[annatar1914]

@ckaihatsu

Oh, okay, so that was just a fun little tidbit from history, but now it's all over and everyone loves the 2-party system, huh -- ?

I'm sure you're just being flippant

But in case you aren't (and even if you are), I'd say that I'm pretty well done with standard Parlimentary/Representative Democracy.


About my own political spectrum;

So, like, about 3 blocks past Ms. Rand and then, like, what, 2 lefts and then a right, past libertarianism, and hold the mayo.

Now that's flippancy

But no, my political spectrum is essentially the same as that of the Libertarians, with them on one end and ''Statists'' of all stripes on the other. I can accept that without accepting them.

[Unthinking Majority]

Please just admit that you don't mind buying cheap good-quality goods at Walmart, even though workers in China have to sacrifice their entire lives, living in dormitories, for it.

No I don't mind it, but now I do in the interests of national security, which i've been concerned about for decades.

Chinese workers work voluntarily, nobody is forcing them to do it. They voluntarily moved en masse to the cities in order to make more money and it has lifted most of the country out of subsistence poverty. Their comparative advantage has been based entirely around cheap labour. So no I don't regret giving them my business, it has benefited them tremendously. I do think they should have basic workers rights and I wouldn't mind paying slightly more for them to have that, but that's mainly on the CCP to make and enforce those laws.

Do you support the communism in China pre-1979/1989 that stagnated their economy until post-USSR capitalist reforms that left a billion people in subsistence poverty including tens of millions dying of famine?

[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu




I'm sure you're just being flippant

But in case you aren't (and even if you are), I'd say that I'm pretty well done with standard Parlimentary/Representative Democracy.


About my own political spectrum;



Now that's flippancy

But no, my political spectrum is essentially the same as that of the Libertarians, with them on one end and ''Statists'' of all stripes on the other. I can accept that without accepting them.

Yeah, I was *trying* for some kind of edgy anti-establishment *irony*, and *this* is what happened.

But *I'm* the one having to pick-up-the-slack for your merely-nominal anti-statist 'libertarianism' while UM and the rest practically *praise* state intervention and get easy points just for knocking past historical laissez-faire formulations.

Sorry to say that you have the rhetorical depth of a *sunbather*.

[ckaihatsu]

No I don't mind it, but now I do in the interests of national security, which i've been concerned about for decades.

Chinese workers work voluntarily, nobody is forcing them to do it. They voluntarily moved en masse to the cities in order to make more money and it has lifted most of the country out of subsistence poverty. Their comparative advantage has been based entirely around cheap labour. So no I don't regret giving them my business, it has benefited them tremendously. I do think they should have basic workers rights and I wouldn't mind paying slightly more for them to have that, but that's mainly on the CCP to make and enforce those laws.

They sure bailed-out the U.S. economy in the '70s, didn't they -- ! (Whew!)

Do you support the communism in China pre-1979/1989 that stagnated their economy until post-USSR capitalist reforms that left a billion people in subsistence poverty including tens of millions dying of famine?

Nope, not a Maoist.

[annatar1914]

Yeah, I was *trying* for some kind of edgy anti-establishment *irony*, and *this* is what happened.

But *I'm* the one having to pick-up-the-slack for your merely-nominal anti-statist 'libertarianism' while UM and the rest practically *praise* state intervention and get easy points just for knocking past historical laissez-faire formulations.

Sorry to say that you have the rhetorical depth of a *sunbather*.

@ckaihatsu ;

I think either you're very confused or I am, possibly mutual. I am most emphatically not a Libertarian in any shape or form, i'm definitely a Statist, believe in the power of governmental action to improve people's lives.

As for my ''rhetorical depth', I am indifferent to your apparent critique. I think most people on PoFo are pretty clear on what I stand for and what I don't in any case, not sure what you could possibly be a tad catty about.

[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu ;

I think either you're very confused or I am, possibly mutual. I am most emphatically not a Libertarian in any shape or form, i'm definitely a Statist, believe in the power of governmental action to improve people's lives.

As for my ''rhetorical depth', I am indifferent to your apparent critique. I think most people on PoFo are pretty clear on what I stand for and what I don't in any case, not sure what you could possibly be a tad catty about.

Out-with-it, then, (please).

Marxist-Leninist -- ?

[late]

They sure bailed-out the U.S. economy in the '70s, didn't they -- ! (Whew!)

As you can see, trade passed 100b somewhere around 2000. The 70s was when we re-established diplomatic relations.

[ckaihatsu]

[img]https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17982.jpeg[img]

As you can see, trade passed 100b somewhere around 2000. The 70s was when we re-established diplomatic relations.

Uh-huh -- hey, I just do what the book says.... (grin)

In the 1950s and 1960s they had convinced themselves that slumps were no longer possible because they could apply the prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes. Business cycles were a thing of the past, the author of the world’s best-selling economic textbook, Nobel prize-winner Paul Samuelson, had assured them in 1970. But when they tried to apply Keynesian remedies to the recession they did not work. The only effect was to increase inflation while leaving unemployment untouched. By 1976 they had abandoned such methods amid panic about the danger of escalating inflation. Economists and political journalists switched overnight to a belief in the completely ‘free’ market, unconstrained by state intervention—a theory previously preached only by a few isolated prophets such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Such a mass conversion of intellectuals had not been seen since the days when theologians changed their ‘beliefs’ on the say-so of princes.

The popularity of the prophets of the free market could not, however, restore unemployment levels to those of the long boom. Nor could it prevent another recession at the beginning of the 1980s, doubling unemployment again and affecting even wider areas of the world than that of 1974-76.

One popular explanation for the crises of 1974-76 and 1980-82 blamed the sudden increases in the price of oil after the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980. But a fresh crisis broke at the beginning of the 1990s, at a time of falling oil prices. Another explanation claimed that the crisis of 1974-76 resulted from the impact of rising wages on profits. But this could not explain the later crises, since wages in the world’s single most important economy, the US, fell steadily after the mid-1970s.297

Something more fundamental in the system had changed, turning the ‘golden age’ into a ‘leaden age’. The US had been able to afford massive arms spending at the time of the Korean War, absorbing perhaps 20 percent of its total output and equal to half the surplus available for investment. This had provided markets for its own industries and for exports from states such as Japan, which spent very little on arms. But by the time of the Vietnam War competition from such countries meant the US could not afford its old level of military output. It still produced massive quantities of weaponry, but the proportion of output this absorbed was probably about a third of that at the time of the Korean War. This was simply not enough to ward off recurrent and deepening world recessions, even if they were not yet on the scale of the 1930s slump.298

This did not bring all economic growth to an end in the advanced countries. But growth was much slower and more uneven than previously, and the cycle of boom and slump had returned with a vengeance. Average output per head in the 1980s grew at less than half the rate of the early 1960s. Unemployment reached levels virtually unimaginable in the long boom, commonly staying above 10 percent for years at a time, and rising close to 20 percent in places such as Ireland and Spain. Lower rates in the US in the late 1980s and late 1990s were driven by welfare cuts which forced people to take jobs at poverty wages—the poorest 10 percent earning 25 percent less than the equivalent group in Britain.299

Generalised job insecurity became a feature everywhere.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 586-588

---

Much of the left around the world had enthused at the Cultural Revolution. In many countries opponents of the US war in Vietnam carried portraits of Mao Zedong as well as the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. The trite sayings in the Little Red Book of ‘Mao’s thoughts’ were presented as a guide to socialist activity. Yet in 1972, as more US bombers hit targets in Vietnam than ever before, Mao greeted US president Nixon in Beijing, and by 1977, under Deng, China was beginning to embrace the market more furiously than Russia under Stalin’s successors.
The Western media saw such twists and turns as a result of wild irrationality. By the late 1970s many of those on the left who had identified with Maoism in the 1960s agreed, and turned their backs on socialism. A whole school of ex-Maoist ‘New Philosophers’ emerged in France, who taught that revolution automatically leads to tyranny and that the revolutionary left are as bad as the fascist right. Yet there is a simple, rational explanation for the apparently irrational course of Chinese history over a quarter of a century. China simply did not have the internal resources to pursue the Stalinist path of forced industrialisation successfully, however much its rulers starved the peasants and squeezed the workers. But there were no other easy options after a century of imperialist plundering. Unable to find rational solutions, the country’s rulers were tempted by irrational ones.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 576

[annatar1914]

Out-with-it, then, (please).

Marxist-Leninist -- ?

@ckaihatsu ;

Since you said ''please'';

I might be described as a Non-Marxist-Leninist Socialist.

I don't know if describing the reality of socio-economic factors could be called a ''science'', but I'm a Socialist because it's simply the right thing to be, in my opinion.

[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu ;

Since you said ''please'';

I might be described as a Non-Marxist-Leninist Socialist.

I don't know if describing the reality of socio-economic factors could be called a ''science'', but I'm a Socialist because it's simply the right thing to be, in my opinion.

Okay, thanks -- sounds like Einstein.

What do you see as the agent of *social change*, historically and into the future, if you would -- ? (Then I'm done with ya.)

[ckaihatsu]

(I told people I'm a socialist because I lost a bet.)


= D

[annatar1914]

Okay, thanks -- sounds like Einstein.

What do you see as the agent of *social change*, historically and into the future, if you would -- ? (Then I'm done with ya.)

@annatar1914 ;

For me, hewing to the long tradition of Christian Socialism, I see the primary agent of social change being the workings of Divine Providence. That is, any progress is purposeful and from ''the'' Intelligent Agency. Secondary agents of social change are a number of what could be called ''praeturnatural forces'', and of course, mankind in general. Marx of course had some good insights on Capitalism, but I'm not sure that there is a deterministic flow which somehow makes Socialism or Communism ''inevitable''.

[ckaihatsu]

@annatar1914 ;

For me, hewing to the long tradition of Christian Socialism, I see the primary agent of social change being the workings of Divine Providence. That is, any progress is purposeful and from ''the'' Intelligent Agency. Secondary agents of social change are a number of what could be called ''praeturnatural forces'', and of course, mankind in general. Marx of course had some good insights on Capitalism, but I'm not sure that there is a deterministic flow which somehow makes Socialism or Communism ''inevitable''.

Okay, thanks again.

What about the 'inevitability' of capitalism's demise due to sustained capitalist *overproduction* -- if cheap and effective tech 'lines-up' to enable enlightened lives for the most part, as through everyday roboticization (like with the vacuuming Roomba, etc.), then human labor will no longer even be needed, freeing everyone up entirely.

Ancient Rome would be envious. (grin)

[annatar1914]

Okay, thanks again.

What about the 'inevitability' of capitalism's demise due to sustained capitalist *overproduction* -- if cheap and effective tech 'lines-up' to enable enlightened lives for the most part, as through everyday roboticization (like with the vacuuming Roomba, etc.), then human labor will no longer even be needed, freeing everyone up entirely.

Ancient Rome would be envious. (grin)

@ckaihatsu ;

''IF''

(to borrow from a story about the Spartans,who spoke as little as possible, therefore striving to have much to say in few words)

That is to say, I do not presume a technological breakthrough, in fact, I think we're headed for a decline.

[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu ;

''IF''

(to borrow from a story about the Spartans,who spoke as little as possible, therefore striving to have much to say in few words)

That is to say, I do not presume a technological breakthrough, in fact, I think we're headed for a decline.

You must be real fun at parties, huh -- ?

My Bluetooth doorlock can stream Spotify.


= D