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.
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?
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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
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"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.
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.
The only reason that markets have been enshrined, is that the left has done everything in their power to destroy anything that looks like a religion (unless it a poorly copied imitation of a eastern religion that ignores everything other than sitting with your eyes closed and chanting while wearing strange clothes).
There has been a strong push to have government take the place of religion (so said leftist can have some control over it) along with the spiritual and charity functions it once assumed, with an equal and opposite push-back to not let the government have those powers and responsibilities. The only place for those powers and responsibilities to land is the free market.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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.
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.
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.
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
They were demonized? Care to elaborate, apparently it didn't arrive over here across the pond.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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".
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.
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?
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.
You do know that you can almost take this word for word, replace some of the protagonists and countries and switch "capitalism" and "communism" without actually losing meaning.
With maybe the eating of dogs being not something you'd witness often in the US, granted.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Those are all extremes and fail because they are so. Capitalism has worked best in the past when properly regulated. The keyword is properly. Breaking up Ma Bell was great for telecommunications in this country. Unfortunately we don't do this anymore. The very idea that we have banks or other companies that are too big to fail should be a sign that we're not regulating properly.
It is a difficult task and even harder to maintain over the long haul as corporations have way too much influence in government and also will do what they can to corrupt the intent of many regulations whether it be through lobbying congress or embedding stooges like Ajit Pai. Too many regulations or regulations that don't make sense and you stifle innovation, not enough and corporate greed leads right back to its destructive roots.
Growing up in Vermont when I did was during the birth of Ben and Jerry's. They had a novel concept that local companies should support the local community every way they can. They instilled a corporate morality into their company and it provided a great example where a corporation can actually do a lot of good and still make a lot of money. They pooled dairy farms in the surrounding area helping those farmers even to this day. They've grown so they are helping even more farmers today despite being sold to a much larger corporation. Most business owners border on the sociopathic though and will not see spending money on the local community as anything but a loss of profit.
Ford had it right while not being perfect he understood that to make a product you have to pay workers enough to afford your product. That is overly simplistic of course as there is a lot more to society than a paycheck. If Ford helped build roads and schools they would have had even larger demand and people to fill the demand. I've yet to work for a company in my professional life that understood the concept of soft dollars without just seeing it as sunken costs. Hard dollars is all a lot of people seem to understand.
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
Economics reboot? "Here's one I've prepared earlier!" - https://civil.money/about
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.
In other words, we didn't have enough checks on capitalism in the law. But people were more moral before so it wasn't a huge problem. Now, capitalism is suddenly in dire need of checks and balances.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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Venezuela would have worked except as a working "communism" it was told to fuck off by the banks and so could not borrow anything.
Yes, this is the key. Communism works great until you run out of other peoples money.
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
Because JK owns the rights to the Harry Potter Universe. She created it and it is hers.
Now if your Fanfic of Harry Potter just changed some details such as changing the Names of the IP.
Harry Potter to Clay Barber, Hogwards to Toadslime...
Now there is a fair amount of liberty on stuff you can rip-off. But you can't cross the line to make people think it is a licensed work from the copyright author.
While Disney has a legal machine backing it up. That doesn't stop a bunch of $5.00 videos of ripoffs from appearing in the stores after a popular Disney release.
After Frozen, we get Ice Queen, After finding Nemo, we get A fish tail.
They are different enough to avoid copyright and legal issues. But similar enough for your grandma to buy your kids a copy based on how the kids try to explain it to them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
Ben and Jerry's used capitalism to sell mediocre ice cream to sheep willing to pay a higher price to feel good. Starbucks and Apple do the same thing. Apple and Microsoft used capitalism to take pre-existing ideas, repackage them, and sell the result. Apple wrapped them in a pretty package and sold them for more. Microsoft wrapped them in a brown-paper wrapper and sold lots. That is the nature of capitalism, find a consumer for your product. Not everyone wants to wait in line at Starbucks for mediocre, overpriced coffee.
Including banks in the 'too big to fail' comparison of capitalism is wrong. Banks were too big to fail because of the amount of capital they had, not because of their impact on capitalism itself. If Google or Facebook or Twitter failed tomorrow, we would all still move on. Because no one really needs Facebook or Twitter, and many of Google services exist in other forms or software such as Android is freely available.
It was a lie that GM and Chrysler were too big to fail, another company would have purchased them, renegotiated all of the union contracts, and not cost the American taxpayer one dime. The lie was told so politicians could benefit.
The breakup of Ma Bell was good because they owned technology no one else had. Google could be broken up into pieces, ads, tech, etc. But it isn't a matter of no one else having the tech, it's a matter of Google doing it 'better' and attracting more customers. Those subsidiaries would still have a perceived advantage, I'd still buy Android phones because IOS is a POS, in my opinion.
And no, I don't have a Google phone. Because they don't have a monopoly.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
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
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.
Ben and Jerry's used capitalism to sell mediocre ice cream to sheep willing to pay a higher price to feel good.
Once upon a time, they made better than average ice cream. Sadly, those days are gone. Now it's pretty crappy ice cream, and lots of the other ingredients are crap, too.
The breakup of Ma Bell was good because they owned technology no one else had.
The technology was well-understood, as it was simple. It was good because they had a monopoly, and consumers suffered predictably.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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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..
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.
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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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.
The end state of socialism is communism. They are the same things. Communist dictatorships are how socialists force everyone else to go along with their bullshit.
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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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...
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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