hustlegrinder
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User ID: 719
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
That is what you would do were you in the state's position, is it not?
No, I don’t generally violate the NAP even if it’s profitable for me to do so — I am a principled man and I value these principles.
What if the ongoing benefits of of your participation in the economy, are less than the perceived costs? You say "value a country receives out of my residence in it extends far in the future" but how can that be if you leave?
First, it’s simply not the case, in a viscerally evident way — the state makes money on taxes and also my participation in the economy of a country means that something in it is getting done well — this is how I get my capital in the first place.
Second, I think you haven’t really understood my perspective of seeing this as fundamentally a business relationship. Suppose you are subscribed to Netflix. You pay them 10$ per month, and in return you can watch movies there. If Netflix feels they are providing you this service at a loss, they can raise the prices (let’s call them “taxes”). Then you are free to either accept these prices or to switch to a different provider.
Similarly if a state feels they spend more value on me than it gets back, well they can raise taxes and then I can decide whether or not to relocate my enterprise after that.
Ideally this all leads to a mutually beneficial arrangement where I provide value to the state, and the state provides value to me; indeed the state can provide valuable services — protection, arbitrage, infrastructure, and so on — I am not opposed to paying for them. It is only fair.
The difference is of course that the state, unlike Netflix, can use force to compel me to accept a deal that I wouldn’t have accepted on my own free will. Some things, like liberal institutions, make it harder, so I support them; some things, like proliferation of nationalism, make it easier, so I oppose them.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Of course you are allowed to be a nationalist, in fact I think you should be allowed to subscribe to any worldview, however wrong or extreme it might be. Freedom of speech and all that
It’s just that I won’t support you in doing so, and will back up people who work in opposition to these ideas.
every leadership, regime that has severely impugned on this right has failed or collapsed, so there is that. There is a balance.
That’s correct, but it’s of little comfort to you personally, if you have no plausible option to walk away from it — which is exactly my point
Not really. nationalism does not imply you cannot pick your stuff up and move elsewhere and even be accepted in your new country (like how Russian Jews assimilated well in the US)
US is not an ethnostate, and ethnonationalism is a different thing compared to the US nationalism — in this post I’m arguing mostly against the former.
Then again, nationalism of any sort is antithetical to the paradigm of shopping for countries that offer the best terms for you and your businesses.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
You have a point, I’ll concede you that, but..
Close. It's a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to refute flimsy justifications for racist practices.
There are many ways to argue against affirmative action and I think it’s best to focus on the ones that don’t sound like a scientific references section to mein kampf. I guess by now it should be pretty evident that shilling for HBD ain’t going to win you the hearts and minds of normal people.
Therefore I think the practice of using HBD to refute affirmative action presumptions should also be considered thoroughly uninteresting.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
My comment is just about this bit. Imagine 5000 Koreans migrated to the Bronx. Through discipline, patience, and sacrifice they’ve made for themselves businesses and a safe community with low criminality. Everything they earned they worked for. Should they have to send their kids to a school filled with non-Koreans, say Dominicans or Haitians, who have average worse values and higher criminality? Should they be forced at threat of ruin to hire non-Koreans?
No, I don’t think we should infringe on their freedom of association.
However, when I hire a Korean to work for my company I don’t want him to promote or hire people based on them being or not being Korean. When my company is small I can ensure that personally. But when it gets big, then I must replace my own judgement (a limited resource) with some kind of a company policy. What options do I have here?
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Regime change.. towards what? Alright, suppose Putin wins and suppose it triggers some regime changes in the West — a few European Putin LARPers might come to power — then what? Is your vision of the future a world littered with dysfunctional authoritarian states on the range from Putinist Russia to North Korea?
Then about the vaccinations… I made a Pfizer shot last year. It’s actual effect on my life is zero. Yes, I get it, it’s a bad precedent. Yes, I get it, the governments should stay the fuck out of regulating what you do to your body. Yes, I get it, it can and will get worse i the future. That said: trading a Western government for a Russian one is trading away a whole lot of your actual, important, substantial freedoms for something that is not (at least yet) a big deal.
John Galt had a hidden valley in the mountains, we the Russians have the western countries; where would you go if you achieved your stated ideal of dismantling the western regime? Don’t delude yourself thinking you’d fare well in Russia. That requires either doing nothing of importance (what kind of life is that), swearing fealty to degenerates, or indeed going against the govt and winning.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
This is certainly true, as I nodded to in my original post advertising is actually excellent for a market, but similar to banking, needs some sort of strong regulatory framework to be best used. To be clear I'm not advocating for full eradication of advertising, I'm advocating the position that advertisements are currently highly effective, and they will become far more effective in the future. We need to have a discussion about where we draw the line, preferably before the line gets crossed. That may be at the level of advertisement we have today, it may be at a different spot. But too few people know or care about how effective ads are.
Consider that your opposition to ads, is in fact precisely due to the ads being not as effective as they might be. The average CTR rate for an ad is in the ballpark of 1%. Average conversion rate in e-commerce is about 3%. It means that for 10,000 ads you see there are like 3 products you are going to buy. 9997 of them end up useless. 9900 of them you wouldn't even click on. The average ad ends up just cluttering visual space for you.
And then imagine a world where say at least 1 out of 10 ads actually suggests something you might want to buy.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
… maybe?
If at some point the baby can be "aborted" via C-section, I don’t have any objections to mandating it be done that way.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
I'm reminded of the "soul-editor" from the SCP Foundation Wiki that had symbols from every major world religion, as well as a few unknown ones.
What SCP number, by the way?
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
I also lean libertarian and I am against euthanasia.
The society and the state simply cannot be trusted these matters, and the added convenience of legalised euthanasia isn’t worth their involvement. There are going to be all kinds of ugly things from states covering up murders, to vulnerable people being pressured towards it by shrinks or activists or whoever else who profits from this.
If someone really wants to end their life they should procure a gun and do it themselves.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Was the fall of the USSR also lamentable for the same reason?
Kind of; the way the USSR was dismantled is a cause both of the Russian government being what it is now, and also of the territorial disputes with Ukraine that are ostensibly the reason for a war that has a [however small] chance of turning nuclear.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
I wonder how much of it will be implemented?
Pretty much none.
All these lamentations by the "good Russians" about how every Russian is now tainted with an original sin of the war in Ukraine and is destined to be hated and shunned everywhere, are by and large self-imposed. Just go to Western Europe or America, as long as you have no ties to Putin’s government you’ll be absolutely fine.
These days I travel all over Europe, do business, raise investments et cetera; so far I haven’t encountered any significant obstacles, hostility or lost opportunities due to me holding a Russian passport.
Collective responsibility is not a given, avoiding it is always an unalloyed moral good, and your question is kind of like asking what is better — to allow a criminal to beat up ten random people on the streets or murder one — then asking if it’s moral to run away from such a criminal. Of course it is; better yet is to incapacitate the criminal himself so that everyone else can go on their merry way.
Similarly in your story it’s the principal who should be fired for not being able to do his job of maintaining discipline in his school, and for taking it out on unrelated students on top of that.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
If you work on gene modification then of course it’s your job to do that, I for one can only commend this valuable line of work
I am merely saying that it’a morally bankrupt to apply anything other than the individual approach when dealing with individuals, even if it is not always practical to do so
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
No, the reason I personally am opposed to death penalty, and legalised euthanasia for that matter, is that I don’t want to give the state any additional ways or possible covers to murder people
An inconvenient person is framed for a crime -> quickly trialled, sentenced to death and executed -> public finds out the accusation is made up -> "oops, justice system error, sorry but it happens sometimes unfortunately"
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Thing is, the "Bruxelles-Washington" can afford both the NATO and the gays in Poland, they aren’t really forced to choose
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Propaganda can manufacture any other cause and work with it, they’d just say the Ukrainians planned to retake Crimea and roll with that.
Or remember the time they invented an insane conspiracy theory about NATO plotting to attack Russia with biological weapons developed in secret bio labs in Ukraine? That would work too
Putin doesn’t need a proper casus belli to start a war. He doesn’t need democratic approval; international legitimacy is a lost cause for him, so not a factor too (contrary to Hitler w.r.t. Sudetenland, for instance)
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
You still should be concerned about stopping your unscrupulous employees making hires and promotions based on race and not on competency
And you still should be concerned about not hiring talented people held back by racism in their previous history, someone might have worse GPA or worse employment history but actually be a better hire
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Equal opportunity
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Fair enough; the first question better represents what I meant to ask.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Yeah, what I would like to see are the concrete stories, requirements, laws, court decisions, etc that would make me see red — it’s the specifics that interest me. I’m well aware of the general argument
Back to the intent of the original post, I don’t intend to argue against the principle of freedom of association — I support it wholeheartedly, and am interested in ideas that reduce racism and at the same time do not go against the spirit of such principle.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
If the government can unilaterally send you to die in the trenches then your freedom is already crushed
Likewise if a country cannot raise enough people who care about it enough to fight for it on their own volition, then perhaps it ceasing to exist as an independent entity is not such a bad thing
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
True, Russia bad and must be stopped; Ukraine didn’t cross any red lines and will never be a credible threat to the West; supporting it is in best interests of the western countries.
That said, the Ukraine state is corrupt, authoritarian and highly nationalist; think twice before labelling it’s government morally good.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
That is also my perspective.
Except why condemn the cynical western backers in this particular case? For all we know they might have the same assessment; surely it’s unreasonable to expect them to broadcast it in their media right as they supply Ukraine with armaments and promises
The amount of otherwise reasonable people who seem to have drunk the coolaid in earnest gives me a pause too, though
Well imagine if someone paid you one billion dollars, on a condition that your children have to listen to let’s say a course of ten 1-hour CRT lectures in school. Would you agree to it?
If yes, then there is in fact a value of $X that compares to teaching CRT in schools, and it is somewhere between zero and one billion.
It may be hard to estimate precisely, so in real life you should just go with what your intuition tells you is a better option.
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