domain:imgur.com
faceh
just now
I gave up on Marxism as a 'serious' ideology (maybe such a thing is already an oxymoron) long ago when I learned that they've failed to resolve the Economic Calculation Problem even though it was introduced 100 years ago. Even though it kept rearing its heads every time
You can redefine 'efficiency,' you can try to redefine people's desires or propose that as long as things are more 'fair' (as defined by you) it doesn't matter if people's desires are fully sated...
But end of the day if your economy is not producing as much of [desirable things] as efficiently as a comparable economy using a different system, you are losing the argument.
Even more telling that even the partial solutions require re-introduce market mechanisms, and thus private property and trade.
But rather than take this critique (and the various real-world experiments that have occurred) seriously and throwing their efforts into truly solving it or at least trying solutions at smaller scales... they just plow on ahead trying to remake various economies into their preferred system and damn the predictable consequences.
Someone I read recently (might have been here?) pointed out that almost all notable lefties these days aren't even trying to pretend there's any place where socialism works and people are thriving, its literally just power politics at this point, leverage grievances, make exorbitant promises, and lie through your teeth to get to a position where, ironically, you can leech massive amounts of wealth off the Capitalist system, and deliver some of that to your supporters as reward. The more earnest ones might still try to claim they're opposing fascism but its almost impossible to believe that they don't know how their proposed system has failed to achieve its goals everywhere at this point. (this is the part where someone says "ALWAYS HAS BEEN")
At this point I am genuinely in favor of a permanent exchange/exile program where avowed communists/marxists over the age of, say, 25 can be sent to any given country of their choice that will take them, and we will accept one citizen from said country that can correctly answer some economics 101 questions.
On the other hand, if there's any "moderate" Marxists who dislike Capitalism but aren't actively trying to dismantle it, I'd also be willing to put them into a policy thinktank where they can propose methods of possibly addressing the worst excesses of Capitalist society (measured in a quantifiable way and compared to a meaningful alternative/baseline!) and work on making Capitalism better. I don't want to remove all ideological competition to Capitalism, that would be hypocritical, and our own theory says competition makes things better. But these Marxists would have to understand that the very instant they're caught doing any of that activist shit, I, personally, will be loading them on the one-way flight to North Korea.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2m ago
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
If you were waiting for the right moment to add a flair, this is your moment.
FtSoA
6m ago
And for what it's worth, Russian influence seems more benevolent than US influence.
Why are you like this?
How much are they paying you?
Why do so many countries desire NATO membership?
Seriously just go read about how the Europeans bordering Russia feel and stop pretending the US is the only actor in the world.
You could try to make the arguments of "cautious" and "beneficial" about China and I'd give you half credit. But about Russia?
Come on what are you smoking.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6m ago
It's a fair question. My subjective impression (i.e I have zero data for this, just a gut feeling based on the games I have played) is that there are fewer of those gems in absolute terms even though the overall number of games has increased. But that's not data, just how it has seemed to me.
He has this weird one-two "pouncing panther - wounded gazelle" gimmick, that I personally got rather fed up with. Maybe he got better after moving on from here, but that would go against my priors of how becoming an influencer affects people.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17m ago
For various definitions of "hater", yes. I think he's a very interesting writer and thinker, and I firmly believe his heart's more or less in the right place. I also think he's one of the better examples about how these virtues are insufficient in the present situation.
crushedoranges
33m ago
If Marxism does not work in practice, it doesn't matter how elegantly his theory is postulated: no more than we don't have to read Mein Kampf to present a convincing rebuttal of Nazism.
As for commodity fetishism and LTV, why do people want to buy Belle Delphine's gamer girl bathwater? Subjective theory of value (STV) is that it is not labor or the raw materials that determine the price of the good, but the people buying and selling. Can Marx explain the used panties market? The collectable card market? Not without extensive academic arm-twisting or moralistic dismissal.
I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick.
The labour theory of value makes economically inaccurate predictions and was falsified as such before Capital was even published (Smith himself, who invented it, admitted it cannot account for short-term fluctuations in prices and offered alternatives). You can say a lot of good about Marx's sociological analysis, you can say no good about the LTV. It's just wrong. The only way you can say it's not wrong is by turning it into a moral dogma.
To quote Rothbard:
[I]n the real world, profit rates clearly tend toward equality (or, as Marx termed it, an 'average rate of profit'), and that real prices or exchange-values in capitalist markets therefore do not exchange at their Marxian quantity-of-Iabour values. Marx admitted this crucial problem, and promised that he could solve the problem successfully in a later volume of Capital. He struggled with this problem for the rest of his life, and never solved it
If we're to call this a nitpick, we're to call all of science a nitpick for discarding theories that make empirically false predictions.
the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized
The reason for the NEP is that Lenin tried Marxian economics and it so massively failed that they had to pragmatically adopt bourgeois economics.
The reason for Dengism is a similar pragmatic concession to the massive toll of Maoism.
Marxian ideas have been implemented, they simply did not produce the expected results. Collective farms do not output more food than centrally planned or privately owned alternatives all else being equal.
FarmReadyElephants
39m ago
There are Trace haters here?
FarmReadyElephants
44m ago
They're bad at risk evals and self-awareness.
IMO Putin errs on the side of caution. For Russian security, he really shouldn't have let the US get 8 years to fortify Ukraine before the invasion. He's a patient leader, to a fault.
Russia projects power over its direct neighbors and a few allies in its neighborhood. We helped overthrow a democratic government on the other side of the world. Well, many actually. I think its weird that we wouldn't expect a large state like Russia to have some influence over its neighbors. And in times of peace, it is a non-issue. It's only something we trot out when the war machine needs a few $trillion and people at State are getting bored.
And for what it's worth, Russian influence seems more benevolent than US influence. It's pragmatic and non-ideological in the post-Soviet era, focusing on mutual economic benefit and security. On the other hand, I lose track of which Jihadis are the good guys that we are using to spread democracy and which are the bad Jihadis that maybe used to be the good Jihadis and etc, etc.
FarmReadyElephants
47m ago
Kiev was part of Russia from 1667 to 1991, barring a two-year interregnum during the Bolshevik Revolution. It is also the founding city of all Rus civilizations and cultures. Personally, I can't tell the difference between the two languages.
Kiev was taken by the Russians in 1667, only a little over a hundred years before the United States existed.
I imagine if New York broke away in a moment of national weakness. We might allow it. But if then China started installing military bases there and buying out the politicians, we would undoubtedly find it galling and invade.
FarmReadyElephants
53m ago
Nice so in 2014 we got strong allies in the region
Not at all. Ukraine was still pretty divided internally between vehemently anti-Russia and pro-Russia factions, with lots of less dedicated people in the middle. It was conceivable that the pro-Russia faction could have gained the upper hand again eventually.
I think what is novel after 2014 is that US war material starts moving into the country. So maybe the pro-Russia faction would have been forcibly suppressed if it looked like they were going to win another election. But it would have been messy
Personally, I think it served US interests just fine to leave Ukraine as a border state. The war has been very costly in men and treasure, and the US seemed to be in the driver's seat in starting it.
Tiber727
1hr ago
I'm someone who subscribes to the capitalism but nice theory. I read your linked previous comment. I think some mandatory training is stupid, but I think you're picking some low-handing fruit. Capitalism but nice can just as easily be EU telling phone manufacturers to stop making proprietary phone chargers when USB exists, or that John Deere needs to stop making their tractors unrepairable by third-parties for arbitrary reasons. Good or bad depend entirely on which law we're talking about.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
The Marxist mythology is very much based on the story of Eden and the fall of man. It is imagined that the first stage of human society was "primitive communism", which is when, contrary to your assertion, society was at its most egalitarian, gender and race relations were at their most egalitarian, society was not based on hierarchical relations of authority, etc. And then that whole "agricultural civilization" thing had to come along and ruin it.
The orthodox Marxist position is that "there's nowhere to go but forward", the only way to reclaim what was lost and make Man whole again is through the ever-increasing development of the technological forces of production. But there's also an anarcho-primitivist strain of leftist socialist thought that says that we should actually be going backwards, back to the garden, back to our lost innocence. For certain environmentalists, degrowth is the mythological symbol of the ultimate fulfillment of the demands of woke identity politics.
Not to say that every member of a Green party is a self-conscious primitivist of course, only that this way of thinking is "in the air". People who emotionally resonate with these ideas are disproportionately likely to be attracted to environmentalist politics.
thejdizzler
1hr ago
A lot of people love to criticize Marx without actually having read him. You and this sub-stacker included. Where does Marx ever support wokeness in his writings? Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct. I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick. Western leftists don't actually want to read Marx (because he is hard), nor do they seriously want to implement his ideas (also hard, and never successfully done, you can complain all you want about me pulling out the "not real communism" card, but the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized).
nomenym
1hr ago
When people talk about tribalism, they're usually only talking about the psychology of inter-tribal competition. The failure mode is xenophobia, and it codes masculine. But when our ancestors started to live in tribes, they also developed a psychology for intra-tribal competition. This is also a kind of tribalism, but it is usually ignored. It's failure mode is oikophobia, and it seems to code more feminine.
The types of people who join geen parties and such seem to excel at the intra-tribal competition. They tend to thrive in institutions, especially when there are few outside threats to their society (which they tend to not recognize and ignore). They join factions that push against or subvert the existing hierarchy, often surreptitiously. But whe they become surrounded by people just like them, their inherent oikophobia kicks in and they start to push against and subvert their own faction and start the cycle all over again. I think it's like a evolved social strategy that is now firing in an evolutionarily novel habitat, and it tends to create a lot of dysfunction.
Armin
1hr ago
I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
I don’t know how you can observe the last 3 years of war and think Russia would roll over a NATO country
Most NATO countries are geographically smaller and less well well equipped than Ukraine, and have fewer troops.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
Early-game civ is easily 10x as fun for me.
I agree. Everything has got higher stakes in the early game. Things that later seem like insignificant motions to go through, like securing a new unique luxury or defending/taking a city, or getting a trade route going to boost your growth, are very fun in the early game. Because it matters and because the future of your civ is uncertain and at risk.
I think you can use mods to help with this though - sort of. You can cap the tech at a certain age, or cut the build times by half or more, which effectively makes the early game last longer if you play at a slower game pace. Here's one such mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=664327211
Now you can e.g. conquer the world long before the modern era.
I'll take his slot, if the game is still running.
This is why I feel like environmentalist parties are not serious. Every single one inevitably ends up falling victim to the SJW, and care more about those issues than things like the environment. These days hear them all saying "climate justice" because more important than climate change itself is how it affects minorities and lgbt. I'd imagine if the roles were switched and whitey lived in the hardest hit areas, the SJW would be sneering with glee at their misfortune.
I actually wonder if the advent of electric cars and cheap solar will spur the development of an environmentalist faction of the right wing. Since the cost of pumping guzzoline into their monster trucks is the most salient reason why normies despise decarbonization efforts.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Or, there never was any national security threat from TikTok, the ban was just classic bipartisanship in the "evil and stupid" sense, and Trump keeps kicking the ball down the road because he thinks doing so gives him some leverage in trade negotiations.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
Come to the black sea resorts and try to figure out who is who.
I don’t hate him, but anyone who ragequits a forum forever because people said mean things about them immediately loses respect from me.
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