Politics thread (USA Elections 2016) - Page 303

On September 02 2021 00:46 Baalim wrote: Show nested quote + On August 30 2021 16:00 Stroggoz wrote: I put the share of responsibility for many problems on both individual people and systems, after all, it is people's life choices that perpetuate a political or economic system. If someone wants to be responsible for their individual actions, usually many other people are too, and often the best way to be responsible for them is to deal with them on a political scale. Oh yes, the right way to take responsibility for your own actions is to protest lol.   One of the reasons I don't take the individual responsibility rhetoric from the right very seriously is that no one who preaches it practices it. Yep, ignore right wingers who preach personal responsibility and dont take their own. Also ignore left wingers who preach redistribution and don't redistribute their own.

The first one is obviously true for many real world problems. Any grade-schooler who puts 2 seconds thought would realize that the best strategy for dealing with the problems I cited is a political one. Of course things like raising children-usually not relevant to politics.

The second one, I basically focus on issues that I can affect. The reason I don't critique NK's ideology is that i can't affect that, I am being responsible for my own actions, (unlike you). It's quite hard for you to grasp the concept of taking responsibility for your own actions, you are one of those right wingers that constantly critique things you can't affect.

On September 03 2021 05:23 Loco wrote: It's not wrongfully attributed because it's not a free market, it only works by manipulating people's worldviews, their sense of self and their desires. Do you consume more or less shit you don't need if you are less satisfied with your life and if you are (or feel) alone? You know the answer to that.

Yeah Bezos is plotting to make everybody dissatisfied with their life that so that they consume more stuff, is is not the nature of the self-awareness of an ape staring at the gaping abyss of meaninglessness no sir... it was Bezos wanting you to buy stuff lol.

The more atomized a society - the less you have a sense of societal obligations - the less satisfied with life you will be, and also the less access to sharable things you have - so you end up buying your own. And that is why atomization has been a central part of the "evolution" of capitalism - to grow markets and make new ones you have to grow unhappiness and loneliness, and the best way to make people unhappy is to incentivize their lives in a way that pulls them away from what has naturally made them human and form strong communities in the past. Relationships based on a trust cannot be the default of human relationships under capitalism, they must be based on fear - fear of the Other, fear of the future, of missing out. Constant fear, generally at the subconscious level, is a defining factor of this new economy.

Atomization is not an evolution of capitalism, atomization is a byproduct of globalism, centralization and megacities, we've never evolved to deal with socities of these sizes empathy breaks down past certain scale.

No you dont create unhapiness and loneliness to grow markets lol, yeah I want to open a coffee shop on the corner... but first I gotta kill some kids to grow the market lol.

Elaborate on the fear thing because you are just stating things without explaining any reason.

It's ironic how much you harp on Drone's supposed myopia when you indirectly make the same argument you condemn by thinking that individual free will and familial values exist in their own bubbles and could be strengthened significantly irrespective of powerful higher order economic forces.

not irrespective, these values are perfectly compatible with the free market.

A central belief behind right-wing ideology is to encourage a "stay thirsty" mentality and the belief that pain builds character. You believe people should not feel entitled to anything, that they should be their own person, responsible for themselves only. That people are fundamentally lazy and uncreative and if their basic needs are not consistently threatened they will just vedge out in front of the TV and do drugs while taking advantage of other people's hard work. From this POV, kicking out your kid is obviously the moral thing to do - you help them build character and learn the "real lessons of life" - that you are on your own, responsible for yourself, and you can't afford to be lazy.

-Yes, right-wing ideology encourages to try to push yourself forward (not that I neccesarely agree with it fwiw)
- some pain builds character, the pain caused by hardships in these attempts at bettering yourself.
- You should be entitled to freedom to forge your own life, certainly not to other's peoples work.
- You are responsible for yourself first before anything else, but you are also responsible in lesser degree to your family, to lesser degree to your other loved ones, lesser degree to your community and so on.
- Lazyness is a vice, some struggle with it more than others, if you create a system where sloth is rewarded the same as overcoming it you will have a lot of sloth inf your society the same with any vice.

- Your conclulsion is totally wrong, the epidemic of family breakdown and homelesness in the US isn't caused by stern right-wing parents lol, its a phenomenom happening in left-leaning mega cities, its as I've been saying the result of atomization due to societal scale and statist incentives.

This is usually the justification a parent has, but the main reason it's done is not out of this "tough love" - it's because it's financially advantageous to the parents doing it. It's an unburdening because of either immediate pressures or a fear of the future and the parent not having enough to meet their own needs at some point (the kid takes away from the "rainy day fund''). Its increase is directly linked to the increasing cost of living while salaries stagnate and decent worker benefits become more difficult to acquire over time in such an economy.

Hahaha man I gotta give this 1st world blindness a name...

We in latinamerica have far less resources, greater uncertanty of the future yet we don't kick kids to the streets, it has nothing to do with stagnating wages and worker benefits, actually theres a very common saying about having an "extra mouth to feed" we just say "add more water to the soup".

All these years in angst against about what you abhor you've been charging at a windmill while misunderstanding the root causes of these things.

On September 03 2021 07:44 Spitfiree wrote: Texas banned abortion after the 6th week of pregnancy. It's interesting how populism keeps pushing towards degradation. The whole 'prolife' - 'proabortion' argument is so stupid. Women will keep getting an abortion even if it's illegal, what laws like this one is doing is making the entire thing quite unsafe for them. On top of that almost all abortions are done because it would be a single mom raising the child, it's quite surprising that conservatives tolerate that but wouldn't increase the social welfare for single moms. The hypocrisy of the entire thing is astonishing.

Make X thing legal because people will continue doing it is a dumb argument easily refuted as it just was.

People against abortion see it as murder, taking a human life, that in no way is inconsistent with not wanting them murdered but not wanting to pay for the upbringing of them either, they think the people who brough them to the world should be held responsible, not the public.

Now, there are a lot of holes in their beliefs regarding this issue, but misunderstanding their views and making bad arguments is not the way to reach an agreement, it just makes people dig their heels more into their dogmatic views and thats why you get Texas laws that don't even exclude abortions from rape and feminists with t-shirts bragging about abortions they've had.

On September 05 2021 23:19 Baalim wrote: Yeah Bezos is plotting to make everybody dissatisfied with their life that so that they consume more stuff, is is not the nature of the self-awareness of an ape staring at the gaping abyss of meaninglessness no sir... it was Bezos wanting you to buy stuff lol.

He is "plotting" in the sense that he is actively working with people that manipulate your psychology in order to spend more time on his website than others and buy more things. If you are theoretically perfectly happy and don't have a void to fill with products you are not going to be on Amazon, unless that's where you do your grocery shopping.

He also makes the life of his employees miserable, they are overworked, over-surveilled, and a good percent of them are on food stamps and have other jobs. It's people in those precarious situations that will want to reward themselves with cheap dopamine hits the most. (Btw, I think there is close to a 0% chance that you would be making the arguments that you are making for societal change if you had had the experience of working in an Amazon factory.)

But it's not him that is the main problem, it's the politicians and the libertarian economists that have pushed for free market ideology in the 70s and onward and which have allowed people like Bezos and these massive corporations to rule over people while offering very little in return. They are the ones who destroyed the possibility for real politics to exist and sold the false idea to the public that the market can fulfill the human being by itself, that it is democracy itself.

In his classic book "Propaganda," Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of the public relations industry, put it this way: "Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained." He argued that business "cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda… to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable".

Without propaganda, capitalism fails. And what is propaganda if not convincing someone that they are miserable or deficient, and that they need something that you have? Fun fact: the general director of General Motors wrote an article in 1929 called "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied". He said in it, "there is no place anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change all the time – and it is always going to be that way because the world only goes along one road, the road of progress."

This is capitalism and its progress - over-production, the constant creation of new products for new needs through the manipulation of a persistently dissatisfied and restless consumer.

And the whole point is that people do not stare at the abyss; they are not even aware that there is one, because (1) they work too much to contemplate such things and (2) there are too many distractions and entertainments available to them nowadays while they are not working.

The response to this awareness of the abyss could be to plunge deeper, to ask questions, to wish to become educated; not to numb the pain with everything that passes through your hands. It has been that for many cultures throughout history. People used to be able to experience pain and existential dread and dwell in it more than they can nowadays, and the development of capitalism (i.e. the progress story that it sells) has everything to do with it.

Atomization is not an evolution of capitalism, atomization is a byproduct of globalism, centralization and megacities, we've never evolved to deal with socities of these sizes empathy breaks down past certain scale.

What you're describing with those words is the natural evolution of capitalism, so I don't know what you're talking about and how it makes sense in your head. You think capitalism could have succeeded without globalism? That it's not built into the very logic of it?

No you dont create unhapiness and loneliness to grow markets lol, yeah I want to open a coffee shop on the corner... but first I gotta kill some kids to grow the market lol.

There are only so many businesses that you can have in a society that serve an actual purpose. A coffee shop is one of the few places where people can go and for fairly cheap be able to have some kind of communal space or work space these days. I'd argue it's still not essential though and coffee's not good for people and you can make better and cheaper drinks yourself but their job is to convince you that it is worth it.

If you are to grow the economy you need superfluous, wasteful, damaging business activity. If you take a capitalist economy and try to make it a steady-state, minimalist, responsible one, it will not survive.

Elaborate on the fear thing because you are just stating things without explaining any reason.

Not much to elaborate on. People are constantly bombarded in capitalist society to be competitive and over-achieve, self-optimize, self-actualize, buy this product or this service or this investment because it will offer you value - at bottom it's all social control and it works because people live in fear. They don't feel like they have enough or are enough -- how could they? They've been sold the belief that nothing's ever enough.

People that live in fear are distrustful of others and don't build strong bonds with them, including with their family members, so it is no surprise to see what happens to children in many families in a hyper-competitive capitalist society.

not irrespective, these values are perfectly compatible with the free market.

You could at least try to make one argument for it instead of just claiming it.

We in latinamerica have far less resources, greater uncertanty of the future yet we don't kick kids to the streets, it has nothing to do with stagnating wages and worker benefits, actually theres a very common saying about having an "extra mouth to feed" we just say "add more water to the soup".

That's the point though - you don't live in generalized fear because you have each other to rely on to meet your basic needs. Despite living under capitalism, much of daily life operates under primitive communism in your society, much more than ours. If there wasn't this communistic element, you would live with people who would want to charge you money for the water that they add to the soup, and these are the kinds of people we increasingly become in North America. And that is the dystopia that you are blindly arguing for with your free market fundamentalism.

Turns out living in human society is "primitive communism"

Hey, are you gonna finish those fries? Primitive communism

Can I borrow your PlayStation? Primitive communism

Mom gives you a haircut? Primitive communism

Educate liquidpoker rightwingers on primitive communism without charging a teaching fee? Primitive communism

On September 06 2021 01:58 Loco wrote: He is "plotting" in the sense that he is actively working with people that manipulate your psychology in order to spend more time on his website than others and buy more things. If you are theoretically perfectly happy and don't have a void to fill with products you are not going to be on Amazon, unless that's where you do your grocery shopping.

You said that they plot to make you unhappy that is a very different claim.

He also makes the life of his employees miserable, they are overworked, over-surveilled, and a good percent of them are on food stamps and have other jobs. It's people in those precarious situations that will want to reward themselves with cheap dopamine hits the most. (Btw, I think there is close to a 0% chance that you would be making the arguments that you are making for societal change if you had had the experience of working in an Amazon factory.)

If you don't like working for Amazon you are free to look somewhere else, if there are no better job openings that means that means you are being paid what your labor is worth, if this isn't true then Amazon isn't playing by free market rules and that should be addressed.

But it's not him that is the main problem, it's the politicians and the libertarian economists that have pushed for free market ideology in the 70s and onward and which have allowed people like Bezos and these massive corporations to rule over people while offering very little in return. They are the ones who destroyed the possibility for real politics to exist and sold the false idea to the public that the market can fulfill the human being by itself, that it is democracy itself.

No libertarian economist would suggest lobbying, libertarians believe in the least amount of interference from the state in the economy, lobbying is the opposite of that ideal.

Only an idiot would think that a free market fulfills the human being? it fulfills the task of providing a working economic structure, personal fulfilment is up to you.

In his classic book "Propaganda," Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of the public relations industry, put it this way: "Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained." He argued that business "cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda… to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable". Without propaganda, capitalism fails. And what is propaganda if not convincing someone that they are miserable or deficient, and that they need something that you have? Fun fact: the general director of General Motors wrote an article in 1929 called "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied". He said in it, "there is no place anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change all the time – and it is always going to be that way because the world only goes along one road, the road of progress."

Advertisement is convincing people they are miserable and deficient is such a edgy kid in the 90s cliché... I don't see body positive ads selling any less product.

This is capitalism and its progress - over-production, the constant creation of new products for new needs through the manipulation of a persistently dissatisfied and restless consumer.

Your perception of the free market is Amazon on one side and a moron going into debt buying sneakers and phones... that aint it.

What you're describing with those words is the natural evolution of capitalism, so I don't know what you're talking about and how it makes sense in your head. You think capitalism could have succeeded without globalism? That it's not built into the very logic of it?

The free market can be applied at many scales, altho many libertarians believe in no-scale, no-borders, others dont like localists.

There are only so many businesses that you can have in a society that serve an actual purpose. A coffee shop is one of the few places where people can go and for fairly cheap be able to have some kind of communal space or work space these days. I'd argue it's still not essential though and coffee's not good for people and you can make better and cheaper drinks yourself but their job is to convince you that it is worth it.

If you are to grow the economy you need superfluous, wasteful, damaging business activity. If you take a capitalist economy and try to make it a steady-state, minimalist, responsible one, it will not survive.[/quote]

Well if everyone become an asetic monk overnight many markets would die sure, I dont like the idea of wearing torn clothes eating gruel nor retarded overconsumption.

Not much to elaborate on. People are constantly bombarded in capitalist society to be competitive and over-achieve, self-optimize, self-actualize, buy this product or this service or this investment because it will offer you value - at bottom it's all social control and it works because people live in fear. They don't feel like they have enough or are enough -- how could they? They've been sold the belief that nothing's ever enough. People that live in fear are distrustful of others and don't build strong bonds with them, including with their family members, so it is no surprise to see what happens to children in many families in a hyper-competitive capitalist society.

This kind of argument would go nowhere it just make abstract assumptions and build upon them

"People under socialism live in fear, fear of never archieving their potential, fear of diluting their individual into the masses...

People that live in fear are distrustful ergo X, Y Z.

See? this isn't a productive way to build arguments

That's the point though - you don't live in generalized fear because you have each other to rely on to meet your basic needs. Despite living under capitalism, much of daily life operates under primitive communism in your society, much more than ours. If there wasn't this communistic element, you would live with people who would want to charge you money for the water that they add to the soup, and these are the kinds of people we increasingly become in North America. And that is the dystopia that you are blindly arguing for with your free market fundamentalism.

No, bonds to other people, generosity, kindness are not "communism", they are independent of the economical system.

On September 06 2021 05:02 Santafairy wrote: Turns out living in human society is "primitive communism" Hey, are you gonna finish those fries? Primitive communism Can I borrow your PlayStation? Primitive communism Mom gives you a haircut? Primitive communism Educate liquidpoker rightwingers on primitive communism without charging a teaching fee? Primitive communism

ok so I think im a free-market primitive communist lol

Spitfiree why is Biden such a good friend of the Taliban

On September 09 2021 04:56 Santafairy wrote: Spitfiree why is Biden such a good friend of the Taliban

Did you really try to take a swing at me thinking I'm a supporter of Democrats in the USA? You don't learn do you

Let me show how big of a difference there is between the two:

https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020

No

On September 09 2021 07:40 Spitfiree wrote: Did you really try to take a swing at me thinking I'm a supporter of Democrats in the USA? You don't learn do you Let me show how big of a difference there is between the two: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL clown

another fellow primitive communist

Slam dunk Loco meme photoshop opportunity. So hard to resist the urge lol

On September 09 2021 23:12 Baalim wrote: Show nested quote + On September 09 2021 07:40 Spitfiree wrote: Did you really try to take a swing at me thinking I'm a supporter of Democrats in the USA? You don't learn do you Let me show how big of a difference there is between the two: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL clown

Really? :D

lol another gem from your link:




yeah lol, everyone is right wing authoritarian, Bernie Sanders is centrist lol

Looks like Spitfire is wrong again.

Surprise, surprise an aid package doesn't turn you into a leftie regardless of your opinion. Sanders is perceived as ultra-leftie when he is a moderate at best compared to European lefties.

Pretty much everyone in US politics has been a right authoritarian since their politics exist, that's common knowledge so this graph of the previous election is not surprising at all.

You could've spent 15 minutes reading their FAQ https://politicalcompass.org/faq to better understand how results are determined instead of making a fool of yourself.

You're just heavily influenced by the US's system where the notion of left and right is simply hilarious.

The reason that chart is quite popular is that it's basically an Orwellian construct. History is erased from it, (or rather not taken into consideration).

If the chart looked at all of political history, basically every single politician listed above will be on the same dot, (has the same coordinates). There might be some very marginal difference between sanders and trump if you zoom in a bit. It would be similar to how an alien might not notice the difference between a mouse and a human as we have very similar genetic material, comparing all life forms in the universe might make us pretty much the same species.

Obviously, all of history might be a bit extreme but if we actually considered a chart that took into account all of politics for the last century then it would have educational value rather than being good propaganda.

It's nice to compare sanders with EU politicians, but that's still a very small boundary on political views.

lol