ReV VAdAUL posted:I've had a look at a few more of these true stories of military veterans attacking educators and there's something I don't understand. The military is one of the most Marxist organisations in America, the Government provides soldiers with free housings, free food, free medical care, free education and a bunch of other stuff but they're attacking professors for promoting what they've benefited from. Are the soldiers angry that they no longer have access to the benefits or Marxism or are the educators from a different denomination of Marxism? Political leftists hate soldiers because they're agents of the status quo. This is only capable of being overridden when it becomes apparent that soldiers are themselves disgusted with the status quo or when the status quo is preferable to oncoming monstrosity, which is why student protesters sent CARE packages during Vietnam and VVATW was politically potent where the equivalent groups for Afghanistan and Iraq have not been. On the other hand, the average soldier here on SA, in addition to being exceptionally malformed compared to the average soldier, tend to assume that the average forumite holds these sorts of opinions, and so adopts an ironic posture somewhere between self-conscious Nazism and caricatured conservatism. Apart from the actual people who hold those sorts of opinions, of course! Meanwhile, the West Point debate team won nationally two years ago by repeating the point that global capitalism was too destructive to be anything but the first priority, but heh, officers.
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Nov 1, 2014 14:03
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Ardennes posted:The vast majority of US officers are Republicans though, and debate teams in the US really aren't about arguments you believe anyway, basically you talk the fasted and most muffled that you can so the other side has no idea what you are saying. I have no idea why anyone thought it was worthwhile, I guess the idea is to train auctioneers or something? No, individual colleges adopt different tactics and political positions they make their arguments from. Michigan State and Dartmouth are conservative powerhouses, while West Point is a fairly radical debate team. More importantly, Republican identification is something that has more to do with the Republicans taking the lead in being "pro-soldier" and the national Democratic response being to follow rather than stake out an oppositional position.
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Nov 1, 2014 14:29
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Ardennes posted:The debate culture I have exposure to is that you are simply assigned a side that you debate for, and then mumble as quickly as possible. You're assigned topics. The way that you argue for them is up to you, and having an ideological position staked out ahead of time makes it easier to tie everything into one overriding topic you can throw a slew of ideas against. And actually, I'm talking about how the "pro-soldier" part of the Republican platform is something Democrats (on the national level) have copied while being somewhat more anti-war, instead of staking out a unique and opposing position. The overriding right-wing beliefs are hardly inevitable, considering Smedley Butler, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kerry, Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, etc. and this is without counting right-wing generals who opposed MacArthur's attempts to invade China like Omar Bradley or the use of military force in Vietnam like Matthew Ridgway.
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Nov 1, 2014 14:48
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ReV VAdAUL posted:It is noteworthy all those examples pre-date the military becoming an all volunteer force. All of them were volunteers, dude, even Kerry, and Grant and Sherman entered before conscription was enacted. Ardennes posted:Well the Democrats are a center-right party, they aren't going to go for actual demilitarization and it is political suicide not to "support the Troops." Also, those examples are what at best 40 years ago if not longer? Historically, US officer corp was more politically diverse at one time but yeah that is history. I doubt that's the case. The senior brass are probably mostly a right-wing club nowadays but outside of goons, soldiers are fairly diverse politically.
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Nov 1, 2014 18:48
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ReV VAdAUL posted:It may be a coincidence but the shift further right among military leadership and lack of any public opposition to war or war crimes among the leadership does track with the end of conscription. That's tracking party affiliation. Does it track political beliefs? Because there were clear majorities in favor of ending DADT AFAICR. I think that Republicans being "pro-army" and "pro-war" is what leads to greater identification of soldiers with the Republican party, more than any sort of fundamental conservative ideology.
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Nov 1, 2014 19:14
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asdf32 posted:Well generally if you find yourself overly concerned with what one guy said/did/wrote a century+ ago you have some sort of problem. Liberalism, conservatism, communism, feudalism, capitalism, etc. are all fail. Only fascism is still acceptable to believe in.
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Nov 1, 2014 21:03
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There are a lot of people here who would, given the opportunity, assassinate Simon Bolivar and Toussaint L'Ouverture because revolutions are incapable of turning out well. I'm snickering at the mental image.
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Nov 5, 2014 15:15
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If we look at the USA during its first 74 years, we see that it hadn't even established universal white male suffrage during this period, and a large chunk of its inhabitants were legally not persons.
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Nov 5, 2014 15:47
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HorseLord posted:I've seen plenty of True American Capitalist Heros describe post 91 as a liberation, and how everyone there is so much better off. Point out that there's now massive wealth inequality and poverty, and how the fall caused shitloads of homelessness and tanked life expectancy, and they stick their fingers in their ears. You got your numbers wrong, anyways, as only about 33% of urbanites had their own dacha. Of course, only 6% of Americans own a second home, comparatively.
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Nov 5, 2014 16:10
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Bob le Moche posted:Can we try using a different measure than per-capita GDP when discussing quality of life? A country where the majority lives in abject poverty can still have a high per-capita GDP as long as the ruling elite is ultra-rich. per-cap GDP is a pretty good measurement for how rich or poor a nation is, and the US is an outlier when it comes to plotting GINI and GDP/Capita together:  (from the Visualizing Economics blog).
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Nov 5, 2014 17:31
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Marxism's application of the labor theory of value (which he adopted from the classical economists) has always only been able to easily describe a section of the economy. Alienation is arguably the more convincing thing to present, given that it speaks to a broader range of people than exploitation does (smallholding farmers, for example, can easily be said to suffer from Marx's third and fourth types of alienation due to the oligopsonies common in agriculture).
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Nov 6, 2014 00:19
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Gantolandon posted:This is not a very good example, because conducting a job interview is actually productive - it helps you get workers able to produce shoes. You participate in the process of making something valuable. The main point is that the owner doesn't even have to do that to get their money. They can hire managers, recruiters and lawyers to make decisions for them and still get the lion's share of the profit. Really, exploitation and surplus value, in the absence of a rigorous way to value labor of all kinds, is best described by looking at the profit of a large corporation like, say, agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, which had a net income of 1 billion dollars after taxes and interest payments last year, and which centralizes the CEO and Chair of the Board positions in one person, Patricia Woertz. This last year was ADM's best year ever, so let's look at her salary from a few years back of 15 million dollars. Let's assume that there are four other people in ADM with similar power and income to Ms. Woertz, for the sake of argument, and that they are not overpaid. In order for ADM's profit to come entirely out of the salaries of the top executives, they are underpaying themselves by more than 90%. If we assume it all comes out of Ms. Woertz's salary, she's paid 2% of her actual value to the company.
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Nov 6, 2014 00:32
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icantfindaname posted:I agree, Marxism won't do much to help anyone Man, you made multiple posts snidely insinuating that the wars of independence in Haiti and Latin America weren't worth it, and now you're down to this kind of hit-and-run?
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Nov 6, 2014 00:39
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icantfindaname posted:Where did I ever mention Bolivar or Louverture? War of independence doesn't equal leftist revolution. In fact, Bolivar was fairly conservative for his time You were talking about how revolutions are a bad thing, and buddy, Latin America and Haiti won their independence through revolutions. I guess it's just "leftist" revolutions that are bad, but given that the Haitian revolutionaries expropriated land to create smallholding farms, they were pretty goddamn left for 1804.
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Nov 6, 2014 00:50
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Ian Winthorpe III posted:And Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after two centuries of independence so I would hardly call their revolution a stirring success. There we go. I was hoping to provoke some unironic musings about whether maybe they should have stayed slaves. But Haiti was pretty prosperous during the second half of the nineteenth century after they managed to pay down the usurious loans they had to take out to pay war reparations to France. Then they suffered from the political turmoil most of the world was going through in the early 20th century and Uncle Sam took a hand.
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Nov 6, 2014 00:59
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icantfindaname posted:it's this. this is the problem. and it's why Marxism isn't the solution, because Marxism doesn't actually address this problem besides blaming it on imperialists, whether that's true or not "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class--neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families--wives, sons, and daughters--work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class."
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Nov 6, 2014 01:00
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Ian Winthorpe III posted:Well my approach is that if something happened then it should have happened because that's the reality we live in. All power to the Haitian people for rebelling against what s no doubt a terrible system, but we should also take from this that revolutions, no matter how heroic and just the motives are, by no means guarantee prosperity or responsible government. Haitians are responsible for the rule of the Duvaliers? Hmm?
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Nov 6, 2014 01:30
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Ian Winthorpe III posted:Yeah, the thought that people in a small, relatively homogenous nation state with substantial natural resources and political sovereignty might be able to improve conditions for their people is laughable huh. I don't know that the guy just asking questions about why countries of blacks and Latinos are poorer than countries of whites and the non-Indian kinds of Asians really has room to start calling people racist or whatever, but to answer your question, Americans are lazier, inferior beings to the Swiss.
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Nov 6, 2014 02:15
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icantfindaname posted:the Swiss speak weird, unintelligible moon German, so no Singaporeans are probably the real master race, but Finland is close too.
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Nov 6, 2014 02:37
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icantfindaname posted:Once again you don't seem to get that Marxist conceptions of use-value vs exchange-value are not by any means universally recognized and are just presenting it as fact. Advertising, or the stock market, or cigarettes, have value that can't be objectively distinguished from that of a comic book or a car, even if you may subjectively think they don't have any Your second paragraph isn't a response to anything he said, and if you're willing to go to bat for cigarettes as valuable, well, hopefully I'll have the chance to help pay for your emphysema treatments in a glorious future of socialized medicine. icantfindaname posted:Leftist infighting is still hilarious, so I think you should keep it up Your posts have convinced me that I actually dislike social liberalism, rather than capitalism, and so I'm going to inflict extreme violence upon you at some point.
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Nov 6, 2014 03:37
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Ian Winthorpe III posted:'What Matters' being the belief in a utopian ideology rather than a realistic appraisal of how human affairs are conducted? What? That sort of "realism" is what led people to assume that slavery was eternal, or that it was impossible to hold civil society together if women voted, or that allowing homosexuality to exist would be the end of humanity. It's conservatism for its own sake, without any ideas, goals, or motivations. Nobody could ever really make a belief system of that.
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Nov 6, 2014 03:40
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icantfindaname posted:Okay so we have you down as "no capitalist ever makes decisions regarding how his capitali is used". I you speak and understand English you will notice this statement is invalidated by even one case of a capitalist involved in the management of his capital. I suspect you're going to go back on this the minute I post this and insist you meant something else though, hence the "pathologically dishonest or trolling". I guess the third option is that you literally have no idea what you're talking about and hinestly cannot even conceive that you're wrong on anything, but I do want to assume you're intelligent and it's worth participating in this discussion You're stupid, willfully so, and I want to call you all the bad words you're not supposed to use in D&D. If you have even a basic familiarity with various corporate corruption scandals or investment dramas (for example, I would recommend James Stewart's DisneyWar for an inside look at both the age of corporate raiding and the age of the golden parachute), you would realize that what Obdicut is saying is effectively true. 99% of the investors in a company do not exert meaningful control over its decisions, and times when they do are noteworthy. There are exceptions, such as in small companies, most privately-traded firms, and firms like IKEA where the majority of voting power is held within the company, but considering that the joint-stock company is one of the archetypal examples of capitalism's power, flipping out like this is frankly an example of you looking at this as a bossfight where by striking someone's glowing red weak point three times you can get a heart container and the McGuffin necessary to get you closer to fighting Ganon.
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Nov 7, 2014 01:03
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wateroverfire posted:Most stock investors are not in the business of running companies. They're managing an investment portfolio to try and make a return. They exercise a whole bunch of executive control over their capital and the quality of their decisions (or the decisions of the manager/s they decided to work with) directly impacts the money they make. They don't give a poo poo about controlling the companies whose securities they own. They're only interested in the securities. You just agreed with Obdicut's argument in its totality, and then called it dumb. Sounds like you should be spiraling away in self-ownage about now.
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Nov 7, 2014 01:55
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JeffersonClay posted:And the act of buying or selling securities affects the price of those securities. Corporations respond to changes in the price of their securities. Does the phrase "maximize shareholder value" ring a bell? Companies have a variety of ways to respond to a fall or rise in stock prices (and thus the price of derivatives and so on), which can't be predicted from the rise or fall of the prices alone. The actual control this represents is pretty limited. We don't say that consumers exert any meaningful control over the operations of a company, despite the fact that they're what generates revenues and thus affect the financial status of the company.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:07
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Friendly Tumour posted:Guys, marxists, look... I'm sure you believe strongly in the whole marxist conception of value and that capitalists contribute nothing of value to economy, but you're not going to convince non-marxists of that. We can see that the world doesn't really work according to your principles. The value of anything isn't defined by the amount of labour put into it, but how much somebody (anybody) is willing to pay for it. Capitalists don't exploit workers, but provide work to do in the first place. If we eliminate the idea that value is determined by labor, we have to ask ourselves why people are paid for doing a job, since they contribute no value to the company, and in fact, every company can have infinite value under pure subjectivism. Even with a social definition of value, we run into the problem that bubbles can never happen under this system. Leaving that aside, no company actually acts as though value is purely subjective. They don't deal with depreciation of capital assets by cooking the books, generally. Abandoning "Marxist" ideas like non-subjective components to value leaves us unable to understand most of the world.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:12
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Friendly Tumour posted:I didn'tsay that labour had no value, I said that the value of anything, including labour, is defined by how much somebody is willing to pay for it. I mean, that's the concensus view of economics, right? Yeah, but it transparently isn't, because nobody actually acts as though value is purely subjective. In fact, even economists ignore that definition when it comes to finance, because there are clear, objective rules for valuing derivatives which everyone uses. wateroverfire posted:Alternately, Marxism uses a peculiar definition of value different from the lay definitions, and it's as useless for understanding the world as the rest of the system. I'm using value to describe the worth of something, dunno what you mean by it. Describe how a capital asset can depreciate in value when you can always cook the books to value it back up again. Describe how bubbles can happen when there's no way to objectively value assets. EDIT: Moving on to the next part of the argument, once we accept the presence of a non-subjective component to value, Marxist/classical theories of value production simply work better for evaluating things than antimaterialist views of value or commodity values, because they eliminate the middleman of figuring out how much gold a haircut is worth. Of course, there's the esoteric split that Obdicut or whoever will bring up with use-value and exchange-value, but that's jargon. Effectronica fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 02:22
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Friendly Tumour posted:Aside from the fact derivitaves are a bit of strange things, they're still defined by buy/sell orders. And I didn't say value was subjective. What somebody is willing to pay for your potatoes or whatever isn't subjective. The definition that you're using argues that value is purely a subjective thing- that is, there is no way to tell someone who wants to buy potatoes for a dollar a pound that they're worth two dollars a pound and come to an agreement from external evidence. This is trivially true, in that we can't really measure the objective value of a potato, or pound of potatoes, but in practice, rotted potatoes are worth less than unrotted ones and so we know that there is some component that is very close to objective, even if it's a percentage and not an absolute.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:35
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Friendly Tumour posted:Sure there is. If there's a buy order out there for potatoes for two dollars a pound, then those potatoes can be sold for two dollars per pound. If there isn't, and you really want to sell those potatoes, you're going to have to settle for whatever is the highest order there is. Unless of course you're willing to put out a sell order for your potatoes for two dollars a pound and wait until somebody buys them. Hmm, you missed what I was saying entirely in favor of talking about commodities exchanges.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:43
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Friendly Tumour posted:I mean, this is how markets work. It's not a thesis, it's a fact. You sell for how much somebody wants to pay, or you wait untill somebody is willing to pay what you want for whatever you're selling. Markets are not the whole of human existence. You can't actually make an eighty-year-old hydraulic press equally valuable to a new hydraulic press just by writing down that they're of the same value, and expect anyone to take it seriously.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:46
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Friendly Tumour posted:Didn't say you could. Why can't you, without some kind of objective value?
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Nov 7, 2014 02:49
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asdf32, do you really think that the CEO of a company is chosen by the shareholders collectively rather than a small group of professionals within the shareholders and the senior management of the company? Because your view seems inconsistent with how large businesses operate.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:55
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Friendly Tumour posted:What. I said you can't say what anything is worth without knowing what somebody wants to pay you for it. What is it so difficult to understand about this? If nobody want to pay for your lovely rear end mechanical press, then it isn't worth poo poo. The end! icantfindaname posted:If you have a captive market sure you can. If the dude is stuck on a desert island and can only buy your product you can charge whatever you want and whatever he can pay Do you know what "depreciation of capital assets" means? Do you understand that when, say, Ford decides it's going to upgrade a production line and replace old automation and so on, they're not going to sell it except piecemeal or as scrap? Economic value exists outside of a market context.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:10
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icantfindaname posted:In fact, to get even more percise whith this value talk, lets say each party to a transaction has a meausre of how much they want something. We can call that 'utility'. Now we can say the price ('value') of a good is based on the interplay of utilities of the actors. We could call those utilities 'supply' and 'demand' even Let's say that you're running a tool factory, stamping out little icantfindanames and asdf32s, and you're considering replacing some of your machinery, but unfortunately, you can't, because value only exists in market transactions.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:13
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icantfindaname posted:I'm sure getting owned by the dude who posts about anime in GBS 8 hours a day See, now you're retreating into personal attacks. But whatever, you're a self-loathing anime-liker, and someday you will realize the truth, grander than anything else- it's okay to live without fear. In any case, your financial obsessions are pretty funny to me, as someone who works in the dying realm of American manufacturing.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:18
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Man, you know, I remember you talking about how great social democracy was, and now you're rejecting the existence of bubbles? Holy poo poo. What the hell kind of (American) liberal are you? An unreconstructed Clintonian?
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Nov 7, 2014 03:21
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icantfindaname posted:Are you marking my name down in a notebook labeled "to be reeducated?" By the way, I said nothing about bubbles. If a market is experiencing a bubble, then the value is inflated from what the expected value is. Notice I didn't say "what it is" but "what it's expected to be". You can't say objectively the bubble value is 'wrong' just that it's expected to crash sometime soon. But I guess precision of language and thought is something Marxism isn't really concerned with much This is a lot of bullshit to get around the fact that bubbles are defined by something being priced higher than its actual value, which is the definition used in like, Krugman or Chang or Quiggin or pretty much any liberal explanation of the housing crisis or the dotcom bubble. I am, in fact, marking you down for extended shoujo treatments when the revolution comes, and also in a little notebook for those whose brains have rotted from exposure to finance without a strong psychological footing. RIP.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:27
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icantfindaname posted:No, you're not reading my posts. Bubbles aren't priced higher than their actual value. They're priced higher than the expected value. These are different things. Do you get that? Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I don't think that's what Krugman ever said, because Krugman's not a Marxist. If you want to get sources go ahead, but you'll be disappointed I get what you're trying to say, I'm saying that it's nonsense. Your split is something you're farting at length about because it's "precise" (you shouldn't have slept through high school chemistry if you think that's a universally good thing), but it doesn't add any meaningful information. How you can sit there with a straight face, as a liberal, and say, "This website with no income, no plan for income, and massive obligations really is worth $500/share, but it will return to the expectation value of $0/share" is beyond me. I'm saying that your model, when applied to Warren Buffett, cannot explain how his investment strategy produced better results than average
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Nov 7, 2014 03:33
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icantfindaname posted:In fact, here you go, here's quotes from Krugman himself saying value is an emergent property coming from markets And yet, he uses "overvalued" many, many times. Clearly, this "precision of thought and speech" is not a priority. I mean, listen to yourself for a moment. You are saying that there's no difference between a company with a strong revenue stream and plenty of assets, and one that has no revenues and no assets, and it's perfectly rational to value theirs shares of stock identically. icantfindaname posted:Did I ever say that? Do you think I have lots of money invested in Twitter or something? Buffet made money because he bet differently on what the expected value of stocks would be, and he was right more than other investors. See, there's no problem here. It all makes sense. I'm sorry an orthodox economist said anime was bad or diddled you as a kid or something, but orthodox economics is actually pretty much right No, he was lucky, because according to you, his investment strategy of studying companies and buying ones that had good reasons to continue growing is meaningless, because it relies on the assumption that there are objective components to value. Not to mention that orthodox economics is still heavily monetarist once you look at policymakers. Effectronica fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 03:39
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icantfindaname posted:No, it relies on him thinking (correctly) that the companies he invested in would increase in stock price more than the market as a whole. You still don't seem to get this distinction. His belief that those stocks would rise in price is because he believes that the price is partially dependent on what the company does. This is antithetical to your belief, but you're ignoring it, because it goes against your fundamental belief that con artistry is a victimless crime. You sleaze. The orthodoxy still holds that monetary policy is the instrument of first resort and fiscal policy is tertiary. You need to look at how things are actually applied, rather than the fact that the freshwater school is less prominent in journals.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:49
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JeffersonClay posted:The IMF came out with a report recently admitting its error in supporting austerity in Europe in 2010. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/international-mensch-fund/ Yeah, let's apply that and consign Marxism-Leninism to the trash heap with Maoism, but without pretending that those are the only Marxist or socialist approaches. I'm fine with that, not being an adherent to either of those ideologies. Communism works pretty great within companies though!
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Nov 7, 2014 03:57
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