i’m on team approval, for “one-for-all” positions, where one person is supposed to represent a whole community. for “everybody in” representative minipublics (e.g. pop-weighted legislatures), you want a system that reliably yields proportional representation drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/24/t...
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Commandment I: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
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the first time his entourage enthused he had a mandate, he said that wasn’t his thing and asked where Laura was. #microfiction
would bombs and bullets chasten these people, or enable a “crackdown on terrorism” they’d use as an excuse for anything and everything? what fraction of Hong Kong marched for democracy? how hard was it, with contemporary technologies of surveillance and control, to utterly crush them? like water.
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📌
i pay them for a subscription year after year, and still i am the product. tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures/... (hat tip Florian Schmidt)
“Mostly, we elect lawyers. Lawyers can do many things, but if you ask a lawyer to tell you how to make your drinking water safe, you will likely die a horrible death.” ~Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/p...
and perfidious ones with /sss 🐍
the truth is out there. and it’s coming for you.
path dependence. a whole lot of people were on Google Reader, used it habitually. that happened because it was well done, and RSS was the main game in town. when G killed Reader, fine alternatives emerged. but now Twitter was there, easy. for most ppl rebuilding a feedreader was too much trouble.
satellite radio
real americans grift.
yes. it would be collective action, but tacitly coordinated. overt organization would mark people for overt punishment.
between starvation and maximal contribution there’s a wide range of participation. think of “work to rule” as a labor action.
maybe? obviously social affairs are uncertain and you can tell all kinds of stories. but vigor of an economy contributing to the legitimacy and durability of a regime seems like a pretty robust observation. you could imagine some special circumstances, you could also fool yourself.
yes, but that is like the economists' case for not voting. the expected local cost is higher than any expected benefit. 1/
it's ultimately a bad argument. in social affairs we are interested in how actions compose, and local choices about how to be rational may yield undesirable outcomes once composition by similarly situated agents is taken into account. 2/
if a wide variety of actors who are well situated to determine by their degree of participation how an economy will perform recognize that they state that superintends them is bad, they might effectively vote by tacitly coordinating to minimize participation and contribution. /fin
I think it's a challenging question, not an easy one. But the reason why not is to accelerate the replacement of the bad state. The near-term benefits a good economy does for ordinary participants must be weighed against an ethical cost in expected durability of the regime.
that's what makes the question challenging. suppose your participation benefits a lot of innocents and increases political support of the status quo. precisely by benefiting innocents, then, you contribute to both the power and longevity of a putatively terrible actor. what's the ethical balance?
anything from making a big investment to contributing in your job. 1/
if you perceive the state under which you operate to be sufficiently ethically abhorrent (obviously, there's a case for the abhorrence of any state, there are degrees and judgment calls), is the ethical choice to minimize participation in the formal economy that state superintends? 2/
the strength of that formal economy defines the degree of resources from which the state can tax, its effective ability to muster coercive power, and most importantly the political legitimacy that ensures its continuity. 3/
if it would be wrong, for example, to work on a new weapons program for a terrible government, is it wrong to help the firm that employs you hire and grow and contribute to the tax base? or to invest in a new such firm? /fin
is it ethical to contribute to a good economy under a bad state?