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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35661 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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I keep wanting to write something about this kind of blatant procedural outcome manipulation (but I'd be better off searching for someone who already has).

Utopians constantly say things like "we shall have a System to ensure X and prevent Y", and then spend zero time designing a system that isn't trivially exploitable by baseline sociopaths who, shockingly, are agents with goals that don't necessarily align with The System. See the current "communism with magic robots has never been tried" thread for a typical example.

Is there any way to get this across to people who don't want to understand it? In my experience the same people who were just complaining about the nomenklatura betraying the last revolution will stubbornly refuse to entertain the idea that the same thing could happen to their revolution.

Anyway, I'm willing to bet this particular event will get officially recorded on wikipedia as "extremist MAGA election fraud conspiracy theory derails effort to save Queer and Brown school children." Because a coalition of Facebook boomers just found out that the secretary of state lied about ballot counting on a massive scale, and the media has spent two years enforcing the consensus that this can't happen:

A shortfall of that size, about 37% less than the number of signatures supporters said they gathered, is not a "rounding error," said Christine Sawhill Accurso. She organized school-choice proponents to monitor petition signing stations — sometimes pushing back against the petition drive — and report their findings. Either Save Our Schools lied about its support, or was negligent in checking the petitions as they came in, Accurso said.

I think the most predictable outcome here is a huge effort to make this kind of organization impossible in future; bank accounts shut down mysteriously, all online accounts banned, and the phones of every participant added to spam blocking lists. The censorship framework is already there and rapidly growing more sophisticated, but some groups can still slip through the gaps for now.

nomenklatura

Can someone explain why I have seen this word maybe 10 times in the past week but never before in my life? Did some prominent person or blogger use it recently?

It's been extremely common in political speak since the Cold War.

You might have drifted into a new circle? It and the New Class concept have been popular in the dissident right for a long time (was it Sam Francis who introduced it from the New Left clique?)

I've been totally offline for a few weeks now, so it's probably not a current trend.

These days many people use it as a synonym for PMC, sadly.

Just Bader Meinhoff.

I keep conflating "Baader-Meinhoff" with "Dunning-Kruger." I suppose the composite that results is "you think this is just the frequency illusion, but you're mistaken."

Yeah, or maybe synchronicity in the Jungian "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved", with the 'something other' being memetic. People who are all thinking about the same topic are likely to be in a similar headspace. You want to decry nepotism, and you think some recent instance feels particularly soviet, and what was that cool word they had for them? Nomenklatura.

This is how memes are started though, and nomenklatura definitely fits the bill, so it is possible everyone saying it picked it up from the same source. They don't even have to do it consciously - if it fits well your brain might do it anyway.

Utopians constantly say things like "we shall have a System to ensure X and prevent Y", and then spend zero time designing a system that isn't trivially exploitable by baseline sociopaths who, shockingly, are agents with goals that don't necessarily align with The System. See the current "communism with magic robots has never been tried" thread for a typical example.

I feel like this is a fundamental difference between Communists and Capitalists.

Communists seem to think the vast majority of human beings are intrinsically good and only do evil when forced to by circumstance. By fixing the circumstance, you can remove the evil, hence prescribing increased bennies as a panacea to crime. In a utopia, nobody would do wrong because nobody would have a reason to. Everyone wants to hit co-operate and is only forced to hit defect by circumstance. Communism is supposedly about providing for everyone so nobody ever needs to defect against society. It is about diminishing the difference in rewards for co-operation vs defection to almost nothing and trusting in people's better nature to want to be good.

Capitalists recognise that the vast majority of people have at least the capability for evil, if not the constant inclination. People will commit crimes of opportunity and exploit systems and other people when they think they can get away with it. Most people will defect when they're reasonably sure they'll both profit and come out on top. Capitalism is supposed to channel people's greed and other evil instincts into a constructive direction by incentivising pro-social things with monetary rewards. It's putting a thumb on the scale of co-operate by increasing the rewards for co-operating. In theory.

To be clear, this is the platonic ideals of these ideologies and I think that almost nobody who supports them actually supports them in these forms or for these reasons. Most real life "communists" just want to upend society for a quick route to the top via new ruling party loyalty and are perfectly okay with guillotining criminals (and most of them think some people are inherently evil, mainly whites). Most real life "capitalists" don't care for much of capitalism at all honestly, they just don't want those aforementioned communists to win power, because they stand to lose personally, in terms of money, status or their life itself, and probably all three.

This, and the continuing efforts to get a Texas independence referendum, are two key efforts to watch for ascertaining the effectiveness of said censorship.

I think the most predictable outcome here is a huge effort to make this kind of organization impossible in future; bank accounts shut down mysteriously, all online accounts banned, and the phones of every participant added to spam blocking lists.

I'd take that bet, I don't think these people are going to face any consequences. School choice is well within the Overton window.

There are lots of bogus or even downright fraudulent signatures on any signature-gathering mission. People will put bogus information on your petition to deliberately fuck with you and you cannot stop them.

See also: Verizon vs. Net Neutrality

Well yeah, but in this case nobody had to do any of that for the official overseeing the process to celebrate tens of thousands of nonexistent sigs.

If they had written down "Mickey Mouse" an extra 50000 times, the process was for the SoS to verify the sigs to her satisfaction, then send a "randomly selected" 5% sample back to individual counties to do their own verification. Lots of opportunities to sneak things through there, kinda surprised it didn't happen; the last big one only failed after it went to the courts for review for fraudulent sigs the SoS "missed" (iou a source that isn't Salon)

That's the sort of thing I was talking about with people designing a System that on the surface looks secure, but in practice totally depends on one person playing by the rules.

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