Billy Gnosis posted:

It's beating a dead horse right now, but for instance pretty much all of big tech do not rely on the ideas of ceos to make them successful (big tech specifically because of my own experiences due to talking to people at conferences etc).

All the people silicon Valley folks fellate as geniuses that change the world are basically just babysat most days and the real changes and successes come from below. It's despite their existence not because of them. Like we have actual proof that companies don't work like libertarians believe because we already know it kills companies.

Caros posted:

Amazon is literally 'what if buying stuff, but online'. Not a unique idea, just one where bezos was at the right place, at the right time in technological development (and a pile of family money).

These guys are driven individuals who were lucky. But they had dozens of people with the same ideas that failed because they didn't enter the market at just the right time, or make just the right deal with IBM, etc.

polymathy posted:

polymathy posted:

Okay, maybe the confusion here is that you're conflating "decentralization" with "political decentralization". I oppose the latter but not necessarily the former. I oppose the State because I'm opposed to the initiation of violence and because I recognize the danger in permitting a monopoly of violence to exist.

The centralization of other non-State entities as required by economic growth or consumer preferences is unobjectionable by a libertarian anarchist.

polymathy posted:

It's also struck me that socialists spend a lot of time focused on improving work conditions and wages for employees (valid to be sure), but they seem to fail to recognize that all employees are also consumers. Their materially well-being is not improved just by working fewer hours or earning more money. The most important thing impacting their material well-being is stores stocked with goods they want to buy at low prices.

The wrong policies aimed at improving conditions for the worker often harm the prospects for the consumer, even though both are the same person.

If giving up "democracy in the workplace" (which many workers don't give a poo poo about to begin with) and permitting the employer to potentially receive a profit on their labor amounts to more efficient production throughout the entire economy, more goods and services they want to buy at lower prices, the trade-off could well be worth it if you take into account the worker as both wage-earner and consumer.

polymathy posted:

Who is to say that all the people employed at a very large company are competent to make decisions about high-level capital goods utilization, market research, and all the varied and complex aspects of running a business?

The problem with all forms of democracy, whether within the workplace or outside of it, is that all people are given equal say despite their widely disparate intelligence, knowledge and skill level. It's better for society as a whole if people are able to use their specific talents in their positions to make decisions without democratic ratification.

theshim posted:

Look, you absolute clown, you utter fool, you complete jester, how hard is it to grasp that the centralization of non-State entities, in the absence of the State, will unequivocally and absolutely lead to the formation of power structures that anyone who isn't a moronic lickspittle would recognize as a State?

theshim posted:

This blind worship of the Market as the Bringer of Good in the world is...well, I find it depressing, honestly.

Ahh, it's always nice to see the mask fall off occasionally and for you to regurgitate the old eugenics and call for a caste system.

Who What Now posted:

Oh, is that so? Then by all means tell us the "legitimate" academic and descriptive meanings.

polymathy posted:

A bunch of bullshit

DEEP STATE PLOT posted:

remember when ron paul happily accepted funds from loving stormfront and hired a kkk member as a campaign coordinator during his 2008 campaign

nothing racist about that!

polymathy posted:

This is an old tactic. Find the most extreme of a candidate's supporters and pretend that the candidate is responsible for those views.

Lee Atwater posted:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N____, n____, n_____." By 1968 you can't say "n____"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N____, n_____."

polymathy posted:

Citation of Ron Paul hiring a KKK member as campaign coordinator?

As to Ron Paul "accepting funds from Stormfront", that's literally the dumbest criticism ever.

I'll say it right now, if Stormfront or David Duke or the loving Grand Wizard of the KKK wanted to give me $1000 today, I'm taking the loving money. That doesn't mean I endorse their views, it means I'm depriving racists of material resources and I'm going to use that money to preach a philosophy that is anti-racist.

polymathy posted:

From an article that you should take the time to read:

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-because-anti-semites-talk-about-cultural-marxism-doesnt-mean-it-isnt-real

quote:

So what is cultural Marxism? In brief, it is a belief that cultural productions (books, institutions, etc.) and ideas are emanations of underlying power structures, so we must scrutinize and judge all culture and ideas based on their relation to power. Following from this premise, advocates for the persecuted and oppressed must attack forms of culture that reinscribe the values of the ruling class, and disseminate culture and ideas that support “oppressed” groups and “progressive” causes.

A short tour through some notable landmarks should suffice to show how 19th-century Marxism evolved into 20th-century “cultural Marxism” and the culture war of our present day:

In the 1920s, the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács set out to address a contradiction within orthodox Marxist dogma: for Marx, a society’s dominant ideology was a “superstructure,” a mere reflection of its more basic economic structure. Thus, the ruling class of capitalists who controlled the money and the means of production also created and controlled its dominant ideas. But a workers’ revolution of the sort Marx predicted could, Marx thought, only come from the subordinated class, i.e., the workers themselves. This question then arises: what will convince workers to revolt when the very ideas in their heads are implanted by their overlords? To answer this question, Lukács, in his History and Class Consciousness (1923), argued for a more subjective conception of class consciousness than the one favored by Marx. Workers (the proletariat) had to have their consciousness raised in order to muster up the appetite for revolution.

The necessary friction to light the revolutionary fuse would come from what Lukács viewed as inevitable tensions within capitalist society that stemmed from its tendency to disguise contingent relations between people as seemingly necessary relations between things (a phenomenon Lukács called “reification”). An institution such as a factory or a university is, in reality, an arrangement of human relationships constituted in particular, contingent ways, but we treat these institutions as more or less fixed givens. The tensions between appearance and reality could not but bubble up to the surface in various ways (e.g., factory worker wages being insufficient to support anything more than a bare subsistence lifestyle), and when workers respond to such conditions, such as by organizing workers’ unions to fight against these institutionalized and reified practices, this then brings about reprisals, cracks of the capitalist whip. And this, in turn, would lead workers to see more clearly what was what, who was with them and who was against them. Thus, proletarian consciousness would be elevated and break out of the ruling class’s ideological girdle. The contingent—and therefore, changeable—nature of capitalist society would be revealed. The principal point for the rest of this story, however, is this: the very process of organizing and agitating was not merely a means to an end (e.g., better working conditions), but also critical to the development of revolutionary consciousness, which must be cultivated in order to blossom.

Building upon Lukács’ ideas, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the key figure in the cultural Marxist canon, developed, in the 1930s, a more elaborate concept he called “hegemony.” For Gramsci, a war of ideas necessarily precedes any actual war against the capitalist ruling class. “Hegemony” is the ruling class’ use of mass culture to dominate the masses. The elites use mass culture as armies use trenches and fortifications to defend their core interests. A revolution, then, can only occur after a long battle of position against these cultural fortifications and ideological defenses. Every revolution, Gramsci argued, is preceded by an intense period of criticism, a culture war. A key role in this process of counter-hegemony is played by people Gramsci referred to as “organic intellectuals”—those born into an oppressed (“subaltern”) class. Such intellectuals refine the “common sense” of the masses into “good sense,” thereby planting the seeds of a more widespread revolutionary consciousness.

In the 1970s, the French Marxist Louis Althusser, influenced by Gramsci (as well as by the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan), distinguished between the “repressive state apparatus” — police, military and other direct organs of ruling class control—from the “ideological state apparatus”—those institutions, such as education, religion, law and familial practices, that work to further hegemony by reproducing the existing relations of production. Echoing G.W.F. Hegel’s famed master-slave dialectic, Althusser then argues that the social roles in which we (mis)recognize ourselves (e.g., “mother,” “worker”) always exist in reference to and in relation with some other, more powerful subject (Lacan’s “big Other”), such as the Boss, the State or God. The end result of this process is that we cannot question or deny the roles and authority of these more powerful subjects without simultaneously tugging at our own rug and denying ourselves.

quote:

Cultural Marxism was no conspiracy, but it is also no mere right-wing “phantasmagoria.” It was and remains a coherent intellectual program, a constellation of dangerous ideas. Aspects of these ideas, to their credit, brought the West’s dirty laundry into the limelight and inaugurated a period of necessary housecleaning that was, indeed, overdue. But their obsessive focus on our societal dirt—real and perceived “injustice,” “oppression,” “privilege,” “marginalization” and the like—quickly became a pathological compulsion. We started to see dirt everywhere. We cleansed and continue to cleanse ourselves tirelessly but are never satisfied, always eager to uncover more dirty deeds and historical sins and stage more ritualized purges. We end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And all our hard-won collective attainments and achievements, all that is great and good and glorious in our midst, gets swept up, spat on and discarded with the rest of the trash.

polymathy posted:

Citation of Ron Paul hiring a KKK member as campaign coordinator?

polymathy posted:

As to Ron Paul "accepting funds from Stormfront", that's literally the dumbest criticism ever.

polymathy posted:

This is the same poo poo they tried to pull on Tulsi Gabbard. Apparently David Duke said something nice about her and the media kept asking her to answer for Duke's "support" for her. The obvious agenda was to pair Tulsi's name with David Duke's in peoples subconscious as a way of smearing her.

quote:

As to Ron Paul "accepting funds from Stormfront", that's literally the dumbest criticism ever.

quote:

I'll say it right now, if Stormfront or David Duke or the loving Grand Wizard of the KKK wanted to give me $1000 today, I'm taking the loving money. That doesn't mean I endorse their views, it means I'm depriving racists of material resources and I'm going to use that money to preach a philosophy that is anti-racist.

quote:

This is the same poo poo they tried to pull on Tulsi Gabbard. Apparently David Duke said something nice about her and the media kept asking her to answer for Duke's "support" for her. The obvious agenda was to pair Tulsi's name with David Duke's in peoples subconscious as a way of smearing her.

This is an old tactic. Find the most extreme of a candidate's supporters and pretend that the candidate is responsible for those views.

VitalSigns posted:

I know it's not the biggest problem with what you're saying, and other people are making great points, but I can't get over this immigration thing because it's probably the most practical obvious example that your political philosophy isn't going to lead to the material outcomes you want.

You hate how difficult national governments make it to immigrate to another country, even a culturally similar, geographically close-by one like Canada (closer to you in Oregon than most other US states in fact!), and you love that you can just up and move from one state to another internally to our national government without paperwork or permission from any government... Yet you want to throw out the document that makes this possible (the federal constitution which imposes freedom of movement on the states), and break the US up into hundreds or thousands of little sovereign governments controlling their own borders, imposing their own immigration laws, issuing their own passports and citizenship etc.

And you can't even assume that they will all respect freedom of movement because you're offering this as a solution to Trumpism and I don't know how much you've listened to Trump people, but even though they don't agree on everything, one thing they do have in common is hatred of immigration.

Dirk the Average posted:

You've never worked at a large company, have you? Atlas Shrugged is not a documentary. In the book, when Rearden fucks off to parts unknown, do you know what his company would do? It would keep making Rearden metal. Why? Well, the workers already know how to make it, they already have the equipment, and the engineers and scientists who did the actual work of mixing the alloys and testing the results are still employed in R&D. The marketing and sales teams already have secured contracts, the shipping companies they work with already are shipping the material out to places, etc. The C level execs would get another CEO and keep going. Every decently sized company is set up such that if one person dies, is incapacitated, retires, whatever, that the company does not fail. The CEO is not some magical linchpin.

Furthermore, just because an entrepreneur starts a company and secures investors, that does not mean that they are competent. Two good recent examples are Theranos and Juicero, both of which failed miserably for a variety of reasons, despite having an entrepreneur that got investors on board. The free market is not always wise, and frequently makes mistakes, as it is an entity run by humans, and especially by humans who want to make a quick buck, in the case of investment.

Putting someone in charge of a company is always a risky proposition, and is one fraught with politics inside the company (yes, companies have politics, even well run large companies have politics). Regardless of the method chosen, there's always the risk that the person in charge is a jerk or an idiot (Sears comes to mind). Arguably you're going to get a better perspective from a group of people working together than you will from one person at the top, and frankly, good CEOs listen to their VPs that are experts in their fields (who in turn listen to their directors, who in turn listen to the engineers, etc. etc.).

And in the end, a worker co-op puts the workers as the board in charge of firing the executives, which means that instead of chasing quarterly profits to the exclusion of all else (what a typical board seeks), stable and long term growth is what the CEO of a worker co-op seeks, because having a stable business that performs well is what the workers of the company want.

Caros posted:

You know this happened with Joe Biden too, right? Richard Spencer endorsed him, and Joe Biden said "lol, fuckoff nazi scum'. Just like Tulsi did, actually.

You know who didn't do that? Ron Paul. Here are the replies:

Tulsi: “I have strongly denounced David Duke’s hateful views and his so-called ‘support’ multiple times in the past, and reject his support,” she told The Post in a statement Tuesday. “Our movement is one of love/aloha, inclusivity. Duke represents hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, fear. We don’t want his ‘support.’ Period.”

Joe: “When Joe Biden says we are in a battle for the soul of our nation against vile forces of hate who have come crawling out from under rocks, you are the epitome of what he means,” wrote Andrew Bates, the rapid-response director for the Biden campaign, on Twitter. “What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10,000% percent unwelcome here.”

Ron: "“If they want to endorse me, they’re endorsing what I do or say — it has nothing to do with endorsing what they say,” said Mr. Paul, who is now running strong in Iowa for the Republican nomination.

One of these things is not like the others. One of these guys, is fine with nazis, can you tell me which guy is not like the others by the time IT IS RON PAUL YOU gently caress.

Caros posted:

Joe: “When Joe Biden says we are in a battle for the soul of our nation against vile forces of hate who have come crawling out from under rocks, you are the epitome of what he means,” wrote Andrew Bates, the rapid-response director for the Biden campaign, on Twitter. “What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10,000% percent unwelcome here.”

NGDBSS posted:

When he endorsed Ron Paul, he knew the man was a fringe candidate. Ron Paul has always been a fringe candidate who's only useful for shaping national discourse rather than enacting policy. So if Richard Spencer is still going to push for this marginal guy and his policies, you know he's really on board for the guy's views.

polymathy posted:

I'll say it right now, if Stormfront or David Duke or the loving Grand Wizard of the KKK wanted to give me $1000 today, I'm taking the loving money. That doesn't mean I endorse their views, it means I'm depriving racists of material resources and I'm going to use that money to preach a philosophy that is anti-racist.

StandardVC10 posted:

Wait what is someone doing Ron Paul apologia in here right now? Have I fallen into a time tunnel? Is the next post after this going to be quoting Randbrick and Boniface? I hear this new iphone gadget is going to be a big deal. gently caress.

polymathy posted:

So what is cultural Marxism? In brief, it is a belief that cultural productions (books, institutions, etc.) and ideas are emanations of underlying power structures, so we must scrutinize and judge all culture and ideas based on their relation to power. Following from this premise, advocates for the persecuted and oppressed must attack forms of culture that reinscribe the values of the ruling class, and disseminate culture and ideas that support “oppressed” groups and “progressive” causes.

polymathy posted:

Citation of Ron Paul hiring a KKK member as campaign coordinator?

As to Ron Paul "accepting funds from Stormfront", that's literally the dumbest criticism ever.

I'll say it right now, if Stormfront or David Duke or the loving Grand Wizard of the KKK wanted to give me $1000 today, I'm taking the loving money. That doesn't mean I endorse their views, it means I'm depriving racists of material resources and I'm going to use that money to preach a philosophy that is anti-racist.

The idea that a presidential campaign that receives thousands of individual donations from small donors is somehow responsible for the views of every person who gives them money is ridiculous.

This is the same poo poo they tried to pull on Tulsi Gabbard. Apparently David Duke said something nice about her and the media kept asking her to answer for Duke's "support" for her. The obvious agenda was to pair Tulsi's name with David Duke's in peoples subconscious as a way of smearing her.

This is an old tactic. Find the most extreme of a candidate's supporters and pretend that the candidate is responsible for those views.

Tweezer Reprise posted:

no yeah sorry if i'm in a room with a libertarian and an ex-CIA director i know who i'm siding with

DarklyDreaming posted:

The CIA director would at least just shoot me with a gun or sneak poison into my food or something.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Meanwhile the libertarian would point and laugh while I starved to death

VitalSigns posted:

The CIA director would train a cat to suicide bomb me but it the director would get distracted by a bird, run off, and get run over

Panfilo posted:

I noticed a lot of Libertarians like to reference the constitution. They like to speculate on what the framers did and did not want for the country.

Sooooo.... How many of these lay scholars actually decided to major in American History? I would think people that believe the constitution to be this sacred document and venerate the people who wrote it would want to learn and understand more. Are there a lot of libertarian historians?