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WampaLord posted:This might be one of the dumbest comparisons I've ever seen. Go ahead and explain why then.
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Dec 6, 2018 03:01
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Lightning Knight posted:Oh my god you guys are still on about this. This reminds me of the PETA infographic that made the rounds recently where they gave alternatives to phrases that were insensitive to animals (like not saying beat a dead horse but instead X), and how we phased out racist and "ableist" language we'd do the same in the future for animals lol. Something tells me future civilizations won't view our industrial farming of animals as a moral deficiency considering thousands of years prior we've been practicing animal husbandry, but I imagine the scale and the way capitalism took consumption of animals to such a massive level will seem incredibly stupid and brutish. I hope future civilizations are as embarrassed of capitalism as people are of feudalism now.
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Dec 6, 2018 03:09
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CSPAN Caller posted:Go ahead and explain why then. Why governments aren't like wolf populations? Are you serious? First off, governments are made of humans, not wolves. Should I go on?
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Dec 6, 2018 03:22
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Cerebral Bore posted:This makes no sense. Unless there are literal logical contradictions within a political movement that would prevent it from arising, then you can't say anything about whether it's possible just because it hasn't come into being yet. Do the projections that Marx makes via use of dialectical materialism carry privileged rhetorical status or something? A priori arguments showing how capitalism falls to socialism, and socialism falls to communism, are respectable conclusions because Marx and the people who followed him 'proved' this with their dialectical process. I'll admit that I don't have any real evidence about the future that justifies why I think socialism isn't robust. But by the same token, Marx had no evidence for his forecasting. Marx looking at evidence that capitalism will collapse doesn't imply what will follow it unless you buy into his whole metaphysical package. Cerebral Bore posted:Capitalism as a system is literally only a few hundred years old, buddy. It's not some force of nature. Also we're at most a few decades away from the collapse of capitalism as we know it due to global warming, so you better hope that socialism wins after that instead of barbarism. Marx made the point that capitalism will collapse due to reasons internal to class struggle. I think that's different than the modern reality that capitalism will collapse due to global warming. And 300ish years is plenty of time for at least a small nation to experiment with socialist alternatives to central planning. But I just don't see evidence that this has happened. I'd be happy if you were right and I was wrong. Do you have knowledge of countries that successfully tried non-centralized socialist economics?
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Dec 6, 2018 03:41
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WampaLord posted:Why governments aren't like wolf populations? Are you serious? Under Marxist and socialist views of historical determinism, the stages of history occur due to that special property humans have of making free political choices.
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Dec 6, 2018 03:58
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Anarchist areas of Spain in the 1930s maybe? I'm not super knowledgable about them, but I think describing them as functioning decentralized worker controlled economies is a fair assessment of them.
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Dec 6, 2018 03:59
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Cicero posted:No, I'm fighting people who apparently don't give a poo poo about free speech or democracy, as long as their way wins. There's no such thing as some sort of pure "free speech" ideal. There's just a variety of separate topics that fall under that header. It's not possible for one country to "have free speech" and another to not have it. It's just varying degrees of negative consequences for undesirable speech and restrictions on the ability of make speech heard. And bringing democracy into it is kind of goofy, since that isn't even remotely upheld as an ideal in any country on the planet. And when people like you usually talk about democracy, you're only talking about the government. Socialism as an ideology is generally far more democratic simply by virtue of giving people representation both in government and in other organizations. Cicero posted:That it also happens in ways other than blatant censorship doesn't mean censorship is good. I never said it's good; the point is that it isn't uniquely bad or worse (in terms of actual effect) than the sort of control over ideology we see in the West, and this whole topic came up due to you (and I think others) bringing up the actions of socialist governments being worse than those of Western capitalist ones. In practice it's not really possible to avoid marginalizing ideas. There's limited time for people to consume media and hear people speak, etc, so you'll inevitably always have certain ideas marginalized due to limited platforms and time for people to read/observe/etc those platforms. I don't think it's that bad to think that maybe people should push for objectively bad ideas to be marginalized, since that marginalization is going to end up happening anyways. A world where "Everyone is given fair exposure to All Of The Ideas and freely decides on things" is flat-out impossible, and in practice attempts to do this just end up becoming "active propaganda in favor of perpetuating the status quo." Cicero posted:Yes, but you can compare West Germany to East Germany, or the PRC under Mao to the PRC under Deng, or Vietnam until recent liberalization to Vietnam post-liberalization steps. Wait, are we talking about comparisons of economic progress, or of political freedoms? That point was related to the "but socialist countries don't do well" point you made, which is kind of a separate one to the whole "censorship/free speech" tangent. But anyways, yeah, it's certainly true that if you selectively only look at comparisons that support your point and ignore the ones that don't, it makes your point seem correct. In the case of China, you're mainly looking at 1. a country benefiting from trade (which is not bad in and of itself and is not inherently in conflict with socialism), and 2. China being a large country with a ton of resources and people (which is a big reason China has done relatively well while nearly all other capitalist developing nations haven't). East/West Germany is a kinda dumb comparison, since the West benefited from positive relations with existing wealthy/powerful nations. This has actually been a big barrier towards left-wing governments throughout the 20th century. It's a real issue that socialists have to deal with, but it's not inherently an issue with socialism. Really, the only nations that come out looking very good at all in the world as a whole are the ones who have benefited immensely from historical dominance and the exploitation of others (or some other fortunate circumstance). If you ignore those countries in a comparison (which you should, because it's like comparing the adult circumstances of a white person born into wealth with those of a PoC born into poverty*), a country like Cuba comes out looking quite good compared with most other developing nations. Or at least definitely not notably bad to the extent where it works as part of "SOCIALISM HAS ALWAYS HAD TERRIBLE OUTCOMES" argument. * and where the white person's parents and grandparents had repeatedly stolen from or enslaved the ancestors of the PoC person Cicero posted:That's an interesting thought, although I'm not sure things like "millions more people gaining healthcare" or "people don't believe you're subhuman for being gay" can just be brushed off so easily. There's a high human cost to not being able to afford to go to the doctor, there's a high human cost to everyone scorning you and telling you you're going to hell. The point is that it's not part of a broader trend towards any sort of "good" outcome. Obamacare wasn't actually a step towards a reasonable solution; if anything it exists largely as an alternative to a real solution. And the result is still extremely terrible compared with that of nearly all comparable countries, even if it improves upon an even more terrible prior situation. You can acknowledge the good while still realizing that the overall situation is bad and shows no signs of improving under current Democratic leadership. Attitudes regarding some social issues have improved, and that is good. Material circumstances for a majority of people have stagnated or gotten worse; that is extremely bad, and has a very high chance of leading towards fascism down the line. Basically, I can't help but ask myself this - why would someone feel so invested in arguing that things are generally good or getting better? In addition to being wrong, it's also not remotely helpful or productive. Part of creating positive change is widely getting people to understand the depth of how bad things are and that something different/better is possible. US liberals/Democrats don't have anything even remotely resembling a solution to wealth inequality or material inequality along lines of race or sexual orientation. "Incrementalism" implies that you're taking steps as part of some plan with a final goal in mind. They aren't even doing this. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Dec 6, 2018 |
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Dec 6, 2018 04:04
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enki42 posted:Anarchist areas of Spain in the 1930s maybe? I'm not super knowledgable about them, but I think describing them as functioning decentralized worker controlled economies is a fair assessment of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana  quote:On February 5, 1826, the town adopted a new constitution, "The New Harmony Community of Equality", whose objective was to achieve happiness based on principles of equal rights and equality of duties. Cooperation, common property, economic benefit, freedom of speech and action, kindness and courtesy, order, preservation of health, acquisition of knowledge, and obedience to the country's laws were included as part of the constitution.[44] The constitution laid out the life of a citizen in New Harmony based on age. Children from the age of one to five were to be cared for and encouraged to exercise; children aged six to nine they were to be lightly employed and given education via observation directed by skilled teachers. Youth from the ages of ten to twelve were to help in the houses and with the gardening. Teenagers from the age of twelve to fifteen were to receive technical training, and from fifteen to twenty their education was to be continued. Young adults from the ages of twenty to thirty were to act as a superintendent in the production and education departments. Adults from the ages of thirty to forty were to govern the homes, and residents aged forty to sixty were to be encouraged to assist with the community's external relations or to travel abroad if they so desired.[45]
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Dec 6, 2018 04:07
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quote:This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm
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Dec 6, 2018 04:15
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CSPAN Caller posted:But is there a historical case where a socialist country has used alternatives to central planning, such as trial and error "market socialism"? I can't find examples of a socialist system that operated primarily market socialism (rather than central planning with ad hoc markets used during crises). In popular discourse, I've noticed that Norway and Sweden are (mis)described as using an alternative to central planning: democratic socialism. But the consensus in this thread, and which I agree with, is that the Nordic model is a form of mixed market capitalism, not socialism. Former Yugoslavia is a pretty good example, I think. Workers' self-management worked relatively well there from what I understand, or at least didn't run into any major problems. Of course, it suffered from the same sort of issues most socialist nations face (one thing unique to the topic of the US becoming socialist is that, unlike other countries it wouldn't have the whole "the US sanctioning you and making/encouraging other nations to do the same" issue). I'm not an expert on it by any means, but it's an interesting example that doesn't come up commonly in these discussions. WhiskeyJuvenile posted:The suppression of the working class - we have the most prisoners per capita - is not meaningfully different from stalinist era suppression, except the Soviets we're attempting to Target counter-revolutionary forces, while we're just targeting the poor This is a good point; our contemporary capitalist society basically just suppresses unfavorable groups through proxies, instead of stating outright what the reason is. Cicero posted:Even by widespread, we're talking about the usual experience for people with socialist beliefs, then no. If you have data saying otherwise, I'd be glad to read it. This is not hard to understand. With the end of the Cold War, the government and institutions felt far less threatened by the left, and felt less of a need to violently suppress it as a result. If people started striking en masse or socialism started to become a major threat (and I don't think the government, etc view that as being the case yet) that's going to change. Currently they still believe (possibly correctly) that they can just continue the same song and dance of occasionally electing Democrats and creating the illusion that something is being done about inequality/injustice. If you go back to a time when the wealthy were threatened, you see poo poo like striking workers being literally gunned down, or the FBI's various actions against left-wing activist groups during the Cold War. At the very least, it certainly makes no sense at all to be confident that this wouldn't happen, since there's an actual history of it and a very clear and obvious reason why it would have dropped in frequency in the post-Cold-War years. The rich are still extremely rich and not getting any poorer, so they're basically okay with the status quo, where socialism ideology is still marginalized due to having almost no presence in mainstream media (which likely makes controlling peoples' political ideas even more easy than it used to be). But if something started to really threaten their position in society? You're crazy if you think they wouldn't violently crack down before sacrificing any significant amount of their wealth. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Dec 6, 2018 |
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Dec 6, 2018 04:39
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Hey dude who wanted the remove the right to assembly from conservatives, What would be done with the individual conservatives? Would they be allowed to go free if they didn't speak up in public? If they didn't speak up in private? What would be the mechanics of your ideological purge of half of the population?
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Dec 6, 2018 08:32
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CSPAN Caller posted:Do the projections that Marx makes via use of dialectical materialism carry privileged rhetorical status or something? A priori arguments showing how capitalism falls to socialism, and socialism falls to communism, are respectable conclusions because Marx and the people who followed him 'proved' this with their dialectical process. Marxists figured out that socialism wouldn't necessarily follow about a hundred years ago, buddy. It's what the whole "socialism or barbarism" quote means. But capitalism is definitely going away, there's no question about that. CSPAN Caller posted:Marx made the point that capitalism will collapse due to reasons internal to class struggle. I think that's different than the modern reality that capitalism will collapse due to global warming. And 300ish years is plenty of time for at least a small nation to experiment with socialist alternatives to central planning. But I just don't see evidence that this has happened. I already mentioned Yugoslavia in the very post you quoted. Besides that, the mechanism by which capitalism will collapse is actually class conflict, it'll just be turboaccelerated by the environment collapsing. Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Hey dude who wanted the remove the right to assembly from conservatives, Since when are ideologically committed conservatives half the population? They aren't now, and they sure as hell wouldn't be in a situation that's gotten so lovely that a socialist revolution becomes a feasible prospect, on account of the vast majority of them having gone full fash at that point.
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Dec 6, 2018 09:47
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Cerebral Bore posted:Since when are ideologically committed conservatives half the population? They aren't now, and they sure as hell wouldn't be in a situation that's gotten so lovely that a socialist revolution becomes a feasible prospect, on account of the vast majority of them having gone full fash at that point. So all opposition you can't dehumanize will melt away? This seems either very optimistic or you have a very low bar for dehumanization. Legit answer tho', I guess.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:06
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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:So all opposition you can't dehumanize will melt away? This seems either very optimistic or you have a very low bar for dehumanization. Legit answer tho', I guess. No, I was actually just trying to establish what we were really talking about, and it turned out to be a bad-faith gotcha attempt.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:11
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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Hey dude who wanted the remove the right to assembly from conservatives, Including factors such as half of the American populace not voting and the bottling of ideological identification with the two-party system, it's very likely that you're overestimating the number of conservatives by a generous amount.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:13
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Cerebral Bore posted:No, I was actually just trying to establish what we were really talking about, and it turned out to be a bad-faith gotcha attempt. So what are you going to do to the wrongthinkers who aren't bad enough to go to the gulags?
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Dec 6, 2018 10:21
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And by the way, what is this thing where the usual suspects suddenly treat conservatives as innocent little angels that we just happen to have a few disagreements with? The GOP at large, and not just the turbochuds, are actively engaged in massive efforts to deny civil rights in general and voting rights in particular to every demographic they don't think will support them, and their base is actively cheering this poo poo on. So purely morally speaking I don't see why they'd get to complain if somebody does to them as they seek to do unto others. Why should we jeopardize the hard-won civil rights of innocent-rear end people just so that a buncha total assholes get to keep trying to turn back the clock?Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:So what are you going to do to the wrongthinkers who aren't bad enough to go to the gulags? Like, just look at this. "Wrongthinkers", jfc. But the answer is you ban them from wielding any power in society. Disallow them from running in elections, remove their voting rights, expropriate the rich among them. Then, when the very ideas they espouse have become quaint anachronisms, you can let them back among decent people.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:26
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Cerebral Bore posted:But the answer is you ban them from wielding any power in society. Disallow them from running in elections, remove their voting rights, expropriate the rich among them. Then, when the very ideas they espouse have become quaint anachronisms, you can let them back among decent people. I don't see how this is any different from what you could have answered to the ~bad-faith gotcha~, dude. Still, consistent with socialist ideas and open about creating a second-class citizenship for dissidents so props for honesty.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:34
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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:I don't see how this is any different from what you could have answered to the ~bad-faith gotcha~, dude. Still, consistent with socialist ideas and open about creating a second-class citizenship for dissidents so props for honesty.  Tell me more about how white supremacists are simple innocent dissidents who'd be unfairly persecuted.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:36
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 dissidents
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Dec 6, 2018 10:42
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If nothing else, this thread shows that liberals really are the world champs at failing the Paradox of Tolerance over and over again.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:44
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Cerebral Bore posted:
I thought the white supremacists were the ones going to the gulags  Hey dude, nothing wrong with suppressing dissidents. China is looking to have a rousing success with it since they combined it with electronic surveillance. I bet it'd be even easier once the American revolution comes. Just bug every smartphone (and/or neural implant) available and you'll catch 'em all!
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Dec 6, 2018 10:47
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Tell me more about how we need to tolerate the intolerant 
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Dec 6, 2018 10:50
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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Hey dude, nothing wrong with suppressing dissidents. Yup
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Dec 6, 2018 10:55
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Cerebral Bore posted:Tell me more about how we need to tolerate the intolerant What's wrong with calling a spade a spade? You're openly calling for a second-class citizenship for your enemies and also claiming (assuming you're the same guy from before here) your society would be more free and democratic than democracies. Why not just say "yes we'll oppress the hell out of them and they deserve it"? If you imagine socialism coming by the way of revolution, it's not like you need to obfuscate to get votes or anything.
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Dec 6, 2018 10:58
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states crack down on subversive elements this is going to be the case so long as there is a state, it's pretty much what a state is even for this would not reasonably be expected to halt in a revolutionary situation, for either side. realistically, one would see a bunch of activity by militia types and use that as a pretext to shut down affiliated organisations - your racist uncle is not going to be rounded up and sent to alaska or whatever note that even liberal societies tend to do this sort of thing, hence the german communist party getting banned, or islamic fundamentalist groups getting proscribed all over the shop, or militant clerics being droned without their citizenship protecting them the argument being put forward is not necessarily that the use of state power to stamp out dissent is a good thing, merely that it's an intrinsic feature of the state as such
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Dec 6, 2018 11:48
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For most modern liberal democracies, the only subversive elements that are routinely and regularly cracked down on are ones that seek to subvert the will of the people and democracy itself. You're absolutely right that a revolutionary socialist party, or any movement supporting political violence would probably be suppressed by most / all liberal democracies. Democratic socialist parties are tolerated however are tolerated in the United States and other liberal democracies (the US has the DSA and many other socialist parties, Canada has a Marxist-Leninist party and a Communist Party, etc.) Advocating for capitalism does not rise to the bar of subverting the will of the people, particularly when most socialist countries have had some elements and aspects of capitalism. Let's take a concrete example - in Cuba, certain sectors of the economy allow for private ownership of businesses. Individual citizens can own bed and breakfasts, or small restaurants, charge money for them, employ workers, and retain and re-invest the profits. That to me seems like a worthwhile experiment, and a state that actively suppressed promoting even small-scale ideas like this feels like it is suppressing dissent at a far greater scale than any liberal democracy I can think of.
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Dec 6, 2018 12:27
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enki42 posted:For most modern liberal democracies, the only subversive elements that are routinely and regularly cracked down on are ones that seek to subvert the will of the people and democracy itself. actually the Republican party repeatedly gets away with voter suppression
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Dec 6, 2018 12:33
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gradenko_2000 posted:actually the Republican party repeatedly gets away with voter suppression You have to know that this doesn't rise to the level of completely and explicitly disallowing advocacy of an economic system.
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Dec 6, 2018 12:38
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most actually existing socialisms are either excessively authoritarian or insufficiently pure, yes it seems to me that the notion that bourgeois democracy does a good job of representing the will of the people really has taken a beating over the last few years, but you might disagree - effectively, states crush organisations that are a threat to their governing interest. the good thing about capitalism is that said governing interest, typically being profit, allows for quite a bit of leeway in terms of nut restricting people's consumption or actions. this is also bad, because it means there is no way to e.g. combat racism or save the environment also lol no liberal states have no issues with loving over non-totalitarian groups - i put to you the treatment of unions in most of the anglosphere as a pertinent example
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Dec 6, 2018 12:45
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enki42 posted:You have to know that this doesn't rise to the level of completely and explicitly disallowing advocacy of an economic system. no but you said "ones that seek to subvert the will of the people and democracy itself", which is explicitly what the Republicans have done and continue to do
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Dec 6, 2018 12:45
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tbh i'm not convinced that banning groups agitating for a return of plantation slavery would necessarily be a bad thing, though it's unlikely to happen because those groups are incredibly marginal
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Dec 6, 2018 12:48
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Reminder that Marx&Engels were science dudes and for them dialectical materialism was a method for the scientific analysis of real-world processes, analysing them in Hegelian philosophical terms but looking to the real world for proof of everything they said. A dialectical contradiction for them is not a logical contradiction, but two natural or societal processes that pull toward contradictory directions, which is expressed as nonlinear movement of things whose position is determined by both, varying based on the changing strength of each process (because each real-world process is in turn determined by the state of other real-world processes). And the resolution of such a contradiction is a qualitative change that replaces those processes with a new one that inherits qualities of one or both. And the processes that most powerfully determine what is being studied should be a focus of the analysis: only by understanding those processes we can understand how to predict and consciously alter the development of what we are studying. I don't think it's very controversial. We know Marx ended up considering that he had proved that capitalism was dying for internal reasons, animated by the pursuit of profit to erase the existence of profit, but too much emphasis is placed by later socialists on those sorts of passive predictions, rather than the identification of the processes capitalism rests on and whose disruption would therefore spell its end, and the identification of processes that produce allies for such disruption. What I'm going for here is that while diamat isn't just some pseudoscientific nonsense and to dispose of it without understanding its point would be a step back, any scientific framework that can analyse present real-world processes and how to consciously change them equivalently or better than diamat is a worthy alternative or outright replacement for it for socialists. The whole point of the deal was to base the struggle for socialism on scientific terms rather than moral or other eternal philosophical terms: if diamat gets obsoleted, then it should be cast aside in favor of what replaced it, but regressions should not be made to philosophizing and wishful thinking. Engels cites the then new biological theories of the cell and darwinian evolution as examples of the kind of science that was dialectical for him and Marx even though it wasn't describing its discoveries in dialectical terms, they understood that the results are what count and would necessitate development of suitable methods. And natural science has only kept advancing, creating ever better theories of complex nonlinear change both in terms of movement of things and the change of things into other things, like climate science is just amazing to me. But how far along are social and other human sciences in their methods compared to that? Especially in areas relevant to changing society for the better? Unlike with natural science, the results society demands of them don't permit a holistic understanding of reality. For diamat to become obsolete for all purposes, they need the sort of coherent connection points and interdisciplinary disciplines that we have from physics to chemistry to biology and so on. That will be like the first step toward being able to form a climate science of society.
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Dec 6, 2018 12:54
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Lightning Knight posted:I will post more about this going forward but tl;dr the conclusion of myself and the writers at Jacobin is not that unions are bad but that organized labor that is focused on careerism and protecting one's job at the expense of solidarity and political radicalism is bad, and if the unions had been more radical and anti-racist it wouldn't have gone so badly for them. I think the trickier question is "How do we prevent the people more interested in careerism, or who have racist views, or other things contrary to the greater good from rising to the top?" Like for this solution: Azathoth posted:Yeah no disagreement here. I tend to think that, but for specific nonleadership jobs*, all roles in a union should be filled by elected workers who should be strictly term limited to prevent that from happening. How do we ensure a regular supply of term limited candidates who are actually interested in the job, particularly at the local workplace level? How do we ensure that this cascade of unions doesn't become a bureaucratic clusterfuck? Not saying these are insurmountable challenges, but it's worth discussing, particularly since some of the people most likely to take all the extra bullshit that comes with leadership would also be the people most likely to use that position to selfish ends.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:19
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Big Mad Drongo posted:How do we ensure a regular supply of term limited candidates who are actually interested in the job, particularly at the local workplace level? this is why term limits are actually a bad idea if you have a democracy that's functional enough to allow people to be voted out normally like they should
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Dec 6, 2018 17:27
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WampaLord posted:Why governments aren't like wolf populations? Are you serious? You are being ignorant. Stocks and flows, read this excellent post: uncop posted:Reminder that Marx&Engels were science dudes and for them dialectical materialism was a method for the scientific analysis of real-world processes, analysing them in Hegelian philosophical terms but looking to the real world for proof of everything they said. A dialectical contradiction for them is not a logical contradiction, but two natural or societal processes that pull toward contradictory directions, which is expressed as nonlinear movement of things whose position is determined by both, varying based on the changing strength of each process (because each real-world process is in turn determined by the state of other real-world processes). And the resolution of such a contradiction is a qualitative change that replaces those processes with a new one that inherits qualities of one or both. And the processes that most powerfully determine what is being studied should be a focus of the analysis: only by understanding those processes we can understand how to predict and consciously alter the development of what we are studying. I don't think it's very controversial. We know Marx ended up considering that he had proved that capitalism was dying for internal reasons, animated by the pursuit of profit to erase the existence of profit, but too much emphasis is placed by later socialists on those sorts of passive predictions, rather than the identification of the processes capitalism rests on and whose disruption would therefore spell its end, and the identification of processes that produce allies for such disruption. You want to model that poo poo WampaLord, it's going to be the same maths as predator prey relationships. Controls theory, systems thinks, this stuff is straight up compatible with the dialectic materialism uncop is taking about. Hell I'm not going far enough. It's the nessisary tool, for doing it. It's also a way to model economies and businesses.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:40
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Cerebral Bore posted:[conservatives] are actively engaged in massive efforts to deny civil rights in general and voting rights in particular to every demographic they don't think will support them, Said with no irony.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:49
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Big Mad Drongo posted:How do we ensure a regular supply of term limited candidates who are actually interested in the job, particularly at the local workplace level? How do we ensure that this cascade of unions doesn't become a bureaucratic clusterfuck? There isn't a silver bullet solution, but increased compensation would be a natural motivator and makes sense if there isn't a stream of people who want it, just like you'd motivate people to want to do any unpleasant but necessary job. To avoid problems with immediate monetary gain, perhaps make it a significant boost to their pension rather than a big up-front pay increase, though I'm not necessarily opposed to immediate compensation increases necessarily. As for preventing a bureaucratic clusterfuck, I don't think the idea of every worker belonging to a union necessarily causes that. In my example, it's more about keeping that hypothetical lawyers union from becoming a yellow union for the union the lawyers work for. In practice, there would be a lawyers union that represents the lawyers that work for many different unions at many locations. There wouldn't be a bureaucratic clusterfuck because the union representing the lawyers working for any given union would negotiate with the union as they would with any employer. I realize this is a lot of use of "union" so let me add in some names. Let's say we have a union of IT workers called Computer Touchers. Computer Touchers is a union of 10,000 IT workers across the country. To effectively advocate for their members, they need a permanent staff of 100 lawyers. Those lawyers cannot be in the Computer Touchers union not only because they are not IT workers, but also because their interests as workers meaningfully diverges from the interests of Computer Touchers. So, the lawyers have their own union Esquires, Esq. to represent them. Esquires, Esq. represents 5000 lawyers across the country, only 100 of which work for Computer Touchers. From the perspective of Computer Touchers, the lawyers are unionized employees, who need to be worked with no differently than a current business would work with union electricians or plumbers. From the perspective of Esquires, Esq., the lawyers are workers who need to be represented and Computer Touchers are no different than any other employer. From the perspective of the lawyers, they have an independent union they can go to for assistance if Computer Touchers tries to exploit them (c'mon just put in 80 hour weeks, it's for a good cause, don't you support us in solidarity, etc.).
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Dec 6, 2018 17:52
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Said with no irony. yup. welcome to the function of ideology in government, OOCC. the question is how you plan to prevent it from happening to you. the system you currently operate under functions by just murdering the people in question when they get worryingly powerful. we think ours is more humane.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:52
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Said with no irony. again, not all ideologies are the same and shouldn't be treated as such
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Dec 6, 2018 17:52
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