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Ciprian Maricon posted:Animal behavior is incredibly complex and is especially in social animals who display signs of understanding of concepts like equity and empathy. None of this actually backs your argument, but this whole line is besides the point. It True Nature of the Heart of Man is only relevant if you're a weirdo anprim making Biotruth arguments about socialism. Instead of trying to use the immortal science of marxism-lenism to create a better man, why not instead say you'd like to create a society that discourages certain behaviors by design (and prohibits others by law)?
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Nov 5, 2020 20:02
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:It seems like you're trying to engage with what you think I mean instead of what I'm actually saying. Greed isn't an immutable force lol. Greed is entirely subjective, it's meaningless to say it is or is not intrinsic. edit: i swear to god ive seen polyamorist weirdoes call people "greedy" for not wanting their partners to gently caress other people.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:05
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I'm not at all interested in what you've heard other people define greed as. I'm talking about greed in the sense of having a base need to hoard material wealth. What counts as "hoarding" is entirely subjective. It's not complicated!! What counts as being greedy depends on who you ask, their current wealth and a bunch of social factors. You can't eliminate greed because greed is redefined based on material circumstances. Is it greedy to buy 2 containers of clorox wipes instead of 1 if you think they'll be sold out next week and you'll run out? Ciprian Maricon posted:Come one man, I get where you're coming from but I'm just trying to point out to this dude that the biotruths idea that animals/people just love to hoard money/food isn't true and some studies where animals share food and people forego money for the benefit of others is a perfectly reasonable take on that. We can talk about the problems with the idea of "innate greed' and what we can really deduce from those studies another point in time. You're under the misconception that greed and altruism are mutually exclusive. They aren't, they're both social constructs (when applied to humans). People aren't robots, they're inherently contradictory
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Nov 5, 2020 20:50
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now replace "squirrels" with kulaks and "food" with grain, and an interesting thing happens (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 5, 2020 20:54
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The Oldest Man posted:The point isn't that a socialist economy will define and ban hoarding as a universal concept, it's that the reward incentive structure to hoard capital wealth that exists in capitalism won't. Socialist economies will still have people trying to collect all the bottlecaps, keep more food than they 'need,' and so on. What a socialist economy makes extremely difficult is the snowball effect where hoarding control of factories and data centers and so on provides an unbounded, compounding ability to dictate terms to everyone else and thus incentivizes that specific type of capital hoarding. I agree with this, but it wasn't what other people were arguing for. A socialist economy should be designed to discourage the personal accumulation of wealth and outright prevent it past some limits. The inherent greed of man (or lack thereof) isn't really applicable. "But if people are inherently greedy, they won't consent to it!" you might say. But at the same time, if people are instead currently socially conditioned to be greedy, then they also won't consent to it. The only way to find out is to actually try it in practice and see what happens, instead of building a theoretical framework that is incapable of explaining why a relatively wealthy person might steal a candy bar from the checkout aisle as anything besides mental illness or inherent evil
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Nov 5, 2020 21:04
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OwlFancier posted:are you ok? Pentecoastal Elites posted:Ah. That's why you're in the thread. Comedy forum.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:05
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enki42 posted:I think it's important to acknowledge the presence of bad actors, and most of the arguments made (at least ones made in some semblance of good faith) don't necessitate everyone to be a bad actor, but acknowledge that some people inevitably will be. After all, if a precondition of socialism is "everyone becomes magically altruistic and no longer cares about wealth", we can skip all the messy economic changes, since no one will even try to accumulate capital in the first place! It's similarly easy to solve the problem of prison abolition if you ignore rapists, or the problem of performing essential but awful jobs under socialism if you say "oh we'll just automate anything people dont like doing" (regardless of whether or not it is feasible or wasteful to do so in a particular case)
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Nov 5, 2020 21:24
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The Oldest Man posted:Prisons protect women from rapists about as well as capitalism protects people from economic bad actors, yes. Cool, then come up with a better solution in your policy proposal instead of treating even the most anodyne critiques of it as bad faith attacks. Ciprian Maricon posted:You made your point clear that you dislike the simplification I used. Cool noted. I do not think greed or altruism are mutually exclusive or that people are robots. Anything else you wanna be pedantic about? I would also like to note for the record that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the monster.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:38
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Ruzihm posted:Adam Frankenstein is a perfectly acceptable name for the monster I'm willing to concede this point to you.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:40
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The Oldest Man posted:This is a bad faith attack, in both venues. It's simply diverting attention from real ongoing harms that have solutions toward harms that exist currently and may well still exist in the future in either case. It's also a pretty good example of middle class and white perfectionism, on both issues. "I won't buy into your project that <prevents your family's being made homeless/prevents your incarceration for life for use as slave labor/prevents your children starving> because <insert issue unsolved in current system that I find more important to solve than your issues>." "Calling out bad faith attacks is the real bad faith attack" is some galaxy brain poo poo. Especially when the stakes here are nonexistent, no one is dying because you are made to look foolish or not on a message board. "Buying into a project" means nothing here, get over yourself. Insisting everyone who doesn't get on board with your half baked post and march arm-in-arm to a beautiful future on the next Maoist offshoot forum is a wrecker is lol, just lol The rest of your post has nothing to do with anything I said, I have no idea what strawman you're even yelling at. Cpt_Obvious posted:Fewer armed police, more therapists. Fewer prisons, more treatment centers. Cure the disease, not the symptom. Thank you, this is the correct (and obvious!) good faith response, and I completely agree with it. And just like that, the most basic criticism (the good faith or bad faith of which is indeterminable, and irrelevant) is easily addressed and disarmed. And so, this post remains pretty much true: enki42 posted:I think it's important to acknowledge the presence of bad actors, and most of the arguments made (at least ones made in some semblance of good faith) don't necessitate everyone to be a bad actor, but acknowledge that some people inevitably will be. After all, if a precondition of socialism is "everyone becomes magically altruistic and no longer cares about wealth", we can skip all the messy economic changes, since no one will even try to accumulate capital in the first place!
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Nov 5, 2020 23:04
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Ytlaya posted:My general belief with this sort of "nature vs nurture" question is that the "null hypothesis" should always be that "nurture" is the cause of something, with there needing to be some sort of direct proof that "nature" was the cause. Does this apply to sharing too? 
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Nov 5, 2020 23:17
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I don't understand what this is supposed to prove. It's not "proving" anything, other than pointing out that some aspects of altruism are largely believed to be learned behaviors.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:23
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Yes, that's kind of the point. You can socialize a child to do anything. Even if you tried to prove it with clickbait. :P And that was the point of me posting that. I'm not sure what the disagreement is here
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Nov 5, 2020 23:26
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Ruzihm posted:i dont think anyone is suggesting that socialism could be self sustainable in a society predominantly populated by toddlers so the relevance that has is a little unclear Oh great, another wrecker...
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Nov 5, 2020 23:27
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Somfin posted:With a clipped, unsourced headline apparently from noted academic journal Today's Parent. Wait, are you contending that teaching children to share (and play nice with each other, and to wear clothes, and not to scream in restaurants) is not a completely normal thing that everyone is familiar with? Are you serious lmao? It's a topic so ubitous that there are countless parenting articles about it. And the key word in the quote you somehow missed there is learned Finally, in case you really have never had to care for young children, here's an actual article on the subject https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3578097/
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Nov 5, 2020 23:36
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Ruzihm posted:Is someone arguing that nobody would be around to teach their toddlers how to share under socialism? I don't really understand the purpose of Slanderer's posting here. You nailed it buddy, good job
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Nov 5, 2020 23:41
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enki42 posted:Why don't you say what you do mean, then? I think you're trying to say that greed is human nature, because altruism is learned? I don't see how that follows - they can both be learned behaviours. Socialize someone to be greedy, and they'll be greedy, socialize them to be altruistic, and they'll be altrusitic. What, no lol. I'm rejecting the notion that humans are inherenty predisposed towards altruism and away from greed, because (a) it's extremely hard to distinguish learned from innate behaviors in people (and in observational studies of primates in the wild) and (b) greed is entirely subjective, more so than altruism in general is, so trying to pin it down as a thing you can specifically learn seems like a fool's errand. That's also not to say that humans are predispoed towards greed and away from altruism, because (a) greed is subjective again and (b) i dont really buy it. But mostly that it doesn't matter what behaviors are learned or innate with regard to socialism, because socialism can't (and doesn't) rely on everyone acting perfectly.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So this is a claim of tabula rasa? The idea that all humans are born as blank slates? I'm saying: who care. Do socialism.
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Nov 6, 2020 01:32
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I think this is important because if humans some have innate drive towards greed (again, as defined as wealth-hoarding at the expense of others), I think communism is impossible in the long term because humans will inevitably reproduce societies where they can satisfy the need to express greed, in the same way that humans will inevitably reproduce societies with clothing and indoor living spaces so they can satisfy the need to protect themselves from the elements. Or maybe you could just, I dunno, try out communism. Just a little. Maybe give it a shot?
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Nov 6, 2020 01:38
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