It's ok to be angry about capitalism
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Clearly not in the full context of the paragraph, most of which you snipped off to make that point work.
Well, our amazing brains have provided us with things like "imagination", "educated guesswork" and "informed opinion", all of which can allow us to consider circumstances different from the current reality. Then we can compare these speculative circumstances against the reality, and derive the relative pros and cons.
I never expected to have to explain such simple concepts.
You are now point-blank insisting I don't believe what I'm telling you I believe, and insisting others believe things they never expressed.
It's really not too much to ask: address what people actually express. You yourself have criticised people on this forum for arrogantly assuming they know others' minds better than they do themselves. Take your own damn advice for once.
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No, the problem is still agency.
As Ag3ma pointed out to you earlier, you are insisting on engaging with agency in some kind of absolute sense as something a person either has or doesn't have, and that's fundamentally not how agency works or what the term means.
You asked what the point of reference is for a relative comparison of agency. The fact that most people are forced to work in order to avoid starvation or poverty while others will be born into a world where they could buy a dozen sports cars for every day of their lives and still never need to work is a relative deprivation of agency.
Given the sheer scale of that disparity, it would be a valid criticism of capitalism in and of itself, but the reality is worse, because this is not an accident. It isn't that everyone voluntarily chose to play the lottery and some people won and got all the money. The extreme concentration of wealth and the relative deprivation of welath from much of the population is a deliberate strategy of control. It's the mechanism by which capitalism works.
Do you not see the contradiction between a political system based, in theory, on ideals of equal power, on the principle that everyone is an autonomous, equal and free citizen, and an economic system based on deliberately concentrating power in the hands of a small minority in order to more effectively control and exploit the labour of the majority? Can you not imagine that those two systems might operate in mutually antagonistic ways?
Better for whom?
So, this answers a question I was going to pose to you in response to your obvious and intentional misreading of my point. Namely, why is it necessary for anyone to be forced to work?
Because "human survival" is certainly a good answer, and there is a grain of truth to it as well. For now at least, work does need to be done, and that means someone has to do it. If noone grows crops, everyone starves, and we don't want everyone to starve so I guess we need to create some way to persuade people to grow crops. If that means threatening those people with starvation if they don't work, you're still forcing them to do something that they need to do and which benefits everyone so I guess it's okay, right?
Except, there is one little problem. Actually two, but let's do the more immediate and obvious one first. If the stakes are literally about human survival, if it's that serious and that important, why are some people exempt from the need to contribute to their own survival? In fact, why are those people allowed to take an enormous quantity of the resources produced by everyone when they contribute nothing to the "societal scale" prospects of human survival?
Which brings us neatly to the other problem. The reason why that can happen, the reason why some people can take enormous, ridiculous quantities of wealth for themselves without triggering societal collapse is because modern industrial economies are incredibly labour efficient. Most people aren't growing crops any more. In developed countries, most people aren't even producing anything at all, their jobs are simply providing services or helping to move the value of what other people produce around. Only around a quarter of the world's population is growing crops, and that number is declining extremely rapidly. In fact, those people who grow the entire world's food are some of the poorest, despite the fact that their work is necessary to the continuation of human life.
This argument that everyone has to work because that's just the nature of things and we all need to survive is transparently untrue, because most people's jobs aren't contributing to human survival.
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Absent
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Most people are unlike you, which we've already established long ago (as you were giving a bad name to religious people as a whole). But again, each one of your choices of argument further illustrates what you are. This one shows very clearly how and why you will never, ever care for a minority (that you aren't part of). Essentially the good old 1940's "hey most germans weren't being gassed in extermination camps, so what's the problem with nazism". No wonder you're cognitively incapable of empathy with trans people or homosexuals - your erase as irrelevant the fate and ordeals of any category of humans you don't identify to.
I mention an avalanche of examples of systemic violence (and I could go on and on, thematically) in a model of society which violence you deny or treat as anecdotal (all while advocating for an even more violent version of it), and still you keep denying it or treating it as anecdotal. Hey, fuck those people, right. Fuck asylum seekers, fuck exploited workers, fuck homeless people, fuck abused women, fuck victims of institutional racism and sexism, also fuck the ecosystem, fuck those dying of pollution or intoxication-related civilizational diseases, long live your god of love and shameless apology of unfairness. You'll just adjust your blinkers to validate not feeling anything for anyone but yourself, to keep baring your face in the mirror, and to continue the circular apology of your political identity - the world be damned. Again, one of your multiple dismissive "true scotsmen" application - nothing in the world applies it it doesn't match the predefined dogma which determines definitions and relevancy.
You're either a deliberate time-wasting troll, or one of the worst human beings breathing on this planet.
Or, example of the power of dogma, to override our primal empathic ethics and morals by creating a compelling narrative drama for "reason" to engage with.
(getting a bit abstract and metta perhaps, don't mind me)
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From the point of view of a working (I've heard) social democratic country I don't know. You could say nobody deserves millions in inheritance, but damn there are hundreds of thousands of people in this small country alone that don't deserve the welfare and healthcare services they get as their existence is nothing but a drain on everyone. It's still the only way to ensure that unlucky people don't get effed up and fall permanently to the receiving side of tax-funded services.
Also to make Finland more socialist you'd also have to make it less democratic through constitutional changes, and those require a 167/200 vote in the parliament. Not impossible but in practice there would have to be multiple election cycles (4 years) moving towards it.
Also to make Finland more socialist you'd also have to make it less democratic through constitutional changes, and those require a 167/200 vote in the parliament. Not impossible but in practice there would have to be multiple election cycles (4 years) moving towards it.
So do you think someone's value to society is nothing but their economic production?
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Yes (and I think that this guy should only be engaged at a meta level, because that's what exclusively predetermines all his stances and pseudo-rationality) but I don't think that dogma has such a power on humane, unwilling people. It's a rationalization tool for people who already seek to indulge in self-centered evil. Generally, religion (the god-of-love) is just a way to phrase a person's or a group's moral conceptions : God is for the good, the good is this and that, therefore God is for this and that. God is against bad, the bad is this and that, therefore God is against this and that. That's why so many religious people have opposing views despite worshipping the "same" god (or defining it the same way : a god of love and a god of good). The Bible is an ideological catch-all that can -and does- support any discourse and its opposite.
So I don't think dogma is a cause. It's more of a mean. Here, only a display of a person's deep, entrenched evil. That's why I don't think of your point as a third possibility, but as a component of the second.
That being said, the fact that he only ever posts in "political" discussions, just to zealously broadcast his extreme-right views, gives weight to the pure troll hypothesis.
Also the occassional wobbly table.
You didn't even attempt to answer the question though.
No, I'm telling you that you aren't identifying the differences between what you and others are expressing. You constantly see people vaguely on your side of an argument, then you make an exceptionally different argument to me, and wonder why my responses to them don't apply to you. Two people disagreeing with me does not make them the same.
No, what you've done is thrown every bad thing you can think of at the wall hoping something will stick. You are actively trying to view the world in the most negative light to support your own sense of moral superiority. I hope you can see the others are having interesting arguments while you're just sort of huffing about.
I mean, if that were true, you'd have a point. The concentration of power is not a deliberate design of capitalism, the need to work is not a product of capitalism, both of these things exist in any economic system. Power concentrates in the hands of a small minority in every society, and in every other system in the history of the world, that power manifests itself in the concentration of physical, violent power. Separating the violence from the wealth, and putting the monopoly on violence in the hands of the democracy, is a feature of capitalism. You might call the systems antagonistic, but complementary is more accurate. I will concede, there is some failure in our democracy on actually being democratic, but that again is not a unique problem.
You clearly underestimate the difficulty and importance of logistics. Growing food is much, much easier than distributing it safely. The tools that mke it so most people don't have to grow food also need to be manufactured and distributed appropriately. All of these require the ability to transfer information. When my state attempted to shut down all non-essential businesses, the hospitals called my place of employment immediately to make sure our sign-making department was still running, because people's lives depend on them having accurate signage. The only place one could even argue (I would not actually make this argument, but you could) where people are not contributing to human survival is the arts, and I don't think the existence of artists does much for your "people are being forced to do the actual work or starve to death" argument.
Lol, you're just trying to shout me down.
You really have no idea the context you've entered into. This sub-forum used to be called "religion and politics". Most of this small community of people has been around since that time. You're drawing conclusions that someone is a troll based on their political posts in the politics forum. Incredible work, Sherlock.
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The point is that nothing "sticks". That you aknowledge nothing that would stain your self-satisfied, reactionary "best of possible worlds" perception. It's your selective indifference that is in display, and the structure of its arguments (minorities can by definition go fuck themselves). Any honest person would aknowledge the problematic levels of violence of your system, and the injustified, avoidable suffering it inflicts on people. You never will. They can all just noisily die at the feet of your castle's walls.
You are functionning exactly like the ordinary, everyday pro-nazi population of 1930s germany. That's quite eerie, and blatant for whoever studied the european public discourses of that era.
You do not think. You do not process facts. You have no curiosity for human reality and sufferings. You're only in circular justifications, dismissal and denial. It means that all your views are pre-defined upstream, by implicit biases and intents on a level "above" the explicit (pointless, fruitless, vacuous) level of your pseudo-exchanges. You strive on people being dupe of that. But all exchanges should be shifted back to that meta level of what drives you and your filters. Precisely because these filters make the rest a masquerade. For yourself and others.
If a discussion is dishonest, like any with you, the dishonesty itself should be adressed instead of wasting time resuming the discussion "as if". Right now, you're just scamming your interlocutors.
It's not like you're super active on any other sub-forum, or show interest for anything else. You're only here to sprout out your proudly inhumane ideology.
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There are the unlucky people that get into traffic accidents and the drunk drivers that cause them.
Like, obviously no, but the economic angle is no doubt always there with almost everything being on a budget and under bureaucracy. These services - beneficial ones that most Finns want to keep going - need entrepreneurship to stay alive. Additionally being able to hold a job, get educated, keep up relationships etc. are signs of well-being, and thus society reflects that.
Terminal never expressed the position you attributed to them. They then explicitly told you you're misrepresenting their position with your description.
I never expressed the position you attributed to me. I then explicitly told you you're inaccurately describing my position.
What else does it take?
Those services are well within the existing ability of Finland (and every other Western European or North American nations) to provide. They are not a major drain on national resources.
And yeah, society of course rewards contribution. There's quite a difference between rewarding contribution and condemning those who fail to destitution.
I don't think I, or anyone else, should really need to explain to a grown adult in a politics discussion forum how people can envision a different way of the world operating that gives them more power or control over their lives. After all, that is amongst the rudimentary political thoughts and motivations on both left and right.
Society to some extent creates the sorts of people you think drag society down, although some will inevitably exist no matter what society does. The question is really what society does with them. They could all be thrown into gas chambers, I guess, but that's generally looked on unfavourably.
Yeah. Everytime I find myself dreaming about a final solution to eradicate those people I realize it is better for everyone that we don't. Pre-emptive social and health work of course, but as you said it has its limits.
Potentially unlimited. Imo it crossed into major territory in 2007-09 and has only increased since. Older people, barely any economic growth, more expensive health problems.
It's so far from being unlimited that that potential is simply unrealistic. The cost as it is, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future, is not particularly onerous.
There are countless expenditures which are far larger, far more unnecessary, and yet which don't draw the ire (or even the attention) of the public. The reason being that the unemployed are an easy target for diversionary political anger.
Not to mention being relatively powerless and expendable. 15 seconds after politicians and their mates were making money out of helping the unemployed we'd see a massive shift in socity.