Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home • Hacker News Board

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#161

Post by kortilla » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #127

kortilla wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teenage targeted publications are actually pretty common ground for extremist viewpoints. It’s an audience pretty receptive to new ideas. Not having “adult responsibilities” nor having to really be a functioning member of society in general makes Marxism, Ayn Rand Capitalism, etc all pretty palatable and reasonable ideas (albeit normally to different cliques).

Fox and old white man media generally seems chock full of extremist propaganda and to have a throughly receptive audience. Frankly I think you're reguritating a Fox talking point.

Calling Ayn Rand Capitalism extremist is a Fox talking point now? Isn’t that channel usually associated with right wing extremism?

Is it possible that you didn’t understand the point I was making and you retreated into a political tribe reaction?

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#162

Post by kortilla » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 12:13 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #135

kortilla wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police are not agents of capital. They are agents of the government and nothing more. Police make a modest government salary and do not (at least in the US) have a history of reacting well to bribes. Police meet out punishment all of the time to capitalists (a.k.a people with retirement accounts and savings accounts). I’m not sure why you think otherwise.

And since government has always sided with capital against labor, it usually amounts to police serving capital, at least in matters of capital VS labor. Remember that the US has a history of using police and even armed forces to crush unions and strikes.

The government does not side with capital. If it did, we wouldn’t have unions at all, minimum wage, etc. Standard Oil would still be dominating and AT&T would never have been broken up.

To say the government serves capital, even in the US, is laughably wrong. Look at the mandate of the Federal Reserve, it’s literally designed for maximum employment.

The government serves those in power, many of whom are rich. Being rich is not enough to have the government serve you though.

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#163

Post by kortilla » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #147

kortilla wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police are not agents of capital. They are agents of the government and nothing more. Police make a modest government salary and do not (at least in the US) have a history of reacting well to bribes. Police meet out punishment all of the time to capitalists (a.k.a people with retirement accounts and savings accounts). I’m not sure why you think otherwise.

This is merely a technical nitpick. A person with a savings account is technically a capitalist but they typically get most of their income from labor. Their interests are not those of the capital, e.g. they would lose from stricter anti-labour regulations.

It’s not a nitpick. Anyone with social security, 401ks, etc are all depending on capital markets to retire.

> Their interests are not those of the capital, e.g. they would lose from stricter anti-labour regulations.

This is incorrect. They would only lose if they were part of the effected labor pool.

Break up the California teachers union and pretty much everyone in California except for the teachers will benefit. Tax revenue shortfalls mean worse services and/or higher taxes for everyone else to pay for fat retirements for incompetent teachers.

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#164

Post by bobthechef » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 12:23 PM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #127

kortilla wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teenage targeted publications are actually pretty common ground for extremist viewpoints. It’s an audience pretty receptive to new ideas. Not having “adult responsibilities” nor having to really be a functioning member of society in general makes Marxism, Ayn Rand Capitalism, etc all pretty palatable and reasonable ideas (albeit normally to different cliques).

Fox and old white man media generally seems chock full of extremist propaganda and to have a throughly receptive audience. Frankly I think you're reguritating a Fox talking point.

While there’s plenty of crap on Fox, this kind of attitude is also ignorant, narrow, and dismissive and fails to break out of the current American political dialectic. Social engineers often use various tactics like teen magazines to influence the young, often by appealing to sexual appetite (post-war Bravo in Germany comes to mind). Sexual liberation is an effective tactic for control. Communists, for example, have always sought to subvert societies from within and perhaps especially by targeting the young. Fox has its purpose, CNN has its purpose, and Teen Vogue has its purpose.

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#165

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 12:31 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #162

tsimionescu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since government has always sided with capital against labor, it usually amounts to police serving capital, at least in matters of capital VS labor. Remember that the US has a history of using police and even armed forces to crush unions and strikes.

The government does not side with capital. If it did, we wouldn’t have unions at all, minimum wage, etc. Standard Oil would still be dominating and AT&T would never have been broken up. To say the government serves capital, even in the US, is laughably wrong. Look at the mandate of the Federal Reserve, it’s literally designed for maximum employment. The government serves those in power, many of whom are rich. Being r…

The fact that it's not 100% dedicated to capital's desires does not mean that it doesn't essentially serve it.

Sure, if it were a purely capitalist state, we'd all be slaves, bought and sold by corporations, and we're not there of course.

But in monetary policy, employee benefits, tax breaks, environmental protection, social securityand virtually any other domain you care to name, government cares about the interests of capital first, and everyone else only a distant second.

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#166

Post by gorgoiler » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 12:42 PM UTC

gorgoiler wrote: post #122

kevingadd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the earlier days of the US one of the police department's responsibilities was breaking strikes, often by injuring or murdering union members: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

At least as far back as 2009 Pinkertons still existed. They were in the business of being contracted by major US companies to perform background checks on staff who needed high security clearance.

At least as recently as 2009, ahem.

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#167

Post by geofft » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #93

geofft wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a police union demands too much, they don't threaten their employer with going out of business the way private sector unions do. The private sector union is naturally constrained to saying, "We want to help you build a reliable business for the long term; treat us fairly and we will do good work." Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times, but it is never in a union's interest to impair the bus…

> but it is never in a union's interest to impair the business to the point where the jobs no longer exist. Yet, that’s what they do. The Packard car company is one such victim. Unions bankrupted Twinkies. The work rules imposed in union contracts required the company that makes Twinkies, which also makes Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowe…

> Yet, that’s what they do.

I'm not disagreeing with that (the beginning of that sentence, which you cut off, was "Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times").

The fact that, at the end of the day, the Packard car company no longer exists demonstrates my entire point. A police union who took the same tactics wouldn't have caused their police force to no longer exist.

There is a natural consequence on private-sector unions that overreach that doesn't exist for public-sector unions. Sometimes private-sector union leaders don't realize this, but when that happens, that's the end of the unionized workplace. Not so for public-sector unions. An effective private-sector union has to keep its employer alive if it wants to keep its members employed. (Yes, there are many ineffective private-sector unions, see Sturgeon's Law.) An effective public-sector union has no such obligation.

Now, if you want to argue that unions are bad in general, that's fine, but I think that's completely off-topic - I was responding to the claim that members of police unions should feel solidarity with members of private-sector unions. My claim is that those two types of unions work in fundamentally different ways and so one should not expect solidarity. Maybe both types of unions are bad - if so, they're bad in different ways.

> There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.

Right, uh, that was exactly the whole point of my comment? I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a new observation?

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#168

Post by geofft » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #125

rbg246 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions bring far more good to society than bad to society. They have given the non-landed class of people a life that even a century ago was unheard of. Countries that have decent levels of union involvement have much better working conditions and standard of living than countries that don't. Blaming unions for failed companies is incredibly flimsy argument against unions as a whole. Sure there are unions that contri…

The OP said it was never in a union’s interest to harm a company. And I provided counter arguments where they did exactly that. Unions reward mediocrity and the self interest of the union leaders at the expense of society as a whole. You pay a union worker more, that means that everyone else pays for it through higher prices. They also diminish the agency of the individual. Everyone is average. The US has a union mem…

> The OP said it was never in a union’s interest to harm a company. And I provided counter arguments where they did exactly that.

No, those are not counter-arguments. You provided cases where unions acted against their self-interest. You didn't demonstrate that such self-interest doesn't exist.

Of course there are countless such cases. There are infinite stories of people, companies, countries, organizations, political parties, investors, wild animals, etc. acting against their self-interest and meeting their end. That doesn't mean the self-interest doesn't exist.

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#169

Post by angry_octet » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #161

angry_octet wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox and old white man media generally seems chock full of extremist propaganda and to have a throughly receptive audience. Frankly I think you're reguritating a Fox talking point.

Calling Ayn Rand Capitalism extremist is a Fox talking point now? Isn’t that channel usually associated with right wing extremism? Is it possible that you didn’t understand the point I was making and you retreated into a political tribe reaction?

You should re-parse that sentence, because you're misrepresenting what I wrote.

Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

#170

Post by angry_octet » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

bobthechef wrote: post #164

angry_octet wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox and old white man media generally seems chock full of extremist propaganda and to have a throughly receptive audience. Frankly I think you're reguritating a Fox talking point.

While there’s plenty of crap on Fox, this kind of attitude is also ignorant, narrow, and dismissive and fails to break out of the current American political dialectic. Social engineers often use various tactics like teen magazines to influence the young, often by appealing to sexual appetite (post-war Bravo in Germany comes to mind). Sexual liberation is an effective tactic for control. Communists, for example, have…

"Sexual liberation" propaganda? What decade are you from? Have you met any teenagers lately?

All political movements attempt to harness the energy of youth. But seeing men move the invisible levers to control the world's youth via Teen Vogue? In the era of Tik Tok and FB Instagram?