Hyperion
1d ago
This is.... Georgism???
No, it's just regular arbitrage. arbitrage would work the same Georgism or not. The whole point of Georgism, is that, if done perfectly, it only has distributional effects, it doesn't change the economic efficiency of the outcome. It is a pure transfer with no distortionary effects.
Hyperion
1d ago
Liberal Democracy is basically only possible if people are some sort of creedal, Reformed Christian. You can have any creed you want, Episcopalian, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Atheist, etc. but you have to conform to the social and theological norms of Reformed Christianity. Shariah Law and Halakah just aren't compatible with Western society and can only be tolerated when they are tiny minorities.
Hyperion
1d ago
pushes low-value companies out of high-value land (as a pro).
If by 'value' you mean a market value people are willing to pay for, then that is true. But, this is a distributional effect. It's like how if we had let the plains Indians own all that prime farmland on the prairie, it could just be used by them to hunt buffalo, but if they had to pay a land tax, they could never afford it. Both outcomes are Pareto efficient, under certain extreme, frictionless, assumptions. However, the distributional consequences are very different, with the land owners rents being totally redistributed to the tax collecting government and these distributional consequences determine what is produced, it's just both outcomes are as economically efficient.
Hyperion
1d ago
By that same argument the only thing that makes a land the ancestral homeland of someone is conquest + time. So, if the Israelis just continue on this path another couple centuries they will own their land just as much as the Scots, English, or Palestinians do now.
(P.S. Your account of the genetic and cultural history of the Jews and Palestinians is very off. I can send you some of Razib Khan's substack posts if you actually care, but I don't think you do.)
Hyperion
6d ago
So stop with the pretense and give me the real thing. Give me actual agency and consequence. Or commit to your singular vision for the story and write a book instead.
The point of the game is the game. Mario isn't about rescuing princess peach it's about platforming. The story is just window dressing for the mechanics. It's just complaining that the game chess doesn't have a canon ending.
Hyperion
4d ago
What do these dystopian sci-fi scenarios of yours have to do with modestly easing California's land use regulations? You constantly attack strawmen positions instead of actually arguing against the policies being proposed.
Hyperion
12d ago
Your dates don't really line up though. Withholding isn't until 1943. You see higher income taxes earlier, after Roosevelt becomes president. You then see an even steeper rise in taxes in general as the USA becomes more and more involved in the war. Finally in 1943 you see withholding implemented, but this is after a decade of higher and higher taxes spurred on by the depression and war. After WW2 you see lower, but still high income taxes and finally income taxes come down after the neo-liberal revolution in the 80s. Withholding doesn't seem important in this picture.
Hyperion
20d ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumes all these 'great' thinkers of the past actually had a point. From my perspective it's all a tower of nonsense with more dung being flung on top and each successive generation just adding more nonsense to the pile.
Saying that Adorno or Horkheimer said something isn't a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place. You can't just cite each others claims as authoritative if those claims are bullshit in the first place.
Not that Zizek cares, his whole philosophy runs on vibes and free association. He is a clown and he likes it when you laugh at him. Trying to argue with a clown is like wrestling with a pig.
Hyperion
14d ago
There's a reason God generally has us call him Father rather than Friend, Boss, or King.
God is referred to as the Lord far more then he is referred to as the Father. If you include Jesus it's even more lopsided in favor of king or lord. Lord is substituted for the name of God in the bible not father. You can hardly go a passage without someone talking about the Lord.
Hyperion
11d ago
She's the wacky MMT advocate who thinks you can just print money to get out of any fiscal problems. He is a very progressive and fiscally liberal, but mainstream, economist who thinks that printing money and borrowing money have very different effects on inflation.
I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.
I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
Hyperion
30d ago
Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.
You don't seem to be advocating one man rule. You seem to be advocating feudalism. China had formal one man rule and this rule was carried out by a massive, powerful bureaucracy. Same thing in France, Britain or Prussia. Whether the state was being run by a parliament of nobles, an elected parliament or just a king. They all needed bureaucracies once they became centralized.
Hyperion
30d ago
How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies? These were things created by kings to run their countries. Kings and aristocrats will still need bureaucrats and courts to run things, your just changing who gets to decide what the laws and regulations are, not the need for them.
Hyperion
20d ago
If Derrida can do it, then anyone can. Post-modernism is the intellectual equivalent of a banana duct-taped to a wall.
Hyperion
1mo ago
I don't think it's just counter-signalling. Freddie really is a dyed in the wool leftist who does have contempt for any remotely rightwing people, even principled liberals and moderates. He hopes he can win those people over to leftism by presenting a more reasonable version, but he knows which side he is on.
Just read this piece from his substack. He hates the anti-woke. Full stop. He hates James Damore and he hates Quillete and he hates Jordan Peterson. He is a leftist. He is 90% woke, he just wants to push for a less insane version.
This isn't a rhetorical tactic, it's what he really believes.
Hyperion
20d ago
There are plenty of philosophers like Hume, who awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, or the late Daniel Dennentt, who aren't building on this pile of nonsense.
There are also various social scientists, historians and other academics who just roll their eyes at this nonsense. There are prominent ones like Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins who even poke the hornets nest from time to time.
It's not hard to tell, there is real stuff being discussed it's just not being discussed by this inbred movement within academia.
Hyperion
14d ago
I was referring to his earlier post. Where he talks about how God is referred to in scripture. Mormon scripture and it's interpretation differs from the Trinitarian majority a lot. He was making claims that only make sense in the context of his Mormonism. The LDS aren't some church, they are a very particular group with very different background assumptions from a standard church that only uses the Bible.
Hyperion
27d ago
Those college campuses still had actual conservatives on them, don't forget that. The radical left and leftists in general, were a minority of a minority then. Conservatives and centrists still dominated the campus. Now the radicals are the minority of the leftist majority, bolstered by the foreign and immigrant Islamic student population.
Also, the radical minority from before is now running the asylum. They pushed for the creation of 'studies' programs that could only accept leftist professors and pushed out conservatives and moderates wherever they could. They use DEI initiatives to further marginalize anyone who would go against them even in STEM fields.
The march through the institutions is almost complete, now we just have to wait for perestroika and glastnov in 3 generations, if we're lucky, maybe I'll still be alive then.
Hyperion
14d ago
The Lord's Prayer also talks about the coming of his kingdom on Earth. I don't know why you hide the fact you are Mormon. I assumed you were coming at this from the perspective of a Christian or Jew whose religious texts and practices I am familiar with. "Heavenly Father" makes more sense in the context of Mormonism's theology, but in the context of more standard Abrahamic faiths, Lord is more common.
These philosophers are talking about stuff that overlaps with social science and science in general. Philosophy isn't some separate world where you can say whatever you like. It is bound by the same rules as everything else. If you are making a point about how humans operate you are making a point that overlaps with economics, sociology, history, psychology, etc. Continental philosophers often make claims about humans that go against what we know about those areas, not to mention claims about physics or mathematics. Sokal makes a big deal in his debunkings of post-modernism the ways that they used ideas from mathematics and physics incorrectly.
'I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathushtra, one who hates the Daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura'
Hyperion
1mo ago
I wouldn't call Germany asleep at the wheel with regards to Russia. I would consider them turning the wheel as sharply as they could towards Russia.
The only surprising thing is that a crisis as immense as the current war in Ukraine was what was needed to wake up their leadership.
Hyperion
2mo ago
They use a tactic that's common to leftist thought. Set up an 'essentialist' strawman of a concept that is 100% discrete and definitive and then after knocking down this strawman declare any more nuanced approach just as essentialist and false as the strawman. It doesn't matter if the 'essentialist' idea of race or sex works 99% of the time, you already defeated any notion that discrete races or sexes exist, so any attempt to categorize people by race or sex must be just as false as the strawman(and motivated by racism and sexism).
Hyperion
8d ago
What would giving native's back their land matter if the land value was all taxed away? I guess if they were their own nations that didn't have to share with white people it would be different, but you can't get to that scenario now without ethnically cleansing white people or allowing minority rule by the natives. Both things allegedly the worst crimes imaginable for the left if white people do them, but somehow righteous if 'indigenous' people do it.
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