Politics thread (USA Elections 2016) - Page 165

Well I get communism from the lens of living in it in a soviet sattelite.
- you had guaranteed jobs and have a centrally planned economy and economic equality

But you need people with a stronghold on power to steer those plans
And naturally they will use measures to hold onto it like "The Party" or "The Movement" that become aggressive. It's not evil or anything, it just becomes a natural extension of the way you run the country.
Just like the credit system and capitalism is based on illusion and if people would stop believing it'd collapse, so would the centrally planned system no?


And as all humans are aggressive and they now can't gain status or ahead economically they started opportunistically joining the party, snitching on their neighbours and get on the good side of the central power to get good placements... stealing from their employers to get ahead became the norm... (We had a saying here, who doesn't steal from the state and their employer is robbing their own family.


I would like to get educated at what true communism would be in practice and how it wouldn't lean towards the above that just happened in all communist countries that ever existed so far?

On September 27 2019 08:36 LemOn[5thF] wrote: Well I get communism from the lens of living in it in a soviet sattelite. - you had guaranteed jobs and have a centrally planned economy and economic equality But you need people with a stronghold on power to steer those plans And naturally they will use measures to hold onto it like "The Party" or "The Movement" that become aggressive. It's not evil or anything, it just becomes a natural extension of the way you run the country. Just like the credit system and capitalism is based on illusion and if people would stop believing it'd collapse, so would the centrally planned system no? And as all humans are aggressive and they now can't gain status or ahead economically they started opportunistically joining the party, snitching on their neighbours and get on the good side of the central power to get good placements... stealing from their employers to get ahead became the norm... (We had a saying here, who doesn't steal from the state and their employer is robbing their own family. I would like to get educated at what true communism would be in practice and how it wouldn't lean towards the above that just happened in all communist countries that ever existed so far?

There is nothing to be educated about, in reality at least. Communism is the economic version of flat earthism, you can learn their theories but 1) they are theoretically wrong 2)whenever they have been tried in the real world, they failed.

Capitalism wouldn't "collapse" if people "stopped believing in it". It would re adjust itself midly. A fully free market, which doesn't exist, adjusts gradually and there is no reason to believe it could ever crush unless a foreign extreme event disrupted it (foreign invasion, natural disaster, etc).

Moreover, unfunded liabilities or the "credit system" as you put it, is not a free market construction but either a direct (government debt) or indirect (government backing financial institutions) product of statism, that is, a left wing institution that remains on top of a somewhat free market.

No it would literally collapse
Money, loans that go towards investments and how businesses are started

Are built on the belief in growth
belief in money
Belief in specific companies and institutions
Belief in government and country
These are human constructs that are vital collective imaginations. They exist largely because people believe in them.

If people would stop trusting these institutions they will all collapse and move towards turmoil. There's nothing wrong with this by the way - that's just how people managed to cooperate on a larger scale and built civilisations and started the industrial revolutions . That's how capitalism churned resources into science. By credit system I mean literally loans to businesses and investment in capital with expectation of returns. Modern capitalism that relies heavily on credit and leverage.


I mean it's really straightforward, look at E.G. Lehman Brothers and what they ignited, same thing would happen on a mass scale if people stopped believing in the concepts above and other institutions.

Pretty well explained here:
https://erenow.net/common/sapiensbriefhistory/81.php


Capitalism is built on trust and belief in growth, people stop believing capitalism would get shaken at it's core, credit would try up and there would be no new...you know...capital

On September 27 2019 08:36 LemOn[5thF] wrote: Well I get communism from the lens of living in it in a soviet sattelite. - you had guaranteed slavery and have a centrally planned collapse and economic suffering

fixed your post

Well you still did get paid and some sort of housing choice you you can't say slavery
But obviously centrally planned economy doesn't work. You have a small amount of people deciding supply instead of the entire market the latter will prevail in the long run economically simple 2+2=4

Again as I said, I am ready to be educated and look past my obvious biases on how actual communism is supposed to work practically and how much different is it supposed to be from all the countries that tried

Communism in all of its forms is an utopia.
The stated ran one is dystopian actually

The anarchy one .. would suggest that "shitty" people would be pushed back 24/7 without any fault.... at the end of the day humans organize themselves in groups and measure the power of one group to another. It doesn't mean we all do it, it doesn't even mean most of us do it. If you've read studies for working environments it literally takes 1 person to turn it into an unbearable place. So you just need one single group in a theoretical harmony, to turn it into a chaos. Even if said "group" doesnt find "allies" to disrupt the utopia, that event would continue happening regardless, and it only needs to succeed once to completely demolish it.

On September 27 2019 13:07 GoTuNk wrote: There is nothing to be educated about, in reality at least. Communism is the economic version of flat earthism, you can learn their theories but 1) they are theoretically wrong 2)whenever they have been tried in the real world, they failed.

Don't straw man communism, steel man it.

The earth being round is an observable and demonstrable scientific fact, socio-economic arrengements of society aren't hard sciences so they can't be accepted or refuted at the same level of certanty, so you can talk about the results, the viability of the theory but you can't refute it as a flat earth theory.

Communism seems viable but it lacks scalability, meaning it has been successfully applied in small societies, think of your average hippie commune where it works fine, however as it scales up you encounter the problems, the centralization of power in "the state", the drop in productiveness etc.

Capitalism is the other way around, it isn't particularly great for a small society but it has amazing scalability.

I mean the primary problem with capitalism from my pov is the environmental damage, which is entirely externalized. (I've heard that Friedman, to his credit, argued in favor of a carbon tax several decades ago.) As it seeks to increase the poor's slice of the pie through increasing the size of the overall pie rather than have a more equitable distribution of the initial pie, it requires constant growth. This becomes hugely problematic when the world has a finite resource pool meaning the pie can no longer be increased.

I do, for the record, think there's some validity to the point of view that a poor country must focus on generating wealth before focusing on redistributing it. But a country like Norway does not need more wealth. The median or average inhabitant lacks nothing important materially (however he or she consumes more than what is sustainable).

On September 28 2019 01:55 Baalim wrote: Show nested quote + On September 27 2019 13:07 GoTuNk wrote: There is nothing to be educated about, in reality at least. Communism is the economic version of flat earthism, you can learn their theories but 1) they are theoretically wrong 2)whenever they have been tried in the real world, they failed. Don't straw man communism, steel man it. The earth being round is an observable and demonstrable scientific fact, socio-economic arrengements of society aren't hard sciences so they can't be accepted or refuted at the same level of certanty, so you can talk about the results, the viability of the theory but you can't refute it as a flat earth theory. Communism seems viable but it lacks scalability, meaning it has been successfully applied in small societies, think of your average hippie commune where it works fine, however as it scales up you encounter the problems, the centralization of power in "the state", the drop in productiveness etc.

How nice of you to "steel man" us by continually avoiding to read any of the literature that libertarian socialists have written, instead relying on the same talking points you've relied on for fucking ever to dismiss us if it isn't just insulting us and calling us tankies. It's definitely some great steel manning when you're mentioning the "successes" of small hippie communes while avoiding to mention the currently existing successful stateless/communalist society of millions of people that exists in Northern Syria.

Capitalism is the other way around, it isn't particularly great for a small society but it has amazing scalability.

First, a society is not a business, so don't use business language to describe its functioning. It exists at a higher level of organization which makes business possible. A society can exist without business, that is, without markets, while business cannot exist without a society. Secondly, in order to have scalability in terms of production, you need to have energetic sustainability in the first place. If you can grow rapidly in the short-term but it comes back to destroy your business because you've overproduced or ignored or misunderstood the systems that your business depended upon for its functioning, it doesn't really scale. It's a delayed suicide. You can't talk about scalability when something is destroying the hand that feeds it, which is precisely what capitalism is doing, with no solution in sight, because there is no solution: the model has to be abandoned due to its inherent contradictions. All there is currently at the political level--and indeed all there will ever be if the goal is to "save capitalism"-- is the buying of more time for the privileged few to keep screwing over the many and avoid the consequences of their actions for as long as possible.

How ironic that you criticize GoTunK for his misunderstanding of science through a bad analogy, as if you had respect for the "hard" sciences yourself. The only reason you don't see how disconnected from reality the quoted statement is is because you don't have any genuine respect for climate science. When you are presented with the actual science you deem it the modern version of age-old catastrophisms and you maintain your delusion that "we are progressing", citing neoliberal frauds like Pinker and World Bank data and cherry-picking local timber-production areas that have seen growth. Or you distract from the problem by making it all about "overpopulation", which only has authoritarian "solutions" to it.

Your ideological attachment to capitalism and this belief that it can continually overcome (i.e. hide) its fundamental contradictions through technological improvements as well as your two-cent moralism (about personal responsibility and better consumption patterns) takes precedence over the reports of scientists. It's like if on the one side of your mouth you were talking about the amazing efficiency of owning slaves and how it benefits them to be slaves and on the other you were trying to teach someone ethics.

On September 28 2019 08:12 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean the primary problem with capitalism from my pov is the environmental damage, which is entirely externalized. (I've heard that Friedman, to his credit, argued in favor of a carbon tax several decades ago.) As it seeks to increase the poor's slice of the pie through increasing the size of the overall pie rather than have a more equitable distribution of the initial pie, it requires constant growth. This becomes hugely problematic when the world has a finite resource pool meaning the pie can no longer be increased. I do, for the record, think there's some validity to the point of view that a poor country must focus on generating wealth before focusing on redistributing it. But a country like Norway does not need more wealth. The median or average inhabitant lacks nothing important materially (however he or she consumes more than what is sustainable).

There's no black and white here...capitalism churned money into science and R+D that started global warming and lead to rapid usage of resources. But the same R+D increased efficiency rapidly.

There are virtually unlimited resources at least when it comes to energy available, the technology just needs to catch up to be able to harness them before we fuck ourselves.

People didn't do that with nuclear weapons, we have a lot to thank the invention of those for stopping large scale wars and showing that people aren't total morons, they deserve at least some faith when it comes to preserving themselves before clean technology catches up and gets deployed.

Create a contraceptive pill for men and all these problems of overpopulation will be solved.

On September 28 2019 08:12 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean the primary problem with capitalism from my pov is the environmental damage, which is entirely externalized. (I've heard that Friedman, to his credit, argued in favor of a carbon tax several decades ago.) As it seeks to increase the poor's slice of the pie through increasing the size of the overall pie rather than have a more equitable distribution of the initial pie, it requires constant growth. This becomes hugely problematic when the world has a finite resource pool meaning the pie can no longer be increased. I do, for the record, think there's some validity to the point of view that a poor country must focus on generating wealth before focusing on redistributing it. But a country like Norway does not need more wealth. The median or average inhabitant lacks nothing important materially (however he or she consumes more than what is sustainable).

I totally agree with this, abundance also allows the society to make more environmentally conscious choices, like buying electric cars, being willing to pay more for clean energy, not buying cruelty food etc, it is possible without the intervention of the state.

Thats why left-wing politics in poor and uncivil countires like latinamerica have been monstruous but they work in your country, but you have to be conscious of managing it really well so your economy doesn't slowly go stale, I've said it before that I think its quite likely a form of collectivism is the best way in a post-scarcity future, but I mean real post scarcity not Loco's concept of if of living in the mud.

On September 29 2019 07:11 Baalim wrote: I totally agree with this, abundance also allows the society to make more environmentally conscious choices .

Cause capitalism leads to abundance?

On September 29 2019 20:33 Spitfiree wrote: Show nested quote + On September 29 2019 07:11 Baalim wrote: I totally agree with this, abundance also allows the society to make more environmentally conscious choices . Cause capitalism leads to abundance?

A free market does, but most often than not the market is hijacked by corrupt states, Scandinavia had the most free markets in the world in the early XX century.

You can critizize about the distribution of wealth and other bad outcomes from free markets, but prouductivity and overall generation of abundance rarely people dispute that.

On September 29 2019 07:11 Baalim wrote: I mean real post scarcity not Loco's concept of if of living in the mud.

Social anarchists are known for and criticized principally because of our "utopian" belief in the liberatory potential of technology, yet here you are saying that I advocate for the total opposite of that in some vulgar form of anarcho-primitivism, haha. I thought you could never match the ridiculousness level of the tankie ad hominem but eh, you're always full of surprises. It's easy to patronize people on your side of the political spectrum and tell them to steel man their adversaries, but when you're faced with them it isn't quite that easy is it? I honestly think if we were to get two teams and set up a formal debate with people from this forum and an outside audience judging the competition, you'd be picked last.

On September 28 2019 21:33 Loco wrote: How nice of you to "steel man" us

Wait did you just admit being a communist? lol

[quote[by continually avoiding to read any of the literature that libertarian socialists have written, instead relying on the same talking points you've relied on for fucking ever to dismiss us if it isn't just insulting us and calling us tankies. It's definitely some great steel manning when you're mentioning the "successes" of small hippie communes while avoiding to mention the currently existing successful stateless/communalist society of millions of people that exists in Northern Syria.[/quote]

What "us" are you talking about, is this commie speak or something, I've only called you a tankie, nobody else, also you didn't you learnin school that if you didn't want a nickname to stick you had to pretend it didn't sting?, its so obvious that it bothers you that you are making it hard for me not to call you a tankie

Rojava has private property, currency, there are wealthier people than others, in fact if I read correctly factories require investment and people who invest their money get more voting rights than others until the investment is repaid among many other capitalist-like structures, it is obviously a left community based society but its far from the left wing anarchic hippie communes, which is exactly what I'm talking about scalability, also I rather live in a capitalist country than Rojava and aprently so do you.

First, a society is not a business, so don't use business language to describe its functioning. It exists at a higher level of organization which makes business possible. A society can exist without business, that is, without markets, while business cannot exist without a society. Secondly, in order to have scalability in terms of production, you need to have energetic sustainability in the first place. If you can grow rapidly in the short-term but it comes back to destroy your business because you've overproduced or ignored or misunderstood the systems that your business depended upon for its functioning, it doesn't really scale. It's a delayed suicide. You can't talk about scalability when something is destroying the hand that feeds it, which is precisely what capitalism is doing, with no solution in sight, because there is no solution: the model has to be abandoned due to its inherent contradictions. All there is currently at the political level--and indeed all there will ever be if the goal is to "save capitalism"-- is the buying of more time for the privileged few to keep screwing over the many and avoid the consequences of their actions for as long as possible.

Scalability isn't necesarely a business word you dumbass.

Clean energetic sustainability can be archieved through nuclear power, in France already produces 80% of its power from nuclear, the biggest hinderance to this switch is dogmatic fools like yourself who don't actually care about energy, you only use it a platform for your political bullshit, so let me say it again, you don't care about energy or the environment, you pretend you do to push left wing ideology.

How ironic that you criticize GoTunK for his misunderstanding of science through a bad analogy, as if you had respect for the "hard" sciences yourself. The only reason you don't see how disconnected from reality the quoted statement is is because you don't have any genuine respect for climate science. When you are presented with the actual science you deem it the modern version of age-old catastrophisms and you maintain your delusion that "we are progressing", citing neoliberal frauds like Pinker and World Bank data and cherry-picking local timber-production areas that have seen growth. Or you distract from the problem by making it all about "overpopulation", which only has authoritarian "solutions" to it.

Civilization ending in 12 year is not a scientific position you dumbass, any prediction of that sort in a complex system such as climate is unscientific, don't worry in 12 years if you are still in this forum I'll make you gargle my balls for this. I haven't denied climate change ever, it is the scientific concensus, also the CO2 related to human activity have a solid coorelation and its likely the cause, so as I've said before we should phase out the most CO2 producing energy sources like carbon, then oil and eventually natural gas to the best options which seem to be nuclear, we should also share new knowledge and tech in nuclear energy as we research it with China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Brazil.

Yes exponential population growth is a problem and I've never suggested an authoritarian solution, and only an auhoritarian or a closet authoritarian like yourself believe that its the only solution, I am all for individual responsibility, remember?

Your ideological attachment to capitalism and this belief that it can continually overcome (i.e. hide) its fundamental contradictions through technological improvements as well as your two-cent moralism (about personal responsibility and better consumption patterns) takes precedence over the reports of scientists. It's like if on the one side of your mouth you were talking about the amazing efficiency of owning slaves and how it benefits them to be slaves and on the other you were trying to teach someone ethics.

Sure, supporting the free market and personal responsibility is the same as supporting slavery, brilliant argument, tankie :3

On September 29 2019 22:47 Loco wrote: Show nested quote + On September 29 2019 07:11 Baalim wrote: I mean real post scarcity not Loco's concept of if of living in the mud. Social anarchists are known for and criticized principally because of our "utopian" belief in the liberatory potential of technology, yet here you are saying that I advocate for the total opposite of that in some vulgar form of anarcho-primitivism, haha. I thought you could never match the ridiculousness level of the tankie ad hominem but eh, you're always full of surprises. It's easy to patronize people on your side of the political spectrum and tell them to steel man their adversaries, but when you're faced with them it isn't quite that easy is it? I honestly think if we were to get two teams and set up a formal debate with people from this forum and an outside audience judging the competition, you'd be picked last.

You first supported the Zeitgeist retards who belielved in ridiculous technoligcal fantasies archievable in a few years, when I called you out on this yo denied it, and said that we currently lived in a post-scarcity society, that post-scarcity didn't mean a technological abundant paradise, so basically living in the mud like hippies.

Actually thats what you fantasized about, living with the hippies in the outskirts of the city, as usual you didn't do shit about it and just keep posting your garbage here, but now you are again with the sci-fi utopia from zeitgeist.




Sorry to burst your bubble but discussing with you about politics isn't hard, its like eating fast food to me, its easy, provides no nutrition, its probably bad for me but some sick part of me loves it, discussing wiith Spitfire, Strog or Drone is more difficult and far more interesting.

"Wait did you just admit being a communist? lol"

Yawn.... not a good start to your post. Definitely lost my interest in reading the rest of it. I don't know if you're just confused, have memory issues or you are already playing disingenuous games, but you used the word "communism" to mean a communally-organized/horizontal society. Let me refresh your memory, you wrote: "Communism seems viable but it lacks scalability, meaning it has been successfully applied in small societies, think of your average hippie commune." If you were using the word communism as capital "C" Communism, so as to refer to orthodox Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, etc. then you wouldn't have mentioned its successes or hippie communes, since they have completely different ideologies and organizational principles. You were not talking about the violent and repressive methods that tankies would use in their sick idea of how they ought to replace the nation-state, so no, you didn't get me to admit that I believe in those principles. Fuck you for wasting my time with this.

Sorry to burst your bubble but discussing with you about politics isn't hard

I'm not surprised if it hasn't been hard for you to discuss hard topics with me here. Here's why I think it's not hard for you: (1) because no one can hold you accountable for the things you say in a way that could influence your reputation in the real world, so you can safely shitpost as much as you want without your life/ego suffering; and (2) because you don't have the courage to ascend to the level where you can actually meet those challenges. You don't have that drive that learners have. You are lazy, self-indulgent and incompetent at learning. If a topic is difficult to tackle, you will take all of the same familiar, quick and easy mental shortcuts to deal with it, and voila, it is dismissed. You can move on to the next entertaining thing feeling like a champ. It's like playing a video game where you can reduce the difficulty level on demand, except instead of choosing the games that allow this as an option, you choose the arguments that you feel most able to trivialize and strawman. Most of that of course happens unconsciously so that you can maintain a positive self-image.

Your involvement with politics and socio-economic issues isn't one of genuine interest to grow as a human being and act differently in the world, it's more like spectator sport. That's why you have this idealized self-image of the man of steel who is constantly triumphing over his opponents. "You're like fast food to me boy, look at how tough I am!" Yeah, you sure are tough. I don't care to discuss politics with you tough guy, I just felt compelled to highlight how false that self-image is and you couldn't have done a better job of proving me right by making this absurd claim that I'm some anarcho-primitivist without providing any evidence to back it up. I've been completely consistent in what I advocate for. It's not TZM, it's not anarcho-primitivism, it's not vanguard parties, it's not any of those things you try to attach me to. The reason you consistently try to attach me to them instead of focusing on the arguments that I have made and the intellectuals that I have quoted the most is because it's easy and convenient.

But as with everything that isn't difficult, it's also meaningless and you're quite right that it's bad for you and the longer you indulge in it the more it will eat away at you and become impossible to ignore. Sadly it is the result of a loveless life, and so is your nihilism. "Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care" - Cornel West. There is nothing you can individually do to overcome that self-destructiveness. No effort of will, nothing. Just like there is nothing that Jordan Peterson could do individually to overcome his drug addiction that got him into rehab recently. It will have to impose itself on you, you will have to find it externally.

You first supported the Zeitgeist retards who belielved in ridiculous technoligcal fantasies archievable in a few years, when I called you out on this yo denied it, and said that we currently lived in a post-scarcity society, that post-scarcity didn't mean a technological abundant paradise, so basically living in the mud like hippies.

You cannot back any of this rewriting of history shit up. It's also completely vague and meaningless, is anyone supposed to know who the "zeigeist retards" are? I only ever posted a couple podcasts and quotes out of Peter Joseph's latest book -- nothing about the Zeitgeist movies or the Venus Project. His book overlaps with some of my ideas and it is pretty well researched and referenced. But do tell me, is Robert Sapolsky one of those "Zeitgeist retards"? Because his work is heavily featured in one of the Zeitgeist movies, so I assume that with your logic he must be. I gotta say, it's pretty impressive of a retard to earn the MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant among other awards.

Actually thats what you fantasized about, living with the hippies in the outskirts of the city

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Didn't you say that pretty much all of your friends are hippies? I don't have hippie friends anymore, haven't in 10 years. I like rebels, I find it inspiring to see the ways in which some people challenge conventions and stand up to injustice. It was people like Socrates, Diogenes and the Stoics that taught me that, not hippies. Hippies are somewhat rebellious but they are not combative, generally much younger, less intellectually-oriented and less emotionally stable than me. Doing drugs every day and having bad hygiene is also really not my thing. At no point have I said I wanted to live in a hippie commune. I said I would have loved to visit Poole's land because Tofino, BC is a beautiful fucking place and the people from that commune seem nice to be around for a short while.

And even if I had fantasized about it, who the fuck are you to mock someone who'd been isolated and housebound for almost a year due to chronic illness and who really wanted to be in a space where human connection is easy? You advocate for a system that atomizes people, that brings the market into the home and destroys human relationships and networks of solidarity -- which makes people physically and mentally sick --and you turn around and mock those same people for really wanting to have their fundamental human needs met. Needs that they would have almost always had been able to meet if it wasn't for predatory capitalist structures negatively impacting their lives. Some human being you are.

I've never said you were anarcho-primitivist, you believe we currently live in a post-scarcity society, we just have to distribute it properly, but let me tell you that you live among the 1% of living standards, distributing our current resources in the world would mean you get the average living standard of the average citizen in Ecuador, and that is a poverty you have never experienced or even seen with your own eyes.

Loveless life? these projections you have been mentioning in your last posts are sad, just because you feel you have a loveless life and are powerless to do anyhthing about it and that you have been atomized by the system it doesn't mean the rest of us feel the same way.

Yep many of my friends were kinda hippies, just one ran to the jungle though so I'm not criticizing the communes, actually I find their determination and congruence admiring, they believe in something and they do it, unlike you who just come to this forum to spit your inane ideas but don't walk the walk, come to Mexico and join the zapatistas you admire or go to Rojava, get off that coach, socialist.

(1) because no one can hold you accountable for the things you say in a way that could influence your reputation in the real world, so you can safely shitpost as much as you want without your life/ego suffering

Ah fan of cancel culture, what a surprise.

You are lazy, self-indulgent and incompetent at learning.

Didn't you post an article claiming there was no such thing as lazyness? haha

So brave of ANTIFA