No, I think many people are fairly reflecting upon ways in which they feel they are constrained or have diminished agency: "no agency" is significantly different from "less agency".
Man, there's *lists* of "would you like to buy a version of [product] that doesn't involve slave labor". You shouldn't be bragging about how you value anecdotes over statistics.
Yes. Rural areas don't have a lot of job choice.
The thing is, that question wasn't for you, or any of the people that answered, so your answers don't matter.
Hey now, there's working in the local industry... working in a job that supports the local industry... the odd community related job... and, of course, cooking meth.
Relative to what they were hoping for when they risked everything in a strike only to get their teeth smashed in by the uniformed goons of your nonviolent willingly hierarchical model of society ?
Relative to other people-- those who, through luck of inheritance or geography, have vastly improved life prospects and access to resources/opportunities.
I mean, I would not offer you the same line of questioning as Terminal Blue. You couldn't even begin to make sense of it.
That's not a useful metric when considering how your own life might improve.
Would your upwardly mobile, poor-helping improved society include employment? I'm certainly not trying to claim the world can't be made better, but the discussion we're having is the idea that employment takes away freedom. Would a world with no employment give you more agency?
You think you've made an argument by stating an extreme possibility, but you're also now just comparing to people's literal imaginations. "I imagined something better, therefore capitalism must be torn down" is not a good argument.
Absolute bollocks. It shows you what's possible in our current scenario, and how. Its the only metric anybody on this planet has to see how their life may be improved-- outside of pure, 100% guesswork.
It would indeed include employment-- though nowhere close to the model of employment featured in this one.
The disconnect here isn't that I'm responding to the wrong thing, it's that you're attempting to speak for someone else who has very different beliefs than you. Terminal Blue is not one to make a relatively modest statement about employment.
None of those statements actually mean what you've ascribed to them. The dissolution of capitalism doesn't entail the end of all work, for goodness' sake, even according to those who advocate it.
You know, I could tell you all kinds of things about my life or the lives of people I know, but let's cut straight to the basic misunderstanding. This isn't how agency works. A person doesn't just "have" or "not have" agency. Agency is mediated. It's like a tabletop RPG. You can make decisions about what your character does, but you're still bound by the rules of the game and sometimes what you want will come up against what the GM wants. Your ability to act is limited, but that's what makes it fun.
It is not an extreme possibility, it is routine "natural hierarchy" in your world. Routine just like women beaten up by their husbands, or raped and victim-blamed for having dared to stroll out at the wrong hour or with the wrong clothing. Just like exiles' homeless people's tents being torn down by cop squads. Like any civil right protesters and minority rights militants who pepper-sprayed or clubbed for your order's preservation. Routine just like institutional violence against people trying to salvage the ecosystem you opted to destroy for profit. Just like the racially profiled people who get harrassed and beaten up by your caste's security service. Just like the asylum seekers who get "pushed back" and drowned while fleeing their countries, so that their sight won't accomodate you. Like those who of them survived only to get destroyed in your concentration camps. Or those who are being hunted like dogs at your borders. Routine like people being thrown out of their houses to appease your bankers after being thrown out of their jobs to appease your shareholders. Just like all the indigeneous people who got slaughtered, acculturated, prostituted, parked into slums, their traditional structures shattered in the name of your god and economy. Just like the slaves of your profit-maximized sweatshops, from whom you expect gratitude. Just like the labouring kids of all the mining companies that you protect in the name of free market and national economy preservation. Just like the carpet bombed villages of your military industry and crypto-colonial endeavours. Like the populations poisoned by the products and the byproducts of the agri-food industry that you shelter from accountability, and whose cognitively manipulative publicists hide behind the notion of "wallet vote". Routine like all the people who don't conform in your obscurantist, imaginary gender categories becoming fair game for murder and psychological annihilation by virtue of not existing for you (just like the states that already implement your desired theocracy torture homosexuals while loudly proclaiming that "there are none" in their countries). Routine like your politicians, industrials and pundits deflecting public frustrations by redirecting them towards whatever vulnerable scapegoat category works best at the time. Routine like populations having to live next to the mountains of waste that your model society dumps at their door. Routine like all the killings by the dictatorships you faithfully support as long as they welcome and protect your most toxic industries. Routine like all the systemic power abuse that women face in the workplace, only to be derided as woke or castrating when they attempt to denounce them. Routine like humans being used, consumed and discarded like cattle, like raw material, by your most glorified heroes. Routine like everything that you hypocritical coward sweep under the rug - just like the ordinary everyday nazis of the 30s avoided wondering about the fate of the jews whose presence was being "solved". Because you don't give a shit about human beings. Heck, you even proudly proclaim in these forums not caring about justice and fairness. And then you want to promote a system in line with your values, expecting what... respect ?
It's only ad hominem if it's an attempt at an argument. I was just purely insulting you.
You don't understand the people you think you align with at all. You are philosophically closer to me than Terminal Blue. You are a socialist only in as much as you see it as a useful thing to help people, and any circumstance that it wouldn't you set it aside unhesitantly. That's not a bad thing, that's just being a pragmatist. But you don't seem to notice how little you have in common with the idealists and the contrarians that make up most of this forum.
So your gripe is not people's lack of agency? The issue you see is that anyone gets to not work? Gotta say, I didn't see that one coming. I did not think you would swing to "capitalism is actually bad because some people aren't forced to work. Everyone should be forced to work." If that's your vision of the world, go for it. Everyone working makes the world better. It just seems odd to come from the person who thinks capitalism robs people of agency. Cause like, the truth is that it isn't capitalism making people work to survive, it's reality, it's nature, working to survive is the inescapable human experience (at the societal scale). I expected to be telling you that everyone getting to just choose not to work is a delusional misunderstanding of all of reality, but here we are, somewhere totally different.
If anyone wants to tl:dr that literal wall of text, I'll give you a free Like. I went crosseyed trying to get through it.
Which is only because you have nothing intelligent to say. Case in point:
"You don't understand your own opinions and beliefs, so let me explain them to you."
"I have no discipline or patience for any viewpoint that is not my own."
"You don't understand your own opinions and beliefs, so let me explain them to you."
When it's repeated, when it's systemic, it's routine. And none of your avoidance devices will change that. Your denial doesn't redefine reality, it only defines you.
You are shadow boxing your own fantasy villains. Go meet people instead, most of them are kind and lovely, and face none of what you described with any amount of frequency.
It's the other people being misunderstood. Like you. You have nothing in common with either Silvanus or Terminal, you have no beliefs, you don't want the world to be better, you just like to complain and mock things.
