domain:houseofstrauss.com
5434a
5hr ago
I use OneNote. Linux users seem to recommend Obsidian for similar purposes.
New pages are automatically dated, it has built in search, and you can embed many sorts of media from pics and video to spreadsheets. Decent OCR too for text within pasted images.
It's a lot easier and more versatile and feature rich than trying to do it with text files. Try it out.
SkoomaDentist
5hr ago
If Marxism does not work in practice, it doesn't matter how elegantly his theory is postulated
Ah, but you don't understand. Nobody has yet tried True Marxism! /s
thejdizzler
5hr ago
But both Maoism and the initial Soviet attempts to produce goods were commodity fetishism. Especially in Maoism there was this obsession with quantities of goods produced rather than with satisfying individual's use values. Even after NEP and in Dengism there were/are heavy amounts of commodity fetishism: focusing on raw quantities of goods produced rather than thinking about what the population actually needs
People love to dismiss the soviet system, and undoubtedly there were serious problems, but in some ways it was very impressive. The soviets took a country that was ravaged by civil war and by the after effects of WW1 that had never been fully industrialized and within 20 years managed to largely self-sufficiently outproduce the Nazis and win the Second World War. Yes lend-lease helped, but Soviet home industry did most of the heavy lifting.
After the war, it looked like things like linear algebra might help better calculate production quotas, but a combination of corruption, lack of compute power, and excessive focus on military spending made it impossible for the soviet standard of living to keep up with the West.
Can you explain the Rothbard quote a bit more? I feel like the easy explanation for that from within the LTV is that the labor equivalence ratios between different goods aren't calculated correctly. Although that kind of argument can quickly get into dogma territory, so maybe you're right.
Supah_Schmendrick
5hr ago
That just shows that the marxian concept of "use value" isn't fully capturing what people find...useful...about the things they buy, because money is entirely fungible into other "useful" items, and insofar as people are willing to spend it on one thing, they're revealing their utility function about both that thing and the other things they could have bought but aren't.
FtSoA
5hr ago
We can actually help deter China without threatening nuclear war if we have the tools needed to fight a conventional war.
I'm not arguing against the need for better conventional deterrents. But in any real conflict between nuclear powers, the willingness to go all the way up the escalatory ladder has to be symmetrical, or at least perceived as such. Otherwise one side is going to get its way.
If China goes for Taiwan, does the USN put itself in harm's way and fire upon Chinese assets? How do we respond if they sink a ship? Hit a regional base? Will we attack the mainland?
As with economics, the expectations matter almost more than actually what happens. If China thinks we'll back off because we are not fully committed to the fight then they will be emboldened to test our resolve. "Strategic ambiguity" was a clever means of not having a formal commitment but still making sure the Chinese were sufficiently worried to not try anything. I don't think that's going to work much longer. Either we gotta put a tripwire there as we have in South Korea, or it's going to become more and more clear the US will not risk a full confrontation.
For all the scary "brinksmanship" the public watched
The public did not "watch" most of the actually scary part. The JCS told Kennedy we should invade right off the bat. Kennedy later on was convinced it was necessary and preparations were made. Luckily, the Soviets were not willing to go down that path. Shooting down the U-2 or spooking the Soviet submarine (for which a single person stopped the launch of nuclear torpedoes) or any other incident could have set things off.
but from a certain point of view it was a success for the Soviet Union
Per Wikipedia, that's not how the Soviets felt:
The compromise embarrassed Khrushchev and the Soviet Union because the withdrawal of US missiles from Italy and Turkey was a secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and the Soviets were seen as retreating from a situation that they had started. Khrushchev's fall from power two years later was in part because of the Soviet Politburo's embarrassment at both Khrushchev's eventual concessions to the US and his ineptitude in precipitating the crisis.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5hr ago
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.
But Marxists don't care about winning or losing "the argument". What they want to do is change the rules by which the argument itself is conducted. They want a wholesale reevaluation of what it means to "win" or "lose" "the argument" in the first place.
If your politics is based on "whoever is producing the most goods most efficiently is the winner", then Marxists would consider that to be, to use one of Zizek's favorite phrases, "pure ideology". That belief is an ideological effect of capitalism itself. It's not a natural or obvious conclusion. You could conceivably hold a different belief instead.
This is not to say that Marxists must necessarily adhere to a degrowth ideology of course. Rather they would say that, whatever historical epoch comes after capitalism, the way in which inhabitants of that epoch think about concepts like "production" and "efficiency" will be as incomprehensible to us as the capitalism vs Marxism debate is to hunter-gatherers. Marxism at its core is a theory of history, and how contradictions in social relations drive historical change (e.g. the contradiction between the formal freedom of neoliberal free trade, and the fact that this formal freedom can paradoxically result in less actual freedom as globalized hypercompetition forces homogenization). Your historical epoch plays a role in shaping what counts as a "winning" or "losing" argument to you, what counts as a "reasonable" political aim, etc.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Yes, Kiev was in the Russian partition.
thejdizzler
5hr ago
This is a straw man of the labor theory of value. And also equally applies to capitalist speculative bubbles. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the divorcing of use value from monetary value.
faceh
5hr ago
More to the point, sometimes you can't even determine how much people will 'want' something until you take the risk of producing it and trying to sell it.
And sometimes you guess wrong, or you underestimate the ultimate demand and have to adjust.
That risk doesn't go away, its just a matter of who absorbs the risk of getting it wrong (or gets rewarded for getting it right!), and the existence of such a risk makes for one hell of an incentive to get it right.
Vs. the Soviet Commissary who is only punished if the widget factory doesn't produce enough widgets in a given month, even if those widgets are just being thrown out. So he'll happily keep the widgets flowing as long as he can.
Amadan's put me as having a "mad hate" for him, and while I try to be even-handed with my interactions with him directly, I've also abandoned TheSchism as a result of his behavior and have been trying to keep any discussion on twitter as fact-specific as possible because I don't see any possible progress or even third-party benefit from value discussions. There's been a few times that's tested my commitment against unfollowing people for disagreement.
((While I hope he has luck putting his money where his mouth is on CEP, I expect that if he gets remotely close to a serious concrete policy going anywhere against or parallel to progressive institutions, he's going to get figuratively drowned in teacher's union meat. And more likely he's going to find his compatriots taking a train straight to Abilene the second one of The Groups makes any demand, no matter how direct the contradiction to CEP's goals, like he did when he thought Yglesias actually meant anything when talking new centrism.))
I expect Trace would point more to the results of his last conversation here.
phailyoor
5hr ago
A communist factory is having its workers toil away for hours making widgets that nobody wants. The value of those widgets is zero irregardless of how much work went into making them.
That's not exactly a nitpick. How much people want something is incredibly important in determining its value.
FtSoA
5hr ago
Point of order: Yes it is. Misapplication of metaphors is against the rules.
Anyway, "domino theory" worked.
Domino theory worked in establishing the Iron Curtain too.
I agree that, in general, people are bad at evaluating dominoes falling and the slipperiness of slopes on either side. But it's only the critics who can invoke the thought terminating cliches of "that's a logical fallacy" or "domino theory was false" without engaging with actual reality.
FtSoA
5hr ago
That's what "rogue" means here. In a civil war, the ChiComms won, but didn't quite get back the full territory of China.
The exact history of who controlled what when isn't even relevant here, strictly speaking.
I love history trivia too, but both sides believe in One China what do you think you're arguing for here?
Breathlessly awaiting someone to upload "The Marxist Explanation of the Labubu Phenomenon" to Youtube.
comfortable
5hr ago
I'm thinking of keeping a journal. It's something my parents tried to instill in me as a child, but I didn't see the point then (of course). Now that I'm much older, I think I can see more of why that type of record keeping/thought organizing might be useful.
I'm planning to type my entries on my Windows desktop. While my initial plan is to just make a folder of text files, I think it would useful to have software that helps me organize it. Ideally, I'd like to be able to sort entries by date or topic (tag?), with multiple entries per date and the possibility of associating other media with entries.
Are there any journal keepers here on The Motte with software recommendations or other journal tips?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
Good or bad depend entirely on which law we're talking about.
My whole point is that we should be talking about fewer laws.
When you use legislation and regulation on a case-by-case basis as you described, you're playing whack-a-mole without ever looking up at the bigger picture. You create a patchwork of laws that, unintentionally, start to bleed into one another and now you have "spaghetti code" of legislation. Businesses - and consumers! - are painted into corners without realizing it and after it's too late. It is also extremely unlikely that these corners will "balance out" fairly across various industries and consumer segments. And then you have the situation we have today.
Complexity is the enemy, especially when refactoring of the system is slow or difficult. Congress likes to pass laws, but it very, very rarely retracts previous legislation.
FtSoA
5hr ago
Makes you wonder why we were willing to commit so much materiel to Afghanistan for so long if we care about maintaining military strength for larger enemies.
Come on. Please, just think for five seconds.
What did we actually have in Afghanistan? How much of it was remotely relevant to confronting "larger enemies"? Spoiler:
Keeping the U.S. locked in Afghanistan gave our enemies pretty solid ROI too, and we have virtually nought to show for it now.
Actually the Iranians in particular hated it. But also it was a very cheap military engagement as these things go.
Why were we concerned about Russia's military at all for such purposes? What threat did they pose to the U.S.'s interests outside of our need to reassure allies we're still top dog?
You can argue that the US should give up caring much about Europe and leave NATO and let Russia do whatever it wants, but that's not the world we actually live in.
Now we've got an ongoing commitment to sustain a conflict that isn't going to pay off much for us unless the Ukrainians pull off an increasingly unlikely win.
Technically, we've had a commitment for decades. But also even if Ukraine loses you're failing to consider the counterfactual where Putin just took over in weeks. That would be worse.
what exactly do we think we're doing here that's worth so many deaths.
Stopping Putin from conquering his neighbors at will? Preserving norms of liberalism and Western mutual support against aggression?
That doesn't really address the point that any invasion by Russia relies on sufficient manpower, and by absolute definition, with declining birth rates, their manpower will only decrease if they wait.
You're leaving out the side of equation where Ukraine is also facing demographic challenges. It's a symmetrical problem.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5hr ago
I don’t hate him, but anyone who ragequits a forum forever because people said mean things about them immediately loses respect from me.
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 they actually got their way and were able to implement the system.
The trajectory of Venezuela and (recently) Argentina alone should make someone skeptical of their ideals!
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, or that Marxism has viable answers... 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 it has been tried (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 helps improve most things. 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?
5hr ago
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
If you were waiting for the right moment to add a flair, this is your moment.
And for what it's worth, Russian influence seems more benevolent than US influence.
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?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr 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
6hr 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.
Have to agree with this. Marx's central argument is that focusing on pure production is confusing use-value for monetary value. Capitalist focus on production above all else results in commodity fetishism and the misallocation of labor and resources to goods that don't provide much use value to members of society.
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