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On May 30 2019 08:05 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2019 05:30 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 03:43 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 00:07 Nebuchad wrote:On May 29 2019 23:02 JimmiC wrote:On May 29 2019 21:08 Nebuchad wrote:
As you may remember, I'm not a fan of central planning on paper, but for the sake of the argument I'm going to answer differently here.
It seems that you're presenting different stages for your argument, and the more you move in the direction of your utopia, the less defined it is. The most defined stage is what you're doing right now with recyclable material: doesn't require any political change, is obviously possible (and probably a good thing). So here we have a ton of details. The issue that I have with it is, and again that's not our first time on this, that your vision to fight climate change is very liberal: it requires a bunch of people to take personal responsibility and fight climate change in their own lives. This is inconsistent with the problem we're facing, as we are only indirectly responsible for climate change: businesses are the main culprit. So no, I don't think it's contradictory for an ecologist to take a hot shower or use single use cups, as long as they understand that the larger fight against climate change occurs at the level of industry, not at the level of how often you accept to pee in the shower.
Then we have, get other countries in the world to be social democracies. Already less defined. And create a global government that does central planning. Entirely vague. Notice that while expanding on this you do not exactly go into details, instead you talk a lot about how other stuff doesn't work and what makes your vision harder to accomplish. You say you don't need as much detail as you work within well defined systems, but you actually don't work within a well-defined system: the system today doesn't contain a central planning, nor does it contain a bunch of social democracies. One element at the center of your worldview also appears contradictory to me: you want central planning, but you don't want a revolution? A central planning isn't compatible with capitalism, as far as I can tell. If you have a way to make this work I'd like to read it.
Also would like an answer on my proposition to increase democracies if you don't mind. From my perspective it's a revolutionary idea that should be compatible with all the issues you have stated concerning revolutionary ideas. It would not be central planning anymore than than a current federal government is, in fact less so. It would just keep some global guiding principals to make sure humanity is not pulling against each other, do things like not have certain banking rules/taxation rules in some countries so people can launder and hide money and so on. And this is the fanciful part no doubt. I more or less through that in as a ideal, but I think many of the problems could be solved if we could just import actual socialized democracies to the world, they would be able to have shared interests for the most part. Pure democracy has its issues as well since most people are uninformed on most topics, that is part of the reason these populists with catch phrases, all the answers and scapegoats are sweeping the polls. Finding the right mix is not easy, but I think the social democracies have done it best. I also don't believe it is as simple as capitalism is pure evil and socialism is pure good. Both sound amazing on paper and both have real issues when put into practice. I think creating a fair environment through social programs, along with regulations on businesses to make sure the reward and risk make sense, as well as that they compete fairly with each other, pay living wages, treat the environment correctly so on. People have to start taking personal responsibility for the choices they individually make. Businesses make things the cheapest possible because people care most about paying the least. If consumers actually said we are not buying Nike anymore because their pay, facilities and so on are not safe then Nike would do something. People also care more about convenience than the environment, do you have a plastic bottle of water you use once or do you have a reusable water bottle? Do you take your own reusable mug to Starbucks or do take there single use cup? There are literately 100's of changes people can make and don't so that is why regulation is needed. But guess what, there are also a TON of private businesses that are leading edge and doing way more than government or requirements. In my city we actually have dedicated staff to just try to bring it up to our own regulations! Governments, unions, so on are great, but they arenot without flaws. Hopefully that answered some of yours. Now can you please explain to me how socialism will fix the environment? So far I feel like I'm in Seinfeld a episode where it is the world has problems yadda yadda revolution, yadda yadda, socialism, yadda yadda climate change solved. And within the yadda yadda so much can go wrong or needs to be explained. The arguments that you bring up against pure democracy aren't arguments against pure democracy, they're arguments against every kind of democracy, pure or unpure. People are uninformed and uneducated, so we can't trust them to make decisions about how they are governed, especially because of populism and propaganda. But in the system that we have today, people are uninformed and uneducated, and we trust them to make decisions about who will govern them, and populism and propaganda play a part in the process of who gets chosen. I think almost nobody in the entire world believes that both capitalism and socialism sound amazing on paper. Capitalism and socialism are contradicting each other on a great variety of important topics about how society should be organized. One says that exploitation is fine, the other doesn't. One says that social hierarchy is fine, the other doesn't. One puts profit at the forefront, the other doesn't. Those are pretty crucial world view differences. It would be extremely weird to view both of those theories on paper and think that they are both amazing. I'm going to give you a slightly flawed metaphor, that I still like, about what the liberal view of fighting climate change looks like to me. There's this huge forest fire in front of us, it's burning the whole forest. A group of people are throwing a ton of fuel into the fire, slightly to the side of the picture so it's not necessarily obvious to everyone watching that they're doing it. Liberals, in the center of the picture, are lining up and peeing into the fire in an effort to stop its progression. Sometimes someone comes up and talks to the liberals: "Hey, don't you think maybe we should try and do something about the people throwing fuel in the fire?" And the liberals answer: "Pff, this dude isn't even peeing with us, I dislike all these people not peeing, clearly they are the reason why the fire is still spreading." And that brings us neatly to how I think socialism would help against climate change: the profit motive stops being the primary motive of businesses and corporations. By giving people the power to decide what a company should and shouldn't do, we get to put other motives into the picture, like, in our case, humanity's survival for example. Here's a concrete example: when confronted with the scientific notion that our species was likely to die if we didn't do anything about climate change, people in the capitalist class reacted by funding antiscience projects and backing antiscience politicians. They didn't do so because they are evil, they did so because convincing people that climate change was a hoax was more profitable than doing something about climate change. And capitalism dictates that the best route is the most profitable route. Capitalism, without a revolutionary reform, is by its very nature ill-equipped to defeat a threat like climate change because in order to defeat that threat, you have to go against the principles of capitalism. The thing is the elected people are like a board of directors not direct oversight. The people hired and trained within the governmental organization are the ones doing the real work and presenting the ideas to the various elected officials. Sure they can make changes about time frames and what they want looked at but the end of the day it is all the bureaucrats that are getting shit done. This is why you don't want every decision made by vote, because people can't possibly be informed on everything even if they wanted to. Your last sentence is why capitalism alone has not solved the problem, it is about the issues with short term thinking which don't go away with socialism. Secondly we do not have "capitalism" right now, at least not in the Adam Smith sense. My issue is it is not a fair comparison to point out the failings of the current systems (which I'm not saying do not exist) and match it up against a philosophical position. There are reasons why neither exists in those philosophical forms. Which is why I keep asking if there is country, preferably with some size, that you would like to at least use as a starting point. Since if you are talking about fixing climate change you have to be talking on a global scale. I If we do trust these people, hired and trained, within the governmental organization, to do the real work and make the right decisions, then why is it good to let the people vote at all? Don't these people in government know better than the uninformed population who would make the best ruler? This isn't to say that you are against democracy. This is to say that if we follow the logic of any argument against having more democracy, these arguments' logic can easily be brought up against the level of democracy that we have now. There is a tension there. Of course we have capitalism. The means of production are privately owned, by a class of people. These people, who we call the capitalist class, then exploit the labor of workers to create a profit, and the goal of the game is to maximize their profit. If you bring up Adam Smith you're talking liberalism, not capitalism. It's not short term thinking that causes capitalism to not fix its problems, it's capitalism. The capitalists aren't short-sighted, they're correct. It is unarguably true that it is more profitable to fight against science on climate change than it is to go with science and fight climate change. Reaching climate goals is a second set of goals, on top of maximizing profits, that you impose on yourself. If instead you just don't do it, you are of course going to maximize profits. Their behavior is entirely consistent with how we train them to think about the economy in this system. You know there is no country like this, obviously. In Switzerland we have more democracy and we're doing fine, but it's not direct democracy either and we aren't fighting for it. And it's not remotely close to socialism, of course, nor should it be as we are a small as fuck country with not a ton of direct power. The change needs to come from a large, powerful country in order to have any chance at sustainability. Since most of the fights against socialism have been led by the US, it is a natural starting point, as it gets rid of a very natural enemy at the same time. No both provide important roles. Mainly to stop corruption, if were were not so self interested you probably could have a real great technocrat, or authoritarian, or centrally run communist country, it just does not work in practice. It is also clear that if the world is going to end due to climate change, that making the world end does not maximize profits it ends them. It is short term thinking, there is no rule in Capitalism that you must make the decision that maximizes profits right now compared to maximizing profits forever. Theoretically you in fact should make it a mix. The issue more involves with how the decision makers are paid, which is stock options. Why do you think there is no country like this? There has been attempts, the USSR certainly had the land mass, people, so on that they could have been successful. What stops them from being successful? Also are you pro union? And have you worked as a part of one?
Election of a leader doesn't by default stop corruption or self-interest on the part of bureaucrats. If he listens to their advice, they can still give him the advice that benefits them or their particular ideology or world view. On top of that, keep in mind that "good advice" is left undefined. If the ideology of most of these bureaucrats is social democracy, they're going to give very different advice than if their ideology is neoliberalism, let alone conservatism... and all of them could still reasonably perceive that they're giving good advice when they do this. The leader will also have an ideology and that will also influence what he perceives to be good advice or not. Keep in mind that the bureaucrats aren't out of a job either. What we could do is continue to let them create policy, but instead of just trusting them with it, have votes on what they've come up with when they're making massive decisions just to make sure that we're being governed in the way that we actually want. Looking at the US specifically there are like 10 different major ideas where that would help improve the country's coherence immediately.
Heh, the world isn't ending tomorrow. First a bunch of brown people are going to die, and that does nothing to the profits, we don't have to care yet. We can realistically still stop a bit later. Also before humanity's end and today there will most likely be a time when people will actually rebel against us and come with the literal pitchforks, and at that point we might want to change policy since we're about to get hurt ourselves, not just humanity. If we stop too early, we aren't maximizing profits, and by definition that means we're doing it wrong. It's a bit weird to think that all these people somehow missed the fact that humanity's end stops them from making profits. Probably they've thought about this a little more than that, and yet they're still not on your side. That tells me something.
Several reasons why there is no country like this. First, active opposition from liberalism, often up to genocide: this has been true since the Diggers and remained true over time, especially in South America but not only (Indonesia). Second, a lot of attempts at anticapitalism resulting in "state capitalism", where the state owns the means of production rather than the workers. Third, capitalism won the Cold War, which caused almost every leftwing party in the west to move way to the center and embrace neoliberalism. Leftism can now be redefined as "liberalism with more government" as opposed to anything anticapitalist; an entire generation of leftists become centrists and that's where the meme of "when you're young you're leftwing, then you grow up and become rightwing" comes from. Fourth, politics: capitalists have a lot of power under capitalism, they can easily influence policy and propaganda so that it's more likely that they stay in power. They even managed to convince a whole generation of humans that the best system for creating wealth for the working class was to give all the money to the rich and wait until it trickles down on the working class, imagine how easy it is to tell people that the system they live in is the best system if they can even convince people of that for a while.
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On May 30 2019 09:26 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2019 09:05 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 08:05 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 05:30 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 03:43 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 00:07 Nebuchad wrote:On May 29 2019 23:02 JimmiC wrote:On May 29 2019 21:08 Nebuchad wrote:
As you may remember, I'm not a fan of central planning on paper, but for the sake of the argument I'm going to answer differently here.
It seems that you're presenting different stages for your argument, and the more you move in the direction of your utopia, the less defined it is. The most defined stage is what you're doing right now with recyclable material: doesn't require any political change, is obviously possible (and probably a good thing). So here we have a ton of details. The issue that I have with it is, and again that's not our first time on this, that your vision to fight climate change is very liberal: it requires a bunch of people to take personal responsibility and fight climate change in their own lives. This is inconsistent with the problem we're facing, as we are only indirectly responsible for climate change: businesses are the main culprit. So no, I don't think it's contradictory for an ecologist to take a hot shower or use single use cups, as long as they understand that the larger fight against climate change occurs at the level of industry, not at the level of how often you accept to pee in the shower.
Then we have, get other countries in the world to be social democracies. Already less defined. And create a global government that does central planning. Entirely vague. Notice that while expanding on this you do not exactly go into details, instead you talk a lot about how other stuff doesn't work and what makes your vision harder to accomplish. You say you don't need as much detail as you work within well defined systems, but you actually don't work within a well-defined system: the system today doesn't contain a central planning, nor does it contain a bunch of social democracies. One element at the center of your worldview also appears contradictory to me: you want central planning, but you don't want a revolution? A central planning isn't compatible with capitalism, as far as I can tell. If you have a way to make this work I'd like to read it.
Also would like an answer on my proposition to increase democracies if you don't mind. From my perspective it's a revolutionary idea that should be compatible with all the issues you have stated concerning revolutionary ideas. It would not be central planning anymore than than a current federal government is, in fact less so. It would just keep some global guiding principals to make sure humanity is not pulling against each other, do things like not have certain banking rules/taxation rules in some countries so people can launder and hide money and so on. And this is the fanciful part no doubt. I more or less through that in as a ideal, but I think many of the problems could be solved if we could just import actual socialized democracies to the world, they would be able to have shared interests for the most part. Pure democracy has its issues as well since most people are uninformed on most topics, that is part of the reason these populists with catch phrases, all the answers and scapegoats are sweeping the polls. Finding the right mix is not easy, but I think the social democracies have done it best. I also don't believe it is as simple as capitalism is pure evil and socialism is pure good. Both sound amazing on paper and both have real issues when put into practice. I think creating a fair environment through social programs, along with regulations on businesses to make sure the reward and risk make sense, as well as that they compete fairly with each other, pay living wages, treat the environment correctly so on. People have to start taking personal responsibility for the choices they individually make. Businesses make things the cheapest possible because people care most about paying the least. If consumers actually said we are not buying Nike anymore because their pay, facilities and so on are not safe then Nike would do something. People also care more about convenience than the environment, do you have a plastic bottle of water you use once or do you have a reusable water bottle? Do you take your own reusable mug to Starbucks or do take there single use cup? There are literately 100's of changes people can make and don't so that is why regulation is needed. But guess what, there are also a TON of private businesses that are leading edge and doing way more than government or requirements. In my city we actually have dedicated staff to just try to bring it up to our own regulations! Governments, unions, so on are great, but they arenot without flaws. Hopefully that answered some of yours. Now can you please explain to me how socialism will fix the environment? So far I feel like I'm in Seinfeld a episode where it is the world has problems yadda yadda revolution, yadda yadda, socialism, yadda yadda climate change solved. And within the yadda yadda so much can go wrong or needs to be explained. The arguments that you bring up against pure democracy aren't arguments against pure democracy, they're arguments against every kind of democracy, pure or unpure. People are uninformed and uneducated, so we can't trust them to make decisions about how they are governed, especially because of populism and propaganda. But in the system that we have today, people are uninformed and uneducated, and we trust them to make decisions about who will govern them, and populism and propaganda play a part in the process of who gets chosen. I think almost nobody in the entire world believes that both capitalism and socialism sound amazing on paper. Capitalism and socialism are contradicting each other on a great variety of important topics about how society should be organized. One says that exploitation is fine, the other doesn't. One says that social hierarchy is fine, the other doesn't. One puts profit at the forefront, the other doesn't. Those are pretty crucial world view differences. It would be extremely weird to view both of those theories on paper and think that they are both amazing. I'm going to give you a slightly flawed metaphor, that I still like, about what the liberal view of fighting climate change looks like to me. There's this huge forest fire in front of us, it's burning the whole forest. A group of people are throwing a ton of fuel into the fire, slightly to the side of the picture so it's not necessarily obvious to everyone watching that they're doing it. Liberals, in the center of the picture, are lining up and peeing into the fire in an effort to stop its progression. Sometimes someone comes up and talks to the liberals: "Hey, don't you think maybe we should try and do something about the people throwing fuel in the fire?" And the liberals answer: "Pff, this dude isn't even peeing with us, I dislike all these people not peeing, clearly they are the reason why the fire is still spreading." And that brings us neatly to how I think socialism would help against climate change: the profit motive stops being the primary motive of businesses and corporations. By giving people the power to decide what a company should and shouldn't do, we get to put other motives into the picture, like, in our case, humanity's survival for example. Here's a concrete example: when confronted with the scientific notion that our species was likely to die if we didn't do anything about climate change, people in the capitalist class reacted by funding antiscience projects and backing antiscience politicians. They didn't do so because they are evil, they did so because convincing people that climate change was a hoax was more profitable than doing something about climate change. And capitalism dictates that the best route is the most profitable route. Capitalism, without a revolutionary reform, is by its very nature ill-equipped to defeat a threat like climate change because in order to defeat that threat, you have to go against the principles of capitalism. The thing is the elected people are like a board of directors not direct oversight. The people hired and trained within the governmental organization are the ones doing the real work and presenting the ideas to the various elected officials. Sure they can make changes about time frames and what they want looked at but the end of the day it is all the bureaucrats that are getting shit done. This is why you don't want every decision made by vote, because people can't possibly be informed on everything even if they wanted to. Your last sentence is why capitalism alone has not solved the problem, it is about the issues with short term thinking which don't go away with socialism. Secondly we do not have "capitalism" right now, at least not in the Adam Smith sense. My issue is it is not a fair comparison to point out the failings of the current systems (which I'm not saying do not exist) and match it up against a philosophical position. There are reasons why neither exists in those philosophical forms. Which is why I keep asking if there is country, preferably with some size, that you would like to at least use as a starting point. Since if you are talking about fixing climate change you have to be talking on a global scale. I If we do trust these people, hired and trained, within the governmental organization, to do the real work and make the right decisions, then why is it good to let the people vote at all? Don't these people in government know better than the uninformed population who would make the best ruler? This isn't to say that you are against democracy. This is to say that if we follow the logic of any argument against having more democracy, these arguments' logic can easily be brought up against the level of democracy that we have now. There is a tension there. Of course we have capitalism. The means of production are privately owned, by a class of people. These people, who we call the capitalist class, then exploit the labor of workers to create a profit, and the goal of the game is to maximize their profit. If you bring up Adam Smith you're talking liberalism, not capitalism. It's not short term thinking that causes capitalism to not fix its problems, it's capitalism. The capitalists aren't short-sighted, they're correct. It is unarguably true that it is more profitable to fight against science on climate change than it is to go with science and fight climate change. Reaching climate goals is a second set of goals, on top of maximizing profits, that you impose on yourself. If instead you just don't do it, you are of course going to maximize profits. Their behavior is entirely consistent with how we train them to think about the economy in this system. You know there is no country like this, obviously. In Switzerland we have more democracy and we're doing fine, but it's not direct democracy either and we aren't fighting for it. And it's not remotely close to socialism, of course, nor should it be as we are a small as fuck country with not a ton of direct power. The change needs to come from a large, powerful country in order to have any chance at sustainability. Since most of the fights against socialism have been led by the US, it is a natural starting point, as it gets rid of a very natural enemy at the same time. No both provide important roles. Mainly to stop corruption, if were were not so self interested you probably could have a real great technocrat, or authoritarian, or centrally run communist country, it just does not work in practice. It is also clear that if the world is going to end due to climate change, that making the world end does not maximize profits it ends them. It is short term thinking, there is no rule in Capitalism that you must make the decision that maximizes profits right now compared to maximizing profits forever. Theoretically you in fact should make it a mix. The issue more involves with how the decision makers are paid, which is stock options. Why do you think there is no country like this? There has been attempts, the USSR certainly had the land mass, people, so on that they could have been successful. What stops them from being successful? Also are you pro union? And have you worked as a part of one? Election of a leader doesn't by default stop corruption or self-interest on the part of bureaucrats. If he listens to their advice, they can still give him the advice that benefits them or their particular ideology or world view. On top of that, keep in mind that "good advice" is left undefined. If the ideology of most of these bureaucrats is social democracy, they're going to give very different advice than if their ideology is neoliberalism, let alone conservatism... and all of them could still reasonably perceive that they're giving good advice when they do this. The leader will also have an ideology and that will also influence what he perceives to be good advice or not. Keep in mind that the bureaucrats aren't out of a job either. What we could do is continue to let them create policy, but instead of just trusting them with it, have votes on what they've come up with when they're making massive decisions just to make sure that we're being governed in the way that we actually want. Looking at the US specifically there are like 10 different major ideas where that would help improve the country's coherence immediately. Heh, the world isn't ending tomorrow. First a bunch of brown people are going to die, and that does nothing to the profits, we don't have to care yet. We can realistically still stop a bit later. Also before humanity's end and today there will most likely be a time when people will actually rebel against us and come with the literal pitchforks, and at that point we might want to change policy since we're about to get hurt ourselves, not just humanity. If we stop too early, we aren't maximizing profits, and by definition that means we're doing it wrong. It's a bit weird to think that all these people somehow missed the fact that humanity's end stops them from making profits. Probably they've thought about this a little more than that, and yet they're still not on your side. That tells me something. Several reasons why there is no country like this. First, active opposition from liberalism, often up to genocide: this has been true since the Diggers and remained true over time, especially in South America but not only (Indonesia). Second, a lot of attempts at anticapitalism resulting in "state capitalism", where the state owns the means of production rather than the workers. Third, capitalism won the Cold War, which caused almost every leftwing party in the west to move way to the center and embrace neoliberalism. Leftism can now be redefined as "liberalism with more government" as opposed to anything anticapitalist; an entire generation of leftists become centrists and that's where the meme of "when you're young you're leftwing, then you grow up and become rightwing" comes from. Fourth, politics: capitalists have a lot of power under capitalism, they can easily influence policy and propaganda so that it's more likely that they stay in power. They even managed to convince a whole generation of humans that the best system for creating wealth for the working class was to give all the money to the rich and wait until it trickles down on the working class, imagine how easy it is to tell people that the system they live in is the best system if they can even convince people of that for a while. Of course it doesn't, I'm not sure why you are getting so upset, so I'm just going to shut this down. In the least condescending way possible let me ask you to take a civics course, I'm not interested or probably qualified to teach it, but it can explain to you how these systems work in attempts to stop corruption and why and when they have changed to try to do it better. Capitalists are people, the same people who would be socialists and make decisions. If you think people are that callus and purely self interested then they are going to do the same things in the name of socialism but with none of the oversight, so good luck with that. Why do you think it won the cold war? There are ways to lift the bottom and compress the top. It is like you don't understand or are unwilling to talk about the regulation portion of governance in the current system. If anyone is high on propaganda here it is you, your ranting like everyone currently is a money grubbing sociopath and that is just not the case. I know a lot of business owners who do awesome things for their staff and care about the environment. So get off your soap box, get some life experience and go out and see how things are, and stop listening to youtube videos of "leftist" truthers who speak headcanon like fake from their dorm rooms.
Nothing in my post shows any sign of being upset, lol? I'm going to assume this is just your way of asserting victory and I'll be over there, quite unimpressed.
First, it's pretty clear that capitalists are doing that, it's not just "if you think that". They have an history of doing it, from lying about sugar causing obesity to lying about smoking causing cancer. Now that they know that they are causing climate change, they are lying about it as long as they can. There is a consistency there. If they were being short-sighted about this, then they were also short-sighted about smoking under the same logic: "we maximize profits now but once people discover that smoking actually does cause cancer, it's going to go badly". Okay... but it's going to go badly later, and for now we are making profits, that's what maximizing is.
Second, no it won't be the same people. You have to be a certain type of person to be a good capitalist and rise to the top of that system. Not all people are like that, most people aren't. It is much harder for an entire set of workers to decide to screw people over than it is for a single individual that massively benefits from doing it.
I don't really know why the US won the cold war to be honest. Probably a variety of reasons. USSR sucked at being leftist, convinced a bunch of Slavs that capitalism was preferable. But I wouldn't be comfortable defining what the main reason is, I haven't cared enough about the USSR to research that.
The business owners that you know won't rise to the top of capitalism. They care about external things like the well-being of their workers or their own moral compass. That doesn't maximize profits. People reaching a sufficient level in capitalism and keeping those types of views are extreme outliers, most of the time we're talking Koch and Bezos and Soros.
I think it's clear from our posts who is getting emotional and who isn't.
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On May 30 2019 09:44 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2019 09:26 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 09:05 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 08:05 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 05:30 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 03:43 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 00:07 Nebuchad wrote:On May 29 2019 23:02 JimmiC wrote:On May 29 2019 21:08 Nebuchad wrote:
As you may remember, I'm not a fan of central planning on paper, but for the sake of the argument I'm going to answer differently here.
It seems that you're presenting different stages for your argument, and the more you move in the direction of your utopia, the less defined it is. The most defined stage is what you're doing right now with recyclable material: doesn't require any political change, is obviously possible (and probably a good thing). So here we have a ton of details. The issue that I have with it is, and again that's not our first time on this, that your vision to fight climate change is very liberal: it requires a bunch of people to take personal responsibility and fight climate change in their own lives. This is inconsistent with the problem we're facing, as we are only indirectly responsible for climate change: businesses are the main culprit. So no, I don't think it's contradictory for an ecologist to take a hot shower or use single use cups, as long as they understand that the larger fight against climate change occurs at the level of industry, not at the level of how often you accept to pee in the shower.
Then we have, get other countries in the world to be social democracies. Already less defined. And create a global government that does central planning. Entirely vague. Notice that while expanding on this you do not exactly go into details, instead you talk a lot about how other stuff doesn't work and what makes your vision harder to accomplish. You say you don't need as much detail as you work within well defined systems, but you actually don't work within a well-defined system: the system today doesn't contain a central planning, nor does it contain a bunch of social democracies. One element at the center of your worldview also appears contradictory to me: you want central planning, but you don't want a revolution? A central planning isn't compatible with capitalism, as far as I can tell. If you have a way to make this work I'd like to read it.
Also would like an answer on my proposition to increase democracies if you don't mind. From my perspective it's a revolutionary idea that should be compatible with all the issues you have stated concerning revolutionary ideas. It would not be central planning anymore than than a current federal government is, in fact less so. It would just keep some global guiding principals to make sure humanity is not pulling against each other, do things like not have certain banking rules/taxation rules in some countries so people can launder and hide money and so on. And this is the fanciful part no doubt. I more or less through that in as a ideal, but I think many of the problems could be solved if we could just import actual socialized democracies to the world, they would be able to have shared interests for the most part. Pure democracy has its issues as well since most people are uninformed on most topics, that is part of the reason these populists with catch phrases, all the answers and scapegoats are sweeping the polls. Finding the right mix is not easy, but I think the social democracies have done it best. I also don't believe it is as simple as capitalism is pure evil and socialism is pure good. Both sound amazing on paper and both have real issues when put into practice. I think creating a fair environment through social programs, along with regulations on businesses to make sure the reward and risk make sense, as well as that they compete fairly with each other, pay living wages, treat the environment correctly so on. People have to start taking personal responsibility for the choices they individually make. Businesses make things the cheapest possible because people care most about paying the least. If consumers actually said we are not buying Nike anymore because their pay, facilities and so on are not safe then Nike would do something. People also care more about convenience than the environment, do you have a plastic bottle of water you use once or do you have a reusable water bottle? Do you take your own reusable mug to Starbucks or do take there single use cup? There are literately 100's of changes people can make and don't so that is why regulation is needed. But guess what, there are also a TON of private businesses that are leading edge and doing way more than government or requirements. In my city we actually have dedicated staff to just try to bring it up to our own regulations! Governments, unions, so on are great, but they arenot without flaws. Hopefully that answered some of yours. Now can you please explain to me how socialism will fix the environment? So far I feel like I'm in Seinfeld a episode where it is the world has problems yadda yadda revolution, yadda yadda, socialism, yadda yadda climate change solved. And within the yadda yadda so much can go wrong or needs to be explained. The arguments that you bring up against pure democracy aren't arguments against pure democracy, they're arguments against every kind of democracy, pure or unpure. People are uninformed and uneducated, so we can't trust them to make decisions about how they are governed, especially because of populism and propaganda. But in the system that we have today, people are uninformed and uneducated, and we trust them to make decisions about who will govern them, and populism and propaganda play a part in the process of who gets chosen. I think almost nobody in the entire world believes that both capitalism and socialism sound amazing on paper. Capitalism and socialism are contradicting each other on a great variety of important topics about how society should be organized. One says that exploitation is fine, the other doesn't. One says that social hierarchy is fine, the other doesn't. One puts profit at the forefront, the other doesn't. Those are pretty crucial world view differences. It would be extremely weird to view both of those theories on paper and think that they are both amazing. I'm going to give you a slightly flawed metaphor, that I still like, about what the liberal view of fighting climate change looks like to me. There's this huge forest fire in front of us, it's burning the whole forest. A group of people are throwing a ton of fuel into the fire, slightly to the side of the picture so it's not necessarily obvious to everyone watching that they're doing it. Liberals, in the center of the picture, are lining up and peeing into the fire in an effort to stop its progression. Sometimes someone comes up and talks to the liberals: "Hey, don't you think maybe we should try and do something about the people throwing fuel in the fire?" And the liberals answer: "Pff, this dude isn't even peeing with us, I dislike all these people not peeing, clearly they are the reason why the fire is still spreading." And that brings us neatly to how I think socialism would help against climate change: the profit motive stops being the primary motive of businesses and corporations. By giving people the power to decide what a company should and shouldn't do, we get to put other motives into the picture, like, in our case, humanity's survival for example. Here's a concrete example: when confronted with the scientific notion that our species was likely to die if we didn't do anything about climate change, people in the capitalist class reacted by funding antiscience projects and backing antiscience politicians. They didn't do so because they are evil, they did so because convincing people that climate change was a hoax was more profitable than doing something about climate change. And capitalism dictates that the best route is the most profitable route. Capitalism, without a revolutionary reform, is by its very nature ill-equipped to defeat a threat like climate change because in order to defeat that threat, you have to go against the principles of capitalism. The thing is the elected people are like a board of directors not direct oversight. The people hired and trained within the governmental organization are the ones doing the real work and presenting the ideas to the various elected officials. Sure they can make changes about time frames and what they want looked at but the end of the day it is all the bureaucrats that are getting shit done. This is why you don't want every decision made by vote, because people can't possibly be informed on everything even if they wanted to. Your last sentence is why capitalism alone has not solved the problem, it is about the issues with short term thinking which don't go away with socialism. Secondly we do not have "capitalism" right now, at least not in the Adam Smith sense. My issue is it is not a fair comparison to point out the failings of the current systems (which I'm not saying do not exist) and match it up against a philosophical position. There are reasons why neither exists in those philosophical forms. Which is why I keep asking if there is country, preferably with some size, that you would like to at least use as a starting point. Since if you are talking about fixing climate change you have to be talking on a global scale. I If we do trust these people, hired and trained, within the governmental organization, to do the real work and make the right decisions, then why is it good to let the people vote at all? Don't these people in government know better than the uninformed population who would make the best ruler? This isn't to say that you are against democracy. This is to say that if we follow the logic of any argument against having more democracy, these arguments' logic can easily be brought up against the level of democracy that we have now. There is a tension there. Of course we have capitalism. The means of production are privately owned, by a class of people. These people, who we call the capitalist class, then exploit the labor of workers to create a profit, and the goal of the game is to maximize their profit. If you bring up Adam Smith you're talking liberalism, not capitalism. It's not short term thinking that causes capitalism to not fix its problems, it's capitalism. The capitalists aren't short-sighted, they're correct. It is unarguably true that it is more profitable to fight against science on climate change than it is to go with science and fight climate change. Reaching climate goals is a second set of goals, on top of maximizing profits, that you impose on yourself. If instead you just don't do it, you are of course going to maximize profits. Their behavior is entirely consistent with how we train them to think about the economy in this system. You know there is no country like this, obviously. In Switzerland we have more democracy and we're doing fine, but it's not direct democracy either and we aren't fighting for it. And it's not remotely close to socialism, of course, nor should it be as we are a small as fuck country with not a ton of direct power. The change needs to come from a large, powerful country in order to have any chance at sustainability. Since most of the fights against socialism have been led by the US, it is a natural starting point, as it gets rid of a very natural enemy at the same time. No both provide important roles. Mainly to stop corruption, if were were not so self interested you probably could have a real great technocrat, or authoritarian, or centrally run communist country, it just does not work in practice. It is also clear that if the world is going to end due to climate change, that making the world end does not maximize profits it ends them. It is short term thinking, there is no rule in Capitalism that you must make the decision that maximizes profits right now compared to maximizing profits forever. Theoretically you in fact should make it a mix. The issue more involves with how the decision makers are paid, which is stock options. Why do you think there is no country like this? There has been attempts, the USSR certainly had the land mass, people, so on that they could have been successful. What stops them from being successful? Also are you pro union? And have you worked as a part of one? Election of a leader doesn't by default stop corruption or self-interest on the part of bureaucrats. If he listens to their advice, they can still give him the advice that benefits them or their particular ideology or world view. On top of that, keep in mind that "good advice" is left undefined. If the ideology of most of these bureaucrats is social democracy, they're going to give very different advice than if their ideology is neoliberalism, let alone conservatism... and all of them could still reasonably perceive that they're giving good advice when they do this. The leader will also have an ideology and that will also influence what he perceives to be good advice or not. Keep in mind that the bureaucrats aren't out of a job either. What we could do is continue to let them create policy, but instead of just trusting them with it, have votes on what they've come up with when they're making massive decisions just to make sure that we're being governed in the way that we actually want. Looking at the US specifically there are like 10 different major ideas where that would help improve the country's coherence immediately. Heh, the world isn't ending tomorrow. First a bunch of brown people are going to die, and that does nothing to the profits, we don't have to care yet. We can realistically still stop a bit later. Also before humanity's end and today there will most likely be a time when people will actually rebel against us and come with the literal pitchforks, and at that point we might want to change policy since we're about to get hurt ourselves, not just humanity. If we stop too early, we aren't maximizing profits, and by definition that means we're doing it wrong. It's a bit weird to think that all these people somehow missed the fact that humanity's end stops them from making profits. Probably they've thought about this a little more than that, and yet they're still not on your side. That tells me something. Several reasons why there is no country like this. First, active opposition from liberalism, often up to genocide: this has been true since the Diggers and remained true over time, especially in South America but not only (Indonesia). Second, a lot of attempts at anticapitalism resulting in "state capitalism", where the state owns the means of production rather than the workers. Third, capitalism won the Cold War, which caused almost every leftwing party in the west to move way to the center and embrace neoliberalism. Leftism can now be redefined as "liberalism with more government" as opposed to anything anticapitalist; an entire generation of leftists become centrists and that's where the meme of "when you're young you're leftwing, then you grow up and become rightwing" comes from. Fourth, politics: capitalists have a lot of power under capitalism, they can easily influence policy and propaganda so that it's more likely that they stay in power. They even managed to convince a whole generation of humans that the best system for creating wealth for the working class was to give all the money to the rich and wait until it trickles down on the working class, imagine how easy it is to tell people that the system they live in is the best system if they can even convince people of that for a while. Of course it doesn't, I'm not sure why you are getting so upset, so I'm just going to shut this down. In the least condescending way possible let me ask you to take a civics course, I'm not interested or probably qualified to teach it, but it can explain to you how these systems work in attempts to stop corruption and why and when they have changed to try to do it better. Capitalists are people, the same people who would be socialists and make decisions. If you think people are that callus and purely self interested then they are going to do the same things in the name of socialism but with none of the oversight, so good luck with that. Why do you think it won the cold war? There are ways to lift the bottom and compress the top. It is like you don't understand or are unwilling to talk about the regulation portion of governance in the current system. If anyone is high on propaganda here it is you, your ranting like everyone currently is a money grubbing sociopath and that is just not the case. I know a lot of business owners who do awesome things for their staff and care about the environment. So get off your soap box, get some life experience and go out and see how things are, and stop listening to youtube videos of "leftist" truthers who speak headcanon like fake from their dorm rooms. Nothing in my post shows any sign of being upset, lol? I'm going to assume this is just your way of asserting victory and I'll be over there, quite unimpressed. First, it's pretty clear that capitalists are doing that, it's not just "if you think that". They have an history of doing it, from lying about sugar causing obesity to lying about smoking causing cancer. Now that they know that they are causing climate change, they are lying about it as long as they can. There is a consistency there. If they were being short-sighted about this, then they were also short-sighted about smoking under the same logic: "we maximize profits now but once people discover that smoking actually does cause cancer, it's going to go badly". Okay... but it's going to go badly later, and for now we are making profits, that's what maximizing is. Second, no it won't be the same people. You have to be a certain type of person to be a good capitalist and rise to the top of that system. Not all people are like that, most people aren't. It is much harder for an entire set of workers to decide to screw people over than it is for a single individual that massively benefits from doing it. I don't really know why the US won the cold war to be honest. Probably a variety of reasons. USSR sucked at being leftist, convinced a bunch of Slavs that capitalism was preferable. But I wouldn't be comfortable defining what the main reason is, I haven't cared enough about the USSR to research that. The business owners that you know won't rise to the top of capitalism. They care about external things like the well-being of their workers or their own moral compass. That doesn't maximize profits. People reaching a sufficient level in capitalism and keeping those types of views are extreme outliers, most of the time we're talking Koch and Bezos and Soros. I think it's clear from our posts who is getting emotional and who isn't.
I know you to be one of the most unshakably well-tempered (make me look like leatherface) posters I've come across on this site, I concur I see nothing in your posting to the contrary of that.
As far as your presentation of argument it seems quite reasonable, well laid out, and convincing of your points. I can't say any of that about the argument it's addressing.
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On the environment, what are you doing to save the world?
I think this is silly but as an individual, I haven't made a child which makes my carbon footprint smaller than all but the most efficient people who make children.
Having children is the most destructive thing a person can to do to the environment, according to a new study.
“A US family who chooses to have one fewer child would provide the same level of emissions reductions as 684 teenagers who choose to adopt comprehensive recycling for the rest of their lives,” it said.
www.independent.co.uk
I do plenty more (little-nothing is more important than joining folks in lifting class consciousness imo), but just that one thing puts me well ahead of your typical "green minded" liberal with with a kid.
When talking about the individual level it's really not even close which is more impactful.
having one fewer child per family can save “an average of 58.6 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year
compared to dramatic lifestyle changes like never driving a car, obsessive recycling, and only using reusables
“For example, living car-free saves about 2.4 tonnes of C02 equivalent per year, while eating a plant-based diet saves 0.8 tonnes of C02 equivalent a year.”
I also don't fly.
This means recycling is between three and 13 times less likely to save the planet than avoiding that extra flight
fwiw (and topical) I think hegemonic myths/perceptions about how to address climate change (and other issues) is at the core of a lot of arguments. For example, some basic research into fighting climate change demonstrates that individual efforts like not driving isn't even close in impact to just not making a baby (this has been mentioned before btw).
But of course individual efforts won't solve the problem because the idea that we'll bend corporations into doing their part with purchasing decisions is an outdated hegemonic myth of capitalism. At best you get some PR and the devastation continues.
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On May 30 2019 20:13 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2019 09:44 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 09:26 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 09:05 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 08:05 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 05:30 Nebuchad wrote:On May 30 2019 03:43 JimmiC wrote:On May 30 2019 00:07 Nebuchad wrote:On May 29 2019 23:02 JimmiC wrote:On May 29 2019 21:08 Nebuchad wrote:
As you may remember, I'm not a fan of central planning on paper, but for the sake of the argument I'm going to answer differently here.
It seems that you're presenting different stages for your argument, and the more you move in the direction of your utopia, the less defined it is. The most defined stage is what you're doing right now with recyclable material: doesn't require any political change, is obviously possible (and probably a good thing). So here we have a ton of details. The issue that I have with it is, and again that's not our first time on this, that your vision to fight climate change is very liberal: it requires a bunch of people to take personal responsibility and fight climate change in their own lives. This is inconsistent with the problem we're facing, as we are only indirectly responsible for climate change: businesses are the main culprit. So no, I don't think it's contradictory for an ecologist to take a hot shower or use single use cups, as long as they understand that the larger fight against climate change occurs at the level of industry, not at the level of how often you accept to pee in the shower.
Then we have, get other countries in the world to be social democracies. Already less defined. And create a global government that does central planning. Entirely vague. Notice that while expanding on this you do not exactly go into details, instead you talk a lot about how other stuff doesn't work and what makes your vision harder to accomplish. You say you don't need as much detail as you work within well defined systems, but you actually don't work within a well-defined system: the system today doesn't contain a central planning, nor does it contain a bunch of social democracies. One element at the center of your worldview also appears contradictory to me: you want central planning, but you don't want a revolution? A central planning isn't compatible with capitalism, as far as I can tell. If you have a way to make this work I'd like to read it.
Also would like an answer on my proposition to increase democracies if you don't mind. From my perspective it's a revolutionary idea that should be compatible with all the issues you have stated concerning revolutionary ideas. It would not be central planning anymore than than a current federal government is, in fact less so. It would just keep some global guiding principals to make sure humanity is not pulling against each other, do things like not have certain banking rules/taxation rules in some countries so people can launder and hide money and so on. And this is the fanciful part no doubt. I more or less through that in as a ideal, but I think many of the problems could be solved if we could just import actual socialized democracies to the world, they would be able to have shared interests for the most part. Pure democracy has its issues as well since most people are uninformed on most topics, that is part of the reason these populists with catch phrases, all the answers and scapegoats are sweeping the polls. Finding the right mix is not easy, but I think the social democracies have done it best. I also don't believe it is as simple as capitalism is pure evil and socialism is pure good. Both sound amazing on paper and both have real issues when put into practice. I think creating a fair environment through social programs, along with regulations on businesses to make sure the reward and risk make sense, as well as that they compete fairly with each other, pay living wages, treat the environment correctly so on. People have to start taking personal responsibility for the choices they individually make. Businesses make things the cheapest possible because people care most about paying the least. If consumers actually said we are not buying Nike anymore because their pay, facilities and so on are not safe then Nike would do something. People also care more about convenience than the environment, do you have a plastic bottle of water you use once or do you have a reusable water bottle? Do you take your own reusable mug to Starbucks or do take there single use cup? There are literately 100's of changes people can make and don't so that is why regulation is needed. But guess what, there are also a TON of private businesses that are leading edge and doing way more than government or requirements. In my city we actually have dedicated staff to just try to bring it up to our own regulations! Governments, unions, so on are great, but they arenot without flaws. Hopefully that answered some of yours. Now can you please explain to me how socialism will fix the environment? So far I feel like I'm in Seinfeld a episode where it is the world has problems yadda yadda revolution, yadda yadda, socialism, yadda yadda climate change solved. And within the yadda yadda so much can go wrong or needs to be explained. The arguments that you bring up against pure democracy aren't arguments against pure democracy, they're arguments against every kind of democracy, pure or unpure. People are uninformed and uneducated, so we can't trust them to make decisions about how they are governed, especially because of populism and propaganda. But in the system that we have today, people are uninformed and uneducated, and we trust them to make decisions about who will govern them, and populism and propaganda play a part in the process of who gets chosen. I think almost nobody in the entire world believes that both capitalism and socialism sound amazing on paper. Capitalism and socialism are contradicting each other on a great variety of important topics about how society should be organized. One says that exploitation is fine, the other doesn't. One says that social hierarchy is fine, the other doesn't. One puts profit at the forefront, the other doesn't. Those are pretty crucial world view differences. It would be extremely weird to view both of those theories on paper and think that they are both amazing. I'm going to give you a slightly flawed metaphor, that I still like, about what the liberal view of fighting climate change looks like to me. There's this huge forest fire in front of us, it's burning the whole forest. A group of people are throwing a ton of fuel into the fire, slightly to the side of the picture so it's not necessarily obvious to everyone watching that they're doing it. Liberals, in the center of the picture, are lining up and peeing into the fire in an effort to stop its progression. Sometimes someone comes up and talks to the liberals: "Hey, don't you think maybe we should try and do something about the people throwing fuel in the fire?" And the liberals answer: "Pff, this dude isn't even peeing with us, I dislike all these people not peeing, clearly they are the reason why the fire is still spreading." And that brings us neatly to how I think socialism would help against climate change: the profit motive stops being the primary motive of businesses and corporations. By giving people the power to decide what a company should and shouldn't do, we get to put other motives into the picture, like, in our case, humanity's survival for example. Here's a concrete example: when confronted with the scientific notion that our species was likely to die if we didn't do anything about climate change, people in the capitalist class reacted by funding antiscience projects and backing antiscience politicians. They didn't do so because they are evil, they did so because convincing people that climate change was a hoax was more profitable than doing something about climate change. And capitalism dictates that the best route is the most profitable route. Capitalism, without a revolutionary reform, is by its very nature ill-equipped to defeat a threat like climate change because in order to defeat that threat, you have to go against the principles of capitalism. The thing is the elected people are like a board of directors not direct oversight. The people hired and trained within the governmental organization are the ones doing the real work and presenting the ideas to the various elected officials. Sure they can make changes about time frames and what they want looked at but the end of the day it is all the bureaucrats that are getting shit done. This is why you don't want every decision made by vote, because people can't possibly be informed on everything even if they wanted to. Your last sentence is why capitalism alone has not solved the problem, it is about the issues with short term thinking which don't go away with socialism. Secondly we do not have "capitalism" right now, at least not in the Adam Smith sense. My issue is it is not a fair comparison to point out the failings of the current systems (which I'm not saying do not exist) and match it up against a philosophical position. There are reasons why neither exists in those philosophical forms. Which is why I keep asking if there is country, preferably with some size, that you would like to at least use as a starting point. Since if you are talking about fixing climate change you have to be talking on a global scale. I If we do trust these people, hired and trained, within the governmental organization, to do the real work and make the right decisions, then why is it good to let the people vote at all? Don't these people in government know better than the uninformed population who would make the best ruler? This isn't to say that you are against democracy. This is to say that if we follow the logic of any argument against having more democracy, these arguments' logic can easily be brought up against the level of democracy that we have now. There is a tension there. Of course we have capitalism. The means of production are privately owned, by a class of people. These people, who we call the capitalist class, then exploit the labor of workers to create a profit, and the goal of the game is to maximize their profit. If you bring up Adam Smith you're talking liberalism, not capitalism. It's not short term thinking that causes capitalism to not fix its problems, it's capitalism. The capitalists aren't short-sighted, they're correct. It is unarguably true that it is more profitable to fight against science on climate change than it is to go with science and fight climate change. Reaching climate goals is a second set of goals, on top of maximizing profits, that you impose on yourself. If instead you just don't do it, you are of course going to maximize profits. Their behavior is entirely consistent with how we train them to think about the economy in this system. You know there is no country like this, obviously. In Switzerland we have more democracy and we're doing fine, but it's not direct democracy either and we aren't fighting for it. And it's not remotely close to socialism, of course, nor should it be as we are a small as fuck country with not a ton of direct power. The change needs to come from a large, powerful country in order to have any chance at sustainability. Since most of the fights against socialism have been led by the US, it is a natural starting point, as it gets rid of a very natural enemy at the same time. No both provide important roles. Mainly to stop corruption, if were were not so self interested you probably could have a real great technocrat, or authoritarian, or centrally run communist country, it just does not work in practice. It is also clear that if the world is going to end due to climate change, that making the world end does not maximize profits it ends them. It is short term thinking, there is no rule in Capitalism that you must make the decision that maximizes profits right now compared to maximizing profits forever. Theoretically you in fact should make it a mix. The issue more involves with how the decision makers are paid, which is stock options. Why do you think there is no country like this? There has been attempts, the USSR certainly had the land mass, people, so on that they could have been successful. What stops them from being successful? Also are you pro union? And have you worked as a part of one? Election of a leader doesn't by default stop corruption or self-interest on the part of bureaucrats. If he listens to their advice, they can still give him the advice that benefits them or their particular ideology or world view. On top of that, keep in mind that "good advice" is left undefined. If the ideology of most of these bureaucrats is social democracy, they're going to give very different advice than if their ideology is neoliberalism, let alone conservatism... and all of them could still reasonably perceive that they're giving good advice when they do this. The leader will also have an ideology and that will also influence what he perceives to be good advice or not. Keep in mind that the bureaucrats aren't out of a job either. What we could do is continue to let them create policy, but instead of just trusting them with it, have votes on what they've come up with when they're making massive decisions just to make sure that we're being governed in the way that we actually want. Looking at the US specifically there are like 10 different major ideas where that would help improve the country's coherence immediately. Heh, the world isn't ending tomorrow. First a bunch of brown people are going to die, and that does nothing to the profits, we don't have to care yet. We can realistically still stop a bit later. Also before humanity's end and today there will most likely be a time when people will actually rebel against us and come with the literal pitchforks, and at that point we might want to change policy since we're about to get hurt ourselves, not just humanity. If we stop too early, we aren't maximizing profits, and by definition that means we're doing it wrong. It's a bit weird to think that all these people somehow missed the fact that humanity's end stops them from making profits. Probably they've thought about this a little more than that, and yet they're still not on your side. That tells me something. Several reasons why there is no country like this. First, active opposition from liberalism, often up to genocide: this has been true since the Diggers and remained true over time, especially in South America but not only (Indonesia). Second, a lot of attempts at anticapitalism resulting in "state capitalism", where the state owns the means of production rather than the workers. Third, capitalism won the Cold War, which caused almost every leftwing party in the west to move way to the center and embrace neoliberalism. Leftism can now be redefined as "liberalism with more government" as opposed to anything anticapitalist; an entire generation of leftists become centrists and that's where the meme of "when you're young you're leftwing, then you grow up and become rightwing" comes from. Fourth, politics: capitalists have a lot of power under capitalism, they can easily influence policy and propaganda so that it's more likely that they stay in power. They even managed to convince a whole generation of humans that the best system for creating wealth for the working class was to give all the money to the rich and wait until it trickles down on the working class, imagine how easy it is to tell people that the system they live in is the best system if they can even convince people of that for a while. Of course it doesn't, I'm not sure why you are getting so upset, so I'm just going to shut this down. In the least condescending way possible let me ask you to take a civics course, I'm not interested or probably qualified to teach it, but it can explain to you how these systems work in attempts to stop corruption and why and when they have changed to try to do it better. Capitalists are people, the same people who would be socialists and make decisions. If you think people are that callus and purely self interested then they are going to do the same things in the name of socialism but with none of the oversight, so good luck with that. Why do you think it won the cold war? There are ways to lift the bottom and compress the top. It is like you don't understand or are unwilling to talk about the regulation portion of governance in the current system. If anyone is high on propaganda here it is you, your ranting like everyone currently is a money grubbing sociopath and that is just not the case. I know a lot of business owners who do awesome things for their staff and care about the environment. So get off your soap box, get some life experience and go out and see how things are, and stop listening to youtube videos of "leftist" truthers who speak headcanon like fake from their dorm rooms. Nothing in my post shows any sign of being upset, lol? I'm going to assume this is just your way of asserting victory and I'll be over there, quite unimpressed. First, it's pretty clear that capitalists are doing that, it's not just "if you think that". They have an history of doing it, from lying about sugar causing obesity to lying about smoking causing cancer. Now that they know that they are causing climate change, they are lying about it as long as they can. There is a consistency there. If they were being short-sighted about this, then they were also short-sighted about smoking under the same logic: "we maximize profits now but once people discover that smoking actually does cause cancer, it's going to go badly". Okay... but it's going to go badly later, and for now we are making profits, that's what maximizing is. Second, no it won't be the same people. You have to be a certain type of person to be a good capitalist and rise to the top of that system. Not all people are like that, most people aren't. It is much harder for an entire set of workers to decide to screw people over than it is for a single individual that massively benefits from doing it. I don't really know why the US won the cold war to be honest. Probably a variety of reasons. USSR sucked at being leftist, convinced a bunch of Slavs that capitalism was preferable. But I wouldn't be comfortable defining what the main reason is, I haven't cared enough about the USSR to research that. The business owners that you know won't rise to the top of capitalism. They care about external things like the well-being of their workers or their own moral compass. That doesn't maximize profits. People reaching a sufficient level in capitalism and keeping those types of views are extreme outliers, most of the time we're talking Koch and Bezos and Soros. I think it's clear from our posts who is getting emotional and who isn't. Upset was probably the wrong word, but you are getting progressively more insulting and I should stop before I insult you and one or both of us get upset. Your second paragraph basically insinuated that anybody who is not a socialist doesn't care about the environment and as you put it brown people. That is super frustrating when there are tons of us out there actually doing something and we have to hear about how you have solution to all our problems, oh whats that, socialism, how does it solve the problems? Socialism. You are going to end up alienating all the people you hope to convince for your revolution. What I don't understand with you and especially GH is do you guys not understand that the people you consider evil centerist libs are the exact people that you would need to convince to have your revolution? Do you really think the right strategy in this is to allude that we are racists who don't care about the environment and are controlled by right-wing propoganda? You seem to think that changing the system from Capitalism to socialism will change all the people from your definition of capitalist to your definition of socialist. So far this has never happened. It might be valuable for you to do some actual research into why the countries that tried to go communist did not work, how it worked out for the average person and why in the end it failed. Not because your wrong, or I'm trying win, because then when people like me ask you these basic questions you will have the answers and it won't appear that you are a very young guy, very naive to how historically these revolutions turn out. Please consider that not every piece of news out there about the negatives of communism or socialism is right wing propaganda. And there is left-wing propaganda out there. If you just dismiss everything that you don't like as "right-wing propaganda" you are really no different then the right wing people who dismiss everything as "left-wing propaganda". I'm clearly not a trustworthy source to you but it is worth looking outside of what your looking at now to better understand why so few people want this revolution you are speaking about when to you it solves all the major problems. And also no I don't think I won, I think I lost, and there is no hope of any positive outcome. I was hoping to have a discussion about how you would implement a socialist system that would fall prey to all the same issues that the others one had, that perhaps you had done some thought and research into it. But instead of you attempting to pull me into your camp with actual ideas I got the same old surface stuff sprinkled with insults and condescension. + Show Spoiler +On the environment, what are you doing to save the world? GH has completely avoided this question. I really hope you are making some big lifestyle changes because it does make a difference. And if you are not and just hoping that this revolution you dream of that only a small % of people want will solve all those problems . And maybe even hoping that some terrible event killing or displacing millions will be what triggers them to join your side. It probably won't it will probably push more people right to protect what they have, more walls, more anti immigration, so on. So I really hope you are actually doing everything you can to stop the catastrophe from happening in the first place. So please let me know what you are actually doing?
I think you shifted the meaning of capitalist from "member of the capitalist class" to "person who supports capitalism" and that's how you got that impression that I was attacking you. What I described was the thought process that would lead someone that owns the means of production in a coal or a petroleum company to fight climate change science without being irrational or short-sighted. I believe that it's totally rational for them to do this based on the framework of capitalism, and that's what I'm trying to show. I do think that when people talk about what they have to lose in a fight against capitalism, that certainly comes from a position of privilege, but that's something I can only attack from a moral standpoint, not a rational standpoint, so I won't be using this.
This conversation is interesting because of the type of progress that we're making. For example, I gave you an answer on why socialism is an improvement on capitalism when it comes to climate change, and you've decided to completely ignore that and continue to pretend that I'm saying "socialism, how does it solve the problems? Socialism". So there's no progress there. On the other side, you're now clearly standing in support of capitalism and against socialism, so hopefully there's progress there, and next time we have this conversation we won't have to deal with the period where you pretend that you like socialism but you just need a clear picture of how it's going to be implemented.
The way you are using moral character of humans is interesting and shows quite a bit of projection I believe. Nothing I've said demonstrates that I believe the character of humans changes between economic systems, that's something that you appear to have just made up. Oppositely, your reaction of "If you think people are that callous and self-interested" when defending capitalists is something that stands in stark contrast with your attacks on state ownership, that generally involve talking about human corruption and self-interest. If there is an inconsistency there, I think it's on your part of the argument.
I... really don't care about the USSR? I'm not a tankie? They went for a state ownership system and I don't think that's a good idea? The idea of state ownership is justified as a transitory state before we give the means of production to the workers, and they... never did that in 70 years (I believe they actively fought against it)? People in the USSR made sure that people read Marx as seldom as possible so that they wouldn't notice that the party line looked nothing like what Marx was saying?
Like, I could also look at Pol Pot, he thought that the good way to go about communism was to go full nazbol, so he went with state ownership (with peasantry as the vanguard, as it's the maoist system) plus a whole lot of nationalism! That's... the horseshoe theory, surprisingly, and guess what it didn't work either. But I don't want to do that shit, so what would it bring me to know how it failed?
I gave you a bunch of answers to the questions that you purportedly have. It's up to you what you do with them.
No, I'm personally not a great example when it comes to climate. I'm not the worst but I don't make particularly large efforts, I use a car when I need it which is about once or twice a week, I take a plane to Vegas every year... I can't even bring myself to become a vegan even though I have no rational argument to oppose veganism. But I do take solace in my ability to recognize that climate change is a systemic problem and it necessitates a systemic solution, that's at least something I've got over the most climate-conscious liberal.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
I must ask: why is this a discussion for the feedback thread rather than the main one? Seems like the meta-portion of the discussion was long since covered and now it's really a political discussion in and of itself.
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On May 31 2019 02:55 LegalLord wrote:
I must ask: why is this a discussion for the feedback thread rather than the main one? Seems like the meta-portion of the discussion was long since covered and now it's really a political discussion in and of itself.
You're right. I'm not good at shifting threads.
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Seeker
Where dat snitch at?36921 Posts
All of you...
Stop freaking posting in here. The feedback thread is NOT for discussions about politics. Keep it in one thread or take it to PMs.
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On May 31 2019 07:43 Seeker wrote:
All of you...
Stop freaking posting in here. The feedback thread is NOT for discussions about politics. Keep it in one thread or take it to PMs.
I just want to try to help by pointing out that the feedback that is in dispute and at the core of many other disputes (including the one that has moved on) is this:
On May 28 2019 08:11 Acrofales wrote:GH's posting is fine. You don't have to agree with him. You don't even have to respond to him. But he's writing informative posts in a clear manner and is happy to discuss his ideas. And yes, I've had my problems with his posts in the past, but I'd rather discuss police violence with GH than Trump's tweets with P6 and Danglars. And I really don't want to discuss police violence in the US with anybody 
Whether you agree with that would be helpful for me to know so that I can continue to improve.
Resolving this issue would prevent my name/posting from being a topic here indefinitely (as that's the primary dispute where I'm concerned) in my opinion and I'll leave it to your discretion from there.
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Is it possible to re-instate the US politics megablog? I know it was discontinued for a reason, but it is really tedious watching GH hijack every thread and turning it into a debate about revolution, re-hashing the same arguments with whoever engages him.
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On May 30 2019 07:49 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2019 07:22 Dangermousecatdog wrote:On May 29 2019 06:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On May 29 2019 06:17 Dangermousecatdog wrote:On May 28 2019 04:10 GreenHorizons wrote:
Feels like I can't win sometimes. I have someone complaining about not explaining myself clearly and another complaining I'm explaining myself too clearly.
Either you want my ideas/positions fleshed out or you don't but complaining about both at the same time is exhausting. I don't think anybody has ever complained that you are explaining yourself too clearly. On May 29 2019 06:17 Dangermousecatdog wrote:On May 28 2019 04:10 GreenHorizons wrote:
Feels like I can't win sometimes. I have someone complaining about not explaining myself clearly and another complaining I'm explaining myself too clearly.
Either you want my ideas/positions fleshed out or you don't but complaining about both at the same time is exhausting. I don't think anybody has ever complained that you are explaining yourself too clearly. Velr did: GH: I would actually love to discuss leftist ideas because I consider myself very leftist, but if the starting point is «revolution», «abolish the police» or «we need full on socialism/communism» I immediatly lose all interest. Coupled with his „with me or against me“ attitude i don’t see any benefit coming from engaging with him. I don’t see bad intent, it’s just a fundamental disagreement on how one should have a discussion especially with people that disagree.
These topics have their place for sure, but thats in a thread about political philosophy and not in one that is supposed to entail the momentary political discourse? The issue here as I see it is that some people view clarification of my position as not being topical while others demand I not opine without that clarification which they seem to be refusing to get from anywhere other than my posts (which seems to exclude the quoted and cited materials). This creates a sort of Wargames situation where the only way for me to satisfy the demands of my posting is to not post. From my perspective the rejection seems to be of my position (as interpreted) rather than my presentation which is used (less effectively when I'm not reflecting the vitriol I regularly receive) to mask that rather weakly argued (on the merit) rejection of my position/s. Only Velr can say whether he is complaining that GH explaining himself too clearly, but it'll be a tough sell to say that he is based on what you have quoted. Of the crowd still complaining about my posting that's the best example (as flawed as it may be) of someone articulating my position and simply not liking it's presentation still/disagreeing with it. Besides not liking that my position doesn't have a place for centrism or "very leftist" as Velr would call it (an important identification) his complaint is that rather than discussing the latest Trump tweet or whatever that I'm instead explaining the philosophy which underpins my position/s (which is at the core of why you guys think I'm making up words/definitions/being vague etc... If I say "Voting for Biden is a better path than revolution" I don't have to explain it, you all just accept it because you've spent a lifetime inundated with arguments that support that hegemonic position. If I say "Revolution is better than voting for Biden" you guys reject it, and demand I explain. In order to explain I have to use concepts, terms, and ideas you guys have never or rarely been exposed to and usually in a dismissive fashion if you are. So by saying "your philosophy explanation doesn't belong here" Velr is arguing for me not to explain the things people assert are vague, something I made up, etc...
Ok, I'll just go out and say it. Velr is not complained that you are explaining yourself too clearly. This is just an example of you making things up. Which curiously enough is not something we had cause to say about you before in particular.
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Was just looking for some clarification on whats happening here? Because I have a PM that says the opposite?
GreenHorizons was just temp banned for 2 days by Seeker.
That account was created on 2011-04-16 10:56:04 and had 16292 posts.
Reason: Please ignore JimmiC from now on. You've been doing well. Don't screw it up after coming this far.
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On June 14 2019 12:48 GreenHorizons wrote:Was just looking for some clarification on whats happening here? Because I have a PM that says the opposite? Show nested quote +GreenHorizons was just temp banned for 2 days by Seeker.
That account was created on 2011-04-16 10:56:04 and had 16292 posts.
Reason: Please ignore JimmiC from now on. You've been doing well. Don't screw it up after coming this far.
Mod Response: + Show Spoiler +
I'd prefer we discuss this in the feedback thread as I could simply copy paste the response here with your permission and it would address many of my previous concerns.
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On June 14 2019 13:44 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2019 12:48 GreenHorizons wrote:Was just looking for some clarification on whats happening here? Because I have a PM that says the opposite? GreenHorizons was just temp banned for 2 days by Seeker.
That account was created on 2011-04-16 10:56:04 and had 16292 posts.
Reason: Please ignore JimmiC from now on. You've been doing well. Don't screw it up after coming this far. Mod Response: + Show Spoiler +I'd prefer we discuss this in the feedback thread as I could simply copy paste the response here with your permission and it would address many of my previous concerns.
Mod Response: + Show Spoiler +
With all due respect I need clear and unambiguous permission to share our PM's without consequences regarding exposing PM's. I apologize for the inconvenience but I've had PM exchanges misrepresented in the past (and the people misrepresenting them refuse to share them) and want there to be no confusion as to whether I was given permission/invited to engage in this rather than me forcing it or acting out of accordance with moderation standards.
While I know this may seem overly cautious to some, I value being able to post here and exchange ideas/perspectives and with moderation watching my posting closely, while also hesitant to try to prevent unnecessary bans like this one by clarifying the context before banning, I want to be crystal clear that I'm attempting sincere dialogue aimed at resolution, and if there's a perception that I've veered away from that, we discuss it civilly rather than simply ban and sort it out after again.
With that in mind, would you be so kind as to provide that (here in thread) Seeker?
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Germany25649 Posts
We've already apologised for the wrongful ban, we made a mistake, case closed. We are not going to sit here and over-analyze the situation.
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On June 14 2019 23:11 KadaverBB wrote:
We've already apologised for the wrongful ban, we made a mistake, case closed. We are not going to sit here and over-analyze the situation.
It's confusing that I have essentially the opposite message sitting in my inbox as well as the unresolved conflict between my ban reason and various PM's I've received regarding it. This is also the first I've heard of any apology.
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