Ted Lemon

Oude nerd uit de V.S. Mijn baan is bij een groot bedrijf in California, maar ik woon in Utrecht.

Ik geef advies over meditatie, ontwakingservaringen, en de problemen die darmee bepaard gaan.

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Last Notes

2024-08-11 02:39:58

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Is this on the nuclear article?

2024-06-26 17:58:43

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Voting has been effective in changing things, but e.g. in the U.S. the electorate isn't organizing effectively, and so indeed voting feels pretty futile.
The point is that it's the organizing that matters, not the voting. You have to organize _and_ vote, but if you just vote and don't organize, nothing changes.
This is particularly problematic when a significant portion of the electorate is disenfranchised.

2024-06-26 17:56:49

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Again I think we are almost agreeing. What matters is the character of the people who are deciding how the laws get enforced. I think you are suggesting that we just get rid of them and then things will be okay, because there's nothing to enforce. I'm suggesting that we take effective collective action to change the way they are enforced.
I suspect that with the right society, either of these approaches would work.

2024-06-26 17:50:52

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All of their power comes from us.

2024-06-26 17:48:29

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No. But in their best sense (and I know that's not the only sense, don't get me wrong), laws are our collective story about how we think things should be done. The civil rights act was a good story, and it made a difference. Roe v. Wade was a good story, and it made a difference.
The problem is that we thought we'd made enough of a difference and that we could rely on just the laws, and that we didn't need to /do/ anything, and that's how we got here.

2024-06-26 17:43:45

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I'm asking you what, specifically, "stopped obeying the police" would look like.
I think it would look like a lot of things we saw during the BLM protests and the Occupy Wall Street protests and other protests we've already seen.
What these have looked like is a bunch of people getting the shit beaten out of them by cops. Dying from injuries received after being hit in the eye by a rubber bullet. Stuff like that.

2024-06-26 17:40:14

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We used to have the civil rights act.

2024-06-26 17:38:18

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From your picture I assume you've lived through the same years I have. As far as I can tell, things are quite a bit worse now in the U.S. and many European countries in terms of human rights than they were when I was born. Is that not also your impression?

2024-06-26 17:33:41

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What would that look like, specifically?

2024-06-26 17:26:49

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We’ve been saying no continuously for my whole life in various ways. It hasn’t worked very well so far. Just standing up and saying no is not a power move.

2024-06-26 17:24:32

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Also, you talk about the state like it’s some independent entity, but it is in fact an emergent property of our society. We are the hardware on which it runs. So it’s not so simple to say “without the state” things would be better. It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t really help, because it’s not actionable.

2024-06-26 17:18:47

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Indeed so. But it’s actually the exact same grift. The recycling grift is that we should treat each other as enemies on the basis of whether we recycle, rather than recognizing that recycling of plastics at least is entirely a propaganda campaign to get us not to address the problem at its source.
The police state grift is that we are responsible for what is supposedly done in our name. That we have agency that we do not have.

2024-06-26 17:13:47

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Taking ownership of it is actually not only a form of self harm, but also sadly tends to support the status quo, because it leads us to ineffective responses to the situation.

2024-06-26 17:12:10

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Maybe the thing to do now is stop taking responsibility for something that isn’t on you. I honestly do not know how to stop this other than enough of us saying no. Until enough of us understand that we need to say no, and do it effectively, we are stuck paying the vig.
None of us can do this alone. We are in exact the same place now that we would be if we were being robbed at gunpoint to support this. So we do not own this violence.

2024-06-26 14:20:59

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Right. So how is that end state better than the status quo?

2024-06-26 12:55:01

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I guess the question is, if those police and military budgets vanished overnight, what would all the furloughed soldiers and police do in their spare time?
This is a serious question.
Some would go do something useful. But I suspect some are in that business, and are abusive in that business, precisely because it gives them free reign to do so. And if they were no longer in that business, would they not just create it and find a new way to fund it?

2024-06-22 20:54:24

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Ze lijken zo lief als ze de kop van een bloem zitten op te eten, met een gelukkige uitdrukking op hun kleine gezichtjes.

2024-05-31 18:32:39

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How does this relate to Markup News?

2024-05-28 20:19:02

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Yeah. I'm not even remotely an expert in this area, so I'm not sure how much it matters, but it really feels to me like this "no deflation" thing needs a bit more nuance. Otherwise it's just a license for profiteers to print money.
If we want more inflation, we can always do the unthinkable and pay people more... :)

2024-05-28 17:57:24

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And of course speaking as someone who is starting to notice retirement age looming, inflation really really sucks for retirees. Every time there's a big inflation hit, you see a burst of old people suddenly re-entering the job market despite real disabilities, because they have no choice. We saw a lot of that in 2008—I haven't noticed if the same thing happened in 2021/2022, but it would surprise me if it didn't.

2024-05-28 17:30:08

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I am not convinced that negative inflatiion is always a bad thing. Of course it's bad for homeowners when prices go down, but that in itself causes serious problems—we can't have more housing, because prices would go down. If you owe money, again deflation is bad and inflation good. But prices dropping because they rose due to profiteering doesn't seem like it would be a problem for anyone other than profiteers.

2024-05-28 15:38:08

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What would get Biden credit would be if the average rate of inflation over the past couple of years had gone down, but for that to happen, the rate of inflation now would have to be negative. That's what people want, and quite reasonably so given the immense profit-taking that occurred in 2021-2022.

2024-05-28 15:37:06

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I don't think your take on this is quite right. In 2021/2022 we had a tremendous amount of inflation, and recently we've had a more normal amount of inflation. However, at no time since 2021 have prices dropped. When the rate of inflation is relatively steady (e.g. varying from 2% to 3%) you can say that inflation is moderate, but that observation simply doesn't apply here, and it's not because the definition of inflation has changed.

2024-05-28 15:06:31

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Wow, that really taught me a lesson about clicking on "show me".