the-world-annealing
machine-saint

remember, it's imperative to turn your aesthetic preferences into moral ones. you can't just dislike neutral colors, or glass-and-steel skyscrapers, or flat design, they have to be symbols of neoliberal capitalism in decay. it's incredibly important that you make sure everybody knows that the only reason anyone could like the things you don't like is that they're an empty shell of a person.

the-world-annealing
machine-saint

remember, it's imperative to turn your aesthetic preferences into moral ones. you can't just dislike neutral colors, or glass-and-steel skyscrapers, or flat design, they have to be symbols of neoliberal capitalism in decay. it's incredibly important that you make sure everybody knows that the only reason anyone could like the things you don't like is that they're an empty shell of a person.

writer-aspirantus
writing-prompt-s

Many young wizards have taken to transmuting swans into humans and marrying them. One day, you are lucky enough to find a swan in the wild, and without hesitating, you turn it into a beautiful lady. Unfortunately, that ‘swan’, was a goose. You have just given a goose a human form.

ramshacklefey

After I explained the mistake, she laughed uproariously.

“You’re damn lucky I’m not a swan!” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “They get by on their reputation for being pretty and graceful, but buddy, a swan ain’t nothing but a bigger, meaner goose. What do you all want swan wives for anyway?”

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. Honestly, I hadn’t actually stopped to think about that much. It had become a mark of status, having a demure, graceful woman following on your arm, always dressed in white and gazing soulfully about.

“They all seem very nice,” I said finally.

She pursed her lips thoughtfully as she finished pulling on the robes I’d brought with me. “Then there’s something else going on,” she said. “I’ve met my share of swans and not a one of them would put up with that shit. Are you sure they were swans to begin with?”

“Well, no, now that you mention it. I mean, everyone says that’s what they are, but I’ve never actually seen anyone else do it.”

“Do they talk? Act like humans? Do they seem intelligent?”

“Well, they are humans, so I suppose they must be, right?” This conversation was not going the way I had expected it to.

“Hah! Fat chance. Transmutation is just changing the shape of a thing. You turn a swan into a human and all you’ve done is put a swan mind in a human-shaped box. Wouldn’t do a wizard much good to be able to turn into a wolf or whatever if they suddenly only had a wolf’s brain to work with, would it?”

“So, you’re saying that if those women were swans originally, they’d still act like swans?”

“Hoo boy yeah,” she said. “Absolutely. Hissing, biting people, trying to build nests, shitting everywhere. The works.”

“Wait, but what about you?” I asked, desperately trying to get the conversation back on track. “You seem like a human, but you were a goose ten minutes ago.”

She grinned wickedly at me.

“I was shaped like a goose ten minutes ago,” she said. “And I appreciate the makeover. But I wasn’t a goose to begin with. Now come on. There’s something hella creepy going on around here, and we’re gonna figure out what.”

She started walking back up the path towards town.

“Wait!” I shouted, hurrying after her, “If you weren’t a goose, then what are you? And what’s your name?”

“You can call me Gwydd,” she said. “And as for what I am, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you some day. But first, you’re going to tell me everything you know about these swan ladies.”

fic
theslowesthnery
theslowesthnery

thinkin about godfrey taking mohg and morgott with him when he's exiled and them growing up to be his strongest, fiercest warriors who he's so proud of

also they fuck, and whenever anyone's like "uh sir are you aware your sons are fucking" godfrey just goes "and what about it? it strengthens their warrior's bond"

togglesbloggle
togglesbloggle

“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

– Patrick Colquhoun

I started reading some of Orwell’s nonfiction essays recently.  “The Spike” isn’t my favorite so far- that honor probably goes to “A Hanging”, although I’m still reading- but it got me doing a Wikipedia dive about British workhouses and that in turn gave me the quote.

It struck me mostly because it’s one of most direct and blunt ways I’ve seen this argument made in the first person.  That is, one often sees this point of view imputed to people that hold capital in the modern era, but it’s always shocking how explicit people could be about it during the early industrial revolution, around the era that gave Polanyi his “Great Transformation.”  Near as I can tell, this isn’t a weak-man argument; the belief in poverty as load-bearing was common enough to express itself in legal policy, and possibly even correct to boot.

The other thing I learned from the Wiki dive is that workhouses themselves (or at least, the system of legal obligations that would mature into them) date from a similar attempt to control and channel human skill at the expense of the skilled:

“The Poor Law Act of 1388 was an attempt to address the labour shortage caused by the Black Death, a devastating pandemic that killed about one-third of England’s population. The new law fixed wages and restricted the movement of labourers, as it was anticipated that if they were allowed to leave their parishes for higher-paid work elsewhere then wages would inevitably rise… The resulting laws against vagrancy were the origins of state-funded relief for the poor.  ”

That is, in response to growing wages, a law was created to keep skilled workers in their place both figuratively and literally.  Relief for poverty was a knock on; not strictly necessary, but if you won’t let people leave to find work, it’s probably smart to give them food at least.  The balance of power eventually swung back towards the nobility, but the workhouses themselves just persisted from century to century, reinventing themselves with new justifications well in to the 20th century.

A friend of mine grew up in a town with an old workhouse that had been recommissioned as an old folks’ home.  When she was a child, she’d run as she passed it- the shadow of the building was bad luck.

No thesis I think, but I want to write it down.  Catch some of these feelings in amber before I move on to Orwell’s other essays.

king-of-men

I do wonder if the connotations of the word poverty have changed, here? It seems to me that Colquhoun is not describing what we think of as poverty, but rather the state of not being a rentier. There is no contradiction between being upper-middle-class in terms of material possessions and lifestyle, and having no investment income and thus being ‘forced’ to work as Colquhoun outlines. But a software engineer who spends all his income is hardly poor, modern sense. (Not very smart, obviously, but that’s a separate issue.) Yet in Colquhoun’s sense he is indeed living in poverty, while being far wealthier than anyone alive in Colquhoun’s time!

And in this sense it does seem to me that the ‘poverty is needed’ argument is stronger. You still cannot make absolutely everyone a rentier. (With present technology, that is.) There just aren’t enough resources for a livable UBI for everyone, even in the US. (Yet. Growth mindset, by all means.) You might be able to arrange things so everyone can retire on their investments after a certain age, but you’re still going to have someone doing the work that generates the real income those investments are a claim on.

togglesbloggle

Ran across this comment again after I think like two years? So this is not a reply so much as an opportunity to think out loud, and keep putting pressure on these ideas in my head and see how they shift. In particular, I think the big thing that changed since I wrote the OP and read this reply last time is that I started reading a lot more Henry George, so take that for what it’s worth.

In any case, I think this comment is very on-point in that Colquhoun, above, is absolutely equating 'not being a rentier’ with 'being impoverished’. Likely, I think, because he was only writing at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, and an educated/specialist middle class basically didn’t exist in 1800. But I don’t think you can say the connotations of 'poverty’ have changed all that much; rather, what’s changed is the idea that a laborer could achieve anything other than subsistence, with any real surplus just being extracted by rentiers and capitalists. (That is, by holders of capital, not in the ideological sense.) Remember that this is the same era in which Malthus lived and theorized!

'Labor’ here, as an economic construct, means basically a pile of undifferentiated human flesh that can be flexibly used in the same way that we’d use programmable robots today- plonked in a factory line, given basic instructions, and told to repeat those instructions indefinitely. Capital, in this equation, was the store of value from which this pile of flesh is provided shelter and nutrition- and in fact, per Malthus, this flesh-pile will in fact grow to the capacity set by capital rather than build savings as an individual might. The construct was very 'ecological’ in that way. Charitably, the Flynn effect hadn’t happened yet, so I think it was probably at least marginally easier to think this way without being a cartoon villain.

The difference is, I suppose, one of the great unanticipated triumphs of industrialism- the discovery that humans at all economic strata are in fact persons, both educable and agentic, and that Malthus can in fact go right to hell.

There are a lot of structural forces now in play that genuinely act to preserve the 'non-subsistence labor’ class, some enshrined in law and some encoded in the needs of the modern economy itself. At the same time, I think unskilled labor is still effectively in the same boat as it was in Colquhoun’s day, and the legal and economic advantages enjoyed by skilled labor aren’t strong enough to prevent Walmart shelvers and Amazon warehouse packagers from reverting over time to the most base level of subsistence possible within their host nation’s welfare system and tech level.

This is, of course, where the Georgist nugget kicks in. For all that we may not have the level of ambient wealth needed to support our entire population comfortably on a living-wage UBI, it’s undeniable that as a civilization we’re orders of magnitude more wealthy than previous generations- and by the same token, it’s equally undeniable that a shitty apartment in Portland or New York in 2023 demands a greater store of wealth from its tenants than Colquhoun himself ever laid claim to in his whole damn life. If our average rent today was “the amount of wealth commanded by a day laborer in 1800”, it would be effectively free!

The value of (especially urban) land- not improvements or construction, mind, just the price of an empty lot- grew hand in hand with the wealth and technology we created throughout the industrial revolution, as did the value of other unmodified natural resources like water, precious metals, and even sunlight. And they seem very likely to continue doing so as we fiddle our way through the full symphony of human technological progress; the greater our arts, the more opportunities we’ll see in the world around us. That created value genuinely is collective, as few other things are, and even if a UBI can’t get all the way to a living wage (yet!), then distributing those gains widely would still go a really long way towards allowing unskilled workers to escape subsistence, or (as they prefer) to work far fewer hours in order to achieve it, even if they aren’t educated specialists benefiting directly from employment in O-ring production networks. Monopolization of natural resources really does seem to be a huge contributor to subsistence poverty in technologically modern states.

In other words, my response to “you can’t make everybody a rentier,” is “sure you can! You can literally make 'everybody’ the beneficiary on rents extracted from monopolies on basic natural resources, dividing them equally and impartially among the whole population. And frankly that seems like a great plan, even if it doesn’t end the need for labor as such, because it does so much to alleviate the misery of poverty.”

politics
bambamramfan
oligetcetera

(attention conservation notice: this is about really coarse patterns that are deconstextualized enough to be a broad heuristic across many situations that you don't know very well, but are best replaced by finer-grained and less abstract concepts the closer you zoom into a particular situation)

in a recent interview, bryan caplan - a very stopped-clock-twice-a-day guy - said his summary of the political spectrum is that "the left is anti-markets and the right is anti-left."

i think that's wrong for a number of reasons - you have market socialists and left-wing market anarchists, the issue is capitalism not markets per se, and the issue with capitalism is part of a broader set of inequities that leftists get huffed up about. the more traditional formulation that the left is anti-hierarchy has fewer errors in either direction than caplan's formulation

but i think he's basically right about the second half? "maximize hierarchy" has always been a bad fit for what actual rightists believe, or at least the vast majority of them, but "left is anti-hierarchy and right is anti-left" seems to have as much truth as you can squeeze out of a formulation that short.

(me using the formulation "right is pro-hierarchy" and caplan using the formulation "left is anti-markets" are i think instances of the same error, where you model your enemies by adding a negative sign to your own values.)

bambamramfan

I’ve been meaning to write an effort post about this, but in short I think the two most fundamental stories each side is about are:

Left: universalism

Right: the circle must be strong

ocprompts
ocprompts

which oc would start a rebellion?

schpeelah

Rip has the leadership skills and inclination to start a local uprising - some riots, maybe a prison rebellion.

Nick has the Luck of the Protagonist and definitely could get into an escalating situation that ends with starting the Han Dynasty.

Buns has the Heart of the Protagonist with not accepting the shitty world lying down, so when correctly pushed the situation could definitely Escalate.

my ocsoc:nickoc:ripoc:bunbun