US Politics: A Game of Chicken (with Constituents lives)

[Centrist Simon Steele]

42 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Lenin was a bad man who believed the people he killed, innocents and all, were worth the blood he allowed to be spilled.  You can absolutely say the same thing about Washington who wanted large portions of Ohio for land speculation.  

Lenin wasn't a bad man. He was ruthless. I don't agree with his tactics, but everything he did was to protect the exploited working class. This insistence that he was willingly killing innocent people shows a poor understanding of history outside of U.S. classrooms. I'm curious to see which phrase you'll snip out of this comment and what question you will ask to mischaracterize my point.

You are an American conservative Scot. You come from a party that has perpetuated myths and lies about social safety nets and emphasized the ol' "if you fail in life, it's your fault" fallacy. I used to be a Republican too. I voted for Bush. I was a flag waving U.S. exceptionalist. When I deployed to Cuba, I saw the lies of the Bush administration firsthand, and I saw the pain of U.S. imperialism on innocent people. The difference between Bush and Lenin is that Bush enacted brutal, evil war mongering for his rich backers, whereas Lenin enacted brutal, evil tactics against his enemies to protect the exploited. I prefer protecting the exploited democratically. But if you continue to operate in a binary mode of thinking, I don't see how this conversation has any value.

[Larry of the Lawn]

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I don’t know.  But claiming Norway, Sweden, Demark, and Finnland are aggressive imperialists… is a tad off.

Sure, but you're conveniently excluding the US, France, the UK, Germany from this.  

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Well, technically if you define capitalism as the tendency to privatize public R&D for the benefit of a select few extremely wealthy individuals who then essentially monopolize the benefits of that investment of public money & knowledge to turn ridiculous profits while denying access to that same publicly researched information, then the system Ran described would practically be the Platonic Ideal of capitalism!

As pointed out this sort of research via military is not particularly a cappie thing. But this gets into what the word 'is' means and all sorts of garbage. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

14 minutes ago, Centrist Simon Steele said:

Lenin wasn't a bad man. He was ruthless. I don't agree with his tactics, but everything he did was to protect the exploited working class. This insistence that he was willingly killing innocent people shows a poor understanding of history outside of U.S. classrooms. I'm curious to see which phrase you'll snip out of this comment and what question you will ask to mischaracterize my point.

You are an American conservative Scot. You come from a party that has perpetuated myths and lies about social safety nets and emphasized the ol' "if you fail in life, it's your fault" fallacy. I used to be a Republican too. I voted for Bush. I was a flag waving U.S. exceptionalist. When I deployed to Cuba, I saw the lies of the Bush administration firsthand, and I saw the pain of U.S. imperialism on innocent people. The difference between Bush and Lenin is that Bush enacted brutal, evil war mongering for his rich backers, whereas Lenin enacted brutal, evil tactics against his enemies to protect the exploited. I prefer protecting the exploited democratically. But if you continue to operate in a binary mode of thinking, I don't see how this conversation has any value.

No.  I voted straight party Democratic in 2020.  I have been a Conservative in the past, no longer.  

Lenin killed far too many innocents for me to be comfortable claiming “Lenin wasn’t a bad man”.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

13 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Sure, but you're conveniently excluding the US, France, the UK, Germany from this.  

Yup.  If the claim is that all Capitalist states, even those with strong welfare systems and strong social safety nets, are bad you need to address the Scandinavian nations without tarring them with the US, France, the UK, and Germany.

[aceluby]

54 minutes ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

That applies to every country that ever had a Marxist-Leninist style revolution.

Then the Marxists claim it wasn't real communism, but the next revolution will be. Hence, no true Scotsman.

And of course, they claim anyone that argues otherwise is an American or has been indoctrinated by American ideology, because the US is the source of all evil (which is, again, just another form of American exceptionalism).

What definition of communism are you using?

[Ran]

Lenin formalized the gulag system. Millions would pass through it, hundreds of thousands would die in it as they were worked to death. 

 

It is impossible to take seriously this doomsdaying about capitalism and its inequities from people who think those who died through forced labor and "re-education" were all "enemies of the proletariat" and deserved what was coming to them.

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

11 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Yup.  If the claim is that all Capitalist states, even those with strong welfare systems and strong social safety nets, are bad you need to address the Scandinavian nations without tarring them with the US, France, the UK, and Germany.

There's been a massive drift over the last few pages, but I think the goalpost moving here is a bit beyond that.  As the Great Unwashed pointed out, even those countries have benefited enormously from cheap goods and cheap labor overseas. 

The fact that your entire argument is hinging on the countries who have stronger and more aggressive controls on capitalism is telling.  It also doesn't prove at all that the technology Ran mentioned couldn't have been created without it.  

I'm also not arguing at all that less capitalist nations like China or Russia haven't engaged in imperialism or massive resource extraction.  

[Larry of the Lawn]

17 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

No.  I voted straight party Democratic in 2020.  I have been a Conservative in the past, no longer.  

Lenin killed far too many innocents for me to be comfortable claiming “Lenin wasn’t a bad man”.

It's not like the Democrats have really made any strong push for a welfare state or for aggressive controls on the worst behavior of capital.

*recently, anyway

[Ran]

Just now, larrytheimp said:

It also doesn't prove at all that the technology Ran mentioned couldn't have been created without it.  

The point is not that these technologies could not be created without it. Indeed, some of them weren't. But the majority of the things that I mentioned are significantly powered by enterprise today. Government subsidies are of no use if businesses do not think their time is worth being spent taking advantage of said subsidies because other things are more lucrative. And government subsidies are basically there to shift market priorities, not replace the market

There's a reason that I'm pretty sure not a single person here has owned a product from AvtoVAZ.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

9 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

The fact that your entire argument is hinging on the countries who have stronger and more aggressive controls on capitalism is telling.  It also doesn't prove at all that the technology Ran mentioned couldn't have been created without it.  

Years ago I made the statement that Capitalism isn’t “immoral” it is “amoral”.  It accepts whatever morality you bring into it.  The Scandinavian nations (it appears you do agree that they have Capitalist economies) illustrate the point I was attempting to make with my long ago statement.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

It's not like the Democrats have really made any strong push for a welfare state or for aggressive controls on the worst behavior of capital.

*recently, anyway

They sure as shit aren’t Republicans.  If I was a “Conservative”.  I’d continue to block vote Republican or Libertarian.  But this isn’t about me.  

[A Horse Named Stranger]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Good.  But that wasn’t what I was asking Zorral.  I was asking Zorral if Zorral is suggesting slavery is a necessary feature of Capitalism.  Zorral hasn’t answered.

I'll jump in, Zorral will undoubtedly add her two cents whether she agrees or disagrees. The following argument can be made.

Slavery (and in a way the concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the forced labor there) is basically the capitalist logic of exploitation (of the human resource in this case) pushed to its extreme end. As you said, capitalism is amoral.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I'll jump in, Zorral will undoubtedly add her two cents whether she agrees or disagrees. The following argument can be made.

Slavery (and in a way the concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the forced labor there) is basically the capitalist logic of exploitation (of the human resource in this case) pushed to its extreme end. As you said, capitalism is amoral.

I think that’s fair.  The point is that Capitalism can and has been tempered with morality.  Look at Scandinavia…

[Kalbear]

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think that’s fair.  The point is that Capitalism can and has been tempered with morality.  Look at Scandinavia…

I would say it the other way - morality is often corrupted by capitalism. 

And capitalism is absolutely immoral by most standards of universal morality. The notion that it is amoral is entirely incorrect. Capitalism at its standard will exploit any market inefficiencies and will attempt to pay people as little as possible in order to gain maximum profits. It will also emphasize things like shorter-term gains for longer term losses depending on the size of the gains. It will routinely be unfair to people whenever it can. It will justify any number of atrocities provided that the cost of the atrocities is less than the profit gained from them. All of these things are deeply immoral for standard operating humans. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

17 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

I would say it the other way - morality is often corrupted by capitalism. 

And capitalism is absolutely immoral by most standards of universal morality. The notion that it is amoral is entirely incorrect. Capitalism at its standard will exploit any market inefficiencies and will attempt to pay people as little as possible in order to gain maximum profits. It will also emphasize things like shorter-term gains for longer term losses depending on the size of the gains. It will routinely be unfair to people whenever it can. It will justify any number of atrocities provided that the cost of the atrocities is less than the profit gained from them. All of these things are deeply immoral for standard operating humans. 

I see your point and disagree.  If nations can, and do, run Capitalist economies in a fair and equitable way it is because they are bringing morality to their systems.  If it can be done in one place it can be done in another.

The existence of nations, like those in Scandinavia, demonstrate you are incorrect in claiming Capitalism is inherently immoral.  Is it your contention that Scandinavian nations are immoral?  Or that they are not Capitalist?

[Week]

Pure unchecked Capitalism = immoral

Regulated Capitalism with strong social safety net (w/ strong protections for individual rights and freedoms) = less immoral

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I see your point and disagree.  If nations can, and do, run Capitalist economies in a fair and equitable way it is because they are bringing morality to their systems.  If it can be done in one place it can be done in another.

The existence of nations, like those in Scandinavia, demonstrate you are incorrect in claiming Capitalism is inherently immoral.  Is it your contention that Scandinavian nations are immoral?  Or that they are not Capitalist?

I don't contend anything about the morality of those filthy Eurocommies. I mean, we can talk about the obvious immorality of lutefisk all we want to - but that's independent of their system.

I will say that it is basically impossible to be particularly moral in a general sense and participate in world capitalism. Norway is a good example here: how much of their GDP is based on oil production that is sent to other countries? How many of them own cell phones, or import processed food? 

Now, we can talk about them being better than other capitalist countries, offering their citizens more healthcare and rights and having higher taxes on their rich - but at the end of the day they got there on the backs of exploiting other people worldwide, and do that still. I would probably frame it like this: they have a government that has a lot of moral underpinnings that is built on a global economy that is deeply immoral. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, Fez said:

Because who doesn't want a day off? And the purpose of the day is slowly changing; every year more places are calling it Indigenous Peoples Day.

You lazy government worker. And it needs to not be a slow change, but an entire shift. It's a dumb holiday that's not historically accurate.

Quote

But also, it's worth remembering that the Day was first created at a time when Italian Americans weren't really considered White and faced a lot of discrimination (the day was first declared shortly after 11 Italian Americans were lynched in New Orleans). The holiday was to make them more included and note their place in the history of the US. Granted, even at the time it should've been called Vespucci Day instead.

That it had a well intentioned origin does not make it right to continue it. And our Italian brothers and sisters are doing just fine now. I mean, they are one of the winners of the Great Food War after all. 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

I don't contend anything about the morality of those filthy Eurocommies. I mean, we can talk about the obvious immorality of lutefisk all we want to - but that's independent of their system.

I will say that it is basically impossible to be particularly moral in a general sense and participate in world capitalism. Norway is a good example here: how much of their GDP is based on oil production that is sent to other countries? How many of them own cell phones, or import processed food? 

Now, we can talk about them being better than other capitalist countries, offering their citizens more healthcare and rights and having higher taxes on their rich - but at the end of the day they got there on the backs of exploiting other people worldwide, and do that still. I would probably frame it like this: they have a government that has a lot of moral underpinnings that is built on a global economy that is deeply immoral. 

And again I see your point (particularly about lutefisk (full body sudder)) I just don’t see how State control of all aspects the economy is helpful and as such disagree.  This is not to claim people who claim profit motive is a “positive good” aren’t immoral.  But I don’t see that attitude as a necessary part of Capitalism.  Hence, we bring the morality we carry into the system.