Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.
I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.
I think it’s kind of stupid that we’re defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default “well, that’s too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!” metric we’re using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that’s not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.
About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don’t control it, there’s probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.
No, my criticism isn’t so much that billionaires aren’t necessarily evil, because I think it’s mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn’t really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We’ve put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where’s the cutoff, here? I’m sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.
My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what’s actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that’s the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a “not necessarily a billionaire” healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.
I’m not defending the insurance industry or capitalism for-profit healthcare, but I worry more generally about society normalizing or celebrating violence.l and where that’s moght take us.
society already normalizes and celebrates violence plenty. it just doesn’t tend to normalize it or celebrate it against the people who actually deserve it, pretty much apparently until a couple days ago when everyone sort of collectively seems to have realized that they all agree.
yeah except for basically all of them
this also, yeah, there’s plenty of people china could drop bombs on, or, opposition groups they could fund in proxy wars or civil wars, probably to their strategic advantage, and they mostly don’t do it. they’ve taken a much softer strain in terms of geopolitics, I think.
I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.
See, now that’s totally different, as a claim, slightly more reasonable, glad you clarified.
I also, I dunno, I think I just dispute that the disposition of the US empire would immediately lead to some sort of mass arms race, or struggle. I think at most you’d expect to see some more minor movement on china’s other political objectives, like just, taking control of taiwan, which I imagine would be a pretty much instantaneous and relatively bloodless kind of move, since they’re most of the way there already. But militaries, and military spending, isn’t infinite, it’s a direct drain on the economy in real terms, especially with modern warfare, as we’ve seen with ukraine, and especially with the threat of nukes.
We’re able to produce all that military shit because we just dump a frankly massive and insane portion of our economy (and especially our extractive economy) into it, in a kind of constant feedback loop where people in power pay themselves. People who work at lockheed martin get hired from positions as US military personnel, where the FAANG is a revolving door with the CIA, that sort of shit. All as sort of a massive sunk cost, that would be pretty hard to disentangle from while maintaining the US economy, since the US economy is so tied to the US empire. We can look at the sort of, landscape that emerged out of the slow dissolution of the new deal, and post new deal government projects, as being less a sort of desert where everything just fell into ruins, and more being a morph kind of slow and incestuous merge between government organizations and private companies, since the “necessity” of those organizations still existed.
I think there’s also definitely some extent to which we’re getting cooked by china more than we realize with this kind of stuff because our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.
If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on. Obviously I’m not a soothsayer, so I can’t say what the landscape would form into given this hypothetical, but I don’t see a whole lot of geopolitical conflicts of interest, or uncrossable roads, so far as china is concerned in terms of their longer term economic growth or outlook.
I think there’s also something to note there about how like, I dunno. I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia. I think it would be naive to say that plays no role, either, but I don’t think it’s as nearly shaping a factor as people make it out to be. Certainly, if your nation’s finding itself in such a position where someone so idealistic and delusional is making your higher level decisions, and especially your military decisions, as the US currently finds themselves in, you’d probably be cooked like, whatever that person’s position is. Probably there’s some sort of back and forth here also about china’s interactions with their uyghur population, perhaps, as an example of how they’ve responded to that kinda stuff, and I don’t think they have a bad track record.
Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?
Because I don’t think it’s human nature that people just inevitably drop bombs on on another as soon as they’re given the opportunity to do so, and I think that’s an extremely oversimplified view of both human nature and history, to think that’s the case. I think, broadly, it depends on a lot of factors. Economic factors, normal economic realities, and the ability of the economic systems to self-regulate and feed information from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, as a result of their political structures. Cultural factors, like the base level of xenophobia present in a culture for other cultures, you know, to what degree that xenophobia shapes the economic realities or is shaped by the economic reality.
I think saying, oh, well, if china was the world hegemon tomorrow, they’d drop bombs as soon as they could, I don’t even really think that passes the smell test. They’d still have to deal with the EU, with Russia, with the militaries of basically every force they’d want to contend with, and with their lack of as nearly of a well-funded military industrial complex. They’ve shown a much higher tendency to approach geopolitical situations with their huge amounts of economic leverage as a result of their manufacturing base rather than just using a big stick to get everything they want.
I don’t see any reason why that would majorly change if the US were gone. If they were to pivot to military industrial capacity, there’s a certain cost-opportunity there in terms of what it would take out of their economic capacity, and it wouldn’t really be the same cost-opportunity that we have (or, mostly, used to have histrorically) in the US, since their public and private sectors are more fused than ours, so they’re not benefiting from the natural efficiency of a large government organization in terms of overall savings, when that’s basically what every corporation over there is, or, is more than over here. Why would they risk their position bombing the shit out of other nations when they could basically just not?
The belt and road initiative has already showcased their geopolitical approach. It’s still something they use a military to protect in terms of infrastructural investments, but those infrastructural investments seem to me to be more significant than those of most western occupying forces, and seem to take a different fundamental stance in terms of technology. China’s economy doesn’t revolve, to the same extent as the US, around the extraction, control, and importation of cheap, sour, heavy, crude oil, from other nations, which can then be refined into much more valuable petroleum products in terms of shipping while the US positions itself as a middle-man between this extractive base and the rest of the world’s energy market. China’s built like 50 nuclear plants since like 2014-ish, we’ve built 2 new plants since the year 2000. That’s obviously shaped by necessity, but that’s also just a vastly different approach.
China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could.
Yeah, except they’re different countries, made up of different people, with a different culture, with a pretty much fundamentally different kind of organizational structure governing them. I don’t think “well, they’d probably do it too, if the US were gone” is a super convincing argument in favor of the US dropping bombs on people.
yerp, I partially think that was necessary for this route (which probably would’ve happened agnostic to either party), since central california does a shit ton of agriculture.
do you not think, that potentially, they just go the indentured servitude route, after holding people for the “crime” of illegal immigration?
I would like to point out that this is just what robin hood is
basically, the US is a one party system, but it has two parties
some of us make good pets, some of us make good masters, the main problem I’m having right now is that it lacks the kind of erotic kind of framing that I tend to prefer
Use illogical, bad faith arguments to trick them into believing that the sky is blue, of course. People fall for horrible stupid dumb propaganda, it’s the nature of humanity. Only like 5% of people are really gonna bother to go actually read studies and shit, I don’t even really do that, I just look at the abstracts and then hope that the scientists didn’t fuck up and run the study wrong or engage in p-hacking or something. I couldn’t afford to go to college and take a statistics course, and my only form of education beyond that is watching 3brown1blue videos at 2x speed interspersed with useless escapist brainrot.
Everyone wants to believe that humans are some highly logical computer creatures that can just be convinced if we get hit with enough rigorous logical argumentation. We’re really not. You can make something much more convincing to someone if you validate their ego, or if you incentivize someone into believing a certain kind of truth as a result of their survival in a certain context, right. Even if we were purely logical beings, that wouldn’t even really solve the problem, because we’re all exposed to vastly different information landscapes, i.e. every MAGA guy you run into has probably be tweaking out to AM radio for 8 contiguous hours at their job, or socializing with a bunch of insularly sexist, homophobic, or racist good old boys in an echo chamber for most hours of the day, or whatever else, right. So, what hope can you have to change their minds over the course of a 1 or 2 hour conversation? If even that. And double this for everyone out there that spends their time listening to NPR, or has milder takes about things, or even just spends their time passively absorbing whatever propaganda floats at them through pop culture and escapist media consumption.
Well that’s why the point of arguing with other people isn’t really to convince them, but just to make yourself smarter and more informed by reading 200,000 pages of government legislation for fun, like it’s just another tuesday. Light work for a person like you
This is false actually. Any claim can be dismissed and evidence doesn’t matter because nobody cares. The best way to convince people of things is with cheap psychological parlor tricks
I’m gonna try not to go line by line here because I think it would end up swelling the comment sizes to a ludicrous degree like when I was vent posting and also I just woke up so I don’t wanna do that, but I dunno. I am mostly convinced that markets are not actually good at allocating things because they assume rational actors, they externalize costs and thrust them upon the public and the government, because they replicate centrally planned monopolies anyways. I also don’t like them because we broadly don’t look a the core power structures that end up manifesting under markets, which are mainly authoritarian and thus obviously have information problems allocating resources, on top of information problems that arise as a result of competition between market actors. I would rather just organize the economy in a way that makes sense, even if it ignores the fundamental right, the fundamental good, the fundamental freedom, of private property and capital.
The broader point I was trying to make about rationality and ethics, is that capitalism and markets have a core conceit of what like, is good, fundamentally. This idea of “freedom” right. Maybe it’s cooked up by the americans, I dunno, not really my point, I’m just looking at the fundamental core values that differentiate each system. In socialism, I’m gonna be looking at like, the organization of power structures, whether or not they’re democratically organized, I’m gonna be looking at central planning vs, I guess the markets would be considered a decentralized form of planning, maybe, though you could also have like decentralized little anarchist communes running around or whatever. Socialism is a pretty broad tent. In capitalism, though, I’m gonna be looking at the ownership of private property, of capital, as a fundamental, core value that makes the system turn. The ownership of capital is thought of as a good, as a fundamental right, a fundamental freedom that people should be afforded. That’s what capitalism is.
Also, again, I’m not so sure you can just be like, “killing old people is economically rational” type of thing. That’s assuming a kind of core value to those economics that you’re using, economics, like rationality, like, we commonly assume a value when we use economics because we live in a sociopolitical context where the people who use economics are going to be using them for a very specific purpose, right, but ultimately “economics”, what we call economics, is just sort of the study of like, resources and how they’re used and shit. I dunno if I wanted to come up with a better definition I can, but ja. But we still have to come up with a core value that motivates the shit along, there, is what I’m saying.
That’s what I’m talking about. The fact that so often in capitalism, the values are assumed. Maybe it’s because we exist in a kind of post-history, end of history reality, where capitalism and neoliberalism won, or whatever, but we assume that whatever is good is whatever makes money, and we assume that whatever makes money is economically efficient. And then, if killing old people can make us money, we do that. But we don’t pay attention to the broader contexts under which all of this takes place, which shapes the incentive structure, it shapes whether or not a particular company can make money doing something or not. That’s my point, is that we don’t look at those core systems, their incentive structures, their organizational structures, we just say “leave it up to the market”, and then the market just sort of shakes out somewhat randomly but mostly towards little authoritarian fiefdoms and monopolies. And we do that because we assume that to chase after private property, and capital, and to be a capitalist, is a sort of core freedom, a core good, a core moral value, which is supposed to exist for everyone.
Also, I must address this, right:
My primary concern for something like socialism is that we would remove some fundamental level of freedom. Only building high density housing because it’s what the collective hive mind says.
So, collective hive mind, right, I dunno. Halfway, that sounds like democracy to me. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, again, divorced from the organizational structure, that I’ve put forward in my previous comment and I could put forward now, you probably know the arguments already, as to why higher density housing is a good idea, why it’s rational, why it’s logically sensible, especially when done at scale. If we give most people the “freedom”, to choose which housing they want to live in, then we kind of run into a prisoner’s dilemma where people of means believe that it’s in their best interest to turn themselves into antisocial suburbanoid hermits that can live apart from the “others” that live in the city, they can commute in and out, they can retain some level of status as a result of their lifestyle, and maybe because of this they can gain some level of luxury through living in suburbia, at least for the first 20 or 30 years before their house fucking crumbles into dust cause it was made of particleboard and sad dreams.
So, is their “freedom” to choose to live in suburbia, is that thought of as more democratic than the popular will might be, because it afforded that minority of people the power to live as they chose, right? Or is it actually less free, is it actually less democratic, because it imposed the will of that minority of people on the majority of people which would’ve rather lived without the issues that suburbia brings to them? i.e. racism, increased utilities costs, increased maintenance costs, financial and economic insolvency leading to crumbling infrastructure, pollution, massive ecological costs, I’ve said this shit already, you get the point. I would say that the former, obviously, forcing people to live either in high density housing, then having some proportion of people live in like, cabins in the woods where they do permaculture style farming, and then maybe having the rest of the people just live totally separate from your society maybe even if they so choose, right, I can argue why that makes more sense as a whole in material reality, why it logically makes more sense. But the question as to which one is good, which one affords more freedom, which one is morally correct, that’s an open question. I put my chips, so far as that exists, in the camp where we’re not doing massive amounts of ecological damage.
But, that’s the core sort of, distinction I’m trying to get at, here, which motivates the difference between capitalism and, not even socialism or communism necessarily, but just between capitalism and other systems. That core ideological divide, that belief in chasing capital as a right, that’s what I’m trying to get at.
If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example.
See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing. People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively, which seems pretty inefficient, people might also try to move, or leave your system as they get older. So I’d expect some level of brain drain there, which leads to another point: You’re also decreasing any worker productivity you would gain from old joe who ran the lumber yard still being around, so you can ask him questions about the quirks of the lumber yard. Maybe old joe even just boosts worker productivity by the fact that he makes his family and friends happier, and more able to tolerate bad working conditions, longer work hours, or more desirable than that, maybe he gives them the will to learn more, and bring you better higher level jobs where they will be ultimately much more efficient for whatever time they do end up spending on production. But back to rationality, that’s just a method you’re using to evaluate things. In this case, maybe “efficiency”, which is sort of a proxy value for other, more real values. Efficiency to do what? Usually by, economic efficiency, we mean like, we’re minimizing the necessary inputs, to affect some productive capacity, while maximizing the outputs, in like, a material way. But then, maybe the sort of our core value that we’re chasing after should be to maximize the happiness that old joe is capable of giving to his friends and family, or something harder to define and measure, and more along those lines. That, that would maybe be a flaw of socialist systems, that we don’t have some universal definition of a “good” to work towards, but I would say that, again, that’s not a distinct flaw of those systems in particular, and in capitalism, that just gets subsumed by a bunch of other bullshit values. You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.
Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take. To take the risk that, by defining the good, you eliminate other definitions of “good” that could’veexisted, and the freedom to have those other definitions of good. It’s better to take that risk, and define that good, and then work towards it (and mostly, even to point out that such a core value exists, in practice, even acknowledge that it exists, more than anything else.). I think it’s better to do that, than substitute your “good” for “freedom”, which, like efficiency (and even like “good”, but shhh), is just a proxy value for other things. In the market, in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things. We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy. Every little corporation gets their “good”, and then they fight it out in the marketplace. Ends up that actually, we’ve just blown this up to be even every single individual, because, again, we’ve adopted freedom as our current value. Swim in the water, stop knowing that it’s there. Big shocker when the individuals at the highest level of the market, having passed through many tests to get there, big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted, and when they can’t implement said definition if they even have one, because when they decide to do so, they get curbstomped for engaging in too much long term thinking compared to just sucking up as much of the industry as is possible at the time. I’m also not even saying that a monopoly is bad necessarily, right, as an alternative to this, I’m just saying that it’s hypocritical to the supposed value of capitalism, which should be to use market economics to do these calculations at basically every level (which I’m also not convinced would be more efficient then just doing them somewhere else). It also tends to be bad because it still exists within this context in which all this short term incentive is naturally floating around and in which the highest powers in the land are naturally selected to be bad authoritarians.
But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives. Suburbanization blows up out of white flight as america, conceived as a sort of colonial experiment in a time of slavery, obviously has a lot of hangups around 18th century conceptions of racial superiority. Then you have the corporate lobbying that affects the political system, on top of the general political system just being tailored for the wealthy from the jump (and being tuned to the wealthy over time), and badda bing badda boom pretty soon you’re ripping out LA’s streetcars to instead flood the streets with massive chunky automobiles that kill a ton of people per year, fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now, so we’re basically locked in, and none of the fundamental problems with cars as a format have been solved, even with EVs, you’re still getting particulate emissions from brakes, lithium mining issues, you’re still getting road wear and expenses from that, you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth. We can talk about socialism as a distinct set of values as mostly divorced from questions of authoritarianism, because it’s assumed that we’re doing this, in good faith, to decentralize ownership of everything, ownership of the workplace, restoring the ownership of the means of production to the proletariat and all that good shit. We can assume all that to be the case, right, oh, and then since we don’t want market economies to really re-emerge, replicating class dynamics inside of the apparatus of the corporation, we go from having a co-operative to just having the corporation be owned by the public, and then maybe that’s “authoritarian” even if we have a more democratic voting system than a capitalist country is allowed to have. Whatever, those are all good debates to have, those sorts of debates, they’re what socialists are gonna talk about in a sort of abstract sense, and then they’re all gonna draft up lines like, oh, I’m a marxist because of XYZ, whatever. My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever. My concern is that we currently find ourselves in a system where all of that shit about the ICE exists, and the ICE isn’t just used to power like, a bunch of farm vehicles somewhere, and then everyone else takes the train because if I talk through every other point about car use then obviously none of it makes any sense to any set of values that isn’t “I want to kill people with my car” or “I want to waste a lot of gas” or “I want to intentionally spend a lot of money” or “I want to look cool and feel cool and manly”, type shit. That, is multiplied for like every other facet of the economy, that times a million. I hate that shit, mostly more than anything. That we can come to the correct takeaways and decisions, and then do nothing about it because the system doesn’t care. I don’t care so much how we get there, or even necessarily how authoritarian a given system is, because I think about the most that can be expected from people who have been in a capitalist society is to vote for the replication of said capitalist society with maybe some socialized benefits, democratic socialismo style, and I fully expect that shit to get rolled back in 50 years and also to exploit the third world since obviously people outside the jurisdiction of the state aren’t allowed to vote in the state’s elections. Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense, I want people to stop dying in wars, whatever. The current global system fucking sucks for all that stuff. That’s mostly the only reason why I get pushed towards socialism. Mostly the specifics only exist for me insofar as they affect or not my ability to enforce that idea of “good”, which I think is pretty sensible once it actually gets spelled out into the material.
Nobody ever really wins here. In either the short term, or the long term, with or without violence. If the clap back of oct 7th hadn’t happened, then the state of affairs would’ve remained exactly as horrible as they’ve always been, and probably would’ve slowly decomposed even further, and the population probably would’ve just died slower deaths over the course of several years. Certainly in retrospect, that maybe seems better than the alternative, but nobody knows the future, really. It could be just as likely the oct 7th was exactly the kind of pressure that started a chain of events that ultimately leads to the deconstruction of the state of israel. It’s completely impossible to know the future, completely, anything else is kind of just armchair speculation.
We have to place oct 7th into context, and to place it into context, we have to have a chain of causality. That eliminates the sort of responsibility that people like to attribute to everything. It doesn’t eliminate tactics, or the decision making process, it actually enhances it, if anything, but we do have to look at, say, how the state of affairs in gaza lead to such an attack. Both in how such a sorry state led to such an attack, obviously, and also in how Hamas was funded as their government in part by israel in order to ensure a more violent opposing force that would be more willing to mutually escalate with them, especially when that force is locked in to a specific location and can only really fight on israel’s terms, unlike most of israel’s other actors, which can fight more on the terms of the international political stage. Obviously still a deck which is heavily stacked against them, but slightly less so.
What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with. Under that framework, any tactic the gazans, specifically, could’ve taken, was pretty much doomed to failure from the start. Or rather, was doomed to not really have a positive outcome in the immediate short term, for them specifically. I’m not saying oct 7th was really a wise decision, right, I’m just saying that we don’t really know. Maybe attribute to me analysis paralysis, then, I’m not quite sure, ironically, but I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.