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Like, I'm extremely in favour of a left turn in politics but all you're doing here is convincing me that the average leftist is a moron who would do just as bad of a job as the average neoliberal technocrat.
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Sep 2, 2020 12:41
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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GABA ghoul posted:Cingulate is saying a plurist democracy + mixed markets will probably produce a better outcome than a violent autocratic ecology focused revolution by 2100. But if you naively extrapolate past trends, it will. I'm asking: why should I not naively extrapolate past trends? Rappaport posted:It seems that you are asking for a wholly fool-proof plan that would produce 0 corpses at all, and possibly are confident that capitalism is the only possible such plan, and are therefore irate at the twitter guillotine people for focusing on 12 volt batteries and Elon rather than concrete proposals that would sound great when Walter Cronkite read them out on the evening broadcast. I mean, okay, sure, there's a lot of battery talk out there, but this seems to fall apart when someone actually points you at something like the (admittedly hypocritical) Soviet constitution, your response is what about their piles of corpses, and when it's pointed out that the contradictions therein could be avoided (possibly?), you respond with going back to the beginning, that piles of corpses under capitalism either don't exist or can be hand-waved away, but are a certainty under non-capitalist regimes unless proven otherwise. And we cannot prove otherwise, because we cannot attempt non-capitalist societies, because. I am not so much interested in any (admittedly hypocritical) statement of intent like a Soviet constitution. I just want any indication of why this time, it would be different. When you say "the gulags could be avoided this time", that's where we're getting into the interesting parts. How? Why? How would you go about making sure things will be different this time? I think if you want to try socialism again, you really really want to be thinking about this part a lot. How do we not have gulags and Holodomors and killing 180.000 whales and Chernobyl this time around?
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Sep 2, 2020 12:46
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Orange Devil posted:Can you name a single poster advocating in favor of a violent autocratic revolution? show me a plan that's going to be substantially better than the numbers fuckstein neoliberal plan that's currently going on if you tell people that capitalism is going to gently caress over everyone's lives then you should be able to point to at least a starting point of an alternative. hell, just point at the green new deal (not great but not completely loving dumb and actually stands a chance to be better than the status quo) or the climate bits of the last labour manifesto under corbyn (kind of ok) as an example of how leftists have thought about the issues. even such an extremely basic and lazy answer is miles ahead of just being smug at people over how uninformed they are suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 12:48
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Orange Devil posted:Can you name a single poster advocating in favor of a violent autocratic revolution? - they are very much not in favour of violent revolution? - they are very much not in favour of interim autocratic rule to transition towards socialism? (And then there'd of course be step 2, what to do instead, what with labourers seemingly not very interested in protecting the environment right now.)
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Sep 2, 2020 12:50
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the basic proposition is that bourgeois political power is *irreconcilable* with avoiding ecocide, I.e. it is an inevitable consequence of that mode of society. again, i'm happy to discuss this assumption since it's non-trivial, but nobody actually seems to object to it. so we absolutely need to abolish it somehow, to produce some other society which will not necessarily lead to ecocide. this is what posters as radically different as myself and orange devil agree upon. we will start to disagree once we talk about how we're going to do it and what's the best alternative. this is also normal. imo it's unlikely that even if we achieve socialism, we avert ecocide, but the proletarian society is not structurally and necessarily geared to that end in the way that capitalism is - that is, abolish capitalism and we've got a shot. stay where we are, and it's guaranteed collapse. this is not a very complicated chain of reasoning, which is why it's so intensely annoying when some ignorant rear end in a top hat refuses to acknowledge it or specify where he disagrees in favour of vague 'yeah but idk it sounds risky, i'm going to need an elaborate technical explanation for how every sector is going to work post-revolution' - the relative risk is negligible because if we stay the present course, all is lost, for certain. if you're interested in having another conversation, it has to be in another context - i'm sure orange devil and myself are going to poo poo on each other's vision of the desirable future at some point, but that conversation will have a completely different texture. i'll be real - had this been the eighties i would probably be a social democrat of some description, because the anthropocene collapse wasn't that big a deal at the time and the risks really are pretty big, and revolutionary ideologies have a tendency to get out of hand pretty quickly regardless of the intention of whoever's involved in it. right now, though, we're seriously in the middle of at least two catastrophic meltdowns (biological diversity collapse and global heating) which *necessarily follow* from the way we organise society at a basic level.
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Sep 2, 2020 13:14
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had aliens been doing to us what we're doing to ourselves, the world would've gone full-bore command economy to fight back a long time ago
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Sep 2, 2020 13:16
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Cingulate posted:1)I'm really not confident in anything! See above! I'm in particular not defending capitalism; I'm if at all defending some lame middle of the road compromise in the form of social democracy, and not because I like it much, but because it's not super scary like the other options. Social democracy doesn't have any genocides in its history book so far right? Bolded added by Rappaport. 1) Social democracy is a good system, at least for white people in Northern Europe, I don't disagree with that, but the problems become manifold when we consider the climate change scenario we're witnessing. (For the sake of both honesty and brevity, I will just flat-out state that I think climate change is a real phenomenon and will cause massive global upheaval, and work from there. If someone disagrees with this premise as twitter battery doomsayer nonsense, then they obviously need not respond to any of this!) Social democracy has been crumbling for all of my lifetime, due to the political (reaganism + thatcherism in the EU context) and economic pressures put upon it by explicitly capitalist societies, and guess which way the wind is blowing? Capitalist societies do not seem to have mechanisms which could effectively combat climate change, since the person running on a plank of doing just that got beaten quite severely by the capitalist machine. The EU has done some efforts in the direction of climate change prevention, but the EU itself is (by design!) an incredibly inefficient and powerless machine, so either nothing at all or luke-warm efforts at best are done. If our only concern is genocide prevention, then I suppose I could live under the kind of social democracy I've lived in, since it's familiar and nice. But things don't exist outside context, and it looks like a) EU is already an inherently neo-liberal construct, and will only serve to drive individual states into more economically right-wing policies internally b) the global situation will change at an increasingly rapid pace for the worse as the globe heats up and arable land becomes scarcer etc., and capitalism's only response so far has been to extract even more furiously whatever they can from each region before all goes tits up. I don't see a social democratic answer to any of this. 2) I'm not confident about anything either. If we cannot, by democratic means, enact a more egalitarian society world-wide, then I suppose violence is to be expected. The point is, some form of violence is to be expected either way, and we're just trying to pick which corpse piles are more palatable? But, as I have been droning on and on for several posts now, your examples cherry-picked there are not inherently do to with non-capitalist societies. Chernobyl was a disaster, but so was Fukushima, and last I checked modern Japan is rather pro-capitalist! The Holodomor was a political decision undertaken by Josif Stalin, a known lunatic. The GULAG system was an extension of the power of the Chekist political movement. And I don't even know how to respond to the whale comment, do you realize how rapidly animal extinction rates have gone up under a mostly capitalism-run world over the past couple decades? This is absurd. The first and most obvious answer to your question is the basic Marxist critique of the Soviet Union, it began precisely in the worst place possible, the then-agrarian and economically poor Tsarist Russia. If you are unaware of this line of reasoning, you can probably find an article on wikipedia outlining the basic idea here. If we postulate instead an already over-abundant economy (with regards to food, chemical plants for medicine, factories for cars, toilet paper and so on) transitioning peacefully to a planned economy, it seems somewhat silly to insist that this will instantly lead to a Europe-wide secret police that will stick 12 volt batteries in little Jimmy's anus for the crime of Jimmy not clapping long enough for the brutal totalitarian dictator of Europe, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. It's not like we're insisting that smart phones and computers be instantly banned in glorious communist utopia, they can still exist. But the production of smart phones and luxury yachts have to be modernized in some fashion to at least try and stop us from burning the globe down. Arguably the production process of smart phones and the disposal of old computers already involve "gulag"-style exploitation, so it seems like a worthless criticism to scare-monger about these things. The modernization and transition of humanity's collective (consumer?) will be a painful process either way, that is certain, but it's not entirely clear to me why the least painful path must be pro-capitalist. We keep circling around examples of societies founded on wildly different economical and ecological situations than today, the CCCP from over a hundred years ago and social democracy that (roughly speaking) peaked between the 1950s and the 1980s, and has been systematically been torn down ever since all over Europe. "But what about Mao" seems like such a weird counter to point at when people are saying there's systematic issues around coping with climate change and economic inequality. Rappaport fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 13:19
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bringing up mao makes sense if you're trying to increase the perceived risk of system change, which cingulate is clearly trying to do. the problem with this is that it's totally ignoring the fairly simple position of the opposition, which is that such risk is insignificant next to the ecocide baked into our present system.
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Sep 2, 2020 13:27
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V. Illych L. posted:this is circular. the main thrust of argument - our present system will necessarily lead to catastrophe by ecocide - has not been rebutted or even addressed. i'm happy to discuss it, and i expect that this also applies to OD. however, you will note that it has not been discussed, but simply ignored in favour of what amounts to a concern over specifics. quote:this concern as a general tendency has also been addressed - this is the meat of my discussion with HR over several fairly long posts. the gist of it is that the specifics, while interesting and useful, will necessarily shake out independently of what academics have planned, because that's how academic knowledge interacts with political power. this imo rather relevant point has also been flatly ignored.
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Sep 2, 2020 13:44
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V. Illych L. posted:bringing up mao makes sense if you're trying to increase the perceived risk of system change, which cingulate is clearly trying to do. the problem with this is that it's totally ignoring the fairly simple position of the opposition, which is that such risk is insignificant next to the ecocide baked into our present system. but i don't believe simply changing to another economic system (short of one that forces humanity to revert to pre modern living standards) would significantly decrease the threat of ecocide, if you don't do the right specifics socialism is awesome because if you do it well the general living standards of the masses go up and you get rid of certain humanitarian crimes/avoidable disasters, not because it'll automagically save the planet suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 13:47
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the probability of averting disaster remains low, i agree, but it's not literally zero. thence the burning house analogy, the sliver of sliver of hope etc
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Sep 2, 2020 13:49
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It's really important that we keep on destroying our environment, with the resulting massive loss of life that will inevitably result (reminder that capitalism-induced climate change caused the Syrian Civil War), because it's how we can make Number Go Up, and making Number Go Up is the best possible political system because, have you heard about the gulags? They really sucked. Whereas the fascist dictatorships we prop up everywhere in the south so as to maintain the capitalist world order, those really don't suck. They're great. Definitely better than any possible alternative. Anyway, we can look to a glorious future for humankind where we will have done nothing meaningful to avoid mass extinction of biodiversity, mass destruction of arable lands, and mass pollution with endocrine disruptors and various other toxins everywhere, and the rendering of entire heavily-populated regions of the world unfit for human life. Because it's better than attempting to deviate from this course. Imagine if it somehow failed? I mean, we have to compare a risk of disastrous failure with a new system vs. a certainty of disastrous failure with capitalism. It's better to go with the devil we know and seek the certainty of disastrous failure; the solution where we're guaranteed there isn't any possible way it could turn out good.
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Sep 2, 2020 13:55
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V. Illych L. posted:the probability of averting disaster remains low, i agree, but it's not literally zero. thence the burning house analogy, the sliver of sliver of hope etc yeah but if you assume say a 99.9% chance that capitalism will kill us through environmental destruction vs. a 99% chance that whatever variant of socialism you support will kill us through environmental destruction that's not a meaningful difference, both of those round up to 100% i'd argue that 1) clearly formulating limits to environmental destruction which must be respected on a technical level (arguably this is mostly possible with current knowledge already) and 2) getting whatever economic system you're dealing with to respect those limits is going to make a way bigger difference, the only environmentally relevant aspect of changing the economic system is whether you can enforce those limits more easily
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Sep 2, 2020 13:56
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suck my woke dick posted:yeah but if you assume say a 99.9% chance that capitalism will kill us through environmental destruction vs. a 99% chance that whatever variant of socialism you support will kill us through environmental destruction that's not a meaningful difference, both of those round up to 100% i'm not arguing 99,9 i'm arguing 100% - i'm once more phoneposting and will have to get back to you on this in more detail, but capitalism is imo *necessarily* incapable of avoiding ecocide. but also i'd take almost any risk to go from 99,9% to 99% chance of literally civilisation becoming impossible, that's a huge increase
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Sep 2, 2020 14:02
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You know why I insist on pointing out just how bad the system we already live in is? Because I do not believe for one second that you, Cingulate, are actually aware of how bad it is, not matter how much you insist that you agree with me that it is bad. And the reason I do not believe this is because every critique you field about the proposed alternative is something that is literally already happening in the current system right now and yet you see seem fine with that. Socialism would be worse, because people would be put in camps. People are already being put in camps this very day, under and because of capitalism. Socialism would be worse, because there would be genocides. There are already genocides this very day, under and because of capitalism. Socialism would be worse, because animals would go extinct. Animals are already going extinct this very day, under and because of capitalism. Socialism would be worse, because people would be tortured. People are already being tortured this very day, under and because of capitalism. Socialism would be worse, because there would be authoritarian leaders. There are already authoritarian leaders this very day, under and because of capitalism. You are a loving joke.
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Sep 2, 2020 14:03
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suck my woke dick posted:but i don't believe simply changing to another economic system (short of one that forces humanity to revert to pre modern living standards) would significantly decrease the threat of ecocide, if you don't do the right specifics This is a funny thing to point out, since we know how wastefully capitalism exploits and then out-right destroys resources like food. But since we're not allowed to criticize capitalism within the frame-work of this strange argument happening, how do we even define "modern living standards"? They vary wildly between economic classes and global regions. The infrastructure for having electricity, the internet and kitten videos already exists, is it that absurd to say that by removing built in obsolescence and allocating resources in a centrally planned way rather than via for-profit methods, we could do better ecologically than we do already? Obviously living "standards", whatever they are, must change, but if we posit the reality of climate change, they will happen either way, and while cynical it doesn't seem unlikely that capitalism will keep driving the "living standard" for most of the global population down while uplifting the few. Perhaps literally, like in that movie where the rich literally escaped into space!  Tim Curry and his dreams 
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Sep 2, 2020 14:09
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Imagine coming up with planned obsolescence and contrived durability.just the best most eficient system. More people should read marx's ecology:materialism and nature Joel Kovel was a crank, but his Enemy of Nature book is a interesting read.
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Sep 2, 2020 14:15
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V. Illych L. posted:i'm not arguing 99,9 i'm arguing 100% You have no way of knowing that for sure. Predictions that far into the future are pretty much useless. As I said before, there are many examples of western countries moving away from paper clip maximization(at the expense of efficiency and material wealth) and there is nothing about modern western european states that is inherently incompatible with the idea of a sustainable economy. Yeah, the chances of it right now aren't looking too good for it to happen in time before the collapse becomes irreversible, but they sure look a lot better without putting a bunch of insane autocrats in power and let them play Eco-Batka. I think a core problem in all these discussions is the reliance on meaningless poo poo words like capitalism and socialism. Neither are modern western states fully capitalist nor were countries like the Soviet Union fully socialist. They are/were a very complex mixture of heavily regulated public and private sectors, operating huge chunks.of their economies with and without a profit motive.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:16
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Cingulate posted:You want to do what the Soviets did in the 20s and 30s. Ok. Why should anyone expect it to lead to different outcomes this time around? I really thought the clarification that no, I'm talking about the theory of the 1936 Soviet constitution & not replicating the 1936 Soviet Union, would avoid this particularly stupid interpretation of what I was saying but bravo I guess? I am very much a libertarian socialist, I do not have much love for Leninism & it's off-shoots as any good intentions were lost amidst purging & declaring every second person a kulak. You're not engaging with anyone, you're not putting any loving work in as you would if you were sincerely interested, this is why you're tedious, not because you happen to be perfectly fine with a miserable, exploitative, unsustainable economic system. I specifically named the Kronstadt Rebellion & Petropavlosk Declaration so you could do your own legwork but even looking at Wikipedia was more than you could be arsed doing so why on earth would you expect anyone else to bother themselves with you? GABA ghoul posted:Just a random side thought: isn't there an inherent contradiction between central planning(required for rapid decarbonization) and worker ownership/control of businesses? I mean, I guess, the workers could just be executing production requests from the state and collect the profits. But in that case the state decides the profit margin and the whole thing reduces effectively to the state just paying a wage to the workers in a really convoluted way. Might as well simplify the whole thing and just make all businesses state owned. It's a fair question: one can of course argue that the state is the people and so state ownership IS worker ownership. I don't necessarily subscribe to that viewpoint & I think that while weening us off our current reliance on things like decarbonisation is certainly important it should not be the sole concern. I worry that central planning on the scale of the USSR for example almost inevitably contributes to the creation of a managerial class like the nomenklatura, neither new or from the remains of any pre-war bourgeoisie he stick it out and ultimately that just creates a whole host of new problems. Perhaps managerialism is inevitable, I don't know, I'm no theorist, I just read lots. Perhaps the solution to that problem is to do the Stalinist/Maoist thing & massacre the new class every 20-30 years to create room for new blood to flourish but personally I'm a bit soft & don't really like that idea. I'd rather at least attempt to avoid or mitigate the stratification of society. Seems a bit unsustainable too.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:30
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GABA ghoul posted:You have no way of knowing that for sure. Predictions that far into the future are pretty much useless. As I said before, there are many examples of western countries moving away from paper clip maximization(at the expense of efficiency and material wealth) and there is nothing about modern western european states that is inherently incompatible with the idea of a sustainable economy. Yeah, the chances of it right now aren't looking too good for it to happen in time before the collapse becomes irreversible, but they sure look a lot better without putting a bunch of insane autocrats in power and let them play Eco-Batka. yes i do, to a level of certainty which is similar to my certainty that e.g. climate change is real, which is extremely certain - certainly way, way beyond p-value 0,01
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Sep 2, 2020 15:31
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Rappaport posted:Since my understanding of econ is fairly limited, I am going to use an example a child can understand. For my benefit, not yours, I mean! There's a Carl Barks story where Scrooge McDuck decides that he wants to own the only dime minted in 1952 (or something like that, the specific coin doesn't matter), and decides to launch a massive campaign to pay a dollar for every 1952 dime. Or ten dollars, again, the figures don't matter. And eventually he does own every 1952-minted dime, and other hijinks ensue when he tries to keep only one of them. The point is, Scrooge has accumulated loads of capital long, long before these events, and he can afford to spend outrageous sums of it for what is essentially a vanity project. Donald Duck never could, since he barely meets rent. Rappaport posted:Why this children's story is even tangentially relevant to the discussion here is that the current 'liberal' political thinking does, roughly, agree with the idea that everything's for sale. I already ranted about this creating false scarcity of vital resources and all that, but SMWD raised the issue of messaging, so let's turn our eye towards the media landscape, as the voting populace relies on it (more or less) for information and yes, opinion. In a very capitalist scenario, like the US, this means that the Scrooge McDucks (or Rupert Murdochs) have a wildly distorting effect on the opinion of the populace at large, since they can plant serious old men into talking head shows explaining why free markets are good and how you the viewer can earn millions by investing just ten bucks each month! Or even more obscenely, have some 'respectable' newsman break down in tears out of the fear that the democratic socialists will have him shot in Central Park. So my point here is, that the capitalist system has inherent feed-back loops that at best prevent redistributive policies from garnering support, at worst perpetuating policies that further inequality. And this prevents very effectively the scenario you propose, whereby the case for socialism can be made without shouting about guillotines or whatever Cingulate's point was. If you can't ever hear these explanations, all you're left with are the "known truths" that you've heard from the teevee or read on a headline in your facebook feed. Which tend to lean towards sympathy for Scrooge McDuck, or at least tut-tutting at lazy people. Which scenario did I propose? Market socialism? Rappaport posted:In the context of Europe, many nations (do all? I'm kinda assuming yes) have national broadcasting corporations, so in theory at least it's possible to have programming that's less (politically) liberal-inclined, and explain to viewers how regulation of markets is necessary even within an ostensibly capitalist context. But since these national corporations are still run, ultimately, by the governments they serve under, the political landscape dictates how state-owned media leans. And since these state medias also exist in a mixed-market environment, there is still at least some societal pressure that they not veer too far away from "common wisdom discourse", which again can be influenced by Scrooge McDuck on a whim, poor people not so much. I dunno how a nationalized version of social media would work out to equalize the playing field? Ironically, this, too could be termed as a market failure inherent to capitalism but no worries I'll shut my face. Rappaport posted:Broadly speaking it's a very true point that left-wing economic policies should be 'marketed' (oh, the irony) in an understandable, relatable, dare we say populist manner? to get traction among voters. I'm just personally not sure what kind of populist message would reach the Cingulates enough that they'd be able to shrug off their lifetimes of consuming pro-capitalist propaganda I maintain that people itt, especially myself, are probably a bad indicator of what would work. Like, you convince me by sending me research papers about what system you like post revolution and I have pretty much zero dogmatic reasons to be against a system I like, called socialist or otherwise. On the other hand, tell me that "it doesn't matter" and there "isn't any good plan" then I'm turned off or confused. Perhaps a little of that might be helpful to convince the population. I feel like most Americans are convinced that market capitalism is somehow scientifically correct, when I have time and again shown itt that this conclusion does not follow at all. On the other hand, I do like movements that, besides all the strategic marketing, do not patronize voters and assume that people are intelligent enough to understand scientific, well founded arguments. Certainly, one could take people like Cingular more seriously. People have fears and concerns, and some people need information to be convinced. I don't mean on this dead forum, of course, but more generally. Smugness or patronizing just doesn't come across well for a political movement. People want to see what's behind a proposal, they want to know there's "detail" there. Or at least some. But let me reiterate: This is not a precondition, this is not where every bit of effort must go. I did not mean this. Naively, I would think you need some sort of enemy, which you naturally have in people that earn billions of dollars during a recession. You need to understand that people are loss averse, meaning that it's less about doing something new rather than preserving or renewing something good. Finally, you could conjure up some idealized past which is obviously difficult for socialism. Maybe some rebranding is in order in the US because in the US, perhaps because of the language, so much is about singular words and connotations - like how you guys single-handedly ruined the word "Antifa" in one month (a term that stood for what, a good century?). But I am sure all this has been tried before so I have no concrete solution either. Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 15:32
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GABA ghoul posted:Just a random side thought: isn't there an inherent contradiction between central planning(required for rapid decarbonization) and worker ownership/control of businesses? I mean, I guess, the workers could just be executing production requests from the state and collect the profits. But in that case the state decides the profit margin and the whole thing reduces effectively to the state just paying a wage to the workers in a really convoluted way. Might as well simplify the whole thing and just make all businesses state owned. The head of the GDR "new economic system" planning committee concluded that the internal contradiction of worker ownership and central planning were one of the major reasons as to why socialist economies failed. See my post some pages back with a link to an article by this dude.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:36
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Haramstufe Rot posted:
Ok this is a bit, isnt it.that last paragraph ooofff
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Sep 2, 2020 15:39
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My understanding is probably way off but I always understood Antifa as a "very good" organization that punches Nazis during protests and most people I know are totally for that and would say "Antifa is good". Even the people that get a bad press during G8 protests (or what have you) by the media are not called "Antifa" but something like black block. The Antifa symbol here has no bad connotation but a good one. By contrast, in the US before the last decade, I always thought Antifa was not very well known at all. But of course I genuinely don't know. Just my impression from living there for some time. NOW, Americans I know on facebook use Antifa as some sort of shadowy terrorist group that does all the violence in all cities and saying the word "Antifa" is like a slur. People who I know for a fact had NO IDEA what Antifa even was some month ago! I am probably wrong then sorry. Edit: I should have not said "you guys". You get what I mean. Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 15:41
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I understand what you're saying but I don't know if anyone on the left can do anything about 'the enemy' using names and terms in bad faith. Whatever they rebranded as they'd just turn that into a synonym for 'terrorist' just as the word terrorist means 'person we don't like'. It's kind of a weak point in language as a concept. Consensus can and does change meanings. Which is why in the end dialogue will fail and force will be needed.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:45
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C'mon son, external powerfull enemies?a reverence for the past? Finding new terms for propanganda's sake? I...have you read umberto eco?
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Sep 2, 2020 15:47
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V. Illych L. posted:yes i do, to a level of certainty which is similar to my certainty that e.g. climate change is real, which is extremely certain - certainly way, way beyond p-value 0,01 Well, if we are doing a post-factual discussion then I can just as easily claim that irreversible collapse is not certain under pluralist democracy and we can leave it at that. There is really not much else to say
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Sep 2, 2020 15:50
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Antifa Poltergeist posted:C'mon son, external powerfull enemies?a reverence for the past? Finding new terms for propanganda's sake? I shall refrain from making further recommendations and will pour ash over my head to atone for yet another terrible post by yours truly.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:54
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Haramstufe Rot posted:So, also for myself, I am going to translate this into econ nerdspeak: This would be my point about "non-convexities". In reality, Donald Duck can buy exactly 0 coins, and not a small proportion proportional to his marginal productivity that a theoretical convex economy would allow. This fact then means that Scrooge can own all coins and destroy all but one. We are very far away from convincing me right now though. Somebody just claimed 100% certainty about forecasting the future, and that makes me think they and people like them should never be the ones to dream up the next world! I want people in charge who understand and know doubt and uncertainty and that politics and economics are very complex and human minds are very limited. Probably “we need to murder Jeff bezos and eat his money” is convincing to a lot more people than the kind of thing that would convince me, which would mostly convince normal people that socialists are boring nerds.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:58
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GABA ghoul posted:Well, if we are doing a post-factual discussion then I can just as easily claim that irreversible collapse is not certain under pluralist democracy and we can leave it at that. There is really not much else to say i do intend to argue my point once i get back to a computer and we can have a more substantial discussion, not to worry. i am confident enough in this reasoning ti subject it to scrutiny
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Sep 2, 2020 15:59
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Cingulate posted:To be fair I’m super weird and what would convince me probably wouldn’t convince many other people. I’m a nerd, I’d like a long and careful analysis of what went wrong last time, and then a suggestion of how that can be avoided, and then some projections indicating how, across a range of parameters, a given system might play out, with a decent quantification of uncertainty ,.. and most people are asleep by then. you're even more deluded than i thought if you claim you do not actually believe in e.g. gravity with de facto absolute certainty. nobody's actually that serious about philosophical categories of knowledge
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Sep 2, 2020 16:02
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Orange Devil posted:Can you name a single poster advocating in favor of a violent autocratic revolution? Every single reactionary poster in the thread is doing it, they just have no idea lmfao
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Sep 2, 2020 16:02
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V. Illych L. posted:you're even more deluded than i thought if you claim you do not actually believe in e.g. gravity with de facto absolute certainty. nobody's actually that serious about philosophical categories of knowledge Well, that’s the situation Popper found himself in in 1917 too right, storming the prison of Vienna to free the socialist leaders, absolutely no doubt the higher goal justified a few school kids getting shot dead by cops. And I reserve the right to have just a little bit of doubt, and I prefer a politics that has room for uncertainty too.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:15
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Cingulate posted:To be fair I’m super weird and what would convince me probably wouldn’t convince many other people. I’m a nerd, I’d like a long and careful analysis of what went wrong last time, and then a suggestion of how that can be avoided, and then some projections indicating how, across a range of parameters, a given system might play out, with a decent quantification of uncertainty ,.. and most people are asleep by then. If you are genuinely curious about a thorough analysis of the flaws within the Soviet system from an economics and systemics stand-point, you can pick up Moshe Lewin's A Soviet Century, and possibly work your way up to some reforms that would have to be made pre-revolution or however we'd migrate to a non-capitalistic society. It's pretty dense stuff, and I won't attempt any kind of thorough abstract to sell it, but it's there all the same.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:37
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Cingulate posted:If you claim your forecasts about the future consequences of capitalism have the same uncertainty bounds as our understanding of gravity ... right, i forgot, you're a lukewarmist lol
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Sep 2, 2020 16:50
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the thing is, you either believe in certainty or you don't, if you do you can't use the philosophical technicality of 'well you can never know something for absolute certain', *and nobody actually doesn't believe in certainty because that's an insane way to live one's life*
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Sep 2, 2020 16:53
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forkboy84 posted:Socialism is better because people matter more than profits. Because socialism or barbarism is a real choice. Because some oval office spending £500m on a luxury yacht while people 2 miles down the road rely on charity to feed their kids is inexplicably cruel and a fear of "MAYBE ALTERNATIVE WILL BE BAD TOO" isn't actually a good justification for tolerating such abject misery & inequality & greed. This kind of thing always made me wonder. So, you absolutely want a huge private ship for some reason. Do you absolutely have to pay the maximum amount of price possible for it? And if you absolutely can not scale your dream ship down, why not share it with other people, who share the same absurd dream of "huge, luxurious boat". Just make some kind of social contract where you own and share the responsibility among a couple hundred people, with schedules for better organization and poo poo. Sure, just straight-up paying a huge sum and then having a boat is simple, but it's also so pointless it hurts. You can replace the boat in this example with basically every overpriced luxury vehicle/building. Cingulate posted:See that’s what I mean. I’m saying 10 times “I don’t care how bad you think capitalism is, I want to be convinced why what you’re passionate about is better”, and all I’m getting back is explanations of why capitalism is bad. That’s why I suspect you care much more about why this world is bad and needs to be punished than about what to do instead. In school I came with this mad plan of some sort of heavily mechanized and automated society, everyone would get income based on energy credits, building crap that destroys the environment would be strictly forbidden, there were heavy limits on the amount of stuff a single person was allowed to own, just basic things I thought would be necessary to get out of our capitalim-induced death spiral. Of course everyone concentrated on the point where everything is controlled by robots since Humans are clearly too stupid to rule themselves, and I hide that poo poo away in shame. It took me about 20 years to slowly realize that my plan was basically just "Communism, but with Robots!". If we cross out the ruler-part where I just scribbled down "SkyNet??? Possible use a better name." and replace it with something our technology today actually allows, there you have it: A good plan to replace capitalism. I called it the "Technocratic Republic".
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Sep 2, 2020 17:55
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V. Illych L. posted:the thing is, you either believe in certainty or you don't, if you do you can't use the philosophical technicality of 'well you can never know something for absolute certain', *and nobody actually doesn't believe in certainty because that's an insane way to live one's life* I completely and utterly reject the notion of certainty.
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Sep 2, 2020 18:00
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Libluini posted:This kind of thing always made me wonder. So, you absolutely want a huge private ship for some reason. Do you absolutely have to pay the maximum amount of price possible for it? And if you absolutely can not scale your dream ship down, why not share it with other people, who share the same absurd dream of "huge, luxurious boat". Just make some kind of social contract where you own and share the responsibility among a couple hundred people, with schedules for better organization and poo poo. Think I just had an allergic reaction to the idea of Yacht Timeshares
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Sep 2, 2020 18:02
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Antifa Poltergeist posted:C'mon son, external powerfull enemies?a reverence for the past? Finding new terms for propanganda's sake? He can't help it can he, he's German. Truga posted:Every single reactionary poster in the thread is doing it, they just have no idea lmfao This is a fair point. V. Illych L. posted:right, i forgot, you're a lukewarmist lol He's a coward who is so cowardly that he's even afraid to properly think. suck my woke dick posted:I completely and utterly reject the notion of certainty. Are you sure about that? Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 18:09
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