What's Interesting To Me Is That For All The Fervor Surrounding Muslims, I've Never Seen Anyone Do Any

Parenting also contains contradictions in values that can be traced back to capitalism itself; anyone who has watched a parent struggle between telling their kid to follow their dreams by joining a band or “facing the real world” and getting a job in marketing knows this. Parents have to choose between raising good people or raising successful workers; there is very little overlap. To quote one of the greatest video games of all time:

Rose: Everyone grows up being told the same thing.

Colonel: Be nice to other people.

Rose: But beat out the competition!

Colonel: "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed."

Rose: But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed...

Unable to reconcile their own moral impulses with the terrifyingly amoral society around them, parents take refuge in activities with clearly visible, tangible metrics of success or failure. Does my son know how to tell right from wrong? Have I raised him to have a cool head and a warm heart? Fuck if I know, but I followed the instructions in all my parenting books to the letter and only gave him formula, so I’ve done my part. My daughter got all A’s on her report card and I only gave her cloth diapers; what more do you want from me? It’s not my fault she started a fraudulent Silicon Valley startup that swindled people out of millions.

Why Mommy Warring?

[Content warning for discussion of how hard it is to be a parent.]

Becoming a parent has given me a new insight into the mommy wars.

Parenting is terrifying. You are 100% responsible for the well-being of a person. They are utterly dependent on you for everything: for their basic requirements such as food and toileting, for their emotional needs like love and consistency, for creating an…

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What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

Yeah, the original guidelines were pretty awful, but this kind of reaction bothers me. The stuff about communication and building better relationships is great, but telling depressed or anxious men who are stressed out from any number of causes-say, intense competition at work, crippling insecurity, or unhealthy relationships with other men- to fix their problems via...more competition, more contact with other men, and greater submission to their current hierarchies seems like a step back.

Alternative, Scientifically-Literate Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men - Quillette

The American Psychological Association’s “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” have received much criticism from journalists and professional psychologists. Much of the opposition has centered on the guideline’s attack on “traditional masculinity” and the privileging of activism over evidence-based treatment. One of the few redeeming features of the guidelines is their acknowledgement that men face unique physical, psychological, educational, and social challenges and are less likely to seek psychological treatment to meet those challenges. But the guidelines fail in their targeted goal of preparing therapists to help the men under their care. Throughout the entirety of the APA’s guidelines, discussion of evolutionary influences on men’s psychological development is either unintentionally neglected or willfully avoided (“testosterone” appears nowhere in the document and, out of more than 400 citations, only four mention either hormones or anything brain- or neuro-related). Whatever the reason, the fact that a sharp distinction is made between “sex” as biology and “gender” as “psychological, social, and cultural” experience suggests that the authors of the guidelines subscribe to the fallacy of …

I really don’t know what to think of this. We don’t need to explain why men and women are different with evo psych, when we just should take men seriously, and treat them as individuals, not as members of some kind of social masculinity movement/ideology, and take their suffering seriously, not just because of caveman-just-so-story cant-help-it determinism.

My maternal grandfather is an incredibly sweet man who has never raised his voice to me and has always been generous with his gifts and advice.

He also spent my mother's childhood mocking civil rights activists, making racist jokes (such as referring to MLK Day as James Earl Ray Day) and indoctrinating her with racist and neo-Confederate ideas, as well as voting for groups and politicians in the Deep South that aligned with his views. He also did extensive contracting work with the military, which may or may not strike you as evil depending on your perspective, but I view it as such.

Will I be sad when he passes away? Yes, because he was kind to me personally. But I will also be relieved, because the world will be, on net, a better place without him in it.

I mean, I really hope the people in their 70s now will die eventually, since theyve had a stranglehold on politics for years. I don’t think this observation is remotely similar to advocating for genocide (or gerontocide?).

Anon, you’re eagerly awaiting others’ deaths just because you want the reins of power? I’m hoping you’re just not noticing how messed up that is.

"Faced with devastating declines in government services, many have stepped in to provide basic social services and natural disaster training. This is particularly notable in rural counties in states like Oregon, where the combination of long-term collapse in timber revenue and dwindling federal subsidies has all but emptied the coffers of local governments.

In this situation, the Oath Keepers began to offer basic “community preparedness” and “disaster response” courses, and encouraged the formation of community watches and full-blown militias as parallel government structures.

While filling in the holes left by underfunded law enforcement in Josephine County, for example, Patriot-affiliated politicians were also leading the opposition to new property tax measures that would have allowed the hiring of more deputies.

By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions...often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support."

-Phil Neel, Hinterland

Boots on the Ground

Anti-government organizations are filling a disaster-response gap — and using it to spread their message.

For nearly a decade, the Oath Keepers — which formed in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency — have responded to disasters like hurricanes and floods by administering rescue operations, serving hot meals, and doing construction work. Disasters provide the Oath Keepers with opportunities to fundraise and gain the trust of people who might not otherwise be sympathetic to their anti-government cause. By arriving to crisis zones before federal agencies do, the Oath Keepers take advantage of bureaucratic weaknesses, holding a hand out to people in desperate circumstances.

This all serves to reinforce the militia members’ conviction that the government is fallible, negligent, and not to be trusted. And every time a new person sees the Oath Keepers as the helpers who respond when the government does not, it helps build the group’s fledgling brand.

[…]

“There’s a long-standing conspiracy theory among the far right that everything that FEMA does is dual use,” Jackson said. “It has this surface-level purpose of responding to emergencies and disasters and all that kind of stuff. But also it’s building up the infrastructure so that one day when martial law is declared, there are these huge detention camps and there are deployed resources to be used by troops who are enforcing martial law.”

Many Oath Keepers subscribe to that belief, but they’re not vocal about it. Publicly, Jackson said, they portray themselves as supplementing FEMA’s efforts and even working in tandem with the agency. It’s part and parcel of the group’s founding ethos — understand the system, work within the system, and be prepared to defeat the system when the time comes.

What is land theft? Who owns land? Is it whoever settled it first? Whoever defends it from challengers? Should individuals own land exclusively or do people who share a certain culture or race have a right to own land exclusively? How are culture and race defined?

Put it simply, to heavily paraphrase James Conolly, what use is it for black South Africans to drive out white landowners if they will only end up being exploited by their own black bourgeoisie? Does it really make a difference what color hand holds the whip?

No Country For White Men: This after The Leftist Media spent all yesterday saying Trump was lying and it’s a “conspiracy theory”

So much awful American car discourse could be avoided if we simply RetVurned to Tradition and built big beautiful trains from sea to shining sea.

one of the things that’s been lost in the recent “let them buy electric” kerfuffle is that there’s a sort of feedback mechanism at work where americans can’t estimate distance correctly and companies see this and are unwilling to put the electric cars that might serve them well on the market. the go-to cheaper electric car on the north american market is the $30k+ nissan leaf. one thing i’ve often found in twitter threads discussing it is americans who say that its 150 mile range simply isn’t big enough for their needs. however, if you’re commuting an hour each way to work, 150 miles is enough to stop in somewhere and pick up groceries. few americans even drive 50 miles a day for work. meanwhile, in europe and china, much cheaper options exist. the dacia spring sells in france for 17,000 euros, or under 20,000 usd, and has a range of 143 miles. the hongguang mini sells in china for the equivalent of 5000 usd and has a range of 100 miles. for many americans, either of these cars could easily replace their current vehicle, especially for those who live in cities, if companies were willing to bring them over. you can see the proof in sales of electric bikes, which now outpace electric cars and have the sort of price and range needed for <10 mile trips (not to mention, some have cargo compartments for grocery rides). however, given the high profit margins on SUVs (as well as america’s addiction to the idea that bigger cars are always safer), it’s unlikely that companies will want to undercut themselves with efficient smaller electric vehicles.

There's a problem here in that if we give socialism a broad meaning to the point where it can be applied to any political program involving state planned/owned/regulated economy, we end up with "socialism with Chinese characteristics". On the other hand, when I try to give specific, concrete examples of what I want socialism to look like or what I think it would grow into given sufficient organic development and trial-and-error experimentation, my definitions are so narrow I quickly end up looking like just another special snowflake whose own personal definition of socialism has never been tried, etc.

It's great that we discuss and debate our terms but I fear that leaving them too vague means we get bogged down in semantic infighting and our political results follow suit.

Idea: Resolve this problem by giving workers the power to fire colleagues that they deem lazy or dangerously incompetent. Terminated workers have the right to defend themselves in a court-like environment, with consideration given to the importance/inherent danger of their job and the consequences of letting them stay or forcing them out. Terminated workers are compensated with unemployment benefits and recieve assistance from local government in finding a new occupation.