Learn some history. During the economic boom times of the fifties, the highest tax rate was 90% and that didn't seem to slow down the growth. Boo fucking hoo, 37%? My god, what a big whiner.
I'm using the term anarchism in the sense that Proudhon and Bakunin used it, so yes, what it meant in the 19th century. Sure, any economic system can be used to oppress people. I think that's a key point, economics can oppress just as surely as politics can. Do they automatically oppress? That's what we're debating here, I think, not whether they can, but whether they must. I'd say capitalism by its very nature creates an oppressed class. Communism will lead to a non-communistic structure that creates an oppressed class. Socialism won't necessarily. That's my take anyway. Although for me, a cooperative structure like that found in the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain sounds even better than socialism as practiced in, say, France.
Free will, independent thinking, privacy, security, and liberty are ideals of socialism and communism. Wherever did you get the idea they weren't? Communism in practice leads to oligarchy, granted. That is because communism is meant to be a transitional form of government. It is meant to lead people from where they are to true anarchism, but because it assumes they can not lead themselves, it becomes paternal and hierarchal, just like the system it replaces. Socialism is not meant to lead anywhere, and can exist alongside the free market. I'm not sure what exactly you think socialism is, but it certainly doesn't preclude any of those things you mentioned, in theory or practice. In fact, it can easily be argued that in practice, it is more effective at bringing those things to a lrger number of people than a strictly market based system.
And to be honest, what we have in the USA is socialism. We redistribute the wealth all the time, from rich states to poor states, but from poor people to rich people. Think about all the government pork for the well connected. That's a form of socialism, only its socialism for the wealthy.
We should just make everything illegal. That way, when the government figures out that someone is a bad person, they will have a whole list of things to charge them with. What could possiblie go wrong?
I should have said, into the little slot the cup holder comes out of, but I figured everyone knows the wizard lives inside the computer. You can really spoon the ice cream in through any available slot or hole.
As simplistic as it sounds, people growing up evil is the fundamental problem. I don't like to use the word evil, though. I'd say, sociopaths and psychopaths are the problem. Not so much for what they do, but for the over-reaction they cause in others. Look, any socio-political system would work perfectly if people were perfect. All such systems are fundamentally in place not to deal with the 97+% of people who are basically decent, they are in place to deal with the psychos. The problem is how to deal with the psychos without either a.) letting them gain control of the mechanisms meant to control them, or b.) fucking over the regular people with draconian measures that destroy more freedom than they protect.
Any ideas on this matter are welcome, because quite frankly, we haven't got the balance right yet.
The first one sounds pretty nutty, I'll give you that. Got a source so I can verify it was really him saying it? The second one, while it is a bit over the top, highlights an essential and very real problem. I've seen the statistics, and while we are in no way the worst, we're pretty damn bad for a first world nation. So, the second one gets filed under excusable hyperbole. For the last bit to make sense, you have to know a bit about the history of the US, especially here in our hemisphere but also in places like Indonesia, and you have to count the actions of the puppet regimes we installed in Central and South America. Even so, it's hyperbole, but less so even than the second example. Learn some history, the facts are out there. And I mean in unbiased history books, not moonbat websites.
Yes, I'd like more examples. Only one of yours was even close to being inexcusably off base. I'd also like some primary sources, if you please. Not that I don't trust you, but you could be parroting back propaganda without even knowing it. A lot of stuff the man never said gets attributed to him.
Arguing with you is like arguing with an electric universe proponant. I can't comprehend the world view you must have. You don't even understand the political philosophies you are denigrating, and educating you would simply take too long, were it even possible.
The Road to Serfdom was written before computers, and it's main argument, that a small group of people can not process all the information necesary to allocate resources, is no longer true. It is debatable whether the premise that socialism will always devolve into a small group of people allocating resources was ever true. Look at the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain for a counterexample.
But this is not for you, it is for others who might be reading. I've tried having this conversation with you before, it devolved into ridiculous ad hominems about how I and all socialists were responsible for all the genocides in history. You know what they say about arguing with a fool: people might not know the difference. I'm not playing that game again.
Care to cite an example of his reasoning you find particularly egregious? Nice straw man, by the way. Oh, and Godwin doesn't end anything. The law as formulated was that any thread will eventually reference Hitler, not that referencing Hitler will end a thread. Misquoting Godwin is a sure sign of a clueless newb. For future reference, here is Godwin's actual Law:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Me, I've read Chomsky, I've heard him speak. I've seen him run logical circles around debate opponents. I'd be willing to bet that if you and Chomsky were in a debate, he would demolish you utterly. He doesn't use vague generalities and ad hominems like you, he uses facts and logic, something you would be well advised to emulate lest you continue to look like an uneducated fool. Here's a clue: just because you aren't smart enough to understand someone's logic, that doesn't mean he's wrong.
I mean seriously, if the man is that deranged, how hard could it have been to find a real passage to illustrate his idiocy rather than making something up?
Nope, communist, socialist, they're all the same. They all want to steal my hard earned property and give it to minority welfare queens and gay liberals.
Seriously, though, that's how a lot of people think.
It's a pretty reliable rule of thumb that anyone who critiques Chomsky is someone with a stake in maintaining the status quo, a moral compass that points straight at the nearest pile of cash, and the political insight of an inbred hick. Most often a frat-boy or jock college student.
The man is brilliant, and what he has to say is completely relevant. He has one of the most insightful analysis of modern society I've ever read. I challenge you to come up with an example of him being a nutjob. In fact, I think that you know he isn't a nutjob. I think that what he's saying challenges your beliefs, and you don't want anyone being swayed by what he has to say. If he were a nutjob, that fact would be obvious to everyone, and you wouldn't need to mention it. I mean, who bothers to mention that the Timecube guy is a nutjob? We all know it from one look at what he has to say. Not so with Chomskey, which is why small minded defenders of the status quo always feel the need to attack him.
Yes, I was being serious. Well, semi serious, I was exaggerating my trolling a bit. The original sentiment was true, people who defend selfishness are often covering up their own. The best trolls are true, that's what makes them good. The implication towards you was mean spirited. I was in a bad mood. Not a defense, just an explanation.
I was and am very serious about being sorry, though.
I was trolling. It's one of my little things I do, but if people respond like you do, then I apologize and we can go on to have a proper debate. Only there's not much to debate, I agree with you. Anyways, I am sorry and you sound like a very moral person. Rational self interest is the best for everyone. It's the only thing to go on, really. And selfishness is amoral, it's neither good nor bad. I was being selfish, by trolling I was trying to get a rise out of people I don't even know, for my own sick pleasure. But technically, as it was just words, if anyone got hurt it was their own responsibility, right? Yes, I'm a rationalizing bastard. Anyways, cheers, you are obviously one of the good ones.
Read The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. Turns out, most cultures are contaminated by memes of selfishness, violence, and hierarchy. In those that aren't, there aren't any taboos or prohibitions against adultery, yet it happens less!
Based on testicle size and sperm volume, humans are in between the polygamous, highly sexual bonobos on the one hand, and the regular heirarchal, monogamous chimpanzees. We are naturally somewhat monogamous, but not as much so as chimps.
The problem with charity is that of free riders. Everyone benefits from a stable society with little imbalance of wealth. Too much imbalance of wealth leads to revolution, hardly the best environment for business. Too much poverty leads to crime, which hurts everyone. So ending poverty and reducing income equality are economic externalities, specifically public goods. Everyone would benefit from these actions, including those that do not contribute. Knowing that they will benefit without contributing, and that there is no way to enforce contribution, most people will choose not to contribute and hope that someone else does. Socialism is simply a way to reduce the problem of free riders by ensuring that everyone contributes towards the public good.
Any observed human behavior is natural, eo ipso, it is a part of nature and follows natural laws. I agree completely that people define their own personal version of "natural" and find evidence for it in nature in order to promote their own moral values.
However, in common parlance one comes across the idea of nature separate from nurture. So one might claim that one human behavior is natural, while another is learned, all the while acknowledging that both are "natural" from another point of view. There is no real nature/nurture dichotomy, nature shapes nurture and vice versa, and the same gene might be expressed in very different ways in different environments.
So, given that, is selfishness primarily societal, or is it innate? I am saying that it varies due to circumstance and in that regard is not as innate as, say, the fear of falling, which even infants have and which expresses itself in similar ways regardless of culture.
Of course selfishness is a part of human behavior. I never said it wasn't. It just isn't a primary part, unless there is a system that rewards it and punishes cooperation. Because our system assumes selfishness, it does just that: it creates the very situation that it claims exists naturally.
I've read a lot of modern economic research that claims that our economic models of human behavior are not as accurate as you portray them. Google (or use an academic search service) "Fairness reciprocity economic research" for some newer evidence than you seem to be operating on.
In systems where people can easily punish free riders, fairness and reciprocity dominate without the need for any external system that enforces them, such as a welfare state. In systems where people have no easy access to justice and can not punish free riders, people default to selfish behavior in order not to be taken advantage of.
The fundamental assumption of a welfare state (read:communism) is that our system has two stable modes selfish and selfless, and that effort is needed to push the system out of the local minimum, and over the hump into the other mode. The critique that early anarchists had to Marx's critique of capitalism was that the use of force needed to shift the system would encourage further use of force, leading inexorably to the sort of oligarchy that communism seems to devolve into. Or in other words, in a violent revolution, the most violent and revolting will rise to the top.
It appears as if force can not be used to enact the shift to a more fair system. We are left with only the long term methods used by, for example, Buddhism: slow change from within each individual taking place over generations. Sigh.
Modern studies in economics and game theory show that about 15% of people are naturally unselfish, regardless of the system they find themselves in. Less than five percent are naturally selfish, regardless of the system. The rest will act primarily selfishly in a system that encourages it, and primarily unselfishly in a system that discourages it. So it would be more accurate to say that for some people, selfishness is natural, and that for most people, the capacity for selfishness is natural.
Selfishness is much less common than you might think in human cultures that have remained isolated from the dominant cultures of selfishness. Read The Continuum Concept for a good description of how humans "in the wild" actually act.
People are panicking? Why are they panicking, is something wrong? And why say "TRY not to," is it so bad that panic is almost a certainty? FOR GOD'S SAKE, WHAT AREN'T YOU TELLING US?
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The anarchists of course defined things differently, and I am speaking from an anarchist perspective.
Learn some history. During the economic boom times of the fifties, the highest tax rate was 90% and that didn't seem to slow down the growth. Boo fucking hoo, 37%? My god, what a big whiner.
I'm using the term anarchism in the sense that Proudhon and Bakunin used it, so yes, what it meant in the 19th century. Sure, any economic system can be used to oppress people. I think that's a key point, economics can oppress just as surely as politics can. Do they automatically oppress? That's what we're debating here, I think, not whether they can, but whether they must. I'd say capitalism by its very nature creates an oppressed class. Communism will lead to a non-communistic structure that creates an oppressed class. Socialism won't necessarily. That's my take anyway. Although for me, a cooperative structure like that found in the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain sounds even better than socialism as practiced in, say, France.
Free will, independent thinking, privacy, security, and liberty are ideals of socialism and communism. Wherever did you get the idea they weren't? Communism in practice leads to oligarchy, granted. That is because communism is meant to be a transitional form of government. It is meant to lead people from where they are to true anarchism, but because it assumes they can not lead themselves, it becomes paternal and hierarchal, just like the system it replaces. Socialism is not meant to lead anywhere, and can exist alongside the free market. I'm not sure what exactly you think socialism is, but it certainly doesn't preclude any of those things you mentioned, in theory or practice. In fact, it can easily be argued that in practice, it is more effective at bringing those things to a lrger number of people than a strictly market based system.
And to be honest, what we have in the USA is socialism. We redistribute the wealth all the time, from rich states to poor states, but from poor people to rich people. Think about all the government pork for the well connected. That's a form of socialism, only its socialism for the wealthy.
You broke the wizard! You let the magic smoke out!
Well, no. You can write inefficient code in any language. But yes, many times programs written in assembly can be smaller and more efficient.
We should just make everything illegal. That way, when the government figures out that someone is a bad person, they will have a whole list of things to charge them with. What could possiblie go wrong?
I should have said, into the little slot the cup holder comes out of, but I figured everyone knows the wizard lives inside the computer. You can really spoon the ice cream in through any available slot or hole.
As simplistic as it sounds, people growing up evil is the fundamental problem. I don't like to use the word evil, though. I'd say, sociopaths and psychopaths are the problem. Not so much for what they do, but for the over-reaction they cause in others. Look, any socio-political system would work perfectly if people were perfect. All such systems are fundamentally in place not to deal with the 97+% of people who are basically decent, they are in place to deal with the psychos. The problem is how to deal with the psychos without either a.) letting them gain control of the mechanisms meant to control them, or b.) fucking over the regular people with draconian measures that destroy more freedom than they protect.
Any ideas on this matter are welcome, because quite frankly, we haven't got the balance right yet.
Oh I don't care. Someone saw it, and laughed, that's all I care about.
He likes ice cream. Spoon it right into the "cup holder" and he might grant you a wish!
The first one sounds pretty nutty, I'll give you that. Got a source so I can verify it was really him saying it? The second one, while it is a bit over the top, highlights an essential and very real problem. I've seen the statistics, and while we are in no way the worst, we're pretty damn bad for a first world nation. So, the second one gets filed under excusable hyperbole. For the last bit to make sense, you have to know a bit about the history of the US, especially here in our hemisphere but also in places like Indonesia, and you have to count the actions of the puppet regimes we installed in Central and South America. Even so, it's hyperbole, but less so even than the second example. Learn some history, the facts are out there. And I mean in unbiased history books, not moonbat websites.
Yes, I'd like more examples. Only one of yours was even close to being inexcusably off base. I'd also like some primary sources, if you please. Not that I don't trust you, but you could be parroting back propaganda without even knowing it. A lot of stuff the man never said gets attributed to him.
Arguing with you is like arguing with an electric universe proponant. I can't comprehend the world view you must have. You don't even understand the political philosophies you are denigrating, and educating you would simply take too long, were it even possible.
The Road to Serfdom was written before computers, and it's main argument, that a small group of people can not process all the information necesary to allocate resources, is no longer true. It is debatable whether the premise that socialism will always devolve into a small group of people allocating resources was ever true. Look at the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain for a counterexample.
But this is not for you, it is for others who might be reading. I've tried having this conversation with you before, it devolved into ridiculous ad hominems about how I and all socialists were responsible for all the genocides in history. You know what they say about arguing with a fool: people might not know the difference. I'm not playing that game again.
Me, I've read Chomsky, I've heard him speak. I've seen him run logical circles around debate opponents. I'd be willing to bet that if you and Chomsky were in a debate, he would demolish you utterly. He doesn't use vague generalities and ad hominems like you, he uses facts and logic, something you would be well advised to emulate lest you continue to look like an uneducated fool. Here's a clue: just because you aren't smart enough to understand someone's logic, that doesn't mean he's wrong.
I mean seriously, if the man is that deranged, how hard could it have been to find a real passage to illustrate his idiocy rather than making something up?
Nope, communist, socialist, they're all the same. They all want to steal my hard earned property and give it to minority welfare queens and gay liberals.
Seriously, though, that's how a lot of people think.
It's a pretty reliable rule of thumb that anyone who critiques Chomsky is someone with a stake in maintaining the status quo, a moral compass that points straight at the nearest pile of cash, and the political insight of an inbred hick. Most often a frat-boy or jock college student.
The man is brilliant, and what he has to say is completely relevant. He has one of the most insightful analysis of modern society I've ever read. I challenge you to come up with an example of him being a nutjob. In fact, I think that you know he isn't a nutjob. I think that what he's saying challenges your beliefs, and you don't want anyone being swayed by what he has to say. If he were a nutjob, that fact would be obvious to everyone, and you wouldn't need to mention it. I mean, who bothers to mention that the Timecube guy is a nutjob? We all know it from one look at what he has to say. Not so with Chomskey, which is why small minded defenders of the status quo always feel the need to attack him.
Yes, I was being serious. Well, semi serious, I was exaggerating my trolling a bit. The original sentiment was true, people who defend selfishness are often covering up their own. The best trolls are true, that's what makes them good. The implication towards you was mean spirited. I was in a bad mood. Not a defense, just an explanation.
I was and am very serious about being sorry, though.
I was trolling. It's one of my little things I do, but if people respond like you do, then I apologize and we can go on to have a proper debate. Only there's not much to debate, I agree with you. Anyways, I am sorry and you sound like a very moral person. Rational self interest is the best for everyone. It's the only thing to go on, really. And selfishness is amoral, it's neither good nor bad. I was being selfish, by trolling I was trying to get a rise out of people I don't even know, for my own sick pleasure. But technically, as it was just words, if anyone got hurt it was their own responsibility, right? Yes, I'm a rationalizing bastard. Anyways, cheers, you are obviously one of the good ones.
True, and well put.
Read The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. Turns out, most cultures are contaminated by memes of selfishness, violence, and hierarchy. In those that aren't, there aren't any taboos or prohibitions against adultery, yet it happens less!
Based on testicle size and sperm volume, humans are in between the polygamous, highly sexual bonobos on the one hand, and the regular heirarchal, monogamous chimpanzees. We are naturally somewhat monogamous, but not as much so as chimps.
The problem with charity is that of free riders. Everyone benefits from a stable society with little imbalance of wealth. Too much imbalance of wealth leads to revolution, hardly the best environment for business. Too much poverty leads to crime, which hurts everyone. So ending poverty and reducing income equality are economic externalities, specifically public goods. Everyone would benefit from these actions, including those that do not contribute. Knowing that they will benefit without contributing, and that there is no way to enforce contribution, most people will choose not to contribute and hope that someone else does. Socialism is simply a way to reduce the problem of free riders by ensuring that everyone contributes towards the public good.
Any observed human behavior is natural, eo ipso, it is a part of nature and follows natural laws. I agree completely that people define their own personal version of "natural" and find evidence for it in nature in order to promote their own moral values.
However, in common parlance one comes across the idea of nature separate from nurture. So one might claim that one human behavior is natural, while another is learned, all the while acknowledging that both are "natural" from another point of view. There is no real nature/nurture dichotomy, nature shapes nurture and vice versa, and the same gene might be expressed in very different ways in different environments.
So, given that, is selfishness primarily societal, or is it innate? I am saying that it varies due to circumstance and in that regard is not as innate as, say, the fear of falling, which even infants have and which expresses itself in similar ways regardless of culture.
Of course selfishness is a part of human behavior. I never said it wasn't. It just isn't a primary part, unless there is a system that rewards it and punishes cooperation. Because our system assumes selfishness, it does just that: it creates the very situation that it claims exists naturally.
I've read a lot of modern economic research that claims that our economic models of human behavior are not as accurate as you portray them. Google (or use an academic search service) "Fairness reciprocity economic research" for some newer evidence than you seem to be operating on.
In systems where people can easily punish free riders, fairness and reciprocity dominate without the need for any external system that enforces them, such as a welfare state. In systems where people have no easy access to justice and can not punish free riders, people default to selfish behavior in order not to be taken advantage of.
The fundamental assumption of a welfare state (read:communism) is that our system has two stable modes selfish and selfless, and that effort is needed to push the system out of the local minimum, and over the hump into the other mode. The critique that early anarchists had to Marx's critique of capitalism was that the use of force needed to shift the system would encourage further use of force, leading inexorably to the sort of oligarchy that communism seems to devolve into. Or in other words, in a violent revolution, the most violent and revolting will rise to the top.
It appears as if force can not be used to enact the shift to a more fair system. We are left with only the long term methods used by, for example, Buddhism: slow change from within each individual taking place over generations. Sigh.
Modern studies in economics and game theory show that about 15% of people are naturally unselfish, regardless of the system they find themselves in. Less than five percent are naturally selfish, regardless of the system. The rest will act primarily selfishly in a system that encourages it, and primarily unselfishly in a system that discourages it. So it would be more accurate to say that for some people, selfishness is natural, and that for most people, the capacity for selfishness is natural.
Selfishness is much less common than you might think in human cultures that have remained isolated from the dominant cultures of selfishness. Read The Continuum Concept for a good description of how humans "in the wild" actually act.
People are panicking? Why are they panicking, is something wrong? And why say "TRY not to," is it so bad that panic is almost a certainty? FOR GOD'S SAKE, WHAT AREN'T YOU TELLING US?