#Ideology Inc.

[nightspires]

DIMITRI BELIKOV WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU—

[mariacallous]

[lilacsupernova]

Attacks on our freedom of association to meet in women-only, and particularly lesbian-only, spaces have occurred for at least three decades—not all from outside. Women, including lesbians, have sometimes divided against each other over whether trans-identifying males (TIMs) should be included in women-only spaces, causing difficulties within, and even disintegration of community-based organisations lesbians had built from nothing.

In 1994, the lesbian community was bitterly divided after fundraising nationally to purchase a building for the Lesbian Space Project. Most of the elected committee favoured women-only space. But an influential lesbian founder insisted that TIMs be included. Consensus was not reached. The building was sold. 'Inclusive' women formed a funding body for lesbians and TIMs. Eligibility criteria embed the belief that males can be lesbians, thereby invalidating lesbians' sex-based rights and autonomy. Half the 2022 first-round community grant monies went to projects without a specific lesbian focus.

Similarly, in 2000, a 'trans rights' activist applied to join Melbourne Women's Circus, formed in 1990 as a healing initiative for women who had been sexually abused or raped. Women were irreconcilably divided about his application, with some viewing it as a threat to the Circus's raison d'être. They left. One stated, after exclusion by other women, 'I had felt trusted and able to trust others. I had lost an entire community, friends...'.

– Coalition of Activist Lesbians Inc Australia (CoAL) (2023) 'Exclusion by Inclusion: Circuses, Sappho, and strange bedfellows in Oz' in Women's Rights, Gender Wrongs: The global impact of gender-identity ideology, pp. 37-8.

[anti-tenten]

Tosen would make way more sense as a tybw villain

Like during """" Winter""" (even though it did not happen in winter) War and some time before that tosen claims he "follows the path of least bloodshed" but the only thing we know about aizens politics is that he's a control freak. Did tosen think aizen would bring peace between shinigami and hueco mundo as the sole leader? It's never really explained at least I never understood why he sided with aizen for any reason besides "I want to see seiretei burn". He did respect aizen, and not just his power and genuinely saw him as more than just a man with a similar goal. But why?

Meanwhile him becoming a traitor during the Quincy war would fit perfectly. He has trauma around someone close to him dying? Ychwach wants to abolish death altogether. Tosen himself is afraid of dying? Previous statement. He hates shinigami and wants a revenge on them? Ychwach hates shinigami. A powerful leader that does not just strike fear but has very clear ideological stances, honest and has a semi-legendary status due to an extremely long life full of leading armies and winning battles? Ychwach. It's wayyyy easier to see a self-hating shinigami to fall for the Quincy ideals than moving to a world full of creatures you spent your life seeing as a personal threat and try to live alongside them just to destroy seiretei and then what exactly. Just flood the human world with hollows or what? Also seeing a shinigami traitor in tybw would be way more interesting but the problem is that kubo made an entire race full of evil people™ and still tried to make them victims sometimes just to forget about it and demonise all of them on the next page for the sake of a cool looking battle of Ichigo and friends Inc. against Quincy meanies with no substance. What a shame

[whole-fruit-pie]

Sad and (mostly) dark Toontown oc facts

Ok so full disclosure, these headcanons will be in no particular order and some of these will have abuse implications, so tread carefully.

One of Bluebell's post-despair symptoms is depressive episodes, affecting her mood and keeping her laff at a low number. It also can make her disinterested in doing anything, making her more restless and giving her more trauma-based nightmares.

Another one of Bluebell's post-despair symptoms is chronic pain.

The scars on her back and stomach were caused by a scuffle between her and a gang of Backstabbers. She's had these scars since she was a teenager.

Bullying of many varieties is alarmingly commonplace within Cogs Inc. Some incidents have resulted in individual cogs either exploding or actively attacking the perpetrator.

Sometimes the bullying can lead to Cogs isolating themselves or malfunctioning due to constant abuse.

Mr. Zero is not above manipulating children...

In fact, one of Zero's victims was a small toon beaver, and he promised to give the toon special gags.

This missing child case led to Toontown citizens becoming aware of Mr. Zero's presence and floodgates opened with more and more missing toons cases with similar incidents leading up to their disappearances.

The lawbot-run "rehabilitation center" is actually, in fact, a jail. The very prison Bluebell was placed in after the chief justice sentenced her to sadness.

Its existence is a tightly held secret within the Lawbot department's elite. Literally, no one else knows of its existence.

The prison is not located near any of the Cog HQs but far away from both Toontown.

Defective, "ideologically deficient", or particularly troublesome Cogs are often sent to the scrapyard to be upcycled or to wither away and shut down.

Certain magical items like elemental potions can be useful but can also be addicting if you drink in excessive quantities. Drinking too much of any elemental potion can alter a Toon or Cog's body beyond repair.

The Cogs have tried to utilize magic in their strategies and cog-building methods. However, these often end disastrously, with one incident involving a short change getting accidentally sent to another dimension, only to return with an unknown parasitic creature burrowing within them. They were immediately destroyed.

[uswnt5]

Absolutely love these sentences. Really a great article and turns of phrase by our on-again-off-again buddy Kevin.

"She has also devoted more time to the eclectic business empire she and her partner and former teammate Tobin Heath are managing, one that includes RE-INC, a gender-neutral community-driven fashion brand, and the RE-CAP Show, the couple’s entertaining award-winning podcast on women’s soccer."

“There’s pain and there’s also an opportunity,” Press said. “I have this ideology that things don’t happen to you, they happen for you. So I always ask myself, ‘What’s the gift of this?’

“It’s a happy story. It’s life, you know. It’s happy and it’s sad. [Am I] a better person?’ No, I’m different.”

I know these really put him back into the convo of potential friend again.

Really enjoyed the whole article.

[fancyfade]

Ok i love infinity inc so don't take this as a diss, but it seems like comparing NTT demon raven arc to Infinity inc silver scarab arc, the tragedy of NTT demon raven is "sure you could have done something different, but no one would have" like we see Raven consistently reject the idea of reaching out to her friends because of how she was brought up, the azarathians were never going to help her because they viewed directly fighting trigon as a betrayal of their ideology in a way that had been established since the very first arc of NTT...

whereas with silver scarab it feels like. the feitheran fatalism was at least *somewhat* established I guess, but Norda going from mostly chill superhero dude wanting to explore the human world on his own terms to completely unquestioning accepter of destiny happened mostly off screen. no one knows anything because it was all kept secret for reasons that are poorly explained. 'lyta knowing about the prophecy could be fatal' why???? anything different could have happened

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a new proposal Thursday to cut greenhouse gas emissions from thousands of power plants burning coal or natural gas, two of the top sources of electricity across the United States. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), criticizing the “radical” proposal, issued his own scorched earth ultimatum on Wednesday ahead of the announcement.

Manchin, chair of the Senate Energy Committee and the top recipient of contributions from the oil and gas industry during the 2022 election cycle, vowed Wednesday to oppose every one of President Joe Biden’s nominees for the EPA “until they halt their government overreach.”

“This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” Manchin wrote in a statement released Wednesday.

The EPA proposal would require most fossil fuel-fired power plants to slash their greenhouse emissions by 90% between 2023 and 2040. The EPA projects the emissions reduction would deliver up to $85 billion in climate and health benefits over the next two decades by heading off premature deaths, emergency room visits, asthma attacks, school absences and lost workdays.

“Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people — cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement issued Thursday.

By 2035, the Biden administration aims to shift all electricity in the U.S. to zero-emission sources including wind, solar, nuclear and hydropower, Roll Call reported. In a written statement, Manchin warned the administration’s “commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security.”

Manchin is up for reelection during the 2024 election cycle, but he has not yet announced whether he will run.

Last month, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) announced his campaign for Manchin’s seat. The Democrat-turned-Republican is among the most popular governors in the country and leads a state former President Donald Trump won by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020.

Manchin has hammered the Biden administration in recent weeks for its implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, the president’s signature climate change bill that the Democratic senator was instrumental in shaping.

“Neither the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law nor the IRA gave new authority to regulate power plant emission standards. However, I fear that this Administration’s commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security and I will oppose all EPA nominees until they halt their government overreach,” Manchin said in his Wednesday statement.

What Manchin did not disclose in his statement, however, is that the EPA proposal would jeopardize one West Virginia coal facility that’s particularly lucrative for Manchin’s family business, Enersystems Inc., POLITICO reported. Enersystems delivers waste coal to the Grant Town power plant, which was reportedly already struggling financially, troubles that are expected to deepen with the strict new climate proposal.

Manchin personally received $537,000 from Enersystems last year, according to POLITICO’s analysis of personal financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate, and he has been paid more than $5 million by the company since he was first elected in 2010. His son, Joe Manchin IV, now runs Enersystems. The Senator’s campaign has also benefited from political contributions from Enersystems, OpenSecrets reported last year.

“This is going to make it harder for them to stay around. You won’t find written anywhere in the rule that this is supposed to be putting coal plants out of business, but just do the math,” Brian Murray, director of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability at Duke University, told POLITICO.

In 2020, Manchin’s home state of West Virginia generated about 90% of its power from coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By contrast, less than 20% of the energy generated nationally comes from coal. Many states, including neighboring Virginia, are phasing out coal by replacing it with natural gas.

While the U.S. may show signs of moving away from coal, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told the Senate Energy Committee earlier this month that the country was not prepared to abandon coal and maintain a reliable energy system.

“Coal is more dependable than gas and yes, we need to keep coal generation available for the foreseeable future,” said Commissioner Mark Christie.

Manchin took another swipe at the EPA on Thursday during an energy committee hearing on permitting reform, when he accused the agency of preventing the development of carbon capture technology by denying companies the permits they need to trap captured carbon underground.

“Don’t tell me that you’re going to invest in carbon capture sequestration when we can’t get a permit to basically sequester the carbon captured,” Manchin said. “This is the game that’s being played. I know it, they know I know it, and we’re not gonna let them get away with it.”

[beardedmrbean]

(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by child pornography victims to overcome a legal shield for internet companies in a case involving a lawsuit accusing Reddit Inc of violating federal law by failing to rid the discussion website of this illegal content.

The justices turned away the appeal of a lower court's decision to dismiss the proposed class action lawsuit on the grounds that Reddit was shielded by a U.S. statute called Section 230, which safeguards internet companies from lawsuits for content posted by users but has an exception for claims involving child sex trafficking.

The Supreme Court on May 19 sidestepped an opportunity to narrow the scope of Section 230 immunity in a separate case.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects "interactive computer services" by ensuring they cannot be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of information provided by users. The Reddit case explored the scope of a 2018 amendment to Section 230 called the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which allows lawsuits against internet companies if the underlying claim involves child sex trafficking.

Reddit allows users to post content that is moderated by other users in forums called subreddits. The case centers on sexually explicit images and videos of children posted to such forums by users. The plaintiffs - the parents of minors and a former minor who were the subjects of the images - sued Reddit in 2021 in federal court in California, seeking monetary damages.

The plaintiffs accused Reddit of doing too little to remove or prevent child pornography and of financially benefiting from the illegal posts through advertising in violation of a federal child sex trafficking law.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 concluded that in order for the exception under FOSTA to apply, plaintiffs must show that an internet company "knowingly benefited" from the sex trafficking through its own conduct.

Instead, the 9th Circuit concluded, the allegations "suggest only that Reddit 'turned a blind eye' to the unlawful content posted on its platform, not that it actively participated in sex trafficking."

Reddit said in court papers that it works hard to find and prevent the sharing of child sexual exploitation materials on its platform, giving all users the ability to flag posts and using dedicated teams to remove illegal content.

The Supreme Court on May 19 declined to rule on a bid to weaken Section 230 in a case seeking to hold Google LLC liable under a federal anti-terrorism law for allegedly recommending content by the Islamic State militant group to users of its YouTube video-sharing service. Google and YouTube are part of Alphabet Inc.

Calls have come from across the ideological and political spectrum - including Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump - for a rethink of Section 230 to ensure that companies can be held accountable for content on their platforms.

"Child pornography is the root cause of much of the sex trafficking that occurs in the world today, and it is primarily traded on the internet, through websites that claim immunity" under Section 230, the plaintiffs said in their appeal to the Supreme Court.

Allowing the 9th Circuit's decision to stand, they added, "would immunize a huge class of violators who play a role in the victimization of children."

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

From La Stampa (translated from Italian):

“Make Finance Great Again,” Trump family makes its own cryptocurrency and allies with Silicon Valley It will be called “World Liberty Financial,” will have tech investors and real estate developers from Chase Herro and Zak Folkman to Steve Witkoff inside. Sons Eric and Donald Jr. will coordinate. And his backer Tyler Winklevoss jokes, “Donald has been orange-pilled, indoctrinated.” Jacopo Iacoboni Sept. 17, 2024 Updated 11:00 a.m. 3 minutes of reading

They want to do a kind of “make finance great again,” along the lines of MAGA, the election slogan and the Make America Great Again campaign. Donald Trump's sons, Don Jr. and Eric, of course with their father's imprimatur, are about to launch a new cryptocurrency platform that will be called “World Liberty Financial,” and will allow users to make even massive transactions without a bank getting in the way and extracting fees (and with a very low level of tax tracking, it should be added). A couple of concepts familiar to bitcoin fans, for example, but which the Trump family now has ambitions to decline on a large scale. It is not certain that this marriage between Trumpism and decentralized finance, DeFi, is a harbinger of only positive developments. The board of “World Liberty Financial” will also consist of former crypto investors such as Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, and Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and old friend of Trump. But thanks to documents filed with the U.S. Federal Election Commission that we have been able to read we know that in general the entire Trump campaign - Make America Great Again Inc. - received money not only from Musk, but cryptocurrency from billionaire twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who lead the cryptocurrency company Gemini: about $3.5 million in Bitcoin on July 19, the day after Trump's speech at the Milwaukee convention. The Winkelvosses also poured in money to America PAC, the tech investor-backed group that Musk helped launch in 2024 (Trump had bragged that Musk was giving him $45 million a month; Musk said his contribution is “at a much lower level”). Another co-founder of a cryptocurrency exchange, Jesse Powell, boss of Kraken, and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (who created a16z) who have invested billions of dollars in cryptocurrency startups, have also made endorsements and poured money into Trump. In short, for the Trump family to embark on this big cryptocurrency project is a natural consequence of the fact that these are almost becoming a Republican asset in the campaign, and the “libertarian” wing of the old Gop is now a kind of very, very rampant ideologized “cyberlibertarianism.” The real boss of the “tech bros” according to many is not Elon Musk, but Peter Thiel. Zuckerberg's longtime partner in Facebook, co-founder of PayPal, Thiel's fortune has at least doubled during the Trump presidency. Palantir-a much-discussed software company variously accused of extracting data from Americans and profiling them-has managed to get a contract from the Pentagon. Other donors to MAGA Inc include Jacob Halberg, Palantir's princely analyst, and Trish Duggan, a wealthy Scientology funder and friend of the tech bros. Trump's vice presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, traveled to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, celebrating a dinner at the home of BitGo CEO Mike Belshe, 100 people each pouring in between $3,300 a plate and a $25,000 roundtable. Trump in 2021 called bitcoin a “fraud against the dollar.” A few weeks ago, speaking in Nashvill at the bitcoin fan conference, he promised, “The United States will become the crypto capital of the planet.” Better than his friend Putin's Russia, although this Trump did not say so explicitly. The fact is that after his speech, Tyler Winklevoss ran on X (now the realm of cyberlibertarians) and joked that Donald had been “orange-pilled,” making a Matrix analogy, had been “indoctrinated,” or had finally seen the real reality behind the appearances.

[tomorrowusa]

Author and journalist Anne Applebaum spoke to the Commonwealth Club of California about her new book Autocracy, Inc..

She actually goes beyond the book which focuses on the collection of repressive autocratic régimes including Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, and North Korea. Despite significant ideological and social differences, the members of this grouping find ways to cooperate in undermining liberal democracies.

While the presentation is over an hour long, it's primarily audio in substance. It can be treated like any audio podcast.

There's one missing link in the autocrats' chain of international kleptocratic subjugation of humanity.

We have 67 days to make sure that a fanboy of foreign autocrats does not complete that chain in the US.

So is every like-minded friend and family member of yours over 18 registered to vote? Now is an excellent time to ask. Don't wait until it's too late to do anything.

Be a voter | Vote Save America

[anachrosims]

I had an epiphany about the greige luxe aesthetic disk horse and I’m here to share it:

Aesthetics are (mostly) neutral things, provided the aesthetic itself isn’t evoking/promoting an ideology that’s rooted in bigotry and/or harming other people. You’re allowed to like greige luxe, which is what I am personally going to call it from now on. Basically, an aesthetic on its own is not good/evil, it didn’t kill your sensei, etc.

Trends, however? Oh, my friends in Christ! My Dear Honeys and Bunches of Oats! Here’s where it gets fun, because trends imply a group of instances within a period of time. A trend is something you can chart out using a graph to say, “this style is being used X (how much it’s used) over Y (a period of months/years).”

When people gripe about the greige luxe nightmare, it’s because we’ve been experiencing it in a gradual crescendo for well over a decade. When a person gripes about a trend, it isn’t a personal attack against people who happen to genuinely have that personal taste, though I’m sure it can often feel like one.

 The problem in this specific case is that greige luxe has a lot of cultural baggage rooted in classism (this aesthetic has been promoted by companies sponsoring overpriced brands--looking at you Magnolia Home) and the diluting (literally) of other styles into being watered down. It’s taken the sleek and often fun pop of midcentury, Scandi, and midcentury modern and even rustic styles and literally neutralized them, sanding off the “rough” edges to make it all more appealing to a wider audience. 

Don’t believe me? Check out this article from the Guardian from 2022, which discusses that “... the origin of this great wave of grey goes back through centuries of western culture to a longstanding prejudice against bright colors, as explored by the artist David Batchelor in his 2000 book Chromophobia.” It goes on to explain, “Goethe’s Theory of Colors, published in 1810, maintained that bright colors were suited to children and animals, not sophisticated adults. ...  Still today, words such as ‘lurid’ and ‘garish’ have negative connotations. ‘Color is often represented as feminine, or Oriental, or primitive, or infantile, rather than grown-up and philosophical and serious … and it’s clearly indexed to issues of race, culture, class and gender,’ says Batchelor.” 

The article further elaborates on this by comparing the trend to what is associated with “’refined taste’”-- “’...a desire for the muted, the minimal, the sparse...’ Over the past 15 years, ‘what we have seen is a move from the yellow end of the spectrum to the cooler one – from beige, to greige’, amounting to what Fox calls ‘a desaturating effect’ across culture.” (Context: British art historian James Fox, author of The World According to Colour.)

As for the Sims community? Well... I personally associate the greige trend with permapaywallers and even well-known early access (but contraversial) creators following it excessively, leading popular builders to make lots based almost entirely around this greige luxe nightmare. In addition to cultural baggage, it’s now got community baggage heaped on, and I expect that’s what’s led to the visceral reaction we’re seeing. Basically in the Sims community, greige luxe is a whole thing associated now with appropriated styles that have been watered down, commodified, and associated with “upper class refinement”, especially to the detriment of variety and vitality.

The article does also point out that as society has become more and more polarized, the trend has grown, “...[s]ince the mid-2010s especially, people have sought not to be energized by their homes – but soothed.” And yeah, that tracks-- people want calm, want simple. And that’s okay! I myself genuinely like soothing rooms, color schemes that are softer--neutrals and pastels and washed-out rustica with a soft pop of color here and there. Absolutely lovely.

I also think there’s merit to wanting something more uplifting, and the article references things like recent tentative trends toward more color, like interior designs leaning for warmer tones, red dining rooms coming back into vogue, and even Apple’s more colorful line of products: “It suggests that post-pandemic people are prioritising not serenity in their homes, but joy.”

To bring it all back home: Yeah, like what you like. Just please try to understand that trend fatigue and changing times can and will lead people to yearn for something different, and it never hurts to branch out into new palettes and decor styles. While I understand the “mass appeal” of simple neutral colors and sleek styles, my own personal happiness needs a bit more levity, more vitality, lest I feel washed out and uninspired.

(I do recommend reading the article; it isn’t an actual indictment of greige, but rather a discussion illustrating opinions both for and against and the history of the “neutral” trend.)

Further suggested reading: How Are Color Trends Decided? Article from DraperyStreet in 2017, & Color Trend Predictions for 2023, from LuxeSource in 2022, & Greige, the Color That’s Taking Over Pinterest, from Business Insider in 2015.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ostromizing democracy

Friday (May 5), I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor for my novel Red Team Blues; and this weekend (May 6/7), I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

You know how “realist” has become a synonym for “asshole?” As in, “I’m not a racist, I’m just a ‘race realist?’” That same “realism” is also used to discredit the idea of democracy itself, among a group of self-styled “libertarian elitists,” who claim that social science proves that democracy doesn’t work — and can’t work.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

You’ve likely encountered elements of this ideology in the wild. Perhaps you’ve heard about how our cognitive biases make us incapable of deliberating, that “reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Or maybe you’ve heard that voters are “rationally ignorant,” choosing not to become informed about politics because their vote doesn’t have enough influence to justify the cognitive expenditure of figuring out how to cast it.

There’s the “backfire effect,” the idea that rational argument doesn’t make us change our minds, but rather, drives us to double-down on our own cherished beliefs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the Asch effect, which says that we will change our minds based on pressure from the majority, even if we know they’re wrong.

Finally, there’s the fact that the public Just Doesn’t Understand Economics. When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with such obvious truths as “we should only worry about how big the pie is, not how big my slice is?” These fools just can’t understand that an economy where their boss gets richer and they get poorer is a good economy, so long as it’s growing overall!

That’s why noted “realist” Peter Thiel thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Thiel says that mothers are apt to sideline the “science” of economics for the soppy, sentimental idea that children shouldn’t starve to death and thus vote for politicians who are willing to tax rich people. Thus do we find ourselves on the road to serfdom:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Other realists go even further, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with orthodox (Chicago School) economists shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “[a]nyone who opposes surge pricing should be disenfranchised. That’s how we should decide who decides in epistocracy.”

Add it all up and you get the various “libertarian” cases for abolishing democracy. Some of these libertarian elitists want to replace democracy with markets, because “markets impose an effective ‘user fee’ for irrationality that is absent from democracy.

Others say we should limit voting to “Vulcans” who can pass a knowledge test about the views of neoclassical economists, and if this means that fewer Black people and women are eligible to vote because either condition is “negatively correlated” with familiarity with “politics,” then so mote be it. After all, these groups are “much more likely than others to be mistaken about what they really need”:

https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/03/the-demographic-argument-for-compulsory-voting-with-a-guest-appearance-by-the-real-reason-the-left-advocates-compulsory-voting/

These arguments and some of their most gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent Democracy Journal article by Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier, and Melissa Schwartzberg (Mercier’s research is often misinterpreted and misquoted by libertarian elitists to bolster their position):

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/the-new-libertarian-elitists/

The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in American Political Science Review, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of political science, Analytical Democracy Theory:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/analytical-democratic-theory-a-microfoundational-approach/739A9A928A99A47994E4585059B03398

What’s “Analytical Democracy Theory?” It’s the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong. Because the libertarian elitists aren’t completely, utterly wrong — there are times when groups of people make bad decisions. From that crumb of truth, the libertarian elitists theorize an entire nihilistic cake in which self-governance is impossible and where we fools and sentimentalists must be subjugated to the will of our intellectual betters, for our own good.

This isn’t the first time libertarian political scientists have pulled this trick. You’ve probably heard of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” which claims to be a “realist” account of what happens when people try to share something — a park, a beach, a forest — without anyone owning it. According to the “tragedy,” these commons are inevitably ruined by “rational” actors who know that if they don’t overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.

The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we’ve all experienced some version of it — the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic — he claimed that the tragedy was inevitable, and, moreover, that every commons had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn’t true. What’s more, Hardin — an ardent white nationalist — used his “realist’s account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.

After all, if the people who lived in these colonized places didn’t have property rights to keep their commons from tragifying, then those commons were already doomed. The colonizers who seized their lands and murdered the people they found there were actually saving the colonized from their own tragedies.

Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of “lifeboat ethics,” a greased slide to mass-extermination of “inferior” people (Hardin was also a eugenicist) in order to save our planet from “overpopulation.”

Hardin’s flawed account of the commons is a sterling example of the problem with economism, the ideology that underpins neoclassical economics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Economism was summed up in by Ely Devons, who quipped “”If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Hardin asked himself, “If I were reliant upon a commons, what would I do?” And, being a realist (that is, an asshole), Hardin decided that he would steal everything from the commons because that’s what the other realists would do if he didn’t get there first.

Hardin didn’t go and look at a commons. But someone else did.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.

Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons: to create an empirical account of the methods, arrangements, circumstances and systems that produce good group reasoning, and avoid the pitfalls that lead to bad group reasoning. The economists’ term for this is microfoundations: the close study of interaction among individuals, which then produces a “macro” account of how to structure whole societies.

Here are some examples of how microfoundations can answer some very big questions:

Backfire effects: The original backfire effect research was a fluke. It turns out that in most cases, people who are presented with well-sourced facts and good arguments change their minds — but not always.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x

Rational ignorance: Contrary to the predictions of “rational ignorance” theory, people who care about specific issues become “issue publics” who are incredibly knowledgeable about it, and deeply investigate and respond to candidates’ positions:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08913810608443650

Rational ignorance is a mirage, caused by giving people questionnaires about politics in general, rather than the politics that affects them directly and personally.

“Myside” bias: Even when people strongly identify with a group, they are capable of filtering out “erroneous messages” that come from that group if they get good, contradictory evidence:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237827

Majority bias: People are capable of rejecting the consensus of majorities, when the majority view is implausible, or when the majority is small, or when the majority is not perceived as benevolent. The Asch effect is “folklore”: yes, people may say that they hold a majority view when they face social sanction for rejecting it, but that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds:

https://alexandercoppock.com/guess_coppock_2020.pdf

Notwithstanding all this, democracy’s cheerleaders have some major gaps in the evidence to support their own view. Analytical Democratic Theory needs to investigate the nuts-and-bolts of when deliberation works and when it fails, including the tradeoffs between:

“social comfort and comfort in expressing dissent”:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/S0065-2601(05)37004-3

“shared common ground and some measure of preexisting disagreement”:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1037/0022-3514.91.6.1080

“group size and the need to represent diversity”:

https://www.nicolas.claidiere.fr/wp-content/uploads/DiscussionCrowds-Mercier-2021.pdf

“pressures for conformity and concerns for epistemic reputation”:

https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/30811

Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, but what she meant was “stop trying to think of an alternative.” Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic, he claimed that the tragedy of the commons was inevitable — that we shouldn’t even bother trying to create public goods.

The Ostrom method — actually studying how something works, rather than asking yourself how it would work if everyone thought like you — is a powerful tonic to this, but it’s not the only one. One of the things that makes science fiction so powerful is its ability to ask how a system would work under some different social arrangement.

It’s a radical proposition. Don’t just ask what the gadget does: ask who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s the foundation of Luddism, which is smeared as a technophobic rejection of technology, but which was only ever a social rejection of the specific economic arrangements of that technology. Specifically, the Luddites rejected the idea that machines should be “so easy a child could use them” in order to kidnap children from orphanages and working them to death at those machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

There are sf writers who are making enormous strides in imagining how deliberative tools could enable new democratic institutions. Ruthanna Emrys’s stunning 2022 novel “A Half-Built Garden” is a tour-de-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

I like to think that I make a small contribution here, too. My next novel, “The Lost Cause,” is at root a tale of competing group decision-making methodologies, between post-Green New Deal repair collectives, seafaring anarcho-capitalist techno-solutionists, and terrorizing white nationalist militias (it’s out in November):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A lab-coated scientist amidst an array of chemistry equipment. His head has been replaced with a 19th-century anatomical lateral cross-section showing the inside of a bearded man's head, including one lobe of his brain. He is peering at a large flask half-full of red liquid. Inside the liquid floats the Capitol building.]

[dailyanarchistposts]

Bibliography for FAQ

Works about Anarchism

Alexander, Robert, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (2 vols.), Janus Publishing Company, London, 1999.

Anderson, Carlotta R., All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1998.

Apter, D. and Joll, J (Eds.), Anarchism Today, Macmillan, London, 1971.

Archer, Julian P. W., The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact, University Press of America, Inc., Lanham/Oxford, 1997.

Cahm, C., Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1872–1886,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.

Carr, Edward Hallett, Michael Bakunin, Macmillan, London, 1937.

Coleman, Stephen and O’Sullivan, Paddy (eds.), William Morris and News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time,Green Books, Bideford, 1990.

Coughlin, Michael E., Hamilton, Charles H. and Sullivan, Mark A. (eds.), Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty: A Centenary Anthology, Michael E. Coughlin Publisher, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1986.

Crowder, George, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991.

Delamotte, Eugenia C., Gates of Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind — With Selections from Her Writing, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2004.

Dirlik, Arif, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991.

Ehrenberg, John, Proudhon and his Age, Humanity Books, New York, 1996.

Esenwein, George Richard, Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898, University of California Press,Berkeley, 1989.

Guillamon, Agustin, The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937–1939, AK Press, Edinburgh/San Francisco, 1996.

Guthke, Karl S., B. Traven: The life behind the legends, Lawrence Hill Books, New York, 1991.

Hart, John M., Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1987.

Holton, Bob, British Syndicalism: 1900–1914: Myths and Realities, Pluto Press, London, 1976.

Hyams, Edward, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works, John Murray, London, 1979.

Jackson, Corinne, The Black Flag of Anarchy: Antistatism in the United States, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1968.

Jennings, Jeremy, Syndicalism in France: a study of ideas, Macmillan, London, 1990

Kline, Wm. Gary, The Individualist Anarchists: A Critique of Liberalism, University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland, 1987.

Linden, Marcel van der and Thorpe, Wayne (eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective, Scolar Press, Aldershort, 1990.

Merithew, Caroline Waldron, “Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the making of a revolutionary Proletariat in Illinois Coal towns”, pp. 217–246, Donna R. Gabaccoia and Franca Iacovetta (eds.), Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2002.

Miller, Martin A., Kropotkin, The University of Chicago Press, London, 1976.

Milner, Susan, The Dilemmas of Internationalism: French Syndicalism and the International Labour Movement 1900–1914, Berg, New York, 1990.

Mintz, Jerome R., The Anarchists of Casas Viejas, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994.

Moya, Jose, “Italians in Buenos Aires’s Anarchist Movement: Gender Ideology and Women’s Participation, 1890–1910,” pp. 189–216, Donna R. Gabaccoia and Franca Iacovetta (eds.), Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2002.

Oved, Yaacov, ”‘Communsmo Libertario’ and Communalism in Spanish Collectivisations (1936–1939)”, The Raven: AnarchistQuarterly, no. 17 (Vol. 5, No. 1), Jan-Mar 1992, Freedom Press, pp. 39–61.

Palij, Michael, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918–1921: An Aspect of theUkrainian Revolution, University of Washington Press,Seattle, 1976.

Pernicone, Nunzio, Italian Anarchism: 1864–1892, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.

Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel, Palgrave MacMillian, New York, 2005.

Pyziur, Eugene, The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael A. Bakunin, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, 1955.

Ravindranathan, T. R., Bakunin and the Italians, McGill-Queen’s Univsersity Press, Kingston and Montreal, 1988.

Reichert, William O., Partisans of Freedom: A study in American Anarchism, Bowling Green University Popular Press, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1976.

Ritter, Alan, The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, 1969.

Salerno, Salvatore, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community inthe Industrial Workers of the World, State UniversityPress of New York, Albany, 1989.

Saltman, Richard B., The Social and Political Thought of Michael Bakunin, Greenwood Press, Westport Connecticut, 1983.

Schuster, Eunice, Native American Anarchism : A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, De Capo Press, New Yprk, 1970.

Sysyn, Frank, “Nestor Makhno and the Ukrainian Revolution”, contained inHunczak, Taras (ed.), The Ukrainian, 1917–1921: A Studyin Revolution, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1977.

Taylor, Michael, Community, Anarchy and Liberty, Cambrdige University Press, Cambridge, 1982.

Thomas, Edith, Louise Michel, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1980.

Thomas, Matthew, Anarchist ideas and counter-cultures in Britain, 1880–1914: revolutions in everyday life, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005.

Thorpe, Wayne, “The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1989.

Vincent, K. Steven, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French RepublicanSocialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984.

Zarrow, Peter, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990.

[cuppacuppacoffee]

Here's some more silly doodles ft my TTCC characters. This small comic was rushed, but it was something that was living in my head rent free. Ponzi is unintentionally very good with kids, and Betty thinks its so cute. This was based off this clip from the Looney Tunes

Finally, a personal headcannon I have for Cogs within TTCC. I thought about the after effects of Ponzi completely leaving his position at COG Inc to live a life closer to Toons, and it made me think that with the change in his perspective and abandonment of the workplace ideology that the Cogs have- he'd actually change (mentally and physically) to match that of the Toons. The changes are very slow, but overtime, Ponzi personally begins to slowly understand jokes, and other Toon-centric things that normally would cause Cogs to explode. He becomes far different from the Cog he used to be.

[thislovintime]

Peter Tork at a Renaissance fair, 1969; photo by Henry Diltz.

“Right now I’m working with my friend Bobby Hammer on a film. I’m going to deliver a lecture on the generation gap in Aspen, Colorado, and I’m going to show a film just to keep them interested.” - Peter Tork, NME, January 25, 1969

“Early in February, [Ruth M. Adams, Wellesley student] served on the resource staff of a five-day Humanities Seminar for the Young Presidents’ Organization, Inc. in Aspen, Colorado. […] In Aspen, ‘Generation gap or civilization gap — can we cope with it?’ was the question at hand. The delegates included both members of the sponsoring organization, (which consists of men who became president of the businesses before they reached the age of forty,) and resource consultants in widely varied fields. Among these consultants were Miss Adams, author Max Schulman, Peter Tork of The Monkees, SDS leader David Littman, and Edgar Friedenberg of the State University of New York. Vast differences in backgrounds and occupations served to split the conference delegation into two ideologically distinct groups. ‘It must be remembered,’ observed Miss Adams, during a News interview last Friday, ‘that many of the delegates were men in their forties, often parents of children of high school or college age… As parents and as men carrying corporate responsibility, they found it difficult to comprehend, to understand, the views of the radical left.’ At Aspen, this radical view was voiced primarily by Littman, Tork, and Friedenberg.” - The Wellesley News, February 20, 1969

“Tork, now 36, is an avowed socialist and lives in Venice, California." - New West, January 1979 (x)

“‘We’ve all got to stick together or we’re all going to come unglued.’ [Peter] noted a drive for only one’s own fortune is at the expense of others. 'Without community, the individual is dead.’” - The Life, May 3, 1996 (x)

“Now, the business of wresting power away from those who make a specialty of wielding it will be a long and protracted struggle, with a lot of setbacks along the way. The outlines of the new style of governance are only dimly perceivable, and won’t become clear for a long time to come. In the meantime, our job is to practice the principles of fairness and service to the extent possible. One thing is clear: there is a much higher joy in service than there is in acquisition of wealth. (Remember that it isn’t money that’s the root of all evil, it’s the love of money.) Hanging together in brother - and sisterhood is so happy-making you want to sing right out loud. Yeah, I feel the same about those ideas as I did then…in case you couldn’t tell. heheheh, Peter” - Ask Peter Tork (x)

“I believe very much in all that I believed in back in the 60’s. I hope I’m more aware of the practicalities than I was then, but I am positive that the values and principles I held then are critical to the well-being of the planet, or at the very least, critical to growth and contentment in the population. As to the practicalities: the chance of no more war in our lifetimes is so close to zero that I don’t imagine it possible, tho’ there well may be progress along these lines. May be. Sometimes I see the world as an eternal horse race between salvation and dissolution, now one, and now the other gaining the lead. But to the extent that we can learn, each and all of us, that the cooperative good is good for the greatest individual good (with safeguards, to be sure), that forgiveness is the route to true inner peace, and that not everything we deem wrong or bad may be so, to that extent hassles of all shapes, sizes and colors will diminish. I am so sure of all this that I would, I hope, be willing to bet my life on these principles.” - Peter Tork, Ask Peter Tork (x)