The CIA made over 600 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro during his time as the President of Cuba. Chavez was assassinated. Allende would have been assassinated if he didn't kill himself during the US-backed coup. We can always justify who is worthy of being assassinated based on our political beliefs, that was my point. A quick search tells me 5 leftist politicians were killed earlier this year in Mexico.
I'm always very suspircious of failed attempts since they are easy popularity boosts for the "survivor", a drone exploding waaaay off the target seems like such a clumsy way to act for the CIA when simply a car-bomb or sniper in the forehead would suffice.
The 600 attemps are utterly bullshit, I dont doubt the CIA botched attempts but to suggest the CIA can't kill a person after 600 tries is ridiculous.
The "leftist" politicians killed were majors of minuscule towns in cartel ridden areas obviously killed by drug-related problems.
This magnicide was a governor, arguably the main oppositor to the recently elected leftist president, the president also said that he didn't recognize this governor and that the elections were fraudulent... after their appeal fails he dies 10 days later
In the mean time, whatever policies benefit the most marginalized in society and environmental sustainability are those that I support.
and who will be the judge who ushers this justice? will it be race based? sexual orientation based? will you have an ugliness scale? because being ugly is way more detrimental to the quality of your life than your race for example.
I'm not saying it's the capitalist's good intentions that aren't good enough, it's everyone's as they exist under a neoliberal system where businesses are basically unaccountable for the damage they cause through negative externalities. The damage happens too quickly and largely under the radar so people can't notice it before a big panel of scientists releases a report to let them know. A consumer doesn't know all of the business practices that his money funds, he is divorced from that by design. If he's very inquisitive he might know some things, but his knowledge is always limited because of the complexities involved.
Because those are currently the responsabilities of government institutions, that should be the job of the consumer and private institutions.
"shopping at Whole Foods could be construed as support for higher welfare meat and organic agricultural methods, but it will equally support union busting, low wages for workers and right-wing libertarian politics. In short, the personal significance consumers attach to purchasing certain products can translate as a “vote” for a whole host of values they dislike but of which they remain ignorant."
private rating institutions would help a lot with consumer information.
also wholefoolds conveys a "healthy food" branding... not fucking unions and wages lol wtf
But the most important part is that even when we know and we are committed to the most ethical choices, individual consumer consumption only accounts for 25% at best. The rest is done by agrobusiness, corporations, industries, government and the military. And if your dollar is the only extent of your vote, that means that the only thing you can contribute to the world is to be less damaging. But the things you actually need to survive like clean water, air, an intact ozone layer, low sea levels etc cannot be purchased.
corporations and induestries are still tied to the laws of the markets and purchasing choice is king.
water, and other utilities are state run, they could be privately run depends on how big of a state presence you want but none of them are arguments against capitalism
But those are government regulations which you are against, no? It's not that I have no faith in people making better choices, like I said it's the logic of the market that defines those choices as it strips us of true decision power at the political level where we could have a say in how most of the consumption is done.
I'm not saying regulations are bad, but that having a regulating body that choses what and how to regulate bloats up and end ups hurting much more than no regulation at all like it happens in the US where doing anything requires crossing bureaocratic swamps.
I disagree that laws should be the way to control consumption, the state is inefficient, passing laws requires a lot of effort and they are often useless or circunvented by the cinic and powerful I have much more faith in consumer choice... but for consumer choice to work we have to give people back the perception that their chose is at the counter, not in the ballot box, that will take a lot of effort and time, but will ultimately be much better than through laws
I don't believe the CIA can fail the assassination of someone 600 times thats just a joke... Just like I'm highly skeptical that the case of Skripal in the UK last year was done by Russia although evidence points to it.
Secret services of countries like that don't fail. They are highly professional and would triple check if a target is dead.
I said "lol wholefoods" because their deal is healthy food not fucking leftist worker practices, you said they are somehow misleading people, I dont see how.
"misleading" means doing something consciously; I never said that "whole foods" were doing it consciously (though if you look at it, Amazon are evidently consciously exploiting their workers of course -- they also lie about it). My point is that part of the problem with consuming being your only vote is when a person purchases something with some values in mind (e.g. organic food from whole foods is good for the environment) they will often end up supporting practices that they are against unknowingly (e.g. this company treats their workers like shit). The idea of having a lot of power as consumers implies that we have options to purchase things that we support entirely and shape an economy based around those values, but in reality corporations can simply exploit our values for their own ends.
If you want another example, look no further than our own RiKD's latest blog, where he says he is now "cruelty free" and he mentions buying Tom's deodorant. Tom's is a well-known vegan ecofriendly company that was bought by Colgate in recent years, and Colgate is not environmentally friendly and they test on animals.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
On January 04 2019 08:00 Loco wrote:
"misleading" means doing something consciously; I never said that "whole foods" were doing it consciously (though if you look at it, Amazon are evidently consciously exploiting their workers of course -- they also lie about it). My point is that part of the problem with consuming being your only vote is when a person purchases something with some values in mind (e.g. organic food from whole foods is good for the environment) they will often end up supporting practices that they are against unknowingly (e.g. this company treats their workers like shit). The idea of having a lot of power as consumers implies that we have options to purchase things that we support entirely and shape an economy based around those values, but in reality corporations can simply exploit our values for their own ends.
If you want another example, look no further than our own RiKD's latest blog, where he says he is now "cruelty free" and he mentions buying Tom's deodorant. Tom's is a well-known vegan ecofriendly company that was bought by Colgate in recent years, and Colgate is not environmentally friendly and they test on animals.
Again, when the voting mirage is gone knowledge about your purchases will be emphatized, also I probably disagree with what you view as exploitation, for me the market deems what a persons labor costs, if you specifically want to talk labout massive corporations like Amazon then we are going to get into the collaboration of the state with them since the state its instrumental to maintain these corporations that would collapse on their own in the free market in most cases.
About Tom's deodorant if people start to purchase cruelty-free deodorants over cruelty ones then naturally the market will adjust and start producting them since there is a demand for them, Colgate buying the brand doesn't change anything all the other products that they sell would become cruelty-free if there is a demand for them, the only thing that changes when Colgate buys them is perhaps your "I'm cruelty free" ridiculous jack off bubble, im ok with that.
I thought I was cruelty free at least in regards to deodorant, body wash, and shampoo. Next thing I'll learn is that Jâsön Body Wash is owned by BP. Coincidentally, I was going to switch toothpastes to something more eco friendly and cruelty free but have been going through a bunch of Colgate samples my dentist gave to me. It is misleading. I go to the store and am told as long as it has a bunny somewhere on the product it is "cruelty free."
I don't know what a ridiculous jack off bubble is. I would like to buy eco-friendly and cruelty free because it is the right thing to do.
On January 05 2019 16:02 RiKD wrote:
I thought I was cruelty free at least in regards to deodorant, body wash, and shampoo. Next thing I'll learn is that Jâsön Body Wash is owned by BP. Coincidentally, I was going to switch toothpastes to something more eco friendly and cruelty free but have been going through a bunch of Colgate samples my dentist gave to me. It is misleading. I go to the store and am told as long as it has a bunny somewhere on the product it is "cruelty free."
I don't know what a ridiculous jack off bubble is. I would like to buy eco-friendly and cruelty free because it is the right thing to do.
and you buying ecofriendly cruelty free toothpaste and products is helping and if enough people do it it will change the world.
What i mean with "jack off bubble" is that after you knew that brand (which is still cruelty free) was bough by a corporation that sells other non-cruelty-free products now you feel your stupid label stained by association.
It's not merely an association if you don't get to decide what they will do with your dollar....
If I buy Fair Trade chocolate from Nestle and 98% of their budget goes into doing things that are terrible for the environment and workers, I am not making a difference in their business practices, I am helping them grow their practices as a whole, the vast majority of which I do not support. Saying "if most people did it, they would change their ways" amounts to reality denial. Most people are not in the privileged position of being able to afford luxury purchases, they are scraping by. They also have their tentacles everywhere in the form of hundreds of brands that people are accustomed to consuming (many of which are addictive), so it's not by buying the one or two products that are deemed ethical that you can expect them to change. At most you are making a difference in the life of the people involved in making the chocolate, that's if they are not cutting costs and employing child slaves.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
If you buy fair-trade produce companies and corporations will sell it and by demand you can overhaul Nestle if their products have these requirements by the consumer.
If you want to sabotage Nestle thats also fine, what im saying is that its idiotic to label yourself as cruelty free and any other self congratulatory categorization, you help as much as you can with the information you have, and both of those need to be encouraged.
Most people are not in the privileged position of being able to afford luxury purchases, they are scraping by.
Strongly disagree, most people can easily afford many changes but they simply dont give a fuck and spend their money in frivolous crap.
What is a bit crazy to me is that I'm saying that we should give back the power to the consumer, small behavioral changes and you say that people wont even change brands or pay a dime more, so you paint them as unchangable in the slightest when it suits your ideas, but when it comes to eliminating private property and your other ideas then people become infinitelly malleable and all our our natural tendencies were just programmed by evil western colonialism.
There is no such thing as cruelty-free anyway. There is only harm minimization under the current system. But even that has become quite a trivial notion, because it's just a matter of time before it is maximized through inevitable crisis.
If you buy fair-trade produce companies and corporations will sell it and by demand you can overhaul Nestle if their products have these requirements by the consumer.
And I'm saying that in the real world, it does not happen. The theory doesn't map onto reality, because we do not realize our interest when we purchase something without strong collective action, and because we are not rational and orderly economic machines. Some people are malignant, while others are easily deceived, misinformed and simply exhausted/overwhelmed. The system in place does not, by design, seek to benefit us, it is predatory. A simple example of that is the way that the unhealthiest foods, chips, candy, chocolate, is found at the checkout counter. It's not a coincidence, it's because it has been well-studied to maximize profit. It's understood that if you saw a box of candy bars at the front door, you would be more likely to resist grabbing one. But by the time you get to the checkout counter, the number of choices about what to buy and what not to buy has drained your willpower enough that you are more likely to give in and make the impulse purchase. Willpower is like a muscle that gets exhausted over time.
What is a bit crazy to me is that I'm saying that we should give back the power to the consumer, small behavioral changes and you say that people wont even change brands or pay a dime more, so you paint them as unchangable in the slightest when it suits your ideas, but when it comes to eliminating private property and your other ideas then people become infinitelly malleable and all our our natural tendencies were just programmed by evil western colonialism.
Obviously people change brands and they are willing to pay more: if they can afford to, and to soothe their own conscience. My point is not that it is entirely useless though, but that it will never be enough to transform the system if that's the only power of decision that we have and that it's an elitist perspective that serves the elites to think that it can. But let's say that I granted that it could be sufficient given enough time, the fact remains that we do not have that time now given the pressures of climate change and the feedback loops that are in motion. Even a diehard capitalist has to admit that the momentum of the current state of affairs will not be changed by individual consumers making different purchases within the next decade, or two, or three. Yet we've known that this would be the result for decades, and many people championed this "baby steps" mentality that you are championing now along the way, and this is the result.
So now there obviously needs to be more radical, collective action that needs to take place to compensate for the previous inertia -- not that you can really compensate for the countless lives that were lost and the hundreds if not thousands of years that earth's systems will require to regenerate from the damage we have caused. The whole individualist consumer project has failed and a lot of people are in denial about it, and ethical consumerism is just one of the last ways we will cling to our misguided economic notions that are not based in reality.
I'm not saying that the chances that people will want to eliminate private property in the coming decades are much better, lol. I'm just saying that it will become necessary at some point if the species is to survive. But I'm not a futurist. When I talk about anarchism, I'm only trying to see what are the possibilities, no matter how remote they are, of a better society, and debunk common notions that are false or limiting. And yes, it's essential to show the way that we are programmed by our culture/upbringing if we are to become more than obedient automata. It's not a paradox to say that we weren't free to become who we are and believe what we believe and that our realization of that lack of freedom is essential if we are to behave in novel and more adaptive ways in the future. Structural determinism doesn't mean staticity. All species have been shaped through pressures of necessity, they were not free to evolve in the way that they have. Initially evolution favored the strongest, now it favors the most technicized. Maybe (most likely?) in the future it will favor the most conscious, and that's where anarchists place their bet.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
Last edit: 06/01/2019 11:51
1
Liquid`Drone Norway. Jan 06 2019 13:06. Posts 3096
In Norway consumer choices have managed to significantly influence the market in some areas. Most products that used to contain palm oil have swapped palm oil for other vegetable oils because of consumer demand/boycotts, and egg production has changed dramatically the past 10-15 years, with caged hens being much less common than before, "free range" (which does not mean they're free to walk around in the sun, and it's not great, but in most ways it's better than being caged) being the norm, and fully ecological (where they walk around outside) being far more common as well.
But there's a reason why this happens in Norway - whose population is less than 0.1% of the world - as Loco says, we can afford it. We have a much fewer people who lack the economical freedom to make ethical consumer choices. And the slight improvement for chicken hasn't just been about consumer choices anyway, there have also been political changes, and we have a fairly active and well funded 'norwegian food safety authority' that actually supervises farms to see that they've implemented new regulations.
Consumer choices can totally be a contributing factor to ethical improvements of food (or other) production, but it won't ever be sufficient. Political regulations are essential, too. (These seem to largely mirror consumer wishes anyway, as consumers and voters are largely the same people. )
Purchasing power sounds like an absurd idea tbh, go explain to the bottom 30% of the population of the world that they have purchasing power when their options are limited to "buy this or starve to death"
On January 06 2019 07:36 Loco wrote:
There is no such thing as cruelty-free anyway. There is only harm minimization under the current system.
exactly my point
we do not realize our interest when we purchase something without strong collective action, and because we are not rational and orderly economic machines. Some people are malignant, while others are easily deceived, misinformed and simply exhausted/overwhelmed.
Indeed and this is exactly what must be improved and as I've already said many times, the first step is to get rid of the illusion of change in other non-effective ways.
The system in place does not, by design, seek to benefit us, it is predatory. A simple example of that is the way that the unhealthiest foods, chips, candy, chocolate, is found at the checkout counter. It's not a coincidence, it's because it has been well-studied to maximize profit. It's understood that if you saw a box of candy bars at the front door, you would be more likely to resist grabbing one. But by the time you get to the checkout counter, the number of choices about what to buy and what not to buy has drained your willpower enough that you are more likely to give in and make the impulse purchase.
Free trade isn't predatory, there is candy in stores because we want candy, so its self harming because of our own flaws, it is however the system that works best counting in these flaws, what you purpose would be catastrophic because of these same flaws.
Willpower is like a muscle that gets exhausted over time.[/b]
Willpower is like a muscle, it grows stronger the more you use it over time.
[quote]What is a bit crazy to me is that I'm saying that we should give back the power to the consumer, small behavioral changes and you say that people wont even change brands or pay a dime more, so you paint them as unchangable in the slightest when it suits your ideas, but when it comes to eliminating private property and your other ideas then people become infinitelly malleable and all our our natural tendencies were just programmed by evil western colonialism.
My point is not that it is entirely useless though, but that it will never be enough to transform the system if that's the only power of decision that we have and that it's an elitist perspective that serves the elites to think that it can.
Its elitist isn't an argument, its just using a word with no substance in the discussion or are you going back to the "but they can't afford to"?
But let's say that I granted that it could be sufficient given enough time, the fact remains that we do not have that time now given the pressures of climate change and the feedback loops that are in motion. Even a diehard capitalist has to admit that the momentum of the current state of affairs will not be changed by individual consumers making different purchases within the next decade, or two, or three. Yet we've known that this would be the result for decades, and many people championed this "baby steps" mentality that you are championing now along the way, and this is the result.
So now there obviously needs to be more radical, collective action that needs to take place to compensate for the previous inertia -- not that you can really compensate for the countless lives that were lost and the hundreds if not thousands of years that earth's systems will require to regenerate from the damage we have caused. The whole individualist consumer project has failed and a lot of people are in denial about it, and ethical consumerism is just one of the last ways we will cling to our misguided economic notions that are not based in reality.
I see now why you are so against Pinkman's work, in order for your ideology to make sense there must be an impending cataclysm that requires radical change, I couldn't disagree more I think we are progressing, we have for millenia and this isn't some pivotal point, each generation foretells its quick demise, theres nothing different about ours.
I'm not saying that the chances that people will want to eliminate private property in the coming decades are much better, lol. I'm just saying that it will become necessary at some point if the species is to survive. But I'm not a futurist. When I talk about anarchism, I'm only trying to see what are the possibilities, no matter how remote they are, of a better society, and debunk common notions that are false or limiting. And yes, it's essential to show the way that we are programmed by our culture/upbringing if we are to become more than obedient automata. It's not a paradox to say that we weren't free to become who we are and believe what we believe and that our realization of that lack of freedom is essential if we are to behave in novel and more adaptive ways in the future. Structural determinism doesn't mean staticity. All species have been shaped through pressures of necessity, they were not free to evolve in the way that they have. Initially evolution favored the strongest, now it favors the most technicized. Maybe (most likely?) in the future it will favor the most conscious, and that's where anarchists place their bet.
Well perhaps in a distant post-scarcity future free trade makes no sense, but i'm not a futurist either so who cares.
You put so much emphasis on freedom yet leftism requires the sacrifice of personal freedom in pursuit of the good of the many
On January 06 2019 12:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:
In Norway consumer choices have managed to significantly influence the market in some areas. Most products that used to contain palm oil have swapped palm oil for other vegetable oils because of consumer demand/boycotts, and egg production has changed dramatically the past 10-15 years, with caged hens being much less common than before, "free range" (which does not mean they're free to walk around in the sun, and it's not great, but in most ways it's better than being caged) being the norm, and fully ecological (where they walk around outside) being far more common as well.
But there's a reason why this happens in Norway - whose population is less than 0.1% of the world - as Loco says, we can afford it. We have a much fewer people who lack the economical freedom to make ethical consumer choices. And the slight improvement for chicken hasn't just been about consumer choices anyway, there have also been political changes, and we have a fairly active and well funded 'norwegian food safety authority' that actually supervises farms to see that they've implemented new regulations.
Consumer choices can totally be a contributing factor to ethical improvements of food (or other) production, but it won't ever be sufficient. Political regulations are essential, too. (These seem to largely mirror consumer wishes anyway, as consumers and voters are largely the same people. )
Indeed a higher purchasing power allows more freedom of choice, which is why I focus almost solely on a healthy economy, ergo my positions against big governments and their bureacratic social policies that are dead weight that sinks economies even if their goal is to help in the grand scheme of things they do the opposite.
Poliltical regulations can be done by the private sector and are rendered redundant by most consumer choice, and yes consumers are voters, but voting is a placebo, its like cutting your stupid 6-pack plastic rings so it doesn't choke a seal while you transport your 4 children in your SUV every day.
Drone basically just remade my point on geographical determinism and the way that political action and activism has to be the backbone of any change, and the fact that your perspective is elitist, and you thank him, hmm.
"It's elitist isn't an argument" -- no, it's not, but it's what literally anyone who opposes libertarianism/an-capism free market ideology will conclude, and every critique from the left, nearly everything I write about here, is an argument in support of that conclusion. On the other hand, throwing around the words "free" and "freedom" every three sentence and assuming that everyone agrees with you about your right-wing conception of freedom (negative liberty), or that if they don't agree they are deluded or authoritarian, that doesn't consist in an argument and it doesn't go anywhere and inevitably leads you into making sincere but very silly mistakes, like your latest claim that I, as a left-libertarian, am against personal freedom, lol. No, it's that I think your conception of freedom is ill-informed and an insult to my and others' humanity (but it's not an insult that I take personally). This conception of freedom that's been drilled into your skull only serves to reinforce systemic violence and environmental destruction.
I know you ultimately cannot see that free market ideology is at the root of this violence, that you can come up with disconnected explanations as to why it's the government's fault and not the free markets, or how it's about individual shortcomings, despite the fact that it's not about those things in isolation, and I also know why I or no one can change your mind about it. It's a signifier/signified problem. I guess some people might call it the result of brainwashing, but it's not quite that, more like indoctrination. It's that your capacity for integrating information that goes against your imprinting is just like your ability to understand Chinese if someone were to speak it to you now. Your mind cannot decode it, it can only decode what it is familiar with, what is coherent with the closed structure that is your economic ideology and the fear of everything that is associated with its negation. The inversed totalitarianism of neoliberalism is invisible to you, but when a right-wing governor gets assassinated, that is really salient and conversation worthy. This is not surprising, it happens by design in structures of dominance that restrict the propagation of generalized information that threatens the power of the capitalists/technocrats/bureaucrats and it happens in authoritarian socialist regimes as well.
I see now why you are so against Pinkman's work, in order for your ideology to make sense there must be an impending cataclysm that requires radical change, I couldn't disagree more I think we are progressing, we have for millenia and this isn't some pivotal point, each generation foretells its quick demise, theres nothing different about ours.
That couldn't be any more backwards and hubristic. The predictable (and already seen) effects of climate change are completely uncontroversial. Comparing the warnings of climate scientists with previous generations' unscientific apocalyptic prophecies is completely disconnected from reality. The underpinnings of everything I argue for is scientifically uncontroversial -- or else I qualify it as being otherwise. The underpinning of your ideology is fucking praxeology, which rejects the scientific method. You rely on fragmenting an interconnected and complex reality and cherry-picking isolated data or ignoring it altogether to suit your ideology. All this because, by all evidence, you stand on the shoulders of small, simple-minded men, in a mental prison that you cannot see because you were never given the tools to see it. Much like someone who has never seen into a microscope or heard of bacteria cannot know about their existence, you weren't given the tools to see how incoherent and elitist free market ideology is. What's really sad to me is that those tools aren't far from your reach.
And I obviously didn't bring up the pressing need for radical change to justify my own views, my anarchist views would stand even if for some reason I thought climate change would be solved, because I can't conceive of a life that is truly worth living when we are shaped by and coerced into dominance hierarchies, even when we have an abundance of material goods and the freedom to consume. If I was guaranteed that life couldn't get any better than the one that is offered to me by consumer capitalism, I would prefer that you put a bullet in my head right now, even if I had access to unlimited luxury goods for the rest of my life.
Let's put one more thing into context since you want to keep insisting on this idea that everything I care about has to do with leftism and is contaminated by a leftist bias. I'm the one who gave you reading suggestions that are apolitical to get you interested in science and complexity, because I think there is a paradigm of simplicity that undergirds beliefs like yours and many others that are unrelated to economics. My post history on this site shows that I was apolitical for most of my adult life and it was my interest in philosophy and then sciences and making links between the different disciplines through systems thinking that made me interested in politics and economics. (I didn't think that these were interconnected/interrelated before I started becoming systems educated a couple years ago.)
All this to say that it's pretty clear that I wasn't a radical leftist who has been working backwards from some faith-based conclusions, but that's how you like to paint me. By contrast, you've started with economics and ended with economics, only paying cursory attention to anything else. You've been arguing the same things from the fringes for nearly a decade, starting from a rejection of historical analysis and empiricism, and without an interdisciplinary approach. I'm not saying that you haven't learned anything of value in all that time, or that I'm completely objective; what I'm saying is that, looking at the things we argue for and our trajectories, it is much much more likely that you are the one who has been more dominated by confirmation bias and that you are more in the dark due to information deficit.
Steven Pinker hasn't produced any serious scientific work in like two decades. I am not against his legitimate scientific work. I am against his blind Pollyanna optimism and his vulgar defense of the status quo. It's not a personal thing, it's a fact that he's not an authority in any of the fields that he is currently writing about and he has been shown to be factually incorrect about a number of very important issues. His latest oversimplistic analysis of Enlightenment philosophers and whom he deems to be "counter-enlightenment" also would have him fail as an undergraduate philosophy student, it's that bad. There are some mistakes that are understandable. "Nietzsche caused Nazism and post-modernism is killing society" isn't one of them.
Free trade isn't predatory, there is candy in stores because we want candy, so its self harming because of our own flaws, it is however the system that works best counting in these flaws, what you purpose would be catastrophic because of these same flaws.
That's just really lazy. I tell you there is scientific evidence to show why we place the candy at a specific place to prey on human weakness, and you completely ignore my point and just mention that stores sell candy because we like it and then you jump to an unfalsifiable claim. Ironically, if you are not being evasive for ego reasons here, your response is probably this lazy for the reason that I was pointing out (willpower/focus exhaustion).
You call "the best system" one which by design rewards conditioned reptilian/paleomammalian brain behaviors of appropriation and dominance that are unsustainable now. It's clear that a better system would encourage and facilitate more adaptive behaviors made possible by our neomammalian brain, the neocortex, rather than repress them or only use them to improve technicized information for the sake of production as they do now. You can only do this because you are blind to the destruction that these behaviors are causing, blind to what has been possible already throughout history and what is possible now with the technology we have, and of course because you use scapegoats like every religion under the sun has done throughout history. This is not progress, it's a cancerous growth.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
On January 07 2019 03:01 Loco wrote:
Drone basically just remade my point on geographical determinism and the way that political action and activism has to be the backbone of any change, and the fact that your perspective is elitist, and you thank him, hmm.
No, he didn't, I've been saying that consumer action is the way to change things and you are arguings against it, then Drone comes and says that consumer action did change Norway and you thinks he supports you lol.
"It's elitist isn't an argument" -- no, it's not, but it's what literally anyone who opposes libertarianism/an-capism free market ideology will conclude
So its not an argument but a conclusion skipping the argument...
On the other hand, throwing around the words "free" and "freedom" every three sentence and assuming that everyone agrees with you about your right-wing conception of freedom (negative liberty)
When you advocated against freedom of speech you called freedom of speech "libertarian-freedom of speech", when you argue against freedom you call it "right-wing coneption of freedom[/b]
Your arguments are so hollow that you inevitably resort to playing twisted dictionary every single time.
I think your conception of freedom is ill-informed and an insult to my and others' humanity (but it's not an insult that I take personally).
Your intellectual dishonesty is an insult to my and others humanity but I also wont take it personally lol
This conception of freedom that's been drilled into your skull only serves to reinforce systemic violence and environmental destruction.
Holy shit that video haha:
"fascist violence grows out of this as well, as fascism is just capitalism in decay, its a last ditch attempt to hold on to patriotic values like free markets"
Fascism has a socialist economic model you dimwit, and there is no correlation whatsoever with free markets and patriotism.
Half of the video is idiotic and the rest of about wars and interventionism which I couldn't be more against.
I know you ultimately cannot see that free market ideology is at the root of this violence, that you can come up with disconnected explanations as to why it's the government's fault and not the free markets, or how it's about individual shortcomings, despite the fact that it's not about those things in isolation
Its not the government nor free markets, its our collective shortcomings, there is nothing intrinsecally wrong with government, the problem is that its run by us, capitalism is just the system that holds against these shortcomings the best, collectivist systems have historically collapsed disastrously because they require us to be much better than we are.
I guess some people might call it the result of brainwashing, but it's not quite that, more like indoctrination. It's that your capacity for integrating information that goes against your imprinting is just like your ability to understand Chinese if someone were to speak it to you now. Your mind cannot decode it
Sure thing buddy, nice argument.
it can only decode what it is familiar with, what is coherent with the closed structure that is your economic ideology and the fear of everything that is associated with its negation.
Yeah because anarcho capitalism is SO common in Mexico, a country with a 70 year leftist dictatorship lol, a country with about 8 political parties, in which 7 are leftists, 1 religious neo-con and nothing remotely libertarian.
but when a right-wing governor gets assassinated, that is really salient and conversation worthy. This is not surprising, it happens by design in structures of dominance that restrict the propagation of generalized information that threatens the power of the capitalists/technocrats/bureaucrats and it happens in authoritarian socialist regimes as well.
When a leftist president kills a governor its also the fault of capitalists lol.
I see now why you are so against Pinkman's work, in order for your ideology to make sense there must be an impending cataclysm that requires radical change, I couldn't disagree more I think we are progressing, we have for millenia and this isn't some pivotal point, each generation foretells its quick demise, theres nothing different about ours.
All this because, by all evidence, you stand on the shoulders of small, simple-minded men, in a mental prison that you cannot see because you were never given the tools to see it. Much like someone who has never seen into a microscope or heard of bacteria cannot know about their existence, you weren't given the tools to see how incoherent and elitist free market ideology is. What's really sad to me is that those tools aren't far from your reach.
Another great argument there
If I was guaranteed that life couldn't get any better than the one that is offered to me by consumer capitalism, I would prefer that you put a bullet in my head right now, even if I had access to unlimited luxury goods for the rest of my life.
Newsflash for you, the odds that that the consumer capitalism drastically changes in your lifetime are close to 0, so perhaps its time to put the bullet in the chamber lol.
That's just really lazy. I tell you there is scientific evidence to show why we place the candy at a specific place to prey on human weakness, and you completely ignore my point and just mention that stores sell candy because we like it and then you jump to an unfalsifiable claim.
Its not unfalsifiable to the hundreds of millions of death collectivism has produced, ofcourse perhaps there is a better system I just haven't heard of it, for some reason you rarely expose your actual ideals, the only time I've seen you do it you went into it you believed we curently lived post-scarcity and went on on some absurd Zeitgeist 2 babble
You call "the best system" one which by design rewards conditioned reptilian/paleomammalian brain behaviors of appropriation and dominance that are unsustainable now. It's clear that a better system would encourage and facilitate more adaptive behaviors made possible by our neomammalian brain, the neocortex, rather than repress them or only use them to improve technicized information for the sake of production as they do now. You can only do this because you are blind to the destruction that these behaviors are causing, blind to what has been possible already throughout history and what is possible now with the technology we have, and of course because you use scapegoats like every religion under the sun has done throughout history. This is not progress, it's a cancerous growth.
free trade is reptilian haha :D
I wouldn't call the progress in the last 100 years cancerous, flawed, wasteful but we are much better in almost every single aspect than we were 100 years ago and that is Pinker's point even if you contend some specific data the overall trend is very clear
No, he didn't, I've been saying that consumer action is the way to change things and you are arguings against it, then Drone comes and says that consumer action did change Norway and you thinks he supports you lol.
He said that:
- political intervention was necessary
- Norway is in a privileged position to afford more high quality/ethical products (this is due to geographical determinism -- and speaking of ethics, they're also one of the leading arms exporters)
- consumer purchase power is not sufficient on its own
You remembered only that consumer practices have changed and ignored the way that it was achieved. This is a perfect example of confirmation bias and fragmenting things that are connected to suit your ideology. You'll use the successes of the Nordic countries' mixed economies when it suits you while ignoring that the US is much closer to your ideal model and they cannot replicate these successes.
Your arguments are so hollow that you inevitably resort to playing twisted dictionary every single time.
I've learned to be precise with my speech. It's not my fault if you are so often allergic to nuance. This notion of different forms of freedom is just very basic philosophy, it's not me playing games, you know. The primary focus of right-libertarians is negative liberty, while leftists put considerably more value (than you) on positive liberty. "Negative liberty is freedom from interference by other people. Negative liberty is primarily concerned with freedom from external restraint and contrasts with positive liberty (the possession of the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty). My personal hatred towards neoliberal capitalism stems from its not granting this positive freedom -- instead I was put into a world where everything is commodified, and where I have a restricted freedom in the form of the freedom to consume and the freedom to market myself and compete with others for social promotions, money and prestige, things that repulse me.
Its not unfalsifiable to the hundreds of millions of death collectivism has produced, ofcourse perhaps there is a better system I just haven't heard of it, for some reason you rarely expose your actual ideals, the only time I've seen you do it you went into it you believed we curently lived post-scarcity and went on on some absurd Zeitgeist 2 babble
You are again completely ignoring my point and the simple example that I gave to show the predatory nature of capitalist markets focused on profit maximization and instead you choose to focus on something that is completely irrelevant to the subject and which I have stated at least 10 times that I don't support -- authoritarian socialism -- as if that were the only option. It's always about these simple dualities with you. I even gave you a long list of historical and active anarchist societies.
We likely have the means to be living post-scarcity. This is not some outrageous claim. Jeremy Rifkin has a book called "Zero Marginal Costs Society" which has been very well received even by status quo defenders like Sam Harris. If you think it's outrageous it's probably because you know nothing about it and you make the common mistake of believing that post-scarcity means that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services, but a quick wikipedia research will tell you that's not what it is.
I have said many things about my ideals, especially when it comes to education, which has been my main focus, and I also said that there can be no transitional blueprint, societies have to have a new way of thinking that is complexity-focused and allows them to adapt to our complex and unpredictable environments. The direction I believe we need be going into is outlined in the book Doughnut Economics and I posted two talks about it in our 'Neoliberal economics' thread. I believe a transition should be made to a steady-state economy (being agnostic about growth, as opposed to the current productivist economies), global governance, and into a resource-based economy or post-scarcity anarchist societies (Murray Bookchin) eventually. This is something I have barely scratched the surface on and which I am planning to explore more in the future. David Graeber and David Wengrow will have a new book coming out later this year that will probably give me a lot more to think about.
the overall trend is very clear
Yes it is, and I just showed it to you on one single impossible-to-ignore graph, which unlike your Pinker stats isn't biased, funded by elites and misleadingly one-sided. You chose to ignore it anyway, because you know as well as I do that we don't have a solution to it and it's the death kneel to a free market ideology. You have to hope that it's just one big conspiracy or that some scientists will get to save the day in time. And that's all it is, a gamble on science to save us from the ravages that human unconsciousness and vulgarity has brought onto this planet.
Fascism has a socialist economic model you dimwit
"The Nazi government took the stance that enterprises should be in private hands wherever possible.[42] State ownership was to be avoided unless it was absolutely necessary for rearmament or the war effort, and even in those cases “the Reich often insisted on the inclusion in the contract of an option clause according to which the private firm operating the plant was entitled to purchase it.”[43] Companies privatized by the Nazis included the four major commercial banks in Germany, which had all come under public ownership during the prior years..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
The first political groups targeted during the Nazi ascendancy were pacifists, trade unionists and communists. Strasserism, the only strand of Nazism that could be referred to as "left-wing" (i.e. pro-working class in nature), were all killed off (with a handful of conservative dissidents) in the Night of the Long Knives.
More on this misconception:
" fascism is just capitalism in decay, its a last ditch attempt to hold on to patriotic values like free markets"
there is no correlation whatsoever with free markets and patriotism.
Yes there is, it's called Exceptionalism, it's fundamental to both free market ideology and Fascism and there is incontrovertible proof about it, but sadly you're not interested in evidence and historical analysis because you have the absolute irrefutable truth of praxeology to support your views. The crystallization of American exceptionalism, or Americanism, based on such values as individualism, liberty and free market economics, is largely credited to Ronald Reagan:
"No one did more than Ronald Reagan to amplify and popularize the U.S. as exceptional. Refusing to accept the doldrums of the Jimmy Carter presidency or the transgressions of Richard Nixon as the best that Americans could do, Reagan promoted the image of the U.S. as a shining "city upon a hill." This reference is to a 1630 sermon by John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop was calling on the new Pilgrim settlers heading for Massachusetts to stick to the narrow path of Puritanism.
Reagan and his followers wrongly attributed American exceptionalism to this Puritan injunction, and added "shining" to the original, which gave the phrase a distinctly different connotation. Nor was Winthrop referring to any nation, but rather a discrete community of English Protestant believers. Notably, Winthrop's sermon had been neglected for centuries. It was resurrected only in the 1940s by a few Harvard academics who were engaged in an intellectual rehabilitation of Puritan thought. In a 1961 speech, John F. Kennedy, who had been a Harvard student and was influenced by that university's Americanists, used the "city upon a hill" phrase. The idea of the U.S. as a "city upon a hill," however, really gained purchase in political rhetoric in the 1970s and '80s, as Reagan sought to reinvent the country.
Without question, Reagan saw the U.S. as an exceptional nation. The language of exceptionalism, however, derived from Marxism, not God. The idea of a morally superior and unique civilization destined to guide the world did not come under the banner of an orthodox "ism" until very recently, until the 21st century. In the wake of 9/11, the speeches of George W. Bush and his supporters asserted the radical distinctiveness of the U.S. with a new belligerence. We have all heard it: It is "our freedoms" that Islamic terrorists hated; they wished to kill Americans because they envied this exceptional inheritance.
The global financial crisis of 2007-10 added to the geopolitical turmoil that followed 9/11. Though the U.S. economy expanded in the 1990s and early 2000s, economic inequality that began to grow in the Reagan era also became worse. In the post-1945 age, when academics first posed American exceptionalism as a coherent doctrine, the idea also became linked to global U.S. military and political hegemony" (https://theweek.com/articles/654508/what-exactly-american-exceptionalism)
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
On January 08 2019 08:54 Loco wrote:
[quote]
He said that:
- political intervention was necessary
- Norway is in a privileged position to afford more high quality products (this is due to geographical determinism -- and speaking of ethics, they're also one of the leading arms exporters)
- consumer purchase power is not sufficient on its own
Yes he did and I said that the effect the regulations have can be archieved through private initiatives
US and norway's GDP per capita isnt that different and even taking into account gini coefficient, the median isn't that far off, what is vastly different is the structure of the econonmy, Norway's economy isn't based on debt and hyper consumism like the american economy is.
This is a perfect example of confirmation bias and fragmenting things that are connected to suit your ideology. You'll use the successes of the Nordic countries' mixed economies when it suits you while ignoring that the US is much closer to your ideal model and they cannot replicate these successes.
No, I've critiqued ad naseum scandinavian leftist practices, I've said they are built upon the wealth and position built in the early 19th century and the most civil and least corrup civilization on earth but even then its sustainability long term is in question and very frail at the least, I've gone specifically into Sweden economy do you even fucking read my posts? (Norway is trickier since they bumped into a shit ton of oil)
I've learned to be precise with my speech. It's not my fault if you are so often allergic to nuance. This notion of different forms of freedom is just very basic philosophy, it's not me playing games, you know. The primary focus of right-libertarians is negative liberty, while leftists put considerably more value (than you) on positive liberty. "Negative liberty is freedom from interference by other people. Negative liberty is primarily concerned with freedom from external restraint and contrasts with positive liberty (the possession of the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty)
No you arent precise, you simply redefine words as you see fit, it has nothing to do with nuance, you went on and on about refusing to call me an anarchist because apprently ancaps are just internet trolls inyour mind, you have done this like 10 times already.
I googled negative liberty, some leftists used it 50 years ago, I'm fucking sorry but no you dont get to redefine words... now if you want to discuss that empowering people to fulfull ones potential through cohertion is superior than non external restraints fine lets discuss it... but you dont get to redefine words
you choose to focus on something that is completely irrelevant to the subject and which I have stated at least 10 times that I don't support -- authoritarian socialism -- as if that were the only option. It's always about these simple dualities with you. I even gave you a long list of historical and active anarchist societies.
You think that when I say that capitalism is the system that works the best with our flawed nature is an unfalsifiable claim, but you think that collectivism is the correct system but that somehow isn't an unfalsifiable claim.
I made the communism reference to point this hypocricy but the irony went just through you.
We likely have the means to be living post-scarcity. This is not some outrageous claim. Jeremy Rifkin has a book called "Zero Marginal Costs Society" which has been very well received even by status quo defenders like Sam Harris. If you think it's outrageous it's probably because you know nothing about it and you make the common mistake of believing that post-scarcity means that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services, but a quick wikipedia research will tell you that's not what it is.
No, we even talked about hoarding TVs and stuff remember? you painted a different post-scarcity picture than just a "perhaps we can give 2 rations of nutrient paste, some penicylin and a pair of shoes to everybody"
I have said many things about my ideals, especially when it comes to education, which has been my main focus, and I also said that there can be no transitional blueprint, societies have to have a new way of thinking that is complexity-focused and allows them to adapt to our complex and unpredictable environments. The direction I believe we need be going into is outlined in the book Doughnut Economics and I posted two talks about it on here. I believe a transition should be made to a steady-state economy (being agnostic about growth, as opposed to the current productivist economies), global governance, and into a resource-based economy or post-scarcity anarchist societies (Murray Bookchin) eventually. This is something I have barely scratched the surface on and which I am planning to explore more in the future. David Graeber and David Wengrow will have a new book coming out later this year that will probably give me a lot more to think about.
On this I mostly agree, we probably would paint a different line but the monetarian every incrasing debt hyperconsumist economy is awful, I've been saying that for 10 years as you said.
Yes it is, and I just showed it to you on one single impossible-to-ignore graph, which unlike your Pinker stats isn't biased, funded by elites and misleading. You chose to ignore it anyway, because you know as well as I do that we don't have a solution to it and it's the death kneel to a free market ideology. You have to hope that it's just one big conspiracy or that some scientists will get to save the day in time. And that's all it is, a gamble on science to save us from the ravages that human unconsciousness and vulgarity has brought onto this planet.
You showed me a CO2 graph lol.
The concentration of CO2 has risen very likely due to the industrialization, temperatures have also risen and the concensus is that there is a direct correlation between the two, now, the extent of the potential damages and timeframes are widely disputed and there is no concensus, now I bet you can come and post a few scientific articles and in exchange I'll post contradicting ones and we can go on and on if you want.
"The Nazi government took the stance that enterprises should be in private hands wherever possible.[42] State ownership was to be avoided unless it was absolutely necessary for rearmament or the war effort, and even in those cases “the Reich often insisted on the inclusion in the contract of an option clause according to which the private firm operating the plant was entitled to purchase it.”[43] Companies privatized by the Nazis included the four major commercial banks in Germany, which had all come under public ownership during the prior years..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
The first political groups targeted during the Nazi ascendancy were pacifists, trade unionists and communists. Strasserism, the only strand of Nazism that could be referred to as "left-wing" (i.e. pro-working class in nature), were all killed off (with a handful of conservative dissidents) in the Night of the Long Knives.
Fascists commonly have sought to eliminate the autonomy of large-scale capitalism to the state.[44] However, Fascism does support private property rights and the existence of a market economy.[45] Due to the economic hardships that resulted from "war communism", which almost toppled the leadership of Soviet Russia in 1921, fascists in Germany and Italy followed the examples of Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP)
The state takes control of the economy, it is allowed to be run by privately if they serve the interests of the nation... so yeah socialism.
They weren't stupid enough like the Soviets to eliminate private property because they knew their economy would collapse so they toned it down Lenin style.
Yes there is, it's called Exceptionalism, is the basis of Fascism and there is incontrovertible proof about it, but sadly you're not interested in evidence and historical analysis because you have the absolute irrefutable truth of praxeology to support your views.
I didnt see anything that remotely linked free market with nationalism.
What I find curious is that a guy who is convinced the armaggedon is going to happen in his lifetime talks about exceptionalism , iornic... again.
On January 07 2019 23:57 Baalim wrote: capitalism is just the system that holds against these shortcomings the best
Couldn't have been said better. The only problem is, in the long run, everything gets too centralized in all the places where it shouldn't and every next financial crisis or war gets exponentially worse. The thing is I don't believe its capitalism itself that causes the problem but it allowed for it to exist.
It's a bit of a touchy subject since capitalism actually helped the economy by a great deal when it comes to businesses, creating long queues for practically every industry but the ones that matter the most. The power of corporations seems to be a bit overexaggerated as competition keeps them in check, but the power of banks has become so strong due to capitalism that I don't see how countries like the USA would ever free themselves without some sort of a revolution. There is no competition for the banks, and if they fail they get bailed out, essentially giving them the freedom to do whatever they'd like, however they like, whenever they like.
People could say "eeh but look at what happened to Bear Sterns" - which is they got all their assets ceased by another big bank, the people that caused the crisis didn't really get any penalty and we are running into another crash very soon.
I still don't understand your solution of everything through the power of purchase of every individual on too many levels.
First of all, your "will" is being influenced by a hundred different things on a daily basis constantly, whether you understand it or not. You would either spend hours thinking about each and every purchase you make before you make it, to accomplish your goal, or you would simply fail it. E.g. what Loco said about purchasing some quality product from Nestle, but that still leads to Nestle's growth and overall pollution.
Obviously, spending hours on every single purchase is impossible, so are we to ban marketing and advertisement? That seems like a bad idea and an unrealistic idea. The issue is that even if we educate people on a high enough level, they would still be influenced regardless of their knowledge.
Also what are the people that have no option going to do? Interventionalism and establishing capitalism there ? But wait, capitalism needs poor people, to begin with, so that doesn't work either.
You will now come out with statistics of how capitalism has saved the most people from poverty than anything else before. And that's is true, except if you look at stats the purchasing power of the average American has actually fallen down in the past 40-50 years. Now that might be due to the salaries not being able to catch up to the technical advancement and the newly founded necessities we have, but still... Capitalism is a system whose nature is to try to drive the production costs as low as possible, meaning it needs uneducated, undemanding people. Thats why countries like the USA thrive, but don't produce anything in-house, rather have all of their production done by people who'd do it for pennies.
This is honestly the best lazy solution system which humanity could've found and it works for a great amount of people in the short term, but quite unsustainable in the long run, unless we don't wanna grow as species, in which case it's kind of whatever isn't it ?
On a completely different note, Trump is thinking about delcaring a state of emergency in the country, to enforce the government to build its Mexico wall.... I didn't think the guy would get assasinated, but its statements like this that really make me wonder if he just wants to.... And to be honest if that happens which is very very unlikely ( declaring state of emergency that is ), it will be so he could enter in a war with Iran
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United States. Jan 05 2019 17:02. Posts 8989
, iornic... again.
