Slashdot Mirror
'The Language of Capitalism Isn't Just Annoying, It's Dangerous' (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: When General Motors laid off more than 6,000 workers days after Thanksgiving, John Patrick Leary, the author of the new book Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, tweeted out part of GM CEO Mary Barra's statement. "The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, resilient, and profitable, while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future," she said. Leary added a line of commentary to of Barra's statement: "Language was pronounced dead at the scene." Why should we pay attention to the particular words used to describe, and justify, the regularly scheduled "disruptions" of late capitalism? Published this month by Haymarket Books, Leary's Keywords explores the regime of late-capitalist language: a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that he argues promulgate values friendly to corporations (hierarchy, competitiveness, the unquestioning embrace of new technologies) over those friendly to human beings (democracy, solidarity, and scrutiny of new technologies' impact on people and the planet).
These words narrow our conceptual horizons -- they "manacle our imagination," Leary writes -- making it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society. We are encouraged by powerful "thought leaders" and corporate executives to accept it as the language of common sense or "normal reality." When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we're seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we're implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence. After all, if you're not conversant in "innovation" or "collaboration," how can you expect to thrive in this brave new economy? [...] Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies, what we're living through is just the next iteration of an old system of global capitalism. In other words, he writes, "cheer up: things have always been terrible!" What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts. He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.
These words narrow our conceptual horizons -- they "manacle our imagination," Leary writes -- making it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society. We are encouraged by powerful "thought leaders" and corporate executives to accept it as the language of common sense or "normal reality." When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we're seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we're implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence. After all, if you're not conversant in "innovation" or "collaboration," how can you expect to thrive in this brave new economy? [...] Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies, what we're living through is just the next iteration of an old system of global capitalism. In other words, he writes, "cheer up: things have always been terrible!" What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts. He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.
This doesn't require a book, everyone knows about corporate speak. Write your thoughts on a blog. You will get a couple of thousand readers.
The value meals at fast food restaurants were demonized? It is good that this did not impact ordering meals at restaurants. After all, you might just want a burger at the burger shop (as unnutrituous as it might be) but you still order the whole meal at your friendly eateria
When companies have the power to disrupt societies, one manager thinking and taking bullshit can do a lot of damage. It always has been that way but these days or highly optimised society has become more fragile which makes bullshit more likely to cause damage.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Not the language of capitalism.
You know, after you run out of other people's money.
Like the millions fleeing Venezuela have discovered.
Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?
More Socialist Clickbait! Yay!
Belief in "experts" or "omnipotent technology" sounds to me like another lame excuse to give socialism a try. "It didn't work last time, or the time before that, but trust us, this computer that I built is so smart that it can defy the laws of supply and demand!"
Markets existed before what wee describe today as the Capitalist system. What is different today is the enshrining of markets as the universal solution, and thus the ultimate value, even when human values are at stake.
You probably have a weak argument if you put it into the passive voice so you don't have to admit that it originates with you. I pronounce good writing dead at the scene of this shill's Twitter account.
oh no! someone is using words and it's stopping us from 'organizing our economy' the way we want.. /implying central planning of the economy..
no thanks.
it's a common propaganda technique. We all laughed when the Iraqi information minister tried to do it since he was completely doomed.But when you control the media the technique's the same every time.
Put another way: "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.".
Works too. This is why we need to teach critical thinking via the humanities in school. Critical thinking _can_ be taught, but you need a subject that's simple enough for folks who don't do it naturally and where being 50% right has value. STEM doesn't work for that. You'll note the wealthy make it a point to give their kids a well rounded education. This is why.
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So ... everyone who was upset about the biased NR opinion piece from an opinion journal will be showing up anytime now to complain about this one.
Right? Guys?
Every person has the power to disrupt society. However their effect is dependent on how many people are listening to them. The thing is it isn't the quality of their message, but enough people listen to them, they will get followers and cause damage.
Companies have bosses who employee thousands of people so what they say there is a number of people listing to them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Only in the trades. A friend of mine was in a union and a new union was coming in that was more business friendly but they got rid of 2/3 of the workers (their best ones) because â" well I have no idea - probably because they were irretrievably stoopid
the big problem is everyone grew up with capitalism, it is deep in their psychie. To put such people in a different system, of course it will fail. If only there were a way for a reset or reboot
The wall will spend other people's money so I guess it's a wall built by socialism.
How about you build a personal responsibility wall around your own property?
There is nothing knew about our belief in the omnipotence of "experts." It started in the Progressive Era. Everything you see today is just a hardening of trends that were generations in the making.
Coming from the right side of the spectrum, I don't see much respect for "experts" or technology on our side. What I see on the left side is two factions:
1. The highly intelligent and/or connected who know the game and play it for maximum fun, profit and power.
2. The average and 1SD above who love to pretend to be "educated" or "data-driven" folks. All of those postures people take on media such as constantly liking "I Fucking Love Science" to act the intellectual.
The former are scared of losing their power and privilege; the latter are scared of looking like the "rubes" and "hicks" they mock in fly-over country.
In China, the government is guilty of extreme common sense. One might notice that they do not care what you call them - communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever
Maybe your place doesn't have a door with a lock on it?
Why does communist planning always start with the phrase âoeIf we just killed...â?
Hilariously, the only successful communist country, China, became successful by abandoning communism and taking up the mantle of Fascism. In case you kids donâ(TM)t know what fascism is, itâ(TM)s what happens when you combine authoritarianism with socialism.
Except, well, you simply can't have socialism without authoritarianism.
Period.
The only way for "the people" (in real-word terms read that as "the government"...) to "control the means of production" is to fucking TAKE it from the current owners, with violence if necessary (hell, who am I kidding? "Progressives" would probably prefer violence...).
Don't think so? Well, then, what would you "progressives" say should be done to the owners of an oil company that refuses to be nationalized? Just let them keep it?
Yeah, didn't think so.
So yeah, socialism REQUIRES authoritarianism.
all seem to be doing fine. Kind of helps that they're not currently under massive US Sanctions for little to no reason (except oil money).
Seriously, what we do to all of the Southern continent with our foreign police really pisses me off. We wreck their economies and governments and then we bitch that refugees from the disasters we caused come up her and take our jerbs.
Wanna solve these refugee problems: Stop interfering with and overthrowing their populist, left wing governments, stop wrecking their attempts to Unionize (I'm looking at you Coke) and end the bloody Drug War. Their countries will recover and modernize and we'll see an end to the flood of illegal immigrants.
You know, I've never heard the German's claim they're being overrun by cheese eatin' surrender monkeys. Just sayin'
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Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies
So he decries the use of buzzwords and than invokes the buzzy "late stage"
Look there is no reason at all to think we are in "late stage" capitalism. Capitalism as Adam Smith defines it has only really been tried in the 19th and 20th centuries and the societies that embraced it are still existent. We don't know where this road ends or if it ends.
All Leary's argument unless the book actually bears little relation to the summary (highly possible this is slashdot) shows is his imagination is as manacled by language as are those he is complaining about. Other than his captors chose neo-marxist handcuffs rather than neo-capitalist ones. Either way if he is right its by accident rather than insight.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Go post on a social justice site and get lost
"hierarchy, competitiveness, the unquestioning embrace of new technologies" - basically what resulted in humans at the top of the food chain.
Millions dead, people living in slums while the elite live in luxury, no more stray dogs or cats because the poor have eaten them all. Dictators worldwide like Mao, Stalin, etc loved communism and why shouldn't you? Turn over your freedom and your money and your incentive to do anything and start your new life of despair right now! Just ask the millions of dead Chinese how Communism worked for them! Just think, no problem getting a kidney transplant because there are plenty of harvested organs! It's a win-win! All you get for capitalism is decent pay, healthcare, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, you can own your own business but hey you don't really need those things. Turn it all over and if you won't we have guns to make you turn them over. Your money will be liberated from your pockets before you know it and you'll be on the Communism diet weight loss plan in no time. Why would all those happy Socialist Venezuelans want to leave the country when they have it so good? Surely the North Koreans love what they got going and all those fences are to keep those drooling Capitalists out! Comparatively Capitalism is dangerous and how dare Capitalists think people could somehow have a better system than the big benefits of Communism!
"late capitalism" is better than "late socialism". You know, after you run out of other people's money. Like the millions fleeing Venezuela have discovered.
False dichotomy and false equivalence. Authoritarianism is what ruins economies, not socialism. Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.
Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?
Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive. If we could build a physical barrier could keep your kind of willful ignorance out then I'd help build it myself.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The wall will spend other people's money so I guess it's a wall built by socialism.
How about you build a personal responsibility wall around your own property?
It's call a "front door", dumbass.
I bet you have one too.
Damn, child, you're lame.
But totes adorbs. In an "alleycat that's proud of hacking up a hairball" kind of way.
Capitalism (with a social safety net) is the method by which we distribute scarce resources in a world of unlimited demand. Capitalism, via competition, encourages production (to reduce scarcity) while tempering that unlimited demand via market prices.
It is the best system humans have been able to devise given our human and earthly limitations.
Corporate bullshit isn't the language of capitalism. It's the language of MBAs and professional managers (many are bullshit artists). Competition and market prices are the language of capitalism and there is nothing wrong with how those describe the forces at work in capitalism.
What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts.
That's new? What were they doing in 1955 then if not having '"belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts'?
Or is this some value of "new" that I am not familiar with?
...the reality is the reason we have so many problems is because people who are irrational have equal power with the people who are rational.
For those who rail at these words, the reality is right now we live in a lawless oligarchy that's has been basically stealing everything that is nailed down and has been since the US's founding. To even suggest any modern capitalist state "is a democracy" is just utter bullshit when it has been owned lock stock and barrel by corporations for most western states history with brief interruptions of world war 1 and world war 2 and the cold war to try to soften the ruthless harshness of capitalist societies.
Now with the fall of the USSR corporations are unchecked and out of control and being enabled by a heavily indoctrinated public.
Don't think so? Every time IP law came up for review to benefit the public it was pushed to benefit the rich and their corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The reality is the general public in the US worships their robber barrons. George carlin said it best about americans.
Carlin
Look at the distribution of wealth, it is just insane, anyone who thinks they live in a society that benefits the many is uninformed.
US distribution of wealth
https://imgur.com/a/FShfb
Wealth in america
There are still a few linguistically conservative capitalists out there who are concerned about showing their full hand immediately, they use this flowery rhetoric to try to sugar coat their aims. The rest just lay it out as it is - the workers will be punished for being smaller cogs in the large machines while the fat cats will keep getting fatter. Perhaps the former group believes their choice of words makes them better Christians, but they are all playing for the same goal.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Did he give all his worldly possessions away? Nope.
Does he send his entire paycheck to India? Nope.
Does he realize he's just like Michael Moore who made tens of millions of dollars off the misery of others while pocketing the money for himself, owning multiple houses and living a life of luxury all the while screaming at the top of his lungs that the $9/hr workers must hate their $12/hr supervisors? Not a chance.
Their either idiots or psychopaths.
Some pointy-haired types talk all in buzzwords. It's annoying, in fact, it's just as annoying as the author, who uses phrases like "deploying language".
Meanwhile, capitalism remains the only system to heave literally billions of people out of poverty. Generally speaking, the only people who have a problem with capitalism are either pure socialists (who believe that all your marbles belong to the government) or corporate cronyists (who believe that all your marbles belong to companies - enforced by the government). And sure enough: this book was "inspired by a previous work of a similar name: the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’s 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society."
For your reading delectation, I leave you with the concluding paragraph from one of his papers, if you can stand this sort of navel-gazing prose:
When we consider innovation’s religious origins in false prophecy, its current orthodoxy in the discourse of technological evangelism—and, more broadly, in analog versions of social innovation—is often a nearly literal example of Rayvon Fouché’s argument that the formerly colonized, “once attended to by bibles and missionaries, now receive the proselytizing efforts of computer scientists wielding integrated circuits in the digital age” (2012, 62). One of the additional ironies of contemporary innovation ideology, though, is that these populations exploited by global capitalism are increasingly charged with redeeming it—the comfortable denizens of the West need only “stand back and admire” the process driven by the entrepreneurial labor of the newly digital underdeveloped subject. To the pain of unemployment, the selfishness of material pursuits, the exploitation of most of humanity by a fraction, the specter of environmental cataclysm that stalks our future and haunts our imagination, and the scandal of illiteracy, market-driven innovation projects like Mitra’s “hole in the wall” offer next to nothing, while claiming to offer almost everything.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
No a front door is called a door. A wall is called a wall. You clearly don't have a grasp of what these words actually mean. Maybe English isn't your first language.
JP Leary is just another tired Marxist who wishes he could have stormed the barrikady with Lenin, Stalin, and the gang. Haymarket books is likewise a collection of aging hippies and millennial socialists romanticising the glory days of axe-handle-swinging unionists throwing bombs at police.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/aut...
Fuck radicals of both ends of the spectrum. We need to ignore them more.
-Styopa
I'm an anti-capitalist but calling the language of capitalism "dangerous" is a bit of a stretch. Certainly, the language is extremely annoying, pompous, and overused. It sounds like a bunch of business majors jerking each other off and using a bunch of larger words often incorrectly to appear educated. When I think of dangerous, I think of immediately life threatening. I will need to buy a new car come February and it won't be a GM. Citizens wrongly bailed those assholes ou.
Capitalism is OK, it is fine. The problems begin when it turns into the Imperialism as it was proven by the classics still in 19th century.
The main issue is that the Imperialism leads to an imperialistic world war.
...Says mufti Islam Bin-Jihadi Al-Britoni, quoting the spiritual revelations of his cousin who overdid on drugs that one time and thought his penis is talking to him.
Corporations are no longer stewards of society in general, and only looking after interests of shareholder. As such corporations have no reservations to damage society to the benefit of shareholders. This, in itself, is what will doom Western society.
You can't have powerful agents (i.e. corporations) act as sociopaths and have society as a whole succeed. There are two solutions to this - reduce power of corporations (i.e. socialism) or change rules governing corporate behavior to disincentivize antisocial behavior (i.e. strong regulation and anti-monopolist laws). Without this, we will have a new era of Robber Barons. Arguably, silicon valley technocrats are already there.
... everything else, including the workers of a company, is little more than a means to that end. You can parse the words of press releases all you want, but, in the end, Capitalism is all about maximizing profit of the owners at the expense of everything and everyone else.
See, his side engages in the same nonsense.
I think people are overly concerned about the MBA-speak used, but aren't paying sufficient attention to the actions of said MBAs.
"Late-stage capitalism" or whatever you want to call it is about squeezing every single drop of productivity out of an already-stretched system. This is where the disruption comes in...everyone is focused on removing every pocket of slack. Replace taxi companies with a phone app that summons drivers directly to you to kill taxi companies. Outsource every single corporate service to the lowest bidder rather than hiring people directly to lower your costs. It's a race to the bottom and if you ask me, it is beginning to have an effect on society in general.
When I graduated in the late 90s, it was still very common for people to have decent mid-level jobs at large companies. A generation before, it was even more pronounced. Now, in the name of agile and disruption, businesses are killing any stability that was there in favor of contracting positions and outsourcing functions. The problem is this...in a previous time it was possible to party your way through a management degree, get randomly selected for some generic position at a company, and use that position to establish a decent family life. The societal change that's happening is that fewer people are able to stay employed in an area. This will eventually lead to people being more nomadic, having fewer children, renting apartments instead of buying houses, and not contributing to any sort of community.
Once you're out of your 20s, most people aren't really excited about pulling up stakes and moving across the country over and over again to chase yet another contract position. Those plants GM is closing are going to dump a ton of previously well-established workers into the nomad pool, chasing lower-wage positions. Union factory work used to be the only way for people with less education to earn enough to support a decent quality of life. This is the disruption people need to think about. If you put the work in by getting educated, your reward should be a stable living that lasts a career. The problem is that these cycles of consolidation and slack-removal are growing shorter and people are likely to experience a major disruption more than once in their working lives.
Economies that have humans involved need slack. The current system just assumes we're machines.
democracy can turn authoritarian just like any other government. It is not a check on power. It is a lever of power.
This is no surprise. When we surrendered the keys to the kingdom to MBAs and spreadsheet weilding accountants any humanity in our corporations began quickly evaporating. There is no element of humanity to anything that either are taught. The âethicsâ(TM) of an accountant are tied to how to play fast and loose with the rules but to never actually cross the line. MBAs are specifically trained to believe that the only reality is in spreadsheets and that any impact on lives by the numbers coming from them is incidental and to be ignored.
The GM case also shows what happens when an organization (the UAW) gets greedy and surrenders their ability to influence their own future in return for money now.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Leary's tongue-in-cheek "Language was pronounced dead at the scene" is even more ironic when you consider there has been nothing like free-market capitalism in existence for a long time. Corporate mercantilism, yes, Fascism and socialism, for sure. The snake took over this garden a long, long time ago. Anyway, if language is dead, why does Leary continue to beat it so unmercifully?
Socialism REQUIRES authoritarianism to enforce it. This is because capitalism is based upon voluntary transactions between individuals and businesses, while socialism/communism is NOT based upon voluntary transactions between individuals and businesses. Socialism/communism is based upon FORCED transactions between individuals and business, and therefore REQUIRES authoritarianism (culminating in totalitarianism) to enforce.
I vote Trump for president to get a wall.
Socialist DNC decides my vote doesn't count and refuses to fund a wall. (but give twice that amount in foreign aid to central America, and earlier gave twice that amount to GM, but complain it costs too much)
Still waiting for that promised democracy to kick in, but it looks like socialists decided they don't like the results of democracy and are making it clear that they only tolerate it if we "vote the right way".
This is just straight up propaganda. The Chinese are good at it; they make their puppets use local sources.
Just because people want something, not knowing what they really get into, doesn't mean it's a good thing. People don't start shooting heroin for the withdrawal effects, ya know?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because his country doesn't have personal property rights.
As long as the American worker is competing with third world labor, the American job losses will continue and the "middle class" will dwindle as American companies either move production offshore or ruthlessly automate every production process to compete. The USA is in a race to the bottom and Europe is following -- even though they may not yet realize it. Taxing offshoring and automation and the resulting opioid-like economic withdrawal with the loss of cheap products are the necessary evils that will stem the flow of wealth from the USA. Throw in tax incentives to support true domestic production and there might be a workable plan. We didn't need the rest of the world 50 years ago and with some effort we won't need it in the future.
The far left has long been overly sensitive about language. This is just the latest incarnation of it.
I don't need an English professor to tell me that business uses bullshit words to lie, just like I don't need a physicist to tell me that crashing my car at 60 MPH into a brick wall might hurt. The language of it was so thick and absurd it was like satire. I even saw a great article with a "translation"
https://qz.com/work/1475097/gm-layoffs-general-motors-press-release-translated/
The article itself seems to pull out the standard identify politics and attempts to mix it now with business bullshit. The word "grit" (and it's supposed proponents) are now sexists that tell all the repressed people that the problem is that they didn't have grit. Nevermind that the author invented this last statement about women, black people, etc to appeal to the far lefts need for virtue signaling and demonization. No no, it couldn't be that determination isn't just a decent value to have, it's repression because people that use it don't bend over backwards to acknowledge isms exist.
Ugh. Am I alone in not being able to stand both of these groups? The business bullshit boys with their BS language machines, AND the SJWs with their own BS language machines and constant ism accusations.
Communism is the very definition of failure.
Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.
This does not appear to be the case.
It still allows the elite to collude and, say, form effectively a bi-partisan" one party system out of it. Or allows a bunch of parties that collude to throw up a "cordon sanitaire" to keep the popular ("populist") voice out of it. Or allows a guy to get himself elected president, then president-for-life. Say the guy who said that "democracy is like a train; you get off when you get where you want to be." (US, various countries in Europe, Turkey(!); other obvious references would be to Russia and, amazingly, the EU with its toothless EP and its many unelected EU-commissars, sitting on top of ostensibly "democratic" countries.)
That is, democracy by and of itself is not sufficient, for it can itself be subborned. You have not shown it is necessary either. Eg. with a vigorous king who regularly chops heads off of his uppity barons so the rest'll keep their heads down (and who otherwise doesn't do much more than give barons jobs to do) you might have decent checks on power as well. Barbaric, yes. Effective, that also. No democracy, yet functional checks on power.
Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive.
Read: The "progressives" like their labour cheap and don't like nay-sayers.
This is a 70s era sociology department trick: If you agree with it, it's true. If you disagree, it's "relative", or the sayers are "disinformed", or what-have-you. Most of the "progressive" "discussion" consists of criticaster character assassination. I see you, too, lack actual arguments. If I were unkind I might surmise you're a liberal arts grad.
Before you continue your character assassination spree, I don't particularly think a big wall is the ultimate answer. Nor is welcoming as many "refugees" as possible. I'm in Europe and my plan would include buying a big chunk of land south of the mediteranean sea, and sending all asylum seekers, refugees, illegal immigrants, together with our "we must do something!" do-gooders there. "We'll do the security (for now), and if you want to know how to do something, ask and we'll gladly tell. We might even pay for the initial outlay of materials. But actually doing the thing is up to you. Now go build yourself a country."
If we could build a physical barrier could keep your kind of willful ignorance out then I'd help build it myself.
I don't agree that disagreeing with the party line constitutes "wilful ignorance". If you think you know better, show us. Merely claiming you know better makes you an acolyte, not a teacher.
Please note: I do not claim to know better, but I do make an effort to show. Somehow I expect that all that'll do is enrage you. Now, if so, why is that?
GM was bailed out because it failed to reduce its footprint all the while the automobile market was expanding with model choices. Yeah it dumped Saturn, Olds, and Pontiac but that really wasn't enough. These US workers should be glade they got the extended reprieve they did, because the end was inevitable.
It will be a win-win.
A Glorious Workers Paradise and reduction of the world population by several hundred million.
Marxists happy
Envirowackos happy.
Control Freaks Leftists happy.
I think many of you here are actually anti-corporatist. Corporatism is dangerous and is a large part of the USA government control. Capitalism is merely an economic system that rewards low-price better products. GM is a great example of a company that would not exist in a capitalistic economy. The USA government has pumped over $10b into GM. This is not capitalism, it is not socialism, it is corporatism. Corporatism is very bad for everyone. It hurts competition, it hurts the government's ability to spend on infrastructure, it is even bad for the companies that get bailouts. It is bad all around. Capitalism on the other hand has lifted billions of people out of poverty and is the catalyst for us as a species not being hunter gatherers anymore.
Burning mod points because y'all really need to work on your reading comprehension. He isn't bashing technology, he's pointing to a cultural phenomenon that is particularly common among the techno-liberterian crowd, wherein people believe against all evidence that somehow technology and the "free market" are going to save us from the consequences of capitalism while somehow leaving capitalism as we know it intact. It's a dangerously stupid faith, and distressingly well-represented in the comments here.
Workers own their labor (the labor is their capital); under capitalism, they voluntarily trade their labor for money, which is a profitable exchange—laborers, too, make profit.
Authoritarianism is mandated by socialism. Pure socialism forbids private ownership. An authoritarian state is necessary to ensure nobody keeps things for themselves. If you disagree, then please, tell me how you're going to keep someone in line who does not adhere to the ideal?
A capitalistic society does not require an authoritarian state. If you want to keep what you earned, go for it. If you want to give it away? Nobody is stopping you.
I think what you and a lot who parrot the things you say don't actually know what socialism is. Socialism says you work for the community (often short handed as the state), and the community owns everything. You get what the community says you can have. If you work 1000x harder than Joe over there, too bad, you get the same as he does.
Now, a capitalistic society, they can choose to weave in some elements of socialism if they so choose. If society decides we want to take a little from people to provide welfare, well, capitalism allows that. But if society decides not to, well sucks to be one of the have nots. But when society chooses to do weave in socialist elements, if they use a democratic governing system (pure democracy, or the much more common democratically elected representatives), we call that a "social democracy". Every instance that people like you tend to call "socialist countries" that succeed are in fact social democracies, in that they use a capitalistic economy, but have woven in some social elements to provide some level of welfare. They are still however capitalist, because everything isn't owned by the community. Private ownership is allowed.
This isn't complex, I have no idea why so many people have trouble grasping this.
What are the measurements for "highly agile" and "resilient"? Can this "flexibility" be demonstrated? And a normal business invests in more business not in a vague "future".
When some of us read platitudes and inanities that smell like bullshit, we are immediately skeptical of the claims. I think our only hope is that more and more people fine tune their bullshit sensors and start rooting out charlatans in charge our of largest corporations.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Blind leading blind.
Free enterprise and capitalism is the ONLY system that has lifted millions out of poverty and misery, and continues to do so.
Of course it did. Can't make money if you don't have customers to buy your products. So pay your employees just enough that they can afford to consume, and pocket the rest of the profit. To quote of the biggest capitalists in the 20th century who basically revolutionized the manufacturing process: "Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles." Henry Ford realized, pay his workers a little more and give them more time off and they will buy the very products they make.
What benefits society more? 1 person already worth millions making millions more while thousands of others make just enough to survive, or that one person (who is still already worth millions) making fewer millions while those thousands of others make enough not just to survive, but to thrive? We are currently in the first situation, and those with the money have trained everyone else to think that those making massive tons of money earned it or deserve it when the greatest factor to making money isn't effort but rather already having money (and most of the rest is timing more than anything else).
Do we need corporations worth billions of dollars with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash reserves paying employees $10 an hour or bringing in cheap foreign labor, while at the same time paying executives multi-million dollar bonuses and large payouts to stockholders? Oh yeah, and while these companies are making record profits they also use tax schemes to funnel money outside the country to tax havens saying paying taxes is too onerous to their bottom line, leaving their employees (who are paid at least a quarter, if not half of what they company could actually afford to pay them) to make up the shortfall in their own taxes. And remember those executives making multi-million dollar bonuses? They make sure they get as many tax breaks as possible too.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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and trying to tie the two together is just a logical fallacy (I forget which one, stawman? I think there's a more specific one).
It's also a very, very minor problem. The whinny blue haired college chick at your local community college women's studies dept isn't the one oppressing you. It's the billionaire who buys off congress to outsource your job, bring in cheap H1-B labor and lets the Evangelicals run rampant over our legal system with their millions of followers.
TL;DR; Pay attention to who actually has money and power, not just who gets on your nerves or annoys you.
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When companies have the power to disrupt societies, one manager thinking and taking bullshit can do a lot of damage.
That's true only within the scope of the company.
Take that same manager and put them in a very powerful government. Now that manager thinking and taking bullshit has the power to drive an entire society, backed by force of arms.
Say you want to make it super easy to accuse black men of rape. How is a manager at GM going to make that happen? They cannot.
A plant closure affects some 6000 lives, they can find another job. Government interference in handling rape at colleges affects far more people, and the (mostly black) people it does effect have lives changed irrevocably based little on no evidence at all, and no due process.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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Corporate-speak has to assuage moral-free faceless 'investment funds'. But as for 'capitalism'; do you prefer to buy from the lowest-cost supplier? Do you want your savings (or pensions) invested in the highest-yielding opportunities? Maybe it's the 'least worst' system,if abuses are controlled
The problem is capital is power, so therefore the greedy also become more powerful, therefore they will
a) not let go of their power (spend cash)
b) make laws to help them gain power (accrue wealth)
Estate taxes. Make it 80% of everything over 1/4mil. 100% of everything over 10mil. When the greedy cannot pass on their power to their family, they'll spend it rather than let "the ebil tacks men" get it, and it is the spending of capital that keeps capitalism in check.
Spending capital moves power from the powerful to the less powerful.
If your children don't make it independently by the time you retire and they are full adults, then they're a wash out as a success and they should not benefit from your wealth. If you want to help them, help them while you're alive.
Look, Slashdot's been in a very slow downward spiral for many years now. "IT" and "geeky interests" and our zeal for them are very different now than what they were in the 90s. They've changed, and we're to blame for the quality of the submissions. But the approvals are the editors' fault and no one else's.
We know what the /. groupthink is like. We also know that marketing-illiterate pseudo-scientific and pseudo-economic drivel could never fly with other audiences that share its current age groups and interests and socioeconomic backgrounds. This post looks like an attempt to increase our engagement by trolling us. I hope it isn't a sign of what's ahead.
If you write a fanfic of harry potter, it's all your work in the words, but you will be sued successfully. Rip off Lion King and be crushed. When Disney ripped off Kimba the white lion, though, a different story.
And why should you get paid for someone else's work in printing out that book? Sure, you get the words down originally, but if you want to keep the cash for your work, do the printing.
Plus please tell me how to get RDR from someone other than Rockstar. Doesn't have to be the same game, they can reverse engineer it, right? After all, copyright is for work RS did, not what someone did aping their product.
He can have his wall as soon as he gets Mexico to pay for it. Why is he bugging us for the money?
I'd surely hate to see him break yet another campaign promise.
Capiralism is the heroin most people are high on. Only when the bitter aftertaste of unemployment and systemic poverty bites them - will they start looking for better laws.
Nope. Bullshit.
Try something NOT from ayn rand or the RWNJ wankfests of propaganda "institutes". You LOVE "elites" when they're telling you things you already want to be true.
Or yours either. Maybe you dropped out of school in the 5th grade before you learned about what a metaphor is.
Socialism is not the opposite of capitalism.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Because in most places, most especially the USA, if you don't like the offer, you don't get anything to live on. UBI would make it a voluntary exchange. But that isn't what the capitalists want, since that would put enough power in the pockets of labour to take the profts away.
It's the language of capitalism. Likewise, humanism has it's own language. Making a priori value judgements about either is pointless. Unless Leary's goal is to publish the next Newspeak dictionary.
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem with anti-capitalism today is the failure to understand what Laissez-faire capitalism actually is. The biggest part of the fail is with the peoples business of government, the employers (the people) are having their bottom line voice totally suppressed. What happens when employees don't get proper direction from their employers? See US government, now resorting to fighting each other at taxpayer expense, suggesting they don't have enough direction to know what to do in representing the people.
To fix this problem, as the founders did when they separated themselves from the British rule and intended for us, the people, to follow see, read. do & share http://3seas.org/ government work order.
It has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with lawyers.
You don't think she thought that shit up herself do you?
From the perspective of Karl Marx this discussion is presumptuous. Capitalism has its problems but Marx was not keen to propose any alternatives. Indeed countries such as China and Vietnam seem to be doing well with a communist government and a capitalist economy. From an economic standpoint capitalism is far from latent. Even in socialist and communist regimes a black market tended to exist. Legal or not it's not so easy to stamp out trade. Most of the posts here seem to be either opinion or distortions of Keynesian economic theory. Sorry guys but neither Marx nor Keynes promised to have all the answers. Be afraid of anyone who claims to have all the answers.
And then realise that most of the boom times have been due to artisan economies.
Leary added a line of commentary to of Barra's statement:
The English language that is, nice one Rebecca Stoner (the name seems strangely apropos).
Language is SUPPOSED to be "dangerous".
It's the way we convey ideas. And ideas are ALWAYS dangerous to those in power.
The only people who hate this situation are totalitarians and people pushing "surrender to the greater good" ideology like Communism.
Never mind that these things are good for nothing more than depopulating countries in the most brutal and inhumane ways possible.
Is capitalism PERFECT? No.
And nobody sane is seriously pushing for a complete embrace of ancap capitalism.
But this constant push towards Communism is absolutely retarded. It shows exactly how brainwashed these people are about the nature of the subject.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
In fact "abuse" is so common that, scientifically speaking, it's a bit loaded call them mis-uses of language. Your teachers spend years drumming into you that language is a tool for conveying ideas -- which it is -- and no time teaching you about how language is a tool for getting people to do what you want.
There is absolutely nothing unique to business about deceptively manipulative language. In fact, the blanket term for the kind of cant mentioned in the summary is "bullshit". "Bullshit" is a statement that you're expected to believe to be true, but which you'll go along with if it were true. We are surrounded by bullshit -- advertising, political progpaganda, business jargon -- in the way that fish are surrounded by water. It is the primary constituent of the media we consume. Sometimes it's hard to recognize as manipulative because it so so transparently not intended to be believed. We're so conditioned to believe that our ideas are the target of language we leave our behavior completely unguarded.
Ultimately bullshit does end up manipulating belief, but indirectly. Going along with bullshit shapes your behavior, your behavior shapes your attitudes, and very quickly that corrupts your thinking too. That's why people in authoritarian societies believe all kinds of ridiculous things, like the power of the great leader to shape history through sheer will or destiny.
Advertisers, business leaders, and politicians all do important and legitimate jobs, but we should not make those jobs too easy by putting our faith in them. We should be mindful whenever a CEO or president opens his mouth, he's trying to get something out of you. Maybe you'll decide to give it to him, but you shouldn't do that because he's convinced you to do that automatically.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And that's the "communist" version that you idiots get so het up about too. Artisan economyin the USA is still lauded as halcyon (mom & pop industries) until capitalism managed to ruin that by making laws allowing usury and theft (see the homesteading acts).
Communism has worked in scores of countries. Just that the USA and the banks don't want it to work.
Venezuela would have worked except as a working "communism" it was told to fuck off by the banks and so could not borrow anything. Imagine if the most capitalist country in the world, the USA, had to forgo any lending. Not pay back the debt, just go immediately to zero lending, a defecit of zero.
The USA would crash HARD.
THAT is what happened to venezuela. And every other working communism.
PS - Sweden is capitalist. Note that they have a stock market...
Venezuela does too, it is called the Caracas Stock Exchange. So Venezuela is just as capitalist as Sweden, and I guess the U.S.
So why are righties always claiming that Venezuela is socialist through-and-through and proof that socialism always fails?
Because they define all successful economies as "totally capitalist, man!" and all failed economies as "proof of the universal failure of socialism everywhere". In other words it is plain dishonesty. All economies in the world of any size are mixed economies, with some level of regulation for the capitalist component (and the socialist component as well, for that matter).
Venezuela's economy tanked because its government was taken over by corrupt incompetent authoritarians whose only interest is self-aggrandizement.
But don't worry, that can't happen here.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
If Slashdot can't keep to tech, I'll just stop coming here like I do Engadget, Gizmodo and ton of other tech blogs that can't keep on topic.
of the episode of South Park it came from. Randi Marsh didn't care until it was his job, then he was furious and joined the chorus of "They took our jerbs".
This is why we need to push real solutions to the problem. There are a ton of out of work construction workers seeing Mexican and South American immigrants doing the jobs they used to do. Just like there's a mountain of out of work tech workers seeing their jobs go to H1-Bs. Workers in America need to learn solidarity. They need to understand that if you make a living by working you are a member of the working class no matter what color your collar.
If us techies don't start doing that then the blue collar guys are going to get tricked into voting for folks that'll screw us all over. Maybe "tricked" is the wrong word. If they've been abandoned what's the point of caring if the elites in Silicon Valley get screwed? That's where the concept of "stigginit" comes from. Where you're just lashing out.
What's frustrating is that in 2018 we should be able to see these things for what they are: common tactics by our ruling class used to divide and conquer the working class. Race, religion, collar color, wedge issues. Over and over again we see the same pattern. We even have numerous examples of the ruling class talking about how they're going to create issues to separate us (go google the history of how abortion became a political issue in America sometime).
The tricks are all there out in the open, but nobody really seems to call them out on it. Bernie Sanders does I guess (he repeatedly tries to bring folks together) but not sure how far he's gonna get. They're already running adverts on TV against him and he hasn't even announced he's running for the primary...
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See some videos here
The TL;DW (didn't watch, it's youtube after all) is that the World Bank set an arbitrary definition of "poverty" ($1/day or so) and then periodically changes the numbers to make it seem like folks are lifting out of poverty (now it's $1.06/day and a million more are making $1.08/day, congrats, 1 million "lifted out of poverty").
Meanwhile the actual quality of life of those million people hasn't changed in the slighest...
It's a trick meant to keep you from questioning the establishment. Worked too.
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Your anger is misdirected. Be angry at this Universe for having entropy and scarce resources; be angry at your parents for fucking without a thought for your future life.
Be grateful to the factory owner. Without his shrewd mind, you'd be dead in a ditch, which is exactly where your UBI (and then socialism) always leads people: Dysfunctional breadlines, followed by re-education camps. followed by gulags, followed by mass murder; in the end, Capitalism always rises from the ashes of socialism, because Capitalism is the only philosophy for social interaction which actually works.
If you want socialism, you must build it atop capitalism, so that the socialism is constrained by voluntary interaction.
How are you going to pay for your precious UBI? You're going to force people, at the point of a gun, to fund it with their labor; that's how. Your position is obviously self-contradictory.
Many here are missing the point entirely. It's a book about language. The language of capitalism is expanding into topics which are not economic markets resulting in poorer ways of thinking and harmful results. Anyone that has read a selection of books written over the last millennia can see the change.
Trading particular for particular has always been the way of reality, but this new general intermediary with some sort of owner taking a cut is new to capitalism. There is great uncertainty over what the exchange rate is between happiness, spiritual fulfillment, and moral character. Nevermind how one is to make the exchange.
The prosperity-gospel and other "gobbeldygook" has entered society because of this capitalist way of thinking. People actually believe that one can provide money to another person with some spiritual capital and then another entity which owns them will give even more money back. As if Christianity is a bank owned by Madoff.
The same can be seen in social justice. Bringing down the old-guard, propping up people based on physical attributes rather than merit as commodities to be traded, ensuring equitability of ratios without regard to whether or not those ratios need or ought to be equitable, as if the process of justice is market arbitrage.
Many of the ills slashdot posters complain about daily, at length, are consequences of capitalist language shackling the way people think, blinding them to a reality where not every activity involves capital, fungible goods, owners, and market forces.
Throwing people into cages for growing a plant in their homes, bombing bridges on the other side of the planet and then re-building them, bridges to nowhere, a giant boyscouts club they call the "military", global theft through the "Federal" Reserve's monetary policies (i.e., counterfeiting and manipulation), funding worthless immigrants and poisonous single mothers, educational institutions that can't even teach kids basic reading or writing or arithmetic, high-learning institutes that are merely facades for globalist propaganda, bailing out failing business, bickering about who can use which bathrooms, bullying bakers into baking cakes for homosexual gratification, ...
We know where that slack went!
"Hard dollars is all a lot of people seem to understand."
It's the American way. Capitalism! ...
Me, before
It's not money that drives people from their homes, it is debt.
Desperate people (or animals) who has nothing to lose - are quite dangerous, especially if threatened.
- lie about it, heck - lie about everything - that is also the new American way, it seems.
Fork war coming? (It's not guns who kills, it is sharp points ;-)
What is happening is that the use of rhetoric is expanding... it has been around for thousands of years (Ask Socrates about it). But apparently ignorant Business Majors are now discovering it and using it to bend your thinking...
"Governments have been dominated by the corporate entities and citizens have ceased to matter in public policy" true in
"late capitalism"?
Why is slashdot posting a bunch of marxist progaganda?
Er, the problem isn't 'the language of capitlalisn', it's the use of language to obfuscate meaning or propagandize. Fascism, communism did the same thing. Government beaureaucratic-ese. Anyone read Orwell? The Ministry of Peace etc.
It's just another tool used. to influence, control, hide behind.
A friend told me about a new game by obsidian called 'The Outer Worlds' the other night.
How does this tie into your story you might ask? It's one of those 60+ dollar multiplatform videogames about fighting the corporations.
Reflect on the irony for a moment of spending 60+ dollars to a large unfeeling corporation. The kind that usually lay off some or most of their employees after the crunch time finishes, usually before their completion bonuses are due, then pockets the profits into the ceo or other corporate authority's bank account, while leaving the actual creatives broke and burnt out. And people are PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE while spending hours 'fighting the corporate authorities!'
This is just one more way to placate the masses while conditioning them to accept the sort of corporate abuse they seen in the games as normal without understanding how much worse the available technology is for attempting to break the shackles later when things have gotten too bad.
There won't be a rebellion the next time it is needed. There will be a massacre.
Was the original Communist in the family, and that Fidel only became one after his first foray at rebellion during his college years, coming to believe communism was the way forward after that. Hint: There are whole books on this and a quite good series of wikipedia pages covering both Fidel and Che's activities leading up to the Cuban revolution and what shaped their choices.
Furthermore, as shitty as I think authoritarianism is, some people prefer it over the alternatives. Judging by American politics of late, I would say people have been preferring it here for about 20 years. They just have a strong opinion about who the authoritarians should be...
The 'G' word: Growth. That one really grinds my gears. Why is everything about growth? Ok, great, a little growing is good for us but on a planet with finite resources a bit of perspective would be useful.
You are gleefully repeating the words of an idiot Leary complaining about "the language" why using the same propaganda language from the other side: "late capitalism"?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
What i find annoying and dangerous is leftists, their use of language, their obsession with capitalism, and their bizarre arrogant need to lecture everyone about it.
Not to mention slashdot feeding these pigeons...
I absolutely cannot. Because Communism is always destroyed by the first person who succeeds. The effect of greed is such that while the greediest spout about egalitarianism , but their greed causes them to want anything but competition. If I want all of the power that is possible to have , upon success, I will do everything to take others things , and ascertain that the deck is stacked in my favor.
I absolutely cannot. Because Communism is always destroyed by the first person who succeeds. The effect of greed is such that while the greediest spout about egalitarianism , but their greed causes them to want anything but competition. If I want all of the power that is possible to have , upon success, I will do everything to take others things , and ascertain that the deck is stacked in my favor.
You aren't wrong. I hope you weren't trying to disagree with me. Any pure 'ism destroys itself because it makes fatally flawed assumptions.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
CRONY capitalism, IS the problem.
Read Pratchett, more in particular 'Going Postal'. Beautiful examples of business speak all through the book.
Paai
"Markets Not Capitalism," Says Professor Gary Chartier https://youtu.be/EdrBeBwHenk
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
GRQ plan:
1 - Collect anti-capitalist, anti-conservative buzzwords, talking points from newspapers/TV
2 - Collect many anecdotal stories supporting anti-capitalist and anti-conservative ideas
3 - Place 1 and 2 in a blender, mix well, divide into chapters, send to a sympathetic publisher
4 - Profit, hey, that's capitalism you selling a book for profit !
Yeah Capitalism!!!
Is this article just a lot of crap that doesn't say anything of value? Is this just another FUD puller trying to sound like there is anything of interest or value to this article?
How is something that's been going on forever called news?
Authoritarianism is what ruins economies, not socialism
Socialism pretty well demands some level of authoritarianism by default, and with little or no political or economic competition tolerated, economies and morale will suffer. History is very clear on this - parent was only one step removed from the truth.
The only information communicated by the unironic use of the term "late capitalism" is that the speaker has nothing of substance to say and is not worthy of one's attention.
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Don't you have a Party meeting to go to?
outside of a fringe left (encouraged by the right who use them to scare blue collar workers and who would love more of that sweet, sweet cheap labor) nobody is calling responsible immigration policy "racist".
There's a couple of problems here:
1. There's a growing right wing media engine that makes good money scaring folks with SJWs. The Youtube skeptic community has been overrun by them. It's not hard to see why. Nobody likes SJWs. Not even other SJWs. They're annoy little jerks who completely miss the point when it comes to actual social justice. Case in point: They fight over a 1-3% gender pay gap and barely mention the 20% decline in wages since the 70s.
What I'm saying is, SJWs are an easy target to get views and Pateron donations. This lead to the Youtube skeptic community dog piling on them. Add to that right wing think tanks who cheerfully fund top members of the Youtube skeptic community to rail against them (SJWs make a great replacement for blacks, Mexicans and Muslims as a right wing boogie man to distract from real economic issues) and you've got a recipe for disaster
2. We actually do need those immigrants. Go look at Japan. They've got major problems because in a modern, industrialized economy folks don't have enough kids to maintain the population. Without population growth your 401k becomes worthless. Have fun figuring out what the hell you're gonna do in your 60s when nobody will hire you and you've got maybe $300k in the bank adjusted for inflation (don't forget to do that).
3. While we need the immigrants, right now our Winner Take all trickle down economy means those immigrants have very little benefit for workers in general and the lost wages due to excess labor supply means they're positively harmful.
It's not hard to see the solution here. More social programs (Medicare for All, A Green New Deal, expanded SNAP, Tuition free public Universities and perhaps even Social Security for all, aka UBI). Take the wealth generated by those immigrants and make sure everybody gets a piece. Meanwhile like I keep saying end our destructive and evil foreign policy.
But the right wing already have answers for all of this. Social Programs fail because "The problem with it is sooner or later you run out of other people's money" (you don't actually, unless your economy stops growing, but that's a complex thought compared to the simple phrase that it's responding too). Oh, and we need to secure our national interests; e.g. over throw democratically elected leaders. And heck, Americans like being #1 and, since we can't seem to get there through hard work we'll do it by sabotaging everybody else. After all, we're still #1 if the way we got there is not by getting better but instead making everybody else _worse_.
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three things that capitalist control greatly - 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) medical if we can in my lifetime get both of those free, food is free reduces lots of problems, and no rent or mortgage reduces other problems, and no worries about getting ill and getting help... free up our minds and energies for what good we can do... imagine.. in 50 years, we have that achieved... now i don't mind paying for fair wear and tear of stuff, utilities above basic needs, but what if... those three were no longer controlled by capitalist who "capitalize on others" being those who want to remain "NOT" hungry, homeless, and sick. think. think. think. find the formula and equation that works and capitalists can move on to other things... the Internet has leveled the educational problem.. 24x7 library.... for those who wish to learn... the formal degree is no longer required to be successful... more to come..
"Socialism and Communism have no place on this Earth. Anyone under these repressive ideologies live as slaves and have no freedoms."
Yes! All the Nordic countries are hell-holes with no freedom. France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Great Britain, indeed most of the EU, these are terrible places to live.
Oh, to have a minimum of 4 weeks paid vacation a year!
Woe, to have paid-for healthcare!
The sorrow, to be able to eat world-class food!
Dismal, to be able to live in a clean & safe home!
Shocking, to have functioning governments, trustworthy & capable police forces, good education, and economic opportunities!
You need to get your head out of your ass and see the world. Not as you imagine it to be but as it is.
You're such a fucking sucker for sentimental manipulation, that you actually believe all that refugee horseshit.
Either a sucker or a willing propagandist.
The thing is that a lot of folks reduce this whole topic down to a binary point of capitalism versus socialism. That's not just you saying, better of two evils, but there others that would say, "socialism is the only cure to capitalism" or some BS like that. The whole thing is that our current model of capitalism isn't good. It encourages less diversity and bigger more centralized, more too big to fail companies. I'm not saying ditch capitalism, but clearly our current approach is less than ideal.
Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?
I have no idea what that has to do with anything other than sounding edgy. I'm not progressive in the sense of economics or security in any sense, but even I think the wall is a silly idea. The US as a nation doesn't adequately fund anything, hell we've got bridges that have millions of people going over it that have spent the last two decades needing repairs. But some wall that 99.995% of the nation will never see is going to kept tip-top? Call me skeptical, but even if the wall got built, I'll put my dollar here on parts of it falling down and the number of people caring about that, being countable on one hand in two/three decades hence.
Multinational immortal legal "persons" are not capitalism, they're the return of feudalism and oligarchy where the lordship passes from CEO to CEO and the government is satisfied with keeping the arrangement through influence from the feudal lords.
regressive taxation and right wing, anti-worker policies.
Just because France is doing OK doesn't mean they don't have to fight tooth and nail against their ruling class to keep it that way.
I remember there was a comedy group that dressed up as stereotypical billionaires and went around to Republican rallies thanking the (obviously working class) people there for all the tax cuts and deregulation. Not one person called them out for being trolls. They couldn't tell. That's the trouble with the American Working class, they don't see themselves as oppressed fighting for their rights, they see themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.
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Capitalism is so dangerous it has caused thousands of US Citizens to be on our southern boarder trying to get into Mexico.
My current fantasy solution approach would be a progressive profits tax linked to market share. Any company that dominates a market too much would face a choice between reproducing by splitting into competing companies or paying extremely high tax rates. The division into competing companies would give people more choice and freedom while reducing the tax rates so the shareholders received better returns. The other option of paying high tax rates would pay for the government to regulate the monopolist more carefully while funding research to break the monopoly.
If you have a better solution idea, I'd be interested to hear it. Your comment suggests you have a pretty good grasp of the problems created by corporate cancers.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
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Socialism REQUIRES authoritarianism to enforce it. [...] Socialism/communism is based upon FORCED transactions between individuals and business, and therefore REQUIRES authoritarianism (culminating in totalitarianism) to enforce.
You have already proven you are willfully ignorant, there is no extra credit for proving it again. Reading the wikipedia page would be a good start... but only if you are interested in learning the truth.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Bullshit is always dangerous. Capitalism not required.
Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.
This does not appear to be the case.
It still allows the elite to collude and, say, form effectively a bi-partisan" one party system out of it.
It's true that Democracy in the US needs some improvement in representation, such as ranked voting.
Or allows a guy to get himself elected president, then president-for-life.
once you stop having elections to replace leaders, you stop being a democracy.
That is, democracy by and of itself is not sufficient, for it can itself be subborned.
Absolutely correct. Democracy needs people to maintain it.
You have not shown it is necessary either. Eg. with a vigorous king who regularly chops heads off of his uppity barons so the rest'll keep their heads down (and who otherwise doesn't do much more than give barons jobs to do) you might have decent checks on power as well. Barbaric, yes. Effective, that also. No democracy, yet functional checks on power.
If the barons can be killed on a whim then are not the power, the king is. In your model, there is no check of power on the king.
Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive.
Read: The "progressives" like their labour cheap
If that is true then why are "progressives" also advocating for a higher minimum wage? Do they want cheap labor only to pay them more money?
This is a 70s era sociology department trick: If you agree with it, it's true. If you disagree, it's "relative", or the sayers are "disinformed", or what-have-you.
No, I'm talking about people being fed information that is known to be false under the guise of news but legally protected as "entertainment". Which is to say, they disinform people for profit.
Most of the "progressive" "discussion" consists of criticaster character assassination. I see you, too, lack actual arguments.
How do you argue with someone who obliquely rejects scientific evidence? I'm not saying this as a hypothetical, I'm saying there are a large contingent of individuals who get there information from a single source which is the equivalent of a tabloid. Those tabloids keep hammering home that scientists cannot be trusted and everyone is lying to them. When you present them with factual information, they disregard it as "fake news" and move on to conspiracy theories about it's origin.
If I were unkind I might surmise you're a liberal arts grad.
Only if you count compsci as a liberal art. ;)
I don't particularly think a big wall is the ultimate answer. Nor is welcoming as many "refugees" as possible.
I agree, refugee should be a temporary status, not a permanent one. We should work to restore order to their nation of origin and then (gradually) expel them when it's stabilized.
I'm in Europe and my plan would include buying a big chunk of land south of the mediteranean sea, and sending all asylum seekers, refugees, illegal immigrants, together with our "we must do something!" do-gooders there.
If a sufficient government was put in place to ensure their basic human rights were respected then that would be a valid plan.
If we could build a physical barrier could keep your kind of willful ignorance out then I'd help build it myself.
I don't agree that disagreeing with the party line constitutes "wilful ignorance".
The latest wave of anti-immigrant sentiment is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much denial of science and anti-intellectualism that I'm not sure you fully comprehend how bad it is
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This is great. Wish I had mod points. People like to frame things as us vs them when the reality is often that they're only a tiny little bit apart on their perspectives.
once you stop having elections to replace leaders, you stop being a democracy.
The point was to show that democracy can be suborned. Oh, and if you hold elections again once dear leader dies, you technically haven't stopped having elections. You've simply changed the period to "whatever this leader's lifetime".
If the barons can be killed on a whim then are not the power, the king is. In your model, there is no check of power on the king.
There are checks on the power of the barons. They might collude and kill the king, too. Meaning that he at least has to have a decent cause to chop off a head, lest he becomes seen as callous and unpredictable and triggers an uprising of barons. I'm sure there are other models possible, that do contain checks on power, yet openly don't involve the vox populi.
Suborned democracy doesn't involve the vox populi either, but it pretends to do so. Like holding referenda until the population gives the "right" answer, as seen several times in EUrope. Or removing the ability to hold a referendum just because "it hasn't brought us what we expected from it" (==the voters gave the wrong answer). Or so many other tricks you can pull. Gerrymandering is a well-known trick, too.
You could contend that the feelings of disenfranchisement that causes is what helped mr. orange into power. Who promptly got sucked into the swamp himself. Or at least, I'm not seeing much swamp draining effort from where I sit. Which is, admittedly, far away.
On US voting, btw: Why not do away with the indirection and do a direct vote? (Vote once for as many candidates as you like might be nice.)
Read: The "progressives" like their labour cheap
If that is true then why are "progressives" also advocating for a higher minimum wage? Do they want cheap labor only to pay them more money?
While they (want to) leave the back door to illegal immigrants wide open? Illegal immigrants who don't work legally and therefore to whom minimum wages don't apply. Meaning that what they say they want to do and what they (would) end up doing are quite different things.
No, I'm talking about people being fed information that is known to be false under the guise of news but legally protected as "entertainment". Which is to say, they disinform people for profit.
You're blaming the victim? What?
Anyway, my take is that the people shouting "disinformation" the loudest typically tend to spread a lot of that themselves. Both wings of the assfant party, though as noted the academic left started it, years ago. Which is to say, instead of complaining that other people are "misinformed", go ahead and inform us, with high-quality sources. Tell and show.
How do you argue with someone who obliquely rejects scientific evidence?
You could start with making sure your "scientific evidence" is actually credible as "scientific" and "evidence". Especially in liberal arts, this is <b><em><blink><marquee>lacking</marquee></blink></em></b>.
See eg. "new real peer review" for a taste. But you can see it elsewhere, too. Eg. the FSM is a reaction to creationism (complete with lots of "scientific" papers full of fluffy bunkum, but very hard to distinguish from the real thing for the uninitiated --why do people put that much effort in "scientific-izing" their ultimately arbitrary beliefs?-- and in fact sometimes well better written than some of the stuff published in "reputable" journals. IOW, science has a serious problem, and creationism preys on that. Not too surprising because "science" has become worshipped as the ultimate arbiter of truth in some (lib arts) circles, thereby becoming a direct competitor to religion. Hence the counter-attack with creationism "scientific papers".
It's about merit. Why should Donald Trump get Frank's money when all he's managed to do with it is piss all 420mil away? It's about MERITOCRACY YOU THUNDERING MORON. Estate taxes were 100% of all of it under fudality and exists today under capitalism. Fuck all to do with socialism you preprogrammed chunderhead.
Socialism !!!= Communism. Capitalism is not what you think it is either, by the way. What we have in this country is NOT Capitalism, itâ(TM)s a fucking monster.
No one on this site has actually READ âoeAn Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,â let alone UNDERSTOOD it, knowing which makes reading the âoeconversationâ here like listening to a bunch of 3 year olds arguing about whether Batman or Superman is âoebetterâ.
Good day, children.
The words Pirate and Intellectual Property have replaced legally defined terms such as Copyright Infringement, Patents, Trademarks, and Trade secrets. At this point in time you can be sued for humming a catchy tune in public or linking to a newspaper article. This is what unbridled capitalism has brought to us: A world where culture is owned by corporations and the existence of public domain is litigated and legislated out of existence.
Blame it on the big capitalist corporation who cut costs to boost their bottom line.
Amish have opted out of modern economy to pursue their idea of more fullfilled lives. Nobody is bothering them and they are not bothering the rest of us - to each their own. The problem is that the author would have people shot or locked up in cages for refusing to get on with his program. Yet he is the one using misleading language of niceness and solidarty. His ideas have been tried and ended up with the likes of Stalin and Hugo Chavez. Of all people, most Americans are in a position to move abroad to a socialist country or otherwise a place without "late stage capitalism". Why don't we see any caravans going south, or even to Canada?
The point was to show that democracy can be suborned.
Nobody claimed it couldn't be.
Oh, and if you hold elections again once dear leader dies, you technically haven't stopped having elections.
This assumes they will die. This is may not always be true. Just wait until they start raising clones of themselves and claim they are the same person so they never die. ;)
There are checks on power by the barons. They might collude and kill the king, too
FTFY. If it's illegal then it's not a check on power by definition. I understand your point but it unleashes "well anyone can kill anyone" and quickly devolves into there are no systems or restrictions because physics allows it.
Suborned democracy doesn't involve the vox populi either, but it pretends to do so. [...] Gerrymandering is a well-known trick, too.
Absolutely, democracy must be maintained by the people. The US currently has a large problem with this but it's slowly being fixed.
You could contend that the feelings of disenfranchisement that causes is what helped mr. orange into power.
Yes and it's funny because they are actually over-represented. Propaganda tells them they are the majority and that their ideal world is being destroyed by "the radical left" (literally anyone that isn't in their party) which greatly raises voter turnout for this minority of people. It would be brilliant if it weren't so evil.
On US voting, btw: Why not do away with the indirection and do a direct vote? (Vote once for as many candidates as you like might be nice.)
Quite simply, it would require those in power to possibly give up power. They only way to overcome this is to change voting at the lowest levels (local elections) and then propagate the changes to higher levels. It's a feedback loop, you cannot make large changes without elected officials willing to make the changes. The current system benefits them and they are taking advantage of it.
I don't know since I have no contact with such contingents (the world is a big place)
These people are something you should really consider when you read about "progressives' character assassination". There is a large contingent in the US that are immune to facts and logic. This is the kind of behavior I'm referring too when I write of "willful ignorance" because they have been conditioned to reject conflicting information without consideration despite evidence.
Westerners will immediately spot the contradictions between the statements and tell the speaker to quit talking bullshit.
You have no idea how much I want this to be true but it's not true at all. When you point out their conflicting logic, their cognitive dissonance causes them to be enraged and quickly sidetrack to a new grievance.
Well, what you take as fact doesn't necessarily strike others as fact. And, as noted previously, sometimes with good reason.
If they have good reason then I will listen to their reason. However, in general their good reason is because the opposition is conspiring to destroy their way of life. :(
Only if you count compsci as a liberal art. ;)
Well, it isn't a hard science
I agree! When given a general objective there are innumerable solutions and therefore the outcome is entirely non-deterministic, just like art! So, should I start claiming I'm in liberal arts? :)
Well, erm, letting refugees in far away from home usually means they'll settle and not go back.
Not always but yes, sometimes. If it's where they grew up, at the very least they visit their homes.
Also, "workin
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While they (want to) leave the back door to illegal immigrants wide open? Illegal immigrants who don't work legally and therefore to whom minimum wages don't apply. Meaning that what they say they want to do and what they (would) end up doing are quite different things.
Actually, minimum wage applies to all jobs. A person being here legally or not doesn't change that fact. A corporation paying less than minimum wage is in danger of massive fines or possibly jail time thanks to to good people at the IRS. :)
Is it really so hard to believe that some people want to help other people even though it's not financially beneficial?
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If it's illegal then it's not a check on power by definition. I understand your point but it unleashes "well anyone can kill anyone" and quickly devolves into there are no systems or restrictions because physics allows it.
You could make a law that allows the barons to unanimously vote the king out, instead of killing him. Thereby defusing the situation and allowing a check on the king's power. A king might well enact that, or something like that, all by himself just to provide that outlet. Even though by the looks of it he's giving up a little power.
Then you sidestep the core issue of just what is more important, the laws or the rulers making the laws? I say the governed people are even more important. Enshrining rules as "law" is a way to make the rules clear to everybody, but for ruling this is not strictly necessary.
You could contend that the feelings of disenfranchisement that causes is what helped mr. orange into power.
Yes and it's funny because they are actually over-represented. Propaganda tells them they are the majority and that their ideal world is being destroyed by "the radical left" (literally anyone that isn't in their party) which greatly raises voter turnout for this minority of people. It would be brilliant if it weren't so evil.
I don't see it like that. Maybe the left, now rebranded "radical left", was over-represented before and is now sour cut down the overage some. To be sure, both sides make heavy-handed use of all sorts of propaganda.
I'm more concerned that lots of what mr. orange promised, fizzled out incongruously. Just like they did when oklahoma bahamas came to power. That is a really really bad sign.
Quite simply, it would require those in power to possibly give up power. They only way to overcome this is to change voting at the lowest levels (local elections) and then propagate the changes to higher levels. It's a feedback loop, you cannot make large changes without elected officials willing to make the changes. The current system benefits them and they are taking advantage of it.
Oh, I think there are more ways. Though some, perhaps most, tend to violence.
These people are something you should really consider when you read about "progressives' character assassination".
Actually, no, for the good and simple reason that if you start out with the character assassination shtick you assume something about the other party that may very well not be true.
There is a large contingent in the US that are immune to facts and logic. This is the kind of behavior I'm referring too when I write of "willful ignorance" because they have been conditioned to reject conflicting information without consideration despite evidence.
Alright, those exist. On both wings, though. Either believes something different, but both zealously believe.
My basic complaint is that if you claim to know better then you can show you do, so claims without showing don't impress me much. If OTOH you simply leave off the claims then I'm going to tune out the recitals of faith and allegiance, because I share neither wing's beliefs. To me it's one large party full of hysterical nonsense.
Westerners will immediately spot the contradictions between the statements and tell the speaker to quit talking bullshit.
You have no idea how much I want this to be true but it's not true at all. When you point out their conflicting logic, their cognitive dissonance causes them to be enraged and quickly sidetrack to a new grievance.
Again, that does happen on both wings and it means those people aren't running on reason, but on dogma.
We're supposed to have learned since enlightenment. In fact the "better educated voter" is exactly this, and the founding fathers depended on him. Some of us have le
But don't worry, that can't happen here.
There are not many economic powers capable of influencing US economy as much as US is capable of and willing to influence the economies of others. But there could one day be more than one or two.
You could make a law that allows the barons to unanimously vote the king out, instead of killing him.
Then it's not a king because kings by definition are the ultimate authority and cannot be overruled. Kings are the law. You are grasping at straws.
I don't see it like that. Maybe the left, now rebranded "radical left", was over-represented before and is now sour cut down the overage some.
If you are talking about in the US, then it's factually/mathematically (seriously, look at the population numbers) understood that the right is over-represented in congress.
To be sure, both sides make heavy-handed use of all sorts of propaganda.
If that's the case then it should make sense to re-institute something like the Fairness Doctrine to prohibit profiting from disinformation.
That's a surefire way to maximize bloodshed.
Short term, maybe. Long term, maybe not.
You have really dehumanized them.
I understand this opinion and yes, it's a possibility but I think a better solution is to change them be allowing them to experience our culture and ideas then take it back with them. This is most effective way I know to change the thinking of a population short of genocide.
That really doesn't work. Well, not if you import lots of "guest workers" and then say they'll "integrate while keeping their culture". (For the last 40 or so years that was the mantra here. Still is, officially.)
If they aren't refugees and come en masse then it takes multiple generations for cultural changes to occur. It's not possible to integrate and retain your own culture which means they are isolating themselves. The isolation is what needs to change.
I can tell you the ugly truth is that people's views of reality are being distorted for power and profit. I can tell you both parties (one more than the other) are heavily influenced by corporate "political donations" and it's undermining the will of the people.
I don't see the "one more than the other" part. Some differences in where the money comes from, but there's lots of overlap. Which is really curious and really where the hurt starts.
What matters is that the voice and interests of "mega donors" is drowning out the voice and interests of the people. If we can get rid of that disproportionate influence then it doesn't matter which side is more guilty.
Most I see is that they're really offended to the deepest of their dogma that not only the wrong party won, but the totally wrong guy. To the point of going hysterical. This wasn't how they planned it!
An interesting view but it fails to consider the complete lack of respect for the rule of law. The current President is fundamentally unfit for the job and a wannabe dictator to boot. In all honesty, the guy is very dumb, narcissistic to the core and a total con artist. I'm not going to complain about him being dumb though because if he commanded an intellect then would have been able to make himself into a dictator by now and nullified efforts to investigate his blatant criminality.
distract them from the oligarchs up top getting ever richer from robbing the rest of the country blind.
[...]
Both wings of the assfant party do that. Look around you.
Yes, I did say part one party was corrupt and other partly corrupt. This is due to the undue influence of moneyed parties. Removing financial links to politics is the answer.
I don't know how it works in the US but here everyone has to have an identity card
You're right you don't know how things work here. There is no national identification system and you don't have to verify someone is in the country legally if it's a private business.
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I don't know about Germany, but Norway is not really a capitalist economy with social programs the way you are trying to represent it, at least not in the way that people in the English-speaking world usually understand as "capitalist economy". The Nordic countries in general, for instance, have vast state ownership of the enterprises and almost complete union representation, in stark contrast with the US. Read this article for more information: http://mattbruenig.com/2017/07...
You could make a law that allows the barons to unanimously vote the king out, instead of killing him.
Then it's not a king because kings by definition are the ultimate authority and cannot be overruled. Kings are the law.
Then just about none of the people currently termed king or queen (~ regnant, as opposed to ~ consort) aren't, and various dictators are. You're thinking of "autocrat".
If the king is an autocrat, then yes, but that risks countermeasures outside of the law, ie the colluding barons again, who stand up because they no longer agree to the autocrat's word-as-law. IOW, the autocrat is no longer legitimate and dies of regicide (which pterry counts as natural causes for kings).
You are grasping at straws.
I needed to show that checks on power can exist without democracy, and that I have done.
You have really dehumanized them.
That's like saying you've really dehumanized your teenage kid, when you let 'im stew for a bit in jail for doing something stupid, instead of bailing him post-haste.
Anyway, I'm not looking at the individual misery, I'm looking at the (collection of) people(s). My heart bleeds for the individual but at the same time I recognise that the people(s) have brought that misery on their collective selves, and so they need to sort their shit out to get out of the hole they dug themselves into. If you take them out of their misery all they'll do is make more, until they learn not to. Well, I'd rather they did it down there than up here, for I also have my own shit to deal with.
Short term, it hurts. Long term, it's the better solution. But to see it you need to both look long term and understand something about growing up. You seem too focused on the individual to see it.
Moreover, you can't just barge in and "fix it for them". This is what "us westerners" have been doing, and it only makes things worse. You can offer to help (and expect to be turned down a lot), but it's actually better to wait for them to come to you for help. Even then, you need to be very careful indeed what sort of help you're going to give, if any.
And sure, that takes a lot of bloodshed. But then again, once it's bled out, it's done. Instead of, you know, the current situation with lots of tribes warring one another, countries that don't begin to match the makeup of the people living there, power vacuums still lingering after we(!) shot out the stabilising factors, paving the way for religious extremists and a lot of world heritage destruction.
It's the difference between letting a wound bleed a bit before suturing it up, and fucking up the treatment only to find gangrene set in later. There's a proverb that says, translated: "Gentle healers make stinking wounds." I'm proposing to not be a gentle healer when it's called for not to be one.
If they aren't refugees and come en masse then it takes multiple generations for cultural changes to occur.
We're at generation three or four now, I think. We're getting our own "black" (the euphemism is "lightly tinted", for what the English would term "olive") schools now. It's not improving.
It's not possible to integrate and retain your own culture which means they are isolating themselves.
Encouraged by our own elite, who keep on complaining they need the locals to bend over backwards more, throw more money at the poor sad "marginalised" non-integrating groups, and so on. And if you say something about it, like point out the lack of progress in the last decades, why, you're xenophobic, racist, islamophobic, populist, what-have-you. This you'll hear from a chorus of leftist helper whiteys and of course the non-integrating groups themselves. (Who, politically, are fairly right-wing, but also typically marching to the orders of a foreign entity, like the turkish or moroccan governments.)
The isol
I needed to show that checks on power can exist without democracy, and that I have done.
Yes, in your imaginary kingdom, it's all peachy alongside all the communist states.
My heart bleeds for the individual but at the same time I recognise that the people(s) have brought that misery on their collective selves, and so they need to sort their shit out to get out of the hole they dug themselves into
Well going along with your twisted experiment, how do you know they won't come out the other side even worse than before? How do you know they will change at all? Frankly, seems like you're simply interested in saying, "it's not my problem, leave me alone" and just reading the news about people being senselessly killed which you don't mind.
If only there was a way to reach all those people cheaply. Like, with electronic messaging devices connected to each other.
You aren't grasping the scale of the issue. If it was so simple then someone would have already done it, don't you think?
Both this lack of respect, and how the other wing didn't show any such lack of respect. I'm pretty sure mr cigar, mr. dubya, and oklahoma bahamas did all sorts of legally questionable things
Not even close. Republicans were itching to impeach Mr. Obama and would have done so given half the chance (almost did when he wore that tan suit :P). Mr. Clinton was impeached because he lied about an affair but it was more about him having an affair. Frankly, I think Richard Cheney is a war criminal and GW Bush was his hapless dope. However, none of them paid hush money during an election, conspire with a foreign nation to defraud the US, tried to profit from the presidency, suborn perjury, obstruct justice and whatever else has been uncovered by the investigation. That's not even the things that should get him impeached, those are just the crimes that have been exposed so far.
I'll grant mr. orange is no statesman. Just like so many others before him weren't, truth be told.
Having seen all the former Presidents you've listed actually doing their job, I never once questioned that loyalties. I didn't care for all their actions but I never thought they may be acting purely out of self-interest.
But do note: He is not out for setting himself up as an autocrat.
He's hinted at it and tried to act as one but ultimately he failed. He's trying to save himself at any cost and if he had the mental capacity to throw democracy aside then he would do it.
He wants to be "famous"
Yes, he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder and loves the trappings of power but scoffs at the responsibilities of it.
He keeps managing to rile up the chorus, which every time makes him only more "famous". I'm fairly sure that in his own mind he's doing splendidly.
He does that to feed his own ego and in a desperate attempt to save himself from this investigation. He fed his ego but ultimately his attempt to save himself failed and may have even backfired.
Removing financial links to politics is the answer.
How do you propose to do that?
Well that's an entire discussion on it's own. Register as a real user and we may be able to chat about it sometime.
You could have given me the, what do you call it, cliff's notes, instead of gloating.
I wasn't gloating but rather just pointing out there are significant differences and it's something you should keep in mind.
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Yes, in your imaginary kingdom, it's all peachy alongside all the communist states.
Don't be sour now.
Well going along with your twisted experiment,
I already mentioned before that I didn't come up with it.
how do you know they won't come out the other side even worse than before? How do you know they will change at all? Frankly, seems like you're simply interested in saying, "it's not my problem, leave me alone" and just reading the news about people being senselessly killed which you don't mind.
The pointe is exactly that it only works if they solve the problem themselves, and do it on their turf. So altough we can see the problem we cannot bring the solution, for if we try it just won't work. Bringing them to our turf doesn't help either, since then they'll turn into us, too, and that wasn't the plan either. I did say we could help, but that we should be careful how, why, and in what kind we help.
You can call that "inhuman", I call that "letting them learn their lesson on their own". Growing up isn't always smiles and laughter.
So far we haven't been careful at all. We barged in and tried to fix things for them. Not even with them, certainly not in their way, but in our way. And we've seen in the last few decades, that just doesn't work.
To the point that the locals prefer the Chinese over Western "aid". While knowing the Chinese act purely in their own interest and even tend to bring their own workers instead of give jobs to locals.
If only there was a way to reach all those people cheaply. Like, with electronic messaging devices connected to each other.
You aren't grasping the scale of the issue. If it was so simple then someone would have already done it, don't you think?
You mean like that experiment they started back in 1969? Apparently it wasn't such a big success, you never hear about it these days. What was it called again? Something with "ARPA" in it. Hm, ARPAnet? Wikipedia says that closed shop in 1990. Well, so much for that idea.
However, none of them paid hush money during an election, conspire with a foreign nation to defraud the US, tried to profit from the presidency, suborn perjury, obstruct justice and whatever else has been uncovered by the investigation.
Not that anyone found out, anyway. They may or may not be cleaner, they were certainly hounded less, except for by that one sex-obsessed "independent counsel" person.
I'll grant mr. orange is no statesman. Just like so many others before him weren't, truth be told.
Having seen all the former Presidents you've listed actually doing their job, I never once questioned that loyalties. I didn't care for all their actions but I never thought they may be acting purely out of self-interest.
A politician "doing their job" is not the definition of a statesman, sorry. You may not know the difference because the former are a dime a dozen, and the latter are vanishingly rare. Unwanted at the top, in fact. And I'm quite sure they each got something they wanted out of their presidency. Though I'll grant they had more respect for the decorum. That lack, OTOH, is pretty much what got mr. orange elected. That alone should serve as a wake-up call to the rest of the political class: Less ignoring fly-over country, more serving the entire country and not just your corporate backers.
As to loyalties, well, it's still entirely possible he's simply not loyal to the assfant party. But then, since when is assfant the entire definition of your political system?
But do note: He is not out for setting himself up as an autocrat.
He's hinted at it and tried to act as one but ultimately he failed. He's trying to save himself at any cost and if he had the mental
Alright, I'm bored of checking my posts of anon replies. If you want to talk further, register so that I will be notified of replies.
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Authoritarianism is what ruins economies, not socialism
Authoritarianism is the only way to keep socialism going. This is what happened in the Soviet Union and to its satellites before 1991. It's what's happening in Venezuela. That's socialism for you.
And don't confuse and conflate socialism with social democracy. These are two very different ideologies.
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