domain:betonit.substack.com
vorpa-glavo
2hr ago
Because, I don't think most traditional libertarians support the "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" part of the equation, and I think that is a central part of how the idealized form of modern American politics actually works in practice.
I still call myself a "state capacity libertarian" or "liberaltarian" because I want the lightest touch version of this in practice. I'm fuzzy on it, but I think I'd limit it to, say, public schools, employment, banking, and housing. Men with guns can force people to not discriminate in those domains, and then we can leave the people free to discriminate everywhere else in society.
I'm pretty sure that the forced integration of hospitals, hotels, gas stations and public schools that happened at gunpoint in the United States is the only realistic way that could have happened. I'm open to being proven wrong on this point. I would love to be pointed to real world historical examples of oppressed, othered minorities being successfully integrated into wider society without the state forcing the issue.
Also, I think the problem of petty tyrants is not limited to racism. It is just one of the easiest to describe examples. I think even something as simple as, "I'm the black sheep of my family, and the pariah of this small town" can be a case where petty tyranny makes living a happy, fulfilling life difficult. The anonymity of a corporation like McDonald's or Walmart makes us "exile-proof." Even if I reach my lowest point, if I become the most socially hated and cancelled person, the wonderful thing about Capitalist Liberalism is that it shapes us into interchangeable cogs, and I can still get a job at McDonald's or Walmart, and become a part of the background radiation of other people's lives.
bonsaii
5hr ago
It's just yet another step in the direction of forcing American society to restructure for the benefit of dog owners. I've posted before about my utter disdain for modern dog culture and the strong correlation between selfishness/narcissism with dog ownership. They have already turned my city into their personal open-air toilet and have made nearly every space "dog-friendly" despite signs politely requesting otherwise. The difference here is that this isn't just some rule or norm they can repeatedly violate without asking until society throws its hands up at the futility of enforcement. For once, they are on the side opposed to the social norm defectors and need top-down enforcement, but have their heads too far up their dogs' asses to see the irony.
I can agree that the continued fireworks past midnight does get mildly annoying, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the year-round barking these dog owners inflict.
functor
7hr ago
Pope Leo XIV has been pope for two months now. How has his first two months been and has your view of him shifted since he became pope?
aldomilyar
11hr ago
Still you can't deny the Aztecs had a political assemblage which could be meaningfully bargained with about concepts like land ownership and fealty. The Indigenous take in Australia is essentially they were too primitive to 'lose a war' and therefore couldn't have lost a war.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
Tasmania is an interesting one because it's a case of an almost accidental genocide. The Palawa were quite few in number to begin with, and devastated by disease. They then also decided to set about attacking European settlers in raids, and, because colonial government was fairly weak, the settlers tended to band together and counter-raid them, and since the settlers had guns and the Palawa had sharpened sticks, the results were fairly predictable. By the time the colonial government got together enough to locate and resettle the survivors, there were only a few hundred left, and they didn't last.
Today the Palawa are a rare example of an ethnic group that exists purely as mixed-race. There are no people of pure Palawa descent left in existence - they are all people of mixed Palawa-European heritage, and almost all of them pass as white. Examples today would include Michael Mansell, whom I just mentioned, Marcus Windhager, Alison Overeem, Garry Deverell, and so on. All of them, at a glance, are obviously white or Anglo. However, it is supposed to be racist to question a person's Aboriginality, especially if their appearance makes them plainly white.
Deverell, actually, wrote a piece related to Yoorrook last year that hit many of the same notes as this year's report, albeit focused specifically on churches. The 14 aspirations he links are conspicuously unreasonable, including that every Anglican organisation in the state commit itself to employing Aboriginals as 5% or more of its workforce (bear in mind that Aboriginals are less than 1% the population of Victoria); that all properties granted to the church by the government be made freely available for Aboriginal use and that in the event of any such property being sold, Aboriginal groups with a traditional claim receive it for free; that 15% of the sale of any other church properties be given to Aboriginal people directly as reparations; and that all parishes pay 5% or more of their budgets to local Aboriginal groups. It is primarily a demand for money.
The Anglican response to this, of course, was "no".
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
I mean, I can envision an America where Asians run black-like racial advocacy. It's just not very plausible.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
The average daily wage for unskilled labor in the US, even flyover, is higher than a good weekly salary in Mexico, even the DF or Noreste. I don't think you can stop notoriously risk averse unskilled laborers from trying to take advantage of that. You can probably stop them from sticking around though.
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
To add to this, I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it). It's just... rural Oklahoma. There's no added racial tensions. There's probably some legal weirdness in the event of a felony but we're not committing those, or dealing with them against us. Not a lot of people really care.
I have relatives living near the only reservation in Louisiana. The locals are grateful for the casino money(there aren't enough working-age Indians left on the reservation to staff it) but the Indians aren't different enough from the locals for anyone to care about. The white/black(and on top of it, the creole black/economic migrant black) distinction dominates the local racial division to the exclusion of all else.
There's a pop culture portrayal of Indians as these brown-skinned sages with long hair, who may or may not be oppressed but probably have special powers. Lol. They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs. Some of them have unusual superstitions(when I worked construction I had a Cherokee coworker who wouldn't pick up sharp objects unless he knew who owned them) but they're pretty average.
iprayiam3
31m ago
stopping at a reasonable hour (say 10-11 pm) so as not to disturb those trying to sleep. 10pm?! This gets you less than an hour of darkness where I live.
On July 4th itself, we should at least induldge till 2:00am., with maybe till midnight on the day before, through the next closest weekend.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
52m ago
What is to be done? Clearly we must do something
Why must we do something?
Or are you describing someone else’s thinking? Sorry, it just isn’t clear to me if the quoted bit is your own thinking on the subject.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Because, I don't think most traditional libertarians support the "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" part of the equation, and I think that is a central part of how the idealized form of modern American politics actually works in practice.
But in your system, if society is racist top to bottom, how are you getting "men with guns forcing people not to act racist" rather than "men with guns forcing people to act racist"?
functor
2hr ago
Have you really missed naval remote-controlled boats that resulted in Russia losing naval war to navy that has no active traditional surface vessels?
The Starlink ones developed by the US for the defence of Taiwan that are sent to targets located by US surveillance? The Ukrainian naval projects also have a strong British component.
Ukraine's main arms production is assembling Chinese drone components. This is mainly a cottage industry of building parts made to fit together into a small plastic drone. That is fairly far from large scale industry.
aceventura
3hr ago
This tweet was popular on my feed, but frankly I can't distinguish between the physiognomy he's criticizing and how he himself looks. If I didn't know who Dave Greene was already, I might guess he was one of the internet atheists he's mocking. I'll grant that the Antifa people look very odd, but a lot of the terminally online right-wing personalities don't look very different that the terminally online left-wing to me.
Are there differences in physical appearance between the online left and online right?
aceventura
3hr ago
Is this true though?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
I can agree that the continued fireworks past midnight does get mildly annoying, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the year-round barking these dog owners inflict.
This is a crazy take. Fireworks (the mortar kind, which is what people around here do despite them being illegal) are an order of magnitude louder than dogs. Even if your neighbor's dog is barking a lot, barking utterly pales in comparison to fireworks in terms of how disruptive it is due to the massive difference in volume. It's made even worse by the fact that people choose to set off fireworks. At least a dog is an independent creature you can't control, but the fireworks people are deliberately choosing to be assholes disrupting their neighbors. Here people were setting off fireworks until 2 am! Fucking 2 am! Not only that, but people here start setting off fireworks 3-4 weeks before July 4, and continue for 3-4 weeks after, so it's not like it is just one night of this nonsense.
I would've had some sympathy for your argument if you just claimed that the two were equivalently disruptive. But claiming that fireworks are "absolutely nothing" in comparison to dogs barking is not the remotest bit reasonable. And it's not like most people have dogs that bark all the time anyways - I have had one neighbor, in my 40 years on this earth, that had such a dog. And yeah it's annoying. Perhaps one might even say those people are irresponsible and shouldn't own a dog. But they are the minority. Are you really trying to argue that fireworks are just desserts when they punish not only the irresponsible, but also the responsible owners and those who don't even have dogs? Because that would be completely disproportionate.
fmaa
5hr ago
See the first part of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/
I don't even necessarily disagree that this might be a good use of government, but this is essentially not an argument for democracy, but an argument for imperialism. Backwards communities need better morals enforced on them by guys with guns from more enlightened ones.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
Contrary to what @George_E_Hale said, this isn't an odd moment of bluntness for you, it's something you've been warned about before.
Drop this "this is just the way I talk" gimmick. You can say "Blacks aren't smart, but Jews and Chinese are," but phrasing it the way you did just reeks of "I'm an edgy ironic racist, hee hee hee." We've told you this already: being racist isn't prohibited, but you have to figure out how to spray your spittle in a polite manner, and if you find that difficult, that's intentional.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Is there anything to thé theory that the relatively early shift to love matches over arranged marriages has selected Western Europeans for greater phenotypic attractiveness?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
8hr ago
Paralleling @JarJarJedi's story, I tried to outsource some annoying research to Gemini and it just gave me the run around. [TW: Boring ops work] I was trying to find a way to copy a large-ish Cloud SQL MySQL DB from one GCP project to another. Solutions I was given:
- Just make a clone in another project (not allowed)
- Dump the data to a GCS bucket (I said I didn't want to do that in the original prompt)
- Use DMS to transfer the data to an empty Cloud SQL instance in another project (sounded promising, was my original thought... but you can't select a DMS instance in another project from the drop-down)
- Just use the public IP address of the other Cloud SQL instance as the target (and send my prod DB data over the internet? pretty sure the security team would kill me)
- Just use the private IP address of the other Cloud SQL instance (...what? it's in another VPC in another project)
- Just peer the VPCs (hmmm.... but no, Cloud SQL instance interfaces actually exist in a "private services subnet" which is part of a hidden Google-controlled VPC which gets automatically peered to the customer's VPC in the same project (A <-> B), and GCP does not support transitive VPC peering (A <-> B <-> C))
- Just peer the hidden VPCs in each project directly (they're Google-controlled so we can't create peerings)
- Peer the customer's VPC in the source project with the Cloud SQL VPC in the target project (that doesn't make sense)
- Just dump the database into a bucket (sigh)
In the end I probably could have just spent 30-45 minutes reading the docs and figured out what my real options were rather than spending severally hours trying half-baked solutions. I just use Gemini for short scripts, text editing operations, and boilerplate now.
[PS. I think we can use PSC to solve the problem above]
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Yeah, the Aztecs did have something substantial. Pretty sure the Indigenous know they lost a war (they want recognition of massacres on the frontier after all) but want to relitigate it. There's a website that shows you what was happening (or at least what they managed/chose to record) and it was totally one-sided: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
With the Native Americans in the US, they managed to somehow eke out 2:1 or 3:1 native deaths for each white death. In Australia it was 20:1, maybe as high as 60:1.
2rafa
11hr ago
And that’s most of what’s necessary. Some kind of soft-kefala where the migrants don’t stay, don’t have or bring over children, and go home at the end of the season.
cjet79
12hr ago
Calling for collective action seems to have an abandonment of responsibility that I dislike.
I love the phrasing of your second paragraph because it illustrates the problem.
It's not "I want to throw you in a wood chipper for your annoying pedantry" it's 'someone should throw people like you into a wood chipper for their annoying pedantry '. The functional result on my end is the same, but you've dodged responsibility for directly calling for me to be killed.
2D3D
12hr ago
Its just the racial meta. If Asians could only play that game, they would, but they can play the competence game and achieve greater outcomes. The sympathy game is a means of last resort, played only because there are no other cards to play. Nigerian immigrants in Virginia can play both sides of the fence till BLM figures out a way to kick them out fully and get ADOS as a special protected class without the inconvenient racialization allowing actual high performers to cosplay as oppressed.
anti_dan
16hr ago
My preferred solution would be a statute of limitations; maybe 3 years for ordinary stuff, 7 years for really bad stuff.
This is the sort of gamification that just encourages the evil doers. 7 Years is already plenty of time to spread around a few anchor babies so the judge will look favorably on you and maybe violate black letter law in your favor.
this is simply a blatant lie or reveals you have zero knowledge of situation
Ukraine in fact produces weapons. Ranging from "lets zip grenade to civilian drone" through various boring but crucial stuff like ammo and ending on robots, drones and long-range missiles.
And some funky stuff, like what recently took out multiple Russian bombers in long range attacks. No matter how you call it, things that result in multiple burning bombers are weapons and AFAIK these special containers are neither produced by NATO nor orderable on Temu or provided to them by Mossad.
Have you really missed naval remote-controlled boats that resulted in Russia losing naval war to navy that has no active traditional surface vessels?
Please stop commenting on things where you lack basic knowledge. Or, if you are at al qualified in this area: please stop lying and trying to be propaganda repeater. At least find better propaganda materials or learn to add qualifiers so your claims are not obvious lies.
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