(indistinct chatter)
@John (if basically anyone could register a TLD, however expensively, i'd be fine with it. but i don't think that's the case.)
@John with IPv6 everyone can have a big IP space. I don't think it has much to do with DNS names?
i'm a bit grossed-out to learn that google has its own top-level domain.
[new draft post] How rights make wrongs https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/11/15/how-rights-make-wrongs/index.html
@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter i don’t think anyone thinks you are arguing coercion doesn’t exist! but i think the lines you are drawing about how we can distinguish where it is from where it isn’t might be a bit blurrier than we all would like.
@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter sure. whether there’s some partial relevance and to what degree we can debate. but just conceptually, can we agree that under some, perhaps irrelevant, circumstances, provision of a carrot, a voluntary choice, can be a piece of a larger coercive enterprise?
@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter (land and villagers are just a simple example. suppose the leaders of a country that profits from exporting sweatshop labor refuses any social safety net provision, despite it being affordable and utility improving, because the existence of a safety net would raise the reservation wage of workers and reduce profits to sweatshop owners?)
@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter Suppose, my good friend, that a group of bandits comes to a village, sacks it, steals all the land, and then leases it back to them, on bare subsistence terms, so that after rents they just barely have calories to live. Then, they open a factory that offers a somewhat above subsistence wage, purely voluntary. 1/
@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter One way to think of that is that the bad thing was the initial theft, but given that as a fait accompli, the new option is not coercive, in fact should be applauded as offering a real improvement in circumstances! 2/
@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter But suppose the initial theft and the (relatively) generous offer might not be independent. Suppose that the bandits chose to steal the land in order to change the villagers option set so that the wage they wanted to offer would be a real plum, where when they owned the land their reservation wage would be high. 3/
@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter Again, on its own the new offer can hardly be condemned! But to the degree the baseline circumstances that help render the offer attractive are themselves shaped by the offerers, do you think the sequence might compose to something coercive? /fin
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.