flamble · HackerTrans

Already been noted, but what an unbelievably sinister sentiment. "Effective life behaviors" which include being married. Social conformity enforced through corporate power with the approval of the state, and people willing to countenance it as long as the mores being enforced are reactionary instead of disingenuously "progressive".

flamble

5 年前議論

The notion that language is "what the learned have built out of competence and reflection" is abjectly risible. The evolution of language consists of corruption, confusion, coinages of demotic provenance, and general chaos. The contributions of learned classicists to the modern language are subject to exactly the same inexorable flux.

There is no party that refuses to accept "bastard" semantics; in no language does there exist a fraction of a syllable of legitimate descent. The only recourse open to the pedant and misanthrope is to forgo the use of language altogether, which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse.

flamble

5 年前議論

I find it incredible that anyone could have such a cartoonish view of the world that the completely secretive, unaccountable and independent security apparatus, which has totally liberated itself from democratic control or oversight, is simply "the government" in a way undifferentiated from say, the post office.

What is especially galling about it is that the entire monstrosity was constituted specifically in order to maintain the structures of private power and profit and has never deviated from that goal. The entire murder machine exists to benefit the corporate power that you absurdly imagine as some kind of countervailing force.

How do you account for the fact that military and CIA involvement overseas is systematically in the service of imposing minimal-government orthodoxy, from Chile 1973 to the Contras, Grenada, Iraq, Cuba, etc?

flamble

5 年前議論

unlike you, who are clearly not morally outraged

flamble

5 年前議論

What I found so frustrating about the comment was how close it was to some sort of insight, while maddeningly not connecting the dots.

He has some vague sense that his unhappiness is related to "workaholism", but is so fixated on gender politics that he twists it to revolve around that. He imagines that women have a "choice of careers, choice of being a mother while the husband provides", apparently oblivious to the economic reality that single-income families are an impossibility for the majority of people, not because of feminism, but because of market forces.

You can see the alienation and the sense of rage and despair engendered by social atomization and hustle worship, only to be channeled not against any of the root causes, but some bogeyman like feminism which, precisely because of the aforementioned dislocation, hits closer to home emotionally.

And the worst of it is hearing echoes of my previous self in the words (projected or not), but being aware of the irony that it's only people who ARE close to you who have a chance of helping you out of that kind of morass.

flamble

5 年前議論

The point of the minimum wage is not to create jobs, it is to ensure that jobs that exist already pay a certain minimum.

The more coherent argument against the minimum wage is that it destroys jobs which cannot be profitable for the employer at the higher wage. The problem with this argument is that the preponderance of research indicates a small magnitude for the elasticity of minimum-wage employment with respect to the minimum wage, generally around -0.05. If a 50% increase in minimum wage results in a 2.5% increase in unemployment in the cohort of people earning near the minimum, and if your aim is to increase the average wage for that cohort, then minimum wage increases do work. The idea that they don't is based on non-quantitative reasoning about the rightness of interfering with markets, or the virtue of work, or a value judgment about a small amount of unemployment outweighing an overall increase in compensation, etc.

I've elided a bunch of detail here, in particular the distinction between minimum-wage elasticity and own-wage elasticity, but this is a good starter:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/impacts-of-minimu...

flamble

5 年前議論

I'm curious what you mean by "homogeneous". I've just had a quick Google and apparently the Gini coefficient in Japan is ~0.3 compared to ~0.48 in the US, which is one definition of "homogeneous". Another search turned up some suggestion that said coefficient correlates well with the percentage of people who have been victims of theft/assault or who feel unsafe walking home alone.

flamble

5 年前議論

It's possible that once a company reaches a certain size, it's inevitable. Corporations internally have the same top-down centralized organizational structure as a typical government. Market forces can't eliminate that kind of inefficiency if it invariably affects all large enterprises, and the economies of scale enjoyed by such companies outweigh the perverse incentives of sub-organizations.

What strikes me as unique to government is the tendency for sufficiently powerful appendages to secure enough resources to start wagging the dog (e.g. the military industry in the US), although now that I think about it seems possible that it would happen within companies.

flamble

5 年前議論

I understand now. Unfettered market freedom is the best way to organize things and at the same time, large-scale government intervention is an unfair competitive advantage.

> This fails to explain why everything moved to China and not Mexico or Brazil or India.

Of course, no industries moved from the US to Mexico, Brazil or India over the same period as China's rise.

> In other words it's completely different?

Yes, in the sense that a portion of massive Chinese government spending goes directly into producing things that people need, and almost all of massive US government spending goes into funding imperialist violence.

flamble

5 年前議論

The offshoring of the production of consumer electronics devices is mostly the result of the free-trade policies of said countries, coupled with market forces. The growth centred around manufacturing has been the basis of Chinese prosperity and requires no speculating about devious motives to account for.

As for the Chinese government's massive spending and subsidization of key industries, it's largely due to being free of the particular ideological constraints which force the US government to entrust everything to the market (except the military industry) which has predictably led to brittleness and vulnerability.

The American approach does resemble the Chinese one in a sense. Whereas the Chinese government prefers to directly subsidize e.g. semiconductors, the US government pours unfathomable quantities of capital into a military capable of dissuading any country from capitalizing on the US's dependency on any of their industries. When this approach breaks down, as in the case of China, things tend to get very dicey.

flamble

5 年前議論

This a complete non-sequitur.

Authoritarianism consists in undemocratic rule in which obedience is brutally enforced, and dissidence suppressed, using the security apparatus of the state.

Authoritarianism does not consist in using every avenue allowed within the rules of a democratic system in order to exercise power, even if it's "not nice".

Again, it's genuinely puzzling how you could conflate these two things.

flamble

5 年前議論

I'm honestly baffled by this. I care who wins because of the POLICY DIFFERENCE, i.e. the difference between what the two parties want to DO with their power. I can't even imagine what kind of worldview I would need to have to believe that the desirability of a political regime is a function of the level of courteousness of the politicians within it, so I'm struggling to understand where you're coming from with this claim.

flamble

5 年前議論

I think I have the same feelings as you about the Democrats' spinelessness, but a disagreement about what a more robust approach entails.

> standing up for decency without needing to pass a law is at least as big a deal as a tan suit.

"Standing up for decency" is completely meaningless. The Republicans do not think in those terms, and neither do their voters. They want their agenda passed and they will use the means at their disposal to achieve that. That is exactly what I want Democrats to do. What I view as "spineless" is the Democrats' insistence on continuing to abide by norms that their opponents have long since abandoned in the hopes of a return to comity. It is not going to happen.

My view is that the only way to defeat the Republicans is to enact left-wing policies that are broadly popular, e.g. stimulus checks, medicare expansion, etc., and thus eat away at the foundation of immiseration, precarity and alienation that is the root cause of rising social tensions.

I don't think that the Democrats are, as a party, capable of doing that (or even desire to), which is why the outlook is so bleak.

flamble

5 年前議論

A race to the bottom of decency is exactly what is currently happening. One side continuing to "take the high road" will do absolutely NOTHING to stop it.

It is delusional to think that the Republicans will ever be shamed into cooperation. They don't care, their voters don't care, and high-minded speeches about the need for civility are the stuff of a comedy sketch if delivered while the listener is in the process of hacking you to pieces.

flamble

5 年前議論

I think "hold the first accountable" is the wrong focus to have here, especially since so much of what the Republicans do violates norms rather than actual rules. I think it would be better to see the Democrats adopt their tactics, i.e. using every available mechanism to oppose everything they do as forcefully as possible, as opposed to meekly waiting for good faith from the other side which will never be forthcoming.

The other thing with "holding accountable" is that it can backfire. Imagine a second Trump impeachment passing. It would be perfect for the Republicans. They would have a solution to the problem of his potential reelection bid (which they would like to avoid), while simultaneously he would be a martyr as well as a symbol of what "cancel culture" / "leftist authoritarians" took away from you, the patriots.

flamble

5 年前議論

I agree with your point about the Democrats' disastrous rightward slide but I don't think that the resulting problem is that Republicans now struggle to distinguish themselves. They're still the party of further tax cuts and deregulation, even if the Democrats have become the party of the status quo ante (or a "return to the Obama years"). I do agree, however, that economics deeply receded in importance for a decade or two.

But during that time, parties were quite content to focus their message to voters on cultural issues: patriotism vs multiculturalism, religious freedom vs tolerance, etc, and distinguish themselves that way. The problem that the Republicans had was that after decades of the conservative media stoking their voters' rage to searing intensity, Trump came along and gave the base what it wanted, which was an end to the restraint and doublespeak, and posturing / policy which produced as many "liberal tears" as possible; politics as punishment. Now in the aftermath of his presidency they have to figure out how to appeal to the mass of their voters' who are still fiercely loyal to Trump while continuing to serve the interests of their donors, who would like someone more stable.

The Democrats, for their part, are trying to figure out how to digest the left wing of their party and appeal to its voters while spending as little as possible (see the $1400 vs $2000 debacle).

flamble

5 年前議論

Venezuela is an excellent example of a government unable to issue money arbitrarily, because they pegged their currency to the US dollar and accumulated debt in a currency over which they had no control.

flamble

6 年前議論

How common is it for the central banks of currency sovereigns to indulge in massive quantitative easing? If anything, they're far too reluctant to do so (even during recessions) precisely because of the kind of superstition on display here that money shouldn't consist of just a "magic number" - as if Bitcoin were any less of a token.

flamble

6 年前議論

> while they may not be owned by social activists the day to day operations are certainly controlled by social activists

Complete fantasy. You're not citing any evidence whatsoever here so I really shouldn't be bothering, but just think this through. When you witness for example Kuerig pull their advertising from Fox News, that is not evidence of some leftist agenda in their management. It is some combination of (a) a response to customer complaints/bad press, (b) an absolute storm of free publicity resulting from the controversy and (c) customer goodwill from the majority of the population. It's exactly the kind of action of the free market conservatives are supposed to be so enamored of. If you honestly think that companies are running socially progressive ads etc. because they are run by social activists, you are (a) just as gullible as all the liberals who eat up that style of marketing and (b) not living anywhere in the vicinity of reality.

You've also cited the example of a union, an organization explicitly in conflict with management, to bolster your argument about the management of organizations being captured by social activists. Absurd.

> if you talk to many conservatives you will find there is a large contingent of people that believe that since Roger Ailes passed Fox News has also taken a left turn...

Someone who would complain about some "left turn" by Fox News is not someone with whom it's worth discussing politics.

> Further Print News media is clearly Left bias as well probably 70% / 30% left to right positioning

Nope. Almost all media is either liberal (read: neoliberal) or conservative. Left wing print media is negligible.

> I think alot of your position is based on the fact that many of these places are "not as far left" as you

My position is not based on the fact that these places are "not as far left" as me. I am not further along on some sliding scale. Yeah, I probably agree with liberals on most social issues. However, I have a qualitatively different outlook to liberals, one rooted in a fundamentally incompatible worldview.

At the end of the day, you've made it clear that the left-right divide is about culture-war issues for you. Some of the repressive apparatus of the state is going to start being directed against the fraction of reactionaries who can no longer be assimilated by the system, but it's not going to approach the level of brutality reserved for e.g. BLM in the foreseeable future. You can continue to enjoy media catering to people totally fixated on the lost cause of relegitimating retrograde social attitudes, because it doesn't pose a threat to people in power.

flamble

6 年前議論

Yes, the "left" represented by the Democratic party /s.

Every single thing you've listed is controlled by capital, not by the left. Tech, Hollywood/Media, Social Media, News, and payment processing. Academia is a very partial exception (google "Koch brothers university funding").

Do you think that any of the organizations that constitute these groups are run by social activists? These are overwhelmingly multinational corporations. They care about nothing but profit and the preservation of the status quo. They will appropriate rhetoric about identity politics insofar as it is a good marketing strategy, but they never make a move which is not motivated by their bottom line, which is why none of the tech giants acted against Trump until he threatened the orderly continuation of the system in which they're all invested.

"Left" media is a tiny, powerless fraction of the media. MSNBC and CNN toe the line of the DNC, a right-wing clique that represents only the interests of finance capital, and which, because it has comprehensively rejected any project of improving people's lives in any material way, has been forced into a politics of performative culture war posturing. Any leftist challenge to the status quo can be quelled by capital's complete capture of the media apparatus and government.

When you say "the left", it's very clear you mean social progressives, and nothing else. You're conflating co-opted woke capitalism with leftism, the same way countless liberals do.

You are however, absolutely correct about the coming repression that will be directed against the populace. It will be mostly directed against the left, as has always been the case, but we will definitely begin to see greater brutality in general as the overall immiseration and precarity of the average person continue to ratchet upwards.

In tandem with this, we'll see ever-increasing social policing of culture-war nonsense, as the social unrest continues to play out in a make-believe symbolic realm completely detached from material reality. People will of course continue to believe that it's "the authoritarian left" or "the bigoted right" that is ultimately to blame, depending of which flavour of news media they consume, missing the symbiotic relationship between two parties that both represent nothing but the short-term financial interests of capital.

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