Corvos
16hr ago
Understood, and that’s interesting to hear. I wanted to write something about the difficulty of getting genuine policy preferences in an election or polling situation:
- the small supply of viable politicians
- the difficulty of disentangling personal preferences from tradeoff complications.
The former is a well known issue with indirect democracy. For the latter, put it this way: if you ask people ‘do you want A’ devoid of tradeoffs, that doesn’t tell you how they’ll respond to real electoral offerings. OTOH if you add in tradeoffs, you have other problems:
- Are you still pro-A if it will mean all your loved ones die in a fire? Well, no, but I don’t think that’s a realistic tradeoff. If I say that I am not pro A on the survey under those conditions, I give the impression that my support for A is weak.
- I may weight issues on achievability as well as desire. Do you value A or B more? Well, perhaps I really care about A but I believe (thanks to the same polls that have these problems) that public support for A is very low and even a politician promising A will never deliver it. Whereas support for X is on a knife edge. I therefore say truthfully that I plan to vote based on X.
Corvos
19hr ago
I believe that he wants everyone, eventually, to end up as what we currently regard as the peak of society: high-ranking engineers, accountants, screenwriters, what have you. In short, he wants everybody, or at least as many people as possible, to climb the ladder and become Elite Human Capital (in his eyes). He would like the entirety of America to one day look like Manhattan, and feels that his political enemies want the entirety of America to one day look like Bumfuck, Alabama (or Brazil).
Where he and I differ is probably that I don't think this is possible or desirable - lots of non-EHC jobs need to be done, it's best for them to be done locally, and you cannot convert non-borderline-EHC into EHC, although you can certainly wreck EHC with drugs or bad political systems.
Corvos
1d ago
At least in the UK, my understanding is that power supply issues were (are?) disguised by protecting costs for home consumers and passing those costs to businesses and industry.
Corvos
2d ago
Speaking only for myself, I voted Reform because of the Boriswave and because Sunak clearly signalled he didn’t plan to do anything about it. It had nothing to do with the economy.
Corvos
3d ago
As Eliezer Yudowsky once said, “That which can be destroyed by fire, should be.”
Then I apologise for misreading you. I come across the real article every so often and it irks me.
If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.
At the very least, this is not an indisputable fact. I've known various Chinese in and out of the country and I've visited briefly; China had much tighter security and much more overt control of information than America, but it was, basically, just another country. The people clearly didn't consider themselves to be living in a dystopia. Nor were they smiling and desperately terrified like somebody in North Korea.
Meanwhile @No_one is literally arguing that America should keep any potential competitors 'in eternal poverty and civil war'. That strikes me as pretty shitty! Like, probably America is still the country that most of us would prefer to win a battle of superpowers if it absolutely must come to that, but that calculus changes very quickly if America starts throwing its weight around even more than it already does.
As a non-American, I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting. If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?
I would also argue that even America benefits from having an actual rival that can go toe-to-toe with it. When America was competing with the USSR, it had to be focused and cohesive and attractive to its citizens. When the USSR died and the USA was left without rivals, it seems to me that it sickened and started to alternate between flailing around and infighting. (The same of course applies to China in reverse).
Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.
But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.
If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.
Corvos
5d ago
Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:
- They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
- They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.
Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.
Fair enough. So in your proposed libertarian world, you would not automatically have the right to sue for breach of contract, damages, or debt? Unless these things turned out to be foundational.
I thought those things were more central to libertarian ideology.
Corvos
6d ago
The IRA is listed there too, but they were not enemies of America and indeed were partly funded by American groups.
Corvos
6d ago
Is it possible that they worked with government to produce this? As you say, it allows the activists to perpetuate themselves but it also produces sympathy and understanding for the government. More reasonable proposals might have been harder to scotch.
Corvos
6d ago
Four: Enforcing contracts, right?
the idiots don't realize that they need to allow my social project or society will of course collapse
What if some of the people saying this are right, though? That is, excluding the American frontier, which I think was historically unprecedented and will not be repeated, what if a stable society really does need a social code enforced by the state or an entity with equivalent power? I guess that would then pass your bar?
Corvos
6d ago
Specifically it argues that the worms all boil to death as the compost heats up.
Corvos
7d ago
I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”
I think it's sort of different in that the accusations that Darwin threw around were much more inflammatory than in the 2A hypothetical: 'JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people' is much more strong than 'Biden wants to take your guns'. He used to use words like 'eradicate', 'racist', etc. a lot. Saying transphobic or racist things, or performing transphobic or racist acts, is literally illegal in Rowling's and my country. Those are strong accusations to throw around!
In that context, it's really pretty bad to throw that heat when you have no evidence, the existing evidence is exactly contra-indicative (Rowling had been reasonably supportive of trans people at the start) and you openly admit you have no interest in actually looking through what she said.
Then moving to 'people like Rowling' as in the quote "people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people" strikes me as broadening that brush rather than narrowing it.
Forgive me, but could you clarify a bit? Are you saying:
- You literally feel absolutely no repugnance / negative valence whatsoever at somebody buying lots of helpless creatures purely because they find it fun to kill them.
- You have some kind of negative emotional response to it, but for intellectual reasons you have decided not to indulge that response. E.g. you rationalise that no actual harm has taken place to anything with moral weight / man is master of the animals and therefore has the right to do such things even if you don’t find it tasteful.
- You feel a negative response that is weak enough that, to you, it can be rounded down to zero in mildly hyperbolic fashion on the internet.
Corvos
7d ago
I don’t think it’s the case that, under the near-100% global fluidity you seem to be arguing for, the west will continue to remain ahead. That is, I don’t necessarily see why economic growth should be sticky under conditions of high global fluidity.
At the moment, Britain (say) is in relative decline. Because we once had a very large market and because companies serving that have mostly been staffed by British people for various reasons, that decline has been slow. Say, Toyota sets up a car factory in Sunderland to build cars for the British market; that factory is mostly staffed by British people by virtue of being in Britain and because of various employment laws, meaning that a decent number of British people are earning a decent salary, meaning that the market for Toyota cars in Britain is still decently sized, etc. But the decline is still present because (among other things) Britain is expensive and therefore British workers require global-market-beating salaries to live well.
Under conditions of maximal global liquidity, I would expect to see accelerated growth and decline, with some countries entering into the India/Taiwan/China/Japan role of ‘cheap country where multinationals can get decent work for low prices’ and other countries declining to that point or past that point and waiting for their time to get back in the spotlight.
(Countries might decline past the ‘spotlight point’ because factories etc. benefit from synergy and investment tends to cluster, so even if several countries have favourable economic conditions only one of them might win the prize at any given time.)
In short, to my mind, the maximally fluid world looks like it would accelerate boom and bust for any given country (or its native population) rather than lead to ratchet growth spread globally. I think it would be hard to get public support for that - first world countries wouldn’t want to sign up for accelerated decline from their current position, and third world countries want to be able to protect their economic growth once they have it.
Corvos
7d ago
No, I mean that it’s going to make it much harder to get any democratic buy in if people who have already experienced growth think that you’re dooming them to decline, people in third world understand that they’re going to get at best two generations of growth and then decline, etc.
I.e. it’s poison for the idea of economic growth, which up until now was mostly regarded positively.
Corvos
7d ago
Given that the 30% wages essentially work due to relative purchasing power and / or arbitrage between a Third World childhood and a First World adulthood, isn’t this global laissez faire approach basically poison for long-term economic growth?
If it becomes widely accepted that economic growth means an increased quality of life here and now, but that the window of opportunity only lasts maybe 1.5 generations before your (grand)children are priced out of the global market, that seems to make growth and laissez faire economics a much tougher sell.
Other people’s sincere patriotism is always a little annoying because it’s generally a claim that they consider their country’s ways strictly superior to mine. Nevertheless, I believe that love of country is (usually) a healthy love to have. What I object to is those people deciding to kneecap everyone else.
I don’t necessarily disapprove of tariffs on the other hand. People don’t have to cooperate with their rivals, just ideally refrain from stomping them to the ground. Of course tactics like market flooding make this philosophy more complex to hold to.
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