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Rape, murder, war, horrific disease, and all the other “adversity”

I mean, you’re talking about this as though some Divine Agent actively is making one person sexually assault another. Or kill another. Or cough on one another.

If you don’t want to live in a world full of rape, I would suggest you start by not raping anyone. Grabbing someone by the hair, pulling them into the ally, violently forcing yourself on them, and then saying “God made me do it!” is the most cynical shit imaginable.

“What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.” I dunno about you but all I’m looking for is a little less genocide, maybe a bit fewer hungry children, maybe some consequences for well-known pedophiles.

I mean, good news? We’ve been emerging from a state of nature for thousands of years and we are absolutely reaching an apex of civilization such that genocide and famine are at an all time low. Meanwhile, pedophilia and rape and murder are increasingly reviled rather than celebrated or tolerated.

But, again, your parents’ generation watched a thirty-year-old Prince of Wales become betrothed to a 16-year-old girl and clapped like seals. God didn’t make the English Monarchy do that.

God didn’t set up Little Saint James and stuff the Lolita Express full of post-Soviet block easily exploitable teenage refugees.

God didn’t initiate the Nakba or perpetuate a running genocide against the Palestinian people for the next 80 years. Neither did he kick off the German Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. He didn’t spread the Spanish Flu during WW1 or factory farm in such dense conditions that COVID erupted onto the public in 2020.

All this shit is the direct result of human activity. Human ingenuity. Human passions. Human biases. Human politics.

I guess if there is no horrific suffering in the world we won’t evolve.

You can wave your hands and bemoan the existence of heat waves and hurricanes, then blame The Divine for building a universe in which some bad things happen to some living beings some of the time. But then you’re obligated to posit a world without heat waves and without hurricanes. And good fucking luck. That’s one hell of a balancing act.

You can posit a world in which bad things happen but we just don’t notice or care. But where does that end? Is suffering better if we’re blind to it? Not to get too Biblical, but you eat from the Tree of Knowledge and you begin to see the world more clearly. Language, society, historical memory, the capacity for science and engineering - they’re all double-edged swords.

You could be a microbe right now, with absolutely no conceptualization of who you are or why you’re here or what the universe outside a few centimeters looks like. And would that make you happier? Is that your Utopia? A few hours or days of existence mostly eating until you’re fat enough for mitosis. Is that your idea of a good time?

At least then you wouldn’t know enough to blame God for anything, right?

I’m asking why a not real place that actually does democracy well and isn’t dragging a legacy of being shitty behind it

A number of Latin American countries have very loose and friendly immigration policies. Argentina and Paraguay are the most notable. Idk if you’d say they “do democracy well”. That’s a real subjective criteria.

why does someone being a human give them a right to go anywhere and do anything?

We’ve got a wealth of political philosophy and ethics debates that help answer that question, from John Stuart Mill to Lea Ypi who can answer that question better than I can.

But a better question might be, why wouldn’t they?

Holy shit, you really trust social media and advertising to be left unchecked? A lot of peple would 100% move to the Wal-Mart corporate town and condos.

Why would I trust the owners of social media and advertising companies to be the gatekeepers?

People already move to the Walmart Corporate Towns, in large part because Walmart dictates what criticism it will tolerate and what opposition it will face.

People screaming about corporate fascism today wanted to put Walmart Board Member Hillary Clinton in charge of the whole country not ten years ago.

Have a meaningful conversation of how an all-powerful, good God can allow so much suffering.

Evolution is driven by adversity. Organisms experience stress, seek to relieve themselves of that stress, and improve upon their function iteratively over billions of years.

Pain is a form of information which gives an organism an imperative to change. And with a great number of organisms, you will necessarily have a great deal of suffering. But without that pain, you lose the incentive to change. The end result is stagnation and decay. A lack of pain isn’t joy, it’s numbness. A lack of adversity does not imply triumph but inertia. What you’re asking for isn’t a Utopia, it’s the heat death of the universe.

Look at our world. Look at the bad things. Look at the horrific things. God lets all those things happen

Literally the Al Pacino line while he’s trying to convince his son to fuck his sister.

Go to hell. Be a rebel. Be proud of it.

I would simply break the Cycle of Samsara and rejoin the Cosmic Singularity by freeing myself from materialistic desire.

Love how this is getting downvoted. Like there isn’t a rich and storied history of Satanic Panic in the West. Or an active community of Epstein-brained conservatives who are doing blood libel on anyone who fails the Paper Bag Test.

if their government doesn’t like you, the border then binds you but does not protect you.

Okay, but that’s just why this is the most important election of our lives and you need to turn out to vote or we’ll be under the boot of the vile fascist-communist government of the Other Party That Doesn’t Like Me.

Borders exist because it projects power onto people within

I mean, that’s a very narrow perspective. Borders exist as a compromise between neighboring governments, indicating where one set of legal codes ends and another begins.

If you want truly free movement, you can’t have projections of power

Free movement is power projection. It’s just projection by the people (and their attendant organizations and ideologies) doing the moving.

The whole neoliberal One Big Global Market wet dream was about projecting the power of Western financial and regulatory authorities around the globe. Open Borders can be as much about projecting power as closed ones. And whether you believe that’s good or bad really hinges on whether you believe you’re aligned with the people doing the power projection.

You absolutely could describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine (or the US invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria) as a kind-of Open Borders policy under the Bush Doctrine. The borders are simply open to those with a big enough battering ram to kick through the door.

Most people I know that want an end to borders also want the end of government.

Idk about that. The line I’ve always seen is that most people want a system which protects-but-does-not-bind. And what they recoil at is a system that binds-but-does-not-protect.

I want the border to be frictionless for me. But I don’t want the border to be frictionless for people I don’t like.

As if a democratically elected government representing people in a certain place should have no right to its own sovereignty

I mean, “democratically elected” does a lot of heavy lifting in countries that are choked out by fascist governance and fear-mongering media. “Sovereignty” also has a weird way of being used to weaponize self-determination into surveillance-state policing and xenophobic policy.

But then when it comes to countries that struggle to find work for their own people, they also get flooded by people from places where no government functions at all. Specifically Nigerians in South Africa and Ghana. Legally present, and subject to xenophobic attacks because there no hope for them in Nigeria because it’s a hot mess.

Why is it that a French citizen traveling to Germany or Spain is considered benign, but a Libyan citizen traveling to Germany or Spain is considered part of a “flood” that has some kind of existential threat to the locals? Why does Libya’s dogshit government get raised as a reason why this Libyan visitor can’t stay at my hotel or eat at my restaurant or work in my office?

Does being born in Country A stain someone’s soul in a way that makes them incompatible with Country B?

how is it supposed to work without literally magic being involved?

You don’t need magic to not have borders. If anything, you need a certain degree of magic to rigidly enforce borders. You need mass surveillance to track the identities of everyone entering and leaving your country. You need to engineer increasingly complex systems of identification, digital fingerprinting, financial controls, regulation on business and social activities, and prohibitions enforcement pursuant to a constantly shifting web of sanctions. You need an enormous body of labor to manage these rules and enforce them. You need prisons to hold all the trespassers. You sprawling bureaucracies to figure out who is “legal” and to change the legal status in a timely manner.

None of this shit works as intended. Legal residents routinely get harassed because records aren’t properly maintained and distributed. Illegal residents slip through blind spots in the system. Black market trade grows faster than the regulated trade, because there’s a larger profit margin in it. Legal business activity suffocates under the higher costs of compliance.

You ask how no-borders are supposed to work? I’d say, incredibly easily! Do nothing. Boom! You’ve achieved your goal.

I ask you how closed-borders are supposed to work? You’re going to spend several lifetimes and untold fortunes trying to achieve this fantasy.

Grew up in Texas, and back in the 80s it was very normal for kids to just hop into a car and drive south of the border for Spring Break. This was the most normal thing in the world for hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults.

And then national media realized they could make a lot of cheap news coverage by scandalizing the practice. So we got a slew of news stories, which became inflated with an even more over-dramatized series of books, tv shows, and movies, showing kids going across the border for drug use and rape and animal abuse and to dispose of dead bodies for the cartels and to get eaten alive by the Chupacabra. We got bombarded by a slew of media with a flashlight under the chin whispering “Oh, you think these kids are having fun? Well, what if the news threw a red filter over the images and used graphical effects to imply everyone was murdered?!”

Both the US and the Mexican police got more and more involved. The borders became militarized. You ended up with these obnoxious traffic situations, which really killed the appeal of any kind of vacationing. Also didn’t help that a lot of the popular destinations got enclosed and privatized, for the benefit of a few insider luxury developers. The cost of a vacation exploded, as cruise lines and chain hotels and resorts took over the best spots. And now it’s been fully Disney-fied, with a heavily demarcated entry and exit for tourists who are heavily discouraged from mingling with locals.

Shit fucking sucks, man.

You can strive for a future

Can I? I feel like I’m going to get yelled at for striving, because I’m doing it wrong.

If someone I don’t like is allowed to go somewhere I don’t want them to go, they could start killing people at any moment.

Also, I am of the view that every single person south of the border that would want to cross north of Mexico is a gang-affiliated serial killer. Every single person coming from East Asia is a spy, a saboteur, or a left-wing extremist intent on destabilizing the country. Every single African coming to the US has Ebola. Every single Muslim coming to the US is going to impose Sharia Law.

We need to close our borders until I, personally, feel safe. And the TV says I’m not safe. So nobody should be allowed, unless they are white.

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if an engineer figured out how to make a Jpeg 600 bytes it would be impressive

Why use many pixel when few pixel do trick?

Had Sam Altman personally vocalized this article in full sincerity, I would not have been surprised.

I agree that support is needed, but I can’t take this argument seriously.

The way I see it, someone at city hall went out of pocket several hundred dollars to customize those benches. And then they’re paying someone to come out every morning and unlock them (or not and just leaving benches locked indefinitely). All so life is now harder for people already sleeping rough.

Does anyone really believe the city councilor or mayor or whomever who went through that trouble is going to be releasing money to improve municipal services for homeless residents? I certainly don’t.

Our first Christmas together, my wife got me one of those as a joke, because my roommates and I hadn’t decorated.

Almost two raccoons

This is where people get into trouble. They round up. They get sloppy.

A lot of it simply isn’t worth debating in a media that’s suffocated with fascist rhetoric.

When you know the only coverage you’re going to get is “Politician defends Baby Eating Terrorist, flees confrontation with half-eaten baby when confronted” there’s no yield in engaging a Steven Crowder tier interviewer on the subject.

Staying on message on local issues plays better in the long run. And deflecting from “How do you feel about all the Dead Venezuelan Babies that socialism created?” to “I’m busy filling potholes on 47th and Main, where we’re also throwing a pizza party and handing out baby blankets to new moms and college scholarships to telegenic high schoolers. Why won’t you let me talk about that?” is just the standard - highly effective - retail politics that make someone like Zohran or AOC have sky high local approval numbers.

It sucks that we can’t have any kind of serious conversation about foreign policy. But I’m not going to blame that on the heart-of-gold socialist currently getting heckled by a news anchor with a swastika tattoo on his forehead.

Sounds like you’re using some fascist technology, friend.

One of the consequences of living in a fascist state while surrounded by fascist sychophants, unfortunately.

Be more discriminating in your choice of technology suppliers, I guess?

Do what you can, but don’t fall into the trap of individualist consumerism. Blaming the slaves for working on the plantation only serves fascist ends.