US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2042

On January 19 2020 00:01 JimmiC wrote:

Id say you certainly have a well regulated militia in todays term, the national guard. They train, are ready to defend your nation if need be.


Edit: In good news former congressman Collins was convicted for insider trading. The punishment seems light but better than nothing!

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/former-rep-chris-collins-sentenced-to-2-years-in-prison-for-insider-trading/ar-BBZ4W6V?li=AAggFp5

On January 19 2020 10:41 Aquanim wrote:

I think you (and the Guardian article) are substantially over-selling the quoted research. For starters, "Inherently selfish" doesn't necessarily mean only motivated by selfishness or only performing selfish acts.

On January 19 2020 09:19 Gorgonoth wrote:
@Drone

Thank you for your thought-provoking post. I had a couple of thoughts and questions regarding what you wrote about the role of greed in capitalistic societies.

You said that you don't believe that greed is inherent in human nature and that it arises in human capitalistic societies. This seems to me to be a tenuous assertion. Isn't greed simply the motivating forces of self-preservation, and generally self or perhaps community-centered focus, which we can see working mightily in the earliest of human settlements and early tribes long before a formal capitalistic system?
Perhaps I am being too simplistic, but doesn't this seem to be the question that we should be honing in on, because does the global economic system really matter that much if the individual's which we are basing the system on inherently flawed in a way which will lend towards destruction? Of course, we can judge and distinguish between better and worse. Capitalism has undeniably led, as you opened with, to an impressive surge in human quality of life. And I am inclined to believe, that socialistic systems where market control is centralized have tended toward authoritarian regimes that benefit few and are inferior towards allowing greater economic freedom and having free markets. Generally at least.

But I don't want to make this seem like I am trying to reopen a discussion on capitalism or socialism. I have great faith others will do that for me. I'm curious what you think about the most basic element of a society, the individual. In short, I think it is not only tenuous, but dangerous to say that greed is not inherent, but external; because this implies if we only stumble upon the right formula, the right societal situations, we can produce people who are good. If you believe this it inevitably leads and has led to the conclusion that we must experiment, and make certain sacrifices to attain this, you have to break a couple eggs (Or millions of people like Stalin did) to achieve this perfect societal utopian omelet.

+ Show Spoiler +
The main point I'd like to submit is that human greed is inherent in human nature and we have ingrained self-destructive tendencies. The corollary of this is that no matter what economic system you implement, you cannot get around the greed and pervasive self-seeking nature of man.

Attempts like you say to move to a socialistic global system will run into this same insufferable problem. People will just exploit that system in new ways to benefit themselves, probably resulting in a global elite that prospers while the rest of the world gets hit by a massive recession and the nastiest depths of human depravity is exposed. Maybe I'm way off here, but it seems like a fast track to a dystopian Mcormac-esque future.

On January 19 2020 09:19 Gorgonoth wrote:
The main point I'd like to submit is that human greed is inherent in human nature and we have ingrained self-destructive tendencies. The corollary of this is that no matter what economic system you implement, you cannot get around the greed and pervasive self-seeking nature of man.

On January 19 2020 09:14 Nouar wrote:
The only thing Trump is reliably for, is exposure, TV. That's the only thing on his mind, what will make people talk and excite them. True, false, left, right, doesn't matter. Just, not black, especially not Obama.

He went on the right to get elected, saw what worked with these people, and is looking the part. I have to admit he is a genius at that. But it's only ever for his own short-lived benefit. Couldn't care less about the country, and it's sad that his voters don't care either about the long-term rift this is furthering.

This "vigilance against tyranny" is bullshit. It's not the 1700' anymore. The federal govt is not going to be a tyran, there's a democracy. If they lose votes (at the state level), tough luck, that means more people in their state are against that kind of shit and they are the minority. So it's not a tyranny. Rather, they are the ones being it.

The government of Virginia can do things, and you've got a congress to pass it or cross it, and then courts to appeal to it. A few things are necessarily going to stick, nothing strange here.

Again, it's Trump's behaviour the issue for me.
Not a governor, after busting would-be terrorists, trying to ensure a protest can happen in peace (unlike another one that happened 2 years ago). Not the guys protesting themselves. It's absolutely allowed and encouraged. Just, try to understand what happened, beyond your fucking guns ?

On January 19 2020 12:55 Nebuchad wrote:
My argument on this would be quite different from Drone's. I certainly do believe that greed is a component of human nature. I just don't really know why people think that's an argument for capitalism or an argument against socialism. If you're entering the realm of questions of greed and altruism you're going into morality, and I can't tell what the correct morals are. Is it moral to have politics that are good for society, or is it moral to have politics that are good for you personally? I don't know. Neither do you.

I'm inclined to want to sidestep these types of debates because I don't think there's a way to get a definitive answer. I can just tell you that the mechanics of a society that rewards greed in individuals, but also requires a majority of individuals to be in a lower class while a minority benefits, will always have tensions around inequality. You should strive to be a winner, but the reality is that most people will lose. Those tensions will be solved either by a move to the left, which would be my preference, or using divide and conquer methods of diversion: have the people who are losing the most be from another country or another culture, that way the others won't feel like they're losing as hard, and won't feel as connected to the least fortunate in the society as they would otherwise. Also, isn't it those people's fault if you're not making a ton of money? They're driving down your wages by being willing to work for less! And don't let me start about welfare, you know that's the poor and the weak in society holding you back...

Similar methods were used to maintain slavery back in the day. You stopped having irish slaves because it was hard to maintain power over both the Irish and the Black people at the same time, so if the Irish could be something in between white people and black people instead of being just slaves like the rest of them, the system was easier to maintain.

Of course it's not exactly the same thing, I'm not trying to say nothing has changed. But the logic is similar. People who are given the capacity to systemically exploit others will, on average, exploit them as much as they are allowed to, or as much as they feel they can get away with; and they will work to maintain that capacity and increase it.

In a sense we're still going back to morals, because if you're on the side of greed, you could argue that society should be a place where "I" get to strive, not where "individuals" get to strive, and I don't think I can argue against that without using a moral axiom, except to say that in that case you probably should be arguing for absolutely monarchy where you are the monarch rather than for capitalism. But regardless, it's either a little bit more complicated, or a little simpler, depending on how you look at it, than "is greed a human characteristic".

Greed is one of the most common features of human nature, and it has recently attracted increasing research interest. The aims of this paper are to provide one of the first empirical investigations of the effects of greed on job performance and to explore the mediating role of the need for social status and perceived distributive justice. Using a working sample (N = 315) from China, the current study found that greed promoted both task and contextual performance through the intermediary effect of the need for social status. At the same time, greed inhibited both types of performance through perceived distributive justice. These results confirmed our hypothesis that greed is a double-edged sword with opposite effects on one’s performance.
...
The relationship between greed and performance is far from self-evident. In organizational settings, where individuals work together with others and social status is valued even more highly than money (Ezard, 2000). Thus, employees with higher level of greed are more likely to have a higher level of the need for social status, which makes them work harder to gain the status they long for. Meanwhile, greed may distort people’s perception of distributive justice, which may in turn hold them back from devoting themselves to their work. In sum, it seems two different paths may exist through which greed could affect performance. In the current study, we tested the facilitating effect of greed on performance through the need for social status and the inhibiting effect of greed on performance through perceived distributive justice.

Researchers should nevertheless be careful about using the relatively blunt tool of the Dictator Game to draw conclusions about human generosity, says Nicholas Bardsley at the University of Southampton, UK, who studies such games.

His research suggests that players who routinely give money away as Dictators are also perfectly happy to steal money off other players in games that involve taking rather than giving. This suggests that the apparently more altruistic players in Ebstein's game may in fact be motivated by a desire simply to engage fully with the game, perhaps just because they feel that that is what's expected of them.

If that is true, then apparently ruthless dictators may be motivated not by out-and-out greed but by a simple lack of social skills, which leaves them unable to sense what's expected of them.

On January 19 2020 14:10 BerserkSword wrote:


The basis for using greed/human nature as an argument doesnt really concern itself with morality. It concerns itself with economics. Simply put, if people are not allowed to profit from their productive endeavors, and instead have to yield to the priority of equalizing outcomes, they would lack motivation to work. The argument is that socialism, as an economic system, is basically incompatible with human nature. Even guys like Marx acknowledged this when he said his final-state Communist utopia would require the people ascending to a superior Communist individual.

On January 19 2020 14:58 Nebuchad wrote:


Yeah but this is backwards though. It is in capitalism that you don't fully benefit from your productive endeavor, as the profits go to a member of the capitalist class (your boss) and you get a wage that isn't representative of your productive endeavor but of the contract that you have negotiated with your boss beforehand.

It is true that a system where the state just replaces the boss and acts like him for all workers, which is what you're refering to here, would go against human nature if we accept that greed is part of it, and wouldn't improve the situation that I find fault with. But that's not what I or democratic socialists in general are advocating for. We want the company to be owned by its workers, so that they are the ones getting the benefit of their labor rather than their bosses. Arguably what you described is not even what marxist-leninists (with the exception of tankies) are advocating for, but I'm not sure this is worth getting into at this stage.

It seems a system like the one I aspire to would be not only acceptable for, but also superior for the vision of human nature that you describe here.

On January 19 2020 14:58 Nebuchad wrote:


Yeah but this is backwards though. It is in capitalism that you don't fully benefit from your productive endeavor, as the profits go to a member of the capitalist class (your boss) and you get a wage that isn't representative of your productive endeavor but of the contract that you have negotiated with your boss beforehand.

It is true that a system where the state just replaces the boss and acts like him for all workers, which is what you're refering to here, would go against human nature if we accept that greed is part of it, and wouldn't improve the situation that I find fault with. But that's not what I or democratic socialists in general are advocating for. We want the company to be owned by its workers, so that they are the ones getting the benefit of their labor rather than their bosses. Arguably what you described is not even what marxist-leninists (with the exception of tankies) are advocating for, but I'm not sure this is worth getting into at this stage.

It seems a system like the one I aspire to would be not only acceptable for, but also superior for the vision of human nature that you describe here.

On January 19 2020 18:35 BerserkSword wrote:


It's not backwards at all. The market determines whether the wage is representative of your productive endeavor.

Companies don't just grow out of thin air, and don't run themselves. Companies require vision, business acumen, capital, and risk.

Your system falls prey to the same concept - there is no incentive to do much. Why take risks and enter the liquidity pool of a market when you can just let someone else do it and get ownership of someone else's endeavor by merely providing low skill work or something? Are you really suggesting that Amazon should be owned by all its employees, for example?

The union has a monopoly on recruitment in its field, source of its strength. The system resembles british "closed shops" and allows workers to reach a very high salary. According to a senatorial report, salary weight in daily press printing costs is 80% compared to 35% in the other printing services

On January 19 2020 12:07 Belisarius wrote:
There's a huge difference between "humans can be innately motivated by altruism", and "humans are not innately motivated by greed."

That study demonstrates that children can be empathetic. That is cool, but it says nothing about whether they can also be selfish, nor about whether that is innate, nor about which of greed and altruism wins when the two come into conflict. Those are the things that you would need to address to get around this:

Personally, I think innate selfishness is pretty hard to argue against. I don't know how many people here have had children, but I think everyone would be aware that if you watched those kids for another half hour, one would begin to throw a tantrum because another started playing with something they also wanted to play with. They do both, just as adults do both.

On January 19 2020 21:04 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Your example is not greed, that's desire for equability. I don't have time to write a longer post today, but that I can address. I think humans have a very strong innate desire for being treated equally to their fellow man. I don't think the desire to have more than your fellow man is an innate desire (in most humans, it might well be a natural trait found within a small %, I dunno about that).

On January 19 2020 18:35 BerserkSword wrote:


It's not backwards at all. The market determines whether the wage is representative of your productive endeavor.

Companies don't just grow out of thin air, and don't run themselves. Companies require vision, business acumen, capital, and risk.

Your system falls prey to the same concept - there is no incentive to do much. Why take risks and enter the liquidity pool of a market when you can just let someone else do it and get ownership of someone else's endeavor by merely providing low skill work or something? Are you really suggesting that Amazon should be owned by all its employees, for example?

On January 19 2020 22:42 farvacola wrote:
Attempting to determine what is or is not “natural” with regards to human behavior is largely an exercise in futility that serves as a placeholder for a defense-by-proxy of other values, which is one among many reasons why naturalistic fallacies are a thing in the first place. That said, some kind of baseline malleability being a core tenet of humanity has merits as an argument aside from whether it describes objective truths.