I just saw a TV ad for a class action lawsuit against Volkswagen for their environment data fraud
What stage of capitalism is this
lol i bet this is a exhilarating read
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Honestly, these sorts tend to overestimate the degree to which marketers are just being desperate.
Anonymous asked:
"God is sending you messages, but you aren’t checking your phone." Dude, you should've written the Bible.
anarchyinblack answered:
Perhaps one day a time will come when I will be bored enough to release my own version.
“And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I being detained?”
“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and know the gate, and am the gate: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me, for I am the key and the guardian of the gate.”
“But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With central planning, this is impossible; but with the market all things are possible.”
Bet you they have central planning in heaven.
With businesses as well as employers as well as landowners, large entities are better at ruthlessly maximising profit and also are better at responding to regulations. Whereas small entities often go for something other than maximising profit, and if it’s “being decent”, great, but then for some reason sometimes it’s “being pointlessly petty and cruel”. So you get a situation where large entities are often worse on average in very specific ways, but the very very worst and most unfathomable are the small ones.
“Capitalism with a Human Face”
You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)
In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.
Today things are… different.
It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:
1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.
2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment
3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology
I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.
Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.
(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)
If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.
I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.
Endorsed.
“Movies will be free after the revolution!”
Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?
Centralized committee!
Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!
I was doing semi deep dive into Orion’s Arm after @immanentizingeschatons reminded me of it, and it got me thinking about post-scarcity and politics.
Specifically, I was comparing it to some of the other post-scarcity settings I’ve seen, like Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer, and Nova Praxis. One thing that all of these have in common is that the politics presented in the game seems off.
Nova Praxis and Mindjammer to my mind don’t really have political conflict. They try to describe some of the political units, but they seem to be stereotypes masquerading as politics or and otherwise just poorly described. Eclipse Phase and Orion’s Arm do have political units, but they’re fairly obviously based on the political viewpoints favored in the demographic and seem kind of goofy and impossible because of that.
And it strikes me that to some level this is an impossible problem. If you think there won’t be real politics in the post-scarcity future, I’m going to very much doubt that. But if you think that you can predict the nature of political conflict in the post-scarcity future, I’m also going to very much doubt that. So, either way, you’re stuck with writing a political scene that’s weird.
But really, can there truly be post-scarcity? Maybe with magic violating conservation of matter-energy, but without it, someone is going to want to use the mass of your asteroid to build their habitat to replicate their ideology.
I consider “post-scarcity” as describing when technology has advanced to the point where the common material desires like food,
housing, and entertainment of any person are trivially easy to fill.
Then aren’t we there already in some countries?
Indeed. “Post scarcity” more refers to “when people believe there is not a scarcity of stuff.” And as the discourse over the $500,000 New York family shows, it is unrealistic that that would ever happen no matter how many resources our society generates.
The year is 3122. Transhumanity has colonized the entire solar system. The total GDP of mankind and its descendant species long ago exceeded its 2340 high of 14 quadrillion US2016 dollars. A new discourse arises.
PRIVATIZE THE SUN
the idea that Trump/Brexit are purely a racism thing disregards the angst about globalisation that is taking place across the globe, not just in Anglo nations.
sure, people are racist, that’s unsurprising, but people are also exposed to economic dislocations without any sugar coating justification or vision of a hopeful future to come, it’s no surprise that they react with fear and anger.
Anonymous asked:
Again, people googling randos they've never heard of before is not evidence that they become Nazis themselves. You know what stops Nazis? Ten million communists with weapons. You know what would have helped? Liberals. Fucking. Helping. I know you like fascists way too much to defend the oppressed, but AT LEAST DO NOT INTERFERE.
theunitofcaring answered:
If your plan only works if no one ‘interferes’ by arguing on the internet that your efforts are observably counterproductive and unhelpful, then your plan is a colossal failure.
But, seriously, the ‘should you no-platform speakers at colleges’ debate isn’t the ‘punch Nazis’ debate and I think it’s really unhelpful to conflate them. Someone might believe that it’s right to pull fire alarms, scream at the top of your lungs, block cars, etc. in order to make sure that, say, trans-exclusionary feminists can’t give a talk at their college, while also believing that bludgeoning purported Nazis is a terrible idea. “Does suppressing speeches on college campuses and in other public arenas by having violent demonstrations against them work?” is the question I am discussing in that post, and as you correctly observe, “no, that fails to suppress the speech” is not an answer to a wide variety of unrelated questions.
When I write posts about whether punching Nazis is a good idea then you are welcome to spam me with hysterical anons claiming that I love Nazis, am personally a liberal fascist, am responsible for the rise of the Third Reich, etcetera etcetera, but when that’s also your response to ‘no-platforming fails because of the Streisand effect’ then someone might conclude that’s just your default response to literally any dissent, you know?
As always I am proudly and openly committing to interfering with street violence against unarmed people, organized brutality of every kind, and the spread of dishonest, misguided, and nonsensical information about how a society can fight violent extremism. Yes, I will interfere. Yes, I do interfere. Yes, I will persuade everyone that I possibly can to interfere alongside me.
In today’s news, aggrieved Communist Anon unaware of difference between no-platforming, street violence, and war, as well as Lend-Lease Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#US_deliveries_to_the_Soviet_Union
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.