Scrotie's single-question political compass test

1453R, wtf spoiler tags are for teases and extremely solemn occasions. Tsk.

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poor_hobbit wrote:

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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.

Thanks :)

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鬼殺し wrote:

But hey, taking things out of context and abusing them to a point of hilarity is pretty much what people here do every time they post a fucking puerile meme combining Toy Story and alpha-male cliches to create profound insights worthy, with some careful revision, of being scratched onto a grimy toilet cubicle wall. I expect no more and only occasionally no less.

Ha! Glad to see you're feeling better, mate.

On the flute, it's such a quaint, earnest object for the kids to fight over. Bless 'em.

After a few months of careful and extensive thinking about this post I have come to a conclusion that I take the flute to myself. These kids sound entitled and it might be a neat flute so I'd sell it and reinvest the money for something productive for myself. I hate kids, they would get bored of it soon anyway and right now it is presumably new in box so the resale value is much higher. I wonder how much is it worth? I reckon 100 usd entry level so yeah, I can use that money, I think it would cover half of the cost of a new display calibrator which I badly need.

This is good, really good, I wonder if there are any more kids fighting over something expensive and I can decide who gets it, I hope maybe a car or something, I can sell a car as well.

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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.

Sadly true, phenomenon of the last 30 years. Of course, ScrotieMcB, I expect you don't blame the Communists for that I hope.

Its seems naturally evolving capitalism, where all tends to reach ultimate monopoly.

One has all, all have none.

Since I spent parts of my life living under both capitalistic and socialistic societies, I can tell you dudes, first hand, being specimen of a CHILD C population, life was a lot better in extreme measurement under the socialist way. Currently, I'm under capitalist hat and its struggle to remain sane, just and healthy. Its a jungle. You can argue whatever you want, but I tell you this: If I use "jungle" to describe a human society, imagine what all capitalist arguments are worth.

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1453R wrote:

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.

First, there's no such thing as perfect equality of multiple options. Every group of humans has variance in traits such as "disinterest in others' betterment."

Second, I think it's safe to say that, in any voluntary agreement — that is, wherein both parties mutually agree without physical force or fraud — the parties believe the agreement will benefit both of them. It's not like employers treat their employees like Tony Stark, kidnapping them and locking them in a cave until they earn the employee's agreement. If you didn't think employment would help you wouldn't have sought it — candidates generally go to employers, not the other way around — and if you didn't think the terms of employment would benefit you you wouldn't have signed. All of this is to say one thing: that employment is, according to the behavior of the employees themselves, better than the alternatives.

And let's not pretend anyone other than you owns you. That's like pretending a tenant owns the apartment she pays rent on, and thus the landlord's rules don't apply. Employees rent themselves out. Renting is the transferrence of some property rights, usually limited by a blacklist rather than whitelist method, for a limited rather than indefinite time. It's not slavery; it's prostitution.

The fact remains that employment is objectively shown, through voluntary behavior, to be seen by employees as better than unemployment by their own subjective standards. If you insist on referring to employment as the lobbying for a nicer collar, then the natural state of affairs, without employers existing, is a worse collar still. If employment is prostitution, then employment has saved you from a fate worse than being a whore. You blame these people for your daily woes, but the true oppressor, far more powerful than Men, is Nature herself.

As Dr. Jordan Peterson says, the default state of human existence is something akin to unbearable suffering. Are you such a perfectionist that you bite the hand of those who offer you a remedy that would ease your suffering, merely because you know that remedy is insufficient to cure your suffering completely?

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1453R wrote:

And this is defensible in what way?

The burden of proof is on the offence, not the defense. A better alternative has to be credibly established as viable in order to argue that a particular system is indefensible.

That said, I don't consider the current post-capitalist corporatist system fully defensible, as I would argue the properly free-market system that preceded it is preferable. However, at the same time I recognize the flaws in that system which caused post-capitalist corporatocracy to emerge from it, and I'm admittedly unsure as to how to prevent it from rising up again, or how to get back there from where we are now. I believe Marx had a genius insight in realizing that capitalists eat other capitalists, and that capitalism would concentrate economic power in the hands of a fewer and fewer until they bent democracy to their oligarchic whims via lobbyists — or some similar prediction. What I feel Marx got very wrong is what happens after that.

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1453R wrote:

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.

I have some sympathy for short-term analysis in that the long-term is but a series of shorter terms combined together. For instance, if someone is tasked with a long-term goal, breaking that longer process into smaller, digestible chunks and tracking the progress of those short-term subgoals is a good way to manage accountability. The danger of a system that ignores the short term immediately is corporate management that uses the promise of long-term results as an excuse to justify a lack of progress made towards those goals in the here and now.

That said, the idea that the short-term is an end to itself, rather than existing within the context of the long-term, is destructive to society. While I expect most businesses to ultimately fail, I expect the good ones to survive, and more importantly for the merit-based system of liberal natural law to make those discriminations. I hope you understand that, as a staunch free-market capitalist type, I look at the housing crisis of 2008 with tremendous disdain for the banks involved and with awestruck horror upon the way US taxpayers saved those banks from a richly deserved and natural demise. We have institutionalized business shortsightedness by government subsidy, making the US little more superior from the free-market-economics ethics than a Stalinist regime that steals from its people to cover up the failings of its corrupt economic central planners.

If Marx had been alive in the wake of the bank bailout, he would have been absolutely certain the global revolution of the proletariat had finally come. Even more certain than all those other times he was certain.

This folly is not sustainable. If we keep allowing corporations to fix up attain real nice just to sell it right before it runs into a mountain, only to jump over to another train just prior to the crash, without holding these people accountable for the wreckage they willfully caused, it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves in a land of rubble and drained of resources to clean it up.

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1453R wrote:

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.

That's not the distinction. Make no mistake, both aim to get as much as they can. The real distinction is that one requires your voluntary cooperation, and the other requires the consent of only half the people — and has guns to handle the other half.

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poor_hobbit wrote:

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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.

Since I spent parts of my life living under both capitalistic and socialistic societies, I can tell you dudes, first hand, being specimen of a CHILD C population, life was a lot better in extreme measurement under the socialist way. Currently, I'm under capitalist hat and its struggle to remain sane, just and healthy. Its a jungle. You can argue whatever you want, but I tell you this: If I use "jungle" to describe a human society, imagine what all capitalist arguments are worth.

Bulgaria, indeed.

I'm not sure anyone else in this thread can claim to have such first hand experience!!

I wonder that there won't be some interesting questions for you about this.

Do you have any cool Soviet Brutalist architecture nearby?