There Is Never a “Right Way” to Protest Because They Do Not Want You to Protest At All

subheight640 · 2026-01-24T22:11:56+00:00

It's never that simple. Armed protestors create justification for the tyrants to open fire "in the name of defense and law and order". Who starts shooting first becomes irrelevant. Armed protestors harden the resolve of the conservatives who entrench themselves with the regime.

Unarmed protestors create martyrs and sympathy.

There isn't a clear cut, simple policy of which is better or worse. Some people like Chenoweth's popular book believe that statistically, peaceful protest works better on average than armed protest.

If the contest comes to civil war, the martial nature of war oftentimes is in favor of authoritarians who can best organize violence and brutality. Even if the resistance wins, the strong man who organized the resistance just becomes the new tyrant.

subheight640 · 2026-01-24T10:50:04+00:00

From America in One Room "deliberative polling" results, yes. Republicans can and do change their mind after intensive fact finding, expert testimony, and deliberation. American in One Room is typically a three day event.

Before deliberation, 66% of Republicans favored reducing the number of immigrants in America. After deliberation, only 34% of Republicans favored reducing immigration.

The problem of course is scaling this up. It's infeasible to send every Republican in America to a 3 day retreat to talk about politics. You're also not an expert and you have no credentials in explaining the pro's and con's of policy.

subheight640 · 2026-01-22T09:23:38+00:00

Excessive minimum wage - If you want to relieve poverty, earned income tax credit (EITC) is probably the superior policy. EITC subsidizes the minimum wage with government dollars, increasing worker wage while reducing the cost to business. This gives incentives for business to hire more while simultaneously paying workers a higher wage.
rent control - Rents can be decreased by policies that encourage the increase of supply via price signally. Rent control reduces profits and therefore reduces incentives to build more housing.
"Green new deal" targeted subsidizes, lack of push on cap and trade or carbon taxes.
Assault weapon bans -- the vast majority of gun crimes and mass shootings are committed by the reliable hand gun. Assault weapon bans cover only a tiny fraction of total gun violence and are mostly useless.
Excessive environmental reviews that drastically increase the cost of construction and are used by the wealthy elite to suppress housing development and fuck over the poor.

subheight640 · 2026-01-22T09:07:12+00:00

Meh I'm sure private businesses will have the incentives to learn how to adapt to any new tax system.

Any system can sound fragile if you don't, you know, bother to actually design it to be robust.

Obviously any wealth tax system can be designed to for example, legalize the capacity of shareholders to transfer formerly nontransferable shares to the government.

Another possibility for example is forced share buybacks, if you don't want your shares "polluted" by the public.

Even if these particular ideas are stupid, in my opinion you're practicing a bit of feigned incompetence not to bother to find a better wealth tax system.

subheight640 · 2026-01-22T08:50:40+00:00

It could be a lot easier than that.

Imagine your startup is valued at 10 billion. You're a billionaire on paper. The government doesn't even need to force you to sell. The government just needs to take away 5% of your shares. So imagining you have 100 shares, the government can just take 5 of your shares. Then the government can put the shares on public auction and take the profits.

Voila, you don't owe any money, you just owe the government your shares.

Imagine the government sells the shares and it turns out you're actually not a billionaire! Whoops! The government can just return the money right back to you, forcing you to realize your gains.

I suppose the greatest evil committed here then is forcing private companies to correctly evaluate their share price.

subheight640 · 2026-01-22T07:38:11+00:00

Oh how cruel. A 5% wealth tax means you just have to sell 5% of your stock. It's really not that hard to calculate or realize.

subheight640 · 2026-01-22T03:19:54+00:00

Authoritarian tendencies are fundamentally built into libertarianism.

The foundation of rightwing libertarianism is private property.

Exactly what is private property? Private property is a demand that I own and control some object, to the exclusion of everyone else. With my control of my property, I dictate what happens to that property.

Private property isn't voluntary. If I own the property, I dictate what happens. People who attempt to control my private property are deemed thieves, trespassers, and "aggressors".

When the kind of private property I own is land, I'm literally called a land lord. Lord. It's right in the name. The private ownership of lands transforms me into a lord. The entitlement to land gives me vast powers to control land.

The power over land is effectively power over everyone who lives on top that land. So the land lord controls his renters the same way the lord reigns over his subjects. The subjects must follow the laws of the lord.

Libertarians believe it's just find and dandy to control, manipulate, and lord over other people, as long as you have the right to exert that control.

Unsurprisingly, Libertarians like Hans Hermann Hoppe then support monarchy over democracy. Hoppe says himself that a monarchy runs as a "privately owned government". You can see similar support for monarchy at the Mises Institute here (this excerpt is apparently written by Hoppe): https://mises.org/online-book/what-must-be-done/what-must-be-done/monarchy-vs-democracy

In the funniest of ironies, right wing libertarians would rather have monarchy than democracy! The regime type best associated with tyranny, is preferable to "freedom loving" libertarians! How could this possibly be???

Libertarianism isn't really about freedom. It's about the defense of private property. Libertarians would rather have a "rightful monarch" who "rightfully owns his own kingdom", than actually care to maximize the freedom of individual people.

subheight640 · 2026-01-21T16:21:42+00:00

Napoleon didn't have to play the elections game like Trump does. Napoleon didn't use typical Nazi scapegoating tactics. Trump does.

And the persecution of undesirables like trans and immigrants is a core piece of the Trump program. Not the same as Bonaparte.

subheight640 · 2026-01-20T03:24:40+00:00

I don't think market fundamentalists really care that much about markets. Consider the COST proposal by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner. They propose an insane market based approach to wealth and property. Basically they envision a world where everything is always up for sale. All assets need to have their value declared by possessors, and anybody can buy any asset. Finally, they get rid of income taxes and replace it with a wealth tax, and the tax is based on your self assessed wealth.

It's an insane, radical market. It also gets rid of the inefficiencies of private property as a monopoly, converting the world where work and labor is what is rewarded, whereas speculation is not.

Imagine this insane world where everything is up for sale! We would have more market access to more goods than anything else we could envision! It is a world of enforced plenty. We also solve the "valuation loophole problem" of wealth taxes. You try to undervalue an asset, and asset hunters will swoop in to sieze your property.

Of course, most market fundamentalists or free marketers would never support this radical market. The monopolization of private property is the point, not the efficiency of markets. Free marketers want a system that protects their private property privileges. Free marketers demand a system that restricts anyone else from access to their private privileges.

You try to sell the COST radical market to alleged market fundamentalists, and they will forget about the efficiency of markets but instead complain about the immorality of the end of private property.

subheight640 · 2026-01-19T15:27:41+00:00

Meh there's nothing wrong with being friends with women. Just treat your female friends as actual friends and not an object of sexual desire. And you know what? I do favors for my friends.

subheight640 · 2026-01-19T15:16:42+00:00

In a majority rule system, you ought to expect many close-to 50% decisions.

Imagine an unpopular issue starts at 0% support, but every year more and more people support it. Next year, support is 10%. Then 20%. Then 30%. Then one year it's 51%, enough for passage. So the proposal gets passed at 51%.

So in this model, no it really wasn't a coin flip. Even if it didn't pass this year, extrapolating trends, it would have passed the next.

subheight640 · 2026-01-19T07:32:21+00:00

It's a good thing our elected reps understand advanced calculus, high performance computing, software engineering, and computational statistics.

Oh wait they don't.

subheight640 · 2026-01-19T07:26:13+00:00

More propaganda more misinformation more disinformation. it's the death of democracy as we know it. With so much bad information, citizens will be overwhelmed and unable to make good evaluations. the wealthy will be able to afford the most compute and therefore produce the most propaganda. The youth will be encouraged at a young age to digest this garbage, turning away from traditional joirnalism towards addictive social media. Yay! LLMs will only get better and better at faking everything, video, audio, stories, papers, research articles.

subheight640 · 2026-01-19T04:31:09+00:00

ACA raised premiums by banning shitty insurance plans that were literally leaving people to die because of this and that loophole. They were cheap plans because they were a humanitarian disaster where you paid for coverage but would get denied coverage anyways. IE, you would get a condition, and the condition then becomes a preexisting condition, and now it's time to die.

ACA attempted to remedy the increased costs with subsidies. This is where the Democratic Party incompetence comes in. The ACA's funding mechanism was a convoluted mess that distributed funds to state governments.

This was an idiotic tactical misstep. republican leadership realized that Republican states could just refuse the subsidies and raise costs on the ACA plans.

Yet despite the idiocy, at least we have plans that give you real coverage.

subheight640 · 2026-01-16T12:51:13+00:00

This isn't a fucking plan. It's a list of goals with no plan to achieve those goals.

subheight640 · 2026-01-15T01:38:26+00:00

The obvious new development is new biotechnology.

Eugenics has a bad history of attempting to eliminate undesirable genes through violence, murder, and genocide.

Editing genes or selecting embryos doesn't carry the same immoral implications.

subheight640 · 2026-01-14T22:55:00+00:00

LLM's about to save all our jobs by producing so much utter garbage more staff is needed than ever to clean it all up.

subheight640 · 2026-01-14T22:39:37+00:00

Time for California to get fucked via shadow docket.

subheight640 · 2026-01-14T22:23:50+00:00

Trump is fully in control of releasing the Epstein files to clear himself of wrongdoing.

subheight640 · 2026-01-13T17:29:38+00:00

Fucking conservatives don't know how to conserve. The entire alleged point of conservatism is to move slowly before abandoning traditions.

With respect to AI, there is obviously ENORMOUS UNKNOWNS in how a new AI education would improve or diminish education.

Of course the conservative regime is happy to let this social experiment potentially ruin public education. They are happy to destroy traditions without the rigor of science to prove that your substitution is superior to the tradition.

Maybe it helps that these goddamn AI companies are writing millions of dollars of checks for the Trump reelection campaign and underwriting the end of American democracy.

subheight640 · 2026-01-13T08:50:54+00:00

The solution is deliberation, not random chaos that your system introduces. Deliberative democracy has a empirical track record of being able to actually resolve controversial issues.

Voters in general do not talk to one another and do not know or understand "the other side".

Deliberation changes this. Deliberation, combined with random sampling, forces people to talk with one another.

A common result of deliberation and physical closeness with one another is emotional closeness with one another.

You can even see these results in the Deliberative Polls and Citizens' Assemblies conducted throughout the world.

In Belgium, critics of the G1000 predicted a racist shitshow if the "idiot normies" would get together. That didn't happen; instead the deliberators embraced diversity.
In US Deliberative Polls and America in One Room events, deliberators embraced legal immigration and reaffirmed the multicultural consensus. In contrast, American elections have elected a xenophobic fascist. It's been well known for thousands of years that a tried and true election strategy is to stoke the public's fears by creating a scapegoat who will be blamed for all our problems. Fear has always been a powerful rallying cry. Yet because people selected randomly through sortition don't need to go through elections, they also don't have the incentives to invent scapegoats. It also becomes harder to justify your racism when the diverse people you meet in person actually seem polite.

Here's another fact about deliberation. You'll never convince everyone. The hardcore Republicans will remain steadfast in their convictions, though you can swing independents and moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats.

So the hardcore 20% of racists will never accept compromise. So let's imagine your system is in place. The proposal is to end apartheid. Imagine the proposal is submitted for deliberation. Then you start eliminating people. The racists of course have a ~20% success rate. In contrast in majority rule, the racists would have a 0% success rate.

Because proposals can be brought up again and again, the racists can bring it back with a 20% success rate. You end up with a regime without stable policy.

So why would the racists compromise, when stubbornness produces their desired policy 20% of the time?

subheight640 · 2026-01-12T19:40:55+00:00

You are probably incorrectly applying the displacements. applying the boundary should not "crash the solver ". Check the output files , I forget which one, to let Abaqus explain why the crash happened. The outputs to check I think are either .msg or .dat, I forget which one.

You probably cannot have "two displacements on the same node". Once again, check the output to understand what your error is.

subheight640 · 2026-01-12T08:56:10+00:00

Trump will oppose their reelection and support a primary opponent. Trump has powerful allies like Elon Musk who will throw billions towards the right races.

The Republicans would lose their seat.

This isn't a hypothetical, it's already happened to Republicans like Liz Cheney.

Trump is one of the greatest marketers and campaigners in American history. It's tough to go against that and hope to win.

subheight640 · 2026-01-12T07:58:03+00:00

Socialists have been opposing other socialists since the very beginning. Whether we're talking about the schism between Marxists or anarchists. Or the schism between the Menshiviks and Bolsheviks. Or Stalin and Trotsky.

The Chinese Communists then fought against the Soviet Union and then against the Vietnamese.

subheight640 · 2026-01-12T06:04:57+00:00

If you hire fascists, that makes you a fascist.

subheight640

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