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Bullets make far more sense, IMO, having inherent use-value, much like the potato standard. Both are also inherently deflationary.
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Feb 9, 2021 18:53
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It's okay, because the warlords can just adopt full-employment policies to create inflation.
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Feb 9, 2021 19:03
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If you’re only giving jobs to your mutant buddies in the wasteland, that’s crony warlordism
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Feb 9, 2021 19:05
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OwlFancier posted:Bullets make far more sense, IMO, having inherent use-value, much like the potato standard. There's a part in the Last of Us Part II where the main characters stands in a bank vault full of money and the only thing worth anything there is a shotgun.
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Feb 9, 2021 19:09
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Alhazred posted:
 That's basically the point in greece_ancap.txt where the group turns on the kid and hustles him out the door (sans camera).
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Feb 9, 2021 19:44
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https://mobile.twitter.com/dril/status/1349281742272647168
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Feb 9, 2021 19:50
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imo most goldbugism in ordinary like working people comes from them noticing that our society and economy is hosed up, that the rich only get richer while everyone else gets poorer, that the costs of housing and food and healthcare get jacked up every year while wages stagnate and working hours get longer, and that most of the promises of capitalism never come true and the ones that do are the frivolous ones like more iphones and cheaper flatscreens, but they're unwilling or unable to consider that capitalism is the problem, so they turn to magical thinking: capitalism would be perfect if not for the Jews and immigrants and other undesirables attacking it from within (fascism), or capitalism would be perfect if only we were bartering mystically valuable metal for goods instead of trading with pieces of paper (goldbuggery). That's the only problem with capitalism: Bezos' wealth hoard is paper and bits in electronic banking ledgers, if he were sleeping on a literal gold hoard like Smaug or Scrooge McDuck everything would be fine! Or capitalism would be perfect if only it were bitfinex manipulating the money supply to enrich themselves and their friends instead of the Federal Reserve (Bitcoinery)
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Feb 9, 2021 20:50
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VitalSigns posted:imo most goldbugism in ordinary like working people comes from them noticing that our society and economy is hosed up, that the rich only get richer while everyone else gets poorer, that the costs of housing and food and healthcare get jacked up every year while wages stagnate and working hours get longer, and that most of the promises of capitalism never come true and the ones that do are the frivolous ones like more iphones and cheaper flatscreens, but they're unwilling or unable to consider that capitalism is the problem, so they turn to magical thinking: capitalism would be perfect if not for the Jews and immigrants and other undesirables attacking it from within (fascism), or capitalism would be perfect if only we were bartering mystically valuable metal for goods instead of trading with pieces of paper (goldbuggery). That's the only problem with capitalism: Bezos' wealth hoard is paper and bits in electronic banking ledgers, if he were sleeping on a literal gold hoard like Smaug or Scrooge McDuck everything would be fine! Yeah it's aggravating that people don't learn the right lessons from any of this because our society has brainwashed everyone to never question capitalism. The lesson we should be learning is "this system sucks let's destroy it and take back what was stolen from us" but the lesson people learn is "everyone is a grifter out for themselves so i have to be the best possible grifter and get what i can and gently caress everyone else"
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Feb 9, 2021 21:35
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Elephant Ambush posted:Yeah it's aggravating that people don't learn the right lessons from any of this because our society has brainwashed everyone to never question capitalism. The lesson we should be learning is "this system sucks let's destroy it and take back what was stolen from us" but the lesson people learn is "everyone is a grifter out for themselves so i have to be the best possible grifter and get what i can and gently caress everyone else" Yeah, the fact that capitalism is unfair, rewards having been rewarded in the past, and deliberately starves most of the people on the planet is incredibly obvious, and humans have a natural and completely reasonable revulsion to this fact. For most people, that revulsion leads to them considering leftist options and quietly understanding that the left is correct in a number of important ways, even if they have to play the capitalism game for now. For some people, that revulsion leads to them accepting the brainwashing and going through their life with a tired, apathetic resignation to the fact that they live in a bad world that hates them. For libertarians, they decide that the revulsion is the problem and set about systematically replacing their moral code with a zealot's unwavering faith.
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Feb 9, 2021 21:48
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Somfin posted:Yeah, the fact that capitalism is unfair, rewards having been rewarded in the past, and deliberately starves most of the people on the planet is incredibly obvious, and humans have a natural and completely reasonable revulsion to this fact. I'm going to disagree with much of this. To start, I am always bothered by how people focus on dynastic wealth, as if earning tons of wealth "in this life" is somehow perfectly fine. I have just as much contempt for a nouveau riche so-called entrepreneur as I do for someone who was the child of one because they've enriched themselves on the labour of the productive classes. I oppose people being wealthy in general for three simple reasons: Firstly, marginal utility and the fact that greed is infinite - people always want more, no matter what. Secondly, more wealth = more power = more abuse. Thirdly, high material privilege breeds arrogance, detachment from the lives of one's "lessers" and a lack of empathy. There is simply no practical or moral reason for people to be "rich". What counts as such is not in the scope of this post. I feel that there are essentially four (4) ways to become wealthy, and I don't approve of any of them for the reasons that I stated. I am not interested in what ways of becoming wealthy are moral. Great wealth is immoral because of the outcomes, not due to how it is achieved. Only a colossal FuckWit would care more about the means than the ends. Secondly, the vast, vast majority of people in the world think that capitalism is... let's call it fine but flawed. Proposals like universal health care and basic income aren't revolutionary, they are designed to blunt the worst abuses of a fundamentally horrid system. People often want to tweak things to smooth out the rough bits, but veeeeeeeery few people truly realise that the system in itself is designed to gently caress them and that they are being distracted and propagandised to in order to prevent the formation of class consciousness. There are also still a fair few "middle class" people who are doing pretty well, and as for the wealthy, capitalist parasite or not, they certainly aren't going to rock the boat. My point is simply that only a tiny minority of people truly realise that their disempowerment and impoverishment, as well as the death of the planet, are systemic. I am not saying that to blame said people, either. Struggling to survive, the constant media propaganda, historical revisionism, and fascist tactics to get people to blame other victims etc... it's awfully hard to see the so-called big picture with all of that acting as a calculated distraction.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:45
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Since JRod is chickening out again, can we appreciate one last time how he spent pages arguing how people should bow down to their intellectual betters through IQ tests and the like. And then he finally dropped his own SAT scores and they were thoroughly common. And it tells on him so much because he refuses to do as he says like all libertarians)
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Feb 14, 2021 22:25
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Billy Gnosis posted:Since JRod is chickening out again, can we appreciate one last time how he spent pages arguing how people should bow down to their intellectual betters through IQ tests and the like. And then he finally dropped his own SAT scores and they were thoroughly common. Nah he just knows better than the test, which he demands that you take because its results are sacrosanct, but he knows he's an elite so he doesn't need to take it It's just like that story about the dom who couldn't get hard after both of his subs got higher IQ scores than him
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Feb 15, 2021 01:19
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Rappaport posted:Tsk, tsk. We went over this already. There is a, hrm, pardon the expression, third way: To inherit wealth. Yes... But wealth is not some stagnant thing that perpetually exists. For wealth to persist over generations one either has to continue to do productive work in order to maintain or grow that wealth, or else cozy up to politicians and central bankers in order to maintain your wealth through theft. What often happens, in a situation where a fortune was gained legitimately through hard work, is that an individual who has rare talents, a tremendous work ethic, or some combination of gifts and a bit of good luck, happens to move up from either poverty or the middle class into the upper echelon of society. Now, his children end up growing up with silver spoons in their mouths, and this often produces a lack of work ethic and discipline. There's also the phenomenon of the "regression to the mean" whereby the offspring of unusually intelligent people are often closer to average intelligence. So, they may well inherit their parents wealth or the family business, but without the same abilities and skill in the line of work they are inheriting, they'll often eventually deplete their fortune, making bad investments or mismanaging their assets and eventually fall back down to middle class. So inheriting wealth doesn't seem to me to be a big problem in a free society. Now, in situations where families maintain wealth generation after generation, you'll almost always find that they are cronies who buy off politicians and live off of theft instead of productive work.
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Feb 15, 2021 08:30
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I don't think he understands that people can be taught things. It's really just boomer logic; obviously someone either knows something or doesn't. Some things are beyond the cognitive ability of some people and they cannot be taught those subjects, especially not with any depth. There are innate differences in human intelligence and competence among people. And many of us are competent in a very narrow area, and incompetent in most other areas. Given this reality, I don't think it's useful to introduce democracy which is inherently egalitarian in that all participants have an equal say, into business or other private organizations. In economics, we have a division of labor because it's better for all of us if we each specialize in the area where we are competent and let other people specialized in their area of competence. In very large and complex business structures, and really most social organizations, everyone in those organizations are not competent or knowledgeable enough about how most of the organization works to have any meaningful or useful say in how they operate. Hopefully, they are competent enough to play their very small part by doing some very narrowly defined tasks reasonably well.
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Feb 15, 2021 08:46
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You are just describing capitalism, that is what capitalism is. It is the right to tell other people that they must pay you a portion of their labour value in order to access the means of production, or shelter, or raw resources, that you can withold from them because you have a concept of ownership that is backed up by the state and its force monopoly. It is not possible to become extraordinarily wealthy by any amount of hard work, it must come from taking labour from others by relying on the force of the state, because no human can create enough value by their own labour to become even a fraction as wealthy as people can in our society today. Capital without the state is nonsensical, wealth without the state is nonsensical. The state must exist to enforce the concept of ownership, how is it that you can not understand this simple concept? This is not "cronyism" this is capitalism, it is the fundamental nature of the system you are describing. It does not require some especial corruption on the part of the people doing it, it is what the economic system is designed to facilitate. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 08:48
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polymathy posted:Yes... Dear Jrod. Your first mistake is in the bolded line. This invalidates your post. Sincerely, Weatherman. Some people are just so flabbergastingly rich that they can spend thousands of dollars an hour and still not even come close to touching the principal.
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Feb 15, 2021 08:53
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quote:
Interesting, how do you think we should identify those people and what is society’s role in caring for their welfare?
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Feb 15, 2021 08:54
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:Dunning_Kruger.txt Yeah... Look, the most pointless thing that I could do would be to brag about my intelligence or any other aspect of my life on an anonymous internet forum. It's inherently unverifiable and you'd be perfectly right to roll your eyes at claims I make, the same way I do when any of you make claims about your private life. I never claimed I had an IQ of 140, I merely said it was above-average. I don't recall ever having taken an official IQ test, but I've taken the SATs and had numerous other cognitive assessments and evaluations, I've placed in several advanced classes in high school and got good grades. As wrong as you may think I am about libertarianism, or any other subject, if you cannot look through my history of posting and concede that, if anything, my intelligence is at least above the average, then you're just being disingenuous.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:01
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polymathy posted:In very large and complex business structures, and really most social organizations, everyone in those organizations are not competent or knowledgeable enough about how most of the organization works to have any meaningful or useful say in how they operate. Hopefully, they are competent enough to play their very small part by doing some very narrowly defined tasks reasonably well. You have absolutely no idea how large organizations work. At all.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:02
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I can attest that you are extremely wordy but you have a very consistent history of being completely unable to put forward an argument that convinces anyone and every time you post you get absolutely rinsed by everyone, including my stupid rear end, so I can definitely point at your posting history and say that you display a profound lack of ability to understand ideas or argue effectively yet somehow at great length. Which does not correlate necessarily to any sort of quantifiable intelligence but I certainly do not think it is the ringing endorsement of your brain you seem to think it is. Verbosity is not intelligence. Journalists manage to be verbose and I'm not sure most of them are even sapient.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:04
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polymathy posted:As wrong as you may think I am about libertarianism, or any other subject, if you cannot look through my history of posting and concede that, if anything, my intelligence is at least above the average, then you're just being disingenuous. You put on the airs of being intelligent, and you ape the style of people who are intelligent, but that itself does not make you intelligent. You see great thinkers and academics being verbose and using complex words, and you try to use that to signal that you too are intelligent. The problem is that being verbose and using complex words doesn't make you intelligent. Anyone with a thesaurus can sit down and write a lot of words that say nothing. You need to adapt your arguments to your audience. How I explain what is happening at a job to my coworkers who are immersed in our collective subject at a high level is not how I explain what is happening to executives, or marketing, and when I speak to someone outside my industry, I reduce the complexity even further. Effective communication is important, and it is a skill that you are particularly poor at. Right now, what we see from you is the thin veneer of someone who tries to parrot back an argument from a person that they feel is smart, with the intention of sounding smart as well. However, since your understanding of the subject is just a thin veneer, you can't push back against the counterarguments that people here propose. Your lack of experience in the real world shows as well; you keep proposing how companies work as if the idealized libertarian version of a company exists in reality, while those of us who have actually been in the guts of a large organization understand that people are people, and nothing ever lives up to its perfect ideal. When we point to actual recorded loving history, you need to have evidence on the level of actual loving recorded history to back up your arguments. TLDR: You are a lovely poster and your post history makes you look like a loving moron.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:18
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polymathy posted:Yes... This post encapsulates in a few words your total misunderstanding of both economics and statistics.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:22
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You also need to, like, have arguments. Because all you do is assert that something is true and occasionally link to some terrible source that generally doesn't even make the argument you are making and then ignore all the counterarguments you can't refute so you can restate your premise again. Strip out the verbiage and you are a fool who does nothing but repeat "well I reckon" over and over again.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:22
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quote:
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Feb 15, 2021 09:26
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My IQ is above average. OK I have never taken an IQ test. OK the tests I have taken are mediocre. OK but my posting history.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:28
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Somfin posted:Okay, you want to know why you're here, posting on an internet forum, and not making something of yourself in the real world? You know why we know JRodefeld as that shithead who keeps the Libertarian thread alive, and not as the founder of a major company that operates at a massive profit? It's got nothing to do with you being stupid, JRod, and it's got nothing to do with the Government keeping you down. It's got everything to do with you being a lazy scumbag. A couple of things. First, you actually don't know anything about my life. I don't think I have a lovely life, and I don't blame anyone else for things that either go well or bad for me. If me posting on this forum is taking me away from "making something of myself in the real world" (which it isn't), then what is it doing for you? I've been accused of ducking questions because I don't respond to every post on this thread and "retreating" by not posting at all for months at a time, and now I'm being criticized because I spend any time here. I'm actually loving swamped with work and I can hardly justify posting here at all. Look, I know I've posted a lot of links to YouTube videos in the past. But I don't think I ever posted a 3 hour video and then demanded everyone watch it or accuse them of being lazy or "not wanting to learn" if they didn't. In general, I think I have an obligation to make my own arguments. I don't think it would be fair if I said "hey, watch this 3 hour Murray Rothbard lecture and then debate me about it." I would think it's my job to make an argument, defend it, then maybe give a YouTube video that gives more context for people who may be interested. But I certainly wouldn't poo poo on people who don't want to spent three hours of their life listening to Murray Rothbard. My point about IQ was always a very limited one. I wasn't defending The Bell Curve, or racial difference in IQ, or even arguing that IQ is a perfect approximation of intelligence. My only point is that if average intelligence differs, and indeed human abilities in general differ, then organizing complex economic organizations around democracy where everyone theoretically gets an equal say in how all parts of that organization are run, seems problematic. I understand that workers can recognize unique specialties and aptitudes and vote for certain people to be in charge of areas that match their competence. But it's still incumbent upon a majority to recognize those aptitudes and reward them accordingly. It just seems like this sort of structure will be mired in inefficiencies with frequent meetings to discuss and ratify certain decisions. If people differ in so many ways, including intelligence, why should everyone get an equal vote in how things are run that are outside their competence? None of this implies any of the ridiculous things you seem to attribute to me. It is a fair question. Look I'll see if I can spend a bit of time actually watching that video. Maybe it is as mind-blowing as I've been led to believe. However, this doesn't preclude you from actually responding as well.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:35
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polymathy posted:Yes... This is a pretty incoherent mish-mash of different, wildly weird ideas, but let's try and unpack some since we're in a thread dedicated to the subject. Wealth very much actually is a stagnant thing that keeps on existing! In case you haven't read Piketty's Capital (I'm assuming not, even though he's not Marxist), an important part of his conclusion is that the world wars did a lot of lifting for economic equality (once they were over!), since wars blow stuff up. Meaning buildings, factories, that sort of thing. Now, in the absence of war, which I'm assuming for the moment we can agree is a good thing, wealth that gets invested into infrastructure, factories, and yes the labour of other people, keeps generating wealth. I keep using the fantastical example of Smaug the literal actual dragon, but real-world wealth is even more insidious than a pile of gold you sleep on. As you actually manage to come up with in your astute analysis, wealth can be used as currency of influence, just as much (and arguably even moreso, again, Donald freaking Trump) as currency in exchange for bread and butter. Which brings us to the more flabbergasting confusion of ideas you just decided to throw out there, the seemingly arbitrary division between "cronyism" (left helpfully undefined) and "good work ethic". If your example's rich man's son becomes a high-speed trader on Wall Street, is he doing productive work? If the rich man's daughter becomes a vlogger and social media celebrity who sells her used bathing water for a large profit, is she doing productive work? You'll note that both of my examples require an intellect of a sorts, but not necessarily the type that lands one in Mensa. And, in the larger picture, capital-owning people who cozy up to politicians are behaving like perfectly rational, self-interested frictionless spheres, since according to the tenets of libertarianism, pursuit of one's own goals (typically wealth) is the pinnacle of human behaviour. It's an inherent self-contradiction that you claim to believe in the NAP and its corollaries, but then turn around and proclaim that some types of economical behaviour are inherently "crony". The absurdity of which is compounded by the fact that NAP-topia would not have a state to control economic behaviour, whereby there would be no checks on anything! Unless you mean to suggest the NAP would somehow force capital-owning individuals to behave "honourably", or whatnot. I am sad to say I do not share your boundless optimism on human behaviour on this front. Finally, we return to the unpleasant fact (this seems to be a theme...) that in the real world, inherited wealth very much does matter. Your quasi-example of dullard children wasting the family fortune is a nice moral fairy tale, for your purposes, anyway, but real-world examples tend to run to the contrary. Even if Paris Hilton is, by your definition, a dullard, her family fortune keeps chugging along just fine. If anything, your fairy tale counter-part in the real world tends to be people who become suddenly rich, such as lotto winners, who spend it all on blackjack and hookers (this is a popular culture reference, jrod, not a literal statement), and the money's gone. That is the entire point of generational wealth, either the wealthy people themselves or the labour of accountants (is their labour productive, by the way?) that the wealthy people purchase, do their best to ensure that their wealth is secure in firm assets such as companies, factories, housing, and other people's labour. This last bit should actually be sort of comprehensible even to a goldbug, since the whole goldbug paranoia marketing scheme relies on the idea that one, like Smaug the dragon, has a hoard of gold that the Fed can't steal, and so forth. The same concept actually applies to things like houses and factories, but it's even better, since one can use them to generate even more wealth, instead of just sitting on a pile of gold like Smaug or a boomer libertarian nutjob. In conclusion, your entire response is absolutely deluded nonsense divorced from the proceedings of actual real life human society. But we're all glad you're here to share these nuggets of wisdom with us! Rappaport fucked around with this message at 09:45 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 09:39
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OwlFancier posted:Jrod you cannot argue that you think workplace democracy is bad but that worker co-ops are not, a worker co-op is a democratic workplace, if workplace democracy is bad then so are co-ops. Your misunderstanding me. My position is that co-ops can exist in a free market economy alongside traditional employer-employee relationships. Both forms of economic organization should be legal. My personal opinion is that co-ops can work reasonably well in certain circumstances and in certain industries. I think they work better with smaller businesses and as the complexity and size of the business increases, the inefficiencies of co-op structures are magnified. However, my personal preferences are not important. My only position is that, in a market economy, a traditional employer / employee relationship should not only be legal, but is not exploitative but rather mutually beneficial. Both should be legal. If I am wrong, and co-ops work great throughout society and even at scale, that's fine with me. Your side is not arguing that co-ops are so great that they'll simply out compete traditional economic arrangements, you're arguing that co-ops should be the only legally permissible business structure.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:44
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jrod: wealth centralization allows people to behave in a cronyist fashion, which distorts the market. also jrod: wealth centralization should be legal because it will compete with a cooperative model fairly in the marketplace
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Feb 15, 2021 09:46
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OwlFancier posted:Also why are the most dangerous people on the planet "high IQ and low moral character"? Why aren't the most dangerous people on the planet the ones with the most structural power? Some people on the planet have the capability to start a nuclear war almost unilaterally, regardless of what their character might be, the fact that that position exists to be occupied by anybody makes whoever does easily one of the most dangerous people on the planet. High IQ people with low moral character are the type of people who tend to gain control of the most structural power. It's usually not the politicians who have the high IQs. They certainly have low moral character, but it's usually the power centers who finance the politicians who are highly intelligent. Consider Bill Clinton. Not too bright, and certainly lacking in moral character. Now consider Henry Kissinger, a brilliant man who also happens to be a war criminal. He's the type of dangerous intelligent person that I'm concerned about. I believe that a good-hearted simple person with an IQ of 90 has far more human worth and dignity that someone like Kissinger who uses his intelligence to commit war crimes.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:52
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polymathy posted:
Now you’re getting it! https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/worker_co-op_report.pdf quote:
Weird, it’s almost as there is some anti-competitive force in capitalism, particularly in highly economically stratified countries or something.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:56
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Now I’m truly baffled by what you think intelligence even is. Don’t explain, because I’m 100% positive there is no good answer bouncing around that big special mensa brain of yours.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:58
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polymathy posted:High IQ people with low moral character are the type of people who tend to gain control of the most structural power. That completely and absolutely ignores everything I pointed out in that post and serves only to further demonstrate the problem in your thinking because you are seemingly unable to comprehend the concept I am describing. Once again, the personal qualities of the individual are irrelevant in the face of the structures they are a part of. It does not matter one iota what personal qualities people might have, if society depended upon personal qualities of indivudals to perpetuate itself it would collapse within a generation. Society is composed of structures, unthinking, unintelligent, unpersonified structures, and those structures select and shape people to fill them in such a way as to perpetuate the inherent needs of the structure. Your fanfiction about the personal qualities of person X or Y are utterly irrelevant, somebody must prosecute wars because the structure of the military industrial complex demands it, someone must ensure the state favors capital because the structure of democracy in a capitalist society demands it. It does not matter whether there are "good" people or "bad" people, people who meet the necessary criteria to act in the way the system requires will be selected and molded by it to perform the functions that are required. Which is why you can draw a very simple policy line between many successive US governments supposedly led by, we are assured, very different people and parties.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:59
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Brevity is the soul of wit.
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Feb 15, 2021 10:10
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E-Tank posted:If you put any stock in IQ then I'm sorry to say this my dude, but you're supporting Eugenics. IQ tests are just a coat of paint over 'And we should purge the parasites holding us back' by trying to put a quantifiable number on who is 'good' and who is 'bad'. You do understand that there is no value judgement attached to IQ, right? People with lower IQ are not "parasites" who need to be "purged". There is absolutely no connection between these two concepts. Eugenics is a deliberate program of weeding out undesirable traits from the gene pool and enhancing desirable traits. You could just as easily claim that human height is a myth because a lot of people tend to prefer taller people and consider them more attractive. Obesity is another trait that is often partially genetic. Some people have a really hard time keeping weight off and are more likely to have weight problems. There are any number of human traits that could subjectively be determined to be desirable or undesirable. This doesn't mean that acknowledging any of these differences inherently leads to eugenics. That's just preposterous and it's amazing that anyone could convince themselves to believe something so contrary to plainly observable reality. Consider two examples on the far ends of the IQ distribution (which you don't think exists, but consider it for argument's sake). On the one hand you have somebody like Stephen Hawking or Nikola Tesla. On the other hand you have someone who's unfortunate enough to suffer from Down Syndrome or other form of mental retardation. If inherent differences in intelligence don't exist, all you have to do is put the person who's mentally retarded in a school teaching them physics and after twenty years they'll also be doing pioneering research about black holes. If you can't see the patent absurdity of this, then you're beyond hope. Notice that this observation doesn't mean we should consider the person with mental retardation to be a "parasite" who we need to "purge". We can absolutely consider that someone with mental retardation has the same intrinsic human worth as a genius like Hawking or Tesla. We just recognize that the higher intelligence and knowledge of some people make them more useful in professions that require more cognitive ability. We don't do society any good by pretending these differences don't exist.
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Feb 15, 2021 10:14
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OwlFancier posted:I also want to take a minute to take a big poo poo on this particular idea specifically. Your First World Privilege is showing. It's easy for you or I to claim that we don't need more productive output. I think there are quite a few Africans and Indians who would beg to differ. Would you be willing to limit your consumption and lifestyle to the global average? I absolutely guarantee you would refuse, and so would I. The vast majority of the world still needs more production to even hope of living what we in the United States would consider the barest minimum of dignity. And the poverty of the average person in the world is not due to the global rich hoarding all the wealth, as corrupt as many of them are. If you redistributed all the wealth in the world, the global average in consumption and lifestyle would still be less than you and I enjoy and I doubt either of us is what would be considered "rich" by first world standards.
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Feb 15, 2021 10:24
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Car Hater posted:Because cars and the "free market" and a whole laundry list of other technologies (markets _are_ a technology) that promote individualism are not viable at scale over time. Once manufacturing is invented, individualization is synonymous with an intermediate economy that must always always always increase, thus dooming society under the weight of the costs of that intermediate economy. So obviously, capitalism (and its extensions like communism) does not work, here or on any other planet in the universe. Any perceived benefits you yourself accrue are temporary, and at the cost of your own species' longevity. People who see this rightly consider you, and other non-thinkers like you, dangerously insane. Would you describe yourself as a Primitivist? Meaning, someone who would prefer industrial society be shut down entirely and humans revert back to hunter gatherers or small tribes? Would you be okay if billions of people died off? How many people do you think there should be on the planet?
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Feb 15, 2021 10:32
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polymathy posted:Your First World Privilege is showing. It's easy for you or I to claim that we don't need more productive output. I think there are quite a few Africans and Indians who would beg to differ. Motherfucker I don't travel anywhere, I don't buy expensive poo poo, I don't own a house, I have an ancient phone from work that I don't use other than for work, I don't want to own a car. The one and sole luxury I have is a desktop PC and if you asked me what I want to change about that, I want it to last longer rather than being designed to be disposable. Someone actually did a really simple mathematical "amount of wealth in world / amount of people in world" on the forum a while ago and it came out to something absurd like "average income in 1960's france" which would be heaven for me. You offer me secure shelter, food on the table and I would be ecstatic. Do not project your disgusting obsession with endless consumption onto me. Also, fuckface, I live in a rich, first world country. It is the insatiable desire for consumption in my country and others like it that necessitates the immiseration and lack of development of other countries so that we can extract resources from them. If we consumed less poo poo and did not therefore necessitate the establishment of a global hegemony with ourselves at the top to feed that consumption, other countries would be able to expend their resources and productive capacity on improving their own standards of living, you colossal loving idiot. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 10:34
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KozmoNaut posted:Brevity is the soul of wit. polymathy posted:polymathy posted:polymathy posted:
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Feb 15, 2021 10:37
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Caros posted:DiLorenzo was literally an 'affiliated scholar' with the loving league of the south. You know this, don't play off this bullshit as if it can't be answered in a five second google search. I have, in fact, read his book. Not recently, it was years ago. I've also watched many interviews he's given and some articles that he has written. Who the gently caress are you to know that I haven't read it? DiLorenzo's "association", such as it is, with the league of the south is quite similar to the association that Tom Woods had with that group. When the group was founded in the 1990s, and when they were debating it's charter and really deciding what the group was even going to be about, they had no racism or white supremacist sympathies whatsoever. It was only later that the group moved in a different direction from it's original charter that these odious views became prominent. If DiLorenzo is a racist or neo-Confederate (whatever that's supposed to mean) then produce the quotes proving it. Don't hide behind a loose association with a group from thirty years ago, especially one that's gone through a radical metamorphosis in their leadership and focus. For future reference, here's how you can tell whether someone is a racist: You can find a clip of them saying something racist, or an article they wrote that you can verify they actually wrote with racist views expressed. It's pretty loving simple really.
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Feb 15, 2021 10:45
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