Why do you Want communism?

Neither communism nor free-market, controls-free capitalism of the sort Scrotie espouses (O HAI SCROTIE) are viable.

Why?

Same core reason in both cases: people are dickbags.

Let's remember where we are for a moment and use a PoE example: say you get a really awesome drop one day. Call it a 120+ tri-res 100+ life Stygian Vise, simply because I have personal experience in that case. Being an Ordinary PoE Player, what's your first instinct? If you're anything like the enormous majority of the playerbase? "Sell it for every last drop I can get!", right?

Right.

You obtained a Resource - a desirable and valuable collection of bits in the database. You wanted to maximize the profit you earned from that Resource, because Resources are hard to frickin' come by and not maximizing profit from that Resource leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Just imagine what you could've done if you hadn't knocked an ex or two off the price of that belt to get an early sale! You might've been able to afford that really snazzy jewel that'd spike your deeps up another ten percent, but now Joo Po', so no jewel for you!

Makes sense, right?

Now apply the same concept a trillion fold to people who're doing the For-Real Edition and have staked their lives, livelihoods, reputations and egos on Winning - maximizing those profits and making sure they scrape every last single possible exalt from every single trade they make, and no matter if the other guy has to bleed for it.

Corporations, companies, businesses, whatever - they're all run best when they're run by ultracompetitive psychopaths. I'm not trying to hyperbole there; businesses, especially large businesses, objectively benefit from the men at the top, the decision-makers/movers-shakers, being ruthless to a degree that would be factually criminal elsewhere and competitive to levels even high school sports coaches would find uncomfortable.

The position of CEO - or of Commissar or whatever, in a communistic government - attracts people who want to Win. Who desire to dominate their fellow man, to control Resources and maximize their own gains at the cost of everyone else. They're modern-day tyrants with the intelligence to realize that being openly tyrannical gets them into too much trouble, so they twist and abuse and corrupt and contort the system as much as they can to use it as a shield against the anger they incite.

The only verdict is vengeance solution is constant vigilance and tight control of the market from people who're as unconnected from the market as we can manage. There are no Philosopher-Kings and there's no way to get Gamers (i.e. people who game the system as much as possible to twist it to their own ends, no matter the detriment to anyone else, not players of video games) out of the system completely and force them to play fairly - but we need to strive towards that goal anyways because any slack in that effort is slack the Gamers gleefully use to undermine the very system that allowed them to outcompete older Gamers and come into power.

Whatever system of government is in place - communism, capitalism, feudalism, bear-ism, what-have-you - is honestly kind of irrelevant. I believe capitalism is closer than the others because it gives the individual a stake in their own society where communism does not, but even then. Any government that ignores the fact that Gamers exist will soon be a government that is basically run exclusively by Gamers, who will configure that government to allow Gamers to maximize their Winning at the expense of billions of non-Gamers everywhere.

So yeah. No communism, it's a stupid idea that makes no sense the minute you introduce real, actual people to those clean-sounding Ideals Marx kept spewing. No laissez-faire capitalism, and fuck no to government-as-a-market-service; if I can't shoot CEOs in the face when they inevitably come all over Palpatine on us, we need a system in place designed to forestall the Palpatine-ing and to remove them when they do go Palpatine on us.

People are imperfect, and the species is too prone to producing would-be tyrants for me to get behind any system that makes those would-be tyrants' lives easier.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

"

Khoranth wrote:

According to wiki Canada is nearly 80-90% white, hardly diverse.

O rly?

I mean, I get that the US is technically more ethnically diverse, but nowhere else on planet Earth do first-generation immigrants make up a greater percentage of the overall population than Canada. You're comparing Canadians who were born on a different continent with black Americans whose families have been in the US for centuries.

Yes but those immigrants must first prove they skate and chug a pint of Molson Canadian

true story

Canada: It's (Colder) America for the 21st Century.

"

faerwin wrote:

http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-010-x/99-010-x2011001-eng.cfm

That's the official stance on minorities and immigration in Canada.

"Among the G8 countries, Canada had the highest proportion of foreign-born population (20.6%), well above the shares in Germany (13.0% in 2010) and the United States (12.9% in 2010)."

The reason we have a high proportion of white people is because a lot of European countries citizens migrate to Canada as well as a decent amount of people from the US. That said, that doesn't mean that the culture isn't diverse.


The population numbers don't matter nearly as much as you think it does. What matter is the population density and the total population of a city. These two, aside from a few mega cities (like new york) is very comparable with Canada and the small towns are also easily comparable to those in Canada, the only difference being how many of those there are.

I didn't mention criminality because you are correct that Canada's criminality is very low compared to the US. But to be fair, almost half the countries on the planet has lower criminality than the US, including a lot of third world countries and emerging nations.

Yeah, white immigrants don't count as diversity. And, most of Canada's non white population is Asain, which also does not count as a minority, according to US minority hiring laws in construction. From a US perspective, Canada is one of the most non diverse countries in the world.

I understand you disagree, hence my point, Canada is basically a different world than the USA.

You have an almost all white country, with some Asains mixed in, from a USA perspective, that is the opposite of diverse.

diversity doesn't come from skin color but from culture. Skin color has fuck all to do with diversity.

I don't know how you could ever argue that...

"

faerwin wrote:

diversity doesn't come from skin color but from culture. Skin color has fuck all to do with diversity.

I don't know how you could ever argue that...

If you said that on a US college campus: that having all whites with a few Asains mixed in counts as diverse; you would be arrested for a hate crime by campus security and expelled.

This is further proof that USA and Canada are drastically different.

Khoranth, bro...you are seriously missing the point.

Racial diversity is a hot-button topic these days because of lingering racism issues inherent to society. Not U.S. society, not Canadian society, not Western society - all society. Racism is endemic to the human condition and our tendency to want to tribe up; we all have to make an active effort to get over it, same as confirmation bias from the other thread, and the fact that not everybody is on board with that need to make the active effort is why it's contentious.

Cultural diversity comes from individuals of different cultures coming together in the same place. European nations count as a different culture. That makes for cultural diversity, which is a good thing. I would argue cultural diversity is far more important than racial diversity; racial diversity is a bandage for racism issues, especially if all the people of a given melange of colors are otherwise all products of the same culture.

"

1453R wrote:

Khoranth, bro...you are seriously missing the point.

Racial diversity is a hot-button topic these days because of lingering racism issues inherent to society. Not U.S. society, not Canadian society, not Western society - all society. Racism is endemic to the human condition and our tendency to want to tribe up; we all have to make an active effort to get over it, same as confirmation bias from the other thread, and the fact that not everybody is on board with that need to make the active effort is why it's contentious.

Cultural diversity comes from individuals of different cultures coming together in the same place. European nations count as a different culture. That makes for cultural diversity, which is a good thing. I would argue cultural diversity is far more important than racial diversity; racial diversity is a bandage for racism issues, especially if all the people of a given melange of colors are otherwise all products of the same culture.

You would be arrested by campus security and expelled as well.

...

OTL


No, Khoranth. No I would not. Because despite what some white people with no bloody clue what all the 'DIVERSITY!' crap is actually about, what's causing it, and why it's such a fraught issue these days think, nobody is 'arrested and expelled' for simply talking about the issue save as a cheap, self-defeating publicity stunt.

'Racial diversity', as you're going on about, is an attempt by White People to try and police themselves on their Whiteness Bias. The attempt can be more or less ham-handed depending on the given White Person (or organization thereof) involved, but on the whole someone who's a third-generation or later immigrant here is Murican, regardless of skin color. Unless their family is super keen on isolating themselves from Murican culture and forcibly clinging to their own at the expense of all the surrounding culture, then what you've got is a heritage, not a culture, by third generation. Which is why some people with less than 100% Whiteness take issue with the "[X] American" schtick - they're not Latino American or African American or Korean American or Martian American, they're AMERICAN and would like to be thought of as such in many cases.

Canada's preponderance of first-gen immigrants makes for a more culturally diverse stewpot, wherever those immigrants land. That's just sort of the way Canada works. It used to be the way America works, but nobody wants to live here now unless their life is actively threatened wherever they are. Nobody makes an intellectual decision to come here anymore. We dun goofed that up.

Alright, getting back to this briefly, b’cause I said I would.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Are you really making this all about blame instead of about results?

No. I was thinking moreso from along the lines of no system being impervious to malignance. First generation systems administration may be highly successful, but how reliant was that system upon the first generation’s altruism? How resilient is the system to potentially less altruistic future generations? It therefore becomes necessary to be able to identify risks, and I feel “the greater the authority, the greater the risk” is a fairly universal observation.

What we got works, because 1) it is not reliant upon its administrator’s altruism (there are complex systems that are supposed to mitigate overreach of authority) and 2) meritocracy within economic specialization (promotion depends upon a history of success as to mitigate risk of future failures). The communist ideal, as presented by the layman, assumes a wholly altruistic (fairy tale) society. I have yet to see an example of where absolute authority turned out well in the end for anybody; on the contrary, we have enough historical documentation to fuel a trip to the moon that says otherwise.

The whole bit about natural selection may be totally unrelated, but I feel like there are analogues. The ideas of meritocracy, free market, economic specialization, even democracy, are sort of ideological embodiments of natural selection, or at least something analogous. They work because they accept that there is a sort of natural law to things—good ideas are good because they won the competition, not because someone declared it so.