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I mean if you've abolished private property presumably you could approach an existing worker owned factory and ask if they want to consider producing your new widget in exchange for a share of the profit commensurate to your contribution. Or you could see if there are some communal 3d printers or other tools you could use to fabricate your widget and sell it until you can afford to fund some dedicated ones. The whole point of communism is that the means of production is not supposed to be privately owned so having free access to it is kind of... the whole point? This also assumes, of course, that we're still operating on some kind of market based economy where people have to buy things rather than them just being produced as people want them. The idea that the only way we would ever have fancier computer monitors is if some brilliant computer monitor genius comes along and imparts the knowledge from the heavens but he will only do that if he gets to slap his copyright over it and become the exclusive owner of the brilliant computer monitor factory is just... kinda daft. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 09:23
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OwlFancier posted:I mean if you've abolished private property presumably you could approach an existing worker owned factory and ask if they want to consider producing your new widget in exchange for a share of the profit commensurate to your contribution. Or you could see if there are some communal 3d printers or other tools you could use to fabricate your widget and sell it until you can afford to fund some dedicated ones.
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Sep 13, 2020 09:29
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polymathy posted:
But it is how the world worked. Have you read any history of the world from 1500-1900? I don't think the abolition of the state will have the effect you think it will on private property (hint: Private Property is an artifact of the state)
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Sep 13, 2020 09:45
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Community, religion, charity, and civil society, famously not at all in conflict with capitalism.
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Sep 13, 2020 09:47
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polymathy posted:
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Sep 13, 2020 09:52
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Who would win in a fight, community, religion, charity, or more money for me, gently caress you? The answer may surprise you.
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Sep 13, 2020 09:55
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OwlFancier posted:Who would win in a fight, community, religion, charity, or more money for me, gently caress you? They would all team up to gently caress you.
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Sep 13, 2020 10:11
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polymathy posted:A negative impact to who? Wikileaks published true information about Hillary Clinton and the DNC that voters have every right to know. What I am asking is - do you believe that Russia didn't hack the DNC? Or that it didn't have an impact?
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Sep 13, 2020 10:18
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If the state is out, who is going to stop the last few mergers remaining to gently caress everyone royally?
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Sep 13, 2020 11:24
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polymathy posted:A free market economy tends to produce a lot of good paying jobs that most people are perfectly happy to work at. The idea that most jobs would pay what you'd consider to be "slave-wages" is a fallacy. The history of the marketized economy is just the opposite- it came about with an intense level of social strife, and such strife continues unabated through its history. Even in the 'good times' of the free market economy, the strife was just pushed onto foreign lands instead, but now we're having some in the US. The whole reason the gentry accepted having feudal land arrangements replaced with market-property land arrangements is that it was much more lucrative for them. They could easily get more and squeeze harder and more flexibly with rent than corvees and feudal dues. They gained an enormous amount of power in being able to have total control of the land. I'm not saying feudal arrangements were rosy at all, but the markets didn't really buy all that much freedom there. They just gave the landed classes a much more flexible kind of power. When the British did this in India without feeling any kind of need to take care of the poverty this might cause, what happened was enormous starvation and famine, the subject of the book "Late Victorian Holocausts". In it you can read very eloquent liberals suggesting that this is fine as starvation is how the market decides(and also that sunspots cause the business cycle) and that any notion of trying to provide famine relief would distort the markets. This is what powerful capitalists do when they don't have to potentially deal with the peasants at their doorstep.
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Sep 13, 2020 12:22
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polymathy posted:Okay, but then the question that arises is, why is this some great advantage if functionally the job was no different than working for a regular grocery store? You still have a tiny minority in positions of authority and the majority just taking directives from them not understanding or caring about how any of the business actually runs. The great advantage for the employees were better pay, benefits and working conditions than your average grocery store worker, and the customer got better quality products for the price - the co-op society was able to leverage the power of the market because it was eight shops in a group rather than eight individual businesses so while our prices were higher on average than a big supermarket they were lower than most independents and better quality. The society members (workers and customers) also voted on things like only stocking fair trade coffee, tea and chocolate, only selling free-range eggs, not stocking awful low-quality mechanically recovered 'meat' products and so on, even though those things would have been profitable to sell. A private business with shareholders would have been virtually obligated to sell cheap eggs and nasty chicken nuggets because there was consumer demand for it. The co-op society was able to decide to forego the easy profit for the greater good. polymathy posted:At some point I'm not sure there is too much of a disagreement here. I want people to have the liberty to work at co-ops, but I also want an entrepreneur to have the ability to see his vision through with the potential of profits serving the function of justifying the risk necessary to realize his dream. Why should there be any risk? If you didn't have to save a massive stack of capital (or offer up your house as collateral to borrow someone else's...) - if you could share in the means of production equally - then bringing a vision to reality would be so much easier for everyone! Instead of convincing a bank to give you a loan, you'd just need to convince workers to build your new widget. Instead of the bank taking a share of the business or interest on the loan, the people who physically turned your idea into a functioning, distributable product would take a share of the profit - without them your vision remains a vision, so they were pretty fundamental to the process. If your new widget is terrible and no-one wants it, then the factory will decide to make something else and no-one loses their house. This is actually a much better way of encouraging and facilitating the introduction of new products and ideas. It's only bad if you think that the entrepreneur is some higher being who is solely responsible for gifting their ideas to the world and so deserves to be rewarded (possibly to a ridiculous extent for a single individual) for doing so. Or if you think that the only motivation people ever have for coming up with new ideas is "how can I make myself fantastically rich?"
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Sep 13, 2020 12:38
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polymathy posted:Libertarian theory says there are only two ways of legitimate property acquisition: homesteading unowned virgin land or contractual exchange.
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Sep 13, 2020 13:00
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polymathy posted:No, it's not a fully voluntary society because the method of property acquisition is clearly unjust. Libertarian theory says there are only two ways of legitimate property acquisition: homesteading unowned virgin land or contractual exchange. So you are saying Mao was correct in killing all the landlords? Because he caused enough chaos that it is impossible to find a heir of the previous owners the current ownership is now legitimate? Thanks for telling us how to make a land redistribution campaign legitimate for libertarian purposes.
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Sep 13, 2020 13:24
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Was that not always quite clear? he's been saying "gently caress their claims they're all dead" for years
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Sep 13, 2020 15:31
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Harold Fjord posted:Was that not always quite clear? he's been saying "gently caress their claims they're all dead" for years He pays lip service to the idea that if native peoples could prove that are parcel of land was wrongfully taken from their direct blood ancestors by showing a notarized proof of ownership document then obviously they would be granted that land back immediately. But he only says that because he knows such a thing is literally impossible, and you know that if push came to shove and he was the one who would potentially lose something he would abandon those principles immediately.
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Sep 13, 2020 15:57
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polymathy posted:I agree with Noam Chomsky that the primary role of any politically-aware person is to criticize their own government, NOT the government of some other country. Do you actually think Chomsky meant that you're supposed to just talk poo poo about your government regardless of whether it's true or not? Here's a quote from The Responsibility of Intellectuals Noam Chomsky posted:Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy. Your job is to criticize your government when they do bad things. You aren't supposed to just make poo poo up or pose "plausible hypotheses", you need to actually dig for real information and try to falsify your ideas. If you don't do that, you're a conspiracy theorist, not an engaged citizen. And guess what? You don't do that.
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Sep 13, 2020 17:14
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OwlFancier posted:It's almost like that... is the point? This phrase sums up exactly one of the many, many ways in which "honestly not jrod, seriously" shows his true colours. I just reread this thread over many months while recuperating from the illness that will cripple me for the rest of my now-shorter life, and it's amazing how often original vanilla jrod would get so close to some actually human emotions, yet somehow go off into complete sociopathy. For example, he realised years ago that the rich will buy government towards their own ends, but then he somehow veers away from the sensible conclusion of "get rid of the rich" to "it's all the fault of government"... you know, that one tiny veneer of protection that the productive classes have against the parasite class. Above, it's the same song, different chord. He cannot even conceive of the concept of a group of people in a joint venture to make computer monitors. Instead, it has to be the noble capitalist who suffers for years and takes all the risk and, thus, deserves all the reward. I would say I feel sorry for the dumb bastard if I were able of feeling any compassion for him at all I'm not, but there is definitely a reflection of society in there where two things happen: Firstly, it attests to the atomisation of society, especially anglophone society, where people cannot conceive of collective solutions to problems. Secondly, it shows how capitalists have made themselves out to be these magnificent human gods without him society would crumble, just as kings before spoke of divine right and Aryans spoke of being the master race. Here's the thing... being an entrepreneur *is* tough. That skill, let's call it entrepreneurship because I'm pretentious like that is, indeed, a valuable skill. Here's the thing, though - so is everything else. If you want to make computer monitors and sell them, entrepreneurship isn't enough. One needs someone with the technical skills to build them and the manual dexterity that it takes to manipulate components. One needs someone skilled in logistics that can get them to the right places and drivers who can deliver the things, not to mention strong blokes and forklift drivers who move them into the trucks. If one intends to sell to an international market, there needs to be someone who can translate the menus and user's manual into French and German and Chinese etc. I could go on, but meanwhile there is a security, transportation, information and legal infrastructure in place that is also necessary to protect one from theft, build the roads for transport, allow for marketing and protect patents. These are all necessary skills that require education, work and money, and privileging entrepreneurship above all of those such that the entrepreneur gets a huge share of the pie in much the same way as the panther did over the owl is bloody ridiculous. Steve Jobs died fairly young. I won't mourn him for obvious reasons, yet Apple has carried on being very, very successful. If Jeff Bezos died tomorrow (I want to stop to savour that fantasy for a moment), they would replace him and Amazon would carry on just as they would if the head of legal or the head of one their inhumane shipping warehouses resigned. All human endeavour of any consequence is the result of many people working in harmony to achieve a goal - full stop. This idea that a few superior individuals are responsible for all of human progress is simultaneously a laughable fantasy and also a grim reflection of the constant propaganda that we are spoon fed.
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Sep 13, 2020 17:30
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"I'll just be thrifty and save $50,000 per year", with an implication that anyone should be able to do it who is "worthy" to lead a company. It's just a deep misunderstanding of reality rooted in individualist nonsense.
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Sep 13, 2020 17:37
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I don't even know that entrepeneurship is a skill, or if it is it's one that we could easily make irrelevant. The sole "skill" involved appears to be the willingness to "take risks" if that is even true, but as others have pointed out, there doesn't need to be a risk, it is well within our capability to structure society such that nobody needs to take risks to have useful production occur. We can socialize the risks among all of us so that they are so small we don't even notice, a little time taken away from other production to investigate the utility of a new product does not need to end someone's world. The expertise of the manufacturers could be utilized to minimise the chances of failure or even improve the product, and none of this needs to be done by building a factory from scratch with massive amounts of capital investment up front before you've ever determined whether the thing is worth making. The only reason it might need to be like that now is because the means of production are so jealously guarded and everyone's trying to fight everyone else for a share of a limited demand where supply vastly exceeds it, where fortunes are spent to pull people towards specific products and back again, labour working against itself to squeeze ever more blood from the same stone. All wasted, all pointless from the perspective of providing humans with things they need. Capitalism creates the problem it purports to solve. If you did away with the problem you would not need a solution.
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Sep 13, 2020 18:11
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Isn't Jrod's racket something about pirating kung-fu DVDs from Hong Kong and selling them overseas? Hey Jrod do you think the publishers of said DVDs would have more or less of a reason to track you down and cripple you (physically cripple you, not some metaphor about your business) if there wasn't this pesky state with its "laws" to stop them?
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Sep 13, 2020 20:06
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Weatherman posted:Isn't Jrod's racket something about pirating kung-fu DVDs from Hong Kong and selling them overseas? Hey Jrod do you think the publishers of said DVDs would have more or less of a reason to track you down and cripple you (physically cripple you, not some metaphor about your business) if there wasn't this pesky state with its "laws" to stop them? also if he can get me a Buddha's Palm english dub i'd appreciate the heads up, the version you can find on the internet is subtitled, and the subtitles are nowhere near as funny
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Sep 13, 2020 20:38
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Weatherman posted:Isn't Jrod's racket something about pirating kung-fu DVDs from Hong Kong and selling them overseas? Hey Jrod do you think the publishers of said DVDs would have more or less of a reason to track you down and cripple you (physically cripple you, not some metaphor about your business) if there wasn't this pesky state with its "laws" to stop them? It's super clear that Jrod / polymathy does not actually have the theoretical foundation required to be able to debate this, what with not knowing the meaning of fundamental concepts that are being discussed Logically speaking they are consistently not even wrong; remember that one of their foundation texts believes that if theory is not supported by evidence, the evidence is clearly wrong because the theory is necessarily bulletproof.
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Sep 13, 2020 22:10
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Somfin posted:It's super clear that Jrod / polymathy does not actually have the theoretical foundation required to be able to debate this, what with not knowing the meaning of fundamental concepts that are being discussed quote:For a minute let's put aside any evidence for what happened in Syria. Given the history of our government lying in order to justify the invasion or bombing of a foreign country or the overthrow of their leader, shouldn't our instinct be to distrust what our media, our intelligence agencies, our military and our government officials are telling us about the government they are trying to overthrow? quote:Furthermore I'd argue that whenever the US Empire has it's sights set on regime change or other interference into the internal affairs of another country, you have a moral obligation to NOT say anything negative about the leadership of that country. To do otherwise is to aide the US government propaganda effort that will increase the chance that they'll be able to convince the public to support their imperialistic program. He's actually embraced it super hard in this most recent bout. Put aside any evidence and just believe things axiomatically to be true. Don't say anything bad about dictators, even when those things are true. Its why I'm not sure even bothering to engage with facts is worth it at this point, because he simply doesn't give a gently caress about them.
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Sep 13, 2020 22:20
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Caros posted:Don't say anything bad about dictators, even when those things are true. But remember, states are bad!
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Sep 13, 2020 22:22
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Weatherman posted:Isn't Jrod's racket something about pirating kung-fu DVDs from Hong Kong and selling them overseas? Hey Jrod do you think the publishers of said DVDs would have more or less of a reason to track you down and cripple you (physically cripple you, not some metaphor about your business) if there wasn't this pesky state with its "laws" to stop them? I'll actually defend the melon fucker, grey market dvds and blurays are good and important.
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Sep 13, 2020 22:27
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Why do Libertarians have a hate-on for Alexander Hamilton?
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Sep 13, 2020 22:31
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Panfilo posted:Why do Libertarians have a hate-on for Alexander Hamilton?
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Sep 13, 2020 22:38
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Caros posted:He's actually embraced it super hard in this most recent bout. Put aside any evidence and just believe things axiomatically to be true. Don't say anything bad about dictators, even when those things are true. Its why I'm not sure even bothering to engage with facts is worth it at this point, because he simply doesn't give a gently caress about them. They don't want to engage with the question of "why doesn't the theory actually work when put in practice," so they just don't. That's because libertarianism is just the system we have now, but ever-so-mildly tweaked to make things even worse for the poor and even better for the rich (accidentally misspelled as reich there lol). Unlike communists, who have figured out actual loving explanations for why the various attempts to impose communism have historically failed and ways to avoid that in future, because they actually want the thing to work at some point, and it's going to take effort and understanding.
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Sep 13, 2020 22:47
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VitalSigns posted:But remember, states are bad! The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Ergo, it is good for foreign states to use chemical weapons against their own citizens if it means they'll also use it against my government.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:45
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polymathy posted:Okay, so let's say we live in a Left-Anarchist society. Suppose I have an entrepreneurial bent and a vision for designing a new kind of computer monitor. So for five years I abstain from consumption as much as possible and save as much of my money as I can. Suppose after that time I have $250,000 saved up. Then I use that money to buy some capital equipment, maybe some 3D printers, and I buy a factory where I can construct these things. Suppose I then want to hire some workers to help me manufacture these things. What your savings could amount to is a loan; you would be acting as a lending institution in this example. You put down the required expenses for the machines, and profits from the business you've started pay down that loan. Under capitalism, you would retain ownership of the machines as well as any profit they generate in perpetuity. Under socialism, you would be paid back for the machines by the profit generated by them (with interest, if you'd like), but the business owns them. And the workers own shares in the business. This is basically how every bank in the world already works, so it's not like this is a particularly weird or exotic idea. The only difference is whether or not you get to own the machines in perpetuity. This has clear parallels with how libertarians claim to want to do things; if you stopped working for the business, some libertarians would claim that you eventually lose stake in those machines anyway since you're no longer contributing to their upkeep or use. There are clear incentives to make your "dream" of starting a business a reality. You make a handy profit off of the loan you created for the machines, you make profit off of the business itself so long as you keep running it or working at it, and if it's really your "dream" then you're getting to do something that you want to do. This Randian idea that there are only a small handful of people with the entrepreneurial spirit is a fantasy. In reality there is no shortage of people who want to and are personally capable of starting a business, but they are hamstrung because they lack the economic means. Capitalism exacerbates this problem because capital accumulates in the hands of a small class of wealthy elites. Socialism doesn't entirely fix the problem, but it does alleviate it by permitting greater wealth distribution, lowering entrepreneurial barriers in the process. quote:Furthermore, doesn't your theory imply that workers would have to share in the loses? Many companies have long periods where they take loses before they become profitable, and I'm sure many workers are happy they don't have to share in those loses. Does the CEO of a business usually lose everything when a corporation goes bankrupt? Are shareholders usually responsible for covering a corporation's losses? No and no. If a business is unprofitable for a quarter then the employees just don't receive dividends; they're still paid their normal wage. quote:You said: "...if you worked at a co-op getting paid the full value of your labor and you just decided you want to live on $7/hr and give all the surplus to the Walton family because you believe they're entitled to it, no anarchist is going to say "hey no you can't do that, we're passing a law against giving money to the company president" "Come work for me in an arrangement where I own everything and make all of the decisions" is not a co-op, by definition. There is no moral justification for such an agreement, just as there is no moral justification for slavery or sex contracts. polymathy posted:A free market economy tends to produce a lot of good paying jobs that most people are perfectly happy to work at. The idea that most jobs would pay what you'd consider to be "slave-wages" is a fallacy. The reality is that most jobs in the US as well as in the rest of the world pay slave wages. This has been reality since the advent of wage labor. Most people take what they can get, they don't have the plethora of choices that you believe should exist. The only fallacy here is the notion that employment is always voluntary; for many people it is not voluntary.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:58
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Hey Jrod, when you get back I have a question. What is your opinion on the Jewish Question? I ask only becaue I was watching some youtube today, and it really is shocking how your overall rhetoric matches up to groups like nazbols despite your ideological disconnect on socialism vs capitalism. You buy into so many other conspiracies I'm almost afraid to ask.
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Sep 14, 2020 05:53
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polymathy posted:No, it's not a fully voluntary society because the method of property acquisition is clearly unjust. Libertarian theory says there are only two ways of legitimate property acquisition: homesteading unowned virgin land or contractual exchange. But that is the situation we're in now! You said that the ruling class have been using the coercive power of the state to grab more and more wealth and property for hundreds of years. So how can we have a fully voluntary society without redistributing that wealth by allowing say agricultural workers to homestead the fields they're working, copper miners to homestead the mines they're mining, factory workers to homestead the factories, and so on? Your only response to this is that it's too complicated to work out how much property the ruling class justly owns versus how much they unjustly acquired, because we don't have clear enough records, and it would be a greater wrong to redistribute the wealth to people who might not deserve it either. But that response can easily be incorporated into my thought experiment as well. Suppose somebody does say to the Libertarian dictator: "well your ancestors acquired much of the property you inherited unjustly, so you have to give it all back first." She responds, "Oh of course, I recognize that part of the property I inherited was unjustly acquired by my ancestors, and as a Libertarian I believe that anyone who can produce paperwork proving their better claim is entitled to the return of that property. Unfortunately, my ancestor didn't keep any records of what property he confiscated and from whom, and as it was many centuries ago, all original documentation of ownership has been lost or destroyed or in some cases never existed because the people he conquered were too primitive to have any of that. Since it is impossible to determine what part of my inheritance was legitimately acquired and what was not, and who the descendants (if any) of the rightful owners are, I'm afraid that we just can't arbitrarily redistribute my wealth to other people just because they feel wronged or because they need it. They are of course, still welcome to voluntarily serve me in exchange for food and shelter, and they are also free to starve if they so choose, this is a fully voluntary society so there are no restrictions on their actions." So now that your objection has been addressed, the society I've described is fully voluntary according to your philosophy, yes? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 14:38
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polymathy posted:Market forces break down monopolies and regulate business behavior if they are operating correctly. Voters are supporting my preferred candidate and demanding my policy goals if they are operating correctly. The gods are bringing rain and protecting us from our enemies if they are operating correctly. Pigeons are singing Chuck Berry songs and firing lasers from their eyes if they are operating correctly. Libertarianism relies on all of these truisms that are just said, never defined or explained or justified. You can believe them if you want to, if it's pleasant to do so, because they flatter your unexamined biases.
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Sep 14, 2020 15:05
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Market forces do move things around and push businesses from one behavior to another in a fashion similar to regulation, but the direction in which they push everything isn't necessarily towards any moral good or maximizing happiness or minimizing suffering. At least, not unless you've constructed a framework of law to direct market forces towards some desired goal. That's the point of cap and trade if it weren't for the combination of fraudulent accounting and polluters fighting the tightening of it at every turn. Attempting to make minimizing pollution into a goal that the free market would push towards. After World War 2, there were a lot of programs to promote home ownership and provide assistance to people taking out loans that led to a big rise of single family housing (and black people were both excluded from the government programs and discouraged by the private land developers creating the housing, leading to more of them living in cities to this day). It's the point of trying to tie roadbuilding to gas taxes so that the costs of increased traffic are carried by drivers, and it's the point of taxing something like cigarettes to try to decrease consumption. You can do some social engineering with a soft hand, but if you decide to use no hands, you won't go anywhere good and probably some private entity will figure out a way to cheat market forces themselves because playing by fair rules isn't how you win.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:06
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polymathy posted:Okay, so let's say we live in a Left-Anarchist society. Suppose I have an entrepreneurial bent and a vision for designing a new kind of computer monitor. So for five years I abstain from consumption as much as possible and save as much of my money as I can. Suppose after that time I have $250,000 saved up. Then I use that money to buy some capital equipment, maybe some 3D printers, and I buy a factory where I can construct these things. Suppose I then want to hire some workers to help me manufacture these things. Your understanding of anarchist theory is  Also lol at Glenn Greenwald being your shining example of “real journalism.” OwlFancier posted:I don't even know that entrepeneurship is a skill, or if it is it's one that we could easily make irrelevant. The sole "skill" involved appears to be the willingness to "take risks" if that is even true, but as others have pointed out, there doesn't need to be a risk, it is well within our capability to structure society such that nobody needs to take risks to have useful production occur. I would disagree- there’s definitely a skill in organizing all the different people with varying skills together with enough of a technical understanding to make it all fit and then convincing people with resources (capitalists, in this world) to invest in it. That being said, there’s no reason that the two people who get paid first are the owner and the investors other than ”that’s capitalism”. Especially the investors. Capitalist countries with strong safety nets and public education systems like Sweden tend to have much more entrepreneurship despite having much less capital than in the USA despite our “free market.” Of course, wait long enough and the wealthy in Sweden will pull the ladder behind them because “the poor aren’t paying their fair share.”
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Sep 16, 2020 13:19
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Effective administration does take certain skills, but those skills aren't terribly rare, and many of those skills can outsourced or delegated to somebody you hire for that purpose. There do seem to be a lot of stories of businesses built by somebody who likes doing the lower-down work of actually making/doing things getting hijacked by their hired administrator, or businesses that were started by a couple people ending up with the more administrative founder backstabbing the other founders. And presumably if businesses were set up with the idea in mind to keep everything on the top in step with the bottom, those sort of aristocratic machinations would be less feasible in general, at the cost of making it much harder for a company to balloon into a massive umbrella corporation with no perspective on most of its divisions. Stockholders are always pushing companies to make short-term gains instead of investing for the long-term, but people who work at the company for their livelihood are much more likely to value its continued existence and not get involved in some scheme to burn down the entire company for the insurance money (or more specifically, do Bane Capital's scheme of taking out a bunch of totally unaffordable loans in the company's name for personal gain with no intention of paying them off).
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Sep 16, 2020 17:30
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SpaceSDoorGunner posted:Capitalist countries with strong safety nets and public education systems like Sweden tend to have much more entrepreneurship despite having much less capital than in the USA despite our “free market.” I don't know what I am and I despise tribalism/labels regardless, but this is why I am not a "social democrat". I realise that, eventually, capitalism will become hugely top-heavy and bloated and use their power over the literal stuff of life and death to tear down any gains of the productive classes. For an example, see history. Combined with the fact that capitalism has no respect for the finite nature of the natural world and that "creating jobs" is both laughable and a fool's notion, there has to be a fundamental change in the relationships between consumers, owners and producers. I realise that nothing is forever and such institutions as chattel slavery, absolute monarchy and feudalism all fell, but they did not have the metaphorical gun-to-the-head of environmental disaster.
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Sep 17, 2020 01:32
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Gun is the wrong metaphor. We frog-boiled ourselves. But we knew the whole time.
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Sep 17, 2020 04:20
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... Oh my god he's back. And... Jesus. >.< Right. I'm going to say this as nicely as I can, because it is really loving basic to the whole socialist/communist/anarchist contingent here - who live in observable reality where evidence matters, and not in praexiological la-la-land - and yourself. Namely... Personal and private property are different things, you crepuscular, haunted spam-golem!. Personal property is the poo poo you own that you need to live a decent life as your haunted spam-golemy self. Your house. Your car. Your tv. Your computer. The property you need to sustain yourself from one day to the next. The material goods that support your basic, spam-golem needs. None of us, not a one, are even idly dreaming about taking that away from you. Private property is stuff like... say... the three extra apartments you own to rent out as AirBnBs. Property that makes you money simply because you are owning it. It is property which has only a single purpose: Extracting as much value from the work of others for your benefit as you can manage. And that poo poo we do want to take away. I'll gladly let you choose which place you want to live, but those surplus apartments are going away. Do you get the loving difference, you pustulent, tumorous pond of pre-sapient tallow-drippings? When we say 'Private property is theft', this is what we mean. Every apartment pulled off the market to enrich some sallow, pox-ridden landlord by forcing people to rent is someone left homeless. Every factory wholly owned by a corporation or an individual, is a satanic mill that grinds people and spirits down into money for the owners, extracting their blood and sweat and time for their gluttonous, vampiric overlords to batten and grow fat on, drinking the immiseration of the serfs down with nary a thought. It's not just that the system of capitalism and private property doesn't reign in the bad impulses of humanity; It actively loving encourages the very worst aspects of our nature, it encourages sociopathy on a grand scale, to the point it's become absolutely normal that the poorest people in US society work two or three full jobs at once and still -STILL - can't make enough money to properly feed their families. This is an absolute loving travesty. And you, JRode, 0bloated, mango-molesting cud-brain that you are, your solution, your loving solution to all this is to go "Hey, let's take the only thing that even resembles the most flimsy and tissue-thin veneer of restraint off this system, what could go wrong?!" I genuinely, sincerely, hope you never, ever get to experience what life under Archduke Bezos, First of his Name, is really like, even if it's what you think you want. You wouldn't last a loving month in your utopia.
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Sep 19, 2020 20:02
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| # ? May 20, 2024 12:11 |
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I wanted to compliment you on some wonderful insults, TLM. Just to remind you of what human offal jrod is, I spent the last X months rereading this whole thread and I want to post something that he actually said:quote:I abhor the values of socialism and radical egalitarianism. I would consider the teaching of communism, or sympathy toward communism in a public space to be as offensive as speech by a white nationalist. While I can actually understand how people can confuse private and personal property, especially in light of all of the anti-Marxist propaganda that is everywhere, this is for those who think that jrod is just deluded. Given how Caros' attitude has changed towards him over the years (that was fun to read), that's less and less of you. He isn't naïve, or misguided or ignorant of history, he's a genuine sociopath. He genuinely disdains the idea of equality on a fundamental level because he is, for all practical purposes, a racist or a eugenicist. He truly believes that there are a group of people that are inherently better and should be grossly over-privileged to the detriment of everyone else, and even if humanity managed a state of high equality through "non-agression" he would still find it abhorrent. Again, though, he's not deluded... he knows full well that what he espouses would cause massive suffering and exploitation, but he doesn't care because because the capitalist is god and deserves to reign on high. I knew what kind of person he was when, years ago, he said that he didn't care about inequality, but if this doesn't clinch it for you then I don't know what to tell you. He doesn't talk about how he thinks that everyone would be better off because he's foolish enough to believe that, he's just covering his loathsome beliefs with a veneer of utterly false "good intentions" like every politician who hands out more and more favours to big business while saying that it will be good for the economy. All he cares is that people (namely himself) be able to do what they want and that the übermenschen rise to the top as their inherent superiority merits. He genuinely does not care about the consequences of what he believes, but he has to play pretend so that he doesn't become a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
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Sep 20, 2020 02:22
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