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Jolly Jumbuck posted:I agree with this on a local level, but feel that on a large scale, it fails. The prisoner's dilemma kicks in and it's easier to defect against someone you don't know than to cooperate and hope they don't defect on you. This is a good summary. There is a school of thought that proposes that all human actions are inherently selfish, and it can be reasoned that acts of 'charity' are simply done with making people feel good as the primary motivation as well as for praise, religious reasons (trying to get a good place in the afterlife) and social capital. Putting aside the fact that the US has the most expensive and inefficient health care in the developed world and that everyone is already paying taxes to support it's bloated, profit-seeking mass, people are mostly only generous when it's someone they care about or identify with... as opposed to the rich and corporations who are only generous as a PR move, tax dodge and to hide the horrible poo poo that they do the other 99.99% of the time. Southpaugh posted:Nothing self satisfied here but I do disagree, it can be overwhelming if you read the news too much for example. There is a significant bias towards the negative you must be aware of when reading whatever makes it to a headline. This can be further compounded by anecdotes and personal experiences. I can assure you that humans are inherently positive creatures and you just need to give em a chance i.e. educate and motivate on a societal level. Tbh, it sounds like you've got a case of the Doomies and its worth noting and emphasizing the positives around you. The last year+ has been hellish on many levels. Is very understandable to feel this way. I understand why you would say that, and I appreciate your tact. However, I avoid mass media like the plague and have for years. I don't watch television, I avoid newspapers and any internet 'news' sites and I don't discuss current events or politics with anyone. I realise that the mass media is run by capital, regardless of outlet (Fox News just doesn't bother to pretend that it's well-meaning) and that focusing on misery and outrage is what gets ratings and sells advertising. While COVID hurt my health badly, It's hard for me to relate to how the pandemic has affected people socially as I have no friends, no close family, and no significant other and I do not socialise, so having to stay home all the time is status quo for me so I am exposed very little to the wider world. I'm worried about two broad global problems that were here before COVID and will be here long after: people having the means to live with dignity and environmental decay, and I don't need the especially sensationalistic American media manipulating me further for profit. I am also utterly contemptuous of any political party or movement in the English-speaking world; I want nothing to do with them and have nothing good to say about any of them. Simply put, I am by choice and practice as detached from the manipulative media as anyone can be in the developed world without living in a cave. I will also add this... if it were simply and uniquely a case of 'few rich people with all the stuff immiserate the third estate', that would be one thing. That has been the case, as Marx pointed out, since society formed and is the classic definition of evil. If that were the only issue, I would fell much differently because, as history as shown, egalitarian movements come in waves after decades of draining the proletariat dry. However, environmental destruction is intimately linked with the current world economic order and adds a rapidly ticking clock mechanic to all that we do, and the destruction of the means to live is only going to make things worse. I very much hope that I am wrong, but I will die before I act like some libertarian technobro who hand waves that whole thing and assumes that the Glorious Private Sector will invent some way to fix everything while he only really cares about being able to legally get high. If something big happens in my lifetime then I will celebrate it, but I refuse to shrug and say 'eh, we'll figure it out' just because it makes me feel sad to think about the alternative. I have similar feelings on global decline as I do about 'human nature'... I think that people want to say that people are inherently good because the opposite is too horrible to contemplate. I'm not saying that humans are incapable of good acts, but nobody wants to admit that their species is generally awful. I understand why people don't want to admit to that, but I don't agree with it. The horrible irony of all this is that, unlike all other animal species, humans are the only one capable of acting against their worst impulses. The problem is that, far too often, they just don't.
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May 5, 2021 01:46
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Human nature is prone to both collaboration and selfishness in relative degrees and also entirely contingent on context. Stuff is complex. I feel like attempts to create a grand unifying theory attributing everything to external factors winds up skimming over important things, and it's a big part of why I'm skeptical of big plans to fix everything all at once with no compromises at any cost.
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May 5, 2021 02:58
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Read the bread book. People haven't been atomized Homo Economicuses, closely surveilled yet governed from afar, for most of our existence. The technology for this kind of society simply didn't exist.
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May 5, 2021 03:40
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Halloween Jack posted:Read the bread book. People haven't been atomized Homo Economicuses, closely surveilled yet governed from afar, for most of our existence. The technology for this kind of society simply didn't exist. Only sort of related, but I did get a good chuckle out of John Oliver discussing vaccination conspiracy theories: "Why would Bill Gates want to inject you with a microchip to monitor you? That's what your phone does already!"
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May 5, 2021 07:53
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JustJeff88 posted:I've thought about this a lot, and I'm genuinely not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg. I would love to think that capitalist atomisation is at the root of everything or near as drat it, but it's ridiculous to make an absolutist statement like that. There is truth in both, but I'm not arrogant enough to hasard a percentage. What I do, sadly, see happening is that environmental decay and ever worsening overpopulation is going to create more competition for scarce space and resources (except for the rich, of course). Hope is necessary for the survival of what little morality people often have, and if people start to struggle more for the essentials then that is when acts of cruelty worsen, tribalism/fascism rears further it's ugly head, and the strong crush the weak. There's no optimism in my post, I'm aware of the world we live in. All I'm saying is that the 'inherent' part is wrong. There's a ton of research by now showing this, and the classic counterexamples like the stanford prison thing were methodologically flawed to aan extent that makes them meaningless. We're social animals which means we're inherently empathetic and inclined to act for the good the group. Again, current society acts against this in many ways. Also remember that outliers exist. Sociopaths (i.e. libertarians, to get back on topic) can and have abused these properties of humankind for their benefit. Ask yourself who benefits from propagating the 'people are selfish and evil' mindset.
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May 5, 2021 08:17
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I think it is very difficult to make proclamations about human nature, but I also think that it seems very clear to me that we live in a society that encourages a lot of the absolute worst behaviours in us, so I would tend to err a little on the side of humans being capable of being better than they often are today, but the difficulty is how you get there. A great deal of how people act is determined by what is socially acceptable in their circles, because whatever human nature may be, we take most of our behavioural cues from our surrounding environment. And I think this makes it simultaneously difficult to know what people are when you remove them from society, and also perhaps a little bit irrelevant? The question becomes "how do you get to a society that encourages people to act the way you want them to act and how can that society be maintained" Someone quoted I think it was bakunin at me once to the effect of "if humans are naturally greedy and rapacious creatures then it is even more important to construct a society where they aren't encouraged to be like that"
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May 5, 2021 08:29
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OwlFancier posted:I think it is very difficult to make proclamations about human nature, but I also think that it seems very clear to me that we live in a society that encourages a lot of the absolute worst behaviours in us, so I would tend to err a little on the side of humans being capable of being better than they often are today, but the difficulty is how you get there. A great deal of how people act is determined by what is socially acceptable in their circles, because whatever human nature may be, we take most of our behavioural cues from our surrounding environment. And I think this makes it simultaneously difficult to know what people are when you remove them from society, and also perhaps a little bit irrelevant? The question becomes "how do you get to a society that encourages people to act the way you want them to act and how can that society be maintained" Totally agreed. I just think it's important to push back on nihilism and negativity precisely for the reason that they tend to reinforce the tendency to act poorly and inhibit things like reaching out and organising locally and potentially actually improving society again.
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May 5, 2021 09:02
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JustJeff88 posted:There is a school of thought that proposes that all human actions are inherently selfish, and it can be reasoned that acts of 'charity' are simply done with making people feel good There are two problems here. One is that the 'reasoning' you refer to is circular: people assume the good feelings are the goal because they already think some benefit for the self is the only comprehensible kind of motive. Never mind, for example, all the cases where people act altruistically even though it will kill them or cause long-term suffering; no, we must assume they regard a fleeting moment of pleasure as a greater benefit than the rest of their lives, because self-interest is the only motive we can understand. The second is that deriving pleasure from helping others is evidence of unselfishness. What separates good people from arseholes is their goals. Some people want to improve the world, others want to get things for themselves and screw everyone else, some basically just want other people to suffer. It's absurd to say, ah, but they all derive pleasure from achieving their goals, so they're all selfish.
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May 5, 2021 09:55
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You can't just say "people will naturally work together for the good of the group" and leave it at that because they will also naturally reach limits to how many people they count as part of "the group". People can be empathetic, but it doesn't make them infinitely empathetic. Hence all of human history. Like you can make the observation that society defines where their empathy runs out, but that circles back around to the fact that people are prone to creating a society with those limits in the first place. I think part of the whole reason for creating a structured society in the first place might even be to extend our potential to collaborate and get along far beyond complex webs of individual personal relationships.
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May 5, 2021 16:14
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SlothfulCobra posted:You can't just say "people will naturally work together for the good of the group" and leave it at that because they will also naturally reach limits to how many people they count as part of "the group". People can be empathetic, but it doesn't make them infinitely empathetic. Hence all of human history. I think this summarizes what I was trying to say far more elegantly. Yes, I completely agree with the far left that mutual cooperation and working together will achieve greater results than individualism or small, competing community groups or even state/country groups. But groups will inevitably exist, at which point any mathematical models, using Nash/Von Neumann/Whomever will have to take into account multiple groups, not one working with a single goal. Why and how humans limit who they consider part of their group is complicated and becomes a sociological/psychological/biological chemical study rather than an economic one, but they do. I do not think it is possible to get people, either voluntarily or by force, into a unified group. Maybe if technology progresses to the point that abundant and rapid transport from any point on the planet to nearly any other point is possible, so that people currently "far away" can effectively become neighbors, it might be possible then. Until then, I think any attempt to force unity will be exactly that - force.
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May 5, 2021 19:56
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apologies if this was asked before, but what is the libertarian excuse for why many countries in the world who have no welfare state also have some of the highest population of poor people? wouldn't the lack of being on the dole cause everyone to go out and get jobs and be productive members of society and make the GDP sky high?
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Jun 8, 2021 04:46
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They don't care. Like, not giving a poo poo about the welfare of other people is the central tenet of libertarianism as preached currently.
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Jun 8, 2021 06:49
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Mr Interweb posted:apologies if this was asked before, but what is the libertarian excuse for why many countries in the world who have no welfare state also have some of the highest population of poor people? wouldn't the lack of being on the dole cause everyone to go out and get jobs and be productive members of society and make the GDP sky high? No, you see the people in those countries are just not as industrious and intelligent as western* people, which is why they haven't been able pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Also, all of those countries are held back by socialist ideas. I have heard multiple libertarians argue the above, without a hint of irony. *White
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Jun 8, 2021 07:44
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Osmosisch posted:They don't care. right, of course they don't believe that, but they claim libertarianism leads to prosperity for all.
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Jun 8, 2021 08:53
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“That’s not real capitalism”
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Jun 8, 2021 11:06
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KozmoNaut posted:Also, all of those countries are held back by socialist ideas.
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Jun 8, 2021 11:14
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No no, that's just the invisible hand of the free market finding the objectively correct monetary value of the labor potential of any given individual. If those people would just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being so lazy, they could afford to pay for their own labor.
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Jun 8, 2021 11:18
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Can Libertarians cite countries that have minimal taxes/regulations that are super prosperous as a result? Like socialists will look to countries with extensive social safety nets, labor laws, and consumer protections as examples of how much better things could be. But I don't see libertarians do this. The closest thing they'll do is compare things now to how they were over a century ago before income tax became a thing. Like where is this exemplar of libertarian free market ideals besides joke retorts like Ethiopia or something? The dream of Galts Gulch has been talked about for some time, if it were so feasible to make reality then surely it would have happened by now, yes? The captains of industry of the world certainly have the money and power to do so if they really wanted to. Which is what I think comes down to is "Shrodinger's Libertarian" where their true convictions are a paradox that flips between whatever suits them.
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Jun 8, 2021 11:32
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Galt's Gulch only works in the book, because of a literal free energy device and completely ignoring the need for physical labor.
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Jun 8, 2021 12:07
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That's an indictment on the justification for hierarchies between management and workers then. If Libertarians thought the Idea Guys are doing all the work then they wouldn't need workers in the first place.
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Jun 8, 2021 12:28
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KozmoNaut posted:Galt's Gulch only works in the book, because of a literal free energy device and completely ignoring the need for physical labor. And even then it's basically a communist society where supposedly cutthroat businessmen politely make space for other businessmen to take over their current business. Not to mention the oil tycoon who pumps something like 200 barrels a day (and somehow has the equipment and a refinery in a remote valley) when they have an infinite free energy machine so nobody needs to buy oil from him for energy purposes.
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Jun 8, 2021 12:31
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I forget if it was radical reviewer or though slime but they had a video essay about Randian stuff and gave a pretty good analogy that Libertarians think the world is Minecraft, they don’t understand the how technology, trade and social organization interact to make modern life possible.
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Jun 8, 2021 13:38
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A real howler I heard that happened a few years ago was this coffee company in Portland? I think? that was run by a couple of Libertarians and went out of business. I think the sequence of events went like this: -Wife of the owner ( who later claimed she didn't run /have any authority there) wrote some articles to Quilette about how we shouldn't jump the gun when it comes to the MeToo movement, and that people jumping on the outrage bandwagon are harming more people than they help. -This gets brought up on Twitter, and the employees are encouraged to quit. -Some quit but also all their major buyers pull out as well and the company goes out of business. -Wife blames the whole thing on cancel culture. Suddenly everyone on the right forgot that the reputation of a business actually matters and that people will make decisions accordingly. The people outraged over the outcome certainly didn't offer any constructive solutions; after all in a free society nobody should be forced to have to do business with anyone else, right? And if you thought they were so maligned then why didn't you prop their business up on principle? That was the big  in this situation; usually when a chuddy company faces backlash they can count on some wingnut welfare to stay afloat. But they were allowed to crash and burn.
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Jun 8, 2021 14:12
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Mr Interweb posted:apologies if this was asked before, but what is the libertarian excuse for why many countries in the world who have no welfare state also have some of the highest population of poor people? wouldn't the lack of being on the dole cause everyone to go out and get jobs and be productive members of society and make the GDP sky high? Libertarians literally believe that the Free Market is a law of nature and its Invisible Hand is the hand of God. If market activity has negative effects, then it isn't "real capitalism," or the previous regime is to blame. It's a religious belief and you can't really argue with it.
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Jun 8, 2021 14:15
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SMEGMA_MAIL posted:I forget if it was radical reviewer or though slime but they had a video essay about Randian stuff and gave a pretty good analogy that Libertarians think the world is Minecraft, they don’t understand the how technology, trade and social organization interact to make modern life possible. That sounds like Thought Slime.
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Jun 8, 2021 15:02
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Panfilo posted:Can Libertarians cite countries that have minimal taxes/regulations that are super prosperous as a result? New Zealand.
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Jun 8, 2021 15:40
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SMEGMA_MAIL posted:I forget if it was radical reviewer or though slime but they had a video essay about Randian stuff and gave a pretty good analogy that Libertarians think the world is Minecraft, they don’t understand the how technology, trade and social organization interact to make modern life possible. Pretty much this, yes. They don't understand why society exists and think they can bypass it.
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Jun 8, 2021 15:45
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Panfilo posted:Can Libertarians cite countries that have minimal taxes/regulations that are super prosperous as a result? Like socialists will look to countries with extensive social safety nets, labor laws, and consumer protections as examples of how much better things could be. But I don't see libertarians do this. The closest thing they'll do is compare things now to how they were over a century ago before income tax became a thing. Singapore used to be a popular example of libertarian prosperity for the Reason-and-Cato set. And sure, it might be a repressive city-state that will literally beat up citizens for minor infractions or put them to death for drug possession, the judiciary and sovereign wealth fund might be nakedly corrupt and happy to throw journalists in jail for talking about their corruption, and it might have lots and lots of social-safety-net spending - but those low taxes really run up the score on the Freedom Index!
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Jun 8, 2021 16:19
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Right, but what it always comes down to is them wanting a governnent they can fit in a teacup yet able to uphold their property rights. When I pointed out their thimblefull of government is going to do gently caress all for them when, as a landlord, their entire building goes on a rent strike. Their reply was basically "in that case I'd clear them out room by room like we did in Falluja"  The sad part about that was that they weren't even creative enough to come up with a reasonable solution. None of the libertarians I asked replied that they would negotiate for rent/terms everyone agreed to. Contracts are supposed to be sacrosanct but when unions/mutual aid gets involved the NAP gets shot out a grenade launcher in their world. They weren't even creative enough to find subtle solutions that actually happen in real life, like "I would form a cartel with other landlords to besiege and blacklist anyone that didn't pay rent" or "I would make sure some of my tenants were plants loyal to me that would sabotage rent strikes from the inside".
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Jun 8, 2021 16:36
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People talk about how they'd have to hire Pinkertons but that presents another problem-if you're job is to crack skulls for the status quo but you're an independent contractor free to work for whomever, seems to me your job just got REALLY valuable if your employer is about to be stuffed into a burlap sack and beaten like a piñata by his serfs. In fact it might be prohibitively expensive! In the end you're not hiring security, you're hiring the middlemen for the people that will inevitably hold you for ransom. And if you want actual cops that are supposedly beholden to the constitution and all that, you're not going to be able to cram that kind of bureaucracy into a teacup anymore. Even a Big Gulp might not be enough to fit it all. 
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Jun 8, 2021 16:42
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Panfilo posted:People talk about how they'd have to hire Pinkertons but that presents another problem-if you're job is to crack skulls for the status quo but you're an independent contractor free to work for whomever, seems to me your job just got REALLY valuable if your employer is about to be stuffed into a burlap sack and beaten like a piñata by his serfs. Crassus had a fire brigade in Rome that operated a bit like this. Can't deny the effectiveness of the Free Market! (At amassing capital in the hands of the already wealthy  )
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Jun 8, 2021 16:57
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https://mobile.twitter.com/ClickHole/status/1095789712642633728
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Jun 8, 2021 17:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty much this, yes. They don't understand why society exists and think they can bypass it. And without labouring the metaphor too much - even in Minecraft, where you can single-handedly homestead your way to a self-sustaining existence in a blank-slate world with effectively limitless resources, gathered purely by the low-poly sweat from your cuboid brow...the really impressive poo poo gets done on servers with loads of people, and it's much easier and more productive (and more fun) doing stuff cooperatively.
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Jun 8, 2021 18:00
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Panfilo posted:Can Libertarians cite countries that have minimal taxes/regulations that are super prosperous as a result? Like socialists will look to countries with extensive social safety nets, labor laws, and consumer protections as examples of how much better things could be. But I don't see libertarians do this. The closest thing they'll do is compare things now to how they were over a century ago before income tax became a thing. They always tell you that "well, no true libertarian society ever existed" or something like that. I remember Jrod used to make that claim, and I would ask "well, if nobody has ever done it, isn't that worth investigating why?" But Jrod was an incurious person who thought he had all the answers, and thought happiness could be found inside a watermelon.
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Jun 8, 2021 18:04
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Cemetry Gator posted:They always tell you that "well, no true libertarian society ever existed" or something like that. It's only real/fake capitalism or communism when it suits them, apparently.
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Jun 8, 2021 18:10
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Cemetry Gator posted:They always tell you that "well, no true libertarian society ever existed" or something like that. To be fair, he thought websites he didn't read had all the answers and that is the same thing as having all the answers
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Jun 8, 2021 18:10
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Dirk the Average posted:It's because it's Econ 101. It's like how you learn physics in a frictionless vacuum before you go ahead and start throwing in other variables. The idea is to give you a very simple situation where you're not dealing with edge cases, and explain how that sort of situation may work. It's not directly applicable to reality in the same way that frictionless vacuums aren't directly applicable to reality, but the general concept of raising a price results in fewer units sold vs lowering a price results in more units sold is going to be generally correct in many situations. My econ 101 class started with "what is an economic model and what is it for." The professor gave basic concepts of several different models, their entry points, and their theories of value. Then he gave examples of how they could be used to make predictions and highlighted how the predictions are different. He did all this specifically to avoid the easily foreseeable outcome of students taking the intro class and then stopping, and going about life thinking they know jack poo poo. I am deeply suspicious of any econ professor who doesn't do the same without at least announcing at the start that this is all spherical vacuum cows. At least the physics students go in with the intuitive understanding that air resistance exists.
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Jun 9, 2021 05:18
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Econ class is where I learned the term 'widgets' to refer to a hypothetical product that has no real world bias or attachment. Because if you talk about tangible real things, be it diamonds cars or bad dragon dildos then people will split hairs about all the details along the way.
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Jun 9, 2021 14:12
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Panfilo posted:Which is why it's funny when they say that communism never works. Because when you point out that actual communism (classless, moneyless society) has never been attempted on a large scale, they just handwave it away and say that no, the communism that caused the Soviet Union to implode was the real communism. But that Capitalism that imploded when all the donut crazed bears took over? That's crony capitalism.
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Jun 9, 2021 14:22
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Halloween Jack posted:In my experience, they will say that the problems of post-Communist nations is Communism's fault, but the poverty of Communist nations has nothing to do with the fact that they were all devastated by war before Communism took over. This is part of the "Capitalism cannot fail, only be failed" bullshit right?
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Jun 9, 2021 14:31
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