What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[Linguoboy]

I didn’t mean to start reading Aventures i desventures de l'insòlit i admirable Joan Orpí, conquistador i fundador de la Nova Catalunya the day I got it in the mail but I guess that is happening anyway.

[Travis B.]

I didn’t mean to start reading Aventures i desventures de l'insòlit i admirable Joan Orpí, conquistador i fundador de la Nova Catalunya the day I got it in the mail but I guess that is happening anyway.

Somehow I managed to understand that title despite not knowing any Romance language.

[Raphael]

The only part I would have to google is "insòlit". And "desventures", now that I think about it.


I can understand every word in the infamous official announcement of Franco's death despite not speaking any Romance language, either, though.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Playing, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse (3DS).

Reading, A Hat Full of Sky (Terry Pratchett, Discworld).

Listening to: The music from Suliman's magic sequence in Howl's Moving Castle, which the soundtrack seems to name "Saliman's [sic] Spell, Return to the Castle".

[Ares Land]

David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.
I'm not sure yet if I'm convinced by the premise or not. But the fun part is trying to answer the question: Is my job bullshit?

(I thought long and hard about this, but my job is definitely not bullshit. But out of a 40-hour workweek, maybe five hours are actually socially useful. The rest is bullshit.)

[rotting bones]

I was reading Chartier, but I can only concentrate on BS right now.

https://dungeondrunks.podbean.com/

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS-h ... rfsAvAk2mO

Also Mice & Murder on Dropout.

[Ares Land]

If you're thinking of the same Chartier as I do, he's interesting but not exactly the most readable of authors.

[rotting bones]

If you're thinking of the same Chartier as I do, he's interesting but not exactly the most readable of authors.

I was trying to read the same Chartier, but I don't know if I succeeded. I was reading Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society by Gary Chartier. I liked the writing in that book. I thought it was smooth, precise and logical.

[Ares Land]

The same Chartier, and in fact the very same book. I need to re-read it more carefully, I kind of skimmed over the logical demonstrations.

[Travis B.]

Maybe I should read that book - if there is a way to have a stateless society which still regulates its enterprises to prevent many of the problems which occur with both unfettered private capitalism and state capitalism, I am interested.

[Ares Land]

I finished Bullshit Jobs.
The gist of it is that a surprising amount of jobs are bullshit. As in, devoid of any purpose or content. Not the same thing as shit jobs (which are horribly nasty but necessary.) Not quite the same thing as evil, either. (A mafia hitman has an evil job, but not bullshit as he does accomplish something.)
This is one of those elephants in the rooms no one dares discuss, so if there ever was a useful book about modern society, it's this one. Plus, Graeber makes all sorts of clever analyses and observations on the way.
Graeber says doesn't suggest a solution, which I believe is pretty clever. Examining the phenomenon is one job, trying to eliminate it is another entirely.

But of course, he has to spoil it and suggest a solution anyway. His is Universal Basic Income. Honestly that last bit is the weakest part of the book. Graeber is very enthusiastic about UBI. He goes on quite a bit on how wonderful it would be, but he treats the question of how to finance it with contempt.

Anyway, I ended up buying Basic income: and how we can make it happen, by Guy Standing which Graeber recommends. I'd love to find some discussion of how we're supposed to pay for UBI, as opposed to how wonderful it'll be. I don't get my hopes too high though.

[Linguoboy]

I don’t know about other parts of the world, but here in the USA we could finance UBI for the entire country with a modest tax on the profits just of the Amazon Corporation.

We’re swimming in wealth here. We’ve just made a policy decision that virtually all of it will accrue to a small fraction of a percent of the population rather than distributing it more widely.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I don’t know about other parts of the world, but here in the USA we could finance UBI for the entire country with a modest tax on the profits just of the Amazon Corporation.

We’re swimming in wealth here. We’ve just made a policy decision that virtually all of it will accrue to a small fraction of a percent of the population rather than distributing it more widely.

It's really very absurd how reasonable taxes on wealth, high income, and corporations could do so much for society, and yet they aren't carried out, for the most ridiculous reasons.

[rotting bones]

Maybe I should read that book - if there is a way to have a stateless society which still regulates its enterprises to prevent many of the problems which occur with both unfettered private capitalism and state capitalism, I am interested.

I don't think I fully understood the book's argument before I shelved it temporarily. However, my impression was that it's very idealistic in the tradition of analytic philosophy. Being logical doesn't make an argument realistic.

It seems like hardly any intellectual these days bothers to do a deep dive into a physical model of the world while keeping game-theoretic arguments in the back of their minds before proposing a leftist program. The only intellectuals who try this are libertarians. This is probably because the outlook is so bleak. My answer is basically: Yes, leftism is both socially necessary and possible from the point of view of physical laws, but the present state of the world makes it almost impossible for the necessary to become actual.

But read the book yourself before coming to conclusions.

[rotting bones]

It's really very absurd how reasonable taxes on wealth, high income, and corporations could do so much for society, and yet they aren't carried out, for the most ridiculous reasons.

It's logical for all parties concerned to be unreasonable. It's obvious why these policies are supported by their beneficiaries. The dupes support it because they think they are trying to imbibe rich people values. Breaking this misconception about how material systems function takes a lot of education that no one will be paid to provide.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Yes, I know why they do it, but that does not make it not a broadly absurd thing to allow.

[rotting bones]

Yes, I know why they do it, but that does not make it not a broadly absurd thing to allow.

I don't disagree with you. I'm just adding a reminder about the internal logic of the absurdity. This helps avoid idealistic interpretations of the absurdity of existence, which often annoys me.

[linguistcat]

If you assume all things are absurd then you'll be happily surprised when something makes sense.

Lately I've been diving back into my research on Old Japanese for a conlang and mostly listening to "humans are space orcs" stories on youtube.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Lately I've been diving back into my research on Old Japanese for a conlang and mostly listening to "humans are space orcs" stories on youtube.

Old Japanese is fun and more realistic than the indecent liberties I took with Proto-Japonic for my own project, probably. I really like the family a lot.

Humans could very well be space-orcs (or space-oni), too.

[Ares Land]

I don’t know about other parts of the world, but here in the USA we could finance UBI for the entire country with a modest tax on the profits just of the Amazon Corporation.

No, you couldn't: assuming a UBI of $10,000 a year -- barely enough to survive on, there are 200 million adults in the US. This amounts to 2 trillion dollars a year.
(By comparison, Amazon's entire income is 26 billion a year and Jeff Bezos' net worth is 200 billion dollars.)

The US federal budget is 3.5 trillion; and in fact that sum distributed to our 200 million American that would make for a decent UBI.

That doesn't mean it's impossible (far from it: I mean even if the numbers look huge, that's only 15% of GDP.) But 'how to double the federal budget and raise 3.5 trillion dollars' isn't a trivial problem.

It seems like hardly any intellectual these days bothers to do a deep dive into a physical model of the world while keeping game-theoretic arguments in the back of their minds before proposing a leftist program. The only intellectuals who try this are libertarians. This is probably because the outlook is so bleak.

Libertarias are just very good at that sort of thing. That's because the real inventors of libertarianism are Robert and Virginia Heinlein: an engineer and a science-fiction writer.
Engineers feel compelled to explore solutions thoroughly and figure out where and how they'd break. Science-fiction writers or more largely conworlders feel the need to explore in some detail how fictional society would work -- it also helps that Robert Heinlein had worked in marketing and wasn't half bad at it. The two of them working as a team turned Barry Goldwater's uninspiring reactionary conservatism into a very compelling and vivid picture.