posted on January 06, 2020 10:44 PM by
u/foobanana
48
u/DELETED48 pointsat 1578352083.000000
I like how “the poor” to this guy (it’s a guy, duh) are just a
massive hive-minded blob with no individuality, all collectively
responsible for each other’s decadence uhh “moral
decrepitude.” If one poor person uses their EBT card to buy lobster
(spoiler: they don’t, though), every poor person is morally
responsible! It’s a cultural problem! Single-parent homes!
Bootstraps!
ALSO:
Iran is associated with terrorism, nuclear weapons and burning
American flags while chanting death to America, that’s why they’re
disliked.
lol wtf AND
Virtually nobody would favor a war with for example Japan nowadays,
even if they’re non-white.
OP clearly wasn’t alive during the 198— [checks notes] oh Rising
Sun actually came out in the 1990s? Jesus Christ. But
still! How quickly we forget.
>EBT card to buy lobster
It's the "welfare queens" meme all over again. People love to believe that someone, somewhere is getting something they "don't deserve", and laughing at us all while they do it. Which is pretty fucked up when you think about it. Especially if you compare the *harm* caused by the wealthy versus the poor, from a utilitarian standpoint.
I think this is the mechanic that is most (and perhaps best) exploited by populist conservative politicians and media. Because it's so easy to stoke -- some people are just itching to be handed a convenient justification.
> It's the "welfare queens" meme all over again. People love to believe that someone, somewhere is getting something they "don't deserve", and laughing at us all while they do it. Which is pretty fucked up when you think about it.
It's like the joke from *Veep*. They want "jobs, education and an adequate safety net... to be denied to African-Americans". Better to go hungry than to know that the wrong sort of person might be benefiting from the same program you are.
No, his argument is actually crazier than that. He is saying that, if the aggregated spending on frivolities of **all poor people everywhere combined** equals or exceeds the spending of one person on a vanity project, then that makes the two morally equivalent.
So for example, if all the poor people in the world combined spend a billion dollars on junk food, that is morally equivalent to Chairface Chippendale spending a billion dollars to use a laser to carve his name into the moon.
Yeah, I get that. I'm saying it's bizarre to assign collective moral responsibility to "the poor" as a group, as if "occasionally spending money on frivolous things" were a *policy* they'd all voted on or something. The World Congress of Poors agreed to assign 10% of their budget to junk food and Fortnite skins, so we have no choice but to condemn them all as morally decrepit vampires!
I mean even if "occasionally spending money on frivolous things" were a policy they'd all voted on and the world congress of poors actually did agree to assign 10% of their budget to leisure and 'non-utilitarian' things, that would be perfectly okay
Expecting poor people to live in supreme austerity on water and bread in a blank, undecorated room until they can afford everything else is cruel and ridiculous, and such a lifestyle would mentally tear people apart
People with worldviews like that think poverty is the punishment people get for having a depraved moral character, rather than a systemic condition that for most people is impossible to escape from. Any "luxury products" poor people have access to is injustice to people who think like that, morally equivalent to a known murderer walking free because their jury suffered from some kind of misguided compassion.
Agreed. It’s such a weird and loopy argument; you can tell that he came up with his position first and then tried to think of reasons why it is correct.
It sounds like he thinks the percentage should matter (which someone better versed in the ideology of crackpots should divine the origins of)
But to counter a "rebuttal" on the absolute value front, he decided to aggregate the poors lmao
Not just collective responsibility but collective experiences--apparently if some other poor is enjoying herself at a bar, I should not splurge on a nicer purse, because that would raise the "poors" collective spending?
There’s no fundamental law of physics that life can’t be extended
indefinitely
not surprising, considering physics isn’t generally in the business
of describing “life.” It’s funny, I seem to recall there being an entire
field dedicated to studying life and aging, and I’ve yet to hear of any
research there justifying a belief in immortality…
There's a expository neat paper I'll try and find that talks about how it's a fools errand since there are likely many separate causes of death (which, and this is crucial, may be beneficial at a younger age) when we go beyond a certain lifespan.
Ah here it is, from a debate with Aubrey de Grey on MIT Tech Review
> Medawar’s main contribution was the recognition that, because eventual death is inevitable even without senescence, genes that
produce harms late in life are less likely to be eliminated by natural selection than genes that cause the same amount of damage early
in life, since many individuals will not live long enough to suffer any fitness cost. Williams realized that such an evolutionary bias
would favor the accumulation not just of haphazardly bad genes that cause harm very late in life, but also of genes with early-life
benefits tied to late life costs. Much derives from the pleiotropy argument and the senescence causing trade-offs that it predicts, not
least of which is the implication that causes of senescence for which the harms are felt before senility will tend strongly to be
associated with benefits from which natural selection has failed to disentangle them. If Medawar’s work were the end of the story,
senescence would be a simple consequence of natural selection’s weakness against late-acting bad genes. Some such failures—like
Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps—might be medically addressable by stepping in where selection could not. But if individual harms are
closely linked to positive attributes of youth, then remedies may frequently carry costs that greatly exceed benefits. It should be said
that de Grey is, to his considerable credit, totally without confusion about the distinction between the contributions of Medawar and
Williams. That much is clear from his excellent paper on the dubious prospects of greatly increasing human lifespans with caloric
restriction, a technique that has substantially increased longevity in short-lived rodent models (de Grey 2005). But it should also be
said that, amongst the many scholarly papers on senescence that de Grey has authored and posted to his website, despite broad
applicability, only two cite Williams (1957) —the caloric restriction article being the sole example where any of the implications are
in any way apparent.
I think chances are there wasn't any great benefit to those mutations, though. Say, you have a gene coding for a protein. It will periodically mutate, producing another protein that may be harmful. Thus if said protein is no longer actually useful, a mutation that disables that gene completely would be slightly beneficial, after which said DNA will no longer be preserved (will drift rather rapidly like junk DNA).
So it gets broken completely. And adding back what ever reptilian analog got preserved in what ever reptile probably won't work well. So the lost functionality would have to be re-engineered from scratch, which we won't be able to do any time soon.
This is a tangent but there's this lovely short book by Schrodinger called 'What is life' which is on what can be deduced or guessed about the nature of life from physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
Otoh there is some research in finding the 7 (if I recall my transhumanist science reporting correctly) main biological systems of aging. But this doesnt inply immortality of course (these prob are just the ones that kill you first). But i have not heard much more on this topic after they found these 7 causes somewhat of a decade ago. So it prob is like with the humane genome thing, where a new discovery (mapping the genome) is interpreted as having a lot more consequences than it does.
And as we all know, knowing something is causes by something, and stopping it are 2 big different things.
For context, by “extend their life” we’re not talking about someone
trying an experimental therapy - the people being criticized are
billionaires funding anti-aging bullshit.
> If a billionaire spends most of his money on helping the poor, but still spends some millions on himself, is he such a bad guy?
The problem is that billionaires *aren't* doing this.
Yep, even the most generous altrustic billionaires have their net worth grow faster than the average public (in percentages I mean).
The only big counter argument to all this is imho saying that this wealth literally isnt real, due to it being in stocks and liquidity issues. (Stocks nake things so much worse but that is a totally different discussion, just remember 25% of all VC money is from pension funds, i wouldnt be surprised if the upcoming recession hits pensions extremely hard)
Yes.
Yes.
There are worse things but if we're in a vacuum (as hypotheticals like this force us to be) then yes it is pretty awful. Nobody needs millions of dollars. Nobody "deserves" billions of dollars.
Depends on your notion of "average Joe", and "truly essential for living".
I happened to notice that I had the honor of being quoted in the headline of this thread. Perhaps I would've realized my chances of having a rewarding discussion was low if I was more familiar with the word "sneer".
> Yes, I suppose I ended up in the wrong subreddit, and I'll take my leave once people stop replying to what I've already written.
How come you're not replying to my posts?
A younger you? Did you sustain some sort of brain injury that subsequently made you unable to read or understand Marxism properly? Are you unable to engage with quite simple criticisms about the nature of our economy?
I said them matter-of-factly because Marxist analysis is indeed factual
> Well, most of the regimes created by Marxists have disappeared. No longer existing I would regard as a type of failure.
Such as? China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam are all still around. That's a weird 'failure' if many of them still exist.
>Having to forbid your own people from leaving because when they leave they don't want to go back, I would also regard as a type of failure.
1. How is this a "failure"? You can't just label anything you don't like a failure
2. People travel from North Korea to Russia back to North Korea all the time. Cuba's doctors travel all over the world.
>Having economies that are at best mediocre I would regard as a failure for an economic system.
Haha. From "empirical failure", goal posts are now shifting to just "mediocre". I wouldn't call the largest increase in life expectancy in human history (China) "mediocre".
>Such as?
Ever heard of Eastern Europe? Some other links, take your pick:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_socialist\_states#Former\_socialist\_states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states#Former_socialist_states)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_former\_communist\_states\_and\_socialist\_states#List\_of\_former\_Communist\_states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_communist_states_and_socialist_states#List_of_former_Communist_states)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist\_state#Former\_communist\_states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state#Former_communist_states)
>How is this a "failure"? You can't just label anything you don't like a failure
I assumed the goal of Marxism is to make life better than without Marxism? If people have to be forced to stay there, life obviously isn't better.
>People travel from North Korea to Russia back to North Korea all the time. Cuba's doctors travel all over the world.
Really, you're bringing up North Korea as a country which doesn't have to keep it's own people in? They shoot illegal emigrants who try to cross the border to China on sight. And what happens to the families of the people who are legally allowed to leave if they don't come back?
Also, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban\_medical\_internationalism#Costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_medical_internationalism#Costs)
>From "empirical failure", goal posts are now shifting to just "mediocre". I wouldn't call the largest increase in life expectancy in human history (China) "mediocre".
"**Failure** is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective". Is the objective of Marxism to produce, at best, mediocre economies?
Source for that claim about China? I can quite imagine that the life expectancy shot up after the communist famine that killed dozens of millions ended. By the way, life expectancy is not exactly an economic parameter.
None of these things are failures, it's just a big list of stuff you don't like that you sourced from wikipedia (not real evidence).
>Is the objective of Marxism to produce, at best, mediocre economies?
The long-term objective of Marxism is to transition to communism. Short-term, I think it's very beneficial to create a space for socialist experiments and create an anti-imperialist bloc. Those socialist states have continued to exist despite considerable pressure. The idea that you can look at countries like North Korea and China and say they're a 'failure' despite both being a nuclear power is hilarious.
>By the way, life expectancy is not exactly an economic parameter.
The main economic parameter we should look at is "do the working class own the means of production?" If yes, it's an advanced economy.
>The objective of Marxism is to transition to communism.
With the goal of achieving better living standards than capitalism could provide, which has not happened. Therefore, failure.
>Those states have continued to exist despite considerable pressure.
A handful of regimes managing to keep existing (while gradually converting to capitalism) is not the objective of Marxism. In fact, the state is supposed to fade away, no? And it's supposed to be worldwide, no? So, failure.
>being a nuclear power is
not the objective of Marxism. South Africa was a nuclear power, that didn't mean things were going swimmingly.
>With the goal of achieving better living standards than capitalism could provide, which has not happened. Therefore, failure
Standards of living have gone way up in all the communist countries I can think of, China being the most impressive. In Russia, after the totalitarian capitalist regime was restored, life expectancy shot way down, they only caught back up recently.
>Just existing (while gradually converting to capitalism) is not the objective of Marxism. In fact, the state is supposed to fade away, no? And it's supposed to be worldwide, no? So, failure.
Yes, communism will be worldwide. That it's taking the West so long to catch up with Cuba and North Korea is a massive failure on the part of the West.
>not the objective of Marxism.
Marxist do advocate for anti-imperialist self defense, so yes North Korea is doing great by this measure.
Standards of living have gone up everywhere over time. Where did it go up the most, East or West Germany? North or South Korea? China or Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau/Singapore?
Yes, the Russian transition was fumbled, it's better to have been capitalist all along of course. Russian life expectancy was not very good during Soviet times either, and stagnated for long stretches of time because of exploding alcoholism. And during the famines of course.
>Yes, communism will be worldwide.
So communism has a goal that it's failed to come anywhere close to achieve in 150 years, and they've been going backwards in their progress over the last decades? Sounds like a failure. At this rate we'll see full automation before we see the workers of the world united.
>Marxist do advocate for anti-imperialist self defense, so yes North Korea is doing great by this measure.
Ok, but what's the point of succeeding in instrumental goals if you're doing terribly at achieving your terminal goals? South Africa also had nukes, but was a failure in more important ways, like North Korea. Even if communism conquered the whole world, but failed as an economic system, it would still be a failure in it's ultimate purpose. I'm surprised you haven't gone down the "not true communism"-route and that you're actually hailing North Korea as a success.
Russian life expectancy would be best if the USSR still existed. Remember; it was the capitalists who caused a mortality crisis in the 90s.
>So communism has a goal that it's failed to come anywhere close to achieve in 150 years, and they've been going backwards in their progress over the last decades? Sounds like a failure. At this rate we'll see full automation before we see the workers of the world united
A fully automated world would be a communist world. No workers = no capital. If you had read Marx you would know this.
>you're actually hailing North Korea as a success
North Korea is doing fine. Im surprised you're buying into the politically correct fiction that they're bad or whatever.
Why wasn't Russian life expectancy the best, or close to being the best, or even on any discernible path to being the best, when the USSR still existed?
> A fully automated world would be a communist world. No workers = no capital.
Unless the capitalists own all the robots. No workers = no wages. Bread and circuses to keep the plebs from rebelling, or just killer robots. But hopefully we can all cooperate to prevent such an outcome.
> North Korea is doing fine. Im surprised you're buying into the politically correct fiction that they're bad or whatever.
Hey, do me a favor and throw me a message when you've grown up, will you? It'll be reassuring to me.
Anyway, I think this discussion is just about done. You've given up arguing against the fact that Marxism has not achieved it's objective and has been gradually abandoned over the last few decades, therefore constituting a failure. I'm going to bed, good night!
>Why wasn't Russian life expectancy the best, or close to being the best, or even on any discernible path to being the best, when the USSR still existed?
Huh? USSR life expectancy was comparable to the US, and they achieved that without being a parasite on the rest of the world (like the USA is). Very impressive!
>Unless the capitalists own all the robots
Surplus value is not produced by machines. Again, read Marx.
>You've given up arguing against the fact that Marxism has not achieved it's objective and has been gradually abandoned over the last few decades, therefore constituting a failure.
Marxism has achieved its short term objectives in that there are several successful socialist states. Long term, we are seeing a declining rate of profit in the capitalist world (just as Marx predicted) which means class contradictions will sharpen.
Just gonna leave this here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=RU-US-PT
Portugal just as a comparison to a country that used to be a rather poor dictatorship.
Yes, notice what happens in the late 80s and early 90s when the totalitarian capitalist regime takes over in Russia. Shameful. Hopefully Russia goes back to communism soon.
Yes, the economy collapsed because of bad leadership, but that was not inevitable. Look at the countries that started on the reform path to join the EU: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=RU-PL-CZ-SI-SK-RO-BG-HU](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=RU-PL-CZ-SI-SK-RO-BG-HU)
Quite a change in trajectory.
Also, notice what happened from 1971 to 1984 in Russia. Can't blame that on capitalism, eh?
The Russian economy collapsed worst in the capitalist period in the early 90s. Small revisionist changes caused problems before then, but I think they could have averted the worst problems of capitalism if they had stuck with communism through the 1990s and into the present day. This is why good leadership like Stalin would have been valuable. Ah well, Cuba and North Korea are still leading the free world. Other nations can learn from capitalist Russia's mistakes.
What do mean by control for population? They were all stagnating at about the same life expectancy regardless of population size during communist times, and then after communism ended all the ones who did EU-style reforms started improving quickly.
By the way, since Finland was Russian until the Russian revolution, that might be a comparison that interests you: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=1990&locations=RU-FI&start=1960](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=1990&locations=RU-FI&start=1960)
The good old Soviet days were never that good.
>What do mean by control for population?
If we're looking at the decrease in life expectancy wrought by capitalism in that region we should control for population of each country. Capitalism's disastrous impact on 100 million Russians should hold more importance than a couple million Slovenians doing decently.
>The good old Soviet days were never that good.
I love how you've shifted the goalposts from "failure" to "not that good".
I see, but I already admitted that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe temporarily decreased quality of life. My point is simply that it didn't have to be that way, since Russia could've gone down the path of Poland etc.
>I love how you've shifted the goalposts from "failure" to "not that good".
When it comes to ideology, even if it was the second best ideology in the world, that would be a failure. Because why should any country ever enact the second best system in the world? Again, I'll remind you that the definition of failure is to fail to meet it's objectives.
>I see, but I already admitted that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe temporarily decreased quality of life. My point is simply that it didn't have to be that way, since Russia could've gone down the path of Poland etc.
Unlikely. You should read about all the capitalist corruption in 90s Russia. It'll give you a new appreciation for the Soviets, that's for sure.
>When it comes to ideology, even if it was the second best ideology in the world, that would be a failure. Because why should any country ever enact the second best system in the world? Again, I'll remind you that the definition of failure is to fail to meet objectives, and the objective of Marxism is to create the best societies possible.
The objective of Marxism is to seize the means of production and move to communism - this is a long term goal that's still in progress. Marxists have long shown how the capitalist world system creates a center and a periphery - it is the periphery which appears to produce communism revolutions. What exactly is your criticism of Marxism here? It doesn't really appear to be based on anything other than a vague sense that capitalism is the 'best'. One might ask if capitalism is the 'best' why it has had so much trouble stopping communist/socialist revolutions.
>You should read about all the capitalist corruption in 90s Russia.
Indeed, my point is if they had better leadership that didn't sell their industry heavily discounted to insiders with the right connections, they could've been more successful than Poland etc, considering their great natural resources.
>What exactly is your criticism of Marxism here?
I already said, and you've failed to refute:
Most of the regimes created by Marxists have disappeared. No longer existing I would regard as a type of failure.
Having to forbid your own people from leaving because when they leave they don't want to go back, I would also regard as a type of failure.
Having economies that are at best mediocre I would regard as a failure for an economic system.
In short, my criticism of Marxism is that it has not produced the best societies, so based on empirical evidence it does not make sense to support it. Of course if you're comparing it to Islamic theocracy or something, then yes, I would prefer it.
>Indeed, my point is if they had better leadership that didn't sell their industry heavily discounted to insiders with the right connections, they could've been more successful than Poland etc, considering their great natural resources.
The purpose of capitalist leadership is to produce surplus value for the the capitalist class, not to be "successful" from a nationalist point of view.
>I already said, and you've failed to refute:
None of things are actually criticisms or "failures" in any sense. Remember; capitalism keeps failing and producing communist rebellions.
Sure, why not, although measuring skulls is surely empiricism rather than rationalism: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brain\_Size\_Map.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brain_Size_Map.png)
> Whenever someone's significantly richer than you, then they have needlessly and unfairly much money.
The important part is not so much amounts of money, but rather control over the means of production. This has been well known since the days of Karl Marx, at least. If the proletariat simply size the means of production, the money issue will fade into insignificance.
As long as we're discussing hypotheticals, imagine an immortal man who collects interest for centuries and then pays landowners billions in exchange for their land upon death. Eventually all the land belongs to him, and he uses it to enforce an iron rule. Would you say this result of free enterprise creates a free society?
No, I'm arguing that not giving away all your money besides basic living expenses does not make you some moral monster. And also that people who condemn the rich for having more money than they need generally have more money than they need themselves. "They don't love the poor, the hate the rich."
that's literally not the argument anyone was making, but then again guys like you are famous for demanding charity while interpreting the arguments of others in literally the most uncharitable way possible.
Don't even bother replying. I'm 100% certain you have nothing interesting to say.
I like how “the poor” to this guy (it’s a guy, duh) are just a massive hive-minded blob with no individuality, all collectively responsible for each other’s
decadenceuhh “moral decrepitude.” If one poor person uses their EBT card to buy lobster (spoiler: they don’t, though), every poor person is morally responsible! It’s a cultural problem! Single-parent homes! Bootstraps!ALSO:
lol wtf AND
OP clearly wasn’t alive during the 198— [checks notes] oh Rising Sun actually came out in the 1990s? Jesus Christ. But still! How quickly we forget.
not surprising, considering physics isn’t generally in the business of describing “life.” It’s funny, I seem to recall there being an entire field dedicated to studying life and aging, and I’ve yet to hear of any research there justifying a belief in immortality…
For context, by “extend their life” we’re not talking about someone trying an experimental therapy - the people being criticized are billionaires funding anti-aging bullshit.
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