Politics thread (USA Elections 2016) - Page 144

On July 08 2019 07:52 Baalim wrote: sigh, you are making very difficult to discuss in good faith. I said that its gets progressivly more difficult for a state to be authoritarian the more economically right they go, having no control of the economy gives less tool for control and authority to the state, I think that is pretty obvious, that doesn't mean that in contrast anything on the left has to be authoritarian, I didnt say that.

That's not really the case you were making because you personalized it to attack my ideology which is rooted in decentralization. You imply that 'leftist economics' are always geared towards centralizing power which is incredibly ignorant and can only come from bad faith at this point given how many times this has been clarified from the very beginning of our interactions on this website.

As for this idea of control and authoritarianism, that is provably untrue when you have learned to think about these things structurally/systemically instead of from the point of reference of individual human responsibility. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it obscures its violence and diffuses responsibility.

People who think like you don't take the externalities of the system into full account, they want to only look at human heads, and that's why you get fooled into thinking authoritarianism and violence is more significant in left-wing politics. This is why Chomsky says that, no matter what you actually believe, if you subscribe to right-wing libertarian economics, you are necessarily deeply authoritarian. The violence and authoritarianism is rooted in the market forces and the type of relationships of dominance and subordination that the system necessitates. The other point is that it also necessitates the unjust and damaging privatization of profits and socialization of losses. It's not a flaw of human morality but an intrinsic part of how the system can function.

The other critical thing to acknowledge is that control doesn't only come from disciplinary action, i.e. from the top down. Neoliberalism is the greatest system of control to ever exist because most people don't even see the forms of control exerted upon them. Unlike the ancient Greek ideal of creating wise and informed citizens who participate in politics and can appreciate the best that life has to offer, i.e. art and philosophy, its aim is to atomize people, make them deficient in a number of ways so that it is easier to exploit them by creating desires in them and fulfilling them. It creates mechanistic humans, tools to be exploited for the purposes of production and consumption only. There is no need for dictatorial, top-down control when the ideology of the market has seeped so deeply into personal life as to render everyone a self-exploiting subject concerned with never-ending growth/improvement and efficiency.

Life itself is up for sale. That's what "earning a living" means, and when you don't earn enough to deal with awful luck, like illness, and can't purchase what you need to survive, you die.

I said marxist because it encompasses socialism and communism, the nazis never intended to give the means of production to the people, so they weren't communists.

Exactly my point when it comes to NK. NK is a de facto absolute monarchy, they are absolutely not working towards a classless/moneyless society, yet you have no problem calling them communist.

WTF, when did I ever said anything remotely like cultural marxism about converting people and being deceptive?, I've never denied the existence of anarchists or said your beliefs were not valid (you are the one who constantly does that to me).

You explicitly said that when my ideology is applied on a large enough scale, it leads to absolute tyranny and kills many millions of people so I should shut the fuck up.

You said that the free market is an unfalsifiable fairy tale, because it inevitably corrupts to THIS, which is a good argument but for a cynical realist, but its an astonishing ironic argument for somebody who holds your political beliefs.

It doesn't "corrupt" into this because it's a false dichotomy, there is no crony capitalism and pure capitalism dichotomy. That's the fairytale. I know that it's a fairytale because I know all of the assumptions that you are making in order to have this belief, and they are not founded on anything real. The basis of it is the belief that man is, in essence, a bartering, self-interested animal, and there is no evidence for this, quite the contrary. It is the epitome of a just-so story.

I never said capitalism is the end of story, in fact I said that when we reach a post-scarcity future its very likely some form of collectivism would be better, hard to say for sure though, its already difficult enough to especulate what system is best on our time.

The implication is always there in the things you say even when it is not explicit as above. There's this thing called capitalism that works reasonably well, and since it works reasonably well and everything else (which all collapses under the topic of 'Marxism' from your perspective) hasn't worked well, then there's no need to actively think about replacing it, since it's not yet obsolete. But the evidence that it is obsolete and on the verge of destroying itself is already staggering. It has managed to avoid it by hiding its contradictions for a long time, but that time is up. Right-wing UBI might prolong it a little bit, but not for much longer, especially because of the migrant crisis. If you can't see that we have to be imagining something different now, you won't see it in 10 years when the climate crisis is much worse than it is now, which is to say you won't see it before it's too late, so it's futile to even discuss it at this point.

Anarchy being the only way to save human civilization? Wow, do you literally mean this?

I've said it from the beginning. I don't believe human civilization will survive in a class-based system as it is incompatible with an ecological society: the domination of people over people and the domination of man over nature co-create themselves. It has to move away from classes and strictly individual and identitarian group interests and into species-interest, that is to say, function-based activity rather than profit-based activity or any kind of activity that closes itself off based on arbitrary and archaic values like the supremacy of one's gender, race or nation. I'm not talking about becoming purely other-regarding here, i.e. not acting out of ego, I'm talking about complementarity: the understanding that the well-being of the self is entirely dependent on the well-being of the larger society and the planet as a whole.

"No longer are we faced with Marx's famous choice of socialism or barbarism; we are confronted with the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or annihilation." - Murray Bookchin, "Post-Scarcity Anarchism"

They and them typically just mean gender neutral pronouns for queer folk? I always feel like I'm behind on this stuff since I don't have any LBGTQAI+ friends anymore.

On July 08 2019 08:41 Spitfiree wrote: Show nested quote + On July 07 2019 01:02 Baalim wrote: I've read Taleb Nassim criticism of IQ tests, apparently they are terrible in measuring cognitive habilities above 100, the variance is massive, for example the top 20% janitors score higher than the bottom 20% doctors, but they are accurate in below 100 scores. Problem is Taleb completely disregards IQ as any type of factor and ignores data that doesn't suit him. I mostly agree with him since we don't really understand what exactly does it measures and is sort of a test that bases its arguments on the data from results, even though there is no data provoking the source of the test, but you can't ignore some statistics - more on that when I have more than 3 minutes to spend Then again JP is a complete moron

Yup I noticed it too, he isn't making an impartial statistical debunking of IQ, he already has a conclusion and tries to prove it with statistics, and he is right, the noise above 100 IQ is very high, and just tracing average lines in dispersion graphics with such noise is simply stupid., but this isn't the case for sub-100 IQs, in there the tests seem to have little noise and they seem to be quite acurate.

On July 08 2019 09:42 Stroggoz wrote: As for IQ tests they have all sorts of functions, they used to be 'proofs' for eugenics and anti-immigration nativism in the 1920's, that is not so popular anymore apart from maybe the bell curve, so they are mostly just an ego test. If you take one and think it means you're smart, you've been tested positive for having an ego.

Thats definitelly not true, you can talk how they are misused, how the statistical results are being misinterpreted how what it measures isn't an all encompassing intelligence however, its not just a test for ego, you can tell if somebody has an IQ of 70 from 120 in a 2 minute conversation, which means, it is a measure of some cognitive ability.

I don't know to how extent people of certain intelligence can be taught things, but at a threshold it becomes a challenge, I think its difficult to understand until you personally have experiences with people who would rank low in the IQ scale.

On July 08 2019 18:32 Loco wrote: It would be hilarious if it wasn't such blatant dog whistling for Bell Curve pushing 'race realists'. It's no surprise though, we know he's an essentialist when it comes to gender and other things, and he's had these discussions with open racists like Molyneux before and didn't push back on it. It's also hilarious when these people pretend like this "truth" is so damaging and it personally hurt them when they learned about it, like when Molyneux went on the Rubin show and made this whole theatrical performance about how some races are genetically inferior to him and he felt completely devastated emotionally when he learned about it. Peterson is doing something similar here, and just trying to keep plausible deniability for saying that there is no good solution, implying that between social Darwinism and a welfare state there's no clear winner.

Has JBP talked about race specifically? because I find it troublesome that when someone discusses the challenges of unintelligent people in a world that grows rapidly in complexity is seen as in bad faith basically making the whole subject taboo.

Then you have perhaps the ultimate irony: he had Norman Doidge write his last book's preface. Doidge is pretty famous for his book on neuroplasticity. It takes several cases of people who had severe trauma to the head, or congenital cognitive problems, and it shows that because of neuroplasticity they can regain lost functions or become really good at certain tasks if they train for it. Some of the cases are really incredible.

Why would that be ironic? JBP said that increasing intelligence is psychology's holy grail, do you think he doesn't mean it and that what he really wants is to massacre the dummies? come on.

What is your point with neuroplasticity, that intelligence can be increased or that all brains are physiologicaly capable of the same tasks and there is no such thing as a naturally brighter mind?

On July 08 2019 19:11 Loco wrote: That's not really the case you were making because you personalized it to attack my ideology which is rooted in decentralization. You imply that 'leftist economics' are always geared towards centralizing power which is incredibly ignorant and can only come from bad faith at this point given how many times this has been clarified from the very beginning of our interactions on this website.

I dont imply this

As for this idea of control and authoritarianism, that is provably untrue when you have learned to think about these things structurally/systemically instead of from the point of reference of individual human responsibility. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it obscures its violence and diffuses responsibility. People who think like you don't take the externalities of the system into full account, they want to only look at human heads, and that's why you get fooled into thinking authoritarianism and violence is more significant in left-wing politics. This is why Chomsky says that, no matter what you actually believe, if you subscribe to right-wing libertarian economics, you are necessarily deeply authoritarian. The violence and authoritarianism is rooted in the market forces and the type of relationships of dominance and subordination that the system necessitates. The other point is that it also necessitates the unjust and damaging privatization of profits and socialization of losses. It's not a flaw of human morality but an intrinsic part of how the system can function. The other critical thing to acknowledge is that control doesn't only come from disciplinary action, i.e. from the top down. Neoliberalism is the greatest system of control to ever exist because most people don't even see the forms of control exerted upon them. Unlike the ancient Greek ideal of creating wise and informed citizens who participate in politics and can appreciate the best that life has to offer, i.e. art and philosophy, its aim is to atomize people, make them deficient in a number of ways so that it is easier to exploit them by creating desires in them and fulfilling them. It creates mechanistic humans, tools to be exploited for the purposes of production and consumption only. There is no need for dictatorial, top-down control when the ideology of the market has seeped so deeply into personal life as to render everyone a self-exploiting subject concerned with never-ending growth/improvement and efficiency.

Our species have lived under dozens of different systems, its not the systems, its us.

You think capitalism is doing this to us but its the other way around, you just are lacking imagination to figure out what we will do to your particular branch of anarchism

Exactly my point when it comes to NK. NK is a de facto absolute monarchy, they are absolutely not working towards a classless/moneyless society, yet you have no problem calling them communist.

Well they didn't reach the utopia, you still call the corporate-state inbred system in the US capitalilsm.

You explicitly said that when my ideology is applied on a large enough scale, it leads to absolute tyranny and kills many millions of people so I should shut the fuck up.

And how is that me talking about cultural marxism?, I say that because you say my system can't be applied, its a fairy tale, and I'm saying is that so is yours, but with an sad sad ending.

I'm not saying its necessarel true it always ends up like that, but at least have the decency to not talk about fairy tales.

It doesn't "corrupt" into this because it's a false dichotomy, there is no crony capitalism and pure capitalism dichotomy. That's the fairytale. I know that it's a fairytale because I know all of the assumptions that you are making in order to have this belief, and they are not founded on anything real. The basis of it is the belief that man is, in essence, a bartering, self-interested animal, and there is no evidence for this, quite the contrary. It is the epitome of a just-so story.

It is based upon flawed humans, not purely self-interested, my system requires the consumer to make moral choices over personal benefit like paying extra for ethical brands etc.

The implication is always there in the things you say even when it is not explicit as above. There's this thing called capitalism that works reasonably well, and since it works reasonably well and everything else (which all collapses under the topic of 'Marxism' from your perspective) hasn't worked well, then there's no need to actively think about replacing it, since it's not yet obsolete. But the evidence that it is obsolete and on the verge of destroying itself is already staggering. It has managed to avoid it by hiding its contradictions for a long time, but that time is up. Right-wing UBI might prolong it a little bit, but not for much longer, especially because of the migrant crisis. If you can't see that we have to be imagining something different now, you won't see it in 10 years when the climate crisis is much worse than it is now, which is to say you won't see it before it's too late, so it's futile to even discuss it at this point.

We certanly don't share the cataclysmic view of the world you have.

I've said it from the beginning. I don't believe human civilization will survive in a class-based system as it is incompatible with an ecological society: the domination of people over people and the domination of man over nature co-create themselves. It has to move away from classes and strictly individual and identitarian group interests and into species-interest, that is to say, function-based activity rather than profit-based activity or any kind of activity that closes itself off based on arbitrary and archaic values like the supremacy of one's gender, race or nation. I'm not talking about becoming purely other-regarding here, i.e. not acting out of ego, I'm talking about complementarity: the understanding that the well-being of the self is entirely dependent on the well-being of the larger society and the planet as a whole. "No longer are we faced with Marx's famous choice of socialism or barbarism; we are confronted with the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or annihilation." - Murray Bookchin, "Post-Scarcity Anarchism"

Describe the end of human civilization, how does this happen?

What you're saying when you say "the problem is us" is that the problem is "human nature". If that were the case, then we would see the same propensity towards violence and oppression in all places and times, irrespective of organizational structures, but we don't, and the anthropological/archaeological data is very clear on that, so the different socio-economic systems matter immensely. (And it's not just a matter of how much more damage we can do because of the advancement of technology.) Making some blanket generalization that "humans have always been violent therefore social organization doesn't matter" is a non-sequitur because our goal is to study violence in order to minimize it by understanding its preconditions, it isn't to completely eliminate it. We have gone over this before.

The second point is that science is relatively recent. Neuroscience in particular was still in its infancy 60 years ago. That's a blip in time. Consider that we didn't understand ourselves at all at the biological level prior to that, though there have been some very insightful people who "guessed" right: poets, philosophers, writers. The fact is, knowledge changes us as it changes the scope of what we can do; we can gain more autonomy, but we still always remain dependent on environmental and social resources in order to exist. Because of technical efficiency, we should also be getting more time, but we aren't. That was the promise of capitalism from the start, and it has failed to deliver, because the wealthy are addicted to accumulating more wealth and they want to keep the population struggling.

There is a very important reason why we cannot have more time for ourselves: because thinking individuals are a threat to capitalism. Capitalism thrives on obedience and order, it opposes and normalizes deviance unless it can make a profit out of it. There is nothing that capitalism is more opposed to than freedom. It therefore has to sell a synthetic version of it, an illusion. The illusion of the fulfilled consumer, and the illusion of the fulfilled self-exploitative subject. This is necessary because only a minority of people will ascend any dominance hierarchy and be gratified with their place in society. The rest have to suffer being dominated (and humiliated) on a daily basis, but this is much easier to bear if they can be convinced that there is no alternative, and that most people have it worse than them.

Life gets more difficult once you realize that there is nothing fundamental about dominance hierarchies and that knowledge can radically transform human relationships because most people aren't on that boat with you and most likely never will be due to (1) identity protective cognition and (2) informational deficit promoted by neoliberalism: a global socio-economic system that forces most people to work without receiving a living wage, and when they aren't working, they are drowned in irrelevancies to keep them docile and servile.

And how is that me talking about cultural marxism?, I say that because you say my system can't be applied, its a fairy tale, and I'm saying is that so is yours, but with an sad sad ending.

We both know that this is an apples and oranges comparison, because relatively egalitarian/non-hierarchical mass societies have existed throughout history and they still exist now, whereas your ideology is purely theoretical and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Another thing that could be done is to bring some Somali people at the height of your an-cap experiment in a lab along with some people from Rojava and test their health markers, you will understand very quickly what I mean when I talk about a functioning society (a functioning whole is mirrored in the functioning of its constitutive elements). The whole can only be as healthy as the parts and vice versa.

Your denial that I support a working form of anarchism by frequently attempting to tie me to authoritarian communist/socialist ideologies can only be based on an underlying belief in Cultural Marxism if it isn't purely made to spite me in the most unimaginably childish manner. I know that you have said that you were doing it on purpose before because you think I'm personally attacking you by discrediting an-capitalism, but in this instance it was quite different, you were seriously confining all leftism to ideologies that lead to what can be seen in NK, Cuba and Venezuela. If you were being honest and inquisitive you would criticize me along the same lines as most people do, saying that anarchist societies only work when they are small, that they are easy to destroy from the outside, etc, instead of relying on these bizarre comparisons with capitalist states and monarchies.

Perhaps the most important part of this disagreement is that you refuse to acknowledge that your ideology is one dealing with degrees. You believe that deregulation is good on a scale, it isn't only good when the government is completely gone, which is evidenced by your being unsure and promoting a 'libertarian republic'. So, if deregulation is good on a scale, and maybe with some rare exceptions, then the more deregulation the better, so why can't I criticize your ideology right now at least in part? I can see the effects of more or less deregulation in different economies, can't I? So, even if I left aside the 'privatization of profits and socialization of losses' that you don't acknowledge, it remains that I can still attack it and shred it to pieces all the same by looking at the empirical evidence. Again my first instinct is to compare the health markers of people living under these conditions in order to have an idea about how good the society is, whereas you might just be tempted to look at GDP and the material goods that people possess.

Describe the end of human civilization, how does this happen?

There is no way to describe a precise course of events, we can only look at the logic that dominates society/international relationships and various trends and see that it cannot be sustained for long. We can certainly say that nuclear war and runaway climate change are the two explicit threats that threaten to destroy human civilization and that we are doing absolutely nothing to avoid them right now, even though we have known about them for many decades. It shows that those with power have their own agenda, which is to disregard the future for the now (assuming they are aware of it). Of course there are well-intentioned people working within the system trying to change it, but they fail to understand that the systems of dominance that are in place are not going to be made obsolete from within. Their role should be above all to use their position to encourage grassroots action.

The disagreements that we have re "human nature" and the "cataclysmic view" are things that you can come to deduce for yourself if you understand a relatively simple concept in science called feedback. You don't need me to argue for it, you just need to be curious enough to try to understand what feedback loops are and what their implications are at different levels of organization/within different complex systems.

Because of feedback we cannot talk of an essentialist human nature anymore, it's been definitively discredited, and because of feedback we have to accept that capitalism -- 'growthism' -- spells out the death of human civilization as we know it. I know that you think that this is ideological, but it is merely factual. There is no controversy around these topics among scientists in their respective fields, much the same as there is no controversy around the fact that we are the products of biological evolution. There is disagreement on the finer details of it, but there is no disagreement as to the central understanding of each theory.

We are well on track to exterminate ourselves and we have exterminated most of the wildlife already as part of the 6th mass extinction. Capitalism has been around for less than 0.0000001% of the Earth's life and we have managed to create a mass extinction in that little amount of time. The reason is not that we are wicked, it is that we are ignorant as a collective. Ignorance is an information deficit problem, so it is a pedagogical challenge, not a strictly biological obstacle. And information deficit is something that is desired in all societies of control, whether they are authoritarian like NK or neoliberal, that's why they have to both be resisted. They both maintain themselves by restricting the flow of threatening information and encouraging the flow of information that benefits them. It's important not to disregard the biological realm though because biology is hijackable and neoliberalism offers the ultimate tools of control for that purpose. What could be better than a slave that doesn't know that it is a slave? A slave that enslaves itself to serve a productivist death-cult? There is no risk of mutiny there, unlike within a disciplinary relationship.

On July 09 2019 05:58 Loco wrote:Capitalism has been around for less than 0.0000001% of the Earth's life and we have managed to create a mass extinction in that little amount of time

Capitalism Through The Ages: 2014 to Present, John Loco (Quillette and Breitbart are Fascists University Press, 2019)

On July 09 2019 17:12 Santafairy wrote: Show nested quote + On July 09 2019 05:58 Loco wrote:Capitalism has been around for less than 0.0000001% of the Earth's life and we have managed to create a mass extinction in that little amount of time Capitalism Through The Ages: 2014 to Present, John Loco (Quillette and Breitbart are Fascists University Press, 2019)

lol, you criticized him over the most minor of things that no would even care about and you're still wrong.

Just lightening the mood, please don't take one joke as an off hand dismissal of the work and thought that's going into this discussion

+ Show Spoiler +

On July 09 2019 05:58 Loco wrote: What you're saying when you say "the problem is us" is that the problem is "human nature". If that were the case, then we would see the same propensity towards violence and oppression in all places and times, irrespective of organizational structures, but we don't, and the anthropological/archaeological data is very clear on that, so the different socio-economic systems matter immensely. (And it's not just a matter of how much more damage we can do because of the advancement of technology.) Making some blanket generalization that "humans have always been violent therefore social organization doesn't matter" is a non-sequitur because our goal is to study violence in order to minimize it by understanding its preconditions, it isn't to completely eliminate it. We have gone over this before.

I'm not saying all the systems are the same, I'm saying is that capitalism isn't what is making us mindless consumers and all these things you mention, its our natural tendencies in the system, you believe people will willingly work hard because they are going to be fulfilled, they will gleefully clean toilets but you don't take into consideration our natural proclivities because you belive these are the result of the system and not inherent, because you believe in some weird evolutionary denialism that paints us as perfectly plastic, thats why you refuse to acknowledge the scandinavian paradox regarding gender preferences and you seem to have alike ideas regarding intelligence.

The second point is that science is relatively recent. Neuroscience in particular was still in its infancy 60 years ago. That's a blip in time. Consider that we didn't understand ourselves at all at the biological level prior to that, though there have been some very insightful people who "guessed" right: poets, philosophers, writers. The fact is, knowledge changes us as it changes the scope of what we can do; we can gain more autonomy, but we still always remain dependent on environmental and social resources in order to exist. Because of technical efficiency, we should also be getting more time, but we aren't. That was the promise of capitalism from the start, and it has failed to deliver, because the wealthy are addicted to accumulating more wealth and they want to keep the population struggling.

Except that our living conditions are much greater than they were 100 years ago are you fucking kidding? we work less, on easier jobs, we live longer etc, the promises were delivered we are better off than 100 years ago in virtually every single metric you can think of.

There is a very important reason why we cannot have more time for ourselves: because thinking individuals are a threat to capitalism. Capitalism thrives on obedience and order, it opposes and normalizes deviance unless it can make a profit out of it. There is nothing that capitalism is more opposed to than freedom. It therefore has to sell a synthetic version of it, an illusion. The illusion of the fulfilled consumer, and the illusion of the fulfilled self-exploitative subject. This is necessary because only a minority of people will ascend any dominance hierarchy and be gratified with their place in society. The rest have to suffer being dominated (and humiliated) on a daily basis, but this is much easier to bear if they can be convinced that there is no alternative, and that most people have it worse than them.

How does Capitalism oposes deviance? the free market doesn't give a shit if you want to use a fursuit and yiff with your weird friends.

Why do you think work is humilliating?

We both know that this is an apples and oranges comparison, because relatively egalitarian/non-hierarchical mass societies have existed throughout history and they still exist now, whereas your ideology is purely theoretical and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Another thing that could be done is to bring some Somali people at the height of your an-cap experiment in a lab along with some people from Rojava and test their health markers, you will understand very quickly what I mean when I talk about a functioning society (a functioning whole is mirrored in the functioning of its constitutive elements). The whole can only be as healthy as the parts and vice versa.

No we both dont know that, Somalia is an actual contry, not a rural village.

Your denial that I support a working form of anarchism by frequently attempting to tie me to authoritarian communist/socialist ideologies can only be based on an underlying belief in Cultural Marxism if it isn't purely made to spite me in the most unimaginably childish manner. I know that you have said that you were doing it on purpose before because you think I'm personally attacking you by discrediting an-capitalism, but in this instance it was quite different, you were seriously confining all leftism to ideologies that lead to what can be seen in NK, Cuba and Venezuela. If you were being honest and inquisitive you would criticize me along the same lines as most people do, saying that anarchist societies only work when they are small, that they are easy to destroy from the outside, etc, instead of relying on these bizarre comparisons with capitalist states and monarchies.

I said I called YOU a communist because you call me neoliberal, but I do believe leftist anarchy collapses at big scale, I've used that phrase many times "big scale", and I dont mean from external threats.

Perhaps the most important part of this disagreement is that you refuse to acknowledge that your ideology is one dealing with degrees. You believe that deregulation is good on a scale, it isn't only good when the government is completely gone, which is evidenced by your being unsure and promoting a 'libertarian republic'. So, if deregulation is good on a scale, and maybe with some rare exceptions, then the more deregulation the better, so why can't I criticize your ideology right now at least in part? I can see the effects of more or less deregulation in different economies, can't I? So, even if I left aside the 'privatization of profits and socialization of losses' that you don't acknowledge, it remains that I can still attack it and shred it to pieces all the same by looking at the empirical evidence. Again my first instinct is to compare the health markers of people living under these conditions in order to have an idea about how good the society is, whereas you might just be tempted to look at GDP and the material goods that people possess.

I'm not sure what you mean, yes you can criticize my ideology.

Also what do you mean privatization of profits and socialization of losses? That usually refers to bailouts which you probably know where I stand regarding those.

dont know what you mean with health markers but probably some shoddy shit regarding mental health, and yeah I base a lot on economics because I rather be a middle-class Swede than a poor etiophian, and no I don't care if Swedes commit more suicide or that ethipians have such a warm heart or whatever abstract metric you come up with.

There is no way to describe a precise course of events, we can only look at the logic that dominates society/international relationships and various trends and see that it cannot be sustained for long. We can certainly say that nuclear war and runaway climate change are the two explicit threats that threaten to destroy human civilization and that we are doing absolutely nothing to avoid them right now, even though we have known about them for many decades. It shows that those with power have their own agenda, which is to disregard the future for the now (assuming they are aware of it). Of course there are well-intentioned people working within the system trying to change it, but they fail to understand that the systems of dominance that are in place are not going to be made obsolete from within. Their role should be above all to use their position to encourage grassroots action. The disagreements that we have re "human nature" and the "cataclysmic view" are things that you can come to deduce for yourself if you understand a relatively simple concept in science called feedback. You don't need me to argue for it, you just need to be curious enough to try to understand what feedback loops are and what their implications are at different levels of organization/within different complex systems. Because of feedback we cannot talk of an essentialist human nature anymore, it's been definitively discredited, and because of feedback we have to accept that capitalism -- 'growthism' -- spells out the death of human civilization as we know it. I know that you think that this is ideological, but it is merely factual. There is no controversy around these topics among scientists in their respective fields, much the same as there is no controversy around the fact that we are the products of biological evolution. There is disagreement on the finer details of it, but there is no disagreement as to the central understanding of each theory. We are well on track to exterminate ourselves and we have exterminated most of the wildlife already as part of the 6th mass extinction. Capitalism has been around for less than 0.0000001% of the Earth's life and we have managed to create a mass extinction in that little amount of time. The reason is not that we are wicked, it is that we are ignorant as a collective. Ignorance is an information deficit problem, so it is a pedagogical challenge, not a strictly biological obstacle. And information deficit is something that is desired in all societies of control, whether they are authoritarian like NK or neoliberal, that's why they have to both be resisted. They both maintain themselves by restricting the flow of threatening information and encouraging the flow of information that benefits them. It's important not to disregard the biological realm though because biology is hijackable and neoliberalism offers the ultimate tools of control for that purpose. What could be better than a slave that doesn't know that it is a slave? A slave that enslaves itself to serve a productivist death-cult? There is no risk of mutiny there, unlike within a disciplinary relationship.

Its such a retarded way to argue to say "human civilization will end, and everybody informed about it knows it, its as much of a fact as evolution" That is the kind of shit i expect from a man with no pants and cardboard sign at a stop-sign.

The mass extintion is due to exponential population growth and industrialization, not capitalism, but I suppose we would have killed less animals if we fucked less and lived in shit-huts.

The poweful don't have an agenda, stop this illuminaty shit, Bill Gates is using his wealth to improve the living standars in africa, Jeff Bezos doesn't seem to give a shit, Musk is pushing for clean energy, Soros donates to left wing causes and the Koch to righ win ones, they aren't an organized group trying to scorche the earth. there is nobody at the steering wheel.

mindless consumerism and climate change are both results of a combination of technolical development in the hands of institutions that are anti-democratic. Mostly it is the result of capitalists, and sometimes a result of combined capitalist and state oppression as in the case of china. The silicon valley companies have developed new methods for essentially farming data on human behavior-a technological development, but it is not accepted by the public according to polls, so in a democratic society we wouldn't have surveillience capitalism. The silicon valley corporations are fundamentally anti-democratic, as chomsky points out private power is totalitarian in nature. The public plays no role in choosing whether they want to be surveilled for mass consumption or not.

I guess you could blame population growth as a contributing cause for climate change, but it's strange to point to this and not the far greater threat of capitalist interests. The countries where population growth can be halted in a non oppressive and voluntary way are mostly third world nations, essentially countries that are pretty low on the scale of greenhouse gas emission (compared to the rich).

Of course the powerful have an agenda, you can find out what it is from closely following campaign finance and simply asking the powerful what they want to get out of politics, as some political scientists have done. Their interests are not the same as the public interests or global public interest. This has been the downfall of quite a few civlizations before.

On July 10 2019 00:47 Stroggoz wrote: mindless consumerism and climate change are both results of a combination of technolical development in the hands of institutions that are anti-democratic. Mostly it is the result of capitalists, and sometimes a result of combined capitalist and state oppression as in the case of china. The silicon valley companies have developed new methods for essentially farming data on human behavior-a technological development, but it is not accepted by the public according to polls, so in a democratic society we wouldn't have surveillience capitalism. The silicon valley corporations are fundamentally anti-democratic, as chomsky points out private power is totalitarian in nature. The public plays no role in choosing whether they want to be surveilled for mass consumption or not. Of course the powerful have an agenda, you can find out what it is from closely following campaign finance and simply asking the powerful what they want to get out of politics, as some political scientists have done. Their interests are not the same as the public interests or global public interest. This has been the downfall of quite a few civlizations before.

Industrialization was the process of scientific advance and populatin growth, the USSR was just as industrialized and pollutant under other economic model, China was too busy trying not to starve to death, so again, we could have avoided all this harm to the environment if only we didn't reproduce, lived in shit-huts and died of disentery at 35yo.


The ones who created undemocratic mass surveillance was the state, I don't recall the american's to vote for the NSA, or even being told about it before Snowden, and look now what China is doing, but you are concerned about targeted advertizement, which we are unwilling participants of because again the state who is supposed to stop these things from happening, it's allowing it to happen, as usual being nothing but a parasite.

We do have a choice, but we have been told that our power lies in the ballot, not in our consumer choices, in the free market we can collectivly bring down anybody unless you believe we are so inherently selfish that we wont spend a penny more to stop evil, check mate

Pointing to population growth as the problem is outdated Malthusian reasoning. The empirical evidence that Malthus was wrong is impossible to deny, but it's very easy to ignore, and that's what Baal does when it's pointed out to him so I'm not going to go over it again. You can think that capitalism is not the reason why we massively overproduce food and yet one child dies of starvation every 10-15 seconds if it makes you feel better.

Its such a retarded way to argue to say "human civilization will end, and everybody informed about it knows it, its as much of a fact as evolution" That is the kind of shit i expect from a man with no pants and cardboard sign at a stop-sign.

Do you deny that there is a scientific consensus saying that we are heading towards the collapse of human civilization as we know it if the scenario of "business as usual" is maintained (which is being maintained right now) or do you believe the scientists are wrong/ideologically motivated to deceive us?

I ask this question because you have to remember that it doesn't matter what your views are with regards to the possibilities of an ethical and ecological capitalist society in theory, because we have known about this for over 6 decades, and nothing has been done to prevent it, so even if I were to grant that this was possible, the time for "ethical and sustainable consumerism" is past, making it moot. David Attenborough said yesterday that it isn't possible to be too radical when it comes to tackling the climate crisis right now. Can you explain to me with more than a one-liner why you think he is wrong? This is what I am basing my claim on, that we are in dire straits, and there is no time for wishy-washy "baby steps" thinking when it comes to this problem. It's this kind of myopic thinking that has got us here in the first place.

The plan of powerful people is to remain powerful at all cost and it absolutely isn't to serve less fortunate people or help them secure a future for themselves. If such basic observation and reasoning is "illuminati shit" to you and you sincerely believe you are currently discussing out of good faith, then I don't know how anyone can take you seriously. I even said "whether they are aware of it or not" -- I wasn't saying that the rich are all consciously steering us towards doom and gathering together to plot for it to happen with glee. But it's true that there are many who are aware of this and who are consciously planning to leave us behind (what else are they going to do?). They are building bunkers and they are trying to figure out the best way to have control over servants who will protect them and their assets when things get particularly an-capistan-ish. And of course, as you surely know, many of them believe that technological advancement will eventually allow them to upload their consciousness to a computer and essentially become immortal, or stop (and even reverse) the aging process, and colonize other planets with their genes, so they are very much intent on buying time.

On July 10 2019 01:00 Baalim wrote: Show nested quote + On July 10 2019 00:47 Stroggoz wrote: mindless consumerism and climate change are both results of a combination of technolical development in the hands of institutions that are anti-democratic. Mostly it is the result of capitalists, and sometimes a result of combined capitalist and state oppression as in the case of china. The silicon valley companies have developed new methods for essentially farming data on human behavior-a technological development, but it is not accepted by the public according to polls, so in a democratic society we wouldn't have surveillience capitalism. The silicon valley corporations are fundamentally anti-democratic, as chomsky points out private power is totalitarian in nature. The public plays no role in choosing whether they want to be surveilled for mass consumption or not. Of course the powerful have an agenda, you can find out what it is from closely following campaign finance and simply asking the powerful what they want to get out of politics, as some political scientists have done. Their interests are not the same as the public interests or global public interest. This has been the downfall of quite a few civlizations before. Industrialization was the process of scientific advance and populatin growth, the USSR was just as industrialized and pollutant under other economic model, China was too busy trying not to starve to death, so again, we could have avoided all this harm to the environment if only we didn't reproduce, lived in shit-huts and died of disentery at 35yo. The ones who created undemocratic mass surveillance was the state, I don't recall the american's to vote for the NSA, or even being told about it before Snowden, and look now what China is doing, but you are concerned about targeted advertizement, which we are unwilling participants of because again the state who is supposed to stop these things from happening, it's allowing it to happen, as usual being nothing but a parasite. We do have a choice, but we have been told that our power lies in the ballot, not in our consumer choices, in the free market we can collectivly bring down anybody unless you believe we are so inherently selfish that we wont spend a penny more to stop evil, check mate

What's the point of saying we could have all avoided this if we lived in huts? There is no way we would go back to that scenario so why bring it up?

there are a lot of ways the environmental crisis can be prevented while still maintaining an advanced industrial society, and with population as it is right now and it's projections. There are economists like robert pollin that have studied solutions to this. The solutions are there, like progressive one's being proposed such as the green new deal. Are capitalists supporting this? Overwhelmingly they arn't. overpopulation is again, something that can be curbed to some extent by introducing family planning and women's education in underdeveloped countries. It's a big factor, and it's been done in some places. Incidentily the capitalists could help out with overpopulation but they arn't interested really, yet they have trillions of dollars sitting around.

I brought up surveillience because it is becoming the main system for advertising and mass consumption for. Loco, was talking about mass consumption, but we can talk about the system before survillience, it was essentially lead by business and still is.

No, actually, corporations made the mass surveillience system, around 2001 was when google discovered the phenoma of survillience capitalism. They did have powerful actors working with the state, and lobbied the state, and the NSA had it's own survellience system and worked with google to create it. But we arn't talking about that. The system we were talking about was mass consumption, which is exactly what silicon valley's entire business model revolves around-surveiling humans, so they can advertise for mass consumption. you're right that we have a choice, one would be to simply subject google to laws and democracy. The government in Spain made some headway into this with their 'right to be forgotten', other governments can too. Asking people to do research on every business is extremely time consuming. I mean there are actually some computer scientists that calculated it would cost the economy nearly a trillion$ if people took the time to read all those user agreements silicon valley put out. Those companies have formed very easy monopolies through the network effect, and human beings in general have become dependent on them for their social and professional lives. A much simpler solution would be to simply run them democratically.

We do have a choice, but we have been told that our power lies in the ballot, not in our consumer choices, in the free market we can collectivly bring down anybody unless you believe we are so inherently selfish that we wont spend a penny more to stop evil"

This hides the elephant in the room. Forget about others, are people willing to take themselves down too? If you reveal to a so-called successful person that their aims go against social and environmental good, do you think there isn't going to be resistance on their part? That they won't want to preserve their position in a dominance hierarchy at all cost? The gerontocracy certainly isn't willing to give up their position. Maybe there are a lot of young people who are willing to give up the comforts that their parents enjoyed -- and they better be, since it will be unavoidable that they will have to. But that's not going to be enough, is it?

It's also interesting to believe that in a system where relentless individual competition is necessitated to obtain a certain level of comfort and prestige, you manage to believe that there can be such a thing as meaningful collective action. How exactly does such a thing emerge? Is it like we've seen it on the streets of Baltimore in "The Wire" where rival gangs have a rule that they won't attack each other on Sunday, except here you take down the big bad meanies? Why and how wouldn't people have competing interests suddenly? It's always been in some people's economic interest to do harm. When you incentivize profit above all else, you should expect people to cut corners and to treat human well-being as secondary (just like you did above when you mockingly attacked my focus on public health in contrast to your focus on economic growth).

Edit: one more thing I'm now adding much later: What about you? You know what goes on behind the scenes and you still support animal agriculture. Is that not 'selfish and evil', to harm other beings uniquely for your personal gratification? How can you expect that people will naturally move towards ethical choices in your society when you can't do it yourself?

It's interesting how right-wingers believe themselves be spearheading the moral revolution that will be necessary for the future, meanwhile I have yet to ever see them sacrifice their own pleasure/welfare for any cause. Apparently they exist though, I learned today that some right-wingers went to Rojava to fight against ISIS. I'm thinking those are adrenaline junkies though and it has little to do with an altruistic motive. In any case, it's pretty clear that the overwhelming majority of people who have fallen to the hands of ISIS were libertarian socialists.

On July 09 2019 23:33 Baalim wrote: I'm not saying all the systems are the same, I'm saying is that capitalism isn't what is making us mindless consumers and all these things you mention, its our natural tendencies in the system, you believe people will willingly work hard because they are going to be fulfilled, they will gleefully clean toilets but you don't take into consideration our natural proclivities because you belive these are the result of the system and not inherent, because you believe in some weird evolutionary denialism that paints us as perfectly plastic, thats why you refuse to acknowledge the scandinavian paradox regarding gender preferences and you seem to have alike ideas regarding intelligence.

Moving the goalpost much? I don't care that you don't think capitalism has any negative influence on human behavior, I care about what evidence you have for your beliefs, and you don't present any. You just vaguely say stuff like "this is natural and inherent" and refuse to acknowledge that complex systems are dynamic and ever-changing. I'm not arguing for "perfect plasticity", that is a straw man. Human beings doesn't need to be "perfectly plastic" for my point to stand, they just need to be strongly influenced by their environment, which they are.

You also don't care about truly understanding the findings of the gender-paradox study because it supports your preconceived ideas. The research is far more complex than you will ever admit and it's impossible to draw your conclusions in the face of all of the other possible explanations and other studies that have been made. You have no training in the social sciences and you don't know how to read these studies and interpret them, so you just go with whatever "authorities" like Pinker and Peterson say about them and what they look like on a surface level.

Again you present this banal straw man of "toilet cleaning" as if there were no anarchist societies who have dealt with these things and that somehow they all collapsed because no one wanted to clean toilets... LOL. So sad that this is as far as your criticisms go when it isn't "your ideas lead to gulags". The mental shortcuts that you use to expend as little energy as possible to understand and interact with others never ceases to amaze me.

Except that our living conditions are much greater than they were 100 years ago are you fucking kidding? we work less, on easier jobs, we live longer etc, the promises were delivered we are better off than 100 years ago in virtually every single metric you can think of.

Again, just show me the evidence for your claims please. I really don't care what you believe. Start with the point that I was making and show me the data on work hours. You don't have to go back 100 years, you can go back to the Paleolithic. Also if capitalist progress is so great, how is it that the latest findings on lifespan show that it is actually decreasing? Let me guess, "something something the state dun it"?

How does Capitalism oposes deviance? the free market doesn't give a shit if you want to use a fursuit and yiff with your weird friends.

I am talking about deviance that threatens consumerism, as I said. You can engineer what you refer to as deviance in order to sell products to suit those new needs, which neoliberalism does very well, but this is not deviance of the kind that you see in art, literature, philosophy, etc. Basically, anything that has informed counter-culture in the past. It is structurally opposed to it. The education system and the economic constraints that people have to deal with are there precisely for that purpose.

"What does the money machine eat? it eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity." William S. Burroughs

Why do you think work is humilliating?

It's humiliating to be dominated on a daily basis and to have little to no control over your well-being due to social and economic injustice. It's not work itself that is humiliating, it is work that isn't complimented with power of decision, i.e. undemocratic work.

No we both dont know that, Somalia is an actual contry, not a rural village.

I linked you to a Wikipedia page that shows currently active mass societies and you come and tell me that I am comparing Somalia with a rural village. You're not that stupid, you know the difference between a mass society and a rural village. Why do you have to be so blatantly dishonest? What's the purpose of it? Rojava specifically has over 6 million people living there and that's despite the fact that ISIS was defeated only recently. This is the same population that Somalia, "the actual country" had in the 1980s. Are you going to keep moving the goalpost and tell me that it's still not enough people to be considered a "real society"? Once it becomes 10 million, will you ask for 20? What exactly will satisfy you?

I said I called YOU a communist because you call me neoliberal, but I do believe leftist anarchy collapses at big scale, I've used that phrase many times "big scale", and I dont mean from external threats.

Based on what logic and evidence? Is it just the toilet logic or there's something else floating around in that gigabrain of yours?

Also what do you mean privatization of profits and socialization of losses? That usually refers to bailouts which you probably know where I stand regarding those.

Yes, I know that you are in favor of making more people suffer from systemic failings/corruption, e.g. you wouldn't have wanted to bail out Wall Street/big banks in 2007-2008 because fuck it, principles always trump real-world consequences. As long as you think you look consistent and coherent on the internet, it's all that matters.

dont know what you mean with health markers but probably some shoddy shit regarding mental health, and yeah I base a lot on economics because I rather be a middle-class Swede than a poor etiophian, and no I don't care if Swedes commit more suicide or that ethipians have such a warm heart or whatever abstract metric you come up with.

Public health metrics are not abstract, you are just dishonestly trivializing my point and making an either/or fallacy. An economy exists to serve the needs of the people who contribute to it, not balance sheets. 'Economics' literally means "household management". When Aristotle wrote the first economics book, he said that "the accumulation of money itself is an unnatural activity that dehumanizes those who practice it". Even the guy who invented the GDP measure warned that it should not be used as a comprehensive measure of the welfare of a nation which is what is most important.

Living conditions have improved quite a lot over the past 100 years, but yeah as loco points out life expectency has decreased slightly in the US over the last few years, it's studied by an economist angus deaton, the decline is from as a result from 'deaths of despair': deaths from suicide, alchoholism and drugs. partly this is attributeably to neoliberal economics. It's particularly prevelant amoung the white working class. In new zealand this is probably true as well, though don't think it's been studied. Third world disease like rheumatic feaver have made a comeback though. So it's not really progress on all fronts. In any case, as if progression on these fronts could ever be a jusfication for capitalism? There is progression in virtually all soceities on these fronts during the 20th century, capitalism, state controlled dictatorships like nazi germany, and stalinist russia, and China which is a dictatorship as well-and uses massive keynesian state spending mixed with foreign investment as part of their economic growth strategy. If you read the book called the entreprenurial state that loco linked a while back, it points out how afraid capitalists in america were of the economic progress stalin/kruschev was making in the 1950's/60's, it presented a threat to their dominion over the rest of the world who might see it as a better alternative.

As for russia's economy completely it collapsed under capitalism in the 1990's. If there's been a bigger economic disaster than russia's privitizations, i havn't heard of it. they made a lot more progression on those metrics under the stalinist system than they ever did under capitalism. So no, using these metrics is not a good justification for a political/economic system. You can use the massive productivity in industrialism democratically or you can use it tyrannically under state or capitalist control.

As for working hours, yeah we work a lot less than 100 years ago. the 19th century saw some of the longest working hours in human history, at least for recorded data, fuedalism saw much shorter working hours than 100 years ago. I think Keynes thought we would be working something like 20 hour weeks by now because of projected productivity gains, but of course he was wrong about that, because how wealthy a society is has never determined how long it works. But i mean work should be something that is enjoyed, if people enjoy work there's no problem with doing 60 hour weeks. Some work is enjoyable like that. Cleaning toilets isn't, but it would be less taxing to the human spirit under a fair and partipatory system, imo.

Living conditions have improved because of the workers, not the masters. Yes, many countries worked more 100-170 years ago than they do now, but this is meaningless when it is decontextualized. The 8-hour work day has its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It is because people rebelled against their masters that they managed to secure these working hours, it wasn't because of capitalists or the "free" market as Baal contends. People still work 8 hour days two fucking centuries later despite all of the technical progress, and of course there are massive amounts of people who work a lot more than that now, both in rich countries and in poorer ones. In richer countries a lot of people never stop working because their self-worth is completely tied to their work, or because their work environment necessitates that they "bring their work home" to some degree, because "the working place is a family".

The model capitalists that Baal often cites actively campaign and threaten their workers so that they don't unionize and have better working conditions. They have propaganda videos screened for all of their employees that explains to them that unionizing goes against their best self-interest.

And of course no one can dare to talk about working less when it comes to where we outsource our labour for our great progress to exist in the global north. People die from overwork there and they try to kill themselves at the very factories where they produce the goods that everyone feels they absolutely need nowadays. Sweatshop workers wages can be as low as 1 US cent per hour, and they work up to 100 hours a week/14-16 hour days, in conditions of poor air quality and extreme heat. Somehow though for the right-wing libertarian this misery is a result of "fake capitalism" but at the same time they see no contradiction in using their labour to justify the better material conditions of the present in the global north.

You have to be willfully ignorant to think of that as a liberatory and efficient system. The dependence on wage labor is such a huge problem that somewhere around half of the jobs in our economies are bullshit jobs: they are entirely unnecessary and people actively feel shame about their employment/their role in society. I say it's unnecessary because the work itself is unnecessary, but obviously it is necessary that these jobs exist for the system to maintain itself for longer, for powerful people to remain powerful. But the fact that you have to keep people busy with pointless and counter-productive work and you have to create jobs for its own sake instead of focusing on technical efficiency and creating better living conditions is just another indication of a failed system that is desperate to hide its contradictions. Capitalism is not interested in technical efficiency and its freeing potential, it is interested in market efficiency, which is just about the strict opposite.

On July 10 2019 01:22 Loco wrote: Pointing to population growth as the problem is outdated Malthusian reasoning. The empirical evidence that Malthus was wrong is impossible to deny, but it's very easy to ignore, and that's what Baal does when it's pointed out to him so I'm not going to go over it again. You can think that capitalism is not the reason why we massively overproduce food and yet one child dies of starvation every 10-15 seconds if it makes you feel better

There's two factors, how much the person pullutes and how many people there are, simple X*Y. I"m obviously not using an average for how much somebody pollutes obviously people from industrialized societies pollute more than primitive ones.


Yes we overproduce food, theres also endless amounts of fresh water in Canada, how come you don't give a glass from the tap from a kid in Zimbabwe dying of thirst uh? The obvious problem is distribution, it ain't as easy to get that glass of water to africa, and just saying "theres enough water for everybody" is a stupid statement

Do you deny that there is a scientific consensus saying that we are heading towards the collapse of human civilization as we know it if the scenario of "business as usual" is maintained (which is being maintained right now) or do you believe the scientists are wrong/ideologically motivated to deceive us?

"ending civilization as we know it" is very different from ending civilization, the first one means anything, civilization is very different from 20 years ago, so be specific.

If we keep business as usual, meaning reproducing exponentially yeah that shit is gong to get ugly, however it seems we are quite able to correct it, same way with pollution per capita, many things are improving in the developed world and perhaps the 3rd world can industrialize in a cleaner way that the west did through technolgy that wasn't available decades before.

But if you literally mean cataclysm, living in bunkers while the mutants and the coastal refugees fight for human legs to eat lol then yes I laugh at that fake concensus if that is what you are talking about.

I ask this question because you have to remember that it doesn't matter what your views are with regards to the possibilities of an ethical and ecological capitalist society in theory, because we have known about this for over 6 decades, and nothing has been done to prevent it, so even if I were to grant that this was possible, the time for "ethical and sustainable consumerism" is past, making it moot. David Attenborough said yesterday that it isn't possible to be too radical when it comes to tackling the climate crisis right now. Can you explain to me with more than a one-liner why you think he is wrong? This is what I am basing my claim on, that we are in dire straits, and there is no time for wishy-washy "baby steps" thinking when it comes to this problem. It's this kind of myopic thinking that has got us here in the first place.

I don't think the time for ethical consumption is past, that can bring as drastic measures as we collectively are willing to go.

The plan of powerful people is to remain powerful at all cost and it absolutely isn't to serve less fortunate people or help them secure a future for themselves.

Some of them, some of them don't, the rich are just people, ergo flawed.

But it's true that there are many who are aware of this and who are consciously planning to leave us behind (what else are they going to do?). They are building bunkers and they are trying to figure out the best way to have control over servants who will protect them and their assets when things get particularly an-capistan-ish. And of course, as you surely know, many of them believe that technological advancement will eventually allow them to upload their consciousness to a computer and essentially become immortal, or stop (and even reverse) the aging process, and colonize other planets with their genes, so they are very much intent on buying time.

hahahaha WTF, the rich are building bunkers, trying to be immortal and colonize planets with their genes.

Where do the soulsucking intergalactic vampires come Mr. Alex Jones? lololololol you are a madman.


haha i can already see your articles trying to prove this like Jones with the gay frogs lol.