Why do you Want communism?

"

1453R wrote:

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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.

You just did like 5 hate crimes in one post, if you were on a US college campus.

In modern day USA: saying you can have a diverse whites only group (or mix in a few Asians, if you will) is blatantly racist; ask anyone on US college campus.

OR read US diversity hiring law: whites cannot be considered and Asians cannot either; except sometimes US diversity laws punish Asians for being more advantaged than white people.

Look; I am not saying I agree with obvious racist liberal laws; but that is the reality in the USA.

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Khoranth wrote:

"

1453R wrote:

...

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.

You just did like 5 hate crimes in one post, if you were on a US college campus.

In modern day USA: saying you can have a diverse whites only group (or mix in a few Asians, if you will) is blatantly racist; ask anyone on US college campus.

OR read US diversity hiring law: whites cannot be considered and Asians cannot either; except sometimes US diversity laws punish Asians for being more advantaged than white people.

Look; I am not saying I agree with obvious racist liberal laws; but that is the reality in the USA.

hes going for the high score lol

Ignoring Khoranth for a moment because there's only so many times I'm willing to try and explain the same thing to someone who actively refuses to grasp it... A notion has just occurred to me that may explain a lot of the dissonance between views such as mine and views such as CHP's and Scrotie's.

A lot of the issues with capitalism (and in fact any form of government) are less issues with the government in question and more an issue with the overall culture surrounding that government. Government =/= culture, but it has to take culture into account if it wants to even remotely work.

A lot of folks' animosity towards free-market economics and people striving for 'The Communist Ideal' seems to stem from the fact that Western culture (or at least U.S. culture that I've been able to observe, so people don't yell at me for speaking for them) does not prize or particularly value honorable behavior.

No no, hear me out.

Over here? Success is what's important, generally fiscal success. Results matter more than method. If you're a lying cheating conniving megalomaniacal shitbag, but you get your shareholders Heap Big Profits, then you're doing fine. Conversely, if someone tries to run their business in a strictly ethical manner - real ethics, not 'Business Ethics' - tries to take care of their people and ensure that everyone their company touches is better for the interaction, they're operating under vastly more constraints than the Competitive Psychopath. Those competitive constraints will eventually cause him to lose while the dickbag Wins, because he's accepting voluntary constraints that his competition is under no cultural obligation to also accept - especially because he derives no competitive advantage from accepting those constraints, despite what a lot of people would otherwise think.

An evil man with good PR is no different to the public eye than a good man, and even if the Good Man in this example tries to expose the Evil Man for his scumbaggish ways, the Evil Man already has more practice in a PR war and can spin the other guy as being a crappy tattle-tale whistleblower 'unable to compete on his own merits and thus resorting to mudslinging at his betters'.

If our culture deeply valued honorable behavior - if we as a society were manifestly unwilling to put up with lying, cheating, connivery, double-dealing, or general dickbaggery in one's endeavors - then we wouldn't need Scrotie's powerfully coercive government-as-a-service to get people to play fair. Playing Fair would be an intrinsic requirement for existing within society. Unfortunately, modern American society honestly swings the other way - people venerate those folks who can find a way to get away with being scumbags, whether through obfuscation or audacity. Being able to "get away with it" is seen as a positive trait, a sign of cleverness and justifiable rebellion. Being good at being dishonorable is held as a virtue in our modern world, much more so than being honorable in the first place.

What we need is less a governmental reform, in that case, and more of a cultural one. Because so long as being good at being a shitbag is considered a Positive Desirable Thing in society - so long as we're willing to celebrate the Rockefellers and Capones of the world instead of condemning them - any government we put up is going to be deeply flawed and fundamentally ineffective.

Folks need to stop rooting for crooks just because the crooks are good at being crooks before we can try and get the crooks out of the system.

I do grasp your point, but that is irrelevant to reality in the USA, at least according to US hiring laws and college campus policy.

In the USA white is one group, doesn't matter if you live in a mansion or trailer park, you are considered the same, and to say otherwise is considered racist.

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1453R wrote:

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

I was not actually advocating "controls-free" capitalism. I did mention laissez-faire capitalism, but only to highlight that it is not sympathetic to corporatism.

As I've said before in another thread, I do not believe a pure anti-authoritarian society is possible; when no legitimate authority is established, the inevitable result is a violent power struggle until one is established that is capable of threatening would-be aggressors with the credible threat of overwhelming retaliatory force. Free trade cannot function in an environment where the other person believes they can get away with bashing your skull in and taking your stuff — or merely threatening to do so until you relent and give it to him for free.

What I am an advocate of is decentralized authority, not the absence thereof. I am also very much an advocate for free trade — that is, trade wherein all parties who contribute their labor to a commodity agree to their transactions without coercion or fraud. That very definition of free trade implies controls to prevent coercion and fraud — it implies that, while it is not okay to coerce people to trade in a particular manner, it is okay to coerce them into not coercing others to trade in a particular manner.

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Khoranth wrote:

I do grasp your point, but that is irrelevant to reality in the USA, at least according to US hiring laws and college campus policy.

In the USA white is one group, doesn't matter if you live in a mansion or trailer park, you are considered the same, and to say otherwise is considered racist.

Saying "Canada is like another freakin' planet of undiversity" because you don't like U.S. hiring laws is...

Just wow, man.

Look. I get that you're complaining about codified Whiteness Checks. You would not believe the number of people I've talked to - 100% of them middle-class or below White People - who complain bitterly that Anti-Whiteness laws are just reverse racism and Holding Them Down, and that everybody should earn their place the same way because privilege is a myth and discrimination-is-discrimination and THEEEEY'VE never been racist so why should they suffer from people who think all white folks are racist, and blahdy blahdy blah.

All of that's irrelevant. The laws are there for a reason, the reason has nothing to do with cultural diversity which Canada does have as much of, if not more of, than we do because America is right up there with Britain in our rednecks-who-hate-people count that make this an unfriendly place for immigration and Canada's doing a better job than we are of inviting the proper sort of immigration.

And that's irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which is mostly a bunch of tangents related to the overarching theme of 'Why Does Communism Suck?' The answer, by the way, is that when you decouple Effort and Reward, as communism is explicitly designed to do, you get a severe dropoff in the former and a corresponding shortage of the latter. It's probably the most basic possible economics - if Man A can exert ten percent of the effort of Man B, but both Man A and Man B are granted the exact same payout from the system? Then your system sucks, nobody has a reason to contribute to it, and everything goes to shit in a blazing hurry.

Also, communism requires a lack of diversity, which is why communism usually starts with killing everyone with a differing viewpoint.

I was attempting to create a tangential point as to why communism sucks, but we got too far into the other.

And it is not just US hiring laws, it is the mindset on college campuses as well.

But all this discussion just proves my point, USA and Canada are polar opposites: cause from a Canadian view, Canada is diverse, but from a USA view, Canada has no diversity whatsoever.

"

1453R wrote:

Western culture (or at least U.S. culture that I've been able to observe, so people don't yell at me for speaking for them) does not prize or particularly value honorable behavior.

No no, hear me out.

Over here? Success is what's important, generally fiscal success. Results matter more than method.

I'm very strongly opposed to the idea that the practical is immoral, or that the moral is not practical. Thus, when you contrast "honor" with success, I disagree. The moral is the practical.

However, it's important that you understand that by "success" I mean the forever timeframe. I'm not talking about success during my lifetime, but about the well-being of my DNA — my children, their children, their great-great-great-grandchildren — across a potentially infinite expanse of time. Not my life, but the secular equivalent of the afterlife.

If you're familiar with Asimov's Foundation series, I think Hari Seldon had, if not the correct morality, at least the correct understanding of the timeframe to which morality applies. It should be obvious that the fall of civilization would most probably have severe consequences on the sustained existence of my DNA. So yeah, I want at least a significant population of people who aren't my progeny to succeed enough to at least get by, and if at all possible improve. And that's a complicated task, which I must emphasize I can't perform or even properly comprehend without the help of others (especially considering what I'm about to say later in this post).

What is successful when we step out of our lifetimes and consider the path of human life itself?

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1453R wrote:

If you're a lying cheating conniving megalomaniacal shitbag, but you get your shareholders Heap Big Profits, then you're doing fine. Conversely, if someone tries to run their business in a strictly ethical manner - real ethics, not 'Business Ethics' - tries to take care of their people and ensure that everyone their company touches is better for the interaction, they're operating under vastly more constraints than the Competitive Psychopath. Those competitive constraints will eventually cause him to lose while the dickbag Wins, because he's accepting voluntary constraints that his competition is under no cultural obligation to also accept - especially because he derives no competitive advantage from accepting those constraints, despite what a lot of people would otherwise think.

I suggest you re-read my post about the difference between selflessness and self-esteem. The ethical thing to do is to trade value for value, not to sacrifice yourself piece by piece to the satisfaction of those who give you nothing in return. If one person will, voluntarily and without the influence of fraud or coercion, sell lower or buy higher than another person, then that is a fair price, period, full stop. Going beyond that doesn't make you better; it makes you an enabler of parasites.

"

1453R wrote:

An evil man with good PR is no different to the public eye than a good man, and even if the Good Man in this example tries to expose the Evil Man for his scumbaggish ways, the Evil Man already has more practice in a PR war and can spin the other guy as being a crappy tattle-tale whistleblower 'unable to compete on his own merits and thus resorting to mudslinging at his betters'.

While I have deep respect for the power of perception to shape reality, it is still ultimately reality that matters more. At some point, I will cease perceiving, but reality will continue on.

"

1453R wrote:

If our culture deeply valued honorable behavior - if we as a society were manifestly unwilling to put up with lying, cheating, connivery, double-dealing, or general dickbaggery in one's endeavors - then we wouldn't need Scrotie's powerfully coercive government-as-a-service to get people to play fair.

You mean, if by some magic everyone was a morally infallible being. I am nowhere near a morally infallible person — do you think you are? Do you think you ever possibly could be? The sheer amount of knowledge you would need to possess would fry the organic circuits of your meager processor. We need economic specialization in the fields of academic occupations — and as a prerequisite, a functional and efficient market of ideas — in order to have the faintest glimmer of hope at collectively solving the problem.

I mean seriously, do you even Full Metal Alchemist: Bro? Your Homunculus is showing.

"

1453R wrote:

Playing Fair would be an intrinsic requirement for existing within society.

Required by what? Obviously not Nature. We might need Her, but She doesn't need us.

"

1453R wrote:

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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)

I'm wide eyed at this blantant and disturbing bigotry and racism. Reported.

"

Manocean wrote:

"

1453R wrote:

...

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)

I'm wide eyed at this blantant and disturbing bigotry and racism. Reported.

dont reckon it will do any good