Why do socialists deserve to not be poor?

While many capitalists rig the system in their favor, as Karpel pointed out, I think capitalism (big business especially, but even small to a lesser extent) is inherently corrupt, for why should someone detached from managing and working in the megacorporation they own profit off it?
They’re not actually contributing anything to society.

Or if I manage to buy (through discipline, talent, or sheer luck), or inherit a dozen condos, and then a dozen families rent them from me, how is that just?
I may not have to actually contribute anything to society for my entire life, meanwhile a dozen families have to work hard providing goods and services to society their whole life long in order to rent from me, and they may never have anything to show for it.

When machines replace most of the workers at a factory, instead of sharing the profits with them, increasing their wages, reducing their hours and prices, or laying them off with enormous severance packages, they simply fire them, hoard all the profits and reinvest the money.
eventually some other capitalist finds something for these poor saps to do while they scrounge off the meagre dole and the cycle repeats.

Over decades, centuries as more and more technology replaces labor, our productivity becomes increasingly meaningless, and monstrous.
We just produce luxuries for the rich or junk no one needs or even really wants and shouldn’t be compelled to produce or we produce nothing at all, waste.
We have to cut down more trees and pollute more oceans, rivers, lakes and streams to make all this crap.

It’s hideous, rainforests are gradually being torn down.
We need them for our oxygen supply and resources, not to mention they and the animals who dwell in them have intrinsic value.
But if we continue down this path we’re on, they and everything that depends on them, including ourselves will all be gone.

However, the anaerobic microbes on the other hand, are going to make a comeback.
So I guess we’re doing it for them.
Well I welcome our anaerobic overlords with open arms.
I’m sure they’ll do a much better job with this planet than we’re doing, that is if the machines or genetically modified humanoids don’t supersede us first, in this mad quest to consume ourselves into oblivion.

This is my core position from when I was a kid and active in causes.
Much has been lost since then.
One thing I found out along the way is that the leaderships of Causes and Social Parties are invariably corrupt. Oxfam spends 90 percent of its contributions on Overhead, which was revealed to go buying Africans for sex.

I now think the only hope is in the fact that some people actually have more money than they could spend. This is a firm basis for a true ecologic revolution, which is all I care about really.

Lol

I fear that the only hope is that our Hedonism will save us - the will to enjoy the planet as a natural thing.
Socialism has failed, and I was part of trying very hard to protect things, to protect the Earth. Most of it is gone. I now see only potential for some lofty form of capital investments in the natural Earth as a product.

My original question was really aimed at the anthropocentrism of Socialism, the myopic focus on the wellbeing of the human hordes.
If the worker organized to save other species, then maybe things would work out for him.
What planet are they seeking to inherit - is not “meek” a little too close to “invertebrate”?

And if Socialism explicitly denounces responsibility for the others species, then it is truly the weapon of destruction itself.

the interplanetary kalaxion federation designed the Z13 sentinals for the sole purpose of aiding human revolutionary soldiers in combat. in 1917 they were deployed to assist communists in overthrowing the tsar’s army, in china to overthrow the nationalists, in cuba to eliminate batista, and so on.

it is not as simple as coming to ‘the other side of the fence’. these units belong to an elite force that is controlled by the federation, and protocols cannot be violated without the express permission of the institution.

A coinflip could land heads, but possibility doesn’t equal certainty.

They took their productivity back in 1932 when they overwhelmingly elected FDR. Then in 1980 the 30-yr-olds of 1932 were 78 and the new generation that left the backdoor unlocked so the capitalists could sneak back in were too young to remember what happened last time.

Then the French Revolution didn’t happen.

They want to be free from the burden of surviving.

Idk what you mean by that.

There are no such things as rights unless the people make for themselves a government to secure them.

Are you arguing that the minority should take precedence over the majority? By what logic?

I can only go to one restaurant to fetch lunch. 9 guys want burgers and 1 wants hotdogs. Why should I make 9 people eat hotdogs just to make 1 guy happy?

The benefit of the many must be the focus unless I have reason to believe otherwise. We either hang together or hang separately.

Arrogance is attribute of the ignorant and therefore its opposite is the meek.

I don’t understand what you mean.

Im not surprised. You were the one saying to a Venezuelan that he was ignorant of Venezuela.

Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Anyway Ive spoken my mind here. You can go back to fiddling with yourselves now.

Temper, temper.

Just very puzzled by the amount of things that go right past you.

Some of you write quite well, but reading seems more difficult.

Selective reading…
Guess it’s natural like digestive eating.
Doesnt mean people deserve a beating
Cause what’s “deserve”… er, durr…

The social majority tends to follow the biggest idiot. Only in private are people honest enough to be somewhat conscious of reason.

Socialism is a big cruel carnaval. A stomp fest for the sake of it.

I’ve never met a Socialist who didn’t revolt at the idea of an honest psychological analysis of their own self interest.

What it amounts in is (self-)consumerism. The philosophy of man’s right to consume, vs Capitalism, man’s self taken right to produce.

Who? Pedro? I didn’t say he was ignorant of venezuela, but I wouldn’t mind a copper atom every time someone mentioned venezuela without knowing what he’s talking about. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=194729&hilit=venezuela#p2719478

It’s a jab at those who equate venezuela with socialism with intent to demonize socialism. Anyone who does that automatically disqualifies himself from knowing what he’s talking about.

  1. Venezuela is one of the least socialist countries on earth with a private contribution to gdp being well over 50% and I heard one source claim 88%. Fox News claimed 70% ceicdata.com/en/indicator/v … ominal-gdp

Singapore for instance is 35% which means the other 65% is public spending and that’s socialism. Why isn’t Singapore circling the drain?

The Singaporean state owns 90 percent of the country’s land. Over 80 percent of Singapore’s population lives in housing constructed by the country’s public housing agency HDB. The Singaporean state is largest shareholder of more than a third of the country’s publicly-traded companies, and build out a sovereign wealth fund that holds tens of trillions of dollars of corporate assets. peoplespolicyproject.org/20 … re-really/

Singapore is a model of economic health despite being infinitely more socialist than Venezuela en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati … _Singapore

Venezuela is obviously capitalistic which is why one small group of people have all the money and everyone else is starving. How could it possibly be anymore capitalistic than to take ALL the capital and win the game??? Socialism would spread the wealth by definition.

  1. Socialism is social ownership of the means of production. Did or do venezuelan people own the means of production or are they private for-profit companies? Yeah, I thought so.

  2. Even if Venezuela were socialistic, the social programs could have only been predicated on oil prices, which fell off a cliff in 2015 and cratered the economy held up by only one pillar.

  3. Meddling by the US has a lot to do with it, I’m sure. Venezuela is sitting on the world’s largest proven oil reserve. What? You thought the US wouldn’t take advantage of that? Pft.

Regarding whether or not Pedro is venezuelan, observe how many americans don’t know anything about their own government and that atheists know more about the bible than christians. npr.org/sections/thetwo-way … -religious

So what’s your point?

And anyone who could tolerate listening to Rush is…

Exactly.

That was it? :open_mouth:

The safespace beckons.

What was that you were saying about honor and running? :-k viewtopic.php?f=3&t=194672&start=25#p2719852

Me? :confusion-shrug:

You’ve committed at least 2 major logical fallacies on this thread: that potentiality = certainty and every venezuelan is an expert in economics by virtue of being venezuelan. Though, I’ll have to consult Silhouette for the proper names.

I love how I’ve gained this reputation with you :smiley: However I don’t actually have any special or long-standing expertise with fallacies, I just had the patience some time ago to trawl through lists of fallacies to give me sufficient context to go back through them at later dates to find the name of a fallacy that I’ve identified with sufficient success. I’d like to think that this speaks for some natural abilities of mine, but probably speaks far more to the lack of effort by others :wink:

Not having a go at you by the way, you actually seem to be interested and looking into getting to the same point and probably beyond - clichés about how long it look to build Rome applied just as much to me as they will anyone else, the important thing is another cliché about it never being too late to start something.

Anyhoo. The first and last formal fallacies listed on wikipedia are the Appeal to Probability and the Modal fallacy - either would seem to apply to the “potentiality = certainty” fallacy you mentioned.

I love this point you’ve made about every Venezuelan not being an expert in economics by virtue of being Venezuelan - it’s very similar to scientists often being taken as authorities on all aspects of science when in reality they are most often only experts in specific fields of science. It probably takes anyone here less than a second to think of an American who is by no means an expert in economics by virtue of being American. Why doesn’t this apply to Venezuelans and Venezuela? Hell, who is an expert in economics? If there was such a thing, you’d think that somewhere there would exist at least one economy out there that was more robust than the mess you see all over the Western world, which is at least informally alleged to practice “the most” expertise in economics in the world, going by how economically developed it is relative to the rest of the world. Clearly it’s possible to have more economic expertise than others, and in practice people who are native to the economy in question are more likely to have more expertise than others, especially than others who are native to very different economies. However, the economically educated are probably more likely to have more expertise than someone with less economics education even if they are native to the economy in question, and even if it’s of a different type to the one that the educated person is native to. Obviously there’s the problem of who determines who has more economically educated, especially when said education is informally attained. If I am to understand that the person in question is Pedro, it’s quite clear that he has a significant economic bent, and honestly - even if he has attempted to educate himself economically, I see no sign from what I’ve read of him showing any objectivity of the kind that an economically educated person would normally be inclined to demonstrate.

In terms of fallacies, he would appear to be a “False authority” and I believe it is known as the “Genetic Fallacy” that is being commited when assuming something like a Venezuelan is an expert in Venezuelan economics by virtue of their Venezuelan origin. Obviously there is more than one relevant term in “Venezuelan economics”, and probably many other implied points of relevance that need to be considered when determining the validity and authority of someone’s arguments on such a subject.

In researching the above, I came by this fantastic term, Bulverism whereby one assumes a position to be wrong before explaining why it is wrong.
“Socialists think they deserve to be not be poor, and this is why” appears to be driving implication behind this thread - and honestly a great many threads including one I’ve recently been wasting a lot of of my time on. I’d even go as far as saying Bulverism is one of the sources of today’s mutilated political discourse.

So on the subject of Bulverism, I think you’ll find very few Socialists saying this. What you will find instead is a great many anti-Socialists saying that this is what Socialists “would say if they were more honest”.

The crucial distinction is the frame of understanding that differs between such highly charged topics of debate like this one. Determining one within the frame of another gets to this kind of misunderstanding and accusation that we see all the time now. It gets nowhere because nobody is making an honest effort to understand the other: the effort is instead to ridicule the other from the personally preferred ideology - imposing a psychological motivation onto another that would have to be the case if they held their position based on one’s own paradigm instead of based on their own paradigm.

All one ends up doing through this practice is explain the reason why one is personally unable to appreciate another type of thought. As such, you only harm yourself and show yourself up in your attempt to do that to others.

This is why I mentioned the retributive moral framework. Socialists tend to be a bit more utilitarian in their moral framework, which has just as much danger in it than the individualistic framework of those who are more in support of the status quo or variations thereof, than they are in a more fundamental shift in the status quo. By Utilitarian, I mean the primary reason for Socialist sympathies being in what seems to work best at the group level more than the individual level, but not necessarily in sacrifice of the individual level as is the interpretation of those with more Capitalist sympathies. Neuroscience would appear to indicate a correlation in the Socialist framework with theory of mind, and in the Capitalist framework with risk/reward. As such the Socialist sees the Capitalist as lacking in empathy, and the Capitalist sees the Socialist as underhandedly corrupt. If you think a Socialist is operating in terms of their personal risk/reward, then of course you see the ends of more equality as some people getting more than they put in which is an offense to Capitalist sensibilities. Conversely if you think a Capitalist is operating in terms of theory of mind, then of course you see the means of less equality as some people losing out more than is best for the group as a whole, which is an offense to Socialist sensibilities. Capitalists tend to see competition as best for the group as a whole and Socialists tend to see cooperation as best for the group as a whole.

Ironically, the above requires sufficient theory of mind since I am attempting to bridge the gap between not only two tokens of minds, but two types of minds altogether. So it’ll be interesting whether it’s easier for a Socialist mind to appreciate, or whether it won’t appeal to either type? Let’s find out.

To finish on a light note, I wouldn’t wish for this measure of copper because it takes about 10^5 atoms to reach the width of a human hair, and that’s just a line of atoms with only the width of 1 atom. Try 10^10 times someone mentions Venezuela without knowing what they’re talking about to get only a flat cross section of a human hair, and 10^15 to get a small grain of copper. That’s 1 quadrillion mentions :wink:

:smiley:
Its settled then. Socialists do deserve to be poor.

Great work guys.

Haha, caught with his pants down. Damnit, Seren! :laughing:

At least I can appeal to the undistributed subject in the conclusion not matching the distributed subject of the premise :smiley:

Jakob wrote:

Propaganda is very useful for controlling the mind.

Jesus… none of these socialists had even the slightest shred of spirit to attempt to justify their lust for power with some claim to merit.
Well, except promethean, in a completely abstract way, reifying his own will to power as historic necessity.

Futile oblivion on the whole.
Indifference to other beings suffering turns out to be a constant in Socialists. The whole isis story revealed this to me and does so here again.

A psychological ABC. Fucking … blaark.

Inherit your puddle, guys. Inherit it bigly.

Your apathy, and the resulting ignorance and the resulting arrogance and aggression give the Neocons another chance to leverage Trump.

Respectfully, youre idiots.
Which is a shame.

Socialists arent interested in real beings.

Hypothesis, they have to hypothesize their own being.

The real depth-problem brought about by mass industry. Not financial poverty, but dilution of presence, of Geist, thus of density of being.

Yes, a Capitalist is a higher density of being than a Socialist - this is why there are far more socialists, and why it takes one capitalist to move a thousand socialists.

Chemistry remains the best tool to discern the life of ideological qualia.

A farmer is in essence a capitalist.

Can’t we just discuss ideas without being insulting?

And why does everyone/thing have to be absolutely right/wrong?

You’re the nomenclature man who can tell me what I’m talking about :smiley: And I think identifying fallacies by name is a rare expertise. :sunglasses:

I’m not particularly good with labels, which apparently includes vocabulary considering I ran about the forum admonishing “superficially sensible, but actually false ideas” without knowing I could save real estate by simply saying “specious”. But then the problem is: how many know what specious means? So by educating myself, I’m making communication more difficult as most folks would probably assume specious means “silly” without looking it up.

I do better with concepts, the nuts and bolts, and although I can’t remember the quadratic formula, I’ll never forget how to derive it. Likewise, I know the fallacies, but can’t remember the names. I could learn what Bulverism means, but by using the term I’m relying on someone else to look it up, and if a person could be trusted to look something up, then I probably wouldn’t need to use the term in the first place :wink:

On the other hand, you have a innate talent for words and enjoy such, so rather than struggle with what I’m not good at, I’ll concentrate on what I do best and fall on the mercy of the naturally talented to polish it up for me, if they would be so kind :slight_smile:

I could point out a very subtle difference in venezuelans and scientists which is the latter is practiced at being scientific, so there is some merit in considering the opinion of a scientist outside of his field. But what skill or talent does a venezuelan have by virtue of being venezuelan? If the topic were about the equatorial climate, then I could see a venezuelan as more of an expert than a canadian, but still might defer to a meteorologist.

He didn’t think it through, but bulveristically assumed the premise before finding evidence. I think all absolutists do that because absolute truth is inherently baseless and held on faith, and evidence of having an absolutist proclivity is using terms like “honor”. Absolutists are practiced at not thinking things through.

I don’t think economists disagree with each other as much as colloquially suspected. Kenneth Arrow for instance taught many economists who went on to win nobel prizes. The problem isn’t economics, but politics (ie the interest of the capitalists to keep people down for profit).

Chomsky characterized Adam Smith as liberal, but conservatives have distorted his teaching and pigeonholed him into the capitalist category. Milton Friedman is often championed by capitalists, but they make no mention of his negative income tax idea. The economists are in far more agreement than disagreement, but the capitalists have incentive to distort.

A liberal economist is a professor at university.
A conservative economist is a hedge fund manager.

Singapore is a good example. Checkout singapore on google maps. The zoo is like a small city. With all the socialism, no wonder they don’t have a minimum wage; they don’t need to.

I can’t understand how any intellectually honest person could listen to Rush, ad hom extraordinaire, without getting nauseous.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men

If a person has the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, then he has the right not to be poor. Especially if the only reason he is poor is because the rich “deserve” to keep “their” money, which they pirated honestly.

Yes, objectivists, absolutists, conservatives, religious, they’re all bulverists.

That’s a profound observation and I wish it were as innocent as a capitalist merely advocating competition as a virtue to society, but it’s far more nefarious than that. It’s much easier to be a winner by pushing others down than in lifting oneself up. Remember the baby video? They will take less for themselves if it means even less for someone else. That’s in no way beneficial to society. Remember organ-donor guy? He didn’t have society’s interests in mind.

Capitalists lie and claim they think competition is good for society, but they don’t think that. Gain Wealth, forgetting all but Self chomsky.info/nothing-for-other- … ed-states/

Oh yes, good point, I should settle for quarks of copper atoms for every mention lest my penny get too big for the universe :smiley: