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I think drawing direct parallels between two radically different societies is always prone to failure, given how different the systems of value and government are, but in a few places there are intersections. - The ability of the ultra-wealthy to basically break apart whatever checks and balances exist in the political system for their own gain. This was a lot easier in Rome, given that you could just bribe the electorate or threaten them, but the slightly more subtle measures in the US are quickly catching up (controlling parts of the media in the form of talk radio and fox news, vast invisible contributions of money, corporations crafting model legislation via ALEC, etc). - Imperial overreach and military spending. If the US actively engages on any more fronts, it's going to basically bankrupt itself. Even if it doesn't, the immiseration of the population will lead to serious social upheaval and continued erosion of civil government (continued warfare led the Romans to basically reject civilian government. The Imperator was initially a supreme general, after all).
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Aug 13, 2017 15:15
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WampaLord posted:Oh, yea, it owns being poor. I'm just loving living it up on my many welfare programs and GMI experiments! I think perhaps he means that if we had full employment, we wouldn't need quite so much welfare. A lot of welfare in the US comes about as a direct result of lovely minimum wages and no job protection. Technically full-employment, higher min wages and unionization would decrease the number of welfare recipients. Corporations underpay their workers partially because they can and partially because they know that the welfare state will pick up the difference (this isn't an excuse to get rid of it however). Basically, welfare can be considered a barometer of dysfunction and more welfare can mean more dysfunction in general, not that the welfare should go away. However, it can go either way. States like Sweden and Norway, which have extensive and comprehensive welfare programs, aren't falling apart or seizing up like the US is today. Those states provide both improved worker rights in the form of better compensation and job protection and penetrating welfare systems like full health care coverage, maternity leave, mandated vacations, free education and other pieces. There is also a difference in the types of welfare. The US system is largely composed of stopgap, last-minute, catastrophic welfare (food stamps, medicaid). Sweden, Canada, et al have lots of comprehensive, preventative welfare that addresses basic needs before they reach breaking point.
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Aug 13, 2017 17:08
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I think you guys are saying the same thing, more or less. Economic failure of the capitalist system for some segments of society and betrayal of the working class by their supposed center-left defenders contributes to racism. I guess I would say on Nov. 8th, the actual support for racism came from a variety sources however, most of them being lower middle class.
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Aug 13, 2017 18:14
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Sneakster posted:Is it maybe, just possible, that you're describing disengagement from a system that's proved itself completely antagonistic to the poor, and you're desperately trying paint them as immoral villains of democracy rather than alienated victims? I don't know why you're attacking me. I'm not trying to paint the poor as anything. Economic dislocation and disengagement definitely leads to a variety of terrible outcomes, including racism. That said, "the poor" are not a monolith and not free of agency. Some poor white people have made a specific set of decisions about how they're going to disengage from the system and in what direction they're going to go. Instead of becoming more radically leftist, they chose, to a certain extent, to become more radically right-wing. Alienation does not necessitate listing towards fascism and being a victim of the economic system does not preclude you from becoming a foot soldier in a race war. The SturmAbteilung recruited heavily from the working classes as well. Also, I didn't really make this point, but racism in the US spans all class boundaries. It's a fundamental identity of many white Americans, rich, middle class and poor, going back several centuries. You can say that it was started as a divide and conquer strategy by the wealthy after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 (and it was), but it's been ingrained ever since. Americans, regardless of their economic class, live in a state deeply inscribed by racist culture and practices. tl;dr Economic and political alienation is a strong factor in WWC racism, but it's not the only factor. The WWC isn't free of agency and being a member of the WWC doesn't preclude you from acting in your own best interests. Being at the intersection of culture, politics and economics makes everyone both a victim and an actor.
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Aug 13, 2017 18:55
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Sneakster posted:Really, really, really not intentional. I think my writing style comes off as accidentally aggressive. Got it. Thanks for explaining that. Sneakster posted:That's still incredibly fallacious reasoning. West Virginia was founded on avoiding slavery and went left when it had the chance, and the left pulled away. The democrats pass nafta, cut welfare, and propped up segregation, but not voting for them is against your own interests. At what point were the poor given a political choice that they didn't take the better one on? I agree with this analysis, but the question still remains about why they decided/were compelled by alienation to join extra-political organizations like right-wing militias instead of left-wing militias, communes and the like. They were betrayed by the "left" and the right, but still tilted in a specific direction. Sneakster posted:How is WWC racism a larger factor than middle and upper class racism? Why is it the poor are held in contempt while the bourgeois have violent hostility to integration despite the closest-to-left wing politics pandering to their interests? This is a good point, but I don't think I was arguing that they should take on a larger proportion of responsibility here. Middle-class racism is probably worse in many cases because the middle class votes and holds many of the putative levers of power. It tends to drive the majority of the social agenda and works as a great booster for upper-class economic agenda. Middle and upper-class racism are also worse in some ways because they're more insidious and hidden. I think that's why more people put the blame on the WWC for their racism, however. It's far more visible and in your face than the middle class voting repeatedly to cut taxes and social assistance programs that disproportionately help PoCs. It also doesn't make them any of less of an imminent and physical threat (as much as say upper class machinations make them a political threat).
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Aug 13, 2017 20:18
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Rime posted:Poland is swinging hard to the right, seven years after the assassination of most of their executive branch. Please stop peddling conspiracy theories here. I think the majority of Poles, except for the hardest right-wingers in PiS, agree that this was an accident. Unlike say the shooting down of the MH-17 (in which it is clearly complicit), Russia basically provided full co-operation and allowed Poland and the international organizations to investigate the scene and all flight recorders. All bodies, including Polish investigators, reached the same conclusion. Pembroke Fuse fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Aug 13, 2017 |
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Aug 13, 2017 20:27
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Sneakster posted:Sorry for any hi-jacking, I just thought it was weird cause it seemed an analysis doomed to failure by describing as the system via the assumed motives of those with the least agency in it. I certainly think that things are moving in this direction. Some city-states will emerge as the dominant centres of power. Unfortunately, cities actually need a significant amount of countryside to provide energy and food, and the logistics to deliver and distribute the goods. Any serious upheaval threatens the survival of cities simply because they're such complicated organisms. If the food shipments stop coming, everyone in the concrete jungle starves. If power lines are cut, cities stop functioning. So, if they can survive the upheavals and build up enough sustainable infrastructure, cities can flourish. If they can't, it's back to the farms for the survivors (at best).
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Aug 13, 2017 20:35
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asdf32 posted:But a large percentage of poor and working class people supported Trump who has zero to offer them. That's the thing to look at. The particulars of the problems we face aren't anywhere near as interesting as they seem because problems are inevitable (and especially problems of power concentration). By its very nature, Capitalism undermines democracy. See Peter Thiel, Ayn Rand and the Dark Enlightenment in general.
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Aug 13, 2017 20:37
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Rime posted:Meh. The country has gone to hell since that event, and is currently attempting to strip the judiciary of independence. This follows having cracked down on the media, limited public gatherings, and the usual list of bullshit you associate with authoritarian eastern european failed states. The decline in internal affairs can't be hand waved away. I was referring to the part where you stated that President Lech Kaczyński, his wife and General Staff had been assassinated (presumably by Russia). That's a conspiracy theory actually peddled by the far right in Poland. I'm not hand-waving away what PiS/Law and Justice is doing, which is terrible and needs to be stopped by the coalition.
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Aug 13, 2017 20:42
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Doorknob Slobber posted:for the sake of this thread are we ignoring climate change and super bugs and poo poo? I feel like those are going to contribute a lot to the fall of western civilization over the coming decades. Yeah, there is already a thread for Climate change horror. I think that will do us in, in the end (unless we put in a massive effort very, very soon), but let's leave it out for the sake of this thought experiment. I guess you could also say that stable, interconnected polities are the basis for combatting climate change and if western civ falls apart, we won't be able to combat it as effectively (China/India notwithstanding).
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Aug 13, 2017 21:39
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asdf32 posted:Right it's not in material decline. What's remarkable is to watch the left and the right both pretend they're under constant siege. Social welfare decline was a bullet point in the OP yet social welfare hasn't really declined anywhere ever but has generally increased in the western world steadily for decades including in the U.S. Relative social welfare has declined however in the form of increased income inequality and stagnation of social mobility. Also, automation will make some of that decline far more permanent and harder to ignore.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:17
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rudatron posted:GDP is up up up, but that doesn't match the experience of real people, who have seen their real wages stagnating or reversing. The only think that keeps pushing life expectancy and other metrics up is technological progress bringing the marginal costs (cost per unit) down, because the benefits of increases in productivity have only filtered up. Life expectancy in the US is starting to level out, mostly because in wealthier states it rising, while in poorer states it is actually starting to fall: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/05/08/u-s-life-expectancy-varies-by-more-than-20-years-from-county-to-county/
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Aug 14, 2017 03:39
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asdf32 posted:
Wait... is that adjusted for inflation? Because $4,000 in 1982 is roughly $11, 800 in 2017. So in that case welfare spending would have gone up to match inflation only with no additional increases.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:45
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rudatron posted:American adversaries are well aware of US technological and global logistical supremacy, but building and maintaining such a system has a cost to it, and the US real economy hasn't advanced comparably to match. It's also all the pork-barrel military spending that went with it. See F-35, that catamaran they built for the Navy and then dry-docked because it rotted out in a year and other random crap that gets shelved after a short stint in the real world.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:52
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asdf32 posted:Yes. That's what "2014 dollars" means. I missed that. I retract my point. However, it's still basically poverty line or below poverty line spending.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:01
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Fojar38 posted:I, too, get all of my information on the performance of military technology from GBS threads There is a thread about someone who worked as a defence contractor right here in D&D. I do also nip out to GIP or whatever it's called these days. Also, the F-35 is really expensive, as were some of the recent Navy projects that didn't really bear fruit.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:38
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Fojar38 posted:The F-35 was absurdly expensive and also unnecessarily expensive. But the idea that it was a trillion dollars for no returns and the plane can't fly in the rain or whatever the current meme is is not true. Eh, I didn't claim it couldn't fly, but I should have articulated my problem with it a bit more specifically (i.e expensive and kind of doesn't do what anyone actually wants)
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Aug 14, 2017 04:46
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