domain:traditionsofconflict.com
thejdizzler
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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.
8hr 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
8hr 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.
8hr 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?
8hr 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
8hr 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
9hr 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
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
9hr 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
9hr ago
There are Trace haters here?
FarmReadyElephants
9hr 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
9hr 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
9hr 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.
Yes, Kiev was in the Russian partition.
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