WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.
I think that can more straightforwardly and more humanely achieved by, you know, making laws against those things and enforcing them. You don't need to start gatekeeping access to food like a Charles Dickens villain.
And also, reducing welfare to disincentivize actively harmful behavior is one thing; setting the bar at positive "social contributions" is still another. In a post-scarcity world where there's no need to incentivize human beings to pump their time and energy into the economy rather than spending it on more pleasant pursuits, there is no ethical justification for placing any artificial barriers in the way of someone who just wants to collect their share and then go off to live as a reclusive hermit, keeping to himself and never affecting other people's lives one way or the other. In the real world, we rightfully discourage people from becoming unproductive hermits living on welfare, because they're unfairly leeching off other people's sweat and toil, and if too many people defected in that way, the economy would collapse. But if the economy starts literally running itself then preventing hermits from being hermits is just senseless tyranny.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Cyberpunk dystopias are defined by the social order itself being oppressive in one way or another, not by the behavior of the citizens - but regardless, if citizens' good behavior isn't producing anything I object to calling it "social contribution". If what we are talking about is some kind of social conformity tax, its advocates should own up to what they are proposing, without hiding behind language associated with the fair allocation of scarce resources between productive and non-productive members of an economy.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I don't understand this. If we're talking about ~universal welfare in the age of AGI-granted post-scarcity, it becomes ridiculous to try to police the "social contribution" of citizens: nobody's "contributions" will be worth a damn anymore, that's exactly why everyone will be on the dole in the first place. Tiered welfare of the kind you propose might be a useful framework in a society for whose long-term survival the existence of a growing chronically-unemployed underclass is an existential risk, but it loses all meaning in a world where everyone is unemployed and human labor has become permanently irrelevant to the survival of human society.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I don't dispute that there's a lot of fraud and over-extension, but "25-year-old girls" can have crippling health issues. I've known 25-year-old girls with crippling health issues. I imagine you meant "obviously healthy and able-bodied 25-year-old girls", but at that point why specify "25-year-old girls" at all, and while leaving the important bit implicit? Chronic illness can affect people at any age, and of either sex.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Cheap bread isn't very healthy to have as a major component of your diet. Ought to be rye bread or the like, if we're trying to design something people can live on indefinitely with no adverse effects to their health.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
I do not lightly agree with SecureSignals about anything, but I think he has a point that you'd misunderstood his claim: while it may be true that some advocates for the meme want to intentionally cause Hard Times, Signals had bee fairly clear that he wasn't making that point, merely the retrospective claim that historically, as a matter of fact, Hard Times have produced Strong Men via eugenics - whether or no that was "worth it" and whether or not that would or should still work today.
If I am spending my free time reading about Sparta, it's because I think Spartans are cool, and I want to learn more about them.
I hardly think that follows - one can be interested in monstrously evil societies because they're monstrously evil. A man who seeks out an in-depth exposé about the Spanish Inquisition or the Gulags or the Nazis probably is here for the lurid details and the frequent histrionics about how twisted and awful they were. By no means is this the only possible audience for a documentary series about Sparta, but there's no reason to assume that audience doesn't exist.
(Indeed, I myself as a boy, during the brief period where Sparta occupied a large part of my thoughts, pictured it as very much the City Populated Entirely By Nasty Drill Sergeants - it tickled my imagination as a city of insane-sounding joyless motherfuckers which I could scarcely believe had ever existed outside of a cartoon. Not something to be condemned with serious mournful expressions like the Nazis, but a nation made up entirely of heels. That's fun.)
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I think Eupraxia means that it's one thing for sleep sex to have its own appeal that might make up for the advantages it otherwise lacks relative to conventional mutual sex; and another thing to declare it a strict improvement.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I would think that the problem is self-compounding due to the absurdity heuristic. A woman waking up with sore genitals for the first time ever could conceivably put 2 and 2 together and go "oh God, have I been raped in my sleep"; but provided she otherwise trusted her husband, what kind of a mind does it take to go "I've been periodically waking up from sleep with sore genitals for years; it must be because I have been systematically raped every time"? The latter sounds insane. Even if the thought occurred to her, she might very well dismiss it as ridiculous paranoia. Human bodies are weird and full of little aches and itches, middle-aged women's bodies especially. I would guess that precisely because it was a somewhat regular occurrence, she just assumed these sensations must be some kind of natural most-menopausal ailment.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I can imagine a kind of internal logic that overlaps heavily with "men bad, women good" ideas. Anyone can change their identity and pronouns at will, but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male.
That's conceivable, but I'd hardly describe someone who believed that as non-zealous in their gender activism, they'd just be a very idiosyncratic zealot.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Why should I indulge a murderer, though?
You needn't; but the non-murderous trans people you're interested in being nice to understandably perceive misgendering any trans person as an insult to them as a group. Similarly, you may not care about a black murderer's feelings, but you shouldn't call him the N-word in a newspaper article, because it would be hurtful to your non-murderous black readers.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
This is fair, but I don't think that Scott, if asked, would in fact defend ignoring a murderer's pronouns in the press on that basis. Not sure if he'd phrase his objection in terms of "misgendering anybody is hurtful to the sensibilities of the innocent trans people in your readership, so you should she-her the murderer to be nice to them", or in terms of "misgendering people is a mild but indecorous insult, and it's undignified for journalists to hurl indecorous insults at murderers; you shouldn't harp on about a dead murderer's biological sex any more than you should harp on about a dead murderer having had a small penis or an ugly wart, even if the claims are factually true", or something else I can't model.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Lukewarm support for trans rights looks like "studiously use preferred pronouns but avoid materially contentious questions like kids, prisons, sports and bathrooms", not like "use preferred pronouns for nice people but not for murderers". I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.
I yearn to be a parent feels to me like it fits in the lack of hope box, rather than the don't want to box.
Perhaps, but the way you'd phrased it seemed to be focused on people who are doomers about the world as a whole, whereas I'm talking about people with self-confidence issues/therapy-culture-induced paranoia about their personal ability to do right by a child.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
I think "I don't like children." is covering a lot of ground between "I dislike being around children generally" and "I yearn to be a parent but am anxious about whether I'd be bad at it and ruin their childhoods so I won't risk it" (with mid-range options being things like "I like children fine, but there's so much more to life and they're such a time-sink - I'd rather be an uncle!").
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
'Gypsy' is now regarded as a slur
Confusingly, it's a slur in America but a reclaimed community term in the UK.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Surely it seems rather unlikely that even the kind of man who feels up young girls in the street would feel up young girls already carrying knives. There's poor impulse control, and there's Darwin Award-bait.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Just look at NASA.
I don't think NASA is a good example; their mandate means they were always going to have much less friction surface with the general population than most of what we call "institutions".
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Well hold on, if Epstein didn't really know anything then wouldn't this remove the need to keep him quiet in the first place, and thus nullify the starting point of all this theorizing ie "that 'suicide' was sketchy, clearly some spooks took care of him to clean up after themselves"?
I would be happy with calling some of the BLM stuff terrorism, yes!
Not all of it, mind. I think blocking roads is fairly normal protest stuff that doesn't really serve to create a climate of terror in any straightforward sense - not sure how it could terrorize you, would honestly appreciate elaboration. Were the Canadian truckers terrorists? If anything, blocking roads looks to me it's a straightforward show of strength. The protesters demonstrate the ability to actually impede everyday life and the local economy on a meaningful scale if they don't get their way. That's not really the same kind of strategy as the archetypal terrorist attacks - small-scale acts of extreme violence which the terrorists couldn't scale up to a strategically meaningful extent, but which they leverage to frighten people into getting what they want anyway.
(Maybe 9/11 confuses the issue because it's intuitively "big"? But as I see it, what makes it a terrorist rather than merely military act is still the fact that the people who did it could not have repeated it enough times to actually defeat the US militarily. They merely hoped that taking out one or two high-profile targets would freak the enemy out to an irrational degree. Which, alas, it did.)
But certainly, a lot of it was terrorist in nature. Burning buildings is a very good example.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Ah, right. I think we were talking at slight cross purposes. When I said "because it's wrong", I meant that I wanted to designate "openly racially profiling minorities" as in itself "a bad thing", harm done to minorities as a class, as per the framework I outlined in my latest reply where living in a society that racially profiles imposes a significant psychological cost on any person who might be targeted by it, whether or not they actually are. (In contrast to how you seemed to consider the first-order effects of racial profiling itself to be neutral or negligible, and only look at outcomes, ie how many guilty vs innocent men get detained, how unpleasant it is to be briefly detained if innocent, etc.)
I did not mean "it's wrong because it's wrong" as some sort of completely abstract "if someone racially-profiles in the middle of a forest and no one hears it, Baby Jesus still cries" position, though I suppose I can see how you got that impression.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
I think it’s very hard to describe something as both “wrong” and “true”.
I disagree. 24/7 totalitarian surveillance of all citizens at all times would also "work", far better than racial profiling. I am absolutely confident that it would drastically reduce the murder rate. But we still shouldn't do it. It'd be a bad thing in itself, an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on hundreds of millions of people 24/7 - in the same way that perpetually being looked on as possible criminals/rapists/illegal immigrants every day of their lives is an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on the tens of millions of non-white American citizens. (Similarly, parents should not be monitoring their children every second of their life beyond their toddler years, even if that does result in slightly more children who get run over crossing the street.)
In other words:
more young black men killed by black men, a TSA that pats down Asian girls, more expensive ICE operations, etc. how can you describe something as wrong if it reduces bad things in the world?
I think that the cost of normalizing racial profiling would in fact amount to more bad things than its implementation would prevent. Above I spoke of the distributed psychological harm done to all POCs from having to live in a society where it is normalized, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The horrors of slavery, segregation and lynchings are not so far behind us that we should laugh off the chance that reintroducing racial stereotypes into the Overton Window would allow for their return in force. Not in five years, but in fifty? A hundred? Slippery slopes exist. Give the ape brain's anti-outgroup bias an inch and it will take a mile, far in excess of what can be rationally justified.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Certainly that's a valid concern, and a key reason why I would strike "schools and child-care facilities" from the list at least. But even if you believe that it's being used as a Trojan horse for this less savory gambit, I do think the principle I describe is valid in itself, and should be implemented even if divested of the excessive add-ons.
That may be, but "evil state-sized megacorps make you pay through the nose for the very air you breathe" is still a core enough part of the aesthetic that "in order to avoid a cyberpunk dystopia, we should establish a regimented system where people get less food to eat depending on a social credit score" scans to me as almost comically backwards.
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