Anonymous asked: Why would you ever give an anecdote like that without linking to sources for it?
Sorry! See here, here and here for the whole story: John Shepperson learned that there were areas without power, took time off work, bought 19 generators out of pocket, and rented a UHaul to drive them down from Kentucky to an area of Mississippi without power after the storm. It would have been legal to sell them ‘at cost’ in the sense of ‘at their retail price’ but not ‘at cost’ counting expenses, let alone time and effort. He was jailed for it while the police confiscated and never distributed the generators. Note that the earliest version of the post had a serious error; he was only jailed for a week, which is horrible and unreasonable but much less bad than the version I first ran across.
They’re both characterized by a situation of sudden (and unpredicted) scarcity because of a breakdown in the usual supply chain that provides a good, and the price of that newly scarce good increasing dramatically.
One is where someone who already has a stock of the newly scarce good increases the price and reaps a windfall profit from the event. The other is where someone acts to increase the supply of the newly scarce good, and charges a price commensurate with the extraordinary measures required to do so (ordinary measures, by definition, no longer being adequate to provide a supply).
There are good reasons why we might want to treat these two cases differently, and yet I see very few people, on either side of the debate, willing to make the distinction.
In particular, if you put in tons of time and effort driving supplies to a disaster area from somewhere unaffected by the storm, you should be allowed to sell things for whatever price they sell at. Because getting more supplies to a disaster is good and if you’re not allowed to sell above a stupid definition of ‘at cost’ that doesn’t take into account ‘putting a thousand miles on my car’ or ‘losing my entire weekend’ or ‘the risk that I was wrong and this wouldn’t be needed’ then there will just be fewer supplies for disaster survivors.
And yes, the laws get used that way: After Katrina a guy heard that people needed generators, so he bought 19 of them in Kentucky, rented a U-Haul, and drove them to New Orleans. The police arrested him and confiscated the generators (which they did not distribute to disaster survivors). He intended to sell them at double the cost, and people were eager to buy them at that price. Instead he went to prison.
Anonymous asked: What's your point with the last post? The main reason Germany didn't have totally free speech is precisely to ban speech that aims at destabilizing the democratic state in order not to repeat what happened in the Weimarer Republik. So if you're post is supposed to criticize these rules, because they also apply to the left, I'm not sure what to make of that. Are you claiming the German justice system has a 'blind right eye'?? (Disclaimer: I'm German)
There are a bunch of American leftists who have been arguing recently that the United States should criminalize speech like much of Europe does, and in particular:
1) that Germany bans speech by Nazis but refutes slippery slope arguments - the ban on Naziism has not resulted in the criminalization of speech they believe should be legal
2) that while people might think that a government with the power to criminalize speech will always end up using it for the benefit of the government rather than for marginalized people, in practice anti-free-speech laws do just get used against Nazis.
Shutting down a leftist website/forum because a post called to kill cops is a counterexample. It shows that European speech laws are not the narrowly-tailored anti-Nazi laws (which preserve the freedoms of anyone who isn’t a Nazi) they’re being sold as.
So I’m not accusing Germany of ignoring Nazis, I’m saying that the German laws are not just used against Nazis, and that we should not expect that if we had them here they would only be used against Nazis, and that ‘speech laws that stop Nazis without curtailing the freedom of anyone else’ are a pipe dream. Germany is not being hypocritical, they’re being consistent in application of a principle which I oppose.
Germany’s Interior Ministry on Friday banned and ordered raids on a portal popular with leftist readers and activists. Possibly the last posts from linksunten.indymedia.org - commemorations of a 1992 far-right mob attack on apartments where foreigners lived in Rostock-Lichtenberg and reports of racist graffiti on a memorial to a young woman killed by neo-Nazis in the United States - went live the previous night.
The site was closed for “sowing hate against different opinions and representatives of the country,” said Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, adding that the operation of the site was now “a criminal offence.” …
Justifying the ban, de Maizière said that the measures were a “consistent” action against “left-wing extremist hate speech,” before adding, “The call for violence against police officers and their description as ‘pigs’ and ‘murderers’ is supposed to legitimize violence against policemen. It is the expression of an attitude that tramples on human dignity.”
European speech laws, everyone
Cops are never going to be more bothered by “kill jews” than by “kill cops”.
That’s one of the reasons that free speech protections are so important.
subbak asked: "Using some mechanism other than markets to decide what goods are produced in what quantities and how they are distributed: bad." Please tell me you don't believe that about services though (for example: it is good that railway companies keep operating lines that are losing money but necessary to some people).
I am totally in favor of this. I am in favor of it being done in a non-distortionary way, ideally by the government going “how much money are we willing to spend on transit access in rural areas? okay, let’s make that money available to whoever best provides transit access in rural areas”, rather than a distortionary/invisible costs way like “let’s mandate that anyone doing trains has to do some trains in rural areas”.
Anonymous asked: Do you see the emails of people supporting you on Patreon (in which case I should probably use that email?) or not?
I have access to it but if you say ‘I’m a Patreon supporter and want to request a thing’ I’m not going to go ‘the email doesn’t match, prove it’, I tend to assume good faith and this has always worked fine.
Anonymous asked: What is the best way to contact you about a Patreon thing? (I sent you a message on there but you said they're not working well)
Email. kelsey.piper2@gmail.com (And yeah, Patreon used to notify me when I got messages but now it does not and it makes them a hassle to check directly.)
Anonymous asked: Is communism good or bad?
Anonymous asked: I used to be supportive and really into applying social justice into my fandom experience, but then I feel really awful because there are lots of things and restriction on there that making my fandom experience miserable so I stopped. I often still feel so guilty about it because it feels like I just don't try enough,but I just can't get into that level of intensity anymore. It's just too mentally exhausting and I ended up can't go back to the fandom I used to love. Do you have any advice?
Yeah!
So, first thing, I like to say “happiness is morally good, and therefore your happiness is morally good” on this blog, and it has lots of exceptions (what if the thing making you happy is horrible? what if your pursuit of happiness involves causing horrible things? what if you could make more other people happy by being unhappy all the time?) and yet I always say it without any of those qualifiers, and that’s because I have this feeling that often my audience has let those qualifiers swell up and completely consume the original insight, and have forgotten to even consider that their happiness is good.
Fandom social justice seems to have a particularly concentrated version of this. Like - the reason it is good for stories to have representation is because it makes people happy. The reason it is good to engage with stories politically, to critique and reinterpret and challenge and so on, is because 1) you find that interesting and fun in its own right or 2) it helps you treat people more kindly and combat harms more effectively.
It isn’t good just because stories contain problematic things and one has an obligation to react to problematicness in a particular way. Social justice engagement is good only if you like it, or it’s making you treat people better.
So I guess my question is - was it? Did you enjoy it? Doesn’t sound like it, you said it made your fandom experience miserable. Was it making you treat people better? I doubt it - miserable people aren’t usually kind and happy and generous. Fandoms run on the love of a thing, and fandoms run on guilt and obligation do not tend to treat anyone better.
And were you combatting harms effectively? No. Because talking about fandom on tumblr does not combat harms effectively. Writing stories with good representation increases representation, as does buying them. Publishing guides to how to learn about a topic, because you want more writers to have more information so they can tell better stories, helps make it easier to tell the stories you care about. Everything else, all the jumping on someone who said something stupid and fretting about whether people are shipping bad things and combing through the author’s Twitter for bad opinions and debating whether the demographics of the story are acceptable -
- it’s fine, if it’s fun. For some people it is fun, and it’s a extension of their interest in justice into their interest in fiction, and it makes them happy. For some people it’s their best source of other perspectives and lets them inhabit a broader world with more kinds of people in it and it lets them be kinder to people who are very different from them. But if it doesn’t make you happy and it doesn’t make you kinder, well, it’s also not making the world safer for marginalized people.
If it doesn’t make you happy, you should stop. Not ‘can’ stop, I’m not giving permission. I’m saying that it is right for you to stop, that your happiness is good and it is good for you to pursue it by engaging in fiction however you like, with as many caveats or as few as you like, with as much attention to politics as you find personally fulfilling and enriching (which can be ‘none’.)
And find people who don’t make you miserable, and do fandom with them, and give yourself permission to blacklist or block everyone else, because they are pursuing happiness their way (…hopefully) and you your way, and the Internet is big enough for both of you.
Anonymous asked: I sexually harassed someone because of being weird and awkward and not having enough social skills. (Then I read about sexual harassment and realized that what I did was wrong and felt really bad about it for years.)
I hope that you no longer feel bad; learning not to hurt people is good, but being chased by horrible guilt is not.