I wish journalists (hi NPR!) would tell us the news without leavening every story with their speculations about how the news might affect various politicians' electoral prospects.
Why don't you just let us know what's going on, and then we can decide what we think about it all and vote however we choose.
This is life and death, not a horserace.
@admitsWrongIfProven undead 🧛♂️
@SteveRoth Right. Neoliberal economics is based on the presumption of an innocent or "natural" default, that could be left untouched, "undistorted". But of course there is no such thing in social affairs. The world as it exists is a result of our choices, across a whole spectrum of (de)centralization and institutions that look nothing like the atomized price takers of models. Those institutions continue to make choices, none of which can be neutral.
@FeralRobots what pipe are you smoking? (or is it not a pipe?)
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it’s a weird time when you read a line about a “complex surgical operation” in a hospital and then realize no doctor would be involved.
@magitweeter @whatzaname @HeavenlyPossum @passenger i think there are ends that would be desirable. whether there are means that might achieve those ends that wouldn’t ultimately subvert them, that would at least improve our situation rather than harm it, is a question that i think can’t be answered abstractly. we have to consider possibilities in their details.
@violetmadder @HeavenlyPossum @passenger absolutely. much of how we’ve fucked up the world is by normalizing use of extrinsic, venal motivations for excellences and kindnesses that can only thrive when derived from intrinsic motivation. no “incentivizer” can make kindness profitable in ways that won’t be gamed and subverted.
@magitweeter @whatzaname @HeavenlyPossum @passenger for all of us, i think it’s virtuous and admirable. but i don’t think enough of us will choose those virtues when alternatives tempt if there is not institutional support to engender and sustain a critical mass. 1/
@magitweeter @whatzaname @HeavenlyPossum @passenger some of those “institutions” can be the techniques @HeavenlyPossum points to. they don’t need to be a bureaucracy necessarily. but engendering reliable and very widespread decentralized enforcement of nondomination is quite an organizational problem of its own. /fin
@passenger @HeavenlyPossum i think analyzing these questions — why beyond our gauzy fairy tales do some states seem to succeed for a while? what part of that success represents genuine virtue, what part of it is due to awfulnesses we paper over? how can we sustain the success while increasing the virtues and mitigating the awfulness? — these are the crucial questions. 1/
@passenger @HeavenlyPossum what i don’t think is sufficient is to say, well, just don’t do the awful stuff and everything will be great. to the degree the apparent success depends on the awful stuff, things won’t be great if you just stop. you have to actually figure out what you can do to make thriving consistent with less exploitation and subordination. and that’s hard, but i don’t think impossible. 2/
@passenger @HeavenlyPossum when you analyze the world in functional terms, what is functional and what is moral don’t magically coincide. our work is to figure out how to make goods that contain strong tensions and contradictions between them able to coexist. /fin
@magitweeter @whatzaname @HeavenlyPossum @passenger i agree with you. but they think their definition of noncoercive is the right one. and though i’m sure theirs is wrong, i don’t think there is a right one that would be sufficient to organize our behavior in ways that would be both functional and not compose to domination in the way theirs does. “non-“ anything is not a good basis for what actually to do.
@HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname Stationary bandits, Mancur Olson called them. The community pays for, really provides, everything the state provides, for sure. That doesn't mean the state is a bad way of organizing the community's provision, even if one way of understanding how states emerge is as bandits civilized by the need to maximize the value of the pool from which they steal.
@HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname This is very good. Because I am an enthusiast of the possibilities of states (on that dimension i suspect we will remain opposites, hopefully not bitterly), I read in it a lot of great strategies for helping to discipline and direct a variety of institutions, including states (which I see as fire-like technologies, wonderful when directed well, catastrophic when not). In general, you catalog a lot of good techniques for preventing and subverting domination.
@HeavenlyPossum @whatzaname @passenger let's just say i went off on a hobbyhorse then, and we're all agreed at least this much.
@HeavenlyPossum @whatzaname @passenger i apologize for the word "easy". but i'm doubting the idea that good outcomes are the default, if only bad ways of being or thinking would be abjured. you don't get good from simply an absence of bad. you have to cooperate actively to create what is good. humans have to develop institutions that support and sustain those. they are inevitably imperfect, somebody games them, internal dynamics blind them to some harms. it's hard, never "right", still necessary
@HeavenlyPossum @passenger It's possible that in the absense of things that exist basically everywhere, everything would be great. We can't observe that condition. It does suggest that, even if that were the case, it might be a condition difficult to sustain, given the places we have fallen to, pretty much everywhere. (not everywhere has a meaningful state, but the places that don't don't seem admirable. perhaps bc of the meddling of states! but we can't really say, or prevent that.)
@violetmadder @HeavenlyPossum @passenger I'm really glad to consider alternatives! But I think they have to be positive constructions — what should we do, and how, and this is why people are going to live and act together in ways that lead to good outcomes — rather than negative proscriptions (this is what we dislike, we just won't do that). I don't think eliminating what is bad is a sufficient path to creating what might be good.
@HeavenlyPossum @whatzaname @passenger i agree in practice that's what they are. but i think many of them begin sincerely enough, imagining their creed is about noncoercion and solely voluntary cooperation.
(they tend also to begin from a position of having, or being likely to have, so they are looking for something consistent with keeping. i can extend some benefit of the doubt, but i'll agree one can extend too much.)
@HeavenlyPossum @passenger publics don't provide them in very many elsewheres though. those states seem like a part of a coordination arrangement that works remarkably well. i'm certainly open to other coordination arrangements that might work better, but so far those strike me as the most appealing demostrably feasible models.
@whatzaname @HeavenlyPossum @passenger all i'm saying is they are a cautionary tale. starting from a principal on noncoercion, at an *individual* level, you can find your behavior composes into systems that are terribly coercive. i think freedom, prosperity, cooperation without domination are challenging problems, not easy defaults.
