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Spikosauropod Profile
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Parliamentarian

Registered: 06-2007
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


After we ban Fourth of July fireworks to keep from scaring animals in the forest, I will worry about Gulags in the Amazon.
3/23/2020, 10:29 pm Link to this post PM Spikosauropod
 
James Jaeger Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


>Nurses sobbing that, after having completed a 48 hour shift, they can find no basic foodstuffs with which to satisfy their hunger. Pensioners and other frail people having food snatched from them. Shelves of produce stripped bare by hoards of shoppers that descend like locusts, driven by a ‘me first and damn my fellow citizen’ mentality. Fights breaking out as the strong strive to push their way to the front of queues.

>This is what happens in societies built around scarcity and greed. This is capitalism.

Horseshit.

We have no semblance of "capitalism" running in this country. And the proof is the national debt.

It's government spending that has destroyed the standard of livings of regular people. It's fiat-issuing central banks that have enabled the welfare-warfare state.

>Hoping to restore some sense of sanity, the governments of the world are asking the people to look out for each other’s interests.

The governments are the culprits because they passed laws that have enabled central banking and such thing as citizens united and endless terms. It is the government of the world that are taxing and borrowing their citizens to death.

>On social media there are calls going out asking those who have the ability to help people in need to do whatever they can to assist.

!@#$ these anecdotes. Look at the causes.

>‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need’, you might say.

Horse.

>This is communism. Communism has been, and always will be, fundamental to any human society. Without it, society degenerates into a war of each person for himself, a zero-sum competition that can only end in ruin.

I'm ashamed of you Extropia. I though you had a brain and were non-partisan. This is a straw argument you are using -- tossing out something you claim to be "capitalism" and then shooting it down so you can advocate "communism". Communism is total government. Don't you get it: it was GOVERNMENT that passed the Federal Reserve Act that enabled the crooks in the banking system to print up the very fiat currency the crooks in the GOVERNMENT are spending to sucker people like you.

Are you suddenly a !@#$ moron? Has the Virus eaten a hole in your brain?

Last edited by James Jaeger, 3/24/2020, 12:50 am
3/24/2020, 12:44 am Link to this post PM James Jaeger Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


>Pro-communism but not tolerating Gulags?

Your Communism calls its political prison camps something more English, mebbe?<

Gulags have nothing to do with communism. They did have something to do with a particularly authoritarian version of state socialism. In confusing baseline communism with the worst horrors of State Socialism all you are doing is parroting phrases the capitalist system has indoctrinated you with so as to prevent critical examination of its flaws.

3/24/2020, 12:48 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
James Jaeger Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


The problem with runaway capitalism is, when certain individuals get money they hoard it and use it for themselves, eventually depriving the rest of the population of resources. And the state helps these individuals do this because they buy up the state with the resources they have confiscated from the population. The bribe money the state receives from the rich individuals is then used primarily for state-protection weapons and not the benefit of people. This lack of benefits is where all the anecdotes come from.

Low IQ people can only see anecdotes, not cause. Thus they scream for socialism, not free enterprise.

We do not need socialism or communism -- these technologies are as unresponsive as crony capitalism -- we need a methodology that will limit WEALTH, provide INCENTIVE and limit GOVERNMENT.

In other words, no human being should have a personal wealth in excess of X dollars -- but by the same token no government should have more weapons than the sum of its citizens.

To over-empower either the individual or the state is insane.

Last edited by James Jaeger, 3/24/2020, 1:08 am
3/24/2020, 1:00 am Link to this post PM James Jaeger Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


>We have no semblance of "capitalism" running in this country. And the proof is the national debt.<

Your problem is that you believe that there could be commercial markets run on laissez-faire principles even though there are no instances of such markets running absent of State regulation in all of recorded history, and anthropology has definitively concluded that Adam Smith’s notion of markets naturally evolving from individuals bartering with one another was something he just made up. In actual fact commercial markets were founded on violence.

>It's government spending that has destroyed the standard of livings of regular people. It's fiat-issuing central banks that have enabled the welfare-warfare state.<

It’s government spending that provides the critical infrastructure upon which so many other businesses depend, but which we cannot rely on commercial interests to provide us with because they are too focused on immediate, short-term gains and, being essential utilities that we cannot really choose not to rely on if profit-seeking private firms were in charge of maintaining such infrastructure they would be price-gouging.

Also in the case of banks and other major businesses the fact that executives of such firms regularly move back and forth between top positions in those companies and top positions in government (CEO of Goldman becomes the treasury secretary implementing laws that will suit Goldman before reusuming a top role in Goldman) suggests we should not think of this as a change in careers at all but rather moving from one department to another in what is essentially a single entity.

>The governments are the culprits because they passed laws that have enabled central banking and such thing as citizens united and endless terms.<

Look, if you want to devote your whole life to completely understanding the government side of the capitalist relationship there’s nothing wrong with that. It is a complex enough topic to absorb a lifetime of study. But what you should not do is confuse this aspect of the system as the one and only culprit. It’s not the case that only the government benefits from the cartel-like relationship that exists between it and big business, which is why so much money is spend on lobbying.

Capitalism is all about the endless pursuit of more profit and free, fair and open competition only gets you so far. To really rake in the mega-profits requires rigged markets so it can be taken as almost inevitable that we would find ourselves in the situation we are with big business in a very cozy relationship with the State. This is not a contradiction of capitalism it is its very essence.
3/24/2020, 1:14 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Registered: 11-2017
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


The Communist Party that took roughly 70 years to almost literally run the USSR into the ground wasn't "really" communist.

And we should just disregard their focus on Marx, and how they focused on Marxism so much it was like medieval Catholic clerics debating aspects of angels.

Same-same the ChiComs, from the Mao dictatorship to the president dictatorship of Xi.

Each time the Commie tragedy comes around to some benighted country, some clowns there follow goons like that and repeat the killing and the torturing. They murder their way into power, justifying their bad acts when they sing such sweet campaign songs. You see:

"It's a moree-true kind of morality! All of this will be worth it - we are building utopia! Maybe even in our own lifetimes!"

Sure, the next time they wont be a mass murdering horror-show. Check!


3/25/2020, 3:08 pm Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


>The Communist Party that took roughly 70 years to almost literally run the USSR into the ground wasn't "really" communist.<

Correct. They were socialists.

And we should just disregard their focus on Marx, and how they focused on Marxism so much it was like medieval Catholic clerics debating aspects of angels.<

You can focus on something and still misunderstand it. Just ask the eugenicists who supposedly based their plans on the theory of evolution, even though a proper understanding of Darwinism reveals it has little to do with ‘survival of the fittest’ in the sense that eugenicists interpreted that phrase. The strongest are not always favoured in natural selection.

Marx didn’t talk much about Communism because he was one of the first Singularitarians, and he recognised that full communism would only be realised after capitalism had reached its full potential, unlocking such technological wonders and sparking such radical social revolutions that we in our current paradigm would not be able to imagine what life might be like in what was to follow. As it says in the book ‘The Great Philosophers’, “Marx’s own writings represents a more modest, restricted enterprise, which aims to identify, and work to dismantle, the major social contradictions which at present prevent us from living what he would see as a truly human life, in all of the wealth of our bodily and spiritual powers. He has very little to say of what would happen then, since for him this process would be the beginnings of history proper, which lies beyond our present language...Since Marx’s own work belongs to this epoch, inevitably dependent on its own thought forms and life models, it cannot, by its own historicist logic, seek to leap over it to imagine some sort of utopia”.

So, given that A) Marx expected the revolution to occur only after capitalism had reached its peak potential and B) he also recognised that we could only identify the conditions that worked to push history toward the point of revolution, but could say nothing about what would come after, we must conclude that those behind the ‘Communist’ regimes you keep referring to did not understand Marx, because not only did they try and plan for utopia they also tried to bring it about in countries where industrial capitalism had barely begun.

Or maybe they were cynically using Marx? Communism appeals to various kinds of people. It appeals to dreamers with a vague sense that there are better ways of organising life but can’t really articulate just how we might go about doing this (they might try but for reasons given they mostly fail). It appeals to those who don’t care about anything other than seeing the current system crash and burn (I think Marx fitted into this category. It seems he was against workers’ unions working with business to improve conditions because he wanted capitalism to squeeze and squeeze until the proletariat got to a point where they were so angered at being in poverty amidst such potential luxury that “the knell of capitalist private property sounds and the expropriators are expropriated”), It appeals to those who don’t see anything wrong with hierarchy in principle, but would prefer if they were the masters and cynically use Marx as a means of getting the people behind them with tales of abolishing the current system when all they really intend to do is to take over the ruling positions and become Masters themselves.

Stalin, Mao and people like that fit into that last category.
3/26/2020, 1:19 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


Marx did once have a stab at envisioning what the post-singularitarian life would be like. This came in the form of the famous quote that begins “in the highest phase of communist society after the enslaving subordination under division of labour, and therewith the antithesis between mental and physical labour has vanished” and ends with “only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind, and society inscribes on its banners ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’.

Anthropologists have determined that life was a lot closer to communism in the past than it was to any kind of hierarchical way of organising life. Jared Diamond wrote, “Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago...Bands lack many institutions that we take for granted in our own society...The band’s land is used jointly by the whole group, instead of being partitioned out among subgroups or individuals. There is no regular economic specialisation, except by age and sex: all able-bodied individuals forage for food. There are no formal institutions, such as laws, police, and treaties, to resolve conflicts within and between bands. Band organisation is often described as ‘egalitarian’: there is no formalised stratification into upper and lower classes, no formalised or hereditary leadership, and no formalised monopolies of information”.

As bands grew in size they evolved into tribes. Diamond wrote “despite...differences between bands and tribes, many similarities remain...Tribes share with bands an ‘egalitarian’ social system, without ranked lineages or classes. Not only is status not inherited; no member of a traditional band or tribe can become disproportionately wealthy by his or her own efforts, because each individual has debts and obligations to many others. It is therefore impossible for an outsider to guess, from appearances, which of all the adult men in the village is the big-man: he lives in the same type of hut, wears the same clothes or ornaments, or is as naked as everyone else...Since tribes lack economic specialists, they also lack slaves, because there are no specialised menial jobs for a slave to perform”.

So in the past we lived without divisions based on class, where nobody could become disproportionately wealthy, nobody was enslaved, and everybody worked for the good of the group.

It could be argued that there was no poverty for our ancestors. This is because poverty is largely relative, a perceived lack of needs. While a vagrant living rough on the streets can compare his condition with the luxury on display on shops and with the glittering skyscrapers from which pour other human beings clad in the finest clothes and eating the finest foods, our ancestors living a hunter-gatherer existence had no such comparisons to make. They had everything they needed, provided for by the bounties of Mother Nature, and if they didn’t and their search for provisions failed to find sufficient quantities of what they needed, they wouldn’t have been alive for very long to suffer from this lack.

Given how weak human beings are in every respect save collective strength, it can only be assumed that humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years by working together, adopting the principle ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’. So, far from communism being something that never works, it actually formed the foundations of human society for hundreds of thousands of years (compare that to capitalism, which has to be rescued with socialism for the rich in the form of bailouts for the financial elites and austerity for everybody else at least once a generation). In fact, communism still is the foundation, because whenever the ability required is small enough or the need large enough, we don’t normally seek to profit from that situation, but instead just offer to help. These regular, small acts might seem trivial but they are the foundations upon which all other forms of human interaction are built. Without this baseline communism, capitalism would be unworkable as we would be so busy bartering over the price of every possible action no work would get done.



Last edited by Extropia DaSilva, 3/26/2020, 2:34 am
3/26/2020, 2:29 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Registered: 11-2017
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


"In fact, communism still is the foundation, because whenever the ability required is small enough or the need large enough, we don’t normally seek to profit from that situation, but instead just offer to help."

Wrong as acid rain with that one, Extie.

Our ADV China friends have well-explained how the Chinese in ChiCom-land who grew up in the era of Maoist mess before they decided to let their people do some business had their pre-Commie Confucian ethos stripped away.

Now, for them and their families - its them first, and everyone else can "go hang."

Thus vids of kids and women run-over in the road and ignored by very, very many passers-by for some time.

Why a kid can be snatched up, wrapped up and stuck into a car and driven away, and a guy diverts the woman with him to not look as they walk on.

This is not our ethos, of course. Nor the ethos in Singapore and Tiawan, both dominated by ethnic Chinese who did not suffer under generations of Communism.

The way Confucianism and the West both developed a similar wealth of "good community spirit" ethos shows that you don't need the extreme of communism to benefit from the basket of many goods that fit into that realm of good community spirit.

Communism takes subordination of the one to "the body of all of us" to the extreme.

The West and Confucianism both accept the supremacy of the Polity in various ways - but both - differently, of course - lay out the role of the individual as well, independently in many ways from the State.

We in the west, and our atomic, anomic, individual extreme that many of us prize mostly also accept that we must compromise much independence so as to have a successful society.

Many of us hope that as the West continues to evolve, we can switch up the trend up to now, and start preserving more and more of our independence as we continue ever forward, faster and faster.

4/3/2020, 10:30 am Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: Coronavirus is showing us capitalism.


>In fact, communism still is the foundation, because whenever the ability required is small enough or the need large enough, we don’t normally seek to profit from that situation, but instead just offer to help."

Wrong as acid rain with that one, Extie.<

Actually I’m not wrong. It is you who are mistaken, thinking that the cults of personality that arose in the twentieth century, like Stalinism and Maoism, are exclusively what communism are and therefore any objections one can raise over how such regimes were run must be valid objections of communism.

Since this is a mistaken assumption nothing else you have to say is useful, except to remind us of what we already know, which is that those cults of personality lead to very grim outcomes.

4/3/2020, 11:53 pm Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 


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