I AM GRANDO posted:You know, what even is the point of cable news at a time when breaking news shows up on people’s phones and 30% of the footage on tv news is taken from phone recordings of things people were there for? It's for old people who don't feel like spending much time figuring out how fancy new smartphones work.
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# ? May 11, 2023 05:03 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 11:14 |
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goons itt: https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-televisi-1819565469
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# ? May 11, 2023 05:09 |
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pencilhands posted:goons itt: This article is older than some posters itt lol
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# ? May 11, 2023 05:45 |
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Eiba posted:The post I was responding to was implying that "workers" would still demand infinite growth because why wouldn't they? What the conversation was about isn't growth of state power, it's economic growth. Increased productivity, increased output. More food and goods, at cheaper prices. Who doesn't want that? And how that growth is obtained depends a lot on the specific, individual circumstances a society is in. Tokugawa Japan actually underwent substantial economic growth. They didn't directly take over all of Hokkaido, sure, but they didn't need to, and probably didn't consider it worth the substantial amount of trouble it would have posed. At the time, Japan already had plenty of land, resources, and manpower that was very poorly utilized due to (among other things) more than a century of bloody civil war and social disorder. As such, the Tokugawa shogunate could bring out great gains by just giving people a break from generations of warfare. The early Edo period saw substantial population growth, massive increases in agricultural output, and substantial urbanization. On the other hand, in the later part of the Tokugawa period, famines put a stop to population growth and destabilized a mostly-feudal society that was already struggling to cope with the rise of the commoner merchants and the decline of the various noble classes. As a result, the economy (and with it, the social system) was already starting to develop large and obvious cracks when foreign pressure came in and delivered that final series of pushes that broke the shogunate for good. Yes, other priorities compete with economic growth. That's always been the case, and it's still the case. The same is true in capitalism today. Look at the Florida legislature trying to undermine the state's biggest tourist attraction for the sake of culture war nonsense. Look at segregationists refusing to accept the business of non-white people, even though everyone's cash is green. Look at the American media and defense industries purging a number of well-known and highly qualified figures in an anti-leftist frenzy back in the McCarthy era, without regard for the financial or economic impact. I don't think capitalism is substantially more obsessed with "infinite growth" than previous generations are. Both in the sense that previous generations were plenty interested in economic growth, and also in the sense that people are exaggerating how obsessed capitalists actually are with growth above all else. After all, "infinite growth" is just an abstract phrase. The workers and CEOs out there aren't waking up in the morning and saying to themselves "man, I can't wait to pursue infinite growth in our society today". They're saying "man, I hope I make more money today". But the only way for everyone's income to consistently trend upward is for the economy as a whole to keep growing and never shrink. In other words, infinite growth. But when the economy isn't growing, we call that a "recession" and it usually fuckin sucks!
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# ? May 11, 2023 06:01 |
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Eiba posted:Tokugawa Japan is another pretty prominent example, and might be our best example of a developed feudal society that, through some geographical luck, was able to actually just do what a feudal state naturally wants to do without outside influence: just chill. I'm entirely unsurprised that after years upon years of rampaging and conspicuously massacring people all the way across Korea in an attempt to subjugate the entire territory and culture, ending in extremely costly failure and the loss of the fleets necessary for that kind of invasion, Japan was enthusiastically going "Whew, super excited to Just Chill and only do a little brutal military conquest for a while."
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# ? May 11, 2023 06:38 |
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More the problem is all the war and conquest and expansion is the only thing the history books are ever interested in writing about and generally held up as what 'Civilization' is and means. Look at how the New Deal is basically erased from history books when the massive infrastructure and welfare projects fundamentally changed how the majority of Americans lived and what American culture and society looked like. People aren't taught about infrastructure and its importance, and now they've forgotten what it even is. Laughing at 'Chinese ghost cities' and panicking at the idea of living somewhere you don't need a car to function because it's fundamentally alien to them.
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# ? May 11, 2023 07:50 |
Main Paineframe posted:I don't think capitalism is substantially more obsessed with "infinite growth" than previous generations are. Something novel happened when Europeans became obsessed with productivity, enclosing the "unproductive" land that the state couldn't tax, which had been utilized by commoners to their own ends for thousands of years. That poo poo's not normal human behavior. Previous societies didn't do that for hundreds of thousands of years, while our modern society couldn't imagine doing anything else. The need for the number to go up isn't just a Republican thing, by the way- since you bring up fringe politicians lashing out at corporations. It's an absolute core value of the Democrats as well. And honestly, with things as they are, it should be. If the number fails to go up, without a massive restructuring of our society- which I don't see happening any time soon- we'll all be hosed. Maybe I've just given bad examples, but I really don't understand why it's so hard to understand, with any historical literacy at all, that our modern world is far more oriented to a single goal than most of human history. There's only so many ways I can say, "greed isn't new, but it didn't used to be this central to everything." Kavros posted:I'm entirely unsurprised that after years upon years of rampaging and conspicuously massacring people all the way across Korea in an attempt to subjugate the entire territory and culture, ending in extremely costly failure and the loss of the fleets necessary for that kind of invasion, Japan was enthusiastically going "Whew, super excited to Just Chill and only do a little brutal military conquest for a while." Maybe our current culture will discover that infinite economic growth isn't worth it after vast human tragedies make that conclusion unavoidable.
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# ? May 11, 2023 07:59 |
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Eiba posted:Then I just fundamentally do not understand the current or past world as you do. The reason you’re confused is because people have been demonstrating how the societies you idealize, frequently non-European societies, do seek perpetual growth, they are only limited by the ways they believe they can accomplish that end. I am begging you to stop with the noble savage/orientalism stuff. What would you call the conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, both wildly untenable endeavors to sustain, if not wild unchecked growth? The tools to accomplish it might be better and more self reinforcing but the behavior is the same.
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# ? May 11, 2023 09:21 |
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Eiba posted:Then I just fundamentally do not understand the current or past world as you do. You fundamentally don't understand rest of the world and its' history, past or current, if that is your conception. Europeans were playing with sticks and stones compared to the rest of the world, literally doing the rise of the civilizations. Not only Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the Indus and Yellow River civilizations as well as American ones. Excess production is the core of every agricultural society, its upper classes and the rise of wealth and ownership. Europe gained a recent edge thanks to smallpox (excess resources!) and the industrial revolution (improved methods of productivity!), but it did not invent or perfect anything you are talking about. There was no "common land" that the state could not eke some kind of money from, no matter where you were an agricultural society, and even in hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies increasily hemmed in by agriculture, grazing your herds in the wrong area was a pretty good way of getting an arrow in your face. Normal human behavior kinda clocked out once the Neolithic Revolution really got off the ground. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 11:35 on May 11, 2023 |
# ? May 11, 2023 11:32 |
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I AM GRANDO posted:You know, what even is the point of cable news at a time when breaking news shows up on people’s phones and 30% of the footage on tv news is taken from phone recordings of things people were there for? To give people who are scared of their phones something else to also be scared of
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# ? May 11, 2023 11:38 |
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Staluigi posted:This is all important because a lot of pancreatic cancer being "successfully treated" basically means "we retarded the carcinomic spread enough that they didn't kill the patient for a few years" as I understand it The pancreas can absolutely be removed, not sure where you get the idea that it can’t. Pancreatic cancer isn’t some super mutant cancer or whatever you’re saying, the issue is that it’s usually only discovered once it has metastasized, at which point removing the cancerous pancreas is of limited utility.
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# ? May 11, 2023 11:58 |
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Jaxyon posted:He's literally bragged on camera about sexual assault. It probably helps him. Trump? I don’t think so. Care to back this claim up with a source?
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# ? May 11, 2023 11:59 |
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I assume they're referring to the famous "grab 'em by the pussy" "they'll let you do it if you're famous" stuff from the Access Hollywood video back in 2016.
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# ? May 11, 2023 12:08 |
Clarste posted:I assume they're referring to the famous "grab 'em by the pussy" "they'll let you do it if you're famous" stuff from the Access Hollywood video back in 2016. Which he repeated in his videotaped under-oath deposition for the Carroll trial, which was replayed at the Carrol trial, like within the past week
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# ? May 11, 2023 12:47 |
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Clarste posted:I assume they're referring to the famous "grab 'em by the pussy" "they'll let you do it if you're famous" stuff from the Access Hollywood video back in 2016. If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention). It’s crude and indecorous, to be clear, but not an admission of sexual assault.
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# ? May 11, 2023 12:50 |
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Eiba posted:I am 100% not saying a society that doesn't value infinite growth is necessarily good. Tokugawa Japan is pretty hosed up in a lot of other ways. But this is a non sequitur. The Edo period lasted for centuries. If it was in part the product of Japan failing at incredibly brutal attempts at imperialism... okay? It's still an example of many generations of humans agreeing that "growth" isn't worth it. It's not an example of anyone agreeing "growth" isn't worth it. It's an example of of several generations of humans pursuing growth so aggressively it upended their entire social structure, not unlike the industrial revolution. You're artificially limiting your definition of growth to one very specific type of growth which is only tangential to what we're talking about. The "infinite growth" being associated with capitalism is economic growth, not pushing borders on a map, conquest only became relevant to the discussion as a means of getting more resources to feed it. As much as conflict is frequent throughout human history, most successful civilizations recognize that it is way less costly to grow using underutilized resources they already control, and only turn outward when those resources become insufficient to sustain it. Both of your examples are societies which had vast untapped/underutilized resources as a result long periods of internal conflict, and went through periods of pursuing economic growth through internal development.
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# ? May 11, 2023 12:53 |
Cool NIN Shirt posted:If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention). if you think "they let you do it" == "they consent", then, uh h h h . . . . dude no
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# ? May 11, 2023 13:07 |
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Cool NIN Shirt posted:If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention). That’s because he doesn’t understand what consent or sexual assault are. If I say I’m not racist but I understand that mexicans are inherently violent and inferior to the white race, I am still confessing my racism. E Jean Carroll couldn’t stop him and he was able to grab her by the pussy, but she did not consent. Surely he would say she “let him do it.”
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# ? May 11, 2023 13:11 |
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Cool NIN Shirt posted:If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention). That is not consent.
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# ? May 11, 2023 13:16 |
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Cool NIN Shirt posted:If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention). Yeah I hope enough people have jumped on you, but power imbalance negates consent, that statement is very gross.
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# ? May 11, 2023 13:25 |
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Jarmak posted:That's absurd. Most of recorded history is humans killing each other to gobble up more resources. The main change capitalism brought to the table was individuals were free to do it for themselves instead of primarily helping the king gobble up more resources.
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# ? May 11, 2023 13:48 |
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I'm not a historical economist, but I think the main thing was that feudal lords had all their wealth in the form of land (which included the labor of the peasants living on it), while the shift to capitalism made the very idea of wealth more... fungible? Like, you could still be rich by owning land (or people), but you could also own like a business or whatever. Modern billionaire CEOs actually have relatively more power than most feudal lords did though.
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# ? May 11, 2023 13:51 |
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Greed has existed all throughout history. Growth has existed all throughout history. Nobody is disputing that. But neither of those statements change the fact that the greed and growth of modern capitalism is wildly unsustainable. And that fact shouldn't be excused or minimized by saying things like "well it's just human nature to be greedy" or "well past societies did it too" or "well socialism would be just as bad".
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:03 |
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I thought we were done here so I didn't respond. Since we aren't. Conflating "greed", which is where I got pulled into this conversation, and "the economy" is causing a lot of confusion. I would like to restate what others have said about greed more succinctly. Humans can be greedy. There is a limit to this greed. Abstracting away the consequences to a community of a person's greed, which is what obscene wealth does, makes it easier to go beyond that limit.
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:07 |
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Here's the α and Ω of this CNN Trump obsession They went from record profits to record losses in one quarter because Trump went a way and scared and angry liberals stopped watching cable news. CNN isn't trying to bring in consevatives, they are energizing their base - so to speak - by putting on frightening Trump spectacles for terrified liberals to freak out about. No one who is persuadable on Trump (and it may be that no one is persuadable on Trump, I think public sentiment is pretty well cemented in that regard) watches CNN, we've spent the last 10 years fretting about media bubbles and the fact that half the country gets its news from essentially propaganda sources. Conservative voters don't read the NYT op ed columns, they don't tune into CNN to hear policy discussions, they watch Fox and read Facebook. This was, essentially, CNN trolling their liberal viewership base in the classic sense: putting on intentionally inflammatory content in order to drive engagement. There is a bias in the media, it's not towards a political spectrum, it's towards the bottom line. And Trump is very, very good for the bottom line. They want him to win. My personal opinion is that Trump doing town halls is the worst thing he can do, he's not articulating a policy vision, he's just ranting about personal grievances. During 2016, the more he was in the news the lower his approval rating went, and when the cycle turned away from him his numbers would recover. Trump is deeply unpopular in a way that no other politician is America is (maybe Hillary lol) and he's never won a popular vote, he's a huge drag on the rest of the GOP ticket, and he lucked his way into the White House based on a black swan outcome that he couldn't come close to repeating in 2020 against a walking corpse with several Republican legislatures doing everything they could to steal a win. https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1656646628411949056 This is an ethics-free conception of the duty of journalism. zoux fucked around with this message at 14:32 on May 11, 2023 |
# ? May 11, 2023 14:20 |
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Fister Roboto posted:Greed has existed all throughout history. Growth has existed all throughout history. Nobody is disputing that. But neither of those statements change the fact that the greed and growth of modern capitalism is wildly unsustainable. And that fact shouldn't be excused or minimized by saying things like "well it's just human nature to be greedy" or "well past societies did it too" or "well socialism would be just as bad". What's made things unsustainable isn't capitalism itself. It's industrialization, which has allowed humans to exploit the planet's resources far more efficiently than in the past - leading to massive population growth, substantial over-exploitation, and significant negative externalities. Switching
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:22 |
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Main Paineframe posted:What's made things unsustainable isn't capitalism itself. It's industrialization, which has allowed humans to exploit the planet's resources far more efficiently than in the past - leading to massive population growth, substantial over-exploitation, and significant negative externalities. Switching And what was the dominant economic system throughout almost all of industrialization? Spoiler: it was capitalism. Industrialization was the means by which capitalism became better able to grow and consume resources. It didn't just happen by itself. This argument is getting absurd.
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:34 |
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Eiba posted:I am 100% not saying a society that doesn't value infinite growth is necessarily good. Tokugawa Japan is pretty hosed up in a lot of other ways. But this is a non sequitur. The Edo period lasted for centuries. If it was in part the product of Japan failing at incredibly brutal attempts at imperialism... okay? It's still an example of many generations of humans agreeing that "growth" isn't worth it. Those generations didn't agree on that, though. The strictness of class division that they enforced during that timeperiod was essentially to mandate economic and agricultural growth for the sake of the ruling class. All that's really demonstrated by the transition to the edo period was that, for the time being, growth and exploitation would have to focus mostly inside the country because of how poorly their previous imperial occupations of other territory went in the end. I don't really think they get bonus points for this kind of 'inward focus' mandated by a generational-scale loss of force projection capability, especially considering how the experiment ended with the return of imperial occupation
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:41 |
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Cool NIN Shirt posted:If we take his statements in good faith, he acknowledges that they consent to the “pussy grabbing” (the “they let you do it if your famous” part that you mention). uhh mods?
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:41 |
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Republicans released their 4-month investigation into the Biden Crime Family. You will be shocked to learn that they could not find any evidence that Hunter Biden was laundering money from the Chinese government to make the Biden administration aggressively pro-China. But, just because there was no bribery or corruption by anyone in the Biden Crime Family, that doesn't mean that they weren't still a crime family. They uncovered a major scandal and coverup. 1) In 2020, during a Presidential primary debate, Biden said, "The only guy who made money from China is this guy [indicating Donald Trump]. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China." However, that was a lie because it was public knowledge that the company Hunter Biden worked for had a contract for $4.8 million with an energy company in Shanghai that was owned by the Chinese government. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1656524579949498369 quote:House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:44 |
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Fister Roboto posted:Greed has existed all throughout history. Growth has existed all throughout history. Nobody is disputing that. But neither of those statements change the fact that the greed and growth of modern capitalism is wildly unsustainable. And that fact shouldn't be excused or minimized by saying things like "well it's just human nature to be greedy" or "well past societies did it too" or "well socialism would be just as bad". Past societies and economic systems producing the same effects, including attempts at socialism, is evidence that "capitalism" isn't the root cause of the problem nor is socialism the panacea to solve it. I've never seen a reason to believe the political apparatus that controls resources in a command economy is any more resistant to being undercut by corrupt influence/politics/social maneuvering than the supposed meritocracy is under capitalism. If anything the inherently more centralized and authoritarian power structure required to administer a command economy seems more susceptible to these influences. The children of powerful bureaucrats and those with connections to them in a command economy are no less advantaged than the children of the wealthy in a capitalist one, and a committee can be just as unempathetic to the poor as a board of directors.
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:47 |
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Fister Roboto posted:And what was the dominant economic system throughout almost all of industrialization? Industrialization was the means by which humans became able to grow and consume resources. Capitalism doesn't consume resources, people do, capitalism is the system which allocates those resources. It's absurd to just assume casualty because two things existed at the same time.
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# ? May 11, 2023 14:57 |
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Isn't this whole argument adjacent to the millenia-old philosophy question about whether man is born inherently good, evil, or neutral? (Also what's the philosophical term for that question) https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/1656467730126585856 There are a lot of contenders but I really think I hate Peter Baker the most out of all the major outlet political journalists. zoux fucked around with this message at 15:03 on May 11, 2023 |
# ? May 11, 2023 14:57 |
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Jarmak posted:Capitalism doesn't consume resources, people do "Guns dont kill people, people do." A statement that is technically true, but functionally meaningless. You cant ban people, so you have to deal with the tool that they use to cause harm. And in this case, the tool is capitalism. I honestly dont care what you call it or what you blame it on. But our current state is not sustainable. It needs to be fixed. If all that matters to you is not blaming it on capitalism, then fine, lets do that. But i guarantee that any viable solution is going to look an awful lot like abolishing capitalism.
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# ? May 11, 2023 15:10 |
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The whole conversation is kind of academic because there is a lot of space between “$24 trillion” and “$infinity,” - approximately $infinity, by my calculations - and I would imagine that somewhere along that line we will find some other new paradigm for describing prosperity, or our civilization will collapse. (Of course, the conversation being academic doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.) Fister Roboto posted:And what was the dominant economic system throughout almost all of industrialization? Like, yes, there were more capitalist societies than socialist ones during the Industrial Revolution, but that doesn’t really prove anything on its own. If capitalism was specifically to blame for industrial resource use, wouldn’t there be any indication of that in the history of the largest, most significant and most successful socialist society we’ve seen?
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# ? May 11, 2023 15:23 |
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zoux posted:Isn't this whole argument adjacent to the millenia-old philosophy question about whether man is born inherently good, evil, or neutral? (Also what's the philosophical term for that question) Possibly the state of nature or social contract question, e.g. Hobbes(nasty, brutish and short, so kings are great to prevent that) /Locke (great, we have inherent rights that coincidentally reflect my personal preferences) /Rousseau (blank slate, but also better than society today with all those newfangled ideas). None of these are very informative, other than to illustrate that imagining humanity as having some inherent quality prior to or outside of its current conditions is a pretty ineffective way to approach these problems, because writers have tended to just import their prior beliefs onto the question of what the nature of man is like. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:33 on May 11, 2023 |
# ? May 11, 2023 15:24 |
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I don’t even think ascribing a desire for ever-increasing prosperity to human nature is the same thing as describing humans as “inherently evil.” There can be altruistic motivations for increasing prosperity - in a hunter-gatherer context, supporting the continued health of your band/tribe. It can be both true that “always wanting more” is a basic facet of human nature AND that modern, excessive, “evil” greed is not the inevitable growth of that seed, or as a part of human nature itself. Even if the wealth-beyond-measure impulse was part of our nature, that alone wouldn’t be sufficient to make humanity “inherently evil.” (And I do think it’s fair to think that the “infinite” type of greed is, if post-agricultural, pre-capitalist. Why else would we have the parable of King Midas?) Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 15:36 on May 11, 2023 |
# ? May 11, 2023 15:32 |
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Mellow Seas posted:The whole conversation is kind of academic because there is a lot of space between “$24 trillion” and “$infinity,” - approximately $infinity, by my calculations - and I would imagine that somewhere along that line we will find some other new paradigm for describing prosperity, or our civilization will collapse. Those societies had to engage in the context of the established capitalist societies. They were forced to compete on those terms or perish A lot like how companies have to engage in certain shittybbehaviors to succeed in the stock market, actually
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# ? May 11, 2023 15:47 |
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Jarmak posted:Past societies and economic systems producing the same effects, including attempts at socialism, is evidence that "capitalism" isn't the root cause of the problem nor is socialism the panacea to solve it. The soviet system was essentially imperialism for Moscow focused on centralized control of industry as its model of extraction instead of cash crop territory control. Its corruption problems massively worsened when the only people with any preexisting foreign exchange, criminals and corrupt officials, were allowed to freely buy all the state managed assets for a fraction of their true value in a privatization fire-sale. The Chinese systems economic reforms away from the malaise of post Maoist autocracy was very vulnerable to corruption, but the corruption problem massively worsened when state industry was allowed to be privatized without disrupting the corrupt interplay between production and industrial oversight. Both times it happened with the encouragement of western free market absolutists who managed to get out competed both times because they didn't have as good information or networks of connections to actually cash in on the fire-sales of state assets and survive (the Russian system became so captured by local oligarchs they were able to weaponize the legal system, and the Chinese system required majority Chinese ownership in control, while often directly picking winners). Its a fundamental rule that you have to judge a system by what it does, not what it claims. Both of these systems were actually hostile to worker control at every level, far more so than even the very indirect western systems of representative democracy. At no point were they ever actually closer to socialism, because both the state and industry were autocratic. They were and still are, at best, socialism themed dictatorships. Norway is closer to every form of socialist theory then they ever were. The phrase "Actually existing socialism" was the death knell of the soviet union, purely because it showed the government had abandoned the pretext it ever intended to change. Command economies are incredibly prone to stagnation because they lack incentives to improve anything, and often lack mechanisms to actually enforce rules, instead ending up cheating themselves because they have a mentality that treats failure as a moral problem instead of a systematic one. It was far easier to over-report production numbers than solve production problems, for example. Capitalism is proudly the source of many problems. Just see how viciously the capitol class lobby to be able to literally dump the consequences of their actions onto the public. Corporations love socialism for the capitalist class, handouts to prop up businesses or tax breaks to move jobs from city to city every few years. They love big government budgets so much they wish they could replace bits of it and be a monopoly providing those services on the public dime, able to FORCE everyone to buy their product indirectly, instead of just having to bid on contracts.
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# ? May 11, 2023 15:57 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 11:14 |
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zoux posted:
CNN's leadership has been pretty open about a deliberate rightward shift. They want to eat Fox from the left.
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# ? May 11, 2023 15:59 |