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#15140020
For me, Marx was the one who best expressed the importance of an economy based on respecting each human beings sovereignty, rather than "giving" most people's sovereignty to a Master figure. He was not the first to describe what a moral economy might look like, but he was the most succinct and thorough in his day (and ours).


Your Anti-Monotheism bias is showing, which kind of proves my points I mentioned earlier.

No. First and foremost, he was a moralizer. A priest figure.


Not so. Marx believed in revolutionary morality-what furthered the revolution is moral, what hinders it is not. He did not believe in an absolute morality and I suspect that you do not either, right?


In the absence of an economy based on morality and indivdual human sovereignty (non-slavery), ALL our controlling groups ("the elite") function like this. They are all exclusionary hate-mongers - all our capitalist "clubs."


Evil is not exclusive to a Socio-economic system. Nor do I believe in absolute ''individual human sovereignty''. God is Sovereign, not man. I'm wondering what your definition of ''hate'' is, given your previous posts? Do you think Capitalists personally ''hate'' Workers, or vice versa?
#15140022
annatar1914 wrote:Your Anti-Monotheism bias is showing, which kind of proves my points I mentioned earlier.

Can we stick to Western Democracies, please, and leave me out of it?



Not so. Marx believed in revolutionary morality-what furthered the revolution is moral, what hinders it is not. He did not believe in an absolute morality and I suspect that you do not either, right?

Absolute is a brand of vodka, and I'm not a drinker.

The reason Marxism seemed (and seems) "revolutinary" is because of the deep hole that revolutionary capitalism, monarchy, and other elitisms had dug for the human race by the 19th Century. He describes the damage that greed-bag slave-owner "revolutionaries" (that includes Christopher Columbus and Bill Gates) had had on human lives. He could see the damage by looking at the British working class and its Dickensian hellscape.

And he describes the scams that keep the rich rich.

Do you think the Covid-reset-Internet-isolation "4th Industrial revolution" will be any kinder to its slave classes than British capitalism was to its own citizens?

And didn't we get - over the course of a few centures of slavery and genocide - to smartphone-slavery via well-marketed revolutions that concentrated wealth? How can we "roll back" the effects of all these commercially-seeded faux revolutions... without a revolution?

Getting rid of our revolutionary blinders and leashes... might seem revolutionary if you are leashed and blinded yourself, or have been taught that this is the best way to be a good dog. But it's not a "revolution for its own sake." It's more of "a final revolution to get rid of the need for a permanenctly revolutionary mindset."
#15140026
QatzelOk wrote:
Covid-reset-Internet-isolation


QatzelOk wrote:
"4th Industrial revolution"



I'll note that these prevailing social realities and societal-paradigm terminologies, respectively, are emanating *from* the bourgeois ruling class -- it doesn't automatically mean that these will *become* the actual social reality, as things play-out. These characterizations could very well turn out to be *wishful thinking* from the top-down.

I, for one, am *very* interested to see if the tech faction of the bourgeoisie prevails with their '4th industrial revolution' -- meaning artificial intelligence, or *full-automation* over industrial mass production, over all supply chains, or if the inherent dynamics of capitalism (balkanized private interests, cheap labor), will *prevent* such logical and even intended full-automation.


Worldview Diagram

Spoiler: show
Image
#15140027
ckaihatsu wrote:I'll note that these prevailing social realities and societal-paradigm terminologies, respectively, are emanating *from* the bourgeois ruling class -- it doesn't automatically mean that these will *become* the actual social reality, as things play-out.

Land Enclosures created a ruined peasant class with no social capital.

Suburbia created a ruined peasant class with no social capital.

World wars create ruined peasant classes with no social capital.

The Great Reset will create.... (I can't wait to see!)
#15140030
@QatzelOk


Can we stick to Western Democracies, please, and leave me out of it?


Persons and their ideas are inextricably linked I'm afraid, resulting in actions. As for the Liberal Democracies, I don't believe in them any longer, they are just a means for some to carry out certain ends.

So I'll take that as confirmation of your bias, especially as you add concerning absolute morality that;

Absolute is a brand of vodka, and I'm not a drinker.


So to you as to others, ''morality'' is what furthers your aims, and ''immorality'' is what hinders them.

The reason Marxism seemed (and seems) "revolutinary" is because of the deep hole that revolutionary capitalism, monarchy, and other elitisms had dug for the human race by the 19th Century. He describes the damage that greed-bag slave-owner "revolutionaries" (that includes Christopher Columbus and Bill Gates) had had on human lives. He could see the damage by looking at the British working class and its Dickensian hellscape.


No, Marx would laugh at that, he was a revolutionary first and foremost, and that determined the nature of every single thing he did and every single thing he wrote. Much like yourself possibly.

And he describes the scams that keep the rich rich.


But is Revolution the answer or is it an absolute evil as horrid as or even worse than that which it tries to overthrow?

Do you think the Covid-reset-Internet-isolation "4th Industrial revolution" will be any kinder to its slave classes than British capitalism was to its own citizens?


Since it's critics lack all morality themselves for the most part, they are doomed to fail in any case.

And didn't we get - over the course of a few centures of slavery and genocide - to smartphone-slavery via well-marketed revolutions that concentrated wealth? How can we "roll back" the effects of all these commercially-seeded faux revolutions... without a revolution?


Interior change in one's soul instead of external re-arranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic called the Modern Age, without trying to drive out the Devils by means of the Prince of Devils.

Getting rid of our revolutionary blinders and leashes... might seem revolutionary if you are leashed and blinded yourself, or have been taught that this is the best way to be a good dog. But it's not a "revolution for its own sake." It's more of "a final revolution to get rid of the need for a permanenctly revolutionary mindset."
[/quote]

Lucifer couldn't have suggested ''better' than sophistry such as I've heard over the years. What revolutionaries secretly wish for is extinction, simply put. Nothing they build is real, it all falls to pieces once the real Revolutionaries die off. All true Revolutionaries are Demoniacs, Nihilists, mentally ill, the sick and degenerate result of the very Bourgeoisie Civilization they decry.
#15140031
QatzelOk wrote:
Land Enclosures created a ruined peasant class with no social capital.

Suburbia created a ruined peasant class with no social capital.

World wars create ruined peasant classes with no social capital.

The Great Reset will create.... (I can't wait to see!)



Point taken, but obviously what's happening right now, with the prolonged economic stagnation (GDP) and coronavirus pandemic, is that the ruling class is having to *simplify* and *needs time* -- the world situation is becoming *too complex* for them to handle with the typical U.S.-empire-and-international-patchwork approach, and 'autopilot' isn't a solution either (risk-death-at-work-for-our-profits).

Those in the tech faction see 'AI' as being a direction for *streamlining* -- which is what technology *does* -- so as to lighten the management load (supply chains), but I'm questioning whether it's really a *logistics* issue, or if it's really a *social organization* issue, meaning balkanized private interests (company-by-company, in any given industry), in which case all the tech options in the world *won't* have any impact, because it won't relieve the *political* standoffs (like U.S. vs. Iran, etc.).
#15140042
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:Yes, really. Spending on elections in Europe is a fraction of that in the USA.

That just means the influence of corporations happens in other ways. Otherwise, you don't really end up electing Emmanuel Macron or Angela Merkel again and again.

Prosthetic Conscience wrote:That makes a huge difference.

Yes, but you don't have a 1st Amendment guaranteeing political speech nor a 14th Amendment making all persons equal--including corporations. So in the United States, corporations have free speech rights.

QatzelOk wrote:For me, Marx was the one who best expressed the importance of an economy based on respecting each human beings sovereignty, rather than "giving" most people's sovereignty to a Master figure. He was not the first to describe what a moral economy might look like, but he was the most succinct and thorough in his day (and ours).

I wouldn't disparage all of his analysis. I would disparage so many other problems he ignored, his myopia, and I would disparage his prescriptions.

Ckaihatsu wrote:Why don't you apply this personalist kind of analysis to *Trump*, whose *politics* itself are personalist -- ?

What makes you think I don't. I pretty much said that many leaders are psychopaths (as distinguished from sociopaths). I'm fine characterizing Trump as a narcissist. I think Obama is too.

Ckaihatsu wrote:What is society *for*, except for *people*, of all kinds, ultimately -- ?

Marxism oversimplifies. Marx ignored other significant problems that can wax and wane as well. In fact, another significant left winger came to power in Germany--Adolf Hitler--who also despised individualism, capitalism, and democracy. However, he was at war with an aspect of capitalism that Marx hadn't dealt with--massive unemployment. Marx was dealing with much of the early industrial revolution--the rapid move of the population from rural areas to cities, poor living conditions in hastily built urban slums, and industrialists pocketing profits rather than improving the wages of low-skilled workers. So the class divide was rather stark--physically, much more so than today. How much better off physically is Jeff Bezos than a typical middle class person? He eats much finer foods, but better? He lives in a much finer house, but heat, AC, running water and sewage are again universal in the 80/20 sense of the word. A poor person back then didn't have enough to eat, was over worked and underpaid. A poor person in 1932 was unemployed and getting hungry and had cash that became worthless. A chronically poor person today is unemployed, and drug/alcohol addicted, mentally ill, an anti-social personality, or fairly low IQ. What good do billions of dollars do for Steve Jobs and his pancreatic cancer, or Paul Allen and his cancer? It helped doctors offering snake oil at best. It's not entirely an issue of a monetary-based class divide. There are other significant attendant factors.

Ckaihatsu wrote:Racist.

Boring. Pitting races against each other is a classic divide and conquer strategy. So is calling people racist.

Ckaihatsu wrote:It's called 'Google Translate', and 'Wikipedia' -- look into it:

That's like Biden telling people to "learn to code," when there is no way he'd be able to do so himself. So why not take this stance with the poor? "It's called a job. Look into it."

QatzelOk wrote:The reason Marxism seemed (and seems) "revolutinary" is because of the deep hole that revolutionary capitalism, monarchy, and other elitisms had dug for the human race by the 19th Century. He describes the damage that greed-bag slave-owner "revolutionaries" (that includes Christopher Columbus and Bill Gates) had had on human lives.

Christopher Columbus and Bill Gates are hardly comparable. Columbus was looking for an untaxed route to the West Indies, because Islam had taken over the Silk Road and the route across Suez and they figured there was a cheaper route than going completely around the Cape of Africa. The discovery of natives and subsequent enslavement of peoples is essentially incidental to what the explorers were initially trying to do.

Bill Gates simply got control of a computer operating system that became dominant. He's known for minting many, many, many millionaires and perhaps unfair competition practices against other capitalists. He's not known for running sweat shops and grossly underpaying people.

QatzelOk wrote:He could see the damage by looking at the British working class and its Dickensian hellscape.

Yes, but that's my point about Gates, Jobs, Bezos, et. al. They can certainly be characterized as assholes to at least some people, but they weren't known for running Dickensian hell scapes. The kind of work they employed people doing didn't even really requires workers compensation and disability insurance, because it was completely non-dangerous--except maybe repetitive stress/carpal tunnel syndrome in some cases.

QatzelOk wrote:Do you think the Covid-reset-Internet-isolation "4th Industrial revolution" will be any kinder to its slave classes than British capitalism was to its own citizens?

No, but it is not being pushed by a run-of-the-mill business owner. It's being pushed by communists and neoliberals.

QatzelOk wrote:And didn't we get - over the course of a few centures of slavery and genocide - to smartphone-slavery via well-marketed revolutions that concentrated wealth?

Smart phone slavery? This is a very different issue. The only economic argument that works here is that firms like Google and Apple control the App stores and who can and who cannot participate, including creating their own app stores. That's where anti-trust needs to focus in the smart phone world. The rest of it is about gathering information on customers and selling it to businesses. When you are using free stuff on the internet, you're not the consumer; you're the product.

Ckaihatsu wrote:Point taken, but obviously what's happening right now, with the prolonged economic stagnation (GDP) and coronavirus pandemic, is that the ruling class is having to *simplify* and *needs time* -- the world situation is becoming *too complex* for them to handle with the typical U.S.-empire-and-international-patchwork approach, and 'autopilot' isn't a solution either (risk-death-at-work-for-our-profits).

Well, I can certainly agree that they are obsolete and it is obvious. I just don't see socialism being able to replace any of it. It's mostly a problem of a hivemind/oligarchy we can call neoliberalism. You are pretty well indoctrinated into some of its tropes in calling me racist. The elite have tried to prevent a competition for power and a competition for ideas.

Is it a horrible idea for European and North American populations to travel among themselves? It's not so bad. Yet, we've learned a horrible lesson from China, and this isn't the first time. Even the Black Death came out of there. We've seen big Ebola outbreaks in Africa. China can declare itself a super power, but that's just a lie they are telling themselves. They can't even run a country that doesn't spread infectious diseases to the entire world, so they can hardly be called a first world nation.

America is too religious? Try the Middle East. The West was pretty religious itself until it's belief in God was destroyed by two world wars.

I'm not sure I agree with annatar1914 that revolutionaries are strictly nihilists. Old orders die and they get replaced by new ones. However, that's often because of technological changes. The American revolution was possible in part because of a nascent industrial revolution and the enlightenment, but also because there was more real estate and resources to exploit than people to exploit it. The industrial revolution catapulted that rise in living standards forward, and continues to do so for most people. Now we are in an information revolution.

I distinctly remember telling a now very wealthy boss that Global Crossing meant outsourcing of call centers and customer service. He looked me dead in the eye and said, "that'll never happen." It did. That was in the late 1990s. Industrial workers were told that some jobs would be lost, but others would replace them. That didn't happen for a lot of people both in North America and in Europe. Nationalism is very much the antidote to that problem.

Ckaihatsu wrote:Those in the tech faction see 'AI' as being a direction for *streamlining* -- which is what technology *does* -- so as to lighten the management load (supply chains), but I'm questioning whether it's really a *logistics* issue, or if it's really a *social organization* issue, meaning balkanized private interests (company-by-company, in any given industry), in which case all the tech options in the world *won't* have any impact, because it won't relieve the *political* standoffs (like U.S. vs. Iran, etc.).

Well, it can create social stratifications with hiveminds and groupthink on a class level ("Racist!"). So I think you have a point, but again socialism isn't the answer.

Last night, I watched The Outpost about a combat outpost in Afghanistan. The disconnects between soldiers on the ground and senior officers was astonishing. Of course, I read the book and it was naturally better than the movie. However, the neoliberals like the marxists only see the world filtered through an ideology. So you've probably heard former General Mattis counsel Joe Biden to get rid of "American first" in the US national security strategy. What kind of moronic idea is that? Well, it's not unlike the leadership that put combat outposts at the bottom of ravines, ceding the tactical high ground to the enemy and leaving soldiers in a completely indefensible position in order to "win hearts and minds" in a country where killing a woman, and blaming it on American soldiers so you can try to get some money out of them is socially acceptable, because women are worth less than farm animals.

The so-called elite are not elite. They are out of touch. Abstraction is a controlled form of ignorance. Elitism is just plain ignorance.

Looked at from a supply chain issue, if you only look at things from the standpoint of profit margins, it might make sense to outsource ALL of your antibiotics manufacturing to China. It might make sense to outsource all of your binding agent manufacturing to China, like hydrochloride for example. Yet, it looks pretty fucking moronic when coronavirus hits--ironically from China--and all of your medical supply chain is over there. What if Covid killed all the Chinese workers and those supply chains completely stopped. We saw the hording behavior for PPE.

Yet, comparative advantage is well known and has been well understood for a very long time. So has risk diversification. Yet, these so-called elites thought it was a good idea to move all of that stuff to China.

Why are drug and vaccine lifecycles so long? Is it all about public safety? No. It's about raising barriers to entry too. In that sense, Trump's efforts to cut regulations to expedite vaccine delivery has been nothing short of miraculous; yet, the same establishment that put so little protection on the spread of communicable diseases and put so many regulations in place to protect their market positions ultimately blamed Trump as though he was somehow responsible for covid.

Covid is going to change many things. Very soon, you will no longer see toll takers on bridges or toll roads. That's one of those jobs featherbedding things that could have been done away with by technology 15-20 years ago. Yet, those are all high-paying, low skill political patronage jobs. California is talking about implementing a per-mile tax, because gas tax revenues have collapsed and will likely stay collapsed for the foreseeable future.

The governor of California has implemented a curfew in areas from like 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. as though covid likes to spread more in those hours. There is just very clearly a lack of a strong scientific foundation for the decisions made by our ruling class. Since the echo chamber of the media only reflects what they say, they seem to have no clue that people increasingly hate them. So I do see revolutionary forces brewing. It's just not going to be a communist revolution.
#15140046
@blackjack21 , about Revolutions;


I'm not sure I agree with annatar1914 that revolutionaries are strictly nihilists. Old orders die and they get replaced by new ones. However, that's often because of technological changes. The American revolution was possible in part because of a nascent industrial revolution and the enlightenment, but also because there was more real estate and resources to exploit than people to exploit it. The industrial revolution catapulted that rise in living standards forward, and continues to do so for most people. Now we are in an information revolution.


Aside from the question of Socialism for now, I stated that all revolutionaries are at heart Nihilists because the only lasting things about any revolution come from those men of action who are not Nihilists, engaging in non-revolutionary or even counter-revolutionary acts. Stalin was not exactly a Nihilist, for example, and neither was Napoleon, and what they built or preserved has lasted at least to a degree. They take the helm after the revolutionaries fail as they must.

And the industrial and information revolutions? I'm not even sure that they are anything to be considered outside the larger revolution that they are branches of, along with the related Scientific revolution. Perhaps the West itself and it's Modernity is the Revolution, universally speaking, in which case my remarks on Nihilism are only partly right.
#15140047
ckaihatsu wrote:
Why don't you apply this personalist kind of analysis to *Trump*, whose *politics* itself are personalist -- ?



blackjack21 wrote:
What makes you think I don't. I pretty much said that many leaders are psychopaths (as distinguished from sociopaths). I'm fine characterizing Trump as a narcissist. I think Obama is too.



Okay.


---


blackjack21 wrote:
Well, there is always a persistent problem with a non-performing class of people, and it is in part because there are reasons other than Marxian analysis for these problems. Marxian analysis over simplifies and asserts that everything is class and economics and power struggle. For whatever reason, that's the sort of analysis that prevails in a so-called democracies as well as dictatorships in spite of rather obvious empirical evidence to the contrary that we need something beyond class struggles and so forth to address some of societies persistent problems. In a large population you will always have:

1. Anti-social Personalities: Sociopaths generally need to be imprisoned--no respect whatsoever for the life or property of others. Psychopaths often should be too, but they are frequently leading large organizations because they lie with alacrity and have an ability to manipulate people to work in larger groups. Then, you have your narcissists (they will never be compatible with socialism, except joining the party apparatus and self-dealing), people with borderline personality disorder (run hot and cold with people and parties), and oppositional-defiance disorder (always confront and reject authority).

2. Mentally ill: Chronic schizophrenics, manic-depressives, depressives, and perpetually anxious people generally cannot perform well consistently. Some can create great art works, etc., but many are non-functional and problematic in ordinary production environments.

3. Addicts: You have a class of people who are often co-morbidly mentally ill who cannot perform, because they are physically dependent on exogenous ligands that dissociate them from reality or over-stimulate them to the point of schizophrenic or manic-like behavior.

4. Low IQ/Mentally Handicapped: In a normal distribution (Bell Curve), you always have a percentage of the population that is mentally incapable of performing productive tasks. Frankly, they are just idiots.

5. Physically Handicapped: You will also have people who were born with congenital birth defects and people who were seriously injured at work or at leisure or otherwise; and, those who come down with a disease like Lou Gehrigs or MS or something, who are no longer able to perform some physical tasks.

6. Non-heterosexuals: Homosexuals, transgenders, etc. frequently struggle with mental illness, addiction or borderline personality and psychopathy. Forcing the rest of society to accommodate them does not address the problems they frequently face.

All of these people, at times, tend to be a drain on a society.



ckaihatsu wrote:
What is society *for*, except for *people*, of all kinds, ultimately -- ?



blackjack21 wrote:
Marxism oversimplifies. Marx ignored other significant problems that can wax and wane as well. In fact, another significant left winger came to power in Germany--Adolf Hitler--who also despised individualism, capitalism, and democracy. However, he was at war with an aspect of capitalism that Marx hadn't dealt with--massive unemployment. Marx was dealing with much of the early industrial revolution--the rapid move of the population from rural areas to cities, poor living conditions in hastily built urban slums, and industrialists pocketing profits rather than improving the wages of low-skilled workers. So the class divide was rather stark--physically, much more so than today. How much better off physically is Jeff Bezos than a typical middle class person? He eats much finer foods, but better? He lives in a much finer house, but heat, AC, running water and sewage are again universal in the 80/20 sense of the word. A poor person back then didn't have enough to eat, was over worked and underpaid. A poor person in 1932 was unemployed and getting hungry and had cash that became worthless. A chronically poor person today is unemployed, and drug/alcohol addicted, mentally ill, an anti-social personality, or fairly low IQ. What good do billions of dollars do for Steve Jobs and his pancreatic cancer, or Paul Allen and his cancer? It helped doctors offering snake oil at best. It's not entirely an issue of a monetary-based class divide. There are other significant attendant factors.



You're jumping all over the place -- is your concern really with marginalized people, or are they a 'drain', here in the wealthiest country in the world -- ?

Marx posited *class* as had never been done before -- that's *gargantuan* in political-economy / the social sciences, because class is the main division in society since it relates to how society produces and disposes of its material *surplus*.

You're almost a *demographer*, or an *ethnographer*, which has little to do with politics or economics.

In terms of demographics you seem to be conflating the 'lumpenproletariat' with the *bourgeoisie*:



The term lumpenproletariat (/ˌlʌmpənproʊlɪˈtɛəriət/) refers – primarily in Marxist theory – to the underclass devoid of class consciousness.[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat




In Marxist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production during modern industrialization and whose societal concerns are the value of property and the preservation of capital to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy in society.[2]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie



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blackjack21 wrote:
Then, you throw in the race and culture mixing through mass immigration, problems of language adoption, acculturation and assimilation and you have yet another set of problems expressly created by the neoliberals. Much of a population can tolerate some of this. However, some significant percentage of the population cannot--very often including my enumerated list above--and it leads to further social problems. Increase it to a biblical mass of Babel where people cannot speak to each other, because they don't share a common language and you end up with very serious discord.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Racist.



blackjack21 wrote:
Boring. Pitting races against each other is a classic divide and conquer strategy. So is calling people racist.



This was *your* critique -- 'race and culture mixing', as though society's paramount social ill is that of racial *biology* (eugenicist), or demographic-determinism.

*I'm* in no position of power to *use* race as a classic divide-and-conquer strategy -- you're thinking of the bourgeois *ruling class*, the Republicrats.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
It's called 'Google Translate', and 'Wikipedia' -- look into it:



blackjack21 wrote:
That's like Biden telling people to "learn to code," when there is no way he'd be able to do so himself. So why not take this stance with the poor? "It's called a job. Look into it."



Those *aren't* my words -- *my* politics call for full government social services so that everyone can have the means for a decent modern way of life, no questions asked. Society can certainly afford that, especially to avoid the costs and social ills from *not* providing the basics to everyone, as we see today.

Online automated services like Google Translate and Wikipedia are *not* comparable to the skill of coding, or programming -- the former are *services*, to online *clients*, for *free*, while the latter is equivalent to skilled labor, once learned and used proficiently.
#15140055
ckaihatsu wrote:You're jumping all over the place -- is your concern really with marginalized people, or are they a 'drain', here in the wealthiest country in the world -- ?

I'm not trying to leave you bewildered, but rather to jumping from context to context and illustrate the assertion of the OP--that the establishment has failed, and they are the only ones who don't seem to know it.

I'm not going to put myself forward as a champion for all of the world's dispossessed, but to say that about 20% of the population is not capable of operating on an "equal" or "civil" basis with the rest of society--meaning, if you leave them to their devices they will be destructive of others, themselves or a general nuisance. Sooner or later, we have to confront that as a reality--and figure out some reasonable and hopefully more agreeable solutions. We've done that to some degree with things like social security. In an age of physical labor, old people past 65 years are simply not capable of too much physical labor. Yet, as Drlee points out in another thread, many doctors are middle aged and work into their retirement years. They aren't lifting I-beams, digging trenches, etc. I once had a doctor who was a retired surgeon, and had lots of back problems from years of surgery and bending over. Retirement was just boring for him.

However, in ones adult productive years, we have many who are simply stupid. They will not "learn to code" as Joe Biden suggests--having no idea the mental discipline it takes. It's one of those areas that's open to anyone, because it's hard and it's impacted. So there is no government incentive ban people from doing it without a license. We have people with personality disorders, who frankly are very difficult to keep employed. They simply do not get along well with others. We have alcohol and drug addicted people, etc.

ckaihatsu wrote:Marx posited *class* as had never been done before -- that's *gargantuan* in political-economy / the social sciences, because class is the main division in society since it relates to how society produces and disposes of its material *surplus*.

Marx lived in a time of significant flux that hadn't been seen since the Renaissance/Reformation. We too are living through such a time. When industry started absorbing rural labor it started waves of boom bust cycles. One industrial output was agricultural machinery, which could do the work of many men. Today's agricultural machinery does the work of thousands of men. Today's manufacturing technology does too. In Marx's time, even the cotton gin simply increased demand for slavery. There wasn't a real economic slump until the late 19th Century.

Also, in Marx's time, understanding of genetics, trait inheritance in a scientific sense, etc. was in it's infancy. Progressives pushed Eugenics and breeding of better humans, and not entirely without merit but it obviously became quite inhumane. The current establishment still pushes Eugenic abortions, but won't admit to its roots in Eugenics and instead tries to cloak it in women's rights.

Yet today, we know that in the US population, probably 1/3 of whites and 1/2 of blacks have a 3-repeat allele of monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), and that environmental factors in their youth have a significant impact on their behavior as adults. Marx didn't know a fucking thing about stuff like that.

One aspect of democracy--and one of the reasons the establishment dislikes Donald Trump--is that democracy helps ensure that you don't elect people with a history of violent anti-social behavior toward the electors, for example. Yet, many of the anti-Trump factions are horrified not at his policies so much, but at his manners. We have huge swaths of the population that the establishment wouldn't even want elected dog catcher. Yet, they create all sorts of schemes to keep them employed when most employers would simply terminate their employment so that they don't have to deal with them.

Jumping to another context... Is AI racist and sexist? Did white software engineers deliberately encode racism and sexism into human resources AI systems? No. Yet, AI tends to have the same tendencies as a typical human with prejudices (e.g., Asians are good at math; women don't make great programmers, etc.). Today's establishment is to invested in the notion of "equality" to better understand sources of inequality that don't involve some evil oppressor that must be stopped.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're almost a *demographer*, or an *ethnographer*, which has little to do with politics or economics.

That's cute. These very studies were created by social scientists for precisely political and economic analysis. Outside of the political, education and media establishments anyone else perpetually obsessed with such notions? Let's take a small economic analysis. African-Americans tend to have nappy hair, and as such tend to use different hair care products from whites and Asians. Are you suggesting that businesses haven't looked at the racial or ethnic differences of people and created products accordingly? Hair products for African Americans suffer from what retailers call "shrinkage," and prosecutors call "shoplifting." Some African Americans find it "racist" if those products are behind lock and key, but products intended for a white or Asian demographic are not so locked up. Are they racist? What about "Irish Spring" soap? Are they not targeting a demographic?

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Irish-Spring ... /878031662



C'mon now.

ckaihatsu wrote:In terms of demographics you seem to be conflating the 'lumpenproletariat' with the *bourgeoisie*:

On the contrary, I'm suggesting as Marx did that the lumpenproletariat will always be a problem for society, and the abstraction of "equality" or "egalitarianism" isn't workable with them. In fact, the American Revolution wasn't concerned with them at all. It was only concerned with overthrowing a hereditary class system. Marx was consumed with the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

ckaihatsu wrote:This was *your* critique -- 'race and culture mixing', as though society's paramount social ill is that of racial *biology* (eugenicist), or demographic-determinism.

The purpose of illegal immigration is to drive down wages and to get illegal immigrants to do the jobs that voters don't want to do.

ckaihatsu wrote:*I'm* in no position of power to *use* race as a classic divide-and-conquer strategy -- you're thinking of the bourgeois *ruling class*, the Republicrats.

In the United States, yes. It's also true in Europe. Doubly true in the Middle East.

ckaihatsu wrote:Those *aren't* my words -- *my* politics call for full government social services so that everyone can have the means for a decent modern way of life, no questions asked. Society can certainly afford that, especially to avoid the costs and social ills from *not* providing the basics to everyone, as we see today.

Not everyone can or will function that way, even if they have the means. That's the problem with the universal basic income argument. You have to tie welfare to specific benefits. If you give money to drug addicts, they just buy more drugs--not food and shelter. There are homeless shelters with beds to spare, and homeless sleeping on the streets. Why? They don't allow drugs. So the homeless choose homelessness and drugs over a homeless shelter.

Harkening back to my high school Utopian Literature class (where we read Erich Fromm among others), we read modern counter arguments to modern liberalism too--notably, B.F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity."

We know from experience that some social services proved harmful--like mental hospitals performing lobotomies. We also know that well-intentioned high rise housing projects also tended to aggregate the lumpenproletariat along with the social problems that are endemic to many of them--violence, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. They had heating, cooling, running water, sewage, electric lights, etc. How did it work out? Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago for example? That's where notions like "social capital" came from, because the net effect of government help was to take the limited amount of physical capital people had in their less than ideal homes they owned and provided them with government housing they didn't own. It stripped them of agency while aggregating them with the violent, the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped, etc.

Yet, some people, such as violent criminals, need to be stripped of at least some agency. Many addicts too would benefit from a temporary loss of freedom to undergo detox programs and recovery and self-help communities. We know from plenty of studies from rat models to soldiers addicted to heroin what works, but we also know what doesn't work--letting people continue to behave in destructive ways. We also know that the prison system is reasonable for anti-social people, but not necessarily for addicts, the mentally handicapped or the mentally ill.

Wealth redistribution is not some magic panacea.
#15140144
ckaihatsu wrote:Point taken, but obviously what's happening right now, with the prolonged economic stagnation (GDP) and coronavirus pandemic, is that the ruling class is having to *simplify* and *needs time* -- the world situation is becoming *too complex* for them to handle with the typical U.S.-empire-and-international-patchwork approach, and 'autopilot' isn't a solution either (risk-death-at-work-for-our-profits).

This is similar to "the Land Enclosures" situtation, where lack of community organizing and lack of cooperation lead to "the Tragedy of the Commons" (pasture land deterioration - pollution - Pasture-Change). Rather then help communities to organize themselves to restrict Pasture-Change, the elite decide that this would be too dangerous (in terms of loss of narrative control) and that it's better to "reset" in a way that kills families, societies, and natural human behaviors of many kinds.

Business interests and the rich lead a top-down "reset."

Those in the tech faction see 'AI' as being a direction for *streamlining* -- which is what technology *does* -- so as to lighten the management load (supply chains), but I'm questioning whether it's really a *logistics* issue, or if it's really a *social organization* issue, meaning balkanized private interests (company-by-company, in any given industry), in which case all the tech options in the world *won't* have any impact, because it won't relieve the *political* standoffs (like U.S. vs. Iran, etc.).

Like during the Land Enclosures, the Elites (and their newly minted vassals) decide to destroy the world rather than equalize opportunity. It is "decided" by newly-rich people... that much of humanity is "useless" meaning "to them." By trying to demonstrate "differences" between the two periods where "the system is revealed to be destructive, so the elite destroys other people in order to stay on top," we actually defend this kind of abuse, and our own slavery within it.

annatar1914 wrote:Aside from the question of Socialism for now, I stated that all revolutionaries are at heart Nihilists...

You are making "nihilism" a way of life, rather then a strategy to deal with an unsustainable and abusive social system. This is a means of defending that very system by demeaning people who actually want to react against it and change it.
#15140150
@QatzelOk


You are making "nihilism" a way of life, rather then a strategy to deal with an unsustainable and abusive social system. This is a means of defending that very system by demeaning people who actually want to react against it and change it.


Destruction is not a strategy, nor should it be the evil means to allegedly good ends. Nihilism leads to well, nothing.

As the philosophers of old once said; ''Out of nothing, nothing comes''. One must build on what is, as an organic development, in order to make change that is true to the reality of things. Leave the railing against true reality to the insane and the demoniacs.
#15140153
annatar1914 wrote:Destruction is not a strategy, nor should it be the evil means to allegedly good ends. Nihilism leads to well, nothing.

Destruction is the tool of the elites who want to re-model their slaves ever few generations in order to keep them poor and disorganized - primed for continued slavery and ignorance. Top-down destruction of our own class, of nature, and of social relations, is our way of life under our civilizational model and its propaganda messages.

Wanting to hault this regular torture is NOT a desire for any kind of destruction. Change might seem like "destruction" and media makes us "feel" like certain changes are painful. Media being owned by the violent changers themselves.

We need to change in order to not destroy ourselves any more.

Darwin didn't prescribe "the survival of the most destructive." But that is what we have become with our social behaviorism and techno-perversions.

*And the wealthy and most educated, are often the most destructive. And they get to decide what "survive" means.
#15140230
ckaihatsu wrote:Why don't you apply this personalist kind of analysis to *Trump*, whose *politics* itself are personalist -- ?


I think it is actually fair for Blackjack to not apply these directly to individuals, but to speak generally. It's hard to make a proper diagnosis of any individual as specifically a sociopath unless you can really interview them, and they really want to tell the truth... and even then, how do we know they tell the truth?

But sure, why not speculate that there are sociopaths, psychoapths, and narcissists out & about, having reasonable amounts of success..?

How would your system deal with them?

ckaihatsu wrote:What is society *for*, except for *people*, of all kinds, ultimately -- ?


Society is for providing the proper context for personal growth & self-actualization, and also for the embellishment of the group.

"Mixing," and, perhaps, "diversity," are values that secular humanists like to read into these things is just public school teacher talking pionts.

ckaihatsu wrote:Racist.


The most overused and heavily leaned upon word in the English lexicon.

It's called 'Google Translate', and 'Wikipedia' -- look into it:


https://translate.google.com/

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias


I get your point... I can theoretically whip out my phone and ask them to make my food vegetarian in Cantonese... and they can nod heartily, and then add fish cake to it because many Asian groups do not view fish as a regular meat.

I can also share my Big Tech & Big Media approved messaging by referring a Russian speaker to the Russian language article on Anarcha-feminism.

But this is, ultimately, silly.

How do you sit down and converse with people who speak a different language? You don't.

How does a population that is highly divided along culture & religious lines unite? It generally doesn't, unless there is top-down organization.

It reminds me of mercenaries -- perhaps many societies end up relying on mercs because who wants to go & die for the Big Open Air Marketplace? Only the barbarians who need coin & don't have homelands with futures.
#15140234
The main problem with western democracy is corruption. Many western democracies are actually more like plutocracies with paid-off middle-men (politicians) that people get to vote on every 4 years.

Democracy is rule by the people, or by the majority. If the wealthy and corporations have disproportionate direct influence on government and policy because of the money they give gov officials/parties then that is by definition not democratic, it's corruption involving bribery (whether legal or illegal).
#15140241
The inordinate focus on the laborers, as "without them, there would be no product to sell" ignores that this is true of EVERY step of the chain. Without the boss, there would be no product for the laborer to make, no building to make it in, no tools to make it with, no capital to purchase the necessary materials, and no wage for the production. After it was made, it would have no outlet to be sold, no marketing to tell the populous that it had been made, no transportation to get to market, and no mechanism to reap the profits to make more.

Without the man at the helm, the business falters, and no amount of labormen can fix it, but without the laborman, the business simply finds another avenue, including automation. The unfortunate truth is that unskilled labor is like a cog in a machine. It is easily replaceable, and the business functions the same with any cog. He contributes his labor from 9-5, but nothing more, and is compensated accordingly for his efforts. No one has ever convincingly explained why a man who invests his fortune in a venture should not be given much more payment than someone who merely offers labor.
#15140274
Verv wrote:Society is for providing the proper context for personal growth & self-actualization, and also for the embellishment of the group.


"the proper context"

As opposed to "improper contexts" like nature itself? Your use of the word "proper" here suggests that you possess gnostic knowledge that allows you to determine "which contexts" humans should be trapped into.

"personal growth & self-actualization"

Doesn't nature provide this much better than fake societies? Ex. Look at all the lack of personal growth and self-actualization that the "discovery of the Americas" provided to the people who were "discovered." Or the destruction of opportunities for natural self actualization that are caused by worklife, wars, and TV isolation in the burbs. Car companies brainwash people into seeking "self-actualization" through the purchase of certain high-end brands. Etc.

I think you are placing the "blame" for deteriorating social and environmental conditions on "nature itself" while you are thanking all the behavioralism and control institutions who reduce our freedom to almost nothing, and then offer small coping methods (like praying and drug use) as "means" to buy back some sense of order amongst all the obvious disorder.

If nature can't provide the things you list as positive, how can the lies and fakery of the spectacle society possibly do any better?
#15140287
blackjack21 wrote:
I'm not trying to leave you bewildered, but rather to jumping from context to context and illustrate the assertion of the OP--that the establishment has failed, and they are the only ones who don't seem to know it.

I'm not going to put myself forward as a champion for all of the world's dispossessed, but to say that about 20% of the population is not capable of operating on an "equal" or "civil" basis with the rest of society--meaning, if you leave them to their devices they will be destructive of others, themselves or a general nuisance.



Jesus, BJ, your own politics aren't *equipped* for this kind of social cause -- that of the dispossessed / marginalized / alienated / self-abusive, because you're oriented to the *nation* (entity), and the *economy* (monetarism). You yourself said that such marginalized people are a 'drain', which implies that nationalist society should take *precedence* over such economy-resource-draining individuals, meaning that they're a 'problem', in your eyes.

People have been saying that a positive *byproduct* of this COVID pandemic is that they've had to refocus on what *matters*, contrary to your incessant victim-blaming, nation-touting, financial-values-hailing line that would rather throw 'undesirables' under the bus than see any tremors affect the capitalist social hierarchy that you believe to be timeless 'human nature'.


blackjack21 wrote:
Sooner or later, we have to confront that as a reality--and figure out some reasonable and hopefully more agreeable solutions. We've done that to some degree with things like social security. In an age of physical labor, old people past 65 years are simply not capable of too much physical labor. Yet, as Drlee points out in another thread, many doctors are middle aged and work into their retirement years. They aren't lifting I-beams, digging trenches, etc. I once had a doctor who was a retired surgeon, and had lots of back problems from years of surgery and bending over. Retirement was just boring for him.

However, in ones adult productive years, we have many who are simply stupid. They will not "learn to code" as Joe Biden suggests--having no idea the mental discipline it takes. It's one of those areas that's open to anyone, because it's hard and it's impacted. So there is no government incentive ban people from doing it without a license. We have people with personality disorders, who frankly are very difficult to keep employed. They simply do not get along well with others. We have alcohol and drug addicted people, etc.



'We' -- ? There's no 'we' in your version of social reality because you're *scapegoating* marginalized people the way the *Nazis* did. Your rhetoric here is *very* similar to *fascist* thinking, in wanting to formally stratify *civil society*, instead of having government and economy *aid* those who have particular requirements due to being *marginalized*.


blackjack21 wrote:
Marx lived in a time of significant flux that hadn't been seen since the Renaissance/Reformation. We too are living through such a time. When industry started absorbing rural labor it started waves of boom bust cycles. One industrial output was agricultural machinery, which could do the work of many men. Today's agricultural machinery does the work of thousands of men. Today's manufacturing technology does too. In Marx's time, even the cotton gin simply increased demand for slavery. There wasn't a real economic slump until the late 19th Century.



Here's the best treatment I've ever seen on the topic:



Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.



https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /soul-man/



---


blackjack21 wrote:
Also, in Marx's time, understanding of genetics, trait inheritance in a scientific sense, etc. was in it's infancy. Progressives pushed Eugenics and breeding of better humans, and not entirely without merit but it obviously became quite inhumane. The current establishment still pushes Eugenic abortions, but won't admit to its roots in Eugenics and instead tries to cloak it in women's rights.



Can you reference any investigative reporting on such claims? Any exposés?

*My* understanding is that regular women often require the health care that includes terminating pregnancies, and that *that's* why abortions are performed.


blackjack21 wrote:
Yet today, we know that in the US population, probably 1/3 of whites and 1/2 of blacks have a 3-repeat allele of monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), and that environmental factors in their youth have a significant impact on their behavior as adults. Marx didn't know a fucking thing about stuff like that.



So what's the purported *significance* here?


blackjack21 wrote:
One aspect of democracy--and one of the reasons the establishment dislikes Donald Trump--is that democracy helps ensure that you don't elect people with a history of violent anti-social behavior toward the electors, for example. Yet, many of the anti-Trump factions are horrified not at his policies so much,



You're not even *mentioning* his policies, like tearing immigrant families apart, interning migrants in concentration camps, interning separated children in concentration camps, imposing warfare-like *sanctions* on other countries (the opposite of 'free trade'), along with the regular government subsidies to the already-rich (tax cuts), and the bailing out of the stock markets, to favor zombie companies.

There's plenty *here* that's been anti-social, and even proto-*fascist*, at the federal level.


blackjack21 wrote:
but at his manners. We have huge swaths of the population that the establishment wouldn't even want elected dog catcher. Yet, they create all sorts of schemes to keep them employed when most employers would simply terminate their employment so that they don't have to deal with them.



'Schemes that retain employment' -- ? Like what, exactly, or is this all just *hyperbole* on your part?


blackjack21 wrote:
Jumping to another context... Is AI racist and sexist? Did white software engineers deliberately encode racism and sexism into human resources AI systems? No. Yet, AI tends to have the same tendencies as a typical human with prejudices (e.g., Asians are good at math; women don't make great programmers, etc.).



So what do you make of this outcome? What's your conclusion?


blackjack21 wrote:
Today's establishment is to invested in the notion of "equality" to better understand sources of inequality that don't involve some evil oppressor that must be stopped.



What do you think of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights?


blackjack21 wrote:
That's cute. These very studies were created by social scientists for precisely political and economic analysis. Outside of the political, education and media establishments anyone else perpetually obsessed with such notions? Let's take a small economic analysis. African-Americans tend to have nappy hair, and as such tend to use different hair care products from whites and Asians. Are you suggesting that businesses haven't looked at the racial or ethnic differences of people and created products accordingly? Hair products for African Americans suffer from what retailers call "shrinkage," and prosecutors call "shoplifting." Some African Americans find it "racist" if those products are behind lock and key, but products intended for a white or Asian demographic are not so locked up. Are they racist? What about "Irish Spring" soap? Are they not targeting a demographic?

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Irish-Spring ... /878031662

jt0c-SkQuwg


C'mon now.



So now your concerns are about, what, *retail* solvency, and racial attitudes?

How do you propose to *address* these issues?


blackjack21 wrote:
On the contrary, I'm suggesting as Marx did that the lumpenproletariat will always be a problem for society,



For *capitalist* *class* society, that is, that officially enforces a *social hierarchy* according to *wealth ownership*.


blackjack21 wrote:
and the abstraction of "equality" or "egalitarianism" isn't workable with them. In fact, the American Revolution wasn't concerned with them at all. It was only concerned with overthrowing a hereditary class system. Marx was consumed with the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.



Yes, you're empirically accurate -- the American bourgeois Revolution was anti-monarchy and anti-colonialist, while a *proletarian* revolution would be anti-*bourgeoisie*, and pro-working-class.


blackjack21 wrote:
The purpose of illegal immigration is to drive down wages and to get illegal immigrants to do the jobs that voters don't want to do.



What about your idealized 'free markets' -- ? Shouldn't such extend to the *labor markets* as well so that workers can cross national boundaries, for better *wages* for their labor?


blackjack21 wrote:
In the United States, yes. It's also true in Europe. Doubly true in the Middle East.


blackjack21 wrote:
Not everyone can or will function that way, even if they have the means. That's the problem with the universal basic income argument. You have to tie welfare to specific benefits. If you give money to drug addicts, they just buy more drugs--not food and shelter. There are homeless shelters with beds to spare, and homeless sleeping on the streets. Why? They don't allow drugs. So the homeless choose homelessness and drugs over a homeless shelter.



You're alleging the burden of *micromanagement*, then using this 'White Man's Burden' kind of argument to say that humane needs shouldn't be provided-for, humanely.

The way to address *any kind* of scarcity is to *flood* people with what they need, so that there's no person-by-person struggling, and complications, just over the *procurement* of whatever it is that people *need*. Your politics would rather bolster the social power pyramid by making political *hay* over complications -- typified in the War on Drugs and War on Terrorism -- rather than make people's lives *easier* by just producing and distributing what they need so as to *obviate* patronage / rulership *turf* altogether.


blackjack21 wrote:
Harkening back to my high school Utopian Literature class (where we read Erich Fromm among others), we read modern counter arguments to modern liberalism too--notably, B.F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity."

We know from experience that some social services proved harmful--like mental hospitals performing lobotomies. We also know that well-intentioned high rise housing projects also tended to aggregate the lumpenproletariat along with the social problems that are endemic to many of them--violence, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. They had heating, cooling, running water, sewage, electric lights, etc. How did it work out? Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago for example? That's where notions like "social capital" came from, because the net effect of government help was to take the limited amount of physical capital people had in their less than ideal homes they owned and provided them with government housing they didn't own. It stripped them of agency while aggregating them with the violent, the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped, etc.



And how's *military spending* working out, by comparison? Successful? Not so successful?

What's *that* kind of social ecosystem look like, by comparison?


blackjack21 wrote:
Yet, some people, such as violent criminals, need to be stripped of at least some agency. Many addicts too would benefit from a temporary loss of freedom to undergo detox programs and recovery and self-help communities. We know from plenty of studies from rat models to soldiers addicted to heroin what works, but we also know what doesn't work--letting people continue to behave in destructive ways. We also know that the prison system is reasonable for anti-social people, but not necessarily for addicts, the mentally handicapped or the mentally ill.

Wealth redistribution is not some magic panacea.



Where's the prison system and sanctions for *politicians* and the *wealthy* / corporations, for the anti-social policies that *they* implement?

Again you're just scapegoating / demonizing / blaming the *marginalized* who have no real power, while letting the *policy criminals* off-the-hook.
#15140288
QatzelOk wrote:
This is similar to "the Land Enclosures" situtation, where lack of community organizing and lack of cooperation lead to "the Tragedy of the Commons" (pasture land deterioration - pollution - Pasture-Change). Rather then help communities to organize themselves to restrict Pasture-Change, the elite decide that this would be too dangerous (in terms of loss of narrative control) and that it's better to "reset" in a way that kills families, societies, and natural human behaviors of many kinds.

Business interests and the rich lead a top-down "reset."



What are you implying to be the rich business top-down 'reset', this time around?
#15140292
Verv wrote:
I think it is actually fair for Blackjack to not apply these directly to individuals, but to speak generally. It's hard to make a proper diagnosis of any individual as specifically a sociopath unless you can really interview them, and they really want to tell the truth... and even then, how do we know they tell the truth?

But sure, why not speculate that there are sociopaths, psychoapths, and narcissists out & about, having reasonable amounts of success..?

How would your system deal with them?



I'm not a Stalinist, so I have no institutional-clinical approach to a state-bureaucratic medical administration over society.

From a *political* standpoint I'd say that we need to eliminate the existing capitalist social hierarchy based on *wealth* so that society's efforts can be towards *collective* interests in common, like that of infrastructure, health care, education, food, housing, utilities, etc. -- such would go a long way towards the cessation of *alienating* and *marginalizing* people, displacing them into domains of tyrannical micro-management -- the psychological disorders you itemize.


---


blackjack21 wrote:
Well, there is always a persistent problem with a non-performing class of people, and it is in part because there are reasons other than Marxian analysis for these problems. Marxian analysis over simplifies and asserts that everything is class and economics and power struggle. For whatever reason, that's the sort of analysis that prevails in a so-called democracies as well as dictatorships in spite of rather obvious empirical evidence to the contrary that we need something beyond class struggles and so forth to address some of societies persistent problems. In a large population you will always have:

1. Anti-social Personalities: Sociopaths generally need to be imprisoned--no respect whatsoever for the life or property of others. Psychopaths often should be too, but they are frequently leading large organizations because they lie with alacrity and have an ability to manipulate people to work in larger groups. Then, you have your narcissists (they will never be compatible with socialism, except joining the party apparatus and self-dealing), people with borderline personality disorder (run hot and cold with people and parties), and oppositional-defiance disorder (always confront and reject authority).

2. Mentally ill: Chronic schizophrenics, manic-depressives, depressives, and perpetually anxious people generally cannot perform well consistently. Some can create great art works, etc., but many are non-functional and problematic in ordinary production environments.

3. Addicts: You have a class of people who are often co-morbidly mentally ill who cannot perform, because they are physically dependent on exogenous ligands that dissociate them from reality or over-stimulate them to the point of schizophrenic or manic-like behavior.

4. Low IQ/Mentally Handicapped: In a normal distribution (Bell Curve), you always have a percentage of the population that is mentally incapable of performing productive tasks. Frankly, they are just idiots.

5. Physically Handicapped: You will also have people who were born with congenital birth defects and people who were seriously injured at work or at leisure or otherwise; and, those who come down with a disease like Lou Gehrigs or MS or something, who are no longer able to perform some physical tasks.

6. Non-heterosexuals: Homosexuals, transgenders, etc. frequently struggle with mental illness, addiction or borderline personality and psychopathy. Forcing the rest of society to accommodate them does not address the problems they frequently face.

All of these people, at times, tend to be a drain on a society.



ckaihatsu wrote:
What is society *for*, except for *people*, of all kinds, ultimately -- ?



Verv wrote:
Society is for providing the proper context for personal growth & self-actualization, and also for the embellishment of the group.

"Mixing," and, perhaps, "diversity," are values that secular humanists like to read into these things is just public school teacher talking pionts.



Okay, then what's *your* policy approach to people who are anti-social and/or have special needs? Warehousing?


---


blackjack21 wrote:
Then, you throw in the race and culture mixing through mass immigration, problems of language adoption, acculturation and assimilation and you have yet another set of problems expressly created by the neoliberals. Much of a population can tolerate some of this. However, some significant percentage of the population cannot--very often including my enumerated list above--and it leads to further social problems. Increase it to a biblical mass of Babel where people cannot speak to each other, because they don't share a common language and you end up with very serious discord.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Racist.



Verv wrote:
The most overused and heavily leaned upon word in the English lexicon.



Not in this instance -- BJ is invoking *biblical* / ancient social conditions to refer to our 21st century present-day reality, as if we're all just emerging from village life to encounter each other in the cities for the first time.


Verv wrote:
I get your point... I can theoretically whip out my phone and ask them to make my food vegetarian in Cantonese... and they can nod heartily, and then add fish cake to it because many Asian groups do not view fish as a regular meat.

I can also share my Big Tech & Big Media approved messaging by referring a Russian speaker to the Russian language article on Anarcha-feminism.

But this is, ultimately, silly.

How do you sit down and converse with people who speak a different language? You don't.

How does a population that is highly divided along culture & religious lines unite? It generally doesn't, unless there is top-down organization.



So your political concern here is over, what, international cultural integration? Got a manifesto for that handy, or is this all just a bullshit *imputation* of liberal-utopian-type idealizations?


Verv wrote:
It reminds me of mercenaries -- perhaps many societies end up relying on mercs because who wants to go & die for the Big Open Air Marketplace? Only the barbarians who need coin & don't have homelands with futures.



Oh, well, in *that* case you *know* what happens next -- look at the Roman Empire and the way *it* went. It became so dependent on 'barbarian' 'mercenaries' for warfare and for farming that it couldn't sustain the elitist social pyramid anymore and the whole civilization collapsed into the Dark Ages, which relied on monastic preservation of past culture.



The centuries of chaos

The 5th century was a period of break up and confusion for the three empires which had dominated southern Eurasia. There was a similar sense of crisis in each, a similar bewilderment as thousand year old civilisations seemed to crumble, as barbarians swept across borders and warlords carved out new kingdoms, as famine and plagues spread, trade declined and cities became depopulated. There were also attempts in all three empires to fix on ideological certainties to counter the new insecurity. In Roman north Africa, Augustine wrote one of the most influential works of Christian doctrine, City of God, in an attempt to come to terms with the sacking of the earthly city of Rome. In China, the Buddhist doctrines elaborated almost a millennium before in India began to gain a mass of adherents, especially among the embattled trading classes. In India new cults flourished as Hinduism consolidated itself.

The similarity between the crises of the civilisations has led some historians to suggest they flowed from a global change in climate. But to blame the weather alone is to ignore the great problem that had beset each of the civilisations for centuries. It lay in the most basic ways in which those who worked the land made a livelihood for themselves and everyone else. Advances in agricultural productivity were nowhere near comparable to those associated with the spread of ironworking a millennium before. Yet the consumption of the rich was more lavish and the superstructure of the state vaster than ever. A point was bound to be reached at which things simply could not go on as before, just as it had with the first Bronze Age civilisations.

The crisis was gravest for the Roman world. The flourishing of its civilisation had depended on an apparently endless supply of slaves. The result was that the imperial authorities and the great landowners concerned themselves much less with ways of improving agricultural yields than their equivalents in India or China. The collapse was correspondingly greater.

The period which followed in Europe is rightly known as the ‘Dark Ages’. It saw the progressive collapse of civilisation—in the sense of town life, literacy, literature and the arts. But that was not all. The ordinary people who had paid such a price for the glories of Rome paid an even greater price with its demise. Famine and plague racked the lands of the former empire and it is estimated that the population halved in the late 6th and 7th centuries.1 The first wave of Germanic warriors to sweep across the former borders—the Goths and Franks, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes—began to settle in the Roman lands and soon adopted many Roman customs, embracing the Christian religion and often speaking in Latin dialects. But behind them came successive waves of conquerors who had not been touched by Roman influence in the past and came simply to loot and burn rather than settle and cultivate. Huns and Norsemen tore into the kingdoms established by the Franks, the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons, making insecurity and fear as widespread in the 9th and 10th centuries as it had been in the 5th and 6th.

Eventually all the conquerors did settle. The majority had, in fact, been cultivators in their lands of origin, already beginning to use iron for tools as well as for the weapons that enabled them to defeat ‘civilised’ armies in battle. Their societies had already begun to make the transition from primitive communism towards class division, with chieftains who aspired to be kings, and aristocrats ruling over peasants and herders who still had some remaining traditions of communal cultivation. Had Roman agriculture been more advanced and based on something other than a mixture of large, slave-run latifundia and the smallholdings of impoverished peasants, the conquerors would have successfully taken over its methods and settled into essentially Roman patterns of life. We shall see that this is what happened with successive waves of ‘barbarians’ who carved out empires in China and its border lands. But Roman society was already disintegrating as its conquerors swept in, and they simply added to the disintegration. Some of the conquerors did attempt to adopt Roman agriculture, cultivating huge estates with captives from war. Some also attempted to re-establish the centralised structures of the old empire. At the end of the 5th century the Ostrogoth Theodoric proclaimed himself emperor of the west. At the end of the 8th, Charlemagne established a new empire across most of what is now France, Catalonia, Italy and Germany. But their empires fell apart at their deaths for the same reason that the original Roman Empire fell apart. There was not the material base in production to sustain such vast undertakings.

Soon the cities were not only depopulated but often abandoned and left to fall apart. Trade declined to such a low level that gold money ceased to circulate.2 Literacy was confined to the clergy, employing a language—literary Latin—no longer used in everyday life. Classical learning was forgotten outside a handful of monasteries, at one point concentrated mainly on the Irish fringe of Europe. Itinerant, monkish scholars became the only link between the small islands of literate culture.3 The books which contained much of the learning of the Graeco-Roman world were destroyed as successive invaders torched the monastic libraries.

Such was the condition of much of western Europe for the best part of 600 years. Yet out of the chaos a new sort of order eventually emerged. Across Europe agriculture began to be organised in ways which owed something both to the self contained estates of the late Roman Empire and the village communities of the conquering peoples. Over time, people began to adopt ways of growing food which were more productive than those of the old empire. The success of invaders such as the Vikings was testimony to the advance of their agricultural (and maritime) techniques, despite their lack of civilisation and urban crafts. Associated with the changing agricultural methods were new forms of social organisation. Everywhere armed lords, resident in crude fortified castles, began simultaneously to exploit and protect villages of dependent peasants, taking tribute from them in the form of unpaid labour or payments in kind. But it was a long time before this laid the basis for a new civilisation.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 103-105
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