The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point
locusmag.com
locusmag.com
I don't really believe that it's a "pretense" but rather that people in power tend to take every opportunity to keep and bolster their power and freedom and care less about the power and freedom of the already disadvantaged.
Something being leveraged for somebody's advantage doesn't mean that it was created for that advantage.
And mistrust in general as well.
Also mind reading (or simple guessing/heuristics).
All these things are usually bad compromises that came out of some group or committee that's not nearly as homogenous and aligned as conspiracy theorists like to believe.
Edit: what is Agenda 2023? Google shows me links to places wehre I can buy a planner for 2023.
Typo, fixed.
> The COVID crisis is very, very real.
> But that doesn’t mean that it’s not also a pretext.
> ...
> This didn’t have to happen, but powerful people know better than to let a good crisis go to waste.
Using those words implies that the COVID lockdowns were created entirely for that purpose, and the stated purpose was a lie.
> A reason or excuse given to hide the real reason for something.
> That which is assumed as a cloak or means of concealment; something under cover of which a true purpose is hidden; an ostensible reason, motive, or occasion; a pretense.
It is epistemically unsound, as is calling it bollocks.
Because of this, herding sheep is easy, thus I am hyper-vigilant about identifying potential sheep herding maneuvers, of which there were many during the whole covid debacle.
People found so many ways of gaming the system and getting the vaccine instead of the prioritized elderly/immune-compromised. I knew rich college kids with parents who had ownership stakes in elder care companies so they got the shot early, etc. etc., in SF many seemed to get hold of the special codes that were given to communities with low vaccine uptake, etc.
The difference is that none of those people were themselves hyping the threat of the virus, or insisting everyone else should stay at home.
Non swivel eyed non loons have been pointing out the hypocrisy of the govt and those in charge for a long time. Even the Cummings example created outrage and if it wasn’t for the UK being led by probably the most unethical PM in its history, he would likely have gotten into far more trouble (or more likely wouldn’t have acted so blatantly illegally). Ironically, the reason Boris Johnson was PM was entirely due to Brexit, which the swivel eyed loons at least disproportionately, if not all of them, likely voted for.
Who is the "swivel eyed loon" in this scenario again?
"Capital's profitability now depends on 'lockdowns', acute social enclosure, and 'medical' tyranny": https://grossmanite.wixsite.com/my-site/post/capital-s-profi...
What leads them down these toxic paths is that they lack the full context; they have been primed on decades of Pelican Brief X Files Conspiracy turds to not trust certain parties, but somehow they've missed that there are worse parties than those.
There is your problem, right there. You still think in "we" vs "them" in 2023, and express yourself with an air of superiority towards people with a different world-view than you.
(regardless of what the crisis says on the tin, or the response formally says on the tin, this is a thing and the wingnuts aren't... entirely wrong in noticing that there's something off about the world)
(And, an irrelevant aside while I'm on the topic. Cummings, rat though he is, did not 'drive 275 miles to Durham to check in on his family' as Doctorow claims. He drove there to take his autistic child, who needs round-the-clock care, to his parent's house because he believed he and his wife were infected. There was no real excuse for the Barnard Castle trip though)
The second does not follow from the first. Some people don't understand risks ever. Learning is optional.
What, if anything did Mr Johnson learn from having COVID in office? What did Mr Trump?
I suspect a) nothing and b) less than nothing.
I could be wrong, but the opposite, that "he must have learned" does not follow.
> The antilockdown movement exploited the legitimate anger of everyday people about elites ignoring the rules they set for the rest of us. These everyday people were then mobilized to fight for the rights of factory owners, logistics companies and other large corporations to murder their workers with a policy of “let ’er rip.”
My take is that the rich and powerful get special treatment and never have to follow the rules so why would they during a pandemic. Its just that it was a bit more noticeable then during their rule flouting during normal times.
Rich people get away with a lot of shit poor people don’t. Theft, scams, murder, genocide, illegal wars, etc.
The equivalent of this argument would be that locking people up for murder is simply a pretext for rich people controlling the masses because they rarely if ever get caught whereas the poor and ordinary are locked up for it all the time, therefore those advocating for legalizing murder are not really wrong.
There is a wider issue here where some people value individual liberty and some people value order, environment or public health more. For some people seeing the WEF declare you will own nothing and eat insects, all sorts of folks saying you wont drive cars, etc etc - people can see this as an amazing step forward in [environment or equity in this case] - other people see this as a totalitarian step into removing their autonomy.
It's good to keep in mind that discarding grievances as being 'woke' or 'conspiracy minded' or apparently 'swivel-eyed loonish' (this term tickles me a lot as a non UK person lol) is a good way to feel right and morally sound but the end results for society at large will probably be less than exciting.
But - outside of performative activism and spleen-venting - do they have any interest in sustained or intelligent actions which might address a few of the problems?
On paper, the UK's Liberal Democratic Party sounds like the perfect place for people alarmed by a creepy, authoritarian state. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democrats_(UK)#Ideolog... ) Wikipedia says the Liberal Dem. Party had under 75,000 members in 2021 (a touch over 0.1% of the UK's population). The next UK general election - where their nearly-all-powerful Parliament will be elected - must happen by 28 Jan 2025.
Anyone up for actually doing stuff?
EDIT: Yes, the LD's have at least as much of a "Faithless Elector" problem as any political party. How much of that is due to their party having a micro-membership, and the voters having no attention spans nor memories? Vs. (example) back in the "golden era" of America's National Rifle Association - the NRA kept "forever" records on how every congressman voted on every bill of interest to the NRA, and gave their loyal members "scorecards" on the candidates before every election. NRA Membership was ~1% of America's population...but Congressmen who didn't want to become ex-Congressmen generally thought very, very hard before they voted against the NRA on anything related to guns.
I get the paranoia, but where are your solutions? Wouldn't it be more effective to instead come up with a fix that you prefer?
I think we can all look at places like Florida to see what the right has in mind, and it certainly isn't reducing the size or intrusiveness of government.
The spectrum of opinions and solutions from people on both sides seems to be massive at a grassroots level but there are massive interests involved in the media distilling them into two camps of people with zero nuance.
When it comes to major issues like "how do we handle this virus?" I haven't seen any answers at all from the right other than "we don't want anything the other side of the fence wants".
How does the right plan to handle many of the largest problems? Food monoculture? Environmental problems? Wealth inequality? Racial inequality?
I live in a pool of conservatism, and the answer is always "what's the problem? My life is good."
Wealth inequality: reducing regulatory capture and ease of doing business to encourage more competition and wealth across all levels of industry.
Food monoculture: reducing globalization of trade and exports to focus on local farming and agriculture
Environmental problems: reducing globalization of trade and exports to reduce shipping and much worse pollution and environmental damage in countries of origin (while also promoting manufacturing here to help with wealth inequality)
Racial inequality: of what?*
*edit now that I re-read it, I mean what particular race and inequality are we addressing, there are plenty and there is no blanket solution.
As far as "racial inequality" goes, it's loaded and difficult. I disagree with the common approaches I've heard on both sides (the left tends to push for an oversimplified hypercorrection, which causes different sets of problems). It's like cancer, in that it's often lumped into a single category, but it's actually a huge set of problems without a single solution. Most of the conservatives I've talked to reject that any inequality exists at all.
What you are talking about is what I'd really consider to be "true conservatism", but in my interactions, a lot of real life conservatives I've talked to sound more like 4chan trolls. Maybe I need to get out of this city.
Covers this.
They were pro lockdown (even after the basis was undermined in 2021) and gain most of their MPs from local issues such as promising to stop the building of housing estates etc.
They have no political agenda that is in anyway related to their historical basis
(And when they were punished in the polls for this, their leader quit and got a job as Facebook's amoral bullshitter in chief.)
Plus, the LibDems support all the amoral creepy shit, anyway. Unfortunately, it's got cross-party support, as has the Online Safety Bill.
You basically have to choose the least bad options.
- the EEC would have stayed as just that, I suspect. Perhaps the EU would have formed without us, hard to know.
- yup
For two reasons:
First, because politics is an ecosystem, and political parties are much stronger than unorganized political actors, so they outcompete and win. Your effectiveness is multiplied tremendously if you have an organized group which can fundraise, make small compromises among its members to reach common goals, scan membership to find compelling leaders, etc. Unorganized political actors have no chance against parties, and so they adapt (by becoming parties themselves) or die.
Second, because "political parties" are just a fact of gathering large numbers of humans: they will always have different opinions, and form tribes and cliques with like-minded people. If you don't have explicit parties, you will have hidden, implicit, internal ones, and that is much worse. See The Tyranny of Structurelessness, or alternatively one-party states like China, which still do have political factions, because having political factions is something people naturally do, but hide these behind the opacity of the CCP, leading to much less transparent decision-making.
And then there's this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202...
I do not think our rulers (or their advisors at least) are complete dummies.
Do you? I choose not to vote because I refuse to participate in a charade of false consensus. If you pick the lesser of two evils, you are still picking evil.
The obvious -- yet never stated -- reason voter turnout is so bad in the United States is that the candidates offered are such garbage.
The world isn't perfect. There will always be issues with candidates, because the world is messy and complex. If you chose not to vote for the lesser of two evils, you leave more opportunity for the _greater_ to succeed.
"What are you complaining about? You asked for it?"
Sticking your head in the sand just gives more opportunity for _you_ to get the worse outcome.
Dream bigger. I mean unless you love the current shitshow.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies
I know I’m not living in a totalitarian state like Solzhenitsyn, but yet I am refusing to eat dog shit cause it tastes better than cat shit.
The system is going to continue on, for the near future at least. If you've got some plan to fix 'the current shitshow', do that, _while making the best out of the current shitshow_.
You say you are refusing to eat dog shit. You're not. You're just letting society decide which shit you eat, without putting your vote in. The better, or worse, of two evils is still going to be elected. You're still going to be part of that system unless you're entirely off grid and self sufficient.
Which presumably explains why their leader Nick Clegg went off to work for the not at all creepy and authoritarian Facebook.
Well, that would like under the purview of your conundrums of political science, not stuff for the hoi polloi. You don't want a tyranny of the majority, but - I believe this is the point being made - just dismissing popular concerns which have at least a grain of truth will bite you in the arse and take down not just your one pet project, but everything else even vaguely connected.
Ultimately here that means solving some thornier problems, because it is an amazing but accurate stereotype these days that the person riding a bike in most cities is more privileged than the person driving. The former could afford a nice place in the city, which is way more than the cost of car ownership - and almost certainly relied on nepotism in some way. To fix that, alternative transit to suburbs NEED to exist, even in the face of negligent or outright malicious government. Accommodation in cities NEEDS to be cheaper, something I'm not sure has ever happened without urban decay and collapse. And lastly, crime, in cities and on transit, NEEDS to be controlled at relatively low levels - yes, even if the perpetrators are minorities. I have to really strongly disagree with the idea that automation makes the law less fair. That's a cheap shot, the progressive's equivalent of "think of the children". High crime areas are not romantic anti-racist utopias where the downtrodden mix rap with ceilidhs. They are shit, they are devastating to any real investment and growth, they hold no opportunity whatsoever to any decent person of any ethnicity, and discussion of policing shouldn't ignore that.
During the pandemic SF closed a section of Great Highway, a road that runs along the ocean in the Sunset district, so people could get out and exercise on it and not have to get close to others. Now, Great Highway is also one of the fastest ways to go north-south through the area. I met one guy who lived in Sunset who was welding up caltrops to throw on the road if it was reopened to car traffic. Surely those noble caltrops would know better than to puncture the tires of a single mother driving in from out of town to work at his local coffee shop, though. Talk about privilege.
He then swanned off to become VP of Facebook.
I'm not saying it should tell you everything you need to know, but a large part, yes.
And yet, people right here on this platform routinely imply that there's no risk of such technology being abused (e.g. [1] but that's far from the only time I've had to read such hot takes)...
> Our computers and phones – often devices that we ourselves were expected to pay for – were enlisted to the corporate IT system and then enshittified with bossware that spies on our keystrokes, plunders our filesystems, monitors our network activity, and for some workers, watches and listens to them constantly through their devices’ cameras and microphones.
Corporate owned devices are one thing (and bad enough), but who the hell onboards their personal devices onto corporate MDMs? If corporate wants me to be reachable out of working hours they better provide me a corporate phone.
And he definitely has a point there. The worst amount of bullshit (keyloggers, screen capture) are illegal here in Europe under labour law but completely legal in wide parts of the US.
People who don’t have the luxury, or living space, to be able to own multiple devices of every type.
I agree with the closing statement most of all.
> Help them understand that corporate power, and its capture of government, is our true shared enemy.
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/home-garden/library-things-d...
> Oyster payment cards are virtually impossible to use anonymously
You can just buy them with cash from the machines, right? Isn’t it a rare example of a public service in the UK that does not involve a bunch of surveillance?
Likely one card, for years? At best it's pseudonymous not anonymous - a dataset identified by a GUID not a name.
That card has a unique id, and so a large data history attached to it. Commuting habits will be evident in the data. Should the person who uses the card need to be identified, it won't be that hard to find a clear image of them using the card to enter or exit at an otherwise quiet station in that history.
It doesn't matter if one of us drives a pollutey car. It matters if millions or billions of us do.
The entire concept of being elite is manipulating others into having and doing less.
I mean, quite literally not everyone can have the life of someone who has significant wealth even.
No mention of the overbearing hate-speech laws that threaten seven years jail time for something as vague as "stirring up hatred", even within one's home [1,2], the foster parents whose foster children were taken away for being members of UKIP [3], the police investigation launched targeting "It's okay to be white" posters on public lamp-posts [4], or police recording "non-crime hate incidents" by children, that will become part of their background checks [5].
It's too much lying by omission for my taste, despite strongly agreeing with the overt part of his message.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56364...
[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scottish-bill-would-crim...
[3] A couple have had three foster children removed from their care because they belong to the UK Independence Party. - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20474120
[4] Basingstoke 'It’s okay to be white' posters spark investigation - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-59179914
[5] Police recording thousands of messages sent by children as non-crime hate incidents, which will show up when employers run background checks - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/05/children-warned-...
Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I think that if he really does care about the examples in the article, he cares about the ones you listed too, and he just knows it's not politically correct to mention them.
The real question therefore should not be "lets find common ground now its peacetime and be friends" but "how can we be resilient to not be enemies in the next war?".
It's a difficult and deep question which requires a kind of secure moral framework to operate in.
Another point in regard to numerous things like this is that those who promote them do so largely undemocratically. They use issues that are seen as above politics (e.g. climate), then apply some very tenuous statistics that could be undermined by a child to promote them and apply them in ways that will have no measurable benefit to the vocal goal they articulated.
Living in the middle of this new politics one gets a sense further that the goal is not stated. Tenuous evidence based policies are repeatedly implemented to erode people's standards of living and their ease of living. Preferring instead punishment and self flagellation from the citizenry. All with the more tangible side effect of extracting hundreds of millions of pounds from them.
Not helped that local politics especially in the UK is fundamentally broken. People are voting on modern day religious grounds, not for policies, leaving a vocal minority of usually highly unempathetic and emotionally questionable people making impactful decisions about day to day life for millions of citizens.
One also gets a sense of civil society as we have known it in the UK for a few hundred years of ending. The reasons are many and the actors motivations hard to articulate simply because all they want is to destroy that which currently exists; with no plan for that which replaces it
[1] https://thecritic.co.uk/its-not-happening-and-thats-why-its-...
British history over the last few hundred years is underlaid by dissent and violent. We've had a civil war, war between England, Ireland and Scotland, regicide, restoration and a whole mass of protesting groups: luddites, levellers, diggers, ranters, suffragettes too name a few, and massive social upheavals caused by defeudalisation and then industrialisation/urbanisation.
To be clear, I also believe that the UK is getting more, ermm, 'agitated' than it has been since WW2, but IMO this is reverting to type rather than something that has never been seen before.
> To be clear, I also believe that the UK is getting more, ermm, 'agitated' than it has been since WW2, but IMO this is reverting to type rather than something that has never been seen before.
The upheavals of the past had relatively little conferred interference on the everyday lives of most people due to the structure of society.
Modern upheavals are visited upon us with unprecedented latency and at a granularity that's far more effecting. Reading contemporary accounts of the restoration you'd barely think anything had happened
> civil society as we have known it in the UK for a few hundred years
Sorry if I missed the 300 somewhere
In the UK a few generally means 3
I don't really care if the people noticing (let's call them Noticers) if they blame aliens or the Knights Templar (to make a nod to Umberto Eco), they've picked up on something.
Forcing people to be pedestrians would be likely a significant improvement for their health and quality of life.
As an American in a major city, the alternative sucks. I'm forced to be a driver, car costs eat a significant portion of my income, my neighborhood doesn't even have sidewalks between the residences and shops (which are across a highway that has a cross walk with no sidewalk leading up to it), and I end up having to drive at least 5 hours every week just to work and get my kids to and from school. This increases pollution in my city and comes with a regular risk of injury and death from a car accident, which is one of the leading causes of preventable death.
I'd rather be forced to be a pedestrian than a driver. Having the choice would really be great.
And I'd rather if the bus was an option at all. The bus is expensive and unreliable in most US cities. Getting somewhere by car that takes 20 minutes can take hours by bus due to scheduling. This is a stark contrast to London, which has an actual public transit system.
Maybe I'm biased by living in Colorado Springs, where it might be particularly bad, but cities with sprawling suburbs are usually terrible for living without a car, and the US has tons of suburbs.
I think adding more pedestrian-friendly places, or at least stopping building ones that are outright hostile to everyone but car-drivers, is very important.
Poor people in London already mostly do not own cars. And also they disproportionately suffer the negative effects of pollution from cars. (1)
If by "pedestrians" you mean people who get around on foot, on bicycles, on busses, on London Underground trains, on overground trains, in taxis, Minicabs and Ubers then sure, they are "pedestrians" .
In my case, if I needed a car I could arrange to buy one, but where would I put it, how would I secure it and what would I do with it? It would be nothing than an expressive source of hassle and worry. It's cheaper and less hassle to use busses to commute, cabs or ubers when I need to travel other short distances, rental cars a couple of times per year.
Groceries? There's a small shop in walking distance that way, and others in walking distance the other way, and a similar near the office, but the main shopping _comes to me_ not vice versa.
1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/17/poorest-...
I don't think there's any reason to believe they mostly do this. Mostly what they do is encourage people to use public transport to get to areas well-served by public transport.
The initiative behind the ULEZ in particular is that it is a strong disincentive to owning/using a car at all in these areas, not just one that happens to be an old banger. Doubly so when considered on top of the congestion charge.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone/dis...
Taxis are exempt, despite plenty being diesels older than even euro 4.
Plenty of delivery vans with significant emissions are de facto exempt because the fee is negligible when compared to other expenses.
If the fee was at least a percentage of income/revenue or a percentage of the value of the vehicle, it would be a bit less bad. If it also scaled measured emissions by passenger instead of using the flawed emission standards, then it might even become useful. If it also included free vehicle replacements funded with revenue from the taxes on the excessive cars, then it might even be good.
https://greenercars.org/news/list-leed-qualified-cars
I made the mistake of scrolling through this list. On the list: 2022 M850i xDrive Coupe 4.4L V8. A vehicle of pure excess, entirely unnecessary, getting 20mpg while transporting like two people. Not on the list: my 1988 Ford Bronco with a 2.9L V6 that can haul cargo, move people and dead animals, drive off-road and gets ~20 mpg.
So in the eyes of the university and LEEDS list people, it would be better for me to ditch my perfectly functional 1988 vehicle and instead purchase a brand new 2022 V8 sports coupe. This is literally just a poor person tax.
I’m slightly confused by the existence of that list, USBGC provides LEED certification to buildings, not cars, right? Is it possible that someone at your university was tricked?
No, LEED credits are given to buildings for providing incentives for low-emitting vehicles.
The list is real and it is part of a LEED standard. Technically it's compiled by ACEEE and just referenced by USGBC, but it's a real thing and not trickery.
If ULEZ and CAZ were serious about air quality they’d tax based on per passenger emissions, which would end up taxing the rich people in excessive luxury cars.
So, did the Uni specify that their discount applied to vehicles which got better than a certain "Green Score" according to that list? If not, then everybody is eligible for the discount, even Ford Bronco's if they're newer than 1999.
>A list of vehicles that meet the LEED Low Emitting and Fuel Efficient Vehicles requirements from model years 1998 - 2023.
Also keep in mind, the emissions of pollutants is much higher from this older engine while the emission of CO2 is probably lower.
This, mixed with the artist class pretending that poor people don't own cars, because they don't in their flatshare.
You need to invent a new class to put them (and me) in, I guess.
Flatshare people mostly don't, that's basically it. The council estates are full of cars. If you were here it would be obvious.
"Here?" I don't know what you think you're saying; but you should not assume that you know me; who or where I am. Yeah there are lots of cars in London; there are even more people.
I see also you're throwing out random numbers (50% according to who? ) that even if true, don't directly relate to or contradict what I said - "households" are not "people", "people" are not the same stat as "poor people", car owners are not evenly distributed, and IDK why "Flatshare people" are something subhuman that you scorn and exclude from counts.
I'm not doing your research for you. The poor and middle class do drive in London. If you think otherwise you're simply mistaken, even in a back of the envelope sense. There are over 2 million cars in London, I don't know who you think owns them if not ordinary people.
I didn't say that "it doesn't happen" just that it's not prevalent.
> There are over 2 million cars in London
Did you notice that the number of people in London is a multiple of that? "ordinary people" is broad, do you think that it varies within that, and varies in sync with disposable income, or is evenly distributed?
From Your own source at https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-a... :
> "Londoners are more likely to own a car if they live in outer London, live in an area with poor access to public transport, have a higher income, have a child in the house, and are of Western European nationality."
have a higher income , household car access rises as income increases, live out in the suburbs.
I like Cory Doctorow: he's a rare case of doing a good job of critiquing the establishment liberals without playing to the resurgent paleoconservatives. But one thing I really don't like is when anyone puts something true next to something not-so-true and makes it a chore to pare apart the good information from the, hopefully, mistakes.
The "Great Reset" is a real WEF initiative. The idea of taking advantage of a crisis that killed millions of people to achieve some geopolitical objectives is indeed creepy.
However, the "own nothing" line was never officially endorsed by the WEF and owes its existence to an ill-advised essay by a Danish politician who has belonged to three different political parties (including both socialist and liberal) and might be charitably described as careerist. It should not appear in serious critique except when it is necessary to dispel misconceptions about it.
Overall I think the whole thing is puff that was never really intended to be seriously considered, but I think there's some meaning in what is curated.
[1]https://archive.org/details/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2... [2]https://web.archive.org/web/20161125145049/https://www.wefor... [3]https://web.archive.org/web/20161125144156/https://www.wefor...
Besides, this lenience of "don't take everything so literally" might equally be applied to whatever the swivel-eyed loons are saying, but somehow in that case any surface-level weirdness is seen as grounds to dismiss their subtler points entirely.
Notably, most of the other ideas in that video are also improbable: drone-delivery is not as easy as it sounds; multilateralism is hard; organ printing is extremely unlikely (growing in a vat has been pursued for decades but is still nascent); the displacement of the whole population of Africa seems more than a little hyperbolic; the widespread implementation of carbon taxes doesn't feel any closer (sadly); we are nowhere near sending humans to Mars or supporting long-term space residents; meat alternatives have yet to reach market acceptance (or meat-equivalent RPER). But one part is true: Western governments are feeling quite unstable lately.
Just wanted to point out that the rich in London see this as more of a tax. i.e. Poor people are banned from driving in London, whilst it has made no difference to the rich.
I knew someone who regularly sped in the bus lane, and saw the fines he got everyday as a fee for doing so.
Fines make no sense unless they're weighted against your taxes (though of course, the rich find ways around paying tax too).
The surface-level rhetoric sounds vaguely similar, but look under the surface and you'll find that the people behind opposition to global capital from the right have less in common with the people who oppose it from the left than with their supposed shared enemy.
If they really cared about mass surveillance they wouldn't roll it up with all sorts of other off-putting things that virtually guarantee the rest of us won't take them seriously. But my feeling is that they're not, they're just generally fucked off with various parts of modern-day life, possibly a bit bored and definitely a little too Online.
He would love this if the drill he were to borrow was (more or less) in as good of shape as his own is now. But why would that be so? Do you want to ride around in a bus that has the odor and cleanliness of the worst car you've ever seen on those gross-out subreddits?
If book lending libraries don't have to deal with this (and I concede that they mostly don't have to), then it is down to the fact that the vast majority of people are semi-illiterate quarterwits who wouldn't be caught near a book if they thought there were hundred dollar bills hidden between the pages.
It seems to me sometimes that the same people who have always used the "tragedy of the commons" as a counter-argument to any libertarianish comment I made are now turning around and wanting to force me to live that same tragedy of the commons. The pro-"you'll own nothing and like it" aren't very convincing to me, not even his "neighborhood drill" version. He's playing good cop to their bad cop, but the grift's still the same.
Exactly. I would also like the Neighbourhood Makita toolbox. But then, who has the incentives to make this work? Who tracks down the person that keeps it for two months? Who sources this stuff? Who sets the budget? What else is there? A community gym? Well, top quality stuff is thousands, and there are many kinds of gym - weightlifting, gymnastics, boxing... What other resources would you want?
There's no way any of this could happen and actually be good. It's just... thermodynamically going to end up crap. There are so many ways for a commons system to be shit, and only one way for it to be good.
I have the "Neighbourhood Makita toolbox" today: Max across the street is into woodworking and lends his tools freely & happily rents you his time for the price of a beer or two. David will let you pull your car into his garage for an oil change because he has a nice car lift. I'm less useful, but lift my share of heavy things & set my share of fence posts and am always around when their computers act up.
When I was younger I grew up in a rural area with decent poverty, and this went even deeper. Farmers knew they could each get a small mower that takes forever to clear their field, or could pool their cash and share one big PTO-driven Bush Hog that did the job better & faster. There wasn't any worry about "who keeps it nice": you washed it and sharpened the blades if needed when you were done because you know your neighbor washed it and sharpened the blades when he was.
Is the rub that Cory talks about "the library" being the source, giving a vision of some faceless Other going to a big building downtown and renting the drill in exchange for their library card, nothing else, with no incentive to keep it nice for the next person? Maybe that's it; I'd argue, however, that a 15-minute city implies more libraries serving fewer people, so the Other isn't faceless, it's Max or Dave.
Maybe "the library" concept reeks too much of socialism for the average individualistic American.
But the tool library near me is a group of old guys who volunteer to run it out of a church basement. No faceless Other, just a community of people who want to work with others and put in the work to keep it going.
If not you, then some of us somewhere will be sharing the tools with him. He'll dump our community's tools in the quarry, or set them on fire with thermite. You know, so it will go viral.
He'll be ordered to do restitution, but that won't help me when it takes 12+ months to replace them (if indeed he ever does pay the restitution). Some communities will institute laws to prohibit such people from the tool libraries for life, but that will be struck down because now that no one can have their own tools, prohibiting him from the library leaves him tool-less and it violates his human rights. I mean, even I can't argue against that logic. It'd be true, my arguments would only amount to that it would still be just.
It's not a weird train of thought. It's the correct train of thought. It's how I do my work. I imagine the various things that can go wrong, and then I design solutions to prevent those.
Apparently you work in a completely different tech field where you just imagine scenarios where nothing ever goes wrong, and "poof" they appear in reality in a puff of smoke like magic.
See, this is where you're just inventing an entire hypothetical oppressive regime to support your meandering train of thought. You've decided you don't like tool libraries. That's fine, you do you. I'll enjoy my tool library that continues to be great, despite your protests that reality can't be real.
Also, that's not correct thinking. Like, apolitically, I hope your work isn't paying you for that. Thinking of ways things can go wrong is great. Skipping the part where you weigh the odds of things going wrong and how to mitigate that and then declaring "there's no way this can possibly work" is not something you should be admitting to publicly.
Neal Stephenson did a whole thing about the Hole Hawg, you'd think Cory Doctorow of all people would have read it.
I did in my time. Survived it just fine.
I doubt either exists now, but I'm sure the buses do. They don't smell. The cleaning contract for the buses will have been outsourced to the lowest bidder, but they still do the job.
Actually, the tool library probably still exists. I found one is Glasgow easily https://glasgowtoollibrary.com/borrow-tools/
But being cleaner than your perfect car isn't the requirement.
I also live in a city with one of the highest-rated public transit systems in the US. The buses don't smell and they're affordable and provide great jobs to thousands of city residents while making it possible to cross the city for $2.50 (or $5 for the entire day.)
And lastly, no one is talking about "forcing" you to do anything. You're welcome to own your own set of tools if you don't want to use the libraries (I own a set of my own, but it can be much smaller because I can always pop by the library for something I don't own.) The commons are opt-in, aside from the rare cases where they need to be protected from people who refuse to be a part of the community that cares for the commons.
We're not talking about a tool club with limited membership and everyone that wants to be part of it (and therefor quite likely behaves themselves). We're talking about doing that to an entire country, and dismantling some or all of the infrastructure that would allow others to "opt out" of such nonsense.
It's great that your public transit system is awesome and as clean as a hospital operating room with butt-massaging warmed-seat seating. I don't give a shit about the best public transit system... I'm worried about the worst. Personal experience shows me that in such cases, I'm much more likely to have to deal with the worst of X, than I ever am to deal with the best of X.
> And lastly, no one is talking about "forcing" you to do anything. Y
Yeh, they are. No one who's not a gullible cretin believes otherwise. That's just your propaganda strategy early on. But if we get to a point a few years from now where one of the advocates is frustrated in public and loses his cool, or where you've managed to neutralize some of the opposition, then the truth will come out. You just can't afford to be honest right now.
I even allow that you personally know nothing of the agenda, but that you're just parroting the party line, as a loyalist would. True believer, you can't even imagine that it would be anything other than the truth. That's even more pathetic.
> The commons are opt-in, aside from the rare cases where they need to be protected from people who refuse to be a part of the community that cares for the commons.
These commons are meant to crowd out the non-commons until nothing else exists. And no one with any sense believes otherwise.
Tool libraries work great. They can even utilize the free market so you don't have to get icky poor germs and can touch only tools used by other upstanding freedom-loving Libertarian tools, or whatever floats your boat.
"We need to act boldly now if we are to avoid economy-wide lockdowns to halt climate change": https://www.marketwatch.com/story/we-need-to-act-boldly-now-...
"Report: World Needs Equivalent of a Pandemic Lockdown Every Two Years to Meet Paris Carbon Emissions Goals": https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/03/03/re...
And anyone who doesn't think a large motivating force for 15 minute cities is the fines revenue it will generate doesn't know local councils very well.
I'd rather that we didn't tie 15 minute cities to very low emissions or car restrictions other than reducing parking minimums and eliminating free parking on public property. You then don't have to worry about that whole class of surveillance.