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Capitalism (pg. 11)
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| wotyzoid |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
IGK? |
Bro, you sound stupid as hell. Did you get dropped on your head? Your jokes are straight out of 2002. I've heard more original from cover bands. What are you, like 50? Lol loser |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jon_Snow
Lira I’m curious have you ever meet this Kenny IRL. |
I'd love to meet him someday, but we've never been in the same city at the same time :p |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by wotyzoid
You cannot stop the future. No matter how much cry and scream it is always running towards you. |
I think it's overwhelmingly more likely that we will suffer catastrophic environmental collapse long before we reach the point where Communism becomes inevitable. And this is what gets me. The environment is, by an enormous margin, THE existential issue facing humanity. Wealth distribution and worker's rights and equality are quite frankly sideshows. If you aren't terrified by the environment, you simply haven't read enough about it. And over and over again online I see the left-leaning and politically engaged display the exact same attitude you have in previous threads. You genuinely seem to think that wealth distribution will solve this problem by default, because inequality the only thing on your radar. And that isn't just misguided. It's actively negligent. We need the left to fight this cause, because the right certainly won't. And far more than socialism, environmentalism is one issue where the individual can enact tangible change through their consumption and, more importantly, their social attitude towards consumption. You don't need to rupture the stratified power monopoly of the two-party system to help the environment. But again the left will always emphasise the system and not the individual, a malfunctioning auto-immune reflex from an ideology that instinctively protects the vulnerable, to the point it becomes blind-sided to the two-way interaction between corporation and citizen, producer and consumer, and ultimately to the power of personal agency itself. |
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| wotyzoid |
| Dude, what kind of mental gymnastics are you doing? By all means ignore the fact that we are in this predicament largely because of the rules in place. What the hell are you even trying to argue? |
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| wotyzoid |
| This is basically what you're saying. It's all equally everyone's fault that we are trashing the place. Forget the system in place, forget the boss who is trying to maximize his profits, it's all irrelevant and everyone's fault. |
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| wotyzoid |
Oldies but goodies
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| planetaryplayer |
| the moon doesn't exist i am projecting a false image of it into our sky. I am the scorpion king |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by wotyzoid
This is basically what you're saying. It's all equally everyone's fault that we are trashing the place. Forget the system in place, forget the boss who is trying to maximize his profits, it's all irrelevant and everyone's fault. |
You still haven't really grasped my original point from the start. When every individual wants a car, wants to eat copious amounts of meat, wants regular long-haul flights to expensive holidays, wants to buy and dispose of plastic water bottles every time they are thirsty, wants to treat their children to the latest gadgets every Christmas... then yes, the system is irrelevant. There is no economic system that will allow that to happen for every individual who wants it without environmental ruin, certainly not in any realistic time frame.
We need a radically different social attitude towards consumption that equates unnecessary environmental footprint as essentially sinful. Every individual should have a feeling of burning guilt when they take an unnecessary car journey instead of walking. This is something we can tangibly enact as individuals, and our consumer choices based on this new morality would feed back into the market and force capitalism into a tool that provides to customer demand for greener products and processes. We can already see that happening on a small scale with the disposable plastics backlash.
Wealth distribution wouldn't help, because having the majority of the world's wealth locked up by a few people is actually stopping the current destructive Western lifestyle from being available to far more people. The carbon footprint of an American is massively greater than someone in the third world, and yet all those emerging countries aspire to have the same consumptive lifestyle. And you are here, actively arguing they should be allowed it, that the global carbon footprint should be allowed to spiral in the name of equality.
So yes. I can't see any evidence in your reasoning as to why global Communism will help the environment, except this vague idea that green technology will have advanced enough by the time this hypothetical utopia arrives that it'll all be okay. Whereas I'm saying that we won't live nearly that long as a society to see your worker's paradise if you just say to the average Joe, "Don't worry about your environmental footprint, that's The Man's fault anyway." If individual consumers care, the market cares, and then Capitalism will care. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
Also, the environmental crisis isn't really due to Capitalism at all. It's the result of over-population of the planet and scientific ignorance for most of human history. We quite literally didn't realise the consequences of our actions, and most people still don't. That's got no inherent relationship to capital or the free market. So no, we're not in this mess due to the current system, and there's no existing evidence from previous regimes that Communism in practice will do any better than Capitalism. Because Communism is a theory from the 1800s before science understood human impact on the environment, before plastics and the combustion engine even existed. Beyond talking about the need to move away from the idea of "endless economic growth", there's nothing I can see in the Communist system that in any way tackles consumption, because it wasn't designed for that purpose. It wasn't even aware of that purpose.
If you want to prove me wrong, you now need to show how the specific mechanism of Communist social order and economy would improve the environmental situation. The only possible method I can see if by having centralised state enforcing consumption limits on each worker, which would mean curbing the individual's lifestyle. I can tell from previous posts you don't want to live in the kind of miserable austerity that Communism has historically produced and would have to produce again to solve this problem before all this wonderful hypothetical green tech can magic away the problem.
So yes. I'm welcome to have it demonstrated to me. Because I've never yet heard a practical explanation of how Communism or wealth distribution will solve this problem. And if you lapse into more vague rhetoric, you will essentially be admitting that you don't know. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lews
Why are people feeding the troll? |
yeah sorry, lol. i mistakenly thought he was interested in a proper argument about his religion, but i realise now this isn't the case. in my defence though, we did get to see accusations of google scholarship and a lack of understanding from someone who thought 'withering away of the state' was an anarchist phrase :stongue: so it wasn't a complete waste of my time :) |
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| Moral Hazard |
| quote: | Originally posted by wotyzoid
You cannot stop the future. No matter how much cry and scream it is always running towards you. |
You also can't force the future. |
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