191–200 of 242 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you heard of social democracy, i.e. taking those ideas and not implementing them by being a murderous crazy dictator? It's working out just fine for the countries which are consistently ranked as the best to live in in the world. As opposed to the US, which is closer to third world status when it comes to things like low median wage, little to no maternity leave, expensive and poor healthcare system, school shoo…
US median wages aren't low compared to Western Europe. Modestly lower than the Nordic countries yes, but modestly higher than France and Germany and so forth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting perspective. I wonder how much "cronyism" costs. It is a problem, but how big? Sort of the issue is that their is a systemic change taking place globally and it moves at a compounding rate. Most governments on a micro scale, are inefficient snd comprised of largely unaccountable people. They make (benevolent/naive view) decisions but are ill equipped with the skills to make the proper ones or (cynical) in…
> Luckily as PG notes there is a massive defragmentation His essay is about a _re_-fragmentation, which is the opposite of a defragmentation. If this was just a typo, ignore me, but I wasn't sure if you had misunderstood the metaphor he was using.
I hope this means that as these descriptors fade, people will relate on individual levels and cooperate. Essentially, this is how society improves and the "income inequality" will be offset by the better measuring stick quality of life. i think that fragmentation in pgs sense, from companies and old patterns, is good.
Smart people are getting wealthy and, while am edge case, Elon Musk has had an impact on earth that it could accelerate the pace of technology by decades. So it doesn't matter if income goes down, people can fix the world for a lot less than they used to be able to and things tend to approach their marginal cost.
Tl, dr am bullish on the individual, technology and less structured institutions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you heard of social democracy, i.e. taking those ideas and not implementing them by being a murderous crazy dictator? It's working out just fine for the countries which are consistently ranked as the best to live in in the world. As opposed to the US, which is closer to third world status when it comes to things like low median wage, little to no maternity leave, expensive and poor healthcare system, school shoo…
After government transfers, the bottom income quintile in the US makes more than in the UK and many other wealthy nations. Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better, with a less healthy more diverse population than just about every other country (the top ten hospitals with the best cancer survival rates are overwhelmingly in the US), maternity leave may not be mandated, but is available to many if not m…
No it doesn't
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_heal...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
US median wages aren't low compared to Western Europe. Modestly lower than the Nordic countries yes, but modestly higher than France and Germany and so forth.
What is the US median wage? All I ever see are SF developer salaries on here, which are way higher than most parts of Europe.
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014
I guess income inequality measures result in less favorable comparisons than basic measures of wages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you heard of social democracy, i.e. taking those ideas and not implementing them by being a murderous crazy dictator? It's working out just fine for the countries which are consistently ranked as the best to live in in the world. As opposed to the US, which is closer to third world status when it comes to things like low median wage, little to no maternity leave, expensive and poor healthcare system, school shoo…
After government transfers, the bottom income quintile in the US makes more than in the UK and many other wealthy nations. Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better, with a less healthy more diverse population than just about every other country (the top ten hospitals with the best cancer survival rates are overwhelmingly in the US), maternity leave may not be mandated, but is available to many if not m…
> 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade.
There's a lot of illiteracy in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
> The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." Further, this study showed that 41% to 44% of U.S. adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale (literacy rate of 35 or below) were living in poverty.[2]
"I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly" You mean the part where communists murdered 100 million people in the last century? That "propaganda"?
This is the point: The US right tries to label anything they perceive as to the left of it socialist or communist and by extension to equate all of these ideologies with Soviet or Chinese inspired socialism with total disregard for the fact that while it also includes related ideologies, this spectrum also encompasses ideologies that are further apart than Republicanism and Stalinism.
It just becomes comical when e.g. European style social democrats gets lumped in with Stalinists, ignoring that Stalin himself ordered all Komintern member parties to treat the social-democrats as fascists (more precisely they were deemed to be "social fascists") and to oppose them with the same urgency as they opposed Hitler, effectively destroying any chance of a united opposition to Hitler, and draining both.
And it just becomes ridiculous when libertarian and moderate socialists who fought the Bolsheviks authoritarian tendencies tooth and nail and often lost their lives also gets lumped in with them: Millions of socialists and communists and anarchists were amongst the 10 million dead during the Russian Civil War - fighting alongside the White's to oppose Lenin. Thousands died in the Kronstadt rebellion, demanding reinstatement of free speech. Rebellion after rebellion against the Bolsheviks were arranged by SR, Left SR, the Mensheviks and other left wing groups, leading to executions after executions, and starting in 1922 a concerted campaign of political show-trials. Tens of thousands of them were murdered after the Moscow Processes by Stalin in the 30's - at that point Stalin was even purging opposition inside the Bolshevik party.
Many, many more perished in labour camps or had been wiped out together with other political opponents in the years before for standing up for democracy.
So, if you define what you consider socialism and communism, we can nail down which of these groups you are including, and how many of them were actually actively opposing the mass murders you are referring to and/or were victims of them.
"I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly" You mean the part where communists murdered 100 million people in the last century? That "propaganda"?
The comment you're answering to cited "Canada, Australia, England and Argentina". None of these nations has anything to do with communism. What the propaganda has created is the idea that anything that isn't Reaganomics means Socialism which mean Communism which means murdering millions of people.
When even Obama - a conservative not much left of Reagan, that not that many years ago could have fit into the Republican party politically - was repeatedly accused of being a socialist there was a watershed.
More and more the response was a "well, I kinda agree with Obama, so if he's a socialist, why do they say it's bad?" curiosity.
The only reason it didn't backfire far worse was that there was no strong social democrat or socialist political organization ready to benefit. But I strongly believe that the only reason Bernie Sanders is getting any kind of hearing this election campaign is that the right laid the groundwork by making the term "socialist" socially acceptable again amongst large groups of the US public
They overplayed their hand massively, and legitimated discussions of socialism by making the category so ridiculously over-broad that they defined people into it and forced those people to re-evaluate socialism rather than re-evaluate their own viewpoints. It's a truly classic failure to understand the psychology of propaganda that deserves treatment in university courses on psychology:
You don't win a propaganda war by saying "these viewpoints you agree with makes this guy you're considering to vote for a [insert label believed to be offensive here]". You win propaganda wars by disassociating your opponent from the views of his base and presenting yourself as the protector of the same views.
The right way to have fought Obama was not to label him a socialist, but to upstage him and paint him as unwilling to go far enough, and twisting the mechanism to fit whatever they'd wanted afterwards. It's not like this is a new strategy: Specifically within the context of welfare and healthcare, it was first used by Bismark in the 1880's, leading to the first welfare state, but at the same time both shoring up the German state by undermining support for revolutionary socialism, and establishing an insurance system that persists to this day that avoided a nationalisation of the entire system.
Instead they walked right into what may turn out to be one of the largest political own goals for decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 100 million civilians murdered by communist/socialist governments is well documented. What are the numbers for capitalist governments murdering their civilians without even the semblance of a fair legal system?
Pinochet is the first person that comes to mind. He was capitalist wasn't he?
The point is that it is irrelevant in the first place because the people he wants to lump in with mass murderers like Stalin or Mao or Khmer Rouge largely have never supported them or policies anything like theirs.
The discussion of numbers is pointless without first getting him to narrow down exactly what ideologies he is referring to by nature of actual policies implemented rather than by massive overloaded names.
The debating technique is equivalent to trying to argue that democracy is bad because the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is oppressive and tricking us into trying to turn it into a comparison of relative authoritarianism based on flawed, self-selected labels.
Instead it is the premise of what is included in the label you must challenge. It unravels quickly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Communism never happened. Communist propaganda happened.
haven't we mostly proven that communism isn't a thing that can work given human nature?
But most people seem to tend to think that communism requires some kind of pure altruism to work (and to be fair, there have been socialist and communists that also believed that), but a central aspect of Marxism is the opposite:
The working class must learn to value its own work and not buy into the subjective moralism of the capitalist classes (that tend to ascribe virtue to wealth: if you're rich, it is generally assumed to be an indicator you have worked hard, while poverty equally is suspect), but be willing to grab the proceeds of their labour. Marx spent a considerable amount of time ripping to shreds early "utopian socialism" (Fourier, Owens et. al) for failing to understand this amongst other failings.
The very insistence of revolution as the mechanism for social upheaval in Marxism is explicitly that Marx did not believe that the ruling classes would be willing to give up privileges willingly even in the face of election defeats, and so once a sufficient working class majority comes into being, sooner or later there would be conflict.
An egalitarian system according to Marx is a desirable, advanced stage of society, but it will come into being, he argues, not because it is the right thing, but because it is the only possible next step: the working classes can only overcome the power of the capitalist classes through sheer numbers, and can unite only because capitalism eventually creates a situation where carving up the pie equally becomes a net improvement for a rapidly growing majority: The rational choice for most of us to maximize our own wealth is an equal distribution the moment the majority of wealth is health by a minority of people, because most of us will otherwise be in the majority that receives less (and for this reason he was insistent that a socialist revolution would fail if attempted somewhere not advanced enough to allow redistribution to eradicate poverty - if it instead merely spread poverty out, class struggles would resume).