All of us need to unite

I agree, but the problem with a socialist healthcare system is the amount of people on a wait list because of the exceptions some people receive or just the strains on the industry, here in Australia as an American I've seen my wife's family members being put on waiting lists while their time is running out and under the system we have in the U.S., I lost my mother. So Balance should be the overall state we should all achieve personally and globally sadly my cynicism is not seeing that happen anytime soon, at least globally.

OB1Shinobi wrote: 3 different stories about industrial capitalism

Nice story that guy made up. When you look at the facts, they tell a very different story.

Whyte Horse wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: 3 different stories about industrial capitalism

Nice story that guy made up. When you look at the facts, they tell a very different story.

The "facts" in both videos are all from a certain perspective. As quoted from the first video, "anyone can find experts that support their side." The arguments and facts in both videos can be true (a lot of claims were made without sources), but they are being presented without the equally true counter arguments. We need to see a fair comparison of Socialism and Capitalism with pros and cons of both in actual practice and then try to judge what is best for the current economic and political climate.

It also needs to be clear what kind of Socialism and Capitalism we are comparing. Are we speaking strictly economics, or do we include the form of government as well? A nation can be democratic while being socialist and capitalist at the same time. The United States of America is a weird mix of capitalist free market economy regulated by a democratic republic form of government that allows for socialist welfare and health programs that sometimes differ from state to state. It really is an experiment in combining many different schools of thought. That's partly why it sometimes goes bat shit crazy.

And on a side note, the video saying Marx is "considered the most influential philosopher to have ever lived" is pretty subjective. I think Plato, Aristotle, and Descarte might just be in the running.

Adder wrote:

Whyte Horse wrote: Check this out: -snip- Noam Chomsky

I don't see that as a critique of capitalism, which is unusual as usually I think is is selling socialism all the time. His point that ever increasing production will decimate the Earth is very true, even if we start trying to move offworld right away. I do tend to take the hard line that humanity needs to move to Space and leave Earth as a sanctuary to be wild, for native flora and fauna - and that we have proved we are not intended to be inhabitants with them, but either destroyers or guardians of it.... so its up to us to choose which one, and not choosing is still a choice. It's not a particularly attractive proposition, Space, but I've imagination enough to see how it could work given where we are and what we'd need. It's never easy to leave the warm cosy nest.

The issues he raises are serious, but the solutions need to address the larger problems before the smaller ones, else the smaller ones will probably reoccur if they are a result of the larger ones.

If I was to assume he is being anti-capitalist and selling socialism still, then I can put on my anti-Chomsky hat and make a donkey of myself....

Warning: Spoiler!

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a system of convenient myths.

I think he means 'All civilization has developed within a system of convenient myths'?

The driving force has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation.

I've always thought Noam like so stage his arguments with suggestions presented as fact. So on this point I instead think it tends to be 'engaged', and given that, promises the opportunity for public benefit only among other things. I'd disagree it's the main reason - rather its just the industrialization of human endeavor. The issue at hand is the forms that endeavor can take, socialism takes the power away from the individual by limiting a capacity for growth while capitalism mediates growth into a uniform element to serve as a measure of the system throughout the system - so that something can mitigate the dynamics of civilization without it falling back to the cycle of empire rise, empire crash. Capitalism is not perfect, but its weaknesses are mostly representative of factors which would be worse in socialism. There are entire professions dedicated to sorting out the weaknesses specific to capitalism, so there is no need for academia to invent fairytales and confuse people with crosstalking concepts.

His key point here seems to argue against any nature of specialization, which itself generates a suite of needs from the public to support what it offers the public. That exchange becomes the place for a market, and a currency is needed to allow the market to self regulate based on demand. The root of the problem of any market is the peoples use of the market. There should be plenty of regulation in place to protect markets from being controlled, but that is the real game I'd imagine and outside of campuses or lecterns.

It has long been understood very well that a society based on this principal will destroy itself in time.

Yea, because capitalism like this has been done before..... never. But seriously, to his point that material private gain was done for public benefit can be projected across into all sorts of things like feudalism etc. I just do not see the relevance to capitalism beyond the realization that a person can create and trade, and as a result any increase in their own capacity meant they could increase that which they can create and trade.

It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can.

Has he been to socialist countries?? I haven't, but they seem to have been very inefficient and slow in achieving progress. Even in those places population growth rapidly outstrips those civilizations and succumb to the very same fate he levels at capitalism.... at least the capitalist system endeavors to maximize efficiency and progress in an attempt to allow that problem to be detected and confronted. To blame the incumbent system for all things because its incumbent is inane. Is his point to create an emotional distortion on reality for career reasons, and in that he is not alone, so perhaps he is just using capitalism to his own ends at the expense of risking hypocrisy to his true self and either confusing folk or motivating them to explore an erroneous line of reasoning.

At this stage in history one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control.

Agreed, we'd need a system to promote efficiency and progress, while maximizing individual freedoms but also providing protections for complexity to be built into the system to support those two things. Sort of sounds like how capitalism is supposed to work to me. I tend to think its about the right blend of regulation and free markets, but I aint no economist or lawyer so bugger that. His whole premise seems to ignore the hard realities of achieving anything of any complexity. As I said, people need to specialize to achieve progress, and by doing so they develop a suite of needs to support what they offer. That is taking control of their destiny to some extent, but no-one can fully control their destiny - to assert as much is absurd IMO. What is being probably being interpreted by readers of that is how to best let people take control of their own destiny, so offering no suggestion is not adding anything but again, creating an emotional distortion for his own gain by the looks of it.

As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy for the special interests that it serves.

This sentence is interesting. The concept of class does not exist in capitalism except for that which a person perceives. The market should be accessible to anyone, and instead what determines ones interaction is their resources to interact. A class is different, and incurs other restrictions. So again I think he is blurring things to distort reality to promote his agenda. I've never liked the blokes arguments personally, but he is the Professor so I'm probably wrong... maybe. The use of 'specialization' here is interesting also, because as I've said capitalism developed out of the reality that people tended to specialize in certain things and not others and so to allow each person to have a role in society, the economy emerged to balance work effort with worker need, using markets as the place for that to mediate itself. Over time it showed weaknesses and regulations became required to protect the extent of participants capabilities from entry level to hugely advanced, from abuse of positional power within the system. Any system has positional power though, so an enquiry into the different natures of that might be interesting across different political and economic systems.

But the conditions of survival let alone justice require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and by now that means the global community.

Agreed, but its tricky and gets trickier the bigger the scope. Another thing which becomes more tricky as scope increases is the possibility of orderly radical change to the system.

The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely to impose necessary illusions to manipulate and deceive the “stupid majority” and remove them from the public arena.

It's about ensuring the freedoms exist in access, and innovation within, communication platforms. The internet has sort of solved that problem he is talking about. We know how fast online stuff can spread far and wide from someones webcam etc. But while I can build a fancy news website, I cannot afford to hire anyone to write stories. So it comes down to having a free market which allows products to emerge freely which meet the needs of the people. So people develop platforms which allow the individual to reach millions of people without having to build a website and employ journalists. The only worry I have for the 'stupid majority' is when people distort information and create emotional bias for personal career reasons, whether they be presidents or professors - because while his argument there is redundant, the reality is now information is more accessible to and from anyone, it means anyone can manipulate anyone if they produce an effective enough product. The problem with empowering the buyer is often the buyer is not really aware of what they are buying - but again, that is not a problem of the system but of the people using it. What is human civilization to be but not representative of the action of humans?

The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.

To me, capitalism is the most democratic and free system on the table. So if he was selling socialism for example, his is sales pitch to the darkside is complete and the distortion goes full circle there to end up fully inside out and pretending to be capitalism itself!! Basically more of his socialist propaganda nonsense massaged into a thought virus and spluttered far and wide, hehe, just having a bit of fun.

In that quote, Chomsky was referring to the cold war and nukes(possibly terminal phase of human existence), thought control(necessary illusions), the rich(specialized class), and overthrowing the people of the US(set policy for the special interests that it serves). Anyway, there's a lot of history that goes along with that quote. It took me a long time to fill in all the pieces, but I'll just brief you on it:

A long time ago, there was a crisis with capitalism and the workers rose up and threatened to oust the rich. A deal was struck(The New Deal) wherein the rich got to keep a little bit more than the workers but they had to pay 90% taxes and those tax dollars were used to hire millions of Americans into good paying jobs. Thus the interstate highway system was built, dams all over the country, parks and forests everywhere, etc. The people also got free money if they were poor(welfare) or old(medicare+social security) or disabled(disability). The work week was reduced to 40hrs, all workers got pensions(social security), and child labour was abolished. The guy who pulled it off, Roosevelt, was so popular that he kept getting re-elected until congress passed term limits.

Anyhoo, this revolution grew and empowered many other groups which led to things like women being able to vote, desegregation, etc (the civil rights movement of the 60's and 70's). The rich people didn't like that very much so they started a counter-revolution. Can you guess who won? So this quote by Chomsky was probably somewhere in the 70's or 80's, probably right after the "red scare", mccarthyism, and japanese-american internment camps.

So now we have a global thought meme that says communism=bad and capitalism=good. Capitalists claim they are the reason we have all these wonderful roads, parks, schools, military, etc. Communism sucks as is evidenced by the collapse of Russia, China, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam, etc.

To bring that Chomsky quote into the 21st century, we have global warming(possibly terminal phase of human existence), fake news(necessary illusion), corrupt gov't(special interests), etc. And that's the brief version...

Senan wrote: The "facts" in both videos are all from a certain perspective. As quoted from the first video, "anyone can find experts that support their side."

My thoughts instantly went to this after reading this.




But I agree, the reason why most arguements can even happen in the first place is because people can find experts that will bakc them (eg. Hillary vs Trump, Choice vs Life, ect). Also expert is a subjective word, it doesn't mean much without a proper peer review... or if seen... from a certain point of view.

Senan wrote:

Whyte Horse wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: 3 different stories about industrial capitalism

Nice story that guy made up. When you look at the facts, they tell a very different story.

The "facts" in both videos are all from a certain perspective. As quoted from the first video, "anyone can find experts that support their side." The arguments and facts in both videos can be true (a lot of claims were made without sources), but they are being presented without the equally true counter arguments. We need to see a fair comparison of Socialism and Capitalism with pros and cons of both in actual practice and then try to judge what is best for the current economic and political climate.

It also needs to be clear what kind of Socialism and Capitalism we are comparing. Are we speaking strictly economics, or do we include the form of government as well? A nation can be democratic while being socialist and capitalist at the same time. The United States of America is a weird mix of capitalist free market economy regulated by a democratic republic form of government that allows for socialist welfare and health programs that sometimes differ from state to state. It really is an experiment in combining many different schools of thought. That's partly why it sometimes goes bat shit crazy.

And on a side note, the video saying Marx is "considered the most influential philosopher to have ever lived" is pretty subjective. I think Plato, Aristotle, and Descarte might just be in the running.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Capitalism vs Socialism... OK go! No you can't have both or anarchy or decentralized or any of the other possibilities. Call me pragmatic, but at the end of the day, if I don't pay my student loans, a little man in blue with a big gun and shiny badge is going to take my car and house and give it to a very wealthy person.

Whyte Horse wrote: The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Capitalism vs Socialism... OK go! No you can't have both or anarchy or decentralized or any of the other possibilities. Call me pragmatic, but at the end of the day, if I don't pay my student loans, a little man in blue with a big gun and shiny badge is going to take my car and house and give it to a very wealthy person.

Yes, but at the end of the day you chose to take out student loans just as did I. You could've robbed a bank or taught yourself with Google or decided to break rocks for a living instead. I could've practiced my guitar more when I was young and become a rock star. The options available to us depend greatly on the economic and government systems we can participate in. I live in a capitalist economy where loans to pay for school are required because universities can claim they are more or less "competitive" and charge a lot because they know degrees are required for a lot of vocations. If this were a communist economy, the education would be free, but likely lower quality because the government would provide my job. Regardless, the people with power will always try to take from those without it and will always exploit it to make themselves more wealthy. The conversation should be which system distributes power and wealth most fairly without discouraging healthy and natural competition.

The title of this post says "All of us need to unite," but it immediately turns into talk of uniting against the "man" and railing on the mustache twirling bespectacled monopoly guy who is controlling our lives from behind a curtain. Socialism was an evil spectre in the '50s and now capitalism is the root of all evil. The premise of this post completely ignores the fact that we would all have to unite under a common banner, and there is no right answer. Everyone wants to be comfortable, but some want to do it at the expense of others while some want it to be a group effort. In either case, someone isn't going to be happy.

Senan wrote:

Warning: Spoiler!

Whyte Horse wrote:

Senan wrote:

Whyte Horse wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: 3 different stories about industrial capitalism

Nice story that guy made up. When you look at the facts, they tell a very different story.

The "facts" in both videos are all from a certain perspective. As quoted from the first video, "anyone can find experts that support their side." The arguments and facts in both videos can be true (a lot of claims were made without sources), but they are being presented without the equally true counter arguments. We need to see a fair comparison of Socialism and Capitalism with pros and cons of both in actual practice and then try to judge what is best for the current economic and political climate.

It also needs to be clear what kind of Socialism and Capitalism we are comparing. Are we speaking strictly economics, or do we include the form of government as well? A nation can be democratic while being socialist and capitalist at the same time. The United States of America is a weird mix of capitalist free market economy regulated by a democratic republic form of government that allows for socialist welfare and health programs that sometimes differ from state to state. It really is an experiment in combining many different schools of thought. That's partly why it sometimes goes bat shit crazy.

And on a side note, the video saying Marx is "considered the most influential philosopher to have ever lived" is pretty subjective. I think Plato, Aristotle, and Descarte might just be in the running.

Whyte Horse wrote: The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Capitalism vs Socialism... OK go! No you can't have both or anarchy or decentralized or any of the other possibilities. Call me pragmatic, but at the end of the day, if I don't pay my student loans, a little man in blue with a big gun and shiny badge is going to take my car and house and give it to a very wealthy person.

Yes, but at the end of the day you chose to take out student loans just as did I. You could've robbed a bank or taught yourself with Google or decided to break rocks for a living instead. I could've practiced my guitar more when I was young and become a rock star. The options available to us depend greatly on the economic and government systems we can participate in. I live in a capitalist economy where loans to pay for school are required because universities can claim they are more or less "competitive" and charge a lot because they know degrees are required for a lot of vocations. If this were a communist economy, the education would be free, but likely lower quality because the government would provide my job. Regardless, the people with power will always try to take from those without it and will always exploit it to make themselves more wealthy. The conversation should be which system distributes power and wealth most fairly without discouraging healthy and natural competition.

The title of this post says "All of us need to unite," but it immediately turns into talk of uniting against the "man" and railing on the mustache twirling bespectacled monopoly guy who is controlling our lives from behind a curtain. Socialism was an evil spectre in the '50s and now capitalism is the root of all evil. The premise of this post completely ignores the fact that we would all have to unite under a common banner, and there is no right answer. Everyone wants to be comfortable, but some want to do it at the expense of others while some want it to be a group effort. In either case, someone isn't going to be happy.

Yeah I chose to borrow money and a lender chose to lend money. The key here is the lender can't lose the money if they made a bad loan... they just get bailed out by the system and the borrower goes into debtors prison or becomes an indentured servant. No talk of accountability of lenders. That's just not possible. Lenders have no responsibility for their loans.

Whyte Horse wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: 3 different stories about industrial capitalism

Nice story that guy made up. When you look at the facts, they tell a very different story.

if youre going to invoke the f-word with me (facts) then youre going to have to show that you actually do respect facts yourself. posting this communist propaganda in response to jonathan haidt is a serious hit on your credibility in my eyes. the marxist professor in the video you posted is about as disingenuous and hypocritical as it is possible to be from the very first time he opens his mouth, talking about power being concentrated in the hands of elites lol as if lennon and stalin and pol pot and mao and all the other communist murderers werent elites in their own respective domains.

lets look at some facts about communism that your dr whatshisname conveniently glosses over:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Estimated number of victims
In the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that "Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government."[4]:2 According to Courtois, the death toll amounts to 94 million.[4]:4 The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:

65 million in the People's Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Ethiopia
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Eastern Bloc
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."[4]:4
Courtois writes that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism. The statistics of victims includes deaths through executions, man-made hunger, deportations, and forced labor.

Soviet repressions
Repressions and famines occurring in the Soviet Union under the regimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin described in the book include:

the executions of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners
the murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922
the Russian famine of 1921, which caused the death of 5 million people
the Decossackization, a policy of systematic repressions against the Don Cossacks between 1917 and 1933
the murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps in the period between 1918 and 1930
the Great Purge which killed almost 690,000 people
the deportation of 2 million so-called "kulaks" from 1930 to 1932
the deaths of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933
the deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Moldovans and people from the Baltic states from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945
the deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943
Operation Lentil in 1944
the deportation of the Ingush in 1944."

https://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2212529-communism-the-leading-ideological-cause-of-death-in-the-20th-century/?utm_expid=.5zxdwnfjSHaLe_IPrO6c5w.0&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

"The brutal brainchild of Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto, promised utopia on Earth. All one needed to do was overturn society and throw off the ruling class through violent revolution. The road to paradise was red, built on a new social order built by destroying traditional beliefs, social structures, property ownership, and governance.
....
Some lay-Marxists have described the waves of killing that followed communist revolutions as aberrations. In fact, these deaths are systematic outputs of successful communist revolutions, prescribed solutions to the inequities of capitalism and entrenched beliefs and practices. For this reason, communist revolutions have been followed by unprecedented killing."

---

you could look into alexander solzhenitsyn and his book "the gulag archipelago"

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Gulag-Archipelago
"the Gulag Archipelago is an exhaustive and compelling account based on Solzhenitsyn’s s own eight years in Soviet prison camps, on other prisoners’ stories committed to his photographic memory while in detention, and on letters and historical sources. The work represents the author’s attempt to compile a literary and historical record of the Soviet regime’s comprehensive but deeply irrational use of terror against its own population."


so, are you willing to respect the facts of communisms murderous history? i mean you could realistically say "wikipedia is not a scholarly source" and i would agree, but i used it only because it was convenient; there are enough others that its moot. we could talk about the effect that western policies have on other, less powerful countries of course, and you could bring up the ghettos in america and our incarceration rate, which is higher than most other nations. those are legitimate concerns.

but i dont think it would be honest of you to deny the historical evils (atrocities) of communism, and if you choose to do so then there wont be much point in discussing anything else with you from here on out- you either respect facts or you pick and choose the facts you respect which means that you dont actually respect facts at all.

i would say that you summarized the great depression and the new deal, and the advances of civil rights in that era in a very simplistic way. i mean you just rolled up decades of complex social evolution into a couple bullet points that sound more like political slogans than considered (or informed) historical commentary. im thinking that you missed quite a lot of important information- relevant facts, if you will- but i dont have time (or desire) to wade through it atm, so i will mention that there could be more to the story than youre letting on, and then move along to respond to this instead:

Whyte Horse wrote: The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Capitalism vs Socialism... OK go! No you can't have both or anarchy or decentralized or any of the other possibilities. Call me pragmatic, but at the end of the day, if I don't pay my student loans, a little man in blue with a big gun and shiny badge is going to take my car and house and give it to a very wealthy person.

1) sounds like the typical conspiracy theory/illuminati/lizard people silliness. i could just as easily say that the way to keep people disorganized and ineffective is to feed them dissident propaganda that makes them reject the system that actually supports them and fantasize about impractical revolutions, rather than embracing it and utilizing it to their own advantage. keeping us all divided on weather its the rothschildes or the reptillians who are running the show and the masses wont ever learnt o just succeed and become welathy themselves. which is what the capitalist system actually does allow.
but your assertion here is factually incorrect: in america we are free to talk about whatever we want, the FACT is that most people just arent interested in the conversation that you want to have.
no one is silencing you or me except our own selves and our potential audiences, who arent really silencing so much as ignoring.

2) if you could put together a case of what these other systems of government would actually look like and how we might shift our economies towards implementing them then maybe there would be a conversation-- as it stands you just make strange assertions that Putin is the new darth plageous and that zeus will return to destroy industrialized capitalism, which is also empire- as if life isnt actually better with industry, electricity and modern infrastructure-. meanwhile ignoring the historical facts of capitalism increasing the day to day wealth of the average (western) person by multiples over the last 300 years. youre on a computer on the internet bemoaning the evils of industrial capitalism lol

3) but you also GET student loans. and schools to spend them on.
i completely agree that the way we handle student loans in usa is awful. its a problem i myself also have to deal with and i would love to see changes made. but im thankful that i live ina society where i can go to school, get a degree, pursue my ambitions, and if i work hard and make good decisions i can eventually be more wealthy than i was when i started out.

I am always intrigued by what we see as conspiracy theories of control, and how in the end we always turn to the forms of governments as a point of debate for the reasoning behind them. The reality is the population of the ruled over, have always been able to control who has ruled. This is still a truth today, it may seem far off but a united, educated and focused citizenry is the fear of every powerful entity from corporations to dictators. Just food for thought, uniting people in today's world is so much more than what we have previously thought possible and is only made difficult by each individuals need to to justify their own thinking process. Certain things in the world will build to a limit than collapse to be replaced by the next phase or invention. Remember, Western Europe used to be feudalistic is it now? So, there must be some form of progression we are headed too. Until the next shift occurs none can be sure and even those working in the shadows for further power cannot understand what has yet to happen. Plans are fragile things which often end up broken unless built to flex, world control plans depend to much on rigidity to be fluid.