi regimes, as ‘light’, ‘fox regimes’? Even though they were opposed to debate, to voting, and made direct unrestrained force the order of the day?
The legitimacy they rest on relies on the illusion of public support, which means they have to control and shape public opinion as much as possible.
There’s a contradiction here. If the people are truly powerless, their support a mere ‘illusion’, why do the rulers need it, shape it? Your answer ‘Legitimacy’ is tautological. Why do the people in power need this ‘legitimacy’, what is legitimacy but the people’s acceptance of a ruler’s authority?
Tree
1yr ago
Yeah, but that's the difference: Kolmogorov and Aaronson compromised themselves too much, and for me at least, ended up on the wrong side of the friend-enemy distinction, while Scott (very, very) mildly condemned giving that much succor to one's enemies.
Tree
1yr ago
I understand one-man-one-gun-one-vote fine, I don't see why it should undermine debate or democracy.
You can't escape violence, you can only add abstractions on top of it.
If you want; then I am pro-abstraction. One man goes around shooting people - another talks to them, then counts their vote, and then, only if he has won, uses limited force. Do you think they are the same?
Tree
1yr ago
So voting works
Sure, but that necessarily means that discussion doesn't.
Why? Is discussion incompatible with democracy?
A billionaire very likely changed the result of the election by buying a communications platform
According to the previous alt right theory, “‘the elites” were acting collectively, in a specifically “‘New York Times” direction, against the wishes of the masses, always successfully. It wasn't predicting an isolated eliteman taking a turn to the right with popular support.
Although maybe that’s a caricature of alt right thinking on my part. A caricature of my position would be that billionaires/elites are just as influential as normal people.
Tree
1yr ago
Another way to look at it is the vote that happens after a debate to determine the winner.
But even from a perspective of the vote as representing force, the vote is less an instrument of conflict than a sublimation of it.
Tree
1yr ago
So voting works, we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham? Okay, next.
Why couldn't they just convince their opponents of the truth by making superior arguments?
They did. Some, like our progenitor, in a rather ‘conflict avoidant’ way. Not my style, but still. Or did HBD warriors use their fists beat up on their enemies until they gave up?
Tree
1yr ago
Is voting conflict now? According to SS and his ridiculous euphemism "memetic political conflict", even discussion is conflict.
Tree
1yr ago
It refutes the main far right talking points.
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Voting doesn’t matter : Trump’s election has loosened the tongues of intellectuals who can finally express “what the man on the street is really thinking”.
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Discussion is pointless/conflict theory: The Truth triumphs yet again against all attempts to censure it (including a brief attempt by our own mods) ; kept alive by the tireless arguing of myself and others, transferred to the public, voted in, correcting course, guiding & guarding us on our way to a better future.
Tree
1yr ago
I have seen virtually identical frames priced more than $100 apart.
That’s not that bad. In France, they have a system where it’s obligatory for the employer to provide glasses insurance(1) . Then once a year the giddy employee can choose glasses with frames worth 600 dollars(2) “for free”.
(1) This costs him frequently around 100 dollars/month or more. There's some other random nonsense included in the insurance. A full set of glasses costs only like 50 dollars.
(2) They look exactly the same as frames worth 25 dollars. There’s a lot of ads for glasses in France.
Tree
1yr ago
'Existence worthy of human dignity' is how it is described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, meaning more than mere survival. Living in a bare closet, eating tasteless gruel, dressed in rags, and staring at a blank wall when not working or sleeping, would not be 'worthy of human dignity' even if it isn't 'starving'.
Minimum wage workers have garish clothes, and spaghetti bolognese, and libraries, and dancing parties – oh, how they laugh and play together!
Who dares to call their lives unworthy of the dignity of a human?
If Alice wants an employee who will provide sexual favours/stand up for hours on end doing tasks that can be done sitting down/not eat rice on Tuesdays, and Bob wants a steady pay-cheque without involving genitals/allowing him to sit down if he can still get his work done/letting him eat whatever he feels like on whatever day he pleases,
- how often will Alice blink first, and how often will Bob blink first?
Depends on the terms offered. If alice lists all of her demands in the interview, I think most people would refuse to work for her, especially if she’s ugly and they love rice.
- if they cannot come to an agreement, how hard will it be for Bob to find employment under his conditions, and how hard will it be for Alice to find an employee willing to accept her conditions?
Pretty easy for Bob, and Pretty hard for Alice I imagine, see answer 1.
If Jack wants a woman who will provide sexual favours, and else leave him be, and Susan wants a man who will buy her a cup of coffee and listen to her stories and dine at her parents’ and kill a spider.
- how often will Jack blink first, and how often will Susan blink first?
- if they cannot come to an agreement, how hard will it be for Jack to find sex, and how hard will it be for Susan to find sex?
I just want romantic conditions in which Jack does not almost always yield first. /s
I think in your search for a purely equal relationship, where consent is perfect, free from pressure, the entire concept of voluntary relationships gets dissolved.
Is there any salary amount where you will say : 'ok well that's a shitload of cash, I admit, the workers must have freely consented.' ? Because if 19th century-Celestial-body-NOS had agreed to the hypothetical, we would have reached that amount.
a living wage (in the FDR sense, adjusted for the material progress of broader society)
That goes without saying: As the gruel price decreases, so does the living wage.
Seems to me you’re just promising an imaginary state where workers are free/not coerced/secure/rich/ and no one is unemployed, and I don’t think science or history backs this ‘you-can-have-it-all’ utopia. Regardless, what measures are you proposing?
Tree
1yr ago
Cypselus was the first tyrant of Corinth in the 7th century BC. Like the signori of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, the tyrants usually seized power at the head of some popular support. As in Renaissance Italy, a cult of personality naturally substituted for the divine right of the former legitimate royal house. He ruled for thirty years and in 627 BC was succeeded as tyrant by his son Periander, who was considered one of the Seven Sages of Greece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypselus
According to Polyaenus, Syloson was a general of the Samians who was believed to have democratic leanings. He suggests that Syloson was the founder of a tyrannical dynasty which ruled Samos for most of the sixth century BC, being succeeded first by Aeaces and then by Polycrates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syloson_(son_of_Calliteles)
Pisistratus was a politician in ancient Athens, ruling as tyrant in the late 560s, the early 550s and from 546 BC until his death. Pisistratus' championing of the lower class of Athens is an early example of populism. Pisistratids is the common family or clan name for the three tyrants, who ruled in Athens from 546 to 510 BC, referring to Pisistratus and his two sons, Hipparchus and Hippias.
Tree
1yr ago
A lot of hereditary monarchies start by winning a vote (Hugh Capet, or the old greek cycle where democracy devolves into tyranny) .
the divine right of kings will never get you a democracy
Divine Right of Kings => Mandate of Heaven => Popular Sovereignty imbued by the Creator.
Tree
1yr ago
But then you have the problem of people who work full-time who still can't afford the costs of an existence worthy of human dignity.
I don't think that's a real thing. What about a 15k$/year life is below human dignity? The only real indignity is starving, plus maybe not having a (small) roof over your head. And minimum wage workers are far from that. In most western countries, even those who refuse to work, who are supported by the rest of society, are far from that.
unions are an attempt to solve the very problem I am alluding to, namely the gross imbalance of power between Alice and Bob!
Only the imbalance between union members and the boss. The unemployed are screwed. It creates a new class of protected workers who cannot be fired, and so make hiring more risky and expensive, increasing unemployment.
Perhaps 'full employment' was not the exactly correct term; I am referring to the balance of power between management and labour, and economic circumstances in which the lack of an agreement has similar costs to both sides.
So essentially, you admit there's full employment, yet there's still no way to get you to accept that workers have agency/they aren't raped when they have sex with their boss? Only if there's a new system, full communism or something.
I think achieving the lack of any real unemployment in a society (like the current 4% in the US) is of primary importance, and a great boost to the agency, bargaining power, and psychological health of workers. So I'm very sceptical of any attempts to help workers that could increase unemployment (raising minimum wage, anti-firing legislation, etc). What they gain in salary or security, they lose in bargaining power - that's not a good trade over the long term.
Tree
1yr ago
An that's why I always say the best anti-rape policy is to lower the minimum wage and fight the unions.
Doesn't the US have full employment already, therefore Bob was not raped?
Tree
1yr ago
I don’t think any historical system can be said to ‘actually work’, but especially not the chimera of incoherent nonsense embodying our sexual mores these last years. And even if the old ones did, technological advances like the pill have made them obsolete.
I don’t propose my strict rape standard as some glorious RETVRN point, it’s just the best, most legible standard, gender-neutral, as liberal as it gets and in line with the rest of (less emotionally and religiously charged) jurisprudence.
(the minimum age to babysit in those days was about 13 and the age of consent was 16),
I feel like you’re trying to sneak in ‘underage’ into your draconian ‘babysitter rule’ from earlier. I was thinking, schwarzenegger.
The old school understanding of rape related to the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent, not to the boundary between licit and illicit sex.
Most of what they considered illicit sex (between two unmarried adults, between men, with vestal virgins, etc) has rightly been declared licit, because sex is of little consequence in the modern world. So its ongoing criminalization in eg the workplace, is a pure loss (while being quietly tolerated as long as the woman feels like it, which is also harmful to the rule of law).
But what some ancients considered illicit-innocent-women-sex is an actually decent, generalizable standard for illicit sex. The rest is yesterday’s garbage.
In the instant cases (both "Caroline" and Pavlovich) the woman would have been unemployed and homeless within 24 hours of calling the police on Gaiman - that is something you need to make plans for, and making those plans can take weeks.
I find that a far-fetched scenario, no one needs weeks. But even if the women were ready to flee, were they going to starve on the street? Again, I expect people to show just a little bit of courage, instead of warping the justice system to accommodate them.
I don’t fear luca brasi. The state protects me from luca brasi’s superior force (which is a gun btw) , like it protects women from mine (and I don’t even have a gun). Equality before the law works. Let’s not make up arcane rules about -if citizen A is heavier/smarter/more famous than citizen B, give B retroactive consent-cancelling power on all his contracts.
If your boss says "Can you run down to Fatbucks and fetch me a coffee-flavoured double sugar-water with extra lard?" then you might be able to give an excuse, but a simple "no" is what Sir Humphrey would call a brave career move. Is it different when your boss asks you "Will you kneel down under the desk and blow me?"
No? I don’t get your point here. People fetch their boss’ coffee, and do other tasks they feel queasy about for the paycheck, all the time. This doesn’t give them the legal right to attack their boss five years later.
The equilibrium in societies where quid pro quo sexual harassment is a normal incident of being a woman in the workplace is that women with options stop working outside the home.
And in societies where fetch me coffee is a normal incident, people with options stop working outside the home, because working sucks.
Tree
1yr ago
I never heard of no ‘don’t screw the babysitter’ rule. Babysitters will fuck parents and employees will fuck employees. All the effect of these laws, the ‘real’ sexual harassment laws as you term them, is to ‘multiply crime’. It gives women a legal joker they can play when they feel like it, way down the line. Like here.
I have an old school understanding of rape: victim screams no, immediately goes to the police. All the rest, the sordid relationships, the misunderstandings, the regrets, the quid pro quos, I don’t want to hear. Not any of my or the state’s business.
I just think women are people, and they have the capacity to say no, even when saying yes is the most comfortable path.
Tree
1yr ago
Talleyrand supposedly served France, not any one man or crown. Can't think of any influential russian clergymen, but that's probably on me - o wait, rasputin, lover of the russian queen! I need to switch one of my podcast choices!
Tree
1yr ago
I didn’t know russians had a thing for french men of the cloth. Longing for a historical counter-weight to the autocrat, perhaps?
I’d take Hannibal, Leo, and Lavoisier.
What dilemma is there in this gossip rag? The man is innocent. A crying woman is not a story. People's disgust is not an argument.
it will eventually create headaches for them
It’s not ‘it’ that creates headaches for them, it’s people who try to get them cancelled or prosecuted. Assume your role of censor and hangman.
I'm not sure being married to palmer(edit: pavlovich) would have helped: the rag would have printed the lurid details of what they did behind closed doors, people would have felt 'iffy', they would have moved the blurry boundaries of consent to marital rape, and the tabloid life goes on.
Tree
1yr ago
My boss. Although tbh I didn’t care for the job. I like taking l long holidays after a few years' work.
the woke mob were absolutely capable of destroying people's livelihoods if they told them to fuck off
I'm not saying they weren't, but like hydro says a lot of people were far more afraid than they realistically had reason to. Also, defending one's ideas is not supposed to be costless. I would prefer to lose out on a job than debase myself with a DEI statement. And that's before any moral implications, because all those who went along were complicit in making other people's lives hell. I'm sorry your life got ruined, that's obviously above and beyond what can be expected of people, but I do think they have a duty to offer resistance when they disagree.
Not that pure. There’s three levels of deniability to soften the lie of ‘I disagree with’: ‘sort of’ , ‘in a way’(redundant), ‘creeps me out’ (focusing on his feelings to avoid admitting his thoughts).
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