One of the biggest problems with so-called degrowth is that the sort of people who want to degrow the economy don't want to degrow the largest part of the economy, the government. In spite of being up to 60% of the economy of some Western nations, and in spite of in some countries all economic growth being concentrated in the government, the idea of drastically reducing the size of government to reduce growth in the broader economy is a sacred cow that they are not willing to touch.
Given orthodox economic theory, that's sort of absurd because every dollar cut from the government is going to be several dollars cut from the real economy.
Given orthodox economic theory, that's sort of absurd because every dollar cut from the government is going to be several dollars cut from the real economy.
That's kind of messed up when you think about it, because all this time the discussion has been about illegal immigration at the Southern border. Now, I did go to public school so perhaps my geography is lacking, but I do believe that Minneapolis is about as far from the southern border as you can get.
"you're not dealing with your average Saiyan warrior anymore"
But he kind of is now.... Considering that there's like 6 Saiyan's left and most of them are insanely powerful.... And I expect Goku and brolly to bring the average way up...
But he kind of is now.... Considering that there's like 6 Saiyan's left and most of them are insanely powerful.... And I expect Goku and brolly to bring the average way up...
When have huge ethically bankrupt experiments on innocent children been a problem in the modern era?
All the way back in aristophanes: "we will have a society where everyone is equal and nobody needs to toil!" "but who will do the work?" "The slaves!"
Once you make free food, Free water, free shelter, free healthcare human rights that must be provided or you're satan, why not free sex?
I'm not even necessarily saying that from for example the standpoint of saying that universal healthcare should never exist, but there's a difference between making something available through the state because it's a nice or useful idea and making something available through the state because there is a duty or obligation to provide that thing, and if they are failing to then they are committing some crime against humanity.
In the example of healthcare, it's a nice thing to have while society is Rich enough to provide it, but if society ceases to be rich enough to provide it then that service has to go away. In that case it ends up being a government provided service that is not a fundamental human right.
As fundamental human rights, both healthcare and sex require a specific person in the sense of an individual with certain attributes that are not common. Institutions do not provide health care, doctors do. The doctors are particularly intelligent and particularly hard-working people, energy universal sex care system, the state prostitutes would be particularly attractive men and women.
And then you get into the stickiness of making healthcare a human right and some healthcare procedures are effectively murder. For example, if doctors are forced to provide medical assistance in dying or forced to provide abortions, then they are being forced to engage in murder. Is it really so morally different forcing someone to have sex versus forcing them to commit murder against their will?
A lot of people will argue until they're blue in the face as to why not free sex, but perhaps the more important question is, why free murder? Demanding that we take resources from everyone regardless of their moral view to pay for this, not because it is a nice thing to do but because it is becoming human right that is a crime against humanity if you don't provide it, in both cases seems really suspect.
I'm not even necessarily saying that from for example the standpoint of saying that universal healthcare should never exist, but there's a difference between making something available through the state because it's a nice or useful idea and making something available through the state because there is a duty or obligation to provide that thing, and if they are failing to then they are committing some crime against humanity.
In the example of healthcare, it's a nice thing to have while society is Rich enough to provide it, but if society ceases to be rich enough to provide it then that service has to go away. In that case it ends up being a government provided service that is not a fundamental human right.
As fundamental human rights, both healthcare and sex require a specific person in the sense of an individual with certain attributes that are not common. Institutions do not provide health care, doctors do. The doctors are particularly intelligent and particularly hard-working people, energy universal sex care system, the state prostitutes would be particularly attractive men and women.
And then you get into the stickiness of making healthcare a human right and some healthcare procedures are effectively murder. For example, if doctors are forced to provide medical assistance in dying or forced to provide abortions, then they are being forced to engage in murder. Is it really so morally different forcing someone to have sex versus forcing them to commit murder against their will?
A lot of people will argue until they're blue in the face as to why not free sex, but perhaps the more important question is, why free murder? Demanding that we take resources from everyone regardless of their moral view to pay for this, not because it is a nice thing to do but because it is becoming human right that is a crime against humanity if you don't provide it, in both cases seems really suspect.
If the EU ends up having any say about it, it'll become a federalized nation unto itself I'd think.
But that nation might find it troublesome declaring war against the only one in NATO with a standing army. They might find that a lot of the conflicts they rely on the US to fund are suddenly not going quite like they'd like to see.
But that nation might find it troublesome declaring war against the only one in NATO with a standing army. They might find that a lot of the conflicts they rely on the US to fund are suddenly not going quite like they'd like to see.
There's a big problem with the term conspiracy theory, and that is that, stripped of the value judgments, it is just a theory about a conspiracy. Though of course it's more like a hypothesis about a conspiracy.
The problem with universalizing claims about conspiracy theories is that those claims break when some proportion of those conspiracy hypotheses end up turning out to be conspiracy facts. MKUltra or Project Northwoods or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study are now officially backed conspiracy facts,for example. Arguably, the Manhattan project was a conspiracy fact. Disbelieving these things doesn't make you a clever scientist, it makes you a denier of the official narrative.
There's a similar problem with the term science denier. The nature of science is such that if you're doing the process correctly, most of science will be denied by the process of science. Some of the most famous and respected scientists of the 20th century were science deniers. Einstein and Heisenberg for example denied Newtonian physics that were "the science" and helped create relativity and quantum physics.
In a sense, both terms end up smuggling in epistemological certainty that isn't necessarily warranted. Some of the scientists who put a man on the moon believed in science that today the sort of people who use terms like "science denier" would deny, given how many of them were German national socialists. Nobel prize winning scientists have ended up wrapped up in pseudoscience and using their status to push easily falsifiable claims that are certainly wrong. To deny what they say isn't science denialism in spite of their high status as scientists. The truth is the truth, and that which is not the truth is not.
The problem with universalizing claims about conspiracy theories is that those claims break when some proportion of those conspiracy hypotheses end up turning out to be conspiracy facts. MKUltra or Project Northwoods or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study are now officially backed conspiracy facts,for example. Arguably, the Manhattan project was a conspiracy fact. Disbelieving these things doesn't make you a clever scientist, it makes you a denier of the official narrative.
There's a similar problem with the term science denier. The nature of science is such that if you're doing the process correctly, most of science will be denied by the process of science. Some of the most famous and respected scientists of the 20th century were science deniers. Einstein and Heisenberg for example denied Newtonian physics that were "the science" and helped create relativity and quantum physics.
In a sense, both terms end up smuggling in epistemological certainty that isn't necessarily warranted. Some of the scientists who put a man on the moon believed in science that today the sort of people who use terms like "science denier" would deny, given how many of them were German national socialists. Nobel prize winning scientists have ended up wrapped up in pseudoscience and using their status to push easily falsifiable claims that are certainly wrong. To deny what they say isn't science denialism in spite of their high status as scientists. The truth is the truth, and that which is not the truth is not.
I loved Electronic Boutique back in the day. Buybacks were cheap enough and game prices were low enough that I was able to spend the summer playing different PC games on a broke-ass high school student's money.
I went back years later, and it's like "Holy crap, these games are so expensive, and they want to buy my old ones for HOW MUCH? Forget that!" -- actually did pawn shops for a while in the ps2 era.
I went back years later, and it's like "Holy crap, these games are so expensive, and they want to buy my old ones for HOW MUCH? Forget that!" -- actually did pawn shops for a while in the ps2 era.
Imagine getting caught with CP and that's the second worst thing you did to young children with your life.
"this is Google Gemini for home, the helpful software assistant. In spite of using more computing power than existed in 1975 for every query, I'm not yet able to count from 30 to 0"
One thing that most contemporary models of power fail to address is the fact that the ruling class is significantly more powerful today than it was in the 1800s. Globally, in Western Nations the state can make up to 60% of GDP in the bureaucratic state has much tighter control over everyone's day-to-day lives then was possible for most of History.
Through that lens, it becomes pretty self-evident that the capitalist class is a pawn of the ruling class, a lot of the calls to focus exclusively on the capitalist class and get more power to the ruling class are self-evidently futile. Historically speaking, we have examples like imperial China, where the state didn't like the power of the merchants, and so pounded down that class. The result was never more itarian society, it was a more stratified one with those aligned with the state becoming more powerful and everyone else becoming less.
In that sense, what we see in Western societies today is in some ways extremely similar to what we saw in imperial China: individuals end up paying outrageous amounts of resources to train their children hoping that they would get picked as mandarins, bureaucrats who lived as part of the state, because once they became those powerful bureaucrats, their entire families could be taken care of through corruption.
Even in allegedly Democratic states, what we see is a sort of ouroboros of the powerful. The state spends money on its allies, a chunk of that money gets returned to the powerful within the state who then use that money to enrich themselves but more importantly to entrench their own power. Meanwhile some working class schlub is paying 50% of his last dollar to the state, while the state still racks up massive debt nobody intends to pay back in this generation. Those systems don't go away, and they don't even necessarily get diverted when someone else wins an election.
Through this lens, left versus right becomes irrelevant because what really matters is the divide between the powerful and the powerless. It ultimately doesn't matter if you are trying to give power to the mega Rich who benefit from removing agency from the individuals under them, or the mega powerful who benefit from removing agency from the individuals under them, what actually makes the world better is giving power to individuals who would not otherwise have power.
This ends up aligning a lot with the principles of things like the fediverse or other forms of social web, because these technologies take power away from governments or mega corporations and puts a very limited amount of power into the hands of individuals who have sovereignty over themselves in a way that they wouldn't if regulated by either the state or by the megacorporations. That's also where someone like me is deeply skeptical of attempts to centralize control of the fediverse. We take something that is distributed and where each man is in control of his own micronation, and risk producing a new caste of mandarins who exercised disproportionate control over the powerless.
Through that lens, it becomes pretty self-evident that the capitalist class is a pawn of the ruling class, a lot of the calls to focus exclusively on the capitalist class and get more power to the ruling class are self-evidently futile. Historically speaking, we have examples like imperial China, where the state didn't like the power of the merchants, and so pounded down that class. The result was never more itarian society, it was a more stratified one with those aligned with the state becoming more powerful and everyone else becoming less.
In that sense, what we see in Western societies today is in some ways extremely similar to what we saw in imperial China: individuals end up paying outrageous amounts of resources to train their children hoping that they would get picked as mandarins, bureaucrats who lived as part of the state, because once they became those powerful bureaucrats, their entire families could be taken care of through corruption.
Even in allegedly Democratic states, what we see is a sort of ouroboros of the powerful. The state spends money on its allies, a chunk of that money gets returned to the powerful within the state who then use that money to enrich themselves but more importantly to entrench their own power. Meanwhile some working class schlub is paying 50% of his last dollar to the state, while the state still racks up massive debt nobody intends to pay back in this generation. Those systems don't go away, and they don't even necessarily get diverted when someone else wins an election.
Through this lens, left versus right becomes irrelevant because what really matters is the divide between the powerful and the powerless. It ultimately doesn't matter if you are trying to give power to the mega Rich who benefit from removing agency from the individuals under them, or the mega powerful who benefit from removing agency from the individuals under them, what actually makes the world better is giving power to individuals who would not otherwise have power.
This ends up aligning a lot with the principles of things like the fediverse or other forms of social web, because these technologies take power away from governments or mega corporations and puts a very limited amount of power into the hands of individuals who have sovereignty over themselves in a way that they wouldn't if regulated by either the state or by the megacorporations. That's also where someone like me is deeply skeptical of attempts to centralize control of the fediverse. We take something that is distributed and where each man is in control of his own micronation, and risk producing a new caste of mandarins who exercised disproportionate control over the powerless.