guesswho
3yr ago
But the whole problem with capitalism in a post-scarcity environment is that it relies on price signals set by supply and demand.
If we invent the Mr. Fusion and Replicators such that we can produce everything anyone wants for basically free forever, capitalism has no mechanism to give those things to people, because the supply is infinite so the price is zero so no one can make money distributing it.
Capitalism is great for deciding how best to spend scarce resources, which is the type of economy we've been in for all of human history so far, and may continue to be the best way to distribute eg real estate and prostitutes and other inherently scarce goods into the far future.
But as more and more goods fall into post-scarcity (including the push to a digital/information economy), we increasingly need a new system that functions well under those conditions.
guesswho
3yr ago
I feel like capitalism with a strong UBI paid for with progressive taxes to keep wealth inequality flatter could solve a lot of problems. Not enough to permanently solve the contradictions of capitalism, but enough to push the reckoning down the line another century.
I also like the idea of having the government allow people to vote on which post-scarcity good it should buy out and publicize. Enough people need a specific expensive medication, the government buys the patent and produces it for pennies a pill. Enough people love a new video game, the government licenses it and makes it free to every citizen. Etc. Obviously a lot of details to work out but I think it's one possible solution to artificial scarcity, which I think is one of the biggest problems with capitalism as we move towards an increasingly post-scarcity and information-based economy.
guesswho
3yr ago
Just chiming in with the usual reminder that what desperate people look and act like after decades of neglect and deprivation is not a very useful indicator of what they would look like had they been receiving aid and care that entire time instead.
Which is to say: yes, many people living on the street are now destructive and oppositional, making it difficult to treat and assist them in the short-term. But that's not an indication that there's some percent of the population that's genetically and inevitably incapable of not destroying everything around them, it's the result of what they've suffered under our system, and the self-medicating they've done to live through it.
A comprehensive system of social welfare that didn't let anyone fall through the cracks to begin with would prevent most of them from getting to that point, making schemes like this much more practical and useful.
guesswho
3yr ago
I feel like it's kind of incoherent to ask how America would react in circumstance that America wouldn't be in.
Like, in order to have Mexicans feel about the US the way Palestinians feel about Israel, the US would have to have a very different national character that made us do very different things.
What would we do if we were very different from what we are now? Who knows!
Which is an important point about analogies and popular imagination on this topic; we all talk about how various western democracies would respond if they were in Israel's place, with the implication that the answer to that question is what it would be reasonable for Israel to do, and we should side with them if they do that.
But there's a reason none of those western democracies are in Israel's place, that reason has a lot to do with Israel's actions as a nation, and those actions do change what is reasonable for them to do, and who we should side with.
guesswho
3yr ago
Honest question: Do you believe that articles appearing in Breitbart or the Daily Mail are as likely to be accurate and well-sourced as articles appearing in the NY Times or Wall Street Journal?
Do you think the userbase who reads Breitbart and Daily Mail are as likely to care about truth and accuracy when spreading the news that appears in them as the userbase who reads NYT and WSJ?
To me, that list of deprecated sources doesn't sound like they said 'all conservative outlets are banned', Fox News isn't on there and frankly you can get as much anti-trans and pro-neo-liberal news as you could need from NYT and WSJ anyway.
To me that list just looks like 'outlets that are rabidly agenda-pushing in a way that ignores accuracy and facts whenever it's convenient, with a userbase that has a tendency to use their articles to push misinformation and inaccurate narratives online.' Like, I see meme posts from those sources on forums all the time, and the way they're presented is almost always inaccurate when you look into it.
'But why only conservative rags, where are the deprecated left-wing sources?'
With reference to our recent discussions about elites and institutions, I think this is a genuine difference in policy and aesthetic between the sides: the left retains a certain reverence for elites and intellectuals and journalism that forces their large and prominent news outlets to at least care a little about the truth, in ways that don't mean the things printed in them are always true or that they're not pushing an agenda, but does mean that the magnitude of the problem is much less.
And of course this is not to say that lies and misinformation aren't present in the left's rhetoric and narratives; just that when they are, they are more likely to come from social media or activist groups or other influencers rather than the type of large 'news' outlets listed on this page. I presume Wikipedia already didn't accept Facebook memes and Communist podcasts and PR statements from BLM and etc as sources, and those things are sort of the left's equivalent of Breitbart and Daily Mail.
guesswho
3yr ago
I mean, if we're granting the ability to apply arbitrary genetic behavioral modification to classes of people, I'd rather make all the oppressors uninterested in oppressing...
Anyway, there's a difference between 'would Palestinians in the real world be better off without the instinct now' versus 'Would Palestinians from five hundred years ago be better off today in expectation without the instinct.'
I think this instinct, like a lot of human instincts towards violent retaliation under various circumstances, serves an important evolved purpose as a disincentive towards other people doing those thing in the first place.
An instinct towards psychotically attacking oppressors is an incentive against oppression. Not a strong enough disincentive to stop all oppression, oppression can be really really profitable, but God alone knows how much more oppression there would be in the world and in the history books without that instinct.
So again, I think its better to keep overall.
guesswho
3yr ago
Not knowing much about the topic, the two things I'd look for are 1. generic accelerationist tendencies (end the status quo and force a resolution, whatever it may be) and 2. Ways in which the specific (still living) people behind planning the attack benefit from it personally ('career' advancement/etc) even if it doesn't help the cause overall long-term.
guesswho
3yr ago
That is not necessarily my impression of how the British government works.
guesswho
3yr ago
Ok, so by 'IC cars will be banned in 5 years' you meant 'several environmental agencies have suggested phasing out new sales of IC cars to consumers within the next 12 years'.
That is indeed much closer to what I expected, and pretty much demonstrates my point about filter bubbles distorting your perception of the world.
It is interesting that discovering this huge gap between what you thought was happening, and what is actually happening, does not seem to have changed your position or argument at all. I propose that it should have, and I would be interested to hear your thought process on how you reacted to learning this.
Anyway, if we're moving from 'actual laws on the book' to 'proposals by agencies for things they think we should do a decade from now', then yes, we've always had lots of crazy shit like that, and we can't remember most of it because most of it never actually happens.
guesswho
3yr ago
Internal combustion cars are not going to be banned in five years. I don't where you're getting that from.
But think about McCarthyism or the Comics Code Authority, warning labels on music and stores refusing to stock albums after government investigations, etc. The government is always having a panic and going after something or other.
guesswho
3yr ago
It's only hard to avoid feeling that way if you are in a filter bubble that is pushing those narratives and subconsciously motivated to accept them.
Most people feel fine about those things, if they ever think about them at all. Or, more to the point, picking a few narrow interests where there have been some new regulations is a form of cherrypicking; it says little about the state of the world overall, you could find similar contemporary examples at any point in history.
guesswho
3yr ago
Honestly, I feel like the Right staked a claim on anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism long ago. Which is great for populist rallying of the masses, but pretty bad for running institutions where the top layers of management will pretty much always be elites and intellectuals.
guesswho
3yr ago
2nd comment because I had another thought:
A lot of it probably has to do with conservatives making Marxism sound super cool and awesome for the last 3-4 decades?
Like, if Marxism actually meant, in the public imagination, 'Stalin and Mao and nothing else', it would probably still be unpopular.
But conservatives have applied the label to everything from every attempt the government makes to help people (that includes spending money) to every attempt by workers to organize or otherwise improve their bargaining power relative to bosses to basically every form of critical analysis and critical theory (post-modern neo-Marxism) to most of Hollywood and the entertainment industry to etc. etc. etc.
So, given that Marxism means all of that in the popular imagination, then yeah, of course people are going to like it, or at least not get universal support for virulently attacking it.
As far as I can tell, the process went something like 'Communist countries were legitimately awful and threatening -> Conservatives attacked American communists and Marxists in a reaction against those terrible nations and threats -> This worked so well that conservatives continued to call everything their political opponents did communist/Marxist as a generic smear for decades -> The next generation of their political opponents found that they were growing up in a world where everything they wanted to do and be was being called Marxist -> The next generation really likes Marxism'
Maybe the same thing will happen with racism if the left keeps using it as a generic smear against everything the right does, seems like that's already happening a little bit in places like this, between HBD and 'despite' and so forth. Of course, as other commenters have pointed out, the difference is that Marxism has a utopian vision it can rally all kinds of people around ,whereas racism is definitionally decisive and exclusionary, so no matter how much it is recontextualized it still has a limited audience. But time will tell.
On a per capita basis, I'll put Marxism up against the Crusades and etc. any day of the week, and people don't fire Christians either.
Ignoring for the moment the endless arguments about how many people were actually killed by Marxism vs other features of Marxist countries and their enemies, how many people are killed by capitalism and whether we're applying the same standards to those two accounting, what ideology gets the blame for the British empire and slavery and etc., I'm sure we're all sick of that debate.
Leaving all that aside, I think this idea you're applying of 'social acceptability of an ideology is/should be primarily determined by how many people it historically killed' is something you made up just now, and is neither how society ussually determines such things nor a good decision criteria to use abstractly.
Also, you know, McCarthyism, every backlash has its day in the sun.
guesswho
3yr ago
I would also like to add that if conservatives won't forgive former racists, they're conceding that the only path to salvation is to become a full-on leftist.
Well, they're not forgiving well-known public figures with a googleable history of overt racism.
This is a rather small number of people, and it's easier to just promote a new talking head to prominence than to redeem a tarnished one. That's show business, I'm afraid.
Those restrictions don't apply to voters, or anyone else who isn't going to embarrass them.
guesswho
3yr ago
Sure, I was replying to a specific comment making that specific argument.
guesswho
3yr ago
This is not my area of expertise, but 'People buy more guns and become less able to wage war' seems inherently self-contradictory to me. Could you explain what you mean in a bit more detail?
guesswho
3yr ago
I accept all of that as good critiques of the law, and perhaps sufficient reason to overturn it if it can't be reformed to meet those objections.
But I don't think it addresses my point, which was that these laws don't affect enough people to meaningfully interfere with the 'state should fear its people' value of 2A.
guesswho
3yr ago
I mean, I agree that a priori you can expect systemic inconveniences to have large downstream effects, sure, that's something you should always check for.
But the best way to check for that is to actually look at the data, and as far as I can tell, gun ownership rates haven't dropped in the last 20 years, despite all the measures passed in that timeframe.
It just doesn't look like any of these recent measures have actually decreased gun ownership, so I don't think the argument that they are disarming the citizenry and making them weak to tyrants holds water.
There are lots of other good arguments against these measures, just not that one, AFAICT.
guesswho
3yr ago
Slightly complicated.
Census is based on self-ID. To the extent that the culture at large uses the one drop rule to define people - which it mostly does, in practice - the census will do the same.
Next layer of complexity is that the census allows you to select as many racial ids as you want, so you can say you are a white black hispanic asian if you want to.
This leads to the situation where people reporting on the census can parse categories in multiple ways, such as 'any white' (white plus other categories) vs. 'white alone' (white and no other categories).
Usually when someone cites a number that shows shrinking white populations, they are citing the 'white alone' number without mentioning that they are doing so to their audience. Which is about 18% lower than the 'any white' number.
guesswho
3yr ago
I took one semester of anthropology courses in college and that was enough to tell me I don't want to return to a hunter-gatherer level of civilization.
There are plenty of forests available to you if you do want that. Until then, please stop trying to destroy my civilization.
guesswho
3yr ago
It hasn't worked in the sense that views critical of wokeness have not come to dominate society.
I mean, they took the white house and supreme court and the majority of state assemblies, that's pretty dominant.
Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?
There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'
Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.
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