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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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I think age segregation is a problem, but I’m not sure there’s a good solution to it, either. Ideally robust extended families would function to break it, but we don’t have those and we’re not going to.

There's a solution, but you wouldn't like it.

Create a movement that wishes to see the world dangerous again.

Create a doctrine that attracts people and abhors the managerial regime. Patiently disrupt services through least legally risky forms of sabotage.

Once things come tumbling down, actual serious hardship is real, there's anarchy, people will form communities. Or die, bit the survival drive of most people is strong.

There's no reason for community if what the omnipresent state can't give you isn't something the market can either sell you directly or provide you with an inferior substitute of.

Seems space exploration and colonization could be a good outlet for the dangerous world desires.

I agree. I think without a frontier to explore, people tend to get neurotic and society mutates in ways that aren’t ultimately healthy. Plus, we don’t have to destroy things or depopulate earth. Just send them to mars.

For there to be exploration you need something interesting to find, otherwise why send people to Mars? For them to fuck around and waste expensive to ship supplies?

The purpose of a frontier is settlement. The goal would be to create "self-sustaining" settlements on the Moon or Mars. ("Self-sustaining" here meaning economically, primarily, not literally able to exist forever with zero imports)

The incentive mechanism is straightforward: so long as settlers require economic subsidy, they are citizens of the colonizing nation, like regular astronauts, bound by its laws and duties. Once they are economically self-sufficient and can pay for their inputs on the open market, they gain political independence, ownership of the settlement passes to the settlement collectively, and they may choose to establish whatever form of government seems best to them.

Why would any government subsidize the creation of a colony with no expectation of ultimately realising the profits?

Well, there are minerals in space. More land and this more space for people. We sent people to the New World on leaky boats on the promise of land for the taking and possibly minerals.