The Return of Testing Chat Thread

[Sandman]

i like the way that some people put money over human suffering when it comes to greece

i like it a whole lot

It's almost as if capitalist and proto-capitalist institutions have emphasised the importance of financial wealth as one of the most important and prevalent cornerstones of human society since the 17th century. Couple that with the ease by which a startlingly large number of people can disassociate themselves from the suffering of human beings in other countries, and then you have the Greek situation.

[Dooey Jo]

it's as if the views and interests of the ruling class become the prevailing views and interests of the society as a whole

nationalism and similar things are very useful as it makes people believe that there is something fundamentally different about other people, that "their" needs are different and less important than "ours"

but everyone knows that already

more interesting to discuss in this time of political electioneering is the notion that "we need to create jobs", and "we need jobs", and how this has become fact

even though no one has ever died from not performing meaningless paperwork 40 hours a week

[evilsoup]

what about meaningful paperwork?

[Sandman]

what about meaningful paperwork?

We call the people who produce that 'writers' and 'novelists', for the most part, and they don't always tend to have typical nine-to-five day jobs.

[evilsoup]

hey now bureaucracy is vital to a functional society

[adr]

the class war is being lost right now b/c most the victims don't even realize they are at war

[Aaron]

It's also exhausting.

[evilsoup]

'class war' is misleading, because it implies that there can be some final victory
'class struggle' is a bit better

[Dooey Jo]

writers too do not die from not writing


what people need is money, to get access to the things they actually need

and the only way to get such money for most is to sell their labour power to produce a profit for others

so what it really means is "we need to increase the profits of the already rich so that we can get a slice back of that which we have produced"

which you think wouldn't win you very many elections, but then i live in a country where parties can run around touting decreased taxes and worse social security as gender equality

you might say

that class war is a war of propaganda

[RyanThunder]

You know, I like to say that I'm nationalist, but I'm beginning to think that I misuse the word. I just like my country and think its generally run better than other ones.

I wish everybody else had the same opportunities I have because of it and all that, you know?

So I think I'll stop using that term... xD

[evilsoup]

nationalism is one of those words that has had many definitions over time, and means different things in different contexts

A Scottish Nationalist (pro-scottish independence) isn't the same as an American nationalist (probably an imperialist)

[Dooey Jo]

it pretty much always means that people born in a particular region share important and unique traits and ought to share an identity and unity

[evilsoup]

there's always a bunch of other baggage on top of that, though

[Bakustra]

i'm starting to wish i could post this in thanas's german reunification thread

"Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all."

or this

"Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."

see if you can spot the ironic trolling

[evilsoup]

well I see what you did there, but I think you should get over it

[adr]

gotta luv rosa luxemburg

[adr]

what's 1+1?

11 if you ask javascript

fucking a

[Jung]

it's as if the views and interests of the ruling class become the prevailing views and interests of the society as a whole

Kinda reminds me I'm reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined right now and one of the major theories he brings up to explain the Long Peace (lack of large great power wars in the past half-century) is the Democratic Peace one, and I thought if you think about it that makes sense.

I mean consider the pay-off matrix of war here:

Dictator/elite: I get to sit safe in a palace/bunker and eat caviar while sending gigantic numbers of my thralls out to fight and die for my enrichment and glorification. My privilidged position insulates me from the dangers of war (being shot, bombed, starved etc. or having the same happen to people I know personally) and makes it likely I will get a disproportionate cut of plunder/material gains (as I remember in America something like 10% of the people have 70% of the wealth, assume material war gains are distributed with similar equitability to peacetime economic productivity...).

Average person: is the one actually likely to get shot, bombed, starved etc..

Not really a huge stretch to imagine that as the political system shifts from revolving around the perspective of some of the ppl most insulated from the costs of war to empowering the perspective of those less insulated states start to act as if war somehow became less attractive.


I guess maybe what I'm kinda sorta getting at is it's a bit funny how modern democracies are designed around concern for the negative consequences of concentration of political power, but ppl don't seem to worry in the same way about concentration of financial power, even though that also logically confers disproportionate power over society (you can use that money as a carrot for ppl and politicians to make them do what you want, fund advertising to influence ppls opinions and values etc.). Even when ppl complain about income inequality they tend to approach the problem as entirely one of poverty or fairness, rather than coming from the perspective that if money is power do we want the top 10% having 70% of that power and the bottom 50% having less than 2% of it (I'm quoting from memory here but I remember seeing these statistics about wealth distribution in the USA).

I mean somebody correct me if I'm wrong here I'm not a business person at all but a typical business is a pretty undemocratic organization, isn't it? The guys who work at Walmart don't get to vote on its policies or who runs it. So we're worried about top-down dictatorship as a model for governments, but cool with it as a model for powerful NGOs? That seems a bit of a blind spot to me if you think about it.

I ask this cause I'm kind of turning over in my mind a pet hypothesis that one of the places the communists went wrong is they kind of misdiagonised the problem. It isn't that capitalist organizations exist, it's that capitalist organizations are undemocratic, with the familiar problems of undemocratic management that creates (policy revolves around the perspective of the guys at the top, who have a natural incentive to fuck over the guys at the bottom to benefit themselves, and even if they're OK ppl just aren't very in touch with what it's like for the average person - like with the war example, it might not even be that the warmongering dictators are bad ppl, but they've never actually been shot at and have grown up hearing nothing but standard patriarchal-militarist narratives about how war is glorious and it is sweet and honorable to die for your country and all that crap which generally leaves out the nastier stuff like guys dying in hideous pain from having their stomachs torn open and that is what informs their perspective). The answer isn't to put an end to private business, it's to extend the democratic revolution in political thought to NGOs. Complete crank stuff, or do you think I might have something here?

[RyanThunder]

Nah the answer is to totally remove the importance of private business through an enormous government apparatus that renders it superfluous.

[adr]

jung: you're starting to sound like a marxist

the socialist ideal is not state concentration at all, quite the opposite

the word "soviet" means "council" and reflected what they were hoping for.... things run by local, democratic councils of workers


didn't exactly work out that way for a number of reasons, but the big idea is exactly that: to bring democracy to the economic sphere

[adr]

BTW I haven't read Pinker's book but from what I've seen of it, he makes at least one extremely major flaw: violence hasn't actually declined at all here in the real world.

Though this doesn't discount the democratic peace logic, since we don't live in democracies here in the real world either.

[Jung]

BTW I haven't read Pinker's book but from what I've seen of it, he makes at least one extremely major flaw: violence hasn't actually declined at all here in the real world.

The book has a lot of statistics to back up the argument that it has.

[adr]

lies, damned lies, and statistics

[Jung]

Well he makes a fairly convincing case to me, but I haven't really researched counterarguments.

If there's any big flaw I see in the book offhand it's his analysis of history is pretty Eurocentric. Like he makes an argument that the invention of the printing press might have been a big factor, but talks about it entirely in terms of Europe - didn't the technology exist in China for a while before that?

It's an interesting book, I would recommend it, whether you think you'll agree with it or not it's got food for thought.

[Dooey Jo]

i don't know which "communists" you refer to, but the marxian answer is that the problems of capitalism are inherent to the capitalist mode of production, not the existence of capitalist organisations (which are just manifestations of the former anyway). it's true self-declared communist revolutionaries have pronounced capitalism abolished, killed the people seen as capitalists and nationalised all private production to be run in a "for the people" fashion. however none of them even claim to have abolished the system of production for buying and selling on a market with a view to profit, by people who have to sell their own labour power in order to gain access to the things they have produced. thus all they have really managed to do is to set themselves up as the owning class, often through totalitarian means.

the "natural incentive" to fuck over the workers remains in such societies (i'm sure everyone is familiar with the horror stories of "worker's paradises" like cuba or chine), not because it is a "natural" incentive, but because the only choice an owner of production has is to make their business turn a profit at any cost, or cease being an owner.

Kinda reminds me I'm reading Steven Pinker