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Josef bugman posted:I can genuinely not understand what was going through the skulls of Russia's high command and political elite during the first world war. It was as if they had no idea how to do anything correctly. That's the biggest snag with hereditary government, really. Whoever gets born into it is in charge which can lead to some serious idiot kings. This is especially true with all of the inbreeding among European royalty in general. Sometimes you'd actually get somebody competent but just as often you'd get somebody who couldn't put pants on without burning something down.
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Jun 11, 2018 02:42
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I recommend playing Crusader Kings II because it teaches you two very important lessons: 1) Anyone who is given absolute power will go on insane murder sprees to keep/increase that power. 2) Hereditary government means your country is playing Russian Roulette solitaire-style.
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Jun 11, 2018 04:00
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The military is at least nominally 'serving' the people in question and historically joins in on revolts not infrequently. The police on the other hand has an entirely antagonistic relationship basically design and I'm not sure has ever supported any sort of popular revolt, thinking anyone should waste effort on subverting them mostly just makes you look like an idiot.
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Jun 11, 2018 05:40
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reignonyourparade posted:The military is at least nominally 'serving' the people in question and historically joins in on revolts not infrequently. Closest thing I can think of would be in the immediate aftermath of WWI in Britain when there was a wave of strikes that occurred in reaction to capitalist exploitation of the economic disruption that accompanied demobilization of the huge conscript army, and surprisingly the National Union of Police and Prison Officers joined with the other workers in both 1918 and 1919. Scared by this display of class solidarity, the soon-to-disintegrate Liberal government of Lloyd-George predictably passed the Police Act of 1919, which broke NUPPO and institution the Police Federation in its place, which split the police from the other trade unions and forbade striking.
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Jun 11, 2018 13:39
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And since then the police have been happy strikebreaking cunts all the way.
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Jun 11, 2018 16:38
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OwlFancier posted:And since then the police have been happy strikebreaking cunts all the way. One wonders how things might have played out a few years later in the General Strike of 1926 if NUPPO had still existed.
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Jun 11, 2018 17:26
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VitalSigns posted:The most loyal troops of the Tsar's army lying in their graves in Poland, Silesia, and Prussia had a lot more to do with the Tsar failing to maintain control of Petrograd than did Bolshevik infiltration especially since as mentioned the Bolsheviks were despite their name the minority party in the Revolution. Yeah, I'll grant that I was making too much of bolshevik infiltration of the military. It's been a while since I've read on the subject and I was misremembering. More specifically, I was misremembering because I was listening to a lecture on the revolution where the professor was talking about how infiltration was an aim of the bolsheviks and I forgot that this was more of an aim than a truly realized goal.
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Jun 11, 2018 22:31
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I don't know if there is any discussion or research on this or if anyone here has even thought about it, but recently I have really started to see the flaws in the very concept of money. I don't mean "DOWN WITH FIAT CURRENCY!" like some end-the-Fed libertarian fuckwit, but I mean the flaws in the practice of using money as universal exchange for everything. Essentially what happens is that there can be an abundance of vital resources while there still are huge numbers of people lacking them. For example, most industrialised nations import/produce more than enough food to feed their populations, but food insecurity is still very high because nobody has any money. The people who have all of the food are the big grocery chains and producers, but they won't part with a crumb of it unless you give them otherwise useless money for it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about physical paper and coins or just electronic funds because the former has minimal practical value and the latter is literally 1s and 0s. Let me say that I fully realise that currency exchange is much smoother than barter was in ancient times, but there is a huge downside to any monetary system. I want to make it clear that the gold standard would be far, far, FAR worse than fiat currency, but it would have the same inherent problem plus so many others. Shiny rocks or coins and bank notes in exchange for everything... both have the same inherent flaw, and that's why all of the money resting in the hands of a tiny few is killing this world. Many countries have evolved into post-scarcity societies in some aspects, but nobody has the one thing that they can exchange for these hyper-abundant resources because global capitalism has concentrated the universal resource among a very small group of people. Even a rich arsehole who eats nothing but lobster and caviar all day can only consume so much food and he would never eat enough to starve a working-class person who subsists on hamburgers and peanut butter, but when said same arsehole owns all of the food legally, but certainly not ethically, and will only exchange it for money that nobody has (because capitalism concentrates the one means to survival), then everyone else is hosed. If one can't have the means to live or the means to acquire the means to live, what do you do? Die, mostly. Living a pre-industrial agrarian lifestyle is both very hard, beyond the talents and endurance of most people and genuinely impossible, possibly illegal, unless one finds themselves very far from civilisation.
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Jun 12, 2018 04:06
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JustJeff88 posted:I don't know if there is any discussion or research on this or if anyone here has even thought about it, but recently I have really started to see the flaws in the very concept of money. I don't mean "DOWN WITH FIAT CURRENCY!" like some end-the-Fed libertarian fuckwit, but I mean the flaws in the practice of using money as universal exchange for everything. Essentially what happens is that there can be an abundance of vital resources while there still are huge numbers of people lacking them. For example, most industrialised nations import/produce more than enough food to feed their populations, but food insecurity is still very high because nobody has any money. The people who have all of the food are the big grocery chains and producers, but they won't part with a crumb of it unless you give them otherwise useless money for it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about physical paper and coins or just electronic funds because the former has minimal practical value and the latter is literally 1s and 0s. When you embrace that ideas have their moments that arrive, that their time is come, and it is likely within our limited scope of human thought, someone has probably had the thought you have had before. Money is a sign of poverty RuanGacho fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 04:13
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Josef bugman posted:I was about to say, the backing of the Bolsheviks came after the SocDems decided on continuing loving the Seriously why did they do that. I never got that part; the government just fell, there were no reliable troops to keep order because everyone was at the front, literally everyone hated the war, winning wouldn't have been good for the average Russian anyway. Not a good time to start a new offensive!
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Jun 12, 2018 05:00
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JustJeff88 posted:I don't know if there is any discussion or research on this or if anyone here has even thought about it, but recently I have really started to see the flaws in the very concept of money. I don't mean "DOWN WITH FIAT CURRENCY!" like some end-the-Fed libertarian fuckwit, but I mean the flaws in the practice of using money as universal exchange for everything. Essentially what happens is that there can be an abundance of vital resources while there still are huge numbers of people lacking them. For example, most industrialised nations import/produce more than enough food to feed their populations, but food insecurity is still very high because nobody has any money. The people who have all of the food are the big grocery chains and producers, but they won't part with a crumb of it unless you give them otherwise useless money for it. It doesn't matter if we are talking about physical paper and coins or just electronic funds because the former has minimal practical value and the latter is literally 1s and 0s. The thing to remember is that currency is just a method of distributing scarce resources. And honestly, it's probably one of the better systems for doing that. But when resources aren't scarce, the whole thing falls apart, because there's no money in abundance. It's more profitable for companies to induce scarcity than it is for them to supply to everyone. We could absolutely be post-scarcity for daily necessities, it's not a technical challenge. The issue is that we're taking a system that evolved to deal with one challenge (create locally optimal distributions of scarce resources) and expecting it to manage... everything. When all you've got is capitalism, everything looks like a market opportunity.
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Jun 12, 2018 05:34
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CountFosco posted:Yeah, I'll grant that I was making too much of bolshevik infiltration of the military. It's been a while since I've read on the subject and I was misremembering. More specifically, I was misremembering because I was listening to a lecture on the revolution where the professor was talking about how infiltration was an aim of the bolsheviks and I forgot that this was more of an aim than a truly realized goal. perhaps there is a lesson in this exercise for you
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Jun 12, 2018 05:50
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JustJeff88 posted:money Have you read Capital? Maybe the most important contradiction in capitalism Marx points out is the fact that production of huge amounts of commodities necessitates making the people who make them too poor to afford what they make. VitalSigns posted:Seriously why did they do that. Because they were losing, basically. Germany wasn't going to let them back out of the war without a bunch of punitive conditions including the loss of a lot of land, which is in fact what happened when the Bolsheviks negotiated peace after they took over. The provisional government's plan was to go on a big flashy offensive and then negotiate from a position of strength, except oops the army was a mess from top to bottom, which is why they were losing in the first place.
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Jun 12, 2018 06:13
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Goon Danton posted:Because they were losing, basically. Germany wasn't going to let them back out of the war without a bunch of punitive conditions including the loss of a lot of land, which is in fact what happened when the Bolsheviks negotiated peace after they took over. The provisional government's plan was to go on a big flashy offensive and then negotiate from a position of strength, except oops the army was a mess from top to bottom, which is why they were losing in the first place. Kerensky's government also feared that if they ended the war without the army regaining at least some of its morale via a face-saving final offensive, it would collapse and they'd have no armed force to hand to resist counterrevolutionary forces which were already coalescing into what shortly became the White Army.
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Jun 12, 2018 13:39
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Goon Danton posted:The provisional government's plan was to go on a big flashy offensive Why didn't Tsar think of that, they could have wrapped up this whole thing in 1914!
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Jun 12, 2018 14:55
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Many years ago, I read an article about "dangerous ideas" that had a bunch of brainstorming from various famous people. I wish I could find it. One of the ideas was complementary currency - how, in the past, there were two currencies. One for local use, one for use outside the area. So let's say, there's the US dollar, but there's also a Los Angeles dollar, a San Francisco dollar, a New York dollar, etc. And it said that the point of the bigger currency was to be scarce - because it was for trading with distant people - but the local currency was to be abundant. It was with these local currencies, not reliant on trade from without, that gave them the base to build great medieval cathedrals and the like. I wish I could find that article. Fake edit: oh poo poo hi google https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11079 The core of it is: The larger currency is based on fiat or precious metals, whereas the local currency is based on labor.
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Jun 12, 2018 15:10
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VitalSigns posted:Why didn't Tsar think of that, they could have wrapped up this whole thing in 1914! Pretend I posted a gif of the quadruple pratfall from Clue, but with the flags of various Eastern Front powers awkwardly pasted onto the different actors.
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Jun 12, 2018 15:20
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Can you post the original gif I haven't seen that
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Jun 12, 2018 15:26
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I couldn't find it 
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Jun 12, 2018 15:27
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's the biggest snag with hereditary government, really. Whoever gets born into it is in charge which can lead to some serious idiot kings. This is especially true with all of the inbreeding among European royalty in general. Sometimes you'd actually get somebody competent but just as often you'd get somebody who couldn't put pants on without burning something down. 
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Jun 12, 2018 15:38
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We could try one currency for functional needs like breastplates, swords, smoked salmon, etc and a different currency for cosmetics like in the microtransaction games
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Jun 12, 2018 16:28
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Totally doesn't favour people living in large cities and poo poo on people living in isolated or rural areas. No sirree.
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Jun 12, 2018 17:47
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I was shocked, just shocked I tell you! To see that the Edge article breezily ignored the period where the US had competing state (and sometimes local) currencies and it was a monumental clusterfuck that, among other things, led to our first attempt at central banking in a desperate effort to have money that people could, you know, actually use. Funny how libertarians always seem to insist on rediscovering historical economic crises in their monetary wanderings.
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Jun 12, 2018 17:54
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Totally doesn't favour people living in large cities and poo poo on people living in isolated or rural areas. No sirree. I mean, that's what current unified currencies kind of do..? They create a pretty major divide between high wealth areas and low wealth areas because in the low wealth areas you might be paid and spend little but because everyone uses the same currency, the inflated high wealth areas effectively lock out the low wealth people by operating on higher pay, higher expenditure. You also get it when you have separated areas of an economy such as, eg: a housing bubble, house prices have absolutely no relation to any sector of the economy where people work for a living, or their wages, which effectively isolates the housing market from people who are not already in it. The Eurozone is another example of the problems of currency unification across widely different economies. Not that returning to the gold ducat is going to solve any of that but "it fucks people over due to unequal wealth distribution" is certainly not remotely a unique feature of different currencies. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 17:58
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I was shocked, just shocked I tell you! To see that the Edge article breezily ignored the period where the US had competing state (and sometimes local) currencies and it was a monumental clusterfuck that, among other things, led to our first attempt at central banking in a desperate effort to have money that people could, you know, actually use. Funny how libertarians always seem to insist on rediscovering historical economic crises in their monetary wanderings. I've heard libertarians argue that it would be fine if total deregulation led to company scrip coming back. That was in no way a horrible thing that led to enormous power imbalances or anything. The argument is usually "well if you don't want a job that pays scrip find a different one! Free market!"
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Jun 13, 2018 00:13
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Karia posted:The thing to remember is that currency is just a method of distributing scarce resources. And honestly, it's probably one of the better systems for doing that. This was very helpful; thank you.
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Jun 13, 2018 01:05
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Goon Danton posted:Have you read Capital? Maybe the most important contradiction in capitalism Marx points out is the fact that production of huge amounts of commodities necessitates making the people who make them too poor to afford what they make. No, I haven't. Could you elaborate on this? My reading backlog is rather epic and I'm still struggling with ideas like the labour theory of value. From what I have seen, I honestly think that Marx was a genius and visionary up until the point where capitalism fails. I believe that it must and will fail, but I cannot buy into Marx's idea of how things will transition.
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Jun 13, 2018 01:11
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I've heard libertarians argue that it would be fine if total deregulation led to company scrip coming back. That was in no way a horrible thing that led to enormous power imbalances or anything. For reasons that continue to elude me despite being a thread regular for like years now, most libertarians have a massive blind spot for coercive/exploitative power relations so long as no party involved is the actual government.
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Jun 13, 2018 01:49
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Ze Pollack posted:perhaps there is a lesson in this exercise for you Yeah, the lesson is, never admit that you made a mistake because people will rub it in your face. Also, I need to dig up some of my old Russian revolution texts from the book boxes.
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Jun 13, 2018 02:16
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JustJeff88 posted:No, I haven't. Could you elaborate on this? My reading backlog is rather epic and I'm still struggling with ideas like the labour theory of value. Fundamentally he writes an exceptionally detailed and comprehensive and correct critique of how capitalism functions at present, which is why Capital is still the go to book for that, but his ideas about what will happen in response to it are based heavily on the same thing: his observations of the world around him, and thus they have not aged very well. You can learn a lot from historical communists and the fundamental things they fought for are still extremely relevant but the landscape in which they operated was a different one to the one we operate in now and thus you can't map their methods 1:1 onto today. Not least because we've got their history to look at and we can see how they went wrong a lot of the time and it's prudent to try to avoid the same mistakes and be aware of the same threats. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Jun 13, 2018 |
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Jun 13, 2018 03:33
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Captain_Maclaine posted:For reasons that continue to elude me despite being a thread regular for like years now, most libertarians have a massive blind spot for coercive/exploitative power relations so long as no party involved is the actual government. There's a few logical pieces of reasoning. One is that libertarian policy would lead to everybody being wealthy so it'd be impossible to coerce people economically. Another is that people would obviously just not do business with a company that immoral or wouldn't work for them. See, somebody would see that and offer real money instead of scrip to entice the employees away. Just ignore literally the entire 19th century, OK? Yet another is that it's just a product of the times it happened in rather than something that would automatically happen the day after it was made legal again. Hell companies have already tried similar shenanigans; when I worked at Walmart they tried to get rid of regular paychecks or direct deposit entirely and instead put your pay in a debit card that just so happened to have transaction fees and be associated with a bank they liked. This also just so happened to happen when Walmart was trying to start its own bank. I'm sure those facts are all entirely unrelated to each other.
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Jun 13, 2018 04:14
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Captain_Maclaine posted:For reasons that continue to elude me despite being a thread regular for like years now, most libertarians have a massive blind spot for coercive/exploitative power relations so long as no party involved is the actual government. Yep, it was realizing the power imbalance and the permanent renter:owner class split that finally turned me from an ancap into virtually a commie.
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Jun 13, 2018 04:43
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Why so many not understand money/value? Local money - long distance money divide, is same the soft money - hard money issue. Those area/person that get long distance money, hard money, always advantage over local money, it always buy local money favorably wherever you are. Some people suffer under all hard money but are far outweighed in suffering when two-currency (three-currency, more) system in place. Much of how rich are valued is not real. You see 1% top wealth individuals gain large percent of new wealth since XX decade - you not consider much of this wealth does not hold value without top wealth people around. Who pays 50$ millions for sculpture & painting in fancy house without idle billionaire son to purchase? To the people it holds a value if in museum and park but is surely not near the value listed when billionaire's son says "I am worth 500$ million". We say, Jeff Bezos has 140$ billions, but is that not speculation of stock value which cannot be realized in money nor goods, certainly not in quick succession without magically erasing 'value' since there is no buyer for 140$ billions of stocks tomorrow morning. Would Jeff Bezos truly lose any money if Amazon worker had fair wage? No, not besides stock value that recover anyway, is one reason why such underpaid is so unjust. Greedy manager think they need to take 1000$ yearly from each worker to get 1000$ for themselves, in real world they get 1000$ for themselves already and company makes much more value no matter what. It considers also the question of if rich persons leave country for rebellion or escape tax. Some of you say, why would bodyguard stick, how would they live elsewhere, how can they take wealth. You forget the rich man already have houses in multiple countries, already have huge wealth in international accounts. Probably also has guard and housestaff already in country they flee to, and money spend as good there as at "home". Maybe he lose some value yes in home country rebellion, but probably is not worldwide, even whole continent. We know of many rich people who have fled wars and live far richer than all of us in country they flee to, even if they say they lost millions in flight. We know of many businessman and performer who fled English residence in 20th century during high taxes after war, just to continue to remotely operate business or sing while resident of America or France or random island country (Phil Collins or Beatles, anyone?). So remember when you think seizing the wealth is what matters, or even means of production sometimes. So much of what is held over the poor man's head might as well be clouds, often what is produced is not of true value or uses to society. The things the people need (even want sometime) often not so dear in cost or value, no matter how measuring such things. Meanwhile millions of people do labor that is unnecessary just to pump value that is illusory elsewhere. Must also consider that the same flips to Rand fans if they got their wishes, much of wealth they may already have is faked and is not to live in anarchism-land This is enlightening thread colleague reccomended, but some seem hang up in mutant capitalist thought. Even despite saying they abhor it - or jerking rejection of parts of it that are true under misguided assumption capitalism whole lie. One must remember the teachings of Marx and his successors which even if flawed in many ways. They recognize capitalism thought and modes provide serious improvements to many aspect and function well on flow of history and we are even not yet equiped to move on from it in many country/society, as Soviet or Mao learned to great chagrin. Also to not be hasty to project as "fault of capitalism" so much of things that are also present in earlier or simultaneous mode of economy as some users seem to do.
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Jun 13, 2018 05:15
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I was shocked, just shocked I tell you! To see that the Edge article breezily ignored the period where the US had competing state (and sometimes local) currencies and it was a monumental clusterfuck that, among other things, led to our first attempt at central banking in a desperate effort to have money that people could, you know, actually use. Funny how libertarians always seem to insist on rediscovering historical economic crises in their monetary wanderings. (it's always the same like three idiots in libertarian historical thought, isn't it?)
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Jun 13, 2018 05:21
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Goon Danton posted:Pretend I posted a gif of the quadruple pratfall from Clue, but with the flags of various Eastern Front powers awkwardly pasted onto the different actors. I too want to track this down, but I don't know which pratfall you mean! fake edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDDdeHtrxfA&t=71s ? real edit: holy poo poo a Reynolds remake? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Jun 13, 2018 |
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Jun 13, 2018 05:29
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Captain_Maclaine posted:For reasons that continue to elude me despite being a thread regular for like years now, most libertarians have a massive blind spot for coercive/exploitative power relations so long as no party involved is the actual government. It makes sense when you remember the demographics of your average libertarian. They tend to come from an economically privileged class where the only run up against coercive power they've had to deal with is (their parents) paying taxes and being inconvenienced when their weed dealer gets arrested. Your boss treating you like poo poo because he sees you as replaceable and cheap, the problems that come with being an impoverished renter, and so on are not problems they or likely anyone in their daily lives has to deal with. And if they ever do hear about them, then they have a ready supply of people ready to tell them that those problems don't really exist or aren't really problems. So it just doesn't factor into their thinking very much/at all.
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Jun 13, 2018 06:44
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DACK FAYDEN posted:You know who wanted to start a currency to compete with the U.S. government? Lysander Spooner. Yeah you can usually set a clock on how long it'll take them to mention Spooner, cite Rothbard, or link something on mises.org.
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Jun 13, 2018 13:41
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CountFosco posted:Yeah, the lesson is, never admit that you made a mistake because people will rub it in your face. Also, I need to dig up some of my old Russian revolution texts from the book boxes. there are more pure expressions of libertarianism, but "never admit you were wrong about a feel-good lie you pulled directly out of your rear end for fear otherwise people might think you're stupid" is still a pretty solid summation of the mindset
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Jun 13, 2018 15:58
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Captain_Maclaine posted:For reasons that continue to elude me despite being a thread regular for like years now, most libertarians have a massive blind spot for coercive/exploitative power relations so long as no party involved is the actual government. They imagine they'll always be the one with an edge.
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Jun 13, 2018 16:22
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JustJeff88 posted:No, I haven't. Could you elaborate on this? My reading backlog is rather epic and I'm still struggling with ideas like the labour theory of value. Okay, so Marx spends a lot of time building the argument and I'm going to necessarily gunk it up by trying to summarize, but I'll do my best. So capitalism is all about keeping capital "in motion," that is, invested in things. Money doesn't count as capital if it's sitting in a hoard in your basement, it needs to be spent on tools and materials and labor to get a return. And the capitalist wants to get as much bang for his buck as possible, which means making as many commodities as possible for the money he has. And thanks to the labor theory of value, that means working his labor force as long and hard as possible while paying them as little as possible. So the more successful he is at keeping his labor force overworked and underpaid, the more return he gets on his investment, so the more he'll be able to invest again, meaning he's able to make more commodities. In a situation where the capitalist class is politically dominant (so, liberalism), this means that wages are going to be pushed down more and more while more and more commodities are being made. The result is a "crisis of overproduction," where the low wages that let you make so many commodities are also the reason why no one can afford them.
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Jun 13, 2018 16:48
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