if you are arguing for socialism you need to have a pretty reboust understanding of and even more convincing and robust argument for what went wrong in the soviet union, and why the things people have seen and heard about socialism are, depending, 1)not true 2)not that bad 3)good, actually. like, that's sort of the minimum, not getting into china or anywhere else. people saw things go bad in a big way, and they've heard things of varying degrees of truth that are disturbing. So if you want to be a socialist weekend warrior you've got to, minimum, be able to navigate that with the appropriate mix of rhetoric and truthful+developed understanding.

Similarly, if you are arguing for capitalism, I think you also have to have a robust understanding of what exactly is going wrong today, at least in the US, and a convincing argument for why it's 1) not real 2 not that bad 3 good, actually. because frankly most people feel things are pretty dicey and trust in capitalist institions is at an all time low. trust in democratic institutions is hardly better.

you can't wave this stuff off no matter what side you're on, because whether you believe in democracy or in revolution, your main task is going to be "get people to agree with you" followed by "implement policies that don't make people rip you from power or which destroy your state"

Economists do have Econ Brain from being too into econ but if you're not enough into econ you can get something much worse

There's a point I want to make here, but I'm struggling to make it because I neither want to come off as a "you need to study these three books and then you will become an Enlightened Libertarian", because I don't think that, and I really do think you can study these concepts and still come away with a solidly socialist belief system of some stripe, nor do I want to bury the point in so many conditionals that people don't grasp concepts like "when more people want something the price will go up"

I think there are useful tools there, useful jargon and concepts which you need to use to understand the logistics and relations which make up the modern world. And which rule your life!

But every week I read diatribes about energy policy written by people who think coal plants are made of the evil gloop from ferngully

For me this comes down to "all models are wrong, but some are useful," and if you're going to have strong opinions on energy policy, they ought to be supported by a mental model of cause and effect that approximates the real world. Basic economics gets you first-order accuracy on a lot of other systemic models.

If your mental model of cause and effect is wrong, you start proposing policy interventions and then just declaring that they'll have the intended effect, which is not how that works... "cause and effect" doesn't mean you get to pick one of each.

A good hint that you don't understand these things is that your policy positions rhyme with "an outright worldwide ban on..." and the mechanism for replacing the banned thing, or making other things more accessible, etc. is a shrug emoticon.

Only by accurately understanding capitalism's functions, strengths, and weaknesses can a viable replacement be designed and implemented.

The Richard Hanania discourse is weird for me because no one is willing to be specific.

Like, periodically someone links one of his pieces, and I read it, and it's generally pretty anodyne. But of course I'm reading pieces (1) that are current and (2) that people I like are recommending. This is not a good way to figure out what his worst takes are!

But I'm too apathetic to go, like, scrolling through his blog looking for the bad takes. And when people criticize [engaging with] him they never link specific posts or quote specific things he said. They say he's a "white supremacist race realist" and like, that probably means he said some things I'd disapprove of, but I can't tell how strongly I'd disapprove because a lot of people use those terms rather more promiscuously than I would.

(And even if someone made specific allegations, it's hard to know if they're doing a Tumblr Callout-style list where the first three entries are "he literally ships Jen and Fred even though we once had a flashback to when Jen was 17" and then somewhere in the middle is "literally killed and ate several children". If I read the first three links and conclude that it's all bullshit that's not even necessarily right!)

So it's just very hard to get a sense for "how bad are his worst views" and also "to what extent does he still hold those views?" And I don't really have motivation to actually figure it out, so there's just a bunch of slightly dumb discourse that I'm not able to evaluate.

In the early 2010s Hanania was writing for relatively-low-quality far-right and white supremacist websites under a pseudonym, then (I believe) stopped writing for a while and started doing more political writing under his legal name. In 2023 Hanania's earlier identity was doxxed, and he wrote this article: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully explaining why his political views shifted and partially recanting his earlier views. The stuff Hanania was writing in 2022-2023 was still right-wing and still criticized from the left as white-supremacist. In particular he wrote openly about race-realist ideas like black people committing more crime than other demographics of people in the US in a way that is relevant to criminal justice policymaking. That is roughly when he published The Origins of Woke, a political book criticizing wokeness and specifically identifying the primary cause of wokeness as a number of US government civil rights policies, which he advocated abolishing. The Trump administration but also some subsequent supreme court cases, such as SFFA v. Harvard, have implemented some of his policy proposals. In general Hanania's writing seems to have become more liberal over the past few years, he is more willing to criticize people he characterizes as "racists" and the Trump administration and vocal Trump supporters (although I think he always had some amount of unabashedly-elitist disdain for cultural conservatives). There's been a fair amount of criticism of him from the right that he is trying to ingratiate himself with liberal cultural elites, and it's hard to distinguish this from having a genuinely complicated set of social and political ideas and being willing to write about them in a way that pisses other people off.

He wrote a book called "The Origins of Woke" without disclosing that he used to be an old school white supremacist writing for white supremacist web sites while studying as a lawyer and planning to influence the direction of America's laws regarding race, an ambition he was largely successful at.

Now, personally, if *I* were writing about the origins of woke, the fact that racists were organizing online to influence the legal thinking of the Republican party and the American courts in the early teens seems like a key part of the picture.

This is like writing a book on the origins of the red scare without ever mentioning that you spent the 50s as a KGB spy in the White House.

It demonstrates a profound and knowing intellectual dishonesty.

In the spirit of the original post here's a link to a post I wrote when Hanania was first exposed for his racist pseudonym:

Which has a bunch of direct quotes, specifically including a speech he gave to the federalist society about how his current views of civil rights law were already developed *during the time he was posting his white supremacist rants*.

Whether we assume he was telling the truth back then, and his current views are a result of his 2010s white supremacy, or if he's telling the truth now when he says actually his views have evolved and changed and he was just misleading the Federalist society out of cowardice is kind of irrelevant; *either* one of those options casts severe doubt on his intellectual honesty.

Like, either the wokes are right and this Federalist color blind ideology *really is* often offered up as the thin end of the wedge for white supremacy, *or* he wrote an entire book on the origins of woke while deliberately and knowingly distorting what it was that the wokes were responding to.

The thing about The Origins of Woke is that it seems woefully incomplete, and very, very convenient. On the one hand, yes. There is a certain pressure to institute racism awareness training and sexual harassment seminars in a certain cover-your-ass way, giving more power to HR while often being completely unhelpful to victims of workplace bullying or sexual harassment. But it's only one piece of the puzzle. You can't just reduce the Internet culture wars to "HR and college administrators have too much power because of civil rights legislation that makes it easy to sue people" without connecting that to specifics of "woke ideology".

But it's really convenient when your actual motivation is repealing civil rights legislation.

Well, and beyond that as I keep pointing out, affirmative action keeps losing in the courts (and with the voters, but particularly the courts).

Like another way to explain woke HR is as a response to a Supreme Court that believes the following:

And the legal regime you get from combining those three positions results in exactly the incentives that result in the current HR environment.

Which is awkward because the Republicans really don't want to campaign against any of those assumptions.

The way they are trying to square the circle strikes me as overtly racist.

Like, an example from my brother's DEI training was,

"What if you look at your frontline staff and notice that 40% of them are one race, but in the management layer directly above them, only 10% of workers are that race?"

And I feel like the "color blind" Republicans are rapidly coming around to an answer of "Well, it depends on what race we're talking about. If blacks are 40% of frontline staff and 10% of management, that's probably the result of a fair, colorblind policy and the government should leave them alone. If whites are 40% of frontline staff and 10% of management, that's extremely strong evidence of illegal discrimination and the government should launch an investigation, even if there is no other evidence of discrimination."

And hey, I don't think you're going to get buy-in for that from black America.

Since Harvard was rich enough to tell them to get bent in response to their threat to pull funding, we get to read the letter outlining the government's demands, and I was thinking about this remark the whole time because they're just are just a beautful illustration of this whole idea. Great stuff in here, extremely on-the-nose depiction of what "anti-woke" governance actually looks like in practice.

Woah, thanks discoursedrome for reading all that. Fascinating.

Take on hanania: you're not gonna get better writing against the actually existing right wing than what you get from hanania. Trying to publish origins of woke without disclosing his sordid past is reasonably a sign of general intellectual dishonesty, tho. But overall I like him.

Plus, he literally did change his mind about trans people. That's a beautiful thing to behold, someone changing their mind. It's not about the points he gets from that, but from the benefit all of us get from being reminded that people change their minds sometimes.

Hanania may have changed his mind on trans people, but he also tweeted "These people are all animals, whether they're harassing people on subways or walking around in suits" after Daniel Penny was arrested.

Elon and DOGE have access to your banking info and can drain your account.

Russia needs money? Maybe they will access your life savings. Putin is Musk ally.

Speak out against Musk? He will target dissent.

Want to file a complaint? They got rid of CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is beyond apocalyptic.

This isn't going to stand. It's absolutely lawsuit territory, and even the most Trumpian judge would forbid it because it will destroy confidence in the banking system if allowed to go on. And a failure of confidence in the banking system cripples the banks, which fucks up big corporations. I mean, if anything was ever going to trigger the Socialist Revolution, it would be the government randomly stealing money from banks, thus destroying the banking system, thus plunging the country into economic chaos.

(For the record I do not want this. It would kill or deeply harm so many vulnerable people. But I don't think the judicial system will let it come to that. Among Republicans, Musk isn't nearly as beloved as Trump.)

Keep calling reps and state AGs - especially if they're Republicans. "Get Musk away from our money" is about as non-partisan a talking point as it gets.

I'm pretty sure this was a case I saw recently; what happened is that the federal funds had originally been transferred via ACH (which is different from a wire). ACH transactions can be reversed by the sender within 5 business days, which Elon just managed to do (he did the reverse on day 5, if I remember correctly).

This is obviously unprecdented and concerning, but the government does not have the means to directly remove/transfer funds from within your private account. They can stop transfers from a government account(or again, reverse them within a limited window) or "request" a bank to freeze/close your account for suspicious activity, but they can't just reach in to your checking account and take your money.

i’ve made this post and argued about this before but i don’t get if you’re a revolutionary (of basically any stripe) why you would oppose mandatory military service—what could possibly be better than the state paying for training your future cadres and the people being just one seized armoury away from resembling an actual force—the point of all revolutionary movements is to start and win a civil war and somehow the volunteer service model is going to make that easier

also obviously conscripts are going to be easier to radicalise into defection than volunteers

This feels the same as saying "why would a revolutionary oppose cutting welfare, this will just anger the proles and leave them with nothing left to lose!" People would probably react to mandatory service/conscription the same way they react to most hardship; with passivity and obedience rather than full revolt.

Many countries have mandatory service and it doesn't seem to have made them any more rebellious. Arguably the mandatory service of, for example, Israel and South Korea only serve to entrench their nationalist cultures (and in South Korea, it seems to play no small part in fueling a bitter and resentful mens' movement/backlash to feminism).

I think expecting a soldiers' revolt in today's world is to ignore that the best example we have (revolutionary Russia) only happened in the context of many millions of peasant soldiers being thrown into a horribly unpopular war for a government that many of them had never even heard of before. Many peasants did not even consider themselves Russians, and it still took tremendous slaughter before they began to seriously revolt in large numbers.

Finally, as an American I'm very loath to support any policy that would encourage anyone to join and support the military. Growing up in the War on Terror, a lot of people spoke positively about mandatory military service and I don't think that that program, if enacted, would have resulted in anything other than further suffering for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Got this phrase stuck in my head: "socialism is the fight for the right to take responsibility". Haven't quite worked out what i mean by this, but something to do with it being a move from a mass of atomised and so helpless individuals who have no ability to effect change and so can flee from any sense of responsibility for the state of the world to the formation of a working class collectivity which can take decisive control of society and so the members of which must face up to the responsibility this control entails. This is why revenge fantasies or apocalypse fantasies are ultimately antithetical to socialism -- they're a flinching from responsibility, a retreat to that irresponsible atomised view of the world.

Very strongly endorsed. I see lots of predictions/imaginings of socialism that envision 90% of people living in (dependent) luxury while a small number of enginners and planners actually "run the economy." I don't consider this an ideal system!

I think it also explains why so many people have these purely destructive/venegful understandings of revolution - the prospect of fighting and dying just to win the right to discuss/debate production statistics every month isn't very appealing. Yet I think most people feel powerless because they have no way to provide input or control over the society/economy as a whole. The only antidote to powerlessness is power, which goes hand in hand with responsibility.

not to put too fine a point on it but like, isutzumi was fully 100% a slave of shuro's family

Eeeeh you just lost the lottery so we’re going to play “Cultures That Aren’t The Modern West Exist” and also basic critical thinking

Spoilers for the Adventurer’s Bible and Izutsumi’s actual backstory below, I’ll keep the dungeon stuff out of it

well thankfully i do live in a modern democracy so i can actually very comfortably say that tying minors to posts for trying to escape some guy that bought them, trying to train them as your servant and keeping them obedient through threats of demon curses is bad actually

You’re right! You should instead definitely let minors run off into the wilds to starve to death, or be trafficked (again, since that’s where you got them from), or killed and eaten by literal monsters!

And Izutsumi was clearly so very obedient, terrified to move or flinch against her wicked captors for fear of the terrifying demon curse, living in such horrors!

Oh but how could I forget, everything not completely perfect and ideal is Evil Actually, especially if it doesn’t happen to live up to your cultural standards

Cultural imperialism is just so brave

I hope one day you grow enough to realise how embarrassing you are

Fip I don't know how you have such a knack of finding weird people online like this, but "slavery is fine actually and if you're opposed to it you're racist, you're embarrassing yourself by being anti-slavery" is kind of a new peak. Especially as "slavery was good for the slaves, it kept them fed and with a roof over their heads and their masters gave them good things sometimes actually" isn't like, the apologist argument. What is this, the 1860s?

Yeah forcibly keeping someone captive and making them do work for you is still slavery even if it's not in the West, you absolute wet cucumber. Feudalism was and remains morally abhorrent, this isn't a matter of "respecting cultural differences", respecting someone's humanity and right to self-determination is a universal virtue. If you want to do right by a child slave you free them and maybe offer to look after them, you don't keep forcing them to do slave labour for you.

Man, I can't believe that this discussion is happening in the Dungeon Meshi fandom of all places because this is a legitimately concerning worldview! Stuff like this is still used to defend situations of modern slavery today!

*medieval Ben Shapiro voice* well, technically, they aren't slaves, they're SERFS, so your argument is a fallacy,

A recent poll by YouGov showed that ~20% of adults under 30 in America believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. This is rather worrying (to put it mildly), so one has to wonder why. The direkt reason is probably that those people end up reading stuff by Holocaust deniers on the internat. But I suspect that is only convincing because history education generally only teaches that the Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews but doesn't teach how we know that Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews. If people have only accepted a claim based on authority, even weak arguments may convince them that it isn't true. Education about the Holocaust needs to get into the weeds of the methods historians use to establish what happens: census data shows that there are ~6 million fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1933; we have reports about what was happening at the death camps by people who encountered them from many different perspectives (prisoners, guards, soldiers when they liberated the camps, Polish resistence fighters during the was - the earliest reports afaik); we have pictures and documents that conform to these reports. Refuting the arguments by Holocaust deniers is important, but that on its own will do little. People need to know the evidence for something to believe it, not just the evidence against the supposed evidence against it.

(By the way, I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone who goes down the Holocaust denial path already has an antisemitic worldview before that. Holocaust denial can be a gateway drug to antisemitism.)

I agree with the idea that people going down the "holocaust denial path" don't necessarily already have a substantially antisemitic worldview and instead develop that as a consequence later on.

I think that there's a very specific path towards holocaust denial that people take: They tend to be taught a very oversimplified and frankly somewhat sanitized version of the history of the Holocaust focused on arrests, concentration camp slave labor, death camps, victims who neither attempted to nor were able to resist physically, propaganda, and second-class citizenship.

Missing from this narrative is partisans, collaborators, the ghettos, pogroms, violent resistance, Poland, France, Romania, the USSR, mass shootings, and the exclusion from society or intensity of grassroots antisemitism. How many people even know that the Holocaust was more ferocious in Occupied Poland than in Germany and that the major concentration camps were not within the 1933 borders of Germany?

Since the simplified narrative is not indeed correct, and people can see that, they sometimes get it into their heads that they have discovered something concealed. And they very much haven't.

~20% of Americans believe the Moon Landing didn't happen.

One could form a hypothesis tying these two data points together for specific reasons, perhaps involving a Secret Nazi Moonbase.

One could also start to think there are more general problems, like education having limited effectiveness, and/or 20% of people being deeply skeptical about all official sources, and/or respondents wanting to fuck with the poll caller.

One could also notice that most humans are in the bottom four quartiles of intelligence. By the time we're talking 20, 30 percent, we're speaking of some pretty dumb humans.

The non-belief in holocaust rates were generally higher in urban areas and in the nonwhite population. Could likely be a proxy for hating western civilization and Israel among e.g. middle eastern immigrants in particular, while the native US population believes it as much as ever.

Also worth highlighting "not sure" dwarfs "No" in most response groups. I saw a slice of this poll with urban breakdowns months back but can't find it again.

Maybe lots of people are answering "not sure" because the question seems to be written like a trick question? Most people know about the holocaust and believe in it, but couldn't tell you when it/WWII started and ended. So the question can't be answered unless you know that the holocaust started in 1939, which is probably beyond the grasp of many Americans.

We will never know their names.

The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it - victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done - humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.

It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow.  In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).

Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.

For a long time, there was no hope - only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.

In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.

It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it - but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.

An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.

A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.

And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.

At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Raška, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.

The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.

The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.

They found none.

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world - was destroyed.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.

I'm certainly not a Hamas supporter, but the idea that Israel has ever been interested in working towards a peaceful 2-state solution (and that their relation-building with Saudi Arabia has anything to do with that) is laughable.

Israelis may disapprove of Netanyahu, but from the polling data I've seen, it has more to do with his attempted subversion of democracy than his treatment of Palestine. So the idea that popular opinion in Israel was about to result in a sudden relaxation of the political and economic repression of the Palestinians (if only those no-goodniks in Hamas hadn't ruined it for the rest of them! Ah well, maybe we can try again in 50 years) is bullshit.

Israel (it's voters, state, and institutions) has had decades to do something to end the cycle, and they are indeed the ONLY party that can end this cycle. If the Palestinians' only choices are: 1. Give up and accept total defeat on Israel's terms or 2. Rage impotently and drag a bunch of innocents down into hell with you out of spite, maybe Israel should consider offering them a better set of choices?

Hey what do you mean the Israeli government is actually harvesting sperm from the corpses of IDF soldiers.

If I were a state run media outlet, you would have to waterboard this out of me. They just fucking tweeted it. Publicly. On Twitter.

Couldn't you just bank some before you go to war?

I mean, you can extract some spermatozoa from the seminal vesicles a with a syringe, and they live for 48 hours. I have seen this reported on TV, the wife of a brain dead man wanted his sperm saved. And in one case, the mother of a man who died in an accident tried to donate his sperm so she could have grandchildren – a real "man bites dog" story, but not completely unheard of.

So if the widow of a soldier – or of a civilian victim of a terrorist attack, or of a man with a brain tumour, it doesn't really matter – wants doctors to save the sperm, that's unusual, and maybe there are some ethical considerations of consent and single parenthood here, but it's not really any more complicated than semen donation and organ donation. This situation just puts the two together in a novel way.

Yeah the fact that the Israel government is tweeting about it is definitely part of their right-facing "brand" and all that, but this is a typical medical intervention done in the US and in many other countries. Sometimes people save their sperm for later use, sometimes they don't but maybe should have given their desires and then they get hurt so they do a last minute donation. Are fertility treatments...bad now?

Or does this sound icky and therefore its wrong? I think its that.

(And yes these people should have banked it before the war, but they were assuming they would not die. Death rates for Israel soldiers have been very low, can't even say they are wrong about that call! Welcome to people)

There are three directions you can take this if you want to analyse it further. These don't necessarily apply to OP, but to other posts and posters trying to turn this into a meme.

One is the absurd image of people "jerking off corpses". It's absurd, and if you have a certain morbid sense of humour it might be funny, but then again, it's kind of juvenile, and it's not how any of it works. But why perpetuate the meme "the IDF is jerking off corpses"?

Two is the reverse Freudianism. This is a story about death and making babies. Any attempt to say make this about "jerking off corpses" feels like saying "this erect, ejaculating penis looks kind of phallic".

There is something weird and postmodern, and if I wanted to wage culture war on another front in this post, I might even say millenial or zoomer-ish about the idea of "jerking off corpses". Think about it. This is about reproduction, about women wanting to give birth to the children of their dead husbands. It's not a secret that tumblr's audience is into clown sex with role play or implements or costumes, but to make a story that is about reproduction, about getting women pregnant, into a story about jizz, that's like, you know, people who are familiar with only a simulacrum of sex interpreting normies through the lens of paraphilia.

Number three is the mentions of "eugenics". Is it really "eugenics" to save the sperm of dead men? Would freezing sperm also be eugenics? It's not coercive. It's not preventing Palestinians from having children.

I have previously explained that eugenics has historically been bad at being eugenics, but that was the point. Nobody cared about gene pools. So when people talked about forced adoptions in Pinochet's Chile being eugenics, I understood what they meant. There was the same cruelty of coercive eugenics in countries like Sweden or the US, except it wasn't about the gene pool at all. So when some guy talks about CRISPR being eugenics, you should roll your eyes because somebody didn't get the memo.

And yet, after all this...

...that tweet is fucking weird. Families we can save? Are they secretly Catholic? Are they the Monty Python caricature of Catholic?

I have a knee-jerk disgust reaction to the Tweet, but it's because Israel cannot credibly claim to even value the lives of its own people, so I interpret any claim to the contrary with maximum uncharitability: "If you really wanted to save families, you'd declare a ceasefire. You value your citizens solely to the extent that they can provide cannon fodder or victims to motivate the cannon fodder."

It's hard to look at senior politicians like McConnel or Pelosi and conclude that experienced politicians are somehow any more resistant to lobbyists than freshmen. Fundamentally Congress relies on lobbyists because the government has to interface with the private sector at some point, and certain private interests can make or break the fortunes of entire states. Even Bernie will jump when Lockheed Martin (a major employer in Vermont) tells him to. But this list is definitely a good starting place.

how am i seeing communists earnestly argue that the function of the university (in capitalist society!) is to educate people

sure, but i never disputed that people learn things at university! but if the purpose of the university was to educate, rather than restrict access to education and produce professional qualifications that can be exchanged for a paycheck, then pharmacology courses at university would be free, accessible, and available to people who don't plan on becoming professional pharmacists innit

been thinking about this a lot and i think one of the key things to understand here is that universities don't have any one single primary purpose - they have a lot of competing goals all being pursued at once

this talking point gets brought up a lot but if you live near a university you often can just walk into classes and listen to lectures, and many universities put videos of lectures online. specifically the parts that you pay for are related to credentials - you are paying for access to the labor of graders that certify that you've done the work and understand the material (and also for the right to ask professors/TAs specific questions to aid your understanding).

As someone working at a university my two cents is that the primary goal of a university is to get lots of state and federal grants and build lots of labs and hire lots of brilliant researchers and make lots of money and intellectual property so they can hire more researchers and get more grants and build more labs.

Education of the general populace is a desirable but more or less secondary byproduct. There's a reason the lectures are free online but the research papers (also funded by your taxes) are locked behind a paywall.

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

"humanities should be studied throughout the curriculum and be accessible to everyone. I am not arguing in bad faith and deeptroathing the boot so hard it kicks my ass yet again"

Would you have understood what you learned the way you did if nobody explained it to you? Come on, you can do better than my boomer (neutral) and elementary -schooled dad.

I got a PhD that way so yeah I think so. Skill issue.

"I got a PhD all by myself! Nobody explained anything to me, ever! I am very smart, and my thoughts are completely unbiased."

Yep, that's exactly right. As a PhD student you have to read the literature on your own and almost all your time is spent working independently. You do have an advisor but… at least in my case I learned vastly more reading on my own than directly from him. Not that he was bad, he was great and we got along very well. It's just that he was very busy, and doing research you have to learn things that are so specialised you can't count on anyone being available to explain it to you. A PhD is training you to become an independent researcher. If that is not when you should be able to learn on your own, then when? Promotion to full professor?

So the years of schooling that led up to your PhD program are, what, a waste of time? Am I to assume that you popped out of the womb ready to do independent research? Or that the teachers who taught you critical thinking and reading comprehension just didn't exist, or had no bearing on your individual biases? You simply arrived on this planet capable of complex media analysis of your own accord?

yeah I taught myself calculus in eight grade from textbooks my uncle gave me, then linear algebra, differential equations, and multivariable calculus in high school. I didn't go to any maths classes in high school and I didn't pay any attention in them my first year of university.

Correct, they didn't.

It's very telling how your fandom-poisoned wordcel brain considers this the height of intellectual activity. My PhD is in theoretical quantum physics. And no I wasn't born knowing how to do degenerate perturbation theory or calculate scattering cross-sections but I taught myself by reading books.

"fandom-poisoned wordcel brain" please define this for me.

I can do multivariable calculus as much as you like, but being able to prove mathematical facts doesn't mean dick when it comes to actually explaining yourself, or explaining why your opinions matter. I don't consider media analysis to be the height of intellectual activity, but I do consider it to be a necessary part of understanding the world around us. You're using media analysis to respond to my arguments, you used media analysis to learn from books. Books which need an author who is capable of taking complex ideas and laying them out in comprehensible fashion. Even if your humanities teachers were all dead authors who you never met, *you still had teachers*. You still absorbed biases from those teachers, you still learned to view the world around you in the light of those biases.

What use is mathematics without integration into real-world problems? How can that integration occur without an understanding of the nature of humanity? Or do you believe that we can all be reduced down to ones and zeroes, all bias stripped out of statistics for the sake of proving some 'universal truth' about the newest theoretical model of subatomic partical behavior? What good does theoretical quantum physics do without the human perspective?

What you're doing right now.

I really don't think you can.

no, lol

Ok so you agree the library is a substitute for a humanities class. Then why didn't you say so? Did they not teach you how to say what you mean in Philosophy 101?

Do you think any engineer uses a single thing from a Literature class at work, ever? Oh yeah we really needed Kant to go to the moon and invent GPS. (fun fact: Kant's wrong about spacetime in a way that would make GPS useless if we trusted him over Einstein.)

Yes chad.png

Well it led to the invention of the transistor without which you could not post this dumb shit.

Also why does this only go one way? Why does no one demand humanities students learn quantum physics? Well the answer is obvious. They're too stupid to, but STEM students could crush humanities subjects.

Aka wordcels cope and seethe.

perhaps if you paid attention to the humanities, you might be able to construct a better argument. instead, you can just take your new-wave IQ test and go back to chanting about how yours is the only unbiased form of measuring intelligence.

wordcels cope and seethe

is "nope, numbers don't real" the best the humanities can teach? I'll pass, thank you

I'm sorry, is my tiny wordcel brain putting emotions into your big strong logical computing center? does the idea of inherent bias in data collection make you want to retreat to the safety of your perfectly correct statistical analysis? poor baby, having to read all these complicated words and try to make sense of them when you could be doing nice, easy, clean mathematics.

I'm willing to bet $100 my vocabulary is larger than yours despite my being ESL.

anyway, wordcels coping and seething everyone

so, when i sit there and make the statement of "intelligence cannot be measured by any single metric, and all attempts to do so carry inherent biases," did you just. take that to mean that i disagreed with the specific metric you chose to present? vocabulary size is not a reliable indicator of critical thinking skills. Neither GRE scores nor IQ properly measure intelligence. No test ever formed measures anything other than test-taking skills. Keep your hundred bucks, use it to buy yourself some lessons in media analysis so you can understand the things I'm saying to you.

good news, the chart has two (2) axes

well no, but you accused me of being scared of "complicated words", so,

the entire field of psychology and cognitive science disagrees, but ok

weird how they correlate so well with educational achievement, income, life expectancy, etc etc. almost as if they do measure something real and important. this is pure cope from people who do badly on the tests.

because we do, lol. I can read, you can't do arithmetic. wordcel cope and seethe.

The reason that test scores correlate to educational achievement is because educational achievement is measured by test scores. Tautological statements are tautological. The reason that income follows is because modern society locks almost all salaried positions behind the walls of "must have a degree to apply", and life expectancy will naturally correlate to income. "test taking skills" correlate with "ability to put up with mindless bullshit", which is a quality that modern life is fully structured around.

"cope and seethe." I'm having a lot of fun here, actually. maybe if you had a shred of media literacy, you'd be able to tell how much I'm rolling on the floor laughing at these hot takes.

explains why I keep bothering with you

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

Do you think that the only thing sufficient to decrease the commute time is just to decide to commit resources to it? Nobody has a guaranteed way that will work. Nobody really knows enough to make that guarantee. Instead we have a bunch of people who want to do different things that could be described as "decreasing commute time" that all act on different things in different ways and have different tradeoffs. Which tradeoffs? Who takes the hit if someone has to take a hit? Do the planners have their balls close to the bandsaw, does failure have immediate negative consequences? If not, then they're not going to do effective things, they're going to affirm their group identity by advocating for the Type Of Thing Good People Should Want instead of what's likely to work. If the phrase du jour is 15-minute cities, they'll pursue those even if they aren't actually plausible. If they are plausible in general, they'll pursue it in the most emotionally flattering way, not the way that leads to the outcome.

In fairness, this is pretty much how public works and urban planning work already anyway, but you want it to work like that for more stuff, including the things that are dictated by revealed preferences, the only possible source of accurate information.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

Every feedback mechanism you propose and every decision making mechanism you propose passes through, and is inherently dependent on, a layer of Serious People whose job it unavoidably will be to determine what the people "really" want and what they "should" want.

I would try to design enough formal feedback channels (besides voting) so that public opinion could be inferred without a doubt. We already live in a time where people can yell at BART officials on Twitter directly about poor service; I don't think any official who ignored or willfully misinterpreted those demands would last very long in office. And again, the public would ultimately need to approve an economic plan, and could freely reject any that doesn't reflect their interests. This doesn't solve the tyranny of the majority, but it should prevent tyranny by the planners.

Exactly, what if people could propose what they want on the ballot via referendum, then the planners could crunch the numbers and come back with costs for the most popular choices? They could try to pull a fast one and say "actually bars and strip clubs will cost 10 million labor hours each; pick either booze or hospitals but not both" but I think the public would push back against that estimate. If the government's estimates are compromised, people could recall planners (or perhaps a new group of planners could be chosen randomly by sortition) and ultimately vote for any plan that seemed desirable and attainable, regardless of the source of the plan. If Jim Bob from Duluth has had better success in predicting costs than the professionals, there would be nothing stopping people from voting for his proposal instead.

On your point about labor discipline, this is kind of one of socialism's basic arguments: when capitalist states (or historical socialist states) suppress labor movements and protests, not only is it immoral, but it also denies the government the opportunity to solve the public's problems or inefficiencies. If the public is unhappy with working conditions, then their rights to free speech, protest, and even to prevent production via striking must be protected- not only because it is morally right, but because their dissent is the only means of epxressing their real preferences to the planners and society at large. Ultimately, control of production (and of enforcement, to whatever degree necessary and practical) must belong to the workers, because otherwise they are at the mercy of whoever really calls the shots and can set the narrative (whether that is a capitalist state or state socialist planners.)

Finally, about the market: the market primarily allocates goods depending on peoples' ability to pay, not their willingness. The working class is kept in a state of debt (and in some places, literal) slavery and fear of absolute poverty. Those with vast wealth can artifically and disproportionately skew demand towards their own interests. Thus markets often fail to capture accurate demand, and we end up with outcomes that are bad for the majority but benefit the owning class (privatized health insurance, private cable monopolies, etc.) On the supply side, goods and services are overproduced and wasted (food, unsold vehicles) or are underproduced/overpriced due to regulatory capture (such as laws forbidding direct sale of vehicles by manufacturers), poor policy (either the result of upper class interests, or of government attempts to compromise between opposing classes, such as rent control). Even when production of goods adjusts to market signals, it is slow and imperfect. What if we could just decide to produce however much we would likely need to satisfy a certain goal or demand, plus a bit extra?

Overall, I feel like we're talking past each other somewhat, and I also think I could give you any number of policies, whether practical ("planners could be recalled at any time by the public") or ridiculous ("people could humiliate planners in the street to discourage them from acting too arrogant") and your response would either be (understandably) skepticism, or some variant of "the Serious People will always be around, and will find a way to exploit any system or rule to their own ends and/or to enable bullying". I don't expect to change your mind, especially with nothing but hypotheticals, but I don't think it would be productive to continue the dialogue. But nevertheless, I have appreciated the opportunity to clarify my thoughts and beliefs via answering your questions, and I am sincerely appreciative that you have asked your questions with civility, given how bad other leftists seem to have treated you. I hope I have extended you the same courtesy.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

Do you think that the only thing sufficient to decrease the commute time is just to decide to commit resources to it? Nobody has a guaranteed way that will work. Nobody really knows enough to make that guarantee. Instead we have a bunch of people who want to do different things that could be described as "decreasing commute time" that all act on different things in different ways and have different tradeoffs. Which tradeoffs? Who takes the hit if someone has to take a hit? Do the planners have their balls close to the bandsaw, does failure have immediate negative consequences? If not, then they're not going to do effective things, they're going to affirm their group identity by advocating for the Type Of Thing Good People Should Want instead of what's likely to work. If the phrase du jour is 15-minute cities, they'll pursue those even if they aren't actually plausible. If they are plausible in general, they'll pursue it in the most emotionally flattering way, not the way that leads to the outcome.

In fairness, this is pretty much how public works and urban planning work already anyway, but you want it to work like that for more stuff, including the things that are dictated by revealed preferences, the only possible source of accurate information.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.