HighResolutionSleep
No bio...
User ID: 172
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
No, I get it. We've set up the system of procedures such that when something like this happens we're not allowed to get mad at or fire anyone. The only lever we have is a binary vote on election year where candidates can say either yes or no to all government spending or none.
I'm reminded of the edit someone made where it says "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR A MANAGEMENT DECISION, PRETTY COOL HUH?" except it's government budgets.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
Alright, so I suppose the answer is actually theoretically infinite. It's possible that we could endlessly shovel money into FEMA, and there could still be no money for hurricanes depending on the charge codes. There is no amount of money that one could see going into FEMA that one could feel safe knowing there's enough for actual natural disasters.
The organization has reached the point where responsibility for budgetary decisions is sufficiently diffused that when something like this happens, it isn't anyone's fault in particular and nobody can be fired because everyone was following orders/procedures. Well, I suppose we can get mad at republicans for not authorizing the right charge code as a part of some monster monster omnibus bill.
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
What I'm asking is how much money do we need to shovel into this organization before it starts having enough left over after migrant expenses for hurricane response. The money we're allocating now isn't enough for the hurricane budget after other expenses. How much more money do we need to give before there's enough?
HighResolutionSleep
1mo ago
How much money does the Federal Emergency Management Agency need to be allocated before it starts having some left over with which to manage federal emergencies?
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
This is an interesting way to consider the problem of arguing to normies why socialism/communism is bad. While I agree that whipping out a supply-demand curve probably isn't the best way of doing it, I'm not sure that offering an alternative to capitalism is right either. I think it's more about knocking out a few load-bearing beliefs about how the capitalist world actually works and what it would looks like with the ultra wealthy gone, starting with the the basic premise of your statement:
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The rich, not even the uber wealthy, "horde wealth" in any way that actually matters. If Jeff Bezos has $100 billion in calculated net worth, that does not mean that he's sitting on a hundred billion-dollar vaults full of gold, cars, cures for cancer, and unobtanium. If you ate the rich, you wouldn't get any of these things—you'd get a millionth owning stake in a yacht. How does this change your life? If you got rid of all those private jets, the commercial ones, the one that proletarians like you or I fly on, will still be producing a lion's share of transport emissions.
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Those CEOs don't really make all that much money. If you ate them all, the workers under them might see their wages increase by a few cents per hour. Who is going to make the choices now? Imagine just how dumb the people you've worked alongside have been, and those are (ostensibly) the people some would like to see in charge. For every boneheaded decision some suit makes, how much worse do you think it could get with that moron Joey lead cashier in charge? Susan from the Department of Agriculture?
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Capitalism doesn't actually say anything about who gets to consume how much. You can do all kinds of wonderful and terrible consumptive redistribution schemes and as long as the capital remains privately owned, it's still capitalism. You don't have to have factories and farms ran by state bureaucrats or line workers to do MMT and give everyone free money. These approaches have the same costs and problems regardless if who is ultimately in charge of organizing production. During COVID we gave a bunch of money to everyone in perhaps the most direct way possible and it made you poorer. How would this change if the state were in charge of the factories?
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Capitalism isn't when the government doesn't do things, and the less things it does, the more capitalister it is. The government can still do stuff under capitalism, but because capital is almost always being used near to its maximum extent at any given time (this isn't a feature unique to capitalism, but history suggest that it does it better), the way the government does stuff almost always takes the form of redirecting consumption into production. It can do this through taxes, and it can also do this by printing money. Since the wealthy actually have a pretty tiny overall consumptive footprint, there's actually very little consumption that can be redirected away from them. So it actually winds up getting largely redirected away from you, because you outnumber the wealthy. Getting you to use paper instead of plastic actually does help the environment more than stopping a short-haul private flight because it's compounded by ten million.
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Capitalism isn't when private companies get to do whatever they want, and the more people they kill, the more capitalism it is. In fact, some famous capitalists have even argued that capitalism simply cannot be done without a state setting the stage for a market to operate such as setting basic rules and enforcing contracts. It may be possible to run a small scale food market when your brother could avenge your death if you were sold tainted bread, but could be difficult to imagine a global food market without quality controls. Capitalism doesn't say you can't regulate negative externalities, and some would even say you can't really do capitalism without it.
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Your job doesn't suck to make fat cats rich. The reason your job sucks is because it was optimized to suck the life out of you in order to deliver maximum value to the customer, who does not care how much your job sucks. When you go to the grocery store, which scrapes about 2% off the total cost of the prices you complain about, you do not care how badly those jobs suck to keep the prices low enough to keep you coming back. You do not care how much the farmer's job sucks, or the truck driver's job sucks, or the grocer's job sucks, and they don't care how much yours sucks. Rich suits get rewarded only for coming up with new and innovative ways for you to not care how much other people's jobs suck, and you always reward their ingenuity.
You'd probably have to adjust the verbiage to your audience, but I think the basic arguments above attack some of the basic perceptions about how the world works that underpin normie anti-capitalist sentiment. Advanced anti-capitalist sentiment is almost always a very different creature and would need to be contended with very differently.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
They stupidly believed the lie that nobody would change their sex just for practical reasons. They will find out soon enough that human opportunism knows no bounds, and they'll eventually abolish sex-based privileges too.
The emerging problem with this is the inevitable backlash. The Culture style gender equality can't happen, because if too many men take up the offer to become women because they are treated better it will be declared not fair and do over.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
I confident you would be just as horrified if I said that men should also be stoned if they say they'd be fine with another kid and then dipped out when one actually happened.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
Wait, so if she is on birth control but gets pregnant anyway and decides not to have an abortion, I should still hate her?
If that's what she said she'd do in the event of an unexpected pregnancy, yep. Stone her. The common blue tribe position is that partners need to communicate on this issues, but it's also a common blue tribe position that women can change their minds about these things whenever they want, especially when a pregnancy actually happens. Communications mean nothing if they don't bind.
In the event nothing was said beforehand, I'm willing to call them both morons and move on. She's the bigger moron considering she has the power, but if it ever came to pass that this were the biggest injustice in the way we adjudicate these matters I'd consider that a virtually unconditional win for any semblance of balance between men and women.
Why is it so important to you that we make this a black and white issue where she is pure evil and deserves no compassion at all?
Because if we're going to offer men cultural and social protection in lieu of legal protection from the abuse of women's reproductive power, these protections need to bite. It can't just be like, well you shouldn't do it, but if you do it nothing bad happens to you, oh well.
I am trying to understand your position. You keep changing the terms
Please highlight where I have "changed the terms" in such a way that gave you the impression that I want to force women to have abortions like some kind of deranged psychopath.
You really do seem to basically want to punish women for having the final say in reproductive decisions.
I want to punish women for abusing this final say like we punish cheaters.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
If you're talking about a woman who deliberately goes off birth control despite knowing her husband doesn't want a baby, I agree, that sucks, and he's be justified in considering that a betrayal and leaving her
Ok cool, that's way more than most would offer, but it also needs to be the case where the pregnancy is a true accident, and all other cases sans the truly exotic. Not only in the most egregious and difficult to prove case.
I would certainly sympathize with him more than with her in that case, though I wouldn't join in the public shaming and stoning you seem to want.
You shouldn't sympathize with her at all, and the social stoning is the point. People should be socially deterred from cheating on their spouses and bringing children into that family that aren't fully wanted.
you haven't described a "cultural problem" other than that you think it's unfair that men can't either force or forbid women to have abortions.
This bad faith interpretation of my words can talk to my hand. You're welcome to bring a real objection to my position forward if you'd like.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
By "abuse of power" are you talking about a woman who baby-traps an unwilling man with a surprise pregnancy
Any time a woman in a marriage decides to go and have a baby without mutual consent. Sure, for reasons of bodily autonomy or whatever she can still choose to betray the privileged trust of marriage and stab him in the back, but the cultural and social consequences for exercising this choice need to be dire.
As for your edge cases, no, the most extreme and unlikely scenarios you can imagine are not societal problems.
Let's keep things on rails: I said that the broader reaction to it is a cultural problem, which is anything but an "edge case". Not the anomalous event itself.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
I can't say I have seen your scenario often enough to say who's right about frequency of reactions
I'm willing to agree to disagree on this point. Your reaction provides a good enough working example.
my opinion if an otherwise stable marriage ended because she suddenly decided she wants a child and he doesn't would be "I'm sorry, that sucks" to both parties.
Right, and I'm saying that's not good enough and proves you're unserious about protecting men from women's disproportionate reproductive power. Your reaction to this abuse of power needs to not be "oopsies, oh well shit happens", but rather, "you suck, fuck you".
As for risk and choice, it's obviously a risk for both parties.
No, it is a choice for women. A baby does not fall out of a woman's uterus immediately after sex. It is the finished product of a long and in this day and age deliberate process, that only one party has any official control over. This reality simply cannot be rhetorically smoothed over and ignored.
(And if "he said no to the sex" - are you talking about a man being raped by a woman and having to pay child support? I guess that has happened a time or two. About as often as a woman having a rapist's baby and having to share custody, perhaps.)
Sure, and notice how that the cavalry arrived for one of these people and not the other. This is a cultural problem.
I don't think people do actually have much sympathy for a woman whose partner leaves her because she wants a(nother) child and he doesn't. It's just an unfortunate irreconcilable difference.
Let's keep things in scope and specify that this is happening within an otherwise stable marriage and there's an unexpected pregnancy. If you're still willing to assert this, I'm open to reviewing evidence, but as it stands I'm believing my own eyes.
He's still financially responsible for any children he produces, though.
I'd like to point out that men don't produce children, but I realize that the definition of "producing" always shuffles around based on who and whom. When it's calculating who bears the most bodily cost and therefore who ought to have the say, she's doing the producing. When it comes to who pays, well it bears his genes so it's 50-50. (Even if he said no to the sex, because why not.)
That's an ever-present potential consequence of having sex that both parties have to live with.
It's a risk for one party, but a choice for the other. I will continue to point this out until I am blue in the face, shouting into the abyss, probably until the day I die.
I understand what is supposed to happen. My concern is what happens when something goes wrong.
Blue tribe is happy to hand wave away men's vulnerability to women's overwhelming reproductive power as "biological" in origin. I am unsure how biology writes our laws in any sense other than the most reductive and worthless—but on the other hand, I am not opposed to the implementation of cultural protections in lieu of legal ones where the latter may be too unwieldy. Blues would insist that any legal protection for men is impossible to practically implement. I may mostly disagree, but I can see how it might be hard to implement within a marriage context. Cultural protections may be appropriate here.
The problem is that this form of protection isn't offered to men by blue tribe in nearly enough volume to justify the power differential. Blue tribe culture may be willing to condemn reproductive coercion of men by women as being kinda mean, and wag a finger at women who do it, but that isn't nearly enough, and proves that blues don't really care about this abuse of power.
If we're taking this seriously, reproductive coercion of men by women really ought to be considered at a similar level of transgression as infidelity. This is a good example of a love crime that we do actually take quite seriously, and offer serious cultural protection against in lieu of legal protection. If we were to apply this kind of protection as a safeguard against women's reproductive power, things would look very, very different. It would look like blue tribe looking at a sobbing woman whose husband left her because she tried forcing another baby on him dead in the face, and, shedding no pity whatsoever, assuring her that all this ruin is only what she wrought upon herself. It would look like, in the other timeline, blue tribe lionizing a husband as downright saintly for finding it in himself to forgive this kind of transgression, given to an individual wholly undeserving of mercy, even if the true intended beneficiaries are the children.
But in the current blue milieu, unexpected babies in marriage are something that just kinda happen. Like, it's a little bad if the woman is being deceptive, but comon dude, shit happens. You need to move on and focus on making room for the new kid. I don't even want to know how much of the asshole he would be if he up and left due to this betrayal. Sticking around is simply being a decent human being and awards no cookies.
Again, I'd have less of a bone to pick with Blue Culture if the protections it claims to offer to men were real, but as it stands right now calling it a fig leaf would be offering too much credit.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
That being the case, that only one person has the deciding vote under the law doesn't make it "deceitful" to argue that for most people it is a decision of "heart and home."
Right but the people who want me to accept this would never characterize it that way.
HighResolutionSleep
2mo ago
I think this is a good description of the story the modern blue tribe tells about itself, and if it were true to form I'd probably have less of a bone to pick with that side of the isle's treatment of my sex. But like many autobiographies, it gives itself too much credit.
I think you'll find that in practice, very little scorn is offered to wives who decide for themselves that having another baby is "right for her", and very little lenience to husbands who aren't prepared to quickly get with that program.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
Couple of thoughts:
- People who own homes often spend against their equity, and dropping house values would at the very least put a stop to this money faucet;
- People who own homes often don't want their neighborhoods to become more affordable, as they do not wish to live near People of Affordability;
- People who don't own homes often have pensions and retirement accounts affixed to the nominal value of homes.
Under the current regime, if you're savvy, you can buy an asset that more than pays for itself, appreciates over time, becomes completely yours after 30 years, and even gets a lot of tax benefits. Why put your money anywhere else? This can't go on.
I agree with the general thought that homes as an investment is incompatible with a functioning nation, because it by definition requires housing to become only less affordable over time. When you consider the fact that what can't continue won't, it's simply inevitable that this arrangement will end at some point. The only question is who will be left holding the bag, which I imagine will be a hotly battled political contest.
Not sure if I want my money in that fight. Difficult to imagine that property owners will somehow win. On the other hand, the tide doesn't look like it's turning quite yet. We're still patching in buffs to what is already the best asset class.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
Sure, and a car can last a million miles if diligently maintained.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
Perhaps, but we'd need at least multiple generations of favorable cultural iteration before reproductive autonomy for men isn't a fringe lunatic idea. I imagine that by then the issue wouldn't practically matter anymore.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
In the IRL battle of the sexes, Team Woman always wins because that's the team most men are on.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
It's unpopular to say to women.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
If the choice is between the father financing her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support and me and you financing her unilateral choices... I say the father.
As long as truly not a single red cent comes out of my pocket to fund her reproductive choices, these terms are tolerable.
HighResolutionSleep
3mo ago
Putting it differently, what level of sacrifice do you think it is okay to demand from one person to save another from a major financial onus that they knowingly exposed themselves to the risk of?
This argument is always such a mind-bender. You're getting the causality exactly backwards—her choosing to give birth is what engages his financial obligation under the current legal scheme, not the other way around. This obligation can be discharged without affecting her ability to choose.
The engine drives the transmission, not the other way around.
HighResolutionSleep
4mo ago
I feel really bad for the other guy that Twitter thought for sure was the shooter.
HighResolutionSleep
5mo ago
It's been said a few times that our rejection of supernatural stories has left young people without the kinds of cautionary tales that used to transmit some amount of wisdom.
Maybe Keith Gill can be the modern world's Icarus.
Yes, I understand how this shell game works. The processes and procedures have been set up such that if I see a gross mismatch of funds and priorities and I get mad, I'm an ignorant rube that doesn't understand how government works. Pretty cool, huh?
It seems that the funding and command structure of this government organ has already failed spectacularly. I don't know, I'm pretty stupid, so maybe I'm seeing things.
Here's an idea generated from my simpleton brain: how about we amputate FEMA as government organ and create in its place an organization with a budget and command structure so that when funds are squandered there's someone to hold responsible. Maybe there's reasons beyond my understanding why this isn't possible.
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