Immanentize The Eschaton

“I bounced around a bit after college, but now I’m the COO of a small non-profit focused on health, education and welfare for gifted youth.”

“That sounds really demanding!”

“Well, every job has its ups and downs, but on the whole I find it very rewarding.  And of course I love our target demographic.”

“Do you have a lot of accountability to the board?”

“No I’ve pretty much got free rein as long as I make budget.  And my partner focuses on fundraising, which frees me up to pursue my vision.  I call him “the passive income stream”.  It’s a little joke we have, you see.  Ha ha.“

“Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, then.  Are you ever worried about job security?”

“Oh, my partner and I have a special legal arrangement about that.  When we founded the partnership we both agreed that I’d have tenure for life.”

There is currently no legally enforceable right to marry in the US, and the pushback against this modest claim has always struck me as odd because that was precisely what was to be done.  Quod est faciendum.

As for abuse: well, my claim was that it was harder to leave an abusive situation.

The reason it’s OK to medically transition is not because you happened to fit into a particularly “deserving” category of people, but because it’s your own fucking body. The reason it’s OK to socially transition is because no accident of birth should keep you out of your preferred social role, any more than being Jewish should disqualify you from a profession. If you wouldn’t ask someone if I had a good reason for being a doctor while Jewish, why would you ask them if they had a good reason for living as a woman?

In my pretty strident opinion:

If you want to transition because you hate your body, go ahead

If you want to transition because you hate your social expectations, go ahead

If you want to transition because you think you’d have it easier, go ahead

If you want to transition as a cool art project, go ahead (though probably consider the seriousness of your commitment)

If you want to transition because it would be hot, go ahead

If you want to transition to attract sexual interest, go ahead

If you want to transition to avoid sexual interest, go ahead

If you want to transition because it would be cool, and all your friends are doing it, you should maybe think at least a little about whether this will be the best decision for you. However, if it turns out that, all things considered, you’d be better off transitioned than not, go ahead

“I bounced around a bit after college, but now I’m the COO of a small non-profit focused on health, education and welfare for gifted youth.”

“That sounds really demanding!”

“Well, every job has its ups and downs, but on the whole I find it very rewarding.  And of course I love our target demographic.”

“Do you have a lot of accountability to the board?”

“No I’ve pretty much got free rein as long as I make budget.  And my partner focuses on fundraising, which frees me up to pursue my vision.  I call him “the passive income stream”.  It’s a little joke we have, you see.  Ha ha.“

“Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, then.  Are you ever worried about job security?”

“Oh, my partner and I have a special legal arrangement about that.  When we founded the partnership we both agreed that I’d have tenure for life.”

There is currently no legally enforceable right to marry in the US, and the pushback against this modest claim has always struck me as odd because that was precisely what was to be done.  Quod est faciendum.

As for abuse: well, my claim was that it was harder to leave an abusive situation.

“I bounced around a bit after college, but now I’m the COO of a small non-profit focused on health, education and welfare for gifted youth.”

“That sounds really demanding!”

“Well, every job has its ups and downs, but on the whole I find it very rewarding.  And of course I love our target demographic.”

“Do you have a lot of accountability to the board?”

“No I’ve pretty much got free rein as long as I make budget.  And my partner focuses on fundraising, which frees me up to pursue my vision.  I call him “the passive income stream”.  It’s a little joke we have, you see.  Ha ha.“

“Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, then.  Are you ever worried about job security?”

“Oh, my partner and I have a special legal arrangement about that.  When we founded the partnership we both agreed that I’d have tenure for life.”

It depends a lot on the kid. I do think some kids at that age are capable of really making informed decisions themselves, and you can sit down with them and talk through the costs and benefits and risks of both approaches and have them talk with older trans kids who’ve done each of them and have them eventually make an informed decision which as parents you can just support/enable. But this probably isn’t true of all kids, both because making this decision at 8 is pretty different than making it at 13 and because kids vary in their skills with exactly that kind of decisionmaking (and because our current environment doesn’t really provide a lot of avenues to give either kids or parents  the information they need to make an informed call). 

If we get rid of the status quo and naturalistic biases, it makes no sense to assume that kids can make decisions about undergoing puberty in accordance with their ASAB but the other way around. And why is that so? Puberty is known to completely hijack people’s utility function, often in ways they find actively repulsive and undesirable - such as making people into kissing, which they previously find gross. It changes people’s appearance drastically, unpredictably, and often in ways that they find highly undesirable and causing them distress even at the moment of experiencing these changes - such as having acne. Even HRT in adulthood doesn’t result in changes so unpredictable and drastic. Feminization laryngoplasty is one of the few transition-related procedures that changes one’s voice about as unpredictably as puberty does, and it’s gatekept behind a lot of layers of “are you sure you want it, do you understand what you’re getting into, we have no idea what you will sound like, you may not like it, and there would be no coming back?” and even the transgender community being largely like “eh, do you really want to risk it?”

This is a pretty big deal, and yet we just assume that all 8 year olds want it, should proceed with it unless there are extreme contraindications (such as maybe being transgender and having massively supporting family and doctors), and that 8 year olds can make an informed decision “I wanna grow up”. Do you, kid? Are you really informed and responsible enough to make decisions about so drastically altering your body and mind?

Maybe the correct course of action is actually defaulting to delaying puberty until receiving very comprehensive information about possible changes that it can entail and showing the ability to properly assess the risks!

Right, but the issue is that the companies’ valuation is tied to their productivity. And let’s say socialists don’t want to maximize productivity at all costs (cough cough), they at least obviously want productivity–there’s no point in nationalization otherwise.

So what needs to be acknowledged is that 1. you don’t get to spend the value of a company and still own it (which is why you can’t expect to spend a billionaire’s fortune if you expropriate it, a concept which a lot of people still haven’t got their heads around) and 2. once you nationalize, you either continue to operate it essentially as a capitalist, or you take a hit to the productivity that buttressed that company’s valuation–and of course which provided services to all its customers.

On that last point, let’s imagine a simplified example: a factory (say, Foxconn) with a 5% profit margin gets expropriated. As you decide what to do with that factory, you have 3 broad categories that trade off against each other; let’s call them profits, production and product. Profits are self-explanatory (but taken broadly, in the sense that they may be private or socialized), product is what goes to the consumer, and production is everything to do with the making of the product.

Profits: Foxconn famously pays lousy wages, so the Worker’s Committee decides to distribute profits according to a progressive scheme, which might double or more the pay of entry-level workers (this would be roughly realistic for Foxconn). But that means you have to still run it essentially as a capitalist, maximizing profits, still making iPhone screens, still treating workers like dirt.

Production: So the Worker’s Committee decides to improve working conditions–shorter hours, more breaks, better food etc. Good, but that’s going to eat into the profits, so you can no longer afford to pay the workers as much more as you did. Also, a study found that the factory creates pollution, so they change their manufacturing process to one that is costlier but does not create as much pollution.

Product: But the Central Planning Committee decides that iPhones are a bourgeois excess, and turns the plant into a solar cell plant instead, which they decide is of greater social value. Good, but the retrofit and new product are going to eat into that profit margin, so you either maintain the lousy pay and conditions and pollution, or you don’t get as many solar panels out of that factory.

(I picture here, as a matter of convenience, a society that still uses money, but the point still stands in a completely moneyless, 100% centrally planned society.)

And all this is assuming that whatever system of management replaces the old one is as efficient as the old one, producing no additional waste (of labor, of resources).

And I’m open to arguments that this can produce better outcomes in a broad sense–by reducing externalities, by changing production to something that creates greater value overall, by treating workers better, through economic multipliers etc.