Scrotie's single-question political compass test

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erdelyii wrote:
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poor_hobbit wrote:
Contrary to the Capitalist Scums.
You make a good point, poor hobbit.

May I ask what is your first language?
Seems like he's fluent in Communism to me. Although I'd appreciate confirmation.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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Seems like he's fluent in Communism to me. Although I'd appreciate confirmation.


My first language is Bulgarian.

I'm not fluent in any Communism. I'm simply Anti-Capitalist.

Actually what really irritated me in the above professors' example is that he reasons implying the doctrine of ownership disregarding the fact that you can own a Chaos Orb or you can own strategic nuclear arsenal and those are not the same thing. The capitalist notion in his reasoning is "a priori". This is just false.
Last edited by poor_hobbit on Sep 13, 2018, 11:27:43 AM
Word Wank Incoming


Because I know goddamn well nobody likes it when I go off on wordy tangents, except maybe Scrotes or Mr. Pants. So just move on if you're not one of those two

Spoiler
Just to play tiefling's advocate for a moment here, because wydafuqnawt...

Who does it benefit – truly – for the means of production to be privately owned?

Before the explosions (I know, I know, too late), let’s examine a couple of prepositions for purposes of argument. “Communism”, in this case, does not refer to everybody owning literally nothing and having to draw from government-owned closets to get dressed in the morning – it refers to the engines of society and the means of production being held not by a singular private entity, but by a collective group assumed to have the best interests of the society in general in mind. In this case things like factories, farms, ports, rail lines, and other means of creating and moving goods would be operated by the government and considered to be public property run for the good of all.

I can smell the rightist anger from here, and I haven’t even posted yet. Gimme a second, I’m laying the groundwork.

Now. Let’s dispense, first, with the idea of ‘public ownership’, i.e. the whole of society owning something. In practice, whosoever operates/controls a resource owns that resource – being able to exert that control is the actual meaning of ownership, whatever the legal code says. As such, any resource ‘held in trust for the People’ is in truth owned by the government, rather than a private corporation. That being said, what are the benefits of allowing private corporations to hold sway over critical infrastructure or necessary supply of vital-for-life goods?

Theoretically, according to conventional wisdom, the private market is more responsive to changing circumstances and more conducive to ‘good ideas rising to the top’ than is any governmental institution. Bureaucratic bloat and the bureaucratic desire for stability over innovation both hold back governmental efforts and is supposed to ensure that any private company is going to be nimbler, leaner, and better than any equivalent governmental structure. This was the premise of the capitalist market system emplaced in this country. Leaders of that system were supposed to be the best and brightest, and they’d use their power and foresight to guide the country into the most profitable state it could be in, which was supposed to be synonymous with the most productive state, and in turn synonymous with “the best for everyone” because a profitable productive country is one of plenty for everyone.

Is this still true?

I would argue it most emphatically is not. Corporate supergiants like Alphabet are every bit as bureaucratically bogged down as a government, and furthermore any advancement that the private sector has made in rendering their bureaucracies more efficient and streamlined are advancements that any bureaucratic entity can make. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy; there’s no real difference in speed and responsiveness from a huge, ponderous governing structure for a country and a huge, ponderous corporate megalith spanning the entire globe.

Furthermore, the leaders of the capitalist market system are no longer the best and brightest of us. They’re no longer making the world a better place for themselves, their families, and the families of their workers. Prevailing wisdom/conventional thought in the marketplace is that Shareholders are the actual owners/leaders of any given company, that CEOs and other leadership figures are nothing more than hired help for the shareholders, and that the only purpose for which a business exists is to increase the value of its shareholder’s shares. At all costs. This isn’t me being rhetorical – there’s a very famous article by a man named Milton Friedman that serves as the basis for modern American economics which states that the only responsibility a business is to increase its profitability, AT ANY COST. It reads as a tailor-made excuse for businesses to make toxic decisions and prioritize profitability beyond any other function – the CEO is not responsible for the activities of the business anymore or any damage the business causes, as he is under a legal obligation to maximize the value of his shareholders’ stock no matter the cost. Even shareholders themselves are exempted from having to be good people making good decisions – any single given individual shareholder can have whatever goals they like, but the only goal all of a company’s shareholders can be safely assumed to have in common would be the maximization of their profits.

Again – at any cost.

The article assumes that the government is part of this system and imposes controls and restrictions on corporate behavior as necessary to ensure corporations remain within the bounds of ethical action – they’re supposed to set up the rules such that corporations acting within them can f eel free and unfettered to maximize profits. Save that Mr. Friedman, while he was writing the work that would destroy modern capitalism, seems to’ve failed to account for the fact that according to his horrific thesis here, a corporation is also legally obligated by Shareholder Supremacy to lobby for bad laws, work to dismantle governmental oversight, and erode any and all controls or restrictions on their activities that lead to less profitability than what otherwise might be attainable.

In this case, I ask again. Who does it benefit for the means of production to be privately owned? The answer is not actually you-the-reader. The ordinary Joe Everyman does not benefit in the slightest from the means of production being owned by a giant corporation instead of by a government. The only people that benefit from private ownership of any such institution are shareholders, which have been characterized as money-sucking turbo vampires that cannot be sated by any amount of profit and which do not care for the crippling social, economic, environmental, political, or biological damage their ceaseless drive to maximize short-term profits at all costs inflicts.

Given that this is the case…is it any wonder that some people are perhaps wondering if it might be an idea to take the means of production away from The God Damned Shareholders and putting it in the hands of a bureaucratic structure which is even just nominally accountable to the population as a whole, i.e. the elected government, rather than leaving the means of production in the hands of a bureaucratic structure which doesn’t give rat shit #1 about the population as a whole?

So long as businesses cannot be assed to care about any of the damage their voracious, ceaseless, impossible quest for ever-ballooning, unsustainable capital-P Profitability deals to the world as a whole, mayhaps we could use a dose or two of communism in our capitalist pig troughs?
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poor_hobbit wrote:
Actually what really irritated me in the above professors' example is that he reasons implying the doctrine of ownership disregarding the fact that you can own a Chaos Orb or you can own strategic nuclear arsenal and those are not the same thing. The capitalist notion in his reasoning is "a priori". This is just false.
I am wondering if you're using a priori in a nonstandard context here. In its usual meaning, a priori refers to a conclusion which can be legitimately claimed to be valid without the establishment of material evidence, because it relies purely on logical deduction; e.g. 2+2=4. In the argument that Child B is the most deserving of ownership — that is, that the person who makes a thing has property rights over that thing — I wouldn't consider that a priori because it would make sense that the claim itself could be disputed with material evidence — for instance, if another child could show evidence that they, not Child B, were the one who made the flute.

To be fair to communism, however, I've recently read Thomas Sowell's excellent book Marxism, a thorough examination of Marx's ideas and a great guide for deciphering Marx's works (e.g. when Marx employs the word "value" it carries with it a very nonstandard meaning and definition, similar to how, for instance, Ayn Rand means something unlike the popular understanding of "selfishness" when she invokes the term in her works). It seems that my characterization of Marx in specific, and Marxists in general, as advocating for Child C is rather inaccurate and more complicated than I first believed, with variable possible answers depending on adherence to Marx's economics or to his ethics.

To strip Marx's economic argument down to its relevance to this thread, in a capitalist wage-based manufacturing economy it is the laborers, not the capitalists (that is, factory owners), who directly make the commodities sold by the capitalists; as such, Marx himself would have said Child B has the right to the flute. In order to properly differentiate between Marxist economics and other economic positions, we'd need to reframe the question with a Child D — someone who owned the materials from which the flute was made, but who paid Child B to make the flute out of those materials.

Marx's ethics, however, painted a somewhat deterministic view of human morality. His dialectical materialism was essentially a compromise between free will and determinism, such that free will added an element of variance in individual results that, as applied to classes of people, generally was overwhelmed by the overall conditions of material reality that class was exposed to. (Having long been a fan of the Foundation series, it's a wonder to me that the "psychohistory" that Isaac Isamov dreamed up for his stories is essentially just the practical application of a "science" Marx and Engels first conceived of; however, the Marxist conception of dialectical materialism is notably more, um, materialistic.) As such, from an ethical standpoint, Marx would argue that Child C would never become an actualized and free member of society unless he was given the physical prerequisites for such freedoms — that is, a freedom to do something is more than just permission, but the material means to do so. In this sense, Marxist thought has a deep undercurrent, unjustified by its economics, of sympathy for redistribution of wealth to Child C, notably NOT through direct generosity but by attempting to "naturally" maneuver the historical formation of major institutions to the point that they do so.

Ultimately, I believe the heart of Marxist thought is in the conflation of these two archetypes — in other words, that Child B is Child C, that those who actually make the products of the world are exploited by those who do not, that value is, according to Marx, directly equivalent to seconds of human life spent working and, due to a lack of differentiation of value based on whose time is spent, all human time is of equal value — a fact that capitalist economies stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. I don't acknowledge it either.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Sep 13, 2018, 1:02:05 PM
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1453R wrote:
Who does it benefit – truly – for the means of production to be privately owned?
As Thomas Sowell notes in his analysis of Marxism, Marx in his writings and in his intellectual legacy had an unfortunate tendency to think of capital — that is, the means of production — as inanimate, money and machines; however, in reality a large chunk of capital, perhaps most of it, is human. It is clear to everyone that a skilled laborer can produce more and better than a less-skilled laborer, but Marx seemed utterly blind to the time and resources that are invested in developing that skill, and with it concepts such as the dividends that such investment pays.

So my answer to your question is: when you refer to the means of production, you are referring first and foremost to yourself. Do you believe you should be publicly owned? And if someone would rather develop their material capital than develop their intellectual capital, would you effectively deny them the freedom of that choice by confiscating from them the former if they chose it over the latter?
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1453R wrote:
Let’s dispense, first, with the idea of ‘public ownership’, i.e. the whole of society owning something. In practice, whosoever operates/controls a resource owns that resource – being able to exert that control is the actual meaning of ownership, whatever the legal code says.
Well said.
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1453R wrote:
Theoretically, according to conventional wisdom, the private market is more responsive to changing circumstances and more conducive to ‘good ideas rising to the top’ than is any governmental institution. Bureaucratic bloat and the bureaucratic desire for stability over innovation both hold back governmental efforts and is supposed to ensure that any private company is going to be nimbler, leaner, and better than any equivalent governmental structure. This was the premise of the capitalist market system emplaced in this country...

Is this still true?

I would argue it most emphatically is not. Corporate supergiants like Alphabet are every bit as bureaucratically bogged down as a government, and furthermore any advancement that the private sector has made in rendering their bureaucracies more efficient and streamlined are advancements that any bureaucratic entity can make. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy; there’s no real difference in speed and responsiveness from a huge, ponderous governing structure for a country and a huge, ponderous corporate megalith spanning the entire globe.
Is there a difference in speed and responsiveness? Not much. There might, however, be a difference in terms of incentive to replace the structure with something else that is "nimbler, leaner and better."

I say "might" because a government that defends corporate bureaucracy from innovation by squashing smaller but more efficient competitors before they get big and powerful, is just as bad as a government that defends government bureaucracy from innovating by squashing smaller but more efficient competitors before they get big and powerful. Perhaps worse.

What we are living in today, at least in the US, is what I would call a post-capitalist corporatocracy. A previously capitalist system that is in the throes of massive regulatory capture isn't a properly capitalist system, because the mechanisms behind product improvement via competition are either breaking or completely broken. Merely slapping an entity that has been rendered highly resistant, if not utterly immune, to free market competition with the label "business" doesn't really make it one; for all intents and purposes, many of our contemporary corporations are de facto (as opposed to de jure) unelected federal bureaus — government entities — that have escaped any form of electoral oversight, save those of their shareholders — the real citizens.
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1453R wrote:
Furthermore, the leaders of the capitalist market system are no longer the best and brightest of us. They’re no longer making the world a better place for themselves, their families, and the families of their workers. Prevailing wisdom/conventional thought in the marketplace is that Shareholders are the actual owners/leaders of any given company, that CEOs and other leadership figures are nothing more than hired help for the shareholders, and that the only purpose for which a business exists is to increase the value of its shareholder’s shares. At all costs. This isn’t me being rhetorical – there’s a very famous article by a man named Milton Friedman that serves as the basis for modern American economics which states that the only responsibility a business is to increase its profitability, AT ANY COST. It reads as a tailor-made excuse for businesses to make toxic decisions and prioritize profitability beyond any other function – the CEO is not responsible for the activities of the business anymore or any damage the business causes, as he is under a legal obligation to maximize the value of his shareholders’ stock no matter the cost. Even shareholders themselves are exempted from having to be good people making good decisions – any single given individual shareholder can have whatever goals they like, but the only goal all of a company’s shareholders can be safely assumed to have in common would be the maximization of their profits.

Again – at any cost.
My objections to Friedman are NOT that he advocates profit. Profit is, at its heart, the idea of trading something valued at x for something valued at more than x, so the way I see it expectation of profit is the ONLY justification for ANY action, even on an individual level — if you sacrificed greater value than you got back by doing something, you would have been better off not doing it.

Instead, my objections are that he doesn't put enough emphasis on timeframe for my tastes. For instance, if your mentality is extremely short-term, robbing a bank could seem profitable — you don't give up that much in the short term, and you get a lot back. Naturally, the longer your stretch out the time-frame — to include the possibility of timeframes well beyond one's death — the more likely such decisions are in fact huge losses. I would be completely fine with the Friedman concept of proper management of corporations if it was amended to: the only responsibility of a business is to maximize its profitability according to a timeframe that stretches forward into the centuries. Under that conception, making toxic decisions for short-term gain wouldn't be so easily seen as profitable.
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1453R wrote:
The article assumes that the government is part of this system and imposes controls and restrictions on corporate behavior as necessary to ensure corporations remain within the bounds of ethical action – they’re supposed to set up the rules such that corporations acting within them can f eel free and unfettered to maximize profits. Save that Mr. Friedman, while he was writing the work that would destroy modern capitalism, seems to’ve failed to account for the fact that according to his horrific thesis here, a corporation is also legally obligated by Shareholder Supremacy to lobby for bad laws, work to dismantle governmental oversight, and erode any and all controls or restrictions on their activities that lead to less profitability than what otherwise might be attainable.
Again, short-sighted management. Of what use are government regulations over the longest of terms if you compel the citizenry of your government to revolt against it by transforming your nation into a corporatocracy?
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1453R wrote:
Given that this is the case…is it any wonder that some people are perhaps wondering if it might be an idea to take the means of production away from The God Damned Shareholders and putting it in the hands of a bureaucratic structure which is even just nominally accountable to the population as a whole, i.e. the elected government, rather than leaving the means of production in the hands of a bureaucratic structure which doesn’t give rat shit #1 about the population as a whole?
Why bother? Giving your argument the most favorable reading I believe is reasonable, you've established that oligarchic corporations and government are about equally shitty. It's like you want to move out of an apartment infested by roaches to move into an apartment infested by roaches. Seems like a waste of a U-Haul rental to me.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Sep 13, 2018, 1:42:32 PM
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ScrotieMcB wrote:
As Thomas Sowell notes in his analysis of Marxism, Marx in his writings and in his intellectual legacy had an unfortunate tendency to think of capital — that is, the means of production — as inanimate, money and machines; however, in reality a large chunk of capital, perhaps most of it, is human. It is clear to everyone that a skilled laborer can produce more and better than a less-skilled laborer, but Marx seemed utterly blind to the time and resources that are invested in developing that skill, and with it concepts such as the dividends that such investment pays.

So my answer to your question is: when you refer to the means of production, you are referring first and foremost to yourself. Do you believe you should be publicly owned? And if someone would rather develop their material capital than develop their intellectual capital, would you effectively deny them the freedom of that choice by confiscating from them the former if they chose it over the latter?


And yet, an individual with invested skill has no control over the means of production. A skilled worker cannot exert control save by not working - the only choice she has is which master she permits to profit from her ability while she earns nothing but scraps. Yes, she can instead choose to sell herself to no master, but in this case she starves because her invested skill earns none of your dividends whatsoever.

The human component of 'the means of production' is not free to do as it chooses; it does not have agency, and is for the purposes of this discussion largely indistinguishable from the machinery it operates. Whether one is publicly or privately owned does not change the fact that one is owned, that one's skills and efforts belong to oneself only as much as they can be used to lobby for a better collar.

The only choice you get is who holds your leash, and that choice is utterly meaningless when all available options are equally disinterested in your betterment.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:
What we are living in today, at least in the US, is what I would call a post-capitalist corporatocracy. A previously capitalist system that is in the throes of massive regulatory capture isn't a properly capitalist system, because the mechanisms behind product improvement via competition are either breaking or completely broken. Merely slapping an entity that has been rendered highly resistant, if not utterly immune, to free market competition with the label "business" doesn't really make it one; for all intents and purposes, many of our contemporary corporations are de facto (as opposed to de jure) unelected federal bureaus — government entities — that have escaped any form of electoral oversight, save those of their shareholders — the real citizens.


And this is defensible in what way? We've all played cyberpunk games; we know where this is going. Is it truly okay to go there? As you said, 'citizenship' in these proto-governments is restricted to a bare few thousand ultrawealthy individuals who exist solely by feeding on the system. We're back to only wealthy landowners getting a vote, while the common man is simply hooked up to the engines and ground down in his traces until he collapses.

How is this even remotely legal?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:
My objections to Friedman are NOT that he advocates profit. Profit is, at its heart, the idea of trading something valued at x for something valued at more than x, so the way I see it expectation of profit is the ONLY justification for ANY action, even on an individual level — if you sacrificed greater value than you got back by doing something, you would have been better off not doing it.

Instead, my objections are that he doesn't put enough emphasis on timeframe for my tastes. For instance, if your mentality is extremely short-term, robbing a bank could seem profitable — you don't give up that much in the short term, and you get a lot back. Naturally, the longer your stretch out the time-frame — to include the possibility of timeframes well beyond one's death — the more likely such decisions are in fact huge losses. I would be completely fine with the Friedman concept of proper management of corporations if it was amended to: the only responsibility of a business is to maximize its profitability according to a timeframe that stretches forward into the centuries. Under that conception, making toxic decisions for short-term gain wouldn't be so easily seen as profitable.


A pretty sentiment, and also an utterly meaningless one. That caveat is not part of Corporate Murica's decision-making processes and short of catastrophic intervention, it never will be. Anything much beyond the next quarter is too long-term for Corporate Murica, and all the other economies hooked up to Corporate Murica, to care about. That very concept - that a business should look to the long-term and make decisions that benefit the long-term even if they're not immediately profitable - is exactly what this heartless bastard was advocating against.

And we can all see where it's gotten us.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:
Why bother? Giving your argument the most favorable reading I believe is reasonable, you've established that oligarchic corporations and government are about equally shitty. It's like you want to move out of an apartment infested by roaches to move into an apartment infested by roaches. Seems like a waste of a U-Haul rental to me.


One of these things is simply disinterested. The other is actively invested in extracting maximum value - to it - from you, no matter what the cost to you might be. The difference, in my mind, is between an apartment infested by roaches that just skitter around, doing their roachy thing and only occasionally getting into your corn flakes, and an apartment infested by voracious flesh-eating roaches that pour out of the walls and strip anyone who moves into the apartment right on down to the bone as soon as the movers leave. Neither of those is really an ideal place to live, but at least in one of them you don't end up being eaten alive in screaming torment by flesh-eating plague roaches.
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I am wondering if you're using a priori in a nonstandard context here. In its usual meaning, a priori refers to a conclusion which can be legitimately claimed to be valid without the establishment of material evidence, because it relies purely on logical deduction


Exactly what I meant. Children flute case implies "ownership" as "conclusion which can be legitimately claimed to be valid without the establishment of material evidence". You are supposed to solve by granting the "ownership" to some child. You can solve it other ways. There is no valid clause why you should solve it ONLY by implying "ownership".

BTW, I'm with 1453R in your argument, pls go on, its interesting.
The parable, as stated, infers that one should select one of the three presented options. As I posted much earlier in the thread, any assumed solution which breaks the implied rules of the parable renders the entire exercise meaningless. This is a philosopher's-demon question, one in which nonessential elements are stripped away in order to try and poke at a more fundamental question that the particulars of reality muddle up.

Obviously if a situation arises where three children are locked in a room with no other possessions or prospects in the whole world save this one flute they're fighting over, the proper answer is to unlock the damn room, put some clothes on them and some food in them, get them all a flute and find the Vault-Tech bastard who's been running deranged social experiments on kids. But that's a meaningless stance to take in terms of the original parable because it sidesteps the entire point of the discussion in the first place.
This really is not an accurate test. The distribution of a flute is not comparable to distribution of things that actually matter, like food and medicine. Also the real life equivalents of child A and B most likely wouldn't be asking for all of what child B makes, just a portion of it.
Obviously B.

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