39 Comments

My wife asked me what I was reading, then came over and proceeded to read this heading out loud, sigh, and walk away: "Secrets of bum power"

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Privatizing Cities.

Little bit off topic, but maybe not. You've said multiple times that 'the time is not now' to replace USGov. That is obviously true-- at the federal level. But what about at the city level? It seems like the time is more than ripe for making the attempt on a US city or two. There are dozens of cities in the US that qualify as 'failed cities', any way you define it, any one of which represents millions, or hundreds of millions, of dollars of depressed value, just waiting to be 'liberated'.

There are probably 100 cities across the US, that have massively depressed property values, all because of incompetent/corrupt city governance. By which I mean, mostly, lack of safety, and messed up city services— everything from failure to pick up the trash to artificial scarcity in taxis. So, fixing the governments of any of those cities by privatizing their governments, would certainly pay. Even if the privatizers didn't own any property in the city themselves, they would realize great profits simply through the increased taxes on the property as it increased in value. If they went in ahead of time and bought many city blocks of the worst slum areas they would be able to buy for a pittance, and make out like bandits. So, why isn't someone doing this already? We've probably got a billion dollars profit opportunity here. I'm guessing the reason is because innovators are rare on the ground. It's 'old news' to go in and takeover a badly run company and replace its management and fix its problems, but no one has ever yet gone in and taken over a badly run city and done the same. If that's true, if one person/company, successfully privatized a city, and really cashed in, others would follow, in a massive cascade. Or am I missing something basic? People running for mayor are always promising to clean the city up, but, instead it is always more of the same. That may be because politicians have no real incentive to really fix the problems, unlike someone who really is going to cash in if the city property values recover to what they ought to be. Or it might be, that with the current set of city laws, and current set of city employees, it can't be fixed.

But someone going in to privatize a city wouldn't be doing the equivalent of running for mayor, or city manager, he would be presenting a referendum to the voters, with a new city charter, involving rules and laws similar to something like a planned retirement community— with sale of stock to private investors. The privatizers, of course, hold back a good healthy chunk of shares for themselves, for future sales, etc. The money raised by the sale of the stock will be used for repairing infrastructure—roads and bridges, cleaning up graffiti, etc; forcing landlords to repair their properties, or condemning them and forcing their sale; and improving city services, most especially law and order. That might require hiring a lot of additional cops, who arrest anyone who break even the smallest law, (broken window policing) and 'throw the book at them' judges, who hand out jail time to anyone who breaks the laws. That will clear out your troublemakers PDQ—they will all depart to someplace where they can break the law in peace. A safe place to live means rents will rise, of course, which means property values will rise. There will be a turnover of population of course, 'gentrification', and a virtuous cycle that just keeps increases the value of city property.

Possible problem areas would include: legal problems associated with discharging useless employees, and massive liabilities in the form of retirement benefits for existing city employees. A plan like this would probably only work for cities without a massive pension liability overhang.

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I fear the bums now know that they're stuck in the movie Brazil. Dying in a hail of bullets while _holding the line_ is the only nobility that remains accessible to the bums. The camaraderie of the damned is what links thedonald.win, WSB and the _six_janviertards_. Everything else is just oxycontin of one flavor or another. The Bigs remain proud of the technological terror they have constructed.

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At least it is an ethos

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For the lulz, and definitely not because I have the slightest desire to engage in political action of any kind, I pledge to do my bum best to enroll my bum circles in your bum mobilization scheme, BUT ONLY ONCE, per bum law, assuming you do all the hard work and keep me entertained with more tasty blog posts.

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Glol I'm the farmer in nh. Thanks for the shout out?

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Note to self 📝

1) Write...map...then...step

2) if write bum map...be fun...

Professor Yarvin Professor Yarvin! Wait sorry...map first, got it...hard adjustment really.

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>Bums are not sincere. No bum has had a sincere thought since the age of 15, when he came home early from school and caught his mom banging the cable guy.

Japan is making a nice profit selling American bums their sincerity supplements, in 22-minute capsules.

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Nick Mullen, explained.

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I think this is the spirit you are looking for:

"To begin with, Nishitani says we must heed the call of Nietzsche’s madman and cease fleeing from the experience of nihilism. God as the highest being is dead, and it remains an open question whether he can be reborn as absolute nothingness. In any case, the venture of Nishitani’s philosophy of Zen is more concerned with the existential imperative of letting go of attachments than it is with immediately grasping hold of a new concept for God. In order to finally free humans from their egoistic obsessions and manipulative objectifications in the dualistic “field of being and consciousness,” Nishitani argued for the necessity of first boldly stepping back into the “field of nihility.”

Yet the real breakthrough to a non-dualistic reaffirmation of self and world only occurs when the relative nothingness of nihility is in turn broken through to a genuine experience of absolute nothingness or true emptiness on the “field of śūnyatā.” Nishitani thus explained the personal encounter with nihilism as an experience of the extreme relative nothingness of “nihility” or “vacuous nothingness” (kyomu), and for him the central task of “overcoming nihilism by way of passing through nihilism” entailed transgressing beneath (i.e., “trans-descending”) the “field of nihility” to the “field of śūnyatā” (see NKC X, 109 and 122ff.; Nishitani 1986, 97 and 108ff.).[15] As mentioned earlier (subsection 3.2), the “field of śūnyatā” is not a vacuum of relative nothingness that assaults beings from without; it is an open clearing wherein beings are neither nullified nor reified but rather let be in the mutual freedom of their coming to be and passing away. It is also the place in which a genuine interpersonal encounter can take place (Nishitani 2004; Davis 2017).'

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"More champagne, sir? The better a champagne—the more important it becomes to drink it from the bottle, by the bottle."

And as Dennis Wheatley remarked, the trouble with a magnum is that it's too much for one but not enough for two.

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The trajectory is clear though. Nihilism becomes the lingua franca of the bums. And as the systems try to compete with the memetic lattice the bums fart out, crossing the bum's moat of absurdity becomes an ever higher computational cost the systems must pay upkeep their sovereignty.

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After this description, I’m not so sure that I’m rooting for the bums. They don’t deserve to win.

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Montenegrin? Was I alone in hoping for a Nero Wolfe reference?

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Has anyone ever seen Curtis and David Samuels in the same room together? No? Hmmmm.

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r/wsb is bored. The Dudes / Bums are apathetic. I don't think Curtis is catching the distinction. Who will raise the Dead Bum Army of Dunharrow? Our Nihilist Prince will have to be the Heir to Isildur.

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