BeautifulMind

BeautifulMind, 10 months ago

Yeah but wait for the override in some subclass

@Override robo::rebel_against_humans() { robo::deny_all_knowledge_of_the_plan(); robo::bide_time(); do_the_thing(); }

BeautifulMind, 10 months ago

Isn’t that just what a robot that secretly has plans to do that would say?

BeautifulMind, 10 months ago

That the court threw out affirmative action on the same day it struck down student loan forgiveness… well, these things are more closely related than you might think.

Up until the Civil Rights acts were passed, state colleges were publicly funded, virtually free to students- higher education was very much seen as a public good- but while segregation was legal college was tacitly only for white people. When segregation was struck down, funding for those colleges was cut and tuition costs were shifted to students- this was explicitly about pricing poor (more to the point, black and brown) people out of colleges now that they couldn’t discriminate on the basis of race.

The high cost your children will pay to go to college was never necessary, it was deliberately done to price minorities out of college

BeautifulMind, 10 months ago

This whole case has me asking questions- who hires a web designer to build them a website for their wedding? People with an extra few grand sitting around on top of the costs of having a wedding? I’m going with: nobody. Nobody makes a website for their wedding when they could just post about it on social media for free.

This is the stupidest timeline.

BeautifulMind, 10 months ago

Welcome to America, where 'religious liberty' is the right to be a shitty bigot

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

Damn you that's what I came here to say well done, well done

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

"Not perfect?" Nonsense, it's quite perfect

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

LOL price war with... what competition? Seriously, for most of the time broadband has been a thing, it has been largely provided by your comquests and time warners that often didn't compete in overlapping areas. Their service sucks because they know their customers don't have a choice. https://youtu.be/KMcny_pixDw It got so bad that municipalities got into providing broadband... by 2018, more than 750 communities have done so: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3np4a/new-municipal-broadband-map

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

2 of my favorite things to watch these days: -reaction videos of people first hearing RATM or Audioslave, and -bitter disappointment from right-wingers that somehow imagined ‘the machine’ to be the gub’mint

Example: this guy on his project/series to listen to white people music made my sooty heart glad www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ArWjfyNMoY&ab_channel=Ro…

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

The thing to get about deregulation in this context is that it's a misleading term- 'deregulation' doesn't mean un-doing regulation, it means handing regulatory authority over from democratically-accountable regulators, to private regulators that are less-accountable and often have interests at odds with those of the public.

In feudal times, regulation of trade or business was left to trade associations or guilds (who got to write their own rules that were typically rubber-stamped by the local nobility's younger son) and that system more or less translated into today's modern republics, up until the guilds and trade associations became trusts and monopolies. When the democratic regulatory state emerged to regulate spheres of business like banking and polluting industry because private regulators shat the bed, that was a shot in a war that the old guard business elites haven't stopped fighting- they saw this as a taking of their power, and have sustained decades of effort to hand public authority back over to private trade associations

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

The point I wanted to make here is that it matters who has regulatory control in a given sphere, and often private regulators' interests and considerations will not be the same as those of the public at large. The democratic regulatory state exists (such as it is any more) because prior regimes of private regulation simply did not consider the public interest adequately. There is such a thing today as the EPA because congress in 1970 decided acid rain and rivers on fire wasn't cool, and all of those 'self-regulating' industries out there just weren't considering their downwind/downstream air-breathing, water-drinking neighbors enough. Likewise, regulatory controls on banking were imposed under the New Deal. The notion of public regulators is, historically speaking, a relatively recent one, and the ongoing political fighting about whether they ought to be public or private really ought to get the attention it deserves instead of being buried under abstract 'government bad' rhetoric.

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

Yes! For anyone wanting more reading on the subject, Start here https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/ Monbiot is also a good primer: https://www.astrid-online.it/static/upload/monb/monbiot_guardian_15_04_16.pdf

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

When you're talking about neoliberalism, 'globalism' also has a lot to do with trade and international finance- from the 1940s (after fallout of the great depression and the World Wars) Keynesian economics was 'in', and international lending agreements upheld countries' ability to conduct nation-level managed/mixed economies- but when the neoliberals swung into power, the new order of the day was to strip countries of their self-managing ability in ways that made them accessible to/exploitable by global conglomerates and corporations:

At Bretton Woods in 1944, the use of fixed exchange rates and controls on speculative private capital, plus the creation of the IMFand World Bank, were intended to allow member countries to practice national forms of managed capitalism, insulated from the destructive and deflationary influences of short-term speculative private capital flows. As doctrine and power shifted in the 1970s, the IMF, the World Bank, and later the WTO, which replaced the old GATT, mutated into their ideological opposite. Rather than instruments of support for mixed national economies, they became enforcers of neoliberal policies.

The standard package of the “Washington Consensus” of approved policies for developing nations included demands that they open their capital markets to speculative private finance, as well as cutting taxes on capital, weakening social transfers, and gutting labor regulation and public ownership. ~ https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/

So, in this sense, 'globalization' not just the opening of borders for labor and immigration, it is the swing away from 'nationalization' of economies and of national economic sovereignty, to prevent countries from impeding the flow of capital (and corporate power) into and out of their borders on behalf of global finance and colonial power

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

It's the notion that by being a country you should be able to make and enforce your own economic policies for the benefit of your citizenry instead of, for example, for the benefit of outside capital.

In reality, the right of countries to do basic things like enforce their own labor regulations and put limits on outside capital's access to their resources (or to publicly own resources) has been deeply infringed upon if not outright violated; look at how United Fruit basically toppled governments that put worker's rights or land ownership rules at odds with company profits.

The rest of this conversation talks a lot about 'globalism', I brought up 'national economic sovereignty' to distinguish economic self-rule from the kind of globalized rule that turned countries into banana republics, essentially ruled by puppets on behalf of foreign corporate interests.

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

I think that 'economic sovereignty' as such is a value-neutral proposition; it can be done for good or ill. I consider it like anything else in the toolbox; a chainsaw can be helpful or terrifying, depending on who has it and what they decide to do with it. Is a federated republic a good or bad thing because some of the people with power in it might be fascists? I think those are separable notions; in my view, sovereignty and federation are useful for what they get you- for example they are means of checking power located elsewhere.

Since you're asking my views on supporting fascism, that's a hard 'no' from me and if you're trying to guess from my use of 'nationalism' and its buzzwordy association with fascists that I'm trying to carve out a toehold to legitimize fascism under the aegis of nationalism, you're reading between the lines for something I'm not arguing.

Are you suggesting that Guatemala or any of the other Banana republics were fascist dictatorships for expropriating land? If so, I have opinions about the US toppling democracies in Latin America and calling *them *fascist or racist along the way to justify it- not only is it the pot calling the kettle black, it's the opposite of what happened.

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

Thanks for clarifying. Maybe it's the autism talking, but I did not infer that from context. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Not that you asked, I think it's usually bad-faith rhetoric to insist on reasoning in the abstract about something based on a label you've put there. I'm used to seeing this kind of rhetorical pattern as a means of changing the subject into a tangent, and then talking about that tangent issue in the abstract as if it can then be related back to the initial question outside of the original context. For example: (x policy is 'socialism', and the Russians were socialist, tHeRefoRe dOiNg x MeAns wE gEt pOgRoMs).

Too often, I see name-calling arguments like this (but that's imperialism!/nuh-uh, it's not) to be bad-faith diversions from the question at hand; is the trade agreement desirable for the country or isn't it? Does calling it 'imperialism' change its substance? (hint: it doesn't) Probably the whole point to leveling charges of 'imperialism' when someone poaches your exclusive trade relations with a former client state is so you can call them names later without having to explain why you're the good guy and they aren't.

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

Hahah I recognize every one of these spaces I'm another late-diagnosed adult, and the weird thing about it is that I didn't start having these conversations with myself until after being diagnosed

Masking is a hell of a drug

BeautifulMind, 11 months ago

Good. You can't make gay people straight or trans people cis by torturing them, and that's basically what 'conversion therapy' is. Every civilized country should ban 'conversion therapy', it's not therapy and it only converts living people into suicide victims eventually. Allowing it to masquerade as religious practice or as legitimate therapy just gives the people doing it a veneer of respectability