#quick post

“And again, if I'm a Native American who owns an apartment building, who is better for my power: A green card holder who pays rent on time every month, or a native-born citizen who doesn't?”

For example, this assumes that either ownership of the apartment building is not subject to political attack, or that expropriation attacks against ownership of the apartment building can only proceed along a class axis, rather than an ethnic axis, or combined ethnic/class axis.”

Frankly, I think you are wrong. How does this (explicit, direct) question assume the things you are saying it does? Or rather, what objections do you raise here that are not *exceedingly* general?

It does generalize in that it extrapolates from the single case of one payer for one apartment to the general case of bringing in more payers for more apartments, but failing to connect the dots and reflect backwards that one immigrant != immigration essentially is the issue.

After watching and rewatching Storm Hawks multiple times, I started thinking that it could be a part of an alternate universe of our planet that went through some apocalypse that not only gave earth the reset button making humanity start civilisation back up from scratch. Sure, there's no evidence that will support this. But almost everything they have is like we have.

Music players, instruments, vehicles, and don't get me started on those communication radios that are now making me think of a phone. Not like the phones we have today, but we fans can make something up just like it.

Then there's also some recognizable food, burgers, hot dogs, candy, etc.

Sure, I would also say crystals, but crystals in the real world don't blow up, shoot lasers, glow, or float. But they do power some of the technology we have today.

(I'm posting all this on tumblr cause no one on Deviant Art would be interested in a theory.)

But, Atmos can be an alternate universe, which is parallel to ours. While our world is going through our timeline, Atmos is going through its own timeline and has a multitude of alternate timelines and universes of itself like what Marvel and DC have that we created ourselves through fanfictions, fan comics, and art.

So here's a scenario that might be easy to understand.

Here on earth: the characters of Storm Hawks cartoon could be normal people. Dark Ace would be this one person you don't want to come across, while Aerrow is still that teen who wants to make a difference for the world in a reasonable way. (Might make that as an AU) And they do end up crossing paths still. And yet they feel like they know each other from somewhere but can't put their fingers on it. (OK, this should be an AU)

But anyway, it was just a thought. I'm still active on Deviant Art, I started another series, it's a self-insert series and I'm just gonna let Meagpie be an oc, while my new persona who has my actual name this time takes the persona spotlight. I also have a separate series that is a season 3 idea where I took the Dark Ace came back as a vampire idea that I had for the Rise of the Night Flyers series (canceled) as well as the whole idea of the Storm Hawks being now adults and a new young sky knight and her squadron are there to help. Also, I'm going to cancel Warriors of Atmos cause I'm getting more active on Deviant Art, but some of the stuff I made will still exist. It's just that l have been getting too creative with this stuff.

I'm also going to break the no underage shipping rule, but I won't make it mature. More like if I ended up shipping Dark Ace and Aerrow as their canon ages, it'd be like a big brother and little brother relationship cause I do have a theory that Dark Ace would've been like a big brother to Aerrow if he didn't betray the original Storm Hawks. But he can try as he is now if I planned it. However though, I'm going near that danger line in that separate series where Dark Ace is a vampire on Deviant Art where the Talon Commander might become bi-curious, and Aerrow is already an adult in this series. But hey, underage shipping is just an uncomfortable thing for me to get into cause of how wrong it is in the real world. And sure, fantasy worlds like Atmos might not always have the same laws as us due to the fact that they are at a war and anything goes in some scenarios that would make Stork's eye twitch more than usual. But eh.

So let me ask again: Is Atmos our planet in a post-apocalyptic future? An alternate universe? The Answer: It's actually both. In an interesting and bizarre scenario, our planet in that universe may have gone a different evolution and geological direction than the one we currently know of. And it wasn't called Earth. It was named Atmos. A world where the clouds are the oceans, the terras are the continents and countries, the Farside being a frontier of new discoveries, a war between two parts of the world, yeah, sounds kinda like Earth in an alternative history of itself. So, in conclusion, Atmos is an alternate universe with an alternate timeline. That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. Oh, and the evolution of how the other sentient creatures like wallops, merbs, and raptors came around, that's just up to your imagination. To be fucking obvious, I don't want to know how Merbians came to be.

Stork: And you never will. *uses a flashing light device like the MIB*

I sit here alone in this coffee shop.

Savouring the heart in my cup

They way I would savour yours

So fragile and delicate

Your heart is to be sipped

While mine lasted an instant

Drank by the likes of builders

Who catcall outside

Gulped down without a thought

But yours

Yours is the first flower of spring

The drop of due atop a blade of grass

A quiet snowflake adrift in the breeze.

I covet this pretty little thing.

The harms done to past generations of [ethnicity] persist onto present generations through intergenerational transfer of wealth or persistence of relative GDP

The gains that past generations of the dominant ethnicity accrued through exploiting [ethnicity] persist onto present generations through intergenerational transfer of wealth or persistence of relative GDP

Therefore, wealth should be transferred between present generations to counterbalance this to undo the past wrong inasmuch as that is presently possible, and so that current generations are more equal and are no longer growing up in the shadow of the historical atrocities that went before

There are potential counterarguments to all of these points, but it's rare to hear them, especially against points 2 and 3. The right haven't won the argument on this, and in fact seem to be losing pretty badly on all 3 points, even though the conclusion is not politically popular. Without either winning the argument on this, or suitably large wealth transfers actually happening, I don't see why you would ever expect CIEJ claims to go away. Attributing it simply to tribalism is ignorant, and appears from the other side of the fence like accusing a burgled family of being jealous because they asked for the family heirloom your parent stole.

Another point is that some of the issues you may be folding into the category of CIEJ aren't even intergenerational, because e.g. segregation in the US is still living memory for some people, the partition of India and Pakistan is still living memory for some people, the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Agent Orange is still living memory for some people, and affects the land to this day. Apartheid South Africa is still living memory for some people in their 30s.

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...but you can't understand where the idea comes from without engaging with the fact that the thought-leaders of the movement are explicitly not doing that, and are in fact making the argument: ...

I understand the "runaway capital accumulation from resource extraction" hypothesis, and I don't assign literally zero weight to it, but I think it's the wrong footing entirely.

The big reason is that yes, capital is an input to capital, but unmaintained and unprotected industrial capital degrades to the point of becoming unusable quite quickly. Worse, rapid shifts in market demand can make capital obsolete before it even reaches the end of its practical working lifespan.

Therefore, capital-forming power, the ability to create and maintain capital, is the most important factor, not prior capital accumulation.

There are potential counterarguments to all of these points, but it's rare to hear them, especially against points 2 and 3.

This is partly to do with domestic politics and also to do with not wanting to "punch down."

Important factors are of course (1) intellectual aptitude (which can be influenced by environmental factors such as malnutrition) and potentially other such factors, (2) culture in terms of beliefs, values, and expectations (such as a cultural equilibrium of high-trustworthiness vs low-trustworthiness) as well as loyalties, and (3) organization, the structure of society, how well the country is governed, whether political elites are extractive (which siphons off surplus and prevents capital accumulation) or not. (Particularly, if a country is socialist, the dimensionality mismatch in planning, feedback loop length problems, corruption from the mismatch between the formal system and the reality, and so on will inhibit development.)

As a simplistic model: we can view this as a process where intellectual aptitude allows visualizing more of the possibility space in order to devise a design, and also allows taking on a larger share of a given production problem. Culture sets expectations about whether it's worth investing mental energy in capital development in the first place. Organization then determines how this can be operationalized.

Another way of thinking about it is that capital provides leverage, which multiplies per-person production. A country which has a high efficiency in converting resources into capital will accumulate capital more rapidly than one which has a low efficiency, and a sufficiently low efficiency will result in depletion of capital stocks faster than they can be replaced.

Now, obviously, there can be other bottlenecks, but under global capitalism, you can just buy material resources, so if you need rubber or something and cannot grow it, it can just be shipped in.

Recently one of the right-wingers was describing Botswana as "Basically Fine," and the general opinion in that circle is that the colonial hand-off went well, and then there was a string of native leaders who didn't expropriate industry, so they've been able to let FDI/etc do the heavy lifting. That is, it's well-organized.

If there's a reliably-enforced elite consensus in favor of production, then engineers, managers, and capital equipment can be imported, and it would be largely a matter of making sure they're secure and that the long-term rents you're charging don't force profitability below the average for that industry. This hopefully creates either line-worker or service industry slots for your own citizens, who can then support themselves, the revenue allows for investment in education and infrastructure, and if your citizens can swing it, they can gain experience in these industries, possibly allowing for knowledge transfer.

By contrast, the view in these circles is ANC elites in South Africa gain their power through extraction or promises of extraction.

So...

The harms done to past generations of [ethnicity] persist onto present generations through intergenerational transfer of wealth or persistence of relative GDP.

This assumes a level of conservation of harm intergenerationally that doesn't make sense. Countries like Germany and Japan redeveloped quickly despite losing World War 2, taking huge losses in personnel and being subjected to strategic bombing.

The primary way that "this harm persists for 500 years" makes sense, and doesn't refer to e.g. settler colonialism and the claimed harm is current occupation of territory, is if we delete the other layers of causation and then re-attribute them, making the harm seem a lot more powerful and long-lasting than it is.

The other way it makes sense is if it sets off a bad self-reinforcing equilibrium, but that's not usually the argument.

The gains that past generations of the dominant ethnicity accrued through exploiting [ethnicity] persist onto present generations through intergenerational transfer of wealth or persistence of relative GDP.

There obviously is inertia, and if we're talking about chest-thumping between say, Europe and Japan over "who would really have won" in like 1700 assuming equally-matched technology, as a way of judging Japanese people, then the unequal distribution of capital at that point is a legitimate thing to bring up...

But China, Japan, Singapore, and Korea have all industrialized rapidly. Industrial equipment stocks are stuff that was built 20 years ago, not 300 years ago.

These conversations often treat resource movements as permanent and fixed, which is a bad model of how capital works, and is not a sound footing for development. I understand that your understanding of capital isn't that poor, but in general, I think many of the people advancing these positions tend to think of capital as final, rather than intermediate and shifting.

Therefore, wealth should be transferred between present generations to counterbalance this to undo the past wrong inasmuch as that is presently possible, and so that current generations are more equal and are no longer growing up in the shadow of the historical atrocities that went before.

The big issue here is the conversion ratio of resource transfers into production capacity...

the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Agent Orange is still living memory for some people

Environmental remediation or minefield removal won't really be expected to change short-term production all that much, but in terms of such actions environmental remediation or minefield removal are better choices because they are naturally bounded; they aren't as subject to rent extraction based on political entrepreneurship.

Apartheid South Africa is still living memory for some people in their 30s.

So one of the problems we have in California in the United States is a tendency, among the government there, to view construction projects as rent-seeking opportunities.

If "we are victims, so you have to pay us" exists only at the top level of the governance structure, then in theory, it could work as a mechanism to drive transfers, to power investments, to increase production capacity.

Right? "Top level" because the governance structure is a graph. It's not a solid. Packets of resources and instructions are transmitted along edges (power/institutional relationships) between nodes (people).

However, differences in production capacity are one of the big drivers of the political economy of the revenge model, because they mean that there are potential private gains arising from forced redistribution.

If capturing gains/extracting rents is the general way of thinking at every level of the governance structure, then the conversion ratio of resource transfers to increased production capacity (for the country) will be very poor, as resources will be siphoned off either for consumption or for private investment at every point in the chain, and this will compound the longer that the chain is.

The GDP per capita of Botswana has apparently exceeded that of South Africa, despite starting from a lower baseline.

If capital is redistributed to people who are politically well-connected and who will thus handle it poorly, then production capacity will just be destroyed.

As I stated previously regarding "revenge immigration," if immigrants enter the metropole and then are allowed by local elites to bully the local weak and commit crimes against them, this doesn't undo "the harms of colonialism" in any meaningful way, because it doesn't make the immigrants multi-dimensionally strong enough to be peers to the former colonizers, and in fact compounds the moral injury by degrading the immigrants' moral character.

The right haven't won the argument on this, and in fact seem to be losing pretty badly on all 3 points, even though the conclusion is not politically popular.

Apparently bigshot Acemoglu wrote a whole book about why extractive institutions are bad, so I think we can call "extractive institutions are bad" a win (for the more serious, scholarly types, anyway).

Additionally, I think a lot of what I've laid out above is actually pretty obvious? At least, it should be obvious to most economists, shouldn't it?

Without either winning the argument on this, or suitably large wealth transfers actually happening, I don't see why you would ever expect CIEJ claims to go away.

The point here is that large wealth transfers won't make CIEJ claims go away.

Unless there's an adequate structure in place to convert transfers into durable, intergenerationally-conserved production capacity, that wealth will just be lost, and then the CIEJ claims will start right back up again.

...and if such a structure exists, then it's likely to already be farming foreign direct investment with the long-term goal of knowledge transfer and development of domestic production capacity, which is what I assume real-life Vietnam is up to with all those exports!

So in general, I expect the revenge model to (a) squander money by propping up extractive institutions and rewarding the politically well-connected, preventing development, while (b) increasing the size of the moral claims against the target group by destroying production capacity, and (c) making everyone more angry.

The exception is for measurable, one-and-done cases, but there will always be attempts to reattribute causality to those later on as long as the gaps in production capacity exist.

Attributing it simply to tribalism is ignorant, and appears from the other side of the fence like accusing a burgled family of being jealous because they asked for the family heirloom your parent stole.

Appearing like an excuse from the former colonizers or higher current production capacity group is, in fact, one of the reasons it's a problem.

However, if the shortages are cultural and organizational, not in raw capital, then blind wealth transfers just won't work. The interventions would have to be quite different in character, in ways that the current developed countries are having trouble with internally already, and thus couldn't really provide externally.

In this world there are, of course, convergent forces, divergent forces, and inertia. A culture remains, and remains distinct, through a balance of convergent forces that keep it similar to itself, and divergent forces that keep it distinct from other cultures.