Capitalism has shown that it's war

I fear I can’t expect of you to look at social media content with a fair mind.

I also fear that if Id give you the assignment to find out which accounts have been banned, you’d not be able to find out, because you’d refuse, because of social media conditioning, to enter the websites that give you those lists.

Obviously the sites that provide such lists have themselves been blacklisted.
It is all very painful to see how helpless so many humans are in the face of some pretty basic manipulation.

I think this is for two reasons - firstly they have never known the pre digital age so for them it is just the norm and not at all unusual
And secondly the medium the technology references is an eternal one that never switches off which makes it perfect for addiction
Not only that but they can access it twenty four seven wherever they may be and which makes it even more perfect for addiction
This latter distinction makes it different to other types of addiction that have a limitation upon them due to lack of accessibility

Yes to the above. It has no stigma, yet, like smoking in the 40s say. It can be done anywhere and is. It is free, more or less. It is also necessary, at least, almost. IOW since you often need to or are expected to use various parts of social media in school and work, at the very least the internet it is an addiction that carries the extra problems of addictions to things like food. You cannot stop eating food, so it makes it trickier than say alcohol or narcotics, where you can have a life with none of it. It is also designed by cognitive scientists to be addictive.

It also forms brains and social bonds to make them different from previous generations. Their sense of self is not like previous homo sapiens. Of course their have been changes in this in different periods and in different cultures, but now we are shifting to a sense of self that is more purely surface. I am how I am presented and present myself period. We are watching the death of something once integral to being human.

From Seeking Alpha

Project Libra

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is recruiting dozens of financial firms and online merchants to help launch a crypto-based payments system, WSJ reports. Users would be able to use the digital coins to send payments to each other and make purchases both on Facebook and across the internet. Another idea under consideration is rewarding Facebook users with fractions of the currency in exchange for looking at advertisements. Seeking total investments of about $1B, Facebook is talking with Visa (NYSE:V), Mastercard (NYSE:MA) and First Data (NYSE:FDC) for money that would underpin the value of the coin and protect it from wild price swings.

Didin’t I tell you man? Google goes first. The clarity of mind indicated by project Libra. If you choose government, obviously the next step is the banks. That’s called digging your heels in.

Ain’t nobody at Google got this level of clarity.

The banks man. Let’s not forget, the censorship went from annoying to serious when PayPal and Mastercard started banning people.

That was the Rubicon.

I ain’t too worried though. I have learned about socialists that they are feeble minded and self destructive.

It is not the workers that have to get their shit together and start making capital. It is free men. Stop bitching about unfair conditions and make that cash money.

It used to be "ok socialists, why don’t you make your own factories?’ Now it is “ok capitalists, why don’t you make your own factories?”

A lot of people are missing the pig for the flies.

the socialist should be the atheist/materialist who after finally recognizing the absence of any moral teleology or purpose for man’s existence, sets before himself the task of creating a morality from the bottom up. so he’s basically attempting to do a missing god’s work; finding and establishing a foundation for any possible complete morality to follow. this is to say, if there is going to be a morality, it has to start here, or it cannot become anything substantial. as long as the class conflict exists between bourgeois and proletariat, they are morally incompatible because they are enemies at the most fundamental level. so i don’t think most really fully understand the implications of what capitalism creates in terms of deeper, more philosophical problems.

now i’m okay with all this, but i’m afraid that most others who would also claim to be okay with this, would in fact be horrified by some of the things that might rationally follow the logic of this problem taken to its greatest extreme. they don’t quite understand what it means to say ‘we are fundamental enemies who can have no moral obligations to each other’, and it is not enough to get around this by simply saying ‘ah but that’s what we have laws for’. fuck those laws. let me repeat: THERE IS NO MORAL CONTRACT between bourgeois and proletariat, regardless of what artificial rules society comes up with (to preserve the present order of things). this conflict precedes any of this law making and invalidates all of it.

so usually a capitalist is someone who hopes these artificial and ethically exempt civil laws will stall the proletariat’s violent revolt long enough for him to make a little money for free before he dies. and the proletariat is the one who is looking blankly at all the other proletarians and asking himself ‘why are we still allowing this to happen?’, to which the other proletarians respond ‘because we can’t seem to get organized, get our shit together yet’.

but you can’t understand the logic of the socialist unless you are able to switch perspectives and observe the capitalist from the point of view of the worker. only then will the thesis begin to make complete sense… something so obviously true that it needn’t even be called philosophical. you don’t need an IQ of even 100 to be able to ask the question; what is this guy doing here, and what is he needed for? forget the fact that he can be here… we’re asking why does he have to be here… and we find, after some closer examination, that he couldn’t be less important in the chain of production. but not only that. in addition to being nothing, he’s actually something like a black hole that sucks in and consumes all energy around it without giving any return. in this sense the capitalist is a negative balance. not just useless in the way of just ‘being there’ and not affecting anything. this guy actually absorbs the productive life force of everyone around him and depreciates the value of all of it. like a metaphysical parasite that creates nothing and consumes everything.

" so he’s basically attempting to do a missing god’s work"

Is there something lower than contempt?

Look, as long as the anti-socialists here are complaining about corporate and banking behavior, we can find something new, rather than just bleating the old sentences and playing our parts like it’s all in the Bhagavad Gita and doesn’t really mater.

The problem with capitalism is that like all hierarchies it favours those at the top but this is a rule of nature not of man
Eradicating it is therefore not viable because whatever replaced it would just be another hierarchy by a different name
So modifying the existing system is the most practical option here because idealistic Utopian ideals dont work in reality

Demonstrably false.

Read this thread (it’s not too long yet)

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194939

Is direct democracy going to overthrow capitalism then Ecmandu ?
Do you think that those that benefit from it will let that happen ?

No. Contradiction is what women look for in a mating partner as one of the many sexual signals in the species.

Men will not give up sex to be logically consistent, except for me.

The women are going to have to change to end this tyranny on this plane of existence.

But women hate me.

By hating me, they bury their heads in denial and hate themselves.

The question is, will women change.

That’s out of my hands.

As a transcendent human, I’m not required to stay in this earth. I’m doing it to be kind.

I’m not a free ticket though. My ability to send you to a 100% consensual reality depends on you.

This argument could be used against democracy, against the abolition of slavery, for eating the heads of our mates after sex, for war, for not giving medical treatment…and so on.
Nature has a very complicated set of hierarchies. I don’t know if bacteria or humans are on top and in which contexts. Or worms.
You argument would also have worked, if it works, as an argument against ending feudalism or monarchies. We should just reform them, what are these colonies thinking with their ideas of democracy.
Further modern capitalism is idealistic and would have seemed that way to societies before its arrival.

i dunno, but i have a natural proclivity to turn disorganized messes into well oiled machines. i guess the marxist in me is an archetypical extension of my abilities as a crew-leader, which i’ve been for quite some time. through my eyes, the world looks like seven billion disorganized mexicans who spend more time fighting and arguing with each other than getting anything done. what i see is a macrocosm of the microcosm i’ve been experiencing for decades, and it might as well be that kaufmann translation WTP book four chapter four master of the earth legislative instinct in me that lives and breaths here. i’ve done good to keep the archon in me quiet recently, but i cannot deny that it’s still there. once in a while it gets out when i speak of global orders and stuff, and yeah, i understand it’s all in a strange and unfamiliar language to most. this is why i’m quick to silence the voice again and continue telling jokes instead. everybody can understand a joke, so imma stick with what works.

shoukders.

knickers.

The question is why are you so obsessed with them and why is your answer completely unrelated to the questions which I actually asked
You cannot restrict yourself to the relevant threads but now have to talk about them when the subject matter is something else entirely

Political discussions are just lovely false dichotomies and excuses for making angry finger pointing loyalty moves that do not address points made.

So many people seem to think pointing out that free will is very hard to justify is a defense against any criticism of arguments for determinism. Nope argument rest on their own merits.

It gets even sillier with politics: Here if one system is attacked, socialism or capitalism, so many people think that defending their choice is somehow miraculously done well by labeling their opponents or by attacking what both teams seem to think are the only two options or even meaningful terms.

Socialism has the floppier definition since it includes the option of merely meaning that government regulates industry. Well, by that definition the US has always been socialist and so has Europe. A corporate charter, which actually used to have some real meaning, gave privileges to corporations and could be revoked. Apart from a whole mass of other regulations and oversight over various industries.

Both definitions suffer nowadays because there are no countries anymore and further the corporations are not in countries.

We also cannot say that there is a limit on the degree of regulation, not with good old capitalist China chugging away without even the pretense of democracy and a mass of regulation (though also less regulation in many areas, ironically)

An honest discussion would look at what the problems are of each, rather than pointing fingers and saying that is worse, or these are the emotions you people have, as if that was remotely a defense of anything. Ad homs have their place but they shouldn’t be confused with rebutting criticisms of practical real world effects.

Yes, let’s all show our team loyalty. Keep the discussion very abstract as if all capitalisms are the same and have been over time and as if all socialisims are the same and have been over time.

Let’s not notice that today we have neither.

Let’s not consider that we are being handed a false dichotomy and someone is laughing as we find yet another way to hate other individuals who don’t have much power.