Re: How effective was the New Deal?
Posted: 2019-03-13 09:39pm
Your point being?
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Your point being?
You never disappoint for comedy. Would you apply this weird rationale to any abstraction?
No: the problem is capitalism and some nations consuming like we have 10 Earths to spare.Broomstick wrote: ↑2019-03-13 08:16pm Without spending an hour pondering in thought... yeah, probably.
People are their own worst enemy at this point, and part of the problem is that there are just Too Damn Many People for the planet. If the world population was an even 1 billion a lot of our current problems would be smaller and less catastrophic. But there's no morally acceptable way to cut down the world population by that amount in a short time span.
Its own capitalists are forcing them to. In cahoots with the other capitalists from “developed“ nations. If that powerful ruling class is a „nobody“ then I am a French pilot.
No, the problem is that 8 billion people is not sustainable long term. You either need destructive levels of technology to keep them all fed and disease under control, or if you don't you'll have mass starvation and disease. And crowding/resource conflicts lead to war, which can also cut down on the number of people, not to mention wars are good for spreading disease and famine as well as killing people outright.K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-14 04:40amNo: the problem is capitalism and some nations consuming like we have 10 Earths to spare.Broomstick wrote: ↑2019-03-13 08:16pm Without spending an hour pondering in thought... yeah, probably.
People are their own worst enemy at this point, and part of the problem is that there are just Too Damn Many People for the planet. If the world population was an even 1 billion a lot of our current problems would be smaller and less catastrophic. But there's no morally acceptable way to cut down the world population by that amount in a short time span.
Please - the contaminated sites in the former USSR had nothing to do with "the West", it was the result of decisions made by a centrally planned communist regime, some of those decisions and actions taken as far back as the 1940's. Take responsibility for your own goddamned messes, just like you expect the "the West" to do.K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-14 04:40amAlso I am amazed how you have the gall (sic!) to rail about the pollution in industrial socialist nations when most of the pollution happened to provide god damn rich in the West with their comforts. Industrial China is manufacturing shit for the West and is contaminated because of dirty industries of the West, batteries from China, oil from USSR and Russia, everything - it is all the insatiable capitalist monster.
How is the rational weird? Humans are the source of much of our own suffering be that at the hands of a dictator slaughtering millions, a petty manager emotionally abusing a vulnerable employee, a school bully asserting control at school that they don't have at home, that bullies parents taking control from them at home, etc. In the end, the systems we create to codify our own suffering are human creations and the people that helm them are as human as you or I.
Sustainability of Western, and specifically US standard of overconsumption is not being discussed here at all. Such a standard could never be reached for 8 billion people - it must be dealt with if any honest discussion is to be had. By letting your consumption reach such a comically wasteful standard you have done the world - no huge service, but only sped up its impending doom. Hence the question about whether it is good to have the rule of capitalism maintained in the long term is a very valid one. Under capitalism there is no way out of the dead end.Broomstick wrote: ↑2019-03-14 03:56pmNo, the problem is that 8 billion people is not sustainable long term. You either need destructive levels of technology to keep them all fed and disease under control, or if you don't you'll have mass starvation and disease. And crowding/resource conflicts lead to war, which can also cut down on the number of people, not to mention wars are good for spreading disease and famine as well as killing people outright.
Contaminated sites are inevitable if competition with, or likewise trading with, the capitalist world is the goal. And such a goal is very much related to the existence of capitalism as such. First it was a matter of competition with capitalism, later it was a matter of selling oil & gas to capitalists, to feed their industries.Please - the contaminated sites in the former USSR had nothing to do with "the West", it was the result of decisions made by a centrally planned communist regime, some of those decisions and actions taken as far back as the 1940's. Take responsibility for your own goddamned messes, just like you expect the "the West" to do.
On any large scale analysis, it becomes imperative to look at how a human operates as a part of a system. One doesn't look at the twentieth century and wonder about a sharp rise in human movement in Europe in the second and fourth decades. You abstract the events and they become states waging war on another. You look at the actors and the concepts which comprise them. You look at the classes of the people involved, and so on. If you just go "lol people," you'll miss pretty much everything in a vain attempt to look clever.
That's only because we have no way to model individual human behavior using any greater a degree of refinement. You're acting as if this abstraction is a good thing and how we should be looking at things when in objective terms it's bad at making actionable predictions with enough specificity to be worth acting on. It's well and good to analyze things after they've happened, but until this system can actually make consistent predictions out far enough in the future, to within a narrow window of time, and correctly predicting the outcome of any attempted intervention it's just post action naval gazing trying to make sense of the human condition.Gandalf wrote: ↑2019-03-14 10:04pmOn any large scale analysis, it becomes imperative to look at how a human operates as a part of a system. One doesn't look at the twentieth century and wonder about a sharp rise in human movement in Europe in the second and fourth decades. You abstract the events and they become states waging war on another. You look at the actors and the concepts which comprise them. You look at the classes of the people involved, and so on. If you just go "lol people," you'll miss pretty much everything in a vain attempt to look clever.
I disagree. 8 billion people are too many people for the long-term health of the planet and the fact we're currently in the midst of Great Extinction event is proof of that. An event that started several centuries ago at least.K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-14 05:28pmSustainability under optimal organization could theoretically ensure survival of this number of people, but certainly with no exuberant consumption excesses like now.
We're headed for disaster at this point regardless, the only question is how hard the landing is going to be.Ergo, under capitalism we are heading for disaster.
Yep, slaughter and sterilization, the abolishment of free will and self determinations - as I said, there is no moral and ethical way to fix this current problem. Mao's Great Leap Forward certainly helped ease China's overpopulation problem by killing off 45 million people but mass slaughter whether by directly by guns or indirectly by famine is not a morally acceptable solution.Under a planned system exuberant overconsumption would be put an end to, and quite possibly let us pass through the needle of peak population. Population controls may be implemented by the government based on recognized necessity.
Yeah yeah - officer, I had to hit my girlfriend, the bitch made me do it to - all the poor communist countries are pitiful victims, helpless against the demonic capitalistic forces. Bullshit. The central planning governments chose to do things the way they did them, to engage in projects that laid waste to the environment, to dump radioactive shit into rivers and lakes, turn the Aral Sea into a desert, contaminate vast swathes of land with heavy metals and chemicals. Your system was supposed to be better, superior - why wasn't it? Don't blame "The West" - The West wasn't making the decisions for you, YOU were. There's no reason there couldn't have been better environmental controls on known risks like lead smelters other than callous indifference to human life and suffering.Contaminated sites are inevitable if competition with, or likewise trading with, the capitalist world is the goal. And such a goal is very much related to the existence of capitalism as such. First it was a matter of competition with capitalism, later it was a matter of selling oil & gas to capitalists, to feed their industries.Please - the contaminated sites in the former USSR had nothing to do with "the West", it was the result of decisions made by a centrally planned communist regime, some of those decisions and actions taken as far back as the 1940's. Take responsibility for your own goddamned messes, just like you expect the "the West" to do.
Right. How many dead under Stalin? 20 million? How many under Mao? 45 million? Well, sure that does help the overpopulation problem a tiny bit, but the track record for central planning is nothing to brag about. Again, don't blame The West or The Capitalists for that. Your system doesn't work.Planning is the only road that is not catastrophic. If you do not constrain yourselves, the world will deal with that through catastrophe anyway.
It's like a first year philosophy student shat out a junkie's ramblings. Way to go I guess.Jub wrote: ↑2019-03-15 03:26amThat's only because we have no way to model individual human behavior using any greater a degree of refinement. You're acting as if this abstraction is a good thing and how we should be looking at things when in objective terms it's bad at making actionable predictions with enough specificity to be worth acting on. It's well and good to analyze things after they've happened, but until this system can actually make consistent predictions out far enough in the future, to within a narrow window of time, and correctly predicting the outcome of any attempted intervention it's just post action naval gazing trying to make sense of the human condition.
In the end, we either get good enough to predict/simulate any given human's behavior and thus murder free will or we hit a hard compute limit and admit that trying to predict based on trends and movements is the best we can do an abandon it as a discipline for being too vague and useless to predict anything.
You started out pressing Broomstick on the issue of 'isms' being the issue and I've noticed that you never actually replied to what she had to say about that. I guess you prefer to score cheap internet points going after me...
A big difference being that communism didn't exist in the 17th Century and was never in the majority of nations even in the 20th, yet ran up huge numbers in less than a century. Communism is no more the answer than capitalism is.K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-15 07:19am Look, we have had this discussion before. If you start counting all the excess deaths under capitalism since the XVII century, you would arrive at huge (and also meaningless) numbers.
"People" was not an abstract. Humans have a long history of fucking up their environment to the point of dying off, or nearly so. Look at what was once fertile farmland in the Middle East that is now desert. The famed cedars of Lebannon are long gone. Look at the once-lush Mediterranean area that is now scrub lands. Look at Easter Island - they cut down the last tree then spent a generation or two eating eating other until their population leveled out at a much lower level in a blasted environment.You offered no rebuttal to that and blamed everything on the abstract „people“.
The problem is that your "solution" has been no better for the environment than capitalism, and racked up a death toll of around 100 million in less than a century. The theory is great, that's why it attracts young idealists, but actual practice shows it is no better than what it wants to replace.This has not occurred and you are still hostile to the only people still thinking about a solution.
I'm generally on your side, but can you show me an instance of communism outperforming capitalism in the areas of environmental protection, wealth inequality between it's richest and poorest citizens, and meeting it's citizen's basic needs? I won't count China because they are communist in name only at this stage and show no signs of slowing their change to centrally guided capitalism.K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-15 06:59pm OK. Well, other than 50 million being removed from the equation by “normal” fascists within like 10 years in 1935-1945, I must say once again that these excess death counts are meaningless.
Your are just a nihilist. Nihilism is useless.
So a nation under heavy embargo but with no real need to build up a military can just barely manage to scrape by, and that's your best example? A nation where you can bring in things like pencils and spare underwear and trade it to the locals as better than cash, a success?K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-16 08:03am
The only minimally sustainable nation on Earth (with high development, but no oligarchs, ultra-rich, overconsumption) was made by communists.
I did reply. I asked if Broomstick would be okay with saying Naziism didn't kill people, but people did. The one to which you replied, but Broomstick didn't. Please pay attention to the content of your posts. Also, if you think that "going after you" generates internet points of any value, I think that says more about you and your own vanity than you may realise.
I was trying to work out Broomstick's odd rationale by finding out what was at the root of it, through asking varied questions to see if the rationale held out. I find this better than the usual internet arguing of people making statements at each other, because a series of specific questions makes it easier to examine something. It's something I enjoyed doing when I was a teacher. When a student offered an answer which sounded odd, it wound up being more productive to question how they got there, so the issue that caused the questionable final answer could be solved on a fundamental level. Sometimes they were approaching things from a fantastic and interesting perspective, and other times they didn't do the readings and made shit up.As far as refuting anything you've said, you haven't actually said anything in this thread. The total of your input is a few one-liners, some complete nonsense about analysis, and mockery of what I've had to say on the issue. You haven't made a point worth refuting.
Imperialism, capitalism, and entitled shits on the internet. Imperialism wiped out my people (Indigenous Australians) and keeps us as second class citizens in our own lands. Capitalism keeps perpetuating this problem (among others listed by K A Pital in this thread). Entitled shits on the internet are just an irritant, but I like listing things in threes.So lay it out, what does Gandalf think is wrong with the world today?
You asked me if we could deal with overconsumption better than capitalists. I have show you that it is possible. A military is necessary for only two things: capitalist, imperialistic conquests - or to prevent from being conquered by other imperialists. The rest of your objection is “I don’t care that the reality of sustainable consumption is that we can have food, shelter, education and literacy, but not obscene exuberant riches, so I want to destroy the world”. Ok, go right ahead.Jub wrote: ↑2019-03-16 09:04amSo a nation under heavy embargo but with no real need to build up a military can just barely manage to scrape by, and that's your best example? A nation where you can bring in things like pencils and spare underwear and trade it to the locals as better than cash, a success?
Don't militaries also exist in communist and capitalist countries for a third purpose? To beat down those who don't agree with the system?K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-16 04:00pmYou asked me if we could deal with overconsumption better than capitalists. I have show you that it is possible. A military is necessary for only two things: capitalist, imperialistic conquests - or to prevent from being conquered by other imperialists. The rest of your objection is “I don’t care that the reality of sustainable consumption is that we can have food, shelter, education and literacy, but not obscene exuberant riches, so I want to destroy the world”. Ok, go right ahead.Jub wrote: ↑2019-03-16 09:04amSo a nation under heavy embargo but with no real need to build up a military can just barely manage to scrape by, and that's your best example? A nation where you can bring in things like pencils and spare underwear and trade it to the locals as better than cash, a success?