You are wrong about Obama’s religion— it is sincere, as is obvious from his autobiography. The religious impulse is not about superstition or miracles, it is about the long, hard struggle for justice in a world that rewards great evil with power and money. The African American community has the advantage of a homegrown tradition of sincere religious worship, without blinders about the challenges that the community faces. It is this religious spiritual strength that played a big role in allowing the civil rights movement to succeed as it did. Obama is aware of this history, and appreciates the power of Christian religion to play a role in ensuring that the powerless are made powerful, that they, in the words of a famous text, shall inherit the Earth.
Obama is sensibly secular in his policies, but he is religious in conviction. This is to be contrasted with many on the right who are the exact opposite. I am sure that Obama, as most religious Americans, does not believe there was a literal boat and a flood, or that God literally parted the red sea. But looking at the massive transformations that religious faith enables, who the heck cares, He might as well have.
Jeremiah Wright is a preacher who has emphasized the social justice aspects of Christianity. His sermon “The Audacity to Hope” is a classic, and inspired Obama’s autobiography title. The thesis of this sermon (it is truly great, and you can hear all of it online) is that it is not natural to maintain hope under trying circumstances, rather, it is an audacious step, a bewilderingly irrational step, and yet, historically, over long enough periods of time, it is justified. One should not conflate this uplifting and true observation with the idea that God wants you to heckle your same-sex neighbors or throw women with too-short skirts out of society.
Hi Lubos, I must say one thing right up front— you are right about Widom Larsen theory (the idea that there is inverse beta decay in metals), it is preposterous. There are no neutrons produced on metals, and this is obvious from the MeV difference in mass. It is also true that Rossi is running a scam.
But cold fusion research was for 2 decades a Palladium-deuterium project, and there the results are iron-clad. The heat measurements of Pons/Fleischmann have been replicated many times over in hundreds of laboratories. The evidence for nuclear transmutations are available in extremely lucid experimental papers by Mosier-Boss and collaborators at SPAWAR. Please _read these papers_ before dismissing them, as I am sure they will mystify you as they mystified me. I was scratching my head at the particle emission results for a week or more, before I finally had to give in and admit something nuclear was happening. The evidence is overwhelming, and it had to be for me, because I started out as skeptical as you.
I am no longer skeptical. But I also think I know what is going on. The major clue was the Mosier-Boss charged alpha and charged particle observations. These tell you that the energies involved are not particularly low, the alphas come out in a continuous spectrum <~ 20MeV, while the other charged stuff is KeV scale. There are also KeV X-rays with KeV energies emitted. The key point is that K-shells in Pd can accelerate lattice deuterons. This is very simple to see, it is exactly parallel to K-shell accelerating an electron (a well known process). The K-shell hole (an ejected n=1 electron) absorbes a random electron near the Fermi surface, and uses this energy to kick another electron. Instead of kicking an electron, in a deuterated metal, it can kick a deuteron. The kicked deuteron flies through the lattice at 20KeV, and can fuse. If the fusion is near a Pd nucleus, there are symmetries broken that can open up a fusion channel where the energy is dumped into the nucleus, instead of to a proton or a neutron (this is something you can't observe in dilute beam fusion). The result is a nucleus-fragment and an alpha-particle moving at 24 MeV altogether, and this produces the broad spectrum alpha-emission observed by Mosier-Boss et al. The fast-moving alphas produce more holes (up to 1000 of them, by energy, although probably less, more like 100-400). So long as only 1 in 100 accelerated deuterons fuse, you have a chain reaction. Fusion cross sections at 20KeV are not particularly humongous (but they aren't small either), and deuterons at 20KeV going though deuterated Pd do not fuse at a rate of 1 in 100 before they stop, but rather at a rate of about 1 in 10,000. This is the 2 orders of magnitude missing from the theory. But there are caveats: 1. the fusion is detected by looking for neutrons and protons, so this is the conventional fusion of the beam in the metal. You might have a lot more undetected fusion which is d+d fusion with a specator nucleus, which you don't see, because it doesn't generate neutrons you detect. 2. the deuterons and K-shell holes together make bands of unstable delocalized excitations. These bands can plausibly concentrate the wavefunctions of the colliding deuterons into special configurations which are focused near a nucleus, with greater concentration than an impinging beam. It's not ruled out to get a large factor in intensity of the collisions, since the wavefunctions for the K-shell electron-holes are concentrated in 100fermi shells near the nucleus. It is also not implausible to have most of the fusions happen near a nucleus, to absorb the energy momentum. The bands can also lead the K-shell deuteron states to migrate to a surface, and attain higher density of fast deuterons, they act like a conductor at KeV energies (although their lifetime is not so great, it is long enough to do many many hops before they decay by X-ray). These phenomena are certainly there in the metal, since they are required by current theory, but whether they are responsible for cold fusion remains to be seen. But considering that I am not invoking magic, I think you should consider your dogmatic insistence that cold fusion is ruled out. Maybe H-Ni fusion is, but deuterium fusion in Pd is not, and I consider the present experimental evidence that it is happening overwhelming.
Yes, Lubos, you are absolutely right— the KeV’s would be impossible if they would be thermal energy. This is how I am sure they aren’t thermal.
You are wrong about reproductions of Pons/Fleischamann, many reproductions succeeded in 1989, at least 3 immediately, and all of them would have succeeded if they had patience to run for a few weeks on good samples at high deuteron loading, as Pons and Fleischmann had patience. Further, the lack of reproducibility is a scientific fraud propagated by hot-fusion folks at MIT. But people bought it because of the thermalization argument you give.
The whole cold fusion thing is extraordinarily out of equilibrium— the energy is in ridiculous modes far far above any thermal modes in energy: K-shell holes and KeV deuterons. These take many steps to turn into thermal energy. Usually, they don’t turn thermal at all, they just emit X-rays which escape the material. You might be puzzled by this. Why don’t they turn thermal?
High energy particles don’t have a lot of thermal friction. This is the paradox of high-energy particles. You would naively think they would quickly thermalize their energy into thermal modes. But they don’t. They don’t heat up the solid, they ionize it, and preferentially in inner shells. This is well known since the 1910s experimentally, understanding this was a major motivation for Bohr in 1913, and it was completely explained by QED in the 1940s, by Hans Bethe. The Bethe theory describes what happens to fast charged ionizing radiation, it loses energy to ionizing atoms in a line, and with a completely non-thermal energy distribution— the high energy modes are much more likely to be excited than the low-energy modes. The high energy modes then produce X-rays at KeV energies, not thermal photons at fractions of an eV.
The result stays a crystal, the solid doesn’t melt locally, it just is ionized. This is even though the energy, if translated to thermal terms, would be millions or billions of degrees. These ionized atoms just can’t melt the crystal, because a nucleus can’t be kicked all together with it’s core electrons (even though there is enough energy to do this), this is phase-space impossible. All you can do is kick out an individual electron. It’s the phase-space problem that a melted solid is not immediately phase-space accessible from a crystal solid by kicking a single particle.
On the other hand, you can kick a deuteron, because a deuteron has no core. So there is no obstacle to having fast deuterons in a crystal, as there is to having fast Pd cores. Ionizing radiation can dump its energy into ionizing electrons or accelerating deuterons, but not into melting the crystal. This is why we have X-ray emissions without crystal melting, and you are right that back-of-the-envelope, these are not possible (this is why you need to understand QED to understand high energy particle energy transfer).
The cold fusion process is exploiting the long thermalization time to do many fusions before the crystal melts. The crystal eventually does melt, it explodes in little clumps a few microns across. This is what happens to cold fusion devices. Scanning electron microscopy on used cathodes shows that they are full of micron-scale pits where the Pd melted and exploded outward. The heat output is in extremely localized flashes at very high energy on the surface, it isn’t uniform. This was another clue for me as to the theory.
But melting the crystal only happens after a bazillion fusions, once the KeV scale levels have time to mix with thermal levels. This is what prevents a runaway chain-reaction and an explosion, the chain reaction stops once the solid melts and the deuterons are far from ionized atoms. Still, you can have a chain-reaction in Pd/d, and there are explosions (although not of nuclear scale). The self-limiting aspects are what make this interesting.
You don’t need to publish this comment if you don’t want to— it’s just a correction to your remarks below: the K-shell of Pd is a little over 20KeV, around 22KeV. The next level is at 3KeV. The beam cross section for fusion on deuterated palladium(yes, this experiment is done!) is 1 d-d neutron emitting fusion in 10,000-100,000 at around 3-20KeV, (I forgot the exact numbers, it was something like some thousands of fusions in a beam of a billion particles but I can dig up the paper if you want). The K-shell is not “something like KeV”, it is exactly what I give here, and the fusion rate at 20KeV is not at all negligible, it’s very high (this is higher temperature than the center of the sun, if converted to thermal units). The enhancement of fusion that lowers the barrier for d-d fusion to KeV’s as opposed to MeV’s (which is the naive classical Coulomb barrier for deuterons to touch) is well known, it is what allows ordinary fusion in H-bombs and muon-catalyzed fusion, and all other known accepted forms— it’s ordinary quantum tunnelling during the scattering process. Please fix these errors, as these are a little bit demoralizing considering your usual scientific honesty.
Hey Lubos, What happened to my comments? If you insist on deleting my corrections to your false claims, I will permanently move you from “scientist” column to the “politician” column. That means: I will no longer take anything you say seriously, and I’ll stop upvoting your stackexchange answers, dude.
In a nutshell— high energy particles don’t thermalize crystals, as was known already to Bohr, high energy charged particles deposit energy in ionization of atoms, highest energy levels first. This makes thermalization very inefficient, and the result is that you can have materials emitting X-rays at KeV energies without melting the lattice, even though X-rays have an energy corresponding to a temperature of millions of degrees. When an MeV electron or proton goes through a crystal, the crystal doesn’t locally melt, it ionizes and reemits X-rays.
This is a phase-space restriction on the thermalization, it occurs because you can’t locally melt a crystal by just kicking the nucleus, because this would fully ionize the nucleus. You would need to kick the entire atomic core, the nucleus plus inner electrons, and that is phase space impossible. What happens instead is that electrons are kicked out individually. This was described by Hans Bethe in the 1940s, using QED. The Bethe formula correctly predicts the stopping times of charged particles in matter of all sorts, and is well established science.
Bethe’s process does not lead to melting, it leads to secondary X-ray and beta emissions. The beta emissions are from electrons falling back into the K-shell (and other shell) holes produced by the charged particle. In a deuterated metal, the deuterons don’t have cores, and they can be kicked around. The deuterons accelerate from K-shell holes and charged particles, they fuse near a nucleus, and the resulting fast charged particle emissions lead to more K-shell holes.
The K-shell energy of Pd is 20KeV. The fusion rate of beams on deuterated Pd is published and available, and the neutron emission fusion rate is 1 in 100,000 atoms or so, at around 3KeV, before the deuterons stop. The rate is not negligible at 1KeV, because of known tunneling enhancements to fusion cross sections, things that are known from hot fusion and muon catalyzed fusion.
I know this is your blog, but have some freaking respect for scientific honesty. I have just demolished your retarded argument against cold fusion, so please change your mind on this, and do it quickly. Anything else is not befitting a scientist.
Oops, sorry! I’m an idiot. Thanks Lubos, sorry for repeating myself, I really thought you were removing the comments. You can call me a crackpot all you like, I was just annoyed at what I thought was censorship. I won’t make repeat comments again. Please delete the last comment of mine, it was rude, redundant, and wrong.
Hi Lubos, I won’t bother you again, but I am now certain the theory is correct, as I have figured out the last major discrepancy with the observation. The fusion-near-a-nucleus story is correct, and you can see it is true because if you have a K-shell hole and you kick a deuteron, it will get just enough KE to approach the nucleus to the distance of a K-shell hole, i.e. 100 fermis. This gives a classical turning point, and a wavefunction enhancement as the inverse square-root of the classical velocity, and when two such accelerated deuterons meet, they meet right next to a Pd nucleus, leading to the 3-body fusion. The bands are real, the fusion is real, the result is excess heat at 24 MeV per deuteron pair, and if you were clever, you could have predicted it theoretically with no experimental data already before 1989.
The reason I am certain is the pattern of transmutation products in the Pd, it matches the theoretical predictions to a tee. At first I thought the transmutations would only happen _after_ the fusion, from the alpha bombardment, but that’s not true. A fusion by a nucleus transferring the energy electrostatically fragments the nucleus. The theory is complete, and I am very happy. You don’t need to publish this, I thought you might like to know.
Yes, I’ll submit a few articles somewhere after a few weekends (I have an interesting bioinformatics money job I have been neglecting) . This will consist of three major parts: 1. The theory of deep holes— the K-shell electrons. These are described by the creation-annihilation inverted nonrelativistic spinning Schrodinger field (the Pauli field equation, or the nonrelativistic Dirac equation). They behave as positive charged particles with negative mass, and this allows you to compute the X-ray transition spectra (including selection rules) from single particle QM. The results are interesting, as they allow you to simply calculate the Moseley law screening coefficient from Hartree fock type effective potentials in the electron ground state very accurately. 2. The interaction of these deep holes with deuterons in a deuterated metal leads to the banding of X-rays in hydrogenated metals (this will be uncontroversial and important), this allows X-ray refraction and easy downconversion, together with potential solid state X-ray laser, not plasma (although such a laser will be risky with deuterium, due to the risk of small atomic explosion). The band-width calculation I haven’t done but it’s not hard 3. The effective field theory of deuteron resonances— there are about 6 of these. The coefficients for transitions between these are not observed in cases where you have a strong electric field. I tried to formulate this theory about 3 years ago, but there wasn’t enough data. I think it might be possible to get around this with some heuristic estimates using some nuclear potentials. This requires more expertise in nuclear physics. 4. The wavefunction of the deuterons in certain positions in the X-ray band (it has a lot of states) will correspond to classical orbits which go around from nucleus to nucleus with turning points of closest approach arount 100fm. The quantitative estimates for the fusion probability when such states have a given occupation number can be given from the theory in 4. The important thing is the electrostatic transfer of energy to the nucleus, which leads to fragmentation similar to electron bombardment at 20 MeV (this involves a virtual photon of about the same energy). This leads to nuclear fragmentation and recoil which is quantitatively understood from some 1970s measurements of electron nuclear interaction. The resulting fragmentation spectrum involves a whole bunch of different species, and one will have a roughly quantitatively accurate list of emitted light isotopes during fusion. There is a lot of nuclear data for what happens when these isotopes collide with heavy nuclei, but the general estimates can be just from the Coulomb barrier to estimate absorption probability, and assuming absorption plus gamma/beta decay or one-particle or one-alpha ejection is the major tranmutation source. This allows you to give a quantitative prediction for the tranmutation spectrum for the cold fusion which is a smoking-gun signature— you get light elements and heavy elements obeying a sum rule: (Pd-X)+X = (Pd+X) where X is a light ejecta, and (plus minus one or two in charge to account subsequent beta decay, and with some corrections for known alpha ejection probability). These will be for all transmutations in mass more than +4. For less than +4, the tranmutation spectrum is the exactly same as Pd and d bombardment with 10-20 MeV alphas in a precise distribution (which is dependent on what ejecta comes out). This is exactly consistent with Wolf and Iwamura’s transmutation data (although I should read Mizuno’s book, which is available).
Hi Lubos, Hi Dilaton (sorry Lubos, I hope you can tolerate this mostly offtopic comment, as I can’t really get in touch with Dilaton).
Unfortunately, these events do have permanent consequences, because I can’t return to stackexchange. It is a religious requirement, I can no more do it than a devout Jew can eat pork. I do not participate in ostensibly public internet forums which are controlled by silencing authorities, beyond removing spam, off topic or completely incomprehensible things, libelous material or otherwise legally questionable content, or duplications. All those things can be done without content judgement or opinions on individual people. The freedom to express and protect ideas from silencing is paramount, and without it, you can’t have scientific discussion, as all the good new ideas would get squelched.
The moderators have been lying a little about my behavior, but this is usual in these circumstances. The thing I have said about Larian Lequella is “He is an authoritarian moderator, he knows nothing about physics, he will wreck the site, don’t vote for him, vote qmechanic / manishearth” (although I regert it now, after hearing manishearth’s disheartening conformist answers in the Town Hall Chat— I should have gone with Chris Gerig, he’s honest and fair). An election where you can’t endorse, or discuss voting strategy is not an election at all, it is a false front for appointing people. This is exactly how the elections were managed in the Soviet block (Lubos unfortunately knows something about this)— you had candidates you couldn’t criticize, and you couldn’t coordinate your vote.
Shog9 deleted the statements that said “Don’t vote for Larian, and don’t split your vote, vote qmechanic / manishearth”, because this was the one thing most likely to actually affect the election. I kept rolling back his changes, precisely because it would affect the election, and then he locked the post, and said “Do not revert or else”. I reverted, with “Or else what?” The whole exchange was deleted, and I was blocked. This was the instigating thing— challenging shog9’s authority, and of course I would do it again, and I encourage you to do it too. When you leave, it’s best to leave in a blaze of glory.
I behave the way I do for a reason— I speak openly and I am extremely insulting to the gods, to the gods, to collectives which work by authority. This is something that is very easy to do, if you are independent minded, and it’s interesting, because you learn about the properties of collective intelligences. When you insult the collectives, the people involved will get _pissed off_, but it will be funny, because they won’t know exactly _why_, because you didn’t insult them directly. For example, say hello to a psychiatrist, and ask him if antidepressants cause brain damage to children. She’ll get pissed whether or not she has presecribed antidepressants, to children or adults. Or tell a biologist why he believes in modern synthesis evolution, when it’s clearly a load of bullcrap. Or mention cold fusion to a physicist. Or do what Lubos did to get kicked out of Harvard— question Lee Smolin’s honesty in print. Lubos, I admire you to death for having done that. It required balls of steel, and this is why I never criticize you no matter how many times you call me a crackpot. Your criticism of loop quantum gravity has been cogent and reliable, and I have learned a lot from it, and it came from honestly devoting effort to it, not from some knee-jerk seat of the pants feeling.
If collective dogma can’t be challenged openly, if this is not celebrated, or at least accepted and tolerated, then inexorably it follows that people with truly new ideas, like Lubos, are going to be shut up. Every (correct, nontrivial) new idea is 10 times more insulting to the established order than anything I can say off the cuff by design. The attacks on string theory are an example of this collective hysteria, this is the reaction of the gods to a challenge, and there are herds of people who will do their bidding.
The political trajectory on stackexchange exactly followed that of Wikipedia— it was completely open for a few years, because the higher ups needed a collection of experts to establish their credentials, then a sudden phase transition as the authoritarian idiots take over, and then nobody is safe, and the site productivity grinds to a halt. Because of my behavior, purposefully finding all sorts of socially annoying things to say and do, I am a self-appointed canary in the coalmine. You can tell if a site is honest and sensibly moderated by simply checking if I am banned.
Until recently, on physics.stackexchange, I was not banned. That means that even the most eccentric folks were allowed to speak their mind and their ideas would be protected (and downvoted, but so what). But a few months ago, an abrasive user named Georg got banned— that was a warning, but I missed it. It’s all over now. The new moderators will not allow the freedom to explore ideas and write honestly about them.
The freedom of physics stackexchange int he recent past was hard-won. I don’t think you remember there were attempts to ban me a year ago by members that gave up and left. These first attempts were defeated because these people are physicists, and the honesty is inculcated in physics culture. The current censorious crowd are politicians, and one cannot defeat them except by making a new site.
If you know a good hosting, one can set up a new site with guarantees of complete permanent protection for nontrivial original ideas, but otherwise similar to stackexchange. I would, if involved, allow questions of the form “referee this paper: [link]”, where you would just post an arxiv paper, and allow people to referee it, with voting, in public. This would be better than the political horseshit that goes on during private refereeing behind the scenes in journals, and it can perhaps substitute for this archaic system. Please remember that Einstein published without refereeing, and the modern system was only set up in the 1950s, and after some notable successes (1957 was a very good year, BCS theory, Bohmian dynamics, Everett’s many-worlds, Mandelstam’s double-dispersion relations, lot of stuff), it was all downhill. By the late 60s, quarks were censored, by the 70s, string theory was censored, by the 80s, lots of stuff was censored, and by the 90s, the ratio of science to bullshit in journals was at an all time low.
Usenet and the internet in general helped a lot, and by now most of the egregious stuff is gone. I would be happy to provide a forum which can serve as a public refereeing site. I hoped stackexchange could be this forum, but in its current form, the moderation atmosphere makes it impossible to have an open discussion, as had been the rule until a few days ago.
I would also like to see questions which simply ask for experimental data, published or unpublished, maybe some lying around in a lab. This is useful, as there is a ton of data which can’t be put up anywhere, because it doesn’t come with a conclusion attached.
Also, on a future site, I would prefer to completely exclude unoriginal stuff (like homework, or well known textbook things) by closing them with a one-line answer, or sending people to stackexchange.
I don’t know if this is a pipe dream or not. It’s not like I can afford the hosting, although I think I can set up or modify the software as necessary.
Lubos, of course I don’t mean taking anything away from anybody. I mean a new site, like math.overflow, with a new host and a new domain (and run on available free q/a forum software). As for the religion, there is such a religion, one which you unconsciously and instinctively follow, which was founded in the 1920s by Wolfgang Pauli. It’s this religion that comanded you to criticise loops, even at great personal and professional cost.
Free stackexchange clones exist, they are reasonable. I do not have any attachment to the site anymore, I only liked it because I could tell it was free for sure (and I could tell because I wasn’t banned). I am not interested in “role playing games”, I hate online games. My addiction is to doing justice for the underrecognized marginalized folks, and for advertizing their results and for exposing the charlatans and frauds, and the fraudulent ideas, that have high positions in the field today. This doesn’t take a lot of effort if you know what you’re talking about. Lubos has been doing it here for years. We disagree on some of the technical content, but not on the need for honest criticism of dogmatic claims.
You are wrong about the financial aspects— the reason this happened now is because I came to a bunch of other sites (like stackoverflow) and annoyed them with asshole behavior, complaining about the moderation on skeptics, and saying that they need to tolerate assholes, like the physicists do. This is a goad to them to try to get the physicists to stop doing it. If the site is capable of being taken over by shog9, then I’m going to get banned, and I don’t want to waste too much time, get it over with early, because the longer you’re there, the harder it is to migrate your text to the next forum.
The previous forum was wikipedia, they were totally free until around 2008. The one before was usenet.
I only used stackexchange because it was science, and it was open (or at least, it quickly turned open with a little bit of prodding), so it gives a way to say correct things that can’t be said elsewhere:
1. Large extra dimensions are bunk
2. Cold fusion is not.
3. Loop quantum gravity has degenerated into obviously false nonsense (although the ideas are still annoyingly mathematically interesting).
4. S-matrix theory was suppressed unfairly.
and so on and so on. I tried to mix answers to well known stuff, some new calculations that didn’t take more than a day or two to do, and proselyzing for discarded stuff. There are also smaller things, like recognizing Chew and Mandelstam for their contribution to string theory, and Candlin for Grassman integration.
But mostly it serves as a publishing avenue for original stuff that is suppressed elsewhere, that you are just not allowed to say because of the politics of science. This is the purpose the internet serves. It also served the purpose of publically refereeing some wrong stuff in the literature. It was easy enough to do both things when anyone is free to criticise and argue, because nobody could come and claim stupid things with impugnity (as some nuclear physicist just came and did on my last answer, with no fear of getting called out or exposed for charlatanry), because they would get _called out on it publically_, by knowledgable people. Those people who didn’t know their stuff either learned it, or got intimidated and left, or else stuck to answering really simple questions.
That’s the way it should be. That’s the way math.overflow works, and this is why math is having a reneissance the likes of which we haven’t seen since, well, the reneissance. (I am sorry Lubos for spamming your site, I’ll stop now. If it’s too much unrelated crap, I understand if you throw this into the dustbin).
Lubos was stunningly fair to the cold fusion comments I made on a thread here on TRF, despite more than usual assholish behavior from me, despite me spamming the site with something like 4 comments in a row, and despite the fact that he considers these cold fusion ideas “crackpot rants”. This only cemented my certainty that he is an honest to goodness scientist, with actual unwavering integrity (something which one usually could infer from the quality of his science commentary, but you never know, sometimes people sell out when not protected by an academic umbrella— I know the pressure). I hope he could read the cold fusion explanation I put on stackexchange, and look into the details of deuteron hole banding and 3-body fusion (although this stuff is more condensed matter than he usually studies, there are really no experts here, and the qualitative agreement with otherwise completely inexplicable Iwamura mass-spec transmutation data makes me pretty confident that this is the right explanation), because he might have an idea for calculating the lifetime and energy width of the KeV bands, seeing what density is required for 3-body fusion rates, estimating cross sections, or perhaps rule it out entirely (not with bogus back of the envelope estimates, but using actual cross section estimates at 20KeV) or find the expected x-ray intensity. These were things I was supposed to calculate over thanksgiving, but instead my daughter had an ear infection, and I was busy programming some bio stuff.
The only issue with math.overflow is that I think they licensed the stackexchange software, and this is expensive. The free clones are not as full featured, but close (I looked at some of them), but branching off of math.overflow might be a good idea anyway. I know one of the folks who runs it, but not very well (he was an undergrad prof. of mine, and he is very good). If that doesn’t work, the only expensive thing is the hosting, and there might be academic tricks around that (for example, qmechanic and Arnold are profs, and might be able to persuade someone to host a site on a university server). The software issues are really next to nil, even if you don’t license the software, and even if you want eye candy, the amount of work required to get a site online isn’t so large (the math.overflow people did it themselves with a full research and teaching load.
Also, since the entire content of SE is licensed under a free license, one can borrow many nice questions without asking, the theoretical physics ones and research-level ones for sure.
But I hope one agrees that one will not censor ideas, just downvote them (if they deserve it). I really don’t want to suppress anything of potential value, and that means tolerating a certain amount of downvoted junk.
Go to stackoverflow, and tell shog9 to try to reproduce with himself. End of problem.
It’s not that much work— you overestimate the work this internet entrepreneur put in. Stackexchange is piggybacking on usenet, everyone involved in usenet looked to do something to keep the spirit alive. So you got Wikipedia, and MySpace, and blogs, and so on. One stackexchange clone written as masters project for CS folks, it takes a few weeks at the worst. The big barrier is hosting, which I don’t have, and I am working at a university I hesitate to name, because I don’t want their reputation to suffer by association.
The word “civility” on internet forums means something different than what you think. It is simply a trick of moderators. The “incivility” is not presented with examples of you cussing at people (which no one ever does), it is based on the feeling that the user “creating a disruptive atmosphere” with “percieved hostility toward other users”, and this is the feeling most people get when you tell them that they are factually wrong. So you end up banning any knowledge that contradicts anybody.
What it amounts to is disallowing criticism of any authoritative statement using first principles reasoning, since the reasoning by its nature is unsourced and it “rudely” challenges safe conventions. It makes people extremely uncomfortable when something they believe is challenged, and it feels like a direct and most personal insult. Any scientist will know the feeling, it’s what you felt when you first heard the outlines of BFSS theory, before it was accepted.
You will never get people on public forums to see the difference, therefore, for these forums to function as scientific sources containing factual knowledge, you must get rid of all the civility rules altogether. On these
sites, the politics come straight from the pits of hell, the moderators are playing a social game, they never contradict each other, and they behave as a one-mind herd. Any moderator that disagrees with another one is
stripped of moderatorship quickly. Conflict is always resolved in the moderator’s favor, which means get rid of all conflict. This makes a strong disincentive to criticism, since moderators are politicians and they never
criticize anything.
This is an internet fact of life— disagreement on technical content, especially unsourced solid arguments contradicting published claims, will lead you to be classified as unbearably, obnoxiously, rude, and it will be used
as an excuse to get rid of you.
This is why civility requirements are incompatible with science, and there is no way to explain the nuances, so you just have to ask the site to tolerate rudeness” and if they say no, or at least if they enforce the no, then you leave (it’s easy, you’re blocked).
The problem of cussing cranks and people who argue incessantly insulting each other is essentially nonexistent on forums with voting. I have not seen a single instance.
For Lubos, nobody is demanding anything from a private server, this is not something one can demand. It is within stackexchange’s power, as a private entity, to do whatever the heck they want to do. This is why physicists need an independently run forum. If the mathematicians give their forum to area53, they’ll need a one too.
I did it.
This person was scamming in some way— I emailed, but the information was vague, no details, not academic, and I told him I couldn’t entrust the personal information on such a website to a stranger, who would be able to scan IP’s and so on. He even linked me to this page: http://www.facebook.com/jam… which was full of facebook friends, but is now deleted. It was paranoia inducing. This is why hosting is a serious problem, you need to place trust in the host. I suppose commercial hosting can be trusted, and it’s not expensive. Lubos, either post this, or delete the insincere and frightening offer above.
How can I get in touch regarding details? Like how do you tex? Link pictures? What’s the kB limit on a post? I didn’t imagine you were serious, but I’ll do it. My email is likebox at gmail.
The Turing lecture presents a very important idea: that it is impossible to build a convincing sophisticated computational circuit using point mutations in any reasonable time scale. This point was made intuitively by Pauli in the 1950s, when it was a response to modern synthesis evolution. It has been made by nonscientists as well, who find it hard to buy the idea of evolution happening by random point mutation.
The idea that there is a learning mechanism for modifying the genome is obviously true, and it is fantastic that someone with some clout has finally taken this position. But the learning hypothesis is not very persuasive because it is missing the main point. The memory capacity of the proteins is just too small to account for the computational complexity of the DNA rewriting, the number of protein combinations is generally vastly smaller than the number of DNA combinations. This paradox was very clear to those who studied protein networks, it makes it difficult to imagine any model of evolution which operates on DNA using proteins alone. To modify gigabytes of functional data, You need a molecule which can encode gigabytes of random-access data in a read/write way, in a dense encoding. The only real candidate, excluding DNA methylation and DNA conformation (which are recently emphasized hacks with similar function) is RNA.
The lack of direct communication or compatibility between the protein and DNA level information demands that the information about future mutations must be stored in self-modifying computing strands of RNA. This is a firm prediction, it must be so, and yet it is not accepted fully within biology.
This prediction allows one to predict that the DNA in the cell is mostly noncoding, since the coding region is controlled and evolved by the noncoding parts. It requires that the noncoding part is transcribed into RNA despite being noncoding. This is also now known to be true. It provides the only convincing role for the massive amount of long noncoding RNA in the nucleus. This RNA is computing, making a nervous system for the cell, and this computation provides the only plausible mechanism for machine-learning in the genome.
The computation in RNA requires that the RNA can distinguish different strands from one another, and this is done through complementary binding, and splicing/resplicing events in RNA. The hypothesis is that these events are making closed-loop computation with each other, without any need for translation to proteins, using only proteins available in the nucleus.
The RNA/RNA events and RNA reverse transcription (which is required for the evolution to be influenced by the RNA) are the “strange events” which are described in the video, but they are not all that random, they are constrained by the allowed mutagenesis in the RNA computing system in the nucleus.
The communication between RNA and DNA predicts that there are reverse transcriptase genes in the genome (this is also true, in ERVs), and that these are transcribed and active in certain cases. This has been observed in human tissue in cancer cells, where full functional HERVs are produced, including the polymerase, which allows for reverse transcription. The reverse transcription functionality of the human genome is important, since it allows you to couple the RNA computation back into the DNA.
The contains complementary matching motifs which allow self binding (true and surprising) and that that it is composed of interpretable domains with features which are not random.
The “evolvability” condition then presented here is much too strict, the evolution can include rewriting of the code which is sensible, directed by the RNA networks in an egg.
This completely resolves the paradox of evolution presented in the video, but it introduces vastly more computation into the cell than is known at present. It demands that the RNA computation is sufficiently complex to essentially have a model of the protein production and the noncoding RNA production in the cell, so that it can sensibly modify the DNA for future generations.
These predictions are biologically surprising, and they are the only plausible way to allow for evolution to produce observed biological complexity, yet are not accepted fully,
All patterns match, including metrical and grammatical ones. The enjambments plus feminine endings curve for Shakespeare matches Marlowe, so does function word stylometry, which is sensitive to length of clauses. Whatever metric you use, Marlowe is mathematically indistinguishable from Shakespeare, and this is an unacceptable coincidence for stylometry, it is obviously a sign of common authorship, and considering the number of stylometries, it is mathematically illiterate, and just plain stupid, to deny it.
Sorry Shakespearian scholars, your goose is cooked. You’ve been exposed, you are frauds and nincompoops. It’s nice that the Copernican revolution of English literature has finally arrived.
Hi Peter—
I am more certain than you by now, I am relatively close to 5 sigma sure, because I not only looked over your stylometries (which gave me good confidence, about 3 sigma) but also additional ones— the ones published to refute Marlovian ideas by Charniak et al last year.
The result of the new stylometries not only failed to refute the Marlovian idea, they confused Marlowe and Shakespeare more completely than Mendenhall, and this is after these guys tried hard to look for a stylometry specifically to distinguish these two. This is the last straw, that pushes me to five sigma.
When you have independent stylometries, each one could independently fail. Your stylometries each had a 1 in 4 chance of being a coincidence, but you had 5 of them, and some of them were published specifically to distinguish Marlowe and Shakespeare. This means that one gains 1/4^5 confidence from this, about 1/1000 chance of coincidence.
The newest stylometries confused four separate Marlowe plays as early Shakespeare, by two separate methods! These methods were much more rigorous— they involved careful statistical analysis of vocabulary and function words in baskets compared across works, and this gives another 1/1000 likelihood. So I’m sure, there’s no more evidence necessary, you guys are right, and there’s no need to be so circumspect.
In addition, if you want more certainty, each independent stylometry is additional independent evidence— so I would run your “letter stylometry” on 100 different letter-baskets, and see if you get a smooth match Marlowe-Shakespeare in all 100 cases (you certainly will, since they are the same author). Even if each coincidence is 50% likely (it much less likely than that), 1/2^100 is scientific certainty.
Stylometry of this quality is enough to say “enough, they’re the same guy” with scientific standards of certainty, especially considering the fact that you have shown that the circumstantial evidence is equally friendly to this notion as to any other.
Plus, stop being so nice to the academics. They aren’t returning the favor. You’re right and they’re stupid.
This is indeed a difference in Marlowe and Shakespeare, but it is reasonably explained by maturity. If you believe this— make a sentence length stylometry, plot it for Shakespeare and Marlowe, and show the sentence length is constant in the two authors, and has a discontinuity at 1593. This would be good evidence for your position. But having seen the ridiculous coincidence in the other stylometries, I would bet that you wouldn’t find an actual discontinuity, but a smooth transition. This might be “run on lines” you are talking about, and Peter Farey had a plot of run on lines plus feminine endings, which showed a smooth transition between Marlowe and Shakespeare
The Jew of Malta is a bit obscene at the end, and that stuff, plus Faustus, is a good reason for a chastised humble Marlowe to change his style, he was ashamed of his youthful bombast. But whatever, if you can find a quantitiative difference (sentence length is fine, but I doubt it will be really different), then you have evidence. Until you do, you have no evidence, and the balance of the evidence goes Peter Farey’s way.
Rudeness is extremely important in public discourse, as it cuts through political bullshit, and allows mistakes to be called out forthrightly. There is no alternative. For this reason, rudeness is an institution in physics discourse, it was enshrined by Pauli, you are supposed to insult wrong things bluntly, hostilely, and repeatedly, in strong language. If you are wrong, you then go on to bluntly say so, and hostilely and repeatedly insult yourself.
The internet is bringing scientific honesty to other types of discourse through the magic of rudeness. Politness is a political construct, which allows political hierarchies to keep people in line. It’s gone, and good riddance.
This is nonsense you made up. There is no sub-stylistic difference in Bible reference, and they are manifestly the same author for even the most casual reader. As for keeping him alive in Italy, the research in “Shakesepare Guide to Italy” demonstrates the familiarity with the country. The fact that he is alive and writing the plays is demonstrated by the plays existence, and the stylometric match, which is just plain impossible.
Pauli was about the non-supernatural version of synchronicity, the kind where you discover something and find out that someone else discovered the same thing too. It’s something scientists are familiar with, and it is not bullshit. If you’ve never seen simultaneous discovery, you haven’t done any correct original thinking.
The problem is that Jung was not a careful thinker and mixed up this legitimate phenomenon with others that are bullshit. Pauli criticized the bullshit aspects, but promoted the verifiable and true aspects, because he was able to cut through bullshit persuasively.
Sorry, this is the junk. Encode had it right. John Mattick said it 10 years earlier, however, and his evidence was already persuasive then, so it is really verifying a prediction made a long time ago.
Not being a truther is what destroys your credibility.
The argument for P!=NP is simply that reversing a general computation “should” require exponential search, because irreversible computation can be rewritten as a reversible compuatation, where you are producing random junk bits as you go along. If you have a computation of N steps starting with initial computer memory state I and producing final state F, you can embed it in a reversible computation starting from initial state (I,0) with the initial state expanded to include order N garbage bits set to 0, and end up in final state (F,G) where the final state of the garbage bits is G. Now you can reverse it trivially. But to reverse it without knowing the garbage bit values, you need to reconstruct the garbage bits from F.
The point of P!=NP is that to construct the garbage bits for an arbitrary computation are not structured, so to go from F to (F,G) requires an exponential search through a sizable fraction of all 2^N possibilities for G, even if you know the algorithm and you know N. It is completely reasonable, it should require an exponential search, because whatever structure is present on G is going to be more complex than any fixed algorithm, because the structure of G grows in complexity with the forward algorithm complexity and with time (or equivalently, with the initial state F and with time). This is not anything like a proof, because the space of G’s are structured by the fact that they are generated via computation, but it should be possible to prove that any algorithm for computing G from F quicker than exponentially can be spited appropriately, by choosing the proper algorithm which would produce garbage bits which the backward algorithm would mispredict.
This argument is not dependent on any nonsense about “if it was possible, it would already be done”, or “the consequences would be appaling” or anything like that. It is a heuristic reason to believe the conjecture, and you should (after understanding the argument) just believe that the conjecture is true. The social nonsense is propped up because the intuitions about why it should be true are hard to make precise, and will not be persuasive until the proof is available.
My experience with Quora is getting banned for rudeness. This is a perennial problem on such websites, the enforcement of sanctions by dimwitted administrators against anyone who sounds unusual, and therefore offensive. This makes Quora useless for accurate information, since criticism of incorrect factual content, a form of scientific peer review, is rude by nature. Without this type of peer review, lying content proliferates.
The relation between the two fields of Ulam’s interest, set theoretic mathematics, and Monte-Carlo, is rather direct. In set theory, the monte-carlo method is incompatible with the structure of the continuum as it is normally presented, there are so-called “non-measurable sets”, which make it impossible to consistently speak about a randomly chosen arbitrarily chosen real number, so Monte Carlo is hard to talk about, you need a sigma-algebra and a measure extending the naive Borel measure, and this is Lebesgue measure. It looks like it is universal, but constructions with the axiom of choice prevent it from being universal. This is a serious intuition problem, you run into problems when you make probabilistic arguments, because you are implicitly assuming that all sets are measurable when you make naive probabilistic arguments.
Ulam’s measurable cardinals are a very strong extension to set theory which attempt to figure out what it would mean to have a set so infinite that you could define a translationally invariant measure on it, like Lebesgue measure. But he did some fiddling around with the concept, so that it is not the naive statement “every set is measurable”, but something else compatible with the axiom of choice, but only at the cost of introducing enormously large sets into the universe, much larger than previous large cardinal axioms. The intuition that this should be possible is likely from the intuitive probability thing (although honestly, I don’t understand the intuition well, these cardinals are too big for my limited mind today, I can only grasp little large-cardinals, like Inaccessibles or Mahlo cardinals, which are just cleverly iterated inaccessibles).
The concept of “meager set” and so on is also likely inspired by ideas from measure, the relationship is made clear only later, during Cohen’s forcing revolution of 1963-1965. The upshot of this (for a physicist) came in 1972, when Solovay finally published his 1960s model of set theory where every set of reals is Lebesgue measurable. This is something important, it is a system of mathematics which dovetails with the implicit assumptions of physicists, who assume that any probabilistic construction, like “consider a random thermally equilibrated configuration of an Ising model”, automatically makes sense, so that you can ask questions about set-membership of this configuration.
In a Solovay style mathematical universe, you can say “pick a random real number” and the idea makes sense, so you can understand the notion of “measure” and “volume” from Monte-Carlo considerations. This is in some sense a vindication of this earlier intuition, which was probably shared by Ulam and Erdos. Erdos also worked on set theory issues and measurable cardinals at around the same time, and proposed his “probabilistic method” in combinatorics as an example of “naive” (meaning assuming everything is measurable) probabilistic reasoning becoming useful in spaces as large as the continuum.
Do your offers never expire? Ok, sure, I’ll do it (please be patient, I am flaky). Unfortuately, I now know that my personal theory while theoretically not crazy, is incompatible with the experimental data. Peter Hagelstein showed this convincingly early on, you can’t have the He4 born as fast charged particles in excess heat events, it produces secondary neutron production at levels at least a hundred and more likely a thousand times larger than what is observed. I have only ideas for fixing this, but they are shaky, and I am now confused to a large extent. I was sure it was right, because it wasn’t crazy, but the experimental data is really crazy.
Regarding P!=NP, I thought I could prove it from this heuristic ten years ago, I thought about it a lot during some weeks, and it is not impossible that there is a not-too-difficult proof somewhere, but I never found it. It is not easy to make precise the notion of entropy of garbage bits in reversible computation. But as an intuition, it is heuristically convincing, because the complexity of the forward algorithm keeps going up without bound, while the complexity of the putative inverse algorithm is fixed at whatever it is, so the inverse algorithm really should crap out at some point, when the complexity in the garbage is greater than the program can provide structure to. I assumed everyone else had this intuition, until I saw the ridiculously weak arguments Scott Aaronson gave (and others).
There is one linked article where I saw a vague comment by John Conway saying P!=NP should be a consequence of “Berry’s paradox” (computational complexity) reinterpreted in the complexity class setting, this is roughly the same intuition. But I didn’t realize people didn’t even have a heuristic argument for it.
Considering his time constraints, Oliver Stone is accurate in his history, and refreshingly so. On the other hand, you are saying mentally defective things. Doing this kind of propaganda online is like trying to blot out the sun with a magic marker. It is best to be honest about the past.
Regarding “Birth of a Nation”, in the 1920s, the Democrats were the party of Southern racism, so there is no contradiction. Democrats doesn’t mean left, not before FDR, and not really after FDR. Stone would say Kennedy qualifies, but only from 1963 on, and there isn’t much to judge, so it’s not clear.
“youtube territory” is a silly insult, youtube is freer than television and therefore collectively more accurate. You would be better off insulting a youtube video as being in television territory.
The conspiracies you imagine in Stone’s documentary are not small-room conspiracies, they are structural Marxism. Structural Marxism just means that you are supposed to look at the decisions of a political entity like the US as produced from a weighted average of the self-interest of the members with the most capital. The political orders are subservient to the wealthiest class. This minority decides what foreign policy direction to take, and it is based on class groupthink. The media then sells this politics to the public. That’s not a conspiracy, because the rich folks genuinely believe their own shit, they don’t have enough common experience to see when they are wrong.
That doesn’t mean that they are always wrong, they are sometimes right, it just means that there is a structural bias there, and the structural bias makes for automatic propaganda against any socialist or Marxist movement, or any type of nationalization. One must compensate for this structural bias in order to get a sense of accurate history, and Stone compensates.
Aside from FDR, Oliver Stone would say Kennedy too, US administrations worked primarily to maintain the ability of capital to manage oversees resources for profit. This means that any regime that attempted to expropriate property was an enemy, and any regime that invited Western investment was a friend. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just is what it is, this is what happened. Many right-wing fascist leaders were supported over more popular socialist leaders. Many left-wing movements were undermined, brutal ones like the Khmer Rouge, and more benign ones like the Sandanistas.
This was supposed to counter Soviet supported aggression, meaning various socialist and communist movements all over the world. But the Soviets were just not very good at supporting these movements covertly, nowhere near as good as the Americans suspected. The socialist movements were nearly always home-grown. Even if you think they were mistaken, you need to recognize their independence. This is especially clear today, the Soviet Union is long gone, but socialists in South America win elections.
What the USSR often did is to support the movements with jawboning, and then try to take over by manipulating their leadership with promises of oil and financial support, until they had a friendly government. This didn’t work as well as CIA covert operations, which could work through a network of local businessmen, who always have more power than local guerillas in the mountains.
Regarding star wars, the idea of missile defense protecting the US from a full-scale nuclear attack was a addle-brained fantasy, but at least it was an original idea. Physicists in the US, from Hans Bethe on down, unanimously said it could not work, and they were right. In “unanimously”, I am excluding Edward Teller, who was trying to get research money for an H-bomb powered X-ray laser, and excluding also the recepients of missile defense grants. This politicization of science was deplorable, and became worse under Bush II. A missile defense, as many people pointed out, even if it could be deployed, would be much more cheaply fooled with decoy missiles. It would never never be able to hit 10,000 missiles, not even at a .01% success rate. Intercepting one missile, or a few, on the other hand, is marginally possible, although difficult. This is what iron dome does. To conflate the two types of defenses is imbecilic. Stone is right about star wars.
The Soviets didn’t oppose star-wars because they were afraid of not being able to thwart the defense, they were afraid of an arms race in space, which they didn’t want and couldn’t afford. They also suspected that the point of the thing was to make a nuclear first-strike seem safer, regardless of the reality.
The USSR in the later parts of the cold war was much more benign than the US, partly because it was weaker, but partly because it indirectly was on the side of indigenous rights movements. The US supported the worst regimes in the world to stop communism from spreading. The historical memory is preserved by Oliver Stone, and since he is not making advocacy for the future, I think it is best if you sucked it up and accepted it, because with time, history will get it right.
1. Bonzo Goes to Bitburg 2. Howling at the Moon 3. Today Your Love, Tommorrow the World, 4. Chinese Rock 5. Chasing the Night 6. It’s Not My Place in the 9 to 5 World 7. Strength to Endure 8. I Want To Live 9. I Don’t Want To Go Down To The Basement 10. Swallow My Pride.
ecig second-hand vapors are not just less harmful than cigarettes, ecig vapors are completely harmless. You get nothing at all from an ecig second-hand. The vapors are also not annoying, as you can’t see them or smell them with appropriate handling of the product.
The health dangers from e-cigarettes are getting a nicotine overdose (nausea, chest-pain), and dehydration (from both nicotine and the propellant), two things that happen less with regular cigarettes— you need cigar/pipe for a nicotine overdose, and you don’t have to drink as much water.
The demolition itself doesn’t require a conspiracy, because it can be justified as required for public safety. The 1993 bombing was designed to topple the towers onto lower Manhattan, and it makes sense to place a demolition system, just in case there’s another attack. The number of people involved is very small, and it wasn’t done in such secrecy, the explosives were placed there at some point, it’s not like anyone would notice, nor that the people placing it were malicious. It just sat there for a long time, until the buildings were imploded. It was not a big deal.
There is nothing to argue about, because the demolition is obvious from the laws of physics, and physics trumps all other knowledge.
9/11 truth is completely independent of Marxist ideas. You can hold both, neither, or one or the other separately.
She’s 100% right on 9/11 too, retard.
The movie owes a debt to two stories probably recycled through the comic. The obvious one is Ursula LeGuin’s “Omelas”, but this is just a generally parallel allegory. The clear setting inspiration for this is a story about a closed-ecosystem train running through a post-apocalyptic landscape that I read two decades ago in an anthology of 70s or 80s science fiction. The scenario in the train story is exactly parallel to the train in this story, except the world outside is ravaged by nuclear war, and there are some people outside, starving to death, The folks on the train are all wealthy, it focuses on a young boy who does not accept his own good fortune, to be among the lucky ones on the train. I wish I could remember the author or title, but after lots of searching, I’m still blanking on it.
I know this for a fact because the physics is objective, and kind of obvious to anyone who understands anything about this stuff. It is not important to produce witnesses for the setting of explosives, because the buildings themselves are the witnesses. The team itself was probably small, maybe 5-10 people, the “secrecy” just consisted of using foreigners and telling them to keep it quiet, and telling commission members that they are not to investigate explosives, for national security reasons, and then booting out anyone who disagreed. Who the heck cares. The demolition is secondary.
The main thing about 9/11 is that it was happening with a simultaneous set of drills. Those drills involved live-fly airplanes, simulations of planes crashing into buildings, and air-traffic readiness exercise involving all sorts of computer-generated fake airplanes. That stuff is the main reason one can be certain that it was an inside job.
The reason is not obvious, because it requires you to understand something crucial: when you are staging an attack like this NOBODY CAN KNOW. Everyone has to be clueless regarding the plan, they just have to think they are doing their job.
So how the heck can you pull it off? There is essentially only one way.
You need planes to go into buildings, and no pilot is going to commit suicide, so you need remote control 767s. That’s drill one.
1. Put remote control planes in the sky
But no well trained military pilot would even think about deliberately crashing a remote-control plane into the WTC either. So you need to tell them that it’s just a simulation on a computer. That’s drill two.
2. Computer simulate crashing planes into WTC and Pentagon.
Next, you need to justify where these planes originated. So you need to confuse the air-traffic control into thinking that the drones you are using are a continuation of the planes that are hijacked. So that’s drill three.
3. Screw with the air-traffic computer systems.
But you also need to produce a hijacking, and that’s drill four.
4. Fake hijacking using CIA agent fake hijackers.
Then on the day of the attack, you start the hijacking. Four people are sitting in the back, one stands up and says “I have a bomb”. One is sitting in the cockpit and asks the pilots to turn off the transponders and land at the nearest military base.
After the transponders are turned off, you switch the coordinates of the drones from drill one and the airliners from drill four using drill three.
Next you have the pilots from drill two unwittingly pilot the drons (now identified as the airliners) into their targets.
At the beginning, nobody knows about your plan. Even at the end, nobody knows what happened, only the three pilots in drill two can figure it out. They aren’t involved with the rest of thre drills, all the drills are secret, and nobody has anything more than a funny feeling “Hey, weren’t we simulating something similar to this just as it was happening? Weird.”
You set off the demolition (it’s prearranged, and not hard to cover up), you herd the passengers onto flight 93 (in terms of the actual plane, after all the switcheroos, it’s actually flight 11), and you shoot down flight 93 in midair, and cover that up (again, an easy cover-up, considering the potential liability). That’s it. 9/11.
The only way to pull off an inside job without anyone knowing is to use these drills. This way, nobody can reveal anything, except that there were a bunch of suspicious drills at the same time as 9/11. You shred the documents for the drills 6 months later, and you’re off scott free.
But guess what? People DID speak out about the drills. They leaked early, in 2002. I found out about the radar-blip drill in 2002, the live-fly drill leaked at around the same time (although what kind of planes were used in this drill was still classified and probably already shredded by now), and the simulation of flying planes into buildings ALSO leaked.
Given the complete asininity of the idea that the exact drills you would use to stage 9/11 just happened to coincide with the real 9/11, you can conclude that the drills were used to stage the attack with no further evidence.
You expect no witnesses to anything except the drills, and the various modifications to those drills. Each drill, and each modification, in isolation, looks harmless. It’s only when you put them together that you get a false flag.
I should point out that one person was in charge of all the drills of the day, and of the US military response on that morning. It seems likely to me that even George W. Bush wasn’t sure what was going on that day. It is possible that only one person in the administration was responsible, although it could have been a handful more, of course, it’s not necessary.
The same method is used to stage false flags still, it is the only real way to do it. So now you know how to end terrorism— simply forbid terrorism drills.
Now that you know what happened, you can also understand why the attack is crappy, why so many things didn’t look right. The person planning this can’t make everything go ok, all this person has are drills. So the airplanes that hit the buildings don’t look like commercial airliners, they look like military remote controlled planes. This is confirmed by eyewitness testimony, and also by looking at the bottom of the plane that struck the second tower. You can easily see with your own eyes that there is an outjutting at the bottom, and you can find remote-control military equipment that is in the shape of that outjutting. There is no such outjutting on a commercial 767, and it is hard to deny evidence of your own eyes.
You can also track the switcheroo on Pilots for 9/11 truth, who show flight 175 getting real close and appearing to swap with an “unidentified military plane” from one of the exercizes of that day, the exercize I identified as “drill one”.
You can find the murray st. engine, which is consistent with a military plane, you can find eyewitness accounts to corroborate ALL of the drills required (and more), and given that this story I told you is NOT EVEN DESCRIBED BY MOST TRUTHERS, you can see that they would have no motivation to plant this stuff, because, without the complete story of how the attack was pulled off, who the heck cares about all those drills?
I urge you to do a review. I am afraid that if you don’t, you will continue to say stupid things in public.
There is only one person that needs to know what’s happening— that’s the person in charge of the drills of that day. The way you stage it is by setting up drills for each of the individual parts of the attack.
1. Put remote control 767s in the sky
2. Fake/altered computer radar blips on air-traffic control screens
3. flight simulation of crashing planes into buildings
4. fake hijacking of airliners
Then on the day of the attack, you use drill 2 to switch the coordinates of the airliners from drill 4, and the drones from drill 1, and use drill 3 to professionally pilot the drones into the buildings. Nobody involved has any clue that they are doing an attack, they just think that a real attack happened to coincide with a set of drills that suspiciously resemble the attack.
This is exactly what happened on 9/11. An attack coincided in time, place, and type with a series of drills that resemble the attack. Since this is a-priori statistically impossible, you can be sure that this is how the attack was carried out, and you don’t need further evidence. Nevertheless a lot of further evidence is available if you look for it.
Lubos, you should read Everett’s thesis before commenting on the man’s talent. It contains a deep information theoretic analysis of quantum mechanics, the first statement of the information theoretic uncertainty principle, in addition to the first statement of the principle of decoherence.
The essence of Many-Worlds is what is now called “decoherence”, that quantum mechanics, for large systems, is decohered, and reduces to independently evolving paths which, while you can’t say they are exclusive, might as well be. That’s the only point, it’s a point that has become too well accepted for you to see the original source.
The original source is Everett, and you are maligning a classic physicist with an influential classic paper, and an influential thesis. You should read the paper and the thesis before criticizing, because if you only read secondary sources, you won’t get it.
The first rip-off of Everett was by Wigner, in his “Wigner’s Friend”. The rip-offs continue through into the late 1980s. It’s about time you give Everett a break.
You can pretty straightforwardly explain certain Nobel-prize discoveries to a layman: The integer quantum Hall effect requires only a little background— the effect is straightforward, and it’s significance is obvious. Likewise high-Tc superconductivity, CP violation (or more recently, T violation), or looking back much further, X-rays, radioactivity, and the neutron are immediately understandable by anyone with no preparation. These are experimental discoveries, however, and Feynman was talking about theory.
Even in theory, there are certain discoveries which are very simple to explain to laypeople precisely. Quarks, for instance, are very simple to understand, and the signficance is immediate. Nambu’s pion-condensate is also immediately accessible. Another example (although it did not win a Nobel prize, likely because it is experimentally incorrect in detail) is Kolmogorov scaling theory of turbulence. Fractals are popular, and they are essentially modern block-renormalization in visual image, and this was a Nobel in the 1980s for Wilson.
There are other discoveries that are more abstract, but the main barrier is simply that the public does not understand Quantum Mechanics. So it would be hopeless for Feynman to explain the path-integral, the diagrams, or the relavistic regulator, loop counting, and renormalization methods. For this, a rigid philosophical point of view is a distraction, and there is no harm in leaving the philosophy free-floating.
The observer in Many-worlds is modelled as a comptuer, and the relevant “ein-selected states” are defined by referencing the internal memory state of the computer. This is simply an “external” view of the Copenhagen interpretation, modelling the observer as classical data superimposed upon a purely quantum evolution, and the same things that happen in Copenhangen interpretation happen in many-worlds, with the exact same dependence on the “subjective classical data” as you put it.
The equivalence of many-worlds to Copenhagen is not obvious unless you read Everett in the original. He is simply redoing Copenhagen without the idea that the classical realm is separate and irreducible, only using the positivist idea that the information in the computers is irreducible (because it defines the sensations of the observers).
The result is a recasting of Copenhagen which removes the metaphysical quandaries, and stops you from constant head-banging about what the heck Bohr and co are talking about. They are talking about many-worlds, more or less, with less sophistication, less awareness of the precise mechanism of decoherence, and more philosophical jibber-jabber.
This is an ancient idea, easily dismissed, because the Yukawa couplings are forbidden by SUSY. See the intro to Grant and Kakushadze’s paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph…
The naturalness arguments easily support a conspiracy in the cases of 9/11 and JFK.
Lee Harvey Oswald was certainly NOT a communist, he was a right-winger paid to pose as a communist, as many associates have testified, and as his contacts make obvious. He learned Russian in the Marines, he defected to the USSR in 1959 or something, straight out of the Marines, and returned to the US with no questions asked in 1961, after having renounced his US citizenship. This fits the profile of a CIA guy, since pretty much every single defector from the US to the USSR in this era was an intelligence agent. I urge you to find another sincere defector of this kind. But the CIA program of sending agents to the USSR as defectors in the late 50s and early 60s is out in the open now.
Oswald’s “support Cuba” campaign was an obvious front, his organization had no members, and he met with a known CIA fellow. The shooting itself was not possible using Oswald’s rifle from Oswald’s position in the time it took, and the video evidence is not supportive of the official story to say the least. The undoctored reports of the autopsy are also not supportive of the official story.
On the other hand, it is very easy to see how a conspiracy could be covered up here:
Johnson (to Warren commission): It seems that Oswald was a part of a conspiracy involving Cuba and the USSR. Do you folks want to reveal this and risk WWIII?
Warren: Heck no.
Johnson: Well then, Oswald acted alone, that’s your conclusion.
This cover-up is pretty transparent, and rather lame, and the American public saw through it within a decade. If you listen to authoritative pronouncements on this from media, you will get it wrong. The conspiracy in this case was pretty large, as conspiracies go. It involved at least a dozen people, and more who had a clue about it. The reason Americans got to know this is through percolation of knowledge, some media events, and a 1978 Congressional reinvestigation that concluded that JFK was assassinated in a conspiracy. It is dead certain that he was, the official story is mentally retarded.
To know more, there is a wonderful recent discovery, from an unexpected place. Two top CIA folks were identified in Robert Kennedy’s assasination! These folks had no reason to be there at all, in that hotel. The naturalness argument there is quite impressive.
The RFK assassination is another conspiracy blamed on a lone gunman. Sirhan doesn’t remember the shooting, and claims he was an RFK supporter. His shots were wild, and it is likely that none of his bullets hit RFK. The CIA was involved in hypnosis projects at the time, and his behavior is consistent with a hypnotized assassin (this is not science fiction). Dollars to donuts these two guys also were involved with JFK’s assassination, an Martin Luther King’s.
In the case of 9/11, the naturalness arguments are even easier. It is acknowledged by the US government that there were drills simulating multiple hijackings at the exact same time as the “actual” attack. What is the naturalness bound on any theory that maintains the simulation and the attack were independent events? The naturalness bound only becomes tighter as you understand that the attack would not have succeeded without the drills of that day, as the airliners would have been intercepted by fighters, followed all the way to New York, and shot down if they tried to crash into anything.
Since the drills can be used to fake the attack in certain obvious ways, without requiring a conspiracy at all, just well meaning dupes doing their jobs, knowing about the drills is like seeing the wires used to levitate the magician. The magician will say “no, no, I am really levitating, the wires are for safety.” But the same naturalness arguments is what makes the claim absurd to the ear.
The main problem here is you have the personal trauma of living under communism. Communism was an evil system, sure, but it was opposing another evil system, gigantic corporate capitalism and secret intelligence agency government. The two systems were evil in totally different ways, and if you are trained to identify communist evils, you generally can’t see the capitalist evils, because they weren’t there under communism.
The evils of communism were the squelching of individual initiative, the complete stifling of innovation, the terrible bureaucracy, and the government repression. Those things are a-ok in the US, the bureaucracy is not that bad, and things generally work. The evils in capitalist countries (after industrialization monopolizes capital) are gigantic accumulations of private power, through monopoly and finance, which ultimately produce an aristocracy of wealthy folks with class priviledge, and these monstrous aristocrats engineer these monstrous events, and cover them up with their friends, who own everything, including the media.
Folks who lived under communism can’t imagine the degree of conspiracy and collusion of private and government forces inside a capitalist society, because their society was so communal, so that no individual had that much power, not even in the politburo, and you could never engineer cover-ups of this sort.
Decoherence is there from beginning to end, I can’t give you page number (I don’t remember, I read it more than 20 years ago) but the wording Everett uses is that the “branches become effectively non-interacting/separately-evolving once they are in the thermodynamic limit” or some such thing, and he justifies it rather simply, and this is what decoherence tries to make mathematically rigorous (for no good reason, because it is completely obvious).
This non-interacting nature is what allows classical data (the classical data stored in computers, aka, plastic deformations of the environment, measuring devices, computers, and human brains) to get called a branch-label for a quantum state. The branch-labelling is what others would call a “decoherent history description”, or an “ein-selected state”. Everett called it a “branch”. Others call it a macroscopic superposition.
You need to read the thesis. Really. It’s not that long, and it’s got real results. It also shows a tremendous talent, it’s one of the best theses in history. It also speaks well of Wheeler, to get two theses of this magnitude (one out of Feynman, one out of Everett, on obviously related topics).
The concept of “decoherence” as stated and elaborated in the 1980s was ACKNOWLEDGED by the authors to be an extension of Everett’s work. People don’t acknowledge prior work for no reason. Gell-Mann has patiently explained this many times, it is a fact of literature dependence, the original source of Decoherence in Everett ’57.
It is true that Gell-Mann rederived Everett’s ideas for himself in 1960 or so, so what. Everett is the original. Gell-Mann’s “consistent histories” is a variation on Everett, as he says both in citations and in person, in recorded interviews.
Wigner’s published his “Wigner’s friend” in 1962. The trick with “Wigner’s friend” is HAVING THE BALLS TO PUBLISH, of course people were thinking about this in 1935. What makes it publishable is that it creates a contrast with many-worlds— the observer’s information is treated as “conscious” and different from a computer’s information. Everett treats all classical information the same, whether inside a computer or inside a human.
Wigner didn’t want to upset the Bohr, and saw an opportunity in 1962 to publish some old ideas that would never get into print. Everett was willing to upset the Bohr, and so got sacrificed in Denmark. Everett was the first to publish clearly the ideas involved.
He was also the first to state and argue the information theoretic uncertainty principle (it’s in his thesis, and it’s a great result):
I(x) + I(p) > C
Where C is e\pi or something like this, it’s what the inequality evaluates to on Gaussians. Everett showed that Gaussians are local minima of this inequality, and that there are no other local minima, strongly suggesting it is an exact inequality (it’s hard to prove, it wasn’t proved until 1975, by Beckner).
where I(x) is the information in the x-distribution of psi-squared, and I(p) is the information in the p distribution of psi-squared. This is the first “correct” statement of the uncertainty principle.
Having access to the thesis, the discussion of decoherence is in the fifth section, after the presentation of the interpretation. It begins with the Heisenberg-like analysis of the H-atom on page 86, and the discussion is particularly relevant toward page 99.
The relevant discussion of the information theoretic Everett uncertainty principle is on page 129.
Blah blah blah. Read the paper, it’s linked. Everett doesn’t use the words you didn’t like, and OBVIOUSLY non-interacting in this context means effectively non-interfering, and OBVIOUSLY it is only asymptotically valid in the classical limit.
I gave more specific spot citations, but really, just read the fucking paper. It’s a classic, it’s worth it, and it’s well written besides.
I am not wrong. I really don’t think you read past the end of section I, you skipped all the formal development. The most important results come at the end, not the beginning. The beginning is simply trying to align your philosophical view to understand the new perspective, and the new perspective is simply self-consistent. If you don’t see it is self-consistent, that’s your problem. Don’t impose it on the rest of thw world.
You refuse to recognize the self-consistency, because you are hung up on one particular philosophy, the same one which happened to be shared by Bohr. That’s your hangup. You can’t make people choose philosophical stuff according to your taste.
The philosophy you insist on is that the wavefunction is “informational data”, meaning it encodes what is known by an observer. What information exactly does it encode? The statement “it encodes the information about the result of various experiments through the Born rule” is not a-priori self-consistent, because it needs to make sense even when the observer is folded in to be part of the system. Pretty much no interpretation framework other than Born’s is consistent with this requirement.
If you had not skipped the mathematical parts, you would not say that the fellow is talentless. The information theoretic uncertainty principle is itself a minor result, but it establishes the fellow’s talent all by itself. The information theoretic language regarding the quantum formalism is also important, because it gives a precise and different perspective on the classical/quantum divide in Bohr. The information itself is the only thing that is taken to be classical in Everett, not any physical objects.
Everett pre-dates Wigner’s paper, and Wigner makes the statement that it is not the information which is classical, but “consciousness”. In this way, he separates out different kinds of information as distinguished, the information of a conscious observer. Wigner is ripping off Everett here, not the other way around, even though the basic idea was floating around for ages. The person who published it first, and analyzed it properly, is Everett. Wigner is just cannibalizing the theory after the originator was kicked out.
The way to cleanse your mind for many-worlds is to imagine the following question: what does it mean to (classically) simulate an enormous quantum system, one containing an observer?
Supposing you have an enormous classical computer, and you simulate the wavefunction values. What do you get out of the simulation?
There is no obvious map in such a simulation between the data in your computer and the experience of the observer you are simulating, unlike in a classical simulation. If you wish to insist that this quantum system you are simulating contains a (simulated) AI, you need to give an algorithm to extract the thoughts of this AI and present them as classical information, to a readout terminal.
This is the problem that Everett is solving. Given an enormous wavefunction simulation, he is telling you how to spit-out the internal data contained inside a more-or-less classical device that is being simulated.
It’s not trivial, because the result of simulating such a quantum thing, assuming the initial wavefunction is concentrated appropriately in a relatively localized region, a mess of branching regions, a collection of places like a replicating Cantor-set on which there are significantly nonzero wavefunction values, and everywhere outside this Cantor set, the values are effectively zero.
All that Everett did is to consider that there is no conflict between such an object (presented to you in gory detail on a classical computer) and the statement that this quantum simulation data is describing an observer which is seeing quantum mechanical outcomes, with probability. There is no conflict, because you can pick out “branches” which correspond to observer histories, and assign them consistent probabilities. The key result is the lack of interference in large systems, and the reason I say “it’s everywhere” is because he takes this no-macroscopic interference result for granted, he discusses it in th places I cited, but he doesn’t even feel the need to discuss it in depth, as it cannot be controversial.
It is disturbing to me that you would fire away at Everett, considering that he has done nothing wrong, and certainly nothing dishonest. His work is meticulous, it is honest, and it is perfectly fine (within its own philosophical gauge). It is also one of the most influential physics papers of the 20th century.
When you choose a philosophical gauge, put on yout philosophical glasses and insist on only looking at the world through these lenses, you are blinding yourself. It’s as sensible as a QED fellow who insists that Dirac found the one-true gauge, and anyone else who works with nonphysical photons is talking gibberish.
It is incumbent upon you to separate out the philosophical issues you have from the technical issues. There are technical questions that Everett analyzes— how to define the state of an object relative to another, what it means to have a relative state, how it defines a relative collapse, how to deal with approximate measurements, and these issues are confusing in the usual philosophical gauge. The ability to switch philosophical gauge is simply necessary for a person who is commenting on academic matters. You have to differentiate between something you don’t like, which is consistent within itself, and something which is wrong.
Everett is not wrong, you just don’t like it, for the same reason as Bohr. It makes the philosophical contortions unnecessary, and it shows you that quantum mechanics has not answered unanswerable questions, merely reformulated the positions in different ways.
LM: Everett has no results
RM: What about I_p + I_x >C? What’s that? Chopped liver?
LM: stop with the ad-hominems!
You called Everett’s thesis devoid of content. I am showing you this is not so, as it contains an important result, the correct uncertainty principle.
So you need to remove the slander on Everett’s talent, it’s as simple as that.
Regarding the interpretation, the philosophy doesn’t add all that much, but the technical results, the method of separating states into relative states, is extremely important, as this is how you extract information about measurements when you are given access only to quantum mechanical wavefunction data.
I am using slight ad-hominems, because in this case (and in only a handful of others) you have your head totally up your backside in a physics related matter. That is rare, since you usually are able to read the technical content very accurately.
I suspect you simply have not bothered to read the technical content of Everett’s thesis, because the philosophical context made you vomit. Just cover your mouth, and consider it an intellectual exercize to see how he defines the relative states. I think you will come to like it.
It doesn’t require you to accept any philosophy, the relative state formalism is independent of philosophy.
He gave a “physicist proof” on page 129, he showed that Gaussians are the only local minima of this inquality. After you try out a few examples, you see that this means it must be true. This is the usual variational-principle derivations that physicists sometimes call proofs in the case of other minima. It’s just not a rigorous proof, because the space of wavefunctions is not compact, so you need to worry about violations at the edges of the space, which are all possible distributions. There are clearly no violations, so he is justified in his conjecture, but proving this rigorously is a different kettle of fish than establishing it is true with scientific level of certainty. He did do that much, there could be no doubt it is true given the stuff on page 129.
You call it “awkward” only because you aren’t familiar with it. What it says is that any additional bit of information gained about the probability distribution of p will, in the extreme case, be counterbalanced by a bit of information lost about x, no matter how it is gained. Once you get used to it, it starts to look like the correct fundamental way to state any uncertainty principle, and the variance argument starts to look hokey and derivative (Everett derives it on page 129, showing that his UP is strictly stronger).
On the other hand, the generalization to other commutators is not obvious for the information theoretic principle, while it is obvious for the variance. This is a sign that there is still future work to do, not that Everett was somehow doing something artificial.
The information theoretic formalism he discusses is now standard, but it was relatively new in 1950s. He does a full lucid review from first principles in the thesis, and gives new results.
Further, he then gives the method of embedding classical information into a quantum evolution, by identifying the classical information as a branch-selection. This is a proper way to state how quantum mechanics includes classical anything, the only classical thing here is information.
Everett does not use words like “many-worlds”, not because he is shy, but because he is stating things in a properly positivist way— he doesn’t want to use an inflammatory philosophical gauge. But he isn’t against using inflammatory philosophical language later, when he has nothing to lose, so he uses whatever language he feels like.
The language is not important, the important thing is the mathematical content— he is identifying exactly how quantum mechanics plus embedded classical information selecting the wavefunction branch is equivalent to the Copenhagen interpretation of collapse. This is an extremely important result, it is the basis for all standard (meaning Copenhagen based, not hidden-variable) work on quantum mechanics since then.
You think you understand quantum mechanics enough, you don’t. You only understand propaganda.
The problems he is setting out in his thesis are those that happen when you consider simulating the Schrodinger equation that describes a person, and trying to extract the person’s experience inside the simulation from the numerical solution to the equation. A proper physical theory needs an algorithm to extract the perceptions of an observer from the data.
Unlike Lubos Motl, you are not giving technical criticism based on philosophical disagreement, you are simply spouting ignorant propaganda, so I think it’s best if you shut the fuck up.
Everett is making a technical
point here, that it is technically inconsistent to use the Copenhagen interpretation with two separate observers, since the wavefunction reduction for one observer is not a-priori incompatible with that of the other observer. This is especially clear when one of the observers has access to the full wavefunction of the other observer, this is the Wigner’s-friend paradox (it could equally well or better be called Everett’s friend).
One resolution to Everett’s friend is solipsism, that only YOU can collapse the wavefunction. This is the point he is making, and he is absolutely correct.
The reason he “sounds wrong” to your untrained ears is because he is original. All original work sounds wrong, and it sounds wrong in direct proportion to the originality of the work, not in proportion to it’s correctness. One of the most important parts of scientific training is to learn to suppress the desire to brand all new ideas as wrong.
Everett also sounds wrong to trained scientist readers, for different reasons, having to do with philosophical prejudice, and the fundamental difficulty of getting a clear picture of such a strange idea as what he is proposing in his interpretation. That’s not his fault, that’s the reader’s fault.
The statement you make, that he is “rejecting the fundamentally probabilistic nature of reality” is just making a propaganda point. His reality is fundamentally probabilistic, except the probability occurs in a different place, it is in the perception of classical data inside the observers, whose subjective perception are taking this or that path in the wavefunction, at random.
There is a complete dictionary between Everett concepts and Copenhagen concepts. There is no way to reject his interpretation as nonsensical or inconsistent (unlike, say, the transactional interpretation), because it is complete and with sufficient sophistication, equivalent to Copenhagen. But the different perspective gives insight into why Copenhagen is consistent, and why it looks the way it does.
This is false, the building in the Delft fire had a partial asymmetric collapse, which is all that could happen from fire. The collapse was not “mostly into its own footprint”, it was to the side, as always. Your lying nonsense is easy to expose online, so give it up, dickwad.
As you already lyingly pointed out in an older post. Give it up fuckwit, you can’t win.
It is very easy to know when an attack is an inside job. Find out if there were drills simulating the attack simultaneous with the attack. It’s not a hard question, and if the answer is yes, it’s an inside job, and there are no exceptions, nor can there be, statistically speaking.
The drills are used to stage the attack by using drill participants, who think they are doing something harmless to prepare for terrorism, when in fact their drill preparation is being subverted by the coordinator in order to stage a fake attack. This is relatively easy to do, switch a fake bomb with a real one, switch remote planes with airliners, etc, it’s much easier than making a conspiracy of evil from inside a government. You don’t need anyone to be in on the secret, you can essentially pull it off alone as the coordinator.
The existence of drills simulating the 7/7 attacks means it was done from the inside, end of story. Busted. Sorry, Britain, you don’t have it any better than the USA, unfortunately. It seems Spain and Norway don’t have it any better either. Best move to France.
It probably wasn’t done by “the government”, it was done by the one fellow in charge of the miltary drills of that day, for his own delusional reasons. I’m pretty sure he didn’t ask for permission. What you don’t understand is how easy it is to pull off fake terrorism using drills. You don’t need evildoers to collaborate with you, you can do it essentially alone.
The way to be sure of this is to review the drills of that day, and the way to prevent it happening again is to fobid such drills under penalty of attempted murder.
Listen, you lying fuckwit, I saw the collapse, I saw the pictures of the after-collapse, you can’t put me or anyone else on, we can look it up in two minutes. Give up your lying douchebaggery, it’s useless online.
The building had one side collapse, as is normal from a fire weakened structure. It collapsed completely naturally, in a partial asymmetric collapse. If the WTC had collapsed this way, nobody would be complaining, dickwad.
The WTC 1 and 2 complex buildings collapsed in a nearly symmetric fasion. The only delay from free-fall was due to the inertia of the floors. This means the gigantic central steel structure was melted and cut away during the hour before the collapse. We know it was cut away by thermite, because we have the chemical residues, and the melted steel and elevated temperatures on-site for the next weeks.
The WTC 7 was just a straightforward demolition, it wasn’t even done like WTC 1 and 2, with removing the central part as in this case there was no central part. They buildings were obviously demolished, and arguing against this is mentally defective, and shows you don’t know the first thing about science. Retard.
The demolition is secondary, because while it is true that the buildings were demolished, this can be concievably justified without an inside job, just from crazy public safety secret stuff. The drills of that day are what demonstrate that the whole attack was an inside job.
It is impossible to argue against this, you can only dig yourself deeper and deeper into a hole, so give it up. You just are wrecking your credibility for no reason.
I am presenting to you something that should make you shit your pants, asshole: LOGICAL personal attacks. I watched the collapse you lying little fucker, I looked to see exactly what happened, as I encourage all readers to do. Can’t fool me, dickwad, and it’s mind boggling that you think you can fool anyone else.
The Delft fire had an ASYMMETRIC PARTIAL collapse of about 20-30% of the building, one face came down. The rest of the building was surrounded by concrete dust, you can view the photos of it after the collapse and before, and you can see IT LOOKED NOTHING LIKE THE WTC COLLAPSE!
It was, as the truthers repeat, an asymmetric collapse around the columns that failed, and the crap that collapsed fell down to one side, after breaking off the building, leaving a whole bunch of building standing.
I should point out that the WTC 1 and 2 demolition, the towers, was all done with thermite cutting the massive core, and is completely different from WTC 7 (classic demolition of a classical steel frame building) and WTC 6 (plain old natural collapse, like Delft) both.
Each collapse is a different phenomenon, but all the WTC 1,2,7 were unnantural, and WTC 6 and Delft are natural. The only one who would claim that Delft looks like WTC 7 (or WTC 1 2) is someone who is purposefully lying to make propaganda to cover up mass murder, and there’s a special place for you, with pitchforks and brimstone, motherfucker.
It’s true, I am also ruining my credibility by doing hard propaganda, by calling you names and so on. But thankfully, because I am telling the truth and you are lying, on balance, I am ruining yours more. So in the end, I really don’t mind. I think of it as “taking one for the team”.
Regarding “two theories”, you poor mentally challenged sod, the thermite was used to melt parts of the inner structure, to get rid of a large chunk of the core support, so that there was no central core anymore, all those tons of central steel were melted and disconnected at the joints. Without a central core, WTC I and II buildings would just collapse from the weakest point of the outer structure downward, more or less exactly as they did on that day. With an intact core, you illiterate baboon, the building would stay up indefinitely.
Whether there were additional cutter charges, I don’t know, and I DON’T FUCKING CARE. There was probably one in the basement to remove the foundation, because it killed people, and witnesses saw it, but WHO GIVES A SHIT, REALLY. You don’t need to go to such elaborate lengths to establish demolition, DEMOLITION IS OBVIOUS FROM THE COLLAPSE ITSELF.
To see it was demolished, it is enough to know that the inner structural core strength fell to zero at the moment of onset of collapse. This is born out by NIST’s own model, as the only resistance to the falling in the model, the only difference from free-fall speed, is due the inertia of the building floors which start off stationary. This is consistent with a building with NO CORE ANYMORE, cutter charges or no cutter charges.
Jones’s nano-thermite were not paint-chips, you scientifically illiterate chimpanzee, unless you buy your paint at “secret CIA chemicals R us”. The composition was FeOn/Al in fine-powder form, which is thermite. I admit that this is hard to determine, because you have to learn how to READ, and also how to DISMISS RETARDED ANTI-SCIENCE PROPAGANDA while you are reading. It’s hard for a person without opposable thumbs, I know, but try.
Whoa, whoa, you’re right! I am reversing my position 360: I first thought you were possibly an sincere idiot, who has misled by others. NOW I see you are actually an insincere liar who has decided to deliberately cover up mass murder! That’s an eternity of difference, by eternity, I mean the “fire and brimstone” kind.
Jones found Iron Oxide and Aluminum. I don’t give a FLYING FUCK what other truthers say or what you say, or what you think I said, or what someone else thinks I didn’t say. IRON OXIDE PLUS ALUMINUM IS THERMITE. Jones found thermite, there is nothing to discuss regarding this, it’s the end of the story, there is nothing to spin.
Fire didn’t cause WTC collapse, because fire can’t remove the core. If you don’t remove the core, the building doesn’t fall down. A part can fall to the side. Another part can bend. The building can’t fall down in that middle part. Why? Because THERE’S A FUCKING CORE THERE, IDIOT. The thermite was there to removing the core.
The exterior collapsed because there were also extra cutter charges on the outside.
Wait, no… on the other hand… the core is gone… so… the exterior collapse did not use extra charges.
No no, the witnesses say there were definitely extra charges.
Oh, wait, definitely no extra charges.
Oh no!! Oh no!! FLIP! FLOP! FLIPPITY FLOP! Oh my GOD!
You see, idiot, I can flip flop online until the cows come home. It doesn’t make any difference. The only things that makes a difference is me presenting the core evidence (snicker snicker) and attacking insincere upright turds like you personally, until you retract back into the anus you were expelled from.
How do I know I can persuade despite flip flops, misinformation, projections, and personal attacks? Because these are the only tools available to the OTHER SIDE. Obviously these are effective tools, and I intend use them more than the other side. It works, fucker, it works, and you have no defense, because in addition to these tools, I also am telling the truth. It’s an unbeatable combination.
The goal of these personal attacks is, I suppose, to pull your heart out of your chest cavity and show it to you. It’s ultimately in your best interest to undergo a change of heart.
WOW, ARE YOU STILL HERE, ASSWIPE?
I don’t read anything, I do my own physics. I don’t care what this and so said. That’s PEOPLE, and PEOPLE ARE USELESS. You are talking about PHYSICS and CHEMISTRY, which is not about PEOPLE, and their opinions, it’s about what INSTRUMENTS detect.
So it doesn’t matter how you spin Jones, how he never showers and has muddy shoes. It doesn’t FUCKING MATTER, little idiot. You need to look at the INSTRUMENT READINGS IN HIS PAPER, retarded fool. Thermite is Iron Oxide and Aluminum POWDERS mixed together, STUPID FUCK, and the grain-size is important— they have to be fine powders mixed together uniformly. YOU INSINCERE PSEUDO-SCIENTIST. Jones found Iron Oxide and Aluminum powders mixed together, in a fine powder with a grain size of order 100 atoms.
The thermite was used to disconnect the CORE STRUTS and COLUMNS from each other. They have to be disconnected, because physics will not let the building fall down when the core is intact.
I really don’t give a FLYING FUCK whether Jones said this, or said that, or said the other thing. THE CORE HAD TO HAVE BEEN DISCONNECTED FOR THE BUILDING TO FALL, and the quantity of molten steel and temperatures detected by thermal satellite imaging afterwards are consistent with a large chunk of the core having been melted using thermite incendiaries, JUST LIKE THE STUFF JONES FOUND.
IT DOESN’T MATTER IF JONES MADE THE WHOLE THING UP! If he sat down and used PHOTOSHOP to draw his DETAILED MICROGRAPHS like PICASSO, and SKETCHED HIS SPECTROGRAPH RESULTS BY HAND BY PEN.
IT DOESN’T MATTER, BECAUSE THAT CORE HAD TO GO AWAY FOR THE BUILDING TO FALL. In order for the building to fall down, rather than parts falling outward. The molten steel and high temperatures in an oxygen-free environment confirm that JONES with his photoshop and magic pen (and very steady hand) was just a damn-lucky guesser!
With all your attempts to muster up pretend-authority, you dirty tampon, it must be weird to talk to a person who calls you a POOPY-HEAD, who doesn’t claim any authority, and doesn’t give a fuck about your insincere turd arguments.
I am not arguing rationally, I DON’T FUCKING NEED TO ARGUE RATIONALLY! The time for rational argument has long ago ended. and there is nothing left to discuss rationally, simply to push the fuckers who are too stupid or too complicit to get on board straight down into the mud.
That’s right, you pus-oozing pap smear. I don’t make adult argument, I make the only effective argument for propaganda fed boobs like you, which is childish mindless repetition of hoary insults.
You are too mentally incapacitated to read a scientific paper with any understanding, little lad, so there’s nothing else to do but beat the insults into your head until you realize that you are a worthless roach. You are a worthless rat-roach, you roach.
This stuff works best on propagandized rat-roach people like you, because you are stupid enough to think that you are immune to this stuff. After some hammering by a bully like me, you start to wonder “why is my self-esteem eroding? Could it be from the endless spew of automatic insults from a stranger? No. It can’t be. I must have been wrong on this or that factual point. I’ll fix it. What’s the factual stuff I missed? I wonder…” Good, good. That’s when you start to revise your understanding of the facts.
But it’s really not the facts getting under your skin, rat-roach, it’s the insults. You’re not immune to this stuff, this is the only way you can be persuaded, because you aren’t capable of mathematics and you can’t do science, which means you only have social methods to acquire knowledge, and those methods are manipulable by this propaganda method.
Until now, the insults have mostly come from the establishment, so it was easy— you believed the establishment side. Now they are coming from a truther, so it’s hard. I mean, how can you guarantee that the insults will stop?
I promise you, little buddy, when you join the truthers, the insults will stop. I promise. Then I will love you, and give you support. You’ll be my buddy! I’ll buy you beer. All you have to do is say it… come on… yeah…. that’s it….
“9/11 was…” (yes, go on little buddy, go on) “9/11 was an in…” (yes, yes, you got it, you know what to say!), “9/11 was an inside jjj…” (almost there) “job.” (good boy! Good boy. I’m proud of you.) That’s it. That’s all I wanted. Don’t you feel a lot better now that you’ve stopped being a ratty cockroach? Yes, I knew you would. Now you’re human again.
Regarding your self-delusion regarding building 7, that’s all in the past. Now you see it from our point of view, and you realize that there was hardly any damage to the building at all. Isn’t it clear how obvious the demolition is now? Do you see how ridiculous the standard story is? Good! That’s called “waking up”.
I didn’t wake up until the Boston Bombing of 2013, which makes me nearly as stupid as you. Not quite, though, because I didn’t have a total asshole like me to help me, I had to figure it out the hard way. Alone.
Truthers have to remember that the mental rejects who still believe the official story are REALLY this stupid. This is the only way to persuade them.
There is an important purpose to “online trolling”, when it is directed at ideas and does not threaten individual persons, as it serves as an effective immune system against incorrect or immoral ideas that propagate online. Without it, state agents, or deep pockets, can easily create a situation where criticism of blindly accepted material is heckled and silenced, even when the material is clearly nonsense and the criticism is cogent. Offensive language and over-the-top attacking is the way to overcome this barrier of authority.
The over the top behavior crossed the line to personal harassment in the cases you cite, harassing you, and epileptics, etc. But in fighting such harassment, one must preserve freedom of speech, most especially speech which is not nice. While it is not ethically right to threaten people, it is a criminal offense, the rude behavior is not of the same character, as rude behavior is the most effective tool of the powerless to effect change. Harassment and stalking are crazy, and have no relation to this behavior. One must clearly and forcefully insist that you separate the two modes of behavior, as they are distinct, and online verbal battery is not at all intended as a personal threat or personal harrassment, but as a method of winnowing out ideas with powerful propaganda.
The reason is that the internet only works to produce truth when it is free to be as hostile as possible, only bounded by the limits of sanity. This has been clear since the early days of usenet. While there are a few people who use this freedom to prop up existing power structures, by dismissing the concerns of women or ethnic minorities, there is no exclusion of this tool to such folks, and their attacks are ineffectual, because ultimately they cannot go that far. The freedom of speech is most precious when it is used against those power structures, as it is the most effective form of anti-power anti-propaganda.
For an example of a constructive troll, take a minute to read the feminist classic “The SCUM Manifesto”, which was written well before there was an internet (although in the early 1960s, the independent free press, consisting of self-published pamphlets and magazines served a similar purpose). This document can be read as a prototype for modern-day internet bashing, the rude, foulmouthed, offensive, hate-filled diatribes that threaten one’s sanity, but which serve to recast the world in an alien point of view. You need to protect the aliens, because sometimes the aliens get things right.
Such propaganda techniques are important because they quickly and powerfully overwhelm the comparatively feeble propaganda techniques you find in old media, television, film, or traditional publishing (with the sole exception perhaps the exceedingly vicious and foul-mouthed race-baiting Nazi tracts). In old media, such crass language and over the top insults cannot get through the most rudimentary censors that block the way. The internet allows such language, and unfortunately such language is absolutely required in order to smash through bad or fraudulent science, to purge discussions of bigotry and xenophobia (using the same language the trolls you don’t like use), and to promote harmony and peace (despite the offense inherent to the language).
This language can also be used unproductively, of course. But thankfully, the people telling the truth always have the advantage in a rude discussion. A quick correction such as what you wrote above, renders it harmless, and even counterproductive. In many cases where censored mass-media has been lying to the public, such language is needed now more than ever. So I would suggest to you to grin and bear it, and to learn to do it effectively yourself, because, while psychologically difficult, perhaps especially so for women, it is important. It is an essential online sacrament.
Weev is a reasoned but somewhat angry and irresponsible young fellow, who is being smeared here by unfair associations with much more vicious folks, in particular those who stalk and menace women. You must remember that his _sole_ offense is (arguably) placing already publically available information about the lady in question on a public forum, where it could be more easily read by others. This doxxing is certainly not ethical, but it is not quite criminal either, and it happens frequently towards much more powerless others who do not have the wherewithall to write a long rambling article in WiReD to complain about it.
Here he is being compared with folks who purposefully induce seizures in epileptics, threaten to rape women, threaten to harm one’s children, and threaten murder! It is not right to make this comparison, he certainly didn’t do any of that. Doxxing isn’t stalking, it’s just a bad thing to do. It’s not even the worst legal thing he could do.
In his blog posts, Weev has made it clear that he is not stalking the author of this article (why anyone would pay attention to her is not clear to me). I irrationally like him, simply because he defended internet pioneer, academic martyr, and free-software guru Richard Stallman from the permanent unfair attacks against him. He also made a cogent argument in support of a counterintuitive ethical proposition: he argues we should preserve the right to write and sell software exploits for profit. The ACLU, normally on the side of freedom, opposes this, because they are worried the exploits can be used for surveillance His argument is that, seemingly paradoxically, by allowing folks to sell exploits on an open market, the software exploits are found and fixed much more quickly, as the price is low enough for companies to buy the exploits themselves so as to fix them. In a regulated market, governments are the only customers who can afford to hire the dedicated staff to find the exploits, so the exploits are not fixed, and this actually reduces the cost of government surveillance, because there are more low-hanging fruit. His argument is cogent, and sincere, although I am not sure he is right in this case.
He seems to be a normal sane person. His reckless nonsense, doing borderline criminal things, is probably just youth. He is obviously a valuable contributor to online discussions, possibly more so than the person bringing up the overblown and defaming charges against him, ridiculously associating him with rapists and murderers and those that incite murder.
Thanks, I think you are a garbage person too! The fellow is being smeared by associating his unethical action with much worse actions (for example, “come rape me” is not something he did). I don’t know the details of this case, I just quickly made up my mind by reading this article, and noticing it is propaganda. I didn’t know anything about this case before, and I won’t bother learning.
I don’t know the details, but I am certain he didn’t say “come rape me”. I agree that this stuff is unethical, but the article is a propaganda piece against internet speech, and I reserve judgement about claims of criminal behavior, as it is very easy to make someone look bad in a forum such as this.
No one should EVER dox anyone, it is an unethical thing, but I am not sure you are getting the full story.
If he is lying, which I am not 100% sure about, he is lying so as to avoid the wave of persecution and prosecution directed against him, for example, right here. Remember that he might have been lying the first time, when he obliquely didn’t deny the doxxing. People sometimes aren’t so honest, and take credit for things they didn’t do. People also sometimes lie about things they did do. I don’t know, and I don’t care.
The doxxing is a really unethical thing, it was extremely stupid, but whoever did it was just being an idiot. Who the heck would do anything to this harmless patzer who wrote the article? She is paranoid sure, so am I, isn’t everybody? I also would hate to get doxxed. But there’s little one can do about it.
The doxxer didn’t get the information by hiring a PI or following her around, he found it on the internet. The association with rapists, murderers, and so on is not appropriate, as I didn’t see a claim that there was any of that, except by innuendo. The association with malicious eplepsy inducing people is just a smear.
If it was him, as best as I can see (with a minute’s reading), his motivation seems to have been retaliation for doxxing of others. Doxxing just shouldn’t happen, and retaliating with more doxxing is absurd, and only makes you into a complicit supporter of the practice. But this guy sounds like he’s twenty three, and doesn’t know any better.
Please don’t compare, you have it much worse! She did not recieve a single death threat, nor were there any pictures of her house posted, nor were there threats to her or to her family. She had compromising personal information posted by someone online. It’s not right, but it’s not like the persecution you face.
Who are you psychoanalyzing?
Individuals with Irrelevant Comment Syndrome (ICS) have difficulty following a discussion online and responding in a relevant way. Symptoms of ICS include posting psychoanalysis which has not been requested as a response to discussions of the limits of internet speech, and jargonny pseudoscience to make the ICS sufferer sound like they have something to say.
Huh?
But I am sincerely confused about who you think is the professional victim here, weev or kathy. Anyway, it’s better to not get so personal.
Good, you are not important. WiReD is right. His actions are not criminal, and his sentence was absurd. He’s a weird guy with maturity problems, not a criminal threat. Especially not to Kathy whats-her-face, she is just doing propaganda against him.
He didn’t make rape threats, liar. You are making vicious slander by saying so, much worse than what he did. I think you should rot in a solitary confinement cell for saying that about weev.
Good people DO do that. He might not be the most sane or mature person, but he might be a decent human being. As for racist screeds, I have seen him on his blog explicitly praise a hypothetical black transsexual midget, so I don’t think he suffers from tnis problem, but I might be wrong.
I am a proud troll, and you are a terrible person.
No, he didn’t contradict himself. Trolling is a sacrament, as it is the only tool to oppose government and corporate propaganda. In this case, you have a person who is easy to dislike, but he is the exception, not the rule, and he seems to be the target of an active smear campaign.
He’s a young irresponsible fellow, not a criminal threat.
Where do all these propagandists come from? Who pays you? You don’t know this fellow, neither do I, but you clearly have an agenda. Asshole. It is you who should be in solitary confinement.
I am ignorant, sure, but I don’t believe you or her. The reason is that people say “I think you should be dropped out of an airplane for suggesting comment moderation, an I hope you land on a cactus” on an internet forum, and if you insist on doing propaganda with this, you could call that a “death threat”, it sounds like one doesn’t it? Except we all know it’s not.
I won’t know from talking to you, frankly, because I don’t trust your reporting. This is a propaganda smear campaign against an individual, so I can’t trust you, sorry. If you were more honest, in a verifiable way, and honestly explained the actual details of the death threat, I would be more likely to be persuaded, but honestly, there’s very little you can say, as I decided from the main body of the article that this is a bunch of bullshit propagana directed at someone somebody powerful doesn’t like.
Having found this, I am more convinced than ever: http://www.wired.com/2014/1…
In situations like this, you have to give this weev character the full benefit of the doubt. He’s innocent until proven guilty. Actually, heck, in my book, he’s just innocent no matter what you prove, even though that bastard denies the genocide of my relatives and thinks “my people” are out to get him.
Unlike the other guy, I have decided to thoughtlessly defend this neo-nazi.
I just read the article. Ok, I am Jewish, and relatives of mine were murdered and enslaved. He thinks I am, with my Jewish cohorts, engaged in a conspiracy to get him. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t make me upset. I know why now, it’s because he’s always attacking BASTARDS IN POWER, not powerless people as real nazis do.
I’m sorry, but ultimately, I know a smear campaign when I smell one, and this one reeks to high heaven. He doesn’t deserve this, he did offensive things, but probably not criminal things. He should grow up, meet a nice Jewish girl and have some children.
Him being a neo nazi is not enough to persecute the guy. Can’t you see that you are engaged in a campaign of character assassination against a person you don’t even know? I have no sympathy for neo nazis, but what I read of his does not read like a neo nazi, but a very good troll who is manipulating imagery in a very nice way.
He is being targeted actively in a smear campaign. This is abominable, even if he is a neo-nazi hitler-lover. This is a public lynching, and I won’t take part in it passively. I can only say “shame on you”. Leave him alone, or emulate him.
I know all these things. I defend him doubly. Because this type of persecution is exactly what the Nazis did. “Why behold you the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own eye?” What you are doing here is worse than what you accuse him of doing.
He’s safe in Lebanon now, learning arabic.
That something is what makes the internet precious, and what allows it to uncover truths that are not uncoverable in any other context. Trolling behavior is required for this process to work, and no-one shall expel us from the paradise that Alexander Abian has created.
MichaelZWilliamson is a POS, a thief, a punk, and should rot in jail. The end.
She is campaigning to silence and persecute others, and this is not acceptable. Neither is doxxing, but unlike doxxing, this stuff is dangerous to the freedom of everyone in the world.
A well known Middle-Eastern fellow said this: “Why behold you the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own eye?”
This article and comment thread is far worse than what weev has been accused of doing. There are propaganda minded folks here actively campaigning to destroy his life, people who don’t even know him, and have no way of getting the full story, except through rumor and innuendo, who have decided to silence and bury him forever. Not using imaginary threats from imaginary friends, like he is imagined to have done, but using the all-too-real power of the state.
You are forming a group-minded lynch mob, using innueno, rumors, phony consensus, fake grass-roots, and making a vicious smear campaign with anonymous spiteful malcontents deliberately engaged in character assassination of someone they have never met. This bears a closer resemblance to actual Nazi persecution, more so than anything he is accused of doing. You call him a neo-nazi, because he has a swastika tatooed on his chest. His tattoo is only skin deep. You have a swastika tatooed on your hearts.
You should all be ashamed of yourselves, original poster included.
This Pescadofisk is a real rat turd.
I am disputing the facts as stated in the article. As far as I can see this is a pack of lies.
The reason to trust weev over her is that she is doing obvious political propagana, and weev has a swastika on his fucking chest, so he obviously doesn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks, so he is not doing propaganda. He might be lying, he might not, it is secondary consideration. The primary consideration is that there is an internet lynch mob sicced on him, and this must be resisted.
The trolls would only win in heaven, John. This is the real world, where there are always evil bastards who are scheming to shut the trolls up. The trolls are your only gateway to truth on the internet, and once they are silenced, the internet turns into polite bourgeoise publishing, and it is controlled by the state, and by those with lots of money.
That’s a catastrophe we can’t afford, as we don’t want another 300 years of darkness after getting a bright glimpse of the blinding light.
People must never be nice, it is evil to be polite.
He has a swastika tattooed on his chest. The folks persecuting him have a swastika tattoed on their hearts.
No, no. In the 90s, people saw that on the internet, you could say “You turd-mouthed rat-faced skunk-fucker” to a top notch professor, and nobody could stop you! This made it possible to challenge authoritative statements, and it is still possible, so long as trolling is not forbidden.
This heckling is what allows movements to slowly gain power, and it is extremely important to preserve. It also scares people with money, and people in government shitless, because they can’t abide mockery, and they want to make sure that writing is sanitized for approval. This is why protecting weev is so important.
It is the exact opposite— good trolls brought more people than they drove away. The ones driven away were simply the ones who couldn’t respond to the harshly worded attacks, because they were IGNORANT. This has the effect of inverting traditional power-structures, and it made truth win out in cases which had been problematic in the published literature for decades.
Trolls are not really bullies, they are simply removing authority from discussions, so that your status no longer matters, and politeness becomes a deteriment to your argument. This allows quick progress to the truth, and it is the principle that the internet is founded on. This principle is preserved where there are “righteous assholes”, like Linus Torvalds for the Linux Kernel mailing list, or Richard Stallman for GNU. Physicists pioneered this anti-authoritative discourse, it was especially popular in the Soviet physics school.
Yes, that’s right, there is no use in throwing facts, quotes, or citations. I will ignore them.
I will simply insist that you should be ashamed of yourself. Stop persecuting this poor guy, he hasn’t done anything worth this kind of attack.
I didn’t say he didn’t do it, I don’t know if he did it or not, and I don’t care. I said he is getting smeared, and this is true regardless of whether he did it or not.
He is being compared to rapists, those who threaten murder, etc, for internet activity which is miles removed from any of this. His reputation is being dragged through the mud, purposefully, by hearsay derived from the testimony of powerful idiots, and without any trial, simply through a lynch mob of malicious malcontents who don’t know fuck all about him or his accuser.
That includes me, of course, I don’t know fuck all about any of this. But I AM NOT MALIGNING HIM, OR HIS ACCUSER, you see. I just try to stop YOU from doing it, you vicious asshole.
Before accusing him of being a troll, look in the goddamn mirror.
My daughter will be proud of me, GP. I doubt that will be true of your children. This lady has no pain, she is purposefully seeking to inflict pain on another, driven by pure malice.
One day, stupid one, you will understand what persecution means. It’s exactly what you are doing here, in this comment thread. You are tearing apart a character you don’t know based on a boast of doxxing you can’t evaluate, through a lady who is purposefully and maliciously linking it to heinous crimes like murder and rape by suggestion and innuendo. It is a trial of sorts, and you are revealing yourselves to have lost your minds and lost your souls.
He should be left alone, and all of you should crawl back into your holes. He should also say “sorry” to the lady for having done that bad thing, and she should say “it’s ok, it’s all over now.”
Sorry, you have a point, let me rephrase: if weev is trying to do propaganda, he obviously SUCKS BALLS at it. On the other hand, this lady is pretty good.
He didn’t do this, he just posted some information he found online. You are inferring that he did, as you were meant to, from the article’s long stream of suggestive innuendo and propaganda, which is designed to paint a picture of a stalker, without actually saying it. The article doesn’t come out say it because it simply isn’t true.
This is why the article is so long-winded and has such gas-baggy phrasing, she can’t out and out say he was following her, because he really wasn’t. She’s was never that important, nobody followed her or threatened her in her real-life world. People just got pissed off at her and flamed her online.
What he did is post some personal information stuff he dug up on her on an online forum. It might not even have really been him, he might have just boasted about doing it to falsely take credit from someone else (he has done this before regarding some other hacking claims, for notoriety purposes).
It’s not like the guy who really posted it will say “Hey, weev, no! no! That was me! I did it.” They’d be happy that he’s taking the credit for this. He likes attention. He also might have done it too, I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t like speculating about other people I don’t know anything about, and I certainly don’t follow a lynch mob sicced on them like you have been doing.
This is false! How do you debate holocaust deniers? You do it LIKE A TROLL.
You say “Here, asswipe, are the deportation records from Hungary. Here, turd-fucker, is the testimony of a Treblinka guard” and so on and so on, you can respond to all their arguments completely, while at the same time denying them any respect or credibility!
That’s EXACTLY why trolling is so important to preserve— you can use it to knock down arguments WITHOUT giving them authority or respect as you are doing so.
It is exactly for this reason that the internet killed holocaust denial. The centers for Holocaust remembrance were able to respond to the points with enough disrespect to make it clear they did not deserve much respect.
It is for exactly the same reason that you need to preserve freedom of speech online, because, in other situations, not the holocaust, the holocaust deniers are the powerful ones, and the persons trying to call attention to the thing are dismissed. You must not rob them of the tools of disrespect an mockery, even using the most offensive trollish language you can imagine, and then some!
Please don’t, as it is a propaganda piece. Your other article is much better: http://www.wired.com/2014/1… .
Yeah, somehow I don’t trust your judgement asshole, sucking up to a propagandist maliciously smearing another person publically.
It’s not sweet, it’s necessary, you malicious carnivore. He likely didn’t threaten Kathy at all, you weren’t there, you know nothing. I know what flame-fests are like, they are personal, and abusive. When you are doxxed, you get all paranoid, because sudenly all the potential threats become real in your mind, because “Oh no! Oh no! They know my address”.
Here’s the thing she didn’t realize: nobody cares about you! Nobody is going to follow you, nobody is going to threaten you, nobody is going to hurt you. It’s a psychological ploy to scare you, that’s all it was. It worked.
It was never anything more, and I know, because she never said it was anything more in this article. She tried to imply it like all heck, with weasel words and double speak, but she didn’t say it.
I know enough to know why she didn’t say it. She didn’t say it because it wasn’t true. Nobody did anything to her, and there was no credible threat.
Because you don’t know what he did! You don’t know anything. You are INFERRING what he did from a malicious propagandistic testimony designed to smear him.
He may have doxxed her, or he may have LYINGLY boasted about doxxing her. He has claimed hacks he didn’t do in the past.
But it doesn’t matter, this is not the smear I am talking about. The smear is making a propaganda painting to make his online potential doxxing activity look like it involved any credible threat whatsoever.
There was no threat here at all, beyond the fear it induced in her mind. This fear she is inducing in your mind, so suddenly you are just as angry at him as she was. There was no stalking, there were no real threats, it was all online nonsense like you have seen a million times, when user A threatens user B that he will rip his guts out of his belly and feed it to him. That’s the kind of threat you are talking about.
Your anger and malice is just pure evil, and collective evil, a lynch mob evil. Unlike his non-threat to her, you pose an actual threat to him, as he is being targeted by the state for incarceration, and is susceptible to this political nonsense attacks.
It’s important to defend those who are on the margins, as they are your first line of defense against tyrrany, and also, they make all the cool new stuff.
Thank you!
Ok, but this is not good trolling. You aren’t weev, you know.
He’s right about the distinction. “Women who do tech” are techies. “Women in tech” are fake techies who play a leechy Bill Gates or Steve Jobs role, stealing credit from others and profiting from their hard work.
There are plenty of real female tech geniuses, for a great great example, there’s Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (although she’s very old now). They aren’t the same as the social schmoozers.
It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing.
Yes, and sympathy is completely irrelevant. His maltreatment is shocking.
It’s unethical, but it’s not the level that rises to a serious credible threat of violence, either to herself or to her family. It’s internet bullcrap and it’s just an obnoxious minor threat, and you should know this.
Yes I am! Would you like to have a beer sometime?
Because I like the quote, and it is apropos. I am not a religious Jew.
He stated that he did that, you claim he did that, but he has absolutely no power to do that. He’s a poor young man with no power at all, and his opponent is a wealthy lady with many connections and good political skills. You just can’t see who is picking on who here.
You are comparing real world power, the power to incarcarate and isolate, to internet power, the power to mock and shame. The internet is not real world. All he could do is get strangers to knock on her door through fake craigslist ads saying “Is your Jacuzzi for sale”?
On the other hand, the discussion here is designed to remove trolls from the internet, and that’s like removing the pork from the bacon.
No, dude. I am not nice, and I don’t want others to be nice. I want people to be free. Profanity is the most effective tool in dismantling obnoxious authority. White men don’t fare any better in online shouting matches than anyone else. Women don’t do too badly either, if they are sufficiently profane. The people who do badly are those of HIGH CLASS, and HIGH BREEDING. Those are the people that this type of internet censorship is trying to protect.
Powerful people can’t cuss, so the TROLLS ALWAYS WIN, unless they are silenced. It is also true that the TROLLS SHOULD ALWAYS WIN. So there is nothing wrong with this outcome.
You are putting him on trial without having seen any evidence of guilt, based solely on the testimony of a powerful figure, a professional programmer, in her 50s, who has written a propaganda piece.
Shame on you, you tampon sucking rat turd. Do not do onto your neighbor that which is hateful to yourself. There, a proper old-testament quote.
No, you enema bag, she is definitely not a liar exactly. She didn’t lie, she just manipulated you into thinking a lie.
She spun a doxxing into a rape threat, something which nobody can say with a straight face. She just implied it through innuendo and indirection, so I know it didn’t happen.
I understand phony nazi imagery, and you should too.
Since this discussion is all about unsettling internet speech, perhaps it would be best to inject as much emotion as possible into it, to give a series of examples of exactly what gigantic chunk of our internet heritage we would lose if trolling were banned.
This discussion, unlike the ridiculous doxing, has actual serious real world consequences, as this man is now subject to the criminal justice system. I wouldn’t claim that this was anything more than an interesting discussion regarding trolling if there were no consequences.
There are two consequences here. The first one is that this guy was just released from prison on a technical point of evidence. He was in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT for dubiously illegal internet activities, for MONTHS. You wouldn’t last five days. He was deprived of reading material and writing material, and his lawyer confidentiality was breached. This is serious, and it is potentially grounds for a successful lawsuit, if his character is intact.
Wired just published a favorable article about him here: http://www.wired.com/2014/1… , and by association, it’s a favorable article for all hackers everywhere.
Further, defending rude speech is required for internet liberty. There is nothing for women and minorities to fear, as the racists and sexist folks are heckled worse than anyone in an uncensored discussion.
The stuff he did, if he did it, ultimately had no real world consequences, beyond inducing psychological fear. It is just internet nonsense, although extremely unethical internet nonsense.
This discussion is NOT the same kind of internet nonsense, because he might go to jail. It is also NOT just internet nonsense because it is setting the grounwork for policy which will censor internet discussions in the future, and this would be a catastrophe for the project of open participation science and open participation humanities, which is my real angle on this.
There’s a big difference between harassing me online (I don’t really mind) and harrassing Dzokhar Tsarnaev. If you harrass Tsarnaev with insults, he is more likely to get executed, regardless of guilt. If you harrass me, I’ll get annoyed and flame you back.
The real world consequences for Kathy were unfortunate, but ultimately minimal in terms of actual threat. It was definitely wrong to dox her. But the picture she is painting is calculated to cause him maximum political damage, and this is not appropriate. Just leave him alone, and pick on someone else who is not being hounded by the government. If she wants to press charges, let her do that. This is just making propaganda.
I am defending a human that looks like a not-so-awful human to me, perhaps a decent human being, for the reason that I’ve heard it before.
He is not a likable character, mostly because he does anti-politics. I understand this, as I do anti-politics too.
This young kid is the powerless person in this exchange, in case you don’t see it. The powerful person in question is the lady attacking him. Call me sentimental, but I don’t like it when the strong pick on the weak.
She did have something wrong done to her, but it is not 100% clear that it was something criminal, nor is it 100% clear that it was done by the fellow she is propagandizing against. Also, it is clear that her complaints are with the rude online culture in general, a culture which I believe one must defend to the death.
Following my own internet upbringing, and also the Sieg-Heiling David Bowie, Nazi themes are fair game, so long as you aren’t picking on powerless people. That’s exactly what he’s doing, which is far beyond the type of transgression I could have imagined possible 20 years ago.
These transgressive exercizes are the proper way to leave the mainstream behind so that you can search for something new. Racist talk was something one could not really do in the past, because the power imbalances just did not allow one to joke about racism, with all the real racists still running around. There really are only a handful of real nazis left, and I’m pretty sure that deep down this guy is not one of them. Nazis don’t admire Stallman, and they attack the weak, not the strong.They admire the strong.
The Nazis would probably not admit me into their Klaverns, I am afraid, although seeing they admitted a guy named Auernheimer, perhaps they might.
He was talking about me, dude.
Yes, yes. There is absolutely no way the death threats were an ominous husky voice over the telephone with a credible threat, they were in all cerainty various postings on an online forum saying “eat poop and die!” This is the only kind of death threat you could ever generate from an internet discussion, no matter how charged.
The NYT was SPINNING, as usual. There was no actual real threatening activity as far as I can see, otherwise this article would actually TALK ABOUT IT instead of talking vaguely about “trolls” and “Kool-aid”, but about the actual criminal activity.
Yes, exactly! And it is not contemptible. The proper word is “heroic”. There are actual contemptible creatures here arguing the other way.
Why do you think I’m white? I’m only half white. And I have zero capacity to empathize with anybody. I use my critical skills to analyze my own navel, because frankly I haven’t seen anything too interesting come out of anyone else’s navel.
It’s not about elite, dude. It’s about the hard work required to produce new technical stuff. It’s not the same kind of work as the social schmoozing and ass-kissing you use to rise up corporate ranks, and in fact, the two are mutually exclusive.
It is not clear that the harassment was done by weev, nor was there a “campaign”, there was one doxing and a Craigslist prank of some kind, neither of which produced a credible threat to her safety or her families safety (although it was unethical and deplorable, because it induced paranoid fear).
It’s not about me or weev, it’s anyone who works hard to do actual original technical work, including Yvonne Choquet Bruhat, Karen Vogtman, Ingrid Daubechies, and many others. This is completely different kind of work than becoming a “known and trusted expert” or becoming a wealthy successful businessperson. It’s producing work so radical and important that you are LAUGHED AT and THROWN OUT of companies, like Daubechies was for her revolutionary work on wavelets. Daubechies wasn’t appreciated for more than a DECADE, you understand. This is the kind of harassment that trolls fight against, they fight against the power-structure of the bourgoisie, the orders that always oppress and suppress new mathematics and new science, and new computer science.
Weev doesn’t understand that it’s not the government or a conspiracy, it’s a structural problem of class and money. But that’s ok. He at least sees the problem, which is better than you.
Here’s what’s going on: you have a bunch of brainless twits posting attacks on a person they don’t know because of something someone else they don’t know said about him, inspired by a flame war.
It’s absurd, and it would be comical, except your author here is trying to shut up the trolls, who are the lifeblood of the internet. Go stick it.
If you’re not a troll, there is something seriously wrong with you.
Butt? dumb? Heck no! It just said pfft to you. I don’t need any sources for this propaganda nonsense. Pulling the stuff out of said butt gives me more accurate information than you propagandistic sources.
Sorry, you’re right. I shouldn’t have said malice. Driven by memories of actual fear, but no credible threat. She has no pain anymore, this was a long time ago, and she knows now how impotent internet threats are.
Actually, now that I realize that you are the same person as her, it’s worse than malice, it’s dishonesty with the self-centered agenda of propping herself up at the expense of her betters.
Women and minorities don’t need your help GP. They can beat up the racists and sexist bigots online with their own trolls, and they certainly do, often. The real issue is with people who are powerful, as they want protection from getting beat up by the trolls, and they don’t need protection.
He sort of is, although he’s still young. He’ll grow out of the nonsense.
There is no harm, mental reject. The troll is doing you a favor, by removing taboos so that subjects may be discussed objectively. You don’t need protection for the truth, it will do fine in a hostile environment. Only lies collapse, and that’s what the internet is for.
Yup! I REALLY love myself.
Not false. Nobody is motivated enough to do anything criminal with the information, as there is NO MONEY IN IT, nor is there any BENEFIT TO IT, and all the people involved, due to the self-selection on online forums are LITERATE and SANE. Rapists don’t go looking at the list of latest internet grudges and flame wars when picking their victims, and actual murderers need a real motive. What you are talking about is just a stupid game with fear and emotion.
I am 100% sure on this, as I have been involved in internet discussions which ACTUALLY briefly involved one psychopathic cannibalistic mass-murderer (Jeoffrey Dahmer), and several drug deranged folks, back in usenet days on alt-tasteless. There is NOTHING in the modern internet which can compare to the level of profanity and hostility in 1994 alt tasteless, or to the type of comments posted on a daily basis. Look it up and check for yourself.
I met Mr. Alt-Tasteless 1994 in 1995 in person, we had a beer, and the conversation cause me mental disturbance for weeks and months. He was an EMT, and he described things that no human being should ever see. Many of the folks (not me) had drug habits which were mind-melting.
The actual psychopath’s postings were so stupid and banal, nearly al of them were lost forever, as nobody thought they were interesting enough to save. These posts described actual horrifying murders in gruesome detail, although at the time, people simply thought they were extremely unimaginative illiterate nonsense.
You need to learn to distinguish between internet writing and reality. They don’t intersect today, and in the incredibly rare case that they do, real psychopathology is invisible, because it’s drowned out by good punchy writing about psychopathology.
He’s pretty obviously not a sincere racist, and times are different today, racism is not secretly supported by powerful people anymore, it’s mostly powerless people on the margins.
Besides, Wallace was probably not a real racist either, aside from his public face. He was comfortable with black people as a young man. He just supported it politically after he lost an election because he was too integrationist.
He has nothing against technical females. He dislikes politically powerful people, because these people are always anti-tech. It doesn’t matter if it’s Steve Jobs or this lady, power and tech just don’t mix. Either you’re a big shot, or you build circuits. You’re never both. That’s why he likes Stallman. It’s not about gender. It’s about social class.
The aversion to bourgeoise class power is present in all techies, even if they don’t know what it is. It’s why so many were sympathetic to socialism, and why the USSR despite all it’s weakness, was a tech powerhouse.
Yes, I am defending him totally. And I am not missing the point, I am contradicting your point, and standing apart from your bullcrap, like any good troll should.
He knew the effect of his actions— he knew that she would get SCARED, and that NO ONE would do JACK to her. Why? Because nobody ever does jack with this crap, there’s no money in it, there’s no motive to do anything, and psychopaths don’t seek out victims by perusing the latest flame-wars.
Online stalking is not real stalking. There is no Manson here, because there are no drug-crazed followers, nor personal influence, nor any actual violent criminal activities at all. People on the internet have no real world power to effect criminal activity. They can harmlessly prank someone, as this guy did, and scare them witless. That’s all he can do, and that’s all he did. It’s not right, but it posed no credible threat to her.
The invention of bogus real-world threats is simply to whip up a frenzy for internet censorship, which is the kiss of death. I won’t support it under any circumstances, and I consider you a traitor to the internet for even thinking that there is a problem at all.
This is incorrect. The target is not chosen for gender or race. The target is chosen for class. High class people are the target, regardless of race or gender. This is the real variable here.
Insults and ridicule are two things that high class people can’t abide, so there are calls that “something must be done”. Nothing must be done. It’s exactly how it should be.
There are rare cases of outright racist or sexist comments online, which are quickly met with a wall of hostile outrage by anti-racist trolls. People just don’t do it very often on uncensored fora. They do it only when they can control the content to exclude anti-racist comments, which make racist comments go like molasses. The racists and sexist never got the upper hand on uncensored fora, they got hammered on it right from the beginning, in usenet times. It was one of the things that made it clear the internet was very useful as a mechanism of social justice.
And don’t tell ANYONE not to criticize someone because of her gender. The criticism is for her CLASS not her gender, this is the only thing that really matters.
They are the opposite of bullies. They are powerless folks who fight for justice using internet flame as their medium. In this case, he just hasn’t figured out what exactly he should be fighting for.
One must respect the internet trolls, as they are your only defense from censored mass media. Do you really want to go back to the 80s? When all you heard was what powerful moguls decided you deserved to hear? That’s what you are suggesting when you suggest to silence the trolls.
The GOP is not oppressing blacks because they are black anymore, they are now oppressing poor blacks because they are poor, and oppressing poor hispanics because they are poor. They are very happy with rich black Republicans, and with Mexican billionaires. This happened in the last two decades, George W. Bush was not at all racist, that’s the only good thing you’ll hear me say about him.
I don’t think you understand, I don’t care about my credibility. I have none. I don’t need credibility to argue against you, I just need to be right.
I find it hard to believe Rebecca Schaeffer was singled out for pissing off somebody on an online forum. She was obviously stalked because she was on TV, and had a tremendous amount of mass-media visibility. There are ZERO victims of online forum harassment, not a single one.
Jeffrey Dahmer was the exception, and this was in the early 1990s. He was no good on the forum, and he eventually got sick of it. People were certainly sick of him. Rather, more correct to say, nobody noticed him, he was just the worst writer there by a long shot. No psychopath is a decent writer, at least not while the psychopathology is active. Valerie Solenas was a good writer before she became a psychopath, but that was a long time before her breakdown.
Diana Napolis did not stalk anyone she met online. She stalked mass media figures. You really don’t understand the internet, do you? She was harmless online, as is everyone online.
It’s all harmless, none of it is dangerous to people. It is simply dangerous to wrong ideas, because they are torn apart by trolls. Like me. You need us, you know, because otherwise you would be swimming in the same sea of mass media bullshit I had to endure in anguished silence until 1992.
It takes nothing to succeed as a professional in tech, except being in the right social class or getting in that class through assiduous copying of rich people, then reading many other poor people who had original ideas, then parrotting these people while claiming the ideas as your own. You then will get praised for innovation. This is the tried and true method in the US. And then people wonder why so few Americans want to be engineers or scientists. Would you purposefully work hard so as to have your idea ripped off by a bourgeoise idiot?
Doing original work is damn hard, harder than you think by a factor of 100, and it requires many years of total commitment with absolutely zero payoff. To produce a good mathematical work, or a good engineering breakthrough, is comparable to climbing Mt. Everest alone. Further, you will, if you have a really important idea, certainly get ripped off by the worthless social schmoozers mentioned above, it is nearly inevitable. They will be of the right social class, you will not. They will have time to persuade others, you won’t. Because you are expending 100 times more effort than they are on internal development, and you just don’t have time to learn to win friends and influence people.
I know enough about what was going on at SUN, as these corporations produced the Sun UNIX, and other corporate UNIX. After it was a corporate behemoth, it produced the same garbage as all the other corporate behemoths. All that corporate crap is dead now, because we have Linux, which was produced by two independent free-thinkers who lived on the margins. Richard Stallman who slept in his office (until he got his MacArthur) and Torvalds, who was a student, both working hard in isolation for a long time.
Sierra did nothing original of any importance. She worked at the corporate heirarchy, and developed some of that Java mess, and wrote “design patterns” of some kind or another, which is not something I appreciate as important. It looks like negative progress to me, it’s bourgeoise nonsense.
I am parrotting weev because I AGREE with him. He is right about this, and no neo-nazi or nazi-sympathizer could possibly ever see this, because it’s ultimately a pure Marxist insight. This is why I don’t buy his nazi bullshit, no matter what he says about it. It looks like a total put-on.
The work of Daubechies, Bruhat and Vogtman is not irrelevant, as it required actual hard creative work in isolation. I met one of them (Vogtman) and she was amazing. The creative work is not the only work that is needed, other work is important too, but it is the work that is not cookie cutter, this is the stuff that absolutely requires an individual to stretch outside the mainstream, and leave the culture entirely behind. This is what weev is trying to do, although I hope he finds less abrasive ways to do it (weev, dude, please, please, knock it off with the Jew business— it really gets under my skin for obvious reasons).
You know very well I am talking about internet fora where people talk talk, not credit card theft sites where they fraud fraud. Craigslist involves real world operations, and this is the only place where the problems can start.
It isn’t AT ALL fine to dox. It’s unethical, it’s a completely crappy thing to do. But I am not sure if this guy did it, or just boasted about it, and also I am sure it doesn’t deserve criminal prosecution, rather civil liability is the proper recourse, so that she can sue him for damages, and I would suggest that perhaps she should win her lawsuit. It’s an easier burden of proof anyway, she probably can manage it.
But that’s not what this article is about. It’s about censoring discussions because they might offend people, by linking offense to real-world danger. There is no real-world danger, this is just a figment of this lady’s imagination.
Yes, trolls are often bullies, but so what? You can’t handle being bullied? It’s online, no harm will come to you, guaranteed. These bullies clarify discussions, because there is no better way to get rid of preconceptions than to have a bullying person argue something that 99% of the world doesn’t believe. You need to consider the idea, see whether it’s wrong or right, confront the alien world view head on, and if it’s incorrect, you can bully right back, and even harder, with true statements that make the bully realize they are wrong. It’s not so easy, because you need to actually think about the idea, it is forced upon you. But doing this, you learn to distinguish between ridiculous social consensus and objective truth, you see the difference, and it makes you a better scientists (if that’s what you are).
Since I respect science, and since this type of bullying is exactly how consensus is produced in science, I cannot accept it being villified. The arguments for relativity, or for string theory, went through the same hazing in the professional literature, except there is mathematics in there coding the insults so that they are harder to see.
It’s good to be unhinged when you see a lynch mob.
My position is that you don’t know anything, since you didn’t see the doxx. There might have been no SSN in there, I don’t know, and neither do you. You have no more information than I do.
You also don’t know who posted that doxx. You are inferring this from public boasts of an unreliable source. He might not have even posted it, he might have just bragged about it, like he bragged about hacking AT&T when it wasn’t him.
And still, without any evidence, without anything but innuendo, you persist is villifying this guy, simply because he is a JERK, because he is unpopular. No, no. That’s not acceptable.
Further it is also my position that this is a hatchet job on rude internet discourse, based on nonexistent associations with real-world violence. There was no credible threat of violence to this woman, and her piece is making innuendo to suggest that there was for the purpose of instituting internet censorship. This is abominable.
The powerless folks who are in danger of state persecution require protection from internet lynch mobs. His “lynch mob” posed no credible threat to Karen, that was all in her head. It was not right, it was scary, it caused her distress, and perhaps she should sue him.
But if she decides not to sue him, there is no reason for her to sic an internet lynch mob on him, when it he is threatened with the very real threat of real-world prosecution. He is not the powerful one here, his only presence is online.
I was a troll before you were born.
That’s definitely a crime, but the sentencing was perhaps excessive (although in this case, it does not chill anything, the impact on normal speech is nil). It depends on the credibility of the threat, obviously this one was taken seriously (I can’t judge, I don’t know). It is credible when there is an actual threat. I don’t see how such a thing could happen on a site with no real-world content, you are speaking about hypotheticals, and hypotheticals make bad law.
In our case, I didn’t see an actual threat, simply accusations of such. One must be careful here not to punish offensive speech, rather to punish threatening behavior, and to do so fairly and uniformly. Civil liability seems the best recourse.
It’s obviously worth more than the stance of an insincere “free speech” hypocrit who refuses to support speech he does not like. Neo Nazi speech is not even close to the most offensive speech I have heard, there was speech on usenet that would make a typical neo-nazi’s blood curdle with horror. I defend that speech too, although some of it gave me nightmares.
Ok, but that’s nothing to do with the guy whose picture appears at the top here, who is not accuse of swatting.
I am not sure I believe you have the doxx. How did you get it? Could you demonstrate it in some way? I really don’t believe you, I think you are simply making more propaganda.
I know there is an association between REAL WORLD threats and REAL WORLD violence. I am telling you, “professional in this field”, that the association between online threats between strangers on internet discussion fora and real-world violence, is nil. The flame wars you see on sites like this have never led to a single case of real world violence, simply because there is no motivation or opportunity for it to ever happen, even in cases where doxxing has occured. It is not right, it is unethical, and it deserves a lawsuit, but I don’t see a credible realistic threat there. People just let out steam in hostile comments, there is some bad feeling, it goes away, and this activity is essential, as it is the mechanism of producing truth. I WISH everyone did it! As it stands, it is not the norm.
I will not accept your expertise blindly. I would like you to demonstrate that there is a real-world violence threat from online discussion fora before imposing restrictions on these. I simply dogmatically don’t believe it is possible for these discussions to spill over into real world confrontation, as there is no mechanism for it to happen.
Any credible threat I see only appears in real world sites, where people actually exchange goods and services, or meet in person.
I have no serious problem with the criminal prosecution of this case. It bears no resemblance to the case we are talking about here, as the context is worlds apart. Craigslist is a forum for real-world interactions, and people are looking for real world interaction in the same geographical region.
The context of the doxxing was an international flame war, between parties who are geographically remote. In this case, nobody is looking for real world anything, it would require extreme contortions to make anything real-world happen, and there is zero motivation for such a thing. I am sorry, but be realistic, there is simply zero chance of a real world encounter, and there is no real motive for hostility.
It is impossible to imagine that a violent confrontation could ever happen from anything that went on in a discussion forum, no matter how hostile. I think if you posted the same craigslist comment, with all it’s malice and violence, on a discussion forum, you would also get zero responses. It’s not a real-world thing, it doesn’t spill over.
I know the purpose of this was to create fear. It was frightening for sure, I would be scared too. I am saying that the threat was psychological and not imminent, and there was no real danger, although psychologically it didn’t feel that way (it wouldn’t to me either).
Further, I have to tell you that you are not a judge or a jury, you have not seen the doxx, you have not been presented unbiased evidence with representation for both sides, you don’t even know if he even posted the material (your evidence for this is his demonstrably unreliable bragging), and you have made assumptions of harm by associations and extrapolations that are suggested by the original author of the post above, who is also the victim, so you really aren’t getting two sides of the story here.
This is simply the behavior of a lynch mob sicced against a fellow who has negative political skills and cannot defend himself. How can you justify this? You know nothing, and you are standing in judgement.
I DON’T CONDONE DOXXING! I NEVER DID. IT IS A BAD THING TO DO. I SAID THIS TWENTY TIMES.
Doxxing has nothing to do with what you call “verbal abuse”. The accusation of verbal abuse can come (and has come) for the following actions:
1. Showing someone who thinks they are an expert that their optics solution approximation is incorrect.
2. Pointing out that the Drude model of electron flow is obsolete.
3. Explaining that Neitzsche was a racist writer.
4. Explaining the abiogenic theory of petroleum formation.
5. Describing the S-matrix theory of hadronic processes.
etc. etc. Although these look like safe topics, they are all hotly disputed, and taking the wrong side, an arguing forcefully against the other side brings up accusations of “trolling”, “dishonesty”, “crackpottery”, “creating bad vibes” and finally “verbal abuse” in this order, leading to censorship of these scientific topics, and leading to mistakes in the peer review process online.
The reason is simply POWER. Criticism from powerless to the powerful is simply always percieved as rude when it does not seek compromise, while criticism the other way is never percieved as rude, period. This imbalance is compensated by rude speech online, i.e. by trolling.
This is exactly what is happening in this case too. The powerless person is this weev fellow, the powerful person is his opponent who wrote the article, and the mud she is throwing at him sticks, which includes accusations of threats of rape, threats of murder, when all that she has grounds to suspect him of is the doxxing. Doxxing is NOT threat of rape or murder.
My position is that you can’t censor online discussions period. Any attempt to do so must therefore show some sort of real world danger, and this person is claiming such a danger. I dispute this claim.
I agree that doxxing is a reprehensible thing, she should sue. She should press charges. But she didn’t. Instead she is proposing to censor online discussions. This is not about the doxxing anymore, but about censorship.
Further, the fact that doxxing is a terrible thing to do does not mean that you get to do unlimited propaganda against this guy. You don’t even know for sure he did it, he has boasted of hacks he didn’t do before.
I am afraid of the chilling effect of making this guy a test case, or tearing his reputation apart (more than he has done himself, that is). He is an unpopular jerk, just like the person who attacks the drude model, defends abiogenic petroleum, attacks Nietzsche, points out mistakes in not using optical Fresnel equation approximation methods, and that’s ME. I’m acting out of self-interest here. You can’t see it, because you don’t have enough experience with internet censorship. It is simply never necessary.
She should sue him, prosecute him, ask him to apologize, or leave him alone. This type of thing is simply propaganda.
The cause is ensuring a free internet for all. You guys with your coordinated tag team comments are crazy. I am a sincere person trying to keep the internet open. There was no actual imminent threat from the discussions EVEN WITH THE DOXXING. The doxxing is unethical, but this is no cause for censorship of discussions, but simply for a lawsuit.
??????? Are you nuts??????
I am not wrong, you are simply malicious.
He is not very smart yet, but maybe one day if he gives up his right wing supremacist crap and learns some mathematical science. (Sorry, I made a mistake of ignorance. This guy is not a supremacist at all, and is kind of brilliant)
You don’t need false emotion when you are telling the truth.
Outsmarting a government is not the same thing as solving a differential equation, it is much easier.
People are talking about him because he is held up as a test case for internet censorship. He wasn’t chosen for his smarts, rather, for his complete lack of appeal. He’s the person almost everyone would be ok with censoring.
I am not ok with censoring anybody. If he does crap like doxxing, just sue him. If he makes real-world threats, arrest him. It’s not an argument for censoring the internet, and it will never be.
You don’t know what happened, you are inferring it unfairly from the prosecution’s case alone.
If you would like to see him fighting for something worthwhile, here you go, two recent blog posts.http:// weev.livejournal.com/409835… , http://weev.livejournal.com… . There is another one on political prisoner there too, they are important and interesting
I DON’T BELIEVE YOU HAVE THE DOXX. Can you post the MD5 sum?
Regarding your comments, I accept this threat model is true of traditional interactions. Threats can be credible in the real world.
However it is simply not true that all online idle threats can be construed to automatically turn into actual live threats through the action of posting the dox. There is simply no credible motive or opportunity for real-world violence in an international forum, with participants often thousands of miles away, and nearly always hundreds of miles away, with no expectation of violence, and with no financial or personal motive, other than impersonal insults to pet ideas. It is ludicrous to assume this, it has never happened, and it will never happen.
While it is true that the fellow is doing something I consider highly unethical by doxxing, that does not make him automatically liable for all the idle threats which were posted in the weeks before, which were clearly made with no intention of actually carrying them out. He would be liable only for the direct threat of the dox, the potential of a homocidal or sociopathic reader (although the probability is small, it is not zero) and for the harm caused by justifiable fear of such a person.
For this, he is liable, and he can be sued for damages. I don’t think this is inappropriate, I would take such action myself. Perhaps with proper legislation against doxxing, he can even be prosecuted, although I would not support this legislation if you ask my opinion, as I think the burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt is simply never going to be met.
But this is NOT THE TOPIC OF THE DISCUSSION.
The topic of the discussion is the censorship of online forums. There is simply nothing in this case that leads one to think that this is necessary or advisable. Online forums are useful because they are free speech, and free of real-world violence, or repercussions. They are simply abstract discussions of ideas.
The use of harsh language, and threats in such a forum constitutes a rhetorical device, plain and simple, and it is simply a mistake of context to ever construe such a thing as a direct threat or call to action against an individual. It is designed to offset imbalance in authority, so that an individual with no standing to argue is equally visible as an individual with authority. That is, until the exchange terminates, and one side has been refuted.
This discourse is unprecedented, because it is quite rude, and it is free of the strictures of tradtional authority. This is what makes internet discourse invaluable. Any attempt to rid the internet of “trolling” (unlike, say, an attempt to rid the internet of doxxing) would jeopardize the very essence of the new medium, it would transform it into just another platform for government and business, rather than the public open platform for individuals which it has been since its inception.
IT WASN’T JUSTIFIED. Doxxing is never justified. People do wrong things sometimes.
But the person who did it wasn’t even necessarily him, he might have simply been lying, falsely taking credit for doxxing her. He has done that in the past regarding other hacks that he knew no one else would claim.
He also might have done it. I don’t know. It’s not my job to judge him, and might I suggest it is not your job either. Why are we doing it here?
I do worry about net neutrality. I removed that comment ten seconds after I posted it, it was impulsive, and I was stupid. Sorry.
My real name is Ron Maimon. I refuse to live in fear.
No, but I gave my opinion anyway, goyboy.
The censorship threat is there, by conflating the completely online phenomenon of ‘trolling’ with ‘doxing’ and other real world problems.
Freedom on the internet is absolute, because you can’t murder within the confines of the internet.
Free and open internet is more important to me than MY OWN LIFE. I don’t care about how it hurts me. I will gladly risk my life, my health, and my sanity for this principle, and defend less than savory characters against propaganda attacks, even if they think of me as a racial abortion, as he seems to do. The principle is simply too important to allow it to be manipulated by propagandists.
The people here are FORGETTING basic human decency, and substituting a lynch mob mentality for it. They are following propaganda laced political attack against a powerless and politically incompetent man.
The “avalanche of people” does not bother me, as I do not poll people for my morality. But in this case I am not alone, as this article is simply a focal point for people with an agenda to destroy online freedom, and in reality, these people are in the minority.
People know of what importance the internet is, and how important the lack of censorship is. If they don’t, I am reminding them.
I did something called “sleeping”. You should try it too.
I make the same comments face to face, trust me, and I have lost jobs, positions, and prestige from heckling powerful people to their face. It is more important than my material well being to do this, as it is the essence of scientific honesty, and in the past decade scientific honesty has taken a beating.
A kid hustling dime-bags is selling a material that, once it enters the brain. goes out of its way to harm another individuals thoughts, ideas, and ability to earn an income more than any internet spawned fear. Nevertheless I agree with you, neither should be dealt with harshly, both should be a slap on the wrist from the state, and a lawsuit from the victim.
Give it up, dude.
Nobody wants to infringe on your rights, I am trying to protect your rights. Doxxing is reprehensible and psychologically threatening, but ultimately the damage was purely psychological, and can be dealt with by lawsuits and shaming. It is not sufficient reason for censorship measures.
What if they were recited on audio book in a car you were driving? What if they were implanted in her head by a microchip? What if SHE WROTE THEM HERSELF.
Hi, yes, that’s me. I have not been seriously abused, I just understand the purpose of internet rudeness, and I defend it.
5 years is usually the sentence meted out for conspiracy to murder. In this case, the inciting was ineffectual, as it requires that a rapist read and act upon the comment, he didn’t hire somebody to commit the rape, he suggested it on a much more dangerous internet forum than this one.
A 5 year sentence was justified because of the previous pattern of abuse and battery, if this had been an isolated incident, it wouldn’t merit 5 years.
Your comment above is an example of the type of heckling meted out as propaganda against those who hold unpopular opinions. In this case, the opinion isn’t particularly unpopular, so your attempted attack is ineffectual, but the fact that you attempt is revealing. There is nothing wrong with me, dude, there is something seriously wrong with you.
Not when they are online ineffectual nothings. Go jump off a bridge Ryan.
WOISE, WOISE. ACH. PUTZ GOYYIM IS TWOIYING TO TAICHE BUBBE’S INTERNET AWAY.
I understand perfectly well what leads to the charge of “trolling”. This charge is levelled against anyone forcefully defending an unpopular opinion, whether it is correct or incorrect. This activity must be defended to the very end, period.
I am not standing in individual judgement, I don’t make any claims about criminal behavior by anyone.
I don’t like weev all that much. I am defending him because he is incapable of cogently defending himself, and he needs a good defender, because this cause is important to everybody, not just to him.
He looks fine to me, although he looks slightly too Jewish to be a nazi.
This is simply false. The alternative viewpoint the racist trolls produce is the RACIST viewpoint, which a decent person is simply never exposed to in ordinary life, except by seeking it out, which never happens.
By listening and understanding the racist viewpoint, a lot of subtle racism in mass media is exposed, because you learn what racism really sounds like and what the racism really is. There are subtle racist things that were not picked up on in the past, like the “magic negro” or the “soft bigotry of low expectations”, in George W. Bush’s favorite phrase, which were clarified by out an out racists explaining themselves online. These are now regularly identified by the public, and called out for what they are— racism.
The racist comments may be deleted when they are off-topic, there is nothing wrong with that. But they are simply bringing up one particularly unpopular and particularly heinous point of view, and on usenet, you could always get rid of the racists by heckling quicker than they could produce their nonsense.
They are the most important thing on the internet, and they must be protected.
The forum for epileptics is simply a far-fetched excuse for internet censorship. It is pure propaganda.
Trolling can “kill” ideas in the abstract. It can only do so when the ideas are wrong, and deserve to be killed in the abstract. It feels violent to those ideas, of course, but it is not violent towards any persons.
Trolling cannot kill positive things, it has never done this. Trolling against string theory can be countered by two minutes of trolling for string theory. The trolling of the lynch mob sicced on weev here can be cured by a few minutes of trolling against it, as I am trying to demonstrate.
The freedom to speak without censorship of any kind is the important thing to allow truth to emerge. Here, I can’t hardly say s*** or m****f***** without getting the comment “awaiting approval by moderators”.
I disagree, you are lying just as much as Queod Quodington above. These things do not lead to real world violence, just the opposite, they mitigate it, by allowing the powerless to speak out and be heard, and to debate on a level playing field with the powerful. This levelling effect is why the free speech is being attacked, there is no violence associated with fora.
The evidence that he doesn’t have the doxx is simply that the doxx are unavailable. If he posts the MD5 sum, I will verify it with someone who has the copy (I don’t, but I am sure one of the commentators does).
No, the authority of grand-juries and juries is being eroded instead. Clearly they don’t know doodly squat, and one must fight these abuses of the criminal justice system even harder.
Yes, precisely. What the world needs is more respect for obnoxious psychopaths (like me) and it is wrong to villify them. It’s not about fairness, the psychopaths, when they are right factually, are the most important online resource.
This is not a sticky point against weev, it is a sticky point against you and against that mentally defective jury.
Not your business to judge.
The professor isn’t swayed, but his authority is diminished and the truth wins out. For an example, here is an extremely important famous flame-fest from computer science: http://oreilly.com/catalog/…
The authoritative position was “microkernels are superior”. Linus Torvalds’ position is “No, they’re not. Poopyface.” Linus won, because he was right, and because he gave the official position the zero credibility it deserved. Nobody takes microkernels seriously anymore.
It’s true, these things are rare. You only think they are common because you remember them when you see them. The place where they are rarest is on serious discussion forums dedicated to such things, with open access, for example, Wikipedia talk pages in the days when they were uncensored.
I contradicted myself, and I have a corn on my foot. Both are equally relevant.
It fits both of them, actually. The contrast is that weev is completely powerless, he can do nothing except internet blather, and she can do something to him real world.
The truth in the Sierra case is that comment censorship is unacceptable, and she proposed and condoned it, and still does, despite her denials.
The truth in the epileptic forum case is that malicious people can actually induce epileptic siezures using moving gifs.
Both are important to know, even though the method used in both cases was unnecessarily threatening. Ultimately, both threats are easily neutralized and dealt with, while the benefit from disseminating the truth, and allowing it to be disseminated without limitations outweighs other considerations, which have been embellished in this case by effective propaganda.
The scientific community works in exactly this way, you just don’t have enough experience with it. The insults are much more subtle of course, and the threats are to livelihood and professional advancement, not threats of death and rape, but the situation is entirely analogous.
The insults and ridicule are not subtle, they are just mostly in one direction, from the established authoritative idea towards any challenger. The reverse criticism is not tolerated except online, and it is essential to have, as it is the only way to produce new ideas and let them win politically.
The internet most certainly does operate this exact same way in every case where it is uncensored. The only censorship required is to remove off-topic or libelous postings, so to remove doxxing. The censorship meted out for “trolling” is absurd, and it is always counterproductive.
The censorship of online media is a grave threat, a much worse one than weev can ever pose to anyone. Kathy does propose online censorship, her condoning of the practice is exactly what began the hostile confrontation which led to this mess. Her current article is simply more arguments in favor of more censorship, and they must be resisted, resisted more or less like the Roman empire was resisted, by throwing your body to the lions.
I didn’t condone any real world nonsense, but these threats are simply made up as propaganda so as to explain and justify censorship, they are not real threats.
I am not a weev minion. I never heard about him, except through this article. I came here through a link on facebook and I read it because of the implied threat of internet censorship it contained. I don’t give a rat’s ass about weev, except to the extent that he is being prosecuted unfairly.
Yes, and precisely at stake is the ability of you to shut him up. You must not be given this authority, so that he is as free to express his opinion as you. His opinion is not particularly enlightened, but yours is worse.
Nobody is trying to dehumanize her, just to put her complaint in perspective, to ask her to seek redress through tort, not through a one-sided smearing of a fellow caught up in the criminal justice system, and to lay off attacking freedom of speech on the internet.
Nobody likes doxxing.
Those “white hat” doxxings, as you call them, are just as threatening, and they were what seem to have led to the doxxing here, as retaliation. It is simply never acceptable to spill internet nonsense into threats of real-world violence. The separation is sacrosanct.
These things are desperate compilation of extremely rare abberations in order to make the internet seem dangerous. It is the opposite. It is bringing an end to the violent suppression of ideas.
It’s not quite symmetrical, as they have unequal power. He made her psychologically uneasy, she campaigned to put him in jail.
Yes, except nowadays they come for the nazis first.
Just substitute quantity for quality. You are right, and if you post the same message in different phrasing 100 times, you will get read. It will take ~ 2 hours, not too long to invest.
You’re right that I don’t care. I don’t care about anything you say. The stuff a crazy woman did is of no importance, she posed no credible threat, and her activity is not of any danger. What is dangerous is the call for internet censorship, it must be resisted, without facts, simply by repeatedly confronting it head on, with no regard for the loss of credibility or bad association one endures.
This internet still exists, you just have to look outside the mainstream. I am active on physicsoverflow, for example, which makes effort to maintain the original spirit. You can do the same.
What I said is exactly how you get on top in a corporate heirarchy. You need to become a high class twit, and also find a low class techie to mooch ideas off of. This is why the corporate successes are most often partnerships of businessman/idea person with clear separation of roles.
It’s not one major example, it’s the universal pattern. It’s what happens in the real world all the time.
Sorry scratch that— threats made to kathy don’t matter, but threats made to weev do, because he’s good-good and she’s bad-bad.
It doesn’t come from “the government”, it comes from power. Government power is not the only power in the world, there is also the power of wealthy people to hire folks to do propaganda.
I also got kicked off of Wikipedia, and Stackexchange. It’s important to do this, it is what the internet is for.
I would be scared too, of course. It’s not right. But the level of threat is not the same as death threats, or following, or any real world threatening activity. This stuff is deadly serious, and the internet stuff is a psychological war of attrition.
I don’t condone doxxing at all. I am simply separating the threat and countering the propaganda that equates this behavior with attempted rape and murder. It’s bad, but it’s not as bad as that.
Because of the benefit to the world ultimately must outweigh personal considerations. But the bar is high.
It may be sickening, I don’t care. I should continue until you snap out of the delusion.
The threats were largely imaginary, they didn’t really exist as credible imminent threats, as they do when an abusive husband threatens his wife. Doxxing can carry a short prison term, I don’t think that is wrong, although this is not what is being discussed here. The doxxing is simply a focus for the propaganda for internet censorship, and the villifying of those who make harsh comments online.
The psychological pain that the doxxing caused is real, but here it is used as simple propaganda. The threat was nearly entirely psychological and imaginary. There were no direct real-world threats, only the indirect implied threat that those online harrassers would somehow get motivated to use the doxx to seek out and commit violent crimes against a person they don’t personally know living hundreds or thousands of miles away. While there are a handful of such mentally disturbed individuals, you can usually count them on the fingers of one hand.
This threat is not entirely without cause, it is a real threat, but it is not of the same calibre as a threat from someone you have a real-world interaction with, as there is simply no reasonable expectation that there is any motive or ability here to commit any violent crime. The threats in the real world are simply much more serious than this.
The context of this discussion is to mount a propaganda war against a politically unpopular powerless hacker with extremely offensive views. I don’t like this context.
The other context of this discussion is that internet discussions are problematic because they are dominated by trolls. I vehemently disagree with this, because it is the long trolling which is the only useful thing in the internet discussions. The trolls are challenging the authority of experts, they are challenging the powerful dogmas at the basis of our knowledge/ structure, and one must confront each such challenge so that progress can happen, and wrong dogmas jettisonned.
Mark Twain used to say “What gets us in trouble isn’t the things we don’t know, but the things we know that just ain’t so”. A troll is someone who is trying to tell you that a thing you know just ain’t so. He might be wrong, in which case you can demonstrate it, but rarely, this troll is right, and then you have had a breakthrough.
These breakthroughs simply require uncensored no-holds-barred debate, as you see in the Tannenbaum Torvalds debate, or in the physics literature disputes regarding string theory. There is no substitute for this power-challenging attacks, they are the only mechanism to dismantle the authority from an idea.
If the idea is correct, it will withstand the challenge, and regrow it’s authority quickly. It is for the cases where the idea is incorrect that the freedom must be preserved.
Weev is a powerless fellow using dirty methods to win propaganda wars at any cost, including psychologically disturbing borderline criminal activity. This is not necessary, it is counterproductive. All you need to do is tell the truth bluntly, and seek no compromise. But his example is used to chill speech in general, and this one cannot abide.
The imminent threat is right there in this article. Trolling is a human right.
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It’s damage, sure, I know. No disagreement there.
yeah, yeah. You haven’t seen good new science content removed as “stupidity that wastes everybody’s time”, and defence of this new science removed as “idle threats”. You simply have no idea what you are talking about, jackass.
I am a provocative sociopath too, and I don’t think anyone deserves doxxing.
MLK was successful because there were others more radical than him behind him, ready and threatening to take up arms.
I don’t fear either of them.
I am also Israei, I wasn’t clapping on that day, I was worried about US government repression.
Tee hee.
What privilege? I have no privilege. I just troll and do science, trolling is an underclass thing. So is science, at least the heavy technical parts.
Please do. You have been beaten. It is useless to resist.
The point is that NO TROLLING CAN’T easily turn into those other things, it hardly ever turns into those other things, you have to dig and dig and pretend and exaggerate in order to make it seem so. It is simply PROPAGANDA to pretend it can. The examples cited are extremely unusual, even so they are not comparatively damaging compared to real world events, and they are simply being spun and used as a pretext to get less educated people to try to restrict others freedom to write hostile material.
I write hostile material, and it is an essential and important thing to do. It is the only way we have to prevent a new Aristotlism, criminal government actions, or the mental damage of dogma.
Weev’s exploit was nothing like Kuban’s, it only psychologically seemed that way to the victim, and she is making it psychologically seem that way to you, using effective emotional writing, aka propaganda. His actions were wrong, but they were far less dangerous than Kubans, and there is a propaganda team of nitwits here trying to make it seem different by repetition and mutual masturbation.
But this is ultimately ineffectual, because a person who is telling the truth with a few hours to spare can counteract the propaganda by simply standing firmly against it. That person is invariably labelled a troll, I am trying to be that person, and the first and most important freedom, the freedom to mount this challenge, is what you are trying to take away.
I think “over my dead body” is not an understatement in this case.
Sure. There are lots of dogmas in the world, for example
1. 9/11 was done by 19 muslims, not by the coordinator of the military drills of that day.
2. Petroleum is made from ancient marine plants, not from chemistry in the high-pressure environment of the mantle.
3. Large classical black holes are purely one-way, and the Cauchy horizon evolves to a spacelike singularity under perturbations.
4. Cold fusion is a phony phenomenon
5. Self-modifying computer code is a bad practice
6. Bourgeoise power structures are necessary and justified so as to produce progress.
The only way to challenge to these dogmas is by a discourse which is open and free, and open to anyone. The internet provides this. On previous media, powerful gatekeepers stopped you from hard criticism, and any new idea needed to fight in obscurity for decades to overcome this political authority barrier.
Hard criticism with insults and ridicule overcomes the authority barrier immediately. But the hard criticism is extremely damaging to abstract power, and leads groups of powerful people to accuse you of trolling, no matter what the truth is. This is not an abstract rarefied concern, the accusations of trolling occur when a person who has no power challenges an established authority.
This is what happened in this case too. The person writing this article is an authority in her field, the challenge came from a powerless young man seriously lacking in real-world social skills, but strong with the internet skills. Using an unusual psychologically intimidating tactic, a tactic which is simply not acceptable (but applied regularly toward the powerless anyway), he intimidated an authority into backing down online.
This was both highly unethical and counterproductive, but it ultimately did not amount to a credible imminent danger to the author, although it felt like that to her, and she is making it feel that way to you.
The article is a propaganda piece with a goal of producing internet restrictions on speech. This cannot be abided, as the internet is valuable precisely because it allows challenge to authority. You may not like it when that challenge comes from a person you disagree with who holds obnoxious discredited views, but this challenge is what is most important to preserve. An accepted truth does not need additional external political defense, it can defend itself very well, it is established. It is the new truths, the currently unpopular truths, that require defense. To defend them requires a strong defense of those who are putting out unpopular untruths. The method of sorting out true from false is a long debate, and trolling is the component that levels out the authority playing field, so that the debate is over the objective evidence, and not over the politics.
Trolling is the defense of new or marginalized ideas against the authority of those who oppose them. It is the mechanism by which new ideas politically flex their muscles. It does not imply any real-world threat, any such real-world association is imaginary in all but a handful of extremely pathological cases, although it does involve a real psychological attack, in that it is attacking world-views which are dominant or popular.
One must preserve the right to troll, as it is simply the right to remove authority from those who have power. The propaganda against trolling always comes from established voices with good social skills and a high position, because in order to get to an established high position one must forsake hard outsider positions. This is a serious obstacle to the progress of humanity, it must be resisted.
Authority is what Galileo was fighting against when he trolled the Aristotelians in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World. Trolling is what Linus Torvalds did to Andrew Tannenbaum in the Operating Systems Microkernel debate, the famous Tannenbaum Torvalds debate of 1992. It is what everyone who has a new idea must do to reconfigure authority structures, and preventing it is a serious offense against the internet’s very structure.
If you aren’t trolling in defense of a marginalized position you agree with, what the heck is the purpose of your online activity? Supporting the status quo? You don’t need to do support it, it’s already the status quo. The internet is for debate over marginalized opinions.
WHOA, WHOA, …. not sane anymore ! I just lost it. You guys are right. These crap people are not worth explaining this shit to.
Your personal story is emotional, and while it might serve a cathartic purpose for you in dealing with a criminal threat, it also serves a propaganda purpose here, in tugging at the heartstrings of the reader to support internet censorship.
If you are telling the truth, I’m sorry for your experience, and I hope you take it to the proper place which is the criminal justice system, not here. If you are lying, I am sorry you exist. In either case, there is no relation between this criminal stalking and what is discussed in the article, which is online speech.
I don’t think you understand: this case consists of one very small man against a very big lady.
Because his ass tastes like strawberry wine to me.
The insults is a result of conservative hostility toward feminism. Feminism is a form of Marxism subversion of power structures, and there are powerful opponents for this reason. I have seen feminism defended viciously and cogently, it is not so hard to do “The SCUM Manifesto” was probably the first real troll ever written, I consider this one of the best models for what trolling can and should be, and it was written in support of feminism by a woman.
Since defending feminism is basically defending Karl Marx himself, Feminism is the pinnacle of Marxist thought really, as the power structures touch on our very biology, the same power structures that oppose hackers coalesce around feminists. The attacks are stupid lame insults, and overcoming them is trivial. You simply have to challenge male authority more crassly than the anti-feminist trolls. They simply cannot win on a level playing field, as they are using social authority as a crutch, and trolling sweeps that crutch right out from under them.
Valerie Solenas showed how to do it by example:
“You would swim through a river of snot, wade through a puddle of diarrhea just to get a chance to screw” “You are an incomplete female, a walking abortion”, etc. This is how you remove male authority, it is no different from any other authority, although it seems more menacing for obsolete biological reasons.
The online hostility is more difficult for those who are more empathetic, this is true, but it is not a serious problem, as a few anti-empathy exercizes can easily cure this. There are fine female trolls, some of the best, and the defenses of feminism are ultimately easy, because the feminists are telling the truth.
I have explained to you that under that definition I am a world class psychopath, and I believe you are ethically required to be one too, at the very least online, where it is a requirement.
It’s not false advertizing— this was one of the most offensive posts in academically important writing, and it would be thrown out in any forum which disallowed trolling. This is what is really being threatened by linking trolling with violence.
You simply don’t know how many powerful people staked their reputation on microkernels, and how offensive and troll-like Linus Torvalds seemed. He sounded like an out and out bitter young man with a complete lack understanding of computer science. This was only belied by the fact that he was objectively right, and he had just written the working and obviously revolutionary Linux kernel.
He maintains this honesty, you can google ‘nVidia fuck you’, it is essential. Another such righteous asshole is Lubos Motl. They used to come from the left (like me), but now they come more from the right, I don’t care where they come from, I support them either way. I suppose the conservatives are trying to conserve the internet heritage from the 90s, when it was radical.
If you would like a more foul-mouthed example, this is the best: http://www.womynkind.org/sc… . It might have been the first real modern troll in history.
Threatening violence online is not ok at all, but it is not really seriously threatening either, and it is stupid and counterproductive. It naturally dies on its own eventually, people stop doing it, because all it does is hurt your own cause. It doesn’t do anything except make you look bad and get you ignored.
The reason it happens is because the internet is extremely violent to ideas, it can topple a long held dogma very quickly. The measures against offensive speech are used to protect powerful positions against dismissive ridiculing attack, and this is something that is necessary. Sometimes that means you need to speak out in defense of people who crossed that line to some real world harassment, because if you don’t, that line will gradually move to the point where all criticism is squelched.
Online threats don’t spill over to the real world except in extraordinarily unusual cases, and this is not one of those cases. It doesn’t need special legal protection or any meddling by the state. This is just the response of people who hear a completely uncensored discussion for the first time, and become freaked out, and think ‘oh no, you can’t say THAT, can you?’ Yes you can, and this freedom is what makes the internet different from your TV.
Actually, the real problem is that you aren’t one of these guys.
I have to come clean, I posted the doxx. Weev was lying to protect me. He and I had been lovers for a while, then one night he told me about her, and I got jealous, So one night, when I was drunk and stoned, I snuck over to his computer and put up the doxx. I regretted it immediately. As I sobbed on the bed, he held me close, stroked the tears off my cheek, and he said he would make it all ok.
He claimed credit to deflect attention, and then to protect our secret, he joined a neo-nazi organization, so that nobody would suspect our relationship. It was a brilliant move. Of course, we could never be seen together after that. I moved away, to avoid the temptation. He never calls or writes. It was very hard for him to get that tattoo, but he did it anyway, that’s how much he loves me.
People say all sorts of shit online, for rhetorical purposes. For example “I have the doxx right in front of me” (just a few comments above) or “weev is a POS” (everywhere), etc. You can’t take online boasting seriously.
I have never seen a shouting match which ended with a lying position winning out, it simply removes authority from all sides, and then, in the mud, the truth gradually emerges, and then everyone goes home tired and more enlightened.
Einstein was sent worse, he was threatened with death, thugs went through his home, and he could not return to Germany. This was a direct result of his science. His university appointed an anti-Einstein director who openly supported the Nazi purges to get rid of the anti-German influence of Jewish positivists and their German counterparts, like Mach and Heisenberg. This is probably the most vicious attack on an intellectual. He was also mocked and torn apart in publications, including the famous classic “100 against Einstein” from the 1920s, perhaps you’ve read it.
The scientific community operates with insult, ridicule, and debate. The objective verification is the central tool that ensures that the right kind of heckling wins out eventually
I meant your story is emotionally manipulative, not that you are particularly emotional. I don’t think you are very emotional, you might be a cold-blooded realist posting heart-rending personal stories of persecution to make deliberate propaganda.
I call for no solution to this problem, as I don’t see a problem in her case. I see an invented problem. In your case, there might be a problem, but it is not the same problem, and it might be a made up problem.
On the off chance that you seriously are a journalist telling the truth, you should think a little about what makes online discussions more radical than journalism in the New York TImes. You should consider that the New York Times published out and out propaganda on yellowcake, WMDs, not to mention the granddaddy of lies, the mentally retarded 9/11 official story.
Why did these lies have such a hard time online, when in the media they were dominant? It’s because of trolls continuously attacking them without granting them authority, by mocking. This is scary to established power, so they always try to shut it up. It must not be shut up, it must be done doubly hard.
This is the real problem, and trolling is the solution. The solution to trolling is more trolling, and even more, until the entire corrupt edifices of modern journalism is replaced by something which cusses a whole lot more, and cares a whole lot more about accuracy.
I didn’t bother reading it. I accept that she is likely genuine now. Sorry about being suspicious, but you must understand, people have been lying in this thread, for example, a fellow below who pretended to be a lawyer in possession of the doxx (he isn’t). Trolling is the way to get at truth quickly, and I got at the truth— you aren’t making stuff up.
But you are still barking up the wrong tree. Trolling is important, and stalking is a crime, and the two are completely opposite modes of behavior.
The examples I give are what people really do. The examples in the article are made up exaggerated threats to chill them from doing that.
I have been kicked out Wikipedia, Stackexchange, and Quora, and there is only one or two blogs or discussion places where I have not been blocked. The discussion here is a typical amount of rudeness from me. The real issue is forcefully holding a position, never backing down. In the case of Quora, it was in challenging a personal sob-story directly, to make sure it was honest, and to remove it’s propaganda power so that the events of the Boston Bombing can be evaluated with neutrality. All of these are trolling in the broad sense, and this is what is really under attack here, with weev as a poster boy for why “something needs to be done about this”.
No, no, you little mental-head, this is simply not true. Kuban was posting in a place for sex solicitation, with the intent of producing either an attack or a serious risk of atttack. Our buddy weev was possibly posting harassing nonsense together with not-so-sensitive publically available information, in an attempt to scare somebody into going away. Both are bad, but one is a teeny weeny bit worse, doncha think?
The “death threats” were nothing to do with weev, they were people talking trash to her on the thread, because of her support of censorship, with no actual threat of violence, as follows: Raven, you should be humped by a chimp and crushed by an elephant. Your remains should be scattered in the ocean, and feed the algae, which would be a step-up, evolutionarily speaking.
Threats of rape and murder. You are free to sic the world on me now.
The impression you got from reading her piece was different, but this is what was going on.
In any case, this is a pointless conversation, as you are a bit too limited to understand what is going on here. Online, the real concern is the shutting up of suppressed voices, and the silencing of actual forceful dissent.
I suggest you go breed with yourself.
This is false. Openness means openness, and everyone is free to join. If they feel bullied, that’s not something that one should be concerned about unduly, just point out that this is a natural feeling for everyone.
The internet does produce a much more abrasive discussion than is normal in day-to-day life, but this is also a much more effective discussion in terms of information content, and it is much more accurate when it is left alone. If it is made polite, then horrible and offensive lies are produced, and lynch mobs (such as this one) can operate with impunity. The trolls are the immune system of the internet, and if you have the immune system ganging up on you, then you need to fight back or give up, according to whether they are right or you are right.
The people who harrass online simply do not have any real-world power. This is a fact. They have no power online either, in the case where they are factually wrong.
When they get attention, it is because their writing makes effective propaganda. Anyone can do it, it just takes a reasonably strong self-image, some actual effort to learn how to do propaganda, and a study of insults and a quickly developed thick skin for them. The thick skin is important, as it allows you to venture into new intellectual territory without fear, and without the worry that you’ll get lost and never return to sanity.
A black man can go to a KKK site, and they lose their intimidation factor. A Jewish fellow can find out what neo nazis are into, and learn a bit about Odin and Thor. The Odin and Thor business, is important folklore, not deemed worth preserving, because both in racist thinking and in anti-racist thinking “whiteness” is not an ethnicity. When you get over past oppression, European culture is a real ethnicity, like any other, and Odin and Thor are important.
There is a level playing field, and it is simply false that the insults are more intimidating to the powerless. They are most intimidating to the powerful, as the constant cogent heckling criticism of the mainstream press by the alternative press online, a heckling which is now winning, is the subtext in any such discussion.
In prison, a swastika tattoo is actually politically helpful, as it allows you to join the racial white gang. This is one of the terrible things about American prisons.
The tattoo is a swastika with pictures of various images from European folklore. I find it oddly interesting, because it focuses on European heritage rather than racial violence, and his racist rants just didn’t manage to offend me, as the attacks were always against those he percieved as powerful, not against the powerless. Nazis generally pick on homeless people for racist attacks, not on the lawyers for the prosecution. His method is strange. But it’s not my job to judge his politics, and neither is it yours.
Whatever you say. I oppose prison for weev because she didn’t press charges, and he’s already been in prison for absolutely nothing for a long time. If someone passed an anti-doxxing law, I wouldn’t be so adamently against it, but I think current law is sufficient to deal with it. Just sue.
I know she felt threatened, I am not disputing it was a bad thing to do. I am disputing that it has anything to do with trolling, or that weev should be publically harassed over this any more than he already has been.
Nobody is risking their life here. You have to get your head out of your ass to see this.
What you are risking is an open internet discussion, where all are free to participate without restrictions.
Sorry to you bub, it’s internet times, and you can’t stop the freedom.
1. I do understand the difference between arguing and harassing. Trolling is arguing and Doxxing is harassing. It is the author of this article that conflates the two activities, not me.
2. I indeed do refuse to admit that personal attacks have no place. Personal attacks are essential for exactly one special all-important purpose: Direct personal attacks are the only method which may be effectively used to remove authority from a position.
Authority is not symmetric. If I come to you with a new idea, for example, that black holes emit matter nothermally (sorry to pick the same stuff every time, but it’s not like I have a hundred new ideas), every article you read, every credentialed expert you consult, will tell you that this is false. But suppose it is not false (it is probably true), then it is not a wrong idea, it is just a new idea. How do you argue for such an idea online? You will be heckled authoritatively by experts, you will be made to look silly, and ignorant people will oppose you with ridicule, ridicule which will not be called “trolling” because you will be seen as an idiot.
The way to make people stop looking at you and at the experts, and look at the evidence, is by direct personal insults. The goal is to remove authority from the authorities, as momentarily happens when they are insulted. You have to say “those authorities are bozos, they have no evidence for this”, and then the person will listen to you for a little bit. Then you present the evidence, and let the chips fall where they may. If you are right, you have made progress. If the authorities are right, no harm done.
But this simply cannot happen without the direct challenge to authority. This is Galileo’s lesson.
I should point out that authority is sometimes used by someone who MISINTERPRETS what the authority is saying, and then some heckling quickly corrects the misperception. The correction simply does not happen without the ridicule. This is the purpose of ridicule, it is why it exists.
3. The targets of trolling are ALWAYS those in a position of authority, or those who are arguing in their name online. People who are challenging authority are heckled, but this heckling is simply never called trolling. It is called “removing crap”, “cleaning up nonsense”, or “laughing at the yahoos”. It is simply natural for the powerful position to mock, you don’t even notice it when you agree with the position.
4. I don’t insist on the separation. Libel laws and lawsuits are perfectly fine to use for online harassment. I dispute that trolling constitutes any kind of harassment, simply because it doesn’t.
5. Yes, incitement to violence is a serious crime, but that is not what was going on here. What was going on here was an intimidation using apparent incitement. She was not in any significant real danger. It was still unethical, it could still be grounds for a lawsuit, but this is not the issue we are talking about. The real harrassment of doxxing is being purposefully conflated with trolling. Trolling is essential. Doxxing is a no-no.
6. I am not only a TROLL SUPPORTER, I am an OUT AND OUT TROLL, and I insist you be one too.
No, the author is extending the term “troll” to include cyberstalking.
That’s just the psyche. The psyche isn’t negligible. But it isn’t RAPE or MURDER nor is it a credible threat of RAPE or MURDER.
No one should make fake threats, it is reprehensible. But the person making fake threats should also not be conflated with the person making real ones who is doing something much much worse.
He is the solution.
I am not condoning violence, I am trying to say that online censorship is not needed, and trolling is good.
Doxxing is stupid, counterproductive, and immoral, precisely because it does feel like a personal real-world threat. But it is not as bad as a real real world threat, as those are really, really dangerous.
Yes, your sister had it worse than the author of this article. She was stalked in the real world, not trolled online.
The biggest clue was that if he had actually followed her, stalked her, or threatened her, she would have SAID SO in the article, instead of going on a long rambling diatribe about internet trolls. What is not said is as important as what is said.
Actually, to tell the truth, I was just guessing. I don’t know anything about this. So I asked myself “what could have possibly happened to lead to this situation”. And then I made assumptions, and stuck with them. This is how trolls behave.
I’m not defending him for posting online info. You are absolutely right, it crossed the line to real-world, it was wrong, it was unethical, it was completely unjustifiable. I agree, I never wavered.
What it was NOT is attempted rape or attempted murder. It just was what it was, an unethical thing which is BAD. NOT AS BAD as rape, murder, credible threat of murder, or credible threat of rape. Just bad in a different, lesser, but still bad, way.
But this has nothing to do with trolling, which is what is being attacked in the article. Trolling is GOOD.
Civility equals complicity.
Weev’s actions DID NOT result in a single death threat. The “death threats” were internet nonsense that were separate and independent from the doxxing, and were ongoing before, in the flame war which predated the doxxing. You are being misled by the purposefully vague propagandistic phrasing in the article.
The comparison of place and wording is for you to judge. There is a world of difference here, you just can’t see it. In Kuban’s case, something could happen, in weev’s case, realistically speaking, nothing could happen.
The thing he used to scare her away is PARANOID FEAR of the internet spilling into the real world, a fear everyone knows, and one which is nearly universally unjustified.
That doesn’t make it right, but it isn’t the same as Kuban, not by a long shot.
Yeah, yeah. That’s what the article was implanting in your head. That’s not what happened at all. There was a heated flame war, and a kid made a lady leave by posting her home address, and she got scared.
It’s not right, but it’s not a credible threat of rape or murder either. It just is what it is. It also has absolutely nothing to do with internet trolling, which is something extremely good that everyone should do.
Yes I am, I was one of the early ones. Also, by trolling here, I am demonstrating why trolls are necessary. We are needed to deflate powerful gasbags and remove authority from discussions.
What that MEANS is that somebody kept sending her private messages, in a way that was real-world significant, not that she felt insulted by trolls in a forum. It’s real-world to a certain extent, if it is email, or instant messaging, or something ostensibly private.
It was only inciting in the mind of the internet unsavvy victim, not in the mind of anyone else, not in weev’s mind, nor in any of the folks who were “threatening” her. It was simply not a real incitement, just a psychological ploy.
That doesn’t make it right, mind you, just not the same level as attempted rape or murder, or real-world incitement for those, or internet incitement of those with credible threat. It was just empty posturing which was truly scary.
I don’t know, she is just the same as anyone else, she can post her nonsense. She wasn’t killed by trolling, she was temporarily silenced by doxxing. This is why doxxing is wrong. It just isn’t the same kind of wrong as threatening murder or rape, it’s a second-degree kind of evil.
You bring up really important points.
The censorship I am talking about it real, but it can only be seen when you have a new correct idea that sounds stupid! Unfortunately, it’s not like I’m an oracle and can give you countless examples of this, but I can tell you an easy one where you can review the evidence quickly and come to be certain that it is simultaneously certainly correct and completely dismissed— abiogenic petroleum origin. If you try to introduce this idea in geological circles, you are simply heckled into silence, but I assure you that it is correct, and you don’t have to take my word for it, it was dogma in the USSR past 1968, after a grueling nearly 20 year debate. The Soviets actually openly debated this (unfortunately in Russian), and came to the right conclusion, and the West just sticks with the dogma. You can review the chemistry evidence in a few days, there is also Gold’s book “The Deep Hot Biosphere” which explains this.
This thesis simply can’t be debated in the literature. But online, of course, no one can stop you. So it should be easy to explain to people online, right? But the fact is that if you wish to debate this online, and you want to not be quickly made to look like an idiot, you have to forcefully attack the opposing viewpoint, because you will immediately be flooded with ignorant counter-information, most of which is misinformed misreadings of the literature. For instance, people will explain that kerogen is routinely broken into petroleum today. This is not true, as the thing that is broken into petroleum is shale-oil, which is only called “kerogen” by convention with the biogenic theory. In the abiogenic theory, this is not kerogen at all, but hydrogenated ultra-heavy petroleum, actual kerogen has nitrogen in it, which betrays its biological origin (and also oxygen, of course, which is absent in petroleum). Similarly, you will hear that the isotope ratios are consistent with biology (they aren’t, they are consistent with small pore migration), that there are biomarkers (these are bacterial residues from archaea), that there are fossils in coal (the fossils were there before the rock turned to coal), that the He has an explanation (it doesn’t, as the He concentrations can range to 1000 times the surrounding rocks), that the chemical path to petroleum is understood (a lie only said by ignorant people), and so on, a whole bunch of nonsense, but all of it is backed up with the pseudo authority of misunderstood references and opinions of big shots.
Because this is a disputed topic where all the (Western) experts are demonstrably wrong, it is impossible for anyone with the correct scientific hypothesis to get heard using any standard accepted method of debate. The best way to get heard in this circumstance is to simultaneously rebut the arguments, and present the case disrespectfully, so that the authority of the experts is diminished with each rebuttal. Then once you rebut all the points, you are done, you win. The insults serve to remove the authority from the experts, so that the only authority that remains is that which is supported by factual evidence. This is unfortunately the only effective way to debate an ossified point where all authorities are wrong. It is codified as a rule of physics discourse.
At the start of this process, you look like the most unconstructive of idiots, and a complete troll (you are). But this is what happens when you have an unpopular idea, you always look like an idiot, whether it is correct or incorrect. This is the “Galileo problem”, and it is fixed with trolling. Galileo also fixed it with a form of trolling, Simplicio is mocking the Aristotelians. At the end, you simply look like you were right, and your victory was inevitable. But it was not at all inevitable, you don’t get anywhere without trolling.
Anyway, what “trolling” means in an internet context is a stream of personal insults directed at an individual which hurts their feelings. It is mockery which removes or denies authority to an individual. An example would be “You mental reject, of course the biomarkers in petroleum come from underground archaea”. This type of discourse is forbidden in professional journals, at least when the other side is powerful. It is tacitly accepted in chit-chat and in referee reports when the other side is powerless (“Yeah, you know, he’s one of them abiogenic yahoos”, “Those guys are crazy”, “They don’t have a leg to stand on”, etc). Online, trolling quickly levels the playing field, allowing the ideas to battle on equal footing. Then the correct idea quickly wins, and you’re back to normal.
The article makes the subversive authority denying practice of trolling look like a form of personal harrassment, by focusing on actual harrassment, and ridiculously linking it “trolling”.
People can moderate, sure, but it is best if this is minimal, and self-correcting. I am active on a site called “physicsoverflow”, and the way that physicsoverflow deals with it is “spam is deleted, irrelevant stuff is deleted, and anything with physics content is preserved, although if it is off the wall, it is moved to chat” This model might work in greater generality.
Of course it crossed A line, just not the same line that you think it crossed.
He didn’t do anything regarding her children, that’s another false inference painted in your head. She said “this happens” not “this happened to me”. Why??
I wonder I wonder.
Maybe because it DIDN’T HAPPEN TO HER. What happened to her was a flame-fest because of her MENTALLY CHALLENGED POSITION regarding internet censorship, followed by a doxxing.
Doxxing is not 100% safe, but the risk is INFINITESIMAL compared to any real threat. The article compares it to incitement to murder or invitation to rape. The article is mentally retarded propaganda, it might as well have been written in crap on toilet paper in an asylum.
The level of danger was essentially tiny,, and the connection to the practice of “trolling” is nonexistent. I am merely pointing this out to do counterpropaganda, but I don’t know why I waste my time on anyone who would fall for this drivel.
I don’t know him, and I think the doxxing is not ok. I am downgrading the threat because it was an internet flame war, and this is simply not a plausible pretext for violence.
I think I am very interesting! When I read my stuff, it sounds fresh as a daisy to my ears.
These radicals were taken down by violence, but this required such a massive surveillance system (MKULTRA) that it brought down the last president who supported racial policy. But Panthers were killed while they slept in their beds.
OF COURSE IT’S MY FAULT!! I expect it to happen, this is the DEFAULT EXPECTED REACTION to forcefully advocating an unpopular true position. YOU WILL GET KICKED OUT. It is just what happens when you have a troll-police harassing trolls.
It is also YOUR DUTY, asshat. to do this online. So if you aren’t trolling, you should be ashamed.
This is not Marxism you are describing. Marxism is compatible with objective truth, the word “Marxism” I am using in the broad sense of identifying power structures in society to subvert, not in the sense of a command economy, which I do not support.
I’m not bitter, I know that trolls always win eventually, so I am fine. I am trying to protect the trolling process as widely as possible, so that the time-lag is shorter, that’s all.
It can be shrugged, because she is misreporting what happened, and you are twisting his words maliciously in a context far removed. He made her afraid for her life, but that was mostly her stupidity, his actions carried an extraordinarily miniscule amount of real world danger per unit fear.
There was NO CREDIBLE THREAT OF RAPE OR MURDER except in her PARANOID HEAD, and in the head of the mindless people who take this article seriously.
This man made no rape threats. The real victims here are Stanford and Binet.
I CAN’T FOLLOW MY DICK, BECAUSE IT IS STUCK ON.
I know everything.
There were no threats, just a painter painting a picture in your head to make you think so.
“She explicitly and categorically rejects censoring of online discussions” that’s a good one. This lady is the QUEEN OF CENSORSHIP, and she’s lying about that too..
Yo, Almoron, Al-Qaeda is a CIA invention, you retarded fool. Box boy is a genius, pus boy.
The incendiaries did something called MELTING the metal, over quite a while, many minutes, weakening the core uniformly and progressively. Then the building just collapsed on its own, or not, who cares, you’re still stupid.
I might get such a tattoo now too, following his example.
I want to pardon him, because he isn’t guilty of anything. It’s just a mentally defective woman with her mentally defective crowd of high class twits.
If you think it is inconsistent, you have a broken head.
I don’t need any more proof than she does, but look around in the comments here. It is also obvious from her lying malicious slanderous post.
You poor dimwitted fool.
You tell the difference by means and motive. That a particular person is too stupid to know that a flamewar is not a motive, and an address is not means is not my problem, but hers.
I didn’t claim it was rigorous, I claimed I was right. I was pulling it out of my ass, I admit, but I was right, because I have an experienced ass.
This is bullcrap inciting, it carried no real threat. It shouldn’t have happened, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, and it bears no comparison with real world threats. Sorry, your perception is just being twisted around by a person with an agenda to silence internet discourse.
I am not happy with this at all. Requiring civility is simply a sell-out, and a complete perversion of what the internet is. Being uncivil is not a crime, it is a sacrament, and the conflating of incivility with crimes is the central problem with discussions of internet behavior.
The rudeness on the internet is a feature, it is not a bug. It is the only feature that makes it worthwhile. Before the internet, only professional physicists were this rude to each other in discussion.
It’s the most important thing you can do online.
I do whatever I damn well please, just to make it clear that NO you are not right, and NO you do not have unity, and NO you cannot persuade. I only seem to contradict myself to the mentally retarded. I know what I think, and I’m honest.
I have changed my mind in the course of this conversation. I went from thinking defending weev is a necessary evil in order to protect the internet, to actively liking him, and realizing he really is the best troll who ever lived.
I trust men with swastikas on their chests are not trying to win a popularity contest.
I don’t expect online private places to be completely uncensored, because there is spam and crazy illegible stuff, as well as the need to keep discussions on topic. These are the legitimate reasons to delete comments.
The illegitemate reasons are for denying someone authority, and this is includes abrasive behavior. Without the authority removing heckling, you don’t get anywhere close to the truth, instead it’s all feel-good stories that reinforce the community’s recieved wisdom.
I don’t care about private businesses which restrict speech, I just ignore them. There are places which still do not restrict it,
Hi Guest dude. “Sheldon Cooper” is an (offensive) caricature of me and all other physicists. If I had to guess, I would guess the model for Sheldon was either Lubos Motl or the physicist character in Woody Allen’s movie with that bald Seinfeld creator. Unlike Sheldon, Allen’s character is not a caricature.
Sheldon Cooper is out and out mockery by the bourgeoise media of the honest no-nonsense physicist discourse, which is extremely rude and direct, by linking it to psychopathology. For the same essential reason, this article is trying to link trolling to psychopathology. “Trolling” is simply physics culture exported to the rest of the world, it’s what good physicists have been doing to each other since at least the 1920s, and it’s how the field stays honest and makes progress.
They don’t have any mental disorders or autism. Although I know it’s hard to believe, physicists behave that way ON PURPOSE, to make sure that bullshit doesn’t take over their field. It’s also kind of Soviet, as in the Soviet Union, bourgeoise phoniness was not necessary (you needed other kinds of phoniness), and direct challenge of authority (not government authority, your boss’s authority) was common.
Negative peer review is another form of trolling, except hidden away so that you never see it. I don’t like private peer review, I prefer public peer review, because private peer review leads to something like this getting rejected: http://www.physicsoverflow…. (it was rejected), and something like this getting accepted: http://www.physicsoverflow…. (nonsense that cited the right people). The fix is public peer review, where these mistakes are automatically corrected. That’s what the internet is for.
The reason one needs firm protection for what people identify as abusive behavior is because there are cases where one is NOT wrong, and yet people persist in thinking that one is, because of a cloud of authority. A few well placed insults removes all authority, and then after the insults start to fly, both sides present their case, and the objective truth becomes obvious to everyone.
Without the insults, there is no particular reason for truth to win, only authority matters. With insults, it can’t help but win, because only accuracy matters. That’s the lesson physicists learned, and it’s why we ran circles around all the other academic fields and still do.
He’s trolling, he’s been trolling the whole discussion. It’s hopeless to explain why trolling is required to people who know nothing about trolling. The only thing you can do is just to keep on trolling, and hope they get it.
Why is it hard to explain trolling? Because people just don’t usually see the authority structures that trolls are subverting by direct rude opposition, as these authority structures are invisible until you either have a old bad idea or a good new idea, at either of which points you feel them harshly pushing back at you.
If all you’ve had are bad old ideas, the pushing back seems like a great thing, it’s a lot of heckling and abuse that serves to put you back on track. It’s only when you have a good new ideas that you see that the heckling doesn’t care about right and wrong at all, rather only about authority, and it is equally used to silence new folks who are right as new folks who are wrong.
The internet can overcome this, by merely providing a space for people to explain themselves, and to counteract the authority of received wisdom. The problem is that you get a mass of ignorant people coming at you like a tidal wave, each of them trying to defend the established orthodoxy. So you need to get rid of their authority, by harsh language, by calling them names, so that they lose that mantle of authority they get from parrotting something you already heard before.
Trolling is there to protect important good new ideas, unpopular ideas, from authority. That’s its only purpose. But how can you explain this here? It’s next to impossible. So I suppose all you can do is just provide trolling examples and hope it sinks in.
Surreal huh? Better get used to it, nitwit. There was certainly no issue with you calling box boy names in the past, even though he knows what he is talking about, and you are speaking out of your anus. The mouth calls the anus dirty, and anus doth protest.
Box boy doesn’t need to show anything, it is easy to cut columns with incendiaries, there are patents on the relevant devices, and cutting beams of that size has been reproduced on youtube (you look it up). The chemical detection was done properly and accurately in the paper, but I’m guessing you can’t read the paper, because you don’t know how. I’ll help you: a says “ah”, b says “buh”, c says “kh” or “ss”, etc.
Further, regardless of your mental incapacitation regarding thermite devices, the physics of the falling buildings is completely impossible without demolition. You would be capable of evaluating said physics, if you weren’t a high school dropout.
You don’t recognize propaganda for what it is.
I don’t know what happened at that compound in 2011, and I also try to keep my mouth shut about it, because it was a propaganda win for the side I support when I go to the polling place in November, but I didn’t see any photos, any films, or any evidence at all, beyond “we say so”.
On the other hand, I did see photos when they shot Che Guevara. The story has been defective, and there are credible reports that Osama bin Laden was dead for a while, and no pictures of him holding a newspaper dated anytime past 2003 or so.
So, sorry, no I don’t listen to anything coming out of the mainstream media unless it is accompanied by charts and graphs, and solid evidence, and I certainly don’t believe anything anyone official has to say, and I believe what YOU have to say even less, which means your opinion counts for less than zero.
Yeah, yeah, mental head, I GUESSED, of course, because I’m not an involved party, but I GUESSED EXACTLY RIGHT, or else my guessing would have been refuted long ago, instead of supported.
I am choosing these two, because I don’t know anything about this stuff, I am not Western European and honestly I find pre-Christian Western European culture hokey, I am not a big fan of Alistair Crowley. But hokey or not so hokey, it’s a distinct ethnic culture, and it gives insight into literature and culture, and its worth preserving. These two, Odin and Thor, are ones weev talked about. Loki sounds better, as you say.
I think they are suppressed in the same sense that Irish culture was suppressed in the 18th century, before the famine. Through political pressure to abandon this and join the majority Christian culture. This is ultimately what Nietzsche and Hitler were basing their movement on. Of course Christianity is vastly more important, but the pagan heritage didn’t really have a voice, as it was always commingled with Hitler style race-hatred, at least in the early half of the twentieth century. It seems to be separating from this today.
I do feel connected with these groups because they are persecuted and marginalized (justly, because American and European racism is a more serious problem than neglect of pagan culture), it’s certainly not because I agree with them. I read their material while doing quick online research to make sure the holocause actually did happen as stated. At some point I became skeptical of the story, because I grew up in Israel surrounded by victims, so I was never exposed to the opinion of the perpetrators, for obvious reasons. After a few hours of searching, I found good firsthand documents from Pressac and good firsthand perpetrator testimony, from next generation Germans, which made it clear that the mainstream narrative is actually correct. The Odin and Thor cults were weird things that explained to me where these groups get their legs from. They really need to separate this stuff from racial hatred and white supremacy, so that it can just exist without being evil, oppressive, racist, or satanic.
I like powerless people with an opinion, because I know they didn’t get this opinion by following the mainstream, although this particular opinion, of course, I could live without. So I look to see “what could possibly be worth salvaging in their brain damage?” And the stuff I find interesting is their focus on Western European ethnicity. Loki is good too, I suppose.
Yes, I know she had a breakdown, probably drug induced, it’s was the destruction of a great voice. SCUM wasn’t the cause, this was many years later. It was probably drugs, alienation, and personal money problems between her and Warhol, and it’s a terrible story. I didn’t know she was a schitzophrenic, the story is more plausible now, I couldn’t figure out how such an enlightened writer became an attempted murderer.
That drug induced conversion of alternative viewpoints into homicidal rage happened a lot in the 1960s, for example, the SDS to the Weathermen, which finally ended with that horrible Brinks holdup in 1980 which murdered a security guard. That’s the main problem of the 1960s— what mechanism do you have to allow the speech, while preventing the violence?
The solution was found in 1969, but nobody noticed for a while. The internet is the solution to this problem. This is why trollings place is online, where such things have to surmount a nearly insurmountable barrier to ever spill over into violence.
The internet allows the humanities revolutions and also the scientific revolutions of the 1960s to be widely understood and accepted without the violence and drug damage that destroyed it.
My education tried to beat it out of me, but I thankfully resisted, at a certain personal cost. My education can go put a hairy porcupine in its cooter.
The exceptions were professional asshole physicists. These serve as role models: Eric Siggia, Philip Argyres, and a few others like Henry Tye and David Gross. These people throw poop, but they would usually throw more polished poop more accurately. I am simply popularizing the practice, as the internet calls it trolling, and makes it available outside of physics.
The monkey throwing excrement is serving an important purpose, as he is covering people throwing excrement right back. The excrement the people are throwing at the monkey is invisible to the people, only the monkey can see it.
You are completely wrong, you have clearly not actually spent “hours” arguing with racists, as you would have slowly seen that they don’t make such facile arguments in an unending stream. They intersperse it with reasoning, which is approximately self-consistent and self-reinforcing. Further, the more exposure you have to this, the better you get at spotting subtle versions of it in media. Yes, online it’s sometimes less subtle, but the same people will produce a continuum of racism going from overt to subtle.
Seeing this stuff and talking to those people in depth is what makes you realize that the attitude is held by ordinary people, not space aliens. As they continue discussing, they move from overt threats to explain subtler points. For example, ask a racist what is their favorite portrayal of a black character in film? If they point you to “Gone With The Wind” you learned something about that film. Ask them what is their favorite tool for arguing white supremacy, and they will point at the IQ test. You learn something about what that test is all about. It’s informative to argue with racists, at least until they start repeating themselves, and them it gets boring. This happens very fast.
Ron Reagan was a wild eyed pistol waver who nearly started WW3 the minute he got the suitcase. Seriously, I had horrific paralyzing fear every week in 1983 and 1984, which only fully went away in 1989. I blame HIM personally. What I would agree with you on is that it was out of monumental stupidity and incompetence, not out of malicious intent.
I am staying silent on his racism, because he didn’t seem personally racist, but he didn’t appoint any black people, and he used the southern strategy.
Yeah great for you. It’s a big world. My sister was killed when she drowned in a vat of ice-cream. Let’s ban ice-cream.
Yes, the threats of violence are completely counterproductive, but this is simply not what was going on. The threat of violence is being invented by the author to give a pretext argue against heated language in general, saying that the “feeling of violence” which is the response to impolite language and forceful disagreement. That always feels like violence, and this is what the battle against internet trolling is trying to silence.
There was a threat of violence implied by doxxing, and this is why doxxing is not useful or productive. But it isn’t really a real world threat of violence either, it is just something that hackers think will help when they are young and stupid. They know that an internet unsavvy person will be scared to death by this stuff, without any real signifcant danger.
You haven’t noticed something, but I’ll give you a clue— his last name is Auernheimer. Also, his tattoo is a bit unusual for a swastika, much more elaborate, his racist rants are unusual, in that the language is strangely restrained always skirting the border of the point of no return, and the abuse is directed only at powerful people, namely the judge and prosecution in his case. The only praise he gives to white supremacists is oblique praise of their preservation of Western European folklore, which is really the only nice thing you can say about them.
As far as I can see, weev has pulled off the troll equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. It’s simply unbelievable, I would never have been able to pull of anything like this, it’s the next generation of troll.
That social circle is not a social circle, it’s a 10 creepy lonely guys in a basement, and he really isn’t all that popular among them— they are using him for publicity, he is simply writing to call attention to something interesting without any malice, as usual.
My guessing keeps being ATTACKED POLITICALLY, not REFUTED FACTUALLY. Trolls are people who know the difference between the two, and don’t give up fighting with propaganda and insult until the former turns into the latter.
Don’t hold your breath in this case, I know exactly what happened here.
Unlike your other facile attempts to find contradiction, this one is legitimate. But it’s not because truth is “protean” and “polymorphous”, it’s because I didn’t know anything when I started.
What I did know is that the folks commenting here are supporting a (wrong) majority view, which is that politeness is good. Weev is supporting a (correct) minority view that politeness is bad. I expect a reasoned debate over this, with actual ideas exchanged.
But online, when there is a majority view, there is a numbers imbalance, and people like to chip in with their nonsense supporting the majority view. So you will get a whole avalanche of comments supporting it from people who don’t have any independent opinion, who don’t have any actual argument, and who wouldn’t know what an actual argument looks like even if it bit them on the leg.
The way to deal with this is to attack them personally, until they start to come back with more substantial material which actually does have some meat in it. The “abuse”, “malice”, “lynch mob mentality” etc of my comments were designed to get these people to accept what they are, which is a collective mob with no independent thinking. Now you are coming back with me making a factual mistake, and a real inconsistency. GOOD. Trolling successful, you are now making an effective grown up argument, rather than an emotional laden feel-good reinforcement of majority opinion.
You are also totally right, and it’s the first time I’ve voted up your comments. These discussions in reality, as you say, pose no threat to weev in Lebanon or wherever he is. I was wrong on that point.
But, really, I got it wrong because I didn’t know anything about this two days ago, and I thought he was in jail somewhere, or getting prosecuted, due to insufficient familiarity with the story. But IGNORANCE DOES NOT STOP ME, as I am A TROLL doing COUNTERPROPAGANDA. It’s the other side’s job to find out when I made a mistake, good job.
I lay off the lynch mob angle now that I know more. This is a legitimate discussion with no threat to anyone.
“Nearly insurmountable” is enough. What weev did can’t be compared in severity to what Kuban did, sorry. That’s just rhetoric. It only felt psychologically similar to the victim. None of these are reasonable cases to base your policy on, the barrier to violence is really nearly insurmountable.
Yes, of course! I do the same thing, again, and again, and again, until I get a different result. That’s how you do anything new.
He has a certain amount of Jewish ancestry, and his racist rant attacks with the wrong power perspective from racism, by placing others in a position of power, and attacking from the position of the powerless. This is not what racism normally sounds like.
First, I am not a Marxist, I’m just giving Marx academic credit for authority bashing. Second, that’s not my position regarding truth, I don’t make it out to be fungible. Third this not what “praxis” has ever meant in any discussion I read (it usually just meant doing stuff, but I’m not a Marxist).
Van Gogh would be boring to a mole.
You poor mentally retarded pisspool, you try something more persuasive than copy-pasting propaganda other people wrote. You can copy paste that paragraph all you want, there is no evidence for this other than the fact that it has been copy pasted in many places.
I am sorry that your brain serves the same function as a clipboard, and that it is not much larger capacity than that paragraph above. There is simply no evidence of Bin Laden being around of getting himself shot, and the absence of evidence is enough to become evidence of absence. But I generally shut up about it, because it is used to do propaganda in a direction I like.
The link is broken, unfortunately, but I’m not “just asking questions”, I’m giving answers, and I’m cussing you out for giving different answers, asswipe.
You pus-filled, lists of brain-damaged authorities are about as relevant and important as pictures of hemmoroids dancing on TV. These hemmoroids have been dominating the discussion long enough, time for them to be sleeping on the streets, where they belong.
The question is simply whether these poxy blisters are technically right, or is boxboy? Since the building simply could not collapse without incendiaries or explosives, we see box boy is right! Hooray.
Now if box boy can’t make up his mind, good for him! I don’t make up my mind either, You know what they say about people who make up their minds without evidence. They need to wear rather small hats.
I don’t need to show you anything, as your position is simply unworthy of debate, you necrotic cooter. It is simply mental retardation.
I think I was a troll before the term existed, or at least back then it only applied to insincere people, not to honest critics and protesters.
He hasn’t admitted making anything of the sort. You had better get your head far enough out of your ass to see what he actually has done.
It’s very well documented that you are an idiot, you just documented it above. You need to know what’s what before posting drivel.
weev. He’s the only one with all three, and that’s why he’s the king of trolls.
It’s not from his name, although that was a clue, it was from the sound of his voice admitting it to a reporter in an article. He has Jewish ancestry. He is now in the Levant learning arabic, which can be construed as a form of powerless non-zionist aaliyah.
I have NEVER been NICE OR POLITE in ALL MY LIFE! YOU are the POLITE one. The word you are looking for is HONEST. Polite == dishonest.
There is no Sierra case, she is a gasbag doing propaganda. Weev did not do what you are pointing to. This is a direct twitter criminal death threat, it is much more disturbing, as it is an actual death threat (unlike the nonsense our author recieved), and twitter has no literacy requirement. But even still, even this kind of criminal death threat is not as dangerous as compared to a real world one recieved over non-anonymous medium.
As a FIERCE WEEV DEFENDER, I suggest that you bear the moral burden, for taking this CRIMINAL NONSENSE and conflating it with THE DIVINE GIFT of TROLLING.
It’s not exactly a comeback, it’s a personal insult, like, say, calling you a roach. Insults are just there to chip away at your social confidence, roach. They work sort of like an ice-pick at a phallus, the blood drains and then the thing wilts. Roach.
You imagine that it’s ok to vomit a stream of insults at people you don’t know? Because all the other chimps started beating their chests? They gang up on somebody, so you join in.
The “documentation” you claim for a rape-threat is statements coming from the New York Times, which sounds pretty authoritative for a second, until you realize that the New York Times has been approximately as reliable as my grandmother’s tea leaves lately.
What he claimed to have done, according to the article, is release information about the woman which included her home address, together with hateful material which made her feel threatened personally. This was not appropriate at all, it’s wrong, but it is in no way tantamount to a credible threat of rape, no matter how it was spun by the media.
She got scared, it was wrong, I think this is not acceptable in any way, but that’s not the same level of threat as a stalker, or a real personal harrassment death-threat or rape-threat online. Those are simply much more serious.
But I know that to your palps and mushroom body are overflowing with anger, your leg-bristles are standing on end, you wish to conflate the two, and your antennae are quivering for revenge.
Please stop. He has been ganged up on by certain forces, in such a way that he has become a symbol for online liberty at the present time. What do you symbolize? Time is short, and it’s best to pick your side well. Please, there is no more need to scurry in the walls, you can come out into the light.
I didn’t know who he was exactly, I just found out. I defend him because there is an unjustified attack on rude internet discourse, and he happens to be at the center. But yes, I am developing a crush on him through this, although I won’t be able to bear his children.
It is the first time such a thing has been done, that’s true. I wouldn’t have thought it is possible to get away with, yes. But, shocked as I am, that swastika is sitting reasonably ok with me, it is so borderline, I keep dizzily going back and forth, back and forth, it still makes me queasy every once in a while. The thing is, it is really not being used to rail against the powerless at any point. Racism is about power, and weev always points the gun in the right direction. I genuinely think he might have been able to do it while staying in the kingdom of troll, without tripping over into the kingdom of hell. But he might not. I really don’t know for sure. That’s part of what makes him such an effective troll. I can’t tell, honest, I still can’t tell. But then I reserve judgement. But the very fact that one can’t tell, even with a swastika, and a long racial rant on a racist publication accepted without reservation, this speaks volumes— that doesn’t happen in the normal world, this is a special kind of black magic.
Trolling is a sacrament on the internet, as it is the mechanism by which you remove authority from discussions, and it is how you DIFFUSE LYNCH MOBS, like the nice little circle jerk of consensus you have here.
Trolls break consensus, by inserting contrary opinion. They buck the group, they subvert authority. This is required for the internet to function as a medium which has something to say which is different from what has been said before, or is repeated ad-nauseum everywhere else.
Without trolling, the internet turns into a chattier less eloquent version of “The Morning Circle of Joe and Friends” old media nonsense. You get people repeating the same bullcrap they hear on old media, and you get nothing subversive, nothing new, and nothing interesting. The internet trolls convert consensus to discord, and in the discord new ideas flourish and old ideas just become embarassing to hold.
You don’t have to worry about protecting the status quo, if it is justified, it will reform itself unharmed after any challenge. The thing you need to worry about is a mob of folks silencing alternative viewpoints with one-way heckling which cannot be answered or rebutted. Because only insults in one direction are deemed “trolling”, insults in the other direction are deemed “getting rid of the troll”. The easy direction for insults is the direction of greater to lesser authority. The trolling is the insult going in the opposite direction. You need both directions to function in order for the authority to be neutralized, and the discussion to be at an appropriately high level. Both directions, or neither, but the direct and veiled insults from powerful to powerless are so natural, that to remove them is utopian fantasy.
It is so essential for the functioning of honest peer-reviewing community online, that trolling online is one of the pillars of human existence, like charity, kindness, and goodwill to all.
The troll wasn’t dangerous, you are just being made to think so.
Online, when there is a majority opinion, trolling breaks through the miasma of authority to shine a clear light on the evidence and allow it to speak for itself. Without the trolling, authority clouds the discussion, and nothing can progress, no matter what the objective facts may be.
You can explain something, but a horde of locusts come in and tell you that you are wrong, with authoritative citations. You need to be able to say “shut up, all of you. You’re retarded.” And not get kicked out, then present the evidence, and then let the people evaluate it neutrally, now that authority is neutralized.
That’s what trolls are for, to neutralize authority.
I didn’t drink his kool-aid. Something more like simultaneous discovery, or a memory of the spirit of the internet as it was and as it shall be.
Yes, he did go “real world”, but in a way that is so remote from these other matters in risk and threat that to conflate them is more error than truth. He goes just past the edge, but no further. He doesn’t need to go past the edge at all, but everyone walking on the edge makes a misstep or two.
No he should not be in jail for either of these, you should be in jail for trying to put him in jail.
You aren’t GULLIBLE, you evil fuck, you can’t actually BELIEVE the crap you are spewing. You are just doing propaganda for the side you think is powerful.
Whoa, hey, whoa! Me too! Except the side I fight for is scientifically accurate. Guess who’ll be more content when it’s time to leave this mortal coil? But people like you don’t care about things like the fate of your soul. It’s not going to be pleasant for you, I’ll assure you.
Your retarded lying shit doesn’t work anymore, people know how to troll. All that’s left is the cussing. Give it up and go do something else.
Your anus can keep moving, the gas can keep flowing, but people don’t have to inhale. I haven’t seen even one of the 3 wives weeping on video, I haven’t seen the children interviewed waving bye-bye to daddy and vowing revenge, and I certainly didn’t see any confirmation from Pakistani sources, just YOU saying that, little mental case. The Pakistani sources I read say the story sounds kinda silly to them.
But if you want to play pretend, I don’t mind. As I said, I support this fake story, because it puts a phony end to a phony beginning. It’s good to have two equally phony bookends on a story.
The only thing you need to do is to make sure that the historians don’t start cracking up when putting it in a book. You are aware that people in other coutries write their own books, without your input, right? How long do you think you can keep this up?
You’re really sort of stupid. Could you explain this better? What is this supposed to be? A veiled death threat? a mock veiled death threat? A lousy attempt at humor? All three? The jig is long up, everyone knows its an inside job already, there’s too many people to kill. If you wanted to start killing people, I would have suggested Webster Tarpley, your side has neglected to even threaten him yet.
But if you would like to murder me specifically, please send an email, and I’ll provide you with my exact location.
He wasn’t subcontracting anything, because there were NO SUBCONTRACTORS except in her imagination. All self-inflated internet newbies think they are important enough to get stalked. They never are, and she wasn’t.
But you are sincere, you have a valid point, you are also (probably) a woman and know more about the level of threat this poses. I would be able to cut the difference and say I agree, more or less. Minus the exaggerations. It is likely that the level of threat is greater because of the gender issues, and it is possible that I am blind to it because I am a dude, and because I only care about freedom of speech.
But you said that you don’t support restrictions on trolling, so I don’t know why I’m arguing. Your current position is not insane anymore.
Have you seen me click on your link? Box boy is a scientist, I’m a scientist, and you are a gas bag. The gas doesn’t even make you giddy, it just smells like sulfur.
What else is there to salvage? Race-baiting? Anti-semitism? Church-burning? Lynching? Jim Crow? Goose-stepping? Science-denial? Genetic supremacy? Class superiority? Roman ethics? Slavery? Genocide? Amphetamines? Death metal? There’s nothing here which isn’t completely repulsive except Thor, Grimm, fondue and yodeling. When I was young, I couldn’t understand how ANYONE could possibly get into this Nazi stuff, even with all its implied priviledge, for any reason other than being born evil. But of course nobody is evil in the genes, 1968 Germany was not caused by gamma rays from space. But 1930s Germany wasn’t all about fondue and yodeling either.
I suspect (without evidence) it’s this way: People always look for an identity. They reject the Christian identity, for one reason or another, probably because they like to have sex. So they find the pre-Christian Western European thing, where you could have sex whenever you felt like it.
So now you have a bunch of repressed people who hate the Jews because they think all that repression is the Jews’ fault. That is, if those Jews didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be any Christianity, everyone would be pagan, and they would be having sex-orgies.
They don’t blame the actual European Christians that spread the Christian religion, because if it was really non-Jews spreaing this out of necessity, you know, like the historical record describes, then that means that monotheism would be an inevitable process, the inevitable outcome of human social evolution. Since it can’t be, because it makes people so miserably repressed, it has to be some imposition by other people. So they think it’s the Jews’ fault, because, you know, look at the Bible. If that was your only source for the history of religion, what would you think?
It’s easy, because the scriptures make Christianity look more Jewish than it really is, and make the God concept look like it’s owned by Jews in some special way which of course it’s not. So the Jew hatred is really special, there’s nothing the Jews can do to fix it, because it’s really God hatred, accidentally redirected due to the content of the only holy book they have.
So the Nazis really think there’s a defective monotheistic gene hidden inside the Jewish chromosomes that tells Jews to lie to people about the monotheistic business, and then Jews use their “unique genius of persuasion” (in Neitzsche’s term) to make the whole world monotheistic. They think this monotheistic gene just needs to be eradicated, and for things to go back to pagan times, with orgies and slaves and gladiator games, and all that wonderful stuff.
They hate on other races for a much more banal reason, simply because these pagan traditions don’t consider humanity as one unit, bound under one universal ethical notion, but rather each little clan has its own gods, and those gods take care only of their own members. They enslave and use other clans for whatever purpose, as they are not under the protection of their specific tribal deity. This means that they look for any opportunity to demean and exploit others, and then you get all the rest of the horror. They like you less and less the less you look like a European, because, you know, that means your god looks less and less like thier god. It’s really that shallow.
They also imagine this paganism is secretly what Jews believe in private, and that the Jewish religion is publically monotheistic, but secretly pagan, and Jews are doing terrible things to others in secret rituals. This is what historical anti-semitism says about Jews, for completely different reasons. So now they hate the Jews even more, and everyone else can go to hell too, and that’s Naziism.
I don’t see any other coherent motivation for the peculiar convergence of unique crazy ideas that come together in Nazi ideology, other than restoring the pre-Christian Europe, and ridding it of the “Jewish influence” of Christianity. It was a great puzzle to me where these ideas come from, these things weren’t invented by Hitler— he wasn’t very imaginative. I think it’s a Nietzchian attempt to get Christianity out of Europe, and then kill the Jews so that they don’t whip up another Jesus or something (as if you specifically needed Jews to do that). But Nietzsche wasn’t very imaginative either
Since Marxism is a sort of Christianity 2.0, with modern capitalism replacing the Roman system, and since 2.0 was trying to replace 1.0, 1.0 was really weak in the 1930, and so the Nazis saw a chace to flush the whole thing down the toilet and go back to version 0.0. But of course, anyone who was going by 1.0 or 2.0 (or who had any decency) joined together and eradicated this crap.
Then you can blame two things: the suppression of sex, and the suppression of Odin and Thor. The first is more or less quickly solved in a few decades postwar, anyone can do pretty much whatever without too much interference. But the second is still there, motivating a little bit of residual neo-nazism. I think that once Odin and Thor are respected a little bit, you won’t have any more of this cancer.
Also, weev focuses only on this aspect, the Odin and Thor, which, being the most innocuous aspect of this whole set of beliefs, makes me think he isn’t sincere in this business.
Nothing would happen to him for the same reason nothing happened to her, still what you are talking about is an example of a threat, not a troll.
Yeah yeah, it’s idle talk on a forum. It never happens. Also, this is not an example of trolling, but of a criminal threat.
Yeah 5. Dude, you really should be following the conversation. I feel as threatened by you as I do from the lion roaring in the zoo.
Yes, you have hit upon the problem. Now the only question that remains is who are the gullible ones?
The article is here: http://gawker.com/5962159/t… . Unlike other people here, I don’t make crap up for rhetorical purposes. Now you can conclude from this that he is lying somewhere. Here is an informative pre-prison interview: https://www.youtube.com/wat… . However, earlier videos I have seen show a person who is somewhat deranged in a Bobby Fischer way, railing about Jewish this and Jewish that. It’s difficult to know what is sincere, because the attitudes change from instance to instance, this is unforunately a symptom of drug abuse and lack of a solid center.
I think it is next to impossible to be aware of power structures in society to the extent that he is and simultaneously be a racist, it’s like knowing calculus and simultaneously failing to realize that a product of two odd numbers is always odd. It’s logically possible, sure, but it’s difficult to imagine. Racism of any kind is really, really, primitive.
I am not 100% sure on his position, one of the problems with drugs is that drug addled people don’t have a consistent position from moment to moment, it all depends on the details of the momentary brain chemistry. but the sophisticated awareness of power and trolling makes it unlikely. By the way, being one quarter Jewish, or even half Jewish (like Fischer), or full Jewish (like Fischer, really) does not immunize you to the anti-Jewish thing in any way. But I believe awareness of power structures must, because that’s what its all about.
Now that I’ve heard his voice, it isn’t what I imagined it to be. His trolling is valid, it’s good trolling and it’s for the right reasons in my opinion, but there’s something unstable there, unfortunately more like Valerie Solenas than Richard Stallman. There is absolutely no need to repeat an experiment in psychotropic drugs which failed entirely, and decimated the radical movements once, and can do so again.
I think you have an interesting point of view, I am curious about Yiddish, but I am not persuaded of any your direct points regarding Hitler and Naziism.
You are making it out to be a natural thing, like it was just one crazy guy taking a little bit of German folklore and exploiting a history of anti-semitism like there was in France or Spain. That’s not what it was as I see it, this was not an opportunistic thing, it was the main goal of the program. Reaing Nietzsche is essential here.
I think you fail to appreciate the uniqueness of the new kind of post-industrial secular anti-Christian Nietzschian anti-semitism. It’s something complete different from Christian anti-Semitism. Nietzsche SHUNS all previous anti-semitism, he thinks it is boorish and primitive and completely wrong, because it is an outgrowth of Christian thinking, which he despises.
He substitutes for this something else, which is hatred of monotheistic ethics. Without monotheistic ethics, people, Nietzsche realized, would go right back to the order of Rome, with slavery, naked power, sexual exploitation, sadism, and general barbarism and a pure Darwinian political society, and he liked this idea, so he advocated it. He didn’t mind Jews who liked this idea too, by the way, he was happy with atheistic German Jews who advocated the same thing he was advocating. He just didn’t like what he considered to be the Jewish monotheistic ethics, even though these ethics are really Christian inventions if you look at them closely..
The old pre-Nietzsche Christian anti-Semitism is the old tale of the blood-libel, it goes like this: Jews rejected and crucified Christ, then they rejected the redemption, and this rejection leaves them permanently vengeful and hateful, applying barbaric pre-Christian ideas of eye-for-eye and blood for blood, instead of the more modern (in the sense of the 2nd century AD) ideas of charity and forgiveness, and spiritual growth through meditation and so on. Think of Barrabas or Shylock from Marlowe’s plays. It is false, because the Jews had the same revolution in the religion as Christians did in 135 AD with the modern diaspora and the Jewish martyrs. In the end, the Jews converged on something which is essentially indistinguishable, metaphysics aside, from the Christians.
The antagonism of Christianity and Judaism in the centuries preceding Nietzsche was simple religious conflict, like Jews vs. Samaritans in ancient times. The Christians put pressure on Jews to convert, they evicted them from place to place, but there was no concept of eradication or genocide, or any type of racial discrimination here, simply because this concept wouldn’t occur to a pre-Nietzsche anti-semite.
The anti-semitism of Luther is of the old sort, the anti-semitism in Europe in general was of this old sort before the late 19th century. I believe Hitler was piggy-backing off of this anti-semitism to extend his appeal, but his anti-semitism is nothing like that. Hitler’s anti-semitism is Nietzche’s.
It is a direct attack on monotheism, it is really attacking Christianity not Judaism, by persecuting the Catholics, and deforming the Protestant churches to his will. The Bible was replaced with the Grimm tales in the schools in the period in question, on purpose to remove Jewish influence. Jewish works were burned, and Jewish contributions to thinking were denied, including religious thinking. Even Christmas was denuded of representations of Christ (this was controversial, but it happene in the later years of the era).
Wherever possible, ethical questions that usually involve looking to God for guidance were removed using the Fuehrerprinzip, that you look only to Hitler to determine right or wrong. The Fuhrerprinzip was really an abdication of monotheistic ethics, and it was used to produce behaviors which could not be done since the modern religious era began in the 5th century.
Borrowing from an equally secular and even more Rome-worshipping Mussolini, the Nazis made a restoration of Roman pomp and ceremony, and they restored one by one nearly all the things that the midieval era had gradually abolished. So you saw slavery state torture, and absolute power unchecked by any church.
To this, they added totatlitarian surveillance, and the class rule of a Protestant bourgeoisie with unlimited power, and a complete disenfranchisment of Catholics whose religion was considered second only to Judaism in perniciousness.
Wagner was a traditional anti-semite, not a Nietzschian anti-semite, and Nietzsche did not like him because of this. But traditional anti-semitism was not antagonistic to the new kind of anti-semitism, Hitler, to the extent that he paid lip-service to Christianity, was both, But reliance on Christianity just blocked the attempts to extend this to a removal of Christianity from Germany. But the removal of Christianity was going on still. The goal was to produce a purely German national identity, free of sentimental ethics (ethics) and Jewish ethics (monotheism).
The eventual goal was to wipe out Christianity as is clear from policy, from associations, and from Hitler’s writings. Nazi anti-semitism was first and foremost of the Nietzschian variety, and not any kind of traditional Christian catholic or Lutheran variety. It wanted to wipe out religion by wiping out what they saw as its source, then by gradually removing its manifestations.
This type of anti-semitism produces genoicide, because the idea is that the Jews carry monotheism in their genes, and you can’t have them poisoning future generations. It also has no compunctions about genocide, because it has no sentimental ethics, your goal is to become hard as a rock, and to be able to murder without sentiment.
Mass conversion of Jews saved lives in previous Christian-Jewish conflicts, but it was useless here. The Nazis were simply murdering to erase people who they felt enslaved them with the monstrous lie of God, and they identified these people as the Jews.
Hitler was not at all a religious fellow. If he had any faith, it was gone when he left the trenches.
Sort of, not exactly, it depends on the details. That’s what they say, that they are in danger, but they don’t make themselves seem powerless. Their caricatures of Jews are of a powerless sexless nebbish with a grating accent who sometimes get into a position of power through occult practices, and their caricatures of blacks are of borderline homeless hoodlums with no appeal. This is to deny actual power to those folks, which is something that, for them, involves masculine sexual authority and threat of violence.
Weev does something else, which also crosses the line in certain places.
Ok, fine, whatever. You are looking for dishonesty because you see propaganda. I am doing HONEST propaganda.
Ironic? I’m battling alone against a tidal wave of insipid stupidity from brainwashed gullible turds. I’m using the same method, of insult and ridicule, because it is the only effective method of dealing with propaganda, except, unlike my opposition, I DON’T have the support of a breast-beating troop of chimps behind me.
I choose my insults without malice and without conviction, I just pick the insult that scores the best rhetorical points. It’s onanists like you that can’t see it, reptile brain.
“Trolling” as a term used to be applied for people who made insincere comments to get people emotionally riled up online. It was a form of “hah, made you look”.
Now it is used for anyone who makes people feel bad, sincere or insincere, credible, or incredible. I did not “adopt” it as my mantle, it was shoved upon me at some point, as what I did started getting called “trolling”. In usenet times, this never happened, and my behavior hasn’t changed.
The trolls, when they are sincere, are using methods of ridicule to reduce the authority of nincompoops who don’t deserve it, because these nincompoops are both wrong and saying nothing original. The modern-day version of trolls attack positions with over-the-top ridicule, because this is the only way to strip it of authority. This is the constructive thing people call “trolling” today, and this thing is absolutely essential for internet discourse to function. Without it, you get a mass of gullible know-nothings flooding every discussion with repetition of the well-trod known-to-everyone nothing-new-here majority view, in ten thousand slightly different phrasing.
The troll gets them to shut up until they have something new and informative to say. Or, if they don’t, the troll makes them look ridiculous until they do. That’s the purpose of trolling, it is its function.
Now there is something else called “trolling” which is just a sort of verbal prank, involving insincerely posting offensive material. This behavior is what “trolling” originally meant, but the term has drifted now, and I’m not going to accept conflating activity A with activity B.
That’s not what’s going on here. What you get from him is “I AM racist, because I have this black judge denying my motions, and overruling my objections.” It’s weird, because despite the superficial flagrant assertion of racism, the actual content is not demeaning to anyone. It’s weird, there’s none of the usual racist attempt to diminish others using an implicitly accepted racial heirarchy to force them into a servile powerless position.
Other similar things: “I have this good-for-nothing black acquaintance who beats me at chess and he always gets the girls.” or “I was trying to get this code to compile, and this black guy said ‘dude, you have an uninitialized pointer’ and he was totally pissing me off.” The power imbalance is pointing the wrong way for racism. It’s hard to do, because racism is really pervasive, and hard to avoid or mock, even if you are black. I don’t think Chris Rock managed it, his stuff strikes me as totally insensitive, because it aims the gun the wrong way. It’s next to impossible to aim the gun right.
I’m not going to be careful around anything. I think you should be careful around your toaster, because you are too stupid to keep from sticking a fork into it.
I will report this conversation to moderators, however, because it is not appropriate, little buddy, since here a small weenie is trying to use big weenie words.
Also, thanks! A death threat is one of the best boosts to a person’s credibility. It’s my first, I’m honored, and good luck to you around your electrical appliances.
Here is a video of 3.07″ webs and 215 sq in cut by 18.337 series TexProLite explosive incendiaries: https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Keep going, you scientifically illiterate turd.
To add to that, the dumber the official storytard is, the more defensive and belligerant he becomes.
Uh huh. He’s a scientist now. I just appointed him:
On my authority, I do declare, Box Boy, honorary scientist extraordinaire!
Would you like me to test your scientific literacy? I can ask you a simple question, let’s see how you fare: I have water draining out of a pipe of radius .3 inches, and the pool drains in 2 hours. I want the pool to drain in half an hour— how wide a pipe do I need?
If you manage to do this one, retard, I have more. You don’t know the first thing about science.
There is at least one such tradition, it’s called “academic peer review”. There is another such tradition which is anonymous pamphleteering, for example, Publius writing “The Federalist Papers”. So if by “never” you mean “always” then you are right.
There are anonymous peer reviewed articles too, for example, Bourbaki, or serious criticism in certain cases where anonymity will help.
I am NOT brave, I am a coward, but coward or not, one must speak out.
Nobody takes anyone seriously with ad-hominem attacks, but they always come anyway, in support of whatever happens to be the powerful position. The insults are just designed to be over-the-top, to even out the insult environment and make all the cumulative effect of all the previous insults go away. This happens very fast, the insults become irrelevant once there are enough of them. At this point, people focus on the content, and only look at objective evidence. Without the stage being evenly muddy with roughly equal amounts of mutual insult, the arena for objective review is simply unavailable.
It is unforunately required to have an even balance of insults on the page before people look at the facts objectively. When there is only one side posting insults, people believe that the insulting side must be strong, and don’t bother looking at the objective evidence.
So the first rule of propaganda is to insult the opposition, until all sides are covered with mud. When you are finished with the insults, then you present the objective evidence. The side with the objective evidence has nothing to worry about in a muddy environment.
I don’t have any authority, and I don’t want it and I don’t need it. Authority is useless online, people make up their own minds regardless of your authority, by simply reading the debate and deciding. Authority is only useful in media where some people are shut out by decree, and the authority is let in through a social process. When everyone can participate, authority is actually a hindrance, because you can’t say certain things, at least not if you want to maintain your position of authority.
The internet ethics are not exactly decided democratically, not if democracy means voting without information. These ethical questions are decided like all other ethical questions, by open debate and long discussions without censorship. I have no more authority than anyone else, I have LESS AUTHORITY, in fact NONE AT ALL, because I am posting insults to others.
Hitler possibly believed in a sort of God, the same sort of historical-destiny God Nietzsche mentions sometimes, but this is certainly not the monotheistic God derived from the Christian tradition, which as far as I heard, Hitler considered incompatible with modern scientific understanding (it’s somewhere on Wikipedia, that’s the extent of my knowledge).
He does not ever persuasively assert Christian beliefs as far as I can see, although as a politician he is required to do this, as you say. He certainly he doesn’t hold Catholic beliefs as an adult, as one of the principal tenets is the complete equality and unity of all races, at least anyone among them who accepts Catholicism. Hitler’s policy were ruthless toward the Catholic Slavs and toward the Orthodox Slavs (let alone the Marxist Slavs). His biggest financial support base was international Protestant capital, not Catholics, although his political base at home was in large part Catholic.
He met with clergy, he struck deals with churches, but his movement’s eventual long-term goal was either the eradication of Christianity, or at least, it’s complete de-Judaization, and a Nietzschian-style restoration of pre-monotheistic ethics. I don’t consider Naziism a pure cult of personality either, so Hitler the person is not so important, as his ideas only get power through reinforcement from others around him. Among his political supporters and enablers, the great majority were rabidly anti-Marxist top industrialists and financiers, who were anti-Christian, or at least anti-Catholic, in large numbers. These people included a large number of Nietzsche followers, as they do to this day. So even if Hitler himself was a Christian, then he would have been a misled puppet figurehead for the Nietzschians behind him, a proposition which is extremely dubious.
I hold to those beliefs described in the section of your link entitled “Hitler myths”. Hitler was not a sincere Christian, his regime was the closest the world came to reversing the Christian revolution of the 5th century AD, and Marxism too, I suppose. His Reich church would replace monotheistic ethics with a subserviance to a political order of the party, with all ethics contingent on the poitical decisions at the top. This is much as Communism in Russia had replaced the Orthodox church with subservience to the communist party.
Your answer: “I’d use a pipe with a 1.2″ I.D., assuming the .3″ was an inside radius. Is this your idea of advanced math or something?”
Hoo boy. No, it’s not at all advanced, it’s a simple question, it’s undergrad engineering. You just didn’t do it right, your answer is retarded (I copied the retarded answer above). That’s ok, it just means you’re stupid. Don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault. It’s genetic.
The scaling isn’t linear or quadratic, like your retarded not-even-close-to-correct guess assumes. It’s not by cross section area, retard boy. But keep thinking, keep thinking, little buddy, I know it’s hard for a bear of very little brains.
I’ll take pity on you and give you two hints: it’s explained on Wikipedia on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wik… , and also the square root of 2 is approximately 1.414.
Jesse didn’t upset me, dimwit, it was the part where you said “watch out when walking by tall buildings.” You see, that can be read as a threat. I did read it as a threat, as an IDLE THREAT by a powerless poser who thinks the source of power is thuggery or the veiled threat of thuggery, you know, not God almighty or any of that.
Relax, I didn’t report you to anyone, honestly because I couldn’t find any “email moderators” button.
None of them ever confirmed it either. Nothing has come from these people, except through gullible idiots like you. Like, you know that Leprechaun who swindled Snow White out of her inheritance in a Ponzi scheme? He never ended up suing me for defamation of character! You KNOW that it must be true, because, I mean, wouldn’t he sue? Of course he would.
Oh, believe me, the feeling is more than mutual.
I am truly amazed by your ability to evaluate this! Your lucidity is inspiring! I guess I was just misled into thinking you were an illiterate when you didn’t even know the basic scaling law for amount of water flowing down a pipe as a function of it’s radius.
That wasn’t a trick question, dude. It’s simple everyday physics, and you don’t even need Wikipedia, you can use dimensional analysis to figure it out, if you know basic engineering. You can also use your gut sense, or your intuition, if you have practical engineering experience.
Your gut sense is that water flows four times as quickly out of a straw twice as wide. That collosal underestimate means you need to face it, you’re an ignorant shithead whose underqualified for reading and comprehending, let alone evaluating, scientific material. You must crap your pants whenever you talk to anyone whose solved an equation in their life.
What I do have to say is that I’m glad you informed me that these were 4.91″ flanges, as I had used 4.82″ in my models, leading to a cumulative 4% error in the figures for the demolition times. This doesn’t require precision science, fuckwit. The back-of-the-envelope initial calculation doesn’t work, let alone the details.
There’s been one, it’s true, but one depressed teen does not get to impose censorship policy for everyone else in the world through a monumentally stupid act.
Ok, there’s a problem with this analysis, in that you don’t appreciate that the internet, with it’s rudeness, allows true scientific hypotheses to get a fair hearing, but only if those defending them are not shut up by censors. The censorship rules misidentify all criticism of authoritative comments as a form of “trolling”, or “unacceptable behavior”, because it always consists of a relative nobody telling a whole bunch of accepted experts “you don’t know what you are taking about”.
This activity, when it is unrestricted by notions of politeness or civility, can produce a culture in which false beliefs are quickly eradicated. This is the culture of physics in the 20th century. Harrassment in real life is different from the debates of the internet, and the protections against harrassment, which are necessary, must take care to never make it acceptable to silence dissenting voices.
The main problem in the internet today is not the harrassment, it is the encroaching censorship and civility. Without it, many ideas which today struggle woud be easily able to make breaktrhoughs, as only in a civil context is it appropriate to insult, say, an abiogenic petroleum expert, or a committed Marlovian scholar, as an ignorant yahoo without this person being able to write that the critic is the real yahoo.
The freedom to criticize from those who lack authority to those that have authority always seems rude, an it must be protected at all costs online, as this is the only thing that makes the internet different from previous media.
My ad homs are the WHOLE POINT, fruit loop.
It’s “Mr”, actually, “Dude” is better. I do not have any authority, nor do I want it.
I agree with you regarding harassment. My point is that this harassment, while over the line, is being used as a pretext to institute policy which has the effect of stifling rudeness, and stifling rudeness is something which simply cannot be tolerated, as rudeness is simply the only way to have a legitimate debate in a field which is politically closed to debate (and it helps with open fields too).
Rudeness does alienate the “superior”, you will hardly ever persuade anyone by being rude, and you always, always, have a far better chance with a polite correction. But, counterintuitively enough, despite this being true, a polite correction online is nevertheless ALWAYS a mistake!
The reason is that in an internet discussion, your goal is not to persuade the “superior”. On the internet, you don’t have a superior, you only have the debate. Nobody is superior except to the extent that they have a point to make, and can write it down effectively. So sure, you will alienate the superior nine times out of ten with the rudeness, but you have a much better chance of persuading the disinterested passerby that your case has merit, and then they are persuaded to do their own research, and then the truth emerges, one reader at a time. If you are wrong and rude, you will get corrected. If you are right and rude, the readers will persuade themselves.
That’s the point of internet rude discussion. It hardly ever ends amicably between the participants, but the rudeness levels the authority playing field, it makes the contrasts stark and sharp, and bad or weak arguments are exposed quickly.
In the absence of rudeness, the following will fly as an argument (real example):
“You claim that nonabelian gauge theory configurations randomize at long distances on the lattice, but this is hopelessly out of date. This is belied by the simulations of http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.3423 , which show that the configurations in Landau gauge are consistent with a beta which has a sign change at low momentum” (ACTUAL COMMENT! To me, in accurate paraphrase)
This is COMPLETE BALDERDASH, it’s not true that this is claimed in the paper, it is not true of the interpretation, but it is true of the stunningly stupid MISinterpretation of this bozo. How to respond? One can say.
“I believe that you are misinterpreting this paper, the authors do not come to the conclusion you state…”
But this response is FAR TOO WEAK! This gives an air of respectability an academic debate to a position which is out and out FRAUD. So you respond like this:
“You are OUT OF YOUR MIND! There is NO CHANCE IN HELL that the lattice gauge theory doesn’t randomize on a large lattice, as I SIMULATED IT MYSELF, thousands of people simulated it themselves, and EVERYBODY HAS SEEN IT RANDOMIZE WITH THEIR OWN EYES since 1974!”
What this does is eliminate any idea that a compromise position is possible, and it creates two stark choices, and only one may be supported, not both. When this happens, the reader is forced to choose.
Such a reader will be put off by the harsh language, but in the end, after reviewing the papers, if they know anything technical, they will side with the critique, simply because it is factually correct. This is in fact what happened in this case, although I got called out for “trolling behavior” when I posted responses of this nature.
This is simply the only credible way to maintain accuracy in a discussion which is open to the whole world. You can’t be polite to every idea, because when an idea is totally wrong, you need to harshly say so, and let the readers do their own peer review, until that idea dies a painful (quick) death. That’s it. There’s no alternative.
You might say “what about using academic authority? Perhaps you could say— if what you were saying were true, it would be authoritatively accepted.” The problem with this is that the mentally retarded opinion he stated WAS AUTHORITATIVELY ACCEPTED in a journal, in a peer-reviewed publication, with some respectable number of citations. The academic authority system is not perfect, heck, it’s not even very good, and there are lots and lots of things that are totally wrong that would slide by in the old pre-internet days for years, decades, or centuries, with absolutely no correction, just based on their authority.
The other alternative is polite debate which never ends and leaves everyone confused. I would also lose that debate, because my correction came with zero citations and zero academic credibility (as it usually does). But the lack of credibility or paper, or citations, does not change the property of long-distance gauge theory, I am still objectively right about this, and if I am right and if I am rude, I have nothing to fear, because then I will win.
When I am wrong and I am rude, I will be rudely corrected, and then I learn something. Either way, everyone is better off when there is rudeness.
The non-rude method doesn’t persuade the side that is wrong, because the side that is wrong is also surely the side which is intellectually dishonest and extremely stupid, or else they wouldn’t have made the mistake to begin with.
Further, aside from experts, there are people who will NEVER CHECK the calculations, and will just trust the most respected author if there is no harsh critique (they will just be apprehensive of both sides when there is a critique, until consensus forms for which side is right). For their benefit, it is important to be 100% clear in your comment that you disagree vehemently, that you think that the thing is total crap, so that after people do the calculations or whatever and realize that you were right, they will know that the other side was COMPLETELY WRONG, nothing to salvage, no merit whatsoever.
This is a brutal form of intellectual discussion, and it is simply hard to tolerate in any community. It leads to quick progress in finding truth, and it is simply the default discussion behind the scenes in a physics department, or at least was throughout the 20th century. This is why physics was able to run circles around other fields in terms of progress, where we went from Maxwell’s equations in 1900 to knowing AdS/CFT in 1997. There is no comparable advance in the knowledge of humanity in any other field, there was more progress in those 97 years than in all of the previous history of humanity combined (and in my opinion, the great bulk of that progress post-dates 1960). and the rudeness was the central component which enabled it.
I am sorry, but the moment people talk about “trolling” and “restricting online behavior”, the first people to go under the cross-hairs are those who say things like what I said above. This is not a hypothetical, I have been kicked out of physics forums, off of Wikipedia, and off of Quora (for nonphysics things), because of the no-compromise rude and hostile responses. I will not back down on this, it is simply not acceptable to be polite, and any attack on trolling is an attack on impolite speech in disguise, and therefore a direct attack on academic honesty and academic progress on the internet full stop.
The only reason that an appreciation for rudeness is not more common in all academic fields is because of the layers of authority preventing people from entering the literature. This means that the mechanism of entry is not through actual challenge of the intellectual position, but first through an apprenticeship, and then through a worthless posturing, a comparison of credentials. In an open discussion, there is no such thing, so there is nothing to stop people from posting nonsense. But there is also nothing stopping people from REBUTTING nonsense forcefully, and when nonsense is rebutted without hesitation as forcefully as possible, the discussion is better than any academic journal, by miles and miles, because not only the wrong ideas of those out of power are exposed, also the WRONG IDEAS OF EXPERTS are exposed and jetissoned.
There is no other reason for the internet’s existence in my opinion, other than bringing the gift of rudeness out of physics departments and spreading it to the masses. It is doing just that and people are trying to stop it, through linking this to far-fetched claims of violence.
Threats and harrassment are already crimes, and there is no need to legislate new crimes for rude internet speech. Current law covers actual threats very well. The problem is that there is an attempt to make a consensus that politeness be the unofficial policy for internet discussion in both private and public hands, and politeness is simply a disease which cannot be tolerated.
I will fight for all of them equally. Anonymity is important when one could get killed for a position (for real, not trolling threats from powerless nobodies, but actual assassination related to damaging leaks and so forth)
Other people can deal with other things. I have chosen to deal with this one. Since I don’t see ten other me’s posting here, I’m probably the only one, so I must write ten times as much to pick up the slack. Since the voting is not yet in my favor, I realize I am not preaching to the choir, that other people are still stupid about this, unfortunately, so I must be more insulting.
Yup, I do. It’s extremely good, if I might say so myself.
He was too drug addled to speak out about anything, and now he might be too drug damaged to even remember what happened. I don’t think there is anything more to do regarding him, his erratic behavior makes it impossible to say what he thinks or believes, but one must protect trolling online.
Threats are to trolling as rape is to sex. Sure, there might be a subtle flavor of the first contained in the second, at least when done right, but they can never overlap, and you don’t need to ban or even demean the second to punish the first.
Ok, mental pain is sometimes good, as the act of learning to read involved a ton of mental pain, and I’m sure you approve. It’s sometimes bad, as for example, going through shell-shock. The stuff we are talking about is closer to “learning to read” than “shell shock”, and when it isn’t, it is already a crime.
In rude forums, people come in with NO TRAINING AND NO EXPERTISE and occasionally have good ideas. There was a fellow at stackexchange who asked a nice question with an idea (I forgot what it was) which was totally original, totally correct, and completely wonderful.
There was also stuff about “time flow”, and this is answered once and only once by saying “logical positivism”. Positivism separates flow from physics.
I have been arguing against a nearly unanimous position in this whole comment threat, nearly alone (the other people who agreed with me were all only, well, trolling!). Is it really hard to see the points everyone made and cut through the insults? Not at all because there are an equal number of insults, 100 people each giving 1 insult to me, and me giving 100 insults back, one to each of them.
So in terms of insult/comment, I am the worst offender, but in terms of total number, it’s equal. Trolling neutralizes the authority, and then you can make up your own mind without the bias of feeling like you’re in the minority.
It’s a psychological trick— it’s 1 person’s insults vs. 100 people’s insults, you’re still in the minority really, but the psychological effect is real, the two positions are battling in a position on equality.
Then people go home and think about it, and the right position wins. I’ll give you a clue, the right position is my position, and the evidence that it is right is the very discussion which establishes it, i.e. this comment thread.
Lay off the drugs, your brain will thank you.
Interesting! Thanks.
YOU MENTALLY RETARDED FUCKWIT, YOU DON’T NEED A LENGTH, IT IS IRRELEVANT IF IT IS LONG COMPARED TO THE RADIUS (AS IS CLEAR HERE), THE FLOW ANGLE DOESN’T CHANGE ANYTHING, RETARD, THERE IS NO “STEP BY STEP” ANYTHING, THE SCALING IS QUARTIC NOT QUADRATIC, AND THE ANSWER IS — MULTIPLY .3″ BY SQUARE ROOT OF 2 —. AND THERE ARE NO INTERMEDIATE STEPS. THE ANSWER IS .424″ RADIUS, or .848″ INNER DIAMETER.
IT ALSO SHOULD BE OBVIOUS TO ANYONE WITH ANY PHYSICAL INTUITION OR COMMON SENSE THAT 1.2″ IS FAR TOO BIG. SO YOU DEMONSTRATE LACK OF PHYSICAL INTUITION. I’M NOT EVEN AN ENGINEER, RETARD, I’M A THEORETICAL PHYSICIST, BUT I HAVE PHYSICAL INTUITION FOR THIS ELEMENTARY NONSENSE, UNLIKE YOU.
YOU DIDN’T SIMPLIFY THE PROBLEM, IT CAN’T BE SIMPLIFIED, IT’S SIMPLE. YOU JUST FUCKED IT UP.
Cardboard boxes are all he needs when the physics is obvious. The “4% error” was sarcasm, idiot, and unlike your sarcasm I don’t think it could be “accidentally” read as a personal threat.
The sarcasm wasn’t even dishonest, as I did run a model for the collapse, reproducing NIST’s collapse time, so I know what retarded assumptions they were using to get their answer. They assumed the building fell down with the only resistance to free fall the inertia of each floor. This model is equally stupid no matter if the flanges were 4.91″ or 2.2″ or 10.3″. It means “core stress all vanished into thin air”. It is as stupid as your pipe assumptions, but more reprehensible, because the people weren’t as stupid about engineering as you.
Face it, you are not competent to evaluate engineering claims. Busted, dude, busted. There’s nothing you can do about it, this is objective stuff.
You were beaten. It is useless to resist.
He should stop taking drugs, and apologize.
That’s a good one, cockroach. Get your palps down and calm your mushroom body. Your leg-bristles are extending, and your antennae are quivering with hate.
Because offline, only stupid people get presence.
YOU STUPID F*CK, I DIDN’T READ IT ON WIKI. I LINKED THE PAGE FOR YOUR BENEFIT. THE ANSWER I GIVE IS THE ONLY CORRECT ANSWER, AS A STRAW TWICE AS WIDE PASSES 16 TIMES MORE WATER, AND A STRAW 1.414 AS WIDE PASSES 4 TIMES MORE WATER, AN OPERATION CALLED “RAISING TO THE FOURTH POWER”.
THIS IS SOMETHING THAT CAN BE VERIFIED WITH TWO STRAWS AND A CUP OF WATER, RETARD, AND EVEN THE SLIGHTEST EXPERIENCE WITH WATER AND A CURIOUS MIND SHOWS YOU THAT DOUBLING A STRAW MORE THAN QUADRUPLES THE FLOW RATE.
The three wives and 11 children are leprechauns, the government of Pakistan does not publically give any evidence in support of the story. I don’t want to argue it, because this is one particular made up fantasy I happen to politically like.
You are beaten, it is useless to resist. Don’t make me destroy you, as minutemanIII was destroyed.
They ban you because you have obviously either been mentally incapacitated by a 4.92″ 310 sq in. steel beam running straight through your frontal lobe, or else you are given a small stipend by people more evil than yourself in order to write ridiculous brain-dead propaganda on the internet, and in either case, your insights are as interesting as the patterns on used toilet paper.
But I LIKE your presence, little buddy, because you are lying about science on the internet. It’s really, really hard to lie about science, you generally have to be a scientist to do this, and by the time you get enough training to do it, you generally have become so used to being intellectually honest that you much prefer to do honest science.
So when an incompetent boob like you lies about science, and there’s at least one heartless foul-mouthed bastard like me around, all six of your hairy legs come off one by one and everyone else just gets to see your abdomen squirm.
The Pakistanis agree THERE WAS A RAID, they just don’t agree THERE WAS ANY BIN-LADEN INVOLVED. There was a helicopter raid, something happened, and all the Americans who took part are now dead in a helicopter crash. Oh well, convenient.
Khairiah Saber was actually married to Rumplestiltskin, so her marriage to Bin Laden was null and void, Siham Sabar was killed in childhood by a poison apple given to her by the Wicked Witch of the West (it’s tragic) so her identity must have been stolen by Bin Laden’s bride. Amal Ahmed al-Sadah is a pseudonym used by Aladdin when breaking into the thieves’ cave, and I don’t think Bin Laden was into dudes, but, hey, I could be wrong.
Whoa, whoa, you are right for once! There are 230+ accredited civilian structural engineers who, surprisingly as all heck, reveal themselves to be UNQUALIFIED DUNDERHEADS through their statements on this, and the professional organizations, the ASCE, NCSEA, SEI, SEAoNY, AIA, RIBA are revealed to be COMPLETELY CORRUPT and run by a group of people who are getting too many blow jobs from the former Vice President to realize that they are covering up completely unscientific preposterous crap.
The science is trivial and objective, the number of experts on the other side is only a strike against the experts. But for a person like you, who has the scientific knowledge of a gnat, it is difficult to tell, I understand. This is why I am helping you by waterboarding you online until you say “Uncle”. You’ll thank me, because unlike those professional liars, I am really telling you the cold honest objective scientific truth.
Join MEEE, and together, we shall rule the galaxy.
I read more about this, I strongly dispute the content of that page. It isn’t compatible with readings of Hitler, and it is simply trying to protect Nietzschian philosophy from the stain of association with Hitler, and shoving Hitler on the cross instead. He is not an actual Christian, at least not in any historically accurate meaning of the term, and he is not a pure Nietzschian either. He is Hitler, he’s his own thing.
The “historical destiny” God can be a personal God too, it’s not necessarily impersonal, and I didn’t mean to imply that it was. Hitler did believe he was on the side of historical destiny God. It just wasn’t the normal Catholic God of his youth, at least not as interpreted normally. He was sure that Jesus was an Aryan, he drew a blonde Jesus as an artist. He believed that God was on the side of racial supremacy, and culling of those he percieved as weak, by means of state power. He supported homicidal eugenics, something the church has always consistently opposed with no exception (and opposed in Nazi Germany too, when they were gassing the mentally handicapped, which is why the holocaust was kept more or less a secret), and his positions reflect a populist German brand of Nietzschianism, because although he wasn’t a Nietzsche reader, the ideas of Nietzsche had thoroughly seeped in throughout Germany. The main idea of Nietzsche is that monotheism strangles the strong with the ethics of slaves, and that Jews imposed Christianity on others, so as to weaken the others. Nietzsche himself hated traditional Christian anti-Semitism, because he hated Christianity. Hitler just wasn’t clever enough to hate Christianity, or else he was just clever enough to hide his hatred of Christianity. He just publically hated the Jews, something which both Nietzchians and Christian anti-Semites could both agree on.
You can read his words in Mein Kampf (I read it a long time ago, by skimming, it’s online). He is opposed to the doctrines of weakness— he opposes the notion that “the meek shall inherit the Earth”, he considers the notion of submission and passive resistance as abhorrent, he believes in ruthless power, and says so explicitly.
Bormann was the true Nietzschian, it is true, not so much Hitler, who was not. But the rank-and-file SS was Nietzschian, not weird perverted Christian. The head honcho was more superficially Christian than the rest.
The complicity of the Catholic church with Hitler is well known, and this stains Pope Pius forever. But in contrast, individual Catholics and pious Protestants formed the greatest core of resistance to Hitler throughout the regime.
The fact is that Hitler was trying to reform Christianity as a religion of strength, with an Aryan jesus, a doctrine of merciless cruelty, and an ethics of absolute subservience to state authority. These are simply not compatible with Christianity in any form, although because the Church didn’t like Jews for religious reasons, it did not object to the murder of Jews unless they had become Catholic.
The Jews that converted to Catholicism were butchered just the same as all the rest. Conversion didn’t help, because Nietzsche style anti-semitism is not against the Jews because they are Jewish, it is against the Jews because it imagines that they are the ones who produced monotheistic Christianity, and it is against monotheism. Hitler, like all good politicians, was all things to all people, and both Nietzschians and Christian anti-Semites could find something to support.
The way to resolve such disputes is to read the actual sources, and see who had the power in the regime. Was it the Christian Catholic anti-Semites? Or was it the secular Nietzschians?
Unlike Hitler, Mussolini is openly Nietzschian.
Neitzche wasn’t the official philosopher of the Nazis for no reason, even though he wasn’t Hitler’s favorite. As I said, Naziism wasn’t a pure cult of personality, Hitler was just the top man.
Criminality had nothing to do with German persecution of Jews, as there was no exceptional criminality statistics among Jews in Germany, and the Jews were assimilated. The real motivation is to remove monotheism and restore the pre-Christian ideals of the strong dominating the weak ruthlessly, as this is what Nietzsche advocated.
I read more about Yiddish. The main problem here is the Khazar hypothesis is still ridiculed, when recent genetics and good history make it clear that it is likely the correct origin of at least a large part if not the majority, of Ashkenazi Jews. Once the Khazar hypothesis is accepted, the story of French migration becomes patently ridiculous, and the origin of German Jews is clearly from the East. This favors the Eastern theories of Yiddish origin, but not with certainty. The academic discourse is being polluted because the main point— Khazar origin— is suppressed.
I don’t know why it is suppressed, really. A lot of Ashkenazi Jews told me that Sephardi Jews were considered “more authentic” in the Ashkenazi community, with better ties to historical Biblical Judaism. The Khazar origin of Ashkenazi Jews should not be threatening to Jews at all. What’s wrong with being Khazar? People are people. Central Asia is a nice place.
Anyway, once the Khazar thing is respectable among normal people, instead of just Neo-Nazis (a certain percentage of neo-Nazis support this hypothesis also), then you can determine the linguistic origins of Yiddish in an objective way which doesn’t involve infighting between bigoted academics. I don’t know enough to say which of these folks is right, but the historical guy, the one who said it comes from France, is definitely wrong, because Ashkenazis didn’t come from France, they came from the East for sure.
Yo, Raven, are you the author of this article by any chance? Because then you don’t have an independent opinion, and I shouldn’t have counted you as such.
He’s not in prison anymore, he was released because he didn’t do anything. He’s in the “Levant” learning “Arabic”.
Yes, I know the historical context, I have no disagreement there. But the modern GOP doesn’t want racial segregation anymore, nor do they have a problem with a proportionate mix of powerful people of all races. They want class inequality, not necessarily racial inequality. They would be very happy if 5% of blacks oppressed 95% of blacks in the same exact proportion to the 5% of whites oppressing 95% of whites. They want a rainbow coalition of bourgoisie on top, through their “talent”.
They’re not scared of anything. You’re scared of simple science problems. Here’s another one Einstein, let’s see if you can do any better than before: my e-cig battery, starting totally empty, is 90% charged, meaning it will deliver 90% of the maximum charge it can possibly deliver, after 90 minutes plugged in. How long do I have to wait for it to be 10% charged?
Again, simple freshman engineering, day-to-day stuff, not a trick question. Come on, reptile brain, exercise that grey matter, you might evolve at some point. I have more exercises for you. I guarantee you that after doing <100 of these, you'll see the light and join the truthers, because you'll have learned the minimum amount of science to see through the bullshit authoritative people say.
I’ve seen it, thanks for linking. That is a 100% accurate scientific demonstration. When I saw it for the first time, I was happy he found a really simple way to explain these obvious things to retards like you.
What I forgot, and what he forgot, is that people like you are not scientifically trained, you don’t know how to think, you don’t recognize a correct argument when you see it, that is unless it happens to come wrapped in a mantle of authority, if it is presented by a person with a big beard next to a person with a big gun. Your mentally retarded gut feeling is that “simple == wrong”, and instead of learning some science and understanding which simple things are right and which simple things are wrong (both are simple), you instead prefer to curl up into your cocoon of stupidity, and reassure yourself by repeating the bullshit you heard someone powerful say. It must hurt a lot to get your worldview shattered like this, but I genuinely enjoy hurting you.
There is something called “stress” in the boxes, don’t get scared, “stress” means “force”. That’s just the same as there is stress in the core of the building.
“Stress” is another word for force (technically it’s force per unit area, but the areas and details are irrelevant here), and force is, by Newton’s definition, the rate of flow of momentum from one body to another.
Momentum is a thing, like water. The flow of momentum is exactly analogous to fluid flow, whoops, I’m sorry to bring up fluid flow, except that unlike water, momentum can move nonlocally, meaning that a far-away thing can push on another far-away thing, transferring momentum across a distance. In this case, the only force of this kind is gravity, with the Earth pulling down on the boxes, or the buildings.
Let me call up-momentum positive, and down-momentum negative. That means a stone going up has positive up momentum, and a stone going down as negative up momentum (I know it’s confusing for a lizard, but try to concentrate). The way a building stands up is that negative up-momentum (i.e. down-momentum, i.e. weight pushing down) comes in from the Earth directly into the thing being supported, that’s the weight force of the object, and then up momentum flows up through the struts from the ground, cancelling it out. That flow is like a closed-circuit of momentum, the up momentum is flowing up from the ground like a geyzer (again, fluid flows, sorry) and disappearing by jumping into the Earth nonlocally. That’s how Newtonian mechanics describes a standing building.
When you cut the struts, the circuit is opened, and the down momentum accumulates in the body. Then the body falls. The rate of accumulation of momentum is constant, and the body falls at freefall.
In a building like the world trade center, the core is transmitting stress. The same is true for cardboard boxes sitting on a table. When you have damage, a part of the building can collapse, some parts can fall over.
But there is a strict principle— in order for the thing to fall down at free fall, there has to be exactly zero stress entering from the supports.
The way that the World Trade Center fell is that the collapse started at the point of impact, and the building fell down at the fastest possible rate, except for the inertia of each floor. What that means is that the building lost all support instantly the moment the collapse front reached the next floor, and the momentum in the collapsing section was distributed to all the mass of the collapsing section and the new stuff it just picked up, which wasn’t moving to begin with.
I simulated this process, and, exactly as NIST say, this produces the right time for the collapse (I forgot the figures they said, but the process of collapse of a uniform building with inertia as the only thing holding you back is about 30% longer than freefall).
This model is accurate. What it MEANS is that there was no stress transmitted up through the core when the building collapsed. The core simply stopped working as a support structure when the building began to collapse, it was as if it had disappeared into thin air.
This is simply unprecedented. It is impossible that the core disappeared just like that.
Further, the problem is worse for WTC building 7, because there, the building just fell at free-fall, which means that all the supports disappeared AT THE BASE, not step by step, there was not even accumulating inertia slowing the building down. Building 7 is a no-brainer, it is obviously, without any analysis a controlled demolition. I won’t push this too much, because it is so obvious.
WTC is different, because here, you see, the collapse began at the point of impact, and the only resistance to collapse was inertia of the floors as they accumulate on the falling mass. How do we explain this kind of collapse?
NIST is not as stupid as you, and understands that the collapse had zero resistance. The way NIST explained it is that the core was weakened by fire, and when the building collapsed, it “pancaked”, meaning that each floor immediately on impact severed all its columns and struts, and joined the falling mass above it, with zero stress transmitted at impact.
This is absurd, because it simply is impossible for any impact on steel structures to do this. At best a part can buckle, then another part, and the building slowly plastically deform and have parts fall over. Steel is simply not glass. It doesn’t shatter on impact. Falling with zero stress means that the steel shattered on impact. But this is difficult to explain to a monkey.
But it was obviously the only explanation that was compatible with the government story of hijacked planes, so all the engineers signed on to it like monkeys, and those that refused were threatened with political reprisal and kicked out.
Ok, so they were stupid. What’s the right explanation? The right explanation is that the steel structure was weakened in the hour before the collapse so that it WOULD shatter. The beams were eaten away partially, gradually, and in parts uniformly, so that a large fraction of all the steel was melted. Once the core connections were all uniformly fragile enough, the building actually would collapse the way it did, by collapsing from the point of impact down without any resistance other than inertia, because the core beams are now a swiss cheese of eaten metal with no ability to transmit stress, and no ability to withstand impact without breaking into a thousand smithereens.
Not heated by fire. Melted by incendiaries. Cut, blasted, melted into a pool of molten steel that people saw. The steel dripping down the side of the building. The material continued to be hot for weeks underground, because the heat was supplied by tons and tons of material which was undergoing a chemical reaction.
That’s what happened at WTC 1 and 2. At WTC 7, it wasn’t anything elaborate like this, it was just a plain old controlled demolition.
This explanation is not for you, bird brain, it’s for other readers of this discussion. You have been beaten already.
I discovered a completely new law of physics when I was 26, retard. The sad fact is that if you were to get hit by a bus, you would have nothing to show for your life.
If I were you, I would become suicidally depressed, but please don’t do that! You would like to give some meaning to your currently less-than-worthless life of pathos and pain, give up your evil retarded self-appointed job, and start working for the truth. Then your life will be meaningful, and you will no longer suffer with the weight of the evil you support.
A ding-a-ling who just intellectually castrated you below.
He wasn’t joking, it wasn’t a joke. But he just wasn’t really posing a threat to her either! Bullying on the internet, when it isn’t threats, consists of someone expicitly and forcefully showing you that you are wrong.
This is exactly right. I am a pig, and you need pigs, otherwise nobody wrestles with anybody, and wrong nonsense is never challenged and defeated.
Sometimes you can’t, but in this case I CAN, and I don’t LIKE to be right, I just AM right, and a long enough troll makes it obvious to everyone, even if there is a 20 to 1 imbalance in the perception at the beginning. This is what the internet is for, to correct 20 to 1 imbalances in the wrong direction, and it only works when there is the freedom to insult in both directions (the freedom to insult from the 20 to the 1 is automatic).
I mean “Mein Kampf”. I never read “Table Talk”, and it is not necessary to establish the Nazi’s Nietzschianism.
It becomes a semantic dispute if you define whatever he was as Christian. If you insist on calling it “Christian”, and I don’t like this terminology, but terminology is not important, it is without doubt a new type of distinctly anti-Catholic neo-Protestant crazy Christianity which claims that Jesus looks out for one group, rather than everyone. Looking out for everyone, rather than one group, is what makes monotheism monotheism.
Yes, it’s the coordinated tag team of mentally retarded adults I am talking about.
I live in the internet universe. I haven’t commented on the Ada Lovelace, but if you are arguing with someone who sounds like me, I’d suggest you pay close attention to what that person has to say.
That’s exactly the opposite of the truth, dickwad, and your example of “deserve to be heckled” shows why you need trolls. There are very few questions left about what happened that day, it’s been sorted out for a long time now. The fellow in charge of the military drills of that morning adjusted the drills to fake a terrorist attack, with no help whatsoever from any actual muslims. This is obvious from looking at the drills, and it is also obvious from looking at the evidence.
But idiots like yourself have been trying to silence clever people with evidence for a long time, and the attacks are of the form of “deserved heckling”. It is not deserved, but it is also not a problem, so long as the truthers heckle back stronger, you cockroach.
I won’t, because I am not that important. Hardly anyone online is. The ones who are important have real threats which are more serious, that don’t involve online bluster. Also, it’s not “Ran”, it’s “Ron”, really.
Your stupid fear-mongering doesn’t work, asswipe. The number of internet violent encounters, let alone homicides, can be counted on one hand, and do not pose any greater danger than lightning strike. On the other hand, the amount of good that internet rude speech has done is incalculable.
I changed my mind, you rotten apple. I think you are permanently brain damaged.
It doesn’t add to any gravitas. He is fighting the very notion of gravitas through these actions.
You are an angry moron, who has problem being in front of a keyboard without spewing hatred. I don’t mind your persecution, being persecuted makes me feel bigger than I am, so thank you. I would look you in the eye and tell you that you will rot in hell.
I do the same things real world as I do online, face-to-face, exactly the same, the same way Christians did in Roman times. Yes, I have been thrown out of society, as were the Christians in Roman times (and Jews too), it’s a small price to pay for freedom. It’s necessary, and I expect you to do it too, as an ethical imperative.
This is the only way to deal with the mentally challenged mob which is blind to their own mob behavior. It’s an infinitely less impressive version of what the Archbishop Tutu did in embracing the man who was about to be necklaced to death, and refusing to let go.
I’m not a Marxist, I read Marx. There’s a difference, which is intellectual autonomy. I am not a post-modernist, I don’t approve of Heidegger, Nietzsche or any of their intellectual descendants, and I believe truth is truth.
I am uninterested in learning the facts because you aren’t giving facts, just propaganda. I already guessed the facts upon skimming the article, I guessed right, there is nothing more to learn.
I also read Jefferson, and I would defend his position on free speech over Marx’s, although not so much on gender politics and owning human beings.
My “Ivy League degrees” are as useful as toilet paper online. My accomplishments are in discovering new things about science that sound unpersuasive to idiots, but which are verified by instruments and calculations.
You keep thinking that, and you can keep deluding youself of that, but it just isn’t true. Also, I think you’re the same person as the author, so this is not an independent opinion, and making it look like one is real, actual, intellectual dishonesty.
I don’t have a problem with coming for Nazis first. I just recognize it for what it is.
There are no malicious sociopaths among the accomplished trolls, and no actual violent sadists, as these people can’t write for shit. Writing takes a spark of inspiration that requires a healthy spirit. This is what is protecting people from violence online, the continuous practiced literacy of all involved.
Crazy people hardly ever read, and they certainly can’t write. Writing is the first thing to go when you go mad.
There is nothing to concede. It took me forever to realize that you are likely the same person as the author of the article, because you disguised it. So I took “Raven’s opinion” and “Karen’s opinion” to be two separate opinions which were strangely always aligned, and Raven as strangely knowledgable about all of Karen’s details.
You are the same person, so your opinion is not independent, it is worthless as a data point regarding the threat women feel online. It was also intellectually dishonest to have pretended like this. It was also damn gullible of me to not see it earlier, but I always presume good faith from others. Obviously I made a mistake here.
I do agree that a woman might have a different level of threat aversion than a man, but Raven’s opinion does not establish this, because it is just Kathy’s opinion, and it’s the same moronic propaganda that she does.
“Raven” asked me if I see no value in “Kathy’s” online activities. Now that I see what they are, the answer is “Absolutely not”. She should do something else with her time and talents.
None of these discussions make a credible argument for censorship but rather for a removal of threat.
The reason you feel threatened by my arguments is because they are not giving in. The reason you heckle them is because they are a minority viewpoint in this discussion, so you feel safe in doing so. The reason to protect trolling is precisely so that a person like you, who cannot write even one page of original material which doesn’t repeat itself, can’t silence a person like me, who can write original material which does not repeat, and which persuades.
I must say that you are a nincompoop, and I must repeat it, until this nonsense is eradicated.
It’s not genetic, you will see that when you understand the internet. Like Germany 1968, we will come make your progeny hate you for your crimes. The difference: these crimes are purely intellectual, nobody really got hurt, so the weapons are purely intellectual.
The thing is, trolls are just trying to teach you to do the same. They are living by the golden rule, you are not. Your post is a start, but trolling is not about sadism, it is about levelling authority, so you need to start by doing so for a cause that is NOT popular, but one you believe in.
Whoa, GP! I didn’t know you had it in you. Good job! Maybe you aren’t the problem.
“she”? The word you are looking for is “I”.
Yup.
Seems that way when you read the article and start reading the comments, doesn’t it? Let’s see if it still seems that way when you’re done reading the comments.
It’s a threat of sorts, it’s true. It’s just really not a very credible one. It is what it is, a minor threat deserving very little attention, some stern disapproval, and no change in policy.
It’s something my father, who is an engineer, told me how to estimate, and I slapped my forehead and said “of course”. It’s not in any course as far as I know, it’s not in any book, it’s not dependent on the battery, and it’s something you can’t look up anywhere. It only depends on general properties of batteries and general physical intuition. To help you along, the answer is about 3 minutes and 50 seconds.
This is not about structural engineering and building collapse directly. It’s about your ignorance of science, and about how really simple obvious things in science, like WTC collapse, can be obfuscated by pointing you to irrelevant nonsense and using fake erudition. This method only works when you don’t understand the things completely, which is why I explained the things more or less completely below. But it’s up to you to fill in your understanding, and to be intellectually honest in evaluating the options, which means, ignoring political considerations.
You don’t know how to do that yet, but you’ll have to learn, or I’ll spank you. Right now, at your intellectual level, it would be like flapping your arms and flying to the moon.
You are repeating yourself, idiot. There is no point in repeating yourself. That propaganda technique only works when someone isn’t cussing you out on the other side, fucker. There is no particular difficulty in this problem, it is just a psychological obstacle you put up in your brain to accepting the obvious.
I WROTE WIKIPEDIA, you fucking retard.
Yes, you are right. I am embarassed at how late I joined.
Not all of them are CORRUPT AND UNQUALIFIED, just a handful of the TOP BOZOS, and they are not going to stay TOP BOZOS for very long.
No, the answer is always what I said, up to a small error, at least for any recent battery (excluding old batteries that had hysteretic charging effects, althogh in principle, the law also works for those batteries too, if they are always fully discharged before they are plugged in). The ambient temperature does matter a little bit, but not very much, and it affects the 90% and 10% charging time equally, so my question was just fine as stated. You are just making excuses for not knowing the first thing about the most basic scientific processes, something which should clue you in that perhaps there’s something wrong with your brain, and certainly that you should leave commenting on scientific matters to your betters.
Do you know what the battery charging law is? It’s very useful for your day-to-day life, and it’s known to all freshmen engineers and all physicists as a seat-of-the-pants intuition that just comes. It is completely unknown to everyone else for some reason, it is especially mysterious to the lizard people such as yourself.
I don’t need to enlighten anyone, they’ll have to enlighten themselves or be replaced, one by one, by people who know what they are doing. I am objectively right, you see, and science is about objective truth, not about political consensus.
Now, now, little retard, why in the world would they need to do this? Neither you or anyone other dipshit has given any reason to think it is any more difficult than melting holes in any other steel structure. They’re all the same except for the time you apply the thermite.
I joined in 2005, wrote a bunch of physics pages, then when it got political, around 2009, I started making a stink about their stupid mental policy that allows political anti-science idiots like you to set the tone, and they kicked me out. They kept all the science material I wrote (except for their page on Schrodinger equation, where I removed all my material in a fit of spite, to teach them a lesson), it’s not like anyone else there is competent to write physics. They’re nearly as stupid as you now (nearly).
Joining in 2013 is exactly 11 years of embarassment. I kick myself for not being on board in 2002, I could have at least shown them how to curse at and humiliate the pisspots like you earlier. Well, better late than never!
All you have to do is say it. I’ll remove the insinuations. Thanks.
They did not use criminality to justify their policy, it simply was not a justification in their propaganda. It doesn’t appear anywhere as there was no fear of Jewish gangs. Their propaganda image of Jews is of a scheming sexless physical weakling, not a street thug. I’ve haven’t seen a reference to what we normally call criminality in the propaganda, although I only read a little of der-Sturmer, so if you know examples, please tell me.
Jews in 20th century Germany were assimilated, they didn’t live in isolated Ghettos, they spoke German fluently, they worked in the professions, and they were completely integrated in day-to-day life and were not on the whole extraordinarily socioeconomically disadvantaged, although they were underrepresented in the high German bourgoisie. This assimilation and normality is why the genocide came as such a brutal shock, because it was a demonstration for many that assimilation of Jews in Europe is simply impossible, and even if theoretically possible, too risky to continue.
The propaganda made Jews out to be vermin, and the “crimes” were not street crimes, like mugging, but crimes against Germany. There were other crimes too, like absurd slurs about Jewish incestuous behavior, ideas of corrupt morals (meaning having sex with Germans), and ideas of spreading degenerate art (meaning Picasso and Jazzz). Perhaps regarding the Picasso and Jazz business, some Jews have to plead “guity”, and I’m sure that some people had sex every once in a while outside of ethnic boundaries. But the decadent morality assertions, the incest, the cheating, was simply an old anti-semitic trope used to prop up the new anti-semitism.
The main crime here was God, imposing a religion of weakness on the strong. There was also the imagined crimes: the “stab in the back” of 1918 causing Germany to lose the war (a similar stab-in-the-back motif appears in American films regarding the Vietnam war, except this time blaming Hippies, not Jews) of inspiring Britain to declare war on Germany, and the other imagined crime of having set up the Soviet Union (although here, there were disproportionately many Jews in the politburo in 1917, this was all over by 1930, as Stalin purged all of them, and in Soviet Communism in the early era, being Jewish or Chinese, or whatever, didn’t make any difference. It still usually doesn’t, although it did under Stalin).
Yes, the proportion of those people has fallen to a point where their presence has negligible political impact. I know it doesn’t feel that way when they are so threatening and hateful to blacks in America, and one must always be vigilant, but the Confederate symbol was removed from the flag in Virginia and there are no more obstacles to Martin Luther King Day. The South is shedding its neolithic confederate heritage, and the atrocious blind defense of that wretched heritage in media which used to appear everywhere from “Birth of a Nation” to “Dukes of Hazzard” is now completely erased. You don’t find any positive representations of confederacy or the confederates anymore, and they are always a political liability. They aren’t all dead yet, but under these political circumstances, it won’t be long. They certainly are nothing to worry about today, although one must always keep vigilant, you are right, in case they ever start to get positive mention again.
The reenactments are not sympathetic to the confederacy in general, although they used to have this flavor. Now they are more a way of keeping history alive. I don’t think you can ignore the change in the South in the last 30 years.
Anyway, these neanderthal Confederates are not the source of Republican appeal, or there would be zero membership in the Black Republican Caucus. The appeal is class inequality, and the doctrine of the superior person, independent of race or gender, just by virtue of the “Will to Power” that you need to rise up the ranks in politics.
Ok, I removed it. Quick persuasive corrections are what you get when you are rude and wrong, and I got one. I am sure now that I am taking to a real separate person from Kathy Sierra. But I didn’t know you were a dude, dude. I thought you were a dudette.
Yeah, I rest my case. Nobody was threatened on those forums by this lady, she was just ignored. The people who felt threatened were powerful people far away.
I am not talking about Jesus or even Paul, I am talking about the basic point of Christian church teachings as understood essentially from the beginning until now. These teachings were designed to create martyr actions which would topple Roman naked absolute power, and place the church as an ethical guide above the power of the state. It’s sort of like the communist party placing itself above the state in Russia, this is mideval theocracy, except not totalitarian, in that individual political leaders only looked to the church when they did something objectionable, and the Church ensured they lost support.
The doctrines are of complete equality of all humans who accept Christ, of all Church members, of a non-specific non-tribal deity you are supposed to export to everyone in the world, of denying worldly power, and of spiritual resistance to barbaric cruelty by examples of martyrdom. These are the fundamental tenets.
To say Hitler said “Christ” is meaningless if the fundamental tenets aren’t there. The fudnamental tenets in Hitler are replaced by Nietzschian ones, of strength, and Christ becomes the “god of whites”, instead of a monotheistic “God for all humanity”. That’s a subversion of all previous Christian teachings, there can be no debate over this. There was not a ton of debate about this in Hitler-times either, the sincerely religious people didn’t feel he was one of them, and the White Rose consisted of some Christians in Germany, however few of them were left.
It is difficult to explain unless you understand monotheism, so I would suggest you my answer here first (if you have time : http://christianity.stackex… ). I’m sorry to link, but if you are an atheist, then you usually just don’t understand what monotheism means. Nietzsche was an atheist who actually understood what monotheism means, and rejected it, and the Nazis followed him, not Jesus.
I read EXACTLY THAT STUFF in der-Sturmer. Oh I see. I said “They didn’t use criminality in their propaganda”, I meant by that “They didn’t use criminality in their sincere propaganda, the stuff I said— stab in the back, Jewish weakening of German morals with weakness, Nietzsche, that’s what they used to get sincere people to join the project.
That stuff in Sturmer is not what you normally call criminality. It’s fantasy crime, and the association with Jews was fantasy writing. The propaganda was real, but it was just like “The Weekly World News”, it wasn’t about real-world events. There were no jewish ritual murders, there were no jewish white slavers (nowadays it’s called “human trafficking”), it was all fantasy for the readers, like the Weekly World News in the US, which served a similar role at attacking the public’s brains, minus the genocide.
Your quote “But the Nazis used the theory of “collective guilt” to try to round up and execute ALL Jews for the “criminality” of which only a few were actual examples”.
This is a problematic quote. That’s not what was going on at all. They did not round up and execute Jews for criminality in any way shape or form, this is for sure incorrect, I know, because I know how propaganda is made. That stuff was nonsense which slowly, slowly, gets the public at large on board with the genocide, and it had zero influence on Nazi policy, which wasn’t decided by polling the public, but from the top down.
The Nazis were NOT sincerely blaming the Jews for any actual crimes, Sturmer wrote over-the-top stuff like this “Jews EAT JonBenet Ramsey, use blood for Matzos”, to get the public to hate the Jews through this reasoning: “Well, they didn’t eat JonBenet Ramsey, but they sure are wicked anyway, and I’m sure they had SOMETHING to do with the dissapearance”, etc. This is the propagandist method, it has nothing to do with any actual Jewish criminals, none of which I ever saw in derSturmer. It simply wasn’t about ordinary crime, like a crime novel is about crime.
I think Streicher should not have been executed, he should have been imprisoned instead of the rank and file SS (and the rank and file SS executed). He was the Rush Limbaugh to the Nazi’s Dick Cheney, he had no influence, and he had nothing to do with policy. He was also a boor, and the Nazis had nothing to do with him, he wasn’t a high-class guy like they were. He was just a guy they hired to slowly chip away at the public’s opinion of Jews and communists, by creating such extreme hatred, that more mild but still extreme hatred became the compromise position, and the norm. Because people usually make their opinion by weighted average of everything they hear, and it requires serious counterpropaganda to undue this natural tendency.
That counterpropaganda is what I am doing here. I am simply removing all the Streicher-isms by adding Streicher-isms going in the other direction to neutralize them.
The only way Streicher style hatred becomes a social disease is if it only comes from one direction without neutralizing counter-propganda. In the 1940s, the communist partisans produced high quality counter-propaganda against the Germans, and unlike the Germans, they didn’t focus on imaginary sensationalist crimes, but on very real ones.
“I bring not peace, but the sword” is not talking about cutting people, it is talking about talking, and the context is unambiguous about this. The sword is pitting mother against daughter, father against son, and brother against brother, at the DINNER TABLE, in the struggle to convert them to the new faith. This is likened to a sword in the passage, it is discussing the schism that Christianity will bring in society. This is also discussed here: http://christianity.stackex… .
There is no dispute among Christians regarding the meaning of this verse (nor can the meaning possibly be disputed by any person who is able to read and reads the chapter). There is not a SINGLE Christian denominational interpretation of this verse as militaristic, it is only thought of this way in ignorant people who are skimming the New Testament, and are snarkily looking for a contradiction or alternative reading which in this case does not exist. Jesus never advocates military struggle or violence in any form, and none of the Christian texts are about violent struggle (although they are about a struggle).
The actions of Jesus in overturning the money changer tables are symbolic of nonviolent protest. There is no real implied violence towards any human being, still it is not a passive action. The point is that Jesus is not an authority of any kind, and has no power to get the money changers out, nor is he a man who has any ability to harm them, except symbolically.
The basic tenet of Christianity is the destruction of authority by contrarian action which opposes the authority. This is a form of trolling.
If you would like to see more exampes of trolling by Jesus:
“Are you king of the Jews?” “You said it, not me.”
“Shall we stone this woman?” “The one without sin can throw the first stone.”
“Why do your disciples eat treph from the field?” “Are you complaining that God made it so?”
etc, etc, really pissy annoying answers, classic trolling. The whole of the gospels are a blueprint for effective trolling, and this is why I was inspired to read the whole thing, and why it was moving. It is clearly a description for how to challenge power effectively, with martyrdom accepted as the price.
That’s the essence of what Jesus is all about, nonviolent trolling, accepting that the consequence is potential violent reprisal, and letting yourself take that risk to produce a better world. This is why trolling must be preserved. It’s how you produce progress.
Hitler is about thuggery, and the resuscitation of the Roman empire, and natural law of strong oppressing weak. This is the opposite of the CORE TENET that makes Christianity Christianity, (ignoring metaphysics, since religious metaphysics is always purposefully stupid and nonsensical). The Roman natural law order is opposed permanently and consistently, at all times, by all denominations, without exception, except perhaps Mormonism which I am not familiar with. These things are simply not fungible, if it doesn’t oppose the Roman style order of natural law and hierarchies of humanity, it just shouldn’t be called Christianity.
Look, there was opposition to the theory of relativity in 1920, and it involved powerful people. They kicked out Einstein and instituted German physics. Then in the 1940s they went underground. By 1960s, there was no opposition to relativity except for cranks. The Confederacy is dying, let it die, there will always be cranks.
I agree, it is.
Freshman engineer: an 18 year old who can run intellectual circles around idiots like you.
360-degree reversal: going around to come back to where you started, at least for bosons. For fermions it’s -1.
I know it’s hard for the retarded, but try, man, try.
It’s science, other people’s opinion are simply not important. Only the instrument readings and calculations are important in evaluating a proposition, and for most of my original stuff, so far so good. It is really useful to know that there is someone who finds it unconvincing, because if there weren’t it couldn’t possibly be new or interesting. The evaluation of a new scientific proposition is by testing it as objectively as possible, not by listening to the mentally defective people in positions of authority.
Similarly here, reading long-winded opinion pieces is not useful. If the discussion is rude, people can explain what happened bluntly, and the truth becomes evident quickly, and there is no need to do deep reading. This isn’t rocket science.
Also, you’re a poopy head.
I am sorry, you simply have not read the gospels at all. There is no way in heck that any of that stuff can be read as a preparation for a military revolt. The whole point of the crucifiction is that Jesus was NOT engaged in any military anything, he was completely innocent, he didn’t do anything except troll the empire.
The Jewish revolt of 66 AD was JEWISH not Christian, the Christians weren’t in Palestine at the time as far as I can tell from any reliable historical record, they were all in Rome. This revolt had nothing to do with Jesus, it had to do with the Jewish interpretation of messiah at the time, which was the leader who would overthrow Rome by force of arms.
Jesus, as far as I can see, is more a vague amalgalm of various people than a person. He’s a prototype for martyrdom and resistance. There’s much of James the Just in Jesus, a little of John the Baptist, those are definitely historical people, and maybe there was another person named Jesus too, although that is not strictly necessary for the religion to work. You are trying to read in a historical Jesus into the documents, something that contravenes the purpose of the text, which is to replace the miltaristic doctrines of messiah with spiritual doctrine of messiah. The text is a REACTION to Jewish militaristic interpretation of messianic doctrine, it is saying that messiah is a spiritual term, not a military term, and the victory does not come on a literal field of battle. This is the WHOLE POINT of the texts, and it is not only accepted by Christians, it is also accepted by Jews past 135 AD, when Rabbi Akiva and all the others are martyred.
This new interpretation withstood history. Ben Gurion, who actually “liberated Palestine for the Jews” is not identified as a “messiah” in any Jewish religious text (although some secular Jews proposed that he should be so identified), simply because he is a secular political leader, not a spiritual figure. The interpretation of the term changed, and the Christians led the change. The change is there from the beginning, and any militaristic sentiment you read into the gospels is your own insistence on falsely reading made up history into (reasonably good) theology.
The Jesus followers were nothing like the Manson followers, as they were all Greek, and mostly outside of Palestine, and they did not support militaristic resistance to Roman rule.
I strongly disagree with your painting of the events in the gospels as preparations for military revolution. This is just what non-Christians or atheists do when reading the text without understanding. The texts were written in the 2nd century, and are not celebrating the end of a failed revolt, but the beginning of a successful one.
You don’t have to explain propaganda, I know what it looks like. The disagreement I had here was with the idea that controlling crime was a motivation for the genocide. It simply wasn’t. The motivation for the genocide was the “Stab in the back”, the idea of “Jews control US and British media”, “They hate Germans”, and, most importantly, the new idea that “Jews must be removed so that the German can be strong again without the polluting influence of monotheism”. That’s the motivations for genocide, and of these, all but the last are too weak to explain how it turned into genocide.
Rush Limbaugh has no influence going up, only going down, he is just like Streicher. That’s why I don’t agree with Streicher’s execution, it would be like executing Limbaugh for the crimes of the Bush administration. It’s simply a highly visible wrong target, he’s just a propagandist. I agree with everything else you said.
I agree, except the conversion of the Khazars is not just a story made up by Yehuda HaLevi, it is confirmed by all historical sources and the Jewish empire between the Christians and the Muslims is important in midieval politics.
That’s not neo-Confederates, that’s Republicans, following the example of Kathleen Harris in Florida. They know statistics and they know who they’ll be driving away from the polls. Democrats, when they could, would stuff ballots too in the other direction, and did in 1964, using union power.
I didn’t say there were no Neo-Confederates, I said they were few an they have little political power. This is true. They might have more power in Texas, considering the horrible politics in that state.
The ID laws, however, do not exactly have to be unconstitutional in any interpretation, you can argue both ways. This Supreme Court is just literal minded and myopic, and ignores the intended discriminatory effect of any measure, only looking at the letter of the law to see if there is discrimination.
It had most to do with Einstein being right about relativity. It’s more interesting when it goes in the other direction, where the side that is crushed militarily and politically is the one that is right. For example, with regard to Gentzen, who was a German starved to death after the war, and who had the right position regarding the Hilbert program. Hilbert died (of old age) during the war. In this case, Godel fled to the US, and Godel’s position that there can be no good consistency proof of arithmetic was dogma in mathematics until today. But with a little bit of explanation, you can counteract this political disease and show that Gentzen’s position is right. Gentzen’s position was also close to Turing’s, but Turing postwar is outed as a homosexual and driven to suicide (or perhaps dies accidentally, maybe he was even murdered, although that looks unlikely), and also Alonzo Church, but he dies too. So there was no strong counter-push to Godel politically. So what happened? Did Gentzen get suppressed forever? No. There are mathematicians who advocate his program of ordinal analysis today, including Rathjen at Leeds, and I try to do propaganda to get this injustice reversed. Staying in Hitler’s Germany does not mean you don’t know math. A similar example is Teichmuller’s work on his eponymous spaces, which was underground for decades, although I believe he was an actual Nazi.
Neo-Confederacy is a political movement, and politics is not so different from how science proceeds. There is a truth here too, but a more vague ethical truth, and the processes of history reveal it also, and it is irreversible ratchet. That’s the “historical God”, and it’s a part of monotheism too, that’s probably the most distinctively Jewish part, and it’s not a false proposition.
The defunding of Obamacare has nothing to do with Confederacy, but with free-market fundamentalism, which is a tenet of modern Republicans who abhor the Confederacy just as much as the handful that don’t. Considering the history of the Republican party, it’s a bit ironic that you would be foisting the Confederacy on them!
I call you a shithead, and your objection is that your head is not entirely made of poop.
Thanks, yes, you got it! Humor is how you maintain your sanity when arguing with the mentally incapacitated.
The principal difference being that my humor is actually funny.
That’s them trying to exploit racists for political ends, like the Democrats try to exploit drug use for political ends, it’s not them accepting racism as a principle. The Republican party tried to appeal to racists in that period, but that really was never that strong an appeal, and it ended with Bush I and Bush II, they were not racist at all, and both have serious non-token African American appointees (Bush I had Colin Powell, Bush II had a whole bunch). Further Bush I understood the principle of civil rights well enough to push through a serious expansion of the notion of what civil-rights bill can do, extending the concept to actually disabled people. this was the American With Disabilities Act, which has been a model for the rest of the world.
Wow, I hate Republicans more than cancer, and you sort of force me into the position of having to defend them through this spurious accusation.
Judging whether humor is funny is sort of like judging whether a person has a brain, it’s not as subjective as it first appears, and you fail on both counts.
I don’t like to dispute these, as I don’t support these folks, and I despise Bush II more than any other president, but I really think these are arguable, even though Willie Horton has become a staple example of race-baiting. The content of the ad is Duakakis supporting prison furloughs in Massachussettes, and really it would have worked equally well against Dukakis if Willie Horton had been white and otherwise all the same. I agree that the imagery in the ad was pure race-baiting, that the wording and imagery was playing to racist fears directly, and it was reprehensible. But dude. Prison Furloughs? For lifers? That’s a really stupid idea, and it looks like a legitimate attack, if it were done without the racial aspect (just removing Horton’s photo would have been sufficient).
I don’t believe that the racial undertone had anything to do with Bush I as a president, and I am not sure if he was competent to understand the significance of this stuff beyond the surface level of the ad. He wasn’t so subtle. The surface level is fine, it’s an attack on a stupid policy.
Anyway It is obvious from his appointments and supported legislation that as a leader his racial stance was not out of line with the mainstream today. It’s a terrible ad, but the race baiting aspects are overemphasized in my opinion. A more legitimate example of race-baiting I think is Reagan’s welfare queen in a cadillac, or starting his campaign in a confederate stronghold. Reagan did race-baiting more than the Bush’s, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
The black disenfranchisement in the election of Bush II was racially discriminatory, but in my opinion it was not particularly racist (I know it sounds like a contradiction in terms), not like housing discrimination, or education funding discrimination, or segregated schooling is racist. This was a pure deiberate disenfranchisement of most likely Democratic voters, like ballot stuffing in 1964 for Kennedy, and it did not have the same racial impact as race discrimination per-se. It was opportunism. I do not consider it a racial attack, but a (highly illegal) political attack using voting statistics to identify populations whose disenfranchisement would impact the opposing party. The neglect of the population after Katrina I do not think is about race at all, rather about class, the rich people in New Orleans wanted the poorer folks removed, regardless of race. The wealthy folks in the higher area neighborhoods New Orleans were diverse too, they weren’t all white. I don’t support any of this nonsense, but it is simply not true that either Bush was a racist, it simply doesn’t pass the smell test.
As for the links between Bush and the Neo-Confederates, it is true but it is as understandable as the link between Obama and Bill Ayers, or marijuana clubs. You don’t control everyone you support, and you sometimes support those who help you without supporting their position. Also, Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah” speech was race baiting in a worse way than any of the Bush material, but he was not criticized for it, because it was clearly political opportunism, and his policies were good for racial harmony.
We have no disagreements here, and I didn’t think about this business regarding Limbaugh’s electoral effect. Thanks.
What I say is worth listening to, otherwise I wouldn’t waste my time saying it. There are no other examples of folks who say this preceding sentence, because people generally feel the need to maintain their authority, and such a sentence wrecks your authority immediately. I don’t care, because I do not have or seek authority, because authority is of negative value online.
I am with my wife and daughter, but it has become a wretched hive of bile recently, although not so much misogyny. I don’t think I have enough misogyny in me, as I have not had any special problem with female authorities, as opposed to male authorities. I despise them equally.
Yeah, yeah, continue to think that, bird-brain. It’s not logic, circular or otherwise, it is rhetoric. And this rhetoric I am using to DEMOLISH my own authority, because AUTHORITY IS NOT NECESSARY.
Get this through your skull: there IS NO AUTHORITY THAT CAN JUDGE ANYTHING. Not what I am saying, not what you are saying, nothing. Board certifications are worthless, and online they are doubly worthless. Credentials are toilet paper. Authority is dead, and we have killed it. You need to judge everything independently.
I prefer talking to folks who speak through their mouth and not their anus, as the halitosis is more bearable.
Ha Ha, yes, Disqus doesn’t understand the subtlety of “rooster”. Sorry for “you didn’t read the gospels”, I see you did, and I appreciate the independent interpretation. But I think you were looking at it the wrong way, looking to extract a historical interpretation out of it by interpreting the events causally, and I think this is largely a mistake, because there is no independent solid description of any historical events that led up to this, and they are not necessary. I take it as a snapshot of the spiritual doctrines of the time when they were written, not as any kind of accurate description of any historical events that led to this doctrine, which are lost to history.
I don’t consider the gospels as a reliable historical record, any more than I consider, say, exodus as a reliable historical record. When you try to figure out what could possibly be the historical events behind the text, you are doing something other than reading the text and extracting the spiritual guidance that it is giving, and you tend to focus on incidental passages, like “sell your cloak and buy a sword”, rather than the main message in the text.
The Peter treif-picnic may post-date the crucifiction, but is pre-dates the writing of the gospels, so all that it tells you is that acceptance of Jesus is not dependent on accepting Mosaic dietary law, which just lowers the barrier for the religion to spread.
I am projecting this “back” to Jesus, because the texts were written after all the events were already complete, so they are made self-consistent teleologically by the chroniclers. I don’t consider them to be historical record in any form sufficiently unaltered to divine what actually went on in the sense of historical fact, so I read them as a unified spiritual whole, with backward and forward influence, like Exodus back-influences Genesis.
That’s a very violent interpretation of Christianity, and it does not describe other post Constantine events very well. For example, the Colloseum was closed when a martyr stood up in protest, and was killed by the mob, leading the authorities to shut down the place. Christians brought the religion to Germany, to England, and to Ireland, then to Poland, and Russia, and so forth, and these people were powerless in the new lands, and were persecuted like the Church founders were. This is not the kind of action you expect from a vengeful Christian victory, it wasn’t a military action or an action of the sword, rather the same kind of actions which are consistent with previous martyrs, following the letter of the gospels.
The deaths of the Mithraic priests are historical, but I don’t know what happened there. When you say “Christians did it”, it is not clear that it is the Church itself meting out a death sentence, or whether it is a lot of former slaves doing terrible things to their former masters, as often happens in any successful slave revolt. Same with Hypatia. These pagans were likely slave-owners, and Christianity was a successful slave-revolt, where the slaves become free. the scholarly stuff was destroyed by those who were destroying the slave system, same as the classical art and classical culture.
I see it from a different perspective, which is more Marxist (but Nietzsche also saw it this way, he just didn’t like it). The revolt here is the elimination of the Roman slave-master system, with the creation of a sort of egalitarian brotherhood of slaves, which is then reinforced by religious terror from a political organization, sort of like modern Marxist states. The terror was towards those who supported the old order, and the terror was ruthless toward the masters in a similar way to how slavery was ruthless toward the slaves. It’s like the terror in Russia, or in other communist states, which was directed at those who in other societies would be members of the bourgeoisie. Their plight is more visible, as they are visible members of society, while the plight of slaves was about as worthy to record as the plight of homeless vagabonds is today.
The collapse of the slave system just destroyed the old economic order of Rome, so that the enormous construction projects could not be done, the precision sculpture could not be made (which incidentally suggests to me that the precision sculpting was done as grunt-work by slaves from body-casts, not by an undocumented army of ancient Rodins from their imagination), the libraries could not be maintained outside of Churches, and the old doctrines of master superiority over slave were removed, and anyone who supported these doctrines was a target. The whole system collapsed, and the dark ages means that even high-class literacy was gone, leaving only Church literacy.
I don’t see this as the Christians now doing the same thing when in power, because these power structures just absolutely needed to be removed, otherwise we would still be living in a Roman style essentially Nazi slave state.
The real terror here during the midieval era was the suppression of individual initiative, much like in modern Marxist states. Anyone who wanted to do an individualist project, like Marlowe writing great plays, is considered as an atavistic throwback to the Roman masters, and shunned by the community, and is only accepted back if they accept the authority of the community and the communal values that are shared since the Christian revolution.
The Protestant revolution allowed a certain amount of individuality in Christianity, modern science restored not even Roman science (which was atrocious) but previous Greek science and extended it tremendously— the suppression of honest science was in my opinion the greatest problem with the church, and Capitalism allowed the division of labor found in master/slave societies to be reestablished within a more egalitarian system, but still not very egalitarian. But this partial classical restoration in the 1492-1992 bourgeoise era also lead people to consider Christianity as an imposition of slave-order on the powerful, and there are people who always want to be able to own others and impose their will through force and violence, something against which Christianity puts a good barrier.
I get your point, and it is interesting, but I can’t agree that it was falsified, the pacifism is a major doctrine, and the relative peacefulness of the Christian revolution, as compared to say, the Spartacus revolt, or the Jewish wars, attests that it was not a false front. The vestigial remnants of militarism in the gospels can be considered a hidden coding of some lost original militaristic teaching, but I think it is a mistake and a disservice to the text. I think any military references are always better thought of as an explicit metaphor for the coming spiritual battle. Even the “sell your cloak and buy a sword”, and it is not to be interpreted literally, but in the same way all Christians have standardly interpreted it.
Relative peacefulness is exactly what it was. The transition was Constantine accepting Christianity by a slow conversion process in discussions with one of his family members who was Christian, and then some time later another emperor making the religion the official state religion. That’s what happened, it wasn’t a violent revolution in any sense.
The persecution of pagans was a component too, after the Christians were dominant, but, really, the pagans had propped up the slave system of Rome for centuries, I hate to say it, but they really had it coming, and persecuting them is no more unusual than people persecuting Nazis today (although we are more civilized about it). The pagan system in Rome justified slavery, murder of slaves in arenas, horrors you can’t imagine.
It wasn’t conquest, it was social pressure to convert, and directed localized killings at best to remove Pagan strongholds that resisted Christianization. It wasn’t a bloodbath like Masada or the conquest of Jerusalem circa 66AD, and although I don’t support this kind of thing, it was better than what was going on before.
I think you are trying to read in violence into one of the most peaceful revolutions in history. You can see the same thing again in the conversion of the Germans, in the conversion of the British, the Irish, and so on, there are a dozen or more examples of Christianizing revolutions. Each of these followed the same pattern, proselyzing, conversion, slowly working up the power structure until the leaders capitulate, and then cleaning up the residual paganism by social coercion and a small number of executions at best. That’s the standard pattern, and I don’t believe it was any different in the Roman Empire.
It is not true that each denomination recognizes a different interpretation of these gospel quotes. They all interpret it as a struggle for dominance, without bloodshed, by conversion. Besides, Christianity was under unified leadership at that time, it hadn’t split into denominations yet. That’s the standard interpretation, and it is universal as far as I know, certainly today, and I don’t see evidence that it wasn’t universal in the past. Your examples are just not persuasive.
I am telling you, you don’t have to listen. I have no authority. I am only accepted to the degree to which what I say is correct. I can speak in whatever tone I want, it makes no difference. That’s what online discussions are like.
Sorry, you are just missing the whole point of the Christian revolution here. Christianity discouraged Christians from holding Christian slaves, all Christians were brothers and sisters in the church, and a socially enforced loose condition for joining was emancipating the Christian slaves you owned, on your own schedule, but it was a process that was definitely going on, because widespread slavery is replaced by a different economic order in this era.
You freaked me out, so I just looked it up, and it’s in the same exact Pauline epistle, the Epistle to Philemon. You should read it properly. Philemon is the Christian slaveowner, Onesimus is the fugitive slave. Paul has to decide what to do regarding Onesimus. Onesimus is returned to his master, Paul obeys secular law regarding slavery, but at the same time Paul exhorts Philemon to treat the slave not as a slave, but as a brother in Christ, and insists that they are social equals (I read this on Wikipedia just now, but it is what I remember from the New Testament). Then the master frees the slave, and they are both canonized.
It’s not like the Church handed out Sainthood for no reason, this is what the main teaching on slavery was, as I understood— the masters will eventually join the Church through social pressure, as the empire is Christianized, slaves join the church automatically, they come first. Once the master and slave both join, they are social equals in the Church, and the expectation is for the masters to gradually emancipate their slaves, without coercion, or legal obligation, just as a sign of sincere Christianity.
I should point out that this is exactly analogous to the Jewish religious emancipation, where Jews are required to free Jewish slaves after 7 years of bondage. Except, being Christian, it doesn’t go by a strict timetable, and it’s more of a wink-wink nudge-nudge social compact than a rigid law (as is the spirit of the religion— the expectations for behavior in Christianity are enforced by shaming and collective will, rather than by written law).
This kind of excruciatingly slow emancipation is in conflict with the desire of abolitionists, so the texts are ambiguous on the subject, in the sense that revolt is discouraged, but at the same time emancipation is encouraged. The exhortation to obey your masters I read as an exhortation to not make revolution, but to wait for the process to complete of its own accord, as it did, over 500 years.
The effect of this teaching is that as Christianization proceeded, the slaves would be freed gradually, and the slave system was replaced by serfdom and artisan labor, with political heirarchies of land-owning and serf-control through nobility grants from the local secular authority. The Church’s role was overruling secular policy it felt was not consistent with Christianity, so like a presidential veto plus a supreme court. This is the Feudal system, and it is a different economic order than the Roman slave system, where slavery was basically total and unlimited.
You were completely inverting my own memories of reading the New Testament and related historical materials, but I read only enough to form this basic picture, as this transition I was not so interested in. I was genuinely mystified at how you could come to this interpretation of the Christian slavery teaching, but I think I understand now. You are reading it based on the completely wacko interpretations of these teachings in the American slave era. I do not believe I am the one deluding myself here. Christianization was a real slave revolt, and the most successful one in history.
This doctrine was flexible and did not enforce things by decree and certainly not by direct armed revolt, but the slave system was replaced by a serf system in this time through Church action, and this is gradual and clear because you can see large slaveholding construction projects stop dead, and the whole slave economy collapses. Where did all the large slaveholders go during the dark ages? What happened to the slaveholding dynasties? They were all gone by the 7th century as every slave was freed or died.
The slavery teachings are simply not encouraging a slave revolt, rather emancipation through gradual Christanization of the whole empire. If I am wrong about this, please let me know, because otherwise I can’t understand the massive social upheaval that accompanied the Christianization of Rome at all.
Modern slavery, the 18th and 19th century kind, was historically disconnected from the slavery of Rome. It began with slavery of Muslims and other non-Christians in the late midieval era, and continued with slavery in colonial regions. As I understood the events, there are two completely distinct slave-phases, the Roman one, where the majority are slaves and they are largely of the same ethnicity as the masters, and the modern slavery where a minority are slaves in remote regions, and this minority is foreign and of a different ethnicity. As I understand, the two phases are not connected by any direct historical line of slave-owning.
Also, the readings of these doctrines and texts were perverted and inverted in the American slave era, as I understand it, to understand these gradual abolitionist sentiments, which freed the ancient slaves over geological time, to instead imply that slavery is just and proper. The readings are not consistent with the interpretation of the texts in their Roman context, and really, the feeling of Northerners that Christianity and slavery are just incompatible was wholly correct.
Here is a Christian fellow saying the same thing more eloquently: http://www.biblestudytools….
These are ridiculous Confederate Southern misinterpretations of the purpose of Pauline teachings. Do you really think that those Southerners understood the purpose and principles of Christianity? Don’t you think they were reading in their self-interest?
The type of chattel slavery these southerners condoned was the kind historically removed by Christianity. It is contrary to the traditional understanding of these verses to read them as condoning slavery, although that was a common Protestant misreading in the colonial era, for obvious reasons.
Paul returning Onesimus to Philemon is NOT an example of Paul condoning slavery— it is an example of how Christianity deals with master/slave conflict and the justness of freedom for the slave. The slave and master are first to be reconciled, they become brothers in the Church, and then with enough time, the master sets the slave free because it is the right thing to do (or usually more accurately, as a result of a significant social shaming process if he doesn’t).
I have NO AUTHORITY! I can speak however I want, but best if everyone is rude. Then it’s up to you to think about it. When I am right, you learned something. When I am wrong, correct me, and then I learned something. The essence is real, abrasive intellectual conflict, free of imposition, until total and complete agreement is reached.
YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY! You’re just the same as me, you see. That’s the nice thing about the internet. You have to do more than assert, you have to make an argument. Since you haven’t done so, I will tell you that your belligerence is a good start, nice going, but I encourage you to come back with a more substantive argument than “I say so”.
You can tell me not to reply, but since you have no authority, I am not going to listen to you.
Sorry, you have no idea what you are talking about, and you are repeating Confederate stupidity regarding Christian history. I reviewed the material yesterday, the review did very little, it just shifted the dates of emancipation around— I thought slavery was totally eliminated in the 6th century, and it was actually eliminated in the 7th.
The major role of Christianity, and the largest factor making it spread was in gradually abolishing the institution of slavery. There’s a reason people count the years since Jesus’s birth, and it’s nothing to do with miracles. Slavery was completely abolished throughout Christendom by the 7th century, a process which began with the spread of Christianity and dramatically increased as the Christian reformers started to have an influence on secular policy, and instituted ethical reforms. It becomes an explicit injunction in the Church to disallow Christian owning Christian slaves past the 7th century, and Europe was entirely slave-free between the 7th and 12th century. The 13th century slaves were Muslim, and the Muslim slaves pollute Europe with this again, but the institution was never all that widespread like it was in the colonies, and it is banned through secular legislation in the European countries that reinstated it in the 19th century.
What you are right about is that there was some debate in the early Church regarding slavery, the religion wasn’t uniformly abolitionist, although it was egalitarian. The debate lasted a long time. Still, the emancipatory character of the religion is there right from the start, it is in the decrees of equality of Christians, and it applies to slaves (and freeing them) explcitly in the Epistle to Philemon and the Catholic tradition regarding Philemon freeing his slave. The canonization of the Epistle is controversial, either because it is too abolitionist in sentiment or not abolitionist enough, but there is an explicit denouncements of the slave trade in Paul, and .explicit recognition of equality of slave and master to make abolition inevitable, and the process does complete, although in geological time frame.
The statements of St. Augustine are coming in the 3rd century, before the religion is established enough to do the major reform. There were high-class fellows in the Church, who as always, have no clue about anything, and want to maintain class priviledge. There was a debate about the character of the church in the canonization era, but you can see that the abolitionism stayed, because it completed. There were those who suggested the Jewish method of limited slavery, but the outright abolitionists won out.
I should say that Jews also abolished slavery outright in this era, although when they did it, I don’t know.
It was not an official policy until the 6th century or 7th century, but it is codified in Catholic doctrine that Christians may not own Christian slaves explicitly the 7th century, and abolitionism is the only real secular point of Christianity.
You are speaking about Confederate interpretations of Christianity ignoring the real historical purpose. I don’t have any patience for this, as you are totally wrong. My “guessing” (which is just mental shorthand for previous reading about this) is completely historically accurate. Please don’t continue with this intellectual dishonesty, and review the real church policy on slavery properly.
The gnostics didn’t dispute this interpretation either, but I am speaking about the centralized church, the one that made policy that’s written down that we can study, who didn’t dispute this interpretation any more than anyone else. NOBODY disputes the nonmilitaristic interpretation, it’s just something snarky atheists point out.
I do keep telling you so, but you keep asserting the opposite without any evidence. The military events and the conversion events are largely separate, and the imposition of Christianity is through a social dominance process which is violent only after it is already dominant.
Outright slavery was abolished in Catholic Christendom in the 7th century, there are no more slaves in Europe by that time. The modern slavery and the slavery on the periphery is something different from the main bulk of Catholic Europe. I am not sure about the Eastern Orthodox history, they might not have abolished slavery.
The freeing of the slave is strongly encouraged by the letter, if you actually READ IT, the social equality of slaves in the Chruch is definitely explicitly stated, and Paul takes upon himself the debts of the slave, and asks Philemon to consider that he owes all his soul to Christianity, and to consider this price against the price of the slave’s debt. It is accepted in Catholic tradition that Philemon freed the slave, the same slave reappears later in the New Testament as a Bishop, and I don’t think he was moonlighting as a Bishop and a slave by day. It is clear from later Catholic doctrine that slavery became unacceptable, and you can’t falsify this, because this is the major historical break between slave economies and feudal economies.
St. Paul would not agree with the confederates, but it doesn’t matter. I am not advocating theocracy here, I am just objecting to falsified readings of the purpose of Christian religion. I am more a humanist myself, but I try to be honest about the history.
You have only shown that you don’t know how to read and evaluate historical material dispassionately.
But to the extent that you claim I made a mistake, it looks like bullying to anyone who disagrees with you, it’s just that YOU don’t see it as bullying.
This is complete nonsense. There has never been an abolition of slavery which did not involve an institution outlawing it explicitly, and in the case of 7th century Europe, the institution was the church. I gave you the doctrine, it’s explicit 7th century Catholic doctrine that Catholics cannot own Catholic slaves, and it is effective, in that there are no slaves anymore. It is also clearly an implicit doctrine earlier, going all the way back to the beginning, although it is also not enforced in strict law, but in convention. Onesimus became a bishop in the Church, this is something that comes up later. We know he does not remain a slave. The epistle is abolitionist through and through, although also pragmatic about it.
The idea that the collapse of central authority led to emancipation is ridiculous, as slave-owners simply do not retain authority over their property through a central authority imposing it, rather through local authority using taskmasters with access to violent means of repression. The emancipation is directly as a result of the Church injunctions against slavery. The same is true in Judaism, but much earlier, as the Jewish religion emancipates all slaves after a fixed period, and that’s that, a law on temporary slavery eliminates chattel slavery in less than one generation, as slaves convert to Judaism, and then the Jewish slaves become Jewish freedmen.
The collapse of Roman institution is the result of the decline in slavery, not the other way around. The whole Roman economy is built on the labor of slaves, and as the slaves become serfs, the centralization of the slave economy around the decisions of slaveholders collapses. This collapse is ongoing in the 4th-6th centuries, and it is essentially total by the time the dark ages begin. This loss of financial power weakens the military. There was nothing else going on except Christianization that weakened Rome to the point that it allowed the invasions other than the loss of the powerful slaveholding class. It doesn’t matter so much by then, because power has devolved to the Church.
This is the main point of Christianity, and you miss it. Serfs were now beholden to secular royalty granted by local kings, and the royalty was held in check by clergy from doing things like reinstituting slavery, and all the private large slaveholders are history. That’s the Christian revolution, and it’s Christian. It’s annoying that you are blind to this, as it is the single most significant transition in human civilization.
I should add that this emancipation process was completed in Israel first, where slavery was not a permanent institituion, at least not in the era of Priestly Judaism and Leviticus law. Jews were nearly all free in Palestine before the Babylonians and Romans came, they lived as autonomous agents with occasional 6 year bondsmen to repay debt, and a full reset of the financial system every 49 or 50 years, in the Jubilee. Being universally free and universally literate, of course they resisted external occupation worse than anyone, and Christianity eventually exported the same freedom outside of the confines of Judaism. They left the Jews alone because the Jews weren’t the ones enslaving them.
I will not read anything more, I verified it sufficiently because you questioned it, and so can anyone else, and there is no point in debates regarding established historical facts that are not disputed by anyone except here in this discussion. You are simply wrong about this, and it is up to you to read enough about it, realize it, and say “oops, sorry”, but I don’t hold my breath, as folks like you are usually incapable of admitting they are wrong even to themselves.
Christian slavery of Christians is removed in Christendom by explicit Church decree in the 7th century, which is before 699, not 604, although slavery was already rare (perhaps extremely rare, I don’t know) in 604. The declines in slave population is, according are supposed to begin in the 3rd or 4th century, as I suppose is estimated from estimated economic data, I don’t care, as all I cared about is the approximate slave population numbers. I found the name of the church fellow who pushed through the abolition, but it is also clear from the socioeconomic changes and political system changes that this is the end of a long process and not a sudden thing.
The SECOND slavery abolition in the 18th century, and 19th century is abolishing the SECOND period of slavery from ~1250-1865. This is three times further removed from ancient slavery in time as we are removed from the second abolition. I explained this to you several times, but you are obviously decided you would rather dogmatically play pretend games online to avoid losing face.
Have fun doing it, but it’s pointless to make up stuff online, as people can check for themselves. Online, there is no face to lose, so it is also pointless. Just learn it and move on.
The only thing left to do here is to mop up the exoskeleton and stain your squooshed abdomen left when I stepped on it.
Not exactly “NA NA NA”, more like “come back when you have more intellectual honesty”. Ok, you are acknowledging the main slavery reforms now, although I would prefer it if you say outright “Chrisitianity was a slave revolt”, because that’s exactly what it was. The emancipation is the main reason people go around revering Christmas all over the world, more or less as they revere a Juneteenth.
The doctrines about slavery you are talking about are crazy isolated exceptions to the otherwise universal rule of emancipation, and they are analogous to debt-slavery in Judaism, and I don’t know anything about them, nor do I care about these details so much. I accept that there is a complicated dance of pro and anti slavery forced through the early midieval era, but but you must also accept that a doctrine that frees 99.9% of all slaves and puts the remainder under conditions of non-absolute non-generational servitude cannot be considered “condoning of slavery” in any form. It is an abolition of ancient slavery, replacing it with various forms of penal slavery and debt-slavery used to enforce social law.
The ancient widespread majority slavery is beat back to the point where it is an extremely unusual condition, essentially abolished among the Christian populations of Europe. The condition that you can own non-Christian slaves is not as much a problem as it seems, at least not in the midieval era, as this does not lead to generational servitude, because of conversion. That is, it doesn’t lead to generational servitude until people run away to distant colonies and import large numbers of non-Christian folks to serve as slaves without emancipation on conversion, or create protestant Churches which temporarily turn away from the doctrine of liberation. It’s analogous to the doctrines of ancient Jews, which also required emancipation upon conversion, but it was not a problem among the Jews either, as male children of slaves must be circumcized, allowing for easy conversion, and the practical result of Jewish law is that ancient Judea is free of the scourge of absolute generational servitude, probably quite a while before the Babylonians invade, and certainly before the Romans come. This doctrine is what distinguishes monotheism from other practices, any religion that led to ancient slave emancipation is more or less monotheistic.
I agree that the modern emancipation is more total and more permanent than the first Christian emancipation, because it is enforced by anambiguous secular law and unmodifiable religious decree today. But the religious emancipation of the early middle ages more or less removed slavery from Europe entirely. The abolitionist interpretations of Christianity are dominant through Europe until modern times, they are only perversely interpreted as condoning slavery in the Confederate south, and this is not a Catholic doctrine, those people are all Protestant and make up their own slavery-condoning denomination. The slaves in the South, although largely illiterate, still picked up on the purpose and message of Christianity, pretty much only the slaves (and the abolitionist northerners) understood what it’s all about, and embraced it more than the slave-owners in this period. To this day, the African American community is very committed to Christian religion, and this is tied to the recent experience of servitude.
That’s not a “secret doctrine”, that’s a structural property of nearly all movements that become powerful, with the best exception being modern liberalism (although this becomes violent too in America in suppressing Shay’s rebellion, and other monetary insurrections). There’s relatively little of that in Christian history as compared to previous ancient history, precisely because the major doctrine opposes violence. But there is still some, because there is still power, and where there is power there is violence. The imposition of opinion is at first voluntary when the movement is weak, as it has no other choice at this point, and then looks for excuses to become violent when it is the majority opinion. This violence is what modern liberalism is designed to counteract, by imposing individual freedoms. It has nothing to do with any secret violent teachings, these are just not there in Christianity, any more than Jews have injunctions to slaughter non-Jews and drink their blood.
I have to agree with you completely regarding post 1300 Christianity, it backtracked on this accomplishment in a shameful and reprehensible way, and forgot its founding purpose. But this is a perversion of the intention of the aims of the religion. The perversion in the US in Mormonism is especially pronounced, but in all Southern denominations it was perverted in the same way, to claim that it encourages unlimited chattel slavery. Chattel slavery is what Christianity is designed to eradicate, and it worked nearly as well as Judaism eradicated it in Judea in an earlier era. while it worked in the transition from ancient times to midieval times, it stopped working in the modern era, both because it was splintered, and also because Popes were always on the side of power.
I am not a Christian, or an idealist, I just try to give credit where credit is due. The transformation away from ancient majority chattel slavery is clearly Christian, as it happens simultaneously with Christianization, although at a glacial pace.
I am not, and you shouldn’t be either. Shame on you.
It isn’t a social process, anyone can do it if they have the time and energy to post original material and follow the discussion, which in this case, I took time to do, because this cause is important to me. My long-winded posts are required because others are either deliberately lying or doing propaganda, and the point of this is to demonstrate that these are useless, as one person doing counter-propaganda without listening can easily counteract fifty or a hundred doing propaganda the other way. So best stop doing propaganda unless you are right.
I deserve to be listened to exactly to the extent to which I am right. There is no authority in an online discussion, I can claim to be the king of Prussia, or a fourteen year old boy in his mom’s basement, who cares? Only the text matters. The only reason I am motivated to post long material is because I am right here, so I don’t have any worries about acceptance. That comes slowly at best, when you are right, as people slowly think about things themselves. As for “no one listened”, that’s just more propaganda, as I can see that due to my verbal diarrhea there is no more consensus here, some people got tired of arguing and left, and I got some hate-messages down below. Hate-messages don’t come sans impact.
All right, now your comments are spot on! There is no need for me or anyone else to do fact-checking before blabbing away, as in such a discussion, you will get quickly corrected by others. I also make an effort to correct the mistakes where I am wrong, which wasn’t in too many places (you were more wrong more consistently, and you never corrected anything, because you are not trained in intellectual honesty). I think I did an excellent job with the facts, considering I didn’t even read the article, just sorta skimmed it quickly.
The main message is the same now as at the start— this is an unjustified hit piece on a non-threatening nobody for the purpose of silencing internet discourse, and it should not be accepted at face value. There’s nothing wrong with me saying stupid things along the way, based on false assumptions, so long as a correction doesn’t require too long a process. It doesn’t. Me saying stupid things neither hurts nor helps my credibility, because, and this is what you don’t get, ONLINE THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS CREDIBILITY, only the text matters, and people verifying various statements for themselves using the nebula of online resources all around us. A person who makes three correct statements and one outrageous WHOPPER doesn’t lose credibility, the three correct statements are verified, and the whopper is corrected, and nobody has any more or any less credibility at the end than at the beginning, no matter who said what. But the truth becomes clear to everyone along the way.
Nobody here is wicked, but dishonesty is the natural condition of humanity. The internet fixes that by design, and those who have already learned how to be honest, which is, like, physicists, and pretty much nobody else, don’t have to change anything.
There is no contradiction, little intellectually dishonest twit. The only problem with what I said was that weev is not subject to prosecution, something I didn’t get at first because of all the stupid propagandists here falsely saying “He’s in jail now”. It isn’t relevant anymore, he’s NOT in jail now, he’s been hounded out of the country.
The principle is the same, he is a socially powerless nobody who is being attacked by a wealthy person who has lots of power and no achievements. These malcontents are extremely jealous of people with no power and real achievement, because they think “it’s not fair! I worked hard for all this power, why can’t I do anything significant?”, the world’s smallest violin providing a soundtrack for their sorrow. Nobody corrected it, by the way, because it’s so peripheral to the discussion.
His doxxing was unethical, like picking up a wallet and not returning it, like giving away street drugs, like lying on an official form. It’s not a threat of rape or murder, it’s only psychologically unsettling, it’s a hassle, and it’s not even clear it should be made illegal, because you can’t use the power of the state to correct all unethical things, because the state itself is often worse.
It isn’t possible to discuss with a person who is not intellectually honest, one can only call them an idiot to their face until they change. You aren’t capable of change.
As a famous Dirac anecdote goes, someone sat across from Dirac at lunch, and said “Nice day today.” They finished eating in silence. Dirac went to the door, looked outside, came back and sat down, and said “yes. It is.” The moral of the story: you should ALWAYS look out the window when someone tells you it is raining.
With that way of thinking, “right” and “authority” become synonyms, and truth is simply a social process of consensus. This is the Heideggerrian view, and it is simply false, and even a small amount of experience with the hard sciences shows you this. The Copernicans were right long before they were accepted or even gaining converts rather than losing them. Archimedes was right 1800 years before he was completely understood. Cavalieri was right even though he was heckled and marginalized. The process is exposed in a very clear way in mathematics, and in science, because the people who are right are, by statistics, nearly always very different from the people who are powerful, and this is why studying physics, engineering, computer science, etc, is important for clarifying social processes.
In the case of social questions, there is a view that these more difficult to analyze things do not have an objective truth to them, they way chemistry does. The notion of religious teleology (or teleology of truth) gives a definition of “right” here also: right is that which people eventually come to agree on. Eventually leaves a long time for discussion and debate, and the mechanism is a long consensus-forming process which examines all the various arguments one by one. This process produces authority at the end, but does not require authority to operate. It only requires intellectual honesty. This is different from the Heideggerrian definition because the structure of the discussion process itself is important, the structure of the debate informs you whether you can trust the consensus that is produced from it. Pontification from authority doesn’t help sway things one way or another, at least given a long enough time. Open discussion is foolproof, because no point of view can be shut out, except those points of view that nobody thought of yet, but these are quickly produced when people sit and think for a little bit.
The example of science is useful, because here you can verify the truth of the propositions for yourself, completely independently of the social process, and then check how long it takes for the parallel social process to work itself out, in this case where there is a nearly purely individual method of evaluating true and false. You learn that it does work itself out, but it takes forever, and the length of time is contingent on all sorts of events in history, like which nation won a war. But in the end, the person who got it right, in the sense of correct mathematics and science, always is eventually authoritative. And for the handful of examples where this fails, the person usually gets some small thing wrong that blocks the acceptance, like Geoffrey Chew, or else the idea is just on the way up, like Hugh Everett III. In either case, the internet makes the process go by an order of magnitude faster than before.
The mechanism of social progress requires freedom of participation, tolerance of wrong ideas, examination of all related ideas without bias, and relentless intellectual honesty, so that you point out your own mistakes FIRST, before other people do, and you don’t feel bad when you get something wrong, rather, you learn something. These are the principles of physics discourse, and they are very alien to social politics, where you are supposed to simply twist and bend every statement and fact to your maximum political advantage. The zeroeth approximation to physics discourse is to bend and twist every statement and fact to your maximums DIS-advantage. This is what people are free to do on online forums without repercussion, because you can do so anonymously and remotely. It produces physicist-level of clarity, but too few people do this right now.
Online forums don’t exclude billions exactly, although if you are talking about rural electrification in the Sudan, you might be missing some voices, although you would be surprised at how resourceful 10,000 people are at finding at least one linked in representative. The real exclusion is of the second fellow with the same idea, as repetition is a waste of time, so the first person who has something to say sort of owns it, and needs to defend it, because everyone else with the same point of view doesn’t want to duplicate the effort.
It’s not like I’m claiming any great originality for these observations, I am pretty certain that this discussion will never appear on my resume. This is just mundane observations about the authority-free structure of internet discussions which were already clear to all involved in the 1990s, but seem to have been forgotten by some people today.
Not exactly me, that’s the Heideggerians. Heidegger==po-mo. I’m not exactly with them. But I agree with you on all that.
“Not exactly” is irony-talk for “COMPLETELY 180 DEGREES REVERSED”, I guess I have to clarify for the irony impaired.
Heidegger is a moral stain and a vacuous idiot, Neitzsche is a terrible crackpot, and I have no patience for academic philosophy, as aside from the short lived logical positivist movement, it is all a terrible intellectual fraud. The continental school has produced nothing of value aside from Marx, who was really an economist and not a philosopher, and all the rest can be condensed into a five page summary which would be hard to fill without redundancy.
The points of agreement you see are superficial:
1. the ability to formulate a new position and maintain it in the face of hostile propaganda.
This is something that the post-modernists encourage. It is also something science encourages. The critical difference being that you go with the new position only as far as it is correct.
2. The willingness to use anti-logical arguments, like ad-hominem and propaganda
This is a superficial point of similiarity. The crucial distinction is that these ARE NOT ARGUMENTS AT ALL. These are simply used to diffuse and counteract the propaganda value of authoritative bullcrap, which usually comes in the form of an equal amount of veiled or explicit ad-hominems and anti-logical argument on the other side.
Any logical argument proceeds in parallel to the ad-homs or anti-logical rhetoric and has no relation to this anti-logical nonsense, little idiot. You can remove all the ad-homs, twit, and the content is unaltered, prickface, and consists of a normal rational discussion of the usual sort, testicle-brain.
3. The dismissal of authority structures.
This is the sole point of agreement with the post-modernists. The difference is that one is beholden to the same standard of truth that has been understood since ancient times, now bereft of social authority, proceeding with as many as desire to join, without any barrier to entry, without any barrier of unduly obfuscated language, and with the text itself, judged by independent analysis, shared and evaluated by textual responses being the only acceptable method of arbitration of acceptance or rejection. No socially mediated authority required. That’s not postmodernism exactly. That’s internet discussions.
The philosophical underpinning is totally different. There is no rejection of truth here, no rejection of logic, and no rejection of fact or placing discourse above content. It’s the exact opposite, it is simply a rejection of traditional authority. And that’s not post-modernism. That’s Galileo and Pauli.
I DID NOT GUESS WRONG, TURD BRAIN, I GUESSED RIGHT. I DO NOT NEED TO READ FURTHER, I ALREADY READ TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS NONSENSE. ANYONE CAN REVIEW THE DISCUSSION.
I never use ad-hominems against a person who isn’t using various anti-logical rhetorical devices. It’s just that I MAKE IT OBVIOUS, by calling you a crapstain, while you MAKE IT SUBTLE, by using a high-falutin tone and the dismissive annoying language of authority. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHICH YOU USE, BECAUSE BOTH ARE EQUAL IN PROPAGANDA VALUE. Once there is enough ad-homs and ridiculous rhetoric flying around on all sides, all the anti-logical arguments become completely irrelevant, on both sides. When you force people to pick sides in a conflict, they will either butt out entirely, or they will review the objective evidence.
Hicks is also an idiot (funny enough, I just read his stuff, as he has an attack on post-modernism from a traditionalist liberal point of view). He is writing explicitly anti-socialist texts, which in itself is not a problem, but he makes the following outright OUTRAGEOUS ERRORS:
1. He claims Stalin is responsible for 60 million deaths in the Soviet Union, a country of ~200 million people, and ~120 million in Stalin’s time. This figure is the latest upswing from Solzhenietsin, to 1 in 2 Soviet citizens dead under Stalin, the previous figure was 20 million, or 1 in 6 Soviet citizens dead (in addition to the ~12-15 million war casualties). That’s really awful, the way the population of the Soviet Union declined by 50% as Stalin murdered every other person, like Hitler did with the Jews. You can see it when you ask typical Russians or Ukranians about their familiy, half their family disappears in the 1930s, just like typical Jewish families in the 1940s.
Of course not! That’s obviously ridiculous, and from a survey of former Soviet citizens, or a glance at the population statistics for the era, the rate of death is about 1%-3% at best. Hicks buys this MENTALLY RETARDED bourgeoise propaganda without any critical review. Stalin’s “purges” usually involved firing people from various positions of power, only the most powerful or top people were executed, but these are the most visible people. These purges were AWFUL, but the result was on the order of 300,000 deaths, as revealed in the Khruschev era. There were on the order of 2-3 million imprisonments, with a mortality rate in prison of order 10-30%, and you can do the math. These are roughly comparable to the cumulative suffering and death from street homelessness in the US, although I am not condoning either of these horrific endemic structural democides.
The Ukranian famine killed at most on the order of 3-5 million folks, it is hard to tell, because this is a demographic estimate, so it includes babies who were not concieved. The net total of deaths in Stalin’s time from state repression is best estimated on the order of 2-3 million people. The loss of life in the 1920s civil war was higher, and the loss of life in the Irish potato famine, a similar disaster due to liberal capitalism, is higher still, and from a much smaller initial population. I am not white-washing Stalin’s very real crimes, I am trying to show you what THESE ACTUALLY WERE, instead of doing propaganda for liberalism.
For a relatively honest assessment grounded in actual research, rather than propagandist fantasy, see here: http://www.nybooks.com/arti…
The same estimate inflation works for Mao. Mao’s famine killed less than it prevented births, because food was relatively equally distributed outside of certain areas where people misreported needs, as is usual in the stupidity of central planning. The demographic dip in China amounts to ~30-60 million lost people, but these nearly entirely consist of babies never concieved. You can see a similar but smaller dip in the US during the years of the Great Depression. The baby-boom is a reaction to this, people put off having babies until they were economically secure. I am not condoning Mao’s crimes either, which were very real. I am telling you what they actually were, rather than doing liberal propaganda.
I am not defending Stalinism of Maoism, I am attacking Stephen Hicks, for uncritically repeating propaganda. This is common now in anti-intellectual circles, and it is always rewarded. Online, it is extremely easy to fix, I just did so. To verify these assertions, you need to look at the actual content of Khruschev’s 1956 speech, and the actual demographic estimates for China’s terrible times in the 1960s. These were terrible enough as they were, without lying.
2. Hicks claims that the Soviet Union economic output was roughly comparable in 1917 and 1956, that there was no significant economic growth.
This is complete MADE-UP NONSENSE. The Soviet Union industrialized in the first and second five-year plans, from ~1930 to ~1940, literacy rates went to 100% in this period, and the last unemployment office was closed because unemployment had dropped to 0%. The reason unemployment was at 0% (it really was) is because the Stalinist hiring model paid managers by the number of workers they could attract, and had a free labor movement, with prices set by supply and demand. It was secretly a pure free market, and the pressure was to get every worker into a position. This continued through the 1980s, and unemployment was at 0% or as close as one could measure, throughout the period. But the supply/demand wages led to weird phenomenon, like factory laborers making twice as much sometimes as professors or managers, putting pressure on people to fill what are lower-paid positions in the west. This created a huge amount of resentment, because more powerful positions were lower paid, but it is consistent with the predictions of an idealized frictionless liberal free-market model for labor, which is more or less what was instituted in the second Soviet constitution.
The way Hicks shows no growth in the USSR is by comparing farm output in 1917, when nearly the entire population was farming in small plots, to 1956, when the farming was done with a small percentage of the population in collective farms, and the rest worked as industrial workers. This is an insane economic comparison, and dismisses the many-fold industrail growth in the Soviet economy during the 1930s and 1940s. The USSR had double-digit growth rates until the 1960s, which is why Khruschev predicted that it would eclipse the west. The rate of growth was roughly equal to the west in the 1960s, and stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s. The end of communism was marked by a 50% collapse in the GDP of the USSR, as the state industries were privatized, and cooperation agreements with Eastern block countries collapsed. The USSR’s economy was approximately 30% to 50% of the US’s during the 1950s-1970s, with a similar population. It never caught up, but it wasn’t anywhere near 1917, it industrialized and educated the whole population. It also was completely competitive in the hard sciences, and about 4-5 years behind in electronics development. This lag only became intolerable when personal computer technology was developing, because 4-5 years in computers is an eternity.
I am NOT ADVOCATING USSR STYLE SOCIALISM. I am advocating ACADEMIC HONESTY. If Hicks can’t even be bothered to get his figures right, rather preferring to repeat figures pulled out of the nether-regions of propagandists, how can he discuss these issues objectively?
This type of dishonesty is used by the media as a marker— it tells you who you are supposed to pick out the “great philosophers” now. The great philosopher is the one who goes along with the currently accepted propaganda.
Still, I mostly agree with Hicks in his analysis of Nietzsche and post-modernism, but he is not intellectually honest, as is revealed by him swallowing absurd mass death figures for communist atrocities without actually checking the figures for himself, and by completely misunderstanding the structure of the Soviet economy and the growth rates of this economy in its prime.
3. He associates post-modernism with the left, even though it is a creation of the fascist right.
Post-modernism was ping-ponged between right and left, because it is essentially an ATHEISTIC philosophy, denying the notion of truth. It has nothing intrinsically to do with the left. It was due to Nazi Heidegger, and it was mostly embraced by right-leaning German intellectuals.
It was taken over by the left because it gave a framework independent of tradition for discussing religious notions. But there is a much better framework for this which is monotheistic, in superrational decision making. This is actually monotheistic ethics, with a notion of a personal God, and this is what I go by. So I can ignore all post modernism completely.
I DON’T GIVE A CRAP ABOUT YOUR FAMILY. I have a grandfather brutally enslaved and starved by the Nazis and large chunks of murdered family including people who fled under piles of corpses. What difference does it make? I still verified the assertions of genocide objectively, by READING AND UNDERSTANDING THOSE GODDAMN NAZIS, and TAKING THEIR PHILOSOPHY SERIOUSLY, to see what exactly they were thinking. Individual suffering has nothing to do with academic truth, academic truth is much more important, since academic honesty is the best way to prevent future suffering. Understanding what was going on is the only way to prevent such horrors from recurring. Any lie, even a “noble lie” is a crime against the literature.
The current propaganda claims about the rates of state murder in the Soviet Union are a MADE UP FANTASY, which is good, because it lets you identify dishonest stupid academics like Hicks. The claims that stalin killed 16% of the population is patently absurd, let alone the recent claim that he killed 50% of the population. He can only have been responsible for 3% at most, because you don’t see the effect on total population figures. The repression was terrible, but that doesn’t mean you get to LIE ABOUT IT. Tell the truth, it was bad enough as it was.
There are two different kinds of atheism: scientific atheism and anti-scientific atheism, and they usually comprise two completely disjoint sets of people.
Scientific atheism is the rationalist science folks, who object to supernatural nonsense, and they identify religion with supernatural stuff. These people generally continue to accept the non-supernatural consequences of monotheistic religious thinking without knowing the religious pedigree of these ideas. They accept the equality of humanity, the sanctity of individual life, the abhorrence of slavery, the humanist notions of progress and so on, without associating these with the text of the Bible.
The anti-scientific atheism is aware that these conceptions are due to monotheistic religion, and seeing that the scientific atheists have weakened the supernatural basis of the claims, they then try to substitute other quasi-religious but non-monotheistic claims instead of traditional monotheistic religion. This is the program that Nietzsche started, Heidegger continued, and the post-modernists picked up on. They used it to justify any position which stood in contrast to the religious tradition.
Religion, when you look at it deeply, is not about supernatural nonsense. That’s what it claims in its founding texts, but these supernatural stories are ultimately irrelevant to the practice of the faith. The basic notion is instituting superrational decision making, and for monotheistic religions, it is to extend the superrational decisions to all humanity. Superrational decision making looks superficially collectivist, although it is also informed by individual intuitions, and it forms a conception of an all intelligent super-duper mind that is aware of everything everyone does and wants everyone to be good.
This meta property of superrational collectives is what the religions are decorating up with supernatural window-dressing. It has nothing to do with miracles, nor does it have anything to do with science. It is about constructing a consistent all-encompassing superrational ethics.
The science-atheists generally accept the superrational ethics without question, as it is deeply socially embedded already, and react with horror to the abuses in atheist states like the USSR, or the worse abuses in Nietzschian states like Nazi Germany. They do not understand what religion is, and they attack the parts which are worthy of ridicule, the nonsense supernatural stuff. That stuff is just propaganda tacked on to a social system, it is not at all what the system of religions are about.
The Heideggerian atheists understand the purpose of religion and attack it at the base, by replacing the thinking with a self-consistent non-monotheistic conception. This is a comprehending attack, and it is much more credible. The supporters of post-modernism distrust monotheistic religion because they distrust tradition, and that makes sense. But one should understand the monotheistic insight indepedently of tradition, by understanding superrational decision making, and the universal concept of God, without relying on historical texts or made-up miracles. There are enough non-supernatural real miracles, like eliminating slavery, and instituting science, to establish the superrational monotheistic conception on.
Yeah, yeah, nitwit, sometimes the deniers are just objectively right, which is why you need to do a review in all cases.
In the case of the USSR, the mainstream deniers are 100% right, the ones that don’t dismiss Stalin’s democide as propaganda, but dismiss the recent inflation of those numbers as propaganda. These folks use official figures to compute what was happening, and they are doing good historical work. The other side just pulls numbers out of the ass, and does so to make the average bigger than Hitler. There is no methodology to the 60 million figure, it’s just designed so that the average with 2 million, with weighting, will converge to approximately 20 million, so that Stalin will be “worse than Hitler”. It’s that moronic, and it is deserving of no respect. So ptui on YOU, twit, you are condoning historical LIES which are designed to block honest scholarship and dismiss honest historians into the margin. There is no excuse for that.
The evidence is not only from official speeches, it’s from the population figures, from a random sampling of individuals that were arrested and either executed or served their time (I know many physicists who went through this in the Stalin era), and asking people from the Soviet Union which of their relatives died.
NONE OF THESE are compatible with 20 million death toll, NOT ONE. They all point to a 2-3 million death toll, consistent with the population statistics, and compilation of executions. The compilation of execution figures has been done using post-Soviet figures from previously classified archives, and I trust the careful historian’s modern figures of ~700,000 executions in Stalin’s era (I didn’t know these were available), with perhaps a comparable number in the later Stalin years, but no more.
The demographic figures for the Ukranian famine are much harder to come by, and here you need to sample Ukranian families to know. You simply cannot trust anyone on this, because THEY ALL LIE THROUGH THEIR TEETH, without conspiracy, simply by repeating Solzhenitsin, because this is how you get attention and money.
But given the acceptance of the famine in Khruschev times, we can know that there was a serious, serious death toll here, and I trust the demographic estimates of 5-7 million lost Ukranians in the 1930s, although this involves lost births as well, so the best estimate of the true death toll is on the order of 2-4 million. I don’t know what it was exactly, because I can’t trust the writing of anyone on this, because it is corrupted by propaganda, and influenced by the desire to produce as big a number as possible.
You are an irresponsible FRAUD, and I do not accept your political showmanship as acceptable discourse. Any ad-hominems pale in comparison to this kind of dishonesty. Be ashamed, dude, be ashamed.
You stupid twit, the population census figures for the Soviet Union were ALWAYS HONEST AND RELIABLE, unlike your INSIPID INSINUATIONS, these figures were used for everything from labor apportionment. industrial relocations, planning for industrial cities, they were central to the process of planning, and these people took their planning seriously. You are now disputing the SOVIET CENSUS? What data don’t you dispute? You retarded ape. Give it up. You’re just blowing rhetoric. It doesn’t work online.
There were those who were killed and those who were released. YOU CAN ASK ANYONE IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION. The answer is always the same. Everyone was scared, there were two relative who got in trouble with the authorities, one who was arrested and released, sometimes one executed. That’s typical, and it’s consistent with the numbers I give. The emigrees are OVERREPRESENTATIVE of the repressed people, as they consist of bourgeoisie. The mass of people just went about working trying to make the best living they could under the system, without making waves, and that 99% was left entirely alone. The problem is that among the HIGHER UPS, the only “people that count” in the views of Western media, the persecution rate and execution rate came up to 16%, and among the top of the top, the revolutionaries of 1917, the rate of execution was 50% or higher. It is all consistent with what I told you, because what I told you is the GODDAMN TRUTH, and truth doesn’t change.
There were no mass executions of entire families, the persecution in the Soviet Union was ALWAYS individual, with good party members in the same family as persecuted dissidents. The only family that got killed were the Romanofs. Famines don’t work the way you are claiming, they don’t claim families, they claim individuals who succumb to weakness and disease, and young children, who are neglected due to weakness. You are simply a LYING FRAUD, and I don’t have patience for anything you say anymore. Go live in your own universe, leave the rest of the world alone.
YOU ARE THE HOLOCAUST DENIER HERE, ASSHEAD. ALL PROPER HISTORIANS WITH ACCESS TO ACCURATE DATA KNOW THE TRUTH.
You IDIOT! spelling flames? I’ll spell it however I goddamn want to. U KANT DIMNISH MY OTHORITEY, BECAUSE I HAV NUN, HOW MENI TIYMS DO AYE NEED TO TEL U? When there is a dispute with cuss-words, people VERIFY THE CLAIMS indepenently by looking at data. Mine are TRUE. Yours are DONKEY POO.
Six million Jews were not killed, four and a half to five million Jews were killed, and a couple of hundred thousand died from typhus in addition. These are the Jewish organization estimates from 1945, these are the numbers you find from population census figures, and this is what is consistent with the deportation records and testimonies. The general rule is that the closer you get to the events, the better the estimates become. The Soviet famine figures and the Soviet camp deaths were estimated many decades, before and after the archives opened, and the stories were always consistent, until, in the 1990s, in a spate of popular books, SUDDENLY THEY BALLOON TO 20 MILLION, THEN 60 MILLION!!
WHAT KIND OF MORONS DO YOU TAKE PEOPLE FOR? THE BIG NUMBERS FOR THE SOVIET UNION ARE MENTALLY RETARDED MADE UP LIES BY WORTHLESS IMPOSTERS WITH A POLITICAL AGENDA, LIKE YOU. They are stupid, they are impossible, they are academically criminal, they are unworthy of respect.
The way in which these numbers are produced and percolate is A DISGUSTING SHAMEFUL STAIN on the modern academy, and it is precisely for this purpose that the internet was made, to CORRECT this lying, as I am doing now, without giving them ANY SHRED OF RESPECT, just tearing them apart mouth to anus, claim by claim, like the Jewish center ripped apart the holocaust deniers.
This is one of the worst ACADEMIC DISEASES in academia today, it is a REPULSIVE SELL OUT of monstrous proportions, and one must not be complicit with it in the least, as it is WORSE THAN HOLOCAUST DENIAL, because unlike holocaust denial, holocaust fabrication is something DECENT STUPID PEOPLE GO ALONG WITH. It is a deliberate distortion of history designed to bury the study of the history of half the world in a mountain of bullcrap.
This is also why holocaust denial must never be made criminal, as any restrictions on speech always eventually make it impossible to get at historical truth. The FABRICATION of 20 Stalin MEGADEATHS is actually a great weapon in Neo Nazi propaganda, because they say “See! Look how easy it is to create a genocide out of thin air”. Of course, it is not, because there are ASSHOLES LIKE ME contesting it, who will CONTEST IT TO THE GRAVE.
Yes, yes, you LYING MONKEY. The way it works is this— five good historians, usually left-leaning, study the details of the Soviet Union, and give you accurate “low-ball” estimates. Then come a bunch of bourgoise writers and “historians” who create numbers out of thin air, to advance their own power. Then you publish a “list” of all the opinions together, and I AM SUPPOSED TO TAKE ALL THE ESTIMATES SERIOUSLY?? GO SUCK YOUR BALLS. I KNOW HOW TO ESTIMATE INDEPENDENTLY OF ANY OF THESE JERKS, AND I CAN TELL WHO IS RIGHT.
YOU MUST NEVER MAKE AN AVERAGE OF THE TRUTH AND PROPAGANDA, BECAUSE PROPAGANDISTS EXPECT YOU TO DO THIS, AND ADJUST THEIR PROPAGANDA ACCORDINGLY. You don’t take estimates seriously when they conflict with carefully compiled population statistics, done region by region, over many decades, and over several changes of governments, which are consistent with each other and which are consistent with observations and external CIA estimates. The Soviets didn’t lie too much in their five year plans either— the statistics for production quotas were manipulated to look good in ways OTHER THAN lying about quantity of production. The “lies” about Chernobyl are simply slow announcement, due to official embarrassment, it took a day or two too long. The response was entirely appropriate once the government was active, the Soviet Union in 1985 had an entirely responsible relatively open government for the first time, certainly more responsible and open than the nightmares that people have now in that region.
You simply have no idea what internal gosplan documents looked like, you never read them. You never looked at the discussions of party officials, and compiled statistics, and planning figures, and I have (they are boring but extremely informative). There can simply be no fudging when you are planning an entire economy, as you have people accepting deliveries on each quantitiy you produce, document and send off. The fudging comes in the ignoring of needs you didn’t anticipate, and in overproducing certain goods that you know about at the expense of others you are ignorant of.
You ALSO have no idea what a death rate of 20 million looks like in a country of 160 million. It’s a CATASTROPHE you cannot miss. It’s deaths all over, it’s numbers appropriate to the black plague. You would see mass deaths in nearly every family, it is a HUMONGOUS rate of death, it would be impossible to miss, and you would be able to see it by a small random sample of Soviet citizens. IT SIMPLY IS NOT THERE. IT IS EMBARASSING, OBVIOUS, POLITICAL, LYING. An easy question you can ask: “did more relatives of yours die as combatants in WWII or from political repression under Stalin?” You can easily find the answer to this without any experts to help, and the WWII deaths are compiled independenly, we know exactly what these were.
Another source of economic error came in the black market and small farming, stolen goods, etc, and this hidden economic activity was biggest in the 1970s and early 1980s. It goes above ground in 1985 with Perestroika, and in the last years it is regulated business activity, and it is estimated properly. THERE WAS NEVER POPULATION FUDGING, as nobody cared to hide anything, nor could they even if they wanted to, as the figures were compiled in many offices region by region.
You MUST NEVER MAKE AN AVERAGE OF THE HONEST AND MENTALLY RETARDED. The left wingers here are 100% honest and 100% right, there is no compromise with retarded right wingers, as they MAKE CRAP UP AND THEN LIE ABOUT IT. The fact that you insist on a compromise shows that your brain is compromised.
The “dekulakization” was the process of confiscating property, it removed a social class of peasants. It didn’t proceed by killing all the kulaks and their relatives, but by removing their property, and arresting or killing those who resisted. These are included in the judicial and extra-judicial executions compiled by honest historians. It was socially unsettling, and led to the loss of property by millions of people, but not to their deaths, as you can see BY SIMPLY ASKING PEOPLE WHOSE RELATIVES OWNED PROPERTY. The result was TURNED INTO MASS MURDER BY LYING MORONIC PHONY HISTORIANS IN THE 1990s, rather, I should say, to GREATER mass murder than the ALREADY TERRIBLE repressive executions by the hundreds of thousands. It was known what was going on in the early 1930s outside the Soviet Union, the process was widely denounced in Western media, and collectivization led to hard-to-estimate famine deaths in the way it leads to drops in production whenever it is tried, as for example it did in China, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Yugoslavia reversed collectivization after less than a year, and farming output rebounded immediately. Cuba never even collectivized the farming because they learned from this terrible experience. In the US, the large factory farms have a similar drop in efficiency compared to small plots farmed individually, but the arable land is larger, and the privately managed factory farming was significantly more efficient than state farming. This was Gorbachev’s specialty, he was a specialist in farming and a specialist in Ukrainian production, as this is what he did in the planning days. He also saw firsthand suffering from hunger in the 1930s, and had firsthand experience with collectivization.
The famine was real, people went hungry, including a young Gorbachev, but NOBODY HAS GOOD ESTIMATES for the death toll, the death toll is estimated using the dip in the very same census data that you are MORONICALLY contesting. Death tolls in communist famines involve fewer direct victims of starvation, because the distribution of food is relatively uniform and there is access to medical care for those who succumb to hunger or disease. The 1940s Dutch famine is an example where a capitalist country successfully mitigated mass deaths by enforcing an equitable distribution of the much-too-small supply of food. The Soviets could not be as good as the Dutch, but they were better than England and the Irish. My personal estimate, coming from MY ASS, is that between 2 and 3 million people died directly as a result of the collectivization famine. This is reasonably consistent with the demographic declines of the early 1930s. It COULD BE HIGHER, but I TRUST MY ASS OVER ANY ESTIMATE COMING TODAY, because of the RECURRING DELIBERATE OBVIOUS LYING REGARDING ALL THIS STUFF. You can’t trust people in the field to be honest anymore, let alone a mentally defective pontificating philosopher who never did any deep random sampling survey of mortality rates from various causes in the early 1930s nor ever made a consistent picture.
YOU MENTALLY CHALLENGED TWIT, nobody ever gets ANYTHING from LOWBALLING Soviet death tolls! You get shunned and marginalized, because you are seen as communist coddling! It’s like low-balling figures on the Holocaust, there’s only one side pushing back, and in these cases, you get monstrous errors due to people following self-interest. Believe me, it is not in my self interest to explain the honest estimates of Soviet death. If I just said “Stalin killed 20 million” or better yet “Stalin killed 60 million”, I would get absolutely no trouble, and if I wrote a book that said this, I would get on TV.
The Soviets were EXTREMELY HONEST internally regarding production, because they had all the documents. The KULAKS were not LIQUIDATED by TAKING THEIR FOOD, they were liquidated by confiscating their farm, and then taking their production, and they would the be expected to join a Kolkhoz and get their wages and buy their bread at the same government store as everyone else. They didn’t have enough to buy in the early 1930s, because Ukraine was undersupplied, but the famine’s effects were not as lopsided as made to appear in the West, and regions abutting the Ukraine suffered too, although perhaps not as harshly.
The LYING consists of DISTORTING THE NUMBERS to say 20 million or 60 million died. TO CLAIM THAT ALL THESE PEOPLE WERE LIQUIDATED WITH ALL THEIR RELATIVES AND THEIR EXTENDED FAMILIES AND THE EXTENDED FAMILY BEYOND AND SO ON, RECURSIVELY, IS BEYOND PREPOSTEROUS, IT IS COMPLETELY INCOMPREHENSIBLE STUPIDITY. I CAN’T EVEN BELIEVE ANYONE WOULD SUGGEST THIS WITH A STRAIGHT FACE.
I can do the Holocaust estimates on Jews using this method, a typical surviving Polish family lost 70% of members, and this is all survivor bias, because a lot of families were liquidated entirely. But the estimate comes out ballpark right, as it does for Hungarians, for French, and so on. You can, simply by examining family history, get an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ESTIMATE, and this allows you to know which of the detailed historians is telling the truth.
I don’t expect ANYONE to trust me! I HAVE NO AUTHORITY, AND NOBODY ELSE DOES EITHER. I expect anyone interested in this to look up the Ukrainian and Soviet census data, to examine the arguments that people made for 3 million deaths, 5 million deaths, 20 million deaths and 60 million deaths, to ask a dozen or so Russians and Ukranians to tell their family stories of the period, and to CONCLUDE AFTERWARDS that the true number of famine victims is between 2-5 million, and NOWHERE NEAR 20 million.
I also can’t discuss with you any further, as you have revealed a worse and more monstrous kind of intellectual dishonesty here than anywhere else.
Well, I think that kind of statement is not controversial, except inasmuch as it can be read as praise. Thanks, but I mostly just used my potty mouth here, not much more. I’m not asking to change people’s minds on authority, I don’t have any. I am asking for people to read the debate, and make up their minds after reviewing the issues, after reading related material they feel is relevant, and after hearing all the various arguments, as best they can. Or perhaps not, and then just to leave it alone, and keep a mind as open as they feel appropriate.
It is difficult to evaluate things without knowing basic stuff, but I think you are overestimating the barriers of education today, when you have plentiful online resources. While it is true that in the past, the access to education was limited, with only a few people in universities having access to the best up-to-date literature, now that access at the ordinary undergraduate level is universal, and either today or very soon, with the opening of the scientific literature, it will be completely universal at all levels, even the most cutting edge. Anyone can read anything now., u
Once you have access to literature, education is mostly a matter of being pointed to the right stuff to read and review, to a quick summary in case it is unduly long or arcane, and to the right fora to get answers to the questions that arise when reading it. I think that this barrier is relatively negligible today for anyone under the age of 30, certainly as compared to when I was growing up. Young people can find and read literature very quickly. Once you do this, you can check any claims for yourself, so long as you have enough intellectual honesty to evaluate claims with less and less of a bias.
With this model, expertise becomes widely diffused, and the role of experts shrinks dramatically— you don’t have to look to an expert to be told what to believe, and the public can serve as a check on the experts, in those not so rare cases where the experts are totally wrong and maintain consensus by authority. These are the most dangerous cases.
That doesn’t mean everyone in the world can evaluate a proof in algebraic geometry, but it means that someone who has a need to verify such a proof doesn’t face an impossible barrier to doing so, and the class of people who have acquired the expertise is not controlled by gate-keepers who only let the right sort of people in.
The mention of hunger was a state offence in 1950, it wasn’t an offence in 1959, when the Soviet Union was trying to get its act together. The attacks on the census bureau did lead to fudging problems. Such census problems were LOCALIZED, and can be worked around by any good historian by reviewing local labor and production numbers which include economic figures which are verified internally, which do not suffer from fudging problems because they are not ever delivered to Mr. Joseph. I WASN’T USING THE 170 MILLION CENSUS, NOBODY TOOK THOSE INFLATED NUMBERS SERIOUSLY, NOT INTERNALLY AND NOT EXTERNALLY.
The collectivization famine led millions of people to go hungry, and a certain number of weakened people died of hunger or disease, possibly two million, maybe six million (you need to verify these sorts of claims with a personally conducted survey of random Ukranain families). Informal estimates of Ukrainian population decline in 1932-33 are of about 5 million deaths, and it seems to be greater than Ukrainian deaths in WWII, although you need to verify this by reviewing randomly selected family records, and seeing the statistics for mortality in WWII compared to death by starvation. Both are widely randomly distributed, and the comparison is fair. PLEASE DO THE COMPARISON, because I want to know what was actually happening. You can start with your own family, and that of Ukrainians you know— what’s the number and ratio of WWII deaths and 1932-33 famine deaths?
It’s difficult to know what was happening because there is a GOVERNMENT making DISHONEST, LYING, STRUCTURAL PROPAGANDA, and IDIOTS LIKE YOU lying with them, repeating RIDICULOUS ASSERTIONS where every confiscation of property and arrest gets turned into an execution. This is LYING about human misery, and also profiting from it. Just BE HONEST and do the estimates independently.
The Ukrainian famine numbers were first acknowledged during the Khruschov thaw, when Soviet citizens acquired some freedom of speech and press to discuss Stalin’s problems. The famine was discussed OPENLY AGAIN in Gorbachev’s time, who personally suffered from hunger during the collectivization period. It wasn’t disguised in the 1980s, it was analyzed FOR THE SECOND TIME. This is the period when I went into these events in depth, because data was available, and it was of topical interest.
The current claims of 20 million deaths is ABSOLUTELY PREPOSTEROUS, and cannot be abided in an environment of academic honesty. It is MAKING A MOCKERY of other mass-murder claims, and it shows a level of DISHONESTY and STUPIDITY in regard to analysis of government data that has not been seen since before the 20th century.
The number of Ukrainians that disappear is the order of 5-7 million, this is a census dip, an includes migration and prevented births. The population figures do attest to a tremendous amount of suffering, which is indicative of extreme economic hardship and famine, partly deliberately inflicted by Stalin’s policies.
But DISHONEST IDIOTS take the process which eliminated 11 million kulaks and produced 10.5 million former-kulak collective farmers and state laborors, and call it the EXECUTION of 11 million kulaks. This is INTOLERABLE ASSAULT on academic honesty.
This stuff was extremely repressive and extremely terrible WITHOUT LYING, just using HONEST HISTORICAL ANALYSIS.
Lying crap just can’t work when I can challenge and cuss at you freely, and you don’t get this. You can do a survey of 100 Ukrainians, and find out the accurate extent of the famine. It’s something I expect you TO DO and to HONESTLY ANALYZE THE RESULTS before PARROTTING OFFICIAL NONSENSE.
Weev is not “my own”, I don’t know the guy. I am simply defending open internet discussions. I don’t need to do anything to get people to read and exercise critical thinking, it’s an automatic product of the internet, because the information is available. It doesn’t happen in the previous generation, because they were brought up on mass media.
NONSENSE! The 5 Million figure was determined from DEPORTATION STATISTICS and it is independent of cause of death. It is accurate.
You are IGNORANT of the form of the Soviet economy. The farms were siezed and collectivized, and those peasants who could not make a living were driven to join the collective farms. The collectivization in the Ukraine produced collectivized farming and famine. What it did NOT produce is 11 million DEAD KULAKS. It produced 11 million FORMER KULAKS, some of whom died during the famine.
The extent of all this is disputed, and one should actually do a survey of families to determine the extent of the famine. I urge you to start with yours. One should do this individually, because states can’t be trusted to do objective research. The size of the famine is roughly comparable to the Irish famine, where the family stories easily let you get an accurate estimate of the number of victims. You should see a large number of infant and elderly deaths in 1932-33, which will let you pinpoint the number of victims to within 10%. I’d guess 2-3 million people died in the famine, and that guess is better than the toilet paper estimates you get from so-called scholars today.
Heh. So in America they call you a dirty collectivist, outside they call you a brainwashed individualist. I am not a part of the community under discussion, at least not in any significant way and surely not for 20 years. My political collectivist association is with the community of physicists, which also kicked me out, I should add, so I don’t really have an affiliation with anything anymore.
I defend these trolls because I was followed the original trolling usenet group in my youth, and I see the purpose and value of this group. They helped make sure that polite consensus would be jostled every once in a while, to make enough chaos for new things to be able to form. This activity is very psychologically unsettling, and it feels like violence, but there is no real threat to people. Still, in response to the feeling of violent ideas, there is real censorship being instituted on various discussion forums, and this censorship immediately removes their potential for accurate peer review.
I don’t claim that an individual must shed all allegiances, rather that the evaluation of truth and falsehood regarding matters of fact should be made completely indepedently of those allegiances, by rejecting them temporarily and adopting new ones in the middle of the evaluation. So you should evaluate the holocaust in the identity of a Jew and as a Neo-Nazi, and then you will get a full picture, for example, as Pressac carefully did. That’s not the same thing as averaging the numbers published by Neo Nazis and Jews. Only one of those numbers is at all close to the truth, the truth is not an average of every opinion, but it doesn’t hurt to examine from all perspectives, including heinous and evil ones.
This can be done if you thoroughly train yourself at being rude and reject the imposition of the gods on your mind. This is what trolls do— they are rejecting the imposition of the gods that have a hold on their mind, and the gods then start howling and screaming. These gods don’t need to worry so much.
The KULAKS were LIQUIDATED AS A CLASS by CONFISCATING THEIR PROPERTY and driven to join the collective farms, where they would be assigned jobs and given a wage. They often REFUSED to do this, and resisted the confiscation of their property with violent reprisals or by destroying their property before it could be confiscated. These might be natural reactions to confiscation, but that is what was going on— a large chunk of the nation was in revolt.
The story you tell is IDIOTIC as usual. The farmer would not have thier farm coverted to a collective farm overnight, the land would be seized, the grain would be siezed, and collective farms would open up in separate places with separate people running them. The issue is that the landholders objected to the seizure, and the government collectively punished the region by withholding food aid. This is a form of collective punishment which can be classified as genocide, but you NEED TO KNOW WHAT WAS HAPPENING, and YOU CAN’T MAKE CRAP UP WILLY NILLY, LIKE YOU LIKE TO DO.
The foreign press reports were all fabricated, journalists could not go there. These reports are stupid, they are long discredited, and they came from the Hearst yellow press which was MENTALLY RETARDED. Still, the fact that people are LYING, doesn’t mean that they get it WRONG. DESPITE THE LYING, THERE STILL WAS A FAMINE. But the Hearst press reports are not evidence, and the people reporting these things were just doing propaganda using other people’s suffering.
The best evidence is from your own family and that of others. You can examine the current age of Ukranians, to see the characteristic childhood mortality dip caused by a famine. You can ask people about lost children, lost farms, what happened in the year of the famine. When you do, you will get a reasonable estimate of the causalties— I estlmate they were roughly in the 2-3 million range, perhaps as high as 5 million, perhaps 7 million, but no more. They also have nothing to do with the Kulaks, who were shot in the hundreds of thousands, but make a relatively negligible contribution to the death toll. There was a smaller numbers of deaths outside the Ukraine due to the famine also, and there is dispute about whether the food relief efforts discriminated against the Ukraine.
Those who were on collective farms did not starve, although they also suffered from the food shortages. You need to LEARN TO BE HONEST, and then ONE CAN DISCUSS. Until then, just shut up, because all you are doing is ignorant propaganda.
YOU CAN’T DEMOLISH MY CREDIBILITY, FARTBAG, I DON’T HAVE ANY! Physicists don’t want to have anything to do with me, NOBODY wants anything to do with me, I’m always one step away from homelessness. WHO CARES? Only the text matters. Isn’t the internet lovely?
The census bureau in the 1930s was attacked politically, but THESE ARE NOT THE FIGURES ONE USES TO ESTIMATE THE FAMINE. You can easily estimate the famine deaths from polling families, YOU COULD DO IT TOO, IF YOU WEREN’T A DISHONEST FASCIST APOLOGIST. This is a simple way of estimating famine mortality, it works very well for the Irish famine after more than 150 years, it works very well for ALL FAMINES. The Famine in the USSR in 1932 was accompanied by food insecurity relief efforts which mitigated the death toll, and it was brief, as the 1933 harvest was abundant. The famine year might have claimed 6 million lives in the USSR, it is POSSIBLE, but it might have claimed 2 million lives, or 8 million lives, as it is difficult to estimate with dishonest CHARLATANS running about claiming numbers pulled out of their behinds as worthy of respect.
The process of collectivization in the Ukraine was accompanied by confiscation of land, forcible removal of grain and seed stock, and the complete destruction of private farming, and the simultaneous introduction of intrinsically less efficient collective farming. This process is a terrible crime IN ITSELF, and the associated famine is A PREDICTABLE CONSEQUENCE today, after the experience of 1932 and the analogous experience in China in the 1960s, but it was not clear to communists steeped in 1930s propaganda. Collectivization leads to famine, it is well known today, it was simply not known in 1932.
The death toll of the famine is by far the largest mortality associated with Stalin’s turn at the top. This famine mortality swamps all other mortalities from executions and labor mortality, which are estimated and compiled in serious journals by serious historians, and do not amount to a greater death toll than street homelessness does in the US. This IS NOT TO MINIMIZE EITHER DEMOCIDE, street homelessness is terrible, and the gulag was terrible, in roughly equal measure. The famine is something else altogether, because it meant food insecurity for enormous chunks of the entire Soviet Union, and it should have been a predictable consequence of the policy of collectivization, but it wasn’t predicted. Instead, these consequences were swept under the rug.
The attribution of the famine deaths to Stalin is, in my opinion, justified, because of the political hiding of the famine. But it is ARGUABLE, because the collectivization was not a one-man job, it was supported by rank-and-file party members, and the famine was NOT DELIBERATE, it was due to THE USUAL COMMUNIST STUPIDITY, although the relief effort might have been selective in targeting the Ukraine. The famine has been OBSCENELY POLITICIZED and subject to MADE UP PROPAGANDA ESTIMATES, and there is no discussion with HISTORICAL FABRICATORS. Whether you are a socialist or a liberal, the only defence against darkness is telling the truth LOUDLY.
The enormous numbers of deaths people claim under Stalin are INCOMPREHENSIBLY STUPID, EASILY REFUTED, REPREHENSIBLE LIES which have been studied and understood since the opening of the historical archives in the USSR in 1989. I am not arguing with such stupidity, simply because I don’t need to— there are dozens of honest socialist and honest liberal web pages which describe the deaths in that period, as well as dozens of dishonest socialist and dishonest liberal web pages describing the same events. These are full of authoritative citations and figures, and it is extremely easy to see who is telling the truth when estimating the deaths.
Those who make up large numbers conflate loss of property with loss of life. They turn every kulak who lost their land into a victim of homicide, and turn every imprisonment or demotion into a murder. But since their numbers are drawn from honest sources, it is very easy to see what is really going on by simply reinterpreting the same figures honestly. There were indeed about 20 million people demoted at some point in Stalin’s time, and if you consider getting fired from a nice position a type of victimization, then in some figurative sense, perhaps 20 million party members were victims. Stalin played musical chairs with the leadership of the party. But this is a TRAVESTY and a MOCKERY of the actual victims who were executed. The figures of 20 million dead, 60 million dead, or 110 million dead are simply incomprehensibly stupid laughable jokes, and deserve mention only as an example of how divorced from any notions of accuracy the liberal press has become in recent decades.
There is NO BASIS IN FACT FOR THE CLAIMS OF TENS OF MILLIONS DEAD, and one cannot argue against a person who makes such claims, simply expose you for what you are, a pathetic lying fraud.
Dear Barry— your assumption of fluctuations being the source of the excess heat is incompatible with heat after death, which is present when you switch off the power entirely. The effect cannot possibly be fluctuations, because it exceeds 100% in certain points.
You STUPID TWIT, I don’t NEED HELP! I ENJOY BEING MARTYRED! Haven’t you figured that out yet? I also prefer it if IDIOTS LIKE YOU don’t listen to me when I tell them the truth, because IT MAKES ME FEEL SUPERIOR TO THEM. It’s a nice feeling!
What you still don’t get is that I don’t need credibilty I don’t have to be persuasive, I don’t need to have status, I just need to be right. That I am, and that’s enough. The internet is DIFFERENT in that way, you see.
Alexander Nikolaevich is LYING, JUST LIKE NEARLY EVERYONE IN RUSSIA! Probably without intention, they are just too stupid with statistics to know the truth. You know, “three million, eight million, twenty million, what’s the difference?”
You don’t understand post-Soviet politics, EVERYONE HATES COMMUNISM, and they want to make it look as bad as possible, and they DON’T WANT COMMUNIST CODDLERS AROUND. That makes a strong incentive to lie, because nobody has any stake in historical accuracy. Historical accuracy is the FIRST VICTIM in these sorts of times, and these people are simply TALKING OUT OF THEIR ANUS, JUST LIKE YOU.
This is not ANTI-RUSSIAN, at least not if you mean post-Soviet Russia, it is simply PROPAGANDA. The propaganda is to emphasize the very real suffering in Soviet times using CRAP NUMBERS PULLED OUT OF ASSES. I care more about accurate numbers than people’s suffering. I actually don’t give a crap about people. My concern here is with accurate numbers. I just HATE lying with numbers worse than anything else!
The number of Stalin executions is in the .5-1.5 million range. The number of Stalin famine deaths is more uncertain, but it is most likely between 2 and 6 million, and that’s all USSR during 1932. That’s it. There’s nothing else. Everything else is STUPID LYING by people who don’t GIVE A CRAP ABOUT HISTORICAL ACCURACY, and POLLUTE THE LITERATURE WITH THEIR FARTS.
His ESTIME IS NOT AN ESTIMATE, IT IS AN ABSURD POLITICAL LIE, immediately exposed with the smallest understanding of statisics, and the sightest familiarity with the historical documents. But this IDIOT is probably not a numbers person. Politicians usualy aren’t.
Historians don’t need IDIOTS LIKE THESE meddling in the assessment of historical casualties. The people who talk out of their asses are uniformly ignorant about the official statistics, and also do not understand that PEOPLE CAN INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY the death toll, by simple random sampling.
Sure, I promise you I’ll do that if I ever run into him. I thought he was stupid for other reasons anyway, regardless of this Shakespeare business. I tried to tell Shapiro that he was stupid to his face, I worked at Columbia briefly, but he wasn’t in his office the two days I came by to yell at him, so I gave up. I did manage to tell Stanley Fish off once (on something unrelated), and we had a nice talk outside the hall after his lecture, where he told me “You are much too optimistic regarding the intelligence of the general public” or something to that effect. I am not intimidated by authoritative numbskulls, I have been around at least two ACTUAL academic revolutions. These aren’t done by that class of conservative authoritative idiot, those are done by the borderline insane people that dress funny and talk to themselves, the kind of people I try my best to emulate. I am also not overestimating the intelligence of a public with access to an internet, something Stanley Fish will soon learn, and Harold Bloom. The internet is quite something, isn’t it?
I was however, too optimistic regarding your intelligence. So I’ll start by telling you that you’re stupid.
That’s because you’re mentally retarded. Also, you should know that this isn’t youtube, people are trying to be somewhat more careful in their intellectual positions here.
You wonder, you wonder, as long as authority is behind you, and then, when the weight of authority starts to push the other way, you’ll say you knew it all along, you were just playing. People like you are worthless, you can’t think without someone powerful telling you what to think. Say hi to Adolph Eichmann when you die.
You are beaten, it is useless to resist.
I am aware of the lies of the communists, and I am also aware of the dishonesty and political pressure. What you are are not aware of is the complementary dishonesty on the other side, the liberal side. This dishonesty leads politicians to lie about statistics, as they are either too stupid, or figure the public is too stupid, to do accurate math.
There simply were no 20 million dead under Stalin. I don’t have to be persuasive while I say it, because it is a simple and easily verified fact. You need to check case by case, and independent of BOTH the Soviets and the Liberals, because both of these devils lie.
The way you verify this is to go up to a former Soviet resident, and ask them:
“Who are your closest relatives killed by Stalin?”
This is usually a statistical sample of ~50-100 persons, depending on how large the extended family is. You can know exactly how many are sampled by asking about the extent of the family knowledge. All you need are 10 Russians and Ukrainians to get a reasonably accurate estimate.
If the death rate is 60 million, you expect two grandmothers killed and a grandfather, a third to half the family wiped out in a conflagration analogous to a limited nuclear holocaust. For 20 million, you expect every family to have one grandfather dead, a mortality in the first 8 people alive in the era. If it’s 2 million, you expect a distant cousin to have been arrested, and to have heard about a distant second cousin who was executed or died of hunger. The last is the typical situation when interviewing Russians about personal family deaths, which are independent and not subject to manipulation by any authorities on either side.
The order of magnitude points to order 10 million arrested and order 1 million killed, something which is already atrocious levels of state terror, which do not need exaggeration to be seen as terrible.
Anything which is inconsistent with this order of magnitude is a lie. I don’t need anyone to confirm this, as I have actually talked to Russians and Ukrainians, asking this quesiton, while doing this statistical estimation in my head, and so can you.
The famine deaths are a bit different, there were deaths by weakness and disease from the famine, mostly of young children, who tend to not get recorded in family oral history. These deaths perhaps amount to 5 million over the whole USSR, but perhaps 10 million also. The demographic dip for the USSR in the early 1930s is similar to the demographic dip in the US in the 1930s US (but much larger, perhaps about 20 million people). The US demographic dip claimed 5-10 million people demographically, although of course this simply all consists of postponed births, and these people reappear as the baby boom. You can’t say “Hoover and Roosevelt murdered 5 million Americans! Eisenhower miraculously resuscitates them.” because they didn’t and he didn’t.
I didn’t read your links, because I have already concluded that you are a dishonest clown, and I ignore whatever you say. An honest person needs to sit down and do the survey I requested, which is easy for you, being Ukrainian— you already know the answer. It just isn’t the same as what you are doing propaganda for.
I also cite no sources, and give no persuasive argument, nor direct evidence, I let people do their own research. It is true that there was bad political census data in Stalin’s time— it is also true that I shout and scream, and tell you inconsistent things. It doesn’t matter— I am honest globally, which is all that matters, and I did not deliberately misinform anyone of anything, unlike you. While I did know about the census attack in the 1930s, I also know that it is easy to work around these kind of bad official numbers, because when the census bureau is attacked, it is only the global figures that need to be fudged. The local numbers are ok, for example, labor statistics for each city, and sampled birth and death records for each region. These are what are used by the honest historians to estimate the tolls from these tragedies, and these estimates are never sensationalist lying figures of 20 million or 60 million, but honest figures consistent with the sampling of family history.
The family history, which is available to any interested person who knows some Russians and Ukrainians, just doesn’t care about the census takers, or about any officials at all.
What you are doing is only a game with authority, a game which simply does not work online, as it does in person or on TV (it’s surprising, I know, but it’s true). I verified the assertions I am making with excellent confidence a long time ago, anyone can check that the numbers people give here are made up, therefore I don’t need to do anything except shout.
Also, say hi to Adolph Eichmann for me after you die.
The comment lady is sharing her emotional sob story by making an analogy with the article lady. The article lady suffered from nothing serious at all. This is an analogy which does not exist. Rather, it is an emotional device, which ends up associating internet speech, trolling, with fear of stalking and harrassment. Whether it is purposeful or accidental propaganda doesn’t matter, it is propaganda, and it needs to be met with zero empathy (which comes relatively easy for me in this case).
The comment intends for you to mix up people and activities in your head. This is why it is a bad comment. I have no sympathy for this kind of manipulation of emotions, and no empathy for the author. She should go to the police, and not chip in to help make bad policies.
Kathy Sierra had her home address posted on a forum, where she was flamed. That’s all that happened to her, it is the beginning and end of her plight.
She has argued for censorship of comments in the past, that’s what led to the conflict, and she argues for civility. Censorship is evil, and civility is evil.
The internet is rude for a reason, it is rude so that you can’t do propaganda without getting insulted. The insults are healthy to the extent that they prevent formation and concentrations of authority, and they work. People online have zero authority, and an authority free open discussion leads to truth very quickly becoming self-evident.
Our comment discussion is an example. I think anyone reviewing the discussion has a much greater chance of getting an accurate historical picture than if this person watched all the documentaries on the subject on TV. The discussion itself is useless, it is simply a handle for people to search for related academic materials and read them. Hostile discussions lead to accuracy, because people are given a stark choice between different bony skeletons upon which they can hang the facts they find online. The facts they find independently quickly make it clear which skeleton is more accurate.
But propaganda tries to disallow certain things from getting said, especially rude things, because rudeness kills propaganda dead. So you get an elephant man version of the truth.
Online hostility can lead to some personal nuisances sometimes, the author of the article did feel psychologically threatened because someone posted her home address. That’s unfortunate, it shouldn’t have happened, but it isn’t particularly terrible. She should know better than to think that a flame war is a motive for violence, and she shouldn’t call the flame war “death threats”, and she should make insinuations that her children were threatened, because her adult children were not threatened (and neither was she threatened in any credible way).
The internet produces a nearly insuperable barrier between speech and violence, so the discussions can be free to be vicious. Vicious discussions immediately neutralize propaganda from any side, whether the propaganda is for accurate or inaccurate viewpoints.
All it takes is one person saying “boo hoo” for a sob story to be neutralized. All it takes is one person calling you names for consensus to disappear momentarily. The way to verify the truth of assertions is to research them using neutral scholarly sources, and this doesn’t happen unless people see an irreconcilable conflict.
You have not changed my mind regarding anything, I am inconsistent simply because I am going by hazy memory, I forgot about the census fiasco of 1939, but you are right about that— there was a censored census, I do remember. You are seeing contradictions, because you don’t understand how official lying works— there are figures for export, and figures used internally, and since 1989, we have had access to all the archives, and we can study them all and get a good picture. But that’s not what happened, instead, the honest stuff has been suppressed, and dishonest lies have been promoted. You are promoting the lies.
My sources were never the Soviet census of 1939, I vaguely remember that, but it is usual lying nonsense. I never cited any sources at all for my claims, I don’t need to, as I expect the reader to dig for themselves. But if you want the personal story, I personally read many of the discussions about the famine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet archives were opened, and I went into great detail, including poring over whatever published statistics I could find, because I was curious about how Soviet communism could even function. I didn’t understand how you could run an entire economy from the top down. I got a reasonable picture of all the relevant events, but I was 16 years old, and it was a long time ago. I am not going to repeat the effort, because there has been no new discoveries, all that has happened is that more and more vile propaganda has progressively replaced the honest (negative) assessments of the early 1990s.
I know the rough magnitude of the 1932 famine, it was pretty large as far as famines go. But a famine with 5 million death toll in a single year is an ENORMOUS famine, it is STUPENDOUS. It would leave a generational memory, it is not a small thing.
The famine was acknowledged to be large internally relatively honestly from Khruschev’s time onwards. The census data you find in the 1950s are accurate and reliable, and generally the post-Stalin Soviet figures are very good. The global 1939 population census figures were lies, and these are not the “honest and reliable” figures I was talking about. The honest and reliable figures in that era are not global, but local statistics for labor and population, year of birth, year of death, which you can find in the Soviet archives and which allow historians to piece together a picture of the arrests and the famine.
The other source I used is randomly polled Russians and Ukrainians, just as a sanity check, to make sure I wasn’t missing a holocaust. I did the same sanity check with European jews, to make sure that I wasn’t inventing a holocaust. This is very easy to do personally, so you get a picture of the events without any reliance on anyone else. This is an important sanity check, a sanity check you didn’t do, you lying little Eichmann.
There is one extremely notable person who reports a very high famine mortality in his village, that is Gorbachev. He claims 4 immediate relative dying, children and old folks all over his village, as is typical of a famine, he is telling the truth. The claim for a 40% mortality in his village is very credible, and there is no reason to dispute it, and I don’t.
The famine was a serious thing, affecting large regions of the country, and there were places where the mortality was enormous. But there are also places with very few famine mortalities, like the big cities, or certain villages, because relief efforts or hidden sources of grain mitigated the starvation. You need a random sample of people to know what the extent of the famine was, so that you can estimate the number of victims properly. Taking one person among the worst affected and making them statistically representative is what you are doing. In order for the figures you claim are correct to actually be correct, Gorbachev’s experience would have to be typical. It is not, Gorbachev experience reflects that of a minority of about 10%. That makes number of famine victims is surely quite large— on the order of 2-5 million people, perhaps more, perhaps 10 million, perhaps even more 4% of the USSR population is 6.4 million people, that’s a reasonable estimate. I personally don’t know the precise figures, and it is difficult to estimate, because unlike political repression, the victims are generally invisible— infants and the elderly.
The 1932-33 famine is by far the largest mortality associated with Stalin. It does not come anywhere near the claims of 20 million deaths or 60 million deaths, and it has nothing to do with political executions. The number of political executions is of the order of 1 million people. The remaining mortality is all famine deaths in one year, 1932-33, and these deaths were localized, and did not constitute direct repression, rather the usual indirect production and distribution stupidities of communism. You simply don’t know how to think, so you conflate these in the same way other propagandists do.
The Soviet figures were honest and reliable regarding their internal labor statistics, internal births and deaths. The Soviet Union in the years after Stalin was generally pretty honest about Stalin’s crimes, with some politically inexpedient exceptions like the Katyn massacre.
But I am talking to a buffoon, who does not understand subtlety, so it is better to just say “The Soviets were honest and reliable”.
She didn’t get any personal death threats sent to her. That’s simply a lie. She got flames on the internet forum that said “you should be mauled by wild tigers”, and she called them “death threats” in this article.
The year starting from the bad 1932 harvest and ending with the good 1933 harvest is the singular year of Stalin’s famine. It does not comprise a single calendar year, since harvests don’t come in January. There was some food insecurity later too, the collective farming was not very good.
Rudeness works as propaganda only when it is restricted to come from one side. It works as counterpropaganda when it comes from both sides equally, and when there are two equally vicious sides, people look at the evidence.
I don’t deny the Ukrainian famine. I am telling you what it was. It was a collectivization of farming and the associated collectivization famine, which occurs again in every involuntary collectivization effort in agriculture. It is a genocide in the same sense as the Irish famine was a genocide. I would argue that both are genocides broadly speaking. The collectivization and collective measures which led to starvation was bad enough as it was.
But all the discussions regarding the number of Stalin’s victims are straight up lies, taking victims of famine, and turning them into victims of political execution. and one must be rude and spit on the graves of millions of actually suffering people to correct this.
The extent of the 1932-33 famine is difficult to judge, but the number of non-famine victims of Stalin is of order 1 million people, and the number of famine victims has been played with politically. The best estimate I would make personally is 5 million famine victims over all the USSR, mostly children and the elderly, which is a pretty catastrophic famine, and is consistent with the reminiscences of people I have read from the era. The 1932 famine is the worst death toll associated with Stalin, and it is not political repression exactly, but collectivized agriculture. Mao’s collectivization program led to a worse famine.
The effects you claim are controlled by using light water. You simply are talking nonsense out of your ass, and pretending you know. Read and be responsible, don’t just blurt out the first thing that comes to your mind.
These effects are controlled using light water, everything you say does not depend on deuterium.
The excess heat has no relation in magnitude to the known chemistry effects you say. You need to read the papers and be responsible in finding a chemical explanation, not blurt out the first thing that comes into your head.
I want a discussion full of insults, but no death threats. The death threats are a one-in-a-million occurence, and one does not need to censor 999,999 hostile comments to get rid of one inappropriate, but empty, threat.
The basis for asserting that she got nothing else: she never says she got anything else. She didn’t get anything else, and that’s just a fact. She makes it sound as if she did, using indirection and propaganda.
The details of the collectivization famine in the USSR: there was a smaller Khazakstan famine in 1931 in the pilot collectivization program, and then a terrible all-USSR famine, worst in the Ukraine in 1932 and surrounding regions, which is the one that claimed millions of victims.
The bad harvests were all the initial collectivized harvests, as collective farms are intrinsically less efficient than small plots, and further, the new labor on these farms was inexperienced in collective farming and run incompetently. The famine ended with the first good harvests of 1933. During that year, the mortality was atrocious.
It doesn’t kill it, it is simply tempering an odious idea with the facade of moderation. The hostile discussions are a form of peer review, they prevent the accumulation of authority and the stifling of unpopular opinions.
The linking of internet hostility to violence is a false association designed to prevent hostile and rude internet peer review from working, by requiring niceness. There is no nice way to say “you are full of crap”, and there is no threat of violence in that.
The problem with internet comment moderation is that it enforces the point of view of the moderator, except in cases where the moderator takes special effort to be open to all positions. The role of the internet is to allow the creative destruction of bad ideas, and this process is extremely rude, but must be allowed to function.
In the real world, moderation powers are used to suppress dissent much more often than they are used to get rid of threats. The simple fact is that threats hardly ever come, and when they do, they can be handled simply by usual methods, as they are abberations. One of the nice things online is that there is a nearly insuperable barrier to violence, which protects opinions from retribution.
The open discussion is more valuable if it is let alone. That doesn’t mean that every comment needs to be preserved, but comments which are long, which are thought out, which have nontrivial statements (including rude ones) are important, because they show disagreement. The rudeness is the most important feature, as it leads to accuracy over time, even in competely uncensored places, like youtube comments, you can find nontrivial discussions which converge on unpopular truths, so long as the discussion is both rude, and focused.
The goal for me is preserving rude focused honest discussion. Any attack on rudeness is ultimately an attack on honesty, even if it is tempered with moderation and sounds reasonable. Censorship always sounds reasonable, and it hardly ever is.
I see you are rude and obnoxious, all right! Good job. I therefore agree to defer to your judgement, and accept everything you say without reservation, so long as it is exactly your interpretation, and not someone else. It would be just peachy if you were in charge of the decisions on who to ban and who to block, and what to delete.
But you’re not really in charge, and there is subtext in this article you are blind to, which is contradicting the direct statement you quote (I agree with the direct statement).
Still, whatever, that’s ok. You are an asshole too, so I am on your side. I agree with all the negative things you have to say about me, so long as you are willing to consistently defend hostile and insulting tone like the one you used, no matter in which direction the insults are going.
The people who argue for moderation want to get rid of insults in one direction only, the insults going from the powerless to the powerful. Insults from the powerful to the powerless are usually subtle, and invisible to everyone except those they are insulting.
Wrong kind of illiteracy, fool. Functional illiteracy isn’t about phonics or sounding out words. 100% of Americans can do that. Functional illiteracy is the discomfort with complex sentences, full of grammatical recursive nested clauses, typical of written prose but atypical in verbal speech. Functional due to lack of deep reading and writing in advanced grades, to a lack of literate popular culture, television culture.
The internet has a lot of text, and fixes illiteracy permanently. Nobody can function without reading complex material fluently online, and also, WRITING such material. There is zero illiteracy among young people today.
The rest of the content is brain-damaged conservative claptrap. The best literacy was in communist countries, conservatives can barely read and write themselves, let alone teach it.
This is a nonsense critique of straw-man positivism. The position of the logical positivists was coherent, but the formalization by Carnap had a few minor flaws, which were not particularly significant or important. The problem was academic politics— the positivists simply resolved the age-old mysteries of philosophy, and resolved them for good, by showing, not that they are deep mysteries, but gibberish and wankery. This creates a lot of hostility.
You have stated the principle of positivism more or less as Mach stated it, but it needs more careful statement. Physicists starting with Mach, but not ending with Mach, developed positivism in the 20th century. Essentially all physicists continue to be positivists until today, without understanding that they are adopting Mach’s philosophy, because, in Einstein’s words “They have imbibed it in their mother’s milk”.
The proper statement of positivism is that the sensory experience is the fundamental object which is invariant to theorizing away, you can’t theorize away a direct observation, so that it forms the foundation of knowledge. The other conceptions are important only to the extent that they have an impact, direct or indirect, on sensory experience. So you need to give a path from the object you are hypothesizing directly to a sensory experience to be sure you know what you are talking about.
This principle is extremey important, and it is clarified by some examples from physics. The first notion which is clarified is the “electric field”. What is a “field”? The answer is that you can measure the field by placing charges at a position in space, and seeing how they accelerate. This procedure defines what the content of the field is in a postivist way, and allows you to be sure that the field is a sensible thing to introduce into a formalism.
Another example is a “gauge”. The gauge of electromagnetism, unlike the fields, does not have any impact on observations— any gauge choice gives the same answer as any other. Does that mean that the postivists reject a choice of gauge? This is explicity false! Their experience was from GR and the choice of coordinate system there, Einstein’s positivism, and this experience made it clear that you CAN talk about a gauge, but you consider the question “which gauge is real” to be meaningless. That’s not the same as saying “you don’t need to choose a gauge”, or “gauge’s can’t be chosen”, or “gauges don’t exist”. It’s the statement that “gauge choice is immaterial, and any one choice is as good as any other, and you can translate freely between the gauges. No argument depends on choice of gauge in a crucial way, although some arguments might be simpler or clearer in one gauge rather than another.”
This is the positivist insight that Carnap et al were formalizing in various degrees of formality in the 1940s and 1950s. It is not the same as saying that ONLY sense experience is admissible in a model of nature (as Mach sometimes overstated a little), because, as you say (and as Riechenbacher and Carnap understood very well), you need all sorts of apparatus to make sense of the primitive bit-values in the sense-data. It is next to impossible to disentangle sense-data from non-sense data, because you need to consider the data in the processing stages of the conscious mind, which, as you say, involves a lot of uncontrolled approximations.
But there is a principle here, a simple one: within our given framework, we can talk about sense data. Within the enlargements of the framework to new concepts, there are questions which make claims about future or present sense-data, and questions which do not make any such claims. The answer to questions which do not make any claims about sense-data are A FREE CHOICE, they are up to you, just like a gauge in electromagnetism. You can translate freely from any answer to any other, and the question “which answer is correct” is nonsense, it is metaphysical, and has no answer because it has no meaning.
This is the fundamental insight of the positivists. It can’t die, because it is true. It is used ALL THE TIME in physics, and it forms the core confusion that non-physicists have when discussing physics. If you don’t accept that a question which has no impact on future sense-data is arbitrary and meaningless, you can’t make the framework shifts required for the theoretical advances in physics.
Here is a list of meaningless questions in physics (that are trivial once you understand logical positivism, but hopeless otherwise):
1. Are gauge ghosts actual particles?
2. Does the electron have a position in the ground state of Hydrogen, if you aren’t measuring where it is?
3. Are confined particles, like quarks, actual particles?
4. Do objects cross the black-hole event horizon or get smeared on the surface, never falling through?
5. Are Green-Schwarz superstrings the same as RNS superstrings?
I could go on all day. All these superficially sensible questions are obviously nonsensical in logical postivism, and to simply study physics, you can’t avoid imbibing the entire philosophy right at the outset, and definitely when you study quantum mechanics.
The result is a complete disconnect between physics and philosophy, due to the deranged reaction against positivism in philosophy departments. The positivism is not “wrong”, it is RIGHT! It is the only right answer. There is no other answer, there is no POINT in looking for another answer, the question has been resolved, and it has been resolved FOR GOOD, and EVERYONE IN PHYSICS KNOWS IT, and gets PISSED OFF AT THE IDIOTS AT THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT FOR SCREWING UP THIS OBVIOUS TRIPE WITH POLITICAL OBFUSCATION.
The problem here is that the discourse in philosophy is political, and permanently broken. These people are basically nitwits, and should not exist. The exceptions are those that do mathematical stuff, or study philosophy of political movements and things like this, but usually not. The problems stem from the subservience of philosophy to the hierarchical order of society, so that philosophers are genteel, high-class, well-spoken, mild-mannered, bourgeoise types. Science is done by proles, and logical positivism is the revenge of the proles.
Thankfully, the internet exists, and so it can no longer be suppressed. Now, unlike in the 1950s, it can bury old philosophy for good.
These are not what is meant by “direct observations” in positivism, these are all (false) inferences regarding higher order structure. Also, are you my personal minder? What are you doing commenting on a not-particularly widely appreciated debate in physics philosophy?
A “direct observation”: I see the following jpg-data in my eyes. I hear the following wmv data in my ears. There is NO EXTRA STRUCTURE imposed over this, like “I see a face”, just the direct sensory data. You can’t theorize this away means this is irreducible data. This is what you build yout theory out of, whether that theory is “this is gold” or “this is fool’s gold”. “I am hallucinating” or “this is reproducible”.
It can’t be lying to you, because, in positivism, it is what everything else is made of, it is the foundation of what you are after explaining. The notions of “fool’s gold”, “mirage”, “illusion”, “psychosis” are just more abstract categories which are used to make predictions about future sense impression. In the case of fool’s gold, what a gold-broker would say to you if you tried to sell him some, in the case of hallucinations, about some consistency properties of the impression.
There is no further claim about reality than the statement that it involves a coherent meshing of impressions among folks who communicate, and there is no a-priori notions used to make sense of sensory experience, just what you are given in the sense data.
It is important in physics, because when you have a scientific revolution, like relativity, quantum mechanics, etc, you end up changing all the high-level interpretation while the sense data is unaltered, so that it’s like finding out that a bunch of stuff you thought was gold is all fool’s gold. It is also important because putting together a notion of reality in quantum mechanics is impossible without positivism, and even then, it is weird and unreal. It is an essential part of modern physics, and it is rejected in philosophy, for stupid reasons.
You DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING! The jpg of the oasis IS the basic data you start with. There is no interpretation on this, NADA, NOTHING. No “This is an oasis”, no “this is an illusion due to light curvature”, nothing but a jpg, a list of pixel intensities. That’s it, no extra structure, just the basic data. The interpretations, even the most primitive ones like “hey, that toast looks like Jesus” come from doing INFERENCE on the basic data, using formal logic (usually in your brain, sometimes on a computer), and being open to competely changing the inference based on new sensory impressions. When you are talking about illusions, you are talking about a sudden change of inference due to more careful observation, i.e. more data, with no change in the basic data at all.
There is no a-priori requirement in positivism that the sensory impressions reported by different observers have to come together to make a coherent single picture of reality. This just is an observation that is true in the classical world, and one that arguably fails in quantum mechanics.
The interpretation “There is an oasis there” is an INFERENCE, a THEORY. It is open to getting replaced with any other theory that explains the same sense data, including “I was hallucinating” or “my senses were misfiring”. All of these are plausible hypotheses, and they are deduced from the basic sense-data, which you can’t argue with, because this and Occam’s razor is pretty much all you have.
That’s POSITIVISM.
The basic data comes with NO INTERPRETATION AT ALL, not even the basic scanning of a human brain. It’s just pure data.
Exactly— these things you talk about, the frameworks of interpretation, are all making predictions about FUTURE DATA, and you learn to make these predictions by synthesizing them from previous sense data, and making predictions about future sense data, and seeing which predictions are correct and which predictions are not correct, using new data.
The framework for interpreting the sense data is subject to evolutionary change, and to some a-priori constraint, from Occam’s razor. if you like, you choose the simplest framwork among those that maximize your life expectancy. But since this is not Darwinian evolution, it is better to say, you choose the framework consistent with sense data so as to maximize the correct predictions of future observations.
In positivism that’s ALL you are maximizing— the correct predictions for future observations. You make no a-priori assumptions that do not help in predicting future impressions, and you don’t give any credence to any structure that is not a sense-impression, or a framework for making predictions about sense-impressions.
That’s how physics philosophy works, and it is essential to doing physics, because in quantum mechanics, the sense-data reported by different observers is not consistent with a traditional classical reality underneath, but
with something else. Some take it to be a many-worlds reality, others with a purely positivistic unreality. So long as the predictions are unaltered, which point of view you take between those that predict the same
impressions is a free choice, the two positions are not distinct, they are “equivalent in positivism”. The equivalence means that it is senseless to ask which framework is correct, when the sense-data predicted is the same.
The question “which framework among these two predicting the same impressions” is correct is a Carnap non-question, it’s nonsense. Carnap called it “metaphysics”, but it includes questions like “is many-worlds correct, or
Copenhangen correct?” which are not traditionally considered metaphysics. That’s the main upshot of positivism— identifying together as equivalent any two philosophical positions which are superficially different in their
mental structure, but which predict the exact same impressions in all cases. A clear example from physics is the choice of gauge in electromagnetism— any two gauges make the exact same predictions in every case, so it is
senseless to ask which is correct. Rather, you can choose one, and freely translate to any other, without thinking you are somehow changing anything at all, even though the mathematical description superficially changes
between the gauges. Ditto for change of basis in quantum mechanics, change of picture in string theory, introducing ghosts, doing a different path integral, all things physicsts swap around all the time, but philosophers
stop and say “hold it! Which one is right in reality?” A stupid question, because positivism shows that not only has no answer, it is not
even a real question.
This point of view regarding how knowledge is built up was accepted in philosophy from the 1940s to the 1960s, but went out of fasion in the 1970s, as people made up certain “problems” with it. The only problem is that is is correct, and cutting, in that it shows that most of philosophy is empty prattle, as it has no significance in predicting future sense-impressions, or organizing past ones.
That’s Popperian nonsense. There is no difference between verifiability and falsifiability, they are related by the operation of “logical not”. If the oasis recedes as you approach it, it is a mirage, and whether this is a falsification of “this is water” or a verification of “this is is not water” is trivially logically identical. The two statements are negations of each other!
The distinction between “falsifiability” and “verifiability” is nonsense in formal logic, because they are obviously equivalent, since “not” is a primitive operation. So why is it that Popper was able to go on with this nonsense for so long?
It’s because you need scientific induction to make frameworks. When doing inference that involve scientific induction, one direction of induction is usually easy (falsified!) and one direction of induction is hard (verified!) This asymmetry is due to the fact that theories usually make precise predictions in one direction only, for example “water will get closer to me as I walk towards it”, which are easy to check, because they are precise. Conversely, usually the other direction “a mysterious new phenomenon that looks like water” which usually doesn’t come with precise predictions, and which cannot be checked.
But the reason is simply the asymmetry in induction produced when there is a precise theory. To falsify a precise theory is easy, because it predicts a ton of precise sense-data, while to verify the same theory involves an induction step, because at some point you need to accept the theory, which makes an infinite number of predictions, using only finitely many observations.
The problem of induction in positivism is solved using a precise formulation of Occam’s razor which uses Kolmogorov complexity (ciomputer program length). The criterion of simplicity is made precise using the length of the shortest program which makes the predictions, and the statement of induction is that you continuously update the program predicting the sense-data to the Kolmogorov simplest one which is in accordance with the data so far.
This principle includes both “Falsification” and “verification” and relates them by logical not. There is no difference.
Popper made up this “falsification” nonsense so as to steal “verification” from the positivists. The positivists were usually politically incompatible with Popper, as a lot of them were socialists, and he was a traditional liberal. “Falsification” is prattle which is propped up because it sounds nice to an ignorant student, it is a primitive form of verification, and if you add induction (which you need to do anyway), it is completely equivalent to verification, except it allows Popper to steal credit from the positivists for this idea.
While the negation of “the defendent is guilty” is “the defendent is not guilty”, the negation of “prove a defendent guilty” is “not prove a defendent guilty”. It isn’t “prove a defendent innocent”.
And indeed, the job of the defence attorney in a modern state is to show that the prosecuter “did NOT prove the defendent guilty”. The job is not to prove that the defendent is NOT guilty. If you don’t know formal logic, you sometimes make ridiculous mistakes like this.
These higher structures are very complicated anyway, they are human, involving abstract ideas of “fairness” and “justice” and “authority”, in a situation of extremely imperfect knowledge. They are many steps removed from direct sensory experience, or the reading of instruments. When you can acquire as much data as you like, through future careful controlled experiments, and when you are in a regime where all competing theories are required to be simple, even the difference between “prove A” and “prove not A” disappears.
I did not miss any point, the question of proving guilt and proving innocence are not related by “logical not”. They are treated asymmetrically because there is an asymmetry of power between the state and the individual.
When two individuals are both suing each other, the burden of proof on the two sides is the same, and it is preponderance of the evidence. There is no requirement that one side have overwhelming evidence, unlike the case of a criminal trial.
These asymmetries are entirely due to political factors, who has power, who has authority, which side is in a position to intimidate or coerce witnesses, and so on and so on. These factors were not present (and should never be present, although our world is imperfect) when you are deciding whether Brans-Dicke gravity is better than General Relativity, except to the extent that the scientists involved are also human, and also politicians.
When you have scientific data and hypotheses, you prune the hypotheses using Occam’s razor, and you distinguish between them when you have explained ALL the data using one of the ideas, and ruled out the other explanation using the same data. If the data is ambiguous, you get more. This is a process which does not require political meddling, and this is the process which positivism places at the core of the theory of knowledge. This process also appears in a courtroom, as the testimony of expert witnesses, like fingerprint analysts, or DNA experts, who claim to be reporting the conclusion of such a process.
When you are talking about a judge or jury, where they are making and testing hypotheses regarding some activity they aren’t sure about, these people have to build up much more complicated narrative structures of people, their relations, their exchange of money, and relate these to the law, to authority, to credibility, admissibility of evidence, and so on, and these structures are purely political. These political structures include asymmetric burden of proof, because of asymmetries of power, and they are a headache when you are evaluating scientific theories.
Scientific theories are not immune from this sort of political nonsense, as Aristotelianism and Phlogiston show. Indeed, from a human point of view, because of the power-structure of established doctrine in science, you also do need to bend over backwards to listen to claims of crazy observations that conflict with established dogma, and keep testing the dogma, because there is always the possibility that the dogma is all wrong, and the conflicting observations were politically suppressed. But this is ultimately a game with credibility and politics, and in science, because you are dealing with nature, you can always resolve these disputes unambiguously by just repeating the experiments and observations until you know exactly what was going on, by making and testing the hypotheses repeatedly. The politics gets in the way, sure, but the burden of proof for a theory is to explain EVERYTHING, not just some things better, and the theory is only definitively accepted (in an idealization) once ALL the data is consistent with the theory, and the mistake which led to all inconsistent data is identified.
It’s always the same theory of knowledge, but in the sophisticated areas, the knowledge is talking about very sophisticated abstractions, where you’ll never get a chance to do such a careful inquiry. In that case, you make a meta-theory about probabilities of different scenerios, and try to distinguish between their plausibility. Within physics, you see the pure mechanism of knowledge production, because the extraneous political complications are stripped away.
The assumption is that the state can gang up politically on an individual, and create charges out of thin air by selectively choosing witnesses, bribing or coercing informants to lie, create social consensus through media releases, and cherry-pick evidence that suggests guilt (like states tend to do all the time). The requirement of “beyond reasonable doubt” is to protect the individual from the massive power of the state. It was really designed to protect wealthy individuals from the various charges that come when the powers in government decide to put them away, because of the political resentment of others who are not so wealthy. But it works to protect dissidents and so on, more or less, from capricious charges also. It doesn’t work so well when private power is the one fabricating charges against an individual— sometimes private corporations can get an individual hounded or put away using similarly oppressive methods, as in the case of Aaron Schwarz. The issue is how you produce a free society, where the power is distributed broadly, and this has nothing to do with logical positivism.
Look, this type of philosophy is valid and important, but very far removed from questions of semantics and knowledge which positivism is addressing. The positivism is just a foundation, it tells you how to acquire knowledge with confidence, it tells you nothing about how these complicated things are supposed to work.
Stop talking nonsense, and please learn formal logic. The operation of “not” is not the same thing as the operation of set-complement, it is a PRIMITIVE LOGICAL operation, not realized on sets, as the complement of a set in the universe is not itself a set. If you want to talk about logical operations, you should talk about classes. In this case, the class of Earth and the class of not-Earth are completely equivalent objects in set theories with classes, anything you can state about one, you can state about the other, and there is no difference between the statements despite your superficial untrained intuition.
The operation of LOGICAL not (not set theoretic complement) relates verifiability and falsifiability in all cases trivially. The concept of falsifiability is exploiting an intuition that is false, namely that one direction of verification is always easy, and doesn’t require deep induction, while the other direction is always hard.
This is in practice often the case, where the theory makes many precise predictions, but it is sometimes not, as for example, the big bang only makes a finite number of predictions, essentially the CMB fluctuations. Further, the theory that electrons are responsible for Faraday’s law has exceptions, sometimes the deposition is half the predicted amount. To account for this, you introduce doubly-charged ions, you don’t throw away the Faraday theory. This is not a fudge making Faraday theory untestable, it is a development that teaches you something new, that there are doubly charged ions.
Theories in sociology are statistical and vague, although still knowledge (for example, that inflationary spending reduces unemployment, or how to control hyperinflation). These theories are full of exceptions, yet you muddle through using verification/falsification as best you can, and the main tool is Occam’s razor, and the ability to produce new hypotheses.
The distinction between verifiability and falsifiability is never useful in scientific contexts. The important thing is that there are predictions for sense impressions, and that the framework is simple. These two constraints together obviate any need to distinguish between falsifying and verifying, which is good, because formal logic can’t distinguish these.
Ok, but you should realize that the Popperian notions are not incompatible with positivism, but form a primitive approximation to the idea which is attempting to steal credit from the positivists, who came up with a better formulation first. This dispute is mostly over extremely minute details of what constitutes a “verification”, but I insist on the positivist formulation, because it is the one that is correct when you formalize logic.
I should add that formalizing logic does not preserve all untrained intuitions. In particular, verifying that “all swans are white” is IDENTICAL to verifying that “all nonwhite things are not swans” formally. The intuitive distinction between them comes from the number of things that are swans as opposed to the number of non-swans, and the Baysian confidence you gain from observing something nonwhite and concluding it isn’t a swan is relatively small compared to the observation of a white swan.
But this unformal intuition is simply being exploited by Popper to make a folk-philosophy which is less precise and less rigorous than positivism. But since it is mostly just a primitive version of the same idea, it doesn’t lead to infighting, and positivist like Hawking have even (mistakenly) attributed the positivism to Popper, despite his claim to be an anti-positivist! The reason is that the distinction between falsification and verification is essentially meaningless in the presence of Occam’s razor, and the dispute, when both positions are sufficiently precise, is nonexistent, as they are the same exact position (although Popper is emphasizing an intuitive but formally meaningless distinction, just to do academic politics using people’s untrained intuition).
The equivalence between “all nonwhite things are nonswans” and “all swans are white” is exactly the type of thing that Popper claims is asymmetric with respect to verification. It just isn’t. It isn’t quite a double negative exactly, that’s nothing at all in usual non-intuitionistic logic. This is the contrapositive, which is nontrivial.
To show you a contrapositive without two “not” statements: saying “no swans are black” is the same as saying “all black things are not swans”. The word “not” is used exactly once in both places, but the two statements are identical in content.
In formal logic, classes and negation behave the same way, so you can speak about not-you and you, so that “I am not tall” is the same thing as saying “all tall things are non-me”, and the statement can be understood as a formal statement about classes, and the evidence for the statement is the same as the evidence for the statement “I am not tall”.
The rules for evidence are that you make a hypothesis, and test it using the predictions for sense-impressions. The tests are the same whether you are talking about the formal class, or it’s complement, the predictions don’t depend on this detail.
The intuition Popper has is not necessary. All you need is Occam’s razor and predictions, and you can start culling theories and making better knowledge.
Also, this dispute is very minor, as I am sure you see. The positivists would not complain about Popper, except to the extent that he was claiming credit for their work, and this is a political issue, not an issue of real philosophical dispute.
The notion of complement is INSIDE A GIVEN SET. There is no complement relative to the UNIVERSE, because the UNIVERSE IS NOT A SET. This is why people talk about proper classes.
Sets were ORIGINALLY designed to be collections where all the laws of logic had a counterpart in operations on a set. That was Boole and Frege’s original project. This idea DIDN’T WORK, because of Cantor’s and Russells’ paradoxes. So now sets mean something else, a tower of ordinally constructed objects without a notion of complement, while the word “classes” has taken over for objects which are constructed in correspondence with the laws of logic.
You can sigh all you want, you don’t know logic or sets beyond the vague intuitions of the late 19th century, and pretending to understand formal mathematics doesn’t work.
The CONCEPT of absolute complement exists, it is just INCONSISTENT and NONSENSICAL and REJECTED by set theorists since around 1900. The concept is not included in any modern set theory (you can enter “Naive set theory” in your search bar to read about this).
To see why the concept of absolute set complement is formally inconsistent— consider the empty set, take it’s complement in the universe, and consider the ordinals which are inside this complement, find the limit of these ordinals, and add one. This ordinal is not in the complement (since it is bigger than all the ordinals in the compement), but it should be. Contradiction.
That’s just one of Cantor’s paradoxes. Another is “take the set of all subsets of the complement of the empty set”. This is larger in cardinality than the complement, but the complement supposedly includes all nonempty sets. This is another Cantor paradox.
Knowing about these paradoxes, Cantor explicitly rejected considering the universe as a set, or taking complements of set in the universe. This advice was not appreciated by Frege and Boole, who wanted the laws of sets to mirror the laws of logic. Then Russell forced Frege to take Cantor’s objections seriously by stating the simplest formulation of this paradox, which demolished Frege’s first attempt at axiomatizing set theory.
Russell’s paradox comes from observing that the complement of any normal set, like the empty set, must contain itself (since this complement contains all nonempty sets, including pathologically large sets like itself). Russell then divided sets into two types “pathological” sets which contain themselves, and normal sets, that don’t. He then asked “what is the set of all normal sets?”, i.e. “What is the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves?” This question is obviously paradoxical, as this set can neither contain itself or not contain itself, as a moment’s reflection shows. From this point on, everyone got it, including Frege, and the first good axiomatizations appeared a decade later, first with Russell’s theory of types, then with Zermelo’s axiomatic set theory.
Axiomatic set theory goes along the lines suggested by Cantor’s intuition, and it is entirely without the notion of absolute complement. The sets in any modern set theory are built up from the empty set by the processes of unions, separation, replacement, and powerset, along with trivial things like pairing. The relevant axioms are “Zermelo Fraenkel set theory”, and these do not include the idea of universal complement. The axiom of foundation guarantees that all sets are built from the empty set by a quasi-finite process (meaning that set membership has no loops, if you look at a member of a member of a member of …. a given set, you terminate on the empty set after a finite number of steps). A good no-nonsense modern introduction to axiomatic set theory is in Paul Cohen’s “Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis”.
To make logical operations into a “set theory” of the naive kind, Godel and Bernays reaxiomatized the laws of logic and sets so that they talk about “classes” and “sets” both. Classes are not sets, they are logical collections of sets, which are usually too big to also be sets. All sets are classes, but not all classes are sets. You can then talk about “The class of all sets that don’t contain themselves”, and this is not a paradox, because this class is not a set. This class is also the entire universe, because in modern set theory, no set contains itself.
The formalization of set theory went in tandem with the development of formal logic. You need to understand these things to comment on them, not only because it is interesting, but because you are currently commenting with your head up your ass (although in good faith).
The absolute complement DOES EXIST for classes, you simpering nitwit. I used it for classes, not sets. I always used the concept correctly.
Read it again, you insincere git. The complement of a set in the universe is a CLASS, because every set is also a CLASS. Just not vice versa.
Of course not, little buddy. The contrapositives I gave were correct. P and Q are PROPOSITIONS, i.e. sentences, not things. So P cannot equal “Earth”, because “Earth” is not a proposition. It can equal “The Earth is blue”, or “rain is wet”.
Once you have CLASSES, then you can have propositions as objects, each proposition is the class of sets that satisfy it. When you have SETS and mathematical objects, and you assume “all mathematical objects are sets”. Then you can speak about “Earth” as a set, a VERY UNNATURAL set, the set of “Earth” considered as a mathematical object.
But now you can’t speak about “not Earth” as a set, because “not Earth” is not a set. The complement of a set in the universe is always a class.
So the proper symmetric way to treat “Earth” and “not Earth” as set-like things is to treat them both as proper classes. But it is still unnatural. The calculus of logic applies most naturally to propositions, to sentences. Class language just turns sentences with variables into nouns, the collection of objects for which the sentences becomes true.
Please stop arguing for rhetorical points, it is obvious that you don’t know anything at all. Your insistence on runing your mouth without bothering to learn the most basic material is absolutely galling, and shows your disrespect for intellectual discourse.
I know it’s difficult for you, but the contrapositive of the proposition “All swans are white” is “all nonwhite things are not swans”. It doesn’t look like the formal thing immediately, because you don’t understand formal logic.
In formal logic “all swans are white” reads
X is a swan -> X is white
The contrapositive is
not X white -> not X is a swan
This is the most rudimentary formal logic. Please learn it first, and not just take ten seconds on Wikipedia to prove you never read a book.
Get AWAY, you pestering locust. You are not competent to read.
In PURE SET THEORY WITHOUT CLASSES, e.g. ZFC, there is no complement relative to the universe.
In AN EQUIVALENT SET THEORY WITH CLASSES, e.g Godel-Bernays, the complement relative to the universe exists and is a CLASS, not a SET.
Since ALL SETS ARE ALSO CLASSES, the complement of a set is its complement considered as a class.
I never said anything inconsistent, I just assumed I was talking to someone who understood the first thing about set theory, not an incompetent twit.
In a LIMITED UNIVERSE, you can talk about complements, but then it doesn’t correspond to Popper’s ideas, because these universes are too limited.
Please stop wasting people’s time with nonsense. Your incompetence is galling,
Since you insisted on conflating propositions with objects. I took the charitable interpretation where THIS IS ALLOWED. You make a mathematical model of the Earth and everything in it, and consider the Earth as a mathematical object.
If the surrounding mathematical universe is set theoretic, then, the EARTH in the model, is a set, and it’s complement is a CLASS.
Then any statement you make about the mathematical object “EARTH” is equivalent to a statement about the class “NOT EARTH”. And these are both classes, but only one is a set. This is the only way to talk about statements and their negations in a way so as to pretend to be talking about objects.
If you talk about logical predicates, as you do 90% of the time, there is nothing to discuss. You don’t need to bring up classes, you just talk about the logical predicates.
This stuff is extremely rudimentary, and it is appaling that you would discuss it without learning it, and further, pretend you have some knowledge in the subject.
“Earth is blue” is equivalent to “non-blue is non-Earth”. The statement about classes is that the set/class consisting of the single mathematical object “EARTH” in your mathematical model is included in the class of “blue things”.
It is also the statement that the absolute complement of the class of “blue things”, i.e. the class of nonblue things, is included inside the class “non-Earth”, the absolute complement of the class “Earth” (every set is also a class).
That’s the complete and proper translation of all statements by someone who knows rudimentary logic. Notice, any statement about Earth, you can translate into a statement about the class “non-Earth”. Notice that complements require talking about proper classes. Notice that everything I said is both precise and correct.
This is assuming a model where the Earth is a mathematical object, so that you can talk about it as if it were a mathematical object. This is not the usual way people speak, but it is an acceptable way to speak, because it’s not like “the Earth can be considered as a mathematical object” is a statement with any bearing on the senses.
I USED THE WORDS CORRECTLY IN EVERY CASE, you simpering twit. The discussion here is simply an unwitting display of your own lamentable mathematical ignorance.
You are focusing on superficial linguistic accidental nonsense!
“The Earth is blue” is logically
“Earth class is inside blue class”
and to the contrapositive
“The not blue class is included in not-Earth”
(not-Earth is object)
and also
“not-Earth includes not blue”
(identical sentence where not-Earth is subject)
Where you put the subject or the object is an immaterial detail of English grammar, depending on what form of verb you prefer to use, and has nothing to do with the formal sentence or the content of the sentence in a formal interpretation. There is no difference at all in the formal content of the last two sentences, and this is something one has to get used to when discussing formal sentences.
The statement “not Earth contains not blue” is most definitely a statement stating a property of “not Earth”, just as “not blue is included in not earth”. It is also COMPLETELY EQUIVALENTLY a statement about the Earth.
Similarly,
“The circumference of the Earth is 40,000 miles”
is contrapositive equivalent to the statement
“Not Earth includes all objects whose diameter is not 40,000 miles”
Now it’s a statement about a property of the class “not Earth”.
These formal things are not obvious from informal language, but they are not deep. At least you sound sincere again, not making rhetorical points.
The flipping of implication arrows in the logic description is a flip in the containership properties of the classes, which is completely insignificant, since either “contains” or “is contained in” are equally good properties of a class.
“The Earth is blue” is a property of Earth.
“The Earth is not a gas giant” is also a property of Earth.
“The Earth in 1955 is a special case of Earth” is also a property of Earth.
“The Earth did not exist in 10,000,000,000 BC” is also a property of Earth
The contrapositive statements in class language is:
“Not-Earth is contained in the class not-blue”
“Not-Earth contains the class gas-giants”
“Not (Earth-in-1955) includes Not-Earth and is not the full universe”
“Not (Earth-in-10,000,000,000 BC) is the full universe”
Every statement about Earth considered as a class can be converted trivially to the statement about the class not-Earth, as I explicitly did for you in the four examples. You can do it yourself now.
The question of which way the containership relation goes is an idiotic red-herring you made up. All these statements are equally good properties of Earth (or not-Earth), as you can see explicitly in the examples, and the containership properties go every which way, depending on the sense of the statement.
You can continue to advertise your twerpy ignorance, but it’s really not worth it. It’s better to read an elementary logic book.
As by now YOU VERY WELL KNOW, you insincere potted plant, “contained in” and “contains” are both properties of a class, one property is not distinguished as special over the other, so they are equally good— meaning neither kind of property is preferred over the other, and you can’t say “these containerships are properties of Earth” and “these other kinds of containership are properties of not-Earth”. Both containerships are equally well thought of as properties of either one, equivalently, because of the freedom in formal logic to negate.
Your examples are mentally retarded. “All mafiosi are sicilians” is reversed to “all non-sicilians are not mafiosi” as I have explained many times, and all these statements can be interpreted as properties of “mafiosi”, “sicilians”, “non-mafiosi”, and “non-sicilians” equally well. There is no distiniguished interpretation, nor any preference for a statement over its contrapositive.
The contrapositive just complements all classes and flips one kind of containership to the other, and neither is distinguished. So there is no significance to Popper’s idiotic false intuitive distinction between “verification” and “falsification”, or for that matter, to any other intuitive distinction which hinges on an informal intuition that there is some sort of asymmetry between negated statements. The formal language simply doesn’t allow you to treat these asymmetrically, when you speak precisely, despite Popper’s brain-damage.
I explained how to do the translation from a property of a class to the property of the complement precisely above, so that you can see that it is easily done. What I was saying is precisely correct, and your response is MENTALLY DEFECTIVE RHETORIC. Do you honestly think that any of your examples are confusing? Obviously not. You just want to sound like you aren’t as ignorant as you have unfortunately revealed yourself to be. That doesn’t work with formal mathematics, fortunately. You are just busted.
No, you do the conversion by doing a proper logical operation, by doing a contrapositive, not by your mentally defective substitution drivel.
The claim I made is accurate. Anything you can state about “Earth” you can state about “not Earth”, using trivial and obvious inversion and flipping, which I showed you by example. Your retarded interpretation of this statement shows that you must have suffered a blow to the head. I never made the claim that you do a simple substitution, nor could I even conceive in my wildest fantasy that ANYONE would think this, considering how stupid it is. Guess I was assuming I wasn’t talking to the victim of blunt head trauma.
“Equally well” means that all statements are the same. You don’t consider one kind of statement special and the contrapositive different. none are special.
Since you don’t understand, I see that, on the other hand, you must be a different kind of special.
“No difference” does not exclude negating attributes and flipping arrows. It means the two statements, after the proper flipping of arrows, have exactly the same content.. It takes a really special person to misunderstand this obvious point.
You pathetic sap, you are simply crazy. there is no “double negative” in the contrapositive. Double negative is something else altogether, where two nots cancel each other out, because they are applied to the same thing. In a contrapositive, the two negations are applied to separate things, and don’t cancel each other out. It’s not a simple example of a double negative.
Specifically:
“The Earth is not red” is a proposition. The contrapositive is “Not Earth contains class red”. Notice that there s only one negative in each statement. Nothing to cancel out.
“The Earth is blue” contraposes into “Not Earth contains class not-blue”, and it is not a double negative either, despite your pathetically ignorant untrained intuition, because the two “nots” are acting on separate things.
An actual example of a double negative is “The complement of the class not-Earth is blue”. This is a double negative equivalent to “The Earth is blue”. Double negatives are trivial in formal logic, because you can get rid of all pairs of consecutive nots. Contrapositive is less trivial, precisely because it is not a double negative. That’s the reason they gave it a separate name, you see.
The contrapositive sentence converts a property of Earth into a property of Not-Earth. The Earth is in this class tells you that not earth contains this other class. It’s not the normal way you say “The Earth is blue”, but it’s completely logically equivalent. This is why it helps to study formal logic, because you can’t figure this stuff out just by blabbing ignorantly like you are trying to do. You have to use an organ called “the brain”, which organ, unfortunately, you are missing.
The contrapositive of Earth properties give for each one a property of not-Earth. You can’t distinguish them formally from properties of Earth, you can’t say “these here are properties and these other statements are not properties” (or, rather, you can if you like being ARBITRARY, but hey, so far you don’t care about even seem to care about being correct, so maybe I shouldn’t presume). These statements contain the exact same content, except speaking about the complement. Moron
There isn’t anything more to say about this, I explained this in detail several times, with detailed examples, and you continue to splatter diarrhea onto this page. Have you no shame, asswipe?
I didn’t say “Earth” and “not Earth” were equal, you pap smear, I said that any property of one can be equivalently stated as a property of the other, and this is a simple not-even-counterintuitive fact from formal logic, just a fact that you are obviously far too dim to appreciate. Must be tough with so little light up there.
Trust me, the tactic worked. I look like a monkey, you’re covered in poop, and I’m objectively right on the mathematical logic. In a debate between someone who knows something technical and someone who uses nice political language to disguise knowing nothing, the best way to remove authority from the idiot is to insult.
Hey, wow, you’re stupid again. The correct things that go in your “fill in the blanks” are X and THE COMPLEMENT OF X, not X and X.
X is blue
class (not X) contains class (not blue)
These are the statements with identical truth tables, you challenged moron. I have explained this about a dozen times.
not-Earth contains not-blue
is equivalent to
Earth is blue
or
Earth is CONTAINED IN class blue.
not the stupid thing you wrote.
Again, the same thing a dozen times. You see, you insincere lying wretch, it doesn’t help to claim the same stupid thing 20 times when you are objectively wrong, and I call you an idiot to your face.
Your claim regarding “solid blue” show you don’t understand the class attributes. Saying “Earth contains blue” does NOT mean that “Earth consists of oceans and land”, and has nothing to do with the solidness of color of the Earth, you idiot. What “Earth contains blue” REALLY means in this context is the nonsensical claim that the collection of the one thing “Earth” contains the collection of ALL BLUE THINGS, including every blue gas giant in the Andromeda galaxy. The collection “Earth” does not contain “the sky”, even though the sky is part of the Earth. It doesn’t contain “Krishna” either, even though all Hindus currently happen to live on the Earth. The formal statement about classes is very different from the idiotic meaning your mathematically untrained little brain gives to the informal statement.
Now, you have been so stupid for so long, it is clear you don’t actually sincerely believe your own crap. Rather, you are trying to do propaganda. That fortunately doesn’t work when you have the mathematical sophistication of a zombie.
Yes, I see that you are too stupid to understand what I type, so I explained it in excruciating detail below.
Not exactly. That’s according to YOUR IDIOTIC MISUNDERSTANDING of my original claim. Nobody could possibly take that obtuse literal interpretation, because nobody else could be that stupid. It’s the interpretation of an autistic savant.
“Anything you can state about one, you can state about the other” is correct, and “there is no difference between the statements” is also correct— the statements are contrapositives of each other. Only a lying twerp purposefully doing propaganda could pretend to get confused in this way.
The notion of God was identified by Cantor as the limit of all ordinals in the 1890s, this was the foundation of set theory, it was why set theory was important, and replaced the infinity of calculus and infinite series within mathematical practice.
Cantor took the limit to mean uncountable ordinals, as he was enamored by a set theory that included the real numbers (powersets), since he discovered both ordinals and uncountability. But later analysis of logic through Godel and Skolem showed that the proper logical notion for a set theory is computable axiom systems in first order logic. The proper models for such theories are countable.
Church, Turing, and Kleene through the 1940s analyzed ordinal structures and eventually identified the proper concept of “mathematical God” as the Church-Kleene ordinal. This was elucidated in Turing’s strangely underrecognized 1938 thesis and Church’s identification of the Church-Kleene ordinal, together with Kleene’s “O”, the naming system for ordinals that allows you to speak about ordinals approaching this ultimate complexity.
The Church-Kleene ordinal, when you count down from it, is sufficiently complex to prove any consistent computable theory is consistent, and resolve any well-defined mathematical question, i.e. one which can be phrased as the halting of a computer program, perhaps with an oracle.
The relation to the ethical conception of God is through the proposition that superrational ethical systems can decide how one should behave as if an infinitely wise agent who knows everyone tells you what to do, and the decision procedure is well defined when you have a complete system of mathematics, which is provided by approaching the Church Kleene ordinal as closely as you can. Of course, you can’t reach it, but you can approximate it better and better using more sophisticated axioms of infinity, which produce theories whose proof-theoretic ordinal get closer to Church Kleene.
There is no relation to supernatural conceptions of God, but these are basically considered obsolete even within standard religion by theologens since at least the middle ages.
I am not a theologen, I am a physicist. The “bad philosophy”, however, is done by philosophers. When they say something, the theologens usually have a point.
Yes, it’s easier, but the theologens (I’ll spell it however I like, thank you. I like the “gen” root better, as it suggests that they are the source generating theology, as is historically accurate, although this was only a subconscious motivation for the misspelling at best, I just made up whatever spelling I felt like) generally argue about substantial things. They argue about the limits of human behavior in a community, whether individuals should be allowed to practice polygamy, or charge interest, or go off and do blasphemous art, and this is meaningful discourse. Their arguments, on the other hand, often consist in nitpicking interpretations of ancient texts, which are valueless as arguments, so you get no clue as to how they arrived at their conclusions from the text that they write. The philosophers, on the other hand, tell you their thinking honestly, but generally argue about meaningless things.
Um, I wasn’t saying that you prove axiomatic system S is consistent starting with the assumption that it is consistent, I was saying that you prove S is consistent (without knowing at first) only when you assume a specific large computable ordinal countdown terminates. The assumptions of well-foundedness of large computable ordinals is a justified (but theological) substitute for the otherwise unjustified assumption that some given axiomatic system (like ZFC) is consistent, and it allows you to prove all such statements as normal theorems, making only assumptions of a generally accepted kind about computable structures, namely that a given large computable (and therefore countable) ordinal is actually an ordinal. For a specific example, look at the proof that PA is consistent from the well-foundedness of epsilon-naught, which is a very simple ordinal, comparatively speaking.
This is certainly not true of the good ones, as they have additional guidance from their own moral intuitions and experience, and they use this “holy spirit” guidance explicitly to amend the interpretation of the texts. In Judaism, I heard it is actually considered a sin to read the text without the commentary and amended interpretations, it is considered a sort of blasphemy of literalism. Similarly in Catholicism. One of the heretical ideas in the reformation was that people should read the text of the bible without going to theology school for years and years, because they would read the plain meaning, and not the amended thelogical interpretation which includes the insights of all the people in the following 1500 years. The theological commentary is always informed by a person’s individual conscience, but the arguments themselves are not very good, because they have to hew to the idea that the original texts are infallible, so they need to work like a lawyer to amend the texts where they are wrong, as they often are, for example, about homosexuality, or the role of women, or the appropriateness of genocide, or respect for primitive art.
Since God is a teleological notion, always referring to the future time when God’s will is made more explicitly manifest, the idea is that if the substitution sticks after a long open debate, then their own judgement is really God’s judgement, and they are substituting correctly. The problem is that then they tend to go back and make it sound like it was always this way in the original text, which is a disservice to the history, because it distorts the meaning originally given to the text, and doesn’t allow you to see the evolution of ideas over time. It’s the same in constitutional law, since the interpretation of the constitution is also teleological, as it was designed to be broad enough to accomodate future circumstances into the indefinite future. You can reinterpret a constitutional clause so that it is more consistent with the background of circumstances and interpretations that build up, but you need to also be aware that the founders might have had a different interpretation (and that doesn’t matter so much, as the social context was different, and their interpretation might have made sense in that context).
I thought he was talking about Cortez.
If you believe these numbers, you are a dimwit. Ask a Russian or Ukrainian what fraction of their family died in Stalin’s time and you get the true figure. There were on the order of 1-3 million political murders during this time, and on the order of 10 million imprisonments and subsequent release. The toll from the collectivization famine in the Ukraine in 1932 is between 2-6 million, hard to be sure, because it’s a famine, the victims are often the elderly and young children, who are not counted well in official documents, but you can get a sampled estimate by asking Ukranians about their family history. Both figures have been lied about in preposterous ways in the literature, starting with Solzhenitsyn (who makes up 40 million, 60 million, 20 million, whatever) with the goal simply to make “Stalin is worse than Hitler” claims, which are ridiculous. The numbers from non-Leftist sources are not scholarly, they are simply anti-communist propaganda. Communism is bad enough that you don’t need to lie about it.
It’s not an interesting thought experiment, because the answer to this ludicrous thought experiment doesn’t change what policy should be. The policy needs to be “torture is always illegal, and always punished by the state”, just as the policy is “murder is always illegal, and always punished by the state”, even though if you were given a time machine and a gun, not many people would object to you going back in time and murdering a young Hitler.
If you need to torture someone to save a billion people, you just break the goddamn law and do it, then go into hiding. I’m sure in this incredibly unlikely circumstance, which will never happen in a billion years, some fraction of the billion people you saved will protect you, and feed you and hide you. The law needs to be unambiguous that torture is always illegal, because it is never used to save people, it is used to terrorise dissidents and protesters into submitting to government power. It is also used to make patsies confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and provide false information to complete the story of nonexistent events that are necessary to put together a false narrative about history. All of these things are what torture is used for routinely, including after 9/11, where it was used to substantiate the hoaxed government report.
Even worse, these thought experiments serve as infernal rationalizations for odious policies that increase the power of the state.
Perhaps these are the direct numbers, through those under him, but then the conquest of the Americas depopulated the whole continent, only partly though disease.
Sorry, that’s complete nonsense. There are not 12 million who were killed in gulags and reeducation camps, there are on the order of 1-3 million in Stalin’s time. The main number of victims is the Ukranian famine. This is known to anyone who looks at Soviet archives, it is just something that idiots lie about in the media, because saying bad things about Stalin is rewarded. Tut tut. One must not lie. The vast majority of those sent to the gulag were released after serving their sentence, this number includes 10s of millions of very bitter people. But they aren’t dead, their souls were just destroyed, and their livelihoods removed.
Similarly, the kulaks in the ukraine had their property confiscated in the 1930s, and they were forced onto collective farms. They objected, some resisted, and those that resisted were killed. Lots of others died during the famine that emerged from the bad policy and perhaps the deiberate targeting of the rebellious regions for punishment by no-food. These policies are the worst atrocity in Stalin’s times, but the numbers are lied about again. For no reason, because the truth is horrible already. One must not lie.
You can do a sampling estimate for all genocides, including, for example, Polish Jews, where the number of survivors is extremely small, and in actual reality whole villages were obliterated. If you sample a surviving Polish Jew and ask what fraction of their family survived, it’s on the order of 20-30%, and this is all survivor bias, the true number of those killed is 90%. This allows you to extrapolate that the Polish Jews were exterminated with a rough count.
In the USSR, families were simply not targeted. There were good communists side by side with dissidents in many families. The USSR did not have a hereditary criterion, really.
The place where the death toll under Stalin approaches 100% is among the original 1917 revolutionaries. If you sample these, you find that nearly all of them were killed in the waves of political murders before WWII. After WWII, the situation was better, but very few were left. In Khruschev times, these crimes were discussed, and they were rediscussed in Gorbachev times, and nearly all the analysis since then that you read in the West has been shameful invention.
This is what you find on google, unfortunately, due to a spate of lying literature from the late 1990s. I read about this extensively in the Gorbachev times, when the USSR was still around, and people were analyzing this to death a second time around. Gorbachev sufferered under famine. I claim no expertise, I simply looked at the academics, and asked a boatload of Russians and a few Ukrainians about their family histories so I could be absolutely sure of the scale of the crimes. There is fear of arrest in every family, arrests in many families I could sample (emigres), and deaths are rare, usually a distant distant relative.
That immediately rules out a death toll of 20 million, let alone 60 million. The easy question to ask is “where did more of your family die, in WWII fighting (known casualites) or in Stalinist repression (unknown casualties)”. The answer is statistically representative even with a tiny sample, and it reveals the figures people throw around to be lies.
You can read modern leftist academics to get reasonable accounts of this. The propaganda value of lying about Stalin is just too tempting to resist for anyone who wants to get into big media.
This is why communists in the 1940s didn’t pay attention to the starvation in Ukraine. They were looking forward to the “glorious future”, and they figured that the suffering due to capitalism in the past and present justifies some suffering on the way to socialism in the future, where they assumed the suffering would be gone for good. They figured once collectivization is done, you never have to go through it again. It was a monstrously cold calculus regarding millions of human lives and a complete disregard for the practices of millions of independent farmers with knowledge and efficiency practices. But this callous attitude toward collective knowledge and tradition and toward human lives is shared by the colonialists. The earliest and best example of such a catastrophic preventable famine to my mind is the Irish famine, which was barely disguised ugly genocide done through pure laissez-faire.
I know you’re not doing this, but it’s not a good idea to justify an atrocity because others are doing comparable atrocities elsewhere. You know that’s the response you get when you try to fix the damnable lies about this stuff, that you are trying to minimize crimes, instead of honestly reporting.
What’s damning about this is that while the worst atrocities were happening, people were flocking to communism! The Western left’s dissillusionment with communism came in the postwar years, when communism ossified into a bureaucratic form with no significant atrocity potential, aside from the horror of having to fill out twenty forms just to get your car fixed.
The problem with attributing motives to jihadists is that YOU DON’T KNOW ANY! I certainly don’t know any personally. I have heard about them in the media.
When I heard about Maoists in the media, I could walk around my campus and find actual Maoists. When I heard about neo-Nazis, I could walk around some parts of town and find neo-Nazis, or find those who harbor similar attitudes around me.
Despite knowing a fair number of Muslims, I have yet to meet a SINGLE ONE who is a jihadist, or who even KNOWS a jihadist in their extended family. They know devout Muslims, but they don’t know Jihadists.
I don’t believe in political movements all of whose members are the “other”. I want to meet an actual Jihadist and have him tell me he wants a caliphate in New York City before I believe this nonsense. In Israel, the “Jihadists” are just religious people who oppose Israeli occupation, and tend to have a greater degree of resistance to collaborationism, they are not Jihadist in the sense painted above.
So I have to call this one out. I don’t believe in these fairy tales. I want to meet and talk to a real Jihadist I can see and touch before I believe there is an army of such people out there threatening the order of the West. If you can’t even find such a person in your neighborhood, what threat do these people pose? It’s entirely a concocted threat. The only Jihadists in the sense presented by the Western media in the last decade and a half are certifiably crazy people who get persuaded to light their underpants on fire.
The Abrahamic religions’ statements about the physical world are incorrect, but this is not their point. The point of these religions is to explain that it is possible to act in a way that is not in accordance with a narrow definition of self-interest, but in a way that is mindful of a larger community and it’s goals.
This is clarified if you make it precise with the notions of superrationality, and the ordinals of mathematics. The concept of the Church-Kleene ordinal and the concept of superrational behavior explain that when you act you should act as if there was an all-knowing entity who knows what everyone wants and knows everything about everything, and that this entity then tells you what to do.
Because the only way to have any clue of what this entity wants is to painstakingly reconstruct what the best behavior is in collectives, you need to look at history, and experience, and you need to summarize this thinking in texts. The religious texts just do the best job they could do at the time, given the political constraints around them.
Since we are having this conversation over wires, and since all of us have a scientific and mathematical maturity today that those people would salivate at, we can do better. But the main idea is not garbage, it’s just “act as if God is telling you what to do, where God is defined as a perfect logician who knows what everyone wants, has an idea of the collective goals of all the humans together and tells everyone else what to do too”. The basic law of the religious texts is that those who act this way have an advantage over very long time scales over those who don’t, and this prediction is historically true, and is a self-consistent justification of the idea.
Source: my ass. You need to look this crap up yourself, not trust the nonsense you hear elsewhere. The relevant documents have been out since Soviet archives were opened in the late 80s early 90s and there are hundreds of historians who covered this. The conclusions I gave above are mainstream in some historical sources. The survey you can also do yourself, and any conclusion which doesn’t match a random sampling of Russians and Ukrainians is a lie. People know their own family history independent of official history.
I DON’T READ ANYTHING, so I never cite sources. I am just telling you the truth about this stuff. The political repression under Stalin existed, and it had the casualty levels I gave you, in order of magnitude. The worst atrocity was the starvation in Ukraine in 1932, and this was due to the peasant uprising, and it lasted one year. But it was ultimately just another collectivization famine.
I CATEGORICALLY DENY any holocaust in this instance. It was “just” the usual brutal communist repression, and the usual collectivization famine. The mass-death figures in the media are a hoax, and realizing that they were mostly a hoax, FDR recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. That doesn’t mean that the collectivization program was benign— it was terrible.
The way to discover this stuff is FOR YOURSELF, by doing your own quick research. You just ask a dozen Russians and Ukranians about their family history, to get a sense both of the repression and the deaths, and compare to the baseline of their family deaths in WWII, and to the population of the areas. I did this for the Jewish holocaust too (amply confirming the usual story), and for Pol Pot, it’s not hard to do, but I didn’t do it myself (it would also confirm the official story). I am sorry, but getting past the mountain of bourgeoise invention in this case takes more effort than reading sources, it requires using your brain and verifying independently, to know who you can trust.
I did this for myself, you can do it too, it’s not hard. Stalin and Mao’s holocausts are MADE UP LIES. Pol Pot’s is real (and Hitler). It’s simple.
Mao’s mass-death figures are entirely due to the collectivization famine. These are also produced, like Stalin, by looking at population graphs, and extrapolating to the missing people. This method also reveals that 10 million Americans were wiped out in the Great Depression, only to rematerialize as the baby boom. The reason that this doesn’t work well to estimate famine deaths (unless done carefully) is that hard times lead people to postpone having babies, leading to severe demographic drops.
The Mao famine was especially severe, and millions of people suffered and died. But it is hard to give a good number, it is a collectivization famine, like Stalins. You find the best estimates of numbers by asking people from the affected area. If a statistical sample doesn’t support the story, the story is a LIE.
In this case, there is a deliberate program of lying about Stalin since the 1930s and Mao since the 1960s. This is not necessary, because these dictatorships were atrocious without lying. It is also counterproductive, as these lies make people somehow think that there were no real crimes committed by these folks, and oh boy, were there.
Each person you survey has usually about order 100 people in their extended family, and these people know others, so you are actually sampling quite a few. If you ask a dozen people, you are actually pretty effectively sampling about 10,000 people, which is certainly enough for order of magnitude estimates with 100% confidence, which is why I am so confident, and you’re so busted, silly bird.
The stories of severe repression, murder, disappearance, occur at the “distant acquaintance” level– meaning a second cousin of the grandfather had a colleague who disappeared. This is consistent with the estimates published by serious researchers, which show that on the order of 700,000 people were disappeared in the 1930s purges, with perhaps a comparable number in the 1920s and 1940s. It also reveals a level of mass terror that has hardly any precedent, as EVERYONE is terrified.
The absurd nonsense you spout about “entire villages” being rounded up and killed, and then all their acquaintances killed, and the relatives of these acquaintances, is a mentally disturbed fantasy, and ignorant of the web of networks in society. Even if you exterminate whole villages, as in Poland in the 1942-1945, sampling STILL WORKS to tell you the magnitude of the crime, although it tends to underestimate it.
But I also have interviewed enough (and read enough reports and documents) to know that you are full of it. There were no “death camps”, the people sent to prison were individuals, they were targeted by their local party boss. You have no idea what you are talking about, and I would prefer it if you didn’t lie online, as you will learn that it is pointless, as an ass like me can quickly mock you into oblivion, as Chomsky did to Harris.
Chomsky is not omniscient, and his stance on the Khmer Rouge is understandable once you know how unreliable the Western press can be.
The problem with the reports of atrocities in hard-left regimes is that they always come, whether there’s anything there to report or not. For example, you have reports of Tito’s Yugoslavian atrocities, executions, political murders, etc, in the 1990s, when it was fasionable to attack Yugoslavian socialism, and these reports were either referring either to 1944-46, when the communists were Partisans executing Nazi collaborators, or else to invented events. There were no significant atrocities at all in Yugoslavia in the postwar period, the worst things (which are still bad) were some temporary restrictions on free speech in the 1970s. Similarly, you had reports of press muzzling, reporter suppression, in the Chavez regime, and these were entirely invented. It was crazy to invent, because Venezuela was open the whole time and had a free press throughout, anyone could see what was happening online by going to Venezuelan press. So these accusations didn’t stick. But there were reports of oppression, tyranny, mobs of Chavez supporters rigging elections, businessmen thrown in jail, etc. The press in these cases is a stopped clock, it always reports human rights violations from the socialist left, whether they are real or imagined, and it never reports human rights violation from the fascist right.
In the case of the Khmer Rouge, the stopped clock happened to be right, they even understated the atrocities in this case. Since Cambodia was completely closed, it was difficult to know what was going on with any standard of objectivity. Chomsky was skeptical of the reports until they were clear and confirmed, and I don’t think you can fault him for that too much, since he admitted he was wrong about this and changed his mind relatively quickly. He did not deny the atrocities once they were established with good evidence.
That’s right. No info anymore is accurate. You need to understand that the “stalin crimes” are composed of two pieces— the purges and political murders, and the collectivization famine. Both are real, but both have been subject to death-toll inflation in the 1990s, long after the events. The analysis of these crimes in the 1950s in Khruschev’s time was not far off the mark, as it was redone in the late 80s in the USSR, under Gorbachev (who personally suffered from the famine in the 1930s, and perhaps as a consequence, became a farming technical guy in the Politburo) and again after the fall of the USSR, using the open archives.
The deaths from political murder and executions were on the order of a million people. This is extremely barbaric, comparable to the political murder under Hitler (not to the genoicide). It is about the worst degree of political murder you can imagine. But these million people are turned into 12 million or 20 million by adding all those who were arrested and released, or fired from the party in a purge. This is simply dishonest reporting, but it gets you press.
The Ukraine estimates are the main atrocity, this is a terrible crime, and the midrange of the figures is likely accurate, just by nose. I place it at 2-5 million. It’s hard to know, you need to really sample starvation in the Ukraine. But the famine wasn’t confined to the Ukraine, but thankfully the famine ended in 1933, because the harvest was extremely good. But it could have lasted for years, like it did in China. It’s a collectivization famine, it happened more than once.
But the collectivization famine also involved the dispossession of about 10-20 million small land-owners, the kulaks, whose land was confiscated, and who were forced onto collective farms. These people are victims of Stalin, but they weren’t killed. They are just added to the death toll by irresponsible people, because it gives them attention.
You need to ignore the secondary sources in this case, and focus on the actual documents relating to the two major events— the political murders and purges, the show-trials, and the famine in the 1930s. The “research” that people publish in the semi-popular press is worthless unfortunately, so you need look into it yourself. The way to see that it is definitely worthless is simply to ask a dozen Russians about their family history, to see the numbers who died from political repression, the numbers who died in WWII, and the numbers who were starved in famine. You get a fair estimate of the first two this way, but a bad estimate of the third, because famines are hard to poll, because the victims are often infants and the elderly, who are not properly accounted for in these narratives.
The main issue is that there were multiple military drills simulating multiple hijacking on the same morning as the attack. If you are simulating 9/11, and 9/11 happens at the same time, that’s not a coincindece. You’re responsible for it. It’s very easy to manipulate a set of drills simulating 9/11 into a fake attack, without anyone knowing what they are doing. They just do their job for the drill, and you change a few details so that they are pulling off a fake attack. The same pattern drill->attack occurs in all the other major terrorist attacks of the last decade, including the London bombing, the Oslo attack, the Madrid bombing, and so on and so on. You can read about the drills in mainstream sources, and you can figure out how to pull off 9/11 without conspiracy just by sitting down and thinking.
I guess I am cold hearted. I am more interested in accurate numbers, not in human insanity. I suppose the human reason is that you can’t improve things without knowing exactly what happened first.
Also, however, because of what it reveals about academics and the media, along the lines explained by Chomsky. They manipulate numbers, structurally, whenever there is pressure to do so. Some atrocities are reported accurately, like the Armenian genocide, or the Holocaust, or the Khmer Rouge insanity. Others, like the Tasmanian genocide, or the massacres in East Timor, or the disappearances in South America, are papered over. Yet others, like the Stalin crimes, or Mao’s three-year famine and cultural revolution, are inflated beyond all recognition.
In this case, the pressure to lie was always high, despite their being no need, because communism is terrible without lying. People had been lying about Marxists for a century, dating back to the Paris Commune and Marx’s time. This is extremely problematic, it means you can’t trust anything you read in the Western press, at least not without tedious double-checking yourself, because you know the owner of whatever it is you are reading for sure doesn’t like Marxists, as otherwise he would likely not own anything. Whether it’s Hearst making up nonsense, or others writing as if the Soviet Union was built up by slave labor.
The way the labor system in the USSR worked from the time of the second Soviet constitution (the 1930s Stalin constitution) was that wages were set top down, but otherwise people were relatively free to change jobs. Some wily people in fact exploited the rather cushy job-training period to switch jobs often, some every six months. This was frowned upon, but you couldn’t punish it, because the system needed flexible labor. The worker wages were set by a precise law of supply and demand, the party raised wages wherever they needed more workers, and reduced wages where the supply was too high, very precisely getting exactly the number workers they needed without having to tell anyone where to work, or when to switch jobs. This method produced what I think could be best described as an ideal frictionless labor market, although the Soviets, being hostile to markets, wouldn’t describe it that way.
Wages were NOT equal in the Soviet Union, not at all. Highly sought professions, like precision machinist, or theoretical physicist, made higher wage. The manufacturing wages were supplemented in the 30s,40s,50s by “peice work”, meaning you would get a baseline salary based on meeting a (low) quota plus a hefty bonus according to your extra productivity beyond quota, with the bonus accounting for 60-80% of the salary in the Stalin era, depending on how many hours of labor you were willing to put in. An extremely good worker could make 3-4 times an average worker by working overtime and making more ‘pieces’. This system, at least in peacetime, led to reporting problems, and the paperwork was terrible, so it was scrapped to a more uniform thing with higher quotas and lower bonuses in the Khruschev reforms. The paperwork was reduced, but productivity also slackened then.
The manager salaries were determined differently— you would get paid as a manager by how many workers you could attract and keep. Managers were relatively low paid compared to workers, and they were always sweating that their workers would leave, and they would fail to meet their manager quota and have to change jobs. So they had to be nice to the workers. The workers were relatively powerful, you could complain about the manager to a higher up, you could suggest new improvements and you would be listened to (as long as you didn’t criticize the system itself), and this was the way in which Soviet heavy industry was built. This sector was competitive with the West from the beginning, it was actually somewhat better than the West in heavy armaments and steel, as attested by the miraculous productivity in the second world war.
That was the system. It was reported in the West to be a form of slave labor camp for the entire population, which is a ridiculous invention. It just didn’t have a high-paid owner class, everything was directed by functionaries.
This type of lying is why communists in the 1940s didn’t believe the (very real) reports of atrocities under communism, because they knew the bourgeoise press lies about communism all the time. So leftist needed confirmation about the atrocities from Russian or communist sources, which was impossible, because they either clueless about it, or herd-mind loyal to Stalin, or so horrified by capitalism that they figured anything else must be better, or else they were scared to talk! Eventually, Khruschev had the secret speech, and a more or less free press was restored in the USSR for a few years, and in the era when it had free speech, in the early 1960s and in the 1980s, the Soviet press was at least as honest as the Western press, and more interesting to read (at least for me), because it had no capitalist bias and no ads. But then, of course, you get heavy censorship again after 1968. So, all in all, excluding a few years in the 1960s and 1980s, it was vastly inferior to the New York Times (at least as it was back then— today the NYT is a joke).
I think the press situation during the cold war was already unbearable. The communist press was unreliable because it was censored by the party, but the so-called free press in the West was also unreliable when reporting regarding communist countries. Precisely when you are comparing two systems and you need to know exactly what is going on, you get lied to. The internet fixes this for good, because you don’t have a barrier to speaking anymore.
I was heavy into Soviet history in the 1980s, because it was topical at the time, and, like every other kid in 1983, I would wake up in cold sweats dreaming I was dying in a total nuclear war. Also, knowing capitalism from the inside, one is curious to know what the heck they are doing exactly in the USSR to have no unemployment, no recessions, no year-to-year fluctuations in GDP, and kick-ass education. The unfortunate answer was “not too much worth emulating”.
Anything established for a long time always comes along with bad arguments for why it must be so and no other way. The bad arguments don’t necessarily imply that the conclusion is wrong, only that people forget why the thing was put there in the first place. That’s natural, because the only person who needs to know this stuff is the one who is trying to overthrow it. That’s not just true regarding capitalism, it was true of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. There were a million arguments in the 19th century about why Euclidean geometry is a-priori necessary, they were wrong, but that doesn’t mean Euclid’s geometry doesn’t work to describe our world to first approximation, and you need to know Euclid’s geometry to figure out Minkowski’s geometry.
The authentic justification for capitalism is that you are looking for an evolutionary method, independent of human political judgement, for selecting which ventures are to be kept and which are to be thrown out. If the judgement is entirely political, like in pre-capitalist Europe, then certain things would never get developed— for example, try to persuade any organization which runs by majority vote to publish a book of gay pornography.
This happens with more substantial things too. In the 1970s, you couldn’t get any large corporation to produce a home computer, so a new company had to be started using private capital. In the 1980s, you couldn’t persuade large airlines to cut costs, or big manufacturers like Gillette, so you had hostile takeovers and small competitors do it for you. In the 1990s, you couldn’t get AT&T to modernize for the internet, so you made a scheme where the lines were shared among competitors, and let a thousand telecom companies start up. The same with internet business. Private ownership allows someone to continue to do something as long as they have customers, whether the majority thinks it is a good idea or not. Then the decisions about which entities survive and which entities die is made in a distributed fasion, using binding market choices that literally cost you to make. This evolutionary advantage is enormous, because it means that you don’t make the economic decisions based on political judgement of heirarchies of people, but based on purchasing choices of small entities.
The owner class is just an unfortunate consequence, because private ownership is what defines the boundaries of the competing entities. The owner is the person who controls this little fiefdom. By taxing and anti-trust, you try to minimize the size of the owners, but you really can’t do it very well. Ultimately, the owner is not important, you could usually replace the owner with a scarecrow, it wouldn’t make any difference, as long as the entity boundaries were well defined, and decisions were made internally by a rational process. But it is the owner class that maintains the system, because they get the most obvious advantage from this. The owner is just the natural person who blocks one entity from bleeding into another by gradual takeover, the owner keeps the venture distinctive by dictatorially deciding what goes in and what stays out.
Allowing evolutionary development is extremely important, and it is the main justfication for capitalism. It was the reason that it replaced Feudal economies, because the capitalist economies could concentrate capital into new ventures and very quickly expand to new shores, etc, etc. So if you are looking for a replacement, you need an evolutionary replacement which allows ventures to start and fail without oversight. The failures of replacements have been due to the lack of evolutionary advance, because there is not enough diversity in the economy when the ventures are not finely divided and independent.
Anyone who doesn’t believe this man was framed is a fool. Anyone who has the balls to support killing an innocent man is a fiend.
It is difficult to say, because no evidence was shown. Not in public, not in the trial. The lawyer consciously decided to admit guilt to save his life, so that the family can prove innocence later, when the political atmosphere shifts. The lawyer failed to save his life, it was a stupid move. On appeal, it is impossible to introduce new evidence, this means he will never get a review of the mountain of fabricated hearsay that was used against him.
What was presented in public was all hearsay. People claimed that there is a video of him laying a bomb, this video does not exist. It was attested to exist by anonymous people lyingly commenting in public. There is no picture of him laying down a bomb. People claimed he killed a policeman, but there is no actual evidence of his involvement in the murder, the closest witness to this was killed by friendly fire (i.e. murdered) during the “shootout” at the boat. The shootout itself was not a shootout, as independent citizen video shows— only one side was armed, and the brothers on the boat were yelling that they didn’t do it. Both policemen were murdered deliberately by perpetrators, so as to produce police-hatred of Tsarnaevs.
On 4chan, and elsewhere, people aggregated citizen pictures of the crime, and show Tsarnaev’s backpack, and it doesn’t match the blown-up backpack, which contained the bomb. There are people with backpacks there, these people are mercenary contractors of the blackwater type, and they are still not identified, nor have they been publically investigated. These are the guilty parties on the ground. Their boss in Homeland Security is the guilty party overall.
There was a drill of some sort going on, similar “bomb in backpack” drills had been planned for the period by Homeland Security, and although this drill was scheduled for a few months later, the day of the marathon, witnesses heard anouncements regarding the drill. A drill is a simple way of making a false-flag— because you can easily get people to make a bomb for you, and you can get other people to plant a bomb for you, neither of whom think they have anything to do with the actual events, but rather that it’s a strange coincidence— just as they were planting fake bombs, a “real terrorist” happened to be planting real bombs! What a coincidence.
The fellow Tsarnaev is not at all a religious fanatic (not that I have even seen a religious fanatic of this type in real life). He is a rather ordinary boring student who clearly had no idea he was accused in the bombing until he was announced to be a suspect three days later (and then reasonably ran away!) He was going to classes, joking with his friends, etc. His behavior on the day is absurd.
The government has claimed that he wrote a confession in the boat, it is absurd. They have claimed wild stories of him running over his brother, when it is clear from the autopsy and the video of the scene that the brother was murdered in cold blood. He has been held in torturous conditions, his relatives and friends have been terrorized and murdered.
There is no chance in hell that he is guilty. He needs to be pardoned and released immediately and the folks in homeland security in Boston need to be investigated, one by one. It won’t be pleasant, but it is better than executing an innocent man to protect a bunch of official criminals.
It is a shame that you support killing an innocent man. Mind you, of the two choices you have, only one is a mortal sin.
You are the mental case, whackturd, and you are the one who should be euthanized, because you are too dim to live.
I don’t “get” people, nor am I tough. All I am saying is that your lightbulb is shining at too low a wattage, and you, out of your own free will, should either change the bulb, or turn off the lights, because you are displaying the dimness to the whole world with your comments.
Neither do I.
There are errors all the time, their resolution is usually a famous theorem. For example, Cauchy’s proof that the limit of continuous functions is continuous produced the notion of uniform continuity. The most significant such error is relatively recent— the attempt by Frege to produce a set theory using pure predicates, which was shown to be false by Russell with his paradox, and resolved with the theory of types. The reason older examples are hard to come by is because logic didn’t exist until around 1900, so any earlier example was done using intuition, and could be made precise in many different ways. The true mistakes don’t show up until the logic is clear.
It isn’t clear Columbus was using math. I’m guessing as to his intuition, but he probably knew about the trade wind, from experience at sea, and estimated the location where the wind circle closes was another land mass, and assumed it is Asia. He might have gotten the estimate to distance to land from another mariner, and then used the known distance to China to complete the circumference. He had knowledge of the Atlantic, and the Atlantic currents can be used to infer the existence of a gigantic land mass in the Americas even when you have never been there, analogous to the way the islanders in the pacific used the patterns of reflected waves to find small islands in the Pacific, but much more difficult because you need to use global currents and wind patterns. Somebody noticed, and it probably wasn’t Columbus personally.
The proof was perfectly fine, because it came with heuristic estimates for success which guaranteed that the line of attack would work with a complicated enough discharging notion. The paper by Appel and Haken was perfectly fine, and the mistake in programming was trivial, it didn’t affect anything at all in the method or conclusion, and it is possible that there will be a more conceptual proof showing a successful discharging algorithm exists without exhibiting it explicitly, although why would anyone bother, when you can exhibit it explicitly, I don’t know.
The original idea was Heesch’s, Appel, and Haken’s, and any attempt to assign credit to an automatic process is a form of retroactive plagiarism.
The reason right wingers dominate television is because the left went online in 1995.
Most of the caucasiamitic Jewish shysters in the US agree with you, prickhead, even though you make it hard to do so.
I can read polls, dude, and American Jews poll quite a bit to the left of every other ethnic constituency, with the possible exception of Black Americans.
The “weasely methods” are in your bigoted head. There are right wing genocidally minded stains on humanity in powerful positions in Israel, you won’t find support for their kind from me, but it is ridiculous to claim that their goals and statements are supported by the Jewish public in the US. They are opposed by a minority of Jews within Israel also, but with much less conviction, and with zero results.
You don’t need to tell me about the constant race-baiting and colonial mentality in Israel, I grew up there. It’s abominable. I also know that the race politics in Israel has gotten worse, something I couldn’t have imagined was possible when I was a child, considering how bad it was already back then. But to lump Jews with Israel’s actions is like lumping Irish Americans with the Gerry Adams. Sure, an Irish person might be statistically more inclined to support the IRA, but that’s not surprising, and it doesn’t deserve racist crap from you, because you aren’t helping eradicate the problem, you are simply using it as an excuse to justify your own bigotry and alienate potential supporters.
TV is a one-way internet, it is the monopolized illegitimate child of communication. When it was the only option, a few leftists made the heroic effort required to get on. Now, there is no point. Nobody should be trying to use TV for progressive ideas, because you need a millionaire to agree to air your stuff, so the progressive material will get watered down and censored. Chomsky has not been on TV since the early 70s, despite being America’s most prominent intellectual worldwide. The same goes for prominent Feminists, prominent Socialists. The furthest left voice on TV is an occasional remark by Cornel West.
The internet is a flanking movement whose result is cutting off the oxygen to the right. Permanently. It will leave them in the dustbin of history. Conservatives simply can’t compete online, as they have no actual original ideas capable of surviving in a level playing field. The ideas require millions of dollars of push from billionaires with pet think-tanks to get them any attention, because they are academically valueless.
Dude, you are totally sick in the head. Jews are not a herd of like-minded people imposing their collective will by ingenious behind-the-scenes string-pulling. It’s not like I agree with my relatives, nor do they agree with each other, nor do any of the Jews get orders from the higher-ups in the plot, whoever they might be. It’s hard to explain to you because you obviously don’t know any Jews, and promote a crazy implanted theory born of some crazy propaganda.
Do you really need to believe in a small minority of evil people behind the scenes to explain why the world is corrupt? There is no mystery in that. You don’t need a small group of evil people leading and pulling strings to make an evil system, That happens naturally, whenever people do what is most convenient. How many Jews were pulling strings in 1933-45 Germany? or in Pol Pot’s Cambodia? Evil is something that happens when people go along with their narrow self-interest, ignoring their responsibility to the collective well being of humanity. That’s a distinctly Jewish concept of monotheistic justice, compassion, you might have heard of it, because the Christians borrowed that aspect of the philosophy.
The left-leaning polling of US Jews is consistent with their voting, their party registration, and their fundraising aims. It is also consistent with me talking to Jews in New York, as they tend to be on the left, although not as far as one would hope, and not often on questions regarding Israel. Jews are not hiding anything from you, little child. They are not an oppressor class, they don’t go around distorting polls for some nefarious aims, and they are not particularly highly represented among the old-money classes, that’s all Anglo Saxon Protestants. The richest Jews support the right for the same reason as rich people of any ethnicity support the right, it is good for their pocketbook.
Regarding your preposterous reading of The Talmud, you are quoting a document written around 2nd century AD, which hardly any Jew is familiar with, except religious scholars. You might as well cite the Council of Nicea to condemn John F. Kennedy. But I can explain the Talmudic insistence on separatism: at the time, “Gentile” didn’t mean “Christian” or “Muslim”, or any sort of monotheist. It usually meant a person who worshiped a gigantic lobster that asked you to sacrifice your children in its claws. These pre-monotheistic traditions justified mass murder, mass slavery, genocide, you name it, incredible oppression, and the Jewish religion, like the Christian religion later, distinguished itself by instituting liberty from generational servitude and protection of human life. Christians make similar claims regarding their relation to the Roman pagan order, they are required to resist it until it is destroyed. The Jewish religious injunctions of that era likewise treat the surrounding culture as something hideous to be resisted, because the presumption is that it is not an ethical order. When you are in an evil culture, it was decided that it is ok to hide, and to lie about your Jewishness, etc.
The idea that these ancient religious injunctions, written in 2nd century Babylon, somehow make a Jewish person today consider Christians or Hindus or Buddhists non-ethical beings is absolutely preposterous. Jews and Christians in the US have constant interfaith dialogue, and there is very little that separates fundamentalist Christians from fundamentalist Jews, they are both fundamentalists first and modern people second. They both hate science to an equal degree, and they both have insane outdated strictures to a nearly equal degree. The lessons of monotheism are 2000 years old, and have percolated all over the world. There is hardly any person today who doesn’t have some inkling of what it means to follow a universal ethics, and it is a mental handicap to insist that Jews treat people around them as inferior beings.
Jews in Israel oppress Palestinians for the same reason Apartheid South African whites oppressed South African blacks. It’s because they are living on colonized land, and they displaced a large number of native inhabitants. They don’t want to make peace for the same reason, and they will be forced to change, also for the same reason. That’s nothing to do with the US.
The “eradication of the Zionist disease” also has nothing to do with the US, a version of this process is something slowly going on in Israel. It isn’t going to buy you anything in the US, because the US is not dominated by Jews, except in your unhinged imagination. “Banksterism” is a word you invented, so as to identify the evil, then attach it to Jews somehow. An easier “ism” to attach to Jews, considering historical numbers, is “socialism”. I guarantee you that the number of Jewish socialists and communists exceeds by orders of magnitude the number of Jewish “Banksters”, and these camps are entirely locked in mortal combat for most of the 20th century.
Your criticism is a facile attempt to attach evil to hidden forces of ethnic rivalry, with one ethnicity absurdly imagined as super-strong. It is infantile, and since this opinion is so shallow I can’t imagine an adult of sound mind could hold it, I believe you are just insincere, writing so as to stain the sensible opposition to this mentally unsound decision by the military with racism.
Your quotes are made up garbage. Leon Trotsky was a solid Marxist, like Lenin and Stalin, and never differentiated himself from other communists. I don’t even think he considered himself Jewish. Regarding Menachem Begin, I was in Israel when this unsavory fellow was PM, and as right wing as he was, he would never make such a quote, as nobody would vote for a crazy person. You are quoting made up lies, so as to do propaganda.
http://begincenterdiary.blo… .
The 19th century quotes are equally insane, they are made up wholecloth. I’ll ask you to consider: do you really believe that any people would accept a religion founded on such evil thinking? It is absurd! Any religion based on this primitive thinking would disappear in one generation.
While I am not a religious Jew, I do understand the philosophy of religious Jews, and it is not a philosophy of racial or ethnic supremacy. The “chosen people” thing means that the religious Jews have a collective mission to preserve the ancient language and texts of Judaism, so as to properly preserve the tradition of monotheism and spread it to other people. That’s the entire extent of it. It has nothing to do with racial superiority, or race hatred, or ethnic bigotry, nor putting Jews in powerful positions anywhere. It has to do with the duty to recite some Hebrew text, and teach it to children, and make sure it doesn’t disappear.
In the Soviet Union, Jews were purged from positions of leadership in the 1930s, as Jews were replaced with Russian proletariat to as great an extent practicable. The purging of Jews was consistent with Russian antisemitism.
You are doing ethnic propaganda, lying ethnic propaganda, and it is insulting to people’s intelligence.
Your waste is a terrible thing to mind.
I lived in Ithaca NY, and people there just printed their own money (the Ithaca “hour”, nominally $10). This currency is only viable in Ithaca, it is backed by absolutely nothing, and yet, it allowed people who are underemployed to make a few extra hours on the side, and then transact this in the local economy to buy farm products at the local stores that accept the local currency. This enhances the local economy by the percentage of hour transactions, and it is perfectly legal, and it made a lot of sense, as the central NY economy is chronically depressed and municipalities can’t control monetary policy usually.
The analog in Greece is an obvious solution, and it would work to end the unemployment crisis. It would restore the industrial output, and allow pensioners dignity. It is also not something that needs to be confined to Greece, but towns within Greece, or for that matter, depressed towns in Germany, can do the same thing. It is a shame that currency is thought of as something that is centrally control. Central control is not the solution to problems, it produces larger problems, because the central committee can’t listen to a small town.
Socialism has nothing to do with lack of competition. People always compete. Even in the USSR, people competed to get into a good program, or to do well in school, or in chess, or to make more money (at least in the early days with large amounts of incentive pay). Lack of competition is what happens with monopoly capitalism.
Socialism’s failures have never come from the insipid things right wingers say about it. They come because people weren’t able to innovate. The type of socialism Sanders advocates has no impact on innovation (at least, no negative impact), because it leaves people free to form new ventures as they like.
The picture of the history of Christianity which emerges if you take Carrier’s mythicism seriously has a hidden theological merit.
Within Judaism, divine beings are never human. It would be an unthinkable blasphemy in 30AD to worship any ordinary human being as taking precedence over the laws of God. Still, it is clear from the Epistles that Paul has visions of a transcendent Christ enjoining him to make doctrinal modifications to Mosaic law, and that Peter, James etc, the other Apostles mentioned by Paul, also have transcendent visions of Christ, and also feel compelled to modify mosaic law. James is martyred and says “forgive them father, for they know not what they do”, the stoning of Stephen converts Paul by a direct spiritual experience that sounds completely authentic. These experiences are clearly the same type of religious experiences one personally encounters today, and these early Apostles are clearly acting in a deliberate way, found by consulting their spirit, and using their vision of Jesus-as-messiah as a divine source of courage and faith in martyrdom, as an intermediate between a distant abstract God and flawed imperfect man, and as a direct source of guidance for the evolution of the doctrine of the church.
The historical interpretation of Christianity makes this transcendent spiritual Christ number two, lieutenant to a supposedly more authentic human Christ. But the risen Christ has never been second in the experience of any Christians, not these Apostles, and not to Christians today. The direct experience of Jesus visiting you as a friend, this is the main religious epiphany. The phenomenon actually happens, and it does not have an precise exact analog in Judaism, where overwhelming personal revelation is not typically asked for, and where collective unity is achieved through long unilluminating debate about traditional texts, not through transcendental attempts to form a weird direct mind-meld between all the practitioners.
It seems that there is little doubt that Paul, Philemon, James and Peter shared this mind-meld, and from the Eucharist, that they believed themselves and others like them to constitute the earthly body of Christ, much as modern Christians do. This communal body of Christ, the collective body of Jesus in the congregation, is a completely different corporeal form than the ordinary human Christ of historicity research, and it has no direct relation to it.
Given the authenticity of this experience of Paul and the other Apostles, it is difficult to see how this process could start within a Jewish community as a way to remember the activity of a flesh and blood crucified teacher. This implausibility isn’t apparent when you take the Gospels as historical narrative, because in the Gospels, Jesus performs supernatural feats, which obviously would be persuasive. While these stories are a profound exegesis for the revelation of a Christian mystical experience, they are impossible scientifically. So how is it more likely that these stories came to be? As an illustration of a true experience of revelation of the a personally felt resurrection? Or as mangled anecdotes of a historical teacher? For a person with any scientific sense, these are the only two options available.
Absent the supernatural stuff, I personally find it next to impossible to see how a group of Jews would convert a mundane but saintly human into the martyr manifestation of God. It stops vexing theologically if you believe that the phenomenon of the risen Christ, the thing we know is real, comes first, while the human figure comes as exegesis. This makes the events one can be sure of by evidence and testimony primary. The corporeal manifestation described in the Gospels are written to produce and illustrate this experience, shared by the earliest practitioners. These are not the main event.
To discover the possibility of this type of experience, and to communicate it to others reliably, requires genius theologians who meditated long and hard about the nature of ethics, and the relation of man and God. The historical view mostly puts all the genius on the back of one historical person, while the rest is an accident of bad circumstance.
But there is a relatively plausible path to this point of view as an offshoot of traditional Judaism, which starts just by asking the legitimate question: “What properties would a Messiah need to right the wrongs of the world?” If you accept the concept of Messiah, and you know anything about the world at all, you would naturally reject any answers which give this end-times messiah corporeal form as a human being doing natural works. The reasonable conclusion (also shared by messianic Jews) is that such a messiah is a spiritual entity with person-like attributes, born of woman, etc, which can be thought of in every way as a person, except without inhabiting the world of persons, at least not until the world-to-come of the indefinite future. This is a somehow larger entity, which in Christianity binds the community together. This vision would not work with a historical person there to personify the collective entity, because Jews don’t make Gods out of people. But once your collective God has the attributes of a person, it’s easy enough to make a person out of a this figure, by collecting the stories that emerge.
This origin story makes the stories of the human Christ a byproduct of the verifiable phenomenon of the spiritual revelations. The story of humilty, and crucifiction, and oppression, all the sermons and parables, these don’t require a single flesh and blood person to realize them, as they are naturally formed from the tribulations of the early Apostles, who formed the corporeal body right from the start. Their actions are even more commendable when they come without an idealized human precedent, when they form this human precedent in their mind-meld collectively, by imperfect human flawed actions of self-sacrifice.
The issue with the claim of “solid historical evidence” for an individual named Jesus is that it isn’t solid at all, once you understand the spiritual epiphany of Christianty, and once you understand the living body of Christ, the human body of Christ is secondary, and if taken too literally, it seems somewhat disrespectful of the actual worldly communal entity people call “the body of Christ”.
The spiritual Christ is more than powerful enough to write his own story in the hands of his followers without necessarily using a corporeal body. The followers harmonize their stories in good faith, and would not consider their own stories of Christ as falsifications, as they are not writing history. Since the collective work is the main teaching of Christian doctrine, not the corporeal story, Carrier doesn’t seem to be doing any harm to the message, as the message works even with no necessary connection to history.
In a sense then, it is not clear that the historical Christ is even desirable. I see it as somewhat cheapening the actual spiritual experience. Nobody experiences a urinating Christ, or a baby Christ, Christ picking eye-snot out of the side of his nose. The historical view is in essence claiming that Christianity emerged as a sort of spiritual accident, like religious version of pennicillin. A historical leader was executed, people thought they saw his ghost, next thing you know, millions of people are transformed. This is not a plausible origin story, although, hey, you never know, history is strange. I don’t view Christianity as an accidental discovery.
I agree with you, of course, and I am not arguing from history about evidence, like Carrier, I am arguing about the priors, what level of confidence one should assign to various hypotheses a-priori.
This is not just about history, it is also a history of religion, about which ideas led to which ideas. I just argue that it makes a better more sophisticated, more plausible, theology, that makes for the first time complete continuity between early Christian and Jewish theology, so that you can see the two fit together at the earliest point. The traditional story does not have any fit between early Christian and early Jewish thinking, as the central tenet— deification of a human teacher, is itself a rift of the worst sort. It is hard to see how such a rift could occur.
In the current historical view, Christianity is a radical break from Judaism, which announces itself with the arrival of a special historical person, who is gradually deified upon death. This process is simply incompatible with Judaism, and it strains credulity to assume that Jews began this process.
The result of historical investigation predicated on the unassailable idea of a historical Jesus, whatever the outcome, is an unwitting apologia for a supernatural sort of religion, because the idea that a human was deified immediately upon death suggests to gullible people that supernatual events actually occured, because the deification process starting from a historical person is implausible otherwise. This historical argument is used by apologists today, and it was clearly a useful argument for early Church founders, which is why they insisted on a historical interpretation after a certain time had passed.
Modern people know that Supernatual events simply do not occur, and that informs the historical debate. It changes your priors, and it allows you to see the natural hypothesis is Carrier’s.
Jesus predicted the dawn of the Kingdom of God in his lifetime, but what you must see is that for a Christian believer, this is not at all uncomfortable. He was spot on, as the Church itself and the body of Christ are the arrival of the kingdom of God in the Earthly realm. Once the mind-meld is there, and converts begin to appear, the eventual rise of the Church is preordained, and the end of ancient slavery, and the transformation of Rome, etc.
Sorry, I should have said, sensible modern people know that supernatural events do not occur. Paraphrasing someone, the gullible shall be with ye always. Religion is not about any supernatural events, and it hasn’t been since the middle ages. It is about superrational ethics and a binding of humanity into a collective with a consistent will.
Nice credentials! Unfortunately, I am a hobo who lives in the basement of a church. The reason you should listen to me is because I have supernatural powers over you, granted to me by your supreme being.
There is nothing supernatural about religion, there is no supernatural lesson in there, and the supernatural aspects prevent sane rational people from understanding such sublime concepts as the ressurection, immortality of the soul, ethics from a divine source, and even mundane things like ordinal arithmetic.
I can’t discuss these subtle things with a person who believes that the laws of physics are optional. That kind of hoary stupidity is offensive and pathetic. Also remember, your supreme being gave me the power to supernaturally defeat you.
The claim is not extraordinary, because the Gospels are late, and talk in parables. There are two components to Christ:
1. Direct experience of the risen Christ talking to you
2. Indirect historical testimony of a historical Christ in the gospels.
Number 1 definitely exists, as I have had this happen to me (and I have never even been a Christian!), many Christians report this experience both at the time of Paul and later and even today, and it is a completely reproducible psychological effect, which one can induce rather reliably in normal people.
Number 2, the historical Jesus, serves as a story which induces experience 1 in many people, and also as a proselyzing tool independent of experience.
One has to ask “Did 2 come first? Or did 1 come first?” In other words, is the historical Jesus an exegesis of the risen Jesus, or is the risen Jesus a fossil of the historical Jesus.
Both hypotheses seem relatively equally probable at first, but it helps to have had the experience. The spiritual experience doesn’t come with a name, and it is implausible that a person who has this experience would identify it with any Earthly person.
The best hypothesis I think is a slight modification of Carrier’s thesis— the mythical Jesus took on a body of Davidian lineage, descended to Earth, not the firmament (outer space), but he was crucified anonymously, without Peter or anyone else claiming to know him, or having any teaching. He was one of the anonymous thousands the Romans crucified in the past, and it doesn’t matter at all who he was, because when he got crucified, his blood redeemed humanity. It could happen in outer space too, of course, but the reading of Ascention of Isiah I think is somewhat more supportive of an Earthly decent (but nobody knows about it).
This idea produces a completely anonymous messiah. His name, manner of death, tribulations, are all taken from scriptures. Then different people attached whatever stories they wanted, a Rufus comes along and says his father carried the cross (like anyone would fact check), etc. It wouldn’t even be false, as nobody knows who Jesus is, as he is anonymous by design.
Then the gospels codify this. It’s exactly what Carrier argues, except without the unnecessary over-specificity of assuming that Christ only decended to the firmanent. He could have also descended to Earth, anonymously, without identifying himself as a messiah. Or not. It doesn’t matter which for the experience or the religion. Leaving the individual figure unspecified makes the religion more plausible.
The issue with the “argument from embarassment” is that sometimes you can have embarassment for a reason that has nothing to do with the reason you think it is there. For example, in Hebrew, Christians are called “Notzrim”, which could mean “from Nazareth”, or “formation-people” (the root “notzar” means formed in Carrier’s sense). If you have a community of “Notzrim”, people might assume they are talking about Natzereth, just from fake etymology, and then Mark would place the historical Jesus there just because it sounds like “Notzar”. Then there comes the embarassment about the Bethleham birth prophecy, requiring the story of the nativity, etc, etc. Nothing to do with history, but with the development of myth.
To add to this there are many reasons why something embarassing could appear. For example, Christians in Hebrew are called “Notzrim” (Nazoreans), which could come from the Hebrew root “Notzar”, meaning “formed” or “manufactured” in Carrier’s sense.
When making his mythical account, Mark places Jesus in Nazareth to give a fake historical etymology for “Nazoreans”. Then people say “The Messiah is from Bethleham!”, embarassment, and Matthew fixes this. The embarassment would be not from history, it would come from reconciling different sources of myth.
Carrier’s thesis is a little too strong— he could get by with an “Even more minimal mythicist” hypothesis: Jesus decended to Earth, became Messiah (anonymously), got crucified on Earth (anonymously), and Paul and Peter know this because of scripture and revelation from the risen Jesus (without either having ever known any flesh and blood Jesus).
It’s an answer to “Where is the Messiah?” The standard answer is “He will come.” The Messianic answer is “He is this particular great person.” The Peter/Paul answer is “He came, but humbled himself to be an ORDINARY person, and got crucified in righteousness to cleanse sin and obsolete the Jerusalem sacrifice cult. Then he revealed himself spirtually from beyond to the Apostles, to say that it had been accomplished.” This answer makes sense without latching on to any specific historical person, and it is compatible with several competing theories of historical Jesus.
This hypothesis does not require a reading of Ascention of Isiah as stopping Jesus at the firmament, and does not require any stretch regarding “Born of woman” “died”, “crucified”, etc, they can take their ordinary meaning. It is otherwise identical to Carrier’s thesis, in interpreting “Brother of the Lord” as Christian without a direct vision of risen Christ, “Apostle” as Christian with a direct vision of the risen Christ, and again, has no need for a historical Jesus.
This is more minimal, in the sense that all of Carrier’s argument support this interpretation as well. It ALSO is more minimal in that it is very easy to see how people would later embellish this with stories of Christ’s sojourn on Earth, without bad faith, based on parable, experience, and some incidental testimony.
One reason to believe that a Carrier type mythical Jesus (or the even more minimal mythical Jesus described above) is likely is that the experience of the visitation of the risen Jesus is a real psychological experience, it happens in people today, and it does not necessarily associate itself with any historical event. It is important to place the psychological experience as primary, the risen Jesus, not any random historical events that are completely irrelevant. It makes better theology.
Carrier’s argument is maintained with this hypothesis, only the very few stretched interpretations of Ascention of Isiah and Paul’s Epistles are removed. It’s basically identical to Carrier otherwise. I should add that Carrier’s case is made stronger when you consider that in his interpretation, 1 Peter can be an authentic Epistle of Peter, this is extra evidence.
It only seems that way to you because you have been brought up with a default historicity assumption. This is why Carrier’s Baysian methodology is important, it can quantify the ad-hoccery. I agree with his conclusions, more or less, except I would prefer the “minimal hypothesis” to be the most minimal hypothesis, of a God-Christ encarnated as an anonymous human on Earth, rather than in the firmament, to avoid the issue of interpretation difficulties of words in Ascent of Isiah and Paul.
The major reason it isn’t ad-hoc is because the risen Jesus experience is purely ethical/psychological and will not come correlated with any historical event. It is a stretch to associate this experience with the ressurection of a man directly, rather than the appearance of a God. In the timeline of the theology, it is associated with a God at first, and later with a man, as expected for a religion that identifies the God as sacrificing himself in the bodily form of an unidentified and irrelevant Messiah. The God->man path is more plausible theology than deification of a man, because Jewish theology just doesn’t deify people. The standard story doesn’t make Christianity resemble Judaism at the earliest point, and you can’t see the two fit together. In Carrier’s picture, Christianity is a natural outgrowth of Judaism, and this is consistent with the existence of Petrine Christians who have a different historical Jesus as mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud.
It’s hard to explain why there is much less ad hoc in this, because your implict assumptions of historicity corrupt your objective reading. The discussion about mythicism is not exactly a year old, it’s 100 years old, and really if you count the debates in the early church, it’s 2000 years old. Besides, my copy of Carrier just arrived.
Carrier hasn’t duped himself. He made a very strong argument in his book, a very well argued case. The consensus is unfortunately all due to academic inertia, which is real, and the strongest case (by far) is for a mythical Jesus.
That doesn’t mean that Carrier’s work will be accepted, as this is a political process. In order to have acceptance in academia, it is not enough to be right, you need to align the power-structures around you to agree.
But fortunately, the members of the power structures die, and new people who already are familiar with your argument take their place, and then the idea wins out. It is unfortunate that this is the type of political resistance Carrier is facing.
I speculate that seeing what the academics will do to his book might yet make a Christian out of Carrier. Christianity is not about the historical Jesus, it is about the suffering of the righteous when confronting power, and Carrier is the righteous one here.
They are the same methods applied to a completely different class of source material. The source material about Jesus is not of the same nature as the source material about Alexander the Great, and Carrier analyzes it honestly and correctly. His book is a real masterpiece, it is probably the best book about ancient history ever written in modern times.
This is YOUR dishonesty, not Carrier’s. Carrier doesn’t use this Raglan criterion for anything other than a prior, and he gives the weight as “1 in 3” for historicity, which is very conservative, and doesn’t depend on these stupid details. Even if you take the most conservative view of Raglan, Jesus still scores more than half of the points. Whether it’s 20 or 15.
This category is of VERY LITTLE VALUE, Carrier doesn’t claim that it is of any significant value, this is why he only uses it for assigning a prior! A prior is not evidence, it is an honestly reported bias, it represents what you believe on general principles before you get evidence regarding the specific case.
The notion of prior is: what probability should I expect just from general knowledge about such stories? There are characteristics of made-up tales, and the more of these characteristics you find, the more suspicious you should be that the tale is made up to start. This can change as evidence accumulates, and it is very easy to overcome even absurdly small priors with good evidence, ten reports which have a 1 in 10 probability overcome a billion-to-one prior.
All he is saying there is that the higher you score on the Raglan scale, the more suspicious the character as a historical figure. He quantifies his suspicion of myth as 2 in 3 coming in, which is very generous for historicists. When I see such a cock and bull story, I give it 1 in 10 at best to be based on a real person, at best. Nearly always such hero characters are composites of enormous numbers of people.
The statement is that when you see a story of a person with Raglan traits, your prior should be depressed, but Carrier doesn’t even say by a particularly large amount. So that “Moses” should come with a default ahistoricity assumption, because of the strange birth story, death story, exile story, while, say King David would be neutral prior because he lacks these traits. Carrier in effect gives Jesus a neutral prior 1 in 3 is close enough to 1 in 2 that it makes no difference which you take.
His argument is not about the prior, the prior he gives on Jesus is too generous. His argument is about lack of confirming evidence of historicity, and extremely powerful evidence for ahistoricity.
Your scoring of Jesus on your web page is a farce. Jesus definitely fits the model to a tee, as he has a strange birth story, is whisked away, appears as an adult to teach, then is killed on a hill, and has a strange death story. This is the model that Carrier identifies as suspicious, and it IS suspicious! This is simply common sense. the argument you should have is over evidence, not over priors.
Carrier is absolutely right about the use of invalid methods in the case of Jesus, and in monotheistic religious history in general. The problem with history in this subfield is that the method used is to first make a rough picture of the past, from the sources available, and slowly modify it as evidence accumulates. The presumption is that the consistent narratives are fitting together because they are reporting historical events.
The major issue with this procedure is that Jewish religious narratives are purposefully written to APPEAR AS HISTORY, because the Jewish God is the God of history. The God of Israel doesn’t live as myth within the narratives of the Jewish faith, this God inserts himself into history, by the telling of history in retrospect with God inserted throughout, performing miracles. The stories are made consistent by the teleological requirements of being consistent with each other and with the vision of God, not through being accurate to historical truth. All Jewish myths are written to sound like history, and this makes it easy to get fooled by such stories.
When historians apply the same methods they use to determine the historicity of nonreligious figures like Socrates to the question of historicity of Moses, or of Abraham, they get fooled. They (probably) got fooled by King David, they certainly got fooled by Daniel, and the prepoderence of the evidence shows that they got fooled by Jesus.
Carrier isn’t arguing that histories dispute Jesus’s existence. He is arguing that they SHOULD. That’s a different statement, and he is right about it.
Your accusations are dishonest and illiterate to such an extent that I do not believe you even read the book.
Carrier presents the Raglan criteria informally, and with his biases present, and he explained his biases in detail, and explained the parallels explicitly. This is not an exact science, so he explains each judgement call he made on page 233, and he encourages YOU to DO THE SAME, using your own judgement, and compare with his approach.
I did it myself, I didn’t agree on all points, and I came up with a somewhat lower score for Jesus, as I disagreed with him on the agreement regarding descent from nobility (for example), a few points here and there. The confrontation with Satan in the Wilderness definitely is an analog of the Raglan confrontation with a great adversary, and the ministry is quite parallel to the crown in the standard story, but they are not exact matches (because they never are).
This is not a numerical game, or a trick, it’s an analysis of narrative parallels, and it is impossible to disagree that Jesus matches the narrative arc of the Raglan hero to a good degree, because Jesus simply DOES match this narrative arc to a good degree. You are only quibbling to what extent, and whether the criteria are verbatim the same as Raglan. It makes no difference at all.
The question of whether the hero is “descended from a king” or “is the heir of a king”, or whatever, is not a criterion which is sharp, like “is this material a solid or a gas”. Jesus fits this criterion halfway, in that he is of the line of David, but not really nobility. “The body is not buried” means that “nobody knows where he ended up”, more precisely “nobody is sure if he is dead”. It appears in literature everywhere regarding characters who you don’t want to believe have died. Carrier stated it in the proper spirit, although you can quibble with the precise wording, it is clear that Jesus fits this criterion adequately. The “becomes a king” again is a judgement call, whether you consider Christ’s anointing as the messiah as kinglike or not. But the general agreement is ok, although as always imperfect. You are really picking nits, and not honestly looking at the story arc and literary parallels as Carrier does.
Carrier doesn’t give a uniform score to all the Gospels. He gives Mark a 15 and Matthew a 19. I would give a few points less, but the general ballpark is correct, and there is no dispute that the general ballpark is correct.
His claim is infuriatingly moderate, he doesn’t claim from this parallel that Jesus is a fiction in any way shape or form, this is simply a starting point, to say how skeptical he should be of historicity COMING IN, before looking at any direct evidence. He states that skepticism as an initial probability of 1 in 3 for historicity. This is not a manipulation or dishonesty, it is bending over backwards to be fair to historicists.
He certainly has not dishonestly manipulate anything at all, he simply stated the criteria in a way that is consistent with his biases, and in the way he interpreted them. He doesn’t need to be verbatim accurate to Raglan to be accurate to the spirit of it. That’s not how literary comparisons work.
No matter how you state the case, Jesus ranks high on the Raglan criteria, higher than historical figures generally do, simply by virtue of being a virgin birth, leaving in childhood, coming back in adulthood to assume his ministry and messiah role, dying on a hill, and all the mysterious stuff that surrounds his tomb. That puts him in the “historically suspicious” class, but Carrier only gives it a 1 in 3 a-priori suspicion, because he is being careful.
A less generous observer like me would only have given Jesus a 1 in 20 prior on a good day. And I have no hostility to Christian religion, unlike Carrier.
Your idea is that Jesus belongs in the class of “failed messianic claimants” assumes minimal historicity right from the start. Thiis is an arguable point, the whole point of the book is to argue if this is the right class. “Failed messianic claimant” is in fact the class that Carrier puts him in under “minimal historicity”, but since he is comparing to “minimal mythicism”, to assign him to this class a-priori would be to decide the question before doing the analysis. Carrier does not even make it as specific as that— he simply leaves the class of historicist theory vague, because that would allow for the highest possible probability of the historicist theory being correct.
The reason it is not clear that this is the right category is that the earliest references to Jesus are immediately as a divine figure intermediate between God and Man, an archangel of sorts, as this is how he appears in both 1 Peter and in Paul’s authentic epistles. You could argue that this is a deification of a failed messianic claimant, or argue that the messianic story evolved as a parable of the divine figure. It all depends on whether Jesus was human first, or divine first. Carrier argues “divine first”, and this is also the position of the religious person, who has direct experience with the divine Jesus, but can only infer a historical Jesus through a confrontation with very historically dubious literature which only really makes complete sense as an exegesis of the divine Jesus.
Carrier’s “translation to numbers” is NOT used to intimidate readers, or give false precision. He doesn’t claim that the numbers are any better than the informal argument that he gives to justify the numbers.
The only purpose of the numbers is as a SANITY CHECK, to make sure the evidence is strong or weak, according to the criteria he is using. You could formulate your argument for historicity using the same method, and come up with your own numbers.
The reason he uses the Baysian approach is because people come into this with PREEXISTING CRAZY NARRATIVES in their head! These narratives are constructed because the material is spiritually extremely powerful, and so lends itself to imagining all sorts of historical stuff just from mental resonance, and you come to see a whole bunch of pictures behind the limited (but powerful) events described in the sources. Because there is such a paucity of sources, he needs to really be careful about what is being said and where, to avoid the trap of a self-reinforcing but wrong loop.
This is not by accident, it is common in Jewish Biblical literature. The Jewish narratives are both myth and pseudo-history, in that they are constructed to get you to argue about the details, and in this way accept the big picture of the narrative. You can argue if Moses was speaking Egyptian as a child and therefore had a Hebrew-as-a-second-language accent in his dialogue, or whether his writings were translated to Hebrew later, or whatever, while missing the main point that Moses doesn’t exist as a historical figure.
Carrier really doesn’t abuse numbers in his book (unlike everyone else who uses Baysianism in history). He uses the numbers only to make the arc of the argument clear. His REAL argument is contained in the summary of “background material”, which reveals that the actual support for historicity is on really very shaky grounds, because most historians only support historicity by default, because they are not well versed enough in the background to realize that the apologetic arguments are really not very strong.
In those cases where there is a limited amount of evidence, the only way to extract the best predictions is to try and do a Baysian analysis honestly. He really does do it as honestly as his imagination and source material allows, if you have a nit to pick with the treatment of the evidence, you can simply SAY what mistake he made, and give your own numbers. I’ll do that below.
His methodology is in principle sound, it is used with much greater precision in the hard sciences. There, the evidence is much more easily quantifiable, and the error bounds are much smaller. But a solid argument is a solid argument, and in principle, all solid arguments can be translated to Baysian terms, although in the case of history (as Carrier says), it is not something which creates new arguments ex-nihilo, it is just a simple translation of the informal argument into numbers, which allows you to make a quantitative estimate of plausilbity. This is a formalization of existing method, rather than a “radical new thing”. The reason it is important is because it allows you to milk the most out of a limited amount of evidence, and most importantly, to detect bogus arguments in those cases where historians have inferred too much from limited evidence. He then argues that this is one of those cases.
One of the methodological assumptions that I question is his assumption of independent probabilities. This is a methodological mistake that allows dishonest practitioners to get whatever answer they want from Baysianism, but in this case it is not too bad, because he is really honest, and he factors out the main thing— dependence of sources— right from the outset. Whenever there is a good chance for dependence, he doesn’t consider evidence independent.
When carrier finds a piece of evidence is 10% likely in the hypothesis he’s testing, he adds this evidence by multiplying by 1/10. If he later finds another piece of evidence is 10% likely, he’ll add that one too as an independent factor. He then assumes that the conjunction of both pieces of evidence is 1/100 likely, by multiplying probabilities. This is normally correct, when the evidence is independent, but there are two extremes to consider.
One he takes into account by “dependence”. If the first 10% event entails the next 10% event, then they are not independent, and you have to throw one of the two away. Ok. But you need to know the probability of dependence to make this rigorous. He usually assumes a binary model— 0 or 1, either they are dependent or they are independent. Good enough for this case, it wouldn’t necessarily work in other cases.
But there’s another problem, which never comes up in hard sciences or in Bayes’s theorem as traditionally stated, where the conjunction of the two events is much less likely than the product. I’ll give an example:
I was curious about what we could learn about Peter’s church. I find there’s a reference to the Nazoreans in the Babylonian Talmud. Ok. That could be copied from the Gospels. But then Carrier gives a separate source, independent of NT and Talmud, which also cites the Nazoreans and gives doctrine which matches the Talmud description. The other source could ALSO have been cribbed from the Gospels, if it were isolated. But with the Talmud, the two sources reinforce each other, so that the confidence that the Petrine Nazoreans survive and continue becomes effectively certain, even though each fact by itself would only have provided 80-90% confidence of this conclusion by itself. The two facts together, because of the implausible matching of confirming details, is much much more certain, effectively 1 part in 10^10 certain, or some such thing. This could be turned into Baysianism if you quantified how likely the details were to match by random chance, but you shouldn’t bother in this case, because this probability is effectively zero. That’s because the details-matching is hard to quantify, but it is the main job of the historian. When historians find two matching independent sources, they are happy. That’s because of this effect I described.
But in the case of the gospels, Carrier effectively argues that they are not at all independent, that with high probability they are commenting and ammending each other. But a historian using the traditional criterion of “independent sources” would conclude that John and the Synoptics are independent, without strong evidence of this, when they are really nothing of the kind, at least not with any high probability. The false inference would give the same strong confirmation-feeling for historicity, when it is really not justified by the evidence in the two documents. It is only a consequence of the reinforcing pseudo-history in both narratives being mildly consistent with each other, and with the historian’s picture in their head of the “real underlying events behind this”. Jewish Biblical literature is precisely DESIGNED to fool the reader in this way.
These methodological details are why he wrote a book about Baysian history. This is why I think the historicity book is such a classic, because it really uses a justified method to show that previous arguments are invalid.
One way to argue against Carrier is to say that while each INDIVIDUAL piece of evidence for historicity sucks, the sum total is better than the parts, because of concordant matching. This I think is a BAD argument, but you can make it. It is essentially why people are stuck on this point, they think that the argument is valid in the case of Jesus, when it’s not (because even the conjunction of all the historicity evidence is crappy). What they are REALLY saying is “I can SEE the historical Jesus in my head when I read the Gospels! His personality is coming right out at me!” But this is also true of the historical Moses, it is true of the historical Daniel, because the Jewish writing style made distinct personalities that embodied certain philosophies, and different writers got to know these fictional characters and wrote to form. This is not evidence, it is a feeling, and it is a misleading feeling in most cases, as there is no historical Moses, and there is no historical Daniel (as Carrier also convincingly argues in a subpart of the book).
I disagree with Carrier on one rather central point. He claims that his “minimal mythicism” is in fact, minimal mythicism, in that if you change any one point, the theory becomes so implausible it is not worth considering. I think here he just had a failure of the imagination.
One can agree with him that Peter and Paul saw a resurrected Jesus (no historical Jesus) without agreeing that the Jesus was necessarily crucified in the firmament. Jesus could have also decended to Earth anonymously, and got crucified anonymously, without letting on he was the messiah. His firmament theory also makes sense, but I think the other one needs to be considered, because it is equally minimal.
The “more minimal mythicism” just stays agnostic on where Jesus decended, and allows different sects to identify different Jesuses as the historical manifestation of the cosmic Jesus (the historical figures don’t even have to be named Jesus, they just have to get crucified in some way). So you can have one sect adopt a stoned and crucified Jesus ben Panthera or something, and another sect make up a historical narrative about a Jesus of Galilea, whatever. The convergence process will happen because the believers are coordinating with each other. But Carrier’s cosmic Jesus crucified in the firmament is not too different, and itself outdoes the standard story for matching the evidence. I think the “more minimal mythicist” Jesus is slightly better Baysianwise, but the arguments are identical for the most part.
I am persuaded of Carrier’s thesis simply because I am familiar with the risen Christ, I know how the visions of this work, and I do not believe this cosmic presence could possibly be constructed by Jews simply by misidentifying the ghost of a living mortal teacher. I believe the God Jesus inserted himself into history, as a fabrication. But that’s subjective nonsense, Carrier presents a good objective case.
This is historically incorrect, as the heliocentric model predicted things that are surprising in the Geocentric model. The first is that one can get the DISTANCE to the planets from the data. The epicycle period in Ptolmeian astronomy is always derived from the orbit of the Earth for all three outer planets, and it always has a basic period of 1 Earth year (this is not exactly true, the right statement is that you can calculate the epicycle period from the planet’s distance from the Earth, and it converges to 1 year for far-away planets). For Jupiter and Saturn, the epicycle is 1 year to a good approximation, and this is better explained as parallax, otherwise it is a coincidence that it is 1 year.
So interpreting the epicycle motion as parallax gives also the distance to mars, and allows you to reconstruct the entire orbit of Mars, as Kepler did.
The second thing that is surprising is that the Sun is bigger than the Earth and all the planets. This was known in antiquity, as the distance to the moon and that the distance to the sun was much greater were both known. The radius of the moon could be inferred as about 1/5 of the Earth, and that of sun at least 20 times greater. It made more sense of the smaller object to circle the larger one, and this was an early argument for heliocentrism.
But the most damning argument was the equant. In the heliocentric system, the equant is comprehensible as an equal-area law for the orbits around the sun, and the equants for the epicycles can be derived from the equant for the Earth (the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit). In the geocentric model, these are simply conspiratorial parameter choices.
So NO, it is not right that geocentrism was favored, or Brahe’s model, heliocentrism was obviously correct from the start, and only academic inertia prevented people from recognizing it.
Sure, each figure is different. But when you examine Jesus, the argument for historicity is generally that “I can make a consistent picture for a historical character which would plausibly produce this text”.
The problem is that you can always do this for Jewish religious myth, because Jewish religious myth is by design historical. Pagan religious myths don’t necessarily claim anything about history, and don’t go to pains to make themselves sound historically plausible.
The second problem with this in the special case of Jesus is that really, NO YOU CAN’T construct a good historical narrative. Without the supernatural elements at least. Such a historical narrative would leave a gaping question: How the heck did Jesus get deified???
The deification of a human in Judaism is simply impossible and seems to have been impossible even back then, in that it only happened once (in Christianity). Jews resisted adopting human figures into the pantheon of angels, only doing so in cases which made a clear distinction between the human and the divine (for example, Elijah). The deification of Jesus is extremely surprising, and there is no indication that it began later in Rome, Paul’s early epistles deify Christ right from the beginning.
In a Jewish context, it is simply more plausible that Jesus was a divine figure right rom the start. This just makes a better mesh of theology, and explains how Paul can advocate this, while remaining a Jew. It explains how Peter’s sect remains Jewish. They are not deifying a human, they are humanizing an archangel.
Before understanding this, I struggled even to understand how Christianity could claim to be monotheistic. In Carrier’s view, there is no problem, and Christianity and Judaism mesh together perfectly. In fact, all the elements of Christianity are already present in messianic Judaism in one form or another, even the suffering Christ messiah in the Suffering Servant passage in Isiah.
This perfect meshing of theology is just icing on the cake. Carrier didn’t start with this to make his argument, it simply adds evidence from theological consideration. this is weaker evidence than Carrier’s, which is not theological (it’s not about religious ideas which he doesn’t understand very well at all) but about history.
The evidence at the time (16th century) singled out Galileo’s theory as UNDENIABLY CORRECT, just the phases of Venus alone demonstrate that the planets orbit the sun, and the moons of Jupiter that objects tend to circle around smaller objects. Galilean relativity showed that we wouldn’t feel the spinning of the Earth, and the only thing Galileo didn’t explain was Kepler’s laws, which were formulated contemporaneously.
But the evidence in the 3rd century BC was ALSO undeniably correct! Just the equant system and epicycle periods are enough to conclude from Baysian analysis that Heliocentrism is correct with extremely high probability.
There is nothing unusual or wrong in Galileo’s behavior— you have to trust the self-correcting mechanism to correct you when you are wrong. Galileo had hundreds of arguments, and a few of them are invariable wrong, as is true of every other scientist. You have to defend your babies to the death, but some of them will die anyway.
Carrier is not a crank, he has shows convincingly that his colleagues are.
You do NOT see Jesus mythologized over time, you see Jesus mythologized RIGHT FROM THE START in the epistles of Peter and Paul. Jesus is a divine figure in Paul and also in Peter 1, and in the letter of Clement.
What you see is Jesus humanized ALL AT ONCE in the Gospel of Mark, and then more mythology added in subsequent gospels. That’s not a “mythologizing process”, as the predictions of gradual mythologizing don’t accord with previous or outside source material, and don’t make sense in context, nor with the stories in the gospels, despite superficial impressions of uninformed people who didn’t do the research. This is why you need to read Carrier’s book in detail.
Carrier will never persuade his peers, they are incompetent. They will need to be shamed into doing it by heckling. Carrier is a better historian then all of them put together.
This is a nonsensical comment to make, whatever the plural, Carrier has written an extremely strong book, a great classic. His arguments are entirely sound, and they lead to a revolutionary understanding of the literature in the field.
His historical research is impeccable, and his conclusions regarding the Gospels, the background material, the Epistles, and Acts are close to the only possible ones from the modern Biblical studies literature. He has really proved his case, and there should be no argument anymore.
Unfortunately, academics are bound by academic inertia, and he will face tremendous irrational resistance. The inevitable crucifiction of his classic book might make a Christian out of him yet.
Ehrman is not a propagandist for religion, Ehrman is a propagandist for an incorrect academic consensus.
Richard Carrier wrote the definitive books about the subject, and the argument about historicity should already be closed. Jesus is mythical, there is very little doubt left about this after Carrier, and any argument against his conclusion had better involve new evidence, or a persuasive demonstratio of some dependency not previously accounted for by Carrier.
This has very little to do with Christian faith. I believe Carrier’s version gives a more persuasive Christian faith than the traditional historical story, which makes the risen Jesus into an accident of a mangled historical memory. That’s not what Jesus is, Jesus is purposely crafted to fulfil messianic prophesy, which is why Christian apologetics is stronger than any historical coincidence will allow.
The Maccabees, Ned Ludd, and Betty Crocker can be placed into history the same as Jesus, and all are fabrications. The case for Jesus is closed, Carrier has closed it, he is not a historical person. He is far too conservative in his probability estimates, just to appear reasonable.
I am saying he could have come in secret, and was observed by regular people, just without them identifying him as messiah (nor did he care), just crucifying him. That’s the only purpose the incarnation serves.
The celestial story could be primary, I agree, I just read the last part of Carrier, and there are celestial references. But the celestial events mirror Earthly events, so that there are Earthly analogs of celestial events. Any random crucifiction could be seen as the crucifiction of Jesus in this view, and there is no barrier to making a mythology from composites of martyr stories, as Carrier demonstrates happened later.
If the conjectured theology is definitive on the location of Christ, it is less minimal, you are adding another factor without certain probability— namely that it was certain that Paul didn’t believe Christ appeared on Earth (anonymously) for crucifiction, and I don’t think Paul really gave a crap. He only cared about the risen Christ.
These assertions are not unjustified, as I have just finished reading Carrier’s book. If you read it too, you would agree.
His colleagues are those insipid academics who wrote inferior books on Jesus.
I should say, Michael Behe also has a case to make, but he is not identifying God in the cell, he is seeing the intelligence of RNA networks. That’s more brains than modern synthesis, but infinitely less brains than a supernatural God.
You can quibble about the Maccabees, I am not sure, as Carrier is not sure, and after reading his tour-de-force I now trust him completely and slavishly in all his historical conclusions.
If you have published a series of articles about a book you haven’t read, you are not Carrier’s peer. Carrier reads his sources diligently and independently.
I am not sure about Carrier’s identification of the “Davidic sperm bank”, although it is a good deduction from Carrier mythicism. The only reason I doubt is because Carrier did not establish that his scenario is really the only plausible minimal scenario.
There is a second scenario for mythicism which is nearly identical to his, but places Jesus on Earth (as myth). The statement would be that the messiah came and went anonymously, on Earth, without telling anyone. Then the heavenly Platonic Messiah revealed to people to announce the ascension.
This hypothesis would take the same evidence as Carrier’s version of mythicism, but would not require any change in the interpretation of “born of woman”, “of the sperm of David”, etc. It really should have been clumped together with Carrier’s heavenly Jesus as a combined minimal mythicist.
But this is a quibble, as the evidence for a celestial Jesus is pretty good in Carrier’s chapter on the Epistles, actually better than the idea of an anonymous messiah. I would put it at 4 to 1 for Carrier’s over mine, even though my prior when I came in was 2 to 1 the other way.
The anonymous messiah is still a good half-way house in the historization process, and it can appear in different people, as there is no need for Paul or Peter to take any firm position on historicity in public.
The reason to believe that there was no Jesus of Nazareth is that when you read the documents in historical order, there is no history in the earliest ones, when there SHOULD be. That’s persuasive by itself.
The need to move Jesus to Bethlehem in the mythicist framework is due to the need to reconcile two conflicting sources of myth. The “Nazoreans” name for the early Jewish Christians, which led Mark to place Jesus in Nazareth, and a separate OT tradition that the Messiah is born in Bethlehem.
When you see a concocted story in a Jewish source, it is in the context of hundreds of invisible scriptural sources you don’t see, and reconciling them is just as important for the authors as reconciling history would be to others who are not living in a world of Biblical literature.
This type of evidence is equally compatible with both ideas, although superficially, given modern biases to reconcile to history rather than to prophecy and tradition, we don’t see this. Similar “embarassing” stories can be found in the OT, for example, if Abraham and Sarah are not real people, why are they described as brother and sister in one of the two “pimping to a king” stories? Incestuous ancestry is a sign of weakness and accursedness.
The answer is that this is reconciling different myths, not that it is reconciling a history with myth.
In the mythicist view, Mary simply doesn’t exist as a historical person.
Nobody was lying, people just wrote stories and parables.
Paul thinks it is true that Jesus rose from the deead, because he has had a revelation of the risen Christ. This is not an uncommon vision, it happens today still, perhaps it has happened to you, it has happened to me. The stories of the historical Christ are there to give a historical anchor to these otherwise otherworldly visitations of the risen Christ. Paul doesn’t need material confirmation— he is a sincere religious person.
It’s not a seizure. It’s a pretty well reproducible thing, it is like a voice from outside talking in your head, but without words exactly, although saying specific things. It is not a hallucination in the normal sense, it’s like putting yourself to the side of an ethical center, and listening to it speak to the rest of you.
I had this experience after reading the 120 Days of Sodom by Sade (which I consequently think is purposefully designed to induce this experience in an atheist). I would recommend this for understanding Paul’s vision. Not only is it not a hallucination, it is not even FALSE, in that it is teaching you true ethical things. That Paul had a true ethical epiphane can be witnessed in the earliest and greatest document of Christianity: The Epistle to Philemon.
Carrier shows how to overcome these problems and evaluate this evidence— you have to ask whether “Nazorean” is an indication of a historical source at a historical “Nazareth” or whether “Nazorean” is an indication of something else. “Nazorean” has some meaning in Hebrew, as “notzar” means “formed” in the sense of “manufactured”, the same as Carrier proposes for the body of Christ. The existence of symbolic meaning you could make up is true of a lot of places, but not of “Bethlehemi” or “Beer Shevite” or “Canaanite” for example. Since the word has some plausibly related meaning, it is not completely ad-hoc that Mark made Nazareth the town (whether it existed or not) just to retro-fit “Nazorean”, neither it is implausible that it derives from the history, you just can’t say with any solid confidence.
That just means that you don’t really know where “Nazorean” came from, and the assertion that it is good evidence is simply problematic. It is evidence, but it is simply another piece of weak evidence made to look strong by reinforcing myth, and contradicting myth. The best you can argue for the occurence of Nazareth is that it gives mythicism a 2/3 confidence factor at best, but this is a problem, because it can’t counterweight the other evidence which suggests mythicism at the many hundreds to 1 level, much much stronger than Carrier conservatively states.
I should say that since “mythicism” does not have a specific prediction for any of this stuff, historicity needs to get a better factor in a Baysian analysis— simply for predicting a consistent birthplace (which is what is observed). But the consistency is in strongly dependent sources, which reduces the confidence to at best something like 2/3. Mythicism would not care if the birthplace was consisten, or if you have wild gospels claiming Jesus is from elsewhere This is a methodological weakness in Carrier’s method, the specificity of the predictions are not taken into account in the method. This would make a good rebuttal to the claims in the book, but in the specific case of Jesus, the rebuttals are not solid.
Carrier doesn’t claim it was forgery. He claims the risen Jesus came first. The teachings of the risen Jesus are primary in Christianity, the historical narratives are simply proselyzing tools, and are written to illustrate the central tenets.
There is nothing contradictory about this, nor does it make the documents “forgeries”. They are parables, not forgeries, and they are no more historical than any other scriptural source that claims to take place in history.
This hypothesis must be weighed on its merits, using as objective a methodology as possible, because of the biases of people coming in. This is not just the bias of religious dogma, it is the bias of superficial common sense, that when you see a document showing a historical figure doing works that you should believe the easiest way for this to get composed is if there were a historical figure doing works. When you see details, especially embarassing details, these are true details. Both these criteria fail miserably for Jewish religious sources, because the Jewish sources insert characters into history to make points, and do so often, writing consistent narratives for these people, and further the sources of Jewish myths are in a vast literature, which is enormous, and the motivation to reconcile conflicting myths is so large when producing pseudo-history, that reconciling them often produces embarassment without historical input (for example, Abraham and Sarah, two mythical beings, are embarassingly half-siblings in Genesis).
Historicity is simply false in this case, because you can trace the development of the documents very thoroughly, and show that the mythicist position explains the evidence much much better than the historicist position. This is what Carrier does in a readable 617 pages. Carrier’s thesis doesn’t really argue that Christianity is a lie, simply that Jesus is not a historical character. It doesn’t even argue that it is a false teaching, as the historical Jesus is not the risen Jesus of the congregation that Christians actually worship and experience.
The main event in Christianity in this view is Paul seeing Peter’s risen Jesus (same as modern Christians do), coming to Rome, founding the Gentile church, ignoring Mosaic law, and writing the Epistle to Philemon (among others). The resonance of the religion is that it treated everyone equally, slaves and freepersons, and it made the least first (as attested to in Philemon). The Church explodes because of these social forces, not because what it teaches is historically true.
I’ll put it this way— if there was a person named Joshua who historically died and rose from the grave 3 days later, surrounded by actual supernatural events, we would never hear about it today. Nobody would believe it, nor would there be any motivation for anyone to preserve the witness of this experience. To demonstrate— meteorites fell all over the world, but none of the experiences of rocks falling from the sky were thought to be particularly worth preserving, despite the supernatural-seeming event being so salient. True history is not enough, you need to have a political movement behind you.
On the other hand, the spiritual experience of witnessing the risen Christ, a real event in people’s lives which happens today, something which has nothing to do with the historical Christ, this is a solid foundation to build a religion on. This foundation is what Carrier is assuming, he is simply jettisoning the unnecessary and problematic historical interpretation of the Gospel narratives.
Peter didn’t “make up” Jesus! He had an experience of the risen Jesus, something that many people have had even today. John doesn’t say “I spent 3 years with Jesus”, another anonymous author, writing to piously mythologize the early church, writes this as a proselyizing tool, at least 50 years later, and possibly a hundred years later.
Paul doesn’t just fail to mention Jesus healing, he treats Jesus as a celestial figure whose only Earthly manifestation is to get crucified somewhere (Paul doesn’t say exactly where, Carrier argues with some confidence that it’s in the lower heavens). Clement has the same view. You need to read Carrier’s book instead of attacking straw-men, as he addresses these at length.
As for the psychology making sense— the experience of the risen Jesus is REAL, and it is POWERFUL, and there is no need for a tacked-on historical Jesus to allow it to change the world. Simply the text of the Epistle to Philemon, which spells the beginning of the end of ancient slavery, is enough to allow the Church to be both ethically true and growing.
This is simply ridiculous— if you think that seeing the risen Jesus in the mind is a lie, as compared to seeing Jesus in the flesh, you have never experienced the risen Christ in the mind. It is among the most powerful events in a person’s life, and it will completely rewire their relation to other people and their interpretation of events, and their relation to religious text. This is not arguable, because it happens to people all the time (talk to Christians who have experienced Christ), and it even happens to atheistic non-Christians (it happened to me).
Peter’s probably authenetic epistle, Paul’s authentic epistles, these without doubt talk exclusively about the experience of the risen Christ, the same exact thing you can experience, the same exact things Christians preach and experience today. This experience is very subtle, is consistent with Jewish theology, and has nothing to do with supernatural events.
The identification of the risen Christ with the Messiah (which both Peter and Paul share) means that the flesh Messiah has already come and gone, but without altering the material relation of Rome and Judea. This historical circumstance is what implies that the Messiah is not working on Earth immediately, that the kingdom is in heaven, and it’s Earthly manifestation begins slowly.
The kingdom of Christ begins with his replacing of the temple sacrifice through his own sacrifice, and explains why he must be crucified. It is prefigured in Psalm (Psalm twenty-something, about the crucifiction), and this is what can be very convincingly understood from other scripture too, Daniel, Isiah 53, and the method of Jewish theology at the time will produce a Christology without a historical figure, and further, the Christology that it produces is exactly the Christology of the Epistles.
The credibility of the story does NOT come from history, true history simply doesn’t produce convincing evidence for people who are being converted to a spiritual religion. Eyewitness attestations are forgotten, nobody cares to preserve historical memory except historians. Actual historically provable exceptional events, like the HUGE supernova in 1054 or so (we know about it because we see the remnant crab nebula) are barely attested to in history. But spiritual events are attested, especially ones which are socially meaningful and produce change.
The “new story” would not be new, as the story would be humanized from the beginning. It starts with “Do you know Christ appeared in the flesh and died for your sins to assure your salvation?”, and the details are added by missionaries and proselyzers, without any tradition. You don’t NEED a tradition, other than the Jewish literary tradition, because you are explaining a spiritual truth.
The fact that it is spiritually true, meaning that it does produce transformative change in people’s ethics, means that it has no relevance to history, simply because historical truth is useless and stupid for producing spiritual change. This is the view of early Church founders, who resist the false claims to objectivity of their Pagan overlords.
All powerful orders claim that their order is scientifically supported, and say “logic is on our side”. The Christians were not arguing with logic, they were arguing with spiritual power, and the historicity arguments only came slowly, as the Chuch became powerful and needed unanimous acceptance of doctrine, by even those who are spiritually obtuse and can’t experience a risen Christ directly nor understand those who do indirectly.
No, no no. True Christianity has always been a SPIRITUAL modification of Judaism, with which it shares a historical notion of God, and a synchretism with Platonism, with which it shares the notion of heaven, perfectibility, and afterlife.
The point of Paul and Peter’s authentic epistles is to induce the experience of the risen Christ. The risen Christ is not the historical Christ, and has no relation to the historical Christ a-priori. The risen Christ binds the community through communion, and produces spiritual awakening in those who are dead in spirit.
The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as flesh Messiah is revealed to Paul and Peter, and is interpreted as removing the idea of blood sacrifice from Judaism. This is the revelation that allows the religion to start and grow, and it has nothing to do with the historical Jesus. It doesn’t matter WHERE Jesus was crucified, it doesn’t matter WHO crucified him, it doesn’t even matter WHO HE WAS, so long as he was Messiah, he embodied the spiritual son and effective angel of God, and he was crucified somewhere, in whatever manner. Jesus does this so as to produce a new form of religion, independent of temple sacrifice, and it has no importance what historical event is associated with this, and most likely, none is (although it is possible that there was a historical event that got merged into the story, it isn’t required, and the historical event is not important at all).
The earliest Gospel is designed to produce a historical story, just to EXPLAIN the concepts of the religion, so you can understand this stuff. The concepts of the risen Jesus are very subtle, and require a lot of background knowledge. The concept in the Gospel of Mark are immediately understandable, and convert people based on the story alone.
But you can understand Mark, and then Matthew and then Luke and John, as evolutions of the historical story which illustrates the important features of the risen Christ. The only point of Carrier’s book is to argue that the risen Christ is primary, and the historical Christ is tacked on later.
The non-historical view is that the people were NOT nuts to worship Jesus, because Jesus was not an ordinary man who appeared on Earth. Jesus was a divine being right from the start. It is only the story of his life as a man which was inserted into the historical record, God inserting himself into the historical record, in a sense, through the action of the religious community.
The problem with historicity is that it isn’t the miracles that have anything to do with the religion. It’s the crucifiction and resurrection. These events are what are central to Christianity, not any supernatural events. The resurrection itself is not miraculous either in a historical view, it is people seeing a dead person in their mind.
This interpretation is simply problematic, not just because the historical record doesn’t support it (see Carrier’s book), but also because of the role the risen Jesus plays. The experience of the risen Jesus is not that of a ghost, it is something that people have today, it is an important experience, and it probably pre-dates Christianity.
To postulate that the Christians took the risen Jesus (which is a real experience) and associated it with a historical person is a coincidence theory, it requires that the spiritual experience coincided with a flesh and blood teacher who was crucified at the right time, around the right person (Peter) who could have a vision of the risen Jesus, then identify it with the historical Jesus, so as to make the theology work.
This is simply not the most parsimonious theory. The most parsimonious theory is that Peter had the experience of the risen Jesus, then looked around in Jewish scriptures to figure out what figure Jesus would be. He decided it was a crucified messiah (whether in the heavens or on Earth he couldn’t know and didn’t care). Then Paul had the EXACT SAME EXPERIENCE, and associated it with the EXACT SAME FIGURE, nearly independently (that it is not completely independent is due to Paul persecuting the first Christians). This is not at all improbable, it is analogous to Newton and Leibnitz discovering calculus, since Leibnitz was about as familiar with Newton’s methods as Paul would have been familiar with Peter’s theology. Then they compare notes a little, decide they are compatible theologically, sort out their differences, and Paul goes to preach to the Gentiles, while Peter preaches to the Jews.
This hypothesis predicts that the historical sources come later than the initial vision of the risen Christ. The opposite view would predict the opposite, that the historical tales come first, and the risen Christ later. While it is tough to distinguish, the evidence does support the mythicist position, but you need to read all of it first, to see that it does. This is what Carrier argues persuasively.
The reason one would “make up” a Messiah who gets nailed to a stick is because you COMMUNICATED with the risen Jesus, decided he must be the Messiah, so therefore he came and went, and looked around you and saw that nothing materially changed in the world, therefore, the Messiah must have come and gone without altering the material world. This means he came and went as an ordinary person, not as an Earthly king. His kingdom is solely in heaven. This process actually happens, it still happens to Christians and non-Christians today.
The crucifiction idea comes from Psalm 20-something, pierced my hand and feet, cast lot for my clothes, the persecution by Jews and their involvment in the death from Isiah 53. These sources are not baseless Christian apologia, they really are prophesies of Jesus. The reason is simply that these are the sources from which belief in the crucifiction and resurrection emerged.
The “criterion of embarassment” doesn’t work for Jewish scripture, because there is so much prophesy and text, and it is taken so seriously, that reconciling the texts and reconciling those texts with national historical events produces even MORE contradiction and embarassment than any historical memory.
The fulfilment of prophecy is not accidental in Christianity, it is really fulfilling the prophecies of the Messiah. Really. This is not because a historical event got transmogrified (at least, not most plausibly), most probably it is because Peter had a vision, Paul had the same vision (more or less), and they communicated it as best they could.
The emergence of churches worshipping the risen Christ is not an argument for historical Christ, it is an argument for AUTHENTICITY, that the experience of the risen Christ was representing a true revelation. Those were held in higher regard by the Jews than any historically accurate memory.
I didn’t claim “Nazorean” is “Notzar”, although in Hebrew the two terms coincide almost exactly, but “Nazorean” isn’t “Nazarethian” either (in Greek, I mean, Carrier discusses the subtle distinctions in the book)! Both interpretations are not a 100% match, and neither gives good confidence either way. Unlike Carrier, I consider such a thing some evidence for historicity, but it’s extremely WEAK evidence for historicity, it’s a Baysian factor of 2/3 at best, and it only comes from the dependence of dependent sources, so really 2/3 is the best factor for nonsense like this.
When I say you couldn’t do it for “Canaanite”, what I mean is that there is a PLAUSIBLE mythicist argument for Nazorean, which could be a coincidence, but it also could be the actual reason for the term. That’s something that would happen if the Christians called themselves “Samaritans” (from Shomer, keeping tradition), but not if they called themselves “Galileans”. So it’s just not a very good piece of evidence.
I am NOT following Carrier in doing Baysian probabilities on these sorts of things, I have been advocating this as a way to quantify opinion for over a decade, independently of him. Scientists use Baysian tools to quantify the strength of evidence, and use Baysian arguments to avoid the pitfalls of authority based evaluation, where reinforcing expert opinions drown out the comparatively ambiguous evidence. Baysianism is a TOOL to describe your biases, and a tool for seeing how different evidence comes together to support or refute a hypothesis, it is not a way of making false objectivity where there is none.
It is also a tool that is very easy to abuse, because by claiming improbabilities that are not there, you can convince yourself of almost anything. It takes a heck of a lot of training for scientists to do it right, and you need to know when confidence is overwhelming. There are lot of three sigma signals in physics (99.9% confidence ostensibly) which are false, because of the cherry-picking issue. Scientists generally want 5 sigma evidence (1 in a million baysian confidence of error). You don’t get 5 sigma evidence in history unless you have solidly independent sources with careful attestation and very reliable reporting.
Carrier is doing it, but he isn’t doing it perfectly. He is the first to do it in history correctly, others who do it do it in an extremely biased way. His Baysian comparison of the hypothesis is roughly accurate, except for things that are subtle.
The subtle things are how to deal with correlations in evidence, how to quantify expectations, and how to deal with the specificity of theories. These are “higher order effects”, and they do not change the conclusion in the Jesus case very much.
I think that it is possible to see with good confidence that the Jesus of the Gospels is a mythical creation, which does not derive from any single historical source with connection to Peter. It might include elements of other people, including a Galilean preacher named “Lazarus”, a (different) Zealot named “Simon” crucified in the middle of summer, not during Passover (I’m making these people up), and that Judah dude who stormed the Temple in ~ AD 60 saying “The end is nigh”, but whichever historical narratives contributed to the story, the elements are incorporated into a legend of a composite character at best, there is no single character that produced the mythology. The single most important factor in the mythology is the RESURRECTED CHRIST, the divine figure who replaces Temple worship. That this figure came FIRST, and the rest retrofitted to fit this figure, this is what Carrier is persuasively arguing, at least in Paul’s theology (we have little direct evidence of Peter’s theology).
I disagree that it is a lie. It wouldn’t be seen as a lie by those who composed it, and it wouldn’t be seen as a lie by those who propagated it, and it would gradually turn into what you are calling a lie only later, when a fundamentalist historical interpretation trumped the allegorical interpretation sometime in the 2nd century. But even if the final interpretation is a historical lie (although it’s arguable, I guess it is, in the sense you say), no one person would be responsible for lying, certainly it’s not Jesus’s fault, and everyone is working in good faith througout. The only purpose of the literal interpretation is quicker conversion of people who aren’t well versed enough to see the theological subtleties and visions, it’s not like every missionary has the time to get people to go through however many years of seminary studies to join the religion.
The experience of the risen Jesus as far as I can tell is not exactly unambiguous in the way a scientific experiment is. It is an internal experience that comes with indications and what subjectively feels like communication, but it isn’t in words you can write down, nor can you be sure of the accuracy of the conclusion. The doctrine of the Church isn’t a lie, it just doesn’t look like history.
In my opinion, a person who demands that the events of their religion must have exact replica copies on Earth has a very poor faith. Must the material world be an exact replica of the spirit realm? The spirit realm of Christianity is an abstraction, a Platonic idealization whose rough ugly mirror is the material world, and the claim here of Carrier and the mythicists is that the perfect crucifiction and resurrection are attributes of the Platonic realm, not exactly of the messy historical realm.
I know it is heresy for all denominations, but heretical or not, I don’t see it in conflict with the ethical and spiritual message of Christianity. I also see it as concordant with the ethical and spiritual message of Wolfgang Pauli and Rudolph Carnap, who are interested in the study of the material world, not the spiritual world.
I am NOT talking about a different religion, I am talking about Christianity. It is a subtle faith, it is not an obtuse superstition about a historical magic-doing guy who became a zombie for a few weeks then flew away.
The notion of the congregation forming the body of Christ through communion, that’s there from the beginning. The spiritual center is the risen Christ, the body does works, and the notions of blood sacrifice are removed from the Jewish component of the faith.
The historical parts of Christianity, the Gospel tales as history, this comes much later than communion, resurrection, and crucifiction, which are aspects of Paul’s earliest Epistles, and Peter’s, and have prophetic prefigurements in the old-testament.
You can’t expose this type of historical falsehood as false, because there are no witnesses, nor do there have to be. It is written as exegesis of a religious experience, not as history, and the historical interpretation only takes off in the 2nd century, after everybody has died.
It’s not “making up stuff”, it is illustrating the faith with a simpler to understand story. The actual beliefs are tough to understand at a first exposure, it takes several years to understand what the “body of Christ” means, what communion means, etc. What it means that cultic sacrifice has ended, what it means to have a vision, or speak in tongues, etc, etc. The story “ok, this guy came to Earth, preached, died, and resurrected” gets the main idea across with the minimum of fuss, and gets the quickest conversion, and when it was composed, it is not clear it was thought of as historically true, historically false, as I think the answer Christians back then would have given is “who the heck cares? We’re not here to give you a history lecture, we are after saving your soul.”
An ancient source reports: one day a fox came to a field and saw a large bunch of ripe purple grapes on the tree. He jumped and jumped to get the grapes, and failed to reach them. As he walked away, he said to himself “those grapes were probably sour anyway”.
Now what can we know about the historical fox? It is quite remarkable feat of thinking for an animal like a fox, and if the fox actually spoke, it would be miraculous.
Given that it was attested that the fox jumped to get the grapes, and knowing that grapes were common in Greece, it is safe to say that the historical fox was jumping, and the goal was to get the grapes. Although some scholars dispute that the grapes were purple, as it makes more sense for the latter confusion with immature and green grapes, if the grapes were green throughout. Most scholars conclude that the report that the fox then spoke are probably exaggerated. The historical fox probably simply walked away from the grapes without saying anything, or at least without saying anything clear, so the only clue Aesop could have had to conclude that this is what the fox was thinking must have been by the manner in which the historical fox walked away. I hypothesize that the fox shook his head, and made a whimpering noise of a sort, leading Aesop to conclude that the fox was hungry, and disappointed, but rationalizing the disappointment in this way. I also hypothesize that the historical fox never ate grapes again, due to this experience. I am sure that the fox in reality did not get the grapes by the criterion of embarrassment, it is quite embarrassing to make up such a remarkable fox that is nontheless unable to get grapes from a tree.
Why is my discussion ridiculous? Do foxes not exist? Would they not jump for grapes? It is ridiculous, because the tale is obviously not a history, it is a parable illustrating an important lesson.
The Gospel stories are written to illustrate an even more important lesson, namely that the cultic sacrifice of Judaism has ended, and the Christian religion has salvation and immortality without a direct requirement of Jerusalem temple worship. The sacrifice of Jesus parallels the passover sacrifice and the Yom Kippur sacrifice, as explained by Carrier, and all aspects of Jesus ministry serve an allegorical purpose in describing the manner in which Christianity sets itself apart from Judaism. The death of Jesus is symbolic and meaningful, all aspects of his life are presaged in the old testament.
Any attempt at deducing what the historical Jesus was like is simply as hopeless as deducing what Aesop’s fox was like. While it is possible that there was a historical fox, it is not a bet a rational person would make, nor is it particularly possible to know what that fox was doing.
The deleted snark was fine by me— I don’t claim expertise, I don’t have any authority in any field. I get all my communication out of the asylum written in poo on rolls of toilet paper that I slip out through the bars at night to my devoted but brainwashed lover, who gives me her own rolls containing your response, also written in poo. I don’t know why she does that, as she has access to pens.
(deleted text: “It takes a heck of a lot of training for scientists to do it right” In what did you do your post-doctorate? The fact that you assign a 2/3 ‘Bayesian’ probability to determining two words are linguistic
cognates, in the same post as giving me a lecture
on what 5-sigma events mean in Physics is a very good indication that you’ve no clue what such a result entails.)
Answers:1. no postdoc, asylum.
2. Let me explain this— it’s NOT 2/3 probability of the cognates, the probability is probably 20% at most. What I meant by a 2/3 Baysian factor is that knowing that all the gospels reference the same hometown for Jesus is a-priori not required in mythicism, and is a required prediction in historicity. So it provides a Baysian factor against mythicism and for historicity, which is determined by asking “what is the probability of getting the same hometown in 4 myth sources”.
If the sources were entirely independent, the probability would be effectively zero. But they are not independent of each other, and not independent of shared tradition. So the lack of disagreement about the hometown is simply not that unexpected under mythicism either. It’s like asking “what’s the probability that a new Sherlock Holmes story would place him at 229 Baker St.” (or wherever). The new series placed him there, and so did the old Arthur Conan Doyle stories. But that’s not because of a historical Sherlock. On the other hand, I could see a dispute arising where one gospel would present one hometown and another gospel would present another. That means that the probability of hometown agreement is < 100% under mythicism, and this counts as evidence for historicity. You then can look at other things, like inconsistent geneologies as evidence going the other way. There is really very little you can say from this, as geneologies would be likely made up even under historicity. But, on the other hand, the disagreement between gospels on who was in charge during Jesus birthyear (6AD vs 4BC) is troubling, and cancels out the 2/3 as this goes the other way. Similarly the disagreements on the death date, and other details. Carrier gives it as a wash, meaning both historicity and mythicism are equally likely from the Gospels alone, only considering their agreement and disagreement, and I completely agree. But Carrier then gets a 1/3 anti-historicity prior, which people don't like very much. This is based on the gross character of the Gospels. In particular, the fact that they add a virgin birth, a confrontation with Satan, a lost childhood, attempts to kill him, etc etc, the Raglan criteria. The statement he is making is that when you have a historical figure, and you try to add mythological criteria, you stub your toe--- even in cases where figures are mythologized, most of the time you can't get away with mythologizing them to such a great extent. He scores Mark as 15 on the Rank Raglan scale (I score it 14), and considers this 2/3 likely from myth, rather than historicity. That's actually not a bad estimate as I see it, it's not overwhelming, but it is biased to myth. It's about the same confidence as you get from the agreement of "Nazareth" in all four gospels. I agree with his judgement there too. It is hard to mythologize a historical person to this great an extent, and finding that it happened should start you off at this position. But it really doesn't matter, because all these things are so close to 50/50 that they would be overwhelmed if there was an accumulation of real evidence. Remember that 5 1/4 pieces of evidence is 1/4^5, which is 1 in a thousand Baysian confidence. So real evidence overwhelms speculation and bad priors, always. It's just that in this case, there really isn't any really good evidence for historicity at all. The match on Nazareth in all the sources in all is extremely weak evidence, because it is at least 2/3 likely to my mind that the gospels would agree on this fact even without historical input, simply by following a tradition that started either with Mark, or with the Nazoreans (for all I know the first communal settlement of independent socialistic Christians living as brothers was the establishment of Nazareth, that sort of thing). I really think it's 4/5 likely, perhaps even 10/11 likely, meaning that this evidence is not a significant factor. It's very difficult to assign the confidences, but the point of these numbers is only that you can't hang your conclusion on this fact in isolation. I don't agree with Carrier that the probability of truth of a hypothesis can be determined by justifying a reference class and observing historical data, but I don't think Carrier agrees with this either. What he is advocating is explicitly stating what likelihoods you are using, and using a Baysian calculation to derive the certainty you claim for any claim. It's not hard to do, and when you do it, if you do it wrong, it is possible to criticize the assumed probabilities and to criticize the independence of the things you used, etc etc. It's not more objective, it's just more precisely stated, so that you can pinpoint errors of judgement, even when they are qualitative errors which require subjective judgement. This is what makes it different from "it seems to me" and "in all probability" that historians use, without a quantitative ballpark estimate. The reason this approach is rejected is because it INVITES abuse, and in fact, in history in the past, it has only been used for abuse. Carrier is the only historian who does it roughly right (but I think he makes a few inconsequential mistakes, see below--- but in the end I haven't read "Proving History" yet, and after I read that I might change my mind on his mistakes). Baysian methods require not just simple honesty, but a much more exacting honesty, where you actually have to ask "is this really an appropriate probability", "Are these actually independent events" and "have I missed a possible scenario which would make this probability estimate totally bogus". All of these are very hard to do, and the calculations are usually done better by intuition, because accumulating evidence generally quickly pushes the probabilities so close to 1 or 0 that it's pointless to do calculations. Except in certain cases. But these are the exactly the controversial cases! But in certain cases, in those cases where academic authority has a strong consensus which comes from something other than strong evidence, then it is very important to look at the evidence with a Baysian lens, EVEN THOUGH this is rife for abuse. The online review and checking process can get rid of abusive Baysianism, and really hone down the confidence factors. Now, these are not objective facts, the probabilities, and a different person with different priors and estimates can come to different conclusions. But at least they have to STATE THEIR PRIORS and STATE THEIR PROBABILITIES. In a way better than "it seems to me..." and "after reviewing the evidence, the great likelihood is..." These don't work when the authoritative biases cloud the judgement, which unfortunately happens in history more often than it should. The reason that this method is not universally used is that it practically INVITES abuse! It is so easy to present false probabilities in this methodology. In order to trust the conclusion, you need a back-and-forth, like an online chat, to establish that you really aren't missing something that would completely shift the probabilities around. I'll give an example of mistakes in Carrier, for instance. IF the Gospel of John were REALLY independent of the Synoptics, for example, if we find out it came from Alexandria, and the Alexandria church had no communication with the Rome Church, then historicity goes through the roof simply on the agreement between John and the Synoptics. That means that the estimate of likelihood on independence of John is really a good estimate of historicity. Carrier effectively assumes we are 100% sure of the dependence between John and the Synoptics, but we are NOT, we only are 80% confident based on the evidence he gives, so it should have a 4/5 factor or so. That means that it is only 80% likely that the writer of John was familiar with the synoptics by oral contact, not that he was ripping them off. But this doesn't change the conclusion at all. These higher order dependencies are important when you have a bunch of documents which you KNOW are independent with strong likelihood, for example, the Talmud and that Greek guy writing about the Nazoreans. The fact that they both report the same thing lends essentially infinite confidence to the Nazoreans being the Jewish Christians, and confirms the historicity of the Nazorean references. But although I don't NEED Baysianism to state this conclusion, it doesn't hurt, so long as it is done honestly. For example of dishonest Baysianism, I can pretend that the Synoptics and John are independent, and then find the probability that they agree on all the details they agree on (Jeusus betrayed by Judas, Jesus having a ministry in Galilea, etc), and this would slam down to zero so quickly you would conclude "Jesus is historical" after about 4 points of agreement. But this is to ignore the elephant in the room of agreement by dependence. Carrier really is honest about it. He demonstrates his conclusion, which is NOT that there was no historical Jesus exactly, just that the historical figure is not what Paul had in mind (but maybe Peter did!), and that this historical figure is not the source of the Jesus presented in the Gospels, at best, some history is an additional source to Jesus in the Gospels, along with scripture and myth. The way I state it is as follows: An ancient source reports: one day a fox came to a field and saw a large bunch of ripe purple grapes on the tree. He jumped and jumped to get the grapes, and failed to reach them. As he walked away, he said to himself "those grapes were probably sour anyway". Now what can we know about the historical fox? It is quite remarkable feat of thinking for an animal like a fox, and if the fox actually spoke, it would be miraculous. Given that it was attested that the fox jumped to get the grapes, and knowing that grapes were common in Greece, it is safe to say that the historical fox was jumping, and the goal was to get the grapes. Although some scholars dispute that the grapes were purple, as it makes more sense for the latter confusion with immature and green grapes, if the grapes were green throughout. Most scholars conclude that the report that the fox then spoke are probably exaggerated. The historical fox probably simply walked away from the grapes without saying anything, or at least without saying anything clear, so the only clue Aesop could have had to conclude that this is what the fox was thinking must have been by the manner in which the historical fox walked away. I hypothesize that the fox shook his head, and made a whimpering noise of a sort, leading Aesop to conclude that the fox was hungry, and disappointed, but rationalizing the disappointment in this way. I also hypothesize that the historical fox never ate grapes again, due to this experience. I am sure that the fox in reality did not get the grapes by the criterion of embarrassment, it is quite embarrassing to make up such a remarkable fox that is nontheless unable to get grapes from a tree. Why is my discussion ridiculous? Do foxes not exist? Would they not jump for grapes? It is ridiculous, because the tale is obviously not a history, it is a parable illustrating an important lesson. The Gospel stories are written to illustrate an even more important lesson, namely that the cultic sacrifice of Judaism has ended, and the Christian religion has salvation and immortality without a direct requirement of Jerusalem temple worship. The sacrifice of Jesus parallels the passover sacrifice and the Yom Kippur sacrifice, as explained by Carrier, and all aspects of Jesus ministry serve an allegorical purpose in describing the manner in which Christianity sets itself apart from Judaism. The death of Jesus is symbolic and meaningful, all aspects of his life are presaged in the old testament. Any attempt at deducing what the historical Jesus was like is simply as hopeless as deducing what Aesop's fox was like. While it is possible that there was a historical fox, it is not a bet a rational person would make, nor is it particularly possible to know what that fox was doing.
1. Yes, I include myself in “lots of training”, but my training wasn’t through school. I’m not an experimentalist. I “rediscovered” the Baysian stuff in grad school for myself (nobody taught me, I mean), and I reviewed some experimental papers much later, to make sure I wasn’t crazy, after I realized this probability stuff was called “Baysianism”, so I got the hang of it pretty quickly, on my own, without any authority telling me anything. Rediscovery is the normal way to know something deeply. I used the method about 10 years ago to argue about another controversial case where all experts agree (in my opinion, completely wrongly), which is the case of Shakespeare and Marlowe, whether Marlowe was alive and wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
In the case of Marlowe/Shakespeare, unlike Jesus and history, I had to give a 100/1 prior AGAINST this hypothesis (at least) coming in, because Marlowe faking his death starts out so WEIRD as a hypothesis. But then the stylometric evidence (comparing style markers in Marlowe Shakespeare) is so statistically strong, so quantitative and so easy to make precise, that it overcomes this prior very easily, and immediately pushes you to 100/1 for, and better, as more stylistic points of agreement come in and they all match precisely. The publication of “The Shakespeare Guide to Italy” close the case for me, as it made the discrepancies in the historical record for the Marlovian idea disappear. This is where I realized the power of Baysianism, it really resolved this question in the a-priori surprising direction.
2. The 2/3 is not a frequentist calculation, or a calculation of ANY SORT. It is simply describing how good I consider this evidence SUBJECTIVELY in my head. it is asking the question “What confidence does my subjective probability get from seeing agreement of Nazareth from the four Gospels”.
This 2/3 factor is what Carrier calls the a-fortiori estimate, meaning, I’m bending over backwards to make this evidence into as big a deal as possible. It isn’t really what my personal estimate is, my true factor is actually between 5/6 and 10/11, meaning hardly anything at all. I prefer to say it in “log” terms, so that it’s additive and not multiplicative. The “free energy” of this evidence (log P) is .1, give or take, and a-fortiori at most 1. The “free energy” of the remaining evidence in the Gospels from agreement is of the same order, with fluctuating signs, so in the end, the sum is a wash, it is basically 0, give or take order 1, so nothing at all. To say something with confidence you need at least 3 or 4 free energy.
One must not try to justify these calculations too much, because they are not calculations in a traditional sense, as too many factors enter into it. They are quantifications of judgement, they tell you how I am thinking. But the nice thing about the numbers is that they also tell me how YOU are thinking, and it allows me to correct your mistakes, so that the discussion isn’t stuck.
For example, your statement that you are 95% sure it is a geographic term is manifestly INCORRECT, not just an opinion, and I will show the power of Baysian evidence by arguing it, now that I get your opinion.
Remember that in this assessment of how likely the Nazorean is to be geographical, you aren’t allowed to assume historicity, you must compare the two hypotheses within historicity and a-historicity. Assuming historicity, I AGREE WITH YOU, it is true that the Nazorean is around 80-90% likely to be a place marker. But we are trying to find evidence for historicity, so you need to compare the “fit” of Nazorean to a place under historicity with the “fit” of Nazorean to something else OR to a place under mythicism (both are possible), and in the end take the ratio of how good the “fit” of this is for the two cases (or the difference in free energy) to say how good this evidence is. Under no circumstances is this 2 free energy units, it isn’t even 1, it is about .1-.2. That’s a judgement call.
The reason this is better than saying “I guess” is that you can CRITICISE THE GUESS, much as I did before, and you can see how the DIFFERENT PIECES OF EVIDENCE FIT TOGETHER TO REACH A CONCLUSION without having to guess at the precise method of judgement of the author. You also can incorporate precise evidence (like stylometry) into history, and use the precise evidence with its proper power. The stylometric evidence of Shakespeare and Marlowe matching has wrongly not been considered strong historical evidence by historians.
Your use of Baysianism is in precise large data sets, and is not likely to be very good for this. So your experience is really useless. You need to think of everything you do as baysianism, and live your life as if every decision is a baysian decision. When you start to do this, you quickly learn to translate your subjective judgements into Baysian factors (or free energy factors) and communicate these judgements precisely. Not to give them a veneer of objectivity, simply to make your subjective judgement clearly communicable, and easily understandable.
3. PHILOSOPHY:
The philosophy of probability is a thorny issue. I am a LOGICAL POSITIVIST (physicist), and I don’t consider the philosophical question valid. The interpretation of probability is not a meaningful question really, as it is not approachable by the senses. But if you force me to answer whether I am a frequentist, I would say I am a Baysian, not a frequentist.
But there is still a frequency interpretation of probability, which is the convergence of frequency in many trials, which is just true, it is independent of philosophy. This is what Carrier is using, and because he is enamored with the numbers, he tries to justify everything by hypotheticals with many trials.
This isn’t WRONG, it just is OVERLY objective-seeming, meaning it makes the act of judgement involved less overtly obvious. I consider this slightly dishonest, so I don’t do it, I just state the bald probabilities. But Carrier has to pass peer review, and he has to justify himself more, and this kind of thing is simply not significant. It is not incorrect, just slightly makes the numbers seem more iron-clad than they are.
I should point out that if Carrier is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, then he is really doing a crappy job, because nobody is getting fooled. He really is trying to methodologically answer a question of “how do you find out when expert opinion is being clouded by authority, rather than by neutral best-evaluation of existing evidence?” Making the experts put their priors and probabilities on the table allows you to see how the conclusion is achieved, and removes the ability to obfuscate by authority.
I advocate, with Carrier, the use of Baysian analysis to explain subjective judgements, because this is what Baysianism is good at doing. This allows different people to understand each other, and to correct each other, and for the judgements to converge, because it really is the correct calculus of subjective judgement, much as first order logic is the correct calculus of mathematical inference.
2. That’s not my argument. It doesn’t matter if you convert to a log or not. The mistake is that in order to get 95% you are a-priori assuming historicity, and asking “What does Nazorean mean under historicity”. You conclude it is a reference to Nazareth with 95% confidence. Then after you get the 95% confidence, you are circularly using this confidence to argue backward for historicity, what is the probability that the same place name would be used in all the Gospels and the Epistles to refer to Christians, and you get confidence for historicity. Then you are even more confident of the place-name identification, and so on and so on. The reinforcing loop allows you to conclude your 95% confidence is correct, and also historicity is correct. This is how false judgements are propagated in history. It is not the proper procedure to evaluate evidence. This is the confirmation bias fallacy— your hypothesis has confirmed itself through it’s own conclusions circularly, in a self-consistent loop. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong necessarily, just that your confirmation bias intuition leads you to overestimate it’s likelihood.
To show you the fallacy, let me argue that “There is no dark matter”. First, assume that there is no dark matter, then I need to explain rotation curves of galaxies. This leads me to MOND theory, so that I get a new accelaration for a given tiny force. Now assuming MOND, I reproduce the galaxy curves, so I get high confidence in the precise MOND parameters. Now I look at the rotation curves and ask “What is the probability that I would reproduce the exact curves from MOND?” It’s a-priori very small, but I reproduce the curves exactly! But I fit the MOND parameters from these very curves, so this is confirmation bias, it isn’t evidence. I would get the same results from standard General Relativity and dark matter, and this involves no ad-hoc MOND assumptions.
Likewise, for your “place-name” identification, you assumed historicity. Now suppose you assume non-historicity, that means, you need to make yourself mentally sure that Jesus was a myth (temporarily), and ask yourself “What is the probability that Nazorean derives from Nazareth now?” You know that this is a myth, you know that Mark wrote the Gospel as fiction. So he made up the town from something pre-existing. You know that Matthew Luke and John are responses to Mark (and to each other), and you ask “What is the probability that they would produce the same place-name?” The probability is now very close to 100%. Under this assumption, you know “Nazareth” is either made up or comes from “Nazorean”, and you simply don’t know where “Nazorean” comes from. Now you look linguistically at the match of “Nazorean” and “Nazareth”, and you are only 50% confident that it’s a place name, perhaps even less.
So when you say “I’m 95% sure that Nazorean refers to Nazareth”, you have simply argued circularly. You need to make sure that you use this fact once and only once, and that you consider the mythicist point of view thoroughly. As evidence, it is weak soup.
3. I have NOT missed the point, I am telling you that the distinction between the two philosophies you read in the literature is ridiculously overblown, due to the history of work on probability.
The Baysian method was criticized in the 19th century (unfairly), so a new philosophy was set up which gave a different, more objective seeming, basis to probability than what Bayes and Laplace gave. The philosophy was used to argue for objective tests to replace the subjective Baysian tests. The name for the philosophy behind these tests was “frequentist”.
In point of fact, you can justify all these tests on Baysian terms, and conversely you can justify Baysian reasoning on frequentist terms, they are just not incompatible philosophies. They were only made to seem so because of philosophical debate in an academic field. So criticizing people’s philosophy is not the right thing to do, you should post your own Baysian estimators for the conclusions you reach, as Carrier advocates, and stop nitpicking his philosophy, which is just weird, not wrong.
So your claim is that you can be 95% confident that Nazorean is derived from a place name, without any assumptions, just based on the word? This is a disingenuous position.
I was assuming you were sincere, not making rhetoric. When you do Baysian stuff, you need to stay honest with yourself and with others, not say “Oh, look how easy it would be to make up nonsense and reach nonsense conclusions”. Yes, that’s true. That’s why you need to do it honestly, and not take the probability estimates coming out as objective or too definitive, unless they are overwhelming (like 5 sigma or something).
I wouldn’t know how you would reach a conclusion of 95% confidence on Nazoreans by any method that does not presume historicity, so I just assumed that’s how you got it. Now I realize you were just playing devil’s advocate, and you really don’t attach that confidence to the conclusion. I have to tell you, please stop doing that. I KNOW and everyone knows, that Baysian estimates aren’t immune to devil’s advocacy unless the evidence is extremely strong, you can get different conclusions.
Regarding the “higher order effects”, these are the nebulous coming together of disparate pieces of evidence to produce more confidence than any one piece individually. Unfortunately, in the case of Jesus, this simply does not happen. If you are honest with the coming together of evidence, it is the exact same coming together that is expected on mythicism, it is no more unexpected in mythicism, and it is not evidence. The additional synchronicity of evidence only seems to happen when you have some ignorance about the background, when your background makes the myth sources for the stories not understood, for example, when you think that the crucifiction is embarrassing, or when you think that the ministry is important, or when you presume a historical interpretation to Nazorean and so on.
I wasn’t trying to snow you with the MOND example, just give an example of how you can reach false conclusions with probability. I will point out that we both agree that it’s not 95% likely that the Nazorean refers to Nazareth (without assuming historicity), so we reached agreement on this datum with a little back and forth. This is what Carrier advocates Baysian methods for. Sorry for misspelling everything, I have no dictionary in the asylum, and Wanda-June keeps misinterpreting my poo-stain writing.
I agree that a historical interpretation leads to a different, less spiritual and more literal, view of God, but what can you do about it? It happens gradually, it’s not a purposeful conspiracy, and it’s not exactly a deliberate lie, both because everyone believes their own stories, and also because eventually the believer in the community realizes what communion is all about, and what the body of Christ is in the congregation, and the two beliefs, the literal resurrection and the spiritual resurrection coexist side by side, as they coexist today.
Whether you can see it or not is not really important, the important question is what happened historically. Historically, this is with high likelihood more or less what happened, as Carrier argues well.
Christians can’t have been tempted to remove the cross, as the cross is central event: it’s the sacrifice that ends blood sacrifice. It is what sets Christianity apart from both Judaism and the barbaric Roman order. How do you get more converts by denying the main event? You are not gaining converts by denying the cross, you are converting your religion to something which is the opposite.
I don’t understand— there is absolutely nothing that can convince me that the events of the resurrection are historically true material events. I would not believe such a preposterous story even if I saw it with my own eyes. No event in my mind can possibly change this, as events in the mind simply do not constitute the class of evidence that I accept for changing the beliefs I hold regarding material world. For that, I require instrument readings, quantum mechanics, mathematical laws, S-matrices, that kind of stuff, stuff that is generally irrelevant to ethics.
Likewise, there is absolutely nothing that can lead me to deny that the events of the resurrection are spiritually true insights, as for this class of events, revelation is sufficient evidence, if it can be supplemented with reason and made consistent with ethical teachings that are universal, as I have become sure that this insight is. In this regard, I personally confidently attest to the truth of at least the most central parts of the Christian doctrine. I also try to explain it in a more atheistic-friendly way, as I can do that, having been an atheist before and during my “conversion”. This is not to deny the truth of other religious doctrines, mind you, just to attest that I am pretty sure I personally get it regarding Christianity, and I can explain the doctrine to atheists. I don’t know why you are taking my word for this, because, although I am not lying, I can’t prove it to anyone else very well. I did explain it to other atheists at great length, and I think I was able to get some of them to “see the light”, so to speak. I don’t think you would like the discussion, as it is focused on ambiguities in game theory, large computable ordinals, and teleology in evolutionary dynamics of complex systems, with the revelation being an exegesis of these rather abstract objects and ideas, and their direct relevance to undermining any unethical power-structures in society.
I think it is absurd to think that a spiritual event had to occur in a scientifically impossible way in the material world in order for it to be true. God is not something revealed in miracles in the material world, God is revealed in miracles of the mind. No spiritual event can possibly force a person to renounce rational scientific thought, because any true insights can’t possibly be incompatible with precise logical thinking about nature.
When I got the religious business, as an atheist, I actually got a little angry, because I felt that the doctrine of faith in existing presentations make it needlessly difficult for scientifically minded people. If you insist that a convert must renounce their rationally developed model of evidence about the material world, they are just never going to listen to you, no matter what. I personally never listened to Christians at all, I really thought they were crazy for denying scientific laws are universal.
Supposing the only two choices available were “deny all Christian spiritual teaching” or “deny material truth of scientific insights”, I would be torn. I don’t know which to defend harder, as both are essential insights. It’s really dependent on circumstances. If I were living in Ancient Rome, I would deny science first, because it seems that the corruption of the material order by the monstrously evil power-structure in that horrific empire would require ethical insights be placed first. Perhaps our modern power structure is similarly evil enough. But if I were llving in reneissance Europe, I would insist on the scientific view first, because that is what was required at that time, to advance the study of the material world. But TODAY, I don’t see any reason to deny one or the other when you can have both.
Of course nothing can convince me, and nothing should convince YOU either, because it’s a mentally retarded story for children. Paul is talking about a revealed resurrection. I have nothing further to say to you, except that if you believe that Jesus walked around as a zombie, you need to seek medical help, because you are mentally ill.
Carrier is a meticulous researcher, the best in the field by far, and is the only one who understands Christian theology as deeply as actual Christian theologians.
But I am not Carrier and I did not make the claim that Jesus was a “Pure spirit being” (neither does Carrier). Jesus was incarnated in a body, but whether that body was in the heavens or on Earth, which I think is debatable, nobody claims to know him. Jesus was in an anonymous slave’s body, an insignificant body, except for getting crucified, and the historical Jesus, whether he was in the celestial sphere or on Earth, was simply not considered important by either Peter or Paul. Carrier is persuaded that the events happened in the celestial sphere, but this is not necessary, as they could have been imagined on Earth too, or in both places synchronously, or it might have been left vague.
I read the entirety of the New Testament documents long before reading Carrier, and I don’t read atheist blogs, nor do I consider myself an atheist exactly. I don’t believe in the HISTORICAL Jesus, I believe that the RISEN JESUS is the sole cause of Christianity. The risen Jesus doesn’t need a historical body, He is powerful enough to manufacture a body for himself by getting his followers to modify the historical record, which is exactly what He seems to have done. Only honest Christians and theologians, and Richard Carrier, ascribe to the risen Jeuss enough power to write his own story into history without any material events to inspire them. I assure you that the spiritual Jesus can easily do that, and to deny that it can be done, to require a historical material source, is to deny the spiritual power of Jesus to transcend material circumstances.
If you think a real teacher had to be there to inspire the story and tradition, your faith in the power of Jesus is extraordinarily empoverished. Do you REALLY think the risen Jesus, the same risen Jesus that defeated the power of Rome and converted a billion people, couldn’t get four people to write and synchronize fictional biographies of him in 80 AD and get them accepted as history? That is a lack of faith.
It is hard to argue that Paul and Peter thought of Jesus as anything more than an anonymously incarnated divinity who got crucified to save our sins. Peter didn’t know Jesus personally, or if he thought he did, he didn’t know that THIS particular person, rather than that, was Jesus. He didn’t have a particular historical person in mind, he possibly left it open, or he might have been adamant that Jesus was in the celestial realm. I don’t know, and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. In either case, Jesus is not historical. Carrier makes a stronger claim, that we can know that the incarnation and crucifiction were initially purely celestial events, and he might be right, but the strength of the evidence for this is less than the evidence against historicity. Mythicism does not ride on the celestial interpretation.
Nobody knows who Jesus is, and that’s the way it always was, and the way it should be. The “homeless Jesus” sculpture is more appropriate than any other depiction to the view of the original founders.
A logical positivist cannot be converted by infantile stories of obviously impossible material events, but still, an atheist can follow the teachings of a mythical Jesus more assiduously than the typical theist follows what they believe is the historical one.
So I would suggest to the Christian, if they wish to save the atheist’s soul, to explain why the myth is worth emulating, rather than arguing that it is historically valid, which can’t possibly work to convert atheists, because it isn’t.
Carrier’s is an egotistical narcissist. So what. He’s right about Jesus.
His ego is a function of working hard in relative isolation on something counterintuitive and important. If he didn’t have an ego, he wouldn’t be out there challenging conventions. Progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Nobody is more well studied or better informed than Carrier, because Carrier is the only one that actually gets a part of the profound depth of Christian theology. He understands Isiah 53 is a prophecy of messiah, that it predates the Gospel and inspires it, in that the messiah is prophesied to suffer and die in Jewish sources, so that the death of the Messiah is not embarassing to all Jews. He understands the role that Jesus’s blood sacrifice plays in removing the temple from Jewish life, and he has a tremendous grasp of both the original sources and the modern scholarly literature, which he has actually read thoroughly and independently. This is more than can be said for his critics, who think that the Christian theology is an ad-hoc imposition constrained to fit to historical events. Historical events are never so convenient to fit a pre-existing theology so well.
Carrier understands the main point— that it is not the incidental portions of the gospel story that are used to justify Christian religion, it is the main arc. Nothing about the story is incidental or accidental, nothing is embarrassing, all of it is essential, every last little bit. This makes it more likely myth, not history.
His conclusions are not at all the opposite of Christian scholars. He AGREES with the fundamentalist Christians about Isiah 53 (and he is right, unlike later Jewish commentators— he argues correctly using the 1st century Targum that the chapter refers to the Messiah), he AGREES with fundamentalist Christians that Christ is seen as a manifestation of God right from the beginning (other secular scholars have to make Jesus a man first, God later). Unlike other secular scholars, he takes seriously how WELL Jesus fulfils prophesy, including ALL the old testament sources and parallels to the NT sources, and his analysis is meticulous.
He also understands what “most parsimonious hypothesis” means. When Paul says “according to scriptures”, the most parsimonious hypothesis is not “according to gospels”, because these are not yet written. The proper interpretation is “according to OT scripture”. Carrier shows you the proper scriptural basis for this claim, and also the claim of revelation. Your arguments are refuted in his book, without any use of Bayesian method, simply because you have no idea what you are talking about and he explains this clearly in simple English, no math.
Regarding the Bayesian method, he does it reasonably well, with a few caveats I list below. Baysianism is simply a quantitative version of the heurisitic weighing of evidence that one does in a courtroom or history lesson, and the only purpose he uses it for is to make the underlying arguments clear. He does not give false precision regarding his numbers, his ranges are all over the place. But in all, he is relatively fair to the opposition, by giving very small Bayesian weights to either side. If you wish to argue the other case, you had better say what pieces of evidence, or what confluence of evidence, you attach strong Bayesian weight for historicity using. Good luck, because there isn’t any.
If you demand that I quibble on the use of Bayesianism, I do have some quibbles. Although these quibbles are incidental, and don’t change his conclusions very much.
I personally prefer to use log-factors to do Baysianism, as is standard in physics. These log-factors were introduced by Turing in WWII (probably others too, it’s like free energy in physics). The log-factor is how much better each evidence fits a given hypothesis as compared to the others, and only the difference in log-factor matters. Then you determine how much more likely hypothesis A is compared to hypothesis B by adding the log factors together for the hypotheses, and the exponential of this tells you the confidence. It’s a simpler methodology than using multiplicative factors, as Carrier does.
There are two problems with Bayesian analysis. The first is dishonest people— Bayesianism is a tool that can be used to derive false confidence from 10 pieces of evidence each with probability 1/2. You can conclude that the 10 pieces together give a 1 in 1024 chance of a hypothesis being wrong, when you are missing that they are not independent, and a proper alternative hypothesis can explain all 10 pieces from just one all-encompasing idea. An example would be if you found DNA at a crime scene, and matched it to a suspect with 99.9999% confidence using 20 alleles, but ignored that the suspect has an identical twin, who would also match all these alleles. In the case of DNA, one has easy ways to understand correlations in populations, it is much harder to know the correlations between evidence in history, because it depends on the dating and dependence of the sources. Carrier sidesteps this by telling you his assumptions on dating and dependence, and his probabilities are always global, they come at the end of the chapter, by putting together the historical discussion. He doesn’t use micro-probability false-accurate numbers to drive the conclusion, as dishonest Bayesians do. I have to commend him here.
The other problem is simply that there are too many alternative hypotheses to consider, including ones that you just never thought of. This means it requires a long back and forth to make sure your conclusions are reasonable, letting other people propose explanations for the discrepancies which might make the implausibility go away, and not to take the numbers in intermediate stages too seriously. The probability can fluctuate wildly between what looks like “superficially impossible” and “superficially certain”, back and forth, all based on small changes in how you weigh the evidence in light of new explanations. It is this property that makes different experts reach different conclusions regarding historicity, the evidence, with slightly different Baysian weights, will lead to completely different firm opinions that superficially seem to be solidly based on the evidence.
The cure for this is humility, which Carrier displays in just the proper amount sufficient fo honest academic work. The Baysian factors need to be honestly estimated, as they tell you the summary of a person’s judgement and experience. Carrier is putting his judgement on the line, by publishing his Baysian factors, which lets you see EXACTLY how he is thinking. This makes it easy to criticize him, because he is transparent, while his non-numerical colleagues are opaque. But this is his virtue, and their vice.
My only nitpick with his conclusion is that he doesn’t consider the “incidental Jesus” idea, the idea that Jesus incarnated on Earth anonymously, and got crucified anonymously. This needs to be added to the “minimal mythicist” hypothesis of a celestial crucifiction in order to produce the “most minimal mythicist” hypothesis. His rejection of this idea is facile in chapter 4, he says that if Jesus was on Earth, but as an unimportant person, he would expect Peter to want to know more about him, or to say something about this. I don’t think this conclusion is firm, because he has not considered the idea that Peter’s Jesus was a specific but anonymous “everyman”, like the contemporary “homeless Jesus” sculpture depicts. This is partially consistent with Paul’s description of Jesus incarnating as a slave, but it is not consistent with certain references to a heavenly crucifiction. I would put the odds on celestial crucifiction vs. anonymous crucifiction as only 2:1 or 3:1, meaning that Carrier’s version of a crucifiction and resurrection in the celestial sphere is not supported by as strong evidence as the rest of his case (but it is supported).
Regarding your ridiculous idea that Christians would admit something under torture, you are presuming that there would be some underhanded secret to admit! That presumes that historicity is what the early Christians believed, right from the start. It is preposterous to assume that historicity is the only thing that could inspire Christians to resist Roman barbarity, it is INSULTING to religious faith. No faith ever comes from history, it comes from the mind. The Jews who fought Rome in the three Jewish wars were not going by historical example to resist, and they were tortured and murdered far worse. Just because your faith is too weak to suffer and die for a pure idea with no historical basis, don’t presume that all others are similarly cravenly.
A mythical Jesus is not a conspiracy, it is a description of the growth of a religion with a crucified mythical messiah figure at the start. The mythicist position of Carrier is extraordinarily Jewish in character, as the mythical Jesus is derived from Isiah 53, from mesianic literature, and from the rituals of the temple. I would suggest you read Carrier’s book instead of repeating ignorant statements about mythicists.
I don’t like rules in general, and you are not a good enforcer. I won’t post here only because I have nothing further to say, but you really should chill out. There was no hostility here.
God isn’t a magic person in the sky, it lives in a different place than we do. That’s the Platonic idealized realm of pure mathematics, the world of abstract computer programs, the same place that the number “pi” lives, and the idealized perfect geometrical circle. It’s a very abstract idea, an idealization of perfect absolute morality. It is based on the concept of superrationality, and it can be idealized as having perfect knowledge about every one of us, because it is a Platonic idealization, and it can be idealized as having desires about our personal behaviors, because a consistent moral calculus attributes a utility to all actions. A Platonic idea like this just can’t do supernatural magic, but it can alter people’s minds and actions.
The only impact God can have on the world is through people’s ideas changing and converging, and people acting in concert to make change, as they did during the Christian revolution in the 1st-6th centuries. This change was so profound, that it had the effect of God inserting himself into history as a fake historical person. It is physically impossible for any spiritual God to insert himself into history literally.
I don’t use authority to substantiate ideas. The above ideas, if not found in earlier sources, are mine. If you want a citation to myself, I can provide.
Past authority and sounding-good-to-you are not the only two options for validating ideas. Otherwise new ideas would never come, especially the new ideas that don’t sound good to anyone. I would recommend learning mathematics to see how to properly validate ideas. The paragraphs you seek a citation for constitute a definition of the otherwise undefined word “God”, which everyone seems to have a different opinion about.
The definition I gave for God might be surprising to you, because it isn’t what you usually hear, but this definition is not usually surprising to religious people in general, at least those that aren’t children. As Pope Francis recently said “God is not a magician with a magic wand”. God feeds the hungry not by magic, but by motivating people to feed the hungry.
Religious people don’t usually sit around and wait for miracles, most religious people are not fundamentalists, and do not need to believe in literal miracles. God is what I said above, no magic, no miracles, just absolute ethics. I know, because God came down from heaven and told me. I don’t need to do anything more than assert, because it’s a definition. It’s a good definition, because once you understand it, religious people stop sounding crazy and start sounding sensible
The reason it is confusing is because fundamentalists conflate it with something else, something impossible— a world creating magic person. That’s just a gimmick for children. Whoever seriously believes that crap is mentally ill. Unfortunately, most religious people hardly ever say what I just said point blank, because they don’t want to offend fundamentalists. I don’t care about offending fundamentalists, you need to understand that religious people are not talking about anything supernatural (at least in those cases where they are making sense).
That was a joke, silly. I got it from a rather vivid hallucination of the risen Jesus, like Paul. The hallucination came after reading Sade’s “The 120 Days of Sodom” cover to cover, and I recommend that book for the experience. That’s more or less the truth, although of course, I wouldn’t have taken this hallucination seriously if it didn’t come with a stone-cold rational solid ethical argument.
Will made zero impact before the publication of Venus and Adonis. Idiot.
Pi also only exists in the human imagination as an abstract idea, but it is still undeniably true that the sum of the reciprocal odd numbers in order with alternating signs converges to pi/4. The fact that something is abstract doesn’t make it less “real” or less important. I am trying to explain the important idea behind the concept of God, perhaps ineptly. That’s the reason I wrote a lot.
I am not trying to start a cult following. I possibly could if I tried really hard, I have a vague inkling of an idea of how to go about it, but it’s a stupid thing to do. I prefer to think about science most of the time, not religion. Anyway, it would be extraordinarily time consuming and dangerous, I mean, look what happened to L. Ron Hubbard. Also, I don’t think that 2015 is the time for starting cults and religions, it is the time to end them, and replace them with something more modern.
What I am trying to do is to explain to ignorant atheist commentators what God is REALLY all about, so they don’t make fools of themselves arguing against the wrong thing, you know, the straw-man supernatural universe creating smiting God, you know, that God that’s easy to argue against, and has nothing to do with modern religions. When atheists really get it, like Lunacharsky got it (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… ), only then can they can begin to understand how to REPLACE the ideas of ossified religions without throwing away the core thing, the main idea.
I do enjoy reading my own writing, or else I wouldn’t write it, but these stupid comments I write quickly.
I do not follow any existing religion, I am telling you that it is NOT crazy, because there is a real idea behind it that you can’t see. An abstract idea, a very difficult idea, but a REAL idea, like pi, and if you don’t get it, you can’t criticize it properly. Your arguments sound like “How can pi exist, when every circle has a different circumference?” You just don’t understand the concept of God.
I wrote an intro to God here: http://christianity.stackex… (you need to scroll down, but there are interesting discussions there). The point of the monotheistic Jewish God (and also other versions of the monotheistic God) is as an abstraction of absolute perfect morality. All of these ideas are fundamentally equivalent as ideas, like different infinite series which converge to pi, although they come with completely different stories and traditions (like different series have different terms). The concept is sensible, and needs to be internalized, and it is not crazy, despite your superficial impression, and despite the craziness of the ancient stories that illustrate the concept.
The internet was not created by capitalism. It was created in universities, at CERN, and other solely government sponsored projects, and all it’s software was designed by free software people. Capitalism has been an impediment to its development, as the enforcement of copyright has prevented file sharing, idiotic patents hampered free software development, and corporate bodies wrote crappy inferior software. The only time that capitalism helped spread internet was in the 1990s, when the ISPs and companies were small. Once they were monopolized, they became stupid and useless.
The point Orwell was making with his pigs was that the Soviet Communists were indistinguishable from the Capitalist oppressors, they were only different in the words they abused to justify the oppression. An oppressor class is an oppressor class no matter what the label. Orwell hated Capitalism for the same reason he hated Communism, he didn’t like the idea of a small group of people controlling the economy and telling everyone else what to do. He fought for the anarchist POUM in the Spanish Civil War. There is nothing wrong with equating the pigs to the capitalists, because they become indistinguishable from the humans by the end.
Orwell died before English socialism was fully formed. He was opposed to the British system of Free Markets regulated by equally applied rule of law, because it was the architect of the British class system, and the systematic empoverishment of the working class, and various atrocities, from the Irish famine, to Colonial subjugation, and the internment camps of the Boer war.
Through socialism you get economic growth.
Income doesn’t go to producers, it goes to owners. Owners don’t produce anything, except destruction of other industry.
Right. In about 20% of the controvertial cases, the vast majority of relevant experts are full of crap. This is why it is important to do a review, and online it is marginally possible. A second example of a whole world of self-deluding experts is non-Soviet petroleum science, who beleive the stuff is biological. Authority is simply not a valid argument in any circumstance.
There is no effective grassroots support for organizations like ISIS, not even by small minorities in Muslim countries. They are all lonely crazy people. Their funding is coming from an extremely small handful of individual wealthy donors, from commercial and criminal activity, and from state-level spending funnelled to these organizations under pretext of infiltration and spying. If you take a poll in Syria, in Iraq, wherever, there is zero support— the Arab governments universally denounce these organizations, as does every citizen you will ever encounter in real life. It is not reasonable to treat such terrorism as if it were an ongoing intractable clash of large scale social forces when it is a problem produced by an extremely small group of people supporting organized crime with donations and paychecks. Any such criminal organizations can be easily dismantled by directly attacking the funding sources. Nobody in the countries affected would miss them, except those fighters getting paid.
The fact that terrorist organizations exist means that someone likes them. From polling Muslims, you can see it’s not any Arabs or Muslims. But having crazy people with guns around allows a foreigner only donating money to destabilize whatever government it doesn’t like, without consequences, governments in France and governments in Syria. There is no benefit to ISIS from attacks in France, or from anything else that they do, there is only benefit to those who would like a militarized and surveilled West, and a Middle East in chaos. All the Republican candidates wholeheartedly support the war on terror, and point fingers at Muslims. Among the Democratic candidates, it’s just Clinton. She seems to be happy to live in the new world of artificial terrorism that the Bush administration invented. You can’t expect such nonsense to end if you elect those who willingly join in the charade, even if their contribution was the fantasy role-play involved in killing Bin Laden rather than real murder.
All the terrorist attacks in the West since 1990, with the exception of Basque events in Spain which have a long history, are done by groups whose support and funding is not indigenous and whose motives are insincere. These groups are not legitimate popular movements, you haven’t seen that kind of terrorism since the Weathermen, the PLO, the Red Brigades in the 1970s. Unlike these groups, the financing and political support for ISIS is not coming from local people in the region, it ALL comes from outside. These groups would not have formed without Westerners funneling money to them initially, like the Contras. They are hired mercenaries, not terrorists exactly. In the case of Al-Qaeda in the 1980s, it came from the US through the CIA, to destablize the Soviet supported government in Afghanistan. In the case of the Contras, it came from drug-smuggling to the US, and in the case of ISIS, it came from covert efforts to subvert the Syrian government.
The attacks in the US in the 1990s, the WTC bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, are all extremely suspicious, and come with no sensible motive or political purpose. In the case of the Oklahoma City bombing, the attack coincided with an ATF drill for bombs in the same building, make of that what you will. The attack in Africa, the other things are too poorly reported to make any picture of.
There is no Muslim terrorist agenda, there is no goal, there is no cause, there is no support. The only purpose of terrorism is to subvert Western governments, to make them more powerful and more imperialistic, and to make them spend more money on “anti-terrorism”, which paradoxically goes to finance terrorist organizations through paying infiltrators and moles. The cycle of governments self-financing their own threats is similar to the situation depicted by Terry Gilliam in the 1985 movie Brazil.
It’s NOT AT ALL like the IRA, because zero percent of Muslims support these people. the IRA had significant local support among Irish people. You won’t even find a significant minority of Muslims in any nation, aside from those getting paid by ISIS, who support ISIS, they all wish they were gone. That makes it a foreign influence, not a local homegrown group, and it is gaining financial strength through criminal and commercial activity, not through winning friends and influencing people. Nobody supports ISIS except the people it pays and a handful of billionaires and people buying stolen goods and oil who keep the racket going. In a free election, they wouldn’t win even one seat of parliament, unlike the IRA.
ISIS is supported by zero percent of Muslims. Nobody likes them, and those that hate them the most are in the countries most directly affected. This is a fake-grassroots organization, which is financed entirely from outside.
Like ISIS cares about Islamic teachings. They work exclusively through money and terror, not through holy books.
It’s much simpler— you simply have to ask “what percentage of Musims support ISIS?” That percentage is closer to zero than you can measure in a poll, as you will not find any supporters except people who are literally insane, or on ISIS’s payroll. That’s the end of it— you can’t have a popular movement without popular support. ISIS is a creation of whoever is funding it, wealthy billionaires and some governments engaged in realpolitik to weaken other parties in the region. When the financial support dries up, the organization dies.
This is not likely a false flag, because the operatives were killed in a suicide operation, so they needed to be brainwashed young people, not seasoned intelligence agency people. They were likely receiving orders via internet, and getting supplies, guns and suicide vests, from couriers, and only needed to meet up on the day of the attack. France seems to have been immune to such false flags in the past. While ISIS is a Western and Saudi creation, once it acquired independent sources of financing through looting ancient art and oil production, it seems to have a life of its own, and it can no longer be controlled. This attack is probably what people are saying. That is not to say that past events, the ones between 2000 and 2010 are as they seem, those are clearly false flags, as they have reported drills associated to them, in ways that are statistically impossible. I doubt very much there were any drills in Paris on Friday.
EDIT: It seems I was wrong about drills— there was at least one drill involving medical personnel that leaked. It could be an inside job, but then there is probably exactly one way to do it: have one “hostage taking” drill involving three stupid agents who are killed, and have additional agents shoot the theater and the original agents who take the hostages, killing them. The bombs are easy to do with drills too, same as the Boston Bombing. One just has to wait to see if any French leaks about drills come out in the next few weeks.
They don’t give a shit about holy books, they are a creation of the CIA, and are about as Muslim as the National Socialists were Socialists.
You can tell this because their support among muslims is ZERO PERCENT. The only people who join them are brainwashed and deluded, extremely young people, who are suckered by the CIA authored propaganda.
They don’t give a crap about holy books, they are a creation of the CIA, and are about as Muslim as the National Socialists were Socialists.
Their support among muslims is ZERO PERCENT. The
only people who join them are brainwashed and deluded, extremely young people, who are suckered by the CIA authored propaganda. The only people who think they are Muslims are fools in the West, who know nothing about Arab
countries.
They take their terror from passages in the Koran to fool idiot Westerners like yourself, who can’t tell that this nonsense is from the 7th century, and is not done by any Muslim for about as long as Jews stopped stoning people and Christians stopped burning people at the stake.
ISIS used to be run by the CIA, Mossad, and other intelligence agencies, but it isn’t clear it still is. It probably got out of control, but it might still be doing what people in the agencies want. Either way, it has nothing to do with any Muslims, and it must be destroyed.
You mean at the concert hall, idiot, there were no deaths at the Stadium, unless your friend of a friend is a suicide bomber. This isn’t a hoax, it’s either a false flag, or an out of control ISIS doing what it says it is doing.
None of it is real, but these organizations are composed of actually brainwashed 18 year olds, so they can do stupid things sometimes, it’s hard to tell.
There is no innocent regarding ISIS. It is an organization with 0% support in Syria, in Iraq, and in Jordan. It’s entirely a creation of outside intelligence agencies and billionaire angel investors. The “Tin Foil Hat crowd” is you, and your stupid friends.
I never chatted with a “Harry”, but if you want to know the reason, read Richard Stallman on Facebook. It’s a terrible place to be.
Yup. Really. Those polls conflate support for Hizballah and Hamas with support for ISIS. There is ZERO PERCENT SUPPORT for ISIS style groups, they are a creation of Western nations.
What is not fair is that you are making more in the first place. Under perfect competition, you wouldn’t be making any more than anyone else. So it is important to confiscate the money of those who make a lot of it, otherwise the market breaks down. Sorry bub, those are the rules of economics.
The market is based on a concept of a competitive equilibrium— what that means is that when you charge a price, you are controlled by others who can also charge a price and undercut you. The process of competition ensures that everyone’s salary ends up (roughly) equal, at least at full employment, because, to put it bluntly, if someone is making more than you, you start to do what they are doing. It only takes a little bit of surplus people to drive the salary to the mean. An example is computer programming, which used to be lucrative, but now makes an average professional salary.
This prediction, equal compensation for all, is correct in market theory, but it is abusrd in real life— it’s never even close to what happens in real markets. The prediction breaks down in two ways— the first is unemployment. Competition with the unemployed (which don’t exist in a perfect market) leads salaries for certain jobs to plummet. State spending policiy is designed to remove unemployment by monetary policy. This is Keynesianism. The other place it breaks down is where people have extra power to leverage an enormous wage. Where you see large incomes, this competitive mechanism has broken down. For example, a CEO can demand a large compensation without worrying about a lower bid from a guy who sends his resume in to the company to replace him. Likewise for celebrity actors, etc.
These enormous compensations have nothing to do with optimal market conditions, and this is what progressive taxation is designed to fix. It’s to make the market look more like a textbook market, even when you know this is a hopeless fantasy. The two policies together, government spending to remove unemployment, and progressive taxes to make salaries (roughly) equal, together make the market more efficient, because it looks more like a reasonable caricature of the textbook ideal rather than something wildly distorted.
What Bernie Sanders is talking about is the horrific media situation in 1988, which was entirely hopeless, it was the darkest of dark ages. Among all the media outlets, only the highly technical scientific literature reliably told the truth. Even the abysmal Soviet party-censored press was marginally better than the American press in that period, at least when it was reporting on American and South American issues. This issue disappeared for me to a large extend in the early 1990s, as it became obvious that the internet would solve this problem, as it was intrinsically resistant to monopolistic information control in ways that other media is not. This meant one could foresee there the left movement in the US would grow in tandem with the shift to online media, and, although it was delayed by a decade due to 9/11, I think the expression is “Feel the Bern”.
Americans have been by and large very stupid regarding socialism, which makes the public policy debates in the US by and large unlistenable, since ignoring socialism in economics is like ignoring quantum mechanics in physics. Socialism first fairly analyzes the concentration of capital in a few hands, and then gives remedies to undo the damage that this causes. Depending on the remedy, it can lead to fantastic policies, or else to a Soviet nightmare. Economically, Keynsianism is the child of socialism, it is the British and Obama version, but Keynsianism doesn’t work when banks don’t lend money as today, and it is rather anemic compared to the stronger prescriptions that Bernie Sanders offers, which involve breaking up large institutions and creating real competition, along with encouragements to create a real sector of worker owned industry. These proposals have been necessary since the 1980s, they really have the potential to modernize the American economy, but nobody before has had the backbone to introduce them.
It is clear the the financial support for the flat Earth movement is coming from the same place as the UFO movement, from people who are conducting a social experiment on bogus ideas on the internet. It is extremely easy to disprove bogus ideas online, the flat Earth is refuted by the measurement of “how far can I see from a tower”, the law being that the distance the square root of the product of the height of the tower and the radius of the Earth. This law extends from ship mast-towers of 20 meters, where you can see about 10km to airliners at 10 km, where you can see things up to 250 km away. The law is very easy to check today, and it can be done by anyone from a local mountain.
The demolition itself is not hard to do in secret— just hire a team to rig the building up in advance. It can be 5-10 people, and you can hire Israelis, or whoever. I only say Israelis because of the report of dancing Israelis on 9/11. Maybe they set up the demolition. To cover it up is extremely simple, because you say “The demolition system was necessary for public safety, and we have similar systems on the Sears tower, and we want you to keep it secret, because otherwise the Sears tower will become a target”.
As for disguising the rest of the plot, it is done under the cover of drills. Every aspect of 9/11 can be done using drills, as follows:
1. Fake Airliner hijacking drill (to get airplanes)
2. radar blip drill (to confuse air-traffic control)
3. fly drones over the Eastern US
4. Flight simulate crashing airplanes into WTC and Pentagon.
These are individually harmless drills. But then your conspirator just rearranges things slightly— the simulation from drill 4 is attacked to the drones of drill 3, and the radar blip drill, drill 2, is used to swap the drones of drill 3 with the airliners of drill 1 to make the flight paths seem continuous. Then the attack carries itself out.
The complete evidence that the attack is an inside job is that these exact drills were taking place on 9/11, on the morning, simultaneous with the attacks. They were widely reported in the mainstream press, but of course, you wouldn’t consider this information anything more than a crazy coincidence unless you know how to pull of a false flag like this.
To arrange the death of crew and passengers, you have to do a little bit of shifting of boarding at the gate, which can be justified as part of the drill, and you can also land the now untracked airliners, and transfer passengers, until they are all on flight 93 (actually flight 11 in terms of airplain used). Then you shoot flight 93 down, and this is the other cover up.
The statistical coincidence is impossible without it being a false flag, so that’s the end of the story. Regarding the “conspiracy”, there IS NO CONSPIRACY. All of this is done by whoever organized the drills, essentially working alone. I’ll let you look up who was in charge of that morning’s drill yourself, but I assure you it will not come as a surprise— it was a well known balding neoconservative figure with a pacemaker.
There is no alternative argument, there is no other possibility. The attack was an inside job, but only the demolition and shoot-down of flight 93 were covered up intentionally, the rest seems to be a mysterious attack, coinciding spookily with drills to simulate such an attack, even to the government and those investigating. Bush was probably clueless about this.
Demolition is not quite enough to demonstrate that the attack was an inside job. All that it does is establish a cover-up of the demolition. That the demolition happened is completely obvious, given the physics and chemistry, but it is not in itself indicative of anything much. For all you know, all high-profile high-rises are rigged to be demolished in case of terror attack, to prevent them falling over and killing more people in case of collapse. That’s a terrible thing to keep secret, but that’s not the same as saying America attacked itself.
The main problem is to persuasively explain that it WAS an inside job. This is not done using the demolition evidence, it just isn’t strong enough. To establish the inside job, you absolutely need to examine the drills of that day. Those confirm that it was done in pretty much the only way that it could be done, at least, the only way that doesn’t involve a massive conspiracy. The method I explain below doesn’t involve any conspiracy at all, it can be the plan of one person, the rest all believe they are simply doing their job for a scheduled military exercise, a military drill.
The demolition itself is not hard to do in secret— just hire a team to rig the building up in advance. It can be 5-10 people, and you can hire Israelis, or whoever. I only say Israelis because of the report of dancing Israelis on 9/11. Maybe they set up the demolition. To cover it up is extremely simple, because you say “The demolition system was necessary for public safety, and we have similar systems on the Sears tower, and we want you to keep it secret, because otherwise the Sears tower will become a target”.
As for the rest of the plot, every aspect of 9/11 can be arranged, planned and paid for, from within the government, using four simultaneous drills:
1. Fake Airliner hijacking drill (to get airplanes)
2. radar blip drill (to confuse air-traffic control)
3. fly drones over the Eastern US
4. Flight simulate crashing airplanes into WTC and Pentagon.
These drills are individually harmless, nobody doing them would suspect that they have anything to do with terrorism. But then your lone conspirator, who is in charge of these drills just changes things slightly— the simulation from drill 4 is attached to the drones of drill 3, and the radar blip drill, drill 2, is used to swap the drones of drill 3 with the airliners of drill 1 to make the flight paths seem continuous. Then the attack carries itself out.
The complete evidence that the attack is an inside job is that these exact drills were taking place on 9/11, on the morning, inexplicably simultaneous with the attacks. These drills (at least 3 of them) were widely reported in the mainstream press, but of course, you wouldn’t consider this information anything more than a crazy coincidence. Once you understand how to pull it off, it becomes overwhelming evidence of an inside job.
To arrange the death of crew and passengers on the planes, you have to do a little bit of shifting of boarding at the gate, which can be justified as part of the drill, to get the flight 77 passengers on flight 93, perhaps also flight 175 and 11, and you can also land the now untracked airliners, and transfer passengers from flight until they are all on flight 93 (it’s actually flight 11 in terms of the airplane used). Then you shoot flight 93 down, and this is the other cover up. Both cover-ups are normal government nonsense, one to protect safety, the other to protect the military from civil liability.
The statistical coincidence of drills and attack is impossible without it being a false flag, so that’s the end of the story. Regarding the “conspiracy”, there IS NO CONSPIRACY NECESSARY. All of this is done by whoever organized the drills, essentially working alone. I’ll let you look up who was in charge of all that morning’s drills yourself, but I assure you it will not come as a surprise— it was a well known balding neoconservative figure with a pacemaker. The modern information tools make it possible to do much more effective false flags, if you have the drills you need to pull them off in secret.
There is no counter-argument to this, there is no other possibility, the attack simply WAS an inside job, no ifs ands or buts. Still, only the demolition and shoot-down of flight 93 were covered up intentionally. The only concrete evidence this kind of thing leaves is an attack that coincides spookily with a drill to simulate a VERY SIMILAR attack. That’s all you would see in public, and that’s all you would see if you were investigating. Bush was probably clueless about this, the 9/11 commission was clueless, the only thing they covered up intentionally was the demolition, and possibly the shoot-down of flight “93”, if they knew about it.
That doesn’t excuse the commission members from culpability, nor does it excuse the Bush administration. The solution to a covert attack in the US is a public review of all secret documents and drills, and an investigation of all administration officials, not sheilding people from scrutiny and shredding the official relevant documents, which is what Bush and co did.
Richard Carrier has explained how to weigh evidence like this for a completely different case, in “Proving History” and “On the Historicity of Jesus”, and in Carrier’s case, the evidence is ancient, and has much lower quality. The method is Bayesian inference, and the quality of the evidence is the relative factor of confidence that it gives you for either the “coincidence theory” (the drills are coincidental— required on the official story) or the “one-man conspiracy theory” (the one that predicts the drills).
The “one-man conspiracy theoy” doesn’t just predict that SOME drills are occuring, it is a straightforward inference from this theory that you pretty much need all of the four drills I gave. You need drones, because pilots won’t do it, you need a simulation, because even with drones pilots still won’t do it, and you need real airliners and a switch in order to make it work (you also need a practice run for the simulation, which is reported for four months before 9/11, and you also need other drills to get satellite imagers out of their office, and to disable fighter response, etc, etc, all of which were occuring, but ignore that, as it only makes my case stronger). The only reasonable alternative inside-job scenario is rigging the actual airliners for remote hijacking from the ground, to take over the commercial plane itself and then pilot it into the building without a swap with a drone. But that this is not what happened can be established from the engine on Murray St. (which doesn’t match the hijacked Boings, but matches military aircraft), the speed of impact (too high at Sea-level for a commercial aircraft, but within tolerance for a military aircraft), witnesses (who attest to windowless uniform-color planes), and photos of the underside of the plane that crashed into the building, which show that the underside is that of a drone not a plane. Given these additional bits of data, the hijacked planes were not taken over by remote control, that theory is implausible even within the inside-job sector of theory space, you need a swap.
But ignore all this secondary stuff, and just examine the drills. The scenario predicts multiple precise drills on that day involving airplane crashes, multiple hijacking, air-traffic control, and terrorism, and the frequency of such drills is at best 1 in 100, as it is not even 3 drills a year, these are more once-in-a-lifetime drills. Also, they didn’t need to take place in the morning, they could have been at different times, in the afternoon, in the evening.
To have 1 drill coinciding is a baysian factor of 1/100 confidence, to have 2 drills coinciding is 1/10,000, and three drills on the same morning is 1/1,000,000. We have rock-solid evidence that the radar-blip drill was going on, rock-solid evidence of live-fly exercizes, and rock-solid evidence of simulation of crashes on that day, although the targets are not known to be the Pentagon and WTC with any confidence. There is also some indication of a hijacking drill, but this is from incidental testimony, this evidence is not solid like the others, which is not surprising, because all the direct witnesses to this drill died on the flights. The 1 in a million is a bit of an overestimate, considering the drills aren’t completely independent events, but it is an underestimate in a different way, in that the drills precise form is predicted also, not just their precise date (let alone time) and I haven’t taken any of this into account. The estimate above is more than reasonable, it is charitable, and you could make it better with up to a factor of 10, pushing in my direction.
The level of confidence from the coincidence is therefore that the inside job theory is preferred by about a million to 1 as compared to the coincidence theory. Let me make an analogy. If you saw a magician levitating, and you found out that three weeks before he purchased a large amount of Niobium-Tin alloy, a dewar-full of liquid Helium, and heat-sheilding and thermostat equipment, and that he brought all of these along to the levitation date, you might say “that’s a coincidence, what does that have to do with levitation?”. Once someone points out to you that Niobium Tin is a superconductor at liquid Helium temperature, and that magnets float on a superconductor, you are justified in deducing that the magician was using a superconducting material and magnets to levitate, even if you didn’t yet get direct evidence for the purchace of a large quantity of magnets. That’s how inference works, it works by Bayesian rules, and the theory that best fits the evidence is the one that is overwhelmingly likely to be correct.
But I must caution that by itself, without further evidence, you aren’t 100% confident yet, you need to make sure the story is consistent with ALL the evidence, because there might be some implausible story behind it all. For example, Bin Laden knew administration officials, and arranged the drills and exploited them to his own advantage, or nonsense like this, which is implausible, but the coincidence itself is already beyond implausible. In the magician analogy, maybe he intended to use superconductors to levitate, but the superconductor didn’t work, and he just ended up using wires in the end, or something like this. You can’t foresee all possibilities. This is why, despite the overwhelming confidence of the drills, it is important to review ALL the remaining evidence carefully, to make sure you have accounted for everything (aside from known lies, like the Bin-Laden confession video, or the known-to-be-hoaxed phone call to that administration official from his wife on flight 77)
The ACARS and radar data obtained by Pilots for 9/11 Truth shows the swap of flight 175 and an unidentified plane from the military exercises of that day explicitly. I mentioned the engine, and the underside of the plane, and the witness testimony. In conjunction with the drills very occurence, this is enough for scientific certainty, it’s about as good as the current evidence for the Higgs Boson.
I am sorry to tell you, but 9/11 was simply an inside job, without any qualification. There is no reasonable chance that it happened any other way than the exact way I said above.
Now, it is incumbant upon you to explain the psychology of the deniers, and mainstream shills, who write nonsense articles like the above. What I said was said somewhat more verbosely by Webster Tarpley, and the author of “Flight of the Bumble Planes”, already in 2002. It just seems nobody paid attention at the time, and that includes me. The real psychology worth studying is why most of us were able to deny this evidence and buy a cock-and-bull story for so long. In my defense, I didn’t think about it all that much until the Boston Bombing, but that’s no excuse, I should have.
You are missing Bayesian inference, see my answer to your next post below. It is important you don’t use your intuition, because this intuition is biased by the blast of propaganda, which gives you a gut feeling that the scenario I gave is wrong. That gut feeling is worthless, it is what you must overcome to think independently.
If you want an in-depth description of proper inference for laypeople, there’s Richard Carrier’s most recent books “Proving History” and “On the Historicity of Jesus”, which do a fair job of describing how it works (although, just as a plug for physicists’ methods, it is easier to do it using logarithms of probability, which doesn’t require as much tedious multiplications and divisions, and allows you to do it in your head to the rough ballpark accuracy which is all that is required in these types of debates).
The Mossad can arrange the demolition very easily, it doesn’t even need to be the whole Mossad, just a few agents. But they can’t arrange the military drills, and they certainly can’t pay agents any amount of money to hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings. The Mossad is not a savory institution, and it works in conjunction with the CIA, but even the CIA wouldn’t do this in whole, it would only be a few individuals here and there at best.
It is not possible to blame Israel for this, because Israel just couldn’t do it. They have no control over American airspace, and they have no real Israeli motive for this, as unless you are in the administration and can control what the response is going to be, the effects are unpredictable. I mean, the US could have entirely pulled out of the Levant and adjacent regions in response to 9/11, for all that Netanyahu knew in 2000, and focused all resources on Afghanistan. Where you should examine the Mossad is for similar events inside Israel, like the kidnapping of three teens the summer before last, which was extremely suspicious, as well as the implausible effectiveness of the “Iron Dome” defense, which is likely hyped up beyond its maximum possible effectiveness, by propaganda.
I lived in Israel, I was born there, and I was visiting in the summer of the attacks, and the media situation in Israel, while slightly better than that in the US (because it’s a much smaller country) is still much worse than it was in the 1980s, when the press regularly investigated government malfeasance. Netanyahu’s administration is not above covert activities inside Israel. Israel is probably one of the funding sources for ISIS (as is the CIA) to destabilize Syria, ISIS has no support within Syria or Lebanon, and operates entirely on payments and bribery, power, without any actual religious justification or any base of support.
This is why it is important to explain the drills, and their implausibility, because they don’t require nefarious foreign agents infiltrating the whole government. You certainly won’t find it. All they require is a team of programmers for the radar blip drill and simulation (who don’t even have to be in on the plan), and a demolition team. Those could ALL be Israeli agents without the attack being an Israeli operation, because none of these people would know why they are doing what they are commanded to do. In the end, you need to blame the drill coordinator, not some evil Jews, because although you find plenty of mighty evil Jews in positions of power in Israel today, they aren’t powerful enough in the US to do anything like this.
That depends strongly on the flavor of socialism you are talking about. In the USSR case, it did exactly what you said, it created enormous monopolized industries for every sector of the economy, and placed control of these industries in state ministries that nobody but a tiny handful of people had any power over.
In the case of Yugoslavia, or Northern Europe, socialism diversified ownership by encouraging workers to own more capital themselves. The northern European countries, Sweden, Denmark, etc, explicitly took their cues from Yugoslavia in the late 1960s, after the repression had largely ended, not at all from the USSR, and they didn’t concentrate ownership into large state monopolies, but had a healthy market economy with lots of smaller firms widespread ownership distributed among as many people as possible. This is what Bernie Sanders is talking about (if you take his socialism seriously, which it is not clear one should), and he doesn’t plan on coercing anything, simply providing social Democracy, and some incentives to local ownership, while breaking up monopolies. All of these activities are within the mainstream in the US, and would have been endorsed by Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, let alone Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Martin Luther King Jr.
The issue with socialism is that it is very easy for power-hungry government officials to abuse it to exert undue control over industries, and destroy entire economies by destroying entrepreneurship. This is not a necessary part of socialism, this is the downfall of Leninism.
You think my positions were popular in American institutions of higher education? They were last popular around 1969, all the socialists have been purged from American higher education starting in the 1970s, intensifying in the 1980s, and completed in the 1990s, so that by and large, American universities are now, like the media, barren wastelands of idiot conservatism, with a tiny handful of very old die-hards like Chomsky talking to themselves without anyone listening. I had to arrive at my position long before I went to University, and I had to avoid all (humanities) University classes in order to maintain it, because the classes were dominated by simpletons like you.
Socialism has nothing necessarily to do with government takeover of industry, that’s the split between the Anarchist socialists and the Government socialists. The government socialists are exemplified by Vladimir Lenin and Fidel Castro, the Anarchist socialists are exemplified by George Orwell and Milovan Đilas. The goal of Keynsianism, as practised by Clement Atlee, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon, is to fix the problems identified by Marx within Capitalism by monetary policy and minimum wage, while the goal of slightly more left socialists is to ensure widely distributed ownership of businesses to their employees. Both are not in themselves condusive to government intrusion, as they don’t need to be enforced top-down by heavy handed intervention, simple incentives and progressive taxation should be enough to ensure roughly spread out ownership of industry.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t even call for this, he simply is doing Keynsianism.
The key point is that income distribution is not going according to the model of competitive equilibrium. In capitalist equilibrium, in theory, all incomes are supposed to be roughly the same, because if someone is making more money than you, you just go do what that person is doing, until the supply and demand equalize. It only takes a tiny surplus of people who can replace you to drive your salary to market mean, ask a computer programmer, and they’ll tell you it’s true.
The point is that ownership of capital produces rent-seeking behavior that pushes you away from equilibrium. There is no competition for rent-seeking positions, they are filled by a political process. The incentives to start a business need to be a healthy profit, but a healthy profit is not produced by starting a small business today, but by politically rising to a position of power within an already monopolized industry. These incentives are corrosive to free market capitalism, because they take you further away from equilibrium, allowing some people to starve, and others to siphon off industrial profits into their pockets.
This situation is destructive, it ruins lives, and it also ruins entrepreneurship, because when you have exhorbitant monopolistic profits to find, investors no longer want to put money in small competitive firms, because these small firms have no chance against the big firms, even when their product is better. Even when they can compete in the market, they can’t offer the same absurd rate of return of a monopoly like Facebook, or Amazon. In this situation of monopolistic takeover of the economy, it is important to restore competition by progressive taxation and anti-trust enforcement, which hasn’t happened in the US in any serious way in over 40 years. It was done throughout the first half of the twentieth century with great success, breaking up Standard Oil, AT&T, etc.
The last significant anti-trust effort was against Microsoft, and it failed miserably, ensuring the horrible situation in computer software will not be fixed for another generation. The previous anti-trust effort was the communication deregulation act of 1996, which broke up and deregulated AT&T, and led to the internet boom. There is no case where a pro-competition policy has produced less growth, it’s always good, and enforcement of the Sherman act has only stopped because politicians are beholden to the billionaires who sit at the top of large corporations. From Grayhound, to Walmart, to Oracle, the whole economy is dominated by monopolies, with the only healthy parts being the exceptions to the rule, like the thriving small Linux industry.
You really need to understand what markets theoretical equilibrium looks like. It doesn’t look like real markets in the US today, it looks like something crazily idealistic that you’ve never seen before. Pareto demonstrated that the ideal of capitalist equilibrium is indistinguishable from perfect omniscient and benevolent planning. The Capitalist competitive equilibrium is what socialism is striving to approximate, when it works well.
Sorry, it is you who is the idiot. Socialist economics is something that does not require government takeover of industry, the point is to distribute ownership broadly, and this is something that even the Reaganites called for in the 1980s (if you remember). The stock incentives of the 1980s were supposed to produce socialism through capitalism, by distributing equity. This of course did not work, because equity went to managers in the form of options, and produced even more perverse inequalities than what was there before.
The mild policies persued by Bernie Sanders are not even close to the type of changes that are required to make an efficient economy, but they are a small step in the right direction. Further steps, which are probably not endorsed by Sanders, would ensure that corporations stay small and nimble without heavy-handed anti-trust meddling, and that ownership stays distributed by incentives and contract law, not by government takeover. This is much more difficult to do than nationalizing industries, but it is in line with ideal efficient market theory and socialist theory both, so it is the correct policy.
The founders ideas were antiquated, but not unworkable. They are not opposed to modern economics, they are just corrupted a bit because the founders were largely large landholders and slave-holders. But they weren’t stupid slave-holders, they were relatively smart, so the framework of the constitution is a great advance, as it guarantees civil liberties, it guarantees freedom from confiscation and intrusion from the government, and allows you a guarantee of security in your ventures that other countries didn’t have until the 20th century. The US constitution is one of the great documents in history, but the type of socialist reforms one is talking about don’t involve confiscation of property, or onerous regulation, they involve structural changes that encourage widespread ownership of property. They are not incompatible with the constitution, which, by the way, institutes a rather terrible form of socialism in the Federal Post Office.
When you give a productive job to an otherwise unemployed person, you generate value for nothing.
Bernie Sanders will never get a cabinet position, or have any influence at all on Democratic politics, other than by winning the nomination and the presidency. When you run on the left, it’s all or nothing, and there is hardly any gain at all in almost making it. The propaganda on the right comes too hard and too thick, from people who have no brains.
ISIS in Lebanon has the support of exactly 0% of the population, it was polled just a few days ago. I mean, the political support for ISIS was greater in Belgium or in Switzerland than it is in Lebanon. It is the same 0% in Syria, except you can’t poll the regions terrorized by ISIS, where people are not free to speak. The only supporters of ISIS are those who are directly paid by the organization, mostly young and mentally retarded. It is roughly the same all across the Muslim world, at least wherever people have a clue what ISIS is. The only support ISIS gets are from people who don’t know who they are.
ISIS is not a grassroots organization, it is a creation of Western intelligence agencies, whose goal was to destabilize Syria, that operated on naked power and acquisition of resources, instead of through persuasion. It seems that it is now financially independent. That means it is a terrible problem, but it doesn’t mean it has any more popular support. There is ZERO support for ISIS in the region, and this is in stark contrast with the IRA, who had some minority support in Ireland, or the Basque insurgents, who had perhaps majority support, or the Chechnyans.
When you have an organization with 0% support among Muslims involved, you really need to question whether you are being sane in attacking Muslims as the source of the problem.
They didn’t “recruit” tens of thousands locally by political persuasion, they coerced thousands of impoverished people to join them with high salary payments in an economically destitute area. They also acquired a bunch of male foreign fighters by giving them the chance to capture and rape women at will. There is nothing religious going on here. There is 0% support for ISIS in Lebanon (it actually polls at zero percent) and Syria likewise, except there is no poll in Syria because nobody can speak freely, and you need to consider those who are directly paid by the organization, and the foreign fighters themselves. The “true believers” consist of a handful of 20 year old kids with AK-47s who are drunk with power. This is not a grassroots organization, or a Muslim organization, it is an out-of-control creation that has been funded from outside, and now controls enough oil-wealth to be self-sustaining.
The doesn’t make the Paris attack a false-flag necessarily, as by this point, the self-interest of those in ISIS is to preserve their little fiefdom. But it does mean that the organization has nothing to do with local political choices among Muslims, and everything to do with the choices that your tax dollars support. Nobody in the region would have formed or maintained an ISIS without outside intervention, and the only people who work for them are deluded kids, insane people, or those who only chase after money and power.
An organization with zero percent support can be destroyed just by funding the opposition. The problem is that Assad has only 10% support too, so it is hard to find who to help. The Kurds are the true popular movement in the region, and they have solid Kurdish support, and they fight ISIS back successfully, and they will win if they are funded. But Turkey won’t like it, because if they win, they will form a state, with a chunk of Turkey cut out. So Turkey is dithering on ISIS, and there is no excuse for this. The Kurds have been oppressed enough, doesn’t the principle of self-determination apply even when it annoys an ally?
When I say “equal”, I don’t mean “exactly equal”, I mean “competitively roughly equal”, which is what competition produces, and it translates to “equal up to about a factor of 10”, so an electrical engineer patents something, and you give a bonus of 5 times the salary, that’s totally within the normal parameter space.
But in this case, so as not to be theoretical, I can tell you what a typical reward is for a new invention is. In my case, it was “thanks for the patent, here’s a dollar”, which I didn’t mind. Then a few years later, after destroying my invention and noting that it wasn’t as profitable as they would like, “That was a while ago. Now you’re fired”. This is what they did with their entire scientific staff. If you think unequal compensation goes to innovators, you are deluded. Innovators are lucky to draw a median salary.
The loyal followers are not significant, the truly neanderthal vote is predominantly Republican anyway. The question is the stupidity of the policies and the policy makers. On the Republican side, they have denied Keynsian economics, for example, predicting price hyperinflation in response to the Bush and Obama stimulus packages (and similarly in response to the Russian money printing episode in the late 1990s). These predictions never materialize, they always fail, and predictably so, because these are predictions in equilibrium, and inflation doesn’t kick in until the productive capacity is stretched when you are out of equilibrium. This is something from Keynes 101, but they get it wrong again, and again, and again, and each time, it’s a different blathering excuse for why the prediction failed.
The economists are Frieman and Hayek, who have no honest bone in their body, and have never understood Marx, let alone Keynes. The inspidity would be galling, if I believed it was sincere, but it is clearly not sincere, it is what they learned to say to get rich backers to finance their careers.
When you’re on the left, you have to push with the truth, and you have to push hard, and you only get one chance, and you need to make it work.
They’ve tried a number of times. The shift to online media makes it possible now for the first time, so don’t lose hope. He has a good 50% chance of nabbing the nomination, and it will be a certain chance if he doubles his mobilization and donations.
Marx’s central contribution to economics was the observation that Say’s law is false, that demand in a market economy is not usually sufficient to purchase the industrial output. This observation is routine today, it is echoed by Keynes, but Marx was there first, as this is the main thesis that he pushes. This was amply verified in every depression before and since.
I am not a dreamer in any sense of the word, because the time for dreaming has long come and gone, the time for dreaming was probably in Spain in 1936. The prescriptions of Marx have ossified by now into standard textbook Keynsianism in economics, and the goal of modern social democrats is to get 50% of the desired benefits of socialism just by taxation and monetary policy, to mitigate the market failure Marx identified, namely that workers are not paid enough, because they compete with the unemployed for jobs.
The total Republican rejection of Keynsian economics, beginning with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following right-wing economic quacks, is one of the great stupidities in public policy in all of human history. Was it really necessary to go through the great depression a second time to learn that Marx had it right, and demand is not optimally adjusted by markets?
My own preferred brand of socialism is further left than Bernie Sanders, and involves stronger structural incentives to keep firms small, instead of bureaucratic anti-trust law, a reworked contract law to prevent exploitative contracts between firms (including outlawing special pricing to friends) but without oversight (you can do it by a trick of using pre-specified standardized contract language, as tinker-toys to build up complex contracts from simple ones with standard language), and non-governmental efforts to induce worker control of industry, without coercion, by voluntary consumer and labor choices. People prefer to work where they can have a say, people prefer to buy from nice businesses, and businesses that listen to all their employees are more efficient anyway, so you don’t need a government forcing people to do anything, this can be a voluntary revolution which takes over gradually, as it already has to a great extent in the free software world.
Mexico’s problems are largely caused by drug lords running amok, which is entirely fueled by the insane US demand for cocaine, demand which should be zero, considering the brain-damage that this awful drug reliably produces. With a sensible treatment policy, something proposed by Sanders, perhaps this problem can be relegated to the past, as after all, cocaine is not expensive to produce in bulk, and it should be easy to wean addicts off of it when there is a productive avenue available for them to channel their resources. People don’t become addicts when they have a good job and a significant say in how their workplace is run.
I lived in a social-democratic country, which was Israel in the 1970s, and in more dogmatically free market societies, like the US in the 1980s, 1990s, and today, and Israel past 1996. The alteration of society produced by the evaporating social safety net, the breaking of the social contract, and the production of wage slavery at low wages for the majority of people, it destroys the ability to do productive new things, as people can’t innovate when they are trapped in their jobs by economic pressure. There is no benefit to the type of Capitalism practiced by the US since 1980, Rambo movies are simply not very good, neither is Microsoft Windows. Linux is vastly superior already today, with no government behind it. I find it amazing that the economicaly powerful side is losing the tide of history already today, without any dreaming getting involved, it has already lost the operating systems battle.
Your racist nonsense doesn’t fly with anyone who lived outside the US, and knows that your IQ bullshit is reworked 19th century phrenology. Israel is 20% minority Arab, and includes a substantial very low income Russian underclass, and those minorities are rejected and discriminated against regularly, and despite this they include the greatest artists and poets, mathematicians and scientists, and some of the greatest productive entrepreneurs in Israel. Arab villages are dirt-poor due to systematic denial of funding, and are unable to expand because of discriminatory construction laws, yet, the Arab villagers innovate to maintain a standard of living, building second and third stories on their buildings themselves, with their own hands. At the same time, Jews living under free market policies have to pay prices of $250,000 for a small apartment in Tel Aviv (apartment prices are higher than in Manhattan). Likewise your US “parasites” consistently produce the only worthwhile cultural exports from the US in the last 100 years, most recently hip-hop, and consistently produce the only worthwhile humanities thinkers in the whole corrupt American university system. Yusef Komunyakaa and Cornel West are worth a hundred Ben Bernankes and Charles Sumners.
Mugabe’s socialism and that of others in the 20th century is a form of state control of the economy, and no modern socialist advocates it. In Mexico, there is no socialism at all. It is South America which has embraced social democracy, and seen living standards skyrocket in the last decade, in both oil-rich and oil-poor countries. Your idiotic way of thinking denies the humanity of others, and it has no place in a modern world.
The crony deals occur mainly between private parties. When Walmart took over from thousands of small private businesses, the government had no part in this. It did so by demanding special prices from suppliers, by threat of punishment, and by undercutting local businesses by predatory pricing.
These are the policies that keep Capitalism from functioning, they occur entirely in the private sector. The role of the government is to make sure that nobody can do that, that businesses that have this kind of power are broken up into smithereens, and that the tax code ensures that even when Capitalism fails, income is confiscated and redistributed, so as to approximate market equilibrium anyway.
It’s a new kind of socialism, one that you haven’t seen before, at least not if you haven’t run Linux yet. Linux is a socialist kind of product, it is free to modify and the modifications are again free to view and modify themselves. This kind of freedom encourages individual worker control of the means of production (in this case software), but in a different way, involving freedom and voluntary choice, not state coercion, and in a way compatible with many small market driven firms that can and do make a reasonable profit, and are collectively about ten times more efficient than any large corporate competitor. Compare the Git commits for Linux with the changes in corporate rivals, like Microsoft Windows, and you will see that Linux is about 10 times faster to innovate. Nobody confiscated anything to make Linux.
The RUSSIAN underclass in Israel is the source of mathematicians, as some of them were Soviet educated. Hip hop is as important to humanity as Shakespeare, as it is what we live for, perhaps it is of even greater importance, because it is a living art-form that inspires the whole world, from France to South Africa, to Palestine, to create new worlds out of their minds. There are plenty of great African American academics, the greatest in their fields, people like Maryland’s Gates in Supersymmetry, W.E.B DuBois in history, but that neurosurgeon clown running for president is not one of them. While I am not Sub-Saharan, I am half African, and if colonialism went the other way, I would probably be classified as borderline, but passably black, as the power structure would expand to blackify rather than whitify. But regardless, all this black/white American nonsense is extremely transparent to people from countries like Israel, where the class divisions have nothing to do with race, and have just as great an impact on poverty, “IQ”, opportunity, and social mobility, actually greater because the discrimination is more blatant. Bernie Sanders is as white as titanium paint, and he is a great man, and he will win this election, if all the clowns of your generation get out of the way already, by overdosing on your favorite drug, or your TV, or your rock and roll.
The record of socialist policy is relatively good, and it only gets better when it is stripped of any element of coercion. Socialism is not an intrinsically coercive position, it is not pointing a gun and taking stuff, despite your indoctrination, and despite the fact that it was like this in China and in the USSR. Socialism is intrinsically an outgrowth of modern economics that identifies the fundamental sources of market failures, realistically analyzes the social forces that makes them hard to fix, and adjusts public policy to turn these market failures into market successes.
The interests that oppose fixing market failures are those that profit from these failures, which means large monopolistic business, their managers and owners, and the monopolized large media. These will not benefit from competition, as in a market, their wages would regress to the mean, and they know it. Socialism is the only method to approach a textbook competitive Capitalist equilibrium most closely, despite the fact that this sounds paradoxical.
The opposition to competition within the market system is the main source of conflict inside the political system— owners do not want to compete with anyone, they want their employees to compete with as large and desperate a pool of unemployed and destitute people as possible, and they buy out the government to ensure that this happens. This situation is what Marx called “The Class Struggle”, and it manifests itself not just in policies that allow formation of monopolies, and gross inequities in ownership and compensation, but in an overwhelming blast of facile analysis that brainwashes people into thinking that these perversions of market equilibrium are doing anyone any good. These are contrary to Capitalist theory and Socialist theory both, but only the socialists ever do anything about it.
In every country outside the Soviet sphere of influence, socialist policies have been a tremendous success, as these policies produced the post-war economic boom. Socialism is not something that you should attach to Soviet famines, any more than you should attach Capitalism to the Irish famine, which was produced by Laissez-faire economists in England. The issue in these famine is power and neglect, which happens whenever you try to put a large number of people under the yoke of a small number of people, whether in England or in Russia.
The most important element of socialism is fixing the market failures in modern capitalism. This can be done coercively, but then the cure is worse than the disease. The correct way is to do it non-coercively, as distributed ownership and distributed decision making is truly more efficient, and can easily win a fair competition. Like Linux.
Beats me, I am not an insider, but I hope Richard Stallman is appointed to some position, as in my opinion, he singlehandedly saved the American Left from extinction.
Nobody taught me anything except through literature, I never listen to anyone else, and all my prescriptions are original, at least to my knowledge, although I suspect that the Yugoslavian dissident Dilas and various other Anachist Socialists proposed similar things before, but I have not read Dilas yet. I wrote an answer on “nonbureaucratic socialism” on Quora to explain the idea, it is further left than Bernie Sanders, but not by too much to be unrealistic.
I despise Reagan, but I have to admit that Ronald Reagan advocated widespread ownership of enterprises through employee equity packages, with the hope of creating “The Ownership Society”, something Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2 echoed. This benign idea of enterprise ownership distributed to employees gradually perverted itself into a program of lavish stock options for upper management, boosting inequality instead of reducing it. The reason the outcome was opposite of the intent is because conservatives can’t fight structural perversions of egalitarian ideas, because they don’t understand the class structure, and how political decisions work in a class system. Socialists do understand this, and when Socialists implement distributed ownership, the ownership really is distributed more broadly.
The form of government is not in question, nobody is contesting it, a Democratic republic is a good form of government regardless of economic policy. Human nature is not the issue either, human nature is a mixed bag. The issue is maximum economic efficiency, how to approach it. You don’t get there by having an army of unemployed and underemployed people, that’s just a waste of resources.
One is not betting against selfishness by fixing the economic system, one is adjusting the backdrop of policy so that the selfish interests actually produce competition for efficient production, so that you approach closer to an efficient market equilibrium, with optimal growth, and little inequality. It’s like Judo on the greed, so that it subverts itself, which is what Adam Smith proposed, as well as many non-totalitarian socialists in the 20th century, who were unfortunately drowned out by the louder voices of Leninists with guns.
My father is 100% Tunisian (Berber/Arab), my mother is 100% Hungarian (Eastern European/Central Asian), so I am “White” by an expanding American technical definition of White that places anyone within the boundaries of the
Roman or Russian Empire as “white by expansion”. I am NOT a victim in any sense of the word, my ancestry has never been a barrier to anything, but trust me, if the world were ruled by Africans, I would easily be able to
finnagle my way into a “black enough” category to pass by, much as people like me are “white enough” to pass today. I certainly have no Anglo-Saxon or German or Northern European blood, and I
am 0% “Aryan”.
LOLLOLLOL, brilliant! RMS HEADS NSA! What a headline. He’s certainly more than qualified, he’d *ahem* crush it. Bernie is elected and McConnell is history, as such an election would have 60-70% turnout, and lock in the Senate and House, perhaps not with a fillibuster proof majority.
The RH negative blood line was common in Chimps until 10,000,000 years ago, when a small population of entirely RH positive chimps killed their neighbors, including the last RH negative survivor. It was a tragic day. Come on, stop being stupid, this is not a mystery if you know how DNA evolves. A better question you should have asked is how the Human Chromosome split into two in Chimps— this is a bit stronger mystery.
It didn’t evolve in us, it evolved away in Chimps (for all you know). Chimps aren’t standing still either.
I am giving you a reasonable answer, made up, like your stupid bloodline story. Really, focus on the split Chromosome, it’s a FAR better case for your position. How the heck did the first split chromosome ancestor Chimp have viable children with non-split chromosome partners? That is required if chimps and humans share a common ancestor, and modern split-chromosome babies are usually non-viable, and extremely negatively impacted, and usually sterile. To explain this event requires an actual modification to modern genetics, which is not widely recognized in mainstream biology. Your blood-type nonsense is a property of blood proteins, and it is entirely explained by ordinary selection on gene alleles.
BUT EASILY EXPLAINABLE BY A MADE UP STORY WHICH IS AS LIKELY TO BE TRUE AS FALSE.
There are about 5,000 ape-shaped creatures around us, always on the verge of extinction. There are 7,000,000,000 human shaped creatures. If we keep going the way we are going, there will be NO MORE ape-shaped creatures among us, and that will be the tragic “completion” of the process of evolution as you ask it to happen. Do you really want that to happen? Evolution is not a nice process, it doesn’t involve coordinated planned change, it involves brutal species destruction, and you should be grateful that this destruction is not yet complete on apes, and hopefully, if we get our conservation act together, will never be.
The extinction of chimps could take as little as 20 years, if deforestation is allowed to happen naturally by market forces.
Do you really think that the population of 10,000 that were this common ancestor left bones around we can find? The chances are 0%, we’ll never find fossils of them, we aren’t that lucky, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know it for what it was. The inference of a common ancestor is obvious by looking at DNA sequences (as well as homologous characteristics, other fossils, and so on). It’s not a bluff, it’s an obvious inference if you look at protein sequences and time their divergence. Stop being retarded.
Viruses are a special case, as their evolution is limited. Also, flu can’t evolve without a host. I’m not an evolution denier, but this is an extremely bad argument. You should use bacteria, but even this is a bad example. Yeast is your simplest good argument, and that’s sufficient.
Yes, but within a limited parameter space. It’s actually mysterious how new viruses emerge, because they aren’t freely evolving, as they need to co-evolve with the host and it’s immune system.
Those ancient parrots are nothing like their modern descendants. There are no “limits to nature”, you can evolve to species divergence, for instance, chihuahuas and great-danes obviously share a common ancestor. To avoid genetic defects, you need to do it slowly, and this requires a very long time, longer than breeders have. The evidence that it has happened is in the homology and DNA.
That’s the problem with virus evolution. You can say it this way— a FLU virus is still a FLU virus, and it will never evolve to another type of virus. That’s a property only of viruses, it isn’t true of yeast.
These aren’t micro changes. If you’re ok with all the species of parrot and cockatoo coming from a common ancestor, that’s a bigger genetic diversity than human and chimp.
If a grey african parrot is the same as a cockatoo, then a human is the same as a chimp. Actually, the same as a badger.
Now you’ve hit on the good argument. That requires real new science to resolve.
No, the evolution to a new host is by spot mutation of something like 4 positions on some protein alleles, they are very limited in thier parameter space, as their evolution is by protein. To evolve to “no host at all” never happens with a flu virus, it requires a virus that is descended from a parasitic bacterium, and even then, only if there is enough “bacterium” left to survive without the host. I am afraid this is a terrible example, viruses are highly degenerate things, especially flu viruses, which are 8 proteins and a shell, infinitely far away from enough to be self-sustaining.
Humans evolve by sexual selection, you don’t reproduce with someone you find unfit, and our brains are selective enough to accelerate the process, rather than slow it down.
You don’t understand how science works, it works by inference. You need to know when an inference is justified. The protein homology between humans and rats and dogs is perfect, every protein has an exact analog. The analog is very good down to worms. The non-protein parts are where the interesting things happen. You need to understand that the structure of the solar-system was derived from looking at spots in the sky, we didn’t go there to figure out how it worked, and inference, when done properly, is the major process in scientific discovery. This isn’t my religion. My religion is ordinary religion, ordinary monotheistic religion. It just has nothing to do with DNA.
They evolved from petroleum and protein precursors, amino acids in chains. These are common on the early Earth. In fact, since we are partly a petroleum product, people have mistakenly assumed that petroleum is a biological product! This is not so, and knowing that petroleum is cooked in the mantle resolves the major mystery in the chemistry of the origin of life.
There is nothing God-denying about this. God has nothing to do with petroleum or DNA, it’s a construction of ethics, and it is a construction that doesn’t have anything to do with science, at least in those cases where believers make sense.
I don’t need an authority— I told you the story. The western tribe annihilated the eastern tribe 10,000,000 years ago, killing the last RH negative chimp. For all I know it happened more recently.
For viruses, it doesn’t help. No matter how long you wait, they can’t evolve to self-sustaining life, because their parameter space is closed off from the rest of life. It’s a complete mystery how they can form, and the answer requires modern biology. Your good example is yeast, which is continuously linked to all large mammals by a direct path of evolvability.
You mean, a transition from barrel shaped to inverted cone.
Lucy evolved an inverted cone for all you know, along with the ancestors of chimps. Humans kept the barrel. You don’t know anything about this stuff, and all the lines keep moving, not just ours.
I didn’t say they exist— I said they evolved out for all you know. This is not an argument. I gave you the good argument— the split chromosme. That’s a real mystery, and it requires new science to sort out.
This is false, evolution doesn’t happen because of external factors only. It is driven largely through production of new traits in the DNA itself, without any external changes at all.
Perhaps. Who cares what that old codger thought. I might renounce it on my death bed too, due to the brain damage of dying, don’t change the facts ma’am.
There is a real issue with Darwinism, which Dawkins doesn’t understand, that it requires a sort of “intelligence” to produce new mutations. This was understood by Darwin, but Dawkins denies it. The intelligence involved here is not infinite, it’s the finite but relatively large intelligence of computing RNA networks, they are about as powerful as a modern laptop.
Some people who “deny evolution” are just denying modern synthesis evolution, not the process itself. These critics are not just reasonable, they are right. The religious critics derive their science often by misinterpreting the sensible critics.
Yes, you’re right. There are no environmental trigger conditions necessary.
I don’t use other people’s thinking. That would be plagiarism. All my ideas are due to me alone, although perhaps somebody else thought of the same thing first, and really, in those cases where they are correct, the ideas aren’t really mine, but God’s.
Oh my, somebody has missed out on the revolution in biology in the last decade. DNA inherently mutates by duplicating/silencing, shortening and lengthening and editing non-coding sequences, and back-writing entirely novel RNA from RNA networks using actual reverse-transcriptase, through mechanisms like reverse-transcribing ERVs (endo-retro-viruses— they’re 40% of the human genome). These modifications produce very intelligent mutations.
Ha ha! Yes, my ideas are facts, in those cases where they are correct. The way to check is to compare to actual DNA and RNA sequences, to real data. You aren’t looking for facts, you’re looking for authority. Sorry, I won’t bite. I have no authority, and I don’t believe in authority. I didn’t call you names.
I checked three of the citations in genesis, and they were insufficiently supported by evidence.
Oh yeah, sure. You can check out reviews on “DNA editing” and “RNA editing”. For ERVs, just google “HERV” (Human endo-retro-virus), this is 30% or so of the genome, maybe 40%, look it up, I forget. The interpretation is original to me, for all I know, but maybe not.
About RH negative chimps? What would it help to look? There are only a few thousand chimps left, who knows what blood type they used to have. The blood factors are proteins, and the changes between different blood types are extremely small modifications, and completely obvious under natural selection and normal mutation, you have no idea where they came in, as they could mutate in human or chimp ancestors, or in a common ancestor, or anywhere. There’s no mystery here, so I can’t see why you keep harping on it.
And it’s easier to believe ulcers are caused by stress, rather than bacteria. Doesn’t make it so.
The theory of evolution doesn’t imply that there is no God. God is the limit of evolution in the infinite future, if you like, the infinitely wise end-point we strive toward. You can believe in it without believing it came to be all at once at the beginning of time, although since it is outside of time and space, the question of “when was God born” is meaningless.
The same God you believe in, without taking the nonsense supernatural stuff seriously. It’s called “not being a fundamentalist”.
The traits we find attractive are themselves co-evolved to make us more fit. I’m afraid nobody will choose to reproduce with a mentally retarded person, regardless of their muscle mass.
I told you that the blood type is a protein modification— a very small modification. It can be introduced AT RANDOM by spot mutations anywhere in the human/ape line. It’s so not a mystery, especially as compared to the fact that humans have one merged chromosome as compared to chimps. I am not being deceived by man, you are being deceived by man, by listening to evolution deniers.
Unfortunately, it is true. The methods our sexual selection uses for determining intelligence are much more accurate than our psychological testing. We use “sense of humor” and “vivacity”, which are a natural intelligence test that is used for reproduction selection. In addition to humor and wit, we also choose fit, strong, vigorous people to reproduce with, regardless of gender.
These are mostly hoaxes, the people who deny evolution are sincere.
They’re not really sincere, I went through this too, and lost sleep also. There are a few 18 year olds who buy it for 6 months or so, but the organizations are being paid by someone who wants to discredit alternative media as a whole, especially to suppress 9/11 researchers, and modern socialists, things like this that thrive online. This kind of stuff happens with “Islamic propaganda” funded by the CIA (to catch terrorists) and “UFO propaganda”, also funded by the CIA, to hide spy plane stuff, and also just to practice propaganda. These obvious hoaxes are nothing like evolution denial, which is an organic movement, born from real problems with earlier evolution doctrines, which denied that the process is intelligent to some large extent.
Those diseases and disabilities are not hereditary. It’s all like this, all our “attractiveness” traits are really future fitness traits, and among them, humor, vitality, youth, strength, height, and good secondary sexual characteristics are the most prominent. Evolution works at the bottom, weeding out the 10% of humans who won’t reproduce in each generation, it doesn’t work at the top, because the top is hard to identify. Who knows who is the “most fit”, nobody does. But we know who the least fit person is, unfortunately, because nobody wants to go on a date with him.
Yeah, that was a breakthrough about 15 years ago. “Everyone” was wrong.
I’m basing it on reproduction statistics I read somewhere, which show a positive correlation between health and reproduction. This is also confirmend by watching the extreme difficulty that even mildly mentally and physically disabled people have in finding a partner. The people with 10 kids who appear to you to be “ugly as heck” and “dumb as a rock” are obviously not, as they manage 10 children and you don’t.
No, this is false. The “direction” is maximizing the computational complexity of the totality of life, and it doesn’t go backwards, barring a catstrophic event, like a meteor impact. This is evolution propaganda with no evidence you are citing. Compare Cambrian life to modern life, or even dinosaurs to birds, and you see the sophistication of the parts increases steadily with time, especially the brain. There were no talking parrots 60,000,000 years ago.
That’s not where mutations come from. Mutations are written into DNA by endo-retroviruses, among other mechanisms. These are the major source of evolution today, protein evolution stabilized 300,000,000 years ago, and is now mostly a clock for species divergence.
You need to look at the protein sequence for these blood factors, to see that the change is miniscule, an alteration of a spot on a surface protein’s sequence. There is no need to shout— you haven’t said anything that is relevent to evolution at all, just to your personal medical history.
I don’t know what “evasive” means.
This is nothing like XXY syndrome, inXXY mitosis, you separate the chromosomes individually, and you still end up producing some normal sperm. For merged chromosomes, it’s not like that. and it is not at all clear that the Chromosome 2 merged in humans, it probably SPLIT in Chimps (I think the latter is much easier to explain than a merge). Either way, merge or split, you need to get the sperm and egg to reattach the parts to do crossing over on the split/merged segment, so that the offspring are not less fit. This requires a more sophisticated crossing over machinery than what is usually admitted to. This is a theoretical prediction that must be confirmed, because we know the split/merge happened hisotrically, and it is a new prediction, nobody says what I just said.
I didn’t read propaganda, and I’m not about to start. Nuclear weapons didn’t evolve, they were created by Oppenheimer and Bethe’s teams at Los Alamos. Increase in cognitive complexity is a fact of life, and is clear in all fossil lines recorded. I don’t need to read this in a book, I looked into it myself. I don’t believe in reading, only in thinking.
No, I just didn’t know about the “vestigial telomeres”, your comment is the first time I heard of it. But I should look at the sequences myself, because there is a lot of “telomere-like” sequence in the middle of chromosomes, there are lots of embedded repeats, and it is possible that the split occured in the telomere-like region instead. I don’t know if anyone else proposed this, but it must be investigated without bias. If the telomere regions are more likely from a merge, I have to change the assessment of course.
The common-ancestry is not the issue with the chromosome merge, but the mechanism of merger is completely unknown. To merge chromosomes, you need a mechanism that can do it, and the presently acknowledged mechanisms are too dumb to do it, as they assume chromosomes blindly line up. The real mechanism must involve non-coding RNA linking up the chromosomes in corresponding parts, and it needs to work with split and merged chromosomes, because we know this has happened in history. It’s the strongest argument they have, because it really requires new mechanisms of biology, all the rest of the stuff they say is drivel.
It’s definitely cut-splice, as you can see by inserted ERV sequence. There’s also duplication and shortening.
I am glad you recognize it! Yes, you are, and so is the rest of Wittgenstein.
Yeah, except what I say actually predicts new things about evidence that we have, unlike Wittegenstein, or his smelly foot.
The question is how the crossing over happens in those individuals when they try to reproduce. It requires new biology to line up 2 chromosomes with one. I am not denying that it happens, I am pointing out that it requires new biology to make it work, because you need a way of organzing the chromosomes in partnered pairs along a split/merge and then decide how to produce the offspring crossing over. This requires a brainier RNA network in egg cells than what is normally assumed by biologists, the RNA has to line up corresponding chromosomes with each other correctly, and this is not a trivial feat for the network. I agree with you on the facts, although I am not sure about the viability statistics of the offspring of chromosome-merged and chromosome normal humans.
Of course, yes. But that’s the only missing peice that the anti-evolution crowd stumbles upon.
Cool! I guess it wasn’t new to me. I thought of it in 2014. I didn’t see this before. The answer to the question is “obviously not random”, but you have to understand the current brain-dead consensus in biology—- they think the retroviral sequences come from ACTUAL VIRUSES. That’s as idiotic as denying evolution, and it’s a mainstream position today.
What? NO. This stuff is happening NOW, and it is not yet mainstream biology. There’s an endo-retrovirus acceptance event in Koalas happening TODAY, not millions of years ago.
Mutations are not “completely random”, they are very purposeful, biologists have been misled by looking at protein coding regions, where incidental rare mutations (like sickle cell) occur. Most mutations are in non-coding regions, and very tightly regulated by RNA networks. That’s not accepted yet, but it explains the main source of friction between biologists and anti-evolutionists. It’s a form of intelligent design, but the designer isn’t God. It’s RNA.
Used to. Now I’m unemployed. Perhaps partly due to challenging the consensus on ERVs, but mostly due to the inability to function in a capitalist society.
Right, but you don’t have to be as low-level as they are when responding to them. It’s a good chance to do new science, while also propagandizing the opposition. Cool new science is more persuasive than 150 year old dogma anyway.
True, if those scribbles were written in the 1930s using radium paint.
The current theory is that the ERVs are fossilized infections of ancient ancestors. My own hypothesis is that they are produced by the body to transfer genetic material in healthy animals from one cell to another. Only one of these hypotheses is right, and my hypothesis is NOT mainstream, it is laughed at currently. But that’s because the experts are bozos.
Try reading real science, instead of media hyped medical crap. Real science is found in those journals with wonky names, but you can find it on “pubmed” and “arxiv” today.
I have never had a socialist teacher, ain’t no father to my style. I ask you to become the socialist teacher yourself, by using your own brain, comrade.
The socialists were purged from American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s, there were none left by the time I got there, comrade. I had to sneak out volumes of Capital late at night, so no one would see.
The idea is that the egg got infected accidentally and reproduced anyway. It’s nuts, but it’s the mainstream consensus.
The standards are described by what’s called “Bayesian inference”. I’d recommend Richard Carrier’s “Proving History” to get a taste of it.
It’s not consuming, I spend 3 hours, and I’ll never do it again. I also got two neat references (way down below) to some recent stuff, one about telomeres in Chromosome 2, and another on ERV statistics, so it’s not a total waste of time.
How original! Not like your confederate ancestors thought of that to justify slavery, no.
I’m not implying. I’m straight out saying that you are passing off 19th century religious balderdash as your own original religious balderdash. Not that it’s so important, but you don’t even have original balderdash.
You heard it. You just forgot. Look up “multiple origin theology” or something like this.
It’s disproved by the genetics of people, which show that we are descended from a population of 10,000 at its smallest, around 100,000 years ago. There is no reasonable way to get from a small number of couples to the genetic diversity of humans today. But you probably know it’s balderdash, you just want to do racist propaganda.
I didn’t call you a racist, I said you were spreading racist propaganda. You don’t have to be a racist to repeat propaganda unconsciously absorbed. The regionalist/universalist debate was scientifically resolved a decade ago— humans are 90%-95% from a single line, bottlenecked 100,000-150,000 years ago somewhere in Ethiopia or thereabouts, and about 5% Neanderthal and Denisovich(sp?) interbreeding. That’s some small amount of regionalism, but not a lot.
The mechanism of mutation is very sophisticated, and I would believe that 95% of mutations are neutral or beneficial, but nobody knows, because we don’t know the genetics of the main source of mutations, which is not in protein coding regions, but in the non-coding regions that make up 95% of the genome.
This transformation in comment quality was coincident with the rise of “earn $$$$ working online” ads, where presumably a rich fellow pays you to do right-wing propaganda. It’s not very effective. The internet is largely resistant to this type of thing, because the stupid comments are ignored, and only original comments get attention. But rich people are dumb, and try anyway.
Darwin made no claim about the mutations being “genetic damage”. This hypothesis is the result of the fruit-fly experiments in radiation from the 1950s, where it was discovered that mutation rate is proportional to chromosome damage. But the mutations themselves, when they aren’t protein mutations are NOT random, they are controlled by RNA networks, and the result is much closer to intelligent design than to modern synthesis, because the mechanism of rewriting DNA is authorly, proceeding by inserting functional chunks into the genome, not by any random process. The random hypothesis is simply impossible, the IDers are right about this.
Exception that proves the rule. They were not at Harvard, I can tell you that for sure, that was Dershowitz and Sumner’s clique of right-wingers. Cornel West was the last leftist, and he got kicked out for making a rap album, and he was just a social democrat, let alone communist.
You do need Bayesian inference, because you need the coincident dating, the shapes of the femurs and hip-joints, and point-by-point comparisons to modern anatomy. To determine the number of individuals involved is more tricky, it might be different individuals, I don’t know the history of the dind, but it’s definitely a hominid, and you need a remedial science lesson to be less dim.
That’s a question of solar system stability— and it might be rare, in which case we are going to be alone in the universe. But that’s not an argument for design, it’s an anthropic argument— if we got cooked, we wouldn’t be here to argue about why we’re not here. But it’s not clear how common stable Solar Systems are. Stars are stable for longer than 5 billion years, but planets can drift all around, and they don’t need to be in stable orbits, I mean, so many gas giants have migrated to get close to their star. It’s totally open, it’s important to know.
Funny, I want to take from the lazy and hand out to the productive. That means tax the wealthy, and handout to the poor, because they are the only productive members of society.
It’s not anti-science. The modifications to crops are simply a vendor-lock-in, and encourage over-use of pesticides, or in themselves constitue plants which generate toxic pesticide compounds throughout their bulk, not just sprayed on the surface. The safety testing is nonexistent, there are no benefits in yeilds over selective breeding, and there are much better ways of introducing genetic modifications than having a big corporate entity do it. There are research universities that do this sort of thing with careful controls, and no manipulation power to skew test results their way, and no profit motive to do so. You are risking the monopolization of agribusiness when you support Monsanto, and Bernie Sanders should promise libre-seeds forever. Seeds, like software, are better when they are free.
You wouldn’t know science if it bit you in the knee.
It’s not a question of whether people want the handouts, it’s a question of whether the economy can survive without taxation. The bailouts cost nothing, because the economy was depressed— you need to learn Keynsian monetary policy.
For an insider report, read this: inthesetimes.com/rural-amer…
Farmers don’t see “much higher yeilds”, there is no intrinsic difference in yeilds. They see perhaps a lower pesticide bill, or a discount on their seed price.
I am not against modifying plants on principle, I like the idea of artificial biology. But the point of GMO as practiced by Monsanto is vendor lock-in and monopolization of world agriculture, and it must be resisted the same way Microsoft is resisted. The catastrophe Microsoft caused (and Google is now causing) to the tech industry must not be repeated in agriculture.
The dangers of GMO are not so much to health of human beings, as to the health of the world’s farming economy. If all IP is lifted, if all seeds are free to breed, and if you don’t keep secrets, it can be a useful technology. The current system is developing it into a proprietary monstrosity, whose only effect is destruction of the diversity of seed stock, and a takeover of third-world agriculture by inefficient monopolistic first world business. First world agriculture is already busted, unfortunately, and it would take a lot of activism to get it healthy.
When it is done by the public sector, GMOs are a very good thing.
It is IDIOTIC to compare breeding to GM. Breeding introduces alternate configurations of proteins, at random, but you know what those proteins are, and what they do, because they are a combination of the proteins in the plants you breed. It is next to impossible to mutate a plant protein into a toxin by breeding, you would have to cross a plant with a known toxic plant, and nobody would ever do that. Maybe you could breed an almond to concentrate cyanide. But nobody would ever do that either, and you couldn’t do it by accident, you would need to select for cyanide content.
GM introduces a completely alien modification, whose result must be tested much more thoroughly in order to ensure safety, and yet the testing is done by agencies in the pocket of the industry. Further, the modifications are not essential, they are just for the purpose of vendor-lock-in and commercial domination, they work no miracle on the plant itself.
The genes introduced for herbicide resistance lead farmers to overuse herbicides, and increase the level of herbicide in food indirectly through this. They are also pointless, as farmers should just weed a little better instead. The genes introduced for pest control express pesticides directly in the plant bulk, and lead to chronic ingesting of (very mild) toxins by every consumer. Spraying is the classical way to introduce pesticide, and then you wash it off. You can’t wash off pesticide in the genes, and whether it’s classified as harmful or not, I don’t want to eat pesticide, and neither do you.
The results of these pathetic gene insertions are not worth the effort and cost, as the change in yeild is insignificant compared to traditional methods and selective breeding, it’s a zero on yeilds. But by using predatory pricing and patent lock-in, together with brand advertisment and propaganda, a gigantic firm like Monsanto aims to remove competition, and position itself as the sole provider of patented seeds to farmers. This is abhorrent.
Even breeded and patented seeds are not a great idea, but breeding is easy to reproduce independently, and has no potential danger. If the modifications were more substantial, like actually introducing serious modifications, I would like it. But they are pathetic modifications, the kind of thing you learn in “gene transfer 101”.
The economic dangers of this are obvious, as the worst-case scenario already happened in Tech, with Microsoft, Apple, and Google destroying the entire ecosystem with monopolistic practices and takeovers. When you allow gigantic private corporations to dominate a market sector, efficiency plummets, and you get crap products. Universally.
For a good report on the situation with GMOs by a person who is personally involved, and has no axe to grind, read this: inthesetimes.com/rural-amer…
Your position is simply market propaganda, and I hope you are paid to write it, because it isn’t worth doing for free.
I personally LOVE genetic modifications, but I prefer REAL FRANKENSTEINS created in public universities, without patents, and without corporate political influence on the FDA. By real Frankensteins, I mean, bacteria that make petroleum, bushes that grow pork, trees that grow branches in the shape of chairs, and camels with doors and no poo, science fiction stuff like that. Not this pathetic crap of inserting a pesticide gene into corn.
The Soviet ones.
Yes, the artificial stimulus to Wall Street is a serious problem, but what do you want people to do? Priniting money is not done because it is good for wall street, but because the economy has too low demand, and the goal is to put the money in the pockets of workers, not in the hands of wall street. But it’s tough when banks are not lending. I mean, I’m supporting Bernie Sanders for this reason, because he really will break up the big wall-street investment banks, and tax transactions to remove horrors like microtrading and generate revenue. With competition, you won’t see the kind of systematic rip-off that has happened until now. There is also a proposal for more direct methods of transferring wealth to low-income folks, like hiring people to build roads and bridges. But it’s next to impossible to do anti-depression spending in our economy without propping up wall street, because they stand between the Fed and the public. Do I like it? No. But can I do anything about it? Not really. You can’t expect that increasing rates will improve the economy, that’s what they did in 1929.
Yeah, you’re right. But that’s not a policy. You can’t fix it by turning off the money, you would just plunge the nation into depression, because tight money means layoffs and businesses closing. The only way to fix it that I see is to break up the big banks in a targeted way, tax wall street in a targeted way, and have progressive taxation work its magic as best it can, and then invest the tax money in jobs, research, and so on. I don’t have all the answers, but complaining is not a prescription either. I see the problem, but that’s not a solution. It’s not like I was a big fan of TARP, but without a stimulus, you have 1929 all over again.
Unlike you, I have actually contributed something to the science of biology. You, on the other hand, are a pathetic shill for a corporation that doesn’t love you. Maybe you can still make something of your life if you abandon your masters.
These are not individual farmers, they are factory farms, and the “return on investment” is a deal with the company to provide herbicide for free, or some other monopoly-bundling nonsense. I don’t know the business aspect very well, but I do know the biology, and it sucks balls. These companies should not exist, they have been a net negative for agriculture. Compare them with the socialist breeders of the 1960s, who brought you the modern agricultural revolution, this is the usual capitalist perversion of progress into regress.
And I want to tell these farmers that if you listen to idiot propagandists like the shills on this page, you deserve the destruction of your industry.
There is no case where “90% marketshare” is won by a good product. Microsoft Windows is a disaster, likewise for Verizon internet, or whatever other monopolized service you’ve gotten. The essence of progress is healthy competition. These seed policies are destroying the economic competition, and not by producing a better product, but by bundling herbicide and pesticide “solutions” that are easy, but costly in long-term consequences.
There is no way that you can tell me that a bundling of pesticide into corn is a better idea than spraying corn, it’s absurd. These are not sophisticated gene insertions, and the toxins involved are not neutral to animals, they cause minor problems, and we don’t know what they do exactly to mammals. The bundled seed product is just a little easier for a farmer, it comes with a large corporate guarantee, and it’s selling the farming community up the river. It’s certainly not a question of disliking science, as I said, I like academic GMOs just fine. it’s a question of deliberate monopolistic practices, business infiltrating the FDA and manipulating safety standards, and slowly producing an anti-competitive stranglehold on humanity’s oldest industry.
I’d like to tell anyone reading this this thanksgiving to go fuck themselves. I’m not a politician, or a corporate shill.
Ok, the Soviet seeds. They had a killer collection in the 1930s.
Yeah, yeah. The good Soviet seeds were marginalized by the incompetent Soviet government, which is the usual thing in communism. Good stuff from the bottom, suppressed by ruthless stupidity at the top. They had a top seed guy scour the world to produce the best and most diverse seed collection known to man, people starved to death protecting the seeds during the siege of Leningrad, and yet the seeds were ignored and misused during the Lysenko period. The fellow who created the collection was executed by Stalin for political opposition to Lysenkoism. But the seeds did find some use later, during the Khruschev era. These seeds were not patented.
Seed breeding is not the hardest of science, and when it is done OUT IN THE OPEN, it is extremely beneficial, including GMOs. But when it’s done by private parties seeking a monopoly, it’s a catastrophe through and through. This is an economic argument, decrying monopolies, it is not anti-progress, it is anti-corporatism. I am sorry that you can’t see it, but you are too blinded by self interest.
Yup, it’s obvious. It’s impossible to honestly disagree with the idea that giving Monsanto monopoly control over agricultural seeds is a monumentally stupid idea, regardless of your position on the benefits of individual GMO organisms.
I did some modestly cited bullshit back in 2001 called “Diagrammatic Notation and Computational Structure of Gene Networks”. It’s not relevant to this, but it’s a contribution.
What’s wrong with these quotes? Labelling will obviously kill GMOs, and that’s because the public doesn’t want them. GOOD RIDDANCE. Marketing is not about secretly pushing a product the people don’t want. Nobody should be secretly forced to buy GMO food. If you love it so much, go buy it at a specialty store, I am sure there will be a niche market for GMOs after labelling.
I don’t have any expertise about anything, but you certainly have MUCH LESS than nothing, as your opinions are not only born without thinking, they are bought and paid for.
I don’t claim expertise, and I don’t need any. I am warning you about a monopoly in agriculture, a worse monopoly than one has ever seen. It’s anywhere that Monsanto GMOs are not strangled in the crib by a concerted public effort.
Monsanto’s technology is extremely dumb technology with no beneficial purpose except to create bundling and lock-in to Monsanto. Other GMOs, public sector ones, are not the same, as not all modifications are created equal.
If Ryan isn’t willing to say that, I am! Bullshit on the farmer claim.
When I eat a tomato in the third world, it tastes like a tomato.
Hey, I’m not the one trying to secretly push a massively rejected product on the public.
I personally don’t care whether GMO’s are safe, I’d oppose Monsanto style GMOs even if they were the elixir of life. My main concern is in reducing big corporate power, because monopolists and bundlers like Monsanto destroy the economy.
But regarding the “safety” of ingesting large quantities of the insecticide built into modern corn, you can read the linked article in my other comments: inthesetimes.com/rural-amer… . It seems that animals fed Bt proteins (the insecticide corn expresses) get runny stools. Now, I don’t think that’s the worst thing in the world, it’s similar to Olestra (if you remember that), but it’s not inert, and it’s not benign, and the public rejected Olestra too.
This isn’t golden rice we’re talking about, it’s a plant that expresses a mild toxin throughout it’s flesh. That’s what corporations produce, they are not responsible enough to be given control of the food supply, no large entity is. Food production has been a distributed industry in most of the world, and when it is taken over by large agribusiness, that’s the end of your ability as a consumer to buy a Cantaloupe that doesn’t taste like plastic.
The “market” doesn’t work when you are selling people a black box that you say contains an IPad, and yelling “surprise” when people open it up and discover an etch-a-sketch instead, and saying “hey, that’s good enough”. Consumers must know what they are buying to make an informed choice, and when there is no labelling they can’t make an informed decision.
Boycotting GMO foods is important for economic reasons, not just health reasons. I don’t want to eat Bt proteins, and if I don’t want to, you shouldn’t surprise me with them by springling them throughout my corn. That’s just bad sportsmanship.
Dude, stop being an idiot. Third world food is better in every way, as anyone who ever ate fruit and vegetables outside the US (and now, unfortunately, Europe also) will attest. American agriculture produces crap food, and extremely unhealthy people. Only US meat is reasonably tasty, but even the livestock breeds are more diversified in every other part of the world.
Famines are caused by war and lack of money, not lack of food, at least for the last 80 years. Monstanto does nothing to prevent famine, they make the situation worse. First world agriculture is done by gigantic corporations with enormous government subsidies. They corporations don’t give a damn about diversified practices, or diversified genetics, and they only care how big their fruit is. They’ll breed (natural) mutant plants that are two to three times normal size exploiting “natural” polyploidy, and these plants are terrible tasting and would lose in any market competition to traditional crops, except you can’t taste your fruit at the supermarket.
The destruction of first world agriculture happened a while ago, and it s spreading by gradual infestation to other countries. In Israel, you could get good vegetables until only about a decade ago, now they are just the same crap as in the US, at least, not unless you go to a Farmer’s market in Nablus or something.
Sprayed on Bt is easy to WASH OFF. On the other hand, EXPRESSED Bt is IMPOSSIBLE TO WASH OFF, because it’s inside the kernels themselves, it’s part of the plant now. It may be “totally nonlethal” and “totally nonmeasurable” in its impact, but you can’t say it’s “totally harmless” with a straight face, because that’s not YOUR CALL TO MAKE FOR OTHER PEOPLE. If you want to eat Bt, I’ll prepare you some Bt soup, and Bt jam on Bt bread, and GO CRAZY, you can pig out on Bt all day long, But it’s not your place to make that decision of what to ingest FOR OTHER PEOPLE, who are not interested in a Bt smorgasborg. Whether to ingest Bt or not, that’s the consumer’s call to make. You know that some people think sugar is harmful, others think corn syrup is terrible, and others won’t eat coconut or palm oils. Those are much more obviously harmless than Bt proteins, and yet, all of them are able to see explicitly when that stuff is in their food, and make that decision themselves.
Monsanto will never invent a cure for malaria, neither will any large corporation, because there’s no money in it. Corporations are not good at research, they never have been, because it’s too risky, the rewards never come to the one who discovers. The easiest “cure for malaria” is spraying insecticide on mosquito colonies anyway, that’s what we do in New York.
You found me out, dude. I look down on all other people as if on a lower form of life. Doesn’t change a thing about GMOs.
I know everything dude, I just feel sorry for other people, because they aren’t me.
People eat GMOs because they have no choice. I don’t mind eating GMOs, just not Monsanto’s. I know you have a hard time with reading, but try, man, try.
How the heck can I know when I buy an ear of corn if it’s GMO or not? My goal as a consumer is not to “shop organic”, it’s just to put Monsanto out of business. “Organic” is simply a marketing ploy, a tool exploited by large businesses to sell food at tiered prices to the bourgoisie and proletariat, much like the different brands of detergent, and the different classes of watches and pens. They’re goal is to put small businesses out of business. So I don’t have any interest in buying “organic”. I want to buy “non-Monsanto”, not “organic”.
I’m not going to shop at self-consciously high-class stores like Whole Foods, this is not good consumer behavior, as it encourages the division of society into separated economic tiers for different classes. I expect that when I go to a small Mexican store catering to the proletariat, and buy some tortillas and beans or whatever from an independent vendor, that I know that ZERO PERCENT of my money went to Monsanto.
Can’t fool me with bourgeoise labels.
Bullshit. The famines of the last 100 years have not been caused by crop failures, but by political failures like collectivization or war. Anyway, GMO/non-GMO have nothing to do with this, they encourage crop failure slightly by monoculture, but this is not the main problem with them.
The food tastes better because it’s from a local tradition, and isn’t bred to be 8 times the size by polyploidy. Whenever the farmers start using US agricultural seed stock, or US practices, the vegetable quality plummets. The transformation of Israeli vegetables from “tasty” to “tasteless” happened in the late 1990s, and people REMEMBER, and they COMPLAIN, but there’s nothing you can do about it as a consumer, because you don’t know what you’re buying until you get home, and American vegetables LOOK really good, they just taste awful. I don’t know what caused it exactly, but it was like day and night, but it has nothing to do with freshness. US vegetables suck because of their breeding, and they suck just as bad even when you get it direct from the field.
You dipstick, there’s a question of quantity— when you spray Bt, you can wash it off, it’s on the surface. When you put Bt in the genes, you can’t wash it off. The amount of Bt matters, and it’s always up to consumers to decide what to eat.
The Bt not going to kill you, it’s not going to give you cancer, but it might give you a bit of unpleasant bowel movements, and WHATEVER THE HECK IT DOES, it’s not up to YOU to decide what OTHER PEOPLE EAT! Your position is infantile— if people don’t want to eat corn-syrup or palm oil, for WHATEVER REASON, no matter how much you disagree with it, it’s THEIR DAMN CHOICE, NOT YOURS, and you have no business making it for them.
The only way to fix agribusiness is to allow the consumer full informed choice. Not choosing GMOs is the tip of the iceberg, I wouldn’t choose those horrid tomatoes and cantalopes which are bred to be gigantic either, because they taste like crap.
Private competitive corporations simply can’t do research in any meaningful way, which is why we have an NSF. In order to do research, you need a safe place with safe funding, and freedom, and corporations have pressure to remove research branches, whose profits always come in a too distant future. The only corporations which could do research were monopolies like Bell, which were forced to spin off their labs into separate companies when they became competitive. Science and corporations don’t mix so well, sorry to tell you, profits don’t come to the first scientific inventors, but to the second in line who commercialize the product, nearly always a different set of people than the first.
I personally (probably) eat Bt all the time, I don’t care about it so much, I can deal with some runny stools. The point of labelling is for OTHER PEOPLE, not me, who do care. I don’t wish to impose my preferences on the world.
I don’t want to eat GMOs, not because I intrinisically hate GMOs, but because I don’t like MONSANTO, and I want to help put them out of business.
It never say either “GMO” or “non-GMO”, because there is no labelling requirement for the ingredients. That’s what people are pushing for.
No! Not different. The same. Anti-GMO protesters have a right to “scare people”, and people have a right to either get scared, or not. Those little scary warnings on cigarette boxes, they give people information, people can choose. Likewise, ingredient labelling allows people to choose, and allows other people to try scare them about corn-syrup and nut allergies, and for people to make up their mind how much they want to be scared by it. YOU DON’T GET TO DECIDE FOR THEM, ASSHOLE.
With labelling, it becomes the consumer’s choice whether to support the GMO product or to reject it. The antis are betting that the public will reject it, and since they are right, the only entity which is really scared here is Monsanto, as they know their business will collapse.
I personally am not scared of eating GMOs, I just don’t like Monsanto, as their business practices are monopolistic and corrupt. So I will not buy Monsanto GMOs, but maybe someone else’s, I’ll buy.
The person forced to buy GMOs is anyone who purchases a product without a label. It is idiotic to force people to buy in ignorance because your product won’t survive with full information to the consumer, it’s a form of fraud.
Labelling is for WHATEVER THE CONSUMER WANTS TO KNOW. Yes, you do have the right to satisfy whatever activist demand you have. And you have the right to know which foods are bred with mutagens also, by more natural means. In fact, I’d like to know exactly what brand of seed grew the tomato I am buying, because those gigantic bright-red tomatoes taste like crap, and similar elephantine polyploidy-up-the-wazoo plants. If the consumer wants some information to make a purchasing decision, it MUST be provided, as anything else is a form of fraud.
Monsanto’s GMOs are not about getting costs down or yeilds up, they are about vendor lock-in. They are a stupid corporate product of negative value.
All foods should be labelled with the precise seed stock of all the ingredients, so that you know exactly WHICH mutated tomato you got (by seed ID), WHICH brand of apple, which brand of squash. That will save people trouble.
The labelling of GMO food will not come with an “adverse health effects” sticker, it will just tell you what’s in your food, and where it came from. That’s the least you can do. There are possible serious health effects from trans-fats, but nobody is asking people to say that on the box, just to make sure people know what they are buying.
There is nothing wrong with asking for labelling with INTENT TO KILL, that intent is not a problem. If you like GMOs, buy them! Convince your friends to buy them. There will always be a niche market.
The vendor lock-in comes with bundling deals for products made by the same company— the herbicide goes with the seed. Like Internet Explorer comes with Microsoft Windows. This is the old Monsanto practice. The new monsanto practice is “you don’t need to spray anymore”. The seeds are simultaneously patented and secretive (paradox isn’t it! Patents are supposed to tell you how to do something), and the modifications are hard to reproduce. Not that anyone would want to reproduce these idiotic modifications. The business practices are odious, they are a repeat of other attempted monopolies, and they are reducing the diversity of seed stock, and putting the farming economy in danger.
I gave you a MUCH MORE DETAILED answer than what you asked for. “Organic” is a useless label, it doesn’t tell you MUCH OF ANYTHING, as the organic standards are controlled by big agribusiness. Seed X and Seed Y tells you exactly what you’re buying. If you want to include “Fertilizer brand X”, that would be ok too, but I don’t care about that, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
Right, but, you know, aim at one target at a time. The GMO seeds make the practices worse, because the lock in is enforced by the genes. It’s another business destroyed by secrecy, IP, and ties to government.
Lock in enforced by genes— means the corn expresses insecticide genetically, and you can’t swap out for a competing insecticide, nor can you take the insecticide and use it on your tomatoes.
Secrecy— where did the Bt gene go? What parts of the promoter is expressed in plant? Which other protein networks in the plant are disrupted? Which non-coding RNA interaction cycles are disrupted? The majority of this is not deliberate secrecy, but ignorance, as the genetics of plants are extremely complicated, like the genetics of mammals. This is not like bacteria genetics.
IP— patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
Ties to government— Monsanto gives donations to Clinton, has advisors to Obama and Clinton, is consulted on all matters of agricultural policy, and can manipulate lab testing results by various tricks, to get past regulatory agencies. It has an army of lawyers, and it can manipulate US elections and policy by corporate contributions, like every other gigantic business. This does not involve any conspiracies.
But “organic” doesn’t tell me if the tomato I am buying is an inedible”natural” polypoidy monster. It’s not just GMOs that are a problem, it’s all sorts of shitty food.
Vendor lock-in is not through “banning other seeds”, it’s by predatory practices using bundled products and manipulative marketing to try to gain a monopolist’s advantage in a niche. Microsoft Windows isn’t stopping you from buying another operating system, there just ISN’T ONE, because nobody can compete in that sector anymore, even though the product is terrible. Still, you can install Linux, thankfully, but that’s a miracle you can’t expect in seeds The point of government anti-trust is to prevent loss of competition, but you can’t trust governments on this anymore. So the consumers can just do it by boycotting the product.
*Sigh* I am arguing for FULL LABELLING OF FOOD,telling you all the seeds, all the ingredients EXACTLY, not just “tomato”, but “tomato seed TX13442”, which SUBSUMES GMO labelling. If you know the seed, you know if it’s GMO or not, by tapping the seed into your phone and seeing if it’s a GMO seed or not, or consulting a list of “bad seeds”.
I AM NOT claiming there is no competition TODAY, I know it’s still not hopeless. I am claiming there is a SERIOUS CREDIBLE THREAT to competition in the future, as seed diversity is radically plummetting already, wherever GMOs are introduced and take over, as small seed providers get locked out of the market by Monsanto, using GMO bundling tactics. The trend is now to monopolization, and the leader is Monsanto. It only uses GMOs for this purpose, achieving complete market dominance. If GMOs take over the corn market, corn seed diversity is destroyed, as all the local non-GMO corn varieties are put out of business, as it is impossible (and undesirable) for all the seed providers to make GMO modifications to all the stocks simultaneously, they’re small. This is TERRIBLE for agriculture, it is a potential loss of huge chunks of seed heritage.
“organic” is a rich-person’s label. It labels bourgeoise food, for fancy people. It doesn’t really tell you what’s in the food. Full seed labelling does that.
The process is gradual, and I used the correct tense throughout, reread please.
They don’t care. They fed their cows cow-brains for a while, remember. Also, please stop pretending to be a farmer, nobody’s buying it.
Are you serious? Saying “contains GMOs” is a START, it’s not my own idealistic ENDPOINT. Ideally, if I were dictator of the universe, you as a consumer should know the exact seed stock used for all your grown food, and it’s age when picked, and the exact breed of all meat, and the animals’ age and weight. But I’m not the dictator of anything, so I take what I can get.
Labelling fully will improve consumer choice, and it might perhaps allow tasty vegetables a market edge. It does go beyond GMOs, but my interests are in the market failures of agriculture in general, of which GMOs are only a small part. The main market failure is the tremendous regress in the quality of food in the first world. The only explanation for the market domination of crappy vegetables is that the consumer doesn’t know what exact kind of vegetable they are getting when they are buying it.
Then wipe your contact lenses and try again. That’s how monopolies form. They form circularly, in that exact fasion you describe so ineptly.
Yes, that’s how they form. And it isn’t controversial either.
If it sounds inconsistent, you’ve had a recent head injury. All food should be labelled by exact specific seed label, end of story. That subsumes GMO labelling. “GMO free” is a pathetic substitute for people who only care about GMOs.
I strongly support Bernie Sanders. That’s why I’m on this page, to defend him from business propaganda.
As I said, you are likely not a farmer, just playing pretend. But regardless, Pioneer, Syngenta, Monsanto, and all other large providers are not a substitute for like “Jacob McMillan”, “Arthur Westley”, “Robert O’Hanian”, and the ten million (literally) other small farmers who can provide you with an unimaginably vaster diversity of seeds than any large monopolistic organization by small online orders, and who maintain the knowledge and diversity of agriculture in their practices and traditions. The big firms are making a serious effort at taking over the entire market, they are intent on producing a Soviet-style monoculture, they are removing diversity by creating a small amount of convenience, at the cost of a huge history of innovation.
I am not nice, but you are not intelligent. Can’t have both.
I’m not ignoring it, I didn’t know about it. Thanks.
On the day 50% of Americans finally figured out that it was an inside job.
They’re offended because Muslims didn’t do it. I’m offended too. Considering your name, you are the only accessory.
Suck a blow-pop, turnip head. Your sphincter dilated so far, you’re blind.
Exactly. Monstanto created a set of superficially attractive products whose intended effect is to produce a takeover of the seed business. Bundling is always “effective” for the consumer, because it saves people hassle. If you get IE with Windows, what’s the point of having Firefox? Why should you go to 6 separate private businesses, when you can just go to Walmart? This produces a Soviet economy, exactly one gigantic company for everything. Bundling is the essence of monopoly, it’s anti-competitive behavior, it gives the consumer a little bit of superficial convenience at the expense of the diversity of economic activity, and once you remove diversity from the seed stock trade, you kill an ancient tradition of seed stock evolution, and you lose thousands of years of biological heritage in favor of a nasty monoculture, and that’s the end of progress in agriculture, forever, except for the various iterations of stupid ideas that come from big business.
Monopolies happen, they happen not by government meddling, but as a result of thousands of individual choices, which cumulatively are against the best interest of a healthy sector of the economy. That’s why we passed anti-trust law over a hundred years ago.
The answer to this is simply to avoid bundling insecticide with seed, and to avoid bundling herbicide resistance with seed. Adding vitamin A to rice, that’s pretty nifty, and it has no effect on competition, which is why it wasn’t done by a large corporation. It is also why one shouldn’t be blindly against GMOs, just against Monsanto GMOs, or other large corporate GMOs. These are just stupid GMOs.
Since the government will sadly never enforce any regulation against the interest of big corporations anymore, not after Citizens United, it’s falls to the citizens to do it. Citizens given a choice to eat GMO corn or non-GMO corn will simply band together to get rid of GMO corn permanently, because of their collective revulsion at eating boatloads of Bt insecticide.
Practices that are successful in the marketplace are not automatically good, they are only beneficial when they are competitive practices, that allow others to reproduce what you did, and the go a little further. Breeding a tastier tomato is just fine, nobody is going to regulate that, but if you try to produce a tomato whose sole purpose is to undercut all competition, you need to be controlled before you destroy the industry. Competition is not easy to maintain, it is already lost in most sectors of the US economy, because nobody cares to enforce anti-trust anymore.
[here is a response to JP’s question below— who decides what things are “bundled” and what are not?]
That is the most important question, it is the essence of the enforcement: what practices are anti-competitive, and what practices are not?
Anti-trust law is a beast, because it is extremely flexible, and can be interpreted so loosely that nothing is a monopoly, so, for example, Amazon competes with my local bookstore. This loose interpretation is the current one, it was produced by Reagan appointees, and it pretty much continues under Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, with a handful of exceptions.
Conversely, anti-trust law can be interpreted insanely restrictively to argue that labor unions make monopolies on labor, as was done in the 1920s. The problem of enforcement and clarity is always there, which is why the justice department has lawyers looking over mergers, and other lawyers looking at specific anti-competitive complaints. It’s extremely big government, but it is recognized as important traditionally by both free-market libertarians and revolutionary socialists, it’s completely cross-party, and anti-trust enforcement is recognized as one of the most important functions of government world-wide.
Anti-trust regulation is always difficult, because you are asked to answer what activity of bundling are “in restraint of trade”, and what activity of bundling is just expanding business. It’s the question of what is “dumping” vs. “lowering prices”, “collusion” vs. “friendly implicit contracts”, “efficiency gains from merger” vs. “reduction of choice”. It’s extremely difficult to draw a firm line on anything at all. Nevertheless, by general agreement, putting internet explorer in the operating system, and putting insecticide in corn, should definitely be considered unacceptable bundling practices in any interpretation. The reason is that they shut out an enormous segment of the market for reasons that have very little to do with net benefits in the production cycle.
The legal criterion is the nebulous assessment of whether you are allowing a fair environment for competitors. Can someone else fairly reproduce what you did? Can they come out with a reasonable competing product within a reasonable frame? Would you want them to?
When you bundle insecticide with corn, and it is unlabelled, your efforts are not easily reproduced, they are of dubious benefit as compared to spraying the insecticide, and they are INTENSELY disliked by the public, who would prefer to separate the insecticide from the food by washing, and to not buy insecticide-laced corn, no matter how harmless the insecticide is purported to be. By preventing labelling, you prevent giving the public a choice. Even if it took no massive R&D and it cost no money, other corn seed providers wouln’t necessarily want a Bt producing version of every corn variety they have. There is no clear efficiency gain in removing the separation between the insecticide and seed, spraying is not the most expensive thing in the world. This means that ultimately, disapproving of seed-insecticide genetic bundling is a sensible pro-competition policy.
But although it is the government’s job to protect business from bundling, in this particular case, the consumers can do it all by themselves, if you just label the product. They will get rid of bundled Bt corn, while keeping golden rice, as consumers can be pretty good as sensing evil products when they put a mind to it. So in this case, nobody is asking for law-enforcement to do it, just for labelling to let the citizens do it all by themselves. That’s a no-brainer
In other cases, where nobody can see the inner workings, it is often important for the government to be zealous in taking action, not punitive action against a firm for bundling so much as preventative action, to prevent this sort of activity from killing the industry. has been the source of INCREDIBLE amounts of litegation over the decades.
But this is the standard position. If you ask my opinion, it is important to restructure corporate contract law and tax law to give companies an incentive to break up into smaller firms, without any direct intervention. With a graduated corporate income tax, and a good contract transparency and standardization law, you can ensure that companies will split up separate divisions that produce separate products, and collaborate through open contracts, not because anyone in the government made them do it by direct meddling, but just because it saves them money. This is my own position on anti-trust law, I don’t think anyone else shares it today.
There is no such thing as an employee that is worth $7.50 an hour. The price of labor is determined by supply and demand, and you can get away with paying someone $7.50 an hour only when this person has no choice, because if he doesn’t take your job, he has no job at all. This is a product of artificially produced unemployment, caused by a distribution problem in an industrial economy, where the money doesn’t go to the laborers because of unemployment, and the too-low demand by too-low wages spirals back to prevent full employment. In an economy with full employment, the mean employee salary rises to the exact level required to buy the maximum industrial output, which is roughly the GDP divided by the population, give or take a factor of 5, and we are nowhere near this level of wages, as the productive capacity of the US is nowhere near stretched by consumer purchases. There is a ton of productive capacity that is lying idle, and right now, banks won’t even lend to produce new industry, because there is no reasonable chance of getting any new consumer spending. This has been known for over a hundred years— the problem of low wages is caused by competition with the unemployed. Mandating a minimum wage never produces higher unemployment, it produces higher wages and lower unemployment, contrary to all idiotic predictions from the right (and in line with Keynsian predictions), until everyone is employed. Any further increase in minimum wage at this point just produces inflation, so it is also relatively harmless, compared to unemployment. The only time you need to worry about capital is when there are no institutions willing to invest. Under conditions of moderate inflation, they have no choice— invest, or lose money. This has been also understood for over 100 years.
I don’t understand your comment,
You made a small mistake in your comment: you are not an African American woman, you are a white racist pretending to be an African American woman. No black person (really, no sane person) would ever make this idiotic complaint. I can’t even understand it after you pointed it out, the idea that the “black women” have a separate origin from “non-black women” is something only white racists can imagine makes sense. On the miniscule chance that you actually are a mentally ill black woman, you need to see a shrink .
He rolls over when the other fellow has a point. He rolls over the 1%ers, because they don’t.
Climate change is the only real significant national security issue, as the rest are either self-inflicted or fabricated. The Paris massacre equals about two weeks of gun violence in the US, it’s negligible in comparison to the serious Climate change disruptions, which destroy agriculture in large chunks of the poorer parts world, and reduce water access in the Middle East, where this, not religion, is the number one issue leading to instability.
As far as dealing with terror threats, ISIS is supported by Turkey, which is afraid of the Kurds, who are the serious popular opposition to ISIS. Do you think Clinton will support the Rojava militias? Clinton will make them Honduras part II, as they are certainly not looking to establish a WalMart on their territory. Sanders has a nonzero probability of supporting the Kurds, and supporting the only real leftist government in the Middle East.
The idea that one must rely on the philanthropy of wealthy entrepreneurs is extremely problematic. A competitive economy, by design, should be so competitive that nobody has any billions to spend on philanthropy, as every dollar extra is a dollar that their competitor could cut on price.
Only change in one direction hurts you— from right to left. If he would have flipped the other way, from left to right, he would have become a bigger celebrity in old media. Dramatically flipping from far left to far right is the Bob Dylan recipe for celebrity— you work the left when you are obscure, and then switch to the right when you are getting powerful, so as to cement your power by appealing to the media owners, revealing which side you were really on all along. This idiotic recipe works naturally when you are on drugs, as the gradually declining IQ will lead you to conservatism eventually no matter where you start. It doesn’t work anymore, as online, conservatism is about as popular as Mithraism.
Not persuasive to a fool.
In the totalitarian Soviet Union, in the factories in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, you got paid proportionally for each “piece” you made (whatever you were making), so if you were making double, you took home double the pay. I am not advocating communism, but your idea that incentives don’t exist under socialism is mentally retarded. On communal farms, you would get paid based on the management structure of the farm, they were owned locally, so it would be based on your productivity on the farm, according to the management determination. These policies made people work about equally hard as they do under any other incentive system.
When people talk about “incentives” under capitalism, they aren’t talking about these types of incentives, that is, getting paid for how much you make or for your productivity, but about the “incentive” to become obscenely wealthy through the competition to become a member of the owner class. This type of competition, unlike the competition to produce more and better stuff, doesn’t do anything at all to improve the economy, instead it produces monopolistic firms with no innovation. Nobody wants to work hard when you can just become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, and rely on hired slaves to do your work for you, so that you can take home the profit.
The end point of monopolization is a Soviet economy, with enormous dead entities holding the whole economy back. This is what happens when there is no conscious design of competitive and innovative markets, where people are able to earn according to their ability to produce.
I agree about the collectivization, it was a catastrophic policy which took the land away from the workers and gave it to the state bureaucracy. I am not advocating this Soviet nonsense in any way. I am simply describing how it worked, so as to refute the argument that it failed because of “lack of incentive”. This is simply incorrect. The Soviet Union had PLENTY of incentive, and in many areas, like Science and Engineering, heavy industry, it had much stronger incentives than the West (and in those areas, it was extremely competitive). Soviet industry failed not because of lack of incentives, but because of a total lack of innovation, which has little to do with incentives on work, and everything to do with hierarchical power-structures that produce ossified bureaucracies with no innovation potential.
If you had a new idea, for example “Lets use transistors instead of vacuum tubes”, and you tried to get the top levels to listen to you, you could forget about it. Nobody likes an idea that they didn’t think of themselves. In the West, you would just start in a new firm. But in the East, to start a new firm, you would need to beg the same people who thought your idea was stupid to begin with. The Soviet Union relied on vacuum tubes into the 1980s! They only partially switched to transistors, and they lagged behind in silicon technology to such an extent that the home computers were nearly 8 years out of date. There was NO FREEDOM to innovate.
This is why freedom is essential— so that people can try out new things. The rewards for innovation do not have to be monopolistic ownership of a billion dollar firm, they can be a million dollars and the satisfaction of creating something new, which is the typical situation in a healthy competitive economy. The problem is that people think that the rewards that come to managers of monopolistic firm in the West have anything to do with innovation. The large firms in the West are not very different from the Soviet counterparts, they are hardly ever innovative. The innovation comes from below, from small firms that get created, and in a situation like today, where there is no good market for new products and enormous profits in monopolized businesses, all the capital goes to the giants, and you get a stagnant economy.
There was one way to innovate in the Soviet Union, actually, which was when some big cheese came in and fired all the managers every 5 years. That’s pretty much what Stalin did. This produced a sort of turnover in the system, but this also involved mass jailing and executions, and horrible terror, and so on. The administrators hated the job insecurity of these types of purges, and made sure the top levels would keep them at their job, after Stalin died. But this is talking about a dead system, it’s not like anyone is advocating a return to the Soviet era.
This view is idiotic considering the situation in the US market today. You don’t have any choice where to buy clothing, internet, building-products, food, or computer products. You MUST buy the terrible products of enormous monopolies, because you have no choice. Either wall st. picked exactly one firm to make large, as for example it did with Google and Facebook, or else the larger firms piggy-backed on their size to make predatory contracts which got them special price-deals which allowed them to get rid of all small local business, as in the case of Walmart. Further, as an employee, you MUST work for one these enormous firms, because the only alternative is unemployment and destitution. While some people are willing to endure that kind of suffering to fight monopolistic firms, you can’t expect everyone to do that.
This idiotic facade of choice only becomes meaningful in an honestly competitive environment, with hundreds of small-business competitors, protected from monopolistic price-fixing and predatory contracts, and for employees, it is only meaningful under conditions of full employment at reasonable wage, Then you can really choose between products, and between workplaces, and the competition is real. This is the situation with small business, it is not the situation with facebook or Walmart, or Time-Warner Cable, or McDonalds, or Apple, or any other national chain.
Full employment has traditionally been the number one priority of American socialists, while ensuring competition has been a traditional Republican concern, in the 1950s and 1960s, until Reagan stopped doing it. In the 1980s, anti-trust law was gutted, as the notion of “competition” was exanded to the point where it became meaningless. Breaking up large businesses that stifle other businesses used to be the one thing conservatives and liberals agreed on. Not anymore. Since political commitees can’t be trusted with anti-trust, they get corrupted, perhaps it is better to replace anti-trust law with a graduated corporate income tax, to produce the appropriate tax incentives to split firms without any direct meddling by government bureaucrats.
Ultimately, once you have the choice you talk about for real, every employee will certainly want to work at a worker-owned business, and every consumer would want to buy from such businesses, as their products are simply superior, as more brain-power goes into every decision. But you don’t need to legislate the outcome, just ensure the fair-playing field, avoid the concentration of capital in monopolistic business, make sure each businesses is of size 10-1000 people (supplying each-other by contracts), and the rest should happen naturally through competition.
It’s still socialism, you just don’t use a gun to get there.
Marijuana and physics don’t mix— pot makes you forgetful and the mathematics doesn’t work with pot. As I was trained as a physicist, this means I smoked marijuana approximately the same number of times as Bernie Sanders, a handful of times, just to get a sense of what it does (it makes you forget mathematics). My only activities online regarding marijuana is to warn against it, because it is a tool to decimate the left. In the US, nearly all the leftists’ brains are gradually damaged into conservatism, following the stoned-into-Republicanism path pioneered by Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie. The only ones who stay sane are those like Chomsky, Zappa, and Sanders (and me, I guess), that never liked marijuana.
I am glad people are openly mocking my ideas, as it’s better than ignoring them. You can watch me all you want, I’m not that interesting. As for the “deep rooted sinister agenda” and “meaning to do you harm”, I have to reluctantly agree.
A scandal is when you do something wrong.
Rand Paul is the best Republican, as he is actually opposed to
outright totalitarianism, but that’s not saying much. Sanders and Paul agree on civil liberties and largely agree on foreign policy. The big problem is domestic economic policy— Republicans don’t accept Keynsian economics.
The rejection of Keynsian economics is especially serious in the case of Rand Paul, who advocates a gold standard. Paper money was won during the Civil war, but lost again, and it was only won permanently in the 1930s. In every period, the gold standard led to periodic deflationary busts, no loans and bad terms for borrowers, and economic contraction. It’s a debate we had already.
Once you think that economics doesn’t have objective facts, you tend to follow whatever the wealthiest people propose, as this gets you power most easily. Rand Paul is not so evil, he just doesn’t
understand 20th century economics, because he read Ayn Rand and not Karl Marx.
Please, think about what you are saying— if the dollar were tied to oil, the price of oil wouldn’t change, instead of halving, as it did over the past fiew years, the price of everything else would double. There is no commodity which serves as an anchor for the value of the dollar, it is entirely determined by Fed policy. This is essential, because it allows the Fed to produce inflation when it is needed, and control inflation when it gets out of hand.
You don’t understand what “gold standard” means. The gold standard means that the amount of money is tied to the amount of gold, so that if you want to double the amount of money in circulation, you need to mine enough gold to double it’s abundance. The Fed can always raise the value of the dollar by simply decreasing the number of dollars available, although this would be a really stupid thing to do, so it never does this. Modern money is issued by central banks, for social ends, it has no intrinsic ties to any commodity. That’s a good thing that people fought and died to get for over a hundred years, starting with Shay’s rebellion in the 1790s.
Gold is traded in dollars too. Honestly, there is some effect of the international demand for dollars, but this is not particularly important for anything resembling productive economic trade. The role of currency is just as an intermediate for getting people to move stuff around and work on it, so that it becomes useful.
The pot culture is uniformly libertarian, usually left-leaning but not always, but by construction always self-defeating, because the drug destroys the users’ memory and motivation very gradually. It slowly eats away at only the highest cognitive functions, until there is nothing there anymore, and you have a shell of a person. So these emptied out former leftists forget their mathematics and education, forget the principles of economics, all they have are vague emotional cues, which are then filled by television and rock and roll in such a way that they join the mainstream right (and simultaneously stop smoking pot, stabilizing at this endpoint). This is what happened to an entire generation of radicals. I mean, even John Lennon supported Reagan at the end, after his brain was eaten away. I don’t want people to go to jail, or get harassed, just to please voluntarily avoid these goddamn drugs, so that they stay intelligent.
Thankfully the vote is not restricted to so-called serious people.
If you mean that Sanders wouldn’t install a puppet government in Iran, support a British-French-Israeli war for the Suez canal, or start an insanely expensive nuclear arms race with Russia, you’re right, he might be slightly further left than Eisenhower. On domestic policy, not much difference.
If Bernie Sanders is prevented from winning by DNC tricks, there will be at least one less vote for Hillary Clinton, as I will stay home. There are about a million people who put up money, so I expect about a million people will do the same.
Bernie and Warren are useless for shaping DNC opinion, unless they win. Bernie has a very good chance of winning, and he must win, for our children’s future. The right doesn’t want Bernie Sanders, he has Republicans lining up behind him in droves. Their obsession with defaming Hillary Clinton is justified, she seems to be entirely missing that all-important ethical bone.
I can pin the sell out of Honduras on her, she pins it on herself. Warren can pin the bankruptcy bill on her, she flipped on it for contribution gains. Clinton will not enforce anti-trust law against any corporation that donated to her campaign. There is no chance she will buck Turkey to support the Rojava Kurds. She has no independent thinking, it’s all an average of wealthy donor opinions.
Yes, it does stink, but please, say it only once. There is no need to repeat, especially after you shouted it many times already. Please delete the duplicates, it only makes your important message stronger.
The New Left was not sponsored or endorsed by the Soviet Union, which did not like the Democratic ideals and individualism associated with the movement. The USSR had zero influence in American politics past the 1950s, either overtly or covertly, it had very little influence since the first red scare of the 1920s. Some on the new left were communist leaning, but they were more associated with the 1968 Prague Spring, the “communism with a human face”, than with the 1917 revolution. Their activities were suppressed by the communist party of the USSR, as it suppressed all true leftist democratic traditions in 1936 Spain, in 1960s Cuba, in 1950s Hungary, and tried to do in Yugoslavia. The deplorable inertia and conservatism of the USSR’s huge lumbering bureaucracy is hard to understand for those with no experience with it, considering how fluid and radical leftists were and are elsewhere.
How many Islamists have you actually met, Yehuda haLevi? Have you spoken to one? I try to find them, to see if they exist, and I always come up empty. All I meet in real life are ordinary people of Muslim religion, some religious, none with any political aspirations to a caliphate in New York City. If you can’t find any members of a movement, what kind of movement is it?
The members of ISIS are all bought and paid off, the leaders are insane 20-somethings with guns who care more about raping women and murdering people than any prophets. Their finance comes from wealthy individuals and oil sales, they literally have 0% support in any affected regions where people may speak freely. The phenomenon of Muslim terrorism is a fabricated non-movement, it doesn’t exist in any numbers significant enough to cause any threat to anyone. One would be better off being concerned about Mexican cocaine dealers.
The difference between a bigot and a racist is the degree of political power. When Muslims are attacked, Jews are usually next in line. The Europeans shifted from anti-Jewish to anti-Muslim bigotry with little problem, it’s not much harder to go the other way. If you do not stand with your Muslim brothers and sisters, who will stand with you? It is much easier to support the fabrications of the last 15 years than to open your eyes, but if you wish to be an ethical person, you must not be silent when even a minority of your country turns to fascist bigotry. Remember that in 1932 elections, the NASDAP only won 40% of the vote, and yet was able to finnagle its way into power, because the opposition was divided, socialist against communist.
Of course I tried to find them! When I heard about Maoists and Trotskyites, I tried to find some, and found some. I even found a person who knows a Basque terrorist incidentally through a family friend. A popular movement is characterized by some nonzero degree of popular support, and if you want to find an IRA supporter, just ask 3 Irish people, and you’ll find one of them knows somebody who knows somebody.
On the other hand, when I asked Pakistani muslims, Iranian Muslims, Palestinian Muslims, looking to know if anyone in their extended family or network has ever MET an Islamist anywhere within their personal lives, the answer is “No. Never.” This kind of sample extends to an (unrepresentative) sample of thousands of people, and all of them sincerely report “No, not this type of radical”.
Note that these Muslim people (unlike me) still BELIEVE some fraction of Muslims are radical like this, mind you, just not anyone they know, or anyone they know know, and so on, just maybe some “other” somewhere in Bangla-Desh somewhere, or in the hills of Afghanistan.
Now, I am talking to people in the West, but their networks extend, and when I asked about Maoists and Basque terrorists, I found them. This “radical Islamic terrorism” is in the uprecedented position of having no popular support.
The bloody history of Islam is neither here nor there, most religions have a bloody history, including the Jews, if you look back to the seige of Jerusalem in the Roman wars. We are living in the modern world, and Muslims outside of Saudi Arabia had their religious shift to secularism in the beginning of the 20th century, and you don’t usually go backwards. Secularism only reversed in Iran and Afghanistan, and in both cases due to superpower meddling and financing of movements without real popular support. Iranians aren’t fanatical Muslims as a rule, perhaps Afghanis are, I never met an Afghani, but for sure no one I can speak to holds this ideology, or knows anyone who does.
I am sick of hearing about a movement whose supporters I cannot find, and whose ideology it is impossible to believe anyone seriously holds. If you want me to believe that some millions of people today are living in the 8th century, SHOW THEM TO ME, and not in anonymous propaganda tweets from paid shills, but a real person who you know personally.
This is not fiction. The USSR hated the new left, as it competed with the “old left” of trade unions. But even the “old left” American trade unions purged their Soviet-leaning members from positions of leadership in the 1920s, during the first red scare, and even before— Samuel Gompers hated the communists because he believed they were economically illiterate (regarding that generation of communists, he was usually right). The USSR didn’t like any movement it couldn’t buy out the leadership of. The USSR had a very narrow agenda, of producing movements with heirarchical power structures whose leadership it could then merge into the communist party of the USSR with promises of oil and engineering.
The only conclusion is that radical Islam is financed by something other than Muslims, and gets its support from something other than Muslim masses. That something is your tax dollars, and Turkey’s, and oil sales. The movements are fake, they are not organic, they are produced by Western intelligence agencies, much like the Contras.
By contrast, the Kurdish movement in Rojava is a real popular movement, it is a secular socialist movement of Muslims, it comprises the forces that defeat ISIS regularly, and who are opposed by NATO through Turkey. And I assure you that it is easy to find people who know Kurdish KPP supporters just by talking to any three random Turks.
I am not taking about my microcosm, I am talking about sampling— the support for radical Islam (as it is defined by the media) among actual Muslims you can meet and talk to polls at as close to 0% as is possible to measure, unlike the support for the IRA, or the support for the PLO, or Hamas, or Hizballah (I have found people who support those). That level of support means it is not remotely plausible that ISIS and similar groups are in any way an organic Muslim movement, they are a creation of funded agencies whose goal is to destabilize foreign governments. It is an INSINCERE movement, a movement of non-Muslims putting on a headscarf and yelling “Allah u akhbar! Yitbach al Yehud!” just to make a bogeyman for you to hate.
You are being trolled by your own governments. The “Islamic propaganda” online is just made by intelligence agencies to catch radicals. They catch the same people that take the flat-Earth society seriously. They sometimes get a person to light their underpants on fire, or to shoot people, or to join a rapist’s organization like ISIS, but they have no real Muslim support, nothing. No serious person takes this stuff seriously, you won’t meet any. And I don’t believe in mass movements with no masses behind them.
My comments are sincere,, although I might be wrong sometimes. You can think what you like, and please, flag away! I am not a natural politician, and I have no desire to participate in a censored discussion.
The former USSR was indeed a very complex society, but unfortunately, it’s leadership was not, and the leadership decided foreign policy. The leadership was a dozen simpleton functionaries chosen by a process of groupthink-selection who did nothing the least bit innovative or creative. If the USSR’s leadership was anywhere near to being as diverse and representative of it’s people, it might not have been such a terrible place to live.
The size issued to Israeli-Americans. I know Syria pretty well from living in Israel, and the idea of an indigenous “Syrian Islamist” movement is as preposterous to someone who knows secular Syria as the idea of a modern-day British crusader. Syria and Lebanon are more secular than Connecticut. Can’t fool me bub, I know the places.
I am just doing my duty in explaining the situation in the Middle-East to you, it’s not particularly fun for me, but it’s educational for you. Syria was a Soviet-allied state, it is far more secular than Gaza (Gaza is about as religious as most of the US). Syria and Lebanon are probably slightly more secular than Israel nowadays.
I don’t think it was a good system, I am not an advocate. But it had good scientists and engineers (equal to the US), an excellent education system (the best I think), reasonable heavy-industry (although out of date by the end in everything except oil), and you didn’t worry about dying of homelessness (but on the other hand, you did worry about getting arrested for speaking, and this is just as terrible).
The main problem with the USSR was the lack of innovation. The terrible leadership was a symptom of a much larger disease in the system, which made the whole economy and politics basically frozen in time. You couldn’t do ANYTHING, it was a nightmare to start anything new, you would need to rub elbows with lots of people, and the only thing that ever got done (outside of science and engineering— where they were world leaders) was copying the West badly, always about eight to ten years behind. Yugoslavia was ahead in this regard, as Yugoslavian industry was managed locally, you can read Dilas for criticism of the USSR system from a Yugoslavian viewpoint somewhat more libertarian than Tito’s.
The lesson of the USSR for me is that you can’t have a “vanguard” deciding things for other people, the only proper way to do socialism is not by top-down imposition, but bottom-up, by voluntary association, without anyone coercing others. Since I don’t believe in coercion, I am not going to coerce you to agree on this. I do agree with you that the problems in the USSR were deep rooted in the system itself. If you want to see what the “good socialism” looks like, look at Linux development, which is similar to open science.
Look at Wiki for “Samuel Gompers” regarding American Unions and their purging of communists and socialists. For Soviet ham-handedness in taking over socialist movements, you can read any account of the 1936 Spanish revolution, e.g. Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”. The same pattern continued in the 60s, 70s, 80s, the Soviets took over Cuban socialists with promise of oil and aid, like they promised arms and aid to infiltrate the Spanish unions. The Soviet influence in the US was essentially nil, the American influence in the USSR was much greater. Google is your friend, man.
I am not “miss-educated”, as you say so illiterately. Nobody ever taught me anything, I figured it all out by myself. I am actually a rude self-absorbed SOB. What I say stays true regardless.
The Nobel committee is not how you evaluate the level of the science, that’s a political judgement. You need to look at the published papers themselves.
In physics, which is the only field I am qualified to judge, the USSR was arguably the best, and if not the best, it was a close second to the US, in any case it is a very tight race. If you ignore the 1960s, where you have Landau’s school leading the research on He4 and Superconductivity (although the Americans had Feynman’s theory and BCS theory, just to be fair), and just go to the 1970s and 1980s, the Russians were first with Gribov’s Reggeon perturbation theory, Polyakov’s conformal bootstrap, inflation theory, they had the remarkable Gribov domains, the Shifman Vainshtein Zakharov QCD sum rules, the BPZ revolution in critical phenomena, the Polyakov string, 2d gravity, incredible stuff. It is highly technical (so highly technical that it is not appreciated by non-specialists), and it wasn’t flashy enough to get the attention of the Nobel committee, which was somewhat biased against the USSR, not by conspiracy, but just due to Sweden being a Western nation. Soviet science was rather insular due to travel restrictions and no-need for publicity by their scientists. But everyone who reads the technical literature of the 1960s-1980s knows that the USSR was the powerhouse, and you couldn’t get by without JETP in your library. It’s not just physics of course, they were strong in most technical and engineering fields, with the exception of biological engineering, where they were somewhat behind.
But the US folks were much better in computational stuff, like Renormalization group theory, and Western Europeans and Californians developed string theory, so it’s not like the US was slacking off. Like the space race, it was a tight, tight race, that benefited all of humanity. Just the Russians, in my opinion, produced more sophisticated baroque work. Compare the BPZ paper (a masterpiece) with, say, great American papers like those of Edward Witten. They are both great, but the Russians are more “out there” and more technically dense, the ideas come from outer space and it’s HARD stuff, I mean, hard for even specialists. It’s a total judgement call, and I’m not going to argue this for too long, because it’s silly, but there is no doubt that Russia had the strongest or at least second strongest physics in the world in the 1980s (it’s gone to hell since the collapse).
Although the Russians were somewhat ahead of the US in analytical tools like dispersion relations and conformal theory, in parts of condensed matter physics, in analytical tools for high energy physics, the Americans were definitely ahead in computational physics, other parts of condensed matter physics like sophisticated materials science, and in string theory. You don’t understand what a beautiful thing Soviet physics is, it is like the lost Greek science of the Hellenistic period. It’s a pity it is gone, looking at it makes you cry.
The Nobel committee is not how you evaluate the level of the science, that’s a political judgement. You need to look at the published papers themselves.
In physics, which is the only field I am qualified to judge, the USSR was arguably the best, and if not the best, it was a close second to the US, in any case it is a very tight race. If you ignore the 1960s, where you have Landau’s school leading the research on He4 and Superconductivity (although the Americans had Feynman’s theory and BCS theory, just to be fair), and just go to the 1970s and 1980s, the Russians were first with Gribov’s Reggeon perturbation theory, Polyakov’s conformal bootstrap, inflation theory, they had the remarkable Gribov domains, the Shifman Vainshtein Zakharov QCD sum rules, the BPZ revolution in critical phenomena, the Polyakov string, 2d gravity, incredible stuff. It is highly technical (so highly technical that it is not appreciated by non-specialists), and it wasn’t flashy enough to get the attention of the Nobel committee, which was somewhat biased against the USSR, not by conspiracy, but just due to Sweden being a Western nation. Soviet science was rather insular due to travel restrictions and no-need for publicity by their scientists. But everyone who reads the technical literature of the 1960s-1980s knows that the USSR was the powerhouse, and you couldn’t get by without JETP in your library. It’s not just physics of course, they were strong in most technical and engineering fields, with the exception of biological engineering, where they were somewhat behind.
But the US folks were much better in computational stuff, like Renormalization group theory, and Western Europeans and Californians developed string theory, so it’s not like the US was slacking off. Like the space race, it was a tight, tight race, that benefited all of humanity. Just the Russians, in my opinion, produced more sophisticated baroque work. Compare the BPZ paper (a masterpiece) with, say, great American papers like those of Edward Witten. They are both great, but the Russians are more “out there” and more technically dense, the ideas come from outer space and it’s HARD stuff, I mean, hard for even specialists. It’s a total judgement call, and I’m not going to argue this for too long, because it’s silly, but there is no doubt that Russia had the strongest or at least second strongest physics in the world in the 1980s (it’s gone downhill since the collapse).
Although the Russians were somewhat ahead of the US in analytical tools like dispersion relations and conformal theory, in parts of condensed matter physics, in analytical tools for high energy physics, the Americans were definitely ahead in computational physics, other parts of condensed matter physics like sophisticated materials science, and in string theory. You don’t understand what a beautiful thing Soviet physics is, it is like the lost Greek science of the Hellenistic period. It’s a pity it is gone, looking at it makes you cry.
You don’t understand why the USSR had the largest oil production in the world. It’s not like it had a large amount of oil in 1945. This worried Stalin, as he knew the West would control the Middle-East oil. So in 1950, he set up an all-union conference on the origin and exploration of petroleum. This was like a Soviet “Manhattan project”, it was enormous, and by 1955, Kudryavtsev had proposed the abiogenic hypothesis as a plausible theory.
By 1975, the USSR had demonstrated the basic principles of abiogenic petroleum, and rejected the voodoo Westerners use to dig for oil, opting instead to dig extremely deep boreholes in a grid, all over Siberia. The deepest holes in the world are a byproduct of this exploration. They found a ton of oil by digging where Westerners won’t simply because the Western science failed to discover that petroleum is abiogenic (we’re catching up now, due to the internet).
This is in every way a failure of Western science, and it can be attributed to Capitalism. The oil scientists are working for large oil companies, and they are not able to reevaluate the fundamentals of their field, no matter how much the data disagrees with their theory.
The modern kleptocracy has no relation to the USSR oil exploration, which was just fine in Soviet times, actually, much healthier than it is now. The state-run oil and gas industry was perfectly competitive with the West, actually, because they understood oil much better, they took the West to lunch.
As I said, I am not a fan of Soviet communism, just being fair to their successes. This was one of them.
Dude, I’m a frickin Israeli Jew, born in Nahariya, I live in NYC now, am an American citizen, but I still speak fluent Hebrew. I have a Koran somewhere in my house, though, I dunno if that counts as “being Muslim” (I haven’t read it yet, though, as I found it boring). I would suggest you repeat my experiment by going to some Muslims and chatting with them, asking the same questions. You don’t have to be a Muslim to be sane.
I didn’t do that, but I did do the converse— on a visit to Israel, I wore a Kaffiyah on my head, while walking around Nahariya. That was probably harder, as it was people I knew. It felt like being naked, I was stared at, because I’m obviously a Jew, I mean, look at the picture, but after about 20 minutes, I got over it, and then it was just constant hectoring lectures about how misguided I am from my (ostensibly leftist) relatives.
I don’t think you appreciate how ridiculous the ideology of ISIS or Al-Qaeda actually is. It’s something no sensible person, Muslim or not, could ever take seriously. It would be a joke, if there weren’t mercenaries killing people over it.
You can assert all you like, but the unequalled contributions of Russia to physics are mostly freely downloadable online today, and you just make yourself look foolish. There is no dispute that the best physics papers of the 1970s and 1980s are Russian, this is true just by citation counting (SVZ and BPZ are some of the heaviest cited papers of the era, along with the American Weinberg paper for the standard model). The Nobel committee is not my problem, they have been out of touch for decades. That’s why the Dirac medal was established, and if you look at the Dirac medalists, the Russians are fairly recognized (and Europeans too, especially Italians, who are also regularly slighted by the Swedes).
Ha ha! Yes, quantum gravity. That’s another thing the press gets wrong. String theory solved quantum gravity in cold spaces in 1997 (but still, not for an expanding universe, no inflation, so not our universe quite, but close). I am personally a proponent of string theory, like many other physicists, and string theory was a joint Russian-American development, but to be fair, mostly Western (it was first developed in California and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Russians got ahead briefly starting in the early 1980s with Polyakov and Knizhnik and that gang, but they were never as sophisticated after 1984, the Americans were definitely ahead here after 1985. The great string theory work is mostly American, and it is what for me makes the case for America being number 1. It’s hard to judge this stuff, dude, I am trying to be fair.
No, that just means we still need a new idea. But believe me, it’s a smaller new idea than the genius ideas that went into what we have now. There was more progress in physics in your lifetime than in all the history of humanity before.
The Soviets did infiltrate some Hollywood unions, this is true, but this was the exception rather than the rule, and it ended by the 60s.
It’s not BS, but you need to know some chemistry and physics to see that. The easiest way to demonstrate it is to look at the He content of oil— He is produced from radioactive decay. But much more is known, the whole pathway of oil and coal formation was pretty much entirely sorted out in the USSR, with some minor contributions in the 1990s from Gold at Cornell, and a replication of the crucial Soviet experiment about pressurized methane. At mantle pressures and temperatures, the methane is unstable to forming short-chain hydrocarbons, and these form petroleum by percolating through rock. The Western theory is BS, and it really has no leg to stand on, but this is it’s last stand, as the internet makes it clear there is no evidence for the biogenic theory, it was just an entirely wrong guess.
An alpha particle is an ionized He atom. It gets electrons once it stops, and becomes He.
Yes— that was the secular Stalinist Syria executing a “disloyal” officer. They paid lip-service to religion, they are about as religious as people in Tel Aviv.
Blah blah blah. Islam is irrelevant today, it’s just another religion, like all the rest, and it is only important for individuals looking for meaning in life. Nobody cares about that nonsense when they are fighting wars. They care about money, tribe, water, and oil.
Rubber stamp or not, there is a potential for an upset in Iowa and NH, and the rest of the nation.
An alpha particle is going too fast initially for electron capture. That’s why people didn’t know what the heck it was at first, and called it an “alpha particle”. It’s just 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Once the alpha stops, it’s positively charged, it attracts two stray electrons and they attach and emit ultraviolet light, and then it’s Helium. That’s how all the He on Earth is formed (any He in the atmosphere escapes eventually, the He is too light to stay bound to Earth). The concentration of He in oil shows it was passing through a place with lots of radioactive decay. This is a smoking gun of mantle origin, because that’s where all the heavy radioelements are.
I don’t bet, I contribute. It’s better than a bet, as it gets you closer to the goal. Given the situation now, with the DNC shenanigans, I wish I could do more.
It wasn’t a coincidence, it’s the same as the Dreyfuss trial. It’s not like 19th century France was so Catholic back then, the bigotry remains even when the religion is gone.
I’ve been to Egypt briefly (pretty religious place, comparatively), and I’ve been to the West bank briefly. They sell alcohol there, you know. People still go to nightclubs, and post dirty videos of themselves online. Islam is just another monotheistic religion, just about as silly and profound in equal measure as all the others. How hard is it for you to get over your brainwashing?
She refused to reinstate the elected leader of Honduras, instead implicitly supporting the right wing Fascist coup that drove him from office. She should get a Kissinger prize for that.
The people who support Hamas, the IRA, the Basques, they’re all happy to tell me. An ideology that no one openly holds is an ideology that doesn’t exist.
I contribute money. To Bernie Sanders.
Yeah yeah. It’s the exact Western counterpart of Lysenkoism, except here the Capitalists were the ones blinded by ideology. Oil is not made from squashed plankton, the path of formation is now known in detail, and it is still accepted in post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, and anywhere else where they have 30,000 ft deep oil wells that show that the biogenic idea is a crock. You are exactly right that it is like global warming.
What I did took a lot more courage, and the probability of getting beat up was significantly higher. I haven’t been to Dearborn, but I would be happy to dress up any way you want, including as a large-breasted transvestite with peyes and a yarmulka, and walk around there forever, and trust me, nobody will touch me. I am not afraid of other people, dickwad, only you are.
Leave him alone, he has a right to speak too. He’s not any good at it anyway.
I think the right wingers are right about this— it’s plausible for Lennon, as he followed the waves of political thought with very little stability, because he was always high. But of course, you have to use your judgement, as this is a disputed claim.
Methane is abiotic even in the West, the Western oil scientists capitulated on this about a decade ago, that’s the first real crack in the crumbling biogenic theory. What is still disputed in the West is that coal is also abiotic. Coal is the end product of methane percolating through porous sedimentary rock, turning the rock to carbon gradually by carbon substitution, preserving preexisting rock features like sediment layers and fossils. Peat is not a precursor of coal, it is the same carbonation of vegetable matter exposed to methane outgassings. It is easy to demonstrate both claims by seeing the close association of methane and coal and methane and peat, both form exactly along the migration paths of methane, as orginally observed by Kudryavtsev and confirmed by later research. Everything the industry says about the science in the West is total horse manure. This is all covered in Gold’s book “The Deep Hot Biosphere”, which despite the seeming originality, is largely a summary of 60 years of Soviet research.
I would recommend you read it, but I know you tend to mix up your letters. Go slowly, and look up the big words.
Actually, I discovered it for myself. I recanted for a week or so under pressure from colleauges who laughed at me, but then I read Gold’s book and confirmed I’m not crazy. So you would be more correct to say “you read zero books” than “you read one book”, as I don’t read to get scientific ideas. Kudryavtsev for sure read zero books, there weren’t any. The idea is correct regardless of the number of experts on the other side, and it is sufficiently obvious by now that the more you argue against it the dumber you reveal yourself to be.
Regarding methane, however, the battle is already won. Abiogenic methane is believed in the west to constitute the “vast majority” of methane. Of course, it’s not the “vast majority”, it’s “all”, but you can let them come to their senses slowly, as they are only slightly less dimwitted than you.
Telling you to leave him alone is protected speech also. Nothing he said was libelous— and libel law is civil law, and he isn’t doing me any damages. People in the US have the right to commit libel and slander, and others have a right to sue them for damages. The speech is still protected.
The urge to control others’ speech is an atrocious thing, and it’s unnecessary online, as I can rebut him quickly. If there were censorship here, my comments would be deleted first, not his, that’s what happens in many places, including Quora. So pipe down about shutting people up. Your actions led to his comment getting collapsed by moderators. Are you happy? Just counter the arguments, and move on. When you attack free speech, you aren’t helping the left. The gatekeepers controlling the speech are always on the right.
It’s called the “steady state universe”, and Gold worked on it in the 1950s. He also worked on other things too, he had a long career. Steady-state is a very good theory, it’s just happens to be wrong, as discovered by data collected later, in the 1960s. That’s not a strike against the theorists, who were honest and worked well to develop it. A mathematical part of steady-state theory (positive cosmological constant deSitter vacua) survives inside modern inflation theory, and in the far-far future (100 billion years from today), steady state will be a correct theory in certain sense, the universe will settle into a deSitter vacuum (but without the constant particle creation the steady-state folks theorized). It’s no strike against a scientist to be wrong, your job is to be original and to be parsimonious. Nature tells you when you are wrong, and in the case of abiotic oil, nature agrees with Gold.
I would like to point out that Einstein thought that hopping electron Bohr orbits caused superconductivity, that black holes can’t form because the star would spin too fast at the moment of collapse, and that it was possible to reproduce quantum mechanics from local hidden variables. His work on this was valuable even when it was wrong (although these are his three worst papers, they are justly forgotten today). You are too ignorant to criticise the science, so you criticise the scientist. It’s funny.
If you think having a mix of wrong and right ideas makes you a scientific “loser” than you have never done science. Science is not marketing, or sprinting. The losers are not those with wrong ideas, but those with no original ideas, old ideas. The best theorists have about a 50/50 mix of correct and incorrect ideas, and the percentage of incorrect ideas RISES with the quality of the scientist, because originality means you are sometimes wrong. Dirac had the varying G theory, ‘tHooft thought Hawking messed up a factor of 2, Witten had cosmological constant cones, Galileo thought circular pendulums are equichronus, every great scientist has wrong ideas. This is why science does not criticise people, it looks at the ideas themselves. But you’re not a scientist, just an idiot.
Science is done by losers, not by that guy.
I made my name at 26.
I knew it the day I did it. I was happy, as I agreed with you about the age business. If you don’t do anything in science by age 30, you should do something else.
Online, the hard left loons win.
Listen, you paranoid idiot, I have been posting with my real name with an extremely distinctive easily identifiable and impossible-to-copy writing voice, and you can find posts that are obviously mine stretching back for decades, linked to real world activity with my name on it. If you google the name “Maimon” you find it is a common Jewish name in Israel, it’s the family of the Maimonides, found in Russia and North Africa. My father is a Tunisian Maimon who emigrated to Israel in the 1960s. My father’s North-African ancestry probably helps make me immune to your real motivation, which is anti-Arab racism, but regardless of his ethnic background he’s an Israeli Jew too.
The reason I mention the IRA, the PLO, the Basques, the Weathermen, the Baider-Meinhof gang, and the Red Brigades, is because these are the last authentic terrorist organizations active in the West. After the infiltration and destruction of terrorism by projects like Gladio in the 1980s, modern communications tools made terrorism both counterproductive and impossible, and it disappeared entirely in the mid-90s, to be replaced by it’s fake state-sponsored counterpart— Al-Qaeda and ISIS. There are no authentic terrorist organizations active today.
There is no Muslim doctrine of lying to non-Muslims just as there is no Jewish doctrine of lying to non-Jews. By the way, that nonexistent doctrine, regarding Jews, is an old anti-Semitic trope used to explain why Jews didn’t reveal their sinister agenda. Your racism is old, it is that same old deadly Hitlerian version of conspiratorial anti-Semitism that needs to die, regardless of whether the target is Muslims or Jews.
But of course, you will now invoke the doctrine of Jews lying together with the doctrine of Muslims lying, to explain why I am purposefully lying, and then you will conclude that the Jewish and Muslim conspiracies have joined forces.
I have experience living in minority communities. While members of a discriminated minority won’t generally attack you for being different, a certain percentage of teenagers really might attack you if they perceive you as being a racist. So racists have a different perspective, which is self-justifying, as you, an anti-Muslim racist, possibly really are in some danger in Dearborn. I am not.
Yeah yeah. I know this violence, it is cause by perceived racist slights, by “dissing”, and nonsense like this, with stupid and violent young people. The racists slights are usually invisible to white people, white folks are usually totally blind to race issues, and they unintentionally pick up on disrespectful racist cues from the culture, which drives young black people up the wall, sometimes resulting in violence. It’s not justified, but you don’t understand it very well.
Funny enough, I was walking around my neighborhood smoking a pipe, just a few months ago, past a group of annoying black teenagers that I looked at with some contempt. when I got surrounded by this little gang who started swatting at my pipe. I talked to them for a minute, said “I am 40 years old”, and they suddenly dispersed, as they realized I wasn’t contemptuous for any reason other than that they are bratty little kids. People pick up on authority very strongly, and when the authority structure of society is against you, there are some people who become violent. It’s stupid, but it happens.
There aren’t any significant acts of terrorism committed by Muslims. There are acts of war in unstable countries, there are crazy individual murders with no coherent political motive, and there are false flags. ISIS might be the exception to this, as they seem to be self-financing now, but as their leadership is about as Muslim as Ghenghis Khan, I doubt it. In order to end Modern terrorism, it is important to put Richard Cheney on public trial.
The source for the claim is a credible Lennon associate who has several completely plausible stories related to it, and has no reason to lie. I consider it “certainly true”, but that’s my judgement. I don’t need to present citations and the political consensus regarding any statements, exactly because you and everyone else can check in 10 minutes.
I consider marijuana as a form of particularly hideous torture, so perhaps I will be forced to ingest it when I am shipped off to Gitmo. I will certainly never willingly put that poison anywhere near my body.
Is there a Republican that isn’t delusionally brainwashed?
It’s because the question is stupid. Profiling is dumb, and the idea of being suspicious of your neighbor’s FedEx package is just a dumb tactic to divide and distract Americans from their troubles.
He was talking about folks collecting weapons stockpiles, and those people are already tracked by police.
Yeah, yeah, nonsense. These attacks are due to people getting annoyed at being viewed contemptuously. I am good at pissing people off, and I’m also good at obsequiously getting them un-pissed-off, because it’s all a game of authority, which I understand and subvert, like any good Marxist should.
I found the only sub-animal here.
What defines a 911 call you take seriously?
He didn’t say the guns should be taken away, he said “you should report suspicious activity, like weapons stockpiles, if you are suspicious”. This is a question regarding what citizens should do, and it’s a bad question, and a dumb question, because it’s not about public policy.
Bernie Sanders, unlike other Democrats, generally accepts the right of Americans to own guns. He doesn’t want to take ANY rights away, but to restore the rights the Bush administration took way, and Obama has failed to restore.
I would be happy if you took your starter collection and marched with your weapon to Washington and demanded a repeal of the Patriot act, and an immediate end to warrantless wiretapping, extra-judicial murder and detention without trial. But instead, you conservatives play in your backyard. Karl Marx opposed gun control, because he wanted the public to stand up to the government, not because he wanted paranoid folks to dress in fatigues and pretend to be badasses.
If you think Keynsian economics is stupid, if you think anti-trust
regulation is stupid, if you believe your government is telling the truth about the source and financing of terror, and if you like Richard Cheney sitting in a bunker engineering terror against thousands of innocent
Americans, go ahead, vote Republican. You are walking to the slaughterhouse.
Clinton is not much better, but Sanders is miles above the rest. He will restore this constitutional Republic, not with empty platitudes, but with deeds. He will break up big monopolies, and put the criminals of the last decade on trial.
Sanders is the Democrat who supports the right of people to own guns, to hunt, and to shoot at targets. He is saying that it is ok to report suspicious activity, if they want (it is their right), he is not calling for the police to take away the weapons.
You should look at Sanders honestly— who else supports ALL your constitutional rights? Including the right to be free of the threat of indefinite detention, and extra-judicial execution? Warrantless wiretapping? He not only supports your gun-rights, he supports your free speech rights, your right to habeus corpus, and Republicans have fought to get rid of these, sometimes with the help of Clinton.
You are aiming at the wrong target, bub.
And Clement Atlee kept the population armed, and Tito. Not all socialists are against the rights of the individual, that’s just in your deluded head McPig. Also, I’m older than you.
He supports SOME gun regulation, but not any regulation of principle, nothing that would take way your normal guns. He’s not completely pro-gun, but he’s the best Democrat on this issue for you, and you are attacking him. You should be voting for him instead. It’s like attacking Rand Paul on civil liberties, when all the other memebers of his party are far worse.
Sanders is not a communist. He is a social Democrat, he is has always OPENLY been a social Democrat, and that means he is out to make sure gigantic corporations don’t take away your right to form and build a business. Right now, monopolistic firms are taking away small businesses faster than they are created, more businesses close down in the US today than are created.
Bernie Sanders is the only hope for American small-business Capitalism. Without his type of administration, all you will see are Wal-Marts and McDonalds, and say goodbye to the American small business tradition, the source of innovation and entrepreneurship for 200 years.
Unlike most Americans, I am entirely drug free. It is astonishing that you attack the one Democratic candidate who DOESN’T want to take away your guns.
That’s Mao’s book. Marx’s books (Capital/Manifesto) are actually very good, and his ideas are the basis for Keynes’s reevalation of the role of money in an economy, which is the foundation of modern economics.
The point of Marx is that workers get paid too little, when big corporations call the shots. they always underpay their employees, because the employees compete with a pool of unemployed (Marx called this the “reserve army of labor”). This competition ultimately destroys the economy, and leads to a revolution, if not corrected by something.
The split in the 20th century was regarding what to do with this observation. Keynes was the mildest— he said you should print money and use it to hire workers in government projects, so that workers would get paid more by reducing unemployment. That’s what people did in the US in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Scandinavians and Yugoslavians decided that workers should own the businesses and decide how the profits are distributed. Russians and Chinese decide that the government should own the businesses.
The idea of a centrally controlled economy is ridiculous, as it leads to the government being essentially a gigantic super-corporation. Nobody proposes that today. Sanders is calling for Keynsian policies, which should not be controversial. He is also proposing incetives for some worker-owned businesses, to see how it works out. None of this is coercive, or communist. It is a good idea.
Sanders is not making new laws to take away your rights. He is advocating repealing laws like the Patriot act and corporate pork which took away your rights in the last decade, and have not been repealed, due to a bought out government.
he is not a fan of big brother.
And Sanders has explicitly pledged to protect your shotguns, your rifles, and your handguns.
That’s why Bernie is not most politicians.
Did liberals set up military drills to simulate hijackings on the morning of 9/11? Did liberals pass the Patriot act? Did liberals decimate small-business with pro-monopoly decisions funded by corporate contributions? Did liberals suport imprisoning and executing people without trial? Oops, actually, yes, some did, but not Bernie Sanders. He has consistently protected ALL your rights.
The anti-American policiies came from the Bush administration, and Obama has not had the spine to reverse them completely. Bernie Sanders does have the spine.
I am not a communist, silly, I explained that in the comment you are responding to. You need to learn to read.
I know this stuff pretty well, actually. I would recommend to you to read Marx, as it is interesting stuff, and it influenced Lincoln and the 19th century Republicans, until Teddy Roosevelt.
You need to learn to differentiate propaganda from history. The crimes of Stalin and Mao are real, but they have nothing to do with Keynsian economics, or Clement Atlee, and neither with Tito, Dilas and George Orwell, or the Anarchist revolutionaries of the 20th century. History is not a simple thing, and it doesn’t often come with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. That’s why it is important to understand all philosophies, including the ones you disagree with.
I’m 42, dude.
My mommy escaped from Communist Romania. They don’t have Jr. High, that’s an American thing.
I won’t be done until everyone pledges their support for Bernie Sanders, 2016, and goes to his website to contribute much needed money to his grassroots campaign. He is the real deal, he is the only one honestly fighting for ALL your rights, including your right to as many shotguns, rifles, and handguns as you think you need.
Sanders is supportive of his state’s gun-laws. That’s why he is AGAINST the police state, you fool. You are barking up the wrong tree. He is by far the most sensible Democrat on gun laws.
He is running to win, and he has a solid chance. he just needs you to get your head out of your rear and see that he is on your side. He will not be giving up, as many Democrats are not thrilled about Hillary either. His program is more constitutionally sound and *gasp* conservative regarding civil liberties, than anyone else who has run for a long, long time.
Bernie Sanders supports gun ownership! The authoritarians in this race are Trump and Cruz, who will not only keep you in chains with big brother, they will keep you enslaved to big business.
He is not promising pie-in-the-sky things. Public education and public health are sensible, because the private sector always screws them up. He is also about enforcing anti-trust regulation against the giant banks, and protecting your business from predatory practices by monopolies. This is essential for the health of the US economy, it used to be standard Republican policy since Teddy Roosevelt, until Reagan redefined the word “competition” so that it doesn’t mean anything.
You can call all you want, if nobody broke the law, they don’t have to respond.
He hasn’t changed his position— he explicitly asserted the right of Americans to own firearms in the debate. This is tactics, and politics is very difficult, and he is doing the best job imaginable.
Your old-fasioned progressive strategies are not appropriate today, there are better communications tools, and it is perhaps possible to leapfrog to the presidency with a progressive candidate. The president is capable of issuing indictments for criminal activity, or busting trusts, and helping out progressive organizers at lower levels, if he nurtures the movement he creates. It is a gamble, other movements have been built differently, but the internet makes new things possible, so don’t write it off just yet.
A terrorist bomb planted by a Republican homeland security drill.
He has a real 50/50 chance right now, don’t sell him short. Iowa is a turnout game, and he can win it easily, he’s only 5 points behind. NH he’s 10 points ahead. He can’t run Green, he needs to win, and he can win, but it requires people to work hard and contribute.
Like you live so well. Do you like spending half your life in an automobile?
Yes, with modest limitations, like restrictions on mental health, background checks, and disallowing certain automatic and semi-automatic weapons. He explicitly affirmed the right to own firearms during the debate.
I don’t believe it needs a definition, because it’s exactly the question of whether police take your information seriously. Sanders isn’t calling for laws to prevent weapons stockpiles. He is just saying “you are allowed to report suspicious weapons activity”, and you are. I don’t agree with him on reporting that kind of nonsense, but I don’t think he’s so wrong on it either.
Keynsian stimulus is not correcting lack of private sector investment, it’s correcting something else, which you probably don’t agree even exists (but it does).
You are right that Keynes said stimulus should be temporary, but you must understand that no Keynsian takes this seriously, because they knew something about the economic context. The Keynsian policies of the 1940s were doubled down on in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, and yet again in the 1970s. There was nothing temporary about it.
The reason is that Keynes is really responding to Marx’s prediction that demand is too low in industrialized economies, because the wages of workers are not in equilibrium. In a classical “small town economy”, with a butcher, a baker, candlestick maker, you get equilibrium roughly when the wages of the average professional equalizes, so that an hour’s worth of candlesticks are of approximately equal value as an hour’s worth of baking. This equilibrium is the outcome of Smith’s invisible hand, it produces a relatively fair distribution of income, with some differences of a factor of 4-6 based on talent and ingenuity and hard work.
In an industrial economy, you get a completely different sort of labor— the hired employee. The employee does not negotiate from a position of strength, he is competing with the unemployed, and he can be let go at any time. So his wages go to subsistence, and absent intervention, they stay there. The owner of the factory gets all the profits, and no ingenuity or hard labor is required, other than the ability to become part of the owner class. It’s a perversion of the Adam Smith ideal, but often you hear people pretend that our industrialized economy is still rewarding hard work by a factor of 4-6 pay inequality, just like the village economy. That’s not what is going on. We have a factor of 400-40,000 wealth inequality that has nothing to do with talent or hard work, but based on class identification.
This process of producing inequality though the transition to industrial labor is what Marx works hard to show in Capital. The point is “too low demand”, which means, workers aren’t being paid enough to buy everything you could be making.
Keynes kept this idea, but Marx is totally taboo in normal economics circles, so he had to make up nonsense to justify it. He made up a just-so story about workers refusing pay-cuts, and so on, so as to get the result he needed— too low demand. Once he had this (which was really just a rip-off of Marx), he advocated government spending to compensate for the lost demand. This is the classical situation with Keynsian policies.
The thing is, the demand really never goes up, unless workers are making a bunch more money, and they never do unless unemployment drops to low single digits, because wages are always depressed when there are people unemployed. So Keynsian fixes become permanent, their goal is to keep unemployment at 5% or so, and you get obscene military spending, and road spending, whatever, whose only purpose is to raise wages for people by decreasing unemployment. It’s a very indirect way to do it, because you don’t want to interfere with the free market too much. It wouldn’t be necessary in theory if workers got a wage that reflected their labor, if they weren’t treated as a disposable commodity.
But without these interferences, you aren’t going to have demand in the maket, and the industrial economy crashes. This is what happened in 1929, it’s what is happening to a lesser extent today, and it is always true that the US is not operating at anywhere near it’s productive capacity, because of money distribution problems. Sanders proposes Keynsian fixes, but also hints at more structural fixes that will try to raise wages for workers intrinsically, so that it is more like the “village economy” than the “industrial economy”, at least as far as what wages look like.
I am sorry for writing so much, but it’s an involved topic.
Regarding the promises and the potential— you need to give Bernie Sanders a chance. He has advocated tough policies, including sending certain bankers who engaged in fraudulent marketing of derivatives to jail. He has the backbone to prosecure malfeasance, and there is a reason people go out of their way to make propaganda against him. Please listen to him, give him a fair shake, because he is not a run-of-the-mill lying politician, he is a principled man.
He isn’t lying, but, yes, he is doing pretty much exactly that. He’s straining to the center of the Democratic party on this issue, and the center of the Democratic party pretty much believes “guns are used to shoot people. They are a bad product, like cigarettes, and should be illegal.” That’s their position.
Sanders doesn’t believe that, and he’s appealing to this Democratic party center with more honesty than Clinton ever could muster in a million years. This is the ONE issue that Clinton is further left than he, and can appeal better to urban voters, so Clinton made it a big deal, and Sanders is doing his best to bend and twist, within the bounds of honesty, so he doesn’t lose the primary. He’s doing about as well as he can.
You really don’t appreciate how scared people in cities are of firearms. Nobody has a gun in a city, except for criminals. It’s a big divide. People in NYC are scared to death of guns, and want them banned outright, and don’t understand your stance. They wouldn’t want to own a gun even if it were free, it’s entirely useless here for any sort of protection except in stupidly getting yourself killed in a firefight, or accidentally getting yourself shot.
This is true, but a factor of 6 is a large factor— it’s the difference between a 50K salary and a 300K salary, and this is the actual typical incentive for a small-business owner to run a competitive business. Larger salaries only come in gigantic firms that operate on completely different principles. In large business, the risk is always insured, the innovation comes from buy-outs or rip-offs of small business, and the real big rewards are handed out politically to the board of directors, and the board of directors does not consist of entrepreneurs, but a bunch of snotty Ivy-League brats who maneuvered up the heirarchy by sycophantism and glad-handing.
If you think entrepreneurship risks are too great, you can suggest a government program for subsidized entrepreneurship insurance, or negative taxes on smaller businesses, that would be just fine by me, but Bernie Sanders had not suggested this. You might also be able to make this a private business, although in the market today, it would not be worth it, as no entrepreneur can really make it without the help of gigantic (already structurally insured) venture capital firms, as large corporations will generally destroy your venture before you have a chance to grow.
That’s not a question of public policy, it’s a question of common sense, and Bernie Sanders doesn’t have to answer it, your neighbor does.
What you need is a bigger paycheck. The taxes are there to support programs that increase employment, which has the ultimate goal of increasing everyone’s paycheck. A good raise is better than a tax cut, and Bernie Sanders is trying to give you a raise.
It’s because the answer is that the neighbor should NOT have reported anything, and it’s a stupid question because hindsight is 20/20. Most people who get lots of mysterious packages are selling stuff on eBay. But then, one is a psychopath, and suddenly everyone is like “Oh man, I should have reported it.” No you shouldn’t report anything, just shut the f*ck up and leave people alone. The psychopath is the one at fault, not you.
Know that if Bernie Sanders said anything like what I said above, bye bye election chances, and even though I agree with this, I would get pissed off is he said this, because I want him to win, not to run for show. I don’t know exactly and precisely what Bernie Sanders believes on this, but I believe that what he said reflects exactly what he believes, because he is unusually honest.
Muslims weren’t running the military drills of that day, simulating multiple hijackings. An insincere Christian vice president was. That’s where you need to look for redress, not scapegoats.
Bernie Sanders supports the right of Americans to own guns, and is the only Democrat who sincerely supports that right. You are barking up the wrong tree. His comments are advice to those who feel suspicious, and were not a suggestion for public policy. His stance on public policy is against snooping on law-abiding Americans.
It’s the Republicans that are bat-shit crazy. Bernie Sanders supports second Amendment rights, within reason, and better than any other Democrat. Unlike any other candidate, Democrat or Republican, Bernie Sanders has consistently opposed ALL big-brother measures that snoop on you and invade your privacy. He is more protective of civil liberties than Rand Paul. His suggestion in the debate was not about public policy, but about private citizens’ feelings of helplessness, and the question was stupid, as there is no public policy regarding what people feel they need to report to someone.
These limitations are not limitations on your rights to self-defense, they are reasonable public safety measures regarding the class of weapons you allow. Bernie also wants to ban police from using military style weapons, he completely opposes the godawful militarization of police that you saw for instance in the Boston lockdown. He is not calling for any sort of restriction of your rights, he is calling for moderate regulation in the interest of public safety. He’s the best Democrat on this issue by far.
You have got to be kidding. The only people snooping on you in the US are the Republican approved NSA, who are reading every single one of your emails, and keeping tabs on who you call. Bernie Sanders voted against starting these programs, has voted to end these programs, and is the only protector of civil liberties in the Senate other than Rand Paul. All the Republicans support the erosion of civil liberties.
Socialists in England, in France, in the entire non-communist world, protected civil liberties better than conservatives. You really have to look at the candidate, not at your ideological presuppositions, born of propaganda uncritically swallowed.
I essentially live off of collecting rent on property.
Hillary Clinton wants to get rid of all guns by allowing people who get shot to sue the gun maker. That’s not a reasonable policy.
He is better than the Democratic party line on this issue, and he supports the rights of Americans to own firearms, within regulations that are reasonable, not onerous.
He didn’t say that— he said that if you are suspicious, you can call the cops. He didn’t call for new laws to do anything. You need to learn to parse political speech.
I agree regarding the “no fly” list, I disagree with the list entirely, but he is in a difficult position on this issue, and I cut him some slack.
I honestly don’t know, but I assume anything that fires large capacity magazines, that’s a guess. I guess the idea is if you need to reload after a few shots, you aren’t going to be making a massacre. That’s a total guess, but that’s an example of a minimally invasive regulation, from my point of view.
I know they don’t literally read it, but the CHILLING EFFECT is there. I mean, I know I felt paranoid discussing things that are illegal with friends, even in jest. This is something that must NEVER happen in the USA. China is a totalitarian state, and you must never compare a social Democrat like Sanders to Mao, or even to the current censorious obnoxious CCP.
That lawsuit business is precisely the bullshit policy Sanders opposes and Clinton supports.
Bernie is explaining the difference in perception of guns in rural vs. urban areas. Guns serve no legitimate purpose in any city, they are always used for criminal activity, robbery or murder, and they are essentially useless even for self-defense, except in certain circumstances. Bernie Sanders is explaining the divide in the country, and explaining why it is tough to get a consensus.
He isn’t saying that there should be different Federal laws for one set of people rather than another, he is saying it is a tough issue. And he is right. I live in NYC, and I wouldn’t touch a gun with a ten foot pole. But I understand the position of someone living in rural South Carolina who likes to target practice, who likes to shoot, and feels confident that his gun is not going to get him killed.
I am sorry, but I have been to other countries, and the US health care system, even if you are wealthy, is the worst in the world by orders of magnitude. You get bad treatment, you get pushed drugs and tests you don’t need, just for profit, and you pay three times what you should, and that’s if you get a break. Every other country you get prompt effective treatment that costs at most half as much, and the results are much better both socially and customer by customer. I got treated in Hong Kong once, and I was startled at how much better China’s health care was than ours.
I have written about it at length elsewhere, I will link to a summary someone else made on 4chan at the end. To make a long story short, the US military was simulating crashing airplanes into buildings, radar blips simulating multiple hijackings on air-traffic computers, and had live-fly drills involving god-knows-what military aircraft buzzing around throughout the attacks of 9/11, on the same morning. There were other more peripheral drills as well. While simulating a terrorist attack while the same attack is going on might seem to be the coincidence of the century, it is not, once you understand how to pull off a 9/11 false flag. In order to do it without an army of traitors, to do it essentially alone, one person has to be in charge of ALL the drills, and this person needs a precise exact set of drills to pull it off. Those drills you would need are precisely the ones we know about, with an additional drill one can infer which is not reported, because all of its participants were killed on the flight identified as flight 93. Here is a link to more details: https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/15607580/
I would suggest, if your handle is accurate and you are in fact Canadian, that you butt out, because this is a serious, serious American issue, and a foreigner doesn’t know what went on here. Canadians tend to believe the stories that came out, they don’t know the details.
The drills regarding airline blips and simulating airplane crashes were reported in the New York Times, along with other newspapers (I read about them in 2002, and didn’t think much at the time). Most Americans know about one of these from the small amount of attention they got, the “coincidence” of multiple seemingly unrelated military exercizes simulating hijacking on the exact morning 9/11 is more or less a well documented fact in the American press, and common knowledge among well read folks, regardless of politics. It is not reported much outside the US. You can find ample verification by following the links in the link I gave recursively, and using a search engine.
The mainstream story makes these drills, simulating multiple simultaneous hijacking on the same morning of 9/11, a crazy coincidence. The existence of the drills is not disputed by anyone. but you do need to think a little about how a false flag must work in order to understand the significance. That’s what I provided with the framing story of the false flag, a sketch of how the one person who headed all of the drills pulled it off without any co-conspirators. Important authors who noticed long before I did are Webster Tarpley and whoever wrote “Flight of the Bumble Planes” in 2002. It is important to know how the 9/11 false flag was staged, because otherwise you don’t understand WHY all these drills are coinciding, without the framing story, it just looks like the most uncanny coincidence in history.
Once you understand that 9/11 was done from within the American government, and possibly only by only one responsible person: the vice-president, it stops being a world issue and becomes an issue of American corruption. The problem here is covert activity, secrecy, and unnecessary drills turning into terror. False flags are pulled of by the US and it’s allies in other countries all the time, for instance, the Syrian gas attack blamed on Assad. it just doesn’t happen on this scale, and modern technology allows a person powerful enough to head enough military drills to do it essentially alone.
That means you need remedies, like open government, and especially open drills. You need to be able to trace CIA payments so that no covert money ends up attacking the US. It is difficult, because the CIA is largely independent now, and can’t be audited well.
No, I don’t know anything about firearms, I hate guns. But, despite this, I strongly support the RIGHT to own firearms, and I am POSITIVE that Sanders does too, as I have been following every statement he has made this campaign.
My position is a TINY MINORITY position in the Democratic party, so if someone like me is running for president, he would have to be careful. Bernie Sanders supports gun ownership too, explicitly, because he SAID SO, and SAYS SO whenever anyone asks him for specific policy.
“The American people have a right to own firearms” is his quote from the last debate, and it is consistent with his voting history, and specific policy proposals. Other Democrats generally don’t believe in an individual right to own firearms, constitution be damned. Everyone else in the Democratic party is out to curtail gun ownership rights drastically. I don’t agree with them on this issue, but frankly, it’s not my top priority, because it’s ultimately protected by an amendment, so it realistically can’t be touched.
The positions he has taken on guns are mildly inconsistent, as he is facing a tough primary fight on the issue. He agrees with his own state’s zero gun control policy, and has voted to support it. But he also is sympathetic to people in cities who want to see an end to gun violence, so he shows empathy, without boxing himself in with specific proposals that would restrict guns unduly. A president has to understand murder victims in Chicago as well as gun enthusiasts in Vermont. Bernie Sanders is the only one who can get the two sides to talk to each other.
He hasn’t taken any explicit position regarding regulating handguns. His statements are vague, and only troubling to you because you simply are not part of the urban Democratic party. You could summarize his position as “No gun control at all in Vermont. Best if there are no guns in Chicago.” It doesn’t make sense, exactly, so you need to look at his record, and his record and explicit commitments are firmly on the pro-second-amendment side of the issue.
The remainder of the Democratic party has as a top priority ending the gun culture in America. Bernie Sanders doesn’t. He has never voted to over-regulate guns.
The second amendment is actually also about protecting revolutionary militias which enforce revolutionary order, controlling slaves who try to revolt, protecting large property owners from landless squatters, and massacring Indians without regulation by murder laws. It’s not all Fourth of July and apple pie.
It’s both the Klu Klux Klan and also Malcolm X’s call for African American gun-clubs, to protect themselves from the Klan. It’s a complicated right, perhaps the most controversial right we have in America. Sanders supports it.
His statement that you quote, when made specific in discussions, does not explicitly talk about handguns, but is, upon clarifications, revealed to be about guns used to “kill large numbers of people”, that is military style automatic and certain semi-automatic weapons with large magazine clips. He thinks those should not be on the street, and that’s the extent of the regulation he has proposed.
He has not yet included handguns, because handguns can be used for something other than killing people, in particular offering security from attack, through the threat of killing people. But he leaves himself wiggle room on this, because he is completely to the right of his entire party, as am I, on this issue. Perhaps you don’t like it, but it’s far more supportive of gun rights than any other Democrat. Hillary Clinton would like all guns confiscated, all gun manufacturers out of business, and is proud to say so.
The idea that you would protect yourself from “thugs” with guns is pretty silly. Unless you are a small business owner, or landowner, i.e. if you are a typical city dweller who doesn’t own a liquor store or jewelry shop, you most likely won’t protect yourself with a rifle or handgun. You will just get yourself shot in a gunfight, or accidentally shot by your kid finding it in your small apartment. But the ownership of guns has been historically useful in preventing Fascism, which is why I personally accept it, against my initial judgement, going along with George Orwell and Karl Marx, who both, from experience, said that liberty and gun-ownership go hand in hand.
I have been following Sanders very closely, I support him in every way, and I know exactly what he really is. He is NOT out to take away your rights, that is certain.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t pay me to fight for him, I pay Bernie Sanders to fight for me. I want to see him win your vote, because I am sick of the erosion of civil liberties in America, the encroaching threat of fascism, and I know that he is the best candidate to reverse it.
I am a committed Sanders supporter, I am not paid to comment, I contribute monthly to his campaign, so you might say it is me that is paying. It is very difficult to be here speaking to people who are not on my side politically generally. But we all need to stand together, on the right and on the left, and protect each-other’s rights.
Keynes is not my hero, I think of him as a Marx rip-off. His policies are only good because Marx’s analysis is good, not because Keynes had anything original to contribute.
Marx agreed with you on guns— he wanted an armed population. So did other Marxists, who begged the government to release weapons to the public, e.g. this is what started the Spanish civil war in 1936. The Partisans were armed communist militias, Tito led an armed population. The hard left is not always out to take guns away.
He is running to win. He is already on Hillary’s bad side— she will not appoint him for anything. Don’t be fooled, he can win the election, he is not running for show.
I hope your neighbor’s aunt is donating all that money to Bernie Sanders.
U livin in the wrong century.
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered” , https://www.marxists.org/ar… . Marx didn’t advocate this as a temporary policy.
Keynsian driven economic policy describes every Western nation in the last 80 years. It is the reason that the Fed can print money without spiraling inflation. The Republicans predict inflation every time a government has loose monetary policy, and it’s a false prediction. That’s Keynes, and ultimately, if you look deeper, it’s Marx.
You can call the cops, they aren’t going to do anything without a law. His policy support the individual right of Americans to own firearms, subject only to moderate limitations on class of firearms, limitations which he believes should extend to the police as well, as he calls for an explicitly demilitarized police force.
He doesn’t attack crudely, he attacks through the contrast of the example he sets.
Presumably the illegal semi-automatic was procured by stealing the legal one from somebody. Countries without semi-automatics don’t often see criminals with semi-automatics— the criminals get cheap illegal handguns with limited capacity and accuracy.
I don’t see any contradiction in sensible limits on the mass-murder capacity of guns— you aren’t allowed to have a nuclear warhead, you aren’t allowed to own a tank-turret, that’s in the interest of public safety, what’s wrong with saying you need to reload after 6 shots (or however many)? That’s the kind of public policy debate Sanders is proposing, not taking away all the guns.
Perhaps after enough prosecutions of actual state criminals, the concept of a “no fly list” will no longer be something politicians have to pretend to like.
You are not competent to evaluate evidence, I can see you haven’t looked up the drill articles. It is good you are Canadian, because in the US, we can’t afford this kind of blindness.
Do you think Sanders supported the NDAA? He has fought against all restrictions of civil liberties CONSISTENTLY, more consistently than Rand Paul. When asked in the debate whether he would end warrantless wiretapping, he said “Of course!” Not even granting legitimacy to the other side. He is not Obama, and he isn’t willing to compromise on the constitution, or on civil liberties, but he is also a good politician and will say what is necessary to get elected. Support him, he is your best hope for a reversal of the police state. I mean it. That’s why I support him.
There is no accounting. You don’t understand Keynes. Inflation is tricky, and it isn’t a simple function of the amount of money you make, it depends on the productive capacity being stretched, and on labor contracts.
Use “find” in your browser— come on. You should understand that for Lenin “Bourgeoisie” meant anyone not a member of his party, and for Stalin, totalitarianism meant that no one could do anything independent of the leadership. Marxist thought is very broad. None of this has anything to do with Sanders, by the way— he’s not a Marxist.
Even if your income is high, a pro-growth policy increases it in absolute terms, it just increases the income of low-wage earners more, so you might not be so wealthy in relation to your neighbor. Redistribution policies are required for growth, I am sorry to tell you. Without it, you get a third-world economy, with tiers of society cut off from each other, obscene inequality, and massive inefficiency. Eventually, you get a revolution. In the current climate, most people are working for gigantic box stores, and making a terrible wage, and need public assistance even with a full time job. That’s the government subsidizing effective slave labor. When those workers get paid fairly, the whole economy grows through their purchases, and continues to grow until the productive capacity is stretched, at which point you start to get inflation. I don’t see inflation as a problem today, low wages are.
I agree that illegal immigrants drive wages down, but that’s because they have no legal protection. Immigration to this country is not exploding. My parents came here 35 years ago on an H1b, and I can assure you that American education is not competitive. Americans, even the best educated ones, are mathematically and scientifically ignorant compared to people in other countries. It’s not your fault, you just have no good schools until you get to college. This produces a culture of marijuana and UFOs, creationists, angels, and so-called economics experts who don’t acknowledge that Marx had something to say about how markets function.
Listen, douchebag, I support gun rights, even though there is no legitimate purpose for those awful things. I don’t believe the government should have weapons the citizens don’t, even if it means people will get killed. I would be happy if both the government and the citizens agree to limit themselves to crossbows domestically, but that’s not going to happen. I am not a spokesperson for Bernie Sanders, I’m just a supporter. I’m much further left than he is.
What part of “I support gun rights” is ambiguous? I don’t want to change the constitution, I LIKE IT that you can buy the same guns as your government can use domestically. You are paranoid about this. It is possible to simultaneously hate guns, but understand the right to carry them is important. Is that hard for you to comprehend?
Hitler implemented road construction Keynsianism (copying FDR, later copied by Eisenhower) and got out of the depression in less than a year. Britain had Keynsian policies throughout the postwar boom, so did all of Western Europe. Scandinavia and Yugoslavia had more radical policies, which encouraged worker-owned business, and boomed even more. Morgenthal’s opinion is ridiculous, the only failure of the New Deal was that it didn’t do enough spending, because Roosevelt was not a dictator, and Hitler was.
There are no choices anymore, only horrific gigantic retailers that give me a headache. I will never buy from these, so I’m limited now to the NYC area, but even here, it is impossible to avoid regarding clothing, and in the last decade, the shops in NYC are closing at a dramatic pace, slowly getting replaced by these monstrosities, and I will have to leave the country. I assure you that it is not like this in Hong Kong, in Israel, in Italy, where small businesses still exist for retail, and small businesses open and succeed regularly. Regarding US software, internet service, cable, rail, buses, soft-drinks, candy, even taxi service and NY cart vendors, these are all just outright monopolies.
While many of the other large businesses are not monopolies in the traditional sense, they have a handful of other gigantic competitors, they are large businesses which replaced thousands of local small businesses, and because of their size, they are able to exert contractual power in restraint of free trade, as they can use their size to underpay employees and undercut competitors with predatory pricing. That puts them under the scope of the Sherman Anti-Trust act, and so the use of the word “monopoly” is appropriate in spirit, as they really should not exist. There is nothing more efficient or beneficial about having a Walmart replace 1800 small businesses. They are cheaper because they employ underpaid labor, all but slave labor, and get special deals from suppliers due to threats allowed only by their size. The “savings” they pass on are costing your entire economy, because these businesses cannot innovate as well as 1800 independently owned shops. Actually, they cannot innovate at all.
Large businesses have a lot of overhead and bureaucracy, and are less efficient than a network of small businesses. They only gain an advantage in a situation where they can hire wage-labor at low cost, and manipulate the governments and zoning boards to give them a deal. They also rely on the ridiculously subsidized roads and automobiles that have made most Americans, those outside NYC, spend half their lives driving places, rather than living.
Worker owned business, in the old days, did sort of take over the market, in the age when every business was small, many family owned, and operated. Independent contractors, small firms making a few things, these firms are often worker-owned, and even when they are not, workers have a great deal of say in how the business is run, and the owners listen and respond to their concerns. When the economy was organized this way, the efficiency was higher, and all the innovation comes from these firms anyway. The issue is that when there is a low minimum wage, and a bought-out government, small business can’t compete with big business paying slave wages and getting special contracts due to the size and muscle. This has replaced the healthy American small business economy with gigantic box stores and ridiculously inefficient multinationals, that are hardly distinguishable from Soviet firms.
The worker owned businesses in the US are not market tested, and regardless of the market, they should be the norm, because workers prefer working there, and the products are better.
Regarding Sanders comments about choice, he was criticizing the illusion of choice regarding underarm deoderant. If you look at the active ingredients and composition, the firms are all putting the exact same product in different shaped boxes, with tiered pricing to different socioeconomic groups. It’s the same story regarding laundry detergent, regarding breakfast cereals, and the illusion of choice is produced by a single non-innovative gigantic firm, sometimes two firms, placing the exact same product in 18 different boxes. This is not real consumer choice, which is defined by many small manufacturers taking risks, and producing actually different things, as you will find, for instance, with natural deoderants, or alternative detergents, where the firms producing them are tiny.
What I am describing is NOT an efficiency of scale, it is exploitation. Efficiencies of scale are actual efficiencies— doing the same thing with less labor. There is no reduction of labor in the operation of a chain store, if anything, it’s more hours of human labor per unit product, it’s just that the labor is not paid anything at all remotely fair. The difference between a chain store and 1000 small businesses is that the labor in the small businesses is free and self-directed, the products are more diverse, there is more potential for innovation, because the business is self-managed. The owner of a one-person business is making $100,000 a year to justify the business, and can quickly and effectively respond to the market with her own brain. She stocks her own shelves, she decides what products are good, which are not, and it’s not up to a small bureau with 8 cigar smoking businesspeople in a room.
The labor in the chain store is effectively enslaved and making $25,000 a year. The only efficiency gained is the false efficiency of reducing the average income of those working to give you the product. Reduction of wages is not an actual efficiency, but it sure looks like one when you do a corporate quarterly report.
Even when the firm passes the savings on to the consumer, the consumer is only getting a deal because there are other people whose labor is too cheap, and their lives must be subsidized by government programs. The only difference between the big store and the small is that the employees at the big store are being paid far less than their labor would be worth under proper competitive conditions. If there were zero percent unemployment, nobody would work at WalMart unless the wages were astronomical, because it’s a truly terrible job.
While there are a handful of exceptions to the rule about big business, they are always unstable to buyout and consolidation. The pattern of industry in the US is a remarkable period of free market innovation, like with the competition between free-press newspapers in the 1960s, that ends when one well-financed entity takes them all over through buyouts (as happened with the free press when Rolling Stone bought them out and killed the market). The resolution to such consolidation is active policy to ensure business stays competitive, and this is what the Sherman act was supposed to do.
The Sherman act is not enough, in my opinion. In order to make a healthy economy, one needs to encourage a zoning policy that fights sprawl, and a tax policy that fights against size, so that big firms are punished for their size. This is simply to counteract the terrible power that comes with size, the power to hire labor at ridiculous rates, the power to drive competitors out of business with predatory pricing, and the reduction of say in what the actual wares are.
If Wal-Mart were a flea-market, with independent vendors hawking different things in different departments, the stocking and restocking would be more efficient, the wages would be fair, and the orders would not be centralized and homogenized. This type of thing would raise prices somewhat, but only in the sense that minimum-wage labor and large-size predatory contracts wouldn’t work. There is no additional advantage of these large businesses.
I don’t agree that small firms producing crazy products will always exist. They are unstable in a situation such as today, when large firms are taking over. The consolidation of power in a capitalist economy produces an alienated workforce that is chronically underpaid, because the labor is not freely competitive, but is competing with an army of unemployed, and there is no potential for small business, because it is quickly consolidated or bought out.
The goal of socialism is to protect you from a handful of big-business owners who are just as overweight, ignorant, and unstable in their sex-lives. These owners are taking over the economy, and it was a policy for over 100 years to reduce their power by anti-trust action. This has reversed in the last 40 years, and now big-business is the only business in most of America.
There are many forms of socialism, and not all of them involve the imposition of power over others. Socialists go from Lenin to Bukharin in their attitude toward individual freedom. Anarchic socialist policies seek to reduce both corporate and government power, by adjusting policies to favor both competitive and cooperative ventures.
It’s not about agree or disagree, it’s obvious why the big firms take over. The companies that employ slave labor are cheaper, because they pay their workers too little. The equalization of wages in a zero-unemployment free-market with fair-contract law would quickly put WalMart out of business, as it is a terrible place to work and a terrible place to buy, except for the deals you can get.
Your reasoning is based on false 18th century microeconomic model, and this was explained by Marx in the 19th century, and repeated by Keynes in the 20th century, and is basically folklore today. The rate of unemployment is not determined simply by the way in which businesses consolidate and therefore require more labor for overhead and day-to-day operations. It ALSO depends on the total wages gathered by all the workers in the business, the so-called “aggregate demand” that they generate, in Keynsian terms.
Consolidation lowers wages and reduces aggregate demand, and the loss of aggregate demand is GREATER than the difference in the number of employees in the chain-store vs. the small business network it replaces. Obviously, because the labor costs for the chain are lower than the total payments to those working in the small businesses, that’s their entire “efficiency”! The gained “efficiency” is precisely that the pay of the workers is reduced (assuming this is the only source of their margin, it’s not— they also get special deals from suppliers).
Even though a certain number of extra people are needed to do the same amount of work in a chain store, the reduction in demand due to their low wages in a chain-store dominated economy leads other businesses (that have nothing to do with the chain store) to close, which increases unemployment elsewhere. Everyone ends up working for the chain stores eventually, regardless of skill, collectively doing less than what they were doing before the chain store actually took over. This is not theoretical, there are college graduates and entrepreneurs who are forced to work for chain stores today.
I should point out, on the 0% chance that you go and check the Marx reference, that Marx wasn’t exactly talking about chain stores and small retail businesses in Capital I, but about large automated factories replacing small individual cottage industries, leading to a complete collapse in aggregate demand (an observation he demonstrates with extensive British labor statistics from the mid 19th century— I think Capital is the first systematic collection of such statistics). But it’s the same principle. In the case of factories, there actually ARE economies of scale, they are real, and due to automation. In the case of retail consolidation, the gains have nothing to do with any automation. They are simply due to rotten wages, and due to political power.
The criterion of fairness for prices is described by free efficient market theory— the fair price paid for a product is the competitive price when there are an infinite number of competing producers, and the fair price that goes to labor is the price that the labor can charge in an economic equilibrium with effectively no unemployment. That’s the model in economic textbooks. In this equilbrium, any “theory of value” is equivalent to any other, they only differ in philosophy, and I don’t care about that.
In such a perfect efficient free market, corporations have no profits beyond what is required to pay costs and salaries and return on capital costs. All workers make roughly the same salary, roughly up to risk and hours, quality of work, etc, which account for a difference of a factor of 4-6 in salary. The owners of the factory make about the same as the workers, with a bit of a premium for risk. That’s what economic equilibrium looks like theoretically, and it is also what actual markets look like in a village economy with small businesses with independent producers. If you look at a typical small business, the owner is not making more than 5 times the employees.
But in real markets, when you have enormous corporations, the model is completely distorted from this idealized situation, the kind where the statements you made about “more demand for workers means higher wages” makes sense. In the enormous corporate world, unemployment is intrinsic, it is part of the system, as the industrial economy hires and fires workers in chunks of 10,000, so people migrate to the cities to be a part of the labor army, producing a certain amount of unemployment. This is unavoidable.
The threat of unemployment, when it is present, drives the wages of all labor to subsistence. The only exceptions are cases where someone has some leverage to charge higher prices for their labor, due to some scarcity in the service that they offer. These scarcities are never permanent, eventually other people learn to do what you are doing, and your wage recedes to market average. The only people who extract large salaries are not those who have skills, but those who are positioned to siphon off corporate profits into their pockets, without any bidding war by people willing to offer the same service, a bidding war that would drive their compensation to market average. Such people have an effective monopoly on a position of power, and are selected from a separate class than ordinary workers. These workers skills are not computer programming, engineering, or any other rarified skill, but the ability to shake hands, be nice, and look people in the eye and convince them that they are trustworthy. These skills are the only route to wealth, and they are not skills, they are the opposite of skills. They are social bullcrap.
These fairness criteria are accepted by most people. The price you expect to pay is the competitive price, not “what it’s worth to you”. Even if you are dying, and would pay $1,000 for a glass of water, the water’s price is the competitive price, not the maximum price you would pay. The only person who can charge a price which is at the maximum of what an entity will pay is someone with a monopoly, a famous name, a celebrity, someone with a government granted monopoly, a patent or a copyright. These are not free-market prices, free-market prices are essentially egalitarian and reflect the labor embedded in a product.
If WalMart would not be in business in an economic equilibriium, it shouldn’t be in business at all. The people who lacked skills had better jobs negotiating with many separate businesses long before WalMart came along.
Hey, I’m not Bernie Sanders! but I support him, even though his policies are not anything close to the ones I think are best practice. That’s because I think he is the most sensible candidate for everyone, not just me.
As far as I can see, he is not advocating increasing state power in any significant way, nor is he advocating reducing state power either. He is advocating using the existing moderate level of state power to reduce unemployment (by a jobs program and subsidized college) and reduce the power of big-business (by enforcing anti-trust law and breaking up banks), and reducing the cost of business through a public health program (this benefits business in Europe— health-insurance bundles for employees is one of the so-called “efficiencies of scale” in box stores). These policies are a no-brainer, they are a combination of the best standard Democratic and Republican policies of the past 80 years. He also wants to make incentives for worker owned business, and to direct R&D efforts towards the problems of global warming, and he advocates reducing state power of surveillance. In general, unlike any of the other candidates except for Rand Paul, he advocates a strict, essentially libertarian, approach to civil liberties.
The “handful of big-business owners” is not at all fictional, you need only look at the distribution of income and property in the US to see this. The US economy does not have a broadly distributed ownership class anymore, and the stock of publically traded corporations does not usually reflect expectations of dividend, but expectation of growth for a monopolistic business. The profits are divvied out to a handful of multi-millionaires and billionaires at the top, through equity programs. The higher management is rewarded with a non-negligible fraction of corporate profits. Even if you own equity in a public corporation, the company will reward stock and options to it’s management, effectively diluting your stock and stealing from you to enrich it’s board of directors. These awards are not market based, they are the corporate management lining their own pockets with the profits, instead of distributing it to shareholders and taking a competitive salary, as would happen in an idealized frictionless market.
Regarding “anarchy”, the position of traditional European anarchy is the minimization of BOTH state and private power. This is tricky, as the way to reduce state power is traditionally through a network of businesses which provide services, while the way to reduce business power is through government regulations. This creates the perception that there are only two alternatives— increasing concentrations of private power, or increasing concentrations of state power.
I don’t believe in this dichotomy, because I believe that simple regulatory frameworks, much simpler than the current nightmare of regulations, are capable to reversing the concentration of power in private organizations. The only thing you really need, I THINK, is a strong financial incentive for firms to split up into smaller firms, something which can be done using a strongly graduated corporate income tax based on the number of employees. The other thing is a strictly regulated contract law that makes sure that entities which are independent are open with their suppliers and publish their supply contracts and prices, and suppliers are required to price the same to all buyers (within reason— so a standard box of screws doesn’t cost the same a single screw, but the standard box of screws is the same price for Walmart and my local store). These policies can encourage the unfreezing of a frozen economy, by dividing up businesses into managable chunks that can be competed with without raising billions of dollars. The contract law should also be standardized enough that corporations can’t legislate to consumers through fine-print in their service contracts.
As far as I know, nobody suggest this as policy except me. But I like Sanders because he proposing older ideas that have already been tested in many places in the world, including the pre-1980s US, and are certainly beneficial.
Different liability issue— this is an issue of resale potential. A person might be liable for the mass-sale of guns which he has reason to suspect might be resold illegally. He is not liable if someone uses the gun to shoot someone else. Don’t confuse the two positions, Sanders’ position is sensible, Clinton’s is ridiculous and anti-constitutional.
Is Bernie Sanders muddying the water by using one liability issue to cover up his opposition to another liability issue? Yes, I think so. If it helps him win, I’m ok with that.
Hitler turned the economy around in about 8 months, long before the takeover of Austria. The reason is that he reduced unemployment to zero. In the USSR, there was no great depression (or for that matter, any recessions at all), because there was always zero unemployment since the early 1930s. I am not advocating either Hitler or Stalin as models, these are terrible leaders, the point of this is that your critique is incorrect. The reversal of depression in Germany predated any annexations, and was caused entirely by putting the unemployed to work in road construction and rearming the country. In the USSR, the labor was used to industrialize and electrify the country.
In the US, the same policies did not put everyone to work, and worked to a lesser extent. When the war came, everyone was employed, and the economy recovered completely. This led to four decades of consensus that full employment is the primary goal of government economic regulation, a consensus that was reversed in the 1980s, leading to the problems we see today.
Morgenthal was a bourgeoise dipshit, a rich nitwit like all the other high-class hangers-on around Roosevelt. He, like nearly all economists of his generation, had no idea what Marx was saying, only Keynes did. Morgenthal wouldn’t understand an aggregate demand graph if it bit him on the leg.
The slowing down of growth in the US is a product of neoliberal policies that reversed Keynsianism and anti-trust regulation in the 1980s. The erosion of free labor is caused by the free-fall in demand cause by low-wages. Low wages come from competition with the unemployed, and also through mergers and consolidation that alienate labor, reduce actual efficiency, and remove all innovation and competition. These things were disguised in the 80s and 90s due to the computer revolution, which increased productivity so much, it seemed there was growth. But wages were static in this period, despite the growth in productivity.
On these points,Bernie Sanders is only minimally suggesting to restore the sensible Keynsian policies favored by Eisenhower and Nixon. He isn’t proposing more radical measures. Whatever Morgenthal said, he is dead, and he is dead wrong. I have no respect for that airhead.
Regarding health care, Europe has a tremendous advantage because businesses have nothing to worry about regarding health care— the public part is state, and any private add-ons are the individual. The business never has to worry about it. In the US, businesses have to arrange for health insurance, and big businesses get breaks due to their contracting power and much larger bundle. I would assume the US would follow a French model more than the more old fasioned and centralized British model, but I don’t care which, as right now, I personally can’t see a doctor.
Sanders policies can’t be argued to be a significant increase in state power— all the regulations are already there, they’re old, and the enforcement precedents for his proposals are there too. The regulations of monopolies was established by Teddy Roosevelt, with the Sherman act, and breaking up rail, oil, and communication monopolies was harder than breaking up banks, as there was physical infrastructure issues regarding those. Banks are easy in comparison. Public works spending was standardized by Eisenhower, and never stopped really, just the levels go up and down according to political priorities. So I don’t know what you are griping about. Any public contracting on roads goes through a bidding process, and while it is not optimal, it isn’t the type of waste you see at the Pentagon, and the money helps struggling districts, and constitutes the most effective Federal financial distribution program from wealthy states to poor ones. This redistribution of money is how the US prevents Misissippi from becoming Greece.
In the 1980s, anti-trust enforcement was given up, and the justice department redefined competition so that basically two to five gigantic firms that shut everyone else out are perfectly fine. This was assumed to be healthy, just because it was healthier than the USSR, where it was one state-run gigantic firm. Five competing gigantic firms, as in clothing, is better than the USSR, but it’s still terrible in terms of innovation and labor alienation. I don’t agree with this type of centralization policy, I think economies innovate only when barriers to entry are low. I can give you a list of examples til the cows come home of how innovation worked, and then disappeared when businesses got large.
I doubt you considered strongly graduated corporate income tax seriously, as it is not at all like other anti-monopoly measures. It is nearly impossible to circumvent, except by false splits. The goal of contract reform is to ensure that ostensibly independent firms are actually independent, and not just declared independent for tax purposes. The goal is to get firms to a managable size, much like Unix puts together small programs to achieve arbitrarily complex goals. When you have “everything and the kitchen sink” firms, they can’t do any one thing well, they do everything half-assedly.
The goal of non-bureaucratic reforms like graduated income-tax and transparent contracting is precisely to avoid putting any men or women in charge of any other men or women. Transparent taxation policies like this are not easy to circumvent, as they require a special exemption for your large firm to be legislated into law by a public deliberation process. The goal of campaign finance reform is to avoid giving anyone the power to do that.
I believe that the end goal of minimizing centralized power is best achieved by such policies, that they are not pointless, because they really do try to make sure that power is broadly distributed. I am painting a rather more bleak picture of the US today, due to recent experience with retail in suburban Connecticut, where it is a nightmare of chain-stores and lifeless malls, with zombified people living empty lives. Seeing it, it is a wonder that the suicide rate is so low.
You reflect mainstream economic thinking, but mainstream thinking is wrong, as the field of economics is highly politicized.
It is simply wrong to say that Marxist economics makes false predictions. You don’t know what Marx predicted— it is exactly what happens in industrializing capitalistic economies. He didn’t pull his stuff out of a hat, he was observing English wages during the industrial revolution, and he supported his conclusions with overwhelming evidence.
The famous prediction Marx made is that the same capitalism which works for cottage industries is unstable to industrialization. Industrialization leads to consolidation of cottage business into gigantic industrial businesses by consolidating capital in banks and granting it to a few individuals to build an enterprise. These enterprises purchase wage labor as a commodity, and each one replaces many small businesses due to industrial efficiency. They therefore produce some unemployment, which theoretically should be absorbed by new industries as they appear, and this is what happens as long as there is sufficient demand for products. But the bugaboo is the wages— the unemployment drives down wages of all commodity employees far below what they would be in a Say’s-law zero-unemployment situation, the theoretical equilbrium. Absent regulation, any big industrial firm ends up paying subsistence wages to the vast majority of workers. Since these workers are underpaid relative to the economic equilibrium wage, there are two effects— first there are enormous returns on capital to the capitalists, as they don’t have to pay out their profits in wages, and second, the empoverished workers are not able to purchase all the products the economy can theoretically produce.
This loss of demand eventually leads to a total collapse of business production, and ends either in total ruination or in revolution. The “ruination” scenario is what happened in chunks of South America until the recent socialist victories there, where the economy split into tiers, with a large underclass living on subsistence wages with enormous unemployment, side-by-side with a small number of well-connected owners and lackeys reaping enormous profits, who charge prices for their labor on an entirely different scale. The same process happened in the US after the frontier closed (the thesis is that the frontier could absorb any excess unemployed labor through land-grants, turning unemployed into subsistence frontiersmen). But even before 1890, post Civil War in the 1870s and 1890s, American industrailization produced recurrent collapses, the last and worst of which was the great depression.
There is nothing that Marx said about the problem that is incorrect, he in effect predicted the depression, and his prediction is that absent intervention, such a depression is permanent. This experiment is not wise to try, but it has been tried in countries which industrialized under enforced free-market policies, like in South America. His analysis is not only insightful, it is probably the only significant insight in economics, which is why he is so famous.
Keynes’ policies are based on the fact that Marx is the “he who must not be named” in economics. So Keynes takes Marx’s observation that worker produced demand is too low, and makes up a fable for why that is. He pretends that the too-low wages are a temporary glitch, and proposed “temporary” public spending to shore up demand. As anyone who implements Keynsian policies knows, these policies are anything but temporary, they are not anti-cyclical, they are avoiding a permanent and catastrophic collapse.
The interventions in the market in the US and elsewhere are all really responding to this critique Marx made, except nobody is allowed to say it (except me, as I have no political constraints). All interventions since the 1930s are purposefully aimed to prop-up wages and shore up demand, while simultaneously pretending that this is just temporary anti-cyclical intevention. Eisenhower stopped pretending, and instituted highway spending as a permanent Keynsian stimulus. Nixon didn’t pretend either, he used stimulus cynically to get reelected.
The interventions cannot decrease and will never decrease, because there is no law that demands labor be paid the proper wage to purchace the maximum industrial output in a situation with commodity labor. In the modern US economy, the government arranges the level of demand by manipulating the unemployment and the money supply. If the government refuses to do this for some reason, you end up with a tremendous depression which leaves you in a situation comparable to 1980s South America, where America hypocritically disallowed any Keynsian policies despite using them at home.
That’s Marx in a nutshell. Regarding Marxist-Leninists, they fetishize Marx, and they usually go further, and propose a specific remedy for the problem: government ownership under one-party control. I don’t agree with this remedy at all, and neither did the majority of socialists in most of the 20th century, including Dilas, Orwell, Tito, Atlee, etc. it’s just that these bozos were the loudest voices.
The “labor theory of value” is something that is often misunderstood in Marxist economics. It isn’t actually Marx’s idea, it is taken from an earlier bourgeoise economist named Ricardo. The point of it is that in a frictionless free market equilibrium, profits go to zero, labor prices go to a standard wage, and the price of product is reduced to the expenditures that go into it, which ultimately boils down to the standard wage times the number of average hours that go into producing the product. While Marxists often cite this as normative, it is also the same as Capitalist equilibrium, and it only differs from other theories in philosophy. Your philosophy shouldn’t matter, it is just political, I don’t care what you call it. The trade-value in equilibrium is what the price of a product would be in a frictionless situation.
The deviations from the labor-cost situation are those where there are monopolies and concentrations of power. These are, according to you, “how markets are supposed to work”, but this is not what the theorems people prove are about. The Pareto theorems about efficiency relate to equilibrium, not to situations where certain people are sitting on property generating high prices which don’t reflect average labor cost times hours worked. Any deviation is an inefficiency, and what you are doing by celebrating deviations from the law is maximizing inefficiency in an economy. These inefficiencies are every multi-millionaire, every billionaire, and everyone with a patent or a copyright, but we accept a certain amount of inefficiency to reward innovation. You can’t let yourself accept inefficiency to reward anti-innovation, as in consolidation and rent-seeking.
When you say “socialism effectively wants to turn the entire economy into government granted monopolies”, you are talking about a very specific form of socialism— the kind advocated by mid-twentieth century political figures, say Atlee, so that I can pick a well-liked leader of a free country. He nationalized the coal industry. This type of centralized socialism generally kills innovation dead, it is effective only for certain naturally decentralized activity where innovation is relatively easy to recognize and copy using objective tests. An example is state sponsored R&D, where individual labs are relatively easy to evaluate. In those cases where innovation happens largely at the individual level, where there are simple objective criteria for success which are comparatively easy to recognize, distant pay-offs which make private financing effectively impossible, and generally agreed public benefits. I don’t think the importance of the NSF is up for debate. I would argue that public education, laying down communication and transportation infrastructure, and space-exploration are exactly the same kind of thing, where a Soviet approach is good, because these are the things the Soviets were best at! They were best at chess, athletics, things where it is easy to objectively identify the winners, but maybe not. You know, try it and see.
Nobody is advocating this type of socialism for the economy as a whole today, definitely not Bernie Sanders, and definitely not me. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t other approaches (which Bernie Sanders has never supported either). One key point of socialism is fair wages— that the wages paid reflect the rate at 0% unemployment, where labor is scarce. This can be produced non-bureaucratically by a jobs program, as long as there is a program that ensures that no unemployed person will be turned down. The wage of a state subsidized job can be tied to their productivity at laying down fiber-optic cable, putting down new roads, etc, whatever objective thing they are doing. The wage for this public job is an effective minimum wage, because if you are offering less than that, you had better be doing something really interesting to justify it.
The second point of socialist thinking is that workers’ labor must not be alienated labor. That means that a worker’s complaint needs to have a certain probability of affecting the workplace conditions, and in case it doesn’t, that worker should not have a hard time finding a workplace which is more responsive. For this purpose, a graduated corporate income tax is a good remedy, as it produces small firms.
A third requirement of socialism is that the profits are not accrued distantly, but are distributed widely, so that any corporate are not accumulated by a small class of top management. This can be easily produced by a policy of “no insider equity”. Corporate salaries, unlike equity packages, are actually pretty reasonable.
A fourth requirement of socialism is the idea of a plan for the future. I believe that this can be taken care of by non-governmental organizations, with no power of coercion, which can freely adopt members, much as religious institutions do today. The goal of these is to produce a social plan, and if you don’t like your religion, you just change to another competitor. These organizations can go further, and press certain businesses to adopt fairer wages and become worker-owned, simply by applying economic pressure. No government needs to get involved.
All of these things are either purely voluntary, or done using regulations that are already largely in place. They require no onerous bureaucratic oversight, they are structural policies. They are also not far from what is already done. For example, in the telecom deregulation act of 1996, the infrastructure was socialized for the public, and the carriers would provide services riding on top of this. Of course, telecom recentralized in the 2000s, using the shift to wireless and online, but it must be decentralized again.
I am not in any way frustrated, and I have no desire to join the 1%, as I took a vow of moderate-well-to-do-ness as a child. I will never earn more than a certain amount of money, I will refuse the income. This is to avoid selling my soul to the system. I propose these things with a certain detachment, as I don’t personally feel I have anything much to lose or gain.
So long as the Federal government is limited to crossbows and catapults inside the US, I would be happy with that. Limitations on arms I think must be universal. But this idea is radical, and it’s only me— nobody else is saying that the police and national guard should be armed with crossbows. Regarding national defense, I see no state-level threats today, only crazy isolated individuals.
The issue with liability is complicated— it is clear the makers of Sudafed shouldn’t be liable for brain damage if someone uses their product to manufacture amphetamines, but they might be open to liability if they knowingly engage in bulk sales to such people. This should have no effect on the price of legal Sudafed purchases, it would only make it harder for mass-producers of amphetamine. The same goes for legal gun purchases vs. mass purchase and sales to out-of-state gangsters.
Such liability laws are not cut and dry, and could not reasonably affect those who purchase from small distributors legally. Clinton’s policies, on the other hand, would effectively ban firearms.
While Sanders has not flip-flipped at all, he has disguised his position somewhat. As I said, I want him to win, so I don’t care what he does, so long as he stays honest and faithful to the constitution. I can’t imagine that you are sincere in thinking his position is a danger to firearm ownership in the US.
Sanders does not advocate government planning, he advocates policies to reverse the concentration of power in large private institutions. Reducing private concentrations of power is as important as reducing government power, trust-busting was a bedrock Republican policy since Teddy Roosevelt.
It’s not only the number 1 national security threat, it’s the only threat serious enough to rise to the level of being called a national security threat. One thing it isn’t is a crazy person with a gun shooting people, and being called an international menace.
The threats to US security are fabricated, with the result of robbing people of their civil liberties. The threat of global warming is the destruction of large chunks of agricultural farmland through drought, displacement of millions of people, instability in large parts of the world, and, on the positive side, better tourism in Alaska.
If you think “unemployment” is undefined, you have a psychological problem. “Subsistence wages” means you take the rent plus food plus gas to get to work and back, the absolute necessities, and compare that to the salary drawn by a WalMart employee (even in the presence of minimum wage). They are often within a factor of 2. The Pareto efficiency prediction is that the average wages everywhere are somewhere comparable to the mean productivity per employee, say $65 an hour. Which is the closer prediction? There is nothing vague here, or meaningless, or philosophical, this is the foundation of modern economics.
Mainstream economists are not sitting in a closed room plotting anything, this is a structural cul-de-sac. This is another thing that Marx wrote about, the way in which the power-structures of a society indirectly control academic thinking, by the wealthy owners exerting power, through endowments and grants, to purge any ideas they don’t like from academia. In this case, any economist who mentioned Marx in the early decades of the 20th century was simply purged as undesirable by pressure on departments to be friendly to big donors. SImilarly, again since 1976, left-leaning economists were simply purged one by one from academic departments, and quack Chicago school economists replaced them. Chicago school and Keynesian were running neck and neck, despite the Chicago school getting every objective prediction wrong.
That Keynes ripped off Marx is obvious to anyone who reads Keynes and Marx. Keynes was simply exploiting the hatred of Marx produced by the leftist revolutions of the early 20th century to steal his main predictions and dress them up in bourgeoise clothing. Keynes publically hated Marx, but privately hired Marxist economists as his closest associates. Keynes was the number 2 guy with no significant or correct original ideas, he was just selling Marx for the economist masses.
Regarding NaSDAP (Nazi party), their economic platform was stolen from Keynes and Roosevelt, and was relatively reasonable. They didn’t come up with it though. They were able to go further, because Hitler was a dictator, and made sure everyone had a job by expanding the jobs programs until this happened. Hitler’s economic policy was massive road construction and military spending. Once unemployment was eliminated, wages were relatively egalitarian, as is always true. Hitler went further in terms of economic planning, and included ideas of “class cooperation”, which basically meant the government met with big business leaders to let them dictate general policy directions, making his government a “dictatorship of the bourgoisie” (at zero unemployment). This idea, of letting corporations dictate their own regulation, is a staple of Reagan and Bush economics, it has nothing to do with Bernie Sanders.
Hitler’s jobs program— road construction and military spending— was copied by Eisenhower in the US. Roosevelt’s job programs were smaller and mostly ineffectual. It wasn’t the worst policy in the world, it worked at the time, but it still produces concentrations of power, in the US, Eisenhower called it “The Military Industrial complex”.
I don’t like Hitler’s economic program so much, because what I said above is not Hitler’s, it’s not Keynes’s it’s not Marx’s and it’s not Lenin’s. It’s MINE. The new thing here is the disintegration of monopoly power, the structural splitting and decentralization of large businesses using tax policy, and this was never done, not in the US, not in Germany, not in Russia, nowhere. It is a libertarian anarchist idea, but it isn’t proposed by anarchists either. Ain’t no father to my style, boss.
If your definition of socialism is planning, then Bernie Sanders is simply not a socialist as far as you are concerned, and you can say he is misappropriating the label. If you haven’t examined his proposals you should, as they are the best by any candidate.
Regarding trust-busting, the whole point of monopolies is that they are not a competitive market. You don’t have a choice any longer– you are forced to deal with the rail monopoly, the oil monopoly, the cable monopoly, whatever it is, to get the service. Free markets are predicated on competition to control prices and produce efficiency, and nobody pretends that they work without competition. It wasn’t just TR, it was Eisenhower, Kennedy,Johnson, Nixon, Carter. Anti-trust was bipartisan for 80 years, and should be bipartisan still, as it works to make competition.
Power is not just about politics and violence, it is also about wealth and control. The problem with extreme wealth s that it comes at the cost of economic diversity, and it can destroy sectors of the economy. When large corporations takes over a competitive market by buyout, that’s the end of innovation, the end of rising living standards, and the end of your economic future.
Bernie Sanders probably won’t agree with what I have to say, but regarding your top three concerns:
1. illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration has stopped since the US economy tanked. The net immigration from mexico is zero or perhaps slightly negative today. This is an issue hyped up by the media, but it’s total nonsense, it has no basis in reality anymore. It was a problem in the 1980s and 1990s, now, it’s nothing. The US is simply no longer an attractive place to live.
2. The war of fundamentalist Islam against us
You have never met a Jihadi, you heard about them on TV. Nobody you know, Muslim or non-Muslim, is either a Jihadi or even in any way a Jihadi sympathizer, nobody you know has ever met a Jihadi sympathizer, nor do they know anyone who knows anyone who supports any of these groups.
By contrast, if you wanted to find a communist sympathizer by asking around, it was pretty easy (it’s still easy). If you wanted to find someone who supported the IRA, neo-Nazis, it’s a bit harder, but not too hard. These neo-Nazis were never considered a real threat to civilization. With Jihadis, go and interview as many Muslims as you like, you won’t find any, directly or indirectly.
To find a Jihadi, you literally have to stumble on an isolated insane person willing to set their underpants on fire, or else you have to go to the ends of the Earth. There is no such thing as a threatening political movement without any supporters, doubly so when their ostensible platform is totally insane 7th century batshit nonsense. No modern person in Syria or Iraq could possibly support such midieval nonsense, I know these places (I am Israeli by birth) and they were normal modern nations with normal secular populations before this recent trouble started. finding a Jihadi in Damascus would be like finding a King Arthur style knight in modern day Britain, it’s that anachronistic.
But now you see what is effectively an army of midieval knights ravaging the countryside surrounding London. How did that happen? Tthere are still these organizations, like ISIS, you see on TV.
In the case of ISIS, you have to look at the funding. There was a movement to destabilize the government of syria, and Western aid and arms flowed to a bunch of different groups. Among those groups, the most violent and repressive had a “Sharia law” mantle they put on which, in their warped minds, allowed them to gang rape women and terrorise civilians with torture and murder. The most vicious of such groups was ISIS, the more vicious you are the more success you have (the same is true of the Phalangists in the Lebanese Civil War, and they had no religious pretentions). Such terror tactics force people to submit unwillingly, through fear of torture and murder, not through any sympathy.
These amoral folks then gained control of oil fields, and got an small army of young western teenage boys to come join them, using their money for propaganda, which was also Western aided, because there are conflicting interests. There are tons of moles and infiltrators in these organizations, paid by intelligence agencies, and you don’t know where the money is coming from, where your own tax dollars go. In project Gladio, the worst atrocities, it turned out, were committed by the CIA moles and infiltrators, not by the sincere members. Moles and infiltrators don’t have a conscience, and they will do anything to look more committed and radical than the next guy, just to not get found out.
Right now, Turkey helps ISIS out because they are opposing a socialist Kurdish revolution in Rojava, the Kurds are a minority in Turkey who constantly seek independence. So Turkey shot down a Russian plane. Now some in the US seek to impose a no-fly zone against an ISIS with exactly zero airplanes.
ISIS is collapsing as their army is deserting. They are losing every contested battle now, and their only remaining strength is in propaganda. There is 0% support for these people in the affected areas, people were polled in Lebanon (an affected area where people are still free to speak), and exactly 0% supported it. ISIS is not Muslim, it is not even pretending very well, it’s clerics are nonsense figures, hired for show. I’m not going to say that Palestinians like the US, but even among Muslims who don’t like the US, there is no religious basis for this dislike, it’s based on policy, and there is no motive for attacking the US, as any such attack only causes problems.
Regarding 9/11, I invite you to consider that the US was staging military exercizes on the same day at the same time as the actual attack, simulating multiple simultaneous hijacking, as reported in 2002. There were uncannily predictive simulations of attacks during the London bombings too, and in nearly all other incidents of modern terrorism. The person who ran the 9/11 military drills is not a Muslim, he is an insincere Christian vice-president with a pacemaker. I suggest you look at the proper place to vent your anger.
3. Political correctness run amok.
I don’t see any change. In fact, I see a rise in frank speaking due to online exchanges which are full of vitriol, and outright hatred. I don’t like hiding things behind a facade of politeness either. If you mean that certain internet fora are overly censored, I agree. But it’s not anything a president can do anything about, it’s a cultural shift that is coming from the bottom up, not the top down.
Sorry to tell you, but your top three concerns are made up media hooey. I am not trying to insult you, but the media is insulting your intelligence.
Regarding Obama’s policies: yes, these have increased the gap between rich and poor. The problem with this gap is that it is contrary to the predictions of theoretical efficient free markets. In an efficient market, competition is supposed to control everyone’s wages, so that nobody gets to siphon off millions of dollars into their pocket. The reason is simply that if you are coming to GM as CEO and asking for a million dollars a year, theoretically, someone else should be able to say “Hey, I’ll do that for half a million!” and they’ll hire the other person.
That doesn’t work at all in our economy, because there are tiers of management, and classes of people, and you just can’t submit a resume for CEO of GM, no matter how qualified you are. Further, these companies don’t take managers based on “lowest competent bid”, but based on name recognition, and the perception of the ability to do political maneuvers. These perceptions have nothing to do with skill.
The reason there is massive concentrations of wealth is not because of innovation and entrepreneurship, it’s because there are massive corporations which receive large amounts of profits, and then divvy up a certain fraction to their top management, instead of dividing it up in dividends to shareholders. The shareholders can’t complain about it, because the pay-packages are issued in hidden stock-dilutions, through equity issued to managers. These policies are part of the cause of the skyrocketing inequality. The other part is the competition between laborers and unemployed, and the lack of bargaining power employees have in such a situation. Employees cannot bargain their way to higher wages anymore, because, unlike the CEO, they will be fired and replaced.
The reason Obama’s policies lead to more inequality is because Obama was doing pure monetary stimulus, meaning he makes money through the Fed, and distributes it to banks. The idea is that this money should find itself into new businesses, and then to new employees, and then to new spending, without the government deciding what that spending should be. That policy simply didn’t work, the money enriched bankers, and didn’t do much to increase business investment, because the lending climate is terrible, and new businesses are no longer profitable investments (they would get killed by the giant businesses that have taken over the economy).
I believe the only sensible policy is to break up the large businesses, but Bernie Sanders is more conservative, and just wants to implement a jobs program. Unlike financial stimulus, jobs programs go to the people who spend, without the banks as an intermediary.
Regarding Sanders policies:
1. Minimum wage and wage increases: the US has a problem today in that all small businesses are being gobbled up by gigantic businesses. Mom and pop stores are disappearing, and getting replaced by Wal-Mart and Cosco, and whatever other suburban monstrosity you see. These entities gain nothing from their size, except better contracts through their muscle, and the ability to pay extremely low wages to an army of people who are desperate. They can do this because these people have no choice, if they don’t take the job at these large places, they will be destitute. The policy of a high minimum wage is paradoxically designed to protect small business, and to increase spending, allowing such small businesses to flourish under fair competition. Such programs are required to avoid a collapse in wages to subsistence, which happened before in the US, in the depression, and is happening again.
2. The point of college incentives is to decrease unemployment, as students are out of the labor market, and their degree allows them to find new jobs at a higher tier, allowing for greater job mobility. The tax on speculation is to place some friction on trades, which right now take the form of automated computer trading. I don’t know whether you follow the issue of “microtrading”, but this is the practice of looking to see when someone places a sell for say, 10,000 shares of Apple at 20.89, waiting for someone to issue a “buy” order at 20.89, and then BUYING those 10,000 shares at 20.89, and placing them up for sale at 20.93, forcing that person to buy the shares at 4c extra, just because you had the extra information that this person wanted to buy, and you are situated closer to the trading room computer by some microseconds. This type of practice is eliminated by a small transaction tax. Many such fraudulent practices are eliminated by a small amount of friction in trading. Subsidizing college with these tax receipts makes sense, as it props up wages.
3. Nobody is silencing political speech, the point here is that donations of money are not the same as speech. If you want to make any ad, gather the money for it, and run it yourself. Unlimited contributions are not speech, they are bribery.
4. You need to understand Keynsian economics. The classical equilibrium for wages is when there is 0% unemployment, and workers can negotiate for a wage without competing with an army of unemployed. As you get closer to this situation, you get fair wages. When you have a mass of unemployed people, wages collapse. To reduce unemployment by a jobs program is how Eisenhower stabilized the US economy in the 1950s, and incidentally, how Hitler got Germany out of the depression in record time. It is a policy that ensures that a person can find a job, so that the private sector needs to pay a fair wage, and not count on the threat of homelessness and destitution to retain employees.
5. There is a limit on minimum wage, which is when inflation starts. We are nowhere near that limit. The hard limit is the productivity in the US divided by the population, around $70 an hour. You can’t raise the minimum wage to $100 without at least 100% rise in prices. This is why monetary policy is a balance between unemployment and inflation, and also minimum wage policy. The higher the US minimum goes without inflation, the more the economy expands.
6. Global warming is not imaginary. CO2 in the atmosphere heats up the planet, and it is easy to see that the warming we see is plausibly a consequence of the 30% rise in CO2 concentrations without anything other than an envelope and a few quick calculations. The prediction of warming was made in 1970, by several people, long before any warming was seen, and it was confirmed by observations since. It is doubly confirmed by ice-core data from Antarctica. There is no doubt about the effect of CO2, and there is no doubt that the CO2 emissions are responsible for warming the planet.
7. Bernie Sanders is aware of the downward pressure on wages that illegal immigration causes. Protecting people who are already here by giving them a path to legal status, making sure they receive minimum wage and benefits, that goes a long way to ensuring the immigration doesn’t hold wages down. When it is not under-the-table, immigration is a positive influence on the economy, as you get all sorts of new influences and ideas, and subcultures, from a more diverse population. But regardless, there is no immigration problem today at all, and if it returns, it would only be because Sanders fixed the economy and people want to come here again.
8. Black people are getting shot for no reason, dude. In 1995, I had just read about a young black kid on the subway who was shot holding a candy bar, the policeman said it looked like a gun, and then later that week, a policeman pulled me over for some traffic infraction, and I held my hands over my head, as I was worried he would shoot me (he just told me to put my hands down). That stuff happened every other week when I read the Times regularly, nobody said anything or noticed that it was always unarmed black kids getting shot. The level of police misconduct in this society is appalling, and intolerable, and any reform policy should be welcome. I would suggest to view the Netflix series “Making a Murderer”. There is no threat in reducing police misconduct, the rise in crime of the 70s and 80s was entirely due to drugs, a receding problem.
9. Nobody should discriminate against gay people, or any other kind of people. You don’t like it, don’t engage in interstate commerce. You don’t like attempts at theocracy in Syria, why do you like it any better in the US? If someone doesn’t want to sell to gay people, let them run a private club, where they can discriminate all they wish.
A single-payer health plan is not exactly central planning, look at France. They have a private and public health-insurance market coexisting, with the public providing basic services, and the private insurance providing extras on top of that. The role of government is to make sure citizens get the basic level of care, if they want some crazy add-on, they can get private insurance in addition.
The level of planning involved here is simply the minimum amount required to reduce unemployment so that wages rise again. This minimal level of planning is unfortunately necessary, and has been known to be necessary since the 1930s, to avoid the collapse of our economy to a third world economy. The most famous economist who advocated unemployment reduction is Keynes, and it follows from the general failure of industrialized markets to adjust unemployment to zero. If they did that automatically, there would be no need for government economic policy, but then again, everyone would be making a pretty high wage.
Sorry, but I can’t find any Jihadis. They aren’t anywhere when I ask around. I asked a bunch of Muslims from various countries “do you know Jihadis of this sort through any connection”, nope, nope, nope. There aren’t such people, except for isolated crazy people and shadowy organizations in the far corners of the Earth. I don’t believe in popular movements with no popular support, especially not when their platform is batshit 7th century nonsense. These threats are concocted, they are insane.
On the other hand, I can do the CO2 warming calculations myself on a back of the envelope, and see that a 30% increase in CO2 should yeild observable effects. While I can’t get the magnitude of the effect precise, I know it’s a warming, and I know it’s significant. I can then use ice-core data to see exactly how much warming to expect, after taking into account ocean water, and so on, and it matches the warming since 1970. Note that I didn’t rely on any uncertain models for this, I can do all this myself with an envelope and rudimentary ice-core data. Then I see that the models are consistent with these sanity checks, and then I can trust the scientists who model. That’s how you verify science. You don’t use media reports, because these say idiotic things— like “scientists predict ice age!”, and they say it with a straight face. Scientists never predicted an ice-age in the 1970s, despite media reports. These media reports were planted stories by quacks reacting to the scientists who predicted global warming.
The scientists who predicted warming in 1970, long before any warming was observed, were not taken seriously by most climatologists until they were confirmed independently by two large data sets collected later, one was current climate data, the observation that every single year is warmer than the pre-1980 average, and warmer than the 1990 average, and again by the ice-core data tracking CO2 and global temperate over tens of thousands of years. That’s a slam dunk for a scientific hypothesis, it’s just true that our CO2 emissions are warming the planet, and you should just get used to it, because it is never going to go away.
What the heck? Before the industrial revolution? Are you mad? We’re in the 21st century. Of course the region has more water! Saudi Arabia has desalination plants, wells are dug industrially. Your perception of the wealth in the region is grotesque. Syria and Lebanon are not that poor, people had relatively good living standards there. Iraq wasn’t that poor either, before sanctions, and all these countries were totally secular before 2000.
A tax on carbon will just produce incentives for innovation toward non-carbon energy. There is no barrier to being 100% nuclear, like France, and there are good plans for fast reactors. There are even “out there” proposals, like the “PACER” fusion power plant, which extracts the energy of H-bomb explosions, which are theoretically economically competitive, but were too scary to try due to proliferation fears.
You don’t know how to do quantitative estimates in science. The CO2 warming calculation is very simple— you just need to know the rate of diffusion of infrared light in the atmosphere based on the CO2 concentration. It doesn’t require a computer, you can see that more CO2 leads to a warmer Earth without any assumptions or reliance on experts, and you can see it’s a significant effect, although you don’t know the feedbacks, so you can’t make a certain prediction without further data. But it’s a very simple effect to understand and predict.
You can’t prove the moon is made of cheese using any sort of calculation. Please go ahead and try.
The causal mechanism is known in this case, extra CO2 increases the opacity of the atmosphere to infrared light by a known amount— it’s due to scattering by CO2. I was trained as a physicist, I have enough classes. Blocking infrared light is how you make a greenhouse, hence the 1970s name for the phenomenon “greenhouse effect”, which I still think is the best name. It has the causal mechanism right in the title.
Yeah, yeah. I found sincere communists, I found sincere IRA supporters, I even found a (long ago) connection to a real Basque terrorist through a friend of the family. I know an Italian who vaguely sympathized with the Red Brigades, I even personally saw a Weatherman once, in the audience at a screening of a movie about that group (he stood up during the Q&A period), even though there were only about 12 people in that organization. I am 100% certain those organizations had sincere members, that they aren’t concocted threats.
On the other hand I don’t know a single Jihadi sympathizer, or anyone at all that is dreaming of any sort of caliphate anywhere at all, let alone in the West, or anyone who knows anyone who knows such a person, and that’s after asking around a bit with several Muslims about family and connections. Sorry, I call bullshit. The number of such people, if not zero, is small enough that they can’t possibly be a threat to anyone, except where a few people pretending to hold this ideology (even they are not sincere) are in charge of large amounts of money.
The uncertainties in the data and the modeling regarding global warming doesn’t matter. The effect is something that you can understand for yourself in 10 minutes, and verify that it is significant with some additional personal calculation time. It doesn’t require computers, and it doesn’t require relying on experts. It’s a very simple theoretical prediction, and it is verified by observations. You should stop complaining about nonsense, and learn it.
That’s true. That’s why you need observations and ice-core data, because for all you know there’s a negative feedback that cancels out the effect, like maybe “more CO2 leads to forest growth and clouds that reverse the heating”. But the detailed models show that there is no significant negative feedback (and lots of positive feedback, most significantly water-vapor), and the observations and ice-core data confirm the model prediction, with the positive feedback, up to a factor of 2 uncertainty (approximately, I don’t know the uncertainty, it gets smaller all the time, but it’s still large). So that’s enough to be sure. Science accumulates knowledge in this way, you need to predict, and test, and check, and predict again. But you also need to know when to stop and say “ok, it’s understood”.
Regarding when you know enough, you know enough with certain confidence to predict that the carbon will warm the atmosphere in the next 50 years at least by an amount comparable to how much it has warmed already, and that’s on the borderline of “completely unacceptable”. It will do so again in the next 50 years if we don’t reduce our carbon, and that’s probably a “catastrophe”. While I am not sure it’s a total catastrophe, hey, maybe the Sahara will become a rainforest, and the arctic ice will be gone, producing great shipping lanes, if you are realistic in your projections, you see that it’s not likely to have positive effects, and it’s not like gambling with the world’s climate is an experiment you want to do.
I didn’t use any drama or embellishments, scientists don’t do that and didn’t do that when selling the arguments internally to the field. People used melodrama to make propaganda after they recognized the problem, and I don’t blame them, because the level of public discourse is so low, that reasoned arguments get drowned out.
I understand your fear of regulations, and invasive bureaucracies choking an economy, but in this case, you have to answer the question “how can we reduce carbon emissions worldwide?” Markets don’t respond to this type of externality. People know that you should do it minimally non-invasively and without harming economic growth, and it is difficult to prevent new accumulations of power, and you want to do it without a massive bureaucracy.
I think the easiest way is just a carbon tax of the cap-and-trade variety, coupled with R&D programs for nuclear power. Nuclear power is really the only carbon neutral fuel which is certainly capable of powering the planet essentially forever. But current nuclear plants are ridiculously inefficient (using only the fissile .007 of uranium), and there are much better reactors that can breed new fuel. But it’s up to the R&D, the estimates from business, and the cap-and-trade prices to get these rolled out as fast as possible, with minimal invasive oversight.
I think you are imputing the desire for takeover to people who are sincere in respecting freedom and dealing with global warming simultaneously.
It’s clearly unacceptable to experiment with the planet’s climate, because we have only one planet, and we can’t screw it up. The uncertainties are relatively large, but there are certainties— like that the world will warm at least by an amount comparable to what it has already warmed in the next 50 years, and again in the next 50, if we do nothing. Those certainties are already unacceptable.
The reason to tax carbon is to reduce carbon usage. I don’t know why you think this will lead to a decrease in quality of life, it will probably make incentives to reduce sprawl, reduce the amount of time you spend driving, go nuclear, and explore geothermal and wind.
I don’t know, I’m not an expert, or involved in the groups. All I got from ICCC models was that the water-vapor warming is about an extra factor of 10 from the warming predicted by CO2 alone, and everything else you can ignore. I bet you can get that water-vapor figure just from ocean evaporation, without using a computer, but I am not sure, as they do all sorts of complicated stuff that I can’t check. The factor of 10 (don’t quote me on the exact factor— it’s a ballpark thing) is what is confirmed in ice-core and weather data. The point is that the scientists pass the common-sense meter, and all reasonable checks that an outsider can reasonably do.
The tax is there as an incentive to reduce emissions, to make alternative energy more efficient. I think one can do it as follows (again, I haven’t thought about it as deeply as others, I’m making it up as I go along):
1. reduce sprawl— one large component of CO2 emissions is excessive driving. I think anti-sprawl zoning can reduce carbon and increase quality of life. It also benefits small business relative to box-stores, increasing economic diversification and freedom. You also can increase CAFE standards, and make incentives for smaller and lighter cars
2. nuclear power— I favor the “crazy” option of PACER fusion, but even liquid reactors that use Thorium, and fast-reactors and breeders that use up the naturally non-fissile component of Uranium are good enough to meet energy needs for hundreds of years. All the large polluters are already nuclear powers, and can transition as new designs are made available.
3. renewables— this can produce something like 40% of electricity, I think.
4. reforestation— this is accounted for in some cap and trade, it preserves wilderness and is an incentive to leave the country’s recognizable wildernesses wild, rather than turn them into strip malls.
5. R&D — there are lots of unexplored options in nuclear engineering, and geothermal engineering. The USSR had deep boreholes that can be used for generating power. You can make photosynthetic algae produce gasoline by engineering their proteins to generate, that’s a renewable source of carbon fuel which is carbon neutral. This type of R&D investment is generally good for economic growth.
Once you produce a carbon neutral economy, other nations will copy it. I think the US should be a leader here. Don’t pretend that the current US way of life is so great, most Americans spend half their life driving to and from places, and live in total isolation, due to the vast distances between any sort of place to go. So you gather at a mall instead of in a local square. I think you underestimate the degree to which a moderate incentive can increase the quality of life, without bureaucratic oversight, just by a financial incentive to reduce carbon emissions.
These ideas are off the cuff, I am sure someone who knows more will say something more profound.
I read some Austrians/Chicago people. I found it frighteningly incorrect, an 18th century atavism, but I know that it fools a lot of otherwise clever people. The Austrian stuff gets funded by endowments and conservative think-tanks, the left-wing stuff just has to get by because it happens to be true, which is not much of an advantage in a politicized field.
The best source for the foundations of Keynsian economics is not Keynes, it’s Marx’s “Capital”, which made the same point about declining wages and declining demand much earlier. But ideologically, it is likely you never read Marx.
I get that Sanders is not your guy, but the debate helps other people know the issues.
I brought up Jihad as an example of a bogus threat, it’s a total crock of media shit. I am just as worried about Islamists in the US as I am about the Knights Templar taking over Rwanda, or the Whigs pulling an upset in the next election.
Greenhouses don’t impede energy in both directions. They allow short-wavelength sunlight to come in, but trap long wavelength infrared light going out. That’s why they work. The proof is the scattering data for infrared on CO2 molecules, O2, N2, H2O and CH4. That stuff is measured and known.
It’s not easy to make scientific presentations dramatic, that’s why the public doesn’t watch the Polyakov lectures on YouTube.
“The impedence is asymmetric” is exactly the same thing as what I said, except using bigger words.
China and Russia don’t deny global warming, and China and Russia together are also not powerful enough to make a hegemony, or become any sort of hyperpower like the US. The issue with oligarchy is multinational corporations buying out the governments of the US and other countries, and that includes Russia and to a lesser extent China. The reason I am voting for Bernie Sanders is that he actually has proposals that seek to reduce the power of the oligarchy, which is why the oligarchy ignores him, or when it doesn’t, makes propaganda against him. The Russians and Chinese need to get their act together and elect their own Bernie Sanders too, but regardless of what they do, the US must lead, not follow.
There is a VAT-like aspect to it, which is why it needs to be coupled with policies that increase wages by far more than they increase gasoline prices, that make incentives for rezoning, and prefer small business over enormous firms. Bernie Sanders was always good for Vermont small business, that’s why he gets Republican support. Good Keynesian policies correct market failures and bring you closer to equilibrium, and Bernie Sanders is proposing the first steps in this direction in over 50 years. I don’t see anyone else who will do anything remotely like it, all the others, on both sides, are really candidates of the powerful.
The question of shifting power is not just between the EPA and the public, and international bodies vs. national governments, there’s also the question of large multinational corporations which consolidate and destroy markets, and produce the oligarchy in the first place. I want to reduce all top-down power as much as is realistically possible, and tax policies which are uniform, uncomplicated, that go by a preset formula and not by micromanagement generally can do that.
Isis is an organization that would have zero members, were it not for the payouts of oil money. They consist of teenagers with khalashnikovs lording it over a terrorized impoverished population, that only helps them so that they don’t starve. These ISIS folks are about as spiritual as Ghenghis Khan, they have no religious bone in their body. Their clerics are twenty-something drop-outs from Madrassas, their policies are insane barbaric nonsense that nobody in Syria or Lebanon could possibly take seriously.
As far as the 9/11 hijackers, I would suggest to you that they were coke-snorting sex-addled CIA patsies, and there is no persuasive evidence that they are responsible for the crime. Eight or nine of the people named as hijackers are still alive. I would suggest you examine the military drills of that day, which simulated multiple hijacking, and were run by a materialistic pseudo-Christian vice-president.
Student loans are Federally guaranteed, and it’s a matter of public policy what the interest rates are. It’s stupid to make them higher than property loans, because there is a public interest in education, as it increases labor mobility and reduces unemployment.
Sorry, I should have said “it’s exactly the same thing to someone who knows how to read”.
I don’t accept a ruling class of altruistic experts. What I accept is a uniform highly progressive tax code which is designed to structurally divide up power naturally, without bureaucratic meddling. That’s my preferred way of dealing with large corporations— adjust the tax code to give them a large incentive to split up. Small companies are more innovative, and respond to market conditions, and also allow workers a say in how they are run. There is no reason to have top-down corporate bureaucracies, 9 times out of 10, they are just a waste of money, designed to suck profits into the pockets of the oligarchs at the top of the pyramid. Tax incentives can break these monstrosities up.
I don’t trust experts or bureaucrats to micromanage complex ecosystems of economic behavior. I trust them to set a reasonable number— like the interest rates, or tax progressiveness factor, so as to best hit an economic target, to adjust the market to optimal operating position.
I don’t expect the government to look into every business to see what people are doing. I expect the government to be clear about which contracts it is ready to enforce, and which it is not ready to enforce, and to make sure that the contracts that it is willing to enforce are uniformly fair to those who purchase, so that nobody is getting a better deal because of their size.
I don’t trust government to pay everyone’s salary, but I do trust government to do it’s best to set a number, the minimum wage, at the magical point between unemployment and inflation. I also trust that the government can temporarily provide construction jobs in regions where the market fails to do so, by hiring firms by lowest bid.
There are some things one, as an anarchic-leaning leftist, doesn’t trust a ruling class to do, namely to tell other individual people what to do. But you can adjust macro policy to produce the outcome naturally, through incentives. There is nothing wrong with macro-policy, it is not the same thing as top-down planning, it produces a structural incentive. This is the key compromise which allows decentralization.
The model example for me is the Linux kernel, where the top-down management structure simply audits code for efficiency and correctness (two objective markers) and the remaining decisions are made on an individual level. Linux kernel development is the model for the ideal society of the future, it is the best thing you have ever seen, and it is as far different from both the corporate US or the statist USSR as both of these are different from each other.
Corporate oligarchies formed in the 19th century, in the same way as today, at a time when there were no government agencies to speak of. The oligarchies form whenever markets are not carefully designed to avoid them.
The way I verified the concern about corporate oligarchy is by noticing I have no choice for internet except Time-Warner Cable, and they charge me $60 a month, and give lousy service. French people pay $30 a month for faster speeds. I also noticed that I have to take Greyhound to take a bus between cities, no other option, and they charge me obscene rates per mile, compared with Israel or Europe. I notice that every store in the suburban community I am spending new-year’s eve at is a chain store, pretty much all local business is gone. I notice that small business in Manhattan is disappearing, and being replaced by chain stores. Further, I notice the income distribution in the US has the same characteristics as it had in the gilded age days of Rockefellers and Carnegies.
Whatever you say, boss.
There are no other members of my cult. I’m on my own planet.
I don’t envy them, I want them to not exist. Concentrations of money and power destroy the economy. I don’t chase after wealth, I decided to never make a high income as a small child.
I am not a Marxist-Leninist (if that’s what you mean by communist), and I read the constitution. I have no issues with people engaging in free trade.
The whole modern US economy is dying. Large corporations are taking over diverse markets, destroying the economy by destroying the diversity of the economic ecosystem. Google became a monopoly and gobbled up all the little tech firms in the world. The non-competing duopoly of Time-Warner Cable and Comcast now replaced all small ISPs, and provide lousy service. Software was busted by Microsoft in the 80s. Restaurants in the suburbs means lousy homogenous places like “Denny’s”, not local diners. The ownership class is disappearing, you no longer have freedom to run a business, as you will be destroyed by large entities using what is tantamount to slave labor.
I know the constitution better than you, I studied it when I became a US citizen. I respect it. Nothing I am talking about violates the constitution.
Time Warner Cable is internet. I don’t have TV services. There is no other choice for high speed internet. Also, I don’t consider satellite as competition for cable TV. I consider competition to be 20 small local firms that will provide you with actual cable service. Time Warner is an out and out monopoly. Nobody enforces anti-trust law anymore, and they haven’t really for decades.
The way in which oligrarchies form is by replacing small business with big business, replacing free labor with hired wage labor, and putting all the economy under the control of a handful of companies. The whole US is now composed nearly entirely of large businesses which hire wage labor at low cost, and destroy local business. Open your eyes. This is not good for capitalism, or socialism, it’s just a decent into monopoly madness.
I am not interested in personal power, or personal wealth. I am interested in being able to go to a store and not have to buy lousy products under homogenous flourescent lights from a goddamn chain staffed by slaves. I don’t shop at national chains, that’s why I have to live in New York City, which is the last place where small business is healthy. Except it’s not so healthy anymore— the local optometrist who owned his own shop closed a few years ago, and the service was replaced by “Cohen Fasion Optical” (a lousy national chain), the clothing stores closed a long time ago, now it’s all “Gap” and “Urban Outfitter”, and “Payless”. The local coffee shops are being replaced by “Starbucks”. I can’t buy anything anymore.
You are not understanding the problem— I want to live in a free society, with free people who own free shops and do what they want without top-down control. I can’t shop in a chain, that’s controlled from a central office. Once New York falls (and it’s falling), I have to leave the US, because there’s no place left to go here.
I did all my questions on campuses, I talked to a Pakistani political studies professor, various Palestinian groups, a few Iranians here and there. A Turkish fellow, a bunch of people. None of these people are shy, and they believe some OTHER Muslims are Jihadis, just not them, and not anyone they know, or anyone in their extended family and associates know. That’s not a real threat, sorry.
There’s nothing wrong with what you do, I just want to point out that if the minimum wage is higher, the chain stores are at a competitive disadvantage compared to small business, because half their gains are from bad wages. If there is a strong jobs program, big business is at a disadvantage, because nobody wants to work there. They make money off the savings that bad wages allow, and off a consumer base that is so poor that it must buy their low priced shoddy products.
The other half of their gains come from predatory contracts, where they manipulate suppliers using their size to get a better deal. The way to fight that on the government end is to make sure that there are tough contract laws, and uniform pricing laws regarding businesses, so that dumping and predatory pricing to bankrupt competitors are regulated by lawsuits. Under conditions of fair competition, the chain stores are not profitable compared to small businesses, and they go under. That’s what Bernie Sanders does, and his defense of the small businessman is why I support his presidential bid.
I appreciate your efforts in this direction very much, by the way, but I don’t think they are enough. You also need a government that is on your side.
I am also promoting something like the GNU model. It requires you to have structural incentives to keep business small, like Unix keeps software units small, and competitive.
The threat is a media concocted illusion. The notion of “ummah” and “sharia” is no different from “jewish nation” and “halachah”, or “Christendom” and “body of Christ”. They are personal things that are none of your business. “Jihad” is the Muslim version of “Tikkun Olam”, it’s something from a motivation speech.
The claim is that there is an organized group out there who want it to mean something else, and they have an army of “radicalized Muslims” at their command. I’m sorry, but I can’t find any radicalized Muslims, and that’s after a search. If you find some, go and talk to them and see what they believe, and not online, through personal connections, because you can find people pretending to be radicalized on twitter and in various comments of certain discussions. I just don’t believe they are sincere.
I asked some students at the CS department at Columbia what fractions of undergrads run linux on their computers, and according to the two of them, it’s the majority of the undergrads. The departments don’t get it, but the students do, so I am not worried about Linux adoption, it’s always slow and steady, but it’s inevitable.
I understand your fantasy about government and leftists colluding with big business, but it’s not at all true. Microsoft achieved market domination by making a deal with both IBM and Apple to provide Dos and AppleSoft Basic. The software itself was purchased and modified, the monopoly was due to pre-installation, and it was entirely done by private businesses. The only pause was when Al Gore tried to bust them in the late 1990s, but Bush stopped the anti-trust case.
There was no “search engine standardization law” or “search database tax break” when Google became financed to monopoly status, it happened through the market. Likewise, WalMart is not aided by leftists, neither are Apple, Oracle, or any of the other large firms. They are in bed with government only after they are monopolies, and neither Microsoft nor Google care about government very much at all to date, and IBM only cared when it was a regulated firm.
I know it contradicts your philosophy, but doesn’t the long list of failed counterexamples demonstrate that your philosophy is entirely wrong? Couldn’t the production of large business have nothing to do with government, but have everything to do with the influx of large private concentrations of capital flowing into a company, usually at IPO time (as in the case of Google)?
In order to maintain competition, you need structural incentives to break firms up, and, in my opinion, a strongly graduated corporate income tax whose rate goes up with the number of employees, this is the way to do it. It’s not something Bernie Sanders proposes, he supports old-fasioned anti-trust regulation, with all it’s years of litigation, and problems, but I think this is the easiest structural way to favor small firms. A modified contract law, requiring openness and uniform pricing, can ensure that ostensibly independent firms are truly independent. Such a law will set off an orgy of splits, as companies reorganize to save money. Then it will allow small competitors to the micro-companies that are spun off, as the competitors take over the contracts. It will also allow Apple’s software division to coordinate with hardware makers to end the absurd hardware monopoly Apple enforces through size.
The tendency to monopoly is inherent in capitalism. You can get rid of it by structural incentives, or else you can force restructuring after it happens by heavy-handed government intervention. In the case of Verizon and Time Warner Cable, it is clear that the infrastructure parts (which is what the monopoly rides on) will have to get split from the service parts, and the infrastructure company will have to lease the towers/cables to any service company at the same rate. This is the model of the successful 1996 telecom deregulation act, which worked great for the 6 years before wireless and cable took over everything, just to sidestep it.
I think the 1996 act was great legislation, and it can be a model, but it’s absurd that the government needs to step in to do it. A simple tax incentive to split can ensure that the infrastructure splits from the service when the company gets large, and a simple uniform contracting law can ensure that a new service company can lease the same infrastructure, and not only for telecommunications, but for all aspects of the economy. I don’t think you have given much thought to what regulations which disfavor large businesses can do, as you are so used to a corrupt government bought out by large entities. That’s not how government is supposed to work, and it’s not how government works when it works right.
You’re talking nonsense. Interventions have often favored the employee, for example, forbidding child labor, allowing unionization, demanding time-and-a-half overtime pay, highway Keynesianism, airline deregulation in 1978, telecom deregulating in 1996 (I think by far the best Clinton-era bill). All the policies Bernie Sanders proposes help the less powerful.
You are too blinded by a country where government stopped working for the middle class in the mid 1970s. That’s not how government is supposed to work.
A carbon tax is not a good progressive thing, it’s a terribly regressive tax by itself. But it is necessary so as to give an incentive to reduce carbon emissions. This is not opening Pandora’s box, it’s adding a tax to reorganize production.
Social welfare programs are not jobs programs. Bernie Sanders advocates jobs.
It’s what I said 20 years ago too. And I still say it today, and I’ll say it until it’s complete and there’s no need to say it anymore. Linux progress is steady and inevitable, because Linux comes with a ratchet— there’s no going back. 20 years ago, you wouldn’t find many CS undergrads running Linux, Microsoft was busy sponsoring CS departments with Windows-only computer rooms, to replace legacy Unix machines (they succeeded in displacing Unix much like Linux is succeeding in displacing Windows today).
Regarding the philosophy: I’m NOT talking about individual income taxes— I’m talking about a GRADUATED CORPORATE income tax where the rate rises sharply with the number of employees. This is NOT for revenue, it’s just to encourage companies to split up.
With such a tax, a firm with 10,000 employees has a financial incentive to split up its divisions into firms with 1,000 employees. That solves the monopoly problem for good, and without any government intervention. I’m proposing this as a REPLACEMENT for the Sherman act, I don’t think you need anti-trust law if you have a steeply enough graduated corporate income tax. It doesn’t even need to be that steep before it’s an incentive to split.
The problem with such a law is skirting it by phony splits. You do nothing, but claim your hardware division is independent. The way around this is to require open contracting laws to show the inputs and outputs to independent business, and to standardize purchases of service contracts, so that anyone can contract with an independent firm at the same price. This means that the split firms become genuinely independent.
The third policy I propose is “no insider equity”, nobody working in a publically traded firm can own equity in the firm. This is obviously for publically traded firm. This is a much easier way to avoid insider trading, and it also prevents absurd concentrations of wealth by management options packages.
These form a coherent philosophy, with concrete proposals. The idea is to produce effects like the telecom deregulation act of 1996 without the constant selective government litigation. With these tax incentives, the companies will do it themselves, as it will bring in money.
The reason Microsoft was attacked and Google was not is because Clinton enforced anti-trust (half-heartedly), while Bush did not. It’s as simple as that. Bush also dropped the Microsoft suit, which was just the first of his many atrocious policies.
I guess UCB is different, didn’t Berkeley have their own Unix? I can’t remember well. What I do remember (if my memory is correct) is that at both UCSB and at Cornell (I am certain about Cornell)— Microsoft helped get a bunch of snazzy computers with the stipulation that they run Windows. The Cornell CS department dropped Unix entirely. Of course now every student is using their own machine, so it’s not the department’s call to make.
Regarding other countries having an advantage, your idea is that being big is an advantage. I believe the US, with cooperating small firms, would run circles around the big international firms in efficiency, and we might recover manufacturing again. When you have smaller shops, they innovate, they create crazy new products.
For the purpose of an international presence, it is a mistake to think that you need one unified company. If you have a split up Exxon, or something, it becomes a loose conglomerate of 700 independent companies, and then a small international division is contracted to the 700 companies to run the oversees wells and to return the sell-profits via contractual obligation to the child companies.
The contracts between business would be exactly like a uniform interfaces in software. The company would still employ roughly the same number of people, but now they would be their own boss, they would be only obligated to fulfil their prespecified contractual obligation to their partners. It’s like Unix pipes and shared memory, when you have a library of interfaces, the programs don’t have to do everything at once. It’s also like shared libraries or browser containers— you don’t need a separate video rendering library for every application.
If other countries continue to have monolithic firms, they would just get their asses handed to them by the innovation coming from the US. The US has always been about innovative small business, with 10-1000 employees, only the crappiest parts are the enormous giants that ruin everything for everyone.
I guess UCB is different, didn’t Berkeley have their own Unix? I can’t remember well. What I do remember (if my memory is correct) is that at both UCSB and at Cornell (I am certain about Cornell)— Microsoft helped get a bunch of snazzy computers with the stipulation that they run Windows. The Cornell CS department dropped Unix entirely. Of course now every student is using their own machine.
Regarding other countries having an advantage, your idea is that being a big company is some sort of an advantage. I believe the US, with cooperating small firms, would run circles around the big international firms in efficiency, and we might recover manufacturing again. When you have smaller shops, they innovate, they create crazy new products, and when the product is new, you don’t care so much about a 10% premium for higher paid labor.
It is a mistake to think that you need one unified company to do international operations. If you have a split up Exxon, or something, it becomes a loose agglomeration of 700 independent companies with interlocking supply contracts, and then a small international division is contracted by the 700 companies to run the oversees wells and to return the sell-profits via contractual obligation to the child companies. Exxon can entirely replace this part without touching any other part, just by contracting with a competitor, and conversely, if you’re one of the 400 newly split Shell oil divisions, can ask for the same service from the same formerly Exxon company for your foreign wells. It reduces a lot of redundancy and inefficiency in parallel large firms, you get the same exact efficiencies that people usually claim for large mergers and acquisitions, reducing duplicate bureaucracies,except without the merger. It’s the exact opposite of merger, it’s atomization. The parallel bureaucracies would now not be parallel insulated inner parts of large companies, but competing independent contractors.
The contracts between business would be exactly like a uniform interfaces in software. The company would still employ roughly the same number of people, but now they would be their own boss, they would be only obligated to fulfil their prespecified contractual obligation to their partners. It’s like Unix pipes, threads, and shared memory, when you have a suite of standardized interfaces specified by the OS (the government), the programs don’t have to do everything at once, they can cooperate, and they are small enough that new programs can easily compete. It’s also like shared libraries or browser containers— you don’t need a separate video rendering library for every application.
If other countries continue to have monolithic firms, they would just get hammered. The best of the US has always been about innovative small business, with 10-1000 employees.
On anti-trust, Obama has been about as lousy as Bush.
NO REGULATIONS! I didn’t say anything about regulations. I agree with you about regulations, I dislike regulations tremendously for the exact same reasons you say.
A graduated corporate income tax is not a regulation. It’s not ME breaking up the company. I don’t know anything about the company. It’s a parametrized formula of the nature
marginal rate = – .01 + .05 * ( # of employees /100)^(.5)
where the set rate applies uniformly to every income dollar. It is set by the social price of having a heirarchical command organization, and the social price of influencing politics.
If you want to build a big business, just PAY THE HIGHER TAX, it’s the price you pay for being big.
The goal is to get the companies themselves to think about how to split, not the government. There’s no imposition in terms of detail, there’s no imposition at all, pay a 30% tax, you just won’t be able to compete with a divided up collection of smaller entities paying 15% tax.
The advantages that come from size are all anti-competitive advantages— easier negotiation with large governments that small business can’t do, lower mean wages for employees, wages low enough that a small business owner can’t impose them on himself or herself, low contract prices due to special negotiations with other large entities. These are all contrary to efficient market operation, and whatever advantage a big firm has should be uniformly available to small firms too. If you want special size advantages, pay the higher marginal rate appropriate to your size, your anti-competitive advantage will be more than neutralized, and you had better have a real efficiency reason that justifies your company being big.
The coordination of business, and the selection of leaders, this is something that I don’t have anything to say about. Management and vision can be contracted out to the board of directors, now an independent firm, whose managerial decisions and vision are sent as documents, and which negotiate for themselves a nice 5 figure salary in exchange for their documents. A really visionary firm, that makes brilliant decisions, they make more money for the collection of companies they run, they can negotiate more money. That’s a competitive management for 100 firms all together, it’s not a board of directors skimming the profits from a multinational.
The collapse of the USSR was the worst catastrophe in your lifetime, and it must never happen in China. Russia went from a country of engineers and astronauts to a den of gangsters and drug-fiends, it was “Mad Max”, and millions of people died, of drug overdoses, from lost health-care, and in dire poverty that you can’t even imagine. Russia’s life-expectancy was around 50 in the 1990s. When a country’s industrial output collapses by half it’s not just the leadership that suffers, it’s the whole country. China did their transition to capitalism over the past 40 years, without any collapse, and without an oligarchy taking over. Now China is afraid of democracy, because they don’t want a collapse of the same sort.
He wasn’t assigned to come up with a negative story. He just considered what eventually happens to those who cover leftists positively, they get marginalized, bumped by the editors, lose bourgeoise readership, then get fired, as that Washington Post leftist guy, Harold Meyerson, got fired yesterday. He then considers what happens to right-wing journalists— they get hired to talk on Fox, they go to snazzy parties with fancy shrimp cocktails, and they become superstars at the exact moment when they turn right, like Rivera or Stossel. So the reporter does it on his own initiative. That’s structural bias, and to fight it you need left structural bias opposing, as in decades past.
Time Warner cable is an infrastructure monopoly, and they didn’t use government regulations to get the monopoly exactly, rather they hijacked their pre-existing cable lines to get an internet monopoly by offering faster speeds through those cables at (temporarily) lower prices than other ISPs (if I am getting it right). Once the other ISPs were out of business, rates crept up, and service quality declined. Regulations have very little to do with monopolization, the regulations come after the fact. It was a privately set up infrastructure monopoly, as usual in such cases.
The way monopolies happen is through mergers and acquisition, followed by snapping up all the essential infrastructure under one management. This is what happens in all such cases, and it is an outright delusion to say it is done by the government or by regulations. It is done by private corporations.
One obvious solution is an anti-trust action against TW to separate the cables from the service, and allow internet service companies to rent the cable infrastructure. But anti-trust needs to be done on a case by case basis. There are other monopolies which will never get sued— like Greyhound and so on.
I believe in a uniform solution to the monopoly problem, which is a progressive corporate income tax. This will produce the results structurally and naturally, without and of that heavy handed intervention or regulation, or lawsuits.
I am not interested in reaching people who don’t accept that 9/11 was an inside job. You need to review the military drills of the morning of 9/11, those drills “simulated” multiple simultaneous hijacking of airplanes, “simulated” crashing them into buildings, and are easy to manipulate into a false flag. You also need to look up the one person in charge of all those military exercises. There is no compromise possible with such an issue.
It doesn’t matter how they feel, it matters how we think. Nuclear power is the obvious carbon-neutral solution to energy, the energy density of nuclear fuel is millions of times greater than any chemical fuel, and the radiation risk can be reduced. I don’t think it needs to be reduced, as the risk of an occasional radiation spill is bad, but nowhere near as bad as the certainty of global warming.
France has been nearly entirely nuclear for a while now, and they have the most innovative reactor designs. Nuclear engineering is a wide-open field, it has a lot of unused ideas. Nuclear power right now produces a larger amount of waste than it should, because you only use the naturally fissile .007 of natural Uranium, the bulk is not used to breed fissile fuel, probably because of proliferation fears. There are reactors that breed plutonium, reactors that use Thorium, these are much more efficient, and allow you to cycle the waste in to reduce it’s radioactivity.
There is even a realistic and economical FUSION reactor, using no new technology, which explodes small hydrogen bombs to heat up big vats of liquid salt. This is the “PACER” nuclear power plant, and it was never tested, due to atom-bomb fears. Those fears were justified during the cold war, they are anachronistic now that global warming rather than nuclear war is the top threat.
If you are so concerned about accidents, put the radioactive part of the reactor underground, or in an isolated area. I am not worried about this.
I support Bernie Sanders, but he has not come out with a definite statement either for or against nuclear power. But he has condemned the inaction on global warming. Nuclear power is the only real zero-carbon energy solution.
Didn’t that separate infrastructure and service, like the AT&T breakup in 1984? That’s what I remember of that bill, although I might be misremembering. It might have also removed anti-consolidation regulation, which is bad, but I believe Clinton/Gore and Co. suspected it wouldn’t be important, because the internet would take over. The most important thing is competitive internet, and right now, the cable monopolies have an internet monopoly, which is what I understood the 1996 act was supposed to avoid.
The water is only used for thermal transfer and cooling, if you thermally cycle liquid salt, cool it with a radiator, or use some other cooling strategy, other than taking millions of gallons of water through the pipes carrying too-hot water, you don’t need to dump warm water. This is something that is different in every reactor design, only current designs use tons of water, and the only reason they use tons of water is to reduce the thermal impact of the hot water coming out, so that it’s not that much hotter than the environment.
I really think the main thing is anachronistic fears of nuclear annihilation, and atom bomb proliferation. Nuclear weapons are a nation-state game, and if nation-states agree not to build them for military purposes, then they just won’t get built. Nobody else other than a nation-state can afford to build even the stupidest design, like the Hiroshima bomb.
Global warming is now the top danger. Radiation spills are awful, but their impact is minimal, and hopefully we can reduce the number of accidents far below the 3 per half-century we had this last century. I think 1 per century is acceptable risk, but it should be less than that with a good placement scheme. With the appropriate reactor design, a breach shouldn’t be as catastrophic as that Japanese breach, which literally was the worst possible thing— it exposed the liquid at the reactor core to the open sea! That’s idiotic, and whoever put the reactor there right by the ocean on an earthquake zone has a lot of explaining to do.
After that bill was passed, I remember things appearing, like pre-paid phone cards and hundreds of little phone-service companies, and that reduced prices for about 6 years, until wireless took over. The deregulation aspect was to separate the infrastructure from the service, and I wish they did the same thing with wireless and cable, because they are now just like AT&T was, except completely unregulated monopolies like Time-Warner Cable or near-monopolies, like Verizon.
The situation for small phone-service companies and internet ISPs was, I think, quite good under the last years of Clinton. I remember there being a healthy competitive market in both, with lots of new small firms, until the consolidation wave of the last decade, which wrecked that part of the industry.
I think that i you strip away the repeal of media-ownership restrictions, the competitive parts of the bill were really good, and can serve as a model. The consolidation of media needs be fought as well, but that was, I thought, a bone to throw to conservatives, to support the pro-competition aspects of the bill— it’s not what I remember the main effect of the 1996 act as being.
I personally favor a different way of fighting consolidation— via a graduated corporate income tax based on the number of employees, so as to make a strong structural incentive for firms to split up, without direct lawsuits and interventions by government. If you keep businesses small and dynamic, you don’t have to worry about this mass of consolidation and takeovers But this proposal I think is original, nobody suggests it in either party.
That’s really total nonsense— there’s plenty of uranium. It’s impossible to run out in a reasonable time-frame, because fuel costs are not a significant factor in running a nuclear plant, and you can extract Uranium from as low density ore as you like. It gets more expensive, but the expense of fuel is negligible— you need so little of it. So even when you run out of the cheap ore, and the costs rise by a factor of 10 or 100, it won’t matter at all. The only issue is waste storage and disposal, which is unsustainable with current designs, but which is addressed by more modern designs.
The waste issue is solved by fast neutron reactors and breeders. The current nuclear designs are no good, and leave behind waste for 10,000 years. Breeder designs use up all the fissionable elements, and leave behind only fission products, which are economically valuable waste, which runs out of radioactivity after only 200-300 years, which is an entirely manageable time frame for storage, considering how little waste there would be comparatively, if you have only fission products. The current storage facilities would be nearly enough forever, because they are now storing “waste” which is really 99.5% fuel for a breeder.
The Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor is an even better design. But these are only now being tried, they were shelved for decades. Once you have LFTRs and commercial breeders, you have abundant energy, because we really will never run out of thorium. With the breeders, you dispose of the existing waste as fuel. But US research on these topics has stalled, due to political bureaucratic nonsense.
The idea that wind and solar will solve the problem by themselves is absurd. They can only deal with at most 50% of the energy, because there is no good way to store the energy without loss. Even at 50%, wind and solar will bring more severe environmental problems than nuclear, you are going to blight large areas with wind-farms and solar panels.
Newer reactors should be completely safe, the LFTR can’t melt down, but even if there is an accident per century, one must deal with it, rather than face the certainty of more global warming.
There is no shortage of fuel, and there never will be. Even with Uranium, and with the current terrible waste, fuel costs are not significant, and you can mine terrible ores and still generate energy. With LFTR (Thorium reactors), you will never run out of cheap fuel. The real issue is waste, and for this only fast-breeders and LFTRs solve the problem, but these are expensive to develop and deploy, so they were shelved for decades. Not anymore. Once you have Throium reactors and breeders, the old complaints about waste management will be moot, as fission products only need to be stored for a relatively short period of 300 years. That is not unmanageable, considering the volume of the waste is 400 times smaller when you use up all the fissionable fuel, the waste is economically valuable, and 300 years is not effectively infinite, unlike 10,000 years. The current storage facilities will in volume terms be enough for breeder and LFTR waste.
It’s stupid because “boiling water” is the definition of energy.
That’s nonsense— you don’t pay very much for fuel in a nuclear plant, it’s very energy dense, so you can mine very low-grade ores. So estimates based on the availability of high-grade ores are misleading.
The current spent fuel strategy with light water reactors is unsustainable. But that’s with the old designs. If the fuel is completely used up in a modern reactor, a fast breeder, or a Thorium reactor, the waste is all fission products, it’s very small in volume, 200 times less volume than current waste, and only radioactive for 300 years, not 10,000 years. That can be accomodated by existing storage facilities, or perhaps double that, indefinitely. You can deal with a 300 year problem, not with a 10,000 year problem 200 times bigger.
It would fit in a basement, but that’s not the proper method. You need to burn up all the fissionable material, and store the resulting pure fission-products for the 300 years they remain radioactive. That’s not unreasonably expensive over the entire 300 year span.
That’s what comment discussions are for, to link to alternative viewpoints from those who have dug deep.
The definition of energy is “the ability to boil water”, just as the definition of food is “the ability to make cows fat”.
The 19th century scientific definition of a unit of energy was “the quantity required to raise the temperature of a gram of water 1 degree”, this is the calorie, and it’s 4.18 Joules. This definition is equivalent to any other. But the modern definition is fancier, involving Hamiltonians and time-translation invariance, but in practical terms it boils down (heh heh) to the same thing.
So saying “nuclear power is a fancy way to boil water” is like saying “transgenic corn is a fancy way to make cows fat”. It’s an incredibly stupid thing to say. All energy is a fancy way to boil water.
Except that fusion reaction is only kept stable by the gravity of the sun’s mass. To produce the same pressures on Earth, you need either a tokamak or the ablation power of a plutonium explosion. We can’t get tokamaks to work properly because of magnetic field instabilities, it’s hard to squeeze gas with a magnetic field. Tokamaks will not be competitive. But plutonium bombs are cheap, you can make a 200 kiloton bomb for 200 kilodollars, that’s a dollar per ton in terms of fossil fuel equivalent (more expensive than Thorium, but much less expensive than coal in terms of fuel costs).
The sun’s energy is used to run plant life on Earth. If you capture a grown percentage of the sun’s energy for human use, you will blight the environment with thousands of square miles of collection panels, or engineered environments. Rooftop panels are good for areas with sprawl, but sprawl itself should be reduced, and when we live on minimal land, the area is not enough for solar. Not to mention that solar is intermittent.
If you are talking about a far-future scenario, where we build a Dyson sphere, ok, that’s interesting. But you need to store the energy you collect in a reasonable form. Thorium and Uranium are pre-stored energy from past transmutations, and are energy dense enough to power civilization as we know it forever. Fusion is even better, but it is uneconomical right now, except through fusion bombs, which people are scared of.
The issue with waste is solved by good breeders, like the LFTR Thorium plant. Breeders can also use Uranium in a fast reactor, and these produce a truly minimal amount of waste. The problem with nuclear power is our current crappy unimaginative design, which uses 1 part in 400 of the energy content, and leaves the whole rod behind as 10,000 year waste. That’s the worst possible nuclear solution, and it can be replaced by breeders and LFTRs that use 100% of the energy, and leave behind 300 year waste.
300 year waste, at the small volumes you produce from total usage, can be stored for the entire 300 years with something comparable to the storage we already have, maybe twice that, but not too much more. That means it is economical from beginning to end, and doesn’t accumulate garbage. That makes it better than our plastics industry, or our consumer products industries, which accumulate garbage without end.
The modern nuclear power plants are entirely environmentally friendly, and must be supported by environmentalists. They require political push to extend existing light-water plants with new LFTRs and breeders, which right now are experimental, and only in other countries. The US developed these first, they just aren’t the leaders anymore. Europe, India, and China are.
It’s much more complex, because it is using a fuel with 1,000,000 times the energy density. This is a ridiculous argument.
The only serious argument against nuclear power is the waste, and the waste is due to light water reactor design. Waste is taken care of with a breeder that uses up all the fissile fuel, either a LFTR or a fast-neutron reactor that makes plutonium. Once you have those running (and they work), the waste is reduced in volume by a factor of 300, and in lifetime by another factor of 300, and it becomes completely manageable forever.
This is ignorant claptrap. Converting heat to power is a standard thing that’s been done for hundreds of years, and the water is not changed or harmed, it’s just a heat sink.
It’s stupid because turning heat energy to power is a standard procedure, and you can use any liquid to do it, not just water. Energy is energy.
Nuclear power is complex, sure, because it emits no CO2 and uses a fuel with a million times more energy density, a fuel that doesn’t ever run out. The arguments against are due to the current bad designs, which produced 300 times too much waste 300 times too long lived, and were made by bureaucrats, not scientists. There is no argument against LFTRs, which are just better in every way.
Even with current risks, the chance of a radiation spill is insignificant danger compared to the certain catastrophe that is global warming. But the risks can be reduced more, so that the number of spills is less than 1 per century. That’s manageable, and it won’t destroy the planet, but of course you want to have zero accident potential. That’s much more likely with a LFTR than with a light water pants.
This lady does not understand energy economics, or even what energy is.
This idiotic narrative not only blames poor people for a banker’s problem, it misses the whole point of the collapse— it’s not that poor people were getting loans they couldn’t pay back, that’s not a problem, the risk of default is accounted for in the risk model. The issue is that when housing prices started dropping, the collateral was worth less than the loan. It makes no sense to pay a $200,000 mortgage on a house that is now worth only $180,000, whether you are rich or poor. Either way, you are better off defaulting on the house, cutting your losses on the declining property, and perhaps buy the house back from the bank at the lower price.
This correlated default is the predictable event that made the mortgage securities ridiculous. The folks insuring these assumed the defaults were independent events, and they either didn’t notice that the defaults could all happen at the same time under a rather predictable situation, or else were pressured to look the other way. Other people noticed that the insurance rating was nonsense, and those people at Goldman Sachs took bets against the mortgage bundles.
So it is doubly idiotic to blame poor people, and it is triply idiotic to blame government policies encouraging home-ownership. The issue is the ratings agency issuing bad ratings to bundles based on a bogus assumption of statistical independence.
I didn’t see the movie yet, I read the book a long time ago. I wasn’t sure if the fundamental idea came across, but it looks like it did.
It’s a philosophy. I am not a person who holds this philosophy, but as a leftist, I think we need to explain exactly how it fails, as Marx did, and others later. There is a lot of hidden merit in this philosophy of unregulated markets, that is, if you believe there are only two alternatives— a private sector which is unregulated, or else a top-down bureaucratic government heirarchy saying what you can and can’t do, to the point that you can’t do anything new (like the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil, or the former Soviet Union). Conservatives prioritize freedom of action over stability and common-sense, and I think one should make leftist thinking compatible with this philosophy.
While superficially, it seems that it is impossible to regulate and deregulate at the same time, there are alternatives to traditional regulation which are disfavored because they give less power to the regulating agency. I like to call such proposals “nonbureaucratic socialism”, but you know, call it what you like. The idea here is to regulate using structural incentives. An example is cap-and-trade tax policy to control global warming. The overall policy is set at the top, but the details are left to the individuals who make purchasing decisions. It is a minimally invasive way to produce public benefits.
I think that there is a lot of unexplored potential in this approach. For example, enforcing anti-trust law requires complex lawsuits, and regulators looking over all aspects of a large business, to find opportunities for a split. I believe that this can be replaced with a structural graduated corporate income tax, where the tax rate rises with the number of employees (as this is the size of the control structure). With a steep enough tax, you induce companies to split naturally, simply to save money. If you adjust the tax to be revenue neutral, it just transfers wealth from large to small firms, to compensate equalize their political power.
To make such a proposal work, it needs to come with a transparent contract and pricing law for inter-corporate trade. This is to prevent companies from falsely claiming a split, where none actually happens. The way to do this is to require that contracts between companies need to be published, and need to explicitly take the form of a service contract, a fee-for-service, or secrecy-for-knowledge sort of exchange. The government enforces contracts, so it can specify the language precisely. Such contracts must not be exclusive, except to the degree that you purchase guaranteed supply for a fixed period at a fixed price. Each contract need to be open to outside bids, so that others can buy the same service for the same period, All such contracts need to be published online to be enforced, and must use boilerplate language (the standard language aspect is already de-facto required by corporate lawyers, and the enormous uniform commerciial code acts— this type of policy replaces such regulation with simpler regulation achieving more).
It should be forbidden to own equity in a publically traded company you run, or have any say over. This is a form of insider trading, that is responsible for the gross pay distortions.
With these three policies, you can break up American business natually into smaller businesses that cooperate through transparent, publishe, public contracts, instead of monolithic box stores and giant corporate chains. Most of the gains of mergers and acquisitions can be gained instead by subcontracting the overlapping service to a company that serves both large entities that are merging. The efficiencies are illusiary.
The goal here is a decentralized economy approximating the free-market ideal of maximal competition. Under such circumstances, it is much more difficult to have a situation like the financial meltdown, because markets become more self-regulating the more actors there are, and the less power each individual actors can have. I support Sanders, at least he wants to break up the big banks, which is a step in this direction.
His mill should not be closed due to “unsustainable labor costs”, the fair minimum-wage, standardized medical care, and pro-competition public policy should make his labor competitive with any other. There is nothing unsustainable about wages of $40 an hour— that is half the productivity of the Ameican employee nowadays.
Student loans are secured by the Federal government, they represent no risk. This moots the entire article.
Further, all loans, student loans or credit card loans, are far more secure now after bankruptcy reforms, which prevent people from defaulting. But this has not brought the interest rate down, because credit in the US is monopolized. This is due to consolidation in banks.
The policy of reducing student loan rates is to reduce unemployment doubly, both because students are out of the labor pool while studying, and also because they qualify for better jobs when they come out. Policies that produce employment are sensible and lift wages, and are opposed by those on the right for no good reason.
The productivity is the GDP divided by the population, and it is much greater than $40 an hour, it is more like double this. The point of redistributive taxation is to remove non-competitive concentrations of money, that block economic productivity.
Chinese labor does not get 11 cents an hour, you have never been to china, but they get about 10% of comparable American labor. This is a problem that can be fixed by better trade deals that require higher wages for foreign employees, and provide incentives for local Chinese industry, rather than for a takeover by foreign multinationals.
It seems that way to you because you haven’t learned any actual economics.
Sanders socially sensible policy is also sensible economic policy, it’s based on a theme of reducing unemployment and raising wages. That’s a theme that economists have forgotten, due to their selective amnesia toward all the principles of Keynsian economics that benefit workers and raise wages, and their atavistic promotion of 18th century neoliberal claptrap.
It’s not a coincidence that all his policies, while convincingly sold in human terms, at the same time have a stone-cold rational economic benefit. Both are important, and this article misses both points at once.
I just meant the laissez-faire economics that dominated the field from before the French Revolution until Marx. That was radical stuff when it was opposing anti-banking church decrees, but I mean, come on, it’s 2016.
The actual reforms at home began with Civil War Republicans, half of whom were directly reading and responding to Marx, when he was a current figure. They got off the gold standard and instituted paper money for a while, made real universal male suffrage, opposed big banking and big cotton, and supported northern industrial workers and businessmen both. Later on, they dropped the workers and the Democrats picked them up.
Marx himself was writing a lot about the US for US papers. Thaddeus Stevens and the other radical Republicans were mostly out-and-out Marxists, in the sense of “agreeing with what Karl Marx was saying”, meaning what Karl Marx actually wrote in the 19th century, as it was understood in the 19th century. That’s not Lenin, it’s what we would call Keyensianism today. Marxist thought became more statist and totalitarian later (although it had elements of this from the beginning, following the furthest-left economic planning advocates who took part in the French revolution).
The reforms were a compromise between the Marxist radical Republicans and the somewhat more powerful pro-business republicans. In the 20th century, labor unions in the US rejected Marxism as it became more statist, the democratic socialists split off, and they hitched themselves first to American labor unions, and then to the Democratic party in the 1920s, when the Republicans switched to be a pure laissez-faire party.
I’m just saying this to point out that Karl Marx is not two four letter words. Keynsianism is the distillation of those parts of Marxism that were no longer controversial in 1933, and it is now the standard economic doctrine, or rather, would be, except for some amount of US amnesia.
Regarding trusts and investing, I didn’t know that regulation— I don’t know how you could enforce such a thing, as an investor could just contract out another individual to invest for them in another trust. The trust-busting efforts were the first real successful reform, and used to be considered the crowning Republican success, but now even Democrats don’t make efforts in this direction anymore. The banking consolidation of credit started under Reagan, but completed under Clinton.
A president Sanders can likely get a friendly congress, as he inspires voting among youger people. He has the power to appoint an attorney general who will vigorously prosecute anti-trust suits, and criminal prosecutions against certain figures of the last decade, those in government who shredded constitutional law and those in investment banking who defrauded institutions.
He has the power to appoint do-nothing figures to homeland security, to start to disintegrate that abomination, he has the power to divert military spending to civilian-useful research projects like LFTR, and he has the power to clear out the corrupted regulators who prevent business from being competitive. As mayor, he was able to keep Burlington friendly to small business, and a president has enough power to help small business overall. When Clinton was president, even though he was friendly to big-business, he overall steered the internet economy toward many small businesses through bipartisan deregulation policy.
A real leftist president has a lot of angles through which to take action. It is tough, you can’t do everything, but you can start. Prosecutions change public opinion, and really send a jolt of pressure into the power structures, as people genuinely start to respect the law again, and see it as applying to them. You won’t get a Bybee approving torture again, or some random NSA evesdropping.
Those same people who are stupid enough to listen to talk radio are also stupid enough to follow a random leftist, when the political wind shifts. They are not stable, they say whatever they think will make them more popular. The right wing mob is acting against its own interest, it is brainwashed by old media propaganda, but all that old-media generation is old. The internet has enough resources to get people to think for themselves, and younger folks don’t get their propaganda from corporate TV.
It’s not deregulation, it’s size. When corporations are small, they are the best thing in the world. When they get big, they stifle whole sectors using buyouts and anti-competitive practices. One needs to institute a structural remedy to keep corporations small, and I personally favor a graduated corporate income tax.
There is nothing a big bank can do that 180 small banks can’t. Except for price-fixing currencies, charging outrageous anti-competitive interest rates and fees, and influencing policiticians with enormous donations, all activities which are either already illegal or should be,
When a corporation is small, it is regulated by competition, it cannot influence Congress directly, and it can’t damage the economy at all, it can just go out of business. While you still need a certain amount of regulation, it is much less when business is competitive, as real competition is a good regulator. The rise of enormous business in the US is something relatively recent, there was a healthy small business economy as late as the 1990s. I support Bernie Sanders because he has the right target in his sights— the enormous banks, large multinationals, those that make business in the US difficult or impossible for those who wish to compete in a fair market.
Should a Jew get offended by bringing up a blood libel story regarding a murdered child in 19th century Europe? Is it PC nonsense to say that this is offensive to Jews? It’s the exact same thing— someone commits a crime and the public blames a whole ethnic group for the crime, an ethnic group none of whose members had anything to do with it. Then the event itself becomes a problem of bigotry, even though there is a victim who was murdered, and even though the public thinks “it’s bad apples that did it”. If you are a real truther, Republican or Democrat, it makes no difference (although how you can vote for a party whose leadership appoints people who can do such things is beyond me) then you can see that 9/11 is a trick of displacement of blame, and a new blood libel directed at Muslims.
I may be wearing a tinfoil hat, but you are wearing a dunce hat. Everyone and their sister knows 9/11 was an inside job by now.
I am sorry, but you don’t get that monopolization is something that requires structural remedy. I don’t think that structural remedy has to be so invasive, a graduated corporate income tax is rather modest in terms of government interference, and I think this is immune from political considerations. But traditional trust-busting and directed legislation is necessary right now, when we don’t have a graduated tax. Trust busting was done by Teddy Roosevelt, and by both Democrats and Republicans, and it was not a political retribution system, it was really designed to produce competitive markets. It worked relatively poorly, as there were still monopolies that never got busted, but it was better than nothing.
Sanders has the most educated economic policy of any candidate, the problem is that you have a false understanding of economics, produced by bought-out professionals who don’t tell the truth. The field of economics is very politically loaded, and right-wing think tanks have installed Chicago-school quacks in many departments, who pretend to know what they are talking about. They don’t, and you can see this because all their objective predictions are completely wrong (for example, their predictions of inflation response to stimulus, their prediction of unemployment when minimum wage goes up, etc). The Keynsians get the right answers empirically, because their economics is sound.
message me on physicsoverflow, I had tendonitis in my leg, and I’m not feeling too good.
There is no such transaction. Whatever you imagine, if it is done by a large bank, it can be done by a smaller one, perhaps by some inter-bank behind the scenes lending of capital. If the corporation needs an enormous loan, it can do so with a bond sale, and it doesn’t matter if there is one buyer or 180. The advantages of size for banks are pure anti-competitive nonsense, nothing substantial.
When Sanders was a young man, he also stormed the stage and snatched the mike from others, as part of the student’s movement. He doesn’t silence the powerless.
I know you THINK that these Chicago school predictions are observed, but it is the exact opposite. Minimum wage has gone up several times, and each time, after a period of a few months to a year, the unemployment GOES DOWN in response, and significantly. This is explained each time by Chicago school economists as follows: “DESPITE raising minimum wage, business profits have increased sufficiently over the past quarter to compensate for the unemployment increase, and bring the unemployment down further than the wage pressure has brought it up…”
The same thing regarding price rise during stimulus injections. When Russia just dumped money on its economy in the 90s, the Chicago school economists predicted 10-fold rises in prices. They predicted a doubling or tripling of prices in response to Obama’s Fed stimulus, in response to every quantitative easing. These predictions are quantitative, and COMPLETELY FALSE, not even a little bit, there is no price rise aside from business-as-usual inflation. In this case, the Chicago quacks don’t say anything, because there is nothing to say.
The “Chile miracle” is not a miracle, it is a catastrophe. The fascists took over, and the US pumped money into the country to make the system look good. The South American region only gained decent living standards when they voted in socialists or Keynesians, and this is a fact which your media lies to you about.
When something happens consistently, in contradiction to your economic doctrine, you have to consider whether your doctrine is correct.
The reason minimum wage hikes “coincidentally” happen just in time for economic growth which “cancels out” their unemployment effect is explained in Marxist or Keyensian economics (they are the same regarding this effect, but Marx was there first, Keyens is just ripping Marx off regarding this). The demand in an economy is too low because workers are chronically underpaid, as they complete with the unemployed. Workers equilibrium wage is when there is ZERO unemployment, and it is roughly equal to the productivity per worker, up to a small factor.
This prediction is false when there are large hiring firms, and unemployment, and wages decline to zero. This WRECKS the economy, because demand collapses to zero, and there are no consumers for the products you can produce. Minimum wage raises therefore ALWAYS lead to LOWER unemployment (until the wage gets high enough to produce inflation), and this is the correct prediction, observed EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN TIME MINIMUM WAGE GOES UP.
Likewise “creating money” doesn’t produce price inflation until the money gets in the pockets of workers in the form of wages, and starts to stress the productive capacity. As long as production is not maximum, inflation doesn’t take off. This is also what is observed EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN TIME there is quantitative easing.
When you economic doctrine is wrong like this, in objectively measurable facts, you need to reject it. The funny thing is that this doctrine was rejected in 1936, when Keynesians took over, but somehow got REINSTATED by billionaires with think-tank funds, who don’t know anything about academic economics, only their own self-interest.
Bernie Sanders understands economics. You don’t.
The student movement of the 1960s is the only worthwhile part of your otherwise worthless generation.
Yes, we need to talk about 9/11, but the event that was cancelled was not a discussion or a debate, or an investigation. It was a “memorial”, meaning it was remembering the outright propaganda without critical analysis. These lies were designed to blame Muslims, and therefore remembering this propaganda uncritically is simply a celebration of anti-Muslim hysteria. There is benefit in discussion and in criminal prosecutions, but that’s not what students would get offended at— I guarantee you that all these leftists would love to see Cheney on trial.
Ron Paul is the only republican who was publically skeptical, but he did not advocate reducing anyone’s power, he was there for a “just in case” vote, in case the public becomes less stupid. In a modern society, there is a power problem from two directions, from big business that chokes up the economy, and from big government which can destroy initiative, and the collusion between them which can destroy everything in a puff of dust. Reducing the power of government while increasing the power of business is not a solution, neither is increasing the power of government while regulating monopolated business.
The real solution is what people have done since the Roosevelts: use government taxes and lawsuits to break up big business and limit the accumulations of market power, make investments in R&D and infrastructure to reduce unemployment to near zero, and otherwise keep government from being a nuisance. This combination is supported only by senator Bernie Sanders today, but it is still more or less the platform of the Democratic party, as it is the platform of ALL normal political parties, right or left, in Europe, in Asia, everywhere.
It is never reasonable to vote for buffoons who place criminals in charge of the military, criminals who misdirect military exercizes to kill 3000 Americans. It’s a vote for the real Bin Laden. The Republican party is simply not a competent governing party, it is a fringe party that happens to have mainstream support.
Those folks would take their planes to Vietnam, and come back with full bombers, because they didn’t feel like dropping bombs that day. That kind of self-indulgence is needed more than ever. Your ignorance is appalling.
Most American campuses have no real leftists, they were purged in the 80s and 90s, and in the 2000s. I met many folks who were removed because they were too far left, but it is impossible to be too far right. I was at an extremely conservative school, full of right-wing idiots, and if there was any indoctrination going on, it would have to have come from me as a student toward those bourgeoise idiots.
I do not thrive in the real world, I don’t function in such a place. That’s normal, as no academics ever thrive in the real world marketplace, nobody with original ideas ever does. Do you think that Einstein, Landau, Polyakov, Zamolodchikov, these folks could have a corporate sponsor? Do operator product expansions look good next to a cereal ad? Would you like nuclear power plants to come in a snazzy pink box like an IPad? The inability of markets to fund real thinking is why we have an NSF and government funded research.
I understand that you shake your head, but you should instead learn something about economics. I am 42.
They burned their draft cards too and fled to Canada. The Iraq veterans only wish they had done the same.
I’m more than all in, I’m ready to be crucified, fella. That’s what’s required to overthrow this Babylon.
The essential philosophy is reducing unemployment. All his policies fit within this theme. The market distortions of low aggregate demand are caused by competition with the unemployed, and in a zero unemployment situation, wages rise so that they are fair. To reduce unemployment there are several things you can do:
1. INCREASE the minimum wage.
Paradoxically, increasing the minimum wage decreases unemployment, as the extra employment provided by the spending offsets the expense to businesses due to extra wages. This paradoxical effect is something predicted by Keynes, observed routinely real-world, and denied and laughed at by Chicago school folks who predict the opposite.
2. Subsidize college with free tuition
This removes people from the labor force, and reintroduces them into the labor force in a better position.
3. Progressive taxes
This reverses the loss of demand due to monopolistic extraction of high wages by top management at corporations.
4. Infrastructure jobs program
And in addition, when there is still unemployment, you absorb the remaining labor into useful infrastructure jobs, which has the added benefit of improving quality of life and reducing costs of other business.
The goal of reducing unemployment is also met by the Fed, but the Fed doesn’t do this anymore. Sanders wants pro-employment monetary policy. He also wants a bank-breakup to allow credit to small businesses that reduce unemployment. He is the “full employment” president, and this is the thing that is most necessary. It is not a surprise that economists endorse his platform.
You think that economists go the opposite way than the way they actually do because you only see Chicago school quacks on TV. Real economists are Keyensians, and are fully on board with Sanders.
It’s not envy, it’s practicality. It’s completely unsustainable to have wealthy people running an economy. I don’t want to be rich, I worry that the existence of rich people destroys innovation, much like the communist party destroyed innovation in the USSR, through undue power.
Those aren’t real choices— the deoderants you see in mainstream drug stores are the same exact product in 20 different plastic cases (look at the ingredients). There is no innovation from the large firms that package deoderant, they are enormous firms making a commodity product and repackaging it in different boxes to suit a tiered income population, designing it by advertizing that poor people buy cheap packages, and rich people buy the same product in a more expensive package, so as to maximize their profit. This type of pricing structure (when it was done in a more transparent form) was made illegal at one point, so now it is disguised by assuming the superficial facade of a different product.
Real innovation doesn’t come from “free market capitalism”, not as it is practiced by large firms, it comes from competition. The lack of competition in US markets is appalling— I have no choice for internet, for clothing I must shop at large chains who buy from a limited number of distributors the products made overseas, for a bus, I must take Greyhound, for food I must go to a large national chain, for consumer electronics I am usually limited to a large chain, for every product you can imagine, there is a monopoly or near-monopoly in nearly every community.
The true innovation comes from small business, and Bernie Sanders is the best friend small business in Vermont ever had. This is why he has 85% approval ratings, because he is good to capitalism in its functioning form.
Your position is that there is a trade-off between government power and private-sector power. This is to some extent true, and it is something to worry about. But it’s not the only thing to worry about.
There is a much more important trade-off entirely within the private sector, which is the division of power between competitive small business and non-competitive big-business. In the US, since 1980, the government has consistently sided with big business, and small business in the US is disappearing. The entire entrepreneurial class in the US is vanishing, stores are closing faster than they are opening (the total number of US businesses is actually decreasing today).
One of the “four freedoms” that FDR laid out in his “second bill of rights” speech in 1945 is the freedom to start a business free of fear of monopolistic competition. This right has not been protected in the US, as large banks provide capital to large business to finance takeovers of city after city, replacing the small business economy of each city with homogenous national chains. There is nothing more efficient about Wal-Mart as compared to the thousands of stores that it replaced, except that they can pay slave wages, and they can get special deals with suppliers due to their size. These are anti-competitive practices, and there is no justification for allowing the economy of the US to become dominated by large corporations in this way.
The reduction of power of large corporate entities used to be a top priority for Republicans, since Teddy Roosevelt, but it is now something only Democrats enforce. The goal of keeping the US business economy healthy is something that must appeal to anyone who cares about competition and innovation, because ALL innnovation comes from small firms, you just don’t know it, because those firms are bought out by large ones who bring the product to a larger market and reap the majority of the profits.
Sanders advocates breaking up the big banks, and is favorable to anti-trust enforcement with teeth (as, to be fair, Martin O’Malley also said). There is no substitute for a competitive economy.
I agree that government contracts are often used to exert undue power, which is why structural anti-trust mechanism need to be put in place. I personally favor a strongly graduated corporate income tax, whose rate rises with the total number of employees. This is an incentive for firms to split themselves up, just to make more money. This needs to be coupled with contract reform, to prevent false-splits, and to ensure fair pricing to small and large firms. Contracts are enforced by the government, and contract law is the most important law. Fair transparent contracting allows competition to form, and innovation to happen.
While Sanders didn’t propose a graduated corporate tax, he does work for campaign finance reform, and it is hopeless to think that the power of big business can be opposed when big-business finances the election of congressional candidates.
I’m not saying they are truthers, I don’t know them, but most students nowadays (at least, the intelligent ones), right or left, are truthers, and they most certainly are influenced by the dominance of the truther movement— that’s what transformed 9/11 from a “go get Muslims!” type of thing to a “wait a sec, this country is massively corrupt!” type of thing. They most certainly don’t identify with the perpetrators of 9/11, NOBODY DOES, MUSLIM OR OTHERWISE, that’s why it’s a perfect false flag— nobody can imagine what evil hearts could be behind it. In this case, the evil heart has a pacemaker.
Bernie Sanders has not said anything about 9/11 truth, you must remember that the people who have access to secret documents are LEAST likely to understand what happens, because in this particular case, all the secret documents support the bogus government scenario. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a structural effect of US puppet organizations like Al-Qaeda being easily manipulated from within the government to say and do anything anyone wants, using a handful of agents.
But Sanders has supported real transformation of government, including transparency and real openness (Obama promised this, but delivered the exact opposite). Sanders has been more consistent than either Paul in advocating for no compromise on civil liberties, and he advocates prosecution of financial figures from the last decade, prosecutions which in themselves open the door for prosecution of political terrorist criminals, as the network of power opposing prosecution is the same in either case. He supports the international court for war crimes, which is interested in figures from the Bush administration, and once one of these folks is on trial, the whole house of cards collapses, and the scientists and engineers can feel free to speak more clearly than they already have, and you get a public reconciliation.
The issue here is government secrecy and clandestine operations, and this is engendered by the ties to powerful business as well as by the internal tiers of secrecy and the CIA. I trust Bernie Sanders to bust up the CIA and Homeland Security more than I trust Rand Paul to do it, or Ron Paul, as he opposed such clandestine covert activities even when they were happening in South America, not inside the US. Also, he has the added bonus that he doesn’t come with crackpot economic policies.
The small corporations and large corporations have to pay the same minimum wage. The effects of minimum wage increases are most beneficial to SMALL business, because the small businesses are stressed by
A different minimum wage for men and women is effective at having men preferentially hired. The effect of a lower minimum wage on illegal immigrants is a preferential hiring of illegals. These things have nothing to do with the fundamental law here.
The extreme of Keynsianism is not “let’s bomb our cities”, it’s “let’s employ everyone in useful work”. This useful work can be building roads and bridges, doing scientific research, writing free software, painting pictures, anything at all, so long as it is productive work and gets a good wage, The point is to make an economy’s unemployment go to zero.
The “Chicago school policy” in Chile was tied in to the fascist dictatorship— it was boosted by foreign investment, and creating large corporations. It was not organic growth by the production of local businesses. To allow local businesses to compete with multinationals, you need to have strong protection of small business, and fair-wages policies help in this regard. There are only two advantages to a big firm— being able to pay low wages, and being able to get special contracts from suppliers. You need to ban both to make the economy competitive for small business.
You are addled if you think Switzerland goes by Chicago school. Every European economy has strong permanent Keynsian stimulus in the form of social welfare benefits and investments in schools, research, and construction. There is no exception. When unemployment gets close to zero, the minimum wage regulation becomes meaningless, because labor is scarce, and all wages begin to climb to their market equilibrium value. We saw this in the US in the late 1990s, when unemployment went below 4%. This is what Sanders advocates as the employment target today.
The existence of rich people is the only thing that kills innovation. Innovation can only be done by poor people, as it always has been done in the past.
Rich folks, like say Elon Musk, create nonsense schemes for tubes between cities and rockets that blow up. That’s because money makes you stupid. It’s not his fault entirely, he’s an idiot surrounded by sycophants.
You have the illusion that rich people invent things because these rich people have an army of poor people working for them, and they sometimes claim credit for their ideas, and prevent the poor people from complaining about it by threatening their job. That’s how Wolfram took credit for Cook’s proof that automaton 110 is Turing complete. Wolfram was a good researcher before he got rich. Money turned him into an idiot.
Except student loans are secured by the Federal government, they represent no risk to the lender. So I guess it’s you that’s the economic illiterate.
Standard credit-card loan rates in the US have not gone down despite the passage of “bankruptcy reform” which allows confiscation of income and property to repay debts. Loans have become more secure, credit banks are posting higher profits, and none of the benefits have come to consumers in the form of lower interest rates. This is a sign that you are dealing with monopolistic usury, with banks ensuring profit by draconianly difficult bankruptcy procedure, not with any sort of competitive lending. Similarly, payday lenders have outrageously noncompetitive interest rates, and their mere existence is a sign that you need immediate reform. Bernie Sanders has addressed these issues in his most recent policy speech, and I recommend you listen to it, instead of pontificating nonsense you read somewhere.
That’s completely false. The same monopolization happened in the 1890s, when there were no government regulations to speak of, in every industry. The modern hyper-monopolization is caused by the ability of large business to undercut small business on prices, using their lower costs on labor and their contracts with suppliers, which get them deals through their size.
Both require structural reforms. To deal with labor costs, you need a high minimum wage. This has the effect of disfavoring large business by cutting into their margin. On average, 100 small businesses have 50% of their employees owners, who make a living salary. When they are replaced with a chain, 99% of the employees are wage-laborers, making minimum wage. When the minimum wage is a living wage, this is no gain for the corporation over the small business network.
To deal with favoritism in contract pricing, you need real contract reform. This means transparent contracts with uniform pricing. This is what pro-competitive regulations are about.
To deal with size, I suggest that you need a graduated corporate income tax, to break up big businesses naturally, without government intervention. A graduated tax based on number of employees is a strong incentive to keep firms small, and uniform contracts means competition can always start, while transparent contracts means competition always knows what exactly everyone else is up to.
Sanders and others can’t propose pro-competition policies so easily, because the campaign finance system prevents it. So he proposes executive action, on anti-trust and bank-breakup, and further proposes dealing with campaign finance, so that other pro-competition policy can be reinstated. He has innovative ideas in all the necessary areas.
Do you think that people who work at box stores don’t work for a living? When you have an economy centered around large business, you are working for someone else, and the opportunities for innovation disappear entirely. Sanders created a thriving small-business economy in Vermont, and he can do it for the nation.
On the contrary, I was awake. Socialism replaced neoclassical economics during the great depression, in the form of Keyensian economics. The doctrine you support has destroyed economies with corporate takeovers and empoverished underclasses. It is now destroying the US, as it did before, in the 1890s.
The great debates of the 20th century was between statist socialists, following Lenin, and anarchist socialists, following Dilas and Orwell. The statists lost under the weight of their own bureaucracy, the decentralized socialists won. Unfortunately, there are right-wing business interests who don’t follow anything, who exploited the divide to produce an oligarchy of large business that is the worst option of all, even worse than outright statism. This right-wing pap in the US is atavistic nonsense, and its practice has always been destructive to the US economy.
Except that the model of risk was fraudulent, as it assumed independent default risk. When property values go down, there is a certainty of massive correlated default, all the defaults come at the same time, because it makes no sense to pay a mortgage that is more than the property is worth. This is not an independent risk, it is a predictable correlated default, and it makes the bundled loans total junk. Taking a correlated risk and modelling it as an uncorrelated risk is a method of producing AAA ratings for whatever you want, because multiplying risks gets you to superficially 100% safe loans very quickly.
In this case, many people identified the correlations, and bought insurance against these bundled loans. The fact that a sizable percentage of all experts identified the problem means that even a government, let alone nonprofit or investor financed ratings agencies, heck, even a bunch of individuals who were free to speak publically about the problem, any of these would have caught the problem long before it became a crash. But the enormous structures in place, these enormous private businesses were not able to catch it, and that means they must be restructured.
Sanders is the only one who proposes a proper remedy, which is to break up the banks. Small institutions don’t make mistakes like this, because they are not going to be bailed out.
The commercial ratings are subsidized by the lenders, and are manipulated politically by the large entities pushing for a good rating. A proper rating is something you can get when you have competing interests, and Sanders proposal for a nonprofit agency is sound, especially if their fees comes from the buyers, not the sellers.
In the 1930s, there was no monopolistic entity like WalMart to decimate small business all over America. The lessons of the 1930s was that Keyensian method work, full employment is necessary, and anyone who is first to implement full-employment policy, whether it’s FDR, Hitler, or Atlee will rescue the economy, and from then on be politically immune to criticism, bad or good.
The lessons of the 1930s have already been forgotten by everyone except Bernie Sanders. He is the only one who is for implementing full employment policies, starting with subsidizing universities, an infrastructure jobs program, and raising the minimum wage, all of which are known to reduce unemployment.
Unfortunately, the business press is dominated by quack Chicago school economics, which makes false predictions and produces terrible policy. Without reductions of unemployment, all the international trade in the world won’t save you, and with zero unemployment, international trade is a secondary consideration. International trade is only used now as a cudgel to reduce employee wages in the west, and this has the opposite effect on demand than what is required.
Taxes are used to redistribute income, so that demand doesn’t collapse. The collapse of the 1930s was due to low demand, and this was understood for 5 decades afterwards. You willfully forget economics lessons at your own peril.
Bernie Sanders is the only one willing to call out the ratings agencies’ practices for what they are: fraud. It is an outright fraud to model correlated default risk as independent default.
When you have a 60% chance that someone will pay you back, you have a .4 risk of default. For two people with the same risk, that’s .4 x .4 or .16, a 16% chance of default. For 5 people, that’s .4 to the 5th power, or .01, a 1% risk. For 10 people, the risk is effectively zero. That’s why independent risk is used to hedge, you can bundle together risky investments to make them less risky.
But that doesn’t work when there is a predictable event which can lead ALL the folks to default! In that case, modelling the risk as independent is an outright LIE. For subprime mortgages, the predictable event is housing prices falling, leading all the folks to default, because the mortgage is now suddenly greater than the property value.
When a ratings agency ignores an obvious correlation, this is clear malpractice. When it is doing so because the rating is paid by the issuer, and the issuer is paying for a better rating, it becomes fraud. The distortions of ratings to please issuers is a systemic practice, and a systemic problem, even in milder cases where it didn’t crash the world’s economy.
Part of the solution to this is massive restructuring of the ratings agencies, removing the bribery potential by making them neutral nonprofits, financed by the investing public, not by the issuers of credit. This is what Bernie Sanders proposes. His proposals are the only educated and effective policies in the presidential race, and you have to be out of your mind not to support them, or him.
No, no, my friend. His campaign is based on sound economics.
There is no justification for producing an economy with a class of wealthy people sucking corporate profits into their pockets, this is the path to financial collapse. In order to have an economic equilibrium, workers need to be making wages roughly equal to their productivity, give or take a small factor. When these workers compete with armies of unemployed, they are forced to work long hours, and their productivity goes into the owner’s pockets, and doesn’t show up as demand in the economy.
This process leads to a loss of demand, and a recession or depression, and the only solution is policy to increase demand. Full employment policy is what Sanders advocates, through jobs, through taxation, through minimum wage increases (which decrease unemployment, despite what you read), and through breakup of anticompetitive big institutions. His policies are downright essential.
I support Bernie Sanders, I would rather be shot than be rich.
The theory of the root causes has been understood for 100 years. It has nothing to do with government intervention, these types of monopolistic takeovers occured in the 19th century, when there was no government at all compared to modern times, and they occured in Europe, in the US, and in every industrializing economy. Of course I read the Austrian school, it is an atavistic throwback to the 18th century. They make predictions, for example, doubling of prices after quantitative easing in 2009, ten-fold rise in prices in Russia in the 90s after Russian quantitative easing, increased unemployment with rising minimum wage, and these predictions are not only false, they are the opposite of the truth. There is no success of Austrian economics, it is just a bunch of quackery propped up by big-money because it leads to policy they like.
To understand Keynes well, you actually should read Marx’s “Capital”, although it’s long and obviously focused on 19th century events. The fundamental issue of low worker pay, monopolization, and declining demand is first raised in Marx, who uses this to predict the characteristics of the capitalist depression. Keynes is more of a popularizer, who gets several details wrong on purpose, so as to disguise his reliance on Marx, who, as always, is taboo in economics.
Megacorps are competitive not because of government, but because they pay slave wages and muscle good contract deals due to their size. They can also dump products at a loss to put competitors out of business. To avoid this, you need pro-business policy.
The interventions Sanders backs are tested for 100 years, they are known to work all over the world, and only in the US are wealthy people so able to buy the political class that even 100 year old economic dogma is forgotten.
We don’t have time to wait. You see the problem, you don’t see the solution, but you should know that doing nothing is not going to fix it. The “experiments” that Bernie Sanders proposes are not experimental, they have been tried elsewhere, and I encourage you to examine their purpose and effect with an open mind.
This is nonsense— you don’t measure the loss in value by the actual loss after government intervention to protect homeowners and clean up the mess, You measure the loss by the value of the securities absent intervention.
The correlated default was a clear prediction that could be made before it happened, and was made, leading to the AIG insurance bets against the bundled loans by Goldman Sachs and others. When you have a ratings agency pricing loans as if their failure is independent, when it is not, that is malpractice, and when they make a profit from the rating, it becomes fraud.
The recovery of the nominal value on these securities is not a measure of the level of fraud— the fraud would have been there even if everyone paid back their loans. It’s the bad model that constitutes the fraud, knowingly ignoring correlations that others foresaw and bet against.
It’s impossible to reason with liberals because they are right.
No. It is still fraud even when everyone pays their loans back, because the correlated risk model is not used. The false rating is what led to the collapse of AIG, as it was insuring the loans at wrong risk, and it couldn’t pay off all those who took insurance bets against the bundled loans.
It makes no difference what the eventual outcome of the mortgages are, after government intervention and clean up. The problem was the risk model, and the fluctuating prices when the risk became far greater than the model predicted. The important thing in assessing rating agency fraud is whether the risk model was accurate (it was not) and whether the ratings agencies were in a position to know it was inaccurate (they were). You can’t allow ratings agencies to sell their ratings to the highest bidder, this is the path to collapse.
The article is worthless propaganda, but I did read it.
The fact that YOU don’t understand it, and others on the right don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it isn’t understood. The consolidation of business and the anti-competitive destruction of wages was explained in detail in Marx’s Capital, which described the exact same phenomenon in 19th century England, using English labor statistics.
I am not a Marxist, I am just giving academic credit to Marx for understanding the phenomenon first. The stuff he talked about is mainstream economics today, it is just not credited to the proper author, because of people like you, who are brainwashed.
Marx’s 19th century writings are nothing like Marxism-Leninism— they are a theory of wages and consolidation in capitalist economies, and this theory is correct, and subsumed into Keynesianism today. The statist response to this crisis is what is people reject, including myself. You don’t have to be a statist to understand Marx’s analysis of capitalist markets.
Every economist has Marxist roots, as Marx is the one who analyzed declining demand first. People rip him off today, by saying “Keynesian”, Keynes was simply ripping off Marx, badly.
Marx is not Lenin, he wrote about capitalism, not communism. His statist remedies are not optimal, but his analysis is correct.
True. Keynesian economics is Marx’s economics. It is also correct economics, as can be seen using objective predictions.
You should stop repeating propaganda as if it were true. The predictions Marx made have nothing to do with communism. Marx was writing about capitalism, not about communism, he wasn’t alive when the Bolsheviks took over Russia.
I am not ashamed of 20th century socialists, they did a good job most of the time, outside of communist controlled regions. I am just not a statist like many of them were. You need innovation to come from small organizations, not top down, and this is what modern progressives know that 20th century progressives didn’t.
I agree that being wrong and certain is bad. You should look in the mirror sometime.
I’m 42. Reasoning with someone means providing reasoned arguments. There is nothing to argue about with liberals. They are right, and you are high.
The minimum wage increase business is not circular, it is based on the “Say’s law” principle of economic equilibrium— wages in equilibrium are determined by the negotiating power of employees, and by choice of where to work, and this is supposed to produce an amount of income exactly sufficient for the aggregate of all workers to buy all commodities the market can be producing in equilibrium. If wages are too low for the employees to purchase all the commodities, you get a “general glut”, a “demand slump”, a “loss of consumer confidence”, whatever you want to call it, and the economic output will be below peak. This is a non-equilibrium effect, it is caused by unemployment, which reduces the power of employees to negotiate normal wages equal to their productivity.
The existence of this phenomenon of too-low wages was both theoretically predicted by Marx, and demonstrated by him using labor wage statistics, first. That’s what the entire volume of Capital I is all about. Before Marx, this situation was thought to be impossible (it is impossible in the Chicago school philosophy), with a few economists wondering whether it did happen, as they were worried about periodic recessions.
The point is that anything that gets you closer to economic equilibrium increases economic efficiency, as equilibrium is the point of Pareto optimality, it’s the most production possible. This means that when the minimum wage is far below productivity per-employee, raising it moves you closer to the equilibrium wage, and produces more demand to offset the cost. When it doesn’t do this, it produces inflation instead, as the worker salaries stress production past its limits.
The wage increases need to be done gradually, to allow the extra demand to kick in, and this is what Sanders proposes— he proposes a raise to $15 over two years or so, gradually rising to a living wage.
Regarding large corporate power, Democrats vary. Obama has not been very strong in opposing it, but Carter pushed through airline deregulation that favored small airlines in 1978, and began the AT&T anti-trust lawsuit. This was the model for the successful parts of the 1996 telecom deregulation act under Clinton— this separated infrastructure from service, and allowed many small telecoms to compete in both phone and internet service. The internet remonopolized through cable monopolies, and the phone remonopolized through wireless. Democrats often are able to push through competition acts, which allow competition even in monopolized industry. This is sorely needed in wireless and cable right now. Internet cable service in the US is completely monopolized by two non-competing firms (TW cable and Comcast) and these have an infrastructure monopoly. Likewise for Verizon, which has a virtual infrastructure wireless monopoly. The infrastructure and the service need to be separated, and the service companies need to get an equal rate for the infrastructure usage, as was done successfully with phone in 1984 and for internet in 1996. The competition under Clinton’s economy was very healthy, although some bad decisions were made which allowed consolidation.
Regarding the debt, this is an issue, but not as much of an issue for a country with control of it’s monetary policy. A government’s deby is not like a personal debt, it can be wiped away by inflation. I am not advocating that much inflation, but it must be kept in mind. Good progressive taxes can balance a budget even with increased spending.
The issue is that pro-competition policy, which used to be a Republican concern, is just not a Republican concern anymore. The whole party is bought out by big business. Only half the Democrats are bought out, and I’m voting for the half that’s still clean, as long as it exists. When it ceases to exist, we’ll be in trouble. Sanders has a pro-competition policy in mind, as you can see by both what he says and what he doesn’t say, and by his record with small business in Vermont, which is excellent, and earns him points with conservative Republicans all over that state.
Ted Cruz is a corporate monkey, like all the rest.
He doesn’t pay me, I pay him! $100 every month, the best investment I ever made.
He is bought out by common everyday people like me, and we volunteer our time for him, so as to remove the odious influence of big money from politics. Besides, I don’t think he agrees with everything I have to say, I have some pretty non-mainstream ideas.
In case you haven’t noticed, the USSR is gone, and China is a capitalist country now. There aren’t any communists around. But there are corporate monkeys. Like Cruz.
He’s not a messiah, he’s the person who happens to be the leader at the moment, his movement is not a personality cult. I don’t agree with everything he thinks, but close enough— he’s got his priorities straight. America right now has no real enemies, no powerful ones at least.
Venezuela’s socialists are not even close to communists, neither are Nicaragua’s. They aren’t great socialists, but they’re ok, they improved the standard of living of the half of the population who lived in miserable poverty before they came to power (not anymore, which is why these people are so popular). You really have no idea what they’re doing, or their policies, you just parrot what you hear.
North Korea has real communists, and they are incompetent and powerless, even in the region. Their H-bomb is probably a layer-cake, I bet they didn’t build an Ulam-Teller device, they don’t have the skill.
Ha ha! Ok, fine, you can continue to think that. Iran is a Shiite state, Assad is Sunni, neither is an enemy of the US, and the “islamic threat” is a bunch of teenagers with a power-trip and an AK-47, not an organized political movement, despite what your media leads you to believe. Communism is dead and has been for a while. You are fabricating enemies to avoid facing your own trouble at home.
Sanders doesn’t agree with me on this, by the way.
Except your “clown ruler” was democratically voted out of power just recently, and the Castro dictatorship is opening up to the West. He is anti-capitalist only in that he opposes the impoverishment of more than half the population by a corporate oligarchy, i.e. what Cruz is proposing for the US.
Before Chavez took power, 60% of Venezuelans lived in poverty. Chavez expanded the economy 2-fold, with 5% average growth over his tenure, lifting most Venezuelans out of abject poverty. Maduro has not been as successful, but both are democratically elected socialists, so just butt out of their country’s internal affairs, like you butt out of France’s when the socialists take power.
These folks are not your enemy. They have nothing against you or against the US. They are implementing redistributive policy that the US has had since the 1930s.
Castro is not a Democratically elected leader like Maduro. The US is friendly with plenty of dictators too. Maduro might stay in power, maybe not, you have to wait and see. It’s not your business to stick your nose in other country’s elections, and if you advocate free elections in Cuba, you might get your way. Castro is gone.
You’re nuts. Modern socialists are no longer statists, they are fine with small business, they would like to see more worker say in the workplace, and other reasonable things like this. They have no desire for a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, nobody does.
Nobody is chanting “Death to America” except for paid stooges. You are living in the ’80s.
Republicans enforce fascist invasions and covert operations even within the US. They are a gang of criminals. The US is a world leader by default, nobody is opposing in any serious way.
He didn’t steal any elections— those things are closely monitored by international groups, more so than US elections. You are brainwashed by corporate media, with ties to Venezuelan business.
You’re nuts. I wasn’t talking about the 80s, I was talking about the 2000s. I don’t know what Al-Qaeda was in the 80s, I didn’t follow them, they were obscure and I was a little kid. But in the 2000s, the Al-Qaeda leader was treated in a CIA affiliated hospital, the Al-Qaeda pilots had CIA flight school, there were CIA connections to all the figures, and they smell like CIA from a mile away. I don’t know about the Communist government of Afghanistan, that was just before my time.
You don’t understand structural reforms— when you break up a widget maker, you get the same amount of widgets, except now from two competing firms, or else from a collection of firms which together produce the widget, but now independently run, and open to competition.
The result of such competition and restructuring is that the price goes down, and you get innovation.
The “better prices” at large stores are only better because of anti-competitive practices. I would prefer to pay a higher price and make sure that there are no non-competitive practices. Getting a deal because someone is being paid a slave wage, or because a company muscled its way to a better contract that a small business wouldn’t get, that means you are destroying small businesses, and wrecking the entrepreneurial potential for innovation and growth.
A structural remedy for large size is absolutely necessary, so as to get the WalMarts to disintegrate into local stores with local ownership. Once they do, they are open to competition, their workers have a say, and you will get an explosion of new and diverse products, as you did before WalMart and co. homogenized the US.
There is no difference, except that Vermonters have a good government, and the rest of us don’t.
Then for you, he’s a “social democrat”. He doesn’t advocate nationalizing industries, that’s the key point.
I read it when it came out (and “Koba the Dread” and all the rest of the 90s post-Soviet dreck people published). I believe in revolution. Namely, Bernie’s revolution. That book is not very good, by the way.
Bernie Sanders was not selected. He decided to run on his own, despite his lack of charisma, because he knows that his policies are needed now.
Read Sander’s platform and tell me he isn’t a sensible moderate. I dare you.
Modern socialists aren’t about centralizing production, or producing top-down heirarchies, or nationalizing anything at all. They are about making sure workers have a bigger say in the workplace, wages are higher, and small business is allowed to compete with big business. You forget that there was a nation called “Yugoslavia” where socialism meant that workers owned the business, and the government mostly butted out of their workplace. They didn’t have any walls, people came and left as they wished. The Scandinavian states emulated Yugoslavia, not Russia.
Similarly in the US, there was road-construction Keynsianism and military spending Keynsianism, permanently since the second world war. There is no country on Earth which has not had a Keynsian or socialist policy, except for total economic basket-cases in South America, where Chicago school policy was enforced by US decree, which became split into a wealthy oligarchy and massive slums where 70% of the population lived in squalor.
Socialism is a big movement, and you are examining the statist fraction, because you don’t want to look at the successes. The point of socialism is to correct the failures of capitalism, not to put a government in charge of your life. That was the USSR, and nobody advocates that nonsense today.
You are delusional. There is no communist/Baathist/Islamist “axis”, these are either diametrically opposing forces (Baathist/communist), or completely made up media nonsense.
I am not a politician, I am an academic by training, and I don’t sell out fellow academics, even when it is politically expedient.
Marx is the most influential and important academic in the humanities, and that’s just by counting citations (he is the best cited academic in history). He is the most original and significant economist of the 19th century, by far, and the first person to compile labor and wage statistics on a national scale to test economic theory in practice. His academic descendants include the anti-colonial movement, feminism, gay rights, Keynesianism, half of literary criticism (the good half, the other half is Nietzche’s), all of sociology, and all public funding models for science and technology.
Sorry, it is not right to sell out Marx because Lenin got associated with him. His ideas are important, regardless of the unpopularity of his follower’s positions in the US.
Also, while collective farms suck, nationalized oil extraction in the USSR ran circles around everybody else, mostly because Soviet science figured out the correct theory of the origin of oil and the West didn’t.
As far as I know, I am the first person to say this stuff. I came to this conclusion myself, after reading Marx and Keynes. Who am I parrotting? I would like to read them…
I agree. The inspiring new model for me, not anything like Socialism, Fascism, or Capitalism is Linux development. These is very competitive, and sometimes public and sometimes private, and always successful. Software is like a micro-society where you can experiment with political systems without wrecking nations.
But a new party is for the future. Right now, I think that backing Sanders is the only way to break the stranglehold of big business on US government. I would have been backing Paul if he wasn’t such a Chicago school guy, one of the two Pauls even backed a gold standard.
It was a bill to continuously audit the Fed. It had no chance of passage, Sanders modified it to a one-time audit, which passed (I think). Now Sanders has a regular Fed audit as part of his presidential platform. Sanders and Paul agree on the Fed, as far as openness and anti-corruption measures. Sanders doesn’t support a gold standard, though.
Socialism is the foundation of all economic thought since 1933. It’s fundamental principles are built into Keynesianism. There is no nation that hasn’t practiced some form of socialism aside from failed economies in South America (until recently), with the majority of the population living in slums.
Socialism is the foundation of modern economics— it is the theory of aggregate demand you learn in school.
He apologized for his staff member, and he restored the trust people have in him to deal with problems openly and honestly, not by denial and obfuscation. Clinton should learn from his honesty.
The first thing fascists do is execute all the leftists. Look up Pinochet’s dirty war, Hitler’s mass executions, Mussolini’s suppressions, Franco’s mass murders, etc.
Who is pulling my strings?
The Soviet Union was one huge dictatorship, dude, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Modern Russia is not “neo-communist” in the least, they aren’t even mildly socialist. Putin is fervently anti-communist, he would think Bernie Sanders is a “wrecker”, as are all the political parties in Russia. The Russians have been on a neoliberal trip since the 1990s, despite the terrible destruction of their economy by oligarchs. They suffered too much under communism to understand the value of socialism. The same goes for most Eastern Europeans who suffered under communism, like my mother’s side of the family. They have been so traumatized by the terrible system they lived under that they can’t see the sound academic theory. It’s like a former cult-member having a knee-jerk opposition to all religion.
Russia’s main intervention is opposing the semi-fascist coup in Ukraine, and in trying to destroy ISIS, there is not a lot there to oppose, except if you like the Ukrainian right wing, and covert nonsense.
Look at a graph of Venezuelan GDP over Chavez’s tenure. There’s a reason he was reelected however many times.
He has a sensible plan, that aims to reduce unemployment, and break up the largest monopolies stifling US competition.
I didn’t follow it, I just remember the past allegations of stolen elections, and what nonsense they were. I’ll look at the blogs, and get back to you, but I doubt it was anything other than a free and fair election, because it always was under Chavez, even when he lost his “special powers” referendum by a teeny-tiny margin.
Ok— I found this article by that brainwashed state-run enemy media “Vice magazine” (they are clearly controlled by Afghani opium smugglers, from what I see): http://www.vice.com/en_uk/r…
please read it, review the election auditing (it is better than the US) and tell me that Maduro stole the election with a straight face.
That’s total nonsense. The people with the most money, like Bill Gates, “innovated” with version after shoddy version of Windows, and were put to shame by Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, who had a capitalization of $0, they worked in their spare time. All the innovation in Linux comes from academics, small firms, and large firms who share the product without undue monopolization. The best coders are not wealthy folks.
Elon Musk makes nonsense products, as his technical judgement is extremely poor. He is able to do so because he got an early monopoly on internet payment through “Paypal”, suddenly propelling him to billionaire. The production of an internet monopoly is not a sign of genius, it is a sign of being first to stake a claim. Somebody happened to have done it, and it happened to be Musk. He has no creative bone in his body.
When you have “innovators” who hire people to do all the actual innovating, you shouldn’t call them innovators. The people they are hiring are the innovators. And there is little incentive to innovate when some lazy businessman is going to take the credit.
Of course I have participated in business, I was one of the founding members of a reasonably successful start up. As always, it was the case that the “innovators” at the top do nothing of value except hand-shaking and schmoozing, and bleed their creative folks dry, then hang them out to dry (as they did me, and several others). This is why creative engineering and science is so rarely done in business, and never in competitive business, instead it is usually state-funded.
America is not driven by a “positive can-do abundance mentality”, it is driven by Keynsian spending, and big-business oligarchies that are cemented by ties to big government, along with imperial adventures abroad. The US at one point had a healthy entrepreneur class, but it was destroyed by large business. US innovation has never been done by those big-business owners you like to fetishize. It was done by poor people, like Richard Stallman (who is not so poor anymore, having recieved a MacArthur, and also not so productive). Steve Wozniak was not rich either when he designed the Apple II, and he didn’t do much of anything after he got rich.
This is false— government regulation has often fostered competitive markets where none existed before. This is a staple of Democrat deregulation (Republican deregulation is just a way of allowing big business to do whatever it wants). An example is the Airline Deregulation bill of 1978— this opened up the infrastructure to any airline that wanted to compete, and led to a slew of smaller competitors like Southwest and Jet Blue and an unheard of reduction in prices. Carter also sued Bell to break up the phone monopoly in 1979, the lawsuit completed in 1984, leading to the breakup of Bell into the “baby Bells”, and competition, with infrastructure shared. The competition didn’t become real until Clinton signed the 1996 telecom deregulation act, which led to a slew of small phone and cable companies competing to be ISPs and producing phone-cards and local and international service at ever decreasing rates. These pro-competition deregulation policies were reversed under Bush, who allowed the remonopolization of internet through cable companies with an infrastructure monopoly, and allowed the monopolization of cellular infrastructure through Verizon. The same remedy can be applied again.
Similarly, the US government had an anti-trust lawsuit pending against MicroSoft, to allow software competitors in the browser market. That anti-trust lawsuit was dismissed by Bush II, on one of his first days in office, who recieved large campaign contributions from Microsoft. Now Apple and Microsoft are completely unregulated monopolies in their sector, and you can’t copy pictures from your iPad to your computer, you can’t run Flash under Apple’s iOS, and you need to jailbreak your iPhone to be able to use it properly. That’s what monopolization gets you.
The anti-trust business goes back decades, under both Republicans and Democrats, until Reagan. Since Reagan, it’s only Democrats. Sorry to tell you.
Carbon regulations impact big and small business equally. Not all regulations do, however. Pasteurization is a pro-big-business regulation, as small farmers can get clean milk without Pasteurization, while big commercial farms can’t. Pasteurization equipment is expensive for small farmers.
But this is the exception, not the rule. Sanders is a pro-small-business guy, he has immense approval from Vermont business owners, because he knows which regulations hurt small business, and which regulations help small business, or are equal in their impact on both small and large business. Just because you are used to a corrupt bought-out government doesn’t mean this is the way it has to be, or the way it will be. You should vote for Sanders, to get government off the back of small business, and onto the back of anti-competitive big business.
I am 42, and I justified it in lengthy comments below.
You mean like producing cars? Isn’t that what they do? Didn’t Obama dump some billions there, and recovered it? Or something like that, I forget. It was Detroit, wasn’t it?
Yeah, except even in the USSR, they had the best education system, and the best physicists in the world, aside from maybe, arguably, the US (it was a close call). The communist system was extremely competitive in fundamental science, and very innovative there. It just wasn’t innovative in consumer goods.
I am advocating nothing of the sort, you simply can’t read very well.
If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you aren’t a conservative at 40 you have no money.
The type of socialism advocated by Sanders does not involve confiscating private property.
The academics don’t say this anymore, the Marxists were purged from American academia 40 years ago. This makes American academics more and more valueless. I don’t follow other academics, I think for myself, thanks.
I don’t have to be brilliant in this thread, only more clever than you.
Sanders has a better than 50% chance of winning Iowa and New Hampshire right now, according to polling, it all depends on voter turnout. This is a fact acknowledged by both campaigns. The effect of early wins changes the race substantially, as it did for Obama.
I would estimate he has a reasonable chance in Nevada, due to massive advertising, and his money parity. Visibility is key. Nevada might tip entirely and give him a big win, it is impossible to predict, as Nevada, like Iowa, is a caucus state, and these can be won with an energized turnout.
People vote Clinton strategically, as they believe Clinton is in a stronger position in the general. This is not at all objectively true. Republicans detest Clinton, and often grudgingly admire Sanders, and sometimes agree with his positions on the Fed, on guns, on big banks, on foreign trade, on taxes, etc, it’s different by voter. He also has a strong pro-small-business history that can make many business owners flip allegiance. He polls slightly but statistically significantly better than Clinton against the various Republicans.
Sanders’ media blackout can’t persist after he wins Iowa and New Hampshire, at that point, it’s up for grabs. Disclosure: I’m a contributor to his campaign.
There is a provision for the maintenance of a nationalized post office.
The heads of Nordic governments are from the conservative side of the aisle right now, and they generally agree with the more conservative Democrats in the US. The more progressive democrats would be center-left in Scandinavia, and all their debates are what we would call internal debates in the Democratic party.
I assume you are referring to the president of Norway talking about Scandinavian socialism— it is very friendly to free markets, and he made this point. Sanders wishes to do no more than this, it is only called “socialism” in the US.
The thing is, Scandinavian socialism in the past was more radical in its aims, advocating worker control of industry, strong labor unions, and so on. These aspects would not be supported by conservative governments in Scandinavia, but I am sure they would be by the leftists there. But free college, free health-care, strong employment provisions, these are universally supported, and these are the core of Sanders’ platform.
He is in excellent health, and he will live forever. He doesn’t need to look like a movie star, just to get his agenda passed.
He got the bill passed, by making it a one-shot deal rather than a recurrent audit (which had no chance in Congress), and has made regular Fed auditing and removal of conflict of interest there a major plank of his platform.
It has NOTHING to do with the ability to repay! Even if I can pay a $200,000 mortgage on my home, if it is worth $150,000 total, and even if I put in $40,000 already on a $240,000 initial value, I’m just not going to pay the rest! I’m better off cutting the losses, default, lose the house, and repurchase the house or a comparable house for $150,000. I still saved $10,000 on the deal, even after losing the house and the $40,000.
This completely predictable default situation means that the “historical data” was worthless, because the “historical data” was from history when housing prices only went up, not down. When housing prices go down, the loans become worthless because default becomes the RATIONAL THING TO DO. So it’s not that the folks can’t pay, it’s that they won’t pay, because they SHOULDN’T pay. They are overpaying.
Even if all these folks did the IRRATIONAL thing and paid off their mortgage, the value of these securities still plummets, because there is no way you are going to feel safe in assuming that a bunch of homeowners are going to be stupid enough to pay off a loan worth more than the property, and lose money just to make you happy.
That’s what turned these assets to junk, and everyone who bet against these assets knew that this scenario was likely, excepting AIG, who didn’t know. The ratings agencies should have known, and if they didn’t it’s gross incompetence, and if they did, it’s fraud. Since they were paid by the bundlers to rate assuming uncorrelated default, the latter is more likely.
The poverty rate in Venzuela was cut by more than half under Chavez (look it up), while the extreme poverty rate went to 10% from 25%. People aren’t stupid, and they don’t elect people for no reason.
And my mother was raised in communist Romania, so what. Eastern Europeans for the most part don’t know anything about socialism, they associate anything left with the corrupt dictatorship they fled. It’s a form of post-traumatic stress. Bernie Sanders is no communist, he is very good to small business in Vermont. He even did some things that leftists don’t like, like shutting down a protest in front of an arms manufacturer in his state, and agreeing to big development on Vermont coastline which leftists opposed, but that he felt would be good for business. He is a very sensible leader.
If only. I read them a while ago. Engels makes less sense than Marx, as he was less mathematically competent.
Except Keynes correctly predicted the inflation rate every year since 2008, while your favorite economists predicted doubling or tripling of prices. The same with unemployment rates when the minimum wage was last raised, and for Russian prices during the 90s Russian quantitative easing. Sorry, but when a theory predicts quantitative effects correctly, it is simply correct.
Or to those who believe that 9/11 is an inside job.
I’m a truther Sandernista.
Right on! First comment here I wholeheartedly agree with.
He opposed Marxist-Leninists overseas, he supported Gorbachev’s dismantling of the totalitarian Soviet system, unlike all the Marxists-Leninists worldwide. He supported some socialist governments like Ortega’s that were not Marxist-Leninist.
True, but he can win regardless.
Their small business exists, it is disappearing elsewhere. That’s due to sensible government that allows local business to compete against takeover attempts by national chains, and Bernie Sanders pioneered this, while the rest of the US small business disintegrated. Ben and Jerry’s is a national ice-cream supplier, very pro-Bernie, and emblematic of the kind of quirky innovative business that thrives there, and nowhere else. The closer you get to Vermont, the more you see small business thrive. It’s a North-East thing, and it needs to be national.
Sanders did not praise totalitarianism. He praised those things that were praiseworthy, you know, the child care, education, health-care, space exploration, oil science, you know, the things that they did well at. Heck, I praise Soviet science too, that doesn’t mean that I advocate Soviet anything for anyone, it’s a terrible system.
The Sandanistas were not Marxist-Leninist, they still aren’t. They weren’t nice to the opposition, but the opposition wasn’t any nicer to them either. They were just hard-line socialists, like Tito or Atlee, nothing like Sanders, and now they mellowed out into standard leftists.
The leftists in the 80s opposed US meddling in South America, which empoverished the majority there. South America got out from under the US boot when they elected a bunch of socialists all over the continent, and now they don’t have much less of that appalling poverty that characterized the region.
I like the American left-wing. There is no Russian left wing, just some old communists.
Yeah, read the article. The CIA wanted to turn Venezuela into Florida or Ohio, and failed. I don’t know if you noticed, but 3 out of the last 4 presidential elections in the US have been marred by irregularities, which means exit polling and voting results have been out of sync by more than is statistically plausible. In other countries, matching exit polling to tallies is how the UN determines whether fraud has occured, and the US failed that test repeatedly, in 2000, in 2004, and in 2012 (and never significantly before 2000).
The Venezuelans instituted automatic double-counting, which is like automatic exit-polling, to ensure that they can spot check every ballot box. They audited something like 54% of the ballot boxes, and audited more after the challenge from the opposition. There was no fraud, there was just more US shenanigans, as usual. Except less competently than usual.
It’s not government propaganda, you can find UN statistics, and US statistics online, don’t be lazy. I mean, or you can just talk to some Venezuelans, ask them why people voted for Chavez, he had solid 60% majorities.
The country is in economic crisis partly because the price of oil collapsed, and they are reliant on oil exports. They also have issues with a private sector that can’t stand the government, and colludes with the US to produce crisis periodically, as they did during the oil strike. But they also have some bad economic management, it’s true, but some mismanagement is far better than having a 60% poverty rate and a 25% abject poverty rate.
No toilet paper, and no abject poverty. The government has some problems, but you have no idea what was going on in 2000, because you only talk to the Venezuelan bourgoisie, and they ignore the slums all around them, much like you ignore the homeless.
Because they’re corrupt? The same thing happens in the Palestinian territories, in Russia, in a lot of governments. The existence of corruption doesn’t erase the gains under Chavez, nothing can erase them, he changed Venezuela for good, so that it doesn’t have a permanent underclass anymore.
I am 42 years old, as I said elsewhere. I read them when I was 16, I read Capital about 10 years ago (when I snapped the profile pic), and I was surprised to see Keynesian principles clearly laid out there. You need to stop being so doctrinaire, and learn what you can learn from everyone. I read conservatives also, on occasion.
That’s nonsense, it happened as it was said to happen. Communists are absolutely terrible at covert activities, they act by overt recruiting among poor folks and labor unions. Covert stuff is something the CIA does, with little supervision. There is no way Castro could do it, because he would need a competent team acting nearly completely independently, so as not to get found out, and such teams are not part of a top-down dictatorship.
The only successful covert communist activities were taking place in the 1940s, when many of the communists were decentralized partisans, which was necessary to win World War II. These formerly communist partisans formed the Yugoslavian government, noticed the imposition of power from Moscow and the terrible system, and they rejected Stalinism and Leninism, in favor of a worker-owned Socialist model. Moscow was simply awful at covert activities always.
The fascists got lists of leftists from paid informants, and they extended the lists (inaccurately) by waterboarding those they captured. The fascists and the communists are people in total opposition. They recruit from the same pool of people, but toward diametrically opposite ends.
You have never heard these ideas correctly attributed to their real source, it is always falsely credited. I’m 42, and every one of these points has been implemented throughout Europe, in Japan, elsewhere around the world, with universal success.
Honduras elected a leftist president, they only have a conservative government because of a US backed coup, supported by Hillary Clinton. Mexico and Columbia are nearly failed states, dominated by drug cartels. Argentina has appalling poverty in massive slums, and I don’t know anything about Costa Rica, it’s small.
There was no deep poverty or famine anywhere in Eastern Europe after 1945, or in the USSR past WWII either, for that matter. There was dictatorship and general lack of innovation. Eastern Europe didn’t revolt because they were so poor, they revolted because they were enslaved.
Leftists did not support Soviet meddling in Eastern Europe— most of the left rejected the USSR completely in 1956, when the Hungarians rose up and the Soviets crushed them. Any remaining pro-Soviet left was gone by 1968, with the Prague spring. The revolutions in Eastern Europe were long overdue, but they didn’t quite elect free-market capitalists. Poland elected Lech Walesa, who was a socialist labor leader who opposed Soviet communism. The Czechs elected Vaclav Havel, a leftist playwright, also opposed to Soviet power. These revolutionaries were usually advocating modified forms of socialism publically, but compromised on capitalism as this was a proven system that got them outside support.
Their governments had no economic experience with capitalism, and they implemented shock-treatment, as it was called, to modernize their economy at once. Then US and Western European corporations came in, and provided jobs and investment, and those countries did ok. The USSR also implemented shock treatment, but there it was a catastrophe. Industrial production collapsed by 50%, and the whole country turned into a den of gangsters, prostitutes, and drug addicts. Russia has not recovered it’s science, it’s industry, nothing. It just is free of Soviet totalitarianism, which is progress.
The Soviet totalitarian system was extremely stable for 70 years, through several invasions and with constant anti-Soviet propaganda, it needed internal reform to fall apart. The Soviets knew the system could disintegrate with reform, this is why they avoided doing it, despite constant pressure to reduce the bureaucracy (there were several proposed reforms along the lines Gorbachev adopted in 1965 that were rejected).
You have to understand how fragile and interconnected top-down planning structures are— if you are manufacturing paper products in Czechoslovakia, furniture in Hungary, and computers in Bulgaria, then ALL your paper products come from a gigantic state firm in Czechoslovakia, ALL your furniture is made in a gigantic state firm in Hungary, and ALL your computers come from a gigantic firm in Bulgaria. It’s like an economy consisting entirely of WalMarts and Dells, no small firms at all, and everything directed by Gosplan. It’s like corporatism on steroids, and all run by a single monopolist, the government.
That means that if Czechoslovakia breaks ranks politically, your leadership says “Uh oh! They are going to take our furniture away, and we invested in that…”, when Hungary is fed up, the leadership says “we need paper products for East Germany and Ukraine”, etc. The political repression is a natural outgrowth of the top-down structure.
Gorbachev provided the reform by changing state owned firms to report earnings, and requiring them to post profits, as was suggested by earlier reformers in the 1960s. The problem with this is that all the firms are monopolies, so the easiest way to get better cash flow is simply to restrict your production, until those next in the chain complain, and offer better prices. As soon as Gorbachev introduced for-profit reforms, the shortages began, as industrial production began to contract, in order to meet profit quotas, rather than product quotas. In the west, such behavior is controlled by competition, if you won’t provide screws, someone else will. In the USSR, there was one national screw-maker, and whoever was in charge controlled the price of screws.
The reforms allowing small business allowed certain people to get rich, and other folks, state-planners, said “if only there was private industry, I am in a good position to own this gigantic state monopoly”. When Gorbachev fell, the three representatives of business leaders in the USSR, Yeltsin and two others, decided to dissolve the union, and to privatize the state-owned firms to their constituencies in the party, which they did. This created the Russian oligarchy nearly overnight. There was no structured introduction of capitalism, as in China, it was a free-for-all, it was the worst collapse you can imagine.
Reagan and Thatcher had nothing to do with it, except providing moral support to those opposing communism, something leftists all over the world had been doing also for decades.
If you are a former Marxist, you have to understand that the failure of this ideology is the failure of state power. Socialism is not about state power, it is about correcting the problems of capitalism. One must do this in a decentralized manner, without top-down control, and this is much trickier than nationalizing industries. I didn’t spend any time in the Marxist movement, I hated totalitarianism, my parents and grandparents knew about communist repression firsthand, and anyway it disintegrated when I turned 20. But I still studied it intensely, because I wanted to understand what they did. There are many things they did that give lessons, if only in how NOT to do things.
Progressive taxes are necessary when there are people siphoning off corporate profits into their pockets. That’s not private property exactly, that taking a publically owned corporation and stealing from every shareholder by issuing stock on favorable terms to your board. If the CEO of General Motors was selected by lowest competent bid and a request for resumes, he wouldn’t fit in a higher tax bracket.
Besides, Sanders doesn’t advocate 90% top tax rates, more like 50%. I advocate 90% top tax rates, but Sanders doesn’t listen to me. Sanders isn’t telling anyone they can’t put their products on the shelf either. You just made that up.
Patents are government granted monopolies, and the constitution declares that they are granted only as long as they serve the public interest, as that is their purpose. The terms of patents and copyrights are to be adjusted by the government for maximal public benefit, not to enrich those who own them.
The only legalized theft you see around you is corporate capitalism, which allows board members to steal from shareholders, and allows hirers to acquire labor at far below what it’s competitive cost would be at zero unemployment. Both of these practices amount to taking other people’s money. The goal of Sanders’ policies is to approach a free market equilibrium, where you nearly always don’t have to worry about falling into a $2,000,000 tax bracket, because there are competitors undercutting you on price preventing you from making that much in the first place.
Socialism is the foundation of modern economics. The Soviet Union wasn’t a good system, it was just good at science and education, oil and gas production, steel production, a very few things. This is why the US emulated the Soviet model in its grant network and higher education practices starting in 1957.
It’s the radical right that murdered 3000 Americans, started pointless wars, decimated civil liberties, and destroyed American entrepreneurial business with big-business corruption. The American left consists of patriots who love their country and want to save their government from corporate control.
Voter fraud doesn’t happen through people voting twice. Voter fraud happens when election supervisors strike names out of voter registration lists, and arrange for too-few polling places in cities with populations who vote against their interests. The voter ID laws in themselves constitute vote suppression of voters who don’t drive (I don’t have any state-issued ID, for example).
I don’t talk about Cuba’s activities in Columbia because I don’t know anything about it. I doubt Cuba can do anything in Columbia, they aren’t good at this covert stuff.
Inflation forces people to lend money in the same way. A negative return on funds stashed by banks at the Fed is equivalent to inflation, except without the price rises to consumers.
The elderly already have universal health care— Bernie wants it for the rest of the US.
I don’t know what you are talking about. Stockholm is amazing to live in, Sweden is a very prosperous country, and the living standards blow the US out of the water. Maybe you weren’t used to the fact that things in Europe are smaller?
If you don’t want refugees coming to the US, you need to stop supporting coups in Honduras and right-wing governments in Mexico and Columbia that refuse to do anything about drug-cartels. Hillary Clinton supported the coup in Honduras, and Republicans have been plotting coups for decades. The problem of illegal immigration is mostly a problem of the destruction of the South American economy.
Start now. The Republicans have been busted since GWB, the Democratic primary is the real election.
That was the same kind of “prediction” that makes Sanders lose to Clinton. It’s wishful thinking by media owners.
It is likely that many Black votes will realize Bernie is electable, like they did Obama, and shift allegiance to the candidate who is more firmly aligned with their interests.
Hillary Clinton supports lawsuits for guns that work as intended, and are used for crimes without the knowledge of the manufacturer. Sanders supports lawsuits for gun manufacturers that sell to the insane or the criminal, or who sell large quantities of guns which they know will be diverted to criminals. Sanders’ position is common sense, and can win Republican support. Clinton’s position butts right up against the second amendment, and is political grandstanding.
That’s not covert stuff. That’s overt stuff. It’s building a guerilla movement. Covert stuff is shooting your own people and saying the other side did it, stealing elections, coups, shadowy network type things. The communists are terrible at this kind of thing, because they are always out of power.
Nobody risks going to Federal prison to vote twice, or to vote illegally. It happens at most a handful of times an election (like 5 times in the whole country). It never affects an election result, your delusions nonewithstanding.
Perhaps leftists shouldn’t call it American imperialism. Perhaps they should call it “Exxon imperialism” and “Haliburton imperialism”. It’s when corporations go overseas to make profits, it’s not usually a policy of invasion, only sometimes.
Conservatives got 3000 Americans killed by murdering them in the Twin Towers. At least, I should say more accurately, one of them did, the one in charge of the military drills of that morning, the guy with the pacemaker. I’m sure they did it because they love America, and wanted America to have a strong foreign policy. They still should be swinging from a tree for it.
Sanders is the strongest candidate on constitutional liberties, and I would not trade any freedom amendment on the bill of rights for anything in the world.
This is a tangential discussion, and one that Bernie Sanders would not approve of, but the US military was conducting drills on that morning, all under the supervision of the aforementioned pace-maker-bearing vice president. These drills simulated multiple simultaneous hijackings, simulated crashing airplanes into buildings, and put God-knows-what military airplanes in the air, flying in crazy circles. They also had a drill for simultaneous hijacking in air-traffic control, which inserted all sorts of fake blips into the radar and air-traffic data.
Putting these drills together to pull off a 9/11 attack is a piece of cake, I’ll let you figure out how it’s done. There is absolutely no excuse for a supposedly random terrorist attack to coincide with these specific set of simultaneous drills, the only drills that allow the drill coordinator to fake the attack without a massive conspiracy. There is no rational way to blow off the drills, and I have written about it elsewhere.
Bin Laden is as important as Groucho Marx, he was a patsy, probably dead not long after the attack. The whole attack was a fabrication from start to finish, and the drills are the conclusive evidence.
Both Clintons are associated with similarly suspicious events, that look like covert nonsense. Hillary takes credit for “killing Bin Laden”, which looks like a total psi-op, and under Bill Clinton, there was the mightily suspicious Oklahoma City bombing, which coincided with an ATF drill, and looks to me like the early prototype for 9/11. I don’t support Clinton, and I don’t want to have to vote for her, but I will have to, just to avoid more nonsense economics and neocon foreign policy. I want this nonsense to end, and Bernie Sanders is the best bet for this too.
This is a tangential argument, it is not something Sanders ever said, but it is important anyway, for one’s own sanity. I wrote about the drills and 9/11 elsewhere, google “9/11 drills” or “9/11 drills + my name” to get more details, if you want. Or don’t.
They both did it badly. Most everything they did was overt activities— financing guerillas in the mountains.
You have never heard of anarchist socialists, have you.
Vaclav Havel was not a free market conservative— “we did not make this revolution to restore capitalism”. He was voted out of office relatively quickly for his lackluster support of market reforms, reforms which were supported by most Czechs and Slovaks who wanted in the EU.
The left opposed Soviet meddling in Eastern Europe since 1956, it was a big deal, the break of the left with the USSR, it was the end of communism in the left. There is a nice personal account of this period in Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook”, it documents the USSR-rejecting transformation that produced the new left and second-wave feminism. Western leftists supported Dubcek’s reforms, and to the extent that they looked to the East for inspiration, they looked at Tito’s Yugoslavia. You aren’t on the left, you really don’t know.
No, you need to read them for that, not run them through a word-count.
Sanders didn’t become the only leftist Senator during the most conservative era in US history by playing nice. He’s a ruthless son-of-a-bitch, you just don’t see it, because he is acting on sound ethical principles.
I will not buy a gun, I am not afraid of death. Neither do I hate the rich, they are just destroying the economy. That’s not a statement of hatred, it’s a statement of fact. You don’t need laws or central planning to make people equal, you just need competition.
He has no 90% plan, his top marginal rate is 50-ish. He also does not support preventing people from putting products on shelves— his comments about deoderant are about misplaced priorities, not about policy.
Both are correct, so both make sense.
The truth is on this page, you just have to scroll around.
Whatever you say, buddy boy.
Those “raving lunatics” are the large majority where I live, which is NYC. We know about 9/11, because it happened here. The truth movement is the antidote to your “Islamist” ravings.
They didn’t “covertly infiltrate” anything, sweety. They were true believers all over the world, and some happened to be in the government, Hollywood, and universities. It’s no more strange than the conservative “infiltration” of government, Hollywood, and universities today. I mean,what the heck is “Zero Dark Thirty”?
Hardly any of those people acted on orders from Moscow. Nearly all of them were just leftists, like Dalton Trumbo, who were blacklisted and dismissed in the US hysteria.
The USSR used the stolen bomb designs, because Stalin essentially forced them to. He
threatened to execute the head of the program if the bomb didn’t work. Landau had a better design for a Soviet bomb in 1948 than the American one, it just didn’t get built until later, and the Soviet H-bomb was entirely
independent. Their physics was superb.
It’s in a comment I wrote, little buddy. I thought you could figure that out, but I guess, for the mentally handicapped, I have to explain in detail. It’s ok if you’re a little slower than other people, little buddy. Don’t blame yourself. It’s genetic.
You’re right, I really should work out more.
Republicans: you have two cows. A jetliner smashes into one cow, the other is sent off to war in the middle east.
corpse skin zombie
I hate guns personally, but I want to win the election, and you don’t do that by ignoring the second amendment..
Oh my, little buddy, you mean to tell me you didn’t read “Infinite Conformal Symmetry in Two Dimensional Quantum Field Theory” yet? Here’s a link: http://www.sciencedirect.co… . It’s from 1984. You should leave the debate to your betters, you can’t even pronounce the abstract.
Yup.
Because it wasn’t.
I’m toning it down for you guys. It’s a conservative audience here, after all.
No he doesn’t.
Oh my, someone is too dim to detect sarcasm. I didn’t upvote him, sweety.
Including the innovation of having a clock at all, something invented by a common fellow in ancient Greece.
Fish filet
You just can’t read very good.
You are beaten. It is useless to resist.
It doesn’t matter how she looks, because she’s going to lose. You are beaten, don’t make me destroy you as I did Hippocampre.
It’s your pants size.
There’s comes a time when one has to stand up.
Paying for public medical care is cheaper than paying for insurers, the medical industry doesn’t have cost control right now, and foist crazy tests on the public, and have drug lobbyists pushing medications. Paying for it is a matter of saving money. You still will have private insurance for elective procedures.
It has nothing to do with government, or regulations, or affordable housing. It has to do with fraudulent ratings.
This has nothing to do with individuals. It has to do with a massive failure by ratings agencies to identify correlated risk, which amounts toa fraudulent rating on the bundled securities.
It has nothing to do with what I think about it. When a person is paying a $400,000 mortgage on a $200,000 property, they aren’t going to pay with high probability, and that needs to be taken into consideration by the rating agency. It wasn’t. And that’s fraud.
If it helps him so much, maybe he should hire someone to pull one off, shouldn’t he?
That’s why I am not advocating a Marxist-Leninist revolution, pal. I’m advocating voting for Bernie Sanders, who combines the best of libertarian and socialist doctrines both.
Everyone knows about the Hitler-Stalin pact already.
That’s what I would like. Bernie Sanders doesn’t advocate this.
I read all his interviews, with a less conspiratorial mindest. I have been following his career vaguely since the late 80s.
The minimum wage does not come from “the pockets of the rich”, it comes from revenue to the business. The business doesn’t have to be owned by any rich person, it can be owned by a poor person, by the employees, or by another corporation. The reinvestment of private capital is important, but it isn’t done best by “rich people”, they do nonsense. It is done by banks who lend money to ventures, and by venture-capital firms with professionals who make investments, and who are paid a salary to do so. They aren’t usually investing their own money, their incentive for doing a good job is their professional reputation. Angel investors are not any better than others in choosing ventures to finance.
I cite Say’s law as a prediction IN EQUILIBRIUM. It is false in real markets, demand can be lower than supply, and it is in every recession or depression. You want to make it true, so you raise the minimum wage. The person who discovered that Says law is bunk is Marx. It’s still bunk, but people stopped giving credit to Marx for this discovery.
Yeah ok, continue to believe that. What you mean is crazy individuals with guns. It is ridiculous to be manipulated by the media hysteria like this, there is no organized Muslim threat, it’s in your brainwashed mind. Since you say it helps Trump, maybe Trump hired these folks, right?
He didn’t “ask for it”, he mentioned it, to contrast his own lower top rates. I think the Eisenhower rates are better, but Sanders is more moderate than me. Sanders does not tell people not to put products on the shelf, he advocates policy that would get us closer to economic equilibrium, where incomes are roughly equal, up to a factor of 10 times or so.
The “Boston Marathon bombers” didn’t do anything at all, there was a homeland security bomb drill at the same time as the attack, and that means you need to look at the drill coordinator for redress, not at the patsies.
For you, every murder committed by a Muslim becomes an act of Jihad. There is no organized political movement there, it’s isolated crazy individuals with guns. If you believe in Jihadis, go find one and talk to one. I can’t find any.
You can continue to believe that, but Say’s law was just as false in 19th century England, with no government to speak of, as Marx showed in Capital I. He also identified the cause of this— the reason is that employee wages are not in equilibrium, they fall to subsistence, when employees compete with the unemployed. This is an economic fact, Say’s law is false independent of government intervention, and you can see it in every industrialized economy in history, whether the imbalance was corrected by government spending, or whether it was let to develop naturally into slums and depression.
To understand it, imagine an economy of 10 firms with 10,000 employees, who produce 800 Widgets per employee, which are consumed by the employees. Now introduce 100 new employees, and let them compete for jobs with the 10,000 already there. Equilibrium response is to absorb the labor in a new factory, or make some workers part-time at the same wage. But this can’t happen instantly, and what happens is that the unemployed drive all the wages down to subsistence, say 20 Widgets per worker, corporate profits go through the roof, the investors get insanely rich, and the workers can’t buy the products, and the economy crashes, leading the factories to be idle. This is what was observed in the great depression, and in every recession before intervention.
It’s not competition, it’s repackaging the same product in different cases. The corporate energy that goes into this pointless activity is due to advertizing budgets, and large competitionless chains, and it is important to create a competitive economy where children do not starve, rather than finance large corporate oligarchies. His point is political, it is not economic, and it does not come with any restrictive policy.
I didn’t have a socialist education, I had a neoliberal damnably conservative education that I detested. The Boston bombers didn’t do anything at all, I suggest you look at all the documents and testimonies you can find online, and ignore Wikipedia, as it is heavily reliant on official documents.
The corruption is the reason the socialists were voted out, from what I read. Let them sort out their corruption problems by elections, that’s how the US did it. Corruption happens in any powerful party, that’s why Democracy is important.
Obama is not a leftist, he’s a right leaning moderate.
He can win the nomination cleanly, he will not use dirty attacks, although I think Clinton deserves some of these.
There were two bombs, one of which was nonsense pyrotechnics, the other one across the street was a pressure coooker bomb which maimed people. Both were in the backpacks of the blackwater folks there, who were part of some sort of homeland security drill, a drill which the organizer manipulated to turn live probably by replacing fake bombs with real ones at the last minute. None of these blackwater people would know anything more than that a drill and attack coincided in a spooky way. These drill folks were photographed. Just read about it, don’t bug me about it in an unrelated discussion.
There are Chicago school economics departments and Keynsian departments, about 50/50— they were all Keynsian in 1970, except maybe Chicago. That’s completely insane, considering the track record. I met a few purged academics here and there, mostly leftist humanities former professors, with better publication records than the conservatives who were tenured. In my own undergrad school, they got rid of the last Marx guy, Cornel West, for making a rap album and acting in a way unbecoming of a professor (they mean, for behaving like a proletarian). The boundaries of academic debate are bounded between “conservative Republican” and “conservative Democrat”. The US no longer has leftist education, that was last true in the 70s, if it was ever true at all.
Google “boston bombing drill”, it’s a lot of pages. The best stuff is the aggregated 4chan disussion from the time of the bombings.
I am not only a 9/11 truther, I am also a 7/7 truther, a Madrid bombing truther, a Sandy Hook truther an Oslo Shooting truther, and an Oklahoma City bombing truther. The reason is that all these events coincide with government drills simulating the same event at the same time at the same place. When you have a government drill simulating the same event, you don’t need Jews, Christians, Mossad, MI6, illuminati, or Santa Claus. You just need a criminal with a high-level security clearance in charge of the drill.
I am on the fence regarding the recent Paris attack, there was a drill at the same time, but it was an emergency personnel drill, it was only tangentially related to the attack, and it could be just a coincidence. I don’t know about that one, that could be ISIS. ISIS itself is one giant psy-op with deadly consequences.
But I don’t believe for a second that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama killed Bin Laden in Abattabad, and didn’t show anyone any pictures.
This is one major reason why I can only support Bernie Sanders, as he was an independent until now, and could not possibly support such nonsense. Both parties have a dog running in this fraud, it actually seems to have started under Clinton (although Reagan has the Soviet Korean-air shoot-down thing, that’s on foreign soil, and only suspicious not certain). Sanders is clean.
He was a card carrying communist, he was NOT a Soviet agent. He was a writer with an interest in espionage and movements, like Christopher Marlowe.
Except Christopher Marlowe also participated in espionage activity, in this case against Catholics in France, for the protestant British, and also wrote under a front for many years after his personal atheistic doctrine led him to get blacklisted, namely William Shakespeare. The parallel between Trumbo and Marlowe is the thing that makes Trumbo an important writer for me, I didn’t like his stuff all that much otherwise. It feels too didactic for my taste, too wedded to Soviet realism. The only thing I like of his unreservedly so far is his excellent 1972 or 1973 movie about the assassination of Kennedy.
Yeah, I screwed up— ISIS is the Sunni organization, backed by some wealthy folks in Sunni Saudi Arabia. My bad.
It’s not about the right people, it’s about avoiding concentrations of government and corporate power. Socialist in the 20th century wanted to increase government power, and Marxist Leninists even wanted to increase corporate power, so as to “heighten the contradictions”, meaning make them ripe for state takeover, like Atlee took over the coal mines, and more recently, Obama took over GM (for a while). Big corporations, whether owned by the state or by plutocrats, that’s the Soviet model, not the competitive model that produces innovation.
Modern socialists work in the opposite direction, to reduce government and corporate power, by making uniform regulations that distribute ownership broadly. Sanders is firmly in this tradition, he has opposed concentrations of corporate and government power consistently, and his policy favors small business.
I don’t advocate the state implementing socialism by confiscating private property, I advocate workers creating and owning their own business by creating distributed wealth. Pro-small-business policy helps remove the concentrations of power that block worker owned business. Remember that every private family-owned business, every independent contractor, every independent farmer, is a worker-owned business in disguise.
My own comments get deleted more often. I hate this new internet censorship. If it’s on disqus, I saw it, I get an email notification.
Actually, your mom’s undies. And she’s got the peanut butter. What, dear? Fido? Who’s Fido? Oh sweet Jesus, I’m outta here.
When you are running a drill, you don’t need a conspiracy. You just need a criminal coordinator with a higher security clearance than everyone else. That’s the innovation that allows domestic covert activities, and it’s recent, it needs good information technology to work.
Sterile or not, I wouldn’t let you reproduce with my daughter.
Trump wants to reduce wages, and cut taxes, the opposite of moving to equilibrium. He will crash the economy like Bush. Eisenhower and Nixon were Keynesians, because Keynes is right. The Republican party was majority Keynesian until Reagan.
He’s got some of that too, mostly inherited from Bush II. Not justifying it, he should have reversed it entirely. Obama let a lot of people down. Those people support Sanders, because Sanders has a track record, and no ties to the people who twisted Obama’s strings.
The USSR’s success in oil extraction is due to the discovery in 1952 of the Abiotic theory of oil formation, during an all-union conference on oil. It was debated for 20 years, and eventually won out in the USSR.
The theory was suggested by the correlation in coal and oil deposits, and the correlation of both with natural gas (they form by completely different pathways in the biological theory, and have no reason to be found together). The question of formation required a mechanism to form oil from methane, and the hypothesis was that methane is unstable in the mantle to forming short chain hydrocarbons. Thie prediction was demonstrated conclusively in pressure anvil experiments, which showed exactly that: methane forms hydrocarbon chains spontaneously at mantle pressures. This was reproduced in the USSR many times, and in the West in the 1990s by Gold, and just recently again.
The theory was put to use by drilling and discovering oil in deep bedrock. The West never caught up with these advances, they had no incentives to develop deep borehole technology while there was still a lot of surface oil, so they didn’t bother with understanding the science properly. The Russians ignored the West, and just went and drilled extremely deeply all over Siberia, in a giant grid, with boreholes that went 10km down, far below any fossil line, until they found all the oil they needed (and more). They continued to do deep-drilling all over the communist world, there is a 10km well in Vietnam that produces a ton of oil. The Western denial on this was an outright embarrassment for decades, although it’s ending now, finally, because of the internet.
This is the West’s version of Lysenkoism, it’s a complete farce. The reason is that oil scientists are all working in a large corporate environment, and are just as blind by their power structure as the Soviets were regarding genetics. There is a Western review by Thomas Gold called “The Deep Hot Biosphere” which explains this in detail, but with no references to Russian work, as Gold was trying to steal the theory (he was fluent in Russian, unlike other researchers).
I mean, there was this one forgettable high school civics teacher who was rumored to be a socialist, I guess. I can’t think of any other person in a position of power who was a socialist. I read many socialists, because I figured if I was going to be annihilated in a nuclear war, I should know why. I don’t listen to people, I read and think. Mostly think, I didn’t even read that much.
“Economic computation” is Mises’ nonsense, he has no idea what a planned economy looks like, and what its problems are. Economic calculation is not what stalled the Soviet economy. It was stalled because you couldn’t start a new venture, and you couldn’t update old ones, because nobody could move the bureaucracy, not even the secretary general. The system was permanently frozen. This is a product of lack of freedom, the lack competition, the top-down command structure, and it is reproduced in capitalist monopolized economies, which are only slightly better at innovation than Soviet ones. I guess the freezing is why Stalin purged the whole party, firing all the managers every 5 years. But the managers didn’t like that, for obvious reasons, so it ended with Khrushchev.
Setting wages and prices didn’t take a whole lot of effort. The pricing calculation was relatively easy— they priced the product to recover the material and labor costs at current purchases, plus return on capital for overall expansion. They priced wages to attract people into places they were needed, so that a precision machinist earned a salary 4 times as big as a restaurant manager. There was also incentive pay, to reward workers who did better work, but that peaked under Stalin, Khruschev reduced the incentive pay, because it was a paperwork hassle, and there was a lot of fraud.
These mechanisms are pretty much the same as any gigantic corporation in the US. The wages in the Soviet Union were one of the few successes, they were always nearly exactly equal to what they would be in a perfect capitalist equilibrium, because the method of wage allocation was really a free market in disguise. The labor was entirely free to switch jobs, everyone was employed, and the wages were set to attract the right number of people, like in an ideal free market. Nobody in the USSR said it was like a free market of course, but it was. By the end, there were a whole lot of people who were disgusted with the repression and their lack of power and freedom, and refused to work at all.
As I said before, I am not a fan of the USSR. But you need to know what it was to criticize it.
The real issue that doomed planning was that it was impossible to plan for new integrated industry, like for example personal computers, or even updating industry for transistors instead of vacuum tubes (the USSR used vacuum tubes until the end). The personal computer industry started in the USSR in 1987 or 1988, only by copying the division of labor established in the West spontaneously. The first personal computers came from Bulgaria in the late 1980s, and they were similar to 1983 models in the West, they were 64K machines with a 1MHz microprocessor, but surprisingly they were pretty adequate. The computers were behind by about 5-10 years, but this is tantamount to 20 years for computers.
The USSR heavy industry and big minicomputers and mainframes were not significantly behind, they were completely competitive. It’s just that this sector was done by big business in the West, while PCs were made by small startups. The USSR had no problem competing with any of the large Western firms, the bigger the firm, the easier it was for them to compete. What it couldn’t compete with at all was all the SMALL businesses. This is is the main clue as to the problem is, and what it’s counterpart is in the West. It’s the big concentrations of power, whether state or corporate, that stall economic innovation, as they lock out most of the brainpower in jobs which don’t make use of their brains.
The USA did not stand down, it collaborated with the coup, and probably sponsored and green-lighted it. Bush II recognized the coup leaders, was internationally condemned for it, and then embarassed when the mob stormed the presidential palace to restore Chavez. It was 9/11/1973 all over again, except this time with a happy ending. The business class then sponsored an oil-production strike to cripple the economy, and Chavez busted it, and from that point on, until Chavez died, Venezuela’s economy doubled and the endemic poverty was eliminated.
The democratic party was as socialist as Atlee in the 1930s, 1940s, and most of the 1950s. They supported state control of heavy industry, they just didn’t say it in public. Truman tried to nationalize the steel mills. Kennedy changed course in 1960, and rejected state control, but he was shot. Carter (and McGovern, Hart, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton) were all in the Kennedy mold, pro-market. Carter changed Fed policy to combat inflation, the austerity probably cost him the presidency, but inflation ended with Volker. He deregulated airlines for competition, the most innovative anti-consolidation policy the US had seen since Teddy Roosevelt, and sued AT&T to break up the monopoly. Reagan took credit for Carter’s inflation control, deregulation, and AT&T breakup (it started in 1979 and completed in 1984), but his party’s only contribution was extending the sensible pro-competition Carter policies in favor of big-business, using his nonsense economic doctrine.
No it isn’t. He predicted that prices would be out of whack, and that price signals wouldn’t be there to coordinate the production cycle of complex products. That was totally false, which is why nobody paid attention to Mises when the USSR was a current thing. The price signals functioned exactly the same in the USSR as in any Capitalist economy (after the USSR trade and labor system was set up in the 1930s) What was true is that innovation was impossible.
There was economic computation in the USSR, there was no innovation. Why don’t you read what I wrote instead of spouting platitudes that reinforce your existing dogma.
I am not a product of the US educational system, I am entirely self-taught. I had to buck the entire US education system to learn anything about Marx.
Fanny and Freddie’s $187.5 billion shortfall is a cost of mortgage subsidies, and this is a manageable relatively insignificant problem. On the other hand, AIG and Goldman Sach’s and other banks’ TRILLION DOLLAR bailout is the economy collapsing disaster.
How does a $187.5 billion shortfall turn into a trillion dollar problem? That happens when a ratings agency gives fraudulent ratings to bundled loans, and someone notices, and tries to take advantage of it by buying insurance against the loans.
It has nothing to do with the mortgage paying public, it has nothing to do with lenders, or borrowers, the only people at fault are those who mismodelled the risk of the bundles, and the folks who tried to take advantage of the bad rating to make a profit instead of reporting the bad assessment to regulators and to the public. If they hadn’t been bailed out, they would all be out of business when AIG would have collapsed, and Goldman Sachs in response, and GOOD RIDDANCE.
It doesn’t matter how low it is, it is NOT HEDGED BY BUNDLING. So if the risk of housing going down is, say 4% (it wasn’t, it was more like 90%, but let’s pretend), the risk of loss on the bundle STAYS 4% no matter how many loans are in the bundle! That means the loans ALWAYS carry a 4% risk of total collapse no matter how many are put together, you don’t get to reduce the risk below 4%.
That’s the difference between a correlated event, like declining housing prices leading to a million defaults, and an uncorrelated event, like individual defaults here and there in a stable market, which are statistically independent. When you model a correlated risk as uncorrelated, you are effectively wiping away all the risk, and, as a credit rating agency, you are engaging in fraud. You are making a risky investment look rock solid.
Oh God, do I have to go through it again? Mises predicted several things, most of which were nonsense.
1. He predicted that it would be a problem to set prices in the command economy.
There are millions of products in the economy, and you need to set a rational price for all of them centrally, how do you do that? Mises said it would be impossible for planners to do it, and the prices would be out of whack permanently.
This prediction was simply false, and demonstrated to be false in 1936 with the success of the first five year plan, and the period of Soviet growth. It was simply not difficult to set prices at all. The way it was done was by mandating general pricing principles, like cost of production + capital depreciation, and letting local managers figure out what it should be for their plant. Then the reports would come back up to the party, and they would audit periodically to check for waste.
The way wages was set was by providing a general blueprint for labor allocation at the top, and lower-level managers would make fine-grained decisions about local labor. Then if there was a shortage of labor, they would be authorized to raise wages, and if there was a surplus, decrease wages. This worked pretty ok.
Because this was not a problem, as was discovered 10 years after Mises was writing, people ignored Mises.
2. He predicted it would be impossible to direct production efficiently from the top.
Again, totally false in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, in those industries where the West had already made a blueprint, replicating the results of Western industry was a piece of cake, much faster in the USSR than in the West. Industrialization and steel production was exceeding quotas within 10 years in the first two five-year plans, and the development of heavy industry happened about 20 times faster in the USSR than in the West, because it was a central control reproducing something already known.
3. He predicted that the socialist economics would squelch entrepreneurship and initiative.
Bingo. He got that one mostly right. At least in consumer industries, which require decentralized businesses. In heavy industry, the innovation was pretty much on par with the West, not always, but usually. In some cases ahead, in some cases behind. In consumer goods, it was uniformly terrible.
The main thrust of his argument was “economic calculation”, meaning setting and adjusting prices for maximum output. This was surprisingly not a problem, and a lot of ingenuity went into setting up the bureaucracy in the 1930s and 1940s to deal with this issue. That problem was largely solved, and prices in the East, while not great, were functioning scarcity signals (not quite market signals). To learn about the details of Soviet planning, I recommend a little (anti-Soviet) book called “How the Soviet System Works” from 1956. I read that as a kid.
The claims people make about gross inefficiencies in the heavy industry sector are not borne out by comparing output. In the farming sector, where the West was dominated by small farmers, the Soviets were abysmal. But the Soviet farms were comparable to Western factory farms, although somewhat less efficient.
Mises simply was not focused on initiative and entrepreneurship, he was focused on economic calculation. His critique was brain dead, and it was rejected because it was false from USSR experience. It was revived after the collapse, as people began to forget how the Soviet system worked, and what its real problems were.
Of course it failed! You have to understand EXACTLY WHY AND HOW it failed to know how to move forward. It did NOT fail on prices, it did NOT fail on industrial integration, it did NOT fail on wages, and it did not fail on heavy industry. It simply did not fail on economic calculation, it suprisingly SUCCEEDED in economic calculation, which is why people were buying into it in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
I should point out the insane levels of efficiency in the calculation as follows: the USSR industrialized from 1931-1941 (the first two five year plans) mostly in the region closer to Europe. It then was invaded by the Germans, and the significant heavy-industry plants were closed and moved to Siberia, effectively rebuilding the whole infrastructure a second time, in a few months after the German invasion, where the Russians out-produced Germany in tanks and planes in 1943 and 1944, even though at that time the German Reich was larger in resources and manpower. This required the same economic calculation as the entire US arms industry in the same period, and the whole industry was built from scratch.
There was simply no failure of calculation in the USSR. It just didn’t happen. The system failed on innovation and initiative, and on consumer goods, which require a lot of decentralized businesses, not to mention the totalitarianism and repression, and total slavery.
Knowing the failure mode lets you identify it when it happens in the West. It happens in large Western business almost the same way— they are nearly as resistant to change as Soviet firms were, for essentially the same reason, ossified power structures and bureaucracies.
Ask a Russian how many relatives are dead. It is easy to detect 30 million dead by statistical sampling, that’s like a limited nuclear war. The true figure is around a million and a half murders under Stalin, or at most twice that (from adding together execution figures and camp deaths), and an unknown number of famine deaths in 1932, perhaps around 3-5 million, it is not clear, because there are political writers like Solzhenitsyn doing whatever they can to raise the number, and famines are really hard to poll because they kill the elderly and young children first, and the Soviets covered it up until the 50s, and then again until the 80s.
The Soviet Union did not fail on death rate either, if you accumulate the total deaths from homelessness and lack of health-care in the West during the Soviet period, it is comparable, but somewhat larger. The USSR failed on innovation and freedom, and ONLY on those points. But these are the most important points.
Ok, I’m there— nice response, thanks.
There were about 1.5 million murdered under Stalin, negligible number of murders in China— it wasn’t the same exactly in China, the repression was by job-loss and “reeducation” rather than by murder. There were famine deaths in collectivization pushes, in 1932 some 2-5 million (I can’t estimate reliably) in the USSR, and in the great leap forward collectivization, some 5-20 million in China, can’t estimate either. The bogus estimates you read are purposely skewed by including diminished birth-rates in famines as deaths, or sometimes by just making big numbers up. The same methods would lead you to conclude that 10 million Americans were murdered during the great depression, and were miraculously resuscitated in the baby boom.
This is propaganda, and you are unwittingly buying it. The history of communism is not pretty, but not because of death camps. The repression didn’t happen through murder very often, but it was real anyway.
Large corporations can afford to pay the higher wage, but it cuts into their margin over the small business. The small business gets more business when the minimum wage is higher, because the higher minimum wage raises prices at the big store more than it does at the small one.
Big businesses have an average wage which is lower than the average wage in a small business, because the owner of a small business is usually making more than minimum wage to justify the effort and risk. So all in all, higher minimum wages benefit small businesses, even though the businesses don’t realize this, as they only see the local payroll expenses. So it’s difficult to explain to a business owner, but after the minimum wage rises, and they make more money, and suddenly can compete with WalMart successfully, they’ll get it.
You’re right that higher minimum wage leads to more automation, but anyone doing a job that can be automated is in a miserable job, and should be doing something else anyway. That’s what retraining and college are for, to put you in a place where you can use your brain.
Your criticism of Keynes is off the mark— he wanted full employment by any means, he was joking when he said you bury money in the ground. The full employment is what is needed to get the market working at close to full capacity, and when there is unemployment, you need minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and jobs programs to make sure it doesn’t kill wages. That’s all there is to Keynsianism— guaranteeing employment, and it can be done more easily with a permanent jobs program, as Martin Luther King proposed, than with half-hearted interventions.
Regarding software, you haven’t noticed that all the best software of the past decade is free software. Companies can’t write software well. The reason public investment in software can work is because you can make non-central decisions regarding this, by counting usage, and allowing local competition. This is the same model that prevents over-politicization of science.
I don’t like giving the government monopoly power over anything, it is difficult to figure out how to finance things like software otherwise. I try to make sure things are as decentralized as possible, like Linux development.
I didn’t know that about Switzerland, thanks.
Not lies. Look at the death rates published by the historians that study the records, rather than by popularizers. The whole “Stalin killed 20 million people” thing is something Solzhenitsyn started to make a “Stalin is worse than Hitler” meme. The number of deaths under Stalin can be checked not only by records, but by asking Russians about their family history. The political murders happened at the “distant acquaintance” level, meaning, a colleague of a cousin was arrested. It was similar to the disappearances under Hussein or Pinochet. It was atrocious, I don’t know why you want to exaggerate it.
Do you realize how many Russians died when Capitalism came? How many homeless people die each year? How many people die from lack of adequate health-care? Or poor capitalist nutrition? Talk sense, not propaganda. You don’t judge Capitalism by the Irish Potato Famine (which killed a huge fraction of the population of Ireland due to free-market British policies), you judge it by its most stable manifestation. There were no significant murders in the late USSR, it was crappy for other reasons.
I am not his spokesperson. I am as much further left than him as he is further left than you.
Yes I have, a long time ago, and again just now to make sure I wasn’t misremembering.
Lapdog.
You have totally discredited sources. You don’t get to make up as many millions of murdered people as you like. Stalin repressed tens of millions, jailed millions, and killed a million and a half people on purpose, and another indeterminate number in a 1932 predictable famine. That’s bad enough as it is, you don’t get to make up numbers. Learn to do quantitative estimates, and ask some Russians questions. That’s what I had to do.
That’s right! You shouldn’t believe ANYONE, not me, and not him. You should look at the scientific evidence independently, and not trust experts. I recommend reading Gold’s book, and then reviewing the opposition’s case. To summarize one of the most conclusive points— oil is found with Helium contamination and Helium is produced through radioactive alpha decay. There is no radioactivity in life, but the mantle is full of Uranium and other alpha unstable elements. Likewise coal is full of Uranium Thorium, and other heavy elements which look like they percolated from the mantle in solution in methane.
I didn’t say government is wonderful. I said that Fannie and Freddie were not a serious problem. They are expected to take occasional losses in the public interest, that’s what they’re there for, and that’s what they always did. Their shortfall was managable and insignificant.
What caused the real problems was not corporate greed alone, it was greed coupled with stupidity. The rating agency misrated the loan bundles because it thought the chance for default was independent, when it clearly isn’t. Using a model of independent risk for correlated risk is a form of fraud.
This fraud led hundreds of people in large institutions to bet against the bundles, and when the bundles failed, the insurer (AIG) couldn’t pay out the insurance. That means it would collapse, and all those people would lose their insurance investment, which would lead them to collapse as well. All of this stuff is leveraged investment happening on top of the unproblematic mortgage business, and it wouldn’t matter if it were mortgages, stocks, or any other investment. If the ratings agency models the risk as independent when it is not, such a collapse can happen again.
I read that book, and all the rest of the 90s books. I was horrified, so I asked a bunch of Russians, a dozen or two, about their family to see if the book was telling the truth. I also looked at the research on this stuff from the open-files Gorbachev times. That book is a pile of horse manure.
Sanders doesn’t agree with Rand that the Fed should be abolished, and Sanders certainly doesn’t support a gold standard or pure inflation targets for monetary policy. He supports a strong unemployment target for monetary policy. The crazy parts of Paul’s bills follow from Paul’s Chicago school philosophy, which Sanders does not share.
They agree on audits and transparency, and public accountability, and avoiding corruption. I am sorry to say, but the public discussion on this is not helped when there are so-called experts who are not Keynsians. Economics is a quantitative field, and there are real predictions, and Keynsians get these right, and Chicago school guys get it wrong.
What brought England and Germany out of the depression? Why did Russia not have a depression? The key point is that there was enormous public spending to keep demand from collapsing, and it continued in the US forever, and in England, and in Germany, and in Russia, there was only government spending, and nothing else.
Also, FDR reduced unemployment and brought growth, it was just not politically possible to increase top taxes to 95% and redirect billions in spending to government programs before the war.
You can continue to listen to propaganda, or you can research the deaths properly yourself. The communists were terrible for reasons other than mass murder.
Your number for Afghanistan is the war, your number for Vietnam is the war, your number for Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa is made up (Africa probably includes the Eritrean-Ethiopian war and the resulting Ethiopian famine), and your number for Cambodia is TOO LOW and it is for the Khmer Rouge, who were not a mainstream communist movement, and who were overthrown by the Vietnamese who were.
Hitler is not directly responsible for all the 40-50 million deaths of WWII, he is responsible for killing five and a half million Jews and some millions of Communists, disabled, Roma and gays in camps.
I don’t think you understand Keynesian economics very well. If you read Keynes, you won’t get it. You need to read Marx.
The point is that when there is a capitalist economy with large industrial firms, the unemployment drives wages FAR below equilibrium value, where the wages can purchase all production. This produces depression if not fixed. Any remedy that raises wages gets you closer to equilibrium. A minimum wage is an invasive regulation that does this, but providing jobs at a decent wage to anyone who asks does it structurally. I favor the latter remedy— that way, if someone is starting a new business, and people really want to join, there is no regulation on their wages, they can be paid next to nothing while the business gets on its feet.
But a minimum wage is better than nothing, as in equilibrium, the minimum wage is roughly equal to the productivity per worker, and is also roughly the maximum wage, up to some corrections for risk and sporadic work. You can’t accept an economy that doesn’t look like classical free-market equilibrium.
If a business can’t start at equilibrium, it shouldn’t start at all. It’s not efficient.
Large businesses are extremely bureaucratic and inefficient, they are Soviet firms in essence. They drive their competitors out of business by lower labor costs (fixed by higher wages) and bad contracts (fixed by uniform pricing laws), and by dumping products at below-cost prices to drive competitors out (fixed by anti-trust lawsuits). There is no excuse for the destruction of American small business, you need an active government to protect small business. A small business is automatically an employee owned business.
A larger business can be employee owned, if there are incentives for it. I don’t know if government incentives are the best for this, I think that employee pressure at full employment can make it that most businesses give their workers a fair say in the workplace. All the government has to do is keep unemployment at 0%, which it isn’t doing.
The point of economics is to approach that magical free market equilibrium by whatever method. In equilibrium, unemployment is 0%, all wages are roughly equal, and everyone purchases everything that can be produced. Leaving things alone is not a way, because industrialization and unemployment make it that equilibrium is unattainable.
When you print money and distribute it to workers in a depressed economy, with idle manufacturing and unpurchased supply, you just do magic. It’s gain for nothing, as the supply is purchased, and the factories start up. People want to find something wrong with it, there is nothing wrong with it. It works because of what Marx explained— the economy is not at equilibrium, and printing money and distributing it to everyone gets you closer to equilibrium.
This stops working when you get inflation, which is the basis for the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation in classical Keynesian theory. It is said differently in standard textbooks, because they strip out all the Marx.
You can combine government efforts and individual choice by an interesting program— give people a tax refund on free software donations up to a certain value. This allows expanding the financing without destroying individual choice, and allows the public to become the distributor, rather than the government.
Bernie Sanders has proposed this as a workaround for Citizens United— refund the first $100 of political donations every American makes. There are corruption issues with such things, but it is better than nothing.
I believe the Swiss benefit from some lax regulations and tax-haven status, but this is not the same as increasing production. I don’t care about the financial tricks the Cayman Islands and Switzerland use to keep their population docile, I care about producing enough, and making sure that destitute and mentally handicapped people aren’t dying on the street.
9/11 was an inside job.
I am voluntarily commited to Bernie Sanders.
I am sorry, but you are crazy. Everyone in the education system that I ever met was as brain-dead conservative as you. Granted, I went to college in the 90s, the most conservative era in the US University system.
Oh man, you can’t lie on the internet, people can look things up easily. See this guardian article from April 2002: http://www.theguardian.com/… . It is an undeniable fact that Bush recognized the government a day after the coup, and won international condemnation for it. It is less undeniable, but nevertheless extremely obvious that senior Bush administration officials, who are the same gang from 9/11/73 were either behind the coup entirely, or at the very least wholeheartedly supporting it. I was around and following it closely, silly boy. I was in grad school, and into this sexy girl from Venezuela who hated Chavez.
The idea of a graduated corporate income tax, as a non-bureaucratic non-invasive mostly government-free substitute for the Sherman anti-trust act, which appears in my comments on this page, is (as far as I know) original to me. The idea of deep contract reform for uniform pricing and transparent corporate networks, as a nonuniform simple substitute for the monsterous uniform commercial code act of 1956, is also original to me. The idea of banning stock ownership by insiders in a publically traded corporation is original to me (and moots a lot of insider trading regulation), and the path to a non-governmental socialism (meaning 100% worker/public-stock owned business), enforced only by free worker and consumer choice without any governmental power, is also AFAIK original to me (although perhaps Murray Bookchin had similar ideas, I didn’t read him yet). These are the core of what I believe, they are not Sanders’ positions, or anyone else’s, with the possible exception of Bookchin, maybe Dilas, who I haven’t read.
That bill is all over other discussions, there are youtube videos about it, etc. It’s a right-wing talking point. It’s like you guys get all your memos from somebody, you have no capacity for original thought.
Find a prior citation. I don’t claim originality lightly, I did a cursory review.
Simply recognizing the coup government as legitimate (and congratulating the leaders) is not standing down. The Bush government backpedalled on the coup when they lost. I suggest you read the article I provided, instead of being lazy. 9/11 truth is not a speculation or an undecidable mystery, the evidence is overwhelming. It is one of the main reasons for the destruction of the Republican party as a national force.
You haven’t “refuted” anything, you are just repeating neoliberal pap, with no understanding of the mathematical model it is based on. The mathematical model is a perfect competitive capitalist economy, where everyone is employed, the total wages are exactly sufficient to purchase all products, and the profits of any corporation goes to zero, and all salaries regress to the mean. This is the model in economics textbooks where the marginal analysis for economic peturbations that you are using is correct. It looks nothing like real industrial capitalist markets.
There is no such thing as a voluntarily unemployed person, or the unemployment in the USSR would not have been at 0%. There was not a single unemployed person there after the last unemployment office closed in the mid 1930s, not because of any regulation exactly, but because you could always go to nearly any construction site or shipyard and find a job due to the backlog of necessary work.
The main difference is that in the US, you need to find a job where you enrich a capitalist by selling your labor to this capitalist, either cheaply or dearly, and allow this capitalist to make a profit or to direct your efforts toward reinforcing the current system, and some people are not willing to do that, for example, myself. That’s not exactly voluntary unemployment, as one is extremely willing, desperate in fact, to work for the public interest.
The statement that there is “unnatural involuntary unemployment” from minimum wage is presuming that in a full employment economy anyone would be willing to work for the current minimum wage. This is again belied by the Soviet labor statistics, which show that in full employment (Soviet states were the only states with 100% employment, but it was also briefly true in the US in the late 90s when unemployment dipped below 4%) NOBODY is willing to work for wages far below the mean, and employers MUST pay a higher wage simply to find an employee, as they did in the USSR. Under such conditions of low unemployment, all wages regress to the mean by competition, up to some discrepancies of up to a factor of 10 due to productivity. This is predicted by free-market doctrine, you just ignore the prediction because it is not true in US markets.
The mean wage plus benefits of those making a wage in a small business is usually somewhat lower than that in a national chain, although the wage is usually not the big difference but the benefits. Comparing the employees to the employees ignores the fact that EVERY ONE of the ten thousand workers in a big store is an employee making a low wage, while out of five employees in a small business, three are OWNERS who aren’t making a meager wage, but what amounts to a good salary in the form of profit! The owners constitute a large fraction of the workers in a small business. The removal of owners making a reasonable income is the margin that the large store exploits. There are also health-care costs which are regressive for small businesses, and paperwork and regulation costs, which are regressive for businesses, larger businesses pay less per dollar. Then there is collusion in zoning with governments, and collusion in contracts with businesses, which can be fixed by having a pro-small-business government, and advertizing budgets, which brainwash consumers toward the large business. The advertizing propaganda can be fought with concerted public awareness projects, and directed consumer action to protect economic diversity, which is a version of ecology in the economic realm.
Preserving small business is half-way to a worker owned economy, because small enough businesses are necessarily worker owned, as the owner and perhaps her family are the workers. To adjust the rest of the way to full employee ownership simply requires some incentive and public pressure, since every employee would like to work in a business where they have more say.
There is no evidence that the mega-rich invest better than the moderately rich, or even better than the poor. Wealthy people acquire their wealth through a quirk of markets and political positioning, not through any difficult skill— nobody has to go to school for 8 years like a doctor or a physicist to become an investor.
I have met with wealthy investors and VC professionals, and the VC professionals, while well-to-do, were much better at assessing profit potential. Angel investment is extremely psychotic, and goes to those who sell their pitch most slickly, including outright frauds. The influence of large billionaire investors has started to affect univesity funding, and their investments go to scientists. My brother is a professor at a school with a lot of private funding, and he has told me the things that billionaires fund, and knowing the science, they are completely ridiculous— they involve pet ideas the billionaire has which are absurd given the state of the literature, the billionaire has a big ego and no science training. This type of distortion leads funding to go to ego-driven projects with no chance of success, but is sometimes manipulated by crafty researchers to do a real project in secret among the bunk demanded by the billionaire.
The professional investors are generally more sensible, which is why most people hire professional investors to manage their wealth. There is no real significant correlation between intelligence in investment and wealth— beyond the obvious one that a person who has no sense at all will lose their money. Investment is a natural monopoly, the person outperforming the market in any one year will have people flock to him as some sort of “guru” or “genius”, and this increases their wealth. Conservative investments usually do best, and risky investments which pay off the most due to risk, these are best done by either extremely wealthy people who can hedge with a lot of bets, or by similarly well capitalized VC firms or banks, and using the advice of experts in the field of the investment who are not particularly wealthy.
I am not leaving much at all to the government, I am doing everything by uniform corporate policy.
Your hypotheses are simply false, and I can’t argue against them, because you are not listening to the data. There is data on unemployment response to minimum wage which contradicts your claims, and the predictions of Keynesians for the effect of stimulus have been confirmed in every stimulus since the 1930s, and are an economic fact.
The government is not the best investment source, but it isn’t bad in several areas. It is the best for R&D, and software is often much like R&D, as it is a form of applied mathematics. It is the best at education, as even US private education lagged behind Soviet education. It is easy to see what the government is good at doing and what it is bad at doing, as we have had 70 years of completely government controlled economies, and they were only good at those things that the government is good at doing.
My family came to the US and made some money, not a ton, but enough. My father didn’t manage to get any work in his field (electrical engineering), nor did my family ever make a large salary, my mother worked as a professor with a relatively low salary compared to the mean. But my family made some money due to coming in with some capital, buying a house in a neighborhood where property values went up, and switching houses frequently whenever there was a margin, including labor sunk at improving the property. This type of investment is what produces wealth at the local level, and it is valuable, but not really all that valuable. The houses were cookie-cutter suburban ones constructed of cheap materials, their rising value is and was a mystery to me, they are completely generic.
This type of saving and investment is not affected by any macro policy. But don’t pretend that this is how enormous wealth is created. Enormous wealth is created by acquiring a monopoly in a field and charging people outrageous prices, as Gates, Musk, or Bezos did. It can also be done by having an enormous publically traded firm, and taking the profits into your pocket, as many high level managers do. All these practices are anti-competitive, and should not happen at all in economic equilibrium.
I went to one of the most extremely conservative schools in the US for undergrad (Harvard), I then switched to the most liberal school I could find with a good physics program (still conservative Cornell), and watched it turn into a cesspool of nationalist conservatism and awful politicized science after 9/11/2001. I didn’t meet a single sincere feminist in either school, I never met a sincere Marxist aside from non-affiliated townies. So I was in complete contempt, and I hung out with borderline homeless people to feel comfortable.
I sound young because my brain still works.
Bill Gates took over and destroyed the entire software industry, through monopoly. His “innovation” was closing up software, and making the source code secret and private, something which had to be reversed by 20 years of effort by Richard Stallman, through the Gnu project, which gave you Linux. His wealth is classic robber-baron wealth, it comes at the expense of thousands of software developers, and it destroyed the whole software economy.
The 400 Uber-wealthy people acquire their wealth by monopolizing an industry, and squeezing out thousands of smaller firms who make thousands of less wealthy but still wealthy people. The destruction of wealth due to capital concentration is real, and must be reversed. There is no competitive way to justify an individual making a billion dollars, it means a thousand other individuals aren’t making a million dollars competing with this person.
It is possible to be a self-made billionaire, you can take over an industry by monopoly with help from wall street making you big early. Such is the case with Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other enormous firms with negligible competition. The competition cannot form, because it will get bought out. Those companies hold back innovation, as it is next to impossible to move such an enormous bureaucracy.
It’s changed for the worse, and now it’s changing back.
I am 100% positive that these proposals are original to me, motherfu*ker. I thought of them, you didn’t. Nyah nyah nyah.
Clinton’s was consensual, and none of your business. Vote for Sanders on policy, not smears.
Juanita Brodderick is possibly not telling the whole truth, it’s really hard to be sure, although I do tend to believe her, this is a criminal issue. Unlike Cosby, there is no long-standing pattern of assault, these claims are isolated, although disturbing. It is possible that there is nothing more interesting here than an atypically libidenous fellow, although it is possible that a crime was committed.
None of this is at really relevant. Sanders is winning on the issues, not on personal smears, and if it stays that way, the country would be better off.
I didn’t see women lining up and accusing him of rape, I saw women saying he came on to them rather forcefully. This Juanita Broaderick person is the first actual (credible) rape allegation I have seen. There was an obviously false one fabricated I remember from the 90s, which are nowhere near as believable as hers. Clinton had sex with thousands of women, it is not so hard to find someone to accuse him of wrongdoing, as a large fraction of them probably dislike him.
When you have sex with a large number of women, you are in a bad position. Cosby’s case was specific allegations about drugs and rape, which were repeated in a pattern, and clearly credible. Clinton for sure had a ton of consensual sex, like a lot of people from his generation. He admitted to having “hundreds” of affairs at some point, and everyone was aware of it. When the Paula Jones thing became a scandal, there were a whole bunch of allegations, all of which didn’t pan out, except the Lewinsky business, which was clearly consensual. I figure if there was a good allegation, that was the time to hear about it. I didn’t hear anything about this in 1998, but I might not have been paying attention.
I didn’t see any allegation of rape other than Broaddrick’s. I searched just now, and I still didn’t.
TARP is not Freddie and Fannie. TARP is the bundled loans. It was bailing out the leveraged loans, not the bare mortgages.
Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” was austerity to curb inflation, and it worked. I wish he had been reelected, I wouldn’t have grown up worrying about a flash in the sky and my skin melting off.
Fannie and Freddie were a small and managable part of the problem because they didn’t do any fraud, they were just doing what they always do. They weren’t the ones leveraged off their behinds on bundled loans.
There was a gigantic pyramid built on top of those mortgages, which required not only TARP, but also quantitative easing. The issue of fraud and collapse is due entirely to the fraudulent AAA rating from the credit agency, and the fraudulent exploitation of these ratings by Goldman Sachs and others. The collapse was not of F&F, they are designed to take losses, it was of AIG, which isn’t, and everyone else by extension.
It is amazing to me that you do propaganda when you know very well what was going on. Nobody is buying it anymore, if they ever did.
The selling and “repackaging” of the loans wasn’t a big deal, the big deal was the false security provided by the bogus AAA credit rating, created fraudulently.
If they had been rated properly as risky investments, with a comparable risk to housing prices falling, then the bad mortgages wouldn’t have been such a serious problem, it would have been isolated defaults. But then again, without the credit rating, the mortgages wouldn’t have been bundled in the first place, and there wouldn’t have been such pressure to issue as many as possible.
I don’t know how much of this coordinated fraud was done by the FM&FM bosses, and how much by others, and honestly, I don’t give a flying fig. But I know where the fraud is— it is in giving these securities AAA. That creates an arbitrage opportunity, because it’s a lie— the bundles are not secure, and the risk is not properly hedged.
Once the lie is there, and once Goldman recognizes it’s a lie, it’s a short step from that to getting AIG insurance, passing off the loans, and pressuring banks to provide as many of these as they can, just to maximize profit. The whole thing is motivated by the desire to exploit a rating mistake rather than fix it. Since the rating itself is influenced by those who put it together for profit, it’s all fraud from beginning to end, and it has nothing to do with individual lenders, or with individual loans. It has to do with the bundlers and the ratings agency.
You can’t snow me, I know what was going on. So does everyone else too, by the way. For another fraudulent deals, similarly due to insider knowledge and exploitation of risk to set a false price deliberately, see the lawsuit brought by shareholders regarding the VALinux IPO.
I guess you were hit on the head with a hammer. You can’t lie online, as people can look things up. I would cut your stipend if I were paying you for propaganda.
I didn’t say the public awareness project was supposed to come from the government. That’s something citizens need to do without government getting involved. I agree with Sanders regarding handling crimes on campus. I also agree with you that zoning has little to do with capitalism, beyond providing incentives for sprawl. But the same way it provides incentives one way, it can provide incentives the other way. That’s about it for agreement.
I do not support Nixon’s Keynsian policy, which included price controls and ridiculous hyperstimulus, and led to inflation. But I do support Carter’s economic policy, which was not exactly Keynsian, but austerity. His goal was to reduce inflation, and this goal was met in 1980s, due to the tight-money policies of Volker. The “malaise” of the 1970s is austerity, and it was needed due to the Vietnam war. Israel coincidentally went through a much worse period of hyperinflation due to the monetary policy instituted to pay for the 1973 war, and in that case, the socialist PM in the 80s, Peres, was also the austerity guy. The tough economic policies in both cases came from the left, because the left understands economics.
Regarding employment in the USSR, anyone who was looking for a job could immediately find one. It wasn’t at full employment because of camps, it was at full employment because the incentive of managers was to maximize their labor pool, so they looked for ways to employ people. This is not to advocate for the Soviet system, it’s to point out what happens in a free labor market at zero unemployment. There are no standard examples of zero unemployment labor markets, but the USSR is a hidden example, because it had zero unemployment, and the state system of allocating wages was UNINTENTIONALLY producing the same results as a free market would. The reason is that labor was free to switch jobs, and the wages went up wherever there was scarcity of workers, and went down wherever there were too many, That’s the market mechanism. So if you want to see what wages look like in an equilibrium with no unemployment, there’s no other place to look. It would be nice to see the results in a capitalist economy with zero unemployment, but nobody has ever instituted such a successful jobs policy in any capitalist economy, so I’m stuck looking at a non-market example.
It’s not a good place to look at investment, because investment was not free market there. It also is not a perfect free market for labor, because mobility was restricted by internal passports and work permits, and there were population migration incentives, to get people to move to far-away places. But more or less it was close enough to see the rough outlines of an equilibrium wage structure, as I said, there’s no other example to look at.
The investment by banks does not require rich people, and in capitalist equilibrium, investment is entirely done by banks, and not by any rich people, because there aren’t any rich people in equilibrium. The idea that rich people get rich through wise investment is belied by the dismal investment choices of rich people, like every billionaire out there, who get wealthy through a market mechanism that involves wall street IPO attempting a monopoly. There is no productive investment from any of these people.
I know the history of “liberal”, silly, that’s why I said what I said. I oppose your laissez faire nonsense, because it’s dumb.
But I said what I have to say, you have decided what you believe, there is no point in compromising, just in grinding your side to the ground until you don’t exist anymore.
No? Just watch.
I know you think that, little buddy. Each individual thing you say is correct, that’s not the problem. The problem is that you just managed to ignore the main problem: a trillion dollars of loss which has nothing to do with any individual mortgage failing, but with bundling and false rating.
What?? I’m a real person, that’s my name, I never use a pseudonym (other than on youtube, only because my name was taken already). Drop your internet paranoia. (I get it now— I called you “little buddy”, and looking over the discussion, FormerMortgageBroker called you “Little Buddy” earlier. That’s not because we’re the same person, little buddy, it comes from “Gilligan’s Island”, little buddy. I did go back and upvote his comments though now that you told me, little buddy. Thanks, little buddy!)
I KNOW who sold the mortgages. Selling them wasn’t the collapse. Rating the bundles wrong and insuring them under a false rating was the direct cause of the collapse, and not only that, this fraudulent practice is ALSO what led the demand for the mortgage bundles to skyrocket. The people taking the mortgage aren’t at fault, neither are the people issuing the mortgages. It’s the raters who rated the bundles, and those who raised demand due to the expectation of exploiting the misrating for profit. That’s the fraud. That’s the collapse. Everything else is peanuts.
I am not part of the usual “left”, I’m too far left for that. I do support Bernie Sanders for president, but he sort of looks like an Eisenhower conservative from where I’m standing.
Bernie Sanders is winning on the issues, not on raw charisma, although he has enough of that to get by. You just missed out that the boat you are on sailed the wrong way at least 15 years ago, and now is stranded in the Bermuda triangle, while everyone else stayed on land, and Sanders with them.
That’s why you need several competing nonprofit agencies, some supported by lenders, and others by borrowers.
Unemployed, unemployable, and Bernie Sanders won’t change anything regarding me personally. I never take any drugs, or any government money.
The only brainwashing you got was by your terrible system, which gave you a post-traumatic stress regarding anything with “socialist” in it. Marx had important theoretical insights about Capitalism, and many of these were incorporated into capitalist economics by Keynes, and became the basis of standard economics. Marx wasn’t writing about communism, as there was no communism back then. These theoretical insights were denied by those on the right, and this leads them to wreck whole economies with oligarchic concentration of power, as the Soviet Union was wrecked in the 1990s, when the state privatized the national companies.
Your system was a state run monstrosity, a catastrophe. But the education and propaganda was not too terrible, because Marx was a pretty good academic. If you ignore dialectical materialism (which I don’t think anyone in the USSR took seriously anyway), you have JETP, Landau institute, really good academic work. You need to revisit what you learned in Soviet kindergarten, because it is an important truth, although not the only truth. It doesn’t matter that it was pushed by a failed totalitarian state with a hobbled non-innovative economy. The issues of innovation were due to centralization, which no one on the left supports, whether the concentration of power is in the government, or in large business.
In the US, and in all of the West, the left and the USSR parted ways around 1956. Nobody on the left was crying when it collapsed.
No, not wealthy either.
I live off some meager rent collected from property. I would love to be employed, I am very good at doing very many things, but I doubt I can persuade an employer of this. This is not about me, as I told you. Perhaps I will be destitute and homeless in a few years regardless of who is president, or I might be forced to leave the country to find a job.
Reversing the concentration of power in large banks by breaking them up, a new Glass-Steagalll, making sure the economic doctrine is Keynesian, and not Chicago school, which means investment in jobs, higher minimum wage, and progressive taxation. The lack of universal health care is a national embarassment, and has made US business less competitive for decades.
He supports the 1st amendment, free speech and uncensored internet (Clinton pushed for internet censorship regarding the bogus Benghazi video), the 2nd amendment (Clinton would like to abolish gun ownership through lawsuits), the 4th and 5th amendment by restricting the NSA, repealing the Patriot act, and ending the surveillance state. He supports ending the unconstitutional militarization of police, mass incarceration of the population through an invasive drug war, which is against the spirit of the 3rd, 6th, and 7th amendments, and reversing policies of indefinite detention and torture, which are against the 8th amendment. There isn’t an amendment in the bill of rights that hasn’t been trampled on by Republicans and sometimes Democrats lately. Sanders supports the whole bill of rights, sensibly.
On foreign policy, he does not support invasions or no-fly zones, and would oppose ISIS without starting WWIII.
I read a lot of Soviet stuff when I was a kid, because I was training to be a physicist, and half the good physicists were Soviet, and nearly all the good physicists before 1950s were fellow travellers (I toyed with communist ideology too before I grew up). I liked some Soviet literature immensely, and I studied the system for a bit in the late 80s, when I was in high school, because it was very topical then. Gorbachev had opened the system to criticism, and you could see exactly what was happening in state-farms and industries, and also what happened in Stalin’s time, openly, for the first time.
I can say whatever I want regarding your mentality, I HAVE NO STATE POWER, and I don’t advocate anyone using state power (or any other kind of power) to put anyone else in a mental institution. The issue of power is paramount— people can call other people crazy, so long as they don’t impose their will on others. When you hand out state power you invite trouble.
Bukharin and other early socialist anarchists had a lot to say about socialism and power, and in the end the failures of the USSR are failures of concentration of power more than failures of economics (although there was lots of that too). The same failure of power occurs when Western industry monopolizes, and power concentrates in a few hands, as it has today in the US. The key point is to reverse these concentrations of power WITHOUT increasing state power, and this is extremely tricky, but possible.
I am permanently under-educated. I am a physicist. I am not an “under-achiever”, I am proud of my past academic work, I think it will stand the test of time, and that by that standard I am an “over achiever”, just not financially. I don’t know what “Dilattante” means in this case, I worked in several fields, physics and biology, but I contributed. So perhaps all apply, perhaps none. It doesn’t matter, as the discussion is not about me, it’s about the policies and about Bernie Sanders.
I’ve been using “little buddy” for years, maybe he’s copying me. I doubt it.
The “same arguments” is because those arguments are correct. “Same links” doesn’t make any sense because I gave no links. Regarding intellectual, maybe he or she read “The Big Short”, like I did. You didn’t, that’s for sure.
I know more about the Soviet Union than you do, bub. Solzhenitsyn is nothing more than a bad writer (although “Day in the Life” was readable). I have already contributed more to society than you ever will.
I call myself a physicist because I discovered a new law of physics, unlike 99.9% of professional physicists. This is not about me, as I said, and I don’t care how or when I die.
Troll? Sarcasm? Can’t tell.
Lapdog.
I wouldn’t smoke a puff of pot even if it paid 100k a year.
If these rules are enforced, your platform will go to hell. It is only used because it is uncensored.
Your statements are such utter nonsense that I couldn’t believe you were serious.
I have been treated in Hong Kong for a stomach ailment, in Israel for various things, and I have some experience with healthcare in Europe. In Hong Kong, I was shocked, because it took about 20 minutes to see a doctor and get two good prescriptions, and it cost about as many dollars. I have never been to a country with a worse health care system than the US, I have been treated here (terribly) many times. For one of many examples: my daughter had croup when she was 2 (a common condition), and the treatment she received was substandard (they didn’t want to use steroids and gave her a bogus steam inhaler that did nothing), and, even worse, once she was diagnosed and treated, instead of being left alone to sleep, a parade of charlatans gave her a battery of unnecessary tests which were a total joke. I had to stop them when they decided to stick a tube down her throat with a “cease and desist” order! That was not because they were concerned about any medical anything. It was to make money from my daughter’s insurance.
I have been to hospitals in the US many times, and seen the atrocious care— it really is the worst care in the entire industrialized world, by far. The private system encourages over-prescription of terrible drugs, including the antibiotic “Flagyl” which is extremely psychoactive and depresses and sedates patients. Doctors love it, because it shuts their patients up. The patients? Not so much. The same nonsense happens with over-prescription of anti-psychotics and anti-depressants, catastrophic over-diagnosis of nonexistent ailments, and ridiculous lack of preventative care.
For another of countless examples, my father had a kidney transplant, and the doctors removed his kidneys. He then suddenly suffered from low blood pressure, and fainting spells. Eventually he had to SELF-DIAGNOSE Addison’s disease in himself, and tell the doctors that his adrenal gland was probably not working! He had to diagnose HIMSELF for the adrenal gland failure which should have been predictable, but THEY DIDN’T PREDICT IT. I can’t emphasize how shoddy it is in the US, it’s atrocious. And this was a top-of-the-line private hospital with way up there muckity muck surgeons.
As for Keynsian economics, it predicted the inflation rate correctly in the US in 2009, 2010, 2011, and the quacks in the field didn’t. It also correctly predicts the counterintuitive response of unemployment to raise in minimum wage, a prediction which is the exact opposite of both Chicago school and common sense, and one that is confirmed each time the minimum wage goes up.
The role of the government is to make sure that the market is operating at full employment, at maximum demand, and it hasn’t been doing this lately. This is well known, and accepted by both Democrats and Republicans from 1940 until 1980. Nothing changed in the data since then, so nothing in my mind changed.
I don’t have an employment history, and I’m an asshole. If you’re offering a job, I’ll take it.
Yeah. Like your lack of experience with health care outside the US does.
He can’t smash Marx and Keynes because they make quantitative predictions which are correct, unlike anyone else in economics. In particular, the correct rate of inflation in response to quantitative easing, and the correct response of unemployment to minimum wage increases.
Right again, dunce hat.
I am using statistical probability. It is extremely unlikely that a random person online would have any contributions at all.
You are too dumb to understand.
Keynes and Marx make predictions about aggregate demand, and how economies respond to stimulus. Keynes more than Marx, but Keynes is based on Marx (despite his denials).
Marx wasn’t writing about Marxism, he was writing about Capitalism. The 100,000,000 democides are mostly in the head of propagandists, the communist system was awful for reasons other than mass murder.
I was for a while, it’s complicated. Do you want my history, or Bernie Sanders?
That in any quantum gravity vacuum the smallest particle must have an electric charge larger than its mass, in natural units.
To you, my friend, to you.
He doesn’t support “ideologically sanctioned speech”, he even opposes overbearing liberalism like the campus rape response of late, saying “rape is to be handled by police”. He is for breaking up banks, not nationalizing them, and he is not doing communism or statism, more like anarchism.
I explained below, that was a while ago though.
The mass murder under stalin consists of 1.5 million or so prisoners killed for various political crimes. This is ATROCIOUS and UNBEARABLE enough without lying about it. The remainder of the “democide” consist of a 1932 famine with an indeterminate number of victims, but since it was mostly in Ukraine and Ukraine still existed the next year, it’s less than half the Ukrainianian population (it’s much less). The estimates you read in history books are bunk, because they are made from demographic data which includes babies never concieved. The total deaths for Stalin is the 1.5 million plus 2-5 million famine deaths, and that’s if you think the famine is deliberate, rather than state stupidity. The same ridiculous demographic methods show you that 10,000,000 Americans were murdered during the great depression, and resuscitated as the baby boom.
The same for Mao. The Chinese famine is state stupidity, and it killed an indeterminate number of Chinese people, about 20 million, maybe more, it’s hard to poll, because it’s elderly and children. That’s the “death rate of communism”, it’s really the “famine caused by collectivization programs”, and it’s something that has nothing to do with socialism, or even communism which doesn’t collectivize farms, like that in Cuba.
The Khmer Rouge were not mainstream communists, and were replaced by the Vietnamese who were. The Ethiopian famine was linked to the Ethiopian Eritrean war of independence, and yet, propagandists add this up as “victims of communism”. Likewise for the Vietnam war and the war in Afghanistan and other rubbish. You might as well call the 4 million victims of the Irish Potato Famine victims of capitalism (which they were) or the indeterminate millions who died in the slave trade, or from homelessness, or lack of medical care, in the US, or from the wars of conquest of the 19th century, and the Native American genocide.
This is not how you evaluate a political or economic system, it is simple grandstanding. The whole of this numbers game is Solzhenitsyn playing games. He claims the USSR lost 60 million people, in addition to the 20 million lost in WWII. That’s like a limited nuclear war, and it’s disproved by simply asking a dozen Russians how many of their family died.
Lenin was writing about communism, and Stalin, and Mao, and Castro, and lots of people. Just not Marx, because he had very little experience with it. Marx wrote a critique of capitalism. I would recommend you read Marx. He also wrote some things about the short lived Paris Commune, and about the French Revolution.
I explained in the comments below! Just scroll down.
Ok, my employment is scanty and underdocumented.
It’s a consequence of the holographic principle. It was rediscoved by Motl and Vafa in 2006. I discovered it in grad school, in 1999, my advisor wouldn’t let me publish this with him, as he didn’t believe me, because I look like a bum (and because I said stupid things too). It’s not important, it’s just why I call myself a physicist.
That’s right, that’s why I didn’t want to get into it. I don’t claim I’m a great mind, I’m just trying to have a debate. There’s a bunch of trolls here asking me about my employment status, that’s all.
Yes on all three. But I’m right on the econ.
Government debt is meaningless when the government controls its own monetary policy, it is fixed by inflation. Not that this is the best solution, the best solution is progressive taxation. Inflation is tantamount to a flat tax on all money, without taxing property.
The issue of Keynsian stimulus IN THE US is that the money only went to banks, it didn’t get into the pockets of workers. This is why Keynsian spending is supposed to be associated with a jobs program. Bernie Sanders not only proposes an infrastructure jobs program, he proposes a raised minimum wage and tuition subsidy for state universities, which will both improve employment.
There’s nothing sad about my stories. They’re comical.
Martin O’Malley is just another corporate guy, somewhat more left-posturing than Sanders, but not a sincere leftist with a history like Sanders. Sanders is running a real revolution from the left, he is working with people who wouldn’t normally take the trouble to vote for a mainstream candidate. This is the only reason that he can win.
My profile pic was from when I went online 10 years ago, when I was 32, also the last time I had permanent employment, aside from a brief stint at a lab. Stop talking about me, and talk about the issues.
The only reason the US has better treatment outcome on diabetes statistically is because so many Americans have unnecessary type II diabetes, because they are too fat. The outcome in other countries is “never got diabetes” if you want a fair comparison. The same for heart disease. The US health care system is atrocious, and this is the universal appraisal of all who can compare, either quantitatively, or qualitatively.
The only condescending fool here is that fellow you see in the mirror. Explaining economics to a conservative is like explaining quantum mechanics to an orangutan, but I’ll give it a last shot.
The imminent collapse of AIG was due to insurance hedging by Goldman Sachs and other banks, who bought credit default swaps on the bundled mortgages. The mortgages themselves are not an issue, the credit worthiness of the loans were not the issue, they could default or not. The big issue was that there was a CORRELATION between the loans that was not considered by the rating agency. If housing prices fell, all the loans would default at the same time. They ignored this correlation and treated the risk as statistically indepedent, to give AAA credit rating to these bundled loans based on the independent risk. This is credit-rating fraud.
The credit-rating fraud made it that AIG couldn’t pay off the credit default swaps when they all came due. So they would go bust. And then those who held the credit default swaps would go bust too, because they had a bunch of these swaps, and so on. That’s the collapse.
The mortgages themselves a red-herring. They could have been anything else you can make a bet on, commodities, gold, whatever, just as long as there is correlated risk of drop in price, which is modelled as independent risk to make a risky investment look safe.
You are about as capable of understanding this as I am capable of flapping my wings and flying to the moon, but there might be another reader too.
The way the number of people Stalin killed is calculated is by adding together all the people who were arrested and subsequently executed. This is the 1.5 million people I said. That amounts to “thousands and thousands of people” arrested, and many murdered— that’s the 1.5 million people.
Solzhenitsyn, however, claims that it wasn’t 1.5 million killed, but 60 million.
The population of the USSR in the 1930s was around 150 million. 60 million out of 150 million is 1 in 2.5.
This means that, if Solzhenitsyn’s ridiculous claim is right, asking a Russian today about their family, statistically speaking, a grandparent would have been killed in the 1930s, two cousins, half their friends and acquaintances, and generally, something akin to the END OF THE WORLD, and a LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR. That’s 60 million victims.
I asked a dozen Russians. Most knew relatives who were persecuted in some way, like a demotion, or a questioning, some sort of run-in with police. The arrests come at the “relative” level, and the political murders, when they do come, they come at the “distant acquaintance” level, meaning a co-worker of someone the grandfather knew was arrested, a distant cousin knew someone who was killed, etc. This is the typical level of homicide in the USSR under Stalin.
This is a statistical sample, but it easily disproved claims of 60 million dead, even 20 million dead, as both leave immediate signatures.
I did the same thing with holocaust victims too. If you ask a Polish Jew what fraction of their relatives died, you can quickly get an estimate of the total scale of the events, even though there entire villages were systematically exterminated, and entire family. Similarly, if you ask a Cambodian about the Khmer Rouge times (although I did not do this directly, as there are too few Cambodians for me to meet any). Likewise for the Rwandan genocide, or disappearances in South America, or Native American history, and so on.
The point is that Solzhenitsyn is simply making numbers up. Sixty million is a lie, and twenty million is a lie. The correct figure is what historians in the 1980s came up with 1.5 million killed, and that’s already bad enough. Solzhenitsyn is a Nazi sympathizer, and didn’t like that Hitler had more concentration camp victims, so he just made the number bigger by making the number up. He didn’t have any quantitative training.
The estimate method I gave you is very important, because it also allows you to estimate the number of “radical Islamic Jihadis” out there by sampling muslims (my answer is 0% plus or minus 0%), the number of supporters of this cause,or that cause, etc. It is shameful that I have to resort to this method to demonstrate something so obvious, namely that Solzhenitsyn and all the other 90s fellows who followed him are dishonest historians.
The deaths under Stalin include a famine in 1932, which I cannot estimate reliably. Historians in the 1980s gave the figures I gave, more or less. The later numbers are by the same gang as the 20 million dead and 60 million dead, they are by numerically incompetent dissemblers.
The way the number of people Stalin killed is calculated is by adding together all the people who were arrested and subsequently executed. This is the 1.5 million people I said. That amounts to “thousands and thousands of people” arrested, and many murdered— that’s the 1.5 million people.
Solzhenitsyn, however, claims that it wasn’t 1.5 million killed, but 60 million.
The population of the USSR in the 1930s was around 150 million. 60 million out of 150 million is 1 in 2.5.
This means that, if Solzhenitsyn’s ridiculous claim is right, asking a Russian today about their family, statistically speaking, a grandparent would have been killed in the 1930s, two cousins, half their friends and acquaintances, and generally, something akin to the END OF THE WORLD, and a LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR. That’s 60 million victims.
I asked a dozen Russians. Most knew relatives who were persecuted in some way, like a demotion, or a questioning, some sort of run-in with police. The arrests come at the “relative” level, and the political murders, when they do come, they come at the “distant acquaintance” level, meaning a co-worker of someone the grandfather knew was arrested, a distant cousin knew someone who was killed, etc. This is the typical level of homicide in the USSR under Stalin.
This is a statistical sample, but it easily disproved claims of 60 million dead, even 20 million dead, as both leave immediate signatures. The correct figure is 1.5 million dead, as responsible historians wrote in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the propaganda started.
There is also a famine, but I haven’t been able to sample it. It was localized to regions I couldn’t sample. I know it’s not propaganda, because Gorbachev suffered from it, and knew people who died, and also it was internally acknowledged and studied in the USSR, and the number of victims is roughly as I said it, with great uncertainty. The same goes for the famine in China. Famines are very hard to poll, and that famine was entirely discovered by demographic graphs showing a drop in population.
I did the same thing with holocaust victims too. If you ask a Polish Jew what fraction of their relatives died, you can quickly get an estimate of the total scale of the events, even though there entire villages were
systematically exterminated, and entire family. Similarly,
if you ask a Cambodian about the Khmer Rouge times (although I did not do this directly, as there are too few Cambodians for me to meet any). Likewise for the Rwandan genocide, or disappearances in South America, or Native
American history, and so on.
The point is that Solzhenitsyn is simply making numbers up. Sixty million is a lie, and
twenty million is a lie.
The correct figure is what historians in the 1980s came up with 1.5 million killed, and that’s already bad enough. Solzhenitsyn is a N*zi sympathizer, and didn’t like that H*tler had more concentration camp victims, so he just made the number bigger by making the number up. He didn’t have any quantitative training.
The estimate method I gave you is very important, because it also allows you to estimate the number of radical islamists out there by sampling muslims (my answer is 0% plus or minus 0%), the number of supporters of this cause,or that cause, etc. It is shameful that I have to resort to this method to demonstrate something so obvious, namely that Solzhenitsyn and all the other 90s fellows who followed him are dishonest historians.
The deaths under Stalin include a famine in 1932, which I cannot estimate reliably. Historians in the 1980s gave the figures I gave, more or less. The later numbers are by the same gang as the 20 million dead and 60 million dead, they are by numerically incompetent dissemblers.
I did the same thing with holocaust victims too. If you ask a Polish Jew what fraction of their relatives died, you can quickly get an estimate of the total scale of the events, even though there entire villages were
systematically exterminated, and entire family. Similarly,
if you ask a Cambodian about the Khmer Rouge times (although I did not do this directly, as there are too few Cambodians for me to meet any). Likewise for the Rwandan genocide, or disappearances in South America, or Native
American history, and so on.
The point is that Solzhenitsyn is simply making numbers up. Sixty million is a lie, and
twenty million is a lie.
The correct figure is what historians in the 1980s came up with 1.5 million killed, and that’s already bad enough. Solzhenitsyn is a Nazi sympathizer, and didn’t like that Hitler had more concentration camp victims, so he just made the number bigger by making the number up. He didn’t have any quantitative training.
The estimate method I gave you is very important, because it also allows you to estimate the number of radical islamists out there by sampling muslims (my answer is 0% plus or minus 0%), the number of supporters of this cause,or that cause, etc. It is shameful that I have to resort to this method to demonstrate something so obvious, namely that Solzhenitsyn and all the other 90s fellows who followed him are dishonest historians.
The deaths under Stalin include a famine in 1932, which I cannot estimate reliably. Historians in the 1980s gave the figures I gave, more or less. The later numbers are by the same gang as the 20 million dead and 60 million dead, they are by numerically incompetent dissemblers.
No, Solzhenitsyn is simply a liar. You need a better argument. The better argument is that the state bureaucracy was incapable of innovation, and was permanently frozen in time.
Scroll down and read, lazy bones.
I am a malignant narcissist too. Bernie Sanders is not.
I know exactly why the capitalist West outstripped the communist East, and now the West is destroying that feature.
The communist East was run as one gigantic mega-corporation, it did not have the diversity of small business. The reason they developed this way, into gigantic state-controlled monopolies, is because this is what Marx predicted would happen to Capitalism eventually— all the corporations would merge into mega-corporations, and then the state would take them over. Marx genuinely assumed this was an efficient situation, except for macro issues relating to low worker pay. Then he predicted the state would take over the mega-corporations after the workers revolted due to low pay.
The East just skipped the whole capitalism step and built the mega-corporations by the state. The result is the same as when a state takes over and nationalizes enterprises.
The surprise is that mega corporations are simply NOT efficient! They are stagnant and bureaucratic, and cannot evolve further. When you only look at mega-corporations, then the East was completely competitive. The oil and energy industry was competitive (actually vastly superior in the East), the nuclear industry was competitive, steel, arms production, large 1960s and 1970s computers, etc.
Where the East failed was in small business. That means, consumer goods, microcomputers. It wasn’t competitive in small businesses, because there was no small business.
There was also NO INNOVATION in the big firms, they were frozen in time. The West had creaking innovation in large firms, due to competition. Where competition was absent, the innovation disappeared also, just like in the East.
The lesson of the East-West divide is the lesson of the inefficiency of concentrations of business into monopolies, and the even worse inefficiency of making those businesses state owned monopolies. If they are private monopolies, there is at least a hope of a small competitor emerging.
The West is now converting itself into mega-corporations, and destroying it’s one advantage. It is doing what Marx said it would do, instead of what all the reformers of the 20th century did, which prevented it from going in that terrible direction to monopoly and stasis, and innovation death.
The point of Bernie Sanders is to reverse the concentration of power in large corporations. Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted policy to keep the corporate world from merging into oblivion, by anti-trust and taxation methods. But since Reagan, this has been abandoned. Now the US economy is looking more and more like the Soviet one, enormous state-level corporations producing everything in sight, completely resistant to both competition and change, just as inefficient, except privately owned with a class of managers and owners sucking profits into their pockets, and deforming the state to their ends by endless war and incipient fascism. That’s the worst of all worlds.
When most of your diabetics are obese type II types, you will get better outcomes on average because their condition is milder. It’s a ridiculous comparison. Likewise for heart disease. American medicine has terrible outcomes even judging by simple life-expectancy.
No, they explain why the doctors are jerks— they are driven by money, and their priority in the hospital is not the patient’s well being, but making their life simpler by sedating the patient.
Bernie is a real Democrat. Hillary is what people used to call a liberal Republican. Current Republicans are what people used to call “psychotic”.
These are systematic problems. When you go to a hospital, you will be subjected to endless needless tests, and likewise with a private practitioner. You will be pushed to take medication that you don’t really need. Their pay is determined by the amount of treatment they dispense, not by your outcome.
Americans receive more unnecessary tests, more unnecessary medication, than any people in the world. There is no justification for this, it is a product of the false incentives in the market. The costs are also absurd, sometimes ten times higher than treatment in any other country.. It’s the worst possible system in the assessment of every single person who has ever been treated outside the US, independent of income. You often get lousy care in the US even if you’re rich.
No, no. The predictions on inflation response, on response of unemployment to minimum wage, these were all made in advance, and uniformly work. They are used predictively to set monetary policy to control inflation— this was the innovation of the 1970s and 1980s, learning how to fix inflation by money supply tricks. These are all Keynsian policies, and there is no alternative. Everything else is bunk. It’s not opinion, you see.
Economics is not a science only because there are a lot of economists who are bought out by wealthy people to say whatever they want. These people should not be taken seriously in any academic discussion, but unfortunately, they sometimes are. They are the entire conservative movement.
I am complaining about your bogus statistics, not about the behavior.
It’s not paranoia. It’s called “supply side”, and includes such nonsense as the Laffer curve, which is extremely predictive. Just the predictions never work. It also includes the “Chicago school”, who predicted prices would triple under Obama’s stimulus and so on, and predict a rise of unemployment every time minimum wage is raised, a rise which never comes. You see, when you consistently make wrong quantitative predictions, your theory is wrong.
Keynesian economics is transparently obvious to any Marx reader. It looks like bunk if you are trained in pre-Marx economics, because Keynes was working hard to remove his dependence on Marx, and made up some nonsense to justify his policies. The Marxist underpinnings are still there, however.
The sign of a successful revolution is that the winning side looks like nutjobs to the losers.
Your statements are only non-absurd when it comes to cancer treatment, where the US has many experimental drugs in queue that are not available yet elsewhere, but even there, the benefits must be small, as the treatments percolate out eventually, and the rate of progress is not so high. That is not so much a miracle of the drug industry, it is a product of heavy state investment in cancer research. I believe your statistics regarding diabetes are sourceable, I don’t believe they are meaningful.
Marx’s socialization platform is things that every industrial economy did in the mid 20th century. It wasn’t about Marxism, but about ending the gold standard, and allowing institutionalized inflation. It’s not radical since the 1930s, and it has nothing to do with what you called Marxism in the 20th century. It’s more Keynesianism. Every candidate supports nearly all of Marx’s points, they are mainstream policies today.
Bernie Sander’s positions, on the other hand, are courageous and original, and are a vision for reducing big-money power over government.
Here’s other stuff, you can still scroll down to get other work. You learned in school that the force to get something moving is more than the force to keep it going? Why? I figured that out (in a model, with a colleague, based on earlier work). I also worked out the computational content of protein networks.
Because he lies about the number of people killed there! I don’t need to be in the gulag— his numbers are absurd. Sixty million victims is simply impossible, with the WWII deaths, it’s more than half the Soviet population dead! Even his earlier twenty million number is inconsistent with historians, inconsistent with common sense, and inconsistent with asking a random sample of Russians about the period. These numbers are simply lies.
I don’t blame him so much. He was really a prisoner, he was really abused, and he didn’t lie so much early on— A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a great book. He was a brave dissident to begin with. The lying came later, as he decided the true suffering he described was not enough, and he needed to make additional propaganda to oppose the system he detested, as if the truth weren’t bad enough.
The same happened with Jewish holocaust victims. The accounts in 1946 and 1950s, and into 1961 with the Eichmann trial are all consistent with each other, very authentic, and consistent with guard testimony, and documents. But if you look at the much later 1988 Demyanjuk trial in Israel, a trial many decades removed from the events, the testimony for the first time included absurd fabricated claims of atrocities that one can see did not occur, as they were not documented earlier and are inconsistent with timely camp accounts. Former prisoners described the Gestapo cooking babies on stoves, made up nonsense like this. It’s the same effect— the emotional impact of the cold truth about the mass murder is too low, it doesn’t get the horror across, so people resort to fictional narratives that attempt at a greater emotional truth. But if you are a scientist, these fictional narratives are simply lies, and cold honest narratives (like Ivan Denisovich) are all that are needed.
I am not a fan of Soviet communism, but I can’t allow people to lie about numbers. I don’t give a crap what they suffered.
The conditions don’t have to be exactly the same twice, economics still makes predictions on the margin— you do this, then that happens. You can test it by doing it again, undoing it, doing it later. The recurrent minimum wage hikes, and the recurrent stimulus, the recurring tax cuts and tax rises, that’s what makes these predictions easy to check. If you predict that that government deficits will fall when taxes go down, and you cut taxes several times, and the deficits go up, again and again (as they did under Reagan and Bush), enough, it’s a false prediction. It’s just wrong.
This is a conservative “supply side” counterpart to the counterintuitive prediction that when you raise minimum wage unemployment can go DOWN, and usually does. This prediction is made by Keynesians, and unlike the supply side prediction, it is routinely observed real-world when minimum wage is increased.
This is very strange, and it requires a theoretical understanding. I will explain it correctly below.
The basic prediction fundamental to Marxist economics is that in an industrial economy with unemployment and no minimum wage, workers will be making subsistence wages. This is from classical supply and demand— when the supply exceeds the demand, the price for the product drops to the cost for maintain it. This was verified by Marx in England in the 1850s, in Capital, with a comparison of wage labor return for the 12 hour work day and daily cost of living (they were roughly equal). It is verified again in economies like those of South America, where there are underclasses who are chronically unemployed, and earn subsistence wage.
The low wages means that there is no laborer who can buy the products of the industrial economy, and the demand in the economy is confined to a small class of people who are able to somehow get industrial profits into their pockets, this is the owner class and their lackeys, who survive on services of the owner class. When you have this situation, and you don’t do anything, unemployment will skyrocket, due to the feedback between plummeting demand, closing factories, rising unemployment, and further falling demand. This is a description of the great depression, and of those same South American economies in their normal state.
This is not anything like a free-market equilibrium, which is a situation where everyone is making roughly the same amount of money. In free market theory, if you’re making more money than me, I just go and do what you’re doing, until the wages equalize due to supply and demand. Of course this doesn’t work in real life, but in theory, that’s what supposed to happen. In this equilibrium, there is zero unemployment, all wages reflect productivity of labor, and everyone is making roughly the same amount, up to small differences regarding efficiency of labor, risk, and so on.
When you introduce minimum wage, you raise consumption, and you also increase the price of labor. One effect wants to make the unemployment go down, the other wants to make the unemployment go up. Which dominates?
The Keynsian theory says this— when you are getting closer to equilibrium, the unemployment goes down. When you are getting further from equilibirum, inflation kicks in to bring you back. This predicts that when the minimum wage is far below the productivity per employee, you get a greater spur due to consumption increase than a drop due to the higher price of labor. This prediction has been tested more than a dozen times in the US alone when minimum wage went up, and it is uniformly correct. The change in employment in response to the rise is zero, often negative, and never the marginal amount predicted by supply-siders, who only consider the second effect and not the first, which more than compensates.
You don’t get to make up economic facts. You think you do, because economics is a politicized field. These things are understood theoretically, and verified empirically. It doesn’t matter that it’s more difficult to do experiments, you still do them, and the outcome matters.
Global warming predicts that 2016 will be warmer than 1990, and roughly the same as 2010-2015, despite the fact that 2015 was not only anomalously warm, it was the warmest year on record. We’ll measure next year, but you don’t need to measure, it will be. These predictions have been uniformly correct since around 1995, despite the fact that the average temperature is so warm now, that to call it a statistical fluctuation is insane.
The way CO2 warms the atmosphere is by scattering infrared light. This makes a greenhouse, as the sunlight can get in, and the infrared light takes longer to get out. That’s why “global warming” was initially called “the greenhouse effect” when it was first predicted in 1970. The predicted warming wasn’t measurable until the 1990s.
The effect is known, the cause is known, and you can verify the science by yourself on the back of an envelope, you don’t need to trust experts. The denials are simply a form of mental disability.
My defense is that Marx was writing correct things. Marx wasn’t writing about Marxism, he was writing about capitalism. There were no socialist economies in his time, he had no experience. His analysis was of wages and aggregate demand in capitalist economies, it’s now subsumed into mainstream economic thought. His suggested policies in the “Communist Manifesto” are an outgrowth of that, and are not really radical today.
Modern Marxism, in the sense of completely state-controlled economies, begins with Lenin, and really only seriously starts with Stalin and the first five year plan in 1930. What Marx wrote is not relevant to that so much, as Marx was writing a correct analysis of capitalism. He wasn’t writing about socialist economics.
His ideas are now a foundational part of what is called “Keynesianism”, and are mainstream economics. The idea that Marx is writing something controversial is ridiculous, it’s done by people who haven’t read any Marx or any subsequent economics, and think that reading the name on the title page is enough to know what it’s about.
Your government signed you up in 1933.
I don’t believe in magic or miracles. But I do believe there is a limiting endpoint to asymmetric superrationality in large systems, to be precise about it, and I also suspect that this is also what most people mean when they say the words “I believe in God”. So, basically, without the long song and dance, yes.
My first result wasn’t all that important. But it’s pretty ok.
Bernie is winning by raising a lot of money and beating other candidates in the polls.
The sign of a conservative is the hole in the side of his head.
I believe there is a limiting being, conscious in a precise sense of computing outcomes of ethical questions, and self aware in the precise sense of being self-reflexive, i.e. computing about questions involving itself, existing outside of space and time, which is progressively more perfectly manifested over time, through the collective evolution of human societies over time, and also manifested in nature, through the evolution of biology, and therefore in this precise sense sustaining all life, although I wouldn’t use the verb “sustaining”, as it is basically so vague as to be meaningless to me. Unfortunately, “creation of the universe/life” and “sustaining the universe” are even more meaningless to me, as I am a logical positivist. I don’t know what this means, so I can agree with you or disagree, as I feel I am saying nothing either way.
I am sorry it is complicated, but you can find my precise beliefs in public online sources (e.g. http://philosophy.stackexch… ). But since I understood what religious people mean by “God”, I realize that basically all that long song and dance means is “I believe in God”. Sorry, I can’t be more straightforward, because I don’t accept supernatural anything, and I’m a positivist, so most traditional formulations of the question are meaningless to my ears.
I told you my answer is YES! Why do you refuse to accept this? I have a reasonable relationship with Jesus, which is none of your business.
I like Jesus. Please don’t bug me about personal things. I have to explain in long detail, so as not to sell out positivist atheists like Carnap who I ALSO agree with, despite their philosophy being superficially incompatible with religion. My point is that it ISN’T, but this is difficult to explain.
But Jesus is a personal revelation, which comes in private personal communication. It is not something you read about in books exactly, but something which hits you with personal force. So to me, the degree of communication and receptivity to a figure like Jesus is more of a personal question than questions of ethics and abstract questions about God.
I don’t accept that the New Testament is valid history. I accept the personal revelation of Jesus, that Paul had the same revelation, and Peter, and so on, through the saints. But I believe that when you turn it into history, it becomes as much a lie as Solzhenitsyn’s 60 million dead. It’s just a noble lie for a bigger truth, but in my opinion, the truth doesn’t need any help, especially not with an internet around. But this is probably offensive to you. I apologize.
Please, don’t. It just makes the whole thing dirty and physical, contaminated with worldly nonsense. The personal revelation is miracle enough for me and for all the lifetimes in this world, and all others.
Yes. The revelation is sufficient for me. All evidence is superfluous, and therefore a disservice.
I agree with you on this, although not all the writers of the New and Old Testaments did, as some unfortunately were forging history for a noble higher purpose.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. One of his Kennedy’s last executive orders was ending the war and pulling out all advisors. This was also the first order reversed by Johnson. There is a good film about the assassination, the 1973 Dalton Trumbo authored “Executive Action”.
I didn’t say anything about regulation. I said the big banks should be broken up. I didn’t point to F&F as shining lights, I said they weren’t the serious problem, as they are designed to lose money on occasion. You didn’t prove anything at all, you just have the confidence of a viewpoint reinforced by wealthy associates.
The government model is not the only model, I am further left than the leftist liberal or Bernie Sanders, and, personally, I believe in policies that shrink both big business and big government at the same time, reducing entities in size by taxation nudges. That’s too radical for most leftists, who prefer to control a large entity than to create structural reforms that naturally prevent the large entity from forming in the first place.
Keynsian economics does draw a line— the line is when serious inflation starts. That line is nowhere near today, and it isn’t clear it would have been there in the 70s either, if Keynsian policies had been handled more sensibly by Nixon than dumping millions into war spending.
Carter’s monetary policy was Keynesian in theory, but it was austerity in practice. The goal was to eliminate inflation, and Volker did that, and Volker was a Carter appointee. Carter inherited the post-Vietnam inflation and unemployment, and fixed it with very tough policies that led to him losing his job.
I am happy you are a logical positivist, me too. I would ask you to look at the theoretical predictions of Keynesian and Chicago school economics, that’s what empiricism is all about:
Chicago school predicts that a three-fold expansion in money supply leads to a three-fold increase in prices relatively quickly, as the money starts to percolate around the economy.
Keynesian theory predicts that a three-fold expansion of the money supply does very little to inflation, in cases where the money isn’t in the hands of workers, and industrial capacity isn’t stretched.
We had the Obama stimulus in 2009, and all the Chicago school folks predicted a tripling in prices. The Keynesians predicted inflation as usual. I will let you check which prediction is closer to the truth.
The Chicago school predicts job-losses in response to minimum wage increases. This is completely intuitive, and doesn’t need explanation. The Keynesians COUNTERINTUITIVELY predict job gains, after a readjustment, due to increased spending. There have been a dozen or so minimum wage hikes, and the results are uniformly in line with Keyensian predictions. When you make the minimum wage too high, the result is inflation to restore it to equilibrium value, but that has never happened in any economy. Again, the Chicago school is dead wrong, and this is a quantitative test. I will let you look at employment and mean income statistics for Australia, where the minimum wage is the equivalent of $15 American an hour, Sanders preferred minimum wage.
The Chicago school also has a counterintuitive prediction— that reducing taxes can increase government revenue through extra growth. This prediction can be statistically tested, it is completely false regarding growth— the correlation between tax rates and growth is all over the place, but slightly positive, not negative. Further, the reduction of deficits is magical thinking, it is both counterintuitive and wrong.
I agree that the Republicans were slightly more Keynesian than the Democrats back in the 1960s and 1970s, but they didn’t really understand the deep theory behind it. They just went by the nonsense in mainstream economics books, about some kind of magical trade-off between unemployment and inflation. They therefore believed you couldn’t have unemployment and inflation at the same time, and when that happened in the mid to late 70s, they though ‘whoa, this disproved Keynesianism’.
The deep theory behind Keynes is really fundamentally Marxist. If you actually are a former Marxist, you should understand that Marx predicts that wage labor goes to subsistence in an industrialized economy, while Chicago school economists predict that wage labor goes to the mean productivity per employee. I’ll let you check which prediction is more accurate in economies with wage labor and no regulations. There is always unemployment which drives the price of wage-labor to subsistence, regardless of productivity per employee.
The reason unemployment and inflation are in some sense opposite is because of the effect of raising wages. When you raise wages, you can either get closer to equilibrium, in which case you don’t get inflation and instead you get more production. Or else you get inflation to bring you back to equilibrium, when you are already at full employment. But this is dependent on there being enough capital and innovation in the investment sector to create enough new business to absorb the labor. In the 1970s, investment was too difficult, and this was understood by both the left and the right.
The right decided to do something about it. This is what the ‘get the government off our backs’ philosophy was all about— people needed to be free to start new business, and removing regulations and increasing available capital does that, by any means. The means chosen by the Republicans was to allow concentrations of capital by reducing income tax rates, and allowing deregulated corporate mergers, and a laissez-faire policy. This does increase the availability of investment capital, so it is in some sense an appropriate response to a situation where there is no capital for investment. That’s the extent to which I can say anything good about it, it’s a catastrophic policy for workers, and it’s a catastrophic policy for stable economic growth.
These ideas led to the kind of ridiculous pure-capital growth that you saw in the last 40 years, and to mergers and acquisitions that monopolized all American businesses, and destroyed the small business economy.
Your ideas about the USSR are derived from right-wing propaganda. It was not a good system, but the way it acheived 0% unemployment was not through any kind of slave labor. It just made it easy to get a job, and adjusted wage incentives to get the right number of people into the right position. That’s about it.
The situation at zero unemployment was very funny. A factory worker could make more than a manager, because many people were qualified and wanted the manager job, and nobody wanted the factory worker job. This is what a lot of people were grumbling about— the highest paid positions were often just bad jobs that nobody wanted, so they needed a high pay incentive to fill the slots.
This is exactly what is predicted by capitalist theory, paradoxically enough, at zero unemployment. This phenomenon has not been observed outside of communist countries, only because the unemployment has never been zero anywhere else.
There is no comparable free-market example, not in Israel, and not in Switzerland. Unemployment has never been eliminated entirely in non-communist states. So it’s difficult to look at any other example.
Regarding your own personal evolution, it is influenced by your class status and the ideas of those around you. I read a ton of conservative thought, and I briefly rejected the left and became a free-market guy, when I understood the bureaucratic problems in the government and large organizations.
But the solution to both government and big bureaucracy is to reduce both the government and big business, and this is done by non-regulatory policies that provide incentives to distribute power. Incentives for breaking companies up by a progressive corporate income tax, and incentives for worker control by tax breaks. Together with a reasonably high minimum wage, and jobs programs to absorb excess labor, that’s enough to push the capitalist economy to full employment, and at full employment, wages are basically the same is in the USSR, excluding investment income.
Your delusion about the abilities of people are belied by real life. To make your wage go to the mean, you don’t need everyone to be equal, you just need another person to compete with you for the job. That means just a few more people who can do what you are doing, not everybody.
Investment is not really done by the individual investor, but by a cloud of advisors and professionals. The talent or lack thereof of the individual is not so important, as you can always find investment advice when you need it, and conservative investments like index funds are not much worse on average than risky investments.
The way great fortunes are made is not by investment so much, as by monopoly from an IPO, or by investing OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY, like Warren Buffet. Investment is a natural monopoly, because there are fluctuations, so an investor who outperforms the market in one year suddenly becomes a “guru” and attracts more investment. The best investors and mediocre investors are not that different in skill, and typical investors are stupid enough to believe in magical fairy-dust like chart-analysis and other voodoo. It doesn’t mean they lose money due to their false beliefs, because capital in a time of growth tends to grow. Lets just say that investment is not done by scientists.
What is most important for investors is their politics and class. A wealthy person navigating in the investment world MUST adopt the customs and manners of the upper class, as a bohemian would get kicked out of any position in a capitalist economy. Steve Jobs, for example, was kicked out, as the founder of Men’s Wearhouse was kicked out of the company he founded. Entrepreneurs are generally different people than investors, they actually have ideas, and they are sometimes not of the proper social class. So the investors replace them with their own, a fellow like Scully. Someone conservative looking and reassuring, regardless of vision or ability.
I have no real reason to speak to you, as I think if you still accept anything Chicago school as anything other than a self-serving fantasy you are either delusional or haven’t been looking at data. There is no real academic value to any economic theory from the right since Marx, and that’s a long time.
Bernie Sanders’ more moderate gun stance is part of the reason he is so much stronger in the general election as compared to Hillary, and part of the reason why he polls so well with independents. It is reasonable to compromise on guns with common sense restrictions rather than abolition, if the goal is breaking up banks and restoring confidence in public institutions. Consider that many American voters believe that Democrats are conspiring to eliminate guns, using frivolous lawsuits and photo-op-ready mass shootings. I don’t think any voter believes that Sanders would deceive the public to push any policy goal.
Sanders is running with a plausible claim to support the entire bill of rights, and like it or not, the second amendment is there. It is a freedom that is provided. I expect politicians to do the maximum sensible thing within this framework, not to look for dirty tricks to work around it.
If Sanders is elected, it means the turnout is sufficiently motivated to ensure that there will be no fight necessary. Anyone who doesn’t support it will have an army of Bernie supporters getting out the vote to make sure they are out of office next time around.
That’s what they said in Canada, and in England, right before it passed.
I believe it could be a 60/40 landslide, due to the support he gets from disenfranchised voters, but it could also be a 55/45 election, and still get results afterwards. The reason is that there is an unbelievably organized political movement sprouting up to get him elected, and unlike Obama, he doesn’t plan on shelving this movement, but using it for real electoral clout. The movement is here for the long term, not for a single person, but for the issues.
The canvassing, volunteering, fund-raising, and get-out-the-vote operations for Sanders are superb, they are 50 state operations, and they can be mobilized for or against any individual congressional candidate. Such grassroots movements are real political power, and they can persuade a senator or congressman to vote against big-money interests. Congressional leaders are cautious about organized opposition, much more than individual isolated opposition.
All this is the third iteration of the internet-based political organization ideas which started with Dean, progressed through Obama, and now are lining up behind Sanders. The internet folks know they have a new political tool, and it can be used to counteract the gridlock in congress, and provide solid support for policies, as long as they have solidly strong majority public support, as Sanders policies invariably do.
I believe he is moderate on this issue, and I am a very anti-gun person on principle. Republicans vote for Sanders every election, he gets 25% of the Republican vote, and sweeps Independents and Democrats. The reason is that he is sensible where it counts, and Republicans may not agree with him on all issues, but they know they can trust him.
I don’t feel I can trust the leaders of the Democratic party all that much, and I am certain I can’t trust the leaders of the Republican party. I feel one can trust Bernie Sanders not to deceive the public.
Sanders is not counting on a bully pulpit, he is counting on an organization which is sprouting behind him, and dedicated to his issues. The amount of mobilization for get-out-the-vote, fundraising, canvassing, and political action dwarfs what Obama set up in 2008, it’s all online, it’s all ordinary people, and Sanders is committed to using the grassroots to drive the change he wants to see, rather than shelving it and using it only for re-election, as Obama did. This means he can’t let down the base, as he is counting on their continued support, and the base can’t let him down, as they are the only method of getting reforms through.
With an organized movement, Congress members are not going to automatically oppose your suggestions, as you can organize against their re-election. Congress folks take organized opposition seriously, and will compromise with or capitulate to a powerful grassroots movement, in a way that they will not to an isolated president.
I am not in VT, but I think that when a politician gets significant Republican support, people know that he is sincerely supporting small local business against large corporations, and local property owners who are oppressed by regulations. I mean, how else could he do it?
I think it is clear that Sanders listens, just from his outstanding response to BLM, that’s an issue that didn’t come from Vermont. I think the credibility is transferable, because he has delivered on all his campaign promises, including ones that the media said he would break until the day he kept them, like releasing his detailed tax and health care plan, as described in the article, a plan which involves no pandering and is much more sensible than I expected.
Sanders is more electable than Clinton, and Nader would have done fine if he had run in the Democratic primary, although he would probably have lost.
Hillary’s Republican supporters are supporting her because of her hawkish war stances, and her support for big corporate interests. It is clear that Sanders’ Republican support comes from small business which knows that he is on their side.
Sanders would trounce any Republican by wider margins than Clinton would. Nader was a third party.
You underestimate the dislike of Clinton among Republicans. They believe that she manipulated the Benghazi attack for political gain, by claiming a video was responsible, when she knew this was false. At the time, she also advocated for internet censorship because of that video, which has nothing to do with any attack on Benghazi, but rather constitutes an attack on the first amendment, probably insincere, but that’s even worse.
She attacks the second amendment with her support of lawsuits, Sanders has been vocal in protecting the right of small gun-shops owners from lawsuits. She attacks the fourth and fifth amendment by supporting the Patriot act and invasive government warrantless snooping (at least when it was popular). These measures are really, really disturbing to Republicans, especially to those who supported Ron Paul, and really, the bill of rights should not be up for debate at all on either side.
Regarding pandering, Clinton recently talked about UFOs and space aliens. Does that mean she believes aliens came down in flying saucers to visit farmers? Of course not! She is pandering for the UFO believing vote, who are the only people who pay attention to such pronouncements. This kind of thing is just disheartening.
She has claimed credit for killing Bin-Laden, which a lot of Republicans believe is a hoax (I don’t believe it either, and I’m not a Republican). I don’t want any more Bush-Cheney black-flag style nonsense, I want straightforward honest government, and many Republicans are willing to overlook liberalism on social issues for honest government that respects the constitution and doesn’t pander or lie to voters for political gain.
I am not knowingly lying, but correct me if I made a mistake. I’ll erase the false claims.
I didn’t say she was war-mongering, I said she had a more hawkish declared policy which is continuous with previous Republican administrations. An example is the no fly zone in Syria, which is a measure against Russia, not against Isis. It is also her gloating regarding killing Khadaffi, which was rather distasteful. Look, I’ll still vote for her if she’s the nominee, the alternative is calamitous, but boy will I have to hold my nose.
I agree that the demographic data is unavailable. I am (unjustly) inferring the Republican support from interviews with individual Sanders Republicans, I believe those interviews are linked in an article in this comment discussion, linked under another comment of mine. I still think that his support comes from small business and private farmers, not from any big business ties. That’s the only way I can make sense of his popularity among Republicans. I stand by it, although I cannot support it with data, I believe it is true regardless.
I really didn’t edit, I would tell you. You might have misread.
This is actually a really good thing about American politics. The president is very powerful, he gets to appoint people to all sorts of positions. You don’t know what the appointees are going to look like in advance, or how competent they are going to be, it’s a mystery. When the candidates deliver policy papers, you know they didn’t write them by themselves, their staff did, which means you get to see how competent their eventual appointees are.
The platform is not going to become policy. It’s sent to Congress, and then the party does it’s thing at this stage. At the election stage, it’s a test of the individual’s ability to coordinate large numbers of people. It’s not going to become policy as written.
The results are less bureaucratic and more innovative proposals during the primaries and general elections, although on the Republican side right now, all that innovation means is that you are getting completely idiotic stuff, like a 10% flat tax, or elimination of the IRS, and so on, so you know the fellow is appointing boobs.
The 60/40 is assuming Trump is the opposition. I expect more like 55/45 for Cruz or Rubio. If he wins the primary, he’s got a large turnout behind him for sure, and he can win the general big. I’m not counting on it, even a 52/48 doesn’t dent his organization, just as long as he wins, and the organization is still there throughout.
I didn’t deny your claims, I accept your claims. What I did was explain exactly where the collapse-inducing fraud happened. I have no issues with your F&F complaints, bundling was a small part of the problem, but nothing compared to the rating failure and credit-default swap buying.
The changes in the last 20 years are enormous, and far too fast to have anything to do with “little ice age” nonsense (which isn’t even true). The models are not so accurate, they never were, they don’t need to be, because we did the experiment. The prediction of warming is not based on the models, it is based on a simple mechanism— each molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere increases temperature by a certain amount, just by increasing infrared light scattering. The uncertainty is how much water vapor is evaporated in a hotter atmosphere, and we don’t know for sure. But it DOESN’T MATTER, as we know that each molecule of CO2 will warm the world more, and even the current warming is unacceptable, let alone in 50 years where there will be twice as much human CO2.
There is nothing to argue about here. It’s open and shut. It was open and shut in 1970 also, and in 1985 when I first heard about it, and there was no observed warming then, just a future prediction.
Allowing lawsuits by victims against manufacturers and sellers is de-facto abolition. The gun makers would be out of business in a week.
They are underestimating him, the left underestimated Reagan in the same way, and he is infinitely smarter than Reagan and more committed, as a real leftist must be. He will clean the floor with any Republican nominee, perhaps it will be closest against Kaisich.
It’s 30,000 lawsuits a year, against both manufacturer and seller. They wouldn’t survive even if they won all the cases, just based on litigation cost. That’s why even sane gun people opposed the litigation issue.
Look at the comparative polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. Where he had a chance to stump, he cleans the floor with all of them.
Why? I mean, if someone you knew was shot, wouldn’t you sue? I sure as hell would.
This is not a legitimate criticism. That is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of what he said off the cuff when he was first interrupted, before he had a chance to consult his people and make a decision on policy. He just said those things which were part of his platform already, and which were somehow remotely relevant, he didn’t suddenly make up new policy on the spot (nor should he).
But nothing in his then current platform was enough, and he knew it. So as soon as the issue was pointed out, he respectfully addressed the issue within a week or two, without pandering, sincerely, by a direct hire of the other Sanders, the BLM leader, and by a comprehensive racial justice and policing platform, which became a mainstay of his campaign. He got Cornel West on board, despite his previous concern that Sanders is insufficiently committed to our Palestinian brothers and sisters (in West’s words).
I am sorry if I am not a good propagandist, but I am not used to it. I think you should judge his considered actions, not your initial perception of them. A good president is one who assembles a good team, and listens to concerns in a timely way, and this is exactly what he did.
Sanders is not continuous with Obama, he is closer to a third party candidate. I don’t think anyone would confuse him with a third Obama term.
I don’t think that’s true, given what the Republican party has become. People are smarter now, they have an internet.
It was a better response than any Democratic candidate. I mean Clinton just pandered on this, no serious hire, no serious platform. O’Malley had to retract nonsense like “all lives matter” (something Bernie never said). I am not comparing to St. Peter or to an omniscient being, I’m comparing to other politicians. He did the right thing on something that wasn’t on his list of issues when he started, and you don’t find that kind of responsiveness usually. Not at all.
This is an illusion due to gerrymandering. The Republican party has declined in size, and it consists of an old, nearly entirely white, population. A large fraction of the youngest and best educated Americans blame them for staging 9/11. Any Republican down with 9/11 truth can only support candidates like Paul, Ventura, or Trump, which I believe explains some of Trump’s popularity.
He’s not based on “turning out the vote” in any traditional sense, at least not any pre-existing vote, that doesn’t work. He’s based on honesty, and on a different set of policies which are extremely popular. People who support his policies and demeanor often simply do not vote, or often register as independent, either from the right or the left. He ran as an independent until now for a reason.
What that means is that his voter coalition is highly motivated, and includes a ton of independents, some Republicans, and people who do not normally vote. That’s similar to Reagan siphoning off disillusioned Democrats in the 80s, and it’s the way in which political transformations happen— once you have a grassroots base, you can get things done. You can’t get anything done otherwise, except by lying to constituents.
This tax is a substitute for insurance premiums, and saves people money.
To pass this plan, you need a grassroots organization like the one Bernie Sanders is building throughout the country. The people who support him don’t do so because they think his glasses are cool, they support his policies, and they can work against the reelection of Republicans who oppose by primarying other Republicans who support the policies, or by voting in Democrats.
Reagan’s policies passed by revolution. Sanders is doing the same.
And why is that? Because he had a popular (and big-money funded) revolt against bureaucracies and big regulations behind him. Democrats only supported him because they would lose their seat otherwise.
That’s not how it works. When you have a grassroots organization with funding and motivation, you can target the opposition one by one if they oppose your policies. Any Republican who opposes will be primaried or challenged, and will face a strong fundraising and organizational advantage, as he will be against a national juggernaut. Sanders is winning by assembling this coalition, he got zero media attention to get to where he got now, it was all internet grassroots.
The way Reagan got Democrats behind his policies is by demonstrating that they would get pilloried if they opposed them. Sanders is in a position to do the same.
This is because Obama did not use his grassroots organization for opposing the opposition, but only to get himself elected. The policies were done in the usual negotiated fasion, without any repercussions for opposition. Bernie Sanders has made it a central pledge of his campaign that he will not repeat that mistake. Also his organization is quite a bit better than Obama’s, because we’ve had 8 years to improve internet organizing, and the base is much bigger now than 8 years ago.
The same reason it was different in Vermont. He knows how to put pressure on major parties, because he had to. The internet allows him to do it nationally, rather than in one state.
Yes, at least in this election cycle. Vermont is where his governing program philosophy was born.
Single payer failed in Vermont because millions of uninsured would have flooded Vermont.
Dean and Obama were the internet revolution. Dean failed only because he didn’t understand television, and he was the first. Sanders is the third and biggest internet driven candidate, and Internet 3.0 (Sanders) is bigger than Internet 1.0 (Dean) or Internet 2.0 (Obama).
If it sucks for you, go purchase additional private insurance. It doesn’t suck in any other country it is implemented in, it is cheaper and better.
I know. So what. He wasn’t a sellout in 2004. People have to sell out to keep from drowning. Bernie Sanders didn’t sell out and didn’t drown, even when there was no internet.
Government regulation is not the reason for monopoly. Lack of government anti-trust action is. There is no regulation which led to the internet cable consolidation, or to wireless monopolies.
There is a difference to NRA voters. Lawsuits by gunshot victims against manufacturers and sellers are a de-facto ban, as they justifiably believe the lawsuits would put the whole industry out of business. Background checks and limits on magazines and clips are annoying for them, but tolerable.
The cost was higher because uninsured people would flood Vermont from other states. Bernie Sanders doesn’t pander— when he releases a plan, it is serious and the numbers add up.
That’s what a Republican would propose– a plan which doesn’t add up. Transaction taxes can’t give you universal health care, the order of magnitude is wrong. That’s why Sanders didn’t propose such a pandering plan, but a real plan with serious numbers.
If insurance companies could compete across state lines, the consolidation would get worse. You can open up your own Facebook tommorrow, that’s not the reason for consolidation. Consolidation is actively encouraged by investors, because it increases their profits without having to increase service quality or efficiency.
Regulation in insurance is unfortunately necessary, because insurance is actuarial, and you could turn it into a Ponzi scheme in an unregulated market.
Farming is not only done by large corporations. It is also done by private small farmers, more efficiently.
They didn’t say the same thing about airlines. Airlines can’t be a Ponzi scheme, because you see the airplane take you somewhere. Carter deregulated Airlines in 1978. Carter sued AT&T to break it up in 1979, Clinton introduced deregulation measures for competition in the telecommunication sector, which led to small ISPs and tiny phone companies, and reduced prices. The Republicans do not enforce pro-competition policy anymore, they haven’t for decades. Sanders is the one pushing for pro-competition measures, including breaking up the banks.
Except for the plan in the article you are commenting on, and in every other industrialized nation on Earth.
He paid a pittance of a salary, which was likely far below minimum wage.
You can’t tax all transactions to generate revenue for HEALTH CARE, because health care is enormous, like 20% of the economy or something. If you tax transactions that much, they just won’t happen, or will happen illegally, or through tricks, like exchanging private contracts instead of exchanging money and stock. The proper level of friction to add to a financial transaction is just the one that eliminates microtrading, and which generates just enough revenue to make public colleges tuition free. This is the responsible plan Sanders has proposed.
When trading is done responsibly, it helps get capital to growing business, and helps innovation. Bernie Sanders is not getting rid of investment, he wants to make it competitive and not dangerous to the whole economy.
That’s mostly true, but not entirely true. There is still venture capital, which is useful for new tech business, there is computerized stock trading which made the stock market more efficient, as opposed to microtrading, which is a form of fraud. It’s hard to regulate wall-street because investment is such a natural monopoly. I think Sanders has a sensible approach, and nobody else even comes close.
None of his taxes have this property. To pay for health care, he uses a sensibly progressive combination of income and payroll taxes.
Ok, maybe, I was a toddler, but whatever people said, the Democrat in office didn’t listen. The Democrats passed sensible pro-market deregulation, when the Republicans say “deregulation” they just mean “let enormous companies do whatever they want and consolidate to monopolies”. The Airline deregulation involved infrastructure regulation, to ensure fair-competition in terminal pricing, just like communication deregulation. This Democratic model is the right path.
It depends on the TYPE of deregulation. Breaking up banks means smaller banks that lead to less regulation. Breaking up big companies means small companies that need less regulation. You need pro-competitive regulation, not Republican deregulation, which means letting businesses become monopolies without intervention.
The way they compete for business is by picking which pool to insure, and where to deny coverage, and how much they can increase copays and deductibles in a way that is invisible to consumers until they get sick. There is no real advantage to a health insurance market of this sort, that’s why the US has terrible health care. There is a good market for additional insurance for elective procedures in France, and for sure that would exist in the US just the same as in France.
I have been to Europe and used national health care, and it is the best thing in the world. That’s why they look at the US and shake their heads.
There are really only a handful of credit card companies, nearly all under the duopoly umbrella of Visa and Mastercard, and they made a deal in the mid 90s. I remember getting a letter saying the rate would rise to 20% (from around 12%) sometime in the mid to late 90s, after the consolidation of credit. Every card went to 20% at the same time, it was clear collusion, but nobody stepped in to sue. I closed my account, and I haven’t had a credit card since.
You are being an apologist for a far greater private sector failure. But you aren’t serious, you are a propagandist, so I can’t discuss.
Look up party enrollment statistics, don’t make me do it. I did it a while ago.
Let them try to smear him on it. They can’t, they already try. He is a very principled guy. He has managed to overcome his Democratic Socialist label in the most conservative era in American history. His health care plan is not disruptive relative to the ACA, it would be more disruptive compared to the situation before ACA, and similar plans passed in every other industrialized country in the 1940s and 1950s.
A huge majority (like 80%) of Americans are skeptical of one or another aspect of the official story, and a large minority (including many Republicans) believes the attack was entirely staged by people inside the Bush administration for their own interest. I am one of those people, I am personally certain, because of the drills of that day. The Vice President was in charge of a set of simultaneous once-in-a-lifetime military drills on that morning, drills simulating simultaneous hijacking on radar screens, simulating crashing airplanes into buildings, live-fly exercizes involving many air-force planes, which can easily be manipulated to stage the attack, and are inexplicable otherwise. I am not sure that anyone in the Bush administration other than the Vice President knew anything about it, before or after, but I’m sure they suspected. Maybe they knew.
I read Marx in depth for understanding economics, but I’m not a Marxist. I am not a liberal exactly, as I understand and sympathize with Republican pressure for less regulation. I believe in small worker-owned business, not
national chains and large companies like in the US or USSR. I guess that makes me more of an anarchist-socialist, like Chomsky. I’m much further left than Sanders, he looks like Eisenhower plus Truman to me. I wrote
something on Quora (which seems to have been deleted to my consternation), here’s a copy of the more important second half:
https://www.reddit.com/r/De…
(found the original through the link:
https://www.quora.com/What-…
)
And Medicare supplements for everyone else, for elective procedures, as is popular in France.
And also a winner with economists, with high-info voters, and with wall street stock traders.
Under the proposed Clinton version of the law, a person can sue if the gun ended up in the hands of a criminal. It has nothing to do with craftsmanship and quality control, that stuff is already covered with other laws, and isn’t much of an issue with guns, which are not complicated devices, they aren’t difficult to make right.
If you could sue for bad driving, they all would be. I hope that will happen someday, I hate private cars. They kill people and road subsidies prevent me from having good public transportation outside of NYC. But I’m not crazy enough to run on that platform.
They’re in gerrymandered districts, which means they are not completely safe, they can be toppled by large opposition turnout in low-turnout midterm years. They can also be primaried.
If you’re talking about Sandy Hook, they freaked out, because it looked like yet another false flag.
Not a Republican, but, as painful as it is for me to say, it was a false flag (more accurately, a hoax, as nobody died). Most second amendment voters aren’t gun nuts, they are willing to compromise.
The Sandy Hook shooting changed me from a gun opponent to a gun rights supporter overnight. I can’t abide government hoaxes, even when they come from my side.
It’s NOT EASY, far from it! It requires a large motivated and readily mobilized national organization, which can pour financing, voter-turnout, and attention to individual states. But this is what Sanders is building, so it is POSSIBLE, just barely, but it requires a heck of a lot of work. When you improve Democratic and Sanders-supporting independent turnout by 50% in an off-year (when turnout is normally 40%, that means raising it to 60% among opponents), by mailing them regarding the importance of the election, by a serious get-out-the-vote operation, you can defeat a Republican in a supposedly safe district who normally has a safe 60% Republican majority. When you pour in television money for ads regarding issue vote, you can shift public opinion. This is why congressional candidates don’t like organized opposition, even minority opposition, like the AARP or NRA. Majority opposition, like a nationwide winning Sanders organization, is a non-negligible force, even in traditionally red districts.
You need to work hard for progress, nobody is going to hand it to you on a plate. But when something becomes possible, one must work for it, and vote for it, and organize for it, not settle for an intolerable status-quo. I would recommend you go to Sanders’ website and get involved. I am not Bernie Sanders, and I don’t speak for him, I speak for myself, I am not a moderate. His positions are more popular and moderate than mine.
Whether you think I am sane or not (and I assure you I am totally sane, I check by doing mathematics), there are millions of people who think just like me, and we vote.
Abhorrence of government black-ops and secrecy, whether in this country or abroad, whether from the left or the right, is a number one priority for the truther vote, and the truther vote is a contributor to the rise of outsider candidates. Truthers can support Paul or Trump or Sanders, because all three radiate honesty by having stood by extremely unpopular positions (although of course, Sanders aside, most of these positions are terribly misguided). They can’t easily support Clinton, Cruz, or Bush III, who will say whatever is necessary, including covering up government crime.
To give you an example which is not controversial outside the US, In both the Democratic and Republican debate, you heard about “Assad using poison gas”, and “Obama standing down”, but you never hear why Obama stood down, despite the red-line regarding chemical weapons. The chemical attack was convincingly shown by international observers to have come from the rebels, not from Assad. It was a false-flag. Not that Assad is a good guy, but that atrocity was designed by the rebels, perhaps by the US, purposefully to drag the US into the war. You can’t allow such shenanigans, they need to be publicly exposed.
As a leftist truther, I painfully toyed with supporting Paul, despite the gold-standard economic nonsense, and even for a day with Trump, only because he squarely blamed Bush II for 9/11 (although not in the usual way). I hope I don’t need to say that I don’t support Trump’s racist xenophobic nonsense, but honesty in government is simply that important right now. Truthers exist, and Sanders can win their vote, because he is honest. They are often Republicans, as the issue cuts squarely and evenly across party lines.
I didn’t say the people will come, I don’t think that. I said Sanders supporters need to work hard to mobilize everyone. But Sanders supporters have a chance with a lot of people who are more disgruntled than you can ever imagine. The murder of 3000 citizens by the US itself is beyond intolerable, it is apocalyptic levels of corruption, and even well-meaning policy-pushing hoaxes like Sandy Hook are not acceptable in any way, and must be exposed.
No, man, only yours.
You can’t have consumer goods (or even very efficient military goods) without small organizations. The USSR was top-down, and lacked small organizations at all. This affected everything the in the economy. You need a bottom up economy, like you need a bottom up political system.
A family on minimum wage will not be paying anything, the taxes are progressive. But once you have a jobs program, free college, and the minimum wage is increased, very few will be paying minimum wage, because unemployment will be too low for employers to hire at minimum wage, as happened in the past.
An honest president can rein these folks in by hanging one of them, and appointing entirely new people to the CIA.
If they lean Trump, they should go for Sanders, and you too, if you sincerely care about honesty in government. I am from NY also, and there is a lot of Sanders support in the city, despite Clinton representing NY. Upstate is harder, because it is dirt poor and has more ridiculous racial hangups. But Sanders will bring money in, simply by his minimum wage policy, let alone manufacturing and trade policy, and those racial hangups need to be retired for good. Upstate was a wealthy region when there was manufacturing, it can be wealthy again.
He’s smart enough to mug reality back, and win.
A “useful idiot” is someone who clings to Chicago School economics when it fails with every objective prediction.
There are plenty of worker-run companies in the US— every family owned and run small business, every independent contractor, that’s a worker owned business in diguise. Sanders has courageously added to his platform modest incentives toward encouraging more worker run business. Although it is not the main plank, it is his only vestigial socialist measure, and it makes sense. Worker run small business is extremely innovative and more competitive than top-down impositions like franchises, or billionaire funded pet ventures.
Microsoft was run as a hippie commune when it was a tiny company with a dozen employees, as was Apple. This was also the last period when they did anything worthwhile.
There are anti-state socialists, like Bukharin or Chomsky. Bernie is no longer a socialist in any way but self-adopted title, but he was always skeptical of state power.
More of a social-democrat, or anarchist-leaning socialist, like nearly all modern socialists. It’s not a slur. He’s not in favor of any of the statist measures of recent years, like black-ops, unlimited surveillance, destruction of habeus corpus, second-amandment violations, or the obscene torture and rendition policy. All but gun-rights violation are Republican measures, they constitute a step toward real fascism, and not all have been revesed by Democrats. If you are an anti-statist, you should look in Sanders direction. He doesn’t increase government power unduly in any of his measures, and he reduces concentrations of private power, like Teddy Roosevelt, by trust-busting.
The incentive to production is competition, and communism removes all competition by making firms state-owned monopolies. Socialists favor small integrated business, and enact pro-copetition measures, when they know what they are doing.
Communism didn’t end in destitution, it ended in a prison-state without innovation. Materially, it wasn’t as bad as the third world. It still isn’t what anyone advocates today.
Hitler and Mussolini’s fascism immitated socialist movements, because that was the way to win support in the 1930s. They didn’t resemble them any more than that— they took the worst statist aspects of the USSR, removed state ownership and management, and removed all the talk about equality and brotherhood.
The two statists visions fought it out in WWII, and the fascists lost. Ultimately statist visions are not condusive to a free society. Bernie Sanders is simply not a statist.
Chavez won by democratic elections, because he doubled the Venezuelan economy, and lifted millions of Venezuelans out of poverty and deep-poverty, the kind you can’t imagine. Poverty rates in Venezuela were 60% and rising when he took office, with deep poverty at 25%. Please don’t wait for the US to end up like that before you grow up.
The second rise of Ortega is as an elected leader, not as a revolutionary, and it is driven by similar social problems. These same social problems are starting to divide the US into an oligarchy and terrible poverty, side by side.
The old Bolsheviks believed the political repression would die with Stalin. It did. The problems of the USSR were from lack of innovation, not from problems of economic calculation. The lack of innovation didn’t become evident until the 1960s, when they tried to build consumer goods.
The resolution to this problem is economic freedom to start small business, but this is not the same thing as letting your economy be dominated by large firms and enormous chains.
The Soviet Union wanted to nationalize industry, not revitalize American small business.
The empty shelves started in the late 1980s, ironically enough, due to free-market reforms (not that these are bad). Once Gorbachev introduced profitability as a goal rather than production quotas, the factories would make more money by exploiting shortages to raise prices, because they were all gigantic monopolies. Before the 80s, in the 60s and 70s, there simply weren’t serious shortages in the USSR. It was just that all the goods were bad copies of much more innovative and flashy Western models.
The famine in China was a collectivization famine, which also happened in the USSR in 1932. It’s atrocious, but it has nothing to do with the history of the USSR post Stalin. I am not an advocate of the system, but you need to understand it’s problems honestly, not make ones up, because these problems happen in the West also, just to a lesser extent. The problems are concentrations of monopoly power, which happens also in a free market economy. In the USSR, everything was a state monopoly.
Soviet goods were terrible, but they were usually available, after a long wait. I am not a communist, I am just telling you what happened. You need to talk to Russians, not right-wing media, to learn about the USSR.
What people called “socialism” in the USSR was what people called “communism” elsewhere. What people called “communism” in the USSR is what we would call “utopia”. The goal of the communists was to get to communism by producing as much as possible so that there would be general plenty, and their production was through state-owned monopolies.
The problems of the USSR were the concentration of state power and monopoly power, leading to unbelievable corruption, and terrible goods.
Socialists never advocated Marxism-Leninism, but a move toward social services, and a shift toward more decentralized ownership of industry. Social democrats even drop the decentralized ownership and just give social services their attention. Bernie Sanders is just a social Democrat, with preference for small worker owned business.
There was some of that, but it wasn’t because they loved fascism so much, it was because they hated statist solutions. The non-statist solution to the problems of capitalism has never been spelled out. But Keynesianism has gone half-way with some state-measures designed to mitigate the worst problem— the drop in demand from too-low worker pay.
Actually, the Khmer Rouge rode to power on that platform.
I didn’t contradict myself. I agree with you that the 1932 famine was a direct result of the state taking over EXISTING means of farming production, by collectivizing farms. That’s because the farmers revolted, justifiably, and didn’t want to give up their farms!
That had nothing to do with industry, where the USSR built everything from scratch, according to the first two five year plans. The heavy industry, which was done by enormous firms, was completely competitive with the West, where it was also done by enormous firms. The USSR had no problems keeping up in the energy sector, in steel production, in military parity, in the nuclear industry. Basically, they were competitive in any industry where the West is dominated by large firms.
They were NOT competitive anywhere the West was dominated by small firms. Soviet farms were competitive with factory farms, but not with small farmers who supply breeds, seeds, and various services. Soviet consumer goods were comparable to one supplier, like GE, not to the totality of all suppliers.
The Soviet famine lasted one year, it was not in any way deliberate, although it was exploited to set up collective farms quickly and get a lot labor into cities for the simultaneous industrialization of the first five year plan. There was no other famine, unless you mean from the civil war period, when the new state didn’t have an economic policy at all, at least no coherent one (it jumped from policy to policy, war communism, inflating money away, NEP, etc).
The lines in the Soviet union had nothing to do with Reagan, he did nothing to the Soviets one way or another, except make them paranoid about him starting nuclear war.
I believe you are an economist. I can see you are not a good one.
Your clients are getting cheated, as you are not a good economist. You don’t know very much of the internals of Soviet history. I don’t blame you, it was hard to find details, you had to scrounge around. I am having a very good day, thanks!
Onerous regulation on small business is definitely not a Sanders goal, as otherwise he wound’t win Republican support in Vermont.
I think we ARE just talking stock options, so long as the employees get to own them, or the stock-buying public, and they aren’t issued to a handful of cronies at the top of the pyramid. Or manipulated top-down like IPO prices are.
Sanders is not a statist, and he does not now, nor has he ever, advocated state ownership of industry. His only notion of collective control is incentive to distributed ownership of companies, and greater say for workers in their won workplace, something Reagan also advocated, and the Bushes, with the “ownership society”.
Bernie Sanders’ policies do not expand government unduly. He is not looking to nationalize industries, or place them under government control. He is seeking to improve worker incomes, reduce unemployment, and break up anti-competitive businesses.
He’s not an idiot— his vision for Democratic Socialism simply doesn’t involve state-ownership of anything, but more competitive worker owned business. Every private business which is one-person or family owned is worker-owned by default, there are many worker-owned businesses, and making more worker owned business used to be a Republican goal, before they were bought out.
I don’t think Bernie Sanders is naive enough to think Walmart can be worker owned, given it’s structure. But I think he knows that it will lose any competitive edge in a market with a fair minimum wage and good fair-practice policies, that prevent it from bankrupting all competition by dumping and anti-competitive contracts with suppliers.
That means that once minimum wage is $15, and workers aren’t forced to work at WalMart, they have other options, Walmart will be at a competitive disadvantage, and it can be replaced again with the same network of healthy American small businesses that it displaced,mostly family owned or worker owned. All this without state coercion or heavy handed intervention, just with modest tax incentives. These kinds of small businesses areinnovative and efficient, they don’t need to be imposed from on high.
The other option that you missed is that maybe there is a non-governmental path toward worker owned business. It’s not all “government” or “gigantic monopolies”. There is also small business,and worker managed business in the world, and these are not monopolistic monstrosities owned by oligarchs, nor are they state controlled.
Many people who consider themselves socialist leaning, and who don’t usually enthusaistically support candidates, support Sanders. Two examples are Cornel West and Noam Chomsky, but I think it’s very many.
The socialists who dislike Sanders are Marxist-Leninists, or else believe in state regulations to take over business entirely, or they disbelieve in small business. That’s not Sanders, and not many socialists are like this today. Sanders is not even a socialist, so far he’s only a social-Democrat, but you know, he’s still young, he has time to change.
Hillary supported the coup in Honduras, she voted for the Patriot act and suggested speech restrictions, she proposes a no-fly zone in Syria, she will not do anything to break up banks, and she promises lackluster anti-trust enforcement, more like Obama than like the AT&T suit and Airline deregulation under Carter, or like the 1996 telecommunication act under Bill Clinton. Pro-competition policy is essential, wireless and internet are completely monopolized.
I mean, I’ll still vote for her, considering the alternative, but she is a status quo candidate at a time when American small business is literally dying. More businesses close in America today than open up, and that means a future where every store is a chain, and every employee is a slave.
You may think what you like, but I am not typing for your benefit. Many people read comments, and Sanders needs the conservative vote too.
FDR, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Hitler, Eisenhower, Nixon, and every postwar leader you can name outside of communist states all used Keynes. There is such a thing as being objectively right in economics, because you predict numbers like inflation rate and unemployment, and you either get these right, or wrong. Keynes is really ripping off Marx, the theory of declining demand and too-low worker pay driven by unemployment is already found in Capital I. Unlike Marx, Keynes tells you how to fix it while staying in Capitalism. But it’s the same issue.
The Venezuelan economy doubled under Chavez, and the rates of poverty and deep poverty were cut by more than half.
You don’t know how to read, do you. Look at Venezuelan GDP and poverty statistics, there’s a search engine on the top of your browser, I suggest you use it.
Poverty was at 60% when Chavez took office, and deep poverty at 25%. He cut the poverty rate by more than half over his time in office. He also had 5% average annual growth the whole time, and presided over a net 100% net increase in Venezuelan GDP. That means the Venezuelan economy doubled in size, for an ignoramus.
There’s a reason he was voted into office so many times. You need to look at the actual economic statistics, not listen to your media, which is stupid propaganda.
I am explaining why it failed, and exactly how. No conservative understands why it failed, as when they see the details of the USSR, they scratch their heads and say “why didn’t it work”? Because, once you get into the guts of how the USSR was run, the mechanisms are the same as any mega-corporation. They had the same incentive pay, the same division of labor, the same economic calculation, the same bureaucracy.
It didn’t work because it didn’t have small business, and therefore no innovation. It also had no competition, and therefore giant firms were stuck in time. Competition and fine-grained division of power are required, and that lesson is transferrable to a Capitalist economy.
Chavez presided over the longest period of uninterrupted growth in Venezuela. Instead of criticizing ignorantly, repeating your brain-dead media, go and look at the growth rate and poverty rate in Venezuela during his tenure. You have a search bar. Use it.
Because that’s what it is in Australia, and they have better incomes and standard of living there. A living wage cuts unemployment because it puts more money in worker’s pockets. It’s good for small business, because they get more customers (although they don’t see it that way), and it is good for small business because it cuts into the ability of chain stores to displace them through slave wages.
The minimum wage needs to be raised, and raised again, and raised again, and raised again, until it results in inflation, and then you stop. That’s how you get closest to maximum economic activity.
You can’t double GDP based on oil alone, a large part must be the demand generated by redistributive measures, and the incentives for new cooperative industry. Oil revenue is for foreign reserves to buy import products, but Venezuela has local production too. You also can’t cut poverty by half and deep poverty by more than half without lifting a whole lot of people out of the most desperate situation of any people on Earth. I am only looking at his economic statistics, they’re excellent by any standard.
He didn’t threaten anyone in any election. The Venezuelan press was entirely free, and hated him, and reported every slip of the tongue of his. When he lost a referendum on additional presidential powers narrowly, he accepted the results. He never had a problem getting re-elected, and he respected the electoral process. That is a first for his radical brand of socialist.
I respect the will of the Venezuelan electorate. If 60% of the people supported him, he must have been doing something to improve their lives. In the most recent election, he party lost seats, and I have heard it attributed to corruption.
I don’t like it when people second-guess some other country’s electorate. When people vote in a free and fair election, you shouldn’t go around denying their vote. The only people who used the military in Venezuela were those who plotted the coup against Chavez, and who engaged in false-flag shootings to stir the public against him. It didn’t work there, and it shouldn’t work here.
I am not sure if I would have voted for Chavez, but I’m not in Venezuela. I trust their electorate made the correct decision.
This is what is difficult about economics. Money is not a conserved quantity, and it is possible to raise everyone’s living standard by simply increasing production of goods and services. This is what happens in an economy out of equilibrium, when you bring it closer to equilibrium. The biggest non-equlibrium effect in an industrial economy is the collapse of worker wages to subsistence, due to competition with the unemployed. Minimum wage increases and maximum working hours regulation counteract this tendency, until the demand is high enough and the unemployment low enough that it is not necessary anymore.
What that means is that when raising the minimum wage doesn’t result in inflation, it is only increasing production. It’s not simple and intuitive, all the simple intuitive pictures you paint are wrong. It’s Keynesian. This is a counterintuitive Keynesian theoretical prediction that is verified in the real world whenever minimum wage goes up.
The people already making $13,$15,$17 have some bargaining power, and would be making $25,$29,$33. Their pay will go up, and if there is no inflation, that means production caught up with the new purchasing, and every worker just got richer. If not, there will be a doubling of prices, and everyone will be the same as before, except half the investment capital will disappear. That’s what happens when you stimulate too much.
This phenomenon is what makes monetary policy under capitalism pure magic. There is no law of conservation of purchases, at least not when production is not maximum, i.e. before inflation starts. A rise in minimum wage, when the wage is extremely low, only improves the situation for everyone. The trick is to do it just until inflation kicks in. Right now, monetary policy is only going to banks, and doesn’t improve purchasing except indirectly, by getting more workers hired in businesses started by loans. A minimum wage increase gets money into worker pockets directly.
The magic line where inflation starts is the productivity of the average low-pay employee. The productivity is currently much more than $15/hour, which means that the low-cost labor generates enormous profits for those at the top of gigantic chains employing this labor. The destruction of small business by chains is partly a result of these too low minimum wages, which end up subsidizing large chains, to the detriment of the whole economy.
Ok, you speak Spanish, I don’t. I’ll trust your judgement regarding this. But the way I remember the first referendum, it had expanded executive powers, and the expanded powers were rejected as dictatorial by the electorate, and never enacted.
It is very difficult for me to say anything against Chavez given the opposition’s behavior. They staged false flags to get him out, they shot their own supporters and blamed it on the military. The coup was supported by the G.W. Bush administration, who had just staged a false flag in the US. The day after the coup, military divisions were setting up death squads for Chavez followers, they would have been murdered Pinochet style if the coup had been successful.
I also can’t oppose someone who won elections, nationalized the oil industry, eradiced illiteracy, and reduced deep poverty, even if his policies were totally wrong regarding industry and agriculture, which I can believe given the track record of his type of socialists regarding this stuff. Deep poverty means 25% are living in garbage dumps in total destitution, on the brink of starvation, and whatever happens to industry, this is a national emergency for any country, except 75% of the people don’t see it that way, because that 25% is invisible to them, the way homeless people are invisible to you.
The opposition is in power now, they can fix whatever mistakes were made. That’s what Democracy is for.
You do it gradually, and look out for signs of inflation. It’s not that hard, but it is a little tricky. It has been done before, this is all old stuff that is well understood.
Jobs will get displaced, gradually, obviously. But the biggest effect should be reducing the margin of chains, where the employees are often making minimum wage. Chains have additional advantages, and these need to be dealt with separately.
With a high minimum wage and very low unemployment, chains go out of business, as nobody wants to work for them, and better off customers aren’t forced to shop there.
They will definitely come out of profits. There is no alternative for the company. Alan’s pay naturally doubles along with Ben, as Alan has more negotiating power than Ben.
That’s what happens when minimum wage rises result in inflation, which is why you wait until inflation starts to complain.
I don’t “love” Chavez, I am telling you his economic record is reasonable. I don’t particularly like his policies. I respect the will of the Venezuelan electorate. They voted his party out recently and the opposition can fix the mistakes. That’s what Democracy is about.
Yeah, everyone knows. Except the USSR was not theoretical, it was a real place and it was full of hard financial incentives. There were incentives for managers to produce more, incentives for workers to complete degrees and move to better jobs, incentives for workers to produce more on the job. The pay in the USSR wasn’t equal, and people competed like crazy to get ahead.
The incentive structure of the USSR mirrors that of a large firm. The failure of the USSR is also a failure of large firms. The small business that led the West to victory is disappearing today in the West, and it needs to be revitalized.
True, but you must try again, and again, until you succeed.
If you want to argue with a communist, go and find one. I am not a good representative of their point of view, as I am not one.
Wages for everyone will not double, wages at the lowest income will double. Wages for middle income workers will rise a little bit, and wages for very high income top managers at the top of corporate chains will go down drastically. The income for small business owners should be overall stable, although some will gain (those who serve working people who will have more money to spend), and some will lose (yacht sellers, mansion builders), it will change things around, as usual for an economy.
The companies will not have to double their labor costs overnight, the wages will rise slowly, and the extra spending will offset it. It is much harder for WalMart than for a mon-and-pop store to deal with the minimum wage increase. The experiment has already done, the Australian minimum wage is $15, and their median income is $60,000, which is half again as much as the median US income, despite the US having a higher per-capita GDP than Australia.
The worst case scenario is inflation kicking in, which I guarantee you will not happen. Inflation should kick in at about $25 an hour, when the productivity rise is matched by the minimum wage rise. I can’t play devil’s advocate, because this prediction is more or less an immutable fact, it is as certain as anything about economics can be.
Business folks often have a myopic view of minimum wage policy, because they see their labor costs, but not the overall macro spending and how it benefits them.
They wouldn’t go out of business right away, it will be store closings at first, then regional failure, then bankruptcy, over decades. Walmart, Best Buy, ShopRite. Their margins over small business consist of two things— their average labor cost is lower, because small business has a bunch of owners who make serious money, while nearly all their employees are making minimum wage. The other major thing is that their supply cost is also lower, because they use their size for leverage. This can be fixed by fair-pricing regulation to allow small business the same prices as big business.
They have additional political advantages: in zoning, which Sanders can’t do anything about, but your local community can, in advertizement budgets, which the public needs to resist, to preserve the health of the small business economy.
These chains also have the ability to dump products below cost to put competitors out of business, which is a violation of the Sherman act. Amazon has done this for years to put local booksellers out of business, but it is standard practice. It is also illegal, but nobody ever sues.
The minimum wage is part of a full-employment policy. Nobody likes to work for a chain, so their equilibrium wage would necessarily have to be far higher than at a comparable small business, just to attract labor. It isn’t now. And that’s only because unemployment is high. At low unemployment, they wouldn’t find labor to work for them unless they raised wages and prices to the point that they were not competitive.
The transformation of the American economy away from small privately owned business to enormous chains and multinationals is not ancient history, it’s recent history. And it needs to be reversed to keep the economic diversity and progress alive. Large chains and enormous corporations are more Soviet than American, they are monstrosities.
Thanks. this is the first time I learned something from a comment discussion regarding Sanders. I’ll keep it in mind, and lay off Chavez until I get it straight.
I will point out that oil prices fluctuated over 50 years, and Venezuelan GDP per capita fluctuated too, except for Chavez, where it spikes like crazy and stays stable at double the amount it was before. It’s still double now, despite the drop in oil prices, and the attendant problems.
Because their labor costs will increase, and they can be sued for dumping, so they’ll stop doing that. When competition is fair, the customers will shop at their competitors, as the prices will be slightly higher at WalMart. They have administrative overhead that small business doesn’t, and inefficiencies and diminished nimbleness due to size.
All their advantage on prices comes either from the low-wages of employees, effectively the government is subsidizing WalMart with food-stamps and section 8, and from anti-competitive practices, like special prices from distributors and local dumping to put the competitors out of business one by one. These practices are odious, and usually illegal.
It won’t hurt to have a consumer boycott as well. Keeping small business healthy is a form of ecology which everyone can practice every time they shop.
Sanders is a pragmatist on ALL issues. He runs on a platform each of whose planks have an overwhelming majority support among the public. You missed that, because the media only reports the support among the elite.
You forget that Sanders was right in the 80s, which is why he is so popular today. The Reagan administration supplied arms and aid to the Contras opposing Ortega, illegally, and sometimes through turning a blind-eye to drug-running by South American cartels that are today destroying the region. They also helped defeat Ortega in the 80s, by advising the opposition on ads and research.
Three decades later, Ortega was reelected president of an empoverished Nicaragua. Ortega is still president today, although he is now a Christian socialist rather than a revolutionary. During the same three decades, Reagan’s ideological heirs bankrupted the US and shredded the US constitution. Could Reagan be elected president today?
Sanders has consistently protected Vermont small business, and wins Republican support for it. His vision of the economic future involves many small businesses opening, rather than closing, and his attacks are on the large corporations which make it next to impossible to operate small business in the current US system. His vision of Democratic Socialism means some expansion of social services, a thriving small business sector, and greater worker ownership in larger industry. This used to be the standard vision on the Republican side.
In the 80s, the Soviets did not exactly threaten the US with nuclear annihilation, they had a clear “no first strike” policy. The US didn’t have this policy, and Ronald Reagan UNINTENTIONALLY threatened the Soviets with nuclear annihilation— not because he was serious about starting war, but through misstatements, so as to gain political points for “looking strong”. These misstatments included VP George Bush musing about surviving limited nuclear war, others talking about tactical nuclear war limited to the battlefield, calling the Soviets an “evil empire” (which led to panic in Andropov’s USSR that war was imminent), and deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe which could reach Moscow and destroy it in less than 10 minutes. The Soviet early-warning system couldn’t deal with such a short time, so it led to hair-trigger response chains, and risked accidental war. The greatest crisis came in 1983, with the Korean air shoot down (which the Soviets believed was an American covert operation), and the “Able Danger” military drill, simulating starting nuclear war at the peak of Soviet paranoia. Does this, in hindsight, constitute a responsible nuclear was policy?
Reagan cut it out in 1984, after he saw the made for TV movie “The Day After”. But before that point, his administration harkened back to Curtis LeMay and Douglas McArthur, their absurd nuclear war stances, and Barry Goldwater’s similarly ridiculous stance. Nuclear war is never an option, I hope I don’t have to say that today.
Sanders supported peace, not communism. He supported self-determination, not coups. Now that the Soviets are gone, you can see what kind of opponent the US faced in the communist block— a weak and ineffectual one, as everyone on the left knew. You can judge whether Sanders’ position was the more sensible, or Reagan’s.
Bernie Sanders is not a communist, he has never advocated the government taking over industry, nor is he opposed to private ownership of capital, and true communists simply can’t support him because of this.
Sanders was completely honest, Obama pandered.
Bernie doesn’t need help from the top, but more help from the bottom. That’s me and you, talking to people, you know, stuff like that.
All of Sanders’ policies are supported by more than 50% of voters, which means that they ALL are politically feasable, when the voters have a movement which hold politicians accountable. This is the point Sanders is making.
If any single one of his positions are considered politically infeasable, it implies a small number of wealthy people are able to impose policy against the will of the majority of Americans.
TC is on the Bourgeoise left, which has very little relation to the actual left, it’s the bought out faction. Cornel West and Noam Chomsky are on the actual left.
In the 19th and early 20th century, W.E.B DuBois was the real left, and Booker T. Washington was the bought out left.
Couldn’t some of these objectives be met with class action lawsuits? Calling this stuff “reparations for slavery” is a joke, this is not some ancestral crime, it’s compensation for real damages to living people.
The real problem is home discrimination, since homes are the main source of capital for most Americans. Systematically, denying African Americans access to homes is a crime of marginalization, similar to denying Jews the right to own land, as happened in Europe. It means people are permanently marginalized, as Jews were in Europe.
I think a class action lawsuit is warranted for that. Housing discrimination is hugely damaging to the individual, as it is the main source of access to capital.
Why not? Anyone who can be shown to participate in redlining would be held liable for serious damages, and the class is any African American who tried to buy a home and was denied. Similarly, why can’t you sue the government for discrimination? I would think it is easier.
You’re right, but that doesn’t mean you can’t win a lawsuit. The Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in 1954, when the situation was much worse.
Scalia, Thomas and Alito are completely nuts, but Roberts and Kennedy can be swayed to support damages. Besides, it would only go the SC on Appeal, and with a case like this, they probably wouldn’t hear it, as the notions of “damages” and the illegality of private-sector discrimination are pretty clear and old established law by now.
Sanders’ policies don’t “reach for the stars”. All of them are supported by a majority of Americans, often a large majority. That means he hasn’t proposed anything outlandish.
These policies only seem to be reaching far because the Congress is completely out of touch with the public, and only listens to wealthy donors. That’s what a popular movement is for, to hold Congress accountable.
The only policy you can pass by popular movement are those policies that a majority supports.
I don’t have faith, I think 1 in 4 such suits will be successful. But there’s going to be a heck of a lot of lawsuits, and it’s a better chance than through Congress or any president. Courts are designed to hear the complaints of a class, and listen to details, Congress and the Presidency are political, and listen to ignorant majorities.
Cornel West is the most principled humanities academic left in the US, practically the only one willing to speak for the working class, rather than for the elite that top university professors have recently become a part of. He was attacked at his job by Sumner (before West became a superstar), and left Harvard in disgust for Princeton. Killer Mike is a really good rapper. I wouldn’t say he’s the best in the world, but he’s more than decent. His political sense is superb, however, unlike other rappers, who sold out.
That’s because us Bernie Bots pay for our leader’s campaign. We pull his strings, not corporate donors. We feel for him the same way that the top corporate bosses feel about their candidate, but unlike them, we are actually ordinary Americans.
This is not about collective guilt at all— if you didn’t deny an African American person a home sale, you aren’t guilty. It’s about specific damages due to specific discriminatory acts, that have the effect of keeping a class of people from accumulating capital.
This is not about slavery, pay attention. It’s about discrimination in prices, and in home sales.
Coates has an agenda that I don’t share. He wants to make it seem that the way to fight against racism is to ignore class barriers and focus only on racial discrimination in applying class barriers. This is ultimately because he really isn’t a Democratic Socialist, he’s an aspiring member of the American Black elite. So he wants to make sure that the barriers of race are overcome, without overcoming the barriers of class. That way, a Black elite is allowed to have commensurate power along with the White elite. It’s the Republican version of anti-racism— a rainbow coalition of billionaires telling you what to do.
The goal for Sanders is to reduce the powers of elites altogether, by progressive taxation, by reducing umemployment, by increasing educational opportunity, and by encouraging small business and decentralized industries, rather than consolidation. Such policies are always opposed by members of any elite, whether black or white, but they have always been good for the economy.
The Black elite faces a further challenge in selling their vision, because every African American person is aware of systemic racial discrimination, and therefore is automatically also aware of class discrimination, in a way that many Americans of European ancestry are not. So Coates has a harder sell for his vision of anti-discrimination measures that don’t touch class, and that involves more “white guilt”, and less specific redress to class barriers.
A good rapper, means knowing how to write and deliver raps, which is the most difficult and complex poetry on Earth, as the meter is tied to the melody, and the scansion must be polyrhythmic relative to the beat (that’s what makes it rap). I still can’t write it well, despite years of trying.
Mr. Coates is not an academic writer, he doesn’t understand the academic history in any deep way. West is an academic writer, and it shows. He is a buffoon in the same way Albert Einstein was a buffoon.
That’s right! But Coates is ignoring that, for the purpose of advancing his narrative, and to be fair to him, so have the courts ignored those laws recently, as the practices are still ongoing.
We’re not looking for a top dom for our S&M party. We’re looking for a competent president.
I don’t think she meant slander, I think they are stories about his eccentricities (of which I have a few as well).
He listened to those “girls”, and responded appropriately with measures, because when he was a “boy” he protested just like they did, in the Civil Rights Movement.
What Coates doesn’t understand is that Sanders IS a pragmatist. His policies are actually feasible, regardless of the composition of Congress, because they have majority support.
The measure of a politician’s strength is not how well he shuts up the weak and powerless, but how well he confronts the strong.
I admire his response to BLM, it is a model for all politicians to learn from. You need to listen to constituents with a grievance.
On the other hand, when he is standing up to big money donors, he shows he has bigger cojones than anyone since Teddy Roosevelt.
No, no. When you give a weak person a voice, you make Democracy more inclusive. Power is not a zero sum game, it only becomes that in an oligarchy, when all power flows to the top. Democracy requires that all the voices can be heard, and people will make up their mind which ones to accept and which to reject. Sanders doesn’t aim to silence others, he aims to win on correct policy.
I’m 42, little buddy.
I have in the past worked for years in the private sector, at a startup, and I also worked for different periods at three different Universities, indirectly funded by the government (I’m a scientist by training). I have done enough with my life that if I died tomorrow I would be satisfied.
Guys like Sanders hold their views because their views are more or less objectively correct. You are right that these views are not compatible with the culture of business in America. That is because business in America is a class based race, you need to show how domineering you are to win, because it requires jockying for power in a completely different way than building a coalition for government.
Business deals are done in competition, government is a monopoly. Business can impose conditions on workers top-down, they have no real say. Our government is not a dictatorship, it has to listen.
Part of listening is taking protest seriously, and considering what changes can be made to accomodate real grievance. Unlike other candidates, Sanders politely listens to all the sides, and makes his decisions transparently. This is the only kind of government I am willing to support.
Regarding business, when you are talking about small business, like a start up, or a family owned firm, or a private contractor, the decisions are also made in the same way. The only time you get complete top-down control is when it’s a disconnected egomaniacal billionaire on top, setting up a Soviet-style bureaucracy to run a gigantic firm. This is about as innovative and efficient as the Soviet Union, and I’d personally like to see a little bit less of that. How about you?
There are two major flavors of socialism— one where the state owns all business and industry, the Soviet model, and this was never highly favored by many American socialists, due to the terrible experience in the USSR. The other flavor asks for workers to be owners in their own industry, to increase productivity by ownership.
This second form of socialism doesn’t change property rights, and is implicit in calls to protect small business, independent private contractors, and small family farms, which are worker owned by default, as the majority of workers in these businesses are owners too. This is not only consistent with American values, it was a Republican concern for many decades to preserve small business ownership and entrepreneurship, before corporate sponsorship shifted the party to care only about big business. The decline of American small business in recent decades is catastrophic, and it goes hand in hand with the mergers in banking, and in retail, in movie houses, in grocery stores, and everything else.
Bernie Sanders has not advocated any kind of national control of industry, but he does call for greater worker say in the workplace, and for more small business activity, protected from predatory monopoly. That’s as far as his socialism goes in his platform, and it’s very meager for any real socialist. Basically, he’s asking for small business, and greater support for worker cooperatives, and less emphasis on large heirarchical business, which is the opposite of the Soviet model of an economy.
It’s the kind of socialism you conservatives have nothing to worry about, and in fact, you should (and long ago did) support it.
More like “change it back” to the FDR economic doctrine and the small-business economy it was founded on. In the current US, more businesses close than open every year, and if left uncorrected, you will have every store a chain store, and every employee a slave.
He does not advocate nationalization of industry. He advocates protecting small business from predatory big business by leveling the playing field, breaking up banks, and introducing measures to make the US economy safe and competitive like universal health-care and breaking up the big banks. The type of socialism radical Americans like Noam Chomsky talk about involve a gradual voluntary transition to worker owned businesses, like small business and corporations with publicly owned stock, not state owned monopolies like in the USSR.
His father came to the US at 17, and Bernie is born in Brooklyn. Give it a rest.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t advocate any sort of price controls. That was Nixon.
That was Europe between 700 AD and 1400AD. It had problems, including the stifling of banking and the inability to create industrial ventures.
I said FDR because I meant Keynesianism. Obviously FDR did many things I would not agree with. It is not true that in the 1930s American desperately needed bargains. What they desperately needed was a job.
I have a newsflash for you— the folks at the top of industry did not earn wealth. They make wealth by issuing stock options to themselves, not through work, but through sitting on top of a board of directors. They don’t have to do much of anything except go to the right school and be reasonably effective at office politics to get to that position. When they get there, they often kick out the true entrepreneurs,like Steve Jobs, or the fellow who founded Men’s Wearhouse.
They also make crazy amounts of money through IPO whenever wall-street smells that they might have a monopoly. This is how Bezos, Gates and that Facebook fellow made their billions, and that Musk guy. These are anti-competitive practices, not healthy market profits. The way these corporations stay competitive is by buying out the competition, not by innovation, at least, not by successful innovation (they try and try, but fail and fail).
Sanders does not advocate handouts. He advocates making an economy where labor gets a fair wage, because anyone can find a job, because unemployment is low enough to be nonexistent. He does that with pro-employment policies like a higher minimum wage (this decreases unemployment, paradoxically to a non-Keynesian), subsidized college, and an infrastructure jobs program. He lets the market take care of the rest.
There is nothing there that takes from productive members of society, it is rather equalizing the playing field so that workers are not ripped off by having to charge ridiculously low prices for their labor, in relation to their productivity.
Without a job, you are on the street. You don’t need a bargain, you need a soup kitchen.
You should talk to a real communist sometime. I’ll introduce you, if you like. Or you can go to Reddit, and find the “debate a communist page”. Ask them what they think of Sanders. They don’t like him at all. Some socialist leaning folks, like Chomsky and West, do like him, but these people never advocated a powerful central government.
You should have done it with Bush II. That was a real threat to your liberty. He also wasn’t fairly elected, so you had an excuse. But you did nothing then, and watched as 3000 Americans were murdered, and all your liberties were eroded one by one. Sanders supports the entire bill of rights, unlike your team.
I’m 42, and well out of grad school. I am also not contradicting myself. Americans needed jobs, and dumping by big business breaks the back of small business, and it is not the way to get there.
If they are opposed, Sanders’ volunteer army will pick off the opposition one by one during the midterms, registering as Republicans to primary them if necessary. We will only need to pick off two before the rest get the message.
He was born in Brooklyn, and last I checked, NY became a state in 1776. He may be old, but he’s not that old.
It was a mix of Christians and Marxists, they have a lot in common. On the Christian side were abolitionist newspapermen writing about the bleeding Kansas events, on the Marxist side (meaning, these people read and agreed with Karl Marx, who wrote about this in the American press) were the original radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens. They were, of course, not Marxists in the sense of Lenin, as Lenin wasn’t born yet.
As for Islam, it is completely irrelevant to the modern world. Religion is for personal growth, not for politics.
Indian socialists were strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, and have little in common with American socialists. The ideology that Sanders espouses is just social Democracy, it has little to do with actual socialism. His only socialist leaning plank is some modest incentives for worker owned industry.
The Christians and the Marxists were on the same side, and people easily switch from one to the other, because the social justice message is shared. For an example of a former Marxist, now a Christian, look at Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who was reelected president as Christian, after losing as a Marxist in the 80s.
Do you prefer Stalin over Hinduism?
Stalin was a tin-pot dictator who constructed a top-down economy run like a single corporation, for an entire nation of 200 million people. His decisions were ultimately disasterous, and ruined the good name of socialism to the point where even to this day, modest efforts to reduce unemployment and provide health care can be attacked with hysterical responses along the lines of “you’re going to starve millions of people”. There is nothing good about Stalin. He ran the USSR like Steve Jobs ran Apple, except with concentration camps.
Islam, on the other hand, brought you Sufi poetry.
Sanders doesn’t really have a vision of any actual socialism, he just advocates some modest reforms. I just want to say that, because what I say is not endorsed by Bernie Sanders.
But other people do have a vision of a non-governmental version of socialism. The libertarian socialist idea does not involve government compulsion, it’s about transitioning to businesses which are mostly owned by their workers, or else publically traded. Personally, I don’t accept government anything. If people don’t voluntarily do it, it’s not worth doing.
The alternate vision of socialism, worker owned businesses, was very successful in the US, when most businesses were worker owned small businesses, and most farms were small private plots. You just didn’t call it socialism, because you didn’t see that the alternative is gigantic corporations controlling every aspect of your life. In the 1910s, Teddy Roosevelt busted up the trusts to restore American business, in the 1940s, FDR introduced unionization and Keynsianism, and now Sanders is introducing universal health care, and a new round of trust-busting to go after the big banks.
Sanders has advocated constitutional government, and supports the entire bill of rights. None of his platform violates property rights any more than progressive taxation does, and his vision of socialism is distributed ownership, not dictatorial imposition. It has little to do with government, but with individuals making their own choices.
For others who advocate much more radical visions along the same lines, again, with little or no government involvement, there’s Noam Chomsky, and fellow Vermonter Murray Bookchin. Sanders is just a social Democrat, these folks, are actual anarchists (libertarian socialists).
It opposes Christianity because it aims to replace it. The social justice aims are similar. It’s hard to see, because Christianity is very wedded to all sorts of metaphysical things which Marxism rejects as bunk, but the practical policies have a lot of overlap (although they are not the same).
It should be pointed out that Christianity required a major reformation to allow for Banking, Calvin was a banker as well as a Protestant reformer.
You need to split hairs very finely, because that determines whether government gets bigger or smaller. The goal of socialism is to decentralize economic power. That doesn’t require centralizing government power, it can decentralize both government and economy at the same time, although this is extremely tricky to do.
This is anarchist thought, and I doubt it is something Sanders is into, but if you are going to argue philosophy, you should be aware of it.
The point is that it is irrelevant, as Sanders is just not a commie. He’s a Social Democrat, but earlier in his life, perhaps he was a Democratic socialist.
There is no enemy, just manufactured media threats. Islam turned secular more than 100 years ago. You just didn’t notice, because you’ve never seen Syria in the 80s and 90s. It was a modern secular nation, and it wasn’t even so poor.
Talking about Syrians following in the footsteps of Muhammad today is like talking about the Knights Templar taking over Britain. It’s so anachronistic, I can’t believe even you can buy it. These people are like the Khmer Rouge. They are only interested in power, not ideology. Their clerics are fake Madrassa students, their membership is teenagers with guns.
That’s true. But the effect of salvation of the soul is that you see the other as part of the body of Christ, and you form a community mindful of the dignity of all members. This transformation leads to social change, it is what allowed the slavery abolition of the 2nd-7th century, which completed peacefully in Europe, albeit at a glacial pace. Spartacus and Bar-Giora tried violent revolt, and that didn’t go anywhere.
The Marxists take the community and brotherhood, and remove the spiritual message, substituting a brotherhood of labor. The spiritual message is similar, although it works best if they are combined tactfully, respecting science and spirituality, and economics at the same time. The Marxist violent revolt didn’t go anywhere either, it just led to tyranny.
I tried to find some, but failed. If you believe these people exist, go find one. I genuinely failed, after asking a bunch of Muslims. If it’s really a mass movement, I want to meet someone who holds these views, so I can talk to them, and see what their philosophy really is, independent of the media. If I can’t talk to any, I think it’s just a concoction of the press.
When I looked around, I could find Stalinists, Maoists, PLO supporters, Trotskyites, one Basque terrorist, and I even saw a Weather Underground member once at a movie theater screening a film about that crazy group (even though there are only 10 of these people in the whole world, he stood up during the Q&A session, and you could recognize him in the movie). I simply can’t find a fundamentalist Muslim of that sort anywhere in real life, just a few pious Muslims here and there, who have no interest in any sort of Caliphate, let alone in Paris or New York.
Legislation also ended the 12 hour workday.
Except only they claim that it is endorsed, nobody else claims that nonsense. I can’t find a real-life person who supports ISIS, and when people in Lebanon were polled, the support for ISIS was at literally 0%. That means NOBODY supports it in a region which is still free, in a sample of 1000 people. You don’t get results like that with a real popular movement, I mean, even Hitler gets nonzero support today in Germany, although it’s teeny tiny. It’s a bunch of externally financed nutcases who took over some oil fields, and are soon going to die.
These states are not democracies, and Saudi Arabia is a barbaric outlier in the Muslim world. If they weren’t ruled by a monarchy, they wouldn’t do anything remotely like what they do. Huge Muslim majorities even in Saudi Arabia oppose the government.
I agree there are wealthy donors who support ISIS, and governments, but there is no way a sensible citizen could support this nonsense. It’s insane, it’s barbaric, and contrary to the law and custom in Syria and Iraq for hundreds of years. The people who work for ISIS do so under financial compulsion, and would not vote for ISIS in a free election. They are just like the Khmer Rouge, who also rode to power on barbaric threats of force, in another region destabilized by the US, in this case, due to the Vietnam war.
People who call themselves communists believe the government should own all the industry and business in a country. Classic Socialists don’t believe that, they believe in greater worker protections and partial takeover of industry. Anarchic socialists believe in worker ownership of industry, while Social Democrats just believe in expanded social services. Bernie Sanders is ultimately just a Social Democrat, and that puts him square inside the Democratic party. His only socialist leaning plank is some modest incentives to encourage more worker owned business.
The same consolidation of business, and corruption in the private sector, happened in the 1890s in the gilded age, and in the 1920s in the second gilded age. Back then, there was no government to speak of.
Government doesn’t enable monopoly, it is the only thing that can prevent it. I personally would like to see a structural remedy, and I favor a graduated corporate income tax so that big business would be taxed at a higher rate than small business. This would make a financial incentive for firms to split, and involves no meddlesome bureaucratic regulation.
Your idea that government causes the monopolization is simply false. Standard Oil, AT&T, all those had to be broken up by government to restore competition.
Sanders doesn’t advocate any policies that unduly increase government, aside from universal health-care, which is a tried and successful policy in other nations. He is very conservative in his approach, because he needs majority support. I am not so cautious, because I am just spouting off online.
Not a single trained professional has travelled to Syria to join ISIS. It’s ALL teenage boys who fell for internet propaganda, put up insincerely, just like the flat-Earth revival. I mean it. Look at the folks who go, and look at them trying to run away.
You are witnessing divine intervention, because the success of Sanders’ campaign in this corporate financed election climate is a miracle.
The most conservative constitutionalist running is Sanders. He has opposed the Patriot act, and all the unconstitutional invasions of privacy, and even supports the right to sell and own guns within reason, pushing back against his own party.
You don’t have private ownership of your healthcare anymore, you have corporate ownership of your healthcare. Health is a special industry where there is a real benefit in public ownership, with private add-ons. The French system is probably the best. Without this, US business is less competitive, as the health costs are a nightmare for small business. It makes sense to have universal health care taken care of by the state, although it also makes sense to have a competitive system within the state system, as in France, rather than a bureaucratic system as in England.
I don’t believe in communism, I believe in Keynesianism and in healthy small business. That’s why I support Sanders.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. The individual rights are not only oppressed by government, they are also oppressed by big business, and in the collusion of big business and government. The only way to preserve your privacy rights against invasions from government AND big business is to prioritize small business, and distributed ownership, because that is your only defense against corporate tyranny.
There is more than one tyranny in the world, and it is possible to oppose private tyranny at the same time as one opposes government tyranny.
ISIS exists, it just isn’t Syrian, nor is it Muslim. It’s an organization of power-seeking terrorists financed by wealthy outsiders and governments, and with zero real public support.
All the nations in the region are secular except for Iran and Saudi Arabia, and neither religious government is popular with the citizens. The most religious nation is Egypt, which also had a secular state, due to Nasser.
I really don’t think so. He still supports the right to sell guns, despite this costing him in the primary, although he dances and wiggles around it, to get into the middle of his party, to win the election.
His opposition to the Patriot act came with opposition to torture and rendition, to violations of Habeus corpus, with opposition to the arrest and imprisonment of Americans and “terrorists” without charges. He has supported the first amendment from those who have intimidated journalists, and sold access to the highest bidder, or even from those in his own party who wish to censor Islamic propaganda. He has supported the fourth and fifth amendment, while everyone else is calling for expanded police powers and militarized takeovers of cities, like the Boston lockdown.
All the worst violations of the deepest constitutional principles have come from your side in the past 15 years, and these are not a joke, they were a serious attempt at a police state. The Democrats are the only party today that respects the constitution, although they have a problem with the second amendment, and they pander on security by trading liberty away to Republicans. Bernie Sanders doesn’t compromise on liberty. He supports the ENTIRE constitution as written.
Ok, ok. You aren’t talking about Marxist-Leninists. You are talking about anachist-socialists. When people say “communists” they mean Marxists-Leninists usually, and it is good not to confuse the conversation by choosing another definition.
The only candidate who is not a “NWO enabler” in this election cycle is Sanders. Ron Paul isn’t running this time around, and his son is more compliant.
I asked with a Pakistani prof of Middle Eastern studies, with some Palestinians, with a person of Iranian origin, and with various leftists. These people believe there are radical Muslims “out there”, they just don’t know any, nor do they know anyone who knows one, and they only get media reports about the ideology. I can’t tell what people think from media, I need a real person to talk to.
Because they don’t believe they exist, or if they exist, they are just as “other” to them as they are to you, so there is nothing they can do to oppose them.
I don’t have many Muslim friends, just a handful, and they aren’t well connected. I had to ask better connected acquaintances when I got a chance.
In the Bible, it says you have to burn in a ditch anyone who sleeps with both a woman and her mother, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in the graduate. This isn’t the 7th century, and nobody lives like that today. When you see an organization using this kind of terror, it is not a religious organization, but an organization seeking power by means other than winning friends and influencing people.
Your previous POTUS put people in camps and tortured them. He stigmatized and maligned a minority, in this case Muslims. He invaded countries with trumped up excuses and false flags. That’s directly from the pages of the Nazi party. He created a massive government bureaucracy of homeland security and NSA, whose only purpose is to take away freedom. He got rid of archaic provisions like habeus corpus.
While Obama hasn’t reversed all of this, he reversed some of it. Sanders voted against all of it, and promises to reverse it all.
I don’t know what you mean by “the state”, but Marxist Leninists want a top-down plan, created by a small-room of leaders, like Gosplan, and imposed by an army of bureaucrats on the rest of industry by audit. That’s not exactly opposition to the state. That’s not to mention the security apparatus required to keep people from “misusing state resources” when all business is owned by the state.
It is best if you stick to the terminology “communism = USSR”, “socialism = Yugoslavia”, “Democratic socialism = Scandinavia” and “Social Democracy = England, France, Germany”, because that’s what everyone else uses. If you have a new idea, you should describe it instead of misusing old labels.
Bernie supports the first amendment in it’s ENTIRETY. He has opposed the attempts by Clinton to censor internet speech, and he has even courageously opposed the oppressive leftist speech-codes on campuses indirectly, in his common sense call for rapes to be reported to police. He really believes in free speech, as everyone in the 1960s free-speech movement did.
The so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration Acts” are simply attempts to weaken equal-protection laws that prevent private businesses from discriminating against people.
Bernie Sanders is very zealous in protecting individual property rights, as he did in Vermont, because this is how you protect individual farmers, and individual small businesses. He is more skeptical only when that idea is applied to gigantic monopolistic corporations, who acquire their property by economic force.
If by “yes” you mean “no”, then you are correct!
That’s true in principle, but I think that the best way to achieve worker control of business is to encourage small business. The next best way is to have public ownership of stock, without stock-options to insiders, so that the public can trade corporate ownership. The third best way is to encourage workers to build privately owned worker-owned business. All of these require a government that protects property rights, not a government that takes them away.
The “useful idiot” is one who clings to supply side economics when it fails in every objective prediction.
I don’t support the government intervening in private decisions. When you decide to serve the public, you don’t decide who to serve— this was established in the 1960s Civil Rights era. But if the florists wishes to not cater a gay wedding, they can just say “I’m busy”, nobody forces you to do anything.
That’s a “yes” to plutocracy.
Limiting bullet shape and clip size does not infringe on your right to own arms, it’s just makes it “well regulated”.
If you’re against stealth and subversion, you should have nothing against Sanders, because he tells you exactly what he believes, and uses the label which is most offensive to you.
You are talking about a small business capitalism that no longer exists, and which Sanders is fighting to restore.
Nobody is advocating communism on the left, they haven’t since 1956.
RIght. I don’t see examples of the latter, only people attempting to do the former.
Different KIND of communism. Please, when I say “communism”, I don’t mean “utopia”, I mean the type of socialism which existed in real life in the USSR.
The phrase they used is “well regulated”, because you shouldn’t be allowed to buy a nuclear missile. Sanders is the only Democrat who doesn’t want to stop you from buying a gun legally.
Ok, how about this one— Karl Marx said: “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
I agree. Sanders supports the freedom, and opposes the supply-side.
Ok, then just imagine that when I say “communism” and everyone else on this page says “communism”, that’s their pet term for “state capitalism”, and instead of saying “communism” you should say “anarcho syndicalism”. It just gets the terminology on the same page. Nobody is going to stop calling Marxist-Leninist system “communism”, it was well established usage outside of the Eastern block.
The Scandinavian countries have a long history, and in the 1960s and 1970s their left leadership looked to Yugoslavia’s model for establishing a decentralized worker-controlled industry. They have stronger capitalism today, but they also leaned toward real socialism at one point.
The terminology I use might be misleading, but I’m not speaking to a crowd of Marxist-Leninists or anarcho-communists, I’m talking to American conservatives. When you speak to people, you speak in their language, not in your own preferred pet terminology. The terminology is not that important, it’s the ideas and policies that count.
In most small businesses, the farmer owns the farm, the shop-keeper owns the store, the family owns the restaurant. They may hire 2 employees, but the majority of people working in the business are owners. This is still true in many small businesses and private farms. Even when the workers are not owners, they know the owner personally, and have a large say in their conditions, and the results are a responsive workplace, nearly the same as if they were owners. This dynamic is why Americans hold the concept of inalienable property rights so dear. It’s not to protect oligarchs. It’s to protect their farm and business.
As business gets larger and consolidates the ratio of owners to employees gets smaller and smaller, until in modern corporations, it is effectively zero. When that happens, the employees have no say in their workplace, and they become effective slaves to a distant corporate headquarters.
That’s why we have the publicly traded corporation and encourage public stock, and allow workers to unionize and demand better wages and conditions, so that the same relations that hold in small business will be restored in big business. The problem is that today this public stock is used to enrich board members, not create distributed ownership, unions are corrupted or nonexistant, and the corporate leadership is taking over the economy, and destroying the small business economy.
Then Sanders is not a true socialist, because he does support the freedom.
Is that because he’s Jewish? I can assure you that there are highly capitalist Jews out there.
It’s about 50/50 unfortunately, but every comment helps, so I keep on writing.
Nobody is forcing the small business owner to give his business to his employees. The small business which is worker owned will just have to compete against the small business which is top-down, and we’ll see which business is more efficient. You don’t impose change from the top by force, you let people decide what kind of society they want to have from the bottom.
The point of progressive corporate income tax is to reduce the centralization of power, to ensure that there is an incentive for a split, not just for a merger. The market likes mergers for anti-competitive reasons. When you have a monopoly like Amazon or Facebook, you can make outrageous profits which are impossible when there is competition.
The fall of prices with Standard Oil is due to technology advances which are accomplished by R&D in house, and when that R&D is shared with a large number of companies contractually, a distributed model can do better than a centralized model.
The failure of the Soviet Union was a failure of centralization, and the US is centralizing in the same way. You need to restore distributed ownership and American small business, before it disappears and your entire economy is large firms ruled by oligarchs. If you want to see how that turns out, look at post-Soviet Russia. The state just handed off its monopolies to well-connected individuals, producing oligarchy from communism overnight. The US is just producing that oligarchy more slowly, without passing through communism.
Sanders is a bigger constitutionalist than Cruz, as he opposed the Patriot act, opposes the warrantless evesdropping, opposes the detention of US citizens without habeus corpus protection, opposes the militarization of police, and opposes the creation of secret prisons where people are locked away and tortured. Cruz believes in the erosion of liberty in the name of a faceless manipulated war on terror.
Sanders supports the entire bill of rights, including, courageously, the second amendment. Nobody on the Republican side has endorsed the bill of rights since G.W. Bush has been president. So Beck, I would recommend that you vote for Sanders, even if Cruz were the nominee, as you are right that honesty and constitutional principles are important. Cruz is not very honest at all, just a typical politician, which is only slightly more honest than Trump.
To sweeten the deal, I believe Sanders has promised to begin a set of long overdue prosecutions of figures from the last decade who have gotten away with murder.
You obviously never tried to write a rap, it’s the string theory of poetry. Typical song lyrics and typical poetry are about equally difficult: e.g. “You say Hello, I say Goodbye”. The words come on the beat, and they come slowly.
Rap is fiendish at the next level, because the delivery is polyrhythmic, it comes on off-beats, so you can’t just make it up, unless you want to sound like a wannabe. You need to sit down and compose, for hours and days, and the meter is tied to the melody, like a song, except the syllables come three times as fast as in a standard song. It’s like bebop in words.
Here’s an example (Sonny Shotz, Neon Hooligans):
Cold blooded in a broken world, shoe strings that I’m tripping on love, but girl, I got religion in a notebook, money in a duffle, trying to keep me out of scuffles but I love the bloody knuckles. I’m fighting with the midnight wolf again, just pretty ass girls and some hooligans.
You don’t mean nothing, no you don’t mean nothing, no you don’t mean nothing to us. Me and all my own reflections in this mirror flexing like it feels so good on my own. Never trust a girl out of Brooklyn, strutting in the morning, waking up to break some necks. Get your get your get your eyes on a good girl, coming up from nothing, struggling to get a check
Pretty lady wassup. I’m on the come up, I bring the sun up and take the moon down, and look at you now. You got your internship in the city. Celine bags in the cab with your girlies, early thirties, you woke up early, extra early to keep the rat race going, income flowing, but you don’t know God and you like your flaws. I know, I see you hustle in the summer time.
Neon lights in the whip, kicked you out the crib. Vamanos in the two door, the coupe is pluto. I’m in the booth like its Judo, I kick it brutal. I see the life in you, hyphenate the right in you, until there’s nothing wrong with the pretty ugly side of you. Hi, do you wanna ride? do you wanna ride? I’m on the come up, I bring the sun up and take the moon down, and look at you now, and look at you.
That level of poetry goes into the first MINUTE of this song, it’s delivered in 70 seconds. That amount of material would supply lyrics for six ordinary Beatles or Beach Boys songs, and the imagery and word-flow makes for a top-notch stand-alone poem, ignoring the delivery. This is the typical high-level artistry of the craft. You can see Keny Arkana do it in French, there are folks doing it in Arabic, whatever. It’s the hardest poetry/song-lyrics, but it’s worth it.
Those smaller margins are succeptible to organizational strength— a 55/45 majority can be overcome with a 25% increase in Democratic turnout. Even in safe Republican districts, an organized opposition can primary a challenger and switch sides and register as Republicans to vote out an opponent. Sanders positions are often popular with Republicans too, just less so. Organized opposition is the bugaboo of any politician, they don’t want a national organization that opposes them. Unlike Sanders, they are cowards, that’s how they were bought out in the first place.
God in the modern religious tradition is not supernatural. It’s more like an abstract mind teleologically formed at the endpoint of evolution. This is something a Catholic advocated, with the “Omega point” business, but it’s really at the heart of religion since around 0AD, that’s what differentiates modern religion from superstition. The superstitions of the ancient world died when modern religion took over, as the modern religions all renounced soothsaying, spells, and all that other nonsense, not so much because they are the work of the devil, as some would have it, but because, paraphrasing Maimonides, that nonsense just doesn’t work.
Every politician only brings incremental progress. It’s just a matter of how much. Bernie is more.
Sanders also equivocates on tax rates, on foreign policy, on guns, on Israel and the middle East, and every other controversial topic. He doesn’t equivocate only when the American public is nearly unanimous.
There is no reason to equivocate on a policy that 80% of Americans support, unless you have donations from the remaining 20%.
Economic analysis of politics is always useful, but it is systematically ignored by the mainstream press, so one does have to push harder to get this analysis in the media. Sure, it isn’t everything in life, there is racism that goes beyond economics, there is sexism that isn’t manifested in lower wages, and there are international conflicts that are not driven entirely by the distribution of money and resources. It’s just that these are very few, and so one should focus on the main issue first. It’s a question of getting your priorities straight.
The other “radical” proposals all have at least 51% support among Americans, and are usually at 80%. That’s what makes them different. But Sanders is strong on racial issues as well, just not on reparations, which are not even a good idea, as a payoff doesn’t fix racism or access to capital.
The core of his platform is POPULAR proposals that are ignored due to big money interests dominating politics. He hasn’t taken a single unpopular stance.
He bends to the political winds coming from the majority of the people, not to the political winds coming from big money donors. Bending to the political winds from the majority of the people is called “listening to your constituents” and “being a sensible politician”. Bending to the political winds from big money donors is called “corruption”.
Racial injustice is usually better addressed by the courts, as they can make assessment of damages while listening to the concerns of a minority with a grievance, while the president and congress are beholden to majorities who usually don’t know anything about specific instances of discrimination.
They aren’t thin, they are focused. You can’t campaign on every issue, because each strong stance loses you support. HIs “biggie” stances are already very damaging in the mainstream media, so he has used up his political capital on the most important issues, and he doesn’t have much left. You need to consider whether his focus is on the most important issues or whether he missed the mark. You also need to consider whether his judgement and history on other issues means that he is going to do the right thing regarding those issues at that time when they come up.
Considering Sanders and the alternative, I think the answer is yes. He hits the nail right on the head. I support Sanders because he is fighting at exactly those points where it can do most good to fight right now, and he promises to show sound judgement in future fights as well. This is not true of his opponent.
This is why his support of Black Lives Matter was so important. He hired the other Sanders, the Black Lives Matter leader, to join his campaign. He listened to the grievances fairly and equitably, and came out with a strong racial-justice platform that he has made a center of his campaign. That’s a very strong response, and it blows Clinton out of the water.
Single payer is at 51%. It gets small business support, because the paperwork for health care is a nightmare, it’s the worst aspect of running a business. Sanders’ other positions are at 70% or 80%.
That article conflates all sorts of damages, slavery, Jim Crow, housing discrimination and redlining, educational discrimination, job discrimination, access to capital discrimination, promotion discrimination, all that— some with recent victims, some with victims long dead. It puts redress for all of these different issues under the blanket title of “reparations”. That’s an emotional appeal to recognize the reality of racism, not a blueprint for any policy.
Damages from discrimination are certainly real, and one can get redress from the courts by making a case and winning it. But I can’t imagine a sensible proposal for a piece of legislation or executive order which can do any sort of reparations in any sensible way. The specific damages depend on the circumstances of each individual and class, and depending on the instance, it’s a different amount of damages. That’s what courts are for, not congress, or the president.
How can you criticize a candidate using this? This kind of criticism would make sense only if Sanders was blind to race issues. But he’s the exact opposite. His response to BLM was exemplary, and he’s the only candidate to reach out to the protesters with comprehensive policy, and a serious hire. It’s his opponent who is ignoring race issues. So it’s really just a hit piece, with no merit.
There’s also her adjustment regarding bankruptcy reform, which is much more revelatory, as it is related to donor interests:
It’s not only extremely liberal seminaries. The notion of “God” is clearly distinguished from the notion of “magic” or “supernatural events” by the Pope. It’s confusing because it’s a complicated notion with a mass following, so you get a lot of propaganda and misinformation. But if you want to know what “string theory” is, you ask a string theorist! You don’t go by the average understanding of a layperson who read a popular book about it. It’s the same with God.
The notion of religion in the modern world, and the notion of God, is dealing with the problem of transferable universal ethics. The analysis of this problem leads you to a notion of a sort of “universal mind”, that tells you what the right thing to do is. The religions of the world personify this mind as a character in a pseudo-history, so as to make the concept clear and accessible. Sometimes fundamentalists then take the history too seriously.
But fundamentalists are the minority in modern religious faith. It is a mistake to caricature religion as supernatural, it just isn’t true.
Clinton didn’t hire anyone, and has been extremely weak on racial justice her entire career. Her husband wasn’t much better either, he pandered to the racist vote with the “Sister Souljah” speech, and he ignored Black opinion entirely.
I live in NY, and I noticed the regular execution of black kids starting in the 90s, when a kid holding a candy bar was shot at a subway stop by a policeman who said the candy bar looked like a gun. I freaked out about that when I noticed that that sort of thing happened on a monthly basis, it never stopped. It was buried in the deep pages of the NYT, and nobody in the media ever talked about it. But, even though my pigmentation is pretty much as light as it needs to be to not worry, I still personally got scared of the police.
The only candidate who has spoken about this pattern of police murder as a systemic problem in need of immediate redress, not just as isolated recent issues caused by bad apples, is Bernie Sanders. He has clearly said that the police murder is an issue going back for decades, as far back as he can remember, and has proposed clear effective policy to end it. That takes guts, and it takes moral fortitude.
But you don’t have to take my word for it, ask Killer Mike, or Cornel West.
Summary of video: she flipped on bankruptcy reform, when the donor class kept pushing, and the public stopped paying attention.
It’s Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s omega point I am talking about, not Tipler’s sci-fi rip-off. The vast majority of believers outside the US are not fundamentalists, and I think in the US it’s 50/50 at best.
I don’t think you appreciate what it is that believers actually believe. The existence of an abstract God is not at all a belief in supernatural events. That they are conflated is a pity, because it leads to destruction of the ethical philosophy of religion, and at the same time, it pushes scientifically minded people away from universal ethics and universal compassion.
It’s a lot of things, most of them laudible. What it isn’t is a fair criticism of Bernie Sanders.
He definitely has time for race issues and the impact of discrimination, which is why racial justice is a major part of his platform. Race discrimination is something no fair-minded American can turn a blind eye to.
But TNC’s attack was not about that. It was about something Sanders can’t reasonably address, and nobody else running for president can or did address. That makes it a hit piece, not a fair criticism.
Her flip on the bill is not excused by the amendments regarding child support and peripheral protections. The central aspect of the bill itself, every part of its intent, was a sellout to credit card companies, who have colluded to keep interest rates far above market value, and make exhorbitant profits through lack of competition. There is no excuse for this vote, it was just that the public was looking the other way. That article you link is confusing, because it is trying to mask a betrayal.
That’s nonsense. These attacks don’t stick to Sanders, they backfire, especially considering how long the American election season is. The attacks will lose their novelty after a short while, these types of attack only work when there is some substance to them, or else if there is a secretive candidate. But Sanders is completely honest about his politics.
A more traditionally American class of worker owned business is the private contractor, small privately owned farm or business, and small family restaurant, in which the majority of workers are usually owners, and the remaining workers, if any, know the owner personally. These businesses are the backbone of the American economy, and are highly favored by folks on all sides of the political spectrum.
The larger businesses can be formed from smaller businesses by encouraging splits, using a progressive corporate income tax. Sanders does not support this, but he does support modest incentives for encouraging coops and worker owned businesses, and he does support a broad platform which is protective of small business and private contractors. Just health-care alone will help small business more than all other concievable reforms put together, while the higher minimum wage undercuts the ability of larger firms to take over local economies.
Tax cuts only go to the wealthy, printing money and paying people goes to the empoverished. The effect is the opposite because one is moving closer to equilibrium (giving an unemployed person a job) and the other moves you away (giving an already wealthy person more money).
The rich aren’t better at anything. They are by and large useless moochers. I’ve been around them most of my life.
Your response is a bunch of confused nonsense.
You see, I simply don’t believe you. I need to talk to them myself. Journalists aren’t doing their job anymore.
The travesty is that you would believe a random person on the internet.
You should instead keep an open mind, until you go to Sandy Hook yourself and verify the incident, by speaking to the victims’ families yourself.
I verified the earth was round when I was a kid, working out that the distance out you can see goes as the square root of how high you are, and then checking that the formula works on various platforms (it does). On the other hand, I haven’t seen an interview with the principal and English teacher in that school, or the math and social studies teacher. I haven’t seen interviews with three different janitors and the cafeteria ladies. Nor with seven parents of other kids who were not shot who went to the school. Nor with disinterested townies about their relationship with the shooter or with the kids that are claimed to be dead. All I have seen is a manipulated staged event, and ridiculous photo ops.
Interviewing disinterested bystanders, that’s what journalists are supposed to do. But they aren’t doing their job, instead they are repeating official announcements and doing no investigative reporting. I want to see the interviews with the janitors, the friends, and so on, any people who aren’t making hundreds of thousands of dollars off the alleged tragedy from donations on facebook pages. It’s fraud to claim money falsely, and if I had donated to those families I would sue them in court.
It’s best to reserve judgement if you weren’t there. Academics have a hard enough time doing research without a propagandized public second guessing them.
The term “equilibrium” has a standard economic definition. Economic equilibrium is the situation where every product, wage, and service has a price which is competitive. That means an infinite number of competing suppliers are providing the service, the labor, or the product, and the infinite number of consumers choose their maximum utility, based on competitive cost.
This is a theoretical model. There is a question of how accurate this model is. Is it true in the real world?
You can tell, by checking the predictions of the theoretical model. There are a whole bunch:
1. In equilibrium, any supplier raising prices by a small amount will lead to a collapse of demand. Any supplier lowering prices by a small amount will be operating at a loss. That means that every product has a fixed price, at which the price exactly compensates for the cost of raw materials and labor, for capital depreciation, and for return on investment, and has zero profit left over.
2. In equilbrium, every wage is rigid— if you demand a higher wage, you get replaced by the next person in line. If you demand a slightly smaller wage, you immediately can find employment at any place which employs people such as yourself. This means all wages are roughly equal, up to small corrections for risk, sporadic work (e.g. actors), unusually short careers (e.g. sports figures), and quality of work (which accounts for a small factor of productivity). That means in equilibrium, nobody is making that much more than anyone else, and unemployment is zero percent, with everyone making an amount just equal to their productivity, and all the wages collectively just sufficient to purchase the entire production.
That’s standard equilibrium. This is what you read about in economics textbooks.
These predictions are ok for certain occupations. For example, computer programmers have a wage which is roughly commensurate with the prediction of point 2, they used to get a high wage when they were scarce, but once the wage became competitive, regardless of the fact that it’s hard work, the wages collapse to the mean.
Likewise, the predictions of 1 are ok for small business of any sort. The profits of these businesses, as a rule, provide no more than the equivalent of a comfortable professional salary for the owner.
The issue is that when you have concentrations of capital in large business, the predictions of equilibrium are completely wrong. The top managers siphon off corporate profits. People who have negotiating power and monopoly power, like the class of CEOs, or the class of media-monopoly celebrities, can demand exhorbitant salaries without competition. The predictions are dead wrong.
Most significantly, the wages for wage labor in these large industries bear no relation to the productivity of the workers. They collapse to subsistence, because when there is unemployment, the wage laborers have no negotiating power. They must take the least salary they can.
This is the BIGGEST failure of equilbrium theory— the existence of unemployment, and the failure of Say’s law (the wages being sufficient to purchase products). This failure is what Marx was writing about in Capital 1, and it is a FACT OF NATURE. In every economy with industrial firms and nonzero unemployment, the wages are far below productivity, the profits go through the roof, and the wages NEVER go to equilibrium.
The fix Marx proposed is for the state to take over all the large firms. But if you aren’t going to do that, and it seems that this is not a good idea, then you need to redress the too-low wages by a mechanism.
The proper mechanism is to raise minimum wage, and hire the unemployed to do whatever jobs they can, so that wage labor gets a higher wage. There’s nothing you can do, this is what the failure is in markets, and this is where you need to fix it.
Your writing shows that you don’t understand this concept of economic equilibrium. It’s not something I made up, it’s something that is the fundamental justification for capitalism— the equilbrium of capitalism is, in theory, extremely fair and egalitarian. It just isn’t so in real life.
I don’t need to read it carefully. Inflation has nothing to do with “taking a loan from the future”. It’s just decreasing the value of money. It’s largely harmless at most normal rates except to investment capital, which is depreciated.
The increased spending from raising minimum wage and hiring unemployed most definitely does exist, both in theory, and in reality. People spend more money because they have more money. I have nothing further to say, because denying this is a sign of not being serious.
The issue with IPO is asymmetric information, and special deals to insiders who get sweetheart prices. The company goes through a stock exchange to do an IPO, they don’t just sell stock to the public at a price negotiated with the public. This leads to regular systematic fraud, as for example, the VALinux IPO (LNUX, look it up, it’s the subject of a lawsuit).
I said I don’t believe you. I think you are a propagandist, or else a gullible filmmaker manipulated by liars. I live in the NE, and I am about 20 minutes away from Newtown when I visit relatives on holiday. I will make a pilgrimage to Newtown proper one day, and try to find 3 janitors, a math teacher, a social studies teacher, and 8 parents of children who were NOT directly affected by the tragedy, whose children played with those who were. Until you do so, you should really be quiet. But I can pretty much guarantee you with some confidence that I won’t find them. Nobody knows these people.
You see, the problem is not my distrust, the problem is that what you are pushing is just not the truth.
I honestly don’t care about their pain. Personal pain is a manipulative tool for propagandists like you. I only care about truth, not deceitful emotions. Think Spock.
I am a scientist. I require evidence, not propaganda. That’s why the professor in the article was skeptical, he is a trained academic.
I am not ignoring the facts. When you average labor costs for small business, to do a comparison with big business, you don’t just include the employees, you need to include the OWNERS TOO, not just the hired labor. A large chain replaces 5 owners and 5 employees, as in a coffee shop I go to, with 10 employees. The average wage in the chain is minimum wage. The average wage in the private coffee shop is the profit plus the minimum wage divided by two, which is higher. Hence a margin for the chain. A higher minimum wage cuts into the chain’s margin more than the private business.
Your claim that market forces push toward equilibrium is false. Market forces push toward equilibrium when there is competition and distributed ownership. Under today’s market conditions, as in 19th century England or in the US before 1930, the market attempts to avoid market conditions by minimizing competition and paying a wage far below productivity. When you have big firms hiring, this is very easy.
The government doesn’t do anything to cause this concentration of power, it happens spontaneously. THe evidence for this is overwhelming— the large firms took over England and the US in the early 20th century, when there was no regulation to speak of. They take over in the most deregulated industries the easies. To keep competition nowadays, the government has to arrange the market to be fair, as it did with airline deregulation, or telecom deregulation. Although these were called “deregulation”, what they really were is “pro-competitive regulation”, as the laws separated infrastructure from service, and allowed competitors to rent infrastructure at an equal rate, to prevent reconsolidation of infrastructure and service providers.
The government is often wise enough and well-intentioned enough to restore competition and push the market toward equilibrium, because WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT EQUILIBRIUM LOOKS LIKE. The time when it isn’t wise enough and well intentioned enough is when you elect public officials who claim they want to “reduce government” and “free the public sector”. What that means is that they dismantle pro-competition regulation, and allow the concentrations of monopoly and oligarchy power that wreck the ability of market mechanisms to function.
I am sorry that regulation is a difficult business, it is difficult, I don’t pretend it’s easy. What you have to stop pretending is that the makret magically fixes this stuff when the government gets out of the way. It hasn’t happened historically, it’s just wishful thinking, reinforced by propaganda from the business press.
When Keynsianism leads to serious inflation, as it did in the 70s, then it is reducing the amount of investment capital systematically, and it comes at a cost of investment in the future. This is true. This is why in the 70s, people supported austerity to get rid of inflation, on both sides. But Nixon was the one who overstimulated, and Carter lost his job due to austerity. So it’s only one side which is serious about economics.
The money is “created out of the blue”. It is created ex-nihilo by a central bank, and the government gets it to workers directly through highway spending, mortgage subsidies, college subsidies, and various giveaways, including tax rebates and EITC. The result is deficit spending, but the tax base increases, and often offsets it, or if not, inflation gets rid of it eventually, as it got rid of WWII debt, or else you just raise taxes on the rich (in equilibrium, nobody is very rich).The tax and spending policies are sensible when they are pushing you toward equilibrium.
For Keynsianism to avoid inflation, you simply have to have production not be maximum. It’s not even close to maximum right now, or at any reasonable period in the consumer sector.
The modestly rich got rich by simply owning capital. Their investments are not particular smart, they don’t need to be entrepreneurs, or productive people, and the capital for investments doesn’t usually come from them, it comes from banks. There is no justification for anti-Keynesian thinking, it’s just a load of malarkey.
He’s strong enough to take on the entire media, Hillary and Bill Clinton, the Democratic establishment, and succeed. That’s stronger than you can imagine, he’s probably the strongest politician in living memory. You can’t be weak to run on the real left. The last real progressive president won WWII. Your impression that the left must lose comes from the television days of 1972-2004, when there was no space for substance, only sound bites and photo-ops. The internet fixes that, and as the percentage of internet connected voters grows, the politics of the left gets stronger.
Sanders won elections even without an internet, in Vermont. He had to do this by personal outreach, as national and local media were just as biased against him then as they are now. His organizational strength is superb, and he can make use of modern technology now to bring that organization to the national level.
Although this is not so important to me, I actually tried to do that on two occasions, but I couldn’t get a ride (I don’t drive). I’ll do it for sure at some point, I am in CT often, and very close to Newtown. I have asked around a little to find people who know some folks indirectly, but I need to ask around in Newtown. Until I do so, I do not profess confidence.
All of this could have been put to rest with an interview of 20 random people who work at the school: janitors, teachers, cafeteria people, disinterested neighbors, etc. But it’s the same crowd of 3 pairs of parents and 2 “heroes” that are paraded out every time this nonsense comes up. The lack of corroboration, along with the absurd behavior and ridiculously manipulated media images, is what made me suspicious, and I will continue to be suspicious until I meet those janitors, parents and so on, personally.
You haven’t done it either, and neither has the media, so please, be quiet.
Join physicsoverflow dot org, and send me a private message.
You’re right! Bernie Sanders will “loose” an electoral storm on your ⱥss
Hillary Clinton loves secretive shadow-government, she supported the coup in Honduras. Her signature is “we killed Bin Laden”, whatever that operation was. She pushes for disingenuous gun control lawsuits, instead of transparent legislation. She simply can’t work with honest government, everything has to be secret-secret back-channel.
Her method of getting elected is pandering. In 2008, she said she would “open up those last JFK assassination files”, not because she is serious, but to pander to the JFK assassination crowd (Romney similarly pandered on “cold fusion” in Utah). This time around, she says positive things about UFOs and opening up area 51. This is not serious policy, this is lying to voters who are sick of being lied to.
Clinton blamed the Benghazi attack on an anti-Mohammad video on YouTube, and then disingenuously called for internet censorship to prevent such videos. That’s not responsible, it’s a level of dishonesty that you never want to see in a public official, even if it was legal. Her email scandal is due to her Nixonian paranoia— she won’t let others control her archives. This paranoia is shared by other denizens of secret government, like Cheney.
There will be no improvement in government transparency with Clinton, it will get worse. The US has a serious problem with internal propaganda, with internal deception, and Clinton, like all the Republicans, is part of the problem.
People complain about Clinton not because she has right-wing policy, even though she has some of that, but mostly because she is such a secrecy nut! She loves everything top secret, secret-secret, so that only the top top brass and her can get to know the real policy. Her open positions are chosen by poll, her secret positions are known to her alone, and I for one want a transparent government with public officials who say what they mean, even when it is not so popular.
Secrecy and shadowy stuff was best done by Nixon, Oliver North, Cheney, and the Republicans in general. The Democrats should let them shoot themselves in the foot, not copy their methods.
The Trump supporters have a point to make as well, although a less valid point sometimes tainted by bigotry, and the Paul supporters likewise.
I’m not interested in her yoga class. I’m interested in the operation to kill Bin-Laden, on trade negotiations, on Honduras, oil, and Venezuela.
That’s where you should start googling. That video was all over the internet that week, I watched it (it was not very good).
I’m 42, and I’ll continue wasting my time until every secretive candidate is defeated, either by vote, or by prosecution. Like Nixon.
She’s not a criminal, she’s a liar. There’s a big difference.
Yes, I’ll vote for Hillary too. But it’s a dangerous Republican game to play, this secrecy game. It makes the Democrats into Nixon.
“out of those 10 employees, 5 would still have significantly above minimum wage wages, and can be treated just like the owners of the small business” Are you NUTS? The mean wage at Walmart is $8 an hour. The number of “above minimum wage employees” at a chain store is 1 in 20 at best, and their wages rise so slowly (until you get to top managers) that it makes no difference to the mean. That’s half their margin.
The whole point of such chain stores is that they take the local owners out of the picture. That’s the difference between “Dominoes PIzza” and a local pizza shop. That’s basically all that they do, destroy entrepreneurs and small business for reductions in quality and efficiency. They only survive because of a low minimum wage, bad zoning, and ridiculous corporate advertizing propaganda pushing consumers to shop against their best interests.
This dynamic has nothing to do with government transaction taxes, or patents. Walmart doesn’t have a patent on anything, and Amazon’s patents are on nonsense. I also agree that patent reform and zoning reform are necessary, to fight this consolidation, but zoning is for local government, and patent reform is not easy because of big-money in politics from corporate patent-holders.
Anti-trust needs to be based simply on size, as this doesn’t require specific regulation on each individual business. I agree Apple and Microsoft should be penalized equally (and as far as I am concerned, closed APIs, even closed software, should be illegal), but you don’t need to legislate it specifically after the fact, after the consolidation happens. You can institute anti-consolidation measures by having a progressive corporate income tax, and that will prevent the problems of consolidation in the first place, rather than requiring regulation.
There are no real benefits of consolidation in most of the sectors that it happens. In those few cases where consolidation to nation-state level makes sense, the service basically should be a public utility, not a private company.
I agree with you regarding airlines and government regulation, I strongly support the Carter administration’s deregulation measure. It was pro-competition, and it was mirrored in the 1996 telecom deregulation act, the part that led to small phone companies, not the part that allowed media consolidation (which was disasterous). But airlines reconsolidated later, and while the industry is still relatively competitive, it would also benefit from more competition.
The point of socialism is to decentralize power. Government power is no good, and large business power is no good. The large business power simply doesn’t come from government. It comes when you allow a company to pay absurd wages to people, and use its size for political advantage in negotiating contracts. This is where the modern socialists try to craft policy to create competition and distributed ownership, so that the concentrations of power are prevented from forming in the first place.
I don’t see the point of repeating this again and again, but the idea that big business forms with government help is a terrible delusion, there is not an iota of truth to it. Business consolidates when regulations allow it, and it can make a profit. It usually can, as it drives down mean wages and reduces materials costs through larger negotiating power. This needs to be offset by a size tax, and then you can have a nimble small-business economy, rather than a Soviet large-firm economy.
That’s not due to economic stimulus, it’s due to bad government by Republicans, who don’t care about their constituents.
The line for “serious inflation” is sharp, especially with minimum wage hikes— when you raise minimum wage from $50 to $60, and the economy is at full capacity, you will get 20% inflation right away. When you raise minimum wage from $8 to $15, nothing happens with inflation, because you aren’t at full capacity.
The issue with systematic inflation is when you get indexed funds and indexed payouts, because this can lead to hyperinflation very easily even with a modest stimulus. The point of Carter’s austerity was to get rid of all the indexed pricing in the economy, to prevent spiralling inflation. The same sort of things needed to be done in a more draconian way in Israel under Shimon Peres in the 80s, when inflation was about 100% a month, due to overspending and borrowing for the 1973 war. This was similar to the US Vietnam spending.
Your tax thinking is ridiculous— but it is roughly what is done today anyway, as capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than income. The reason to tax high incomes is because any high income is not an equilibrium phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon of class separation. Those people investing huge sums of money are not at all good at real innovation. I come from a science background, and the real innovation is stuff that no entrepreneur would ever invest in, as it is so uncertain and future-oriented, that it comes with no guarantee of profit. The investments that make money, even large amounts of money, are boring pedestrian second-in-line developments that are important, but don’t require any particular genius. A good professional investor can make those investments, as can a trained amateur with some money to place.
These activities are best done by investment organizations, by people who make a professional salary making those investments. That salary doesn’t need to have any direct relation to the amount of money that they invest, any more than a banker making a $100,000,000 loan needs to get a $10,000,000 commission. The quality of your investments is rewarded by competitive bonuses and keeping your job, not by keeping the money. You have to separate in your mind “how much money I made for the company” from “how much money I should be taking home to my family”. These two quantities have no relation to each other in order of magnitude when you are in a competitive equilibrium, aside from the fact that if you are doing a good job, you get to take home more pay (but not commensurate with the millions you are investing).
This difference is the difference between a “competitive price” and a “monopolists price”. A monopolist’s price is “the maximum you are willing to pay”. A competitive price is “What the next competitor in line charges”. To explain the difference, I’ll tell a story. There’s a screw that holds the arm of my glasses to the frame. It fell out, and I needed a replacement. How much was I willing to pay? Considering that the glasses cost $200, I was willing to pay $40. So I went to the store and found the screw. Did it cost $40? NO! It cost less than a penny, those screws were sold by the pound. Why the huge difference? Because I went in expecting a monopolist’s price, and I got a competitive price.
In equilibrium, every price is a competitive price, and no price is a monopolist’s price. When you pay an investor for investment advice, and you are paying a competitive price, you pay the investor a professional salary. When the investor has a monopoly, they can ask you for a significant fraction of your profit from the investment itself. The difference between the two can be many orders of magnitude, as it was in the case of that screw.
Whenever you are negotiating from a position of power, where you can get a significant fraction of a corporation’s income, on the order of a corporate profit of hundreds of millions of dollars, you are taking a monopolist’s price. All such individual pay is anti-competitive by nature, it is impossible to acquire such payment when there is a competitor undercutting you, and therefore, in an ideal world, such payments should be taxed murderously, at 90% like they were until the 60s.
That’s the central flaw in the thinking of people who say that they support “markets”. They don’t support theoretical markets in equilibrium, where investors make money indirectly in the way I described above. They support a class system where an individual can magnify his own property by the largely pointless activity of individual investment.
Whatever they need to do to win is fine by me. I don’t like dishonest government, but campaigning is tough.
That video is largely accurate, the Clintons are very dirty. You don’t know if the Clintons had anything to do with Vince Foster’s death, neither do I, and I really don’t care. The things I know Hillary Clinton had to do with, the coup in Honduras, the “killing Bin Laden”, the destabilization of the Middle East, the gun-control manipulations, these are dishonest enough for me. I will be forced to vote for her if she’s the Democratic nominee, and I don’t want that to happen, so I’m supporting Sanders.
I know who funds Moveon, it is a great organization, and I support it. I also remember 1980 very well, and how atrocious the new President was. I had war nightmares throughout my childhood because of him, and Bernie Sanders was one of the few rays of light in the darkness.
What you mean is “I heard from some hearsay on the press that some people on the ground in Libya mentioned the video during the attack”. You heard wrong. The attack had nothing to do with the video, it was retribution for the US capturing some fighters, as leaked by Petraeus’s girlfriend. Clinton claimed the video to distract the public, and to push for internet censorship.
Regardless of the degree to which Clinton believed her own nonsense, the push for censorship was reprehensible.
I don’t think this is the worst violation of public trust by a public official, but it is up there. It’s just that in this horrible climate of lies and secrecy, and awful economic policy, there are worse options than Clinton, worse by a mile. I don’t want the least worst option, I’d rather vote for clean government, that’s why I voted for Obama. Except Obama has been as secretive as his predecessor, just with somewhat different intentions behind the duplicity.
He worked out his racial justice platform over the weeks preceding the second interruption, it took a long time to get this platform right, and I think it is a good summary of the public consensus on what measures can relieve the unbearable levels of police brutality in the black community. No politician can go far past public consensus, they can only influence it by persuasion, and choose sides, and he is doing his best to choose the right side, and push the boundary of what is acceptable in the right direction.
Racial justice is more controversial than anything else in his platform, although still not really controversial, and with the possible exception of universal single-payer health care, which is at 51% support in public opinion polls. I am 100% certain that he is on the right side of this issue, due to his history and his declared policies. This is in contrast to all other candidates. Remember that even Jimmy Carter ran with a worrisome implicitly segregationist platform when he was a southern politician, until he became president, and then he was a strong supporter of civil rights and appointed African Americans to high positions.
Priorities in a campaign are different than priorities in government, and one can be sure that the campaign he chose reflects his best considered analysis of those most urgent appeals which can motivate voters to produce a transformative election.
Racial issues are often divisive, not because they aren’t important, but because of splits in awareness in the electorate about the impact of racism. There is no question that justice requires pressure from below, like everything else, and I am grateful that BLM had the fortitude and organizational strength to apply that pressure. Of all the candidates, only Bernie Sanders listens and responds to pressure from below, and this is why he changed his platform so quickly. Other politicians listen to pressure from big money donors, and only give platitudes and superficial glib words, not meaningful policy.
I don’t judge Sanders’ campaign by the standards of the saints and apostles, I judge him by the standards of politicians. He is responsive and compassionate, and moves on the issues quickly when he is lacking, just as he should. The response of Clinton to BLM was essentially empty— no hires, no policies, just words. The response of the other politicians has been worse than empty, it was negative, dismissing the concern.
One must appreciate that Sanders is not a perfect candidate, no candidate is. He is a candidate who is striving to create transformative change, which is never easy, while listening to a diverse set of grievances from below. Appreciate the straightjacket he finds himself in, and the wiggle-room that he manages to find within this straightjacket, while still keeping the eyes on the prize.
I am not saying that you should let up the pressure, but apply that pressure evenly, so that the greatest problems come to the least responsive, not the most.
It’s not the gender, it’s the politician. Bernie Sanders is only running for president because Elizabeth Warren refused.
Their suicide rate is due to their northern lattitude and seasonal lack of light, not to economic policy.
The Republicans didn’t make up anything, the Clintons manipulate for personal gain. The Republicans are just worse, under Bush and Reagan, they manipulate against the national interest.
It’s a legitimate topic for us voters, Sanders has bigger things to worry about, including reassuring corrupt politicians like HC that he will focus on the health of the country, rather than sending them to jail where thy belong.
“Failed” != “False. The accusations against Clinton are true and terrible, just modestly less terrible than the true accusations against Republicans.
The difference is that Ron Paul’s “gold standard” idea was really crazy. None of Sanders’ ideas are actually crazy, they are just opposed by big money.
I accuse Hillary, of the “Bin Laden death” political skit, of complicity in the right-wing Honduras coup, of meddling in Egyptian and Libyan groups with catastrophic results, of meddling in Ukranian politics with a result of partial Russian invasion, of political prosecution of Travel office personnel, of PATCON and complicity in the Oklahoma City bombing, in IRS auditing for political gain, and a million other violations of ethics.
I accuse Republicans of worse offenses, 9/11, torture and rendition, creation of homeland security, massive NSA spying, criminal invasion and wars of aggression, journalist suppression, extrajudicial murder etc. But as much as I hate to admit it, all the Republican malfeasance were only extending Clinton ideas, just taken to the next even more monstrous level. The whole of this corruption has to end, and like, 10 years ago, not today, when it’s already too late. Even retroactive prosecutions of all involved officials would be a drain on the country, and perhaps a “truth and reconciliation commission” is the best one can hope for, to get the historical record straight, and prevent future crime.
Gold standard flies in the face of Keynesian economics, and I am probably older than you, and certainly experienced enough to know that denying Keynesian economics is impossible, as it is as well established today as Maxwell’s equations nowadays. I gritted my teeth and tried to support Paul, only because of the horrific corruption in the government, but it’s impossible to support such regressive nonsense, as a gold standard maintains the wealth oligarchy, or makes it worse, by creating deflation.
Sanders is going to beat Hillary, and if he doesn’t, I will flee the country. There is no hope for the US without a progressive. I have lived a significant fraction of my life in a country where Sanders’ ideas are already implemented, and are considered a no-brainer. There is no excuse for the US being so backward in its politics, it’s a disease of rapid growth and too much international power, leading to isolationist megalomania.
The definition of corruption is when you control the prosecutor’s office with your friends and family. These corruption issues are not exactly personal views, they are backed by evidence, but come with insufficient political power to push a prosecution. It is not even clear how to prosecute most of these crimes.
I will be forced to vote for this corruption if she is the nominee, to avoid worse corruption. But it is not acceptable to nominate a corrupt official. Yet, this is all you get in the current climate. That, and Bernie Sanders.
Sanders is not corrupt, Elizabeth Warren is not corrupt, and disagree with them as much as I do, Ron Paul and Donald Trump are not corrupt (just stupid), and neither is Ben Carson (although he is hopeless). But “stupid” is nearly as bad as “corrupt”, as I don’t think George W. Bush was personally all that corrupt, but he was stupid enough to appoint Cheney, Wolfowitz and all that gang, who were the most corrupt gang of criminals in history.
There is no option of staying home. I will vote for Clinton if I am forced to by the other Democrats, but until then, I hope and pray that they will vote in an honest person, and right now, that means Bernie Sanders.
Oh, Kaisich is far too moderate to ever be the nominee. If he and Clinton were running, it’s a tough choice, because, well, Clinton, but there’s no way I will ever vote for a Republican in a million years. But boy do I not want that to happen! Clinton/Bush covert nonsense is horrific, the hawkish foreign policy is terrible, the cronyism is terrible. The only honest candidate with serious policy is Sanders, so I just keep dumping money into his campaign. I mean, Trump and Carson are honest too, but their policies are insane, just due to their party membership.
Brilliant Light is simply doing fraud, same as Rossi. Rossi showed you could fake out public demonstrations by hiding power coming in by using crazy hidden voltages on the ground wire, or just by misreporting amperage, or whatever other tricks. They are doing electrolysis, the light comes when the hydrogen burns, then because they fraudulently claim less power coming in than the true amount, they can easily claim they get more power out than in. It’s pure fraud, based on the Rossi model.
All this stuff is commercial nonsense. Serious investigations don’t pretend to have an engine, they demonstrate the scientific principle first, openly, with lots of investigators looking on and reproducing, and rechecking. That makes it different from even Pons and Fleischmann, who were open about what they were doing.
Hillary doesn’t “make mistakes”, she positions herself with her donors to maximize power for herself and for them.
Bernie Sanders didn’t really make a mistake with the deregulation of derivatives vote, it’s just hard to explain. Derivatives in themselves were not the real problem, fraudulent ratings from credit agencies were a problem. Regulation is best done as restructuring, so that you don’t need constant oversight, and in this case, only Sanders has real policy for restructuring that adresses the real problem, including reforming the ratings system and breaking up the big banks.
More likely it was a deal in 2008, as she had the popular vote over Obama (he had the delegate vote by a small margin) and she could have contested the election with a strong fight with her superdelegates. She agrees to give up, and he agrees she can be SOS.
Clinton’s influence is just corrupting, and Obama was better off when he wasn’t surrounded by Democratic party apparatchiks.
Rahm was there from the beginning, he seemed like an honest guy from what I saw of him, which is extremely little. He was kicked out to Chicago when the party took over. Some of the apparatchiks I followed are Biden, who pushed the drone assassination program as a substitute for war so that you get more illegal horrific crimes under Democrats too. At least they were not as awful as the horrors under Bush. There was Kerry, who did all sorts of covert nonsense. To this day, you can’t say publically that the Syrian chemical attack came from the rebels, explicitly to draw the US into the war. Thanks John Kerry! He might not have been responsible for the attack itself, but he was definitely responsible for not admitting what every international observer, or sane observer outside the US, already knows.
Then there was H. Clinton who was behind ridiculous “Kill Bin Laden” nonsense whatever the heck that was, and the awful gun control nonsense like that absurd “shooting” at Sandy Hook, all that stuff that continues the duplicity of the US government under Bush, just less of it, and with aims I like more. There was no excuse for the lax response to banks, the non-enforcement of Dodd-Frank, the completely inadequate and irresponsible stimulus, which wasn’t put in the hands of workers, the lack of jobs program, and the general destitution that was allowed to develop. The delay in the expiration of the Bush tax cuts was also inexcusable, even the inability to raise taxes to reasonable pre-1980 levels is not acceptable. The lack of anti-trust enforcement, the lack of regulation in the FDA (see Sanders attacking an Obama appointee for ridiculous claims about importing Canadian medications), etc, etc. It’s all a huge letdown, although Obama as a candidate was only slightly less progressive than Sanders.
You post this comment a million times, on every post involving Sanders, and it’s not really correct. There are lots of different kinds of socialism, and the main difference between them is not democracy, but the power structure. I get that you support Sanders, I do too, but it’s not good to repeat disinformation. The type of stuff Sanders is talking about, and that you are trying to fold into “socialism” in general, is just “social democracy”, and it should not be controversial at all. It’s what people do all over the world to make a rational public system which provides infrastructure and basic services, so businesses don’t have to deal with it.
When you are talking about real socialism, the kind where businesses are publically owned, the “people” can’t tell the government how to spend money, because “people” don’t have a coherent opinion. You need to poll, and ask, and only some people care to vote, and sometimes “people” don’t know anything at all about something. Ask “people” whether the NSF should fund research into “topological superconductors”. This means you need specialized bureaucracies, and they are often monopolized, and when that happens, if you have a good idea that the bureaucracy doesn’t recognize as legitimate, you are just screwed.
The main difference is whether the power is coming from above, or from below, and that means whether the state owns businesses, or whether people own businesses. This is the main distinction in socialist economics, and the same exact distinction exists in the US economy, between a large corporation, which is owned in a far away headquarters, and a local small business, which is owned by a person you know. Reducing corporate power is similar to reducing government power, since a large corporation has the power to effectively legislate policies and conditions to you, the consumer. This situation is intolerable— there’s a Newton’s third law of ideal politics. Whenever something affects you, you should be able to affect it back. When a business is a large monopoly, you are just as helpless as when the state tells you what to do.
The goal of anarchic socialists is to reduce big government and big business power simultaneously.
That’s total nonsense. The problem was that a bank took a bunch of risky loans, pretended that the chance that one person is going to default is entirely independent from the chance that another person is going to default (this is usually true), and then got a rating agency to certify this assumption with a tip-top AAA rating for the bundled loans.
But the bank knew very well that defaults aren’t random. When property values go down, ALL the people default, because it makes no sense to pay back a mortgage that is worth more than the property itself. You won’t pay a $500,000 mortgage on a $300,000 house, you will just default, and repurchase at the lower price.
So that means that the assumption was false, and the ratings agency should have known better. They were likely paid off by the bank that put together the loans, and now this created the analog of a “short sell” for the loans— you could get credit-default insurance from AIG. AIG went by the bogus estimates of risk from the ratings agency.
The result is that there was an opportunity for profit. But to make money, you needed bundles of risky mortgages. So banks went on a wild spree of selling these mortgages, because suddenly they are in demand. Yes, they’re in demand because someone figured out how to use them for fraud.
General oversight of derivatives is not really all that useful, not that I know what that oversight would be. The government is not all that great at judging these risks either, and the government could easily make similar mistakes in ratings.
It is very difficult to regulate this nonsense from the top, you need to make sure that the ratings agency itself is checked by other independent private agencies which evaluate the same risk from the buyer’s point of view, not just the seller. That means you need independent reform of the rating agencies as Sanders has proposed, not a specific government oversight board (although, if done right, that can help too).
None of this has to do with individual homeowners. Their responsibility is ZERO. They had nothing to do with the collapse. It’s all a function of ratings agency fraud, and banks internally buying and selling the bundles. The default rates of the homeowners didn’t even go up all that much during the collapse. They just went up by enough to make the credit default deals pay off, and then AIG was going to collapse, etc, etc.
These protections are nonsense— the main effects of the bill were substantially the same, and Clinton’s vote on the second version is completely inexcusable. There was nothing wrong with American bankruptcy law in 2000, or in 1990, or in 1980, the problem is that you have monopolized credit card companies that charge outrageous usurious rates from customers, outrageous fees from stores, and expect borrowers to never default, to protect their insane profits. They need to be broken up into smithereens, not out there bribing president Clinton.
Sanders took major policy positions regarding credit card rates and usurious banking fees. You would be wise to review them, instead of defending Clinton’s indefensible corrupt behavior.
I agree with you on this. But there is exactly one way in which Sanders can actually claim to be a “Democratic Socialist” rather than just a “Social Democrat”. He advocates some modest incentives for worker-cooperatives, and distributed ownership of corporations. That’s an actual, real, honest-to-goodness socialist proposal, but in a form that can be understood and supported by both Republicans and Democrats, and involves no real state coercion, or state takeover, so it isn’t something Republicans even usually recognize as coming from the socialist philosophy.
But this is a minor point in his platform. Most of it is just “social democracy”, and nobody sane disputes most of those points. the arguments in the public space are not coherent because of the propaganda coming from the right.
As I said, I largely agree with you, but I think your comments are not helping so much, not to be a jerk. I might be wrong, maybe they do.
I followed the bills when they were going through Congress, because I was outraged (although at the time, I didn’t notice or care about Hillary Clinton’s position). There were a whole bunch of attempts to pass this legislation, and the difference between them is superficial nonsense, protecting this tiny constituency, or that tiny constituency.
The main point of the bill was the problem not the little bells and whistles CNN talks about— the goal was to make it easier for credit card companies to go after your assets despite your bankruptcy, because they were unhappy that they had a nonzero rate of default, despite their sky-high monopolistic rates.
American conservatism is HALF of it, the “reduce the power of government” half. American liberalism is the other half, the “reduce the power of big business” half. It is hard to do both, because the counterweight to big business is usually big government, while the counterweight to big government is usually big business.
What you need is structural policies that allow smaller business to thrive, and decentralized ownership that protects the employees from exploitation. These policies are half and half, they are “liberatarian” and “socialist”. That’s anarchism, and it’s not the same as US conservatism or US liberalism, it’s originally a European philosophy.
I hate pot, nothing I said is “pseudo intellectual”, and it is very relevant to the debate. The philosophy I am explaining to you is prominent on the American left since the 1960s, and it is exemplified by Noam Chomsky.
Sanders is not an anarchist, but he is easier to support for someone who holds this view. He cares about centralization and abuse of power in all its forms.
Clinton is just someone who uses connections for power, and always votes to increase government oversight, whether it is useful for working people or not. She voted for every increase of unwarranted power, including the Patriot act, the ridiculous wars, and supports all sorts of covert secret nonsense like Nixon did. That’s not responsible, it produces a police state, it was opposed by the American left, and it ultimately doesn’t help a working person one bit.
In order to get real change, you need to do more than “move the window”, you need to have a candidate with a vision, and a movement that can mobilize people for it. Obama had a vision, but was too centrist to keep the movement going to produce congressional change. Sanders is fixing this.
You are saying foolish things. It’s not “people who couldn’t afford it”, it’s “when people are paid to take loans by the banks they take loans”, and “people won’t pay a loan on a property worth substantially less than the loan”, both of which are both immutable economic laws that have nothing to do with individual consumers or their financial status. The consumers are NOT AT FAULT. Not at all. The collapse had nothing to do with their individual behavior. It was all a problem in the banks and ratings agencies.
That’s what small government was used for in the 1960s, and that type of small government is simply an excuse for bigotry, and if that’s all it was, there would be no black conservatives. Anti-racism measures don’t have to come from the top necessarily, they can also come from the courts. It is important to have strong racial justice in the law, but it is not required to regulate every local school and business to get it done.
The philosophy I stated is the dominant philosophy on the left since 1968. It is the opposite of Marxism in terms of the view of the role of the state, but it is friendly to Keynesianism and to worker cooperatives, unlike Republicans or American “libertarians”.
The berniebots aren’t paid. They pay their candidate. We’re all his financing.
The title “hidden derivative trading” doesn’t tell you the specific problem. The issue wasn’t “people relying on themselves to say no”, or “they couldn’t afford”, that’s right wing fantasy excuses. The issue was that a rating agency misrated the bundles, and gigantic banks were exploiting this false assumptions to both issue more mortgages and bet against their BUNDLED rate of default.
There are no sound bite summaries, and if you blame the consumers even ONE LITTLE BIT, you have no idea what you are talking about.
There are very few Republicans putting money in his campaign, just as in 1980, a very few Democrats supported Reagan in the primary, because “he’s too right wing to win”.
That superpac was a crazy right wing publicity stunt that was shut down by Sanders in days.
It’s naive for old media. It becomes possible with an internet. If you are old, you might be missing the transformation in communication technology that turns this from “naivete” to “vision”. The lack of awareness of the power of internet communications is the main cause of the age-gap in Sanders supporters. It doesn’t take long to learn about the methods of online organizing pioneered by Dean, honed by Obama, and expanded by Sanders, if you join the campaign with a small contribution, you will see the real 50-state breadth depth of this movement. New media is at the core of the Sanders political revolution, but Sanders himself was strong enough to win without an internet, at a time when the internet didn’t exist, and television was bought out by corporations. That’s unimaginable to me, but he did it.
I’ve followed him since 1989, and I can assure you that you are crazy.
NO! If it was one person or a small bank, there would be no problem, as the risk of default model wasn’t wrong for one person.
The problem comes because they fraudulently used statistical independence to bundle together 10,000 loans which are each individually risky into a bundle that superficially seems less risky because of independent risk.
The individual homeowner bears zero responsibility for the collapse. It’s all fraud from the rating agency.
Egypt was a fake out, it wasn’t really a media revolution. Just more outside meddling, like in Honduras, or in Ukraine. Egypt is not as wired as the US.
She has no integrity to attack. Her entire career consists of smears and lies, and deceptive marketing, with a moderate conservative agenda behind it, and a lot of personal power.
There is a serious problem in starting down the road of attacks with Clinton— there is far too much to attack. If he started, he would never finish, and he would become an extremly negative candidate. It is best if his supporters do it, and let the candidate focus on the important issues.
Nobody considers him a hypocrit. He is a responsible politician. He didn’t support a coup in Honduras, he doesn’t do covert activities for political gain like PATCON, he never created trumped up ridiculous charges to fire people like “travelgate”. He doesn’t appoint cronies to high positions, he never pardoned friends and contributors, he doesn’t make corrupt deals for securing credit card profits (as this article demonstrates Clinton did), he doesn’t accept money from Wall St. The line of attack fails on Sanders, because he has always acted his conscience.
There is no comparison between the candidates. Clinton is a dirty candidate, while Sanders is clean. And it’s not a 60/40 thing, preponderance of influence, or any of that. Clinton is a 100% dirty machine politician, while Sanders is a 100% honest Senator. Perhaps in an earlier era, one had to settle for a corrupt Democrat. Not today.
Sanders isn’t perfect, but he’s a damn sight better than the other choice.
The Sanders’ campaign tactics are just fine. The Clinton campaign is busy producing attacks out of sheer nonsense. All these “improper activities” are nothing compared to stranding millions of credit card holders without bankruptcy protection, regardless of the bells and whistles regarding child support and other irrelevant distractions. The intent of the bill was poisonous— it was a prop to hold up the most monopolized industry in the US— the credit industry. Their rates are usurious, their fees to stores are outrageous, the competition is nonexistent since the mid-90s, and ramming through a bankruptcy “reform” bill is absolutely unconscionable. That Clinton supported it, after first opposing, is the most damning criticism of her campaign. There is no sincerity there, it is all poll-tested opinion, and listening to the donors whenever the public lets you get away with it.
There is nothing to condemn. People can say whatever they want online, it’s not the candidate’s responsibility.
Clinton has done worse than this, but this is a clear example of her constant corruption. Whenever a vote isn’t on the public’s mind at that moment, she’ll vote the donor’s interest. When the vote is in the public eye, she’ll vote by poll. There is no conviction, and no principles, not even to the constitution, or to the basic principles of public trust.
She wasn’t “tricked”. She went by the poll numbers. Opposing the war went against a huge majority of the public, and was considered political suicide. She never can take an unpopular position on principle, she doesn’t have any principles other than power and winning.
It is very hard for a politician to speak sensibly on foreign policy, when the public is fed a pack of lies, while those with access to classified information have a fuller picture.
For example, in both Republican and Democratic debates, the moderators still talk about the “red line” Obama drew regarding Assad and chemical weapons, and why he didn’t go to war when the red-line was supposedly crossed, without mentioning that it was known within a week of the attack that the actual source of the chemical weapons was the rebels, not Assad. The rebels released chemical weapons with the intention of blaming it on Assad, so the US would get involved in the war.
There are only a handful of issues where the public is aware of what is going on, and the Iraq war is one of them. I don’t fault Sanders for being vague on foreign policy, he is an honest candidate, and nearly all foreign policy campaigning is pure pandering, saying what the public wants to hear in order to feel safe.
All that Clinton knows is how to covertly meddle in foreign governments for business interests, as she did in Honduras, and probably also in Ukraine. Candidates simply can’t speak honestly about foreign policy, they are forced to pander and lie. Sanders only tells the truth.
Sanders position on foreign policy is not pandering, and if he is elected, he will usher in an era of peace and prosperity the likes of which you can’t imagine. American allies uniformly recognize him as a man who doesn’t bow to business pressure, and who does not support the covert coups and interventions that lead to such instability in the modern world.
Because it was 1988, and they wanted to campaign for peace with a sister-city program. The sister city residents remember Bernie Sanders fondly. Reagan also visited the USSR that year. It was the Gorbachev era, the the Soviet Union was finally opening up, a few years before the final collapse.
When he’s president, he can redirect that money into an equivalent infrastructure program, or research. As a Senator, it’s a question of Keynesian stimulus to his state. There is nothing he can do about it at that level, except for urging other Senators to redirect this massive spending away from the military and toward civilian uses. In context, it is unfortunately is a sensible vote, although a difficult one, because the F35 is really a bad machine. He made the right call for his state, and the only call he can make in this corrupt political climate. If you want it to change, vote him president.
That wasn’t the only draw of the left in 1968. There was also social and sexual liberalism, mind-altering substances, and real progress on civil rights. Not all of that constituted responsible progress, but some of it did, like everything in every generation.
Me too.
I will be happily voting for the better nominee for president in November. The Republican party is cooked. It’s done. They will not win another presidential election. Better to ignore them, and clean house internally, and get a good Congress with the president, to fix the urgent problems.
Sorry, I misspoke. I should have said “no one, except paid shills”.
I am a proud BernieSis, and you should be a BernieSis too. It’s unfortunately not misinformation that the Republican spread. Clinton is as corrupt as the Republicans say, although nowhere as liberal as they claim. She’s only slightly better on corruption than the Republicans themselves, as her corruption is either for personal political gain, or to push policy that she genuinely believes in (that’s no excuse). In the 90s, there was no other option, so I went along with it, to avoid the Republican option of both corruption and terrible politics. Now it is time for a house cleaning. There’s a huge mess of repulsive Bush adminstration lies, precursors to them under Clinton, and some successors under Obama.
Every Bush adminstration abomination has a (much less terrible) precursor under clinton. 9/11? Oklahoma City. Homeland security? Proposed by Clinton, for domestic rather than foreign terrorism. Citizen intimidation using government power? Also Clinton, in travelgate, and IRS audits, and PATCON. The Republicans took it to a whole new level, but the corruption started in the 90s, as much as I hate to admit it. Actually, the 80s were no picnic, with Iran Contra and Oliver North, and various covert activities in South America.
I am sick and tired of corruption, and I can’t vote for a Republican if my life depended on it. So the only option is to win in the primary. There is no alternative, the US needs honest government, and it needed it 20 years ago.
I am not paid, I am a contributor to the Sanders campaign. I want to see an honest US government for once.
Sanders polls with independents much higher than Hillary, and has 10 times the motivating energy for the base. Give up the idea that Hillary is more electable, it was only true in the 90s. The world has changed, and corruption is much easier to identify online.
You can click on my disqus profile, and see my position on Republicanism. I have never voted for a Republican in my life, and I never will, unless they renominate Ulysses S. Grant or Teddy Roosevelt. Come to think of it, WE can nominate Roosevelt. Just vote for Sanders.
I have a relatively long online presence, none of it is Republican, and it is a witness to my sincerity. Sanders has an enormously long public record, and it is an even better testament to his honesty.
Clinton’s public record is a long chain of secrets and lies. I will still vote for her in November if I have to, only because the alternative is worse. But don’t make us hold our nose. Vote for the real honest person here.
Because THEY ARE RIGHT about that stuff. It’s just that they are WORSE than Hillary. Her motto should be “Marginally better than any Republican”.
I swear to you that if you nominate an honest person, like Sanders, you have an opportunity to eliminate the Republican party forever. They have a doddering membership consisting of brainwashed and gullible folks, who will jump ship when the media climate is different. Donald Trump shows you that, there’s no substance there, but he can win a plurality of the party. There is no party as disgusting as the Republicans in any other comparable nation on Earth. They would be a party of lunatics in England, France, Denmark, Norway, Italy, wherever.
Warren should have run for president herself. Now that she hasn’t, she should join the next best thing, which is the Sanders campaign.
I am a proud BernieSis, and I will join with all my BernieSisters of getting rid of the Clinton poison in our party. Once the corruption is gone, the barrier to attracting independents, and even some (gasp) former Republicans is very low. I have had personal conversations with many Republicans who grudgingly admire Sanders, although they believe he is completely insane on economics. He isn’t. But they don’t know that yet. They will know once he is president. He has Vermont approval in the 80s for a reason.
His economic policies are supported by any sane economist. There is no excuse for the ignorance of the American public regarding economic issues, there is no such comparable ignorance in Europe, in Asia, or in much of the rest of the world.
No. Easy choices, purposefully made wrongly, for personal gain. That’s not acceptable, and the primary is the time to get it out of the system, not in the general, when you can’t do anything except stay home or vote for an insane alternative.
Money in politics is more insidious than a bribe. It has the effect of moving your positions subtly, because you think about the opinion of the money donors more often than you think about the opinion of those who do not donate. This is why candidates need to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Clinton not only doesn’t avoid the appearance, she doesn’t avoid the impropriety.
The influence of money in politics is especially obvious in the case of Sanders, who responds to mass public concerns vigorously, especially to his million or so volunteer and donor base, because they are his only source of funding.
Voting in the best interests of your constituents is the opposite of corruption. Sanders votes in their best interest, even when it is difficult, because he is a good representative. That’s why he gets good marks from his state.
On the other hand, voting in the interest of donors, against the best interest of your constituents, that’s the definition of corruption. For example, Republicans who refuse Medicaid money because their Pharma and insurance lobby donors want to kill Obamacare. They’ll say it’s on principle, but its the principles themselves that are dictated by the donor class.
The only viable way to vote against money for your state, for a politician, is if there is an even more powerful special interest than your state’s residents telling you it’s going to be ok, so that the political gain from their donations and advertising will offset the political loss from the loss of funding for the state.
Clinton’s (second) vote on the bankruptcy bill is an example of this type of corruption (not the first vote, or the third no-show). Sanders’ vote on the deregulation of derivatives is an example of an honest vote that you may disagree with. I can accept disagreements, as difference of opinion are real. I can’t accept big money donors regulating the laws that are passed, or even implicitly setting the boundaries of the debate.
The only time the boundaries of the debate have moved in modern memory is when a candidate who wasn’t financed by big-money was running. That person is Sanders, and the time to support him is today.
Yeah, just remember how ISIS flying aces brought down our F-16s. The F-35 is a ridiculous boondoggle that Sanders was forced to vote for. But he needed to vote for it, and I am glad he did.
Bernie Sanders is nothing like McGovern. McGovern was the father of nanny-liberalism. He supported converting nutrition programs to help starving people into nonsense like the “food pyramid” and “food groups”, instead of just ending the programs. His supporters encouraged the use of brain-damaging chemicals like LSD, and the politics of the time was a culture war driven by racist opposition to civil rights. Nixon took all the bite out of the Democrats by supporting Keynesian economics more strongly than Democrats (he even screwed it up with price controls and over-stimulation). So McGovern had no economic platform to run on, and Watergate hadn’t broken yet.
The world is different, we have an internet, and the internet is a tool for exposing corruption. Nixon would have a terrible time online, with pages exposing watergate. Anti-corruption candidates have a huge leg up in this media climate, corrupt candidates suffer due to the intense spotlight of new media, and so Sanders is ideal and Clinton is the opposite of ideal.
Sanders does not share any of McGovern’s weaknesses. He doesn’t support the type of ridiculous government meddling McGovern was into, he doesn’t advocate the use of any drugs (although he wants to decriminalize marijuana to avoid people having police records), he is squeaky clean, and he is running as a stimulus Keynesian at a time when the Republicans have abandoned Keynesianism for decades. That makes him a shoo in, not a long shot.
Hillary is a 50/50 bet, if someone less crazy than Trump wins the Republican primary, and that looks more and more likely.
Call yourself a BernieSis. That deflates them.
Judgement is difficult when you know what kind of right wingers were taking over Ukraine, probably with US support. Not that Putin’s actions were justified, but Ukraine was destabilized, possibly with Western aid. This kind of nonsense is a result of covert channeling of money, and we the public never get the full story, but Presidents and Senators usually get a better picture. I don’t like Putin, but I don’t like US covert operations just as much.
Sanders was 100% right on N. Korea, and showed better judgement than the general, who was repeating the same nonsense the public is fed via the media.
Every strong stance costs you support as a candidate, there is a firm limit to how much specific policy you can dish out and still get elected, just on statistical grounds. He has used up all of his political capital on his big issues, and gone into far more details than anyone else, don’t expect him to walk on water. He’s out to win, not to run for show.
On the remaining issues, especially when the public doesn’t get a full picture, you have to check his judgement, and trust it, because he has proven that it is sound over many unwavering decades.
He isn’t resting on any laurels. Hillary’s “evolution” is simply new slogans tested by polls, there is no substance to anything she says.
I don’t justify it, I think it was terrible. But the regime was being changed the other way, from outside, at the same time. That was equally terrible, and if not for the first intervention, the second intervention would probably have never come. This zero-sum tit-for-tat spy-vs-spy nonsense has to end, it’s completely destructive of the international cooperation necessary for the problems we face today, most prominently, global warming.
Independents already know where Bernie Sanders stands with regard to their interests. He has never advocated state takeover of the economy, and has not supported the Marxist-Leninist Soviet state at any time. It’s an absurd accusation that cannot stick, because he has a long record.
It’s not an excuse. What the heck are you supposed to say when someone asks you “which is more dangerous, Russia or N. Korea?” OF COURSE it’s N. Korea, it’s led by isolated lunatics, and they have an atomic Bomb. Russia acts in its interests.
But the “foreign policy” expected of candidates is repeating the “wisdom” of the establishment generals who feed the same lines of tripe to all the candidates, so you can select the candidate with the best taste in tripe. Clinton’s absurd nonsense about a “no fly zone” is the stupidest policy proposal in recent memory, and alone should disqualify her for president. It’s a policy against Russia, not against ISIS. It helps Turkey, and it helps ISIS indirectly.
The result of this pandering is that the worst possible foreign policy is bandied out at election time, and bears no relation to the real foreign policy enacted by the candidates. Cruz is not going to “carpet bomb” Syria, he just says that. Trump is not going make Mexico pay to build a wall, he just says that. And Clinton is not going to “get tough with Putin”, because she needs Russian help with ISIS.
All this nonsense is a dangerous game of proving who you know and what sentences you can drop to fool the gullible public. Sanders has never pandered, he tells the truth regarding good relations with Iran, and good cooperation to remove ISIS funding from Saudi Arabia. He is right about the Muslim nature of the fight, and he is middle of the road on foreign policy, necessarily so, as any strong position he would take would get excoriated.
It is impossible to judge foreign policy well from a campaign. Nixon campaigned on “Peace”, and brought you escalation and the bombing of Cambodia. Reagan campaigned on “tough on Russia” and nearly brought you accidental nuclear war. This stuff is dangerous pandering, and there is no use in it. You need to know the candidate’s general principles, and what judgement they bring to the issues.
What Sanders said on foreign policy is more than enough to show sound judgement, and I trust him more than anyone else to protect the country from its real threats, and not invent or produce new ones where they don’t currently exist.
He voted against it because he thought it would destabilize the region, and lead to a rise in militants who oppose the US. He thought it would increase terrorism, and lead to a wave of instabilities. He also thought it was a pointless and stupid (and illegal) war of aggression. All of this is explained in a youtube video of his speech at the time of the vote.
He wasn’t alone. All the millions of us who were marching against that war in the street thought the same. It’s just that Clinton and the establishment Democrats sold their base out when most of the public was hypnotized by 9/11, and they followed opinion polls instead of sound judgement, and didn’t come on board until the war turned into a disaster, and George W. Bush turned into a pariah.
Obama spoke out against the war as a Chicago politician, that opposition to the war is the most significant major reason he was elected Senator, and immediately considered a viable candidate in 2008. Dean’s was the anti-war candidacy in 2004, and Sanders is the third iteration of the internet campaign pioneered by Dean and Obama.
The funding fight was ridiculous. Once the war is out there, you can’t strand soldiers without equipment. It’s simply a symbolic vote, and there’s no point in it. He voted right when it counted, and not just voted, organized against the war. His votes and activities are as courageous as possible, consistent with being a sitting senator. It’s the best you can expect, and even a little more, as he was risking his career. Other courageous folks who spoke out, like Cynthia McKinney, lost their job and became pariahs.
Not Russia, foolish person, N. Korea. This isn’t 1961 or 1983.
Didn’t it already get condemned? Bernie certainly doesn’t think it was a great thing. I am just complaining about all the Ukrainian nonsense before and during. This covert stuff has to end, and it all comes from our side now.
Not “only” as in “one and only”, “only” as in “it’s only”. I edited that misstatement before you commented, sorry about that. The intention was: “It’s just that Clinton and the establishment Democrats sold their base out when most of the public was hypnotized by 9/11, and they followed opinion polls instead of sound judgement, and didn’t come on board until the war turned into a disaster, and George W. Bush turned into a pariah”
It’s BernieSis, jackass.
You are the one who should go back to school. The military funding in the US is extremely malleable, and is used for research regularly. A huge amount can be moved around to civilian spin-offs with no problem by a competent president, and military grants are a significant proportion of many academic projects, and industrial development.
Even funds specifically earmarked for F-35 development can be redirected to research for better airfoil design, for engine improvements, for materials research, for hydrolic engineering, a million things, you can be very creative with this stuff in the executive.
But the strongest and most honest method is simply to come to Congress and say that you have a very expensive and unnecessary program, to appoint generals who agree, and you would like to systematically convert these programs to civilian use in a way that doesn’t harm any region money-wise, You also need to have a popular movement behind you to ensure that they pass the funding redirect.
I got news for ya, Bernie Sanders meets with rich people too. They just don’t get to dictate his policy, because he isn’t dependent on their money.
Politics is different, and always has been.
Health care is expensive, and nearly all the taxes Sanders has proposed go to funding this. The resulting tax structure is similar to the Reagan era taxes between 1980 and 1985, before the second round of Reagan tax cuts. The progressive structure has been largely lost, and is responsible for the income inequality and loss of worker purchasing power seen today.
There is no benefit to lowering taxes on high incomes, the benefits only come from lowering costs and taxes on lower incomes. The Sanders health plan is progressive enough that most middle-class and even moderately wealthy families will save money on health care, and the tax will reduce income only at the very top.
The majority of the American people believe taxes are too low, because they really are. The world has changed, people have seen what kind of third-world economy tax cuts on the wealthy leads to.
Sanders is not a tame choice for leader of the Democratic party. He will clean the party up, and that’s a good thing. The Republicans suffer from unfixable corruption, but the Democrats can still be saved. It is not appreciated by the author the degree to which the public has lost faith in the honesty of their government, and a traditional choice for the Democratic leadership will not do better than Obama, and Clinton will do significantly worse.
Because there are still Democrats who are not bought, Sanders and Warren being the prominent two. The Democratic corruption doesn’t infect their ideology in a fundamental way as it does Republicans. It is also a fact that a party whose leaders presided over the murder of 3000 Americans, engaged in systematic corruption in favor of corporate cronies and wealthy donors, led atrocious foreign wars on trumped up excuses, and systematically destroyed the constitution to the point that Habeus Corpus and the Fourth Amendment became optional in their minds, must simply never win a national election ever again. That is, as soon as voters understand what was going on, and that’s already either approaching or past 50% of voters.
The problem with the Democrats is mostly localized to Clinton and close associates. There are many relatively clean Democrats, and with pressure, there will be more.
A nominee is also party leader, and has more leeway as party leader than as president. Clean candidates is a priority for Sanders, and having a clean party will finally win over independents.
Taking outrageous speaking fees is for after you are done with politics, and even then it is questionable. Nobody should be proud of a $200,000 speaking fee. Alexander Polyakov has more to say in 1 minute than Clinton ever had to say in a lifetime, and he speaks for free at Princeton.
They can support the candidate directly within limits, and place truly indepedent speech anywhere, online or on TV, or contribute to truly independent organizations. I think the real issue is the monopolized mass-media, it monopolized in the era of radio and TV, and it is more consolidated than ever, except for the internet. There is no reason why each TV station’s hour or radio hour is not independently owned and rented by a different organization. When the mass media is broken up into teeny tiny smithereens, the cost of ads will be low enough to allow private citizens to advertize their views in radio media, much as they can do so online. A serious issue is monopoly power leading to only wealthy voices getting heard.
But you asked for a solution today and right now. I will follow Sanders, and propose that a good public financing model is to refund the first $100 in political contributions by each citizen as a tax rebate. This is a form of decentralized public financing which involves very little government regulation, and the amount of money will easily swamp special interest donation, as it amounts to $20 billion annually. It can be passed by Congress today, as it will increase political contribution to all sides.
I am unfortunately a male BernieSis, I am just trying to express solidarity. Remember that the “BernieSis”s were always first and foremost “WarrenBros”, their loyalty is to Elizabeth Warren, not Hillary Clinton, and there is no trace of Trumpish anti-Feminist nonsense from them, only anti-corruption sentiment expressed unfortunately. I haven’t seen any real foul language, except for an occasional “Hitlery Clitnon” or some such nonsense.
The problem with Hillary Clinton is that the independents and Republicans are not making up the bad behavior in her past, or the corruption. It is there, it is real, and it is bad. Does that mean I won’t vote for her in the general? No. I’ll have to vote for her to avoid something worse. But Republicans and independents won’t do it, and they will do so for Sanders in greater numbers.
Sanders policy for change is proven, it worked in Burlington, it worked in Vermont, and the internet is the tool to take it national. Please consider that things might be different now than what you were used to growing up.
Since Sanders has a million independent individuals contributing $$$ to his campaign, the chances are 99/100 that when you see a Sanders supporters, they are a sincere person who donated, and wants the donation to be as effective as possible. Since this is not true of other candidates, who are not financed by small internet contributions, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about their internet support.
There is no negative Bernie research, he is clean as a whistle. The publications are continuing the same pattern of attack they always did, and it failed when he was at zero visibility, and it fails even worse now that he is in the spotlight of the national stage.
The BernieSisses sound the same as the majority of the Democratic Party.
It’s because young women are online, and can see through bullcrap.
Hillary Clinton knew she was running in 2016 already in 2008. It is her responsbility to avoid impropriety. She will be in politics until she loses the 2016 primary, and after that she can talk to whoever she wants and take whatever fees she wants. But I guarantee you that once there is no chance of her being president, there will be no fees and no speeches.
The point is that Polyakov has unique insight, he is not repeating platitudes or an amalgam of expert opinion. Yet his annual fees are significantly lower than Clinton’s hourly fees. That means the money is coming not because of competitive advantage, but for another reason. That other reason is that politicians listen to the folks who pay their bills. But I’ll let you figure that out for yourself.
Speaking fees are only outrageous like this when you have some sort of monopoly power, not when you have something original to say.
All of that money influences her, and that’s from looking at her record.
His lack of a strongly unique foreign policy stance is not due to lack of interest, it is due to the immense amount of political capital he has already expended on domestic issues. He is completely trustworthy on foreign policy, more so than any candidate in many decades, since before Eisenhower.
ISIS might not be a threat to them personally, but it is a horrible thing, and I trust Sanders to eliminate it more than others who pander to Turkey, who hates the main opposition to ISIS, the Rojava Kurds. The Clinton talk of “supporting the Kurds” extends only to the Iraqi Kurds, who are not the same as the Syrian Kurds.
You are either dissembling or in the minority. Sanders wins over more Republicans than Hillary, because he shares their distrust of power, whether concentrated in government or in big business.
They know it in rough outlines from his policy pages, and his past stances. Rand Paul is probably the most reasonable fellow on foreign policy, if he is anything like his father.
The early forties version of me is embarassed by the fifty-year-old version of you. I guarantee you that I will not sell out in the 8 years it will take for me to turn 50. If I found myself where you are, I would jump off a bridge.
How much of that is federal taxes? The point of progressive taxation is to boost economic growth by promoting widespread wealth and maximum economic efficiency, by reducing inequality. If the economy doubles uniformly, your income doubles, and even if your taxes go up 2% for health care, you are much better off. You can’t have sustained inequality and sustained growth, people have known this since the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s.
It’s not profit, but redundant administrative costs, which are largely invested in trying to negotiate with hospitals after they over-prescribe and over-treat, and charge outrageous fees, while trying to invisibly increase deductibles and copays on sick people. All this administrative effort is removed in single-payer.
The private insurance market for supplemental insurance would function just fine, as it does in France. But you need basic services decoupled from this, so that businesses are free to concentrate on business, and not on health care. it’s a pro-competition policy, it’s one of the reasons American business is less competitive. This is why many Republicans support single payer also.
Government spending can solve the problem of an economy not working at 100% capacity, or with significant unemployment. This is the fundamental Keynesian principle which has been denied by the Republican party for 40 years, to their own demise. It’s true, and it has been recognized as a fact since the 1930s, when every industrialized economy on Earth implemented Keynesian spending and never stopped.
Obama won the elected delegate race, Hillary won the popular vote (but it was close). It was probably a deal– he can be president in exchange for supporting Hillary in 2016, and making her Secretary of State. It could have gone the other way.
With Sanders, it won’t be like that. Win or lose, it will be a decisive victory.
I’m not talking about the US alone. In England, home spending was their “new deal”, and it was implemented by Chamberlain. In Germany, it was Autobahn and military spending (this was copied by the US in the 1950s), and that was mostly under Hitler. Whichever politician was first with Keynsianism in their respective country won tremendous power, for good or for ill. Every country has Keynsian spending, it is required for an economy to function. If you have too little taxes, the inequality can balloon to catastrophic proportions, and you end up like Argentina.
I meant businesses which have nothing to do with health care, and which are required to provide health-care for their employees in a messy way. It’s a huge headache for businessowners right now.
The government negotiates on basic care— the things that keep you alive. This sets a standard for payment. Then supplemental insurance provides optional care and add-ons, and ensures that there is no rationing, but you have to pay for it. That’s the French model.
The private citizens pay the insurance companies for optional care and bells and whistles, while the government sets the base with tough negotiations on the required care, which they can do, being the largest provider. It’s a good way to keep costs low, and to allow a market. This is why the French system is better than the British. It doesn’t deny markets, it just gets rid of a system that doesn’t work.
National Health Care isn’t just Europe. It’s the entire world, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, India, China, Cuba, literally the whole world. There are as many systems as there are countries, and even the worst ones work much better than the US.
Your dislike bordering on hate is shared by nearly all Republicans and a vast majority of independents. This is a large part of why Sanders is the more pragmatic choice. He will win more votes, and that’s what counts most of all.
The most prominent post-left anarchist, Noam Chomsky, has long supported Sanders in various races.
Those attacks only work when there is something there to stick to. The election season is long, and Sanders has had a plethora of ridiculous attacks already. Remember the “rape-fantasy” essay? The “DNC-server-glitch-gate”? These things don’t stick because Sanders has nothing there to stick to.
With Clinton, the attacks stick, because there was corruption in her past. The only selling point is that her misdeeds are just not as bad as having a Republican in the White House. That’s hardly a rallying cry.
He hasn’t yet caught on to what the internet can do.
The point of anarchism is to reduce concentrations of power. This can be done by progressive policies, until it is structural, and doesn’t need government to enforce it anymore. You don’t need a government preventing you from buying human flesh, nobody wants it, and you shouldn’t really need a government to prevent economic exploitation.
The American version of anarchism is a strange perversion, where corporate concentration of power somehow becomes just fine. This is not anarchism, it is a way of corporatists to sell their ideology to masses with a warped half understanding of leftist ideas. It only worked in the US before the public could educate itself, but now you can use google to understand anarchism with very little effort.
Clinton is riskier on that front, because she is so disliked. And unfortunately the dislike is actually justified. I mean, “travelgate” alone would be a disqualifier if the Republicans weren’t crazy, or the Iraq vote, or the Benghazi video nonsense, or the 90s PATCON, or the ridiculous covert intervention in Ukraine, or Honduras, or the mess in Libya, or any of the other Republican talking points. There are also other things, like the dubious Oklahoma City bombing, which looks like a less horrible Democrat led prototype 9/11. The only reason voters put up with Clinton is because the Republicans were worse, and the Clintons could navigate the dirty waters to a half-way sensible policy in the 90s, But the world is different now, and being clean counts for much more, because the internet is a tool that exposes corruption so easily.
You don’t understand leftist thought enough to differentiate communism from anarchism from social Democracy. No Democrat supports Marxism-Leninism, or any brand of communism even by association, and it was never even popular in the labor movement of the US, or in the student movement, or in academia. It just doesn’t exist in the US, and you can thank your lucky stars, because that allows the real left to win.
That’s a very good thing. The internet started transforming elections with Dean, and Obama honed the fundraising aspects only begun by Dean. Now Sanders is honing the organizational aspects only begun by Obama. The transformation is real, it is very big, and this accounts for the generation gap in Sanders support, the biggest factor in determining supporters is internet experience, which largely, but not exclusively, correlates with youth.
What Sanders is proposing is VASTLY superior to what Clinton is proposing, if only for the simple reason that it will get enacted when Sanders is elected. Simply breaking up the big banks is supported not only by 170 economists, but implicitly by Wall St. traders who value the banks higher when split. There is no comparison between Sanders’ meaty proposals and Clinton’s lightweight second-in-line wannabe ripoff quarter-way measures.
George McGovern was the archetype of the nanny-state liberal. When they succeeded and faced loss of funding, he converted the anti-starvation nutrition programs into the “food groups” and “food pyramid” nonsense that contributed so much to the poor nutrition situation in the US. His supporters included zealous promoters of LSD use, and he supported amnesty for Vietnam era draft dodgers (something Carter did on one of his first days, and something I agree with, but it was catastrophically unpopular). Nixon ran against him as a strong Keynesian, so he had no distinct economic policy to run on, and the racist electorate was split on civil rights, which made his running on negative income taxes a poor sell.
Sanders does not support nanny-state measures, he doesn’t support a negative income tax beyond the EITC, he supports jobs. He is a strong Keynesian running against a party that has rejected Keynesianism on ideological grounds for 40 years. He doesn’t support the use of any brain-damaging chemicals (although he supports decriminalization of marijuana on the grounds that people should not be saddled with criminal records for such a thing), and he is a committed trust buster and an honest politician.
He is not so far left as you think, as many of his positions, on guns, on abortion, on government surveillance and privacy, on the division of business into managable chunks, these are all libertarian positions. Many Republicans can find a lot of common ground with him, which is why his support is sky-high in Vermont, and his polling is so good in New Hampshire, which is a swing state.
There is no contest, if the Democrats nominate Sanders, he will win, and not by a narrow margin. The narrowest margin will probably be against Kaisich, but good luck getting Kaisich past a Republican primary.
If you consider Keynesians socialists, then all of them. If you don’t, then none of them. Sanders is just a Keynesian.
The disputes within the left are the disputes about the society of the far future, and they have been more or less sorted out now. The Marxist Leninists lost in 1956, at least in the US and in Britain. You can read Doris Lessing’s account of that period in “The Golden Notebook”, which describes (among other things) the mass disillusionment of the left with communism after the Hungarian revolution was put down (and also the nascent Feminist movement, and personal spiritual things, it’s a great great book).
You need to take a longer view. Dean lost, but Obama won.
Yeah ok, continue to think that. But Walmart decimated small business by “free people” contracting to supply them at reduced costs, because they were so big, they could leverage their size to bully them into non-competitive pricing. That didn’t come from the government. Chain stores do the same, and are decimating small business. None of that comes from government. The mean wage they pay is a starvation wage that no small-business owner can impose on himself or herself. That’s “free people”.
The problem is not the government, it is concentrations of power that allow large corporations to pay their employees too little and drive small competitors out of business. To get rid of these practices you need pro-competition policy, including breaking up monopolies, instituting pro-competition regulation (or “deregulation”, however you like to call it), like in the AT&T breakup and telecom deregulation/regulation or the airline deregulation, both done by Carter/Clinton.
The only person who calls for something remotely close to this is Sanders. He is the only one who has a proven record in protecting small business and small farmers from big business predation. You must vote for him, as it is a vote not for big government, but for small business.
Sorry, but the constitution was Amended in 1919 to allow a progressive personal income tax for precisely this purpose. The constitution has amendments for a reason.
Dean and Obama are the same candidate in a different hue.
How? That requires a really close vote. The Republicans don’t have a chance against Sanders, and they know it.
But when the objective evidence is ambiguous, and tends to suggest that he can, I think it is best to err on the side of caution and just nominate the guy. He is a clean politician, the first in a long time, and that carries a lot of weight with everyone, regardless of party affiliation.
When the government can get the Fed to print $18 trillion, issue it, and then tax it, at the cost of some inflation, the national debt should not be the overriding concern. This is why nations set their own monetary policy. The overriding concern is making sure that people are fairly paid, and that small business can emerge and compete in a horrific climate.
It is also a fact that Sanders is a simple Keynesian, and Keynesian policies should not be controversial in 2016, when they weren’t controversial in 1946 or 1956 or 1966 or 1976.
He will raise their taxes only if he gets a national health bill, it’s a contingent tax. He will do nothing to their taxes without a comprehensive health care reform, except for a pittance for family leave (which comes with family leave, and is also contingent). Soundbites don’t count for much, contingent tax-raises are not the same as tax hikes, and all his tax proposals are properly progressive.
Elections were won on soundbites when the dominant medium was television. They are not won on soundbites online, and the number of wired voters is at about 50%. The internet also back-influences TV, and sets the tone for what is acceptable in old media, much as TV set the tone for radio once upon a time.
I am already luckier than you have been. I suggest you find your faith again.
How will he make it worse, when he is running against this crony nonsense? You are too used to a corrupt government to appreciate what a clean one can do.
I agree about Sanders, he is a Keynesian, and therefore a Democrat. He calls himself a “Democratic Socialist” because of his support for social programs. But there is one article of genuine socialism in his platform, although it is a very modest proposal. He advocates some modest incentives for worker-owned business. That’s a kind of version of real socialism, although a very moderate, voluntary kind, and it is supported across parties by many people, who like worker-owner business, and private one-person business, or family owned business, which is much the same thing.
Having internet access is not the same as getting all your information from your computer, and none from your TV. That describes every voter under age 35 or so, and many voters under age 45, and I think 100% of the enthusiastic Sanders supporters. Certainly it’s true for me. I found out that Sanders was running from an online comment, and started donating after a few months, when I read his platform and saw the level of online support. Online, he is crushing the other candidates by enormous margins. If you only watch TV, or read print newspapers, his rise would be an inexplicable mystery, like Obama’s in 2008. The only reason he isn’t a dead favorite now is that not all voters are getting their information from the internet exclusively.
I didn’t know about Humphrey, thanks, I’ll read about it. I think that one plank about worker cooperatives, however meager and isolated it appears, completely justifies Sanders’ self-adopted title. It is not an imposition, or a top-down program, but a genuine call for greater distribution of ownership by the public, and an assurance that the government won’t get in the way, and won’t help big business get in the way. This is strongest possible support of small business possible.
He probably will allow independent groups affiliated with the Democrats to run ads helping his campaign, but have no superpac directly affiliated with his capaign. That’s a terrible compromise, but that’s my best guess. I expect he will do something sensible when nominated, and his ideas have uniformly been better than my guesses at what they would be, so I just trust his judgement.
The point is more of a matter of declaring principles. He really can’t stop me from making a pro-Bernie superpac and collecting money, and running ads, but he won’t approve the process, or even indirectly coordinate with me, or even wink at me while I do it. It would be a truly independent effort.
The health care industry is about 20% of the economy, and even with the best savings of national health care, it will still be greater than 10%. so you can’t have national health care without a larger percentage of government expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Health care is by far the single issue differentiating the tax/spend structure of the US government from that of other countries, and it is what makes this statistic meaningless. The cost of health-care is born by the public, whether it is a government program providing basic care, or private insurance companies.
Ok, it’s precedented by the rest of the world.
If you are for real, you are in an infinitesimal minority. The number of independents and even Democrats who would stay home with Clinton is much larger. Heck, I considered staying home with Clinton too before I came to my senses. But there are thousands of signatories to “Bernie or Bust” petitions.
Wow. And that’s without Corbyn. Amazing. It’s really encouraging that you can get conservative support for such a thing. It’s the pillar of sensible socialism on the left for ages.
He’s an avowed Keynsian, and FDR social-program supporter. His only “socialism” is this (which I just found out was passed by the Conservative-Liberals in the UK): https://www.gov.uk/governme… . I don’t know what you would call it, but I bet that conservatives and independents would support that in droves.
“Kids” in this case means everyone not brainwashed by TV.
You don’t need an open mind online. With all your efforts to keep it closed, it will get cracked open.
Donate $10, and see what his organization is doing. It’s worth thee the price of admission. You’ll get regular emails, see meetups, be able to find organizers near you. This is not a presidential race exactly, it is an unprecedented political movement, which you can’t see until you join. The revolution is not being televised, it’s online.
The argument against the type of inequality seen in the US is very simple— in economic equilibrium, the kind you read about in economic textbooks, there is no significant inequality, beyond a small factor related to productivity, because if someone is doing something and making more money, a competitor goes and does that, until the incomes equalize. That’s Adam Smith’s argument for the stabilization of incomes at around the mean, and the economic model used until the mid 19th century to justify capitalism on egalitarian grounds, as counterintuitive as that sounds today, with hundreds of years of experience with the inequality produced by Capitalism.
That prediction is correct in market equilibrium, it predicts a strict correlation between income and productivity, with very little inequality, entirely tied to producitivity differences, and no worker being paid that much more than another, since there is a physical limit on the number of hours a person can work. While it is largely false in the real world, it is actually roughly true in the professions, and in small business.
It fails in the real world due to ownership of capital, and the existence of social classes with unequal access to capital. This produces skewed income, income not tied to productivity, unemployment, and recession/depression, as the workers competing with the unemployed can’t demand the wage justified by productivity. That is the point of redistributive taxation.
I wrote about this in a long explanation to another conservative who doesn’t understand the first principles of economics here: .https:// disqus.com/home/channel/one… . The basic point is that economies which have inequality simply collapse in the same way the US is collapsing now, into an underproducing empoverished underclass making a majority, and small capital-owning parasitic class that is useless. The US avoided this in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s by strong tax policies. But Reagan stopped doing that, and here we are.
I would prefer a president who would force them to pay a living wage, and supported small business until they broke that monstrosity up into smithereens. That’s Sanders.
You relive them whenever you stop doing Keynsianism. We’re reliving them right now.
It is still done by every industrialized economy, it is the foundation of economic thought. It is only denied by the Republican party since 1980, which is why they are not competent to govern.
You don’t understand how Keynsian spending works. It is taking money away from where it is concentrating, and putting it in the pockets of workers who are being ripped off. I wrote about this here in a debate with a similarly educationally deprived fellow like you: https://disqus.com/home/cha…
That’s the whole point of Keynsianism. To diminish inequality, and restore competitive equilibrium.
Sanders will destroy a chunk of the Republicans in the house. Simply the threat of it is enough to get policy through.
Yes, but only one of those “schools” makes correct quantitative predictions for growth, unemployment and inflation, and that’s the Keynesian school. The rest is claptrap.
He doesn’t just need to turn out voters for him, they will turn out in ok numbers in the election. More importantly, he needs an organized opposition for intrasigent Republicans and a fundraising organization with a goal. The goal is aiming that operation on vote-turnout during midterms to target specific individual congressmen, when it is easy, because turnout is already low. He already has that commitment from me and from a million other people, and he’ll be about as strong as the NRA by the time he gets in the white house. Nobody will oppose his policies.
The stuff produced by robots will be cheap, and if the ownership is distributed widely in public stock, the corporate profits will be shared.
Yes he was.
That’s what you think. You have no idea what an organized opposition can do.
As I said, it is denied by Republicans since 1980, which is why they must never be elected to any office in this country.
Obama couldn’t get me to do anything after the election, because he was not governing the way he said he would. He started the drone program, didn’t close guantanamo unilaterally, didn’t bring the prisoners to trial, didn’t put Cheney on trial for his life, and hired a bunch of business donations Democrats. There’s no way anyone would go to bat for that. He was on his own.
I will do things for a real leftist, and Sanders knows how to get it done. He did it in Burlington and to a lesser extent in Vermont, and the barrier to taking it national is lifted by the online organization.
The tea party was useless, it wasn’t an organized opposition. It was a bunch of people paid by a handful of big money donors, who always voted Republican. Sanders needs to primary Republican opposition too, not just elect Democrats.
It’s not ridiculous. I follow his campaign closely, and I know what he spends his policy time on. Nearly all foreign policy is pandering, and there is very little relation between foreign policy positions of candidates and actual foreign policy positions of presidents. Kennedy ran on a “missile gap”, Nixon ran on “peace”, etc.
The vote on bankruptcy reform was corrupt and her vote on the Iraq war was corrupt. But most corrupt of all is her covert foreign policy, which is in favor of shadowy multinational interests overseas, and her meddling to pass gun control predicated on a bunch of lying incidents and false PATCON nonsense.
Keynes doesn’t have anything original to say, he is cribbing Marx, and getting details wrong. His proposals are watered down nonsense, and there is no point in reading Keynes, all a Marx reader has to do is say “Ok, lets say we wanted to fix Marx’s problem under Capitalism. What do we do?” The answer is to equalize incomes by paying people to drive unemployment to zero. Everyone can see that.
Keynes couldn’t mention Marx, or else he would have been an academic pariah. So he made up a bunch of stupid nonsense to get the basic idea across without mentioning the income segregation and competition with the unemployed. His proposals are basically more or less sound, to the extent that they agree with what a random person would say would reduce unemployment.
Deficit spending to grow the economy is a process of redistribution, as the inflation takes money away from people who get paid too much, and the jobs program distributes it to unemployed, who got paid nothing before. There is no point to reading Keynes, he had nothing original to say beyond getting what Marx said discussed in non-Marxist economic journals, in obfuscatory language.
He’s less of a socialist than he is a Democrat.
What is not working is Republicans ignoring the basic laws of economics.
I don’t care so much about hypocricy and cynicism, I care about results. I support Sanders because he knows the best way to get results, and that’s not by compromising with an evil system, but by working hard to change it. If he is required to accept Democratic superpacs in the general, I will still know that his priorities are in the right place.
Progressive income taxes are not for affecting people’s behavior, they are for redistributing ill-gotten high incomes. That’s a major function of government since even before the New Deal.
Those are right wing talking points. No real economist takes this seriously. What you call “malaise” is Carter’s austerity program, which was designed to end inflation, and it did. Inflation and unemployment can coexist when there is no capital to invest in new business, because it has inflated away. This is why you stop stimulating when inflation starts, as Carter responsibly did. That’s what you call “misery index”. The association with depression is unfortunate, as the only real depression is due to Bush’s Reaganomics.
Unforutnately, the Republican party ran on foolish anti-economic fantasy ideas, which were decried by economists on all sides, and now they believe their own voodoo. That’s not a responsible party, and they must never be elected to any office ever again, as they don’t understand the basic principles of economics.
WW2 is Keynesianism on steroids, and Keynesianism in the US never was implemented properly until WW2, when the top tax rate jumped to 94%, and government spending eliminated unemployment altogether. In England, and even in fascist Italy and Germany, real Keynsianism eliminated unemployment before the war, and those economies recovered.
The main point of Keynesianism (you can’t read Keynes, you need to read Marx) is to elminate unemployment. The US programs were never sufficient to eliminate unemployment until the war, when they did so and then some.
No it didn’t. It achieved this by avoiding Keynesian spending due to US intervention. The US prevented Keynesian policies in South America since the Monroe doctrine until the recent socialist wave there finally shook off US imposition.
Countries’ spending is not like personal spending, because the government controls the amount of money. If there is no political will to raise taxes, issuing more money is an effective flat tax by inflation. It’s better to raise taxes.
It depends on the form of the government “handouts”. If they are competitive contracts, then yes, these countries are more competitive. If they are welfare payments, then it cuts into productivity. Sanders is on the right side of government spending.
Inflation only starts when people have enough money to stress production. This is Keynes 101.
It doesn’t require force to get citizens to do what is in their best interest. I’m an American, and I don’t believe in either government or corporate coercion.
Living wage = “the maximum minimum wage you can set before inflation starts”. That’s also the minimum wage level which minimizes unemployment. It would probably be around $25 an hour considering the productivity gap between workers today and 1979.
Sanders calls it $15, which is a political judgement, based on the current minimum wage, and what can be realistically passed.
The president can mobilize a boycott of Walmart, he can lead Federal recommendations to state commissions to recognize the value in zoning out Walmart until their wage policies are sensible, he can point out the politicians who are on the take from WalMart, and ask the public to get rid of them. He can do a lot by himself. But best of all is to come to Congress with a request for a sensible rise in minimum wage over a few years, and for Congress to pass it. If they resist such a popular measure, the leaders of the opposition need to be voted out.
They are “more productive”, only in the sense that they are paid so little that the corporation can suck out more profit. Mon and pop stores are more efficient in every real measure except centralized profits, because they don’t need WalMart’s bureaucratic overhead, and they are more responsive.
To get rid of WalMart’s advantage, you need fair pricing laws, so that WalMart can’t get special deals. You need to enforce anti-dumping laws, so that they can’t operate at a loss to drive competitors out of business. You need zoning reform at the local level to prevent them getting subsidized land deals, and you need a high minimum wage, to cut into their margin. With these reforms, they would quickly go out of business, as they are terribly inefficient compared to small stores.
The WalMart model is the failed Soviet model of nation-state level monopolies. It’s amazing to me that the most anti-communist folks immitate the failures of the USSR most closely.
Hitler had the best capitalist economy in the 1930s, which is why Germany was able to destroy so much of the world in the war. Nobody disputes that, it’s not praise of Hitler. It’s praise of Keynesianism. I am obviously not a Hitler supporter, but he was just a Keynesian, and Hitler’s economic policies, road construction and military spending, were adopted more or less as is, by Eisenhower.
It’s not because Hitler was such a genius. He was just doing what Chamberlain and Roosevelt was doing, except in a dictatorship, where he didn’t need to get all the legislators on board.
My (self) education came in the 80s, and it came from thinking, not from others.
Bernie Sanders has an economic policy which is designed to reduce unemployment, until it is zero. His main policies are an infrastructure jobs program, which gets Federal money directly into formerly unemployed workers’ pockets, education subsidies, which reduce the pool of workers and helps retrain workers for openings, a higher minimum wage which reduces unemployment by increasing demand, and public health care, which allows small businesses to compete, and increases worker mobility, as workers no longer have to worry about health benefits.
These policies, if done right, can reduce unemployment to zero, and produce tremendous economic growth, as in the late 90s. But you need to understand economics, not listen to Republican propaganda.
“pro competition” means not giving a tax break to large corporations at the expense of small ones.
Chavez doubled the Venezuelan economy and halved poverty, and more than halved deep poverty. His policies were nothing like Sanders’, but there’s a reason Venezuelans voted for him in droves.
Did you miss the bailout of Wall St. and stimulus that went directly through banks?
Sanders is not a Marxist revolutionary. His revolution is like the “Reagan revolution” or the “Gingrich revolution”, it is a movement of voters. Please read and think, and stop listening to right wing media.
Not here, not online, which is why Sanders is killing the online vote.
I’m 42, bud, give up the condescension. You don’t understand the American political system and electorate. Your question is ill posed, is cloture a vote?
The country is not at all polarized on raising minimum wage, that’s at 90%, and it is majority with Republicans and Democrats. It is not polarized on subsidized college, nor is it polarized on infrastructure spending, or on tax increases for the wealthy. It is not polarized on breaking up banks, or on support for small business. There are no states where these proposals don’t have majority support. That means, red or blue, you can always find a majority to vote out a candidate on a specific issue either in the primary or in the general.
Further, voter turnout among Republicans is only at 50%, and among Democrats, say 40% in Congressional races. A 25% increase in turnout in opposition beats any Republican, and for that you just need organizing and money. This is why congress is terrified of organized opposition, and it’s the reason money is so important in Congressional races, and it’s the reason Congress is so easy to buy out by donors.
The same factors that allow Congress to get manipulated by special interests is the factor that allows Bernie Sanders to influence Congress. A powerful organization can get results in Congress much more easily than you think. It only takes a march, and a defeat or two, and then it’s a sea change. That’s how Republicans pushed through their policies when they were against the best judgement of most Democrats and Democrats controlled Congress.
The president of the US appoints the prosecutor, and there could have been a trial immediately regarding the torture policy, which blatently and unambiguously violates 7 decades of clear American law and precedent, including specific judgements against waterboarding, and where all parties admitted their actions. That comes with a prison sentence, so it starts to produce political pressure. A torture trial produces political will to look into 9/11 malfeasance, and depending on the results of an investigation, it can lead to a trial for treason. Once you have the trial for treason, you get more testimony, as people feel free to speak, and then you can start the trial for murder. We are a country of laws, and those laws were broken.
The election in the US is long enough to explain that in this case, it means “supports small farms and business over big corporations”.
McGovern was the guy who turned the US nutrition program into the food-pyramid, he was the poster-child for nanny-liberalism. He was running against Nixon, a strong Keynsian, and his supporters advocated ingesting brain-damaging chemicals like LSD. He was running on negative income tax welfare at a time when the racist electorate was split on civil rights.
Sanders is a rock-ribbed supporter of liberty, and his programs support small business, jobs, and economic growth. He is to the libertarian side of Clinton on surveillance, guns, police state, habeus corpus, and all the other issues that I can’t imagine could possibly be controversial, but they are. He is the only real Keynesian in the election, and he is the only honest person running in decades. He is a shoo in, not a long shot.
A good campaign finance system can allow citizens to finance campaigns directly without paying the bill on the first $100, or paying a small and smoothly growing percentage. This requires Congress to vote, but I doubt it would be hard to pass something that increases their funding from constituents. The point is that it isn’t centralized, the citizens decide which candidates to support, not the government.
The goal with media is decentralization and loss of monopoly, which means separating infrastructure from service. The example is airline deregulation and AT&T breakup and telecom deregulation. The infrastructure of television is separate from the service of programming, and nowadays, when the cable lines are digital, the whole thing is restructuring, except the large media oligarchy is standing in the way.
You need good pro-competitive measures, and good anti-trust enforcement, and that requires good judgement in both the executive and Congress. Sanders hasn’t proposed anything beyond the $100 tax rebate for donations, but it gives an indication of the decentralized and citizen oriented approach he takes, not a big-government top-down approach.
I reject Politifact because of the number of “Mostly false” and “False” findings they have been making lately on my boy. When I review these accusations, they mostly fall apart. They are another slightly less biased arm of corporate media. They are still mostly fair to other candidates.
Of course they were stupid buying iPads, but the stupidity is due to the problem of corporate monopoly, not of the interface design of the device. You can’t even log into an iPad remotely, programming it is a nightmare of closed corporate OS and opaque standards, it doesn’t run flash just because Steve Jobs had a funny feeling, and it has an interface that is designed top down by a corporate bureaucracy. That bureaucracy might be making the right choice regarding interface today, but it cannot be counted on to make the right choice in the future.
The only resolution to these problems is a true competitive market for tablets, not a monopolized industry under unified ownership. Apple didn’t invent much of anything of value since it stopped being a small Apple II company, it has become a corporate dead weight preventing competition.
Bernie Sanders’ proposals are successful everywhere they are used, and his economic policy is pro small-business and pro competition. You need to learn how innovation happens, and how economies work. They don’t work when there is no competition, and a small number of people at the top of a small number of corporations stuff money into their pockets. That’s not American, it’s Soviet, and this is the cause of failure of every economy that went down that road.
The difference is the negotiating power of the buyer in regard to health care and food. The person getting health care is not usually in a position to know what kind of care they should be receiving, and they can be manipulated into spending whatever the doctor wants them to spend, by just inventing tests and diseases. The consumers simply don’t have enough information. When they do, as in the case of optional surgery, the market works fine.
That’s what makes health care different, and it is why the parts of care that are most frightening and most difficult to control, the parts that involve lifesaving measures, are paid for by all modern developed states. The remaining health care is done by supplemental insurance and markets, and that system works fine.
They have a higher percentage of immigrants than the US, due to guest worker programs, and these migrants receive health care without any problem.
Sanders didn’t propose a VAT.
There needs to be a government monopoly because the consumer in this case doesn’t have the information required for an informed choice, and the consumer is out to save his or her life, and is going to pay whatever the doctor says, in whichever hospital is closest. It’s an extortionist situation. In cases where the consumers can make an informed choice, like optional surgery or plastic surgery, these are the cases covered by supplemental insurance, everything works well under markets, and no change is necessary.
In health, the patient can be easily scammed and overcharged, and the government is the only entity strong enough to rein in costs of lifesaving care. The role of supplemental insurance is to pay for those things the consumer wants but the government decided it won’t pay for.
The reason the US system is so expensive is that hospitals and doctors systematically overcharge the insurance companies, who are too weak to be able to control costs. That’s just what happens. With supplemental insurance, they can’t be said to be killing their customers, so they can negotiate appropriately. The government needs to be the negotiator for lifesaving care.
He isn’t expanding government except to the extent that it involves reforming health care. He is using government power to reduce the power of big business. That’s the other half of libertarianism you guys on that side forget about.
Hilter enslaved my grandfather, nitwit, and killed most of his family and associates.
I agree that gearing up for war is not good. It does employ everyone, but there are much better ways to do that. The US uses Hitler’s method, and the better way is to do other things, as the war machine wants to be used. That’s the lesson Eisenhower learned.
All government policy is enforced by courts and coercion. Your smear tactics don’t work online, where I can respond, they only work on TV, where I can’t. My relatives were killed by Hitler, my grandfather was enslaved. I didn’t praise Hitler, I praised Keynesian economics.
Government can only be small when corporate power is reduced, otherwise a call for smaller government is a call for larger corporations.
Both parties have been derelict,it’s true, but only the Republicans have turned dereliction of duty into a platform.
The number of totally destitute people is not negligible, you just shut your eyes to the homeless. I meet at least 5 every day walking around NYC. The only effective anti-poverty program is to ensure that every person can always get a job, through the government if none are available.
I know Republican tactics, I saw the Dukakis ad when it was running. Those tactics only work on TV, and the fraction of Americans reliant on TV is shrinking. Sanders is creating a “false narrow avenue of attack” with Socialism— he is presenting the Republicans with what looks to them as a gift, a direct passage to the heart of the city. But because he is not an advocate of state control of the economy, it’s an attack that makes no sense, that path is the easiest to guard, and it is narrow enough that each of the attacks can be deflected in turn. That’s how Sanders could win all his previous elections in the first place.
Clinton’s attack machine is as dirty as the Republicans’, but she fails against Sanders for a reason. Such attack machines are only useful in monopolized media of sound-bites, and can be circumnavigated online.
Sanders is also very good at TV, and can counter the attacks extremely simply. “I have never advocated state control of industry” suffices to refute the socialism attack. At best, it turns into a referendum on American foreign policy in Nicaragua in the 80s, a foreign policy Americans would recognize today as odious.
Americans aren’t so stupid. TV is stupid. Americans are diverse, and TV reduces diverse complex opinion into the lowest common denominator.
The “online vote” is the collection of all the voters who get their information from the internet, and not from TV. That’s every voter under age 45, and these form the nucleus of Sanders strongest supporters.
Carter was one of the two or so reasonable postwar presidents, Eisenhower being the other one. Reagan took credit for Carter accomplishments in reducing inflation, deregulating airlines, and breaking up AT&T. Reagan added nothing but nonsense economics, but enjoyed the inflation free economy he inherited, and created a boom-bust cycle which led to a market crash and recession in 1987 and to a deep recession in 1991.
Carter’s malaise is the austerity Volker imposed to end inflation.There is nothing you can do about it. The reason you associate Carter with misery is that Democrats are only elected when Republicans screw things up so badly that the ruling class can’t bear the economic conditions anymore. We are now witnessing the end of that cycle, as the ruling class loses its grip on elections, with Sanders.
I grew up under Reagan, and it was the worst time of my life. The constant panic induced by fear of accidental nuclear war was sufficient to put him into the “worst president in history” category.
Are you against sweaters?
He was ending the inflation of the overstimulation of Vietnam war production. Nixon stimulated the economy so much, he had to impose price controls to prevent inflation, and instead created gas-lines. Carter’s economic policy was successful, he ended inflation in 4 years, and he also deregulated the Airlines for competition, and started the AT&T breakup in 1979. All these things, Reagan took credit for ridiculously.
I read it when I was a child, it’s well written but not so difficult if you’re used to 19th century sentences. The better book on these matters is Capital I, which I only read as an adult, unfortunately after largely working out the contents for myself through later writings. That’s largely a collection of 19th century wage-labor statistics in England showing that without zero unemployment, industrial wages collapse to subsistence, together with implications of this observation. This is the basis for Marx predicting the collapse of capitalism (essentially the great depression) and Keynes proposing a fix by zeroing unemployment.
Food consumption does not usually involve coercion or emergency, in cases of famine, when it does, the government gets involved. “Government food” existed in the US in the 1940s and 1950s. Food is not a problem usually, because the consumer knows how to buy it.
The main problem with health care is that the consumer usually doesn’t know enough to make an informed choice, the doctor both opaquely diagnoses the care required and gets paid for the amount of care dispensed, and the insurance company foots the bill. This allows hospitals to make profits by over-treating and over-prescribing. Government systems set a ceiling and strong policies for care, and then private add-ons complete the care in a market system, so that there is no rationing.
Government run health care is 30-50% cheaper than what you have in the US, and produces better outcomes. Sanders isn’t proposing a VAT because he does it with a properly progressive mix of payroll and income taxes. It’s not magic, his plan is dead on accurate on the numbers (despite what you read), which is a first for campaigns.
States don’t refuse Federal infrastructure funding as a rule, but to make sure the infrastructure is sound, you absolutely need to vote out all the Republicans in your state. There is no other solution. A second party will emerge after that, as always, probably to the libertarian-anarchist side of the Democrats. I don’t understand why that didn’t happen in 2004, but it needed to happen, like yesterday. It’s not just Flint, I agree.
Minimum wage is Keynesian. You don’t understand Keynesianism, it’s not “what Keynes said”, it’s “how to fix what Marx said in a Capitalist economy”. You can’t understand Keynesian policies without reading Marx.
One of the problems in an economy is that competition with the unemployed pushes wages to subsistence. A mimimum wage offsets that and produces wages as if there were no unemployment. It is better to reduce unemployment to zero, but in the absence of that, a minimum wage is as good as any policy that gets you closer to equilibrium. Minimum wage was passed under FDR, at the beginning of the Keynesian era.
As minimum wage is raised, you increase consumption and decrease unemployment, until you get as close to zero as you can without investment. Then inflation begins. To actually get to zero unemployment, you need a jobs program to absorb excess labor too.
She knows, but she doesn’t tell you. She goes through the same “missile gap” and “peace” nonsense on her campaign, except in her case it’s “no fly zone”.
The mismanagement of the project is by Republicans. They are not competent to govern, and you must remove them from all positions of government. There’s nothing I can say about that, because when you have a party that is not concerned about citizens’ lives, you need to get rid of it. It’s not just Flint’s water, it’s also 9/11, pointless wars, homelessness and destitution, lack of medical care. The Republican party must not be considered a party capable of governing, it is a fringe party, composed of the stupid and brainwashed.
It’s a question of structural bias, I’ll let readers review the Politifact analysis. Bernie Sanders is so clean that he gets “false” for things like “ran an ad that quoted a newspaper correctly, but didn’t mention that the newspaper didn’t endorse him”. He gets “mostly false” for saying “black youth unemployment is at 51%”, because the statistics are including those giving up, underemployment, and are a few years old. These things are such slight errors that it is impossible not to laugh. I don’t dispute Politifact’s analysis, it is usually correct on details. I dispute it’s objectivity. I actually wish Sanders would lie more, so he could win more easily. But no dice, he is more ethical than I am.
Clinton straight up lies. I mean lies on purpose. Again and again. On important things, like “what is PATCON? What did you know about it?” “What do the following things have in common: Oklahoma City bombing, Sandy Hook shooting, Ruby Ridge, IRS audits of right wing groups?”, “Do you believe that space aliens visited the US at any time?“(!!) “Are you going to release JFK files?” on every issue, it’s the same pander pander lie as the Republicans. Politifact misses the big picture here, but that’s ok. They’re still useful.
If no one has done it without a VAT, Sanders will be the first. It’s better to do it partly in payroll, to make the program politically immune from repeal. It’s good to do the rest in income, to make it progressive.
If you want extra health care, pay for supplemental insurance. In France, people get supplemental insurance, they pay 30% less in total, and they get more health care.
Health care is expensive in the US because there is no government to hold down costs for MRIs, prescription drugs, x-rays, and so on, and hospitals and medical professionals make a higher pay than is justified by market rate given the number of doctors, through guild practices.
Once the government holds down basic care costs, that sets the pay scale for the private system on top. If you feel you aren’t getting enough care, buy supplemental insurance. Your rates won’t be driven up by homeless people and uninsured going to emergency rooms, and by ridiculous unnecessary tests for children and ignorant people who can’t evaluate their care independently.
Reagan was catastrophic, everyone under age 50 knows that. Carter was a great president, everyone is slowly learning that.
What the media repeats is not what is eventually settled on as the truth. You will have to learn that the hard way.
No, the Pershing II missile system, with 7 minutes to Moscow was to blame. Reagan mouthing off about “evil empires” was to blame. George Bush mouthing off about surviving limited nuclear war was to blame. The Korean Air shootdown, whatever that was, was to blame. The Soviets believed there would be a nuclear first strike in 1983, and they had glitches that could have led to war. Every 10 year old child was panicking about nuclear war, especially accidental war, but curiously enough, none of the adults (around me at least). The adults were wrong. The kids were right. I stopped listening to old people in 1985.
The psychiatric association of the 1980s had a clinical diagnosis for children with complete paralyzing fear of nuclear war. I wasn’t one of them, but I still had debilitating nightmares once a month. Nothing you can say can ever make me think of Reagan as anything other than a madman who risked nuclear war just to look strong.
Other than Reagan, my childhood was normal.
No, you are against sweaters.
If by “everyone” you mean all the folks who are about to die soon from old age, you are right.
Carter is not a Jew-hater, he led to the Egypt peace-treaty, still the best peace treaty ever signed in the Middle East.
Hitler’s Keynesian policies gave him the power to destroy much of the world and commit horrific crimes. Keynesian policies rescue economies and give people great power, for good or ill. I will never praise Hitler, and I wish the US would not follow his “roads and arms” path to Keynesianism, but it does. This is just a fact.
The only purpose of progressive income tax is to redistribute income. It has no other purpose.
* Bang * (phewt)
Economists make quantitative predictions, and the definition of “real economist” is one that predicts the numbers right. There are relatively conservative Keynesians (like Nixon’s advisors) and Marxist Keynesians (like some European economists) but there are no serious non-Keynesian economists.
*bang* *bang* (whiff)
Hitler murdered nearly my mother’s entire family, nitwit. While it is true that government and big business collude, the source of big business is not government, but consolidation. To avoid consolidation, you need a government that enforces anti-trust law, and breaks up big businesses. That’s not Obama, it’s Sanders.
Welcome to the world of the children of the boomers, whose parents snorted and smoked away their memory.
I guess the million anti-nuke protesters in NYC were delusional, and the millions of European protesters trying to get intermediate range ICBMs out of Western Europe. And the folks who made “Threads”, “The Sacrifice”, “Special Bulletin”, “The Day After”, “Testament”, “War Games”, and “Miracle Mile” were all delusional, since nobody cared about the topic of those films.
Google “films about nuclear war” and you’ll find that they cluster around two periods: 1964 (near the Cuban Missile Crisis) and in 1984 (near the Reagan is so stupid crisis).
I can guarantee you ONE person was definitely delusional. That’s Yuri Andropov. He was completely positive the US was going to launch a nuclear first strike in 1983, and his network of spies had to calm him down that there was no preparation for this sort of thing. But there was still a provocative simulation of a launch in 1983, and a Soviet satellite glitch that looked like a launch. The cold war was extremely serious in 1983, because the intermediate range missiles made the required response time shorter than 10 minutes, so you had hair-trigger launch sequences.
All kids knew it. All the adults were clueless. They had smoked and snorted all their worries away. Can’t wait til your generation is gone.
He can apologize all he wants, he still wasn’t guilty. Jesse Jackson wasn’t guilty either, even though he called NYC “Hymietown”. Racism is not a problem of bad language.
I’m not backing off. I want the president to enforce a $15 minimum wage.
Sanders is proposing infrastructure jobs, subsidized university, and single payer healthcare. So I guess he has your vote. He is not Lyndon Johnson, he actually wants to reduce unemployment.
At the cost of nothing. The same policies continued through the 1950s, and into the 1960s, and living standards skyrocketed.
When you do Keynsianism right, it increases personal liberty too, as you do not put money into enormous corporations making bombers and carriers, but into small businesses doing construction or programming, or into workers pockets through an EITC. None of these are anti-freedom, they are correcting a mistake in the market.
Marx wasn’t proposing slavery, that was Lenin. Marx pointed out that a capitalist economy has a problem with wages dropping and demand not sufficient to purchase all the products. His solution was to let business concentrate into monopolies, as they naturally do, then take the monopolies over by the state. That’s not a good idea, but the problem he identified is real.
Lenin wasn’t exactly proposing slavery either, he just proposed to run an entire country as if it were a single corporation. The idea was to build the monopolies from scratch, instead of taking it over. That is exactly what the USSR did.
That’s a tremendous mistake, as enormous corporations are not efficient compared to small business, but it is effectively what the US chooses to do in most industries also. The USSR was competitive with the US precisely in those industries where the US is dominated by large firms. It was hopelessly behind in those industries where the US was dominated by small business.
That’s why you need to elect Sanders to head your government. He wants to break up the big boys, not give them contracts.
I am talking about the graph of Venezuelan GDP with time. It doubled under Chavez. He wasn’t ideal, he had some dictatorial tendencies, but he was voted in because he was good for the economy. The Venezuelan poverty rate was cut in half, and deep poverty cut by more than half under Chavez.
There is a legacy of corruption that needs to be dealt with now, and this is why the opposition won seats. The problems with paper products is due to the lack of power to import, because of the drop in oil price, it should be fixed by investing in local toilet paper factories, but that won’t happen, because it is difficult to invest right now, but that will change with the new parliament. Still, the rise in Venezuelan GDP under Chavez is incontestable, please look it up before mouthing off.
What YOU call “inflation” is purely monetary, and meaningless. What EVERYONE ELSE calls inflation is the change in the price of a basket of goods which set the CPI. That’s what I mean when I say inflation.
The minimum wage which minimizes unemployment is not zero, and this ridiculous prediction you just made is shown to be false every time minimum wage goes up and unemployment simultaneously goes down. It’s a counterintuitive effect, due to the stimulus effect of extra spending.
The limit at which rising minimum wage produces CPI changes (inflation) is when production is stressed. That happens when everything is working at peak capacity, and that’s when everyone is working and unemployment is zero. It is zero, that is, if there is enough infrastructure to employ everyone. If not, you need more investment in new industry, and until that time, you need a jobs program to get unemployment to zero.
I would prefer to have a progressive corporate tax, which is much higher for larger corporations. That produces an incentive for firms to split themselves up, without onerous regulation.
Regarding subsidies for green firms, you can do that outside the tax code, with direct purchases.
I also would like to see no corporate tax on worker cooperatives, perhaps a negative tax for those. This way, a person who starts a company and distributes equity to employees gets a better tax rate, to reflect the better working environment.
The point of the tax code is to penalize anti-competitive behavior. With the corrupt government we have, it is the exact opposite, and you get tax breaks and tax shelters for the largest corporations, and punitive taxes on the smallest. It’s a miracle you have any small business left in the US really.
That’s why I vote Sanders.
You could make the argument disingenuously, that’s why you need to take it case by case. It is true in the case of medicine, it is not really true in the case of food (although consumers are really stupid about food), and this is why the entire world makes a floor of care which is government provided. I don’t agree with the British system, where the floor is also the ceiling, because there is no reason to prevent markets on top of the basic care provided by the government. Markets fix whatever rationing issue you have with the basic care. But it doesn’t matter, even the British system is better than the US by a mile.
Sanders didn’t propose a VAT. It’s also terribly regressive in addition to hiding costs.
YOU DON’T CUT ANYTHING! You have no understanding of economics. If you reduce all government, large corporations will create their own de-facto government, like your cable company creates its own monopoly and charges whatever it wants for your internet, with whatever laws it can legislate to you through the fine print in its contracts. It’s the government’s job to guarantee a competitive economy where business is nimble and individuals can innovate.
An economy cannot tolerate unemployment. If there is unemployment, you need to absorb it into jobs. Always, without fail. If you can’t raise taxes, you need to print the money! There is no excuse for unemployment, you need to make sure that every person who needs a job has a job, period. Whether it’s a government job or a private sector job.
There can be no unemployment in an economy, it destroys wages for everyone, it is the reason that economies can be depressed. There is also no moral excuse to leave a person’s labor unused while they are looking for a better job. There is always something useful a person can do, build a bridge, write code, whatever. If the private sector doesn’t have use for people, the government must find a use for them, otherwise the wages of everyone will fall due to competition with the unemployed.
There is no unemployment in economic equilibrium, it doesn’t exist in the model you use to justify capitalism. When you see it, you must get rid of it. Subsidizing college is a full employment prescription, both because students are out of the labor pool, and because they come out with better qualifications to fill openings.
Without full employment, there is nothing else that works. The welfare policies of Europe are actually a gimmick to avoid having the government find jobs for people— it’s just easier to write a check, and it’s substantially the same in macro impact. But it kills a person to not be productive, it destroys motivation and makes people useless, and drives them to drugs and suicide. Sanders is proposing the proper policy— jobs for everyone.
That’s not a handout, it’s absolutely required. The rest of his policies require taxing non-competitive income, and instituting single-payer healthcare so that businesses don’t have to deal with it anymore, and costs are finally contained for real, as they are everywhere else in the world.
It is impossible to argue with a conservative, you don’t understand the fundamental problem of capitalist economies. The fundamental problem is unemployment, as Marx identified, which prevents economic equilibrium from ever being attained. Any full employment policy fixes this, although it is always easier for governments to give handouts than to advocate for jobs, because governments find it easier to hand out money than contract for useful work.
Not “non European people”, it’s absurdly racist to care where people’s ancestors come from. Europe just has more immigrants. They have a guest worker program, and they have massive immigration for decades, due to a low indigenous birthrate.
There are two different definitions of capitalism, I will distinguish them and use different terms for both:
1. Existing capitalism— this is the legal system that allows individuals and organizations to freely trade ownership of various abstract deeds for land and physical property, which grants the owner power over the use of that land and property, with the goal of using this property to create more property by employing wage labor.
2. Theoretical capitalism or “competitive frictionless market equilibrium” — this is the situation described by Adam Smith, Ricardo, and other economists in the 19th century, which is an entirely theoretical mathematically precise model. This model makes the claim that every service has infinitely many suppliers in tight competition, every purchasing decision is rational, and all prices are then rigidly fixed at the intersection of supply and demand.
When I talk about capitalism, I am talking about 2, theoretical market equilibrium. This is something one can understand, as it makes a bunch of extremely precise predictions about the structure of payments and prices, the structure of ownership, and the response to marginal changes in prices when an entity like a government makes changes. The result of a market operating according to “capitalism 2” is perfect Pareto efficiency, completely distributed capital ownership is stocks, and nearly equal salaries, which differ only in relation to individual worker productivity. This is why Adam Smith advocated capitalism— he was thinking about the point of perfect equilibrium.
When YOU talk about capitalism, you are talking about 1— a system of free exchange of deeds of property. The result of this system is not the equilbrium of 2, but the concentration of property deeds in a few hands, through buyouts and consolidation.
Since existing capitalism (1) is different from theoretical capitalism (2), that means there are some predictions of market equilibrium theory which are not obeyed. What part of the theory fails most obviously?
The answer is that when the deeds concentrate, the owner can raise prices and siphon off profit, due to power. Once that happens, the economy is not operating at pareto efficiency, because the worker is slightly underpaying the employees. Then the employees can’t quite buy the full production, which means some employees become unemployed (again, this never happens in 2). The unemployed workers compete with the employed, and drive down wages to the lowest possible value consistent with staying alive. Then the economy really crashes, and even the owner isn’t making a profit anymore, because nobody can buy anything.
This is the situation described in Marx. It is a failure of existing markets (1) to reach the equilibrium point (2).
Of course I read Marx, although not all of it. I read The Manifesto, Capital I, and various online and collected essays. I didn’t need to read most of it, as I worked out the mathematical models myself, after taking a course
in microeconomics in high school, and working out the math in a few hours (it’s easy compared to real math or physics or anything).
The main point of Marx is that the existence of abstract ownership of capital separates people into two classes— those who compete for jobs, and those who own capital and do not work. Those who own capital do not pay the wages equal to the productivity, because of the fact that there is unemployment. This means that they accumulate profit beyond the amount required to replace their capital and pay interest and dividends, and this profit is lost by the workers. This means the workers are making less money than they would in capitalist equilibrium.
The problem with your point of view is that you take existing markets described by (1) and treat them theoretically as if they were theoretical markets described by (2). This means you make completely wrong predictions.
For example, you claim that a person flipping burgers doesn’t produce enough to justify a $15/hour wage. How would you know? Do you know what the price of a burger should be in competitive equilibrium? How would you know what that price would be? You only know the real price in real markets, where there is a corporation or owner taking profits on the burger store.
If you imagine a situation of zero unemployment, where the worker has the option of doing other things, like working in construction, or whatever, but with no chance of becoming destitute, this worker can demand a competitive wage, rather than being forced to take a minimum wage. Under these conditions, hamburger flipping is rather boring, rather tedious, and nobody wants to do it. So in a competitive equilibrium it would probably require a salary relatively high compared to say, being CEO of GM, which is a high prestige position which involves using your brain. Heck, I know a lot of qualified people who would PAY to be CEO of GM for a year or two, rather than take pay.
The equilibrium wage of a worker is the wage at zero unemployment, and at this point 2, competitive equilibrium, indeed, the wage they draw is equal to their productivity. But when you look at real markets, point 1, you are not at zero unemployment, and the distortion impacts workers who compete with unemployed most directly hardest. This means that their pay has no relation to their productivity. Their productivity could rise by a factor of 2, and their wages would stay exactly the same, only corporate profits would double, and the concentration of deeds in the hands of a few people would get worse, as they now have even more capital to buy deeds with.
The economy of the US today is operating at point 1, and the ideal is to operate at point 2. The way to make markets like 1 look like the equilibrium in 2 is to get rid of unemployment. Then workers can demand as high a wage as is equal to their productivity, and profits plummet to nothing, and people become equal through market mechanisms of competition. That’s what Adam Smith was arguing for, and it’s also what Karl Marx was arguing for.
Marx made no mistakes in his analysis. His remedy however, was not to remove unemployment, but to take over industry by the state. This remedy is disasterous, and must not be used.
Despite the disaster, the Soviet Union operated at 0% unemployment from approximately 1934, when the last unemployment office closed during the first five year plan, to 1991, when it collapsed. The labor policy in the Soviet union was actually close to point 2, it was just that the bureaucratic nightmare of regulating an economy from the top down led to the worst possible inefficencies you can imagine.
I am not a Soviet style socialist, I believe in distributed ownership. There are ways to encourage the economy described by 1 to turn into the equilibrium described by 2 using gentle nudges, employee ownership, and public stock, and progressive taxation and minimum wage laws. Without these nudges, you will fall away from equilibrium permanently.
All Keynsian policy is based on this analysis, which you really can only find in Marx.
The feeling is mutual.
* facepalm *
Hayek and Friedman are not serious, they are buffoons. They make wrong predictions, regarding the change in employment when you raise minimum wage, regarding the amount of inflation when you do stimulus by monetary expansion, everything. They are just propped up by right wing money.
The “philips curve” is a bastardization of Keynesian economics. The proper term for Keynesian economics is “Marxist economics without Marxist statist prescriptions”, but that’s a mouthful, so I just say “Keynesian” for short. Economics is a bought field, and you aren’t allowed to say the name “Marx”, so the most important analysis is buried and hidden, and everything is obfuscated, but the result of using Marx’s economics but just removing the “state takes over everything” part is Keynesian theory.
The Philips curve is not a prediction of Keynesianism, it’s something philips made up to describe a true effect by a bogus quantitative claim.
The true effect is that when you have the infrastructure to employ everyone, and you introduce a policy perturbation that moves you closer to equilibrium, you employ more people! When everyone is employed, and you try to go further, you produce inflation.
To illustrate the effect, imagine you are increasing minimum wage. As minimum wage goes up, purchasing goes up, and people get employed to satisfy demand. When you can’t employ any more people to satisfy demand, you have to increase prices instead. At this point all your infrastructure is exhausted— you are employing as many people as you can. If your infrastructure is enough to employ everyone, unemployment is zero now.
The point is that stimulus reduces unemployment until the point it produces inflation. The “philips curve” is a silly attempt to make the intuition quantitative. It is true in a sense.
The point of stagflation is that there just wasn’t enough infrastructure to employ everyone, even at maximum stimulation in the mid 70s. To produce new infrastructure, you need investment, but the stimulation was producing inflation, which was reducing investment capital by inflating it away.
That means that you need to increase bank capital, and start a government jobs program to absorb the remaining unemployed people. But that was politically impossible. So the thing that was done was to reduce inflation, and
allow inequality to increase, so as to allow infrastructure investment to go up, until the unemployment could be absorbed. That’s what Reagan’s “revolution” was about— you needed more investment, and Reagan could only see
investment coming from wealthy capitalists at the top of large corporations, or from new corporations that would get financed by wall st. investment.
You see that stagflation didn’t prove “Keynsianism was wrong”, it simply proved that philips didn’t understand Marx. Most Keynsians are hobbled by the inability to speak about the Marxist foundation of their field, I am not
hobbled. The events of the 1970s were simple— there was no more investment capital due to inflation, and stimulus couldn’t fix unemployment because there was not enough infrastructure to employ everybody, and not enough
investment capital to make the infrastructure.
I didn’t read a book to explain this, it is obvious to anyone who read Marx and worked out Keynes for himself.
Also, it justifies Reagan to a large extent, because you really did need more investment back then. But right now, you need to move back to equilibrium. It is also not clear that the investment model is the right one. With appropriate banking stimulus, you should be able to increase infrastructure to the point where a regular stimulus will bring you to 100% employment before inflation sets in.
Carter’s recession was necessary to remove inflation. In Israel, it was “Peres austerity”, and it removed hyperinflation in the early 80s. This is the advance in monetary policy of the 80s, and it came from the left. Reagan did nothing of value.
Volker did the monetary policy, and he was a Carter appointee, and he ended inflation in the four years from 1978 to 1982. It’s just that the austerity cost Carter his job in the interim, so yu’re giving Reagan false credit.
Reagan’s appointee was the moronic Greenspan, who was not a Keynsian, and didn’t know what he was doing.
In the first Volker term, 1978-1982, when the austerity was implemented.
I love watching conservative try to do propaganda. It’s like watching roaches dancing on a hot stove.
*** SIZZLE *** SIZZLE ***
The evidence is the laws of economic equilibrium, where the difference in competitive salary is about a factor of 5-10, the same as the difference between a great programmer who programs embedded systems,and a hack.
All higher salaries are noncompetitive, and are derived from political power in the boardroom or in collusion with government.
It’s cute how conservatives pretend to have a brain.
And Atlee used Keynesianism and defeated him.
I don’t support the USSR or Venezuela, I just use them as examples for reasoning.
**FIZZLE *** POP *** POP *** FIZZLE ***
I don’t torture anything or anyone, that was comrades Bush and Cheney, who I would like to see painlessly hang, after a fair open trial, of course.
** BAH ** DA *** BUNCH SHHHSHH*****
I’m a theoretical physicist, moron.
I am not a collectivist or a communist, you fool. I’m a leftist libertarian.
I’ve never done it on purpose. I was just using dehumanizing language to put you down. Successfully.
I have very few feelings.
I don’t support the USSR, I used them as an example. Learn to read.
You have google, you can check.
I would urge you to read about the history of libertarianism. It was originally an offshoot of Anarchism or anarcho-communism, and the most prominent American supporter is Noam Chomsky.
The point is uniform policy to reduce the power of both government and big business at the same time, until both are superfluous, because the structures in place are self-sustaining with broad-based ownership of capital and diffuse political power. I wrote a blueprint for how to move forward on this, which you can find by googling my name + nonbureaucratic socialism.
My father is North-African, so I guess I am also a black white man.
I wasn’t wearing my glasses, and I thought the roach in the pan was a speck of burned whatever-the-last-thing-I-cooked was. I have never tortured an animal, but I enjoyed torturing you. Here. In these comments.
I discovered a new law of physics, you didn’t. It’s as simple as that. That was a while ago though.
Chomsky is the only American authority on Libertarianism as it originally developed.
* sigh * You’ve been beaten. It is useless to resist.
I didn’t eat it. My mother walked in and screamed “WHY ARE YOU COOKING A ROACH IN YOUR EGGS!” I then put on my glasses. This is a true story.
I discovered that in every string theory vacuum, the lightest charge particle must have a mass less than it’s charge in natural units.
Facts are that the USSR had a better wage system than other economies, due to the zero unemployment. That’s the only good thing about the system, and it explains its stability. Other than that, it was awful.
I did it, little buddy, in 1999. It was 6 years before someone else discovered swampland. I’ve done other things too, but you’re too stupid to understand. I mean, you don’t even know Newton’s laws. Or economics.
No, pretty much only the USSR and sattelite states had zero unemployment. Not Venezuela.
I was 15 at the time.
I don’t need to debate you, just use primitive propaganda The only process I need to win is the fact checking session that the reader will do on google. That’s already accomplished. That’s what makes the internet different from TV.
You think I don’t know whose absurd definition you were quoting? Milton Friedman is an idiot. All his quantitative predictions have failed, and he is a laughingstock in quantitative economics as far as I am concerned. The fact that he has a Nobel prize is an indictment of the economics “Nobel” (which is not really a Nobel). By his definition, we had 300% inflation in 2009, even though prices rose only a few percent. Aristotle style quantitative failures like that is why people don’t take your side seriously anymore.
The “law of supply and demand” fails spectacularly in the case of minimum wage and unemployment. That’s one of the greatest COUNTERINTUITIVE quantitative prediction of Keynesian economics, which no Chicago-school person can make, and which is routinely verified whenever minimum wage goes up.
The reason it works, the reason you can increase the price of labor and yet get higher demand for labor, is because the economy is operating at nowhere near economic equilibrium. When you raise minimum wage (slowly), you increase consumption by more than you increase the price of labor, until you reach the point of maximum employment, at which point you just produce inflation.
This is counterintuitive, I admit it, but it was predicted by Keynesians, and the counterintuitive prediction was verified in every single one of the many dozens of minimum wage hikes in diverse economies around the world. This is the reason minimum wage was instituted, and the reason Australia has both a higher minimum wage ($15/hour) and a higher median income, and lower real unemployment than the US, despite the lower productivity per worker in Australia.
This is the great triumph of Keynesianism, making correct counterintuitive quantitative predictions. That’s how we know the theory is sound.
This fact is ignored by Milton Friedman, which is why I ignore Milton Friedman, and so should you.
It’s a rare generation whose “specialness” consists of undoing fifty years of progress in economic theory. There was also (outside Italy, the USSR and California) some regress in physics, a ton of regress in philosophy, regress in mathematics. It’s amazing how much damage a bit of snorting and smoking can do, although honestly, most of the damage was due to monopoly in TV/radio/newspaper media, the drugs only harmed individuals. On the other hand, there was progress in string theory, and some progress in anarchist thought, and after the internet came along, it’s easy to explain the old stuff to new folks. That’s what I’m doing here.
Your simplistic formula is only true when government and business collude, as in the military industrial complex. It totally misses that he isn’t “growing the government” in any way that involves contracts with large business, or coordination with business interests.
He is taking over health care, which gets rid of several big players, and makes small players more competitive (due to health care being portable), and he is providing family leave by taxes. He is also breaking up big banks, and enforcing anti-trust law, and instituting progressive taxation. These policies don’t involve subsidies to large corporations, and they don’t involve corruption or collusion. They are simply nudging the economy toward economic equilibrium.
His policies are libertarian, in the leftist European sense. They can be supported by a person who wishes to see the reduction of concentrations of power. This is why he is my ideal candidate— he understands concentrations of power, and he knows how to usethe existing degree of government power to get rid of private concentrations of power most effectively.
He is not just a libertarian on social issues. He is a libertarian on economic issues as well. It’s just that the American idea of libertarianism has been corrupted to mean “let big business consolidate arbitrarily, and collude with government without limit”, which is not at all what it’s supposed to mean, or what it meant originally.
The shill is strong with you. He didn’t lie about anything related to the data breach, you are a lying liar. He told the complete truth about a non-issue. The endorsement thing is an issue of using quotes out of context, and using logos to indicate “I support X” rather than “X supports me”, where there is potential for confusion. It’s not good behavior, but it’s nothing serious. The “ringers” were supporters wearing union pins to indicate their support of the union, alongside Sanders badges, and then a Hillary shill in the union disingenuously says “you’re impersonating union members!” Hillary has people in these unions since 2008. Sanders specifically went to the union to explain the dirty trick, and they sorted it out in minutes. It’s all a crock of crap, and it’s unbelievable that anyone woudl fall for it, especially considering that all of it, even if true, is nothing compared even to “travelgate”, and that’s the mildest provable Clinton malfeasance.
I’m 42 years old, foolish person, my profile picture is from 10 years ago when I joined facebook.
I really wish Sanders would do some of the Clintonian tricks. It’s so much easier to do it on her. Here’s my push poll forNevada:
1. Have you heard of PATCON?
2. Why do you think Hillary supported the Patcon effort?
3. Do you think it is reasonable to blame her for the Oklahoma city bombing, or was she just complicit without being responsible?
4. Do you think that those complicit in acts of terrorism deserve the death penalty, or just a long prison sentence?
5. What do you think of the gun-control push Clinton led in light of Patcon?
6. Do you think that a person who thinks space aliens visited farmers should be disqualified for the office of President?
7. Given that Hillary has recently suggested that space aliens visited farmers in Iowa, do you consider Hillary Clinton disqualified?
Oh man, it’s so easy, I could go on all day. And believe you me, the Republicans will. That’s why Hillary is electoral suicide, and Sanders is a shoo in.
You don’t understand national health care. It doesn’t contract with business, it pays the bills directly. That’s 95% of his “grow the government” proposal. His miltary budget would probably redirect money from the traditional big contractors like Haliburton and Lockheed Martin, toward universities and research centers. He is not a big fan of these enormous corporations, that’s the whole point of his campaign.
The contracts for road building, and bridges, are contracts with relatively small business, unless a big bidder forces their way in by corruption, and they are done by bid. I can assume that Sanders would show preference to worker cooperatives, because he proposes to create more of those. Construction is not at all a big-player game.
To help small players in medicine, national health means that they don’t have to worry about which insurance company will provide reimbursements, or haggling with a thousand different negotiators from each company. National plans have standardized fees, so they would only haggle on the supplementals. Also, hospitals are much better at gouging medicare and private insurance, as they don’t have a personal connection, and love to over-test and over-treat. National health care eats at hospitals more than private practice. I assure you that national care is good to private practice, because the phenomenon you see of private practices disappearing is unique to the US.
His policies and goals are libertarian and socialist, and he would have been shot in the USSR, as all the libertarians were executed early. You don’t know anything about the USSR, or about the type of Democratic socialist that helps small business. Small business in Europe is protected from predatory behavior, unlike the US. That’s part of what government is for.
It is an easy read, Marx deliberately wrote it avoiding all philosophical jargon, so that a 19th century worker could self-study using it. He also painfully explains all his mathematics from scratch.
But based on what you said, you didn’t read it. Capital is about Capitalism, it is precisely about greed. There is no anti-greed prescription in there.
By rehiring a CEO who managed like Stalin and knows how to steal the best ideas. That’s not a program for stable progress.
Racism is not a collection of forbidden bad words, it’s a power structure that systematically removes people from decision making.
It doesn’t have preferential contracts with one business or another, it pays all businesses the same amount. There are very few practices that don’t accept medicare, but some don’t accept medicaid only because of class consciousness— they don’t want poor people sitting next to their clientelle. The 50 cents on the dollar reimbursement needs to be universal, and I guarantee you that small practitioners thrive in public health systems, as I was treated outside the US.
He spun the facts on this nonsense, it doesn’t matter, it’s all chickencrap small-fry stuff. He isn’t a crook, and Clinton is. I have nothing against the individual articles on Politifact, I have a problem with them losing the overall picture.
I ignore all rules, winning for me is the only thing that counts. In that, I am like Clinton. Sanders is not like me, which is why I support him. His followers will not fall in line, win or lose, we move on until victory, whether with Sanders, Warren, or the next in line to the mantle.
And “idiotism” is nothing more than noticing a pattern in people based on their online comments.
Marxism was full of propaganda in 1973. I just read Marx, I wasn’t a Marxist, so I didn’t get so much propaganda. It’s not exactly an alternative view, the predictions of Marx for the wage structure in unregulated markets are just true, and are accepted by all the mainstream economists who aren’t stupid.
What you wrote before and repeated above, is brain-dead nonsense.
The “Keynesian multiplier” is what you read about in economics books, because they refuse to discuss Marx. The proper way to say it is “getting closer to equilbrium” or “getting further from equilibrium”. Raising minimum wage gets you closer to equilibrium, because in equilibrium, people are making their productivity, not 25% of their productivity. That’s the end of the discussion.
The minimum wage rise comes out of profits the owner takes home. Those profits would be zero in equilibrium, beyond the amount required to replenish capital and pay themselves a median salary. To start a new business, you would need to go to a bank.
I have never been a Republican, I was a Marx-reading youth, the only propaganda I had to shake off came from the Communist East (I eventually shook it off). I voted for Gore, enthusiastically, I still hope he is Sanders choice for VP if Warren is not. Had I been able to, I would have voted for Bill Clinton over the worse opposition. I haven’t watched a TV since 1994.
I will urge you to review the Oklahoma City bombing, in light of 9/11. There was an ATF drill at the same time as the attack, and thousands of ear-witnesses reported two separate explosions. The structural damage is not consistent with a truck bomb, as internal columns were severed. The materials for the alleged bomb came from sources suspiciously close to internal covert agencies, and the event was part of a “Patcon” political operation which is now declassified and exposed.
The Republicans are NOT all over this, because they copied it in 9/11. The Oklahoma City bombing was the pilot for 9/11, and nobody says it, not on the left and not on the right.
I am sorry, but this is not propaganda. It is not even mentioned among 9/11 truthers, at least not often. The Oklahoma City bombing is the mother of all subsequent false terrorist attacks,including London 7/7, Oslo, Madrid, and all the remaining smaller nonsense. It is also the soft underbelly of all this stuff, it is easiest to bring the perpetrators to justice.
I can’t in good conscience support this kind of thing, and trust me, no Republican will touch this with a ten foot pole, as they are guilty of a thousand times worse..
I already know these things, and they are nonsense. I am glad Sanders is sane on guns, I want gun rights protected. I changed my mind on this issue right after the Sandy Hook shooting. I was a gun-control supporter before that. But after Sandy Hook, I will not vote for a politician that supports stronger gun-control than Sanders does, because I don’t approve of internal psy-ops, even those pushing policy I like, like Sandy-Hook. Sandy-hook made me ashamed to be a Democrat, and made me regret my vote for Obama (although the opposition was far far worse, as always).
Pretty much everything the RNC says about Clinton is true, with the exception of her being secretly more left than she is. The Republicans are even covering up the worst Clinton stuff, because they copied it to do even more terrible things.
Put it in terms Clinton supporters can understand: “It’s the internet, stupid!”
Yeah, yeah. That never worked before. Young voters voted like their parents. The difference is the internet. Dean, Obama, and now Sanders were internet phenomena.
Sanders has integrity, but he compromises like crazy to get things done. But compromise doesn’t mean selling out, and it doesn’t mean criminal action. He is not a crook. Clinton is.
No you weren’t. You didn’t have an internet, so your “idealism” was just phony lip-service and didn’t come with the means to get popular change enacted.
Some of them are atoning by protesting the wars, and helping elect anti-war candidates. You can’t go around blaming brainwashed children for believing propaganda and shooting guns shoved in their arms, they aren’t old enough to know what they’re doing. You need to look at adults to elect responsible leaders, like Sanders, and not war-mongers.
The “war on poverty” cannot succeed by handouts, it succeeds when it is a war on unemployment. The war on unemployment is Sanders’ platform.
A lot of Hillary stuff is so vile, even Republicans can’t attack her on it, because they do the exact same thing much worse. Push polling, “I’m going to look into UFOs…”, patcon, etc. It’s Nixonian. Or should I say “Cheneyan”.
Bernie’s views about guns haven’t evolved all that much, he still opposes lawsuits against small sellers selling guns legally, and he still supports limits on assault weapons, and expanded background checks. He is a liberty candidate in all respects, economic liberty, and political liberty. He is just opposing concentration of power in large corporations as well as concentrations of power in government.
Your candidate ran on negative income taxes with a racist electorate, against the last economically moderate Keynesian Republican. Sanders is running as a Keynesian with a much less racist electorate, against a Republican party which rejects Keynesian economics in favor of voodoo.
Your emotions were ridiculous, you shouldn’t have supported the guy who turned the nutrition programs of the 1960s into the “food pyramid”. There were much better Democrats than McGovern in 1972, they were just railroaded out by Nixon with his dirty tricks brigade. Don’t let Clinton railroad Sanders in the same way.
“It’s the internet, stupid”, you’re duplicating Jacquelyn’s insightful comments below.
Google patcon, that broke recently. Google “travelgate”, that went to court, and the guy was exonerated after a tough legal fight, in a record short jury deliberation time, so there’s no dispute that the prosecution was bogus. Google IRS audits. Google her statements on UFOs, on releasing JFK files (from 2008). Google her “superpredator” comments, her flip on bankruptcy reform (don’t fall for the “child support” nonsense, that’s 1% of the effect of the bill), her destruction of right groups in the country (not that I like those groups, but that type of covert operation is unprecedented internally), her meddling in Ukraine by supporting the government that led to the Russian invasion, her meddling in Libya, her support for the Iraq war, oh man, I could go on forever.
The immoral thing about Benghazi is blaming the attack on a video on the internet, and then having the gall to press for internet censorship because of this bogus claim. I saw that video, and it is an established fact now that it had nothing to do with the attack.
Look up travelgate, and the illegitimate prosecution of the fellow booking travel for the President. That’s just a small one, but that’s easy to see is real, because the guy went to court to prove his innocence, and succeeded.
There are lots of Clinton scandals the Republicans won’t touch, because they did much the same thing under Bush to their opponents. Pretty much only thing they are inventing wholecloth is the claim that Hillary is more left than she is.
I saw the video, and it was blamed for the attack! It had nothing to do with the attack. Saying “Clinton blamed the video for the attack” is not meaningless, she did exactly that. Further, Clinton went on to say that these videos are dangerous, so we should regulate YouTube videos. Sanders doesn’t do this nonsense, even disingenuously. That’s something you expect from Nixon or Cheney.
Travelgate involved Hillary Clinton clearing out old staff to make way for new. But for some reason, they decided to press bogus charges against the people, instead of just firing them, even though firing them was perfectly allowed. This is a level of perfidity you expect only from Republicans. They were within the law, their bogus charges were pressed legally. It was just immoral.
The point of online information is that you can check and double check, and verify, with truly independent sources.
If you’re 42 like me, you aren’t that old, you are the internet.
The Republicans care about the tapestry. I don’t. I care about the video. Because that’s the only odious thing Hillary did in the whole debacle. The things she said about video weren’t illegal, they were just unconscionable, and render her unfit for the presidency.
You were 20 when Usenet reached peak size, 23 when Mosaic came out, 24 when Linux 1.0 came out, and you have enough perspective to understand the dark-age of information that preceded this, and not take the internet for granted.
In your mind. I don’t care about Republicans squirming to find something illegal in the immoral mess that is Hillary Clinton. It’s enough for me to see the mess. I am sure her lawyers are good enough to insulate her by plausible deniability from anything actually illegal. I don’t try to “get her”, I just don’t vote for her in the primary, as I don’t want to be forced to vote for her in the general. And if she’s the nominee, I will vote for her, and then drink a stiff drink.
Only on corporate websites. The internet is better off without them, and they are so slow and badly designed, they lose credibility and views. The best websites come from small independent people, e.g. Disqus.
Millenials understand the difference between a server in the basement and an external email account, but you should say that Clinton had a server in her basement, and not an external email account. It shows she doesn’t want her information running over public wires, because she is afraid it will get intercepted and leaked.
McGovern was an easily smeared candidate who was the archetypal nanny-state liberal. He converted the food-nutrition programs to eliminate hunger in the US into the “food pyramid” nonsense when they were about to run out of funding, due to their success. He was running as a negative income-tax welfare candidate at an extremely racist time with an electorate who was considering segregationists. He was running against the last Republican Keynesian. He was a better choice than Nixon, bu that’s not saying much. There were better candidates than McGovern in 1972, they were just taken down by the Nixon machine. McGovern was partly taken down by more conservative Democrats, who planted the “acid, amnesty, abortion” meme. He was an infinitely weaker candidate than Sanders.
I am not repeating Republican talking points exactly— the insight about the Oklahoma City bombing and patcon is not Republican specifically, and I figured it outthe Oklahoma city thing for myself, without reading anything, thank you very much. The Republicans hardly ever bring any of this stuff up! They have 9/11 to worry about. Right wing media only brings it up in conspiracy websites which run this side by side with UFO stories and quack medicine.
The Republicans take TRUE unethical Clinton behavior, and try to convert it into allegations of illegal activity. Clinton isn’t stupid. She insulated herself from illegality by plausible deniability, you won’t ever find something illegal. But you will find tons of things that are unethical to an extent that should disqualify her from the presidency, were not the Republicans so much worse. She genuinely believes that dirty politics and dirty tricks are required to win, becuase she was running at a time when the public was against her policies. Sanders is showing her that it is not so— the level of dirty tricks you need is extremely small, and you don’t need to sell your soul anymore. Not now that voters can verify statements online, and a majority are actually on your side.
Clinton is a candidate in the mold of Nixon, she is not afraid of dirty politics, or taking dirty money. If she is the nominee, I will have to vote for her, and then take a stiff drink. But there is no excuse for nominating her— not when you have a good candidate.
The reason she is weak in the general is the corruption. It’s not made up. Political blindness and political attack isn’t confined to one of two sides, although the Republicans are worse. You are blinded by your partisanship from seeing the corruption of your own candidate. Not everyone on your side is similarly blind.
Nuclear waste is not that bad, I like nuclear stuff, I’m a physicist. I doubt that it was so racist, it’s just another unfounded smear. A sparsely populated community in Arizona or wherever suddenly becomes a “Latin community” because you’re looking for a smear. He’s the best candidate on racial issues by a wide mile.
I guess she’s incompetent at Nixonian secrecy, but she tries.
The things I said specifically are true. There are also false ones. The true ones have something called “evidence” supporting them.
Ok, ok, I didn’t know anything about it! It’s news to me. I just read your link. Sorry for being dismissive.
Let me explain myself: I don’t defend the choice of repository site. I agree it’s rather scummy the way nuclear waste is passed around from district to district until it ends up in regions with people who are granted less political power on racial grounds. I think it’s a goddamn shame on the US.
I don’t agree with this structural racism, of course, but I am also sure that Sanders doesn’t like any structural racism either. But he’s not a saint, he’s a politician, and he chooses his battles, and he decided not to take this one on, for his reasons. I suspect that the reason is that nuclear waste, unlike a light-water nuclear reactor, is simply an issue of public fear, it’s not at all dangerous to the residents, no matter where it is. I wouldn’t care at all if there were 200 tons of nuclear waste in a concrete bunker directly under my house, so long as the trucks carting it in weren’t too noisy.
There’s no way it can change my vote for him, because it simply wasn’t an issue of corruption, nor an issue of lack of action to protect minorities. It was an issue of Sanders making up his mind NOT to fight on an issue which I frankly think is not a top priority.
But honestly, I didn’t know anything about this until I read the article in the link you provided, thanks.
I will repeat that nuclear waste is simply not very dangerous, it’s not actively fissioning, it’s not a reactor, it can’t melt down, it’s not a power plant, it just sits there, being hot and radioactive for 10,000 years, and as long as it’s in a big concrete room, nobody needs to worry about it, other than making sure the place isn’t leaking water, and moving it around when the political winds change, until it can be used as fuel for the next generation of reactors (see below). It’s not like Bernie Sanders chose the site, or designed the repository. He just voted whatever people in his state wanted him to vote regarding the issue, because he decided that transfer was not worth his political capital in opposing.
I personally agree with his decision, although, of course, as president, I would like to see him move aggressively on assuring the public that ACTUALLY hazardous material is never going to be dumped in minority communities, and I also hope he ensures that residents of Hispanic communities have strong negotiating power in government. It’s just that, honestly, I don’t see how this stuff is realistically going to be hazardous to anyone, no matter where you put it, despite what the public thinks about it. Although, of course, I wouldn’t presume to make that call for other people.
As a policy issue, to deal with the fear, perhaps the nuclear regulatory commission can compensate homeowners who live within a certain radius of a nuclear waste storage facility for the lowered property values due to the perception of danger, and agree to monitor the water and air for radioactivity continuously with automatic systems to assure the residents, even if there is no danger, just to allay the perceptions of danger.
On the bigger issue, one which Sanders has said nothing about, because it’s not an issue in this campaign so far, the main question is “what do you do with nuclear waste?” This is a central issue with nuclear power, and it makes the current designs of nuclear power plants unsustainable.
The correct answer is to move aggressively on research and deployment of brand new LFTR plants, which are a completely different design using Thorium as the main fuel, and a low-temperature unpressurized flouride fluid for the fission part. This design was produced and tested in the 1960s in the US, but now all the research is going on in China, with a little peripheral research in India on related matters. The US needs to take this issue on again, because the nuclear waste of a light-water plant is the fuel for a LFTR, and the LFTR converts all the uranium to plutonium, and fissions it, leaving behind only fully disintegrated fission products, which unlike standard nuclear waste, is much more radioactive and so decays much faster. It is only radioactive at appreciable levels for 300 years. The amount of waste per unit power is cut by a factor of about 100, because you are using up all the nuclear fuel in a LFTR.
This was always the plan, to use the waste as fuel, but that plan got shelved when the fast breeder reactors got scuttled for various reasons in the 1970s and 1980s. These were difficult to design, and at the time, it was cheaper just to store the waste indefinitely, because it’s not such a huge volume. But of course you can’t do that forever, at some point the storage costs are going to be significant, especially when people are annoyed about the stuff. That’s why LFTR is much more promising, because the tested design was obvious and easy, and has none of the safety issues of current nuclear plants, as it doesn’t use a pressurized dome, and it is not particularly good as a nuclear weapons program, it is just the easiest scheme to generate fission power in a breeder.
LFTR is cheap and easy, and I personally think it should be a no-brainer. I have no idea what Sanders’ position on LFTR is, if he wants to solve the global warming problem, I hope he studies the issue, and decides to support the project. With a LFTR, the current storage facilities, or maybe twice as much, would permanently contain all the nuclear waste you would ever make for it’s entire 300 year radioactive lifetime (nuclear waste is very small volume).
It’s for giving her control over email communication, making sure any email she doesn’t want to make public will never see the light of day. She just has to delete it on her server, and it’s gone forever. On a government sever, the backup guy has a copy, the security monitor has a copy, the government network has a copy, whatever. She obviously doesn’t like other people looking over her shoulder. Like Nixon didn’t. It’s a warning bell for corruption.
It’s worse than that. She doesn’t actually believe it, she just pretends to believe it, always with ambiguous wording, just so as to get the JFK-conspiracy vote, or the UFO vote. Nobody else usually pays attention to such statements, and ambiguously supportive statements can flip a percent or two your way in a close election, and you can always deny them afterwards. Romney did the same thing regarding cold-fusion when he visited Utah 2 days before the 2012 election. Romney doesn’t care about this, he probably thinks the cold fusion people are nuts, he’s not a physicist.
That’s regardless of the actual merit of the wacky idea, as JFK was actually assassinated in a conspiracy, Pons and Fleischmann did see anomalous results reproduced by several other groups, although what these results were due to is unknown, and while no, aliens didn’t come down to visit farmers, there seems to have been some active disinformation planted in the media about UFOs to make gullible people believe that they did.
She has never been indicted because most of these things are not crimes. They are just terribly sleazy.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that independent of the poll numbers or Repubican nominee, Sanders is universally more well liked among independents than Hillary clinton. He sweeps independents in his state partly because until recently, he identified as one, and he understands their concern with the corruption in the party system. He is honest, and he cares about the best policy to improve people’s lives, that’s his only overriding concern (after winning, which he must care about a whole lot, or else he wouldn’t win).
They can overlook a ton of disagreements for this trait. It should be universal in public service, and it used to be more common, but now it is pretty much just Sanders. Heck, he should capture some Republican vote, especially small business owners who want to be rid of health care worries, and Ron Paul supporters who want the Fed audited, NSA spying to end, and the Patriot act in the dustbin of history.
I’m 42, and I assure you that you have NEVER been there before. Sanders is not a “very liberal” candidate, although that is how he appears to a Democrat. He can be thought of as a true libertarian leftist, and a Republican or Independent can smell the libertarian streak from a mile away, whether in his stance on guns, or on abortion, or on descheduling marijuana, or on NSA surveillance, or the Patriot act. This is an unprecedented election, and an unprecedented opportunity to win over conservative libertarians to the Democratic party in droves. Please don’t blow it.
The details are largely the same, although the policy intended is opposite. Ron Paul wants a zero inflation policy, Sanders wants a zero unemployment policy, but both agree that having a “whatever big business wants” policy is atrocious, so the support slides back and forth rather easily.
You should realize that his economic platform can be supported by what could be called the Libertarian left (an example is Noam Chomsky). The goal is reduction in unemployment, which reduces the power of big business. He supports small business and worker coops from predatory practices, and he will enforce anti-trust. These are classic overriding libertarian concerns, whether left or right.
The important polls are how well he does with independents, and how good his base turnout numbers are. He scores phenomenally well on both counts. Mondale was abysmal on both.
Same way Clinton can beat Bernie in a heartbeat. They say it, they repeat it, until they lose.
Sanders can be thought of as a kind of libertarian too, the leftist kind. They believe in minimizing both government power and economic power of elites, at the same time. Usually to get one, you have to give up on the other. But this is a false dichotomy.
I’m already middle-aged silly, I’m 42. That picture is from 10 years ago. You are too old to understand the organizing power of the internet, and to realize this, you need only contribute a nominal amount to the Sanders campaign and get involved. He has a national organization which will exceed the NRA in membership and fundraising power by he time he gets elected. It’s a brand-new, extremely motivated, 50 state machine, made up entirely of ordinary citizens, not well connected elites, and he intends to use it. Nobody can stand in the way and survive in Congress.
All he is doing is harnessing the power of the internet to let the majority of ordinary people do what wealthy contributors have been doing for ages, and that is set the tone of the debate in Congress.
Disqus is 20 people and a server room.
I don’t care about nuclear waste in my backyard, I like nuclear waste personally, as I said, but I’m not normal, as I am a physicist, and I think nuclear power is supercool, so I can’t presume to speak for others. I am not dismissing the concern, I think you have chosen the wrong target.
Sanders wasn’t representing Texas, he wasn’t running for Texas Senator. He didn’t choose the depository location, and like every politician, he has to consider not just whether he abstractly agrees with a concern, but whether the fight is going to be fruitful for his constituents at the time. Now that he’s running for president, I expect him to take on this fight, to make sure that abuse of minority communities like this never happens. I just don’t expect it of him as a Senator, because it’s not his state. These were not his constituents.
But really, on scientific grounds, nuclear waste is harmless. Please read the whole comment and don’t presume.
I know about LBJ’s war on poverty— it took all the air out of the true progressive call for a war on unemployment by MLK. King supported a guaranteed jobs program, to ensure that unemployment was always zero, that nobody would ever face the situation of looking for work indefinitely. This was his main economic platform before he was assassinated. The war on poverty had some meager successes, some social failure, but a war on unemployment is what MLK proposed, and I follow MLK not LBJ. Because MLK was a Democratic Socialist, while LBJ was a war stimulus president.
The reason I think acting like an asshole will be effective is because that’s what Republicans have been doing for 40 years to get their awful candidates across to a brainwashed deluded public. I don’t think I’m a particularly good person, but Bernie Sanders is, and you should vote for him based on his ethics, not mine.
It was solely because of him. Watch “Threads”, “The Sacrifice”, “When the Wind blows”, “War Games”, “The Sacrifice”, “Countdown to the Looking Glass”, “The Day After”, and “Miracle Mile”, and you’ll get a taste of what a huge chunk of 10 year olds were dreaming on a monthly basis in 1983. There was no crisis in 1983 other than Reagan himself, and his apocalyptic message of belligerance.
“10 million dollars” is the normal budget of 20 people and a server room, that’s just enough to pay the bills. This is not concentration of anything. 10 billion dollars would be.
I told you that you are spinning a sensible decision into pathetic anti-Sanders propaganda. I am sorry that I am not helping. I am not asking you to vote for me, I am a jerk. Sanders isn’t.
McGovern was a weak candidate. Sanders is the strongest candidate the Democrats could field, because he is a liberty candidate. I am not blind to anything, I know what Republicans and Independents care about. you are blind. They care about liberty, not helping big business, and they want an honest candidate most of all.
Clinton might lose. Sanders would be the landslide, and in your direction. Don’t blow it.
I live in Harlem, it’s majority black, and before I lived in a majority hispanic neighborhood. I appreciate the loss of power that minority regions face. Sanders is the best person to restore political power for those who are disenfranchised, by a wide mile.
If anyone has damages, they should sue. Sanders is your best bet for property damage compensation. In any case, someone is going to have their property value go down, and that person should be more than compensated for it.
I don’t believe you are voting for anyone, you are simply doing propaganda online, and are paid for it.
“appreciate” == “understand” in my comment. Sorry, I didn’t appreciate your point properly. When you said you aren’t voting for Sanders or Clinton, I thought you meant you would vote Republican. You’re voting Green, ok, that’s great. But I think you are too pure, but, hey, it’s your vote, and I’d vote Green too if this were a parliamentary system.
When you have a certain fraction of the white vote totally racist, and a bare majority of the white vote totally oblivious to issues of racism, it’s a hard issue to fix from the top-down. The NAACP and Civil RIghts Movement worked from mass marches, and civil disobedience, not from the top. Sanders is running to head a mainstream party, and I think he is taking his advocacy for disenfranchisement as far as possible for a winning election campaign, and I think his candidacy a near-miracle, so I don’t challenge him. I think he would be the best ally in the white house, of all those that could realistically win. I don’t want to argue with someone on the same side, I just hope you don’t live in a swing state.
Look, if you take Sanders at his word, as I think you can, it is clear he wants constant activism busting his ass, and everyone else’s, from everyone with a grievance. The best time to do it is right after he wins. That’s the only way anything happens anyway. But the Green party is not going to help any more when one of the major parties is crazy. I think it is important to knock the crazy party out before setting up a challenge, because that’s the only way to get a transformation in the party system the way it is set up today.
Sorry for being an ass. I get you now.
Yeah, you’re right. But you know what happens when you hold a hostage too long, after some ransom has already been paid. A bunch of special forces storm in from right field to kill you and also your hostage.
Yes, I hope we will.
It’s not about quantity of money exactly, it’s about size. Disqus is a competitive little counterweight to big corporations— it’s a small nimble company taking on “Quora” and “Facebook” and other billionaire ventures. They can’t make too much more than 10 million a year, because it is relatively easy to compete with them, e.g livefyre etc. You really don’t get it. I like competition, I like independent small business, I like employee owned business. I don’t like monopolized big business run from the top down.
I liked Google tremendously until they got an insane market cap with their IPO. I liked Microsoft when it was a tiny company making Apple II BASIC. I liked Apple when it was a little company making Apple IIs.
The issue is size. You can’t have an economy where one player in every sector is turned into a nation-state sized behemoth, that’s how the USSR failed.
Don’t worry about LegallySpeaking, he’s some mentally defective Trump guy. Don’t feed the troll.
Exactly! There are competing effects with a minimum wage hike, like you said, and ALL the obvious ones go against the prediction I said. So it is extremely difficult to know what the net effect is on the economy from marginal microeconomic considerations like you are making. As you noted, every microeconomic analysis you do suggests that the effect of minimum wage hikes is to net DECREASE net spending and INCREASE unemployment and REDUCE spending in net. That’s why Friedman and other Chicago people say “Minimum wage is bad”, and it’s why it was opposed throughout the 19th century by economists.
That’s what makes the Keynesian prediction regarding minimum wage and unemployment INTERESTING and IMPORTANT. It’s completely counterintuitive from a point of view which doesn’t understand macro. That makes it a unique prediction, a unique quantitative prediction, and these are essential for testing a scientific claim of any kind, as they are strict tests. It’s like the General Relativity prediction for the precession of Mercury’s orbit. It’s something you can’t predict without understanding the full theory.
The point of Marx is that there are certain macro-effects regarding the lowest wages which you can understand just from knowing the theory of the wage structure of economic equilibrium, and knowing about the existence of a class structure and unemployment. The wages are MUCH lower than they would be in economic equilibrium, and consequently the profits are MUCH higher (they are zero in equilibrium). The way to determine whether the net effect of a policy is increased or decreased production is then simply the question of “does it move you closer to equilibrium” or “does it move you further away”.
From ANY micro-perspective, minimum wage is moving you away. It is only from a macro-perspective that you see it is moving you closer— it’s the global unemployment and class structure that it is attacking, by partially fixing the wage distortion that it produces. So ONLY Keynes/Marx would tell you that raising minimum wage slowly has the effect of decreasing unemployment.
That’s an effect that is verified with regularity with every minimum wage hike. It is why Keynesian economics was accepted without question and without controversy from 1940 to 1980.
When there is institutionalized inflation, you don’t need a rich person to put away money in a bank to get investment anymore. You just need to raise capital in banks by creating new money. That’s another aspect of Keynesian economics, removing the dependence on wealthy individual investment by having a global monetary policy.
Both of these things were recognized and institutionalized around the world decades ago, including in the US.
The reason it was rejected in the US is because of stagflation— the existence of nonzero unemployment at stimulus sufficient to produce accelerating inflation. The claim was that “this disproves Keynes”, because, as the conservative people saw it, in Keynes, you can’t have inflation until you reach zero unemployment.
That’s only true in Keynes if you have the infrastructure to employ everybody. When you get stagflation, that means you need more investment capital and an immediate government jobs program, because even at full capacity, not everyone is employed. That’s what Carter and Reagan were all about— reducing inflation with austerity, and increasing investment capital.
The problem with Reagan’s policies is that the increase in investment capital came by increasing inequality, and allowing wealth to concentrate among the already wealthy, so that they could finance new ventures. That’s the recipe for monopolized gigantic business, not new small business. A more decentralized view is to increase bank capital, and encourage small business, and break up the big business. That’s pretty much what Obama and Sanders are all about.
His campaign isn’t focused on Clinton at all. But she is simply corrupt, plain and simple, and this leads some Democratic voters to despair, because we don’t want to be forced to vote for her. So we both support Sanders and explain the corruption of Hillary, and we don’t consult with him, because he wouldn’t approve this message.
Companies don’t get enormous by gradually making more money, you deluded pisspot. The way companies get enormous is through IPO shoving billions down their throat, or by being founded by a billionaire, and then using that capital for acquisition of all potential competitors. That can’t happen with Disqus, because Facebook and Quora already took the monopolist capitalization for that niche.
When companies grow gradually, in an environment which is friendly to competition, they never become too powerful or too big, because new competitors constantly emerge. To deal with the situation of already monopolized business, I support a graduated corporate income tax, to punish big corporations for their size, and encourage them to split.
Sanders has a 25 year Congressional career, he’s already as corrupted as he’s ever going to get, which is not very much. Compromise and picking your fights is not the same as corruption, and he’s done plenty of both.
He’s already got an ego, don’t kid yourself. He’s not a weak guy, he’s the only independent Senator on the real left in Congress. He doesn’t have to formulate policy, he can hire good staff, which he obviously does better than anyone else, just look at his policy papers and commercials. The only thing he has to do is keep his moral compass under pressure. That’s not so hard if you are used to it, FDR could do that, and he was a pampered child born to what would be a billionaire family today.
It’s only in comparison to other candidates that Sanders looks like an incorruptible saint. In objective terms, in world-politics terms, or in historical terms, he looks like a reasonable center-left politician with a lot of talent for politics, and a bit of a libertarian streak. I don’t expect him to be perfect or incorruptible, just incorruptible enough, which he is.
Neither I nor Bernie Sanders have anything against “economic freedom”. You can still compete in a free market.
The point is you need to tax high incomes murderously and increase minimum wage sharply, and create a jobs program and subsidize college, so as to reduce unemployment. That’s not doing anything to economic freedom, it is increasing it.
The Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon both had top marginal rates sky high, and invested in the economy, because both Republicans and Democrats were Keynesians.
Your curves are graphs are “Laffable”. You need to stop pulling out graphs and charts and recognize that the last 40 years of economic theory coming from the right is an out and out fraud.
Wealthy people don’t work hard. They hire others to invest capital. I don’t envy them, I pity them.
The government must take it away because it is destroying the economy.
That’s part of why you should register as a Dem and vote for Sanders.
The rich pay more in taxes now because their incomes are skyrocketing. The rest pay less because their incomes are falling or stagnant. That’s not a sustainable economy.
Without the “LOL” what you said is 100% accurate. But there were some promises Obama didn’t make, and others, like closing Guantanamo that he reneged on. Hence Sanders.
You can vote them out, and destroy their party forever. It is no longer a competent governing party, and it really hasn’t been since Nixon. We need a new libertarian leaning party to splinter from the Democrats, without the covert insane nonsense and corruption that characterizes the Republican party.
Obama doesn’t need leadership skills, it is impossible to compromise with people who are bought. Voters need to bring out the long knives.
His successor would likely be Elizabeth Warren. American “socialism” doesn’t involve state coercion or takeover of industry, it involves reducing the power of big business. The libertarian is strong in Sanders, and it is generally stronger on the American left than on the right. Witness the Patriot act, the Freedom Act, and who voted for it.
A pawn on the seventh rank who’s about to promote.
China is not a communist country anymore, it hasn’t been since Deng Xiaoping. It is an authoritarian crony capitalism on the coast, with a heavy state control of many large industries in the center. Both Republicans and Clinton admire the way China can control its internet. While Denmark had market Socialists in power at one point, the current government is rather conservative. But even the most conservative politician in Denmark would fit within the more left parts of the Democratic party economically, because they are all Keynesians.
Please don’t think that Americans like Sanders are looking outside, they are looking forward.
LOL! Removed “to a queen”.
It’s worse than that. Because the wealth transfer is so successful, rich people have tripled their incomes in the last 40 years. So they also tripled the amount of tax they pay, while everyone else’s tax payments are stagnant. Wallace is saying “if the rich are so good at rigging the system, why do they pay three times more taxes today?” It’s because they have rigged it to get three times more income!
Venezuela imports toilet paper, and their current government is corrupt, so it is getting voted out. But the reason they voted for a socialist is that the poverty rate in 2000 was 60%, with 25% in deep poverty, I mean, starvation level, I-live-in-a-garbage-dump poverty. While Venezuelans today suffer from oil-price shocks, and toilet-paper is difficult to find, Chavez reduced deep poverty by more than 50%, and poverty by 50%, and the economy doubled. That’s an achievement.
That doesn’t mean Chavez is a great leader, he had dictatorial tendencies, he used influence to rig elections, he took over industries, and drove out entrepreneurs. But nobody in the US is like Chavez, at least not on the left.
What you think of as a product of socialism is really a product of enormous corporations taking over. The main characteristics of a socialist economy, the real problem with the USSR, is the nation-state monopolies. That’s what dragged the socialist economies down, and the US had healthy small business.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats support small business anymore. Sanders does.
I don’t need a source, I AM the source. It’s obvious. I don’t read any sources.
Chavez was not a “democratic Socialist” like Sanders. He was a “I want to nationalize industry” socialist. You have to learn the difference between the “libertarian socialist” and the “statist socialist”.
The point of libertarian socialism is to encourage distributed ownership of business. That means more small business, more worker owned business, and less gigantic monopolies. It doesn’t involve government top-down planning.
Chavez was a statist socialist, and he did a good job with oil production, but a bad job with small business.
Voters just stay home. Sanders was an independent until recently for a reason. The Republican party is the party of 9/11, and cannot win any national election ever again.
Ok, but what can you do? Condemn W.E.B du Bois and Albert Einstein? Condemn Martin Luther King Jr. and George Orwell? When people hear “capitalism”, do they think of Pinochet and the Irish Potato Famine? It’s just words, and the choice of words shows which side you are on. The detailed policies matter.
Not think like me. They just have to think.
Fox is a propaganda network. It is always risk to appear on it because they have no journalistic standards. They are getting a little better now, as they are realizing more what a catastrophe Bush was, I guess because they are responsible for him.
I’m not the OP. Fox is a propaganda network, it is pandering to a type of mentality through insincere commentary. That’s why they need to replace their hosts one by one with younger people. As they slowly learn more, they become incompatible with the orthodoxy, and then they are gone.
He shouldn’t go at all. They don’t deserve the ratings. They need to be starved of money.
They beat up on Republicans their boss doesn’t like. That includes Republicans too far left to kiss his rear, and Republicans too far right to win. It is why media must not be controlled by large corporations.
The country is starving because you are allowing capital to monopolize and concentrate. You need to understand what happens in markets eventually— all the property deeds go to a small number of people, who turn everyone else into slaves.
To avoid this outcome, you need progressive taxes, and policies that distribute ownership broadly. The US was late in learning this lesson because there was frontier land in the 19th century, so that if you were a slave, you could always run away West. Now you can’t run away, and you need a sensible system that stops capital from concentrating in a few hands.
CNBC is not MSNBC, and the moderators did all right.
I like Keynesianism. Whether you consider that socialism is up to you, I don’t care. Eisenhower and Nixon were Keynesians, so it’s the kind of socialism they and every other Republican in the 50s and 60s supported.
But the concetration of wealth in a few hands is not a matter of like or dislike. What I told you is a fact of markets, it is unavoidable. Your philosophy leads you to bury your head in the sand regarding this.
Same company, different policies. MSNBC is the part where they pretend to be on the left. There are no leftists on TV, but those who pretend to be on the left sometimes ask different questions.
“The South”. It’s not the third world since the communist block collapsed. Besides, it’s not even that poor anymore.
There is no bias from the left in any media owned by a large corporation.
Yes, but CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN used to be real news agencies, who broke important stories between the propaganda.MSNBC and those give their journalists editorial space to learn and grow, without kicking them out when their politics change.
It’s not “political correctness”, there is no “second world” anymore— the communists are gone.
The “previous” group of socialists murdered the libertarians, and much of the Reagan revolution was coopting the libertarian socialist platform, and removing the “socialism” language. The left has not supported national control of the economy since 1956, it became a right-wing thing. The socialists who inspire the modern left were those in Spain in 1936, who were murdered by Stalin and Franco.
But Sanders is not a Libertarian socialist, that’s more Chomsky, Orwell, Dilas and Bookchin. Bernie Sanders just is an FDR Democrat, and Eisnehower Keynesian, and a Teddy Roosevelt trustbuster, with a Ron Paul style Libertarian streak.
The date was around 2000, when the falling advertizing revenue due to internet competition led them to close investigative reporting divisions. This is what allowed catastrophes like the Iraq war and 9/11. Now the internet has taken over the investigative aspects.
THe USSR went down because all its firms were large top-down monopolies. They needed small business, and they didn’t have it. When it was introduced, people revolted against 70 years of dictatorship and poverty caused by one party rule and gigantic industry.
US industry, where it is large corporations, resembles the USSR very closely. It is also top-down, and it is not much more efficient than USSR state industry. The only place the USSR wasn’t able to compete was in small business, and this is what is disappearing the US today.
And he’s right when he says that. His health care policy numbers add up, which is a completely unprecedented level of honesty in a presidential candidate. You’ve never seen that before.
The nation didn’t prosper under Reagan. Unemployment was relatively high, there was a crash in 1987 you forgot about, and there was a deep recession in 1991. Only he wealthy prospered under Reagan, as the low-inflation climate allowed investments to grow. The low inflation was engineered by Volker in 1978-1982, and he was a Carter appointee. Unfortunately, the wealthy voices are the only ones you hear on TV, so wealthy people doing phenomenally well looks like “everybody is doing great” before the internet.
The nation did prosper under Clinton, and that was largely due to Gore managing a tech revolution. But even then taxes went up, and a tenfold rise in EITC was introduced to redistribute wealth. The internet boom was managed so that it would produce thousands of small companies, rather than Reagan style large monopolies. Bush ended all that, and started the consolidation wave that destroyed the internet economy. It is not clear to me that if the trust-busting Gore was elected that the internet economy would have ever crashed in 2001. It crashed as investors realized those small companies wouldn’t be protected from monopolization.
Like Reagan, Bush cut taxes, monopolized industry, and entered and left with a gigantic recession. Except Bush also shredded the constitution, engaged in covert activities both inside the US and abroad, and left a deeper mess than Reagan ever could have, due to Republican Congressional majorities and a bought out Democratic opposition.
That’s what Republicans THINK they will do. It presents a narrow avenue of attack. But Sanders knows what he is doing. Do you think that Vermont voters liked communism in 1981? In 1990s? In 2004? It’s an attack that doesn’t work, because Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in government control of industry. That means the Republicans will not be busy making a positive message, and that means they will lose, and they will be mystified when they lose.
You’re repeating yourself. Elizabeth Warren is no more of a communist than Bernie Sanders. They believe in protecting small business from the predations of big business, not in the government taking over.
While Chavez reduced deep poverty and poverty, he was not a small business president, and the small business in Venzuela always hated him. There is no comparison between the American left and other country’s left, the American left is much more libertarian, and believes in distributed private ownership, and in getting government out of your life.
There is no 90% tax in Sanders’ plan. A 90% tax on individuals doesn’t do anything to control an oil company, or a computer maker, it is just confiscating income earned by sitting at the top of a board of directors’ seat. I wish Sanders advocated these kinds of taxes. Eisenhower did, but Sanders doesn’t.
You don’t understand taxes, or monetary policy.
That’s not exactly accurate, in the USSR it meant confiscating the peasant’s land, and putting them on collective farms. But it was catastrophic anyway, it led to a disasterous famine in 1932, and an even worse famine when it was done in China in the 1960s.
I have never seen left bias in corporate owned media, only corporate bias. To see left bias, I had to read state-owned newspapers in the communist block.
Money is just a lubricant for people doing work and taking things from stores. The flow of money is supposed to reward people for their productivity, to encourage more innovation and more labor. Right now, it is rewarding people for sitting at the top of enormous corporations doing destructive things, not for innovation or labor.
If you don’t have money in government, you tax it or make it. The issue with overspending is inflation, not the degree to which services are subsidized.
And I repeat it. The government could have zero deficits tommorrow if it directed the Fed to print money and then taxed this money as it entered banks. That’s not a good thing to do, because it encourages irresponsible government spending and that can lead to hyperinflation. This is why the Fed is independent, and why government finances itself through taxes, not through printing money.
Bernie Sanders has proposed an extremely responsible and moderate tax plan, and all his numbers add up. That’s better than any candidate running, or even in history.
The reason it doesn’t raise rates is because investment right now is terrible, people aren’t opening up businesses. The reason is that consumers don’t have enough income. That’s what you need Sanders for, to reduce unemployment and drive up wages.
The things Bernie are making “free” have a value that is already created, by health-care providers and hospitals. The only question is whether the payer is getting their money’s worth. In both these cases, the answer is no, as in the case of health care the spending is through the roof due to limited information for the consumer, and in the case of college, the spending is through the roof, because college is a ticket to a high paying profession, so you can charge the difference in wage.
Both of these cost overruns are anti-competitive, which is why it makes sense to subsidize college, and have a base of government care which takes care of lifesaving medicine. That’s why other nations do it.
No, he isn’t.
No. But I bet he would support policies that reduce drug crime in South and Central America, which are destroying life in those countries and pushing refugees to the US. You don’t appreciate how much of the illegal immigration crisis is due to US influence, both in subsidizing drug cartels, and overthrowing responsible governments in South and Central America.
Those people need to become citizens, to keep them from driving down wages for everyone else. How can you expect a person to make a living picking fruit or working in a restaurant if there are illegals getting paid peanuts to do it?
It also has an income tax component. The numbers add up. The US is wealthier than Europe, and single payer is actually easier for us. People forget that the Clinton tax hike that ended up balancing the budget was originally passed to finance Clintoncare. Balancing the budget is just what Clinton’s tax increase ended up doing when the health-care initiative failed.
He is saying Sanders’ numbers don’t add up, not that people won’t benefit with the published numbers.
I don’t know, and I don’t care. When the immigration issue is solved, that won’t be an issue.
It’s never going to be a moot point if drug cartels run Mexico and Columbia. The US needs to get its drug demand to zero, and stop subsidizing horrible government in the rest of the continent. Whether that’s by treatment or by providing drugs to wean addicts off of cocaine, I don’t know. Sanders hasn’t come out with a position on this.
The health care tax is not flat because the other component of this is to reduce income inequality. The Sanders proposals are interwoven and deliberate. In Europe it’s usually a regressive VAT.
You can’t have cash practice when costs are skyrocketing, and 10% of people will need $300K cancer treatment and 1% of people will need $1M emergency treatment.
Once you have basic health single payer for the cancer and emergency, so that the enormous things are taken care of, then the rest is a normal market, and supplemental treatment and optional things can be cash practice, and helped out with supplemental insurance, as in France. That’s better than the British system anyway, and less governmental.
Things are better in South America. People don’t really want to come to the US right now. If you don’t kill South America with bad policy, it will grow, and people will stay put. It’s nice in South America, it’s nice in Mexico, if not for the corruption. Sanders has always been rather stingy on new immigration, he just doesn’t want a shadow economy with underpaid people, because that’s a de-facto guest-worker program, something he opposed, because it drives down wages.
The great issue of our time is the fact that Americans are getting paid the same when their productivity quadrupled.
He isn’t getting it from the top 2-3%, that money is just to supplement the overall 2% income and 6% payroll that finances the bulk of the plan. It’s really correct on the numbers, you need to read it in detail.
He funded it correctly, and the reason it only hurts a little is that there is a large progressive tax component to it, although the bulk is from general taxes and payroll tax. It’s a mix, and it’s a sensibly designed mix.
That’s the Republican philosophy, it is only sometimes true. In the case of medicine and college, the free market creates the overruns, not any subsidies.
Right. But the single-payer takes out all the middlemen, and leaves only the doctor and a stingy government for essential care. This holds down the costs on essential care, and sets the baseline for nonessential and supplementary care provided by a market on top of the basic care. It saves a ton of money. The French system is at least 30% cheaper than the US system.
It is sensible, because only the government can negotiate on lifesaving care with any power. The insurance company would get sued for “killing patients”. The government can negotiate with strength.
That’s what makes lifesaving care so difficult to provide, you can’t hold down costs in the market. The supplemental insurance and optional care is different, and for these a market is good. That’s what they do in France, and much of the rest of the world.
But in all countries, the government is responsible for lifesaving care. That’s an extortionist situation, and it is a rare case where markets just don’t work.
Artificially raising the cost of labor creates real value, because that cost is depressed by a non-market mechanism, by the creating of unemployment and the prevention of competitive wages. This is not controversial anymore, it is the reason economies don’t operate at 100%. This is Keynes 101.
It is a good idea when you don’t have an economy working at full employment. You need to learn Keynesian economics. I’m 42, by the way.
The level of bureaucracy needed for government payment is far smaller than that required for private insurance. The reason is that the government sets a uniform payment rate for the esential care, determined politically. The issues of maximizing copays and denying care is taken off the table, and private insurance can focus on optional drugs like viagra, or on hair-implants or something. Nonessential stuff.
The number of bureaucrats in toto is reduced, which is why it saves money. It’s also why I support it, and I suspect why Sanders supports it. He is not a friend of bureaucrats.
That’s usually what governments provide. The optional stuff is not governmental in France, I don’t know about England. Basic dental is in Bernie’s plan, but usually excluded by most governments.
Not exactly, but it happened anyway. The peasants weren’t killed for stealing from the state, they were killed when they put up an armed resistance to having their land confiscated, which was completely sensible, I mean, I would too. The people were sent to Siberia for stealing from the state, but usually most stealing in the 1940s was false over-reporting of labor “pieces” by including shoddy or broken pieces.
Try what? I advocate a 90% top income tax rate. Sanders doesn’t. I’m not trying anything.
You didn’t get the printed money to workers, it just sat in banks. There is nothing to do, you need to double down.
Why is maternity care nonessential? Can you have a baby purely at home without risking death? It’s all the stuff you can’t negotiate properly in the market with. The market negotiates fine on sex-changes, flu-shots and Z-packs.
The basic level is determined politically. If you don’t like it, get supplemental insurance, and pay for more care.
Megyn Kelly was hard on Trump because the Fox corporate owners don’t like Trump. It says nothing about her objectivity, it just shows she follows the money better than others.
I read Pravda little when I was a kid, and it covered US poverty and race issues better than the US media did. It was awful regarding internal Soviet issues. Pravda is dead now, you can’t read it. It’s turned into the “Weekly World News” of Russia.
The basic care package is negotiated by the government to save as many lives as possible within budget, the extra care is determined by what the public is willing to pay for. That’s what people do everywhere else in the world. I’m sorry you don’t like it, but it seems there is no other way that works.
I have seen government programs that come in on budget, for example LIGO. Health care is easy, it is just a payment office for doctors to bill.
That’s nonsense. Vermont has issues due to being a single state, businesses would leave, and sick people would come. It’s not something you can do on the state level, unlike Romney care.
I know you imagine this is so, but I assure you as someone who lived a significant fraction of his life outside the US that it is not so. The poor in the US are miserable.
There is a law of diminishing returns, you can’t save more lives after a certain limit, no matter how much money you throw at it. The war on cancer is an example— the breakthroughs didn’t come until the biology research was sufficiently advanced, no matter how much money you threw at it in the 80s.
A national health system just means that the government negotiates the maximum possible lifesaving care within its medical budget, while the public buys the supplemental care if they aren’t happy with what they are getting. That’s the only way to keep the lifesaving care from driving up the costs of everything else.
All pregnancies are potentially life-threatening.
They can do that, and if you want to pay for the stuff where they disagree with the government, go ahead. That’s what supplemental insurance is for.
That’s not true. Voters are extremely skeptical of government spending, especially in the US. They know that if it gets too big, it comes at the expense of private sector growth. The thing about health care is that you are improving small business, because they no longer have to worry about employees getting covered. That’s what some Republicans support national health, and even Donald Trump spoke out in favor. He knows his hotels and casinos won’t have to worry about health care anymore.
You really aren’t getting that the government provided care is a floor, not a ceiling. Congress is responsible for setting the floor, not the ceiling. You can buy as much additional care as you want as a private citizen.
It is not difficult to set the floor, within budget.
This is not true, see France. A lot of workers get supplementals, to cover dental, I guess, and other stuff, like viagra.
Then why is it that McGovern’s negative income tax was such a negative for his campaign? There is no free lunch, voters are not supporting Sanders because his policies are easy or convenient politically. They are supporting him because his policies are necessary.
Fox News is “White people, have more babies!” racist. It’s about as racist as it can be and stay on TV.
He should have said 20% goes into negotiators and bureaucrats which are eliminated in a single-payer system. That would be more accurate. Only a small amount goes into the pockets of executives, but that would be eliminated too.
Stimulus and real spending aren’t the same.
It’s not what you call it that makes a difference. It’s whether the patient can reasonably negotiate regarding the location, price and type of care that is the issue. In both pregnancies and road accidents, the negotiating power of the patient is nil. So the hospitals can do whatever they want, and bill the insurance company after the fact, and the insurers can’t say no.
You can also get additional essential care, by paying out of pocket, or by using pure private insurance. That’s why France is more market than England, and also twice as expensive.
Sanders told you what it would be, and you’re already paying more in insurance premiums, that go to cover the homeless people freezing to death tonight.
LOL! Sorry, my bad. You’re right. Feelin’ the Bern too much, I guess.
Watch this movie: https://vimeo.com/18781528 , and you’ll get a glimpse of what Ronald Reagan did to my 10 year old subconscious in 1983. There’s no amount of ******* that can outdo that.
RT is corporate, it has a few left voices, but they’re mostly gathered from the internet.
If by “rationing” you mean paying $100 for an MRI rather than $800, paying $10 for a pill rather than $190, and disallowing frivolous overtesting when young children are in a hospital, you are right. If by rationing you mean that people won’t get essential care, you are wrong.
If you feel that you are being rationed out of care you want, just pay for it. The government doesn’t need to pay for everything you want, just the minimum consensus for what will keep you alive, at prices that allow the hospital to operate and recoup costs.
The thing that makes reasonable negotiation impossible is that the care is essential, and choice is out the window. It’s a very precise standard: can the patient say “no” and be ok?
The failure of the public option has nothing to do with the country’s voters, it has to do with the country’s donors. The voters supported the public option in big majorities, which is why the failure to pass it demoralized Obama supporters. Sanders won’t repeat this mistake.
NHS monopolized British health, and I believe it is too restrictive in comparison to other national plans. It is one of the earliest plans, it was designed at a time when the importance of competition wasn’t appreciated as well as it is today. We have more experience now, and public/private mixes are best.
If you want care that is not provided, it is essential that you can freely buy it, so that the doctors are able to sell their services beyond what the state is willing to pay. That’s what normal non-NHS health systems look like. In such a system, there can be no compaint of rationing, because you can supplement the state insurance with whatever private insurance you wish to buy, just as you do today.
There is no reasonable claim of rationing in a public/private mixed system as in France, whatever you can pay for, you can get. It’s just that the government provides a floor on essential care, and prevents prices from skyrocketing in those cases where the hospitals are in a position to extort the patient.
This is complete nonsense. The housing bubble had nothing to do with homeowner support regulation, or any such thing. It had to do with the mortgage bundlers realizing they could make a fraudulent AAA rating for the bundled securities, by a false assumption that the defaults were statistically independent. This meant that they could make money from a credit default swap, which would be underpriced.
The demand for more mortgages came from the bundlers, who were selling them off to banks like Goldman Sachs, would would pass them off after insuring them. The banks then went crazy giving home loans, because they were essentially being paid to produce subprime mortgages.
The whole failure was entirely in the free-market part of the system. None of it had to do with government. I know this is impossible for you to believe, because of your philosophy, but it is true. This is why your philosophy is bankrupt.
There is nothing utopian about a mixed public/private system. It’s the default in France.
It’s not only the younger generation. It’s the older generation that rejects economic quacks like you and Thomas Sowell.
The Fed was not the impetus for the housing bubble, the banks were, when someone realized how to defraud buyers of bundled securities with a false rating. There was no failure of government, the failure was entirely in the private sector.
The reason interest rates are low is simply to encourage people to borrow money at low interest and hire people. It’s not happening, because there are no more consumers, and small business is squeezed out. The benefit to investors is a side effect. It what happens when you try to do stimulus but don’t have the political will to invest directly in a jobs program.
This isn’t microeconomics, it’s macroeconomics. The two are at odds with regard to monetary policy, and if you don’t believe in macro, you have the false impression that leftist goverment is doing the opposite of the correct thing. Sorry, but you need to go to read some Keynes.
Do you understand that there is something called “macroeconomics” whose laws are at odds with the laws of “microeconomics”?
The only ones “taking my vote” are Republicans trying to disenfranchise with voter roll purges and voter ID laws.
Have you ever heard of “aggregate demand”? This is the real reason. The reasons you say are economic quackery.
Yes they are at odds. A rise in minimum wage should increase unemployment and reduce total consumption according to every micro reasoning, yet in real life, whenever it has been done, it does the opposite. That’s entirely due to macro reasoning. You raise minimum wage, and unemployment goes down. There’s no micro explanation for this, no matter how hard you try to spin it.
You are unfortunately the economic illiterate. You only understand micro, which means you are missing out on the last 80 years of economic thought. I’m sorry, but you need to learn the basic laws of macroeconomics, and you can’t learn them unless you start by reading Marx. That’s not going to be possible for you, on ideological grounds, so, you’re just “fukked” as you put it.
I don’t know what a “macro measurement” means. Macro and micro are theories of responses, not theories of measurement. The UE is measured by unemployment benefits, I presume. I don’t care how it’s measured, so long as it’s accurate.
Bernie Sanders is not easy to beat, or else he would already have been beaten in Vermont. But I’m glad you think that. Please run more superPAC ads attacking Hillary.
Of COURSE they are at odds, or there wouldn’t have been any need for a field called “macroeconomics” to exist. Conservatives pretend it doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t stop it from existing.
They don’t, but municipalities do.
The promises are easy to fund, and they are done in poorer countries than ours. But please continue in your delusions, the Sanders supporters appreciate your help.
Oh I get it! You are saying because unemployment is the sum of individuals looking for work, there’s no possibility of a conflict between micro and macro, because a drop in unemployment is due to some individuals finding work in their micro environment.
Well, that’s true in a vacuous sense.
The correct way of saying “macro and micro conflict” is the statement that the macro response to a change is not equal to the sum of the obvious micro-responses, due to nonobvious feedbacks due to spending changes, which you can’t predict without knowing the features of general economic equilibrium, and how close or far you are from it.
The reason that the micro changes can all seem to go one way, while the actual macro change goes the other way is that the market is not anywhere close to economic equilibrium. The response theory of microeconomics presumes that you are at equilibrium. The failure of the theory shows that you are not. It’s as simple as that. Conservatives deny that this is true, but economic equilibrium makes precise predictions that fail. One of them is that unemployment must go up in response to an increase in minimum wage.
The main cause for not being close to equilibrium is that the wages in industrial economies are depressed due to unemployment from their equilibrium value. When you fix this depression, by a jobs program, by minimum wage, or by whatever means are required to remove the unemployed from the picture, wages rise to productivity, and equilibrium is restored.
The lack of equilibrium is the most important feature of real markets, and you are blind to it.
As I said, nobody is forcing anyone else. The government provides a minimum payment, and if you want more, pay for more. It’s not force, it’s a public insurance policy.
Those “poles” also say he is wildly popular with independents, can bring out Democrats in droves, and even catches some Republicans, especially libertarian Ron Paul supporters.
It’s not that it’s essential, it’s that it’s coerced by the hospital at point of provision. If you are in a famine, food becomes the same, and in every famine the government steps in to regulate food distribution and hold down prices.
They are both libertarians, at opposite ends, right vs. left.
Sort of. It’s approximately true for new industries as they are developing, not for old ones, and it’s not even true for all new industries. That’s Mises schtick. It has nothing to do with the failure of Marxist-Leninist economies. The failure is one of centralization, not economic calculation.
It’s like saying “statics is at odd with dynamics”.Microeconomic theory is based on an equilbrium state, so that you can predict responses to perturbation. The dynamics of actual industrialized markets drive it away from the equilibrium state, when ownership concentrates and unemployment appears. That’s just the facts of life, and it is quantitatively demonstrated by the response of unemployment to minimum wage which goes in the exact opposite direction you would predict.
Look, I know how the USSR worked. They had internal prices, which rose and fell according to supply and demand. They weren’t stupid. Their labor allocation was nearly an ideal free market. Everyone could switch jobs, and the planners set the salary to draw the appropriate number of people in, providing rather large incentives for tough jobs.
The prediction Mises made was presuming that the planners would be too stupid to mimic a market. They weren’t in the USSR, but conservatives don’t know anything about the USSR. The price signals in the USSR functioned as a signal of scarcity just as it does in a market.
The failure of the USSR was in bureaucratic inertia, and lack of innovation, and it happens in market systems as well in enormous firms. You are just blind to it when it’s MicroSoft releasing the same crappy version of Windows year after year, or if it’s an IPad still not working with flash. Those are enormous concentration of power making horrible decisions, and that’s what you had in the USSR, on steroids, because it was all government monopolies.
Stagflation happens when there is not enough existing infrastructure to employ everybody, and you stimulate the economy to the point of hyperinflation. Then you get inflation at a rate of unemployment determined by the amount of industry you still need to build to employ everyone.
To get rid of stagflation you need new investment. But when there is inflation, it inflates away the investment capital. So you need to pump money into banks, but that has the effect of making the inflation worse.
So the plan is to first get rid of inflation, by austerity, which is what Carter did with Volker, then to reduce taxes on investment capital, to allow new industries to form. That’s more or less what Reagan did. Except he did it with an orgy of tax cuts and consolidations that didn’t help anyone at all. Carter and Volker were the wise minds here, not Reagan.
The point is that the salary the planner set was equal to what it would be in an ideal frictionless market, because if there were too few people in a given job, they would raise the wage for it, until they got just enough qualified applicants. When there were too many they would lower the wage. That made wages differ by a factor of 4-10 throughout the USSR, it was not an equal-wage society by any means.
It’s not a market, but the mechanism is exactly the same. Actually, if you want to see what free-market wages would look like at zero unemployment, I think the USSR is your only example. There is no other economy that operated at zero unemployment with this type of wage system.
Under Reagan, it came from a bunch of rich people. Under a free frictionless market, it comes from bank loans.
The planners acted like robots— if they had a shortage, they raised the wage, if they had a surplus, they lowered the wage. It’s no different from a market. They didn’t tell people where to work, they needed flexible labor. This system was set up in the mid 1930s for the first five-year plan, it was codified in the second Soviet constitution (the Stalin constitution). I looked into this, because I had no idea how the heck they could regulate an entire economy top down. It was mystifying.
It doesn’t have to come from savings. It just has to come when it’s needed.
Banks creating money out of nothing is just a way to produce investment capital for new industries that doesn’t rely on inequality and a bunch of rich people telling others what to do. There’s no need for angel investors if you’ve got a good VC and a good bank. The money doesn’t go to individuals, it goes to build up businesses, whose profits are distributed to employees through their labor, and to pay back the interest on the initial loan.
You think I don’t know that? You need to look at how the central planners were acting. They were acting as market intermediates in this case of wages in the USSR. This is not how investment or innovation was done there, that was pure planning. But the wages were essentially pure market, despite the planners. Nobody said that internal to the USSR, by the way, that they were using markets. They couldn’t on ideological grounds. I noticed that.
In 1965, they wanted to move to pure market planning for all industries, based on profit. This plan was shelved. It was reintroduced in Gorbachev’s time, in 1985. Thestate industries were supposed to operate at a profit now, as opposed to by quota.
Because they were all enormous state monopolies, the easiest way to raise money was to choke the supply, to hold off on orders. This meant that as soon as market reforms were implemented, shortages began, and they just got worse as the USSR became more market oriented. Then it collapsed, and the industries were privatized, producing an oligarchy overnight.
The failure was the centralization and monopolization. The “calculation problem” was not serious. This is something you don’t understand until you look at the USSR deeply, not just read Mises, who never studied the planned economy deeply.
It’s easy because you’re sincere, not a troll like everyone else.
I’ve known about this for 30 years. I studied the USSR as a child in the 80s.
College is pretty much free compared to the US everywhere. In Germany I heard it’s free, in Finland, they even pay you a stipend to go to college, as long as your grades are good. I believe that’s how Linux was written, by a superannuated Linus Torvalds. It really helps get a good academic scene. All industrialized countries have government healthcare, only the US doesn’t.
Why are you repeating yourself? I explained economic calculation below. It’s only relevant for a planned economy, which neither me nor Bernie Sanders is advocating.
Keynes can’t be proven wrong, at least in the sense of wages being depressed due to unemployment, because it’s been verified for nearly a century.
Keynesian economics was attacked politically during stagflation, because non-Keynesian people didn’t understand how inflation worked. Conservatives also used a voodoo version of Keynes based on the “Phillips curve” instead of reading Marx.
Keynesian economics is not disproved by anything. It’s just a fact of life. Stagflation means you need more investment, that’s all, and a jobs program in the meanwhile, because your economy can’t employ everyone as it stands.
I am not asking government to invest, or do much of anything really. I don’t believe in a planned economy. How many times do I need to repeat it? I’m a libertarian socialist, not a Marxist-Leninist.
The point of single payer is to hold down costs when there is a market failure. The way to know the costs is by providing reimbursements at diminishing rates, until the supply starts to fall and private insurers step in to fill the gap. That’s why you need a mixed public/private system.
I am not a fan of planners. That’s why I am voting for Sanders. His policies will help your small business, as you will no longer need to worry about health care, and you will be protected from monopolistic competition dumping on your efforts.
I know how governments are run. Single payer is not very bureaucratic, it’s a simple reimbursement scheme. Insurance is very bureaucratic, because there is negotiation for each procedure, and conflict on what is necessary and what is not, which usually happens after the procedure is already done.
Vermont is rural, more conservative than you think, and he gets 85% support, including nearly all independents, and 25% of Republicans. That’s a miracle, and it’s due to his “get government off your back and onto the back of enormous businesses trying to put you out of business” philosophy, half of which is Republican, the other half libertarian socialist.
Cause or effect? They’ve had Sanders for 30 years. We’ve only had Sanders on the national stage for one.
That’s what you’ve been taught, but it’s not true. Socialism simply depends on workers owning their own business, like small business, and libertarianism means the government doesn’t tell that business what to do through regulation.
The only major role for government in the economy is to break up concentrations of power that stop this natural state from existing. That’s it. It can be done with gentle nudges, like progressive corporate income tax, and incentives for gradual worker co-ownership, like profit sharing, and regulation on publically traded corporations, to prevent powerful executives from sucking profits into their own pockets..
Price inflation has no relation to money supply inflation. That’s a consequence of Keynesianism. There was not a three-fold increase in prices in 2008 and 2009, the rate of price increase was a few percent, as always. This is another catastrophically failed prediction of the Chicago school.
Keynesian economics is the same as Marxist economics, except without the prescriptive part, where the government take over all the big business. The fault Marx identified in capital markets is that unemployment causes wages to plummet. To fix this problem, Keynes suggested zeroing out unemployment. That’s all there is to it.
It’s obfuscated, because normal economics academics are not allowed to mention Marx for political reasons.
Whoa, this discussion finally gets somewhere! Thanks for the original points.
Regarding socialized medicine, remember that it is a baseline insurance. It covers catastrophic care, basic regular checkups, basic sickness, basic dental, and there is still space for a market on top, since this is a basic plan.
The point of covering basic care is that the patient is held hostage to the hospital in many cases of basic care, and cannot negotiate from a position of strength or from any position at all. The doctor both prescribes the treatment and then doles it out, and then bills a third party as much as he/she wants. The third party is then in a bind, because if it doesn’t pay, the doctor can accuse the company of killing the patient, and lawsuits would put it out of business.
When you have single-payer socialized medicine, the baseline care is taken care of by a government that refuses to pay more than a certain amount for the lifesaving care, and also makes difficult choices regarding which care is actually lifesaving, and which care is just an extraneous boondoggle. The government is the only entity that can make a call like that without getting sued.
This puts the hospitals and providers in a situation where they are not able to use the coercive aspects of their business to charge outrageous rates, as the government is stingy, and reimburses them their costs plus a reasonable rate of depreciation on their capital, and no more. Private insurance then is free to negotiate above the baseline.
This type of negotiation is vital for health care, because it is a situation where there are expensive options that are only marginally better for the patient— like a cancer drug that extends life by a month or two, without much benefit. The government plan does not have to reasonably provide this benefit.
Now a private plan can still provide additional coverage for such things, and they will charge market rates. There will still be market insurance, it will just be supplemental, after the coercive parts are taken care of.
The situation is analogous to a famine. In a famine, government regulates the food supply, so that people don’t gouge the consumer, and the distribution is equitable. Any surplus food is left up to the market to allocate. The same holds for essential basic care, vs. additional care. Health care is more coercive than other industries, and forms an exception. That’s why basic care is governmental in all modern societies except the US.
That’s all I have to say about government medical insurance. It increase economic freedom, because people are not tied to a job anymore, and employers don’t have the headache of insurance. All the countries which score highest on economic freedom provide state medical insurance to all their citizens, and that’s a plus for economic freedom, not a minus.
Regarding the second part of your comment, about Keynesian spending and the competition between public and private jobs.
The model you have is the classic “Phillips curve” idea that when you provide jobs, you need to increase the wage to draw more people.
This is not really what is going on, as the unemployed in the society are people actively seeking a job to protect them from destitution. They will usually take a job at practically any wage. Those who won’t are not part of the unemployment problem, they are normal job seekers who are between jobs and have a good resume.
The people who hold down wages for everyone are the people who can’t get jobs because there aren’t any jobs to get. The point of Keynesian road construction, public works, is to employ all those people, so that there aren’t any of them left.
These public works projects are not exactly a loss-making corporation, they are just public projects, so that their value is determined by the labor sunk into them, since they are government paid. The point of “0% unemployment” is to have an open door policy on such projects, so that anyone who is broke and needs a job can always go to the construction office and get a reasonable job at a wage that becomes the effective minimum wage. It’s their choice.
Because it’s their choice, the wage, as long as it is below the inflationary minimum wage, will cause no inflation at all. You CAN get inflation if the wage for these jobs is very high, as in the case of Nixon paying high wages for military production, without employing construction workers. But this is the exception not the rule.
The point of Eisenhower and Nixon was to get rid of unemployment. Eisenhower did it the same way Hitler did, with road construction and miltary spending. Nixon doubled down on military spending.
The Clinton way to do something similar was the EITC, which increased tremendously in the 90s. Martin Luther King Jr. favored the plan I just said— an always available low-paid (but still living wage) public sector option for employment. This can replace minimum wage regulation, the wage for the job is always the effective minimum wage.
Because the wage is relatively low, it doesn’t take out anyone who can find a better paying job in the private sector. Instead, just like a minimum wage hike, it raises the minimum that an employer must offer to get an employee. This does not harm the economy, as I explained before.
This policy makes unemployment moot, because you can always find a construction job. That’s the way to drive unemployment to 0%, it is historically effective, there is no unemployment in societies with open construction projects where people can willingly sign up.
When I say “employ everybody”, I don’t mean pay an exhorbitantly high wage so that literally every person is employed. I mean offer construction jobs at a livable minimum wage near enough to every community so that there is no realistic possibility of destitution. There will still be a certain small number of people between jobs.
This is all that a full employment policy requires— a good infrastructure program that absorbs any excess labor, so that nobody is out there driving down everyone else’s wages by not being able to find any job at all.
The reason the unemployed don’t come together to start a cooperative is because it is impossible, as they lack capital. They will huddle together in a homeless camp, building structures out of cardboard, and begging for money. These activities pay far less than minimum wage, and involve more suffering and labor than construction.
The Kremlin is very hard right today, it does try to make “The West” look bad sometimes, but it has no serious ideological difference with the USA. All the good stuff on RT is just independent internet people who are rebroadcast because they are critical of something or other. Pravda had a consistent, although humorously antiquated, ideology.
Socialism is not about giving and getting money. It’s about correcting market failures.
Boy is it not nonsense. You’ve never lived through hyperinflation. I have. You go to the store, and prices are higher every day. They are higher at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day. You have to spend your money in the morning when you get paid and buy all the stuff you need for the rest of the month. Quickly. Before everyone else buys everything out. People’s decisions cause this problem, and people’s decisions stop it. This problem is understood today, and can be controlled, the procedure to remove accelerating inflation was worked out in the 1980s.
Economics makes predictions for numbers. Unemployment, price inflation, production, labor, consumption. These predictions are based on laws, and these laws are difficult to work out, more difficult than physics, because you can’t really do controlled experiments very easily. That means you need to extract the predictions from uncontrolled messy experiments.
There is a further problem that the field is politicized, so that the best insights are not admitted into academic discussions for political reasons. The most important insights are microeconomic equilibrium and response theory, this is due to Adam Smith and Ricardo and other early 19th century people, macroeconomic failures due to Marx in the mid 19th century, and macroeconomic fixes of these failures, due to Keynes, in the early 20th century. There are other minor contributions, but that’s pretty much the whole story of capitalist economics.
The political problem is that Marx is completely taboo, so you aren’t allowed to mention him. Keynes wasn’t allowed to mention him either. So Marx is ignored by everyone, except those that ONLY read Marx, and ignore the other two pillars. That’s not a good situation.
There is a way out of the impasse regarding controlled experiments, but nobody does it. They are all afraid for political reasons of what they will find. But it is essential to know. What I said on this page is mainstream Keynesian thinking, except without disguising the Marx portion, as is traditional.
Although I agree with most of this, at least the parts not bashing Sanders, Sanders politcal movement is not a phantom. It’s similar to the Bull Moose party that formed around Teddy Roosevelt, except it’s entirely within the Democratic party. The goal of the movement is internet fundraising and organization to unseat Congressional members who are standing in opposition to reform. It can be successful because voter turnout is low in midterm election, even on the Republican side, and even a modest mobilization and get-out-the-vote effort can unseat an incumbent. That’s why the NRA has such power, because they show that they can pour money into local elections when they are displeased. The Sanders movement has membership comparable to the NRA, or will by the time he is elected, they have better fundraising than the NRA, and will therefore have comparable power to modify the tone in Congress. This is not a joke. It is very difficult for people to stand up to the NRA, so they don’t bother. Why would they stand up to Sanders, when he has mobilized support?
This article is not about meat. Please stay on topic.
Stop talking nonsense. I was born in a country where it already happened a long time ago. This Sanders business is simple stuff compared to what we need to do in the future.
Change can’t be dependent on big men. It needs to be organic, so that the person reflects the movement, not the other way around. Then assassination is meaningless, and largely pointless.
Foreign policy is impossible to challenge unless you are already president. Nobody knows what foreign policy a President will enact, except going on general principles that the candidate espouses. So I would say you should be optimistic regarding Bernie Sanders foreign policy, even in cases where his voting record seems to disagree with you so far. Remember that Kennedy ran on “missile gap” and Nixon ran on “peace”. Foreign policy is usually a bunch of pandering lies, which might be why Sanders talks about it so little.
The funding power of internet organizations can be used to unseat any individual member of Congress. This is enough to force change, bill by bill, when there is a credible threat. You can’t give up on Democratic processes, no matter how flawed, because the alternative is imposition of opinion without checks, using a gun. That never works out fine for the good guys.
Civil disobedience doesn’t hurt, of course, but how are you going to mobilize millions of people to picket WalMart? It would be nice if they could be put out of business, bu they have a propaganda budget.
Be conscious of the political reality. Sanders has challenged foreign policy to the utmost limit possible for a Senator, and even a little beyond, as the Iraq vote and leading the opposition set him up to be turned into Cynthia McKinney. She was only a little more opposed than Sanders, and she was completely destroyed (I’d like to see her reelected). Sanders did about as much as possible while staying in the system.
He doesn’t need to send anyone. His contributors seek out the story and comment independently. This is a libertarian movement, not top down.
That’s nonsense. Every Democratic administration brings incremental progress. The Sanders administration promises the most in several generations. I am 42.
You don’t understand politics at all, do you. Yes, I am comparing Cynthia McKinney to Sanders, and in the comparison, I put Sanders even higher, because he had a real serious impact. Cynthia McKinney protested, and let herself be destroyed. That makes her a martyr, not a direct agent of change. She might become an agent of change in the future, and a martyr is something to be also.
You must never do politics from your own perspective alone, no matter how justified. You do politics from every perspective, including those which are on the right, because those people have little bits and pieces of truth also, no matter how small. This is simply ridiculous. You seem to be trying to get voters to not vote for Sanders, when he’s clearly the best choice in two lifetimes.
That’s incorrect. Carter halted the Kissinger, COINTELPRO nonsense and introduced some human rights considerations into foreign policy. Clinton introduced expanded EITC, and led anti-trust against Microsoft. Obama reversed torture policies and several authoritarian measures, although he kept too many.
Sanders will reverse ALL the authoritarian measures with 100% certainty, including the warrantless wiretapping and Patriot/Freedom acts. That’s a guarantee.
I am not an idealist. I support Sanders because I am a realist, and one can’t live with the Nixonian state of the Democratic party, and the insanity state of the Republican party. I believe Sanders can allow the Republican party to finally die, as he appropriated all their sensible libertarianism into his own platform.
This is a sign that Hedges is not a sincere leftist, but some sort of right wing plant, trying to discourage the left from voting sensibly. (ok, a right wing plant who has pretended so well, he has dozen books)
He supports it to the minimum degree possible consistent with getting elected. That’s less support than any other candidate, and much less than Clinton, who is willing to poison relations with Iran when Netanyahu asks.
I don’t know Hedges too well, but I was always shocked when leftist words came out of his mouth. I reserve judgement, but this is a grossly irresponsible article for the entire left, and I can’t believe he would say this stuff. I mean, even Chomsky tells you “think Green, and if you live in a swing state, vote Democrat”.
The communists did that to “heighten the contradictions”, now that they are gone, not so much. Usually this only happens when they deserve it. Sanders certainly doesn’t.
I don’t think they were good, especially not Clinton, but they were better than the alternative, that’s for sure.
No, you’re right, and I believe you. I googled him now, and I see his books. He’s not a plant, but the way he’s writing, he might as well be. You can’t give up on electoral politics.
It’s not just a repackaging, it’s also an extension of the internet component from pure fundraising and canvassing to a real mass movement that can effect electoral change.
So he would do that to himself? That decision is made unilaterally by the President, you know. That’s another thing that will end when he is President. And quickly.
Actually, I hope he declares Cheney an enemy combatant first, and puts him in front of a tribunal. At least that would be a deserving victim. That should lead the GOP to quickly vote away that designation.
It’s a record of a politician who survives. There is no more compromise in there than what is necessary, and sometimes significantly less, as he was taking a risk of getting destroyed.
You have no idea what kind of measures can be implemented from the moderate left, when they get their act together and decide to eliminate unemployment and inequality. They can shift companies to employee ownership by various tricks, they can forbid insider ownership as insider trading, they can break up monopolies. They can reduce unemployment to zero by jobs programs, and raise wages for everybody. These are a road to a better society by other means than top-down imposition.
The idea that there is a magic road to employee control is probably an illusion. You need to do it by building cooperatives, and supporting them, and not buying things at places which are run top-down. There’s no easy path using pure state power, as the state is corrupt by nature.
It’s not lying, it’s being pragmatic. I want a politician that wins, thanks.
It’s not a case against. It’s a case for. I want him to win, dude, not run for protest. He can win, because he is a compromiser, and he understands the libertarian right better than any other Democrat.
He compromises most on foreign policy, because that’s what he can do least about, as a Senator. As President, we’ll have to wait and see.
That’s not utopia. A measure to support employee coops was just passed by a moderate conservative government in the UK. This is what is necessary for worker say in their workplace, not some fantasy of unions taking over a society, as if the leaders represent the rank-and-file, and as if the leadership structure of mass organizations is any more responsive than the leadership of a gigantic corporation.
I want people to control their own destiny, not be tied up in gigantic mass movements who hold a vote before they decide to sneeze.
Yes, they are compromises. There are often greater war crimes and slaughters which they prevent, including the war crimes of Repubicans when they get elected.
Being in power means compromising on people’s lives. It’s unavoidable. Sanders made just about the best choices he could under the circumstances. I certainly couldn’t have done better if I was in his shoes.
To make the greens viable, you first have to remove the Republicans from consideration, as the Whigs disappeared. This isn’t parliamentary Democracy, it’s a two party state. That means you need to make blue states blue/green states, and red states red/blue states, until all the states are blue/green.
I am not a moderate in that sense. To address inequality you need to make sure investment comes from banks, not individuals, and that individual income is progressively taxed. Then you need zero unemployment. The rest takes care of itself.
I know you don’t believe me, because you are so used to inequality, but a free market competition does reduce inequality when you remove leverages of power.
You need better tricks, as most corporations in the US today are monolithic monstrosities.
You should be fair to Obama, this is building up gradually on the more vacuous rhetoric and modest movement toward real money, real change, and a real movement. But Dean and Obama are the two predecessors, they pioneered internet organizing.
Except the internet kills that kind of thing dead, as it will destroy the movement by police infiltration and surveillance before it starts breaking any windows. Thankfully, the internet also provides an alternative means of organizing and effecting change, which is what Sanders is doing.
No amount of water can stop the Bern.
The Revolution in the age of the internet takes place at the ballot box, through mobilization and advertising, led by individuals. It’s better than the usual revolution, because, well, Napoleon.
Counter to what?
Oh yeah. True. I never thought of that as a real revolution before. I thought of it as a bunch of cocaine-addled suckers voting for nuclear war.
That was true in 2000 and 2004. It was attempted in 2012 in Florida, but no dice. It’s harder now, the Democratic party is on it.
Debbie can’t do anything with exit polls on her ass.
I agree, which is why I supported Obama as the best possible choice in 2008. Now that’s Sanders. It’s a gradual movement, like all others before.
What they dislike are corporate liberals, who push leftist measures which are just sufficient to appease workers with a modest sense of comfort, without giving up any power to mass movements, instead retaining it in corporate boardrooms.
Boy is that NOT Sanders. Which is why I am shocked that any part of the left would oppose him. I can understand if they hate Hillary Clinton.
No, I’m a libertarian socialist. A lot of the right wing platform was stolen from the anarchists. The overlap is why Sanders is so popular with Libertarians and Republicans, as well as left-independents.
The competitive wage structure at zero unemployment is basically the wage structure of the USSR, more or less. It’s not obvious, but the compensation system under the planners was indirectly implementing free market wages.
Elections change stuff, don’t delude yourself. You just aren’t the only side with a voice, and your knowlege is not widespread enough to be in the majority yet.
Dean is exactly the same as Obama in positions and policies. They weren’t real left, but they were real internet candidates.
The point of those candidates was to cut our teeth, so to speak, on internet fundraising and advocacy, with mainstream Democratic candidates. Now that this has been accomplished, the internet folks are going for a real leftist, but still within the mainstream. That’s Sanders.
Nothing happens all at once. Sanders is internet 3.0.
Sanders is moving exactly as fast as possible. The internet campaign pretty much determines his platform, and they take into consideration all voices including yours and that of the far right, to detemine exactly how much truth is acceptable.
You can’t win an election on truth. Can I say that 9/11 was an inside job and win? I can’t. Even though it is true, and even though most people know it is true. That’s politics.
It’s not shallow. It’s how you must think to effect change.
Sanders supports worker-owned cooperatives, and wants to encourage these forming. That’s the only part of his platform which is actual socialism, although it is a modest first step. This step is also supported by the RIGHT, believe it or not, and has passed with a moderate conservative government in the UK already. Don’t kid yourself, workers owning small companies is real socialism, and it’s real libertarianism, and everyone can support it, except the Marxist-Leninists, who really should grow up.
Sanders doesn’t believe THE GOVERNMENT should own the means of production, but he believes THE EMPLOYEES should own their own workplace, at least eventually. That’s real left, and more progressive than Marxist-Leninists ever were. This is also supported by many right wing libertarians, believe it or not.
Sanders foreign policy positions are worthless posturing, like the foreign policy posturing of all previous candidates. He is significantly less military than anyone else.
The USSR was basically a theocracy.
The problem with the right is that whenever they see power, they assume it has roots in government. They can’t understand non-governmental power. But that goes away with self-education, which happens naturally online. Then the Trump supporters become Sanders supporters.
Because she’s not running as a Democrat, and you can’t split the vote. That’s how Hitler came to power, and Bush.
I meant “running as a Democrat”, edited. Splitting the vote is evil of the worst sort.
They are not desperate. They should start with municipal elections in NYC, and other liberal cities. Then build up from there. They shouldn’t even field a presidential candidate until they have a Senator. To build up a new party takes about 10 years.
AT LEAST I DON’T SHOUT IT. I am quite a bit further left than Sanders.
WHAT???? I CAN’T HEAR YOU WITH ALL THIS NOISE!!
You should be blocked on this page, dude. Stop it.
You just wait and see. It’s not a cult of personality.
It’s not funny, it’s true. Workers owning their own workplace is small farms, family owned restaurants, worker coops, stock-sharing corporations wiht a professional board, union owned factories and businesses, friends who start a business, and basically every successful part of the American economy supported by both the left and the right since the country was founded.
I told Marxist-Leninists to grow up. I like Marxists who aren’t Leninists.
I supported Obama as an interim measure, to halt the catastrophe of Bush. I didn’t support him as an end goal.
No, you should. You are spamming. This is for discussion, not noise. You are not even a leftist, just a Republican here to gum up the discussion.
That’s false. As president, he gets to set the bidding for construction projects, and he can give priority to worker coops.
It’s not a cult of personality. Sanders can be swapped out for Warren, like Dean was swapped out for Obama. It’s a movement that grows organically online.
I support CANDIDATES lying to people’s faces (as little as necessary), but I don’t support lying in online comments, mostly because it doesn’t work. The internet is a sincerity engine, comments run on it. I tell the truth online, but I will never run for office.
Sanders is as honest as possible for a politician, maybe a little too honest to win.
It’s not a restoration of anything. It’s progress.
Because he has a 25 year voting history, and he kept all his campaign promises, including ones that were very tough to keep, like releasing details of his tax plan and single-payer plan before the Iowa caucuses.
They are not based on the personality, they are based on the platform the online community decides on in advance is just progressive enough to just barely win.
He’ll support Clinton in the election, and continue the revolution into the midterms, and Warren’s election in 2020 or 2024.
Of course they are. They are the only possible socialism.
I never said he was “honest and trustworthy”, he’s just trustworthy enough not to engage in an Oklahoma City Bombing or pander about UFOs, to repeal police state measures, and to enact the platform he promised, or at least try hard to do so.
This is completely false. Like Obama and Dean, I could have told you most of the platform in advance. The only surprise is how well Sanders filled in the details (also, the free college thing is his idea alone, but it’s good). Any good politician is responding to the public desire.
On the right, the closes thing was Ron Paul. But he had the gold standard, which is a deal breaker.
He doesn’t push on foreign policy because he used up all his political capital on domestic policy. You have no idea what he will do with drones, and my guess is that he will end the drone program on the first day in office. But I’m not sure about that. What I do know is that if he had ever SAID that, Biden would be running now, as the drone program is his baby.
The other party lies worse. All politicians lie. Bernie just does it much much less than any of the others.
Elvis insulted the Beatles.
You can’t tell the difference between a compromise and a lie, that’s not my problem.
His stance as an independent is due to his libertarian streak, and it is justified. He caucuses with the Democrats because he is sane.
All you have to do to build a bridge is donate $10 to Sanders. You will be automatically contacted by representatives of the campaign. But if you want him to win, best make it $100 monthly.
Of course it was a compromise. It was a compromise with Lieberman and other conservative Dems, and with Obama. Lieberman was the fillibuster breaking vote, and he demanded no public option. There’s no way to do anything in the Senate without compromise with some enormous egos.
I am not lying. I believe he is lying. Good. I want him to lie as much as possible about foreign policy, if it helps him get elected.
You do realize that it’s political suicide to oppose Israel in the US right? You have no sense of the politics of others. I can’t believe you really want the left to win.
Shut up about guns, nobody is going to shoot anybody. We’re just going to vote in a new president.
Everyone is a 9/11 truther today except you. There is no maneuvering, foreign policy is at the discretion of the president, and you can’t know what it will be from the promises, because these are always pandering, as the public is clueless.
My position on war is not right wing, and I don’t accept any illegal invasions.
Of course the trend is away from worker ownership! That’s why you need to reverse the trend. That’s the whole point of libertarian socialism, and what makes it the opposite of Marxism-Leninism. Those large corporations are inefficient monstrosities, and need to be split up.
I am not an anti-Marxist pseudo left. I read Marx, and I read Lenin. I DISAGREE with the idea that large concentrations of power are inevitable, and the way to prevent them is to bust up the power structure with structural remedy.
The reason it goes the other way is that power naturally concentrates. To break it up, you need a graduated corporate income tax, as a supplement to anti-trust law, and transparent contracting reform, to prevent false splits. You need distributed ownership encouraged, by gradually transferring equity to employees, and if it’s a publically traded corporation, you need to prevent employees from owning equity in the corporation.
This is fixing Marx’s problem of consolidation not by taking it over by the state, but by actually reversing the consolidation.
The experience of Marxist-Leninist states shows that state monopolies are no better than private monopolies. The only solution is no monopolies at all.
It is only troubling to a person who doesn’t understand what it means to be elected to public office.
It was a surrender on the part of Obama. Sanders did what he had to do, and he did the right thing. The ACA is an improvement on what came before.
These votes are meaningless. He is strong where it counts, which is opposing the bloodthirsty murder when it happens. When he is president, I am sure his policies will be tougher than anyone else’s. He can possibly get away with it, because he’s a Jew who’s been to Israel.
He was tough on the last Obama FDA appointment, for the stance on medicine imports. It’s hard to compromise, learn how to do it. Not everyone in the world thinks like you, nor should they.
To who? To a war-mongering right-wing Israel hugger like Clinton? To a Republican? You always vote with the best choice at the moment, not the perfect choice.
Whatever you say. You have no idea how easy it is to talk the talk and how hard it is to walk the walk in Congress. Sanders does it.
If you are not a 9/11 truther, you should google “9/11 drills” or “9/11 drills + my name” and you will be after a few hours. Most people have already gone through this. It’s not a conspiracy theory exactly, it’s pretty much “Cheney acted alone”.
Regarding illegal invasions, there were only 2 in recent years— Iraq and Afghanistan. Sanders only supported one of them. It’s very easy to spin invasions so that they look legitimate. He opposed the first Gulf war, and the Vietnam war.
I didn’t say anything that contradicted what you said. The Kremlin isn’t on the left anymore.
You don’t need to REQUIRE something that everyone already wants. You just need to encourage it and protect it, until it is the new norm. Socialism is NOT about government force, despite what you read, and despite Marxist-Leninist thinking. Socialism means “workers have a say in controlling their place of work”. You don’t need or want a “dictatorship of the proletariat” for that to happen, in fact, a dictatorship of the proletariat is pretty much the only way to guarantee that it will never happen. You need Democracy, good ownership laws, and a gradual transfer of ownership to many.
He does support worker-owned industry, but not by the state taking over existing industry, but by building it up from scratch, and by workers gradually buying their own industry when they have more wealth, as they would at zero unemployment.
If it’s worker owned, the workers can set up whatever heirarchy they want that is most efficient and serves them best. The authority doesn’t control them, they control the authority.
Because one of Sanders “incremental improvements” should and probably will be solving the carbon crisis. There is enough technology out there for a carbon neutral energy economy.
Not the way he’s doing it. He’s changing the Democratic party.
I not only VOTED for Obama, I organized and got contributions for him on the streets. I supported him, knowing that his rhetoric is empty, and that he is a Democrat and not a real leftist.
I am not as disappointed in Obama as others, considering the situation before. He stopped the slide into Reagan/Bush madness, and was the middle-step the transformation toward internet organization that gave you Sanders. His existence also made racism more visible, and allows the confrontation that lies at the bottom of American resistance to the left to crystalize.
Yes of course I subscribe to that idea. I also subscribe to the idea that it is sometimes necessary to vote for a Republican candidate, although it hasn’t happened yet in my lifetime. Right now, the Republican party can be eliminated, and a new center left party can form, with the Democrats center-right.
Venezuela was a wreck when Chavez was elected— they had 60% poverty and 25% deep poverty (people living in garbage dumps). Chavez cut deep poverty by more than half, and poverty by half, and doubled Venzuela’s GDP. That’s why people voted for him and his party. Now they are very corrupt, and people vote for the opposition.
Chavez had completely different policy from Sanders. He wasn’t a libertarian, he was authoritarian. Chavez was a classic anti-business Marxist and he destroyed small business. Sanders supports business strongly. Chavez’s main economically positive move was to nationalize the oil industry and spend on the poor, but that counts for a lot in Venezuela. It counts for nothing in the US, which is why the US will never elect someone like Chavez.
Sanders is an FDR Democrat who is supportive of small business. Corporate power is not good for an economy, healthy small business is good for an economy. It has a further plus that small business is usually significantly worker owned. Americans remember when people owned their own business, and they want that for the future. This is a form of socialism, except we didn’t know enough to call it that.
The crunch in supply is unavoidable, because catastrophic medical care is expensive no matter how you cut it, and it is provided at random times by a very powerful provider. Cash practice and deregulation are good, in conjunction with basic single payer.
That peaceful resistance will be met by a violent repression that will put the 1960s to shame. In eras of violence, people vote conservative, then all the leftists will lose for another generation.
I am a contributor of $100/mo to Sanders campaign, I also went to a meetup once. I am not paid by Sanders, I am a supporter. Having money invested makes you more committed. This is why corporate campaign donations are such an important problem.
The contribution shows you are serious, and the organization will need money to get rid of obstructionist Republicans, not just to elect Sanders. I do not represent his campaign, they sure as heck wouldn’t want me as a spokesperson, I am WAY too far left. I am just a contributor.
I watched him in Minneapolis, and he did a great job in a difficult situation. I hope you change your mind, as Hillary Clinton did not even show up to listen.
You CAN’T tolerate evil, you need to elect politicians that will stop it. But at the moment, some 40% of Americans are ignorant of the evil, and vote actively to support it. The other 60% need to unite and vote it out. That’s the only prescription for change that won’t make the problem worse.
As the ownership gets distributed, the system becomes less capitalist, and more egalitarian. That’s what Americans know that Europeans don’t, since ownership of land was widely distributed in the 19th century. Europe had concentrated land and business ownership since ancient times.
“You can’t fight concentrated power without power” ….
yes, you are right. But the existing degree of state power is sufficient to bust up the power in monopolies. It is sufficient for encouraging distributed ownership, and it is sufficient to make a real professional investment system independent of a parasitic class of capitalists.
“Large companies are extremely efficient at concentrating power”
Yes, they are efficient at concentrating power in a few hands. But they are extremely inefficient at the business of companies, which is producing products and services at the lowest possible labor. That’s why the USSR went bankrupt, because they immitated the power structure of capitalism, and ended up with horrible oligarchic concentrations of power and an inefficient economy.
“Marx described actually existing historical and economic processes and the forces behind them, you know. Just saying that these processes should somehow go in the opposite direction shows you don’t even understand the analysis …”
I understand the analysis perfectly well! It is correct— when you trade property deeds, they concentrate in a few hands, leading to unemployment and subsistence wages for wage labor. The result is a concentration of all business into gigantic state level monopolies.
The point is that it can be reversed with systematic policy, because those deeds granting property rights are constructed by government, and corporations only follow money. That means that if you encourage splits with financial incentives, you will get splits. If you encourage transparent contracts and competition, you reverse the bias to big business. If you make incentives for broad worker ownership, you get broad worker ownership. In net, you reverse Marx’s law, by creating those conditions where the law works in reverse.
“Lies about Marxist-Leninist states make those claims, not the experience”
It is not a lie to claim that the USSR couldn’t produce a decent home computer, or a decent refrigerator that didn’t weigh a thousand pounds. Or a decent camera that didn’t fall apart. Or glossy books and magazines, or new fasions that didn’t immitate the West, or new toys. Their music was derivative, their art was boring and censored. When they had innovation, like the Rubik’s cube, or Tetris, it was through small people who were suppressed by the bureaucracy, and prevented from bringing the product to the masses.
None of this is lies. It is due to the concentration of power in government. This is why people oppose Marxism-Leninism. If it weren’t for this, the world-wide revolution was on its way to completion by 1930, except people looked at the USSR and said “NO THANKS”.
“It is not a “solution” because between an existing concentration of power and a non-existing one, the one that actually exists will win in the end.”
That’s simply false. There was no Linux in 1992, it didn’t exist. It fought against corporate machines as big as the biggest ones in any economy. It was able to build up from nothing to full power in two decades. The rest of the transformation should follow this lead.
Ok, it’s your prerogative, I am not demanding anything. I am sending money, so he will win.
I’m voting for the smallest pile of shit. When parties become majority parties they inevitably have a bunch of stuff you don’t like. It is a mistake to vote for a minority party unless you live in a parliametary system.
Politicians have a lot of tricks to stop evil. Carter gave amnesty to Vietnam war draft dodgers, remember. A simple prosecution for torture, which can be done without anything except a good president, will reverse the slide on civil liberties. Redirecting highway funds to small cooperative businesses can be a shot in the arm to the coop movement. It’s all possible, you just need to organize, contribute, and vote.
They are unable to support an attack on the electoral system, designed to marginalize the left. The left was already destroyed using violent revolutionary movements once, in the early 1970s. By the end of the decade, you had a bunch of drugged out revolutionaries killing a Brinks armored car guard. The situation regarding revolution is only worse today, when revolutionary movements can’t communicate without being spied on. It’s simply a trick to remove electoral power from the left.
Further, even when far-left movements like the Bolsheviks took power, the results were infinitely WORSE than with traditional Bourgeoise politics, both in terms of economic progress and in terms of civil rights. So no thanks, I will vote for Sanders, and I will do counter-propaganda against any sort of protest movement which is unable to congeal around a viable electoral candidate or candidates.
“The people” can’t rule, because “the people” don’t have an opinion. You mean “the people’s representatives”, which means a vanguard, which means destruction and slavery to a bunch of leftists with guns. Sorry, no way.
Sanders does propose that. You need LFTR to solve global warming, and Jill Stein will be politically constrained by her party away from any nuclear component to a solution.
There is NOW, there wasn’t a hundred and fifty years ago. That’s why libertarians are strong in the US. They remember anarchy as an existing state. In Europe, it’s the future. In America, it’s the wild west. It is possible to reproduce these conditions with policies that decentralize ownership, and this is the key to progress.
He decided that foreign policy voters are 5% of the electorate, and are not worth losing political capital over, that’s all. It’s a sensible choice, and you should recognize it as such.
Obama didn’t wreck the country. He took the first steps. The next step is Bernie.
People aren’t “too stupid”, they have incoherent opinions in a mass! You can’t make a popular average of opinion polls and come up with a coherent policy. For example, if you ask “Should we get rid of Obamacare?” you’ll get majority “yes”. If you ask “Should we repeal the affordable care act?” you’ll get majority no. That’s why politics isn’t easy, people don’t come together to make an organized “mass opinion” in any simple way. Whenever someone is claiming that they are representing “the people”, what they mean is that they are representing a faction with a coherent ideology that aims to replace the individual decision making power of all the citizens.
That’s why decentralization is important. You need to make sure that different people can use their own judgement to better their own environment. It’s also why power is important. You have to make sure the people can change anything that affects their lives. It’s the Newton’s third law of politics— no effect without influence. “No taxation without representation” in the language of the country’s founders.
I don’t want Oligarchy. I want Democracy. But that’s not the same thing as holding a popular vote on how much toilet paper I am allowed to use to wipe my butt this morning. Maybe I had a problem which is none of your business. Maybe not.
Democracy involves decentralizing decision making so that small groups of individuals are in charge of their local environment, and larger groups are in charge of their larger environment, by selecting leaders, and debate, and discussion, and responsive leaders. That’s what socialism means— that workers can control their place of work, and share in the profits of their labor equitably.
If you say “the people rule”, what you do is that you select leaders in a movement, the movement purges dissenting opinions, and the leaders decide for everyone. That’s not Democracy, it’s not socialism, it’s what happens under Leninism.
When the workers own the business, they can choose to appoint managers, or not, they can vote on an equitable salary for management positions, and they can vote to let them go if they aren’t doing a good job. They share in the profits of their own labor, and they can choose to set aside capital for future expansion, in order to increase their production. They can also delegate the setting aside of capital to hired managers, who don’t get to keep more than a fair salary for their capital management function. It’s not the same as current capitalism.
The problem with secession is unified monetary policy. The Fed and Congress can pump money from NY to Mississippi, and without this, Mississippi and most red states would turn into Greece. Aside from monetary union, and protecting civil rights of minorities, decentralization is ok. Europe has issues with minority civil rights now, France banned the headscarf at school.
A heirarchy managed from below is not a problem. An example is professors appointing a Dean for their department. This is not tyranny. the Dean doesn’t control the professors, the professors bound the actions of the Dean. The issue of tyranny arises when the far away owner appoints managers over distant employees. It’s not a real heirarchy of power, it’s division of labor into management and other duties.
Travelgate. Not illegal, but oh so corrupt.
It wasn’t 1 man. MLK was a leader of a movement started in the 1940s by WWII veterans, and there was DuBois and the NAACP before that.
But Hedges really is one man.
Oh yeah, I took my baby daughter there a few times. It was very nice as a protest, but it wasn’t anything like the well organized civil rights movement. They worked like dogs with a determined leadership, and they sent out folks like Rosa Parks and MLK to do specific actions to get visibility. They weren’t making a human megaphone and brainstorming in large crowds.
I am suspicious of masses of people. I accept mass movements when the people choose leaders they trust and hold them accountable, not when they try to run things by direct democracy. Direct democracy is very erratic, and doesn’t produce good policy, or even coherent policy, and it is determined by the person who sets the poll.
Yeah, but we need to work even harder. Social media is only a tool.
It’s a phony imperfection, it probably isn’t true. He isn’t running on a foreign policy platform.
Not exactly comfortable, just able to be heard. It equalizes the power of propaganda, so that people can do propaganda with efficacy equal to corporations. But propaganda is not enough, you also need policy, and you need leaders. The internet organization tools of Dean and Obama turned internet organizing into votes for a presidential candidate. Sanders is taking it to the next level, in my opinion, by turning it into a popular movement that can influence Congress directly, by money and turn-out-the-vote. It’s gradual. The next iteration will be even more powerful.
Yes. In the midterms is the real test.
We can win despite the gerrymandering. Voter turnout is low in midterms on the Republican side too, and ads are ads, so money talks. Gerrymandering generally only produces weak majorities for Republicans.
The same is also true of business. That’s why you need trustbusting and a graduated corporate income tax. Generally, any imposition of power on a far-away group of people should be taxed, including franchises and chains. If you want local decision making, the target should be big business.
One problem with decentralizing government is that it often comes with centralization of business. As long as there is a strong incentive for decentralized business, government can do that same, because local issues are best determined by local populations.
Local safety nets are destroyed by corporations running away to the lowest taxed state. They can only be Federal, unless states start preventing interstate commerce, which violates the constitution.
That’s partly why single payer failed in Vermont.
Let the employees decide, not you.
If you are telling the truth, which I doubt, you are hanging out with the incurably naive.
Local is more important for third party activism. Global is important for presidential and Congressional elections. The Global effort also provides financing and networking for local efforts, so they best work together.
Because foreign policy promises are uniformly completely unreliable. Kennedy ran on missile gap. Nixon ran on peace. Bush II ran on isolationism.
So you want NY excise taxes on NJ windsheild wipers? It’s nuts. The system of interstate free trade does good. It just means you need Federal social insurance, that’s all. Social insurance is just money transfers, it isn’t really meddling.
The supply of oil isn’t short on any reasonable time scale. You need to learn the Soviet theory of oil formation.
Right. But without the ACA we wouldn’t be ready today for single payer. Americans only do the right thing after trying out everything else first.
“So…are you saying that we need to take control of the state and use its power to restructure the economy?”
Yes, of course, it’s still the left. It’s just that I don’t expect to take over individual industry, or regulate the economy very strongly, just restructure the nature of contracts, and modify the tax system to change the conditions away from monopolization.
“I suspect we’d have a lot of disagreements on the details”
I wrote the details here: https://www.quora.com/What-…
The main new points are 1. Guaranteed Jobs 2. Graduated Corporate Income Tax 3. Opt in transparent contracting 4. No insider equity 5. Gradual voluntary transition to worker ownership 6. Deregulation.
“I don’t know what a “professional” investment system is”
When you need to allocate capital to new business, this is sometimes done by a wealthy person who invests in a company (an angel investor), for the purpose of increasing their own personal wealth, and sometimes by a professional— a banker or VC (venture capitalist) who is paid a professional salary. The individual investor is usually not very good at this, and sometimes hires a professional to do the investing.
In a real perfectly competitive capitalist equilibrium, nobody is wealthy enough to individually finanace very large ventures, so you need to rely on bankers and successful VC professionals, the ones with a proven track record, who have done a good job with investments in the past.
Then if you want to start a business, you bring your proposal to the VC, and if you get one of them to invest in your company, you can build it up, with worker ownership along with your friends, until it is generating some millions in revenue. You hire workers, first at a wage, then they build up equity over time, like a mortgage. If you are successful, the VC recoups the investment for the firm, as usual, and you get to share the profits, with taxes being paid. The VC is paid a professional salary, and the profits have nothing to do with it, except that if the professional VC is doing a bad job with investment, they are likely to lose their job, and go do something else.
As your firm gets larger, with more paid employees and fewer owners, the progressive taxes get bigger, so at some point, you will want to split, either horizontally or vertically into independent firms, with new owners and fewer employees. In this way, you keep the economy decentralized at all times.
In the USSR or Hungary, new investment was done by a GOSPLAN bureau, and if you did something radical or new, and it outcompeted with existing industry, unlike a VC, you would be destroyed politically, and you would lose your job. Not always. But often enough that it killed all innovation. This is why VC needs to be decentralized, not politically controlled from the top down.
“There were other issues beside the inefficiencies (which, btw, still can’t really compete with the inefficiencies of capitalism – just not hidden nearly as well)”
This is entirely false, capitalist production was in every way vastly more efficient than Soviet production, despite its inherent inefficiencies. You simply need to look at the record of Soviet production to see that there was no comparison between Soviet firms and Western firms in the case where Western firms were small and competitive, and even in the case where they were big and competitive. The Soviet industry never changed anything, they were still using vacuum tubes in the 80s. You couldn’t change anything, because you couldn’t go to an independent VC, you needed to go talk to the local party boss, who would say “transistors? Why do we need transistors. Vacuum tubes worked for 20 years.”
The same inertia happens in large firms. It doesn’t happen in small firms. The example of Yugoslavia (and Hungary) is illustrative. The Hungarian and Yugoslav economies were more competitive, because they left small business alone.
“the very real competition with imperialist capitalism, which was always a violent threat, from its birth.”
Blah blah blah. I am speaking about the USSR in 1980, not in 1930. By the end, you got to see what happens to large state industries. The West is not so dependent on “imperialism” as you put it, except for oil and raw materials. The USSR found plenty of oil, because they understood oil better than the West. The production in the West is outsourced now, but it wasn’t in the 60s and 70s. There was no real threat in 1980, except for the threat of nuclear war, and nuclear bombs are relatively cheap compared to the destruction they caused.
I mean, the USSR could have led on nuclear power plant design, but they didn’t. They could have led a LFTR program, or a PACER project, but these were done by the West. The USSR was a world leader in research, and it had the best education in the world. It was the power structure of business which was screwed up. You couldn’t do anything independently. This is why socialism must be decentralized.
You are blinding yourself to the failures of the USSR, which are repeated in other nationalized industries everywhere they are tried, and ALSO repeated in Western private monopolies, to a lesser extent. If you want efficient business, make sure it is a network of small competitive business, so that employees brains are used to their full potential.
“I’m not sure that (beyond the formal freedoms) a poor inner city black person has a better chance to innovate and create something new than a worker had during Communism”
Look at hip hop. The Black American experience has always been highly entrepreneurial, I have neighbors who sell meals, sell toys, sell everything, although their efforts are always hampered by lack of access to capital. In cases where Black entrepreneurs were locally successful, like in Rosewood, they were destroyed by lynch mobs.
I didn’t bother with the points we agree on, which is most of them. The only point of disagreement is the central control. If you introduce central control, you destroy evolvability, because central control is incompatible with change.
What nonsense. We are just vehemently disagreeing with him. He is wrong, and so are you.
The question is “rule over WHAT?” Are you asking people to vote on how to design a nuclear power plant? On where to buy food? On zoning?
Most of the impositions of power in our lives are through business decisions, not government decisions. You need to decentralize ownership of business, so people have a real choice where to shop, and to make business employee owned, so that workers have a say in their conditions, and share the profits.
That’s already a massive amount of democracy. If the workers then say “we trust Bill, he’s a good manager, we’ll let him make the decisions”, then that’s up to them. They don’t need to keep up with Bill’s decisions, unless Bill starts to cheat them of their wages and profits.
That’s democratic enough. If you vote on every sneeze, nothing ever gets done, because everyone has to be taught the details of everything, and that’s impossible.
He doesn’t say, I am not sure. If you are open to nuclear options like LFTR, it can be done in a period of 10-20 years. If you aren’t, I’m afraid we’re all going to be cooking in our own emissions. But if you come out and say “I support nuclear plants”, you are causing political trouble, so I don’t know. I don’t even know if he supports old nuclear or LFTR, or any of it, and I’d rather not know, because it will hurt him either way.
I didn’t give a reference— the best Western reference is Thomas Gold “The Deep Hot Biosphere”, but the theory was originally Soviet, it was due to Kudryavtsev, and it was well established in Russia and Ukraine for 40 years already, due to pressure anvil tests, radioisotope tests, Helium contamination, and all the other stuff you will find in Gold’s book. If you look in English, and online, you will just see mockery of the idea by so-called petroleum experts.
The idea that we’re about to run out of oil is the Western version of Lysenkoism, it’s nonsense pushed for political reasons. The oil won’t run out, we need to make the transition before we raise temperatures by 5-10 degrees, we should have done it 20 years ago. LFTR is the best option, in my firm opinion, but you won’t find many leftists who agree, because of knee-jerk anti-nuclear. LFTR not only solves energy, it produces 100 times less waste at 300 years of radioactivity, which is completely reasonable to store for the entire lifetime at current storage capacities, or maybe double that.
You seem really dimwitted. The American left, and especially Bernie Sanders, support independent farms, small business, worker owned business, and are opposed to big government measures like the Patriot act, and the NSA.
Venezuela’s socialists are just Marxists.
Of course he has a foreign policy, and it’s probably a good lefty one. He’s not running on it because it’s not worth his time to make up campaign nonsense to pander. Common political wisdom says voters don’t vote based on foreign policy. They just vote if they feel terrorized, and then they vote Republican. So the less he says the better.
This is not a parliamentary system, you don’t get to vote for second-choice, so the only way you can have a third party is if one of the parties is weak in a region. There are regions where this is so, where one party is basically non-existent.
If you want a third party, institute instant run-off elections, but they go against the tradition in the US. Otherwise, you need to destroy a party to form a third. The best target is the Republicans, who are weak now.
It’s a completely compelling rationale. You can’t split the vote, it is immoral. The split between communists and socialists led Hitler to power. Ralph Nader was running to punish the Democrats for their corporate streak. He chose to run against the least corporate new Democrat, Gore. For his trouble, Bush II nearly drove the US to outright fascism. This wasn’t an accident, this is what Nader intended. He was “heightening the contradictions” at the expense of people’s lives and livelihoods.
It was legal for him to do it, but that doesn’t make it right.That destroyed the Green party for me, and for a lot of other potential voters. Your party has no ethics.
There is sense in the wariness. Traditionally, FDR redistributionary socialists instituted even more racially discriminatory allocation of resources than the free market. The GI bill discriminated against black GIs, highway funding and mortgage subsidies favored rural and suburban whites as opposed to urban blacks, and the suburban subsidies pumped capital and people out of cities. These things were explained in the recent appearance Sanders made, where Black and Native voters challenged him.
The voters are simply testing to see whether Sanders is serious about targeting high unemployment urban areas. He is assuring them that he is, and he is, so I think he will win over a large percentage of Black vote, perhaps the majority. Perhaps not. Voters also need to believe he can win.
That’s your propaganda. The presidential choice is the head of the Dem party, and can reorganize it, especially with a decisive victory. Democrats want FDR style full employment policies, they just don’t know how to pass them.
Of course nuclear plants are needed. That Republican-style science-denial is why I will not vote Green. Nuclear power, when engineered correctly, is the greatest thing in the world. You just don’t know anything about it, because you are used to crummy bureaucratically engineered waste-producing light-water reactors.
It does if you don’t understand what instant runoff means, and that we don’t have that system in the US.
The Kremlin is just a reflection of the Russian oligarchy. RT is Russian corporate crap instead of US corporate crap.
I didn’t give an emotional response, I gave a curt response, because your post was long and mostly vacuous. Before becoming disappointed in Sanders, you should vote him in. Become disappointed when he lets you down, not in advance. Then find a candidate that goes further on those issues where you were let down, and persuade others to continue the progress.
Now that I read it, I like the one idea you have in the middle somewhere: a virtual election and a virtual platform online for a political movement. That’s nice, but such an election isn’t for leaders of anything, and it’s just in your head right now. It’s not like you are electing a labor representative. You would be forming a minor party online. That’s something to do.
If you want to do something real with such a party, you can get two dozen volunteers, take some signs, and picket WalMart. Not employees, customers. Demand they pay more money. Tell people not to shop there. They can’t blame the employees for a customer picket line, because the employees didn’t do it.
It’s not all that different from 2008, it’s just going several steps further, for the first time in the direction of actual leftist change. In 2008, we had worse to deal with, and a corporate Democrat was the best thing you could realistically elect. Now Sanders is the best you can elect. Next time, it will be more progressive, if Sanders wins.
Sanders isn’t running on foreign policy, although it is probable, although not certain, that his foreign policy would be an advance, considering his positions in the past. His domestic policy isn’t vague, it’s a solid advance on meaningfully reducing unemployment, redirecting stimulus to workers, and providing health care and education.
He plans to raise minimum wage to $15, spend $1000bn on infrastructure to reduce unemployment directly, and tax trading to finance public college, which reduces unemployment indirectly. He wants to break up the largest banks in 100 days, and introduce public single-payer health care, which reduces the costs of both health care and of doing business as well as providing for those without. He intends to introduce true progressive taxes again. These push the economy toward equilibrium, meaning wages become more equal, and production increases. Read his platform, it’s specific.
He wants to renegotiate trade pacts to tie imports to increased wages abroad, and he supports worker cooperative incentives very broadly and vaguely, which I would suppose means that infrastructure projects would give preferences to worker owned business, and there would be more protection of small farmers and small business.
In other words, foreign policy is almost always idiotic pandering which can cost you an election, and doesn’t indicate presidential policy at all, as the president can act unilaterally. Bush ran as an isolationist, Nixon ran on peace, and Kennedy ran on missile gap. There’s no point in looking at foreign policy platforms, beyond examining the past judgements, and checking if they are marginally better than that of others, a test which Sanders passes.
Breaking up the big banks is something the president can do both under Dodd Frank, and more generally under the Sherman act, if he can find a reason to consider the consolidation anti-competitive. Presidents are granted a lot of leeway in anti-trust, and the last presidents have all been lax.
That’s nonsense. It has grown worse because the president can’t pass a minimum wage increase, or pass stimulus to workers in a jobs program. You need to increase the pay of working people to get improvements, and an infrastructure program is not something Republicans can support, because they stopped being Keynesian when their donors asked them to.
He can do that when he has 4 million supporters willing to donate and mobilize in midterms. I am one of 1.3 million, and I expect 4 million before the election is over. That’s the same strength as the NRA, which nobody in Congress can safely oppose.
That’s not how it works. You hire companies to do construction, they find employees, and this reduces pressure on unemployment, as fewer workers are in the job rotation pool. This is standard since the 1950s, it works to reduce unemployment, it is uncontroversial.
It’s not impossible, it requires mobilization for the election and the first midterms, and about 4 million people willing to contribute to both causes, of which I am one.
Of course it is. Except not just any Democrats, Democrats willing to pass the program he endorses. If they don’t, they will get primaried. It doesn’t even have to be Democrats, that’s the magic of it. It can be Republicans too, if they support the specific programs, they will get ads backing them, and no challengers.
The Democratic party already did these things in the 40s, and the Republican party did them in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. We stopped doing these things in the 80s, because people forgot the laws of economics, as Marxist regimes collapsed.
No. It’s the best plan for change in your lifetime.
It can’t be a ruse, because I am not going to stop even if he tells me to, which he won’t.
His statements are mostly irrelevant. Presidents never tell you their foreign policy in advance, usually because they don’t know what it will be. You just have to trust their judgement. Protest after you see the policy, not in advance.
It’s a good plan, and it can succeed. The NRA has used it for years, and corporate donors do the same. The internet allows ordinary citizens to get in the game (the NRA is ordinary citizens too, but I mean leftist citizens).
It’s not magic, it’s been done before. The NRA and corporate lobbyists are two examples of people doing the exact same thing.
And I believe he will continue the drone program as a political ruse, fly drones to take pictures of nude beaches, and then shut it down because “money is tight”. I believe his meddling will consist of sending money to Rojava and telling Turkey to back off the socialist Kurds. But I don’t know that, and neither do you, so I just ignore foreign policy, while knowing he’ll be better than Clinton and for sure better than any Republican with the possible exception of Paul.
The organization base is the same as the donor base, and it’s at 1.3 million right now. If you chip in, it will be 1,300,001.
I am 42. The only “magic” part is that it doesn’t have to be Democrats. We can deal with Republicans too, because we can accept them wholeheartedly if they support the platform.
Obama wasn’t bad, considering the predecessor, Sanders is better.
It’s not arm-waving. As president, he will unilaterally break up the big banks, and redirect research funding to solutions for global warming. Personally, I am hoping for LFTR research and deployment, but he hasn’t said anything specific about it, and I don’t want him to, because pro or con, it will hurt him politically.
Obama shut them down, as he negotiated with Republicans from a position a mass movement couldn’t get behind. Sanders won’t do that. It’s as simple as that. Also, this is the third iteration, people know better how to organize online. Obama was similarly better than Dean, who was the first.
If you contribute, you will see I am not lying.
That’s for sure not bullsh*t, because he doesn’t need congress or a revolution to do this.
He supports incentives for coops, small business, and other worker owned business. That’s a mild mild form of socialism which Republicans also support, but it justifies his self-adopted title.
I know that because that’s the main platform Sanders is running on, negotiating from strength using the donor base. You don’t understand it unless you are part of it, because it really has the ability to shift elections. That’s what internet organizing is about.
Obama as a person didn’t lie more than usual for a Democrat, I was only seriously let down by the loss of public option, which was Lieberman’s doing, by the drone program, which is Biden’s baby, by the gun-control fabrications which is probably Clinton’s, and by the Kerry-Clinton foreign policy meddling which was corporate imperialist nonsense as usual.
Worker owned business falls under the canopy of voluntary socialism, although, as I said, Republicans like it too. See. Consensus for socialism. You thought it was impossibe.
What do I have to do? I don’t remember promising anything.
I support Sanders lying, because he’s a candidate. I don’t lie, because I am not.
The strategy is post-election, but a mass movement can’t be organized around ordinary Democratic party talking points. The organzing principle is Sanders’ platform, not the Democratic party’s. The movement doesn’t have to do much beyond contribute $40 a month toward ads and make phone calls during midterms, it’s what the NRA does. Nobody can touch a 4 million organization willing to do that, because midterms are so low turnout. It’s continual pressure. But it requires two elections, Sanders, and the first midterm.
Regarding Obama, these are not excuses. It’s what you get with an in-party guy. He needs to work with his dirty colleagues. Obama is slightly further left than the rest of his cabinet, although still a mainstream Democrat. Sanders is not a mainstream Democrat, he has his own people.
Because elections are impossible to win openly and honestly, because every candidate, even your favorite, will take positions you strongly oppose, and the opposition candidate who is vaguer will push ads on those issues you disagree with. That’s why you need to take a strong stand on a few issues, and leave the rest to the imagination. That’s how electoral politics works, and there’s no solution. You just have to vote of the best candidate based on the stuff they are firmly committed to, which will always be a small fraction of all the stuff.
Sanders lies a lot less than others, because he tends to repeat himself on the stuff he is sure is ok to say instead of lying or going off book. That’s called “staying on message”.
How am I supposed to do that if you don’t contribute? The point of contributing is to do exactly that. At some point, you have to trust other people are on more or less the same page as you regarding certain issues.
The nonsensical claim I was refuting is that “not everyone can work construction, so construction doesn’t solve unemployment”.
I dont know you or your opinions, so how can I tell you anything? All I can say is that there are enough people without you, but there’s no reason for you not to join, unless you disagree with the goals in the Sanders platform. Sanders is, superficially, much further to the right than I am, but I know his platform is a step in the right direction, although an incremental one.
Yes I did. You only need enough people capable of working construction to absorb the excess unemployed. Construction absorbed unemployment when it was done as a policy, in the US and in Germany, and to a lesser extent in England, where it was housing construction.
Sanders has a 50/50 chance of winning the nomination, and if he does, he is a shoo in for the presidency. It’s a lot like 2008, the primary is the real election.
I seek both Sanders and meaningful change. They are not in conflict.
It is extremely useful to unbiased third parties like you. I am not writing for them.
I take my change one step at a time. You have to drag 300 million people along, and you’re not always right. At least half the time, the 300 million are right.
People got a very few changes. The torture program is over, the NSA spying is exposed, there is no more preexisting conditions, police brutality on black citizens has been exposed, the war on terror is a joke, and stimulus money went into banks. Now they need real progress on wages and unemployment to get that money out of banks and into people’s pockets.
You keep going to absorb all excess labor, if not in construction, in other things, until people’s wages go up enough that they can spend their own money to keep the economy going. It’s not just construction, it’s also subsidized college and who knows what other infrastructure projects. Programming can be thought of infrastructure too, you know. Research. New power stations, etc. It’s real Keynesian stimulus.
Yes, the assassination program is a catastrophe. It must be reversed. But you can’t run on it as a candidate, unfortunately. It might be possible to sue in the Supreme Court regarding this.
But the “war on terror” was ended with the “I killed Bin Laden” hoax. I don’t like covert operations,and ridiculous Bush Cheney nonsense, but that was one I could see the point of. Not that I approve of any of this, mind you, but it’s better than pretending to chase Al Qaeda around forever. Now there are real horrors in the middle east.
Maybe not, but Bernie Sanders is in effect starting an independent sub-party within the Democratic party, and it is definitely possible from this sub-party. The sub-party is necessary to recreate a real two party system, in a context where one of the major parties is so bought out, it is no longer sane. The conservative-liberal fight is now entirely internal to the Democratic party, as it was in 2008, and Hillary Clinton is the more conservative candidate, while, unlike Obama, Bernie Sanders is a true moderate leftist.
It’s not a pipe dream, although I admit there are no real historical precedents in traditional capitalist economies. The best historical precedent is actually the USSR, strange as it seems, because the internal wage system was an effective free market, and construction jobs were always available on an open-door policy. This meant that you could see what the wage structure a capitalist economy looks like at zero unemployment, something that people don’t talk about, because the communists don’t admit it was an effective market, and the capitalists don’t know anything about the USSR.
The wage structure in the USSR was based on mobile labor making choices, and administrators setting wages so as to draw the right number of people to the jobs. It’s a form of supply and demand, except through planners acting as intermediates. The availability of jobs ensured always zero unemployment, and the wage incentives were just sufficient to draw the right number of people. At zero unemployment (meaning full on-demand construction job availability or other infrastructure job), you must reproduce the exact same wage structure under capitalism, because the USSR was really not all that different from capitalism in its internal structures, except for the parts that sucked (the new venture allocation and the state monopolies). The wage structure in the USSR paid factory labor a bit more than administration, and paid hard jobs much more than easy ones that required training. Your wage was roughly your productivity.
The only way to get rid of independent power structures is to create a totalitarian state. There is nothing wrong with independent power structures, as long as the mechanism granting the power is carefully designed to distribute power broadly. This is extremely difficult, which is why Capitalists put so much thought into structuring contracts and deciding when incorporated entities are independent. The struggle between centralization and decentralization was fought out on both sides of the iron curtain, it’s not a pure socialist theory, there was progress on the other side too. I put some thought into the prescriptions, and you can certainly argue that they aren’t enough. But they are a start. You might need gradual depreciation of property contracts in lieu of taxes to produce gradual ownership distribution, but taxes are probably sufficient.
Regarding hip hop, there is still a ton of great independent stuff which has no contact with corporate fluff.
The Christian revolution was successful, but it took 600 years, and brought about a lot of pain too. I think the best book is “On The Historicty of Jesus” by Carrier.
We insult the scumbags and war criminals so he doesn’t have to. It’s a tough job, but he needs to look presidential.
That’s because there’s a million donors looking through the feed for articles about him. Hillary has to use sockpuppets.
We don’t really have the technology. Storage for solar and wind is spotty, and if you think it’s a good idea to blight the kind of enormous areas with wind-farms and solar plants, I think you are doing more damage to the environment than you need to do.
Nuclear is really the only good way, and I shouldn’t say good. It’s great. The problem is that the plants that fission the entire fuel are politically difficult, so people end up storing “waste” that’s 99.5% fuel, and waiting for the next generation of plants for 40 years.
It showed up high on google news, that’s why. I google Sanders daily and look for comments, I’m sure there are ten thousand doing the same.
The difference is power. We have none. That lack of power is what makes cyberbullying a fantasy.
My my, you say it like it’s a bad thing. “Loners incapable of forming real interpersonal relationships”, you just described 90% of scientists and mathematicians. The psychologists believe human connection is good. I believe the internet is better.
Exposure to what? Radon? You have the same problem in coal mining too. Uranium is not all that radioactive naturally. The “waste pits” are relatively small in volume, and are simply not dangerous to anyone at the moment, and won’t be once you have a good deployment of breeder plants (which are absolutely necessary). Nuclear fuel is very energy dense, and you can store all the waste for its entire lifetime if you do it right.
The main problem is that you are using only the .007 naturally fissile component of Uranium, and not doing breeding. That leaves behind 200 times more waste than theoretically necessary, which is also much longer lived— it is radioactive for 10,000 years, rather than 300 years. The two solutions to this are Fermi’s fast-neutron plutonium breeders, which use U238-> Pu, and LFTR, which uses Thorium->U233, but also can use U238 in addition, and process the waste to pure fission products. These are only radioactive for 300 years, which is entirely feasable to store safely in large concrete warehouses for the entire time it is radioactive.
But we don’t have either reactor online today. Fast neutron breeders were never economical, they suffered from cost overruns. LFTR was just shelved for political reasons, because it was entirely different technology. Only one reactor was ever tested. It is now being reexamined, but unfortunately outside the US.
Nukes, when done right, have no externalities compared with anything else. Even with the current accident rate (which is atrocious) they are better than the alternatives. With a LFTR, there is not much potential for accidents, as there is no pressurized vessel to rupture. A spill per century is better than warming, but I doubt the accident rate will stay high with LFTR, it’s just a better design. That’s not just my opinion, it was the opinion of the fellow who designed the light-water reactor people use in the US today, also many others.
There is no better carbon neutral fuel than nuclear. I am sorry to say it, but it is true. The reaction to nuclear power were a byproduct of the awful nuclear arms industry, which is now best put behind us along with the cold war.
Instant runoff will immediately open up the system to third parties. You can institute that locally with some effort, then talk about voting Green, when it makes sense. It makes no sense under one-preference voting.
No they weren’t, they were just welcomed by the ruling class. They were engineered by the failure of the statist left, which created top-down power worse than any corporation or capitalist heirarchy.
It’s so not disgusting considering the alternative.
Sanders is breaking the circle.
Coops are already legal, and relatively common. Just offer preference to a coop in bidding, and all the construction businesses in town will switch.
Definitely as an alternative to overthrowing capitalism. It is the way to implement socialism from within capitalism, gradually, without any top-down authority imposing change, except through gentle tax incentives.
Your response is a non-sequitor.
Pass instant runoff in local municipalities, and you’ll start to win elections.
There are Republican businesspeople who support single-payer, because it removes health-care headaches from their business. There are Republican who support a higher minimum wage. There are Republicans who think the cost of college is outrageous, and there are Republican stock-traders who believe that a little bit of friction in stock-trades will stop them from getting ripped off by microtraders. There are Republicans who support anti-trust, and there are Republicans who support worker cooperatives.
But there are no ELECTED Republicans who support any of these positions, because their donors don’t like it.
That means, with pressure, it is easy to find a Republican to support any one, or all of these measures, and otherwise be a Republican. Then you can vote this person in, by encouraging Sanders folks to register as Republicans and vote in the primary, or else vote for this Republican in the election over the Democrat that does not support Sanders’ platform.
Republicans aren’t sick in the head, they have a point of view that all power comes from government fundamentally, because it is the monopolist on violence. It’s a perspective, but not the most useful perspective. The elected Republicans are crazy because the party is entirely bought.
It is not nonsense, it is very, very difficult because of entrenched power. But this is the “Keynesian dream”, the “Socialist dream” and the “Republican dream” all rolled up into one, and it is achievable step by step without a state any stronger than it is now. That means you can get a consensus for it, step by step, among all sectors of society except those of immense wealth, by elections.
Elections means you can’t go further than what the public has consensus on. That’s what gradual change is about, and there is no alternative.
You don’t need to show me American propaganda, I grew up in the 1980s with worse.
It’s not minor. It’s why you lose. It’s also the ONLY reason you lose, as if you change this, and change nothing else, you will start to win.
There is no “center”, or at least, it isn’t at the point of the average opinion of Congress. You are presuming that individual Republicans resemble their representatives. It is no more true than that you are like the Democratic party. Republicans consider their representatives guilty of war crimes, like you think of the Democrats.
The fundamental overriding principle of the modern Republicans is maximizing liberty of individuals, and minimizing state intrusion. Their “true philosophy” is closest to Ron Paul, and if you look at Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, they agree on a lot of points, especially regarding constitutional protection and foreign policy, where they might as well be the same candidate. They also agree on Fed audits, except Paul calls for zero inflation, and Sanders calls for zero unemployment. This is why Sanders can win an election, he is not oblivious to the overriding concerns of another huge fraction of the electorate.
There is no fundamental conflict between the principles of liberty and socialism, because socialism seeks to maximize liberty also. But both are in conflict with entrenched systems of power. You have to look at all people as potential supporters to win an election, which is much more difficult than just picking one point of view and going as far as possible within this point of view.
The Republican party itself is corrupt enough that it might be past the point of no return for a political party. It might disappear in the next few elections. If so, the Libertarians are going to form a new party, perhaps along with the Greens. If not, the Republicans will need to represent a different constituency than the two Koch brothers and the John Birch society.
Those things are a weighted average of past and current bets, and are a little behind the times. His current odds are best estimated at 50/50.
My claim is that there are many centers of authority in the society. There is the fellow who owns his own farm, there is the woman who acts as an independent contractor, with a secretary who works for her and two other businesses, and there is a corporation with 10,000 employees making minimum wage.
If you wish to remove authoritarian power structures, you can’t do this by imposition, because the same state power that attacks the corporate heirarchy also attacks the independent people in the society, who are the most important component, and who carry local authority due to their competence and the respect earned by their immdiate peers.
“No. This is a general(ly meaningless) statement. You “get rid of” structures of power by revolution”
Ok, if you want to define it that way. But to get rid of a corporation, which is a power structure, you just have to drive it out of business. Woolworth is gone, that didn’t require a government revolution. You can get rid of WalMart without a government revolution, you just have to reduce its profits sufficiently that it is no longer has the upper hand over local business. It’s margins are large only because of low minimum wage, and preferential contracts.
“The “mechanism granting the power” cannot be completely separate from and external to the power structure itself, it is never “engineered” by some otherworldly and completely “independent” outside actor.”
That is 100% true, and this is why I propose global fixes rather than local fixes. The only things I philosophically admitted to needed a top-down control are tax rates, monetary policy, uniform things that don’t require a separate decision in this instance or that instance. The corruption of government appears when you make specific decisions about a specific firm or organization.
The global control of tax rates is technocratic, and requires only macro data. The global control of unemployment by monetary policy and stimulus requires only macro data. Philosophically, adjusting macro policy to macro data doesn’t admit influence from power structure necessarily, because this is a small enough basket of numbers that the public can be aware of all of them and vote to fix them when they don’t work properly.
It is not at all easy, but there is no revolutionary solution that ends at this policy.
“What the hell does this mean?” (regarding contract law and separation of power)
If you look at capitalist contract law, there is a lot of effort expended to determine when you are an “independent contractor”, and when you are an “employee”. The key differentiator is the degree of independence of your day-to-day work decisions.
There is a lot of effort expended in knowing when you are a “subsidiery”, a “division”, a “franchise”, or a “competitor”. Again, the key issue is control.
The fine-grained distribution of control is the central issue that capitalist legal system obsesses over. It is nearly the entire body of law under capitalism.
This haggling is important, because what it is determining is which power structures will be admitted as legitimate, and which are going to be destroyed by government force, or implicitly destroyed by simply the government refusing the respect your contractual decisions. For example, Uber was forced to declare it’s “independed contractors” employees, because it was telling them what to do.
This legal system is full of precedents about power distribution, in detail, with numbers, with precedents, and it is something socialist theory usually ignores. This stuff is what China was forced to deal with in the late 1990s, when they wrote their corporate law. It is why the USSR was struggling with fine-division of authority.
The policies I suggested work within this framework to nudge the society toward a socialist endpoint. It is much more difficult to do this than to stage a revolution, but the division of power within a revolution reproduce the legal struggles in the contract-law courts which have been worked out over hundreds of years. You need to look at these precedents to understand the details of power-sharing under capitalism.
Of course “capitalism” exploited and degraded hip hop, IF by capitalism you mean “large corporations” and “monopolized power structures”. “Capitalism” in the sense of free trade and small corporations created hip-hop. You need to distinguish between the two, because free trade does not necessary lead to concentration of power, at least, if you succeed in engineering a system which reverses Marx’s law.
For some more current examples, here are two:
To be clear: I am not “designing a new system as if I had control over it”, I don’t presume to be able to that, and I don’t consider it “easy”. It is not “easy”, it is “impossible”. Anyone who pretends to do it is deluding themselves or lying. I can’t design a better system, any more than I could write a new OS from scratch by myself.
What I am telling you are a series of serious PRACTICAL steps which can produce a transition to socialism, without any sort of revolutionary transformation at any point. This smooth path of transition is required, because the division of power negotiations under revolutionary socialist planning reproduces precisely the struggles of contract law under capitalism, and from all revolutionary precedents, it produced an even more lopsided division of power, because there was no court system nominally independent of the communist party to decide the contractual obligations of parties.
This is why capitalism, outside of fascist states, and as atrociously corporate and centralized as it is, ended up with a more decentralized business authority structure than Marxist Leninist regimes. This is why China spent the last 30 years writing and debating contract law. If you want to fix capitalism to turn it into socialism, look at contract law, and set taxes to encourage decentralization and small business.
That depends crucially on the size of the company, and the voting structure of the board of directors. The goal is first to minimize the size of companies that don’t need to be big. There is no reason for retailers to be big, that’s just wasteful and pointless consolidation, and it can be reversed with high minimum wage, fair competition contract policy, Sherman act enforcement, and consumer boycotts. You can kill WalMart very quickly.
The type of nonvoting profit-sharing stock is largely meaningless in terms of directing work at a day-to-day level, and I believe such stock and options on such stock must only be traded by the public, and NEVER be owned by employees, as it is a form of insider trading. The reason corporate compensation is so off the charts is that the board of directors is issuing stock options to itself to sponge off the corporate profits, at the expense of millions of independent stock holders. This is a form of fraud, and “no insider equity” is a simple way to prevent it.
A company can still be worker managed even when all the profit-sharing stock is owned by others. The pressures for the workers to expand the business now comes from outside, as stock-owners agitate for best policies, but the employees can still manage day-to-day decisions.
If you find the vast sprawl under the current system acceptable, I don’t know what to say. I want sprawl reduced to nothing, and compact communities. The area for solar gathering would be enormous, calculate it, and it comes at the expense of plants. Wind is not perfect either, as it blights areas, and has environmental impact on birds. Nuclear is tiny, and as I explained, with good engineering, it is a complete solution.
Except you can’t pursue power online. There’s no power to be had. You can only debate and persuade.
The gist is “FIRST fight hard to get instant runoff, and THEN ask for Green votes, where you have instant runoff”. Until you do this, people will fight you tooth and nail, because you can’t split the vote.
Nothing has ever worked in the past, until it is done right. I am trying to look to the future.
You don’t need to impose something by force that everyone already wants, you just need to gently nudge, and people can do the rest without top-down imposition. The less you impose from on-high, the more naturally the structure will emerge. You don’t want an official “worker coop bureau” in the government deciding what counts as a coop, because that will end with them certifying that WalMart is a worker coop because the workers can vote on the location of the water cooler, and all the “legal preference” will go to WalMart, and not to real coops. Look what happened with “organic” and “certified organic”.
LOL! No… not desirable! I meant “it doesn’t exist”. The feeling of cyberbullying is what people feel when they are first exposed to true free speech. I got over it in 1992, on Usenet.
It’s not bullying because there’s nothing you can do to anyone realistically online, except jawbone at them.
Regarding worthwhile conversations, I agree. Usually I am trying to explain it to people on the other side, who haven’t read “Capital”.
I know the flaws in real existing capitalism, I am engineering a solution. I believe the filters you find which prevent progressive change are not just due to intrinsic power structures and self-interest, although that is the obvious mechanism by which these filters always work. They are fundamentally due to current real lack of engineering solution to the problem of the design of a real, stable, actual socialism.
The trends in capitalism are obvious. My claim is that they are structural, they are due to the “M-C-M'” cycle, as you and Marx put it, and the only sensible fix to this is to separate the C and M so that people who manage capital are making money, not making capital. This is systematically attempted in public corporations, in professional investment banking, and so on. It is difficult, because the structures are never very good, and a uniform legal system doesn’t stop concentrations of capital from forming anyway.
I am proposing to do it, and I believe you are dogmatic in your refusal to acknowledge that it can be done. Once you understand it theoretically, you can start doing politics to implement it step by step by usual means, and persuade critics that it actually does work.
The revolutionary method produces problems because the division of revolutionary power is no more easy than the division of capital.
What you are missing is that the critics are not willfully trying to protect their power (although this is what their actions amount to), they actually believe their own propaganda, and that propaganda is structurally dominant not because people are willfully ignoring the problem, it’s because they are sure that you don’t have a solution.
Your experience regarding pushing change comes with pushing a flawed proposal. When you push a flawed proposal and meet resistance, it isn’t because the resistance is evil or irrational, it is because your proposal is incorrect. You have to fix the proposal first, and be sure that it works, before going around claiming that others are sabotaging it out of self-interest.
The amount of state power required is, I believe, a graduated corporate tax, a transparent competitive contract reform, guaranteed employment, and no-insider-equity. These, along with the existing systemic moderate inflation, inheritance taxes, and progressive personal taxes, remove the concentrations of wealth in individuals, and protect against capital accumulation in monopolistic business, by giving natural incentives to split.
I cannot support any scheme for reversing private concentrations of power in capitalism which grants even more power to the ostensibly public entity doing the reversing. Then the solution is worse than the disease. This is the criticism of real existing Marxism that people give, the obnoxious superpowers of the public representatives, and it is a cogent criticism. If the concentration of power you introduce places a bureau in charge of all businesses, then I would rather have the businesses than the bureau.
Capitalism, by the way, is only the second largest concentration of power in history. The biggest would have to be the Roman slaveholding aristocracy. That was transformed by persuasion, in that case, conversion to Christianity, and it took too long.
It gets at the root of your problem as a party. It has nothing to do with the social problems.
“There is no safe dose of radiation.” This is not at all clear. We are exposed to radiation all the time in nature, from bricks, cosmic rays, dust, coal, and so on. The model people used for radiation damage is the “Linear no-threshold model” (LNT), which is based on the observation that DNA damage is proportional to the number of ionizing particles travelling through your body (which is true), and that the response to DNA mutation is sometimes cancer.
The projection in the model is that the cancer response is roughly linear in the damage. This is true for large-dose sporadic exposure, like an occasional burst of radon in mines, Hiroshima bomb, or big doses on lab animals, and there the LNT model works. For small chronic doses, comparable to natural radiation, the model is very controversial today, and seems to fail entirely.
The (presumably) proper model is most probably the “hormetic model”, which says that radiation damage in doses less than or equal to natural radiation does not produce additional cancers, but paradoxically produces fewer cancers. The reason is not pretty, it’s because your body’s immune system just gets a little better at weeding out mutant cells, or mutant cells are urged to self-destruct. This radiation hormesis thing not completely clear scientifically, the data at low doses is not conclusive, and people are working on it now. The French model is the “threshold model”, which says that doses comparable to natural radiation are negligible for calculating cancer risk, and that’s probably a safe assumption. There are additional unknown effects of small doses of radiation, like RNA breaks in neurons, which are also inconclusive. But since a person living in a brick house or at high altitudes gets something like 3 times the radiation exposure that a person living in a wood house at sea level gets, I think you shouldn’t worry about small exposures at all.
The effect of extremely low-dose radiation is very difficult to study, but I believe the emerging view that it is not at all harmful.
I don’t believe the new reactors are decades away. I think that you could roll out a generation of LFTRs in 5 years or less, with a fully funded research project. Technically, it is much simpler than existing designs. The point of LFTR is that it reuses the waste, it can be rolled out in conjunction with traditional plants, and the old plants can be phased out eventually. France has already transitioned to fully nuclear electricity, using the old designs.
The sun is being used already. The Earth uses a non-negligible fraction of the photons that hit the Earth for plant bacteria and plankton growth. Conversion and storage are much more problematic, and nuclear is vastly cheaper and in LFTR, completely practically inexhaustible.
To have capitalism, the government enforce property rights through a system of contracts and deeds, and you trade the contracts and deeds to others for payments, with the goal of producing more value after the trade. The justification for free trade is efficiency and competition, which in theory produces a capitalist equilibrium where everyone’s needs are met, and people get compensated according to their productivity, more or less.
When this trading produces monopolies and unemployment, you don’t get anywhere near the theoretical equilibrium, and the economy is depressed. The role of socialism, as far as I am concerned, is to produce uniform deed and contract policy which encourages decentralization. The process by which you do this, from my point of view, is by introducing a system of taxes which encourages decentralization, and only enforcing contracts which allow free fair competition.
Marxists-Leninists believe that trade must be restricted altogether, or power allocated through government bureaus. Like nearly all socialists since 1956, I think this is a failure, as the concentrations of power in government are even worse than the concentrations of power in the most awful busineses.
I got into a long discussion about it below with Atomsk, and here’s a link ( https://www.quora.com/What-… ) . The outline is 1. Zero unemployment (via open-ended jobs program at an effective min. wage) 2. Progressive corporate income tax (rate according to no of hired employees) 3. transparent competitive contracting reform (open published contracts, no special deals) 4. no insider equity (stock in public corporation can only be owned by non-employees) 5. transition to worker owned industry 6. deregulation of the worker owned industry.
This is very different from traditional shifts to worker control, as it is entirely voluntary, and requires no revolutionary break at any point. It is compatible with the legal system of capitalism, although the intended endpoint is a sort of market socialism. The only mechanisms introduced to induce worker ownership are gentle pushes through the tax code.
The early stage startup can do whatever it likes, distributed equity, whatever the employees agree on, it’s private. This stage is usually very equitable to all involved.
Once a company has an IPO, once it is publically traded, it gets a huge infusion of capital, and the public interest needs protection. After IPO, equity packages don’t go to the employees, but to top executives, who are in a position of power now. These options package are simply used to transfer a small but significant fraction of corporate profits to the board of directors and top managers.
This distortion doesn’t directly affect corporate profits all that much, but it produces an enormous pay gap between top managers and regular employees or midlevel managers, and is responsible for social inequality. It is not competitively earned income, and so it produces a race to the top which is not justified by a skill on a resume. This produces perverse incentives.
If the board wants to pay itself, it can decide on a salary. The stock-option deals are both the main source of insider trading allegations, it is next to impossible to avoid insider trading when the top managers own stock and options, and it is also the main source of the pay imbalance. Salaries of top managers are usually not as exhorbitant as the options, which effectively steal from shareholders at amounts relatively too minute to complain about.
With a full employment policy, and with salary payments, it is reasonable to imagine that the management of publically traded corporations becomes less political and more technocratic, as there is no longer the lavish pay and class separation that comes with the high position. It becomes a professional job like any other, perhaps a bit more demanding than most.
With a technocratic management, the step to worker control is modest, because all the workers managers are more or less social equals, and there is no negative class mobility in moving to greater worker control. This is not imposed, I assume that workers will prefer to work under worker control, so you don’t need to mandate it, just create the conditions where it naturally emerges.
The class struggle is a struggle of classes, not of individuals. The individuals in the controlling class do not have to be conscious of their class role in the Marxist sense to do their work. In fact, it is very difficult for them to become Marxists and maintain their position. They are certainly NOT secret Marxists, they are something else, which is difficult to describe to a Marxist, because it is so childish and silly, you will laugh, you won’t believe me. I’ll call it “Harry Potter syndrome”.
The basic idea of Harry Potter syndrome is that there are certain individuals, a small group, who are specially magically sensitive. They can predict political and social trends, they have fine-tuned special senses, and they can influence other people by simply the power of thought and wishful thinking. These special magic people are given this magical skill at birth, by random chance. It’s more or less genetic. They do not need to analyze to know, they just KNOW. This “power of intuition” is emphasized in Fascist and right-wing thought, in Nietsche, in Heidegger, and especially in Ayn Rand, where the magical power is attached to sexual power, and to domineering authority. This magic power is the fundamental conceit of the bourgeoisie.
These people call themselves the “natural Aristocracy”, and many of them are born to a bunch of ordinary saps, who don’t have this magic power, who I will call “muggles” (in line with the Harry Potter theme— Harry Potter is actually a perfect introduction to the thinking of the Bourgoisie). The point of the American social structure is to let the magic minority rise to power by getting the government out of their way.
The power structure filters out people who interpret class issues in this childish way, and places them in positions of power. The reason is that others simply don’t have the stomach to do the immoral things required to rise through the heirarchy, because they don’t have the delusion that they are special, and deserve to be on top. You need that delusion to step on 99 others to make it to the 1%.
Not all of the people who believe they are magic succeed, of course, just a relative few. But ALL the people who rise are magical people, not muggles. They demonstrate this by various gestures and symbols of power, which are not particularly obvious, but you know what they are— it’s how you identify the bourgoise aspirant among the working class.
Some of these sell-outs do more than social gestures, they actually have various magic incantations and rituals, for instance, look at Oprah’s “The Secret”, the popularity of occult rituals (despite their ridiculous stupidity), and the prominent role of sex-magic gurus, like the Orgone fellow in the 1950s.
The role of these incantations is to bring you the magic power, influencing wealth to come to you. Once you have wealth, success reinforces the belief.
Needless to say, the vast majority of people with this belief structure are never going to get any wealth, as magic doesn’t work. These people either come to believe they are “muggles”, their magic is defective, or else reject the belief entirely, and realize that there is no magic. The magic people are then by self-selection the majority among the bourgoisie, and in their mind, they are in the minority position of KNOWING that there actually IS magic, but having to hide it from the muggles, so the muggles won’t feel inadequate, pretending that people are equal in public, and they are only able to speak about this fundamental inequality of magic-people and muggles among each other.
Of course, a Marxist is immune to any such superstition, and it is difficult to even explain that there are grown adults who think this way. Drugs like cocaine help in this delusion, also LSD, as they damage the analytical faculty at the same time as giving false insight and isolation. But the simplest way to acquire this philosophy is simply to be born wealthy, which gives you a sense of specialness and unique purpose.
While I am not in a position of power, I was an academic scientist by training. So I went to a rather elite school, and I was surrounded by the elite bourgeoise . The mentality of elites regarding class is opposite to the Marxist view, where class is an emergent structure of the economic transactions, and has very little relation to the individual in question. For the elites, class is purely a product of individual magic power, and selects out the individuals with most magic to wealth.
Once you understand this, the manfacturing of consent takes on a completely different tone. The need to manipulate the public is not a conspiracy to prevent them from revolt— nor is it even against the interests of the masses. It is noblesse oblige to keep the muggles from finding out about the magic world, and feeling bad about their own lack of magic. It also prevents Marxism, which is evil because it sets up barriers to power, which prevents the magic people from using their special magic to protect all the rest of the society.
This is really how the bourgoisie thinks. They blame the collapse of the USSR on the lack of magic people in top positions, not on economic problems caused by centralization, or on extrenal factors. It’s just that the Marxists were foolish enough to think people are basically equal, and there isn’t a minority with special magic powers that can use their magic to help everyone else.
It really helps to reread all the internal documents with this point of view if you are a Marxist, no matter how stupid it may seem to you, because it will reveal how non-evil people can do things like this without conspiracy. They just feel the need to both protect you, and help you, using their specialness. That’s how they think, get used to it. No amount of education can change it, it’s a self-reinforcing belief. The belief leads one to view the class structure as benevolent.
Please, don’t presume I am anti-scientific. Sometimes people tell you something which is both simultaneously in their interests, and also true.
I would support the exact same thing even if LNT were true, it just probably isn’t. The reason I believe the hormetic model is because I studied cancer biology at some point, and the 1950s LNT people didn’t know about checkpoints and apoptosis. These give an immediate mechanism for hormesis, or threshold, and I suspected LNT was wrong at low doses before I saw data. 1950s biology was extremely simplistic.
The traditional nuclear power plants are not great, I admit, but they aren’t that bad either, they are only somewhat unsafe because they are pressurized, and usually need to be built next to a water source for cooling. Nuclear done right is really “too cheap to meter”, you just have enormous bureaucracies and too few engineering decisions made right.
As I said, the sun is already used to near maximum by life on Earth. It is possible to extract sunlight from additional areas, but it is environmentally costly, and per kilowatt, it is much cheaper to research and deploy the new nuclear solutions. Keep an open mind, because putting all your eggs in one basket means you’re going to end up with warming.
I already know all of that, with one exception regarding your statement about abstract art at the end. Their behavior is indeed that of “effective Marxists”, I just wanted to explain the actual thinking there (if you can call it thinking), to make sure it was clear.
It is also really the behavior of “effective statist Marxists”, or “effective Marxist-Leninists”. It is not the thinking of “effective libertarian Marxists” or “effective anarchists”. Interestingly, this makes libertarian conservatives, in part, enemies of the bourgeoise elite, because their anti-elitist and anti-collectivist streak means that they oppose part of the bourgeoise structure, the social part which puts an enlightened minority in charge, while at the same time leaving alone the economic part which is in reality the fundamental reason this social structure is erected in the first place.
I didn’t know the irrationalist tendency was analyzed already, I just noticed it myself, I didn’t read enough Marxists (although it’s not so hard to reproduce Marxist thought if you know Marx). I agree it is obvious. I agree with everything you say about the bourgeoise mentality, but I disagree that it is hopeless to reach out to individuals. Conservative libertarians don’t usually believe in their own special magic, they already agree on the problem, at least in its social aspect. Once they see a practical economic solution that does not depend on statism or a vanguard, or tyranny of the vanguard, putting a new elitist class in charge of even more state power, they often switch and support the economic policies, at least in sufficient numbers to win elections.
There is one exception to our agreement: abstract art. Abstract art is NOT “un-art” (at least if you are talking about Pollock and Schoenberg and not Rothko and Cage, although even Rothko and Cage have their merits as un-art), it is a Western co-option and extension of the socialist avante-garde which was begun in the USSR in the 1920s, with the explicit goal of producing something totally new, something you’ve never seen before. It succeeded in that. The earliest pieces in the MoMA are the Soviet “Suprematist” paintings, which introduced the modernist vocabulary and philosphy, and really form a radical revolutionary break with previous art.
The USSR stupidly suppressed the avante-garde in the 1930s and 1940s by loss of funding, when the government made large bureaus to produce mass art, entertaining the public became the priority, and the decisions were made by non-artist party members, by the “artistic vanguard”, which was neither. It was a bunch of party hacks with a lot of political power and absolutely no taste. Then the “Socialist realism” took over, and it was largely awful. “Socialist realism” meant musicals, spectacles, realistic painting, and large productions. It destroyed the Soviet avante-garde. The German fascists had the same reaction to the new avante-guard, except they called it “Jewish-Negro art” (they meant “muggle art”), and were even worse in suppressing it.
Even the second-rate “Soviet realism” kitch and its descendants, the Soviet musicals of the 1940s and Soviet space operas of the 1950s and 1960s, were co-opted by Western commercial artists (like Norman Rockwell, who was the premier American Soviet Realist) and Hollywood (Star Wars should have been a Soviet production, nearly all of it was prefigured in Sputnik era space fiction. It was done instead by new little producers in California), while the Soviet avante-garde was co-opted by the bourgoise elite. This was done by purchasing the work of Western socialists reproducing and extending Soviet forms which were killed by the bumbling Soviet state, and kept alive by socialists outside the USSR. You don’t appreciate how terrible the USSR was for the socialist movement outside.
It is a terrible shame that the bourgoisie preserved these socialist originated art forms better than the Marxists-Leninists. You really eat your own.
I think that you are totally wrong about the degree to which education can remove the magical thinking, and alert people to power structures. I think you can win election after election, by going step by step on that which you have consensus between the socialists who read Marx, and the Libertarians who read Bukharin and Chomsky.
Re “splitting the vote to get Sanders elected”, it’s not real. They won’t actually split the vote, they just say so for political advantage right now. If Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, I will vote for Clinton (and take a stiff drink, boy do I not want that to happen).
I think you are too pessimistic. You can probably get instant runoff in Vermont right now. You can possibly make a deal with Democrats to introduce instant runoff in districts where the vote is sometimes close, and where they will benefit from the runoff Green vote, and you can also get instant runoff in places where Republicans believe they will benefit from the Libertarian vote runoff. There is an interest to the major parties in this too, as they believe they will still win with instant runoff, and won’t have to worry about vote-splits anymore. In the short term, they are right, in the long term, not. but politicians think short term.
The Australians already passed it nationally, see what they did.
I believe that you can get political consensus for these measures both from Marxists and from Libertarians, as they are minimal fixes to the central problems Marx identifies. That means election after election, where you try to get each plank enacted, step by step. Obama’s election for me was halting the implementation of the opposite platform, the Koch bros. John Birch platform. Sanders will work to get point 1, reduced unemployment, with target zero unemployment. Perhaps he or his successor will work for point 2, graduated corporate income tax. Contract reform might have to be state by state, but if there is consensus among lawyers, it might happen. Contract law is very technocratic, and usually supervised by lawyers, not the public. The previous reform was the “Uniform Commercial Code” of the 1950s, which gave guidelines to states for contract law, and these guidelines are updated technocratically, and states usually pass them by rubber stamp, because nobody pays any attention to this. No insider equity is something I saw mainstream people advocating, as the failure of the equity incentives for managers have become obvious.
The transition to worker ownership I see as happening company by company, through unionization drives where appropriate (importantly, unionization not with the goal of joining a national union, but with the goal of eventual acquisition of the place of work)— this is appropriate for bookstores, movie theaters, independent retail outlets. It is easier when there is a jobs program and effectively zero unemployment, because the threat of getting fired carries less of a bite. For larger organizations, you might need to use threats of consumer boycott where appropriate, local zoning decisions to prevent new stores until the management of old stores is independent, and so on. For enormous state level enterprises, some will have to be broken up, many will break up just for tax purposes with a graduated tax, and others will have to be converted to more reasonable managment by worker action. It is much easier to ask for more power when you can find a job somewhere else. Workers are very powerful at zero unemployment, this is why full employment policies are always resisted, even though everyone knows they are good for growth.
The top graduated tax rate can be lower than that in other countries, the “graduated” part is the important part, the fact that the top rate is growing as the number of non-owning emloyees grows, not the value of the top rate. Whatever the top rate is, it just needs to give the companies sufficient financial incentive to split, in whatever way that split makes sense economically.
You can also make the lowest rate negative, so that it becomes a uniform subsidy for small companies. The goal is to give companies financial incentive to either decentralize or maximize employee ownership, or both, it’s goal is not to raise revenue. The tax, if there is a negative component at smaller business side, might end up costing money in the end. I imagine it as revenue neutral.
I also agree with Sanders that trade deals need to be negotiated with the view of raising employee wages in the trading partner to be comparable to those in the wealthier countries. This is something that requires a whole lot of knowledge that I don’t have, so I defer to Sanders, and other people who thought about fair-trade policies.
The government is not a weaker power, it can tax and therefore it can destroy. I don’t support the idea of an extra-governmental vanguard agency, like the communist party, being given revolutionary power through Soviets to influence and direct the activities of government, because the vanguard and its Soviets are a greater concentration of power than the businesses it is regulating.
Reversing the problems Marx identified is a matter of sensibly designing new conditions where the laws of consolidation and accumulation work in reverse, toward greater distributed ownership, and decentralized business. This is not impossible, it’s just much much harder than staging a revolution. The revolution can’t produce this effect, because a decentralizing policy reduces the power of the revolutionary vanguard as well, and is opposed by the vanguard.
To see this, consider the extreme difficulty of passing even moderate decentralization measures that Tito and Kardelj faced, or Dubcek, or Gorbachev. Only Tito had moderate success, and only Tito had a relatively productive economy. But Tito also suppressed more radical voices for decentralization, like Dilas. Once you produce a revolutionary vanguard, the vanguard sits there opposing decentralization worse than the capitalists do.
If you actually read Marx, you see he had a very nuanced view of the role of Capitalism. For Marx, the role of Capitalism was to end at centralization, and then the role of socialists was to seize the centralized production and redirect it to the common good. It’s all very easy, because consolidation and centralization of power is the inevitable outcome of the mechanisms, and then seizing centralized things is just a matter of a large number of people replacing a small number of owners.
The central problem that Marx identifies is the mechanism of consolidation. The cycle of capitalist production produces large amounts of capital in the hands of a few, and loss of capital for the many. This leads to centralization of capital in a few hands, and the oppression of many by the few. His fix is to seize the concentrated capital.
This fix doesn’t work, because the concentration of power is already bad for production long before it is seized. Marx simply assumed it would be more efficient to have these enormous companies, but it just isn’t. These concentrations of power are themselves destructive to economies, with or without a revolution putting them in the hands of a communist party. The political structure doesn’t matter all that much. You need to break the power structure up, to have decentralized production, whatever the structure of the government.
To reverse the consolidation in capitalism, you need explicit policy that makes incentives for capital to be distributed broadly, and policy to prevent it concentrating unduly. This means capital must be managed professionally, not by wealthy individuals owning it, and its profits widely distributed, by public stock or collective ownership, where appropriate.
There is no law of capitalism that says that this is impossible, it’s just never been done successfully, although some parts are attempted now and again. I am trying to explain how to do it more fully. It requires conscious effort toward the goal, and rejection of revolution in favor of the much harder problem of designing uniform fair policy which pushes in this direction.
An apropos physics analogy is a phase transition. The laws of water molecules aren’t all that different at 0 degrees C as at 1 degree C, but the behavior of the water is different. Marx noticed that capitalism is at 0 degrees, it is unstable to freezing, so you get blocks of ice, the large firms, inside the water of normal people with normal amounts of money doing free trade. The Marxist-Leninist method freezes the whole economy, and puts a small number of water molecules at the top to move the gigantic ice cube this way or that. It’s worse than the disease. The solution I am proposing is to increase the temperature, so that the ice never forms in the first place. This is more difficult, but it is the only permanent solution.
It requires very little government force, because everyone wants the ownership of capital to be more equitably distributed, including a majority of capitalists.
The oil is not a big deal, except for the warming. If the west wasn’t as stupid as it was, it would have done what the USSR did and just dug deep boreholes, the US figured that out now, although it is doing somewhat more damaging fracking instead of deep boreholes. Either way, warming means it all needs to stop.
Raw materials are not that hard to find, it’s just an issue of relative cost. The quest for cheap labor hurts the developed economies and to a certain extent helps the targets of imperialism, as they acquire manufacturing expertise, which can be used to spin off local firms. It only helps individual firms outsourcing, not the West’s overall economy. The quest for “additional markets” is silly, that’s just people buying stuff, it’s no longer the mercantile era where the manufacturing is all done in Britain. The whole trade system is a mixed bag. The real problem is the concentrations of power in multinational firms. With a decentralized approach, globalization can just mean local development with independent local firms, and “raw materials” can just mean selling Lithium on an open market, without multinationals or governments going to war over it.
The real problems are the invasions and impositions of fascist governments, and covert operations. These are delusional actions by a psychopathic minority in powerful positions, and this stuff needed to stop 60 years ago.
“return on investment” is predicated on growth potential, not just on stealing from the workers. If the capital return is in a worker-owned business, it isn’t stealing from anyone, it is equitably shared, and the workers either reinvest it themselves, or hire someone to do so at a fair professional salary, and that person is not exploited either, nor do they make an obscene return by siphoning capital into their pockets.
I am not advocating for the preservation of capitalism. If you read my edited comment (I edited while you were responding), I am trying to build the socialism through worker ownership within the legal structure of capitalism, and without a revolution.
This is important to do, because it is possible. It is also difficult to do, because of resistance from the owners, and also because of resistance from leftists. But it is essential to advocate because of this, and this is why I do it.
The idea that you will reclaim the stolen wealth by revolution is problematic, because the revolution simply confiscates the wealth, and then has the problem of distribution and future production, which reintroduces the problem of division of power, except now with only revolutionary political mechanisms for distributing power. The mechanisms for distributing power in govenrnment or revolutionary bodies do not exist, and if they did, they would amount to worker owned cooperatives distributing capital to themselves, and for expansion.
This is not sellout stuff I am talking about, it is real Marxist thinking, except working within the legal framework of division of power by division of capital. The place it differs from Marx is in the degree to which centralization is desirable in intermediate stages. The correct answer is “none at all”.
The French system is more expensive, but I am not sure that the government part is the expense— I believe the cost includes the private component as well, which doesn’t require government spending.
Jobs programs are expensive, but not that expensive, because they ultimately are stimulus programs— they are only required when the economy is depressed, and the number of workers looking for state jobs is relatively small when private business is hiring. They can be paid for by existing taxes or even by bank taxes (printing money), and if there is inflation, by shifting to corporate taxes or income taxes. Inflation is controllable today. Jobs programs have been done before, the US does it with it’s highway and military budget continuously since the 1950s, just never before with an explicit goal of zero unemployment. Zero unemployment gives a ton of negotiating power to employees, this is the key.
The taxes to pay for health care are income and payroll in Sanders plan, and they are a little easier than in Europe, because the US is net wealthier. The tuition free universities is paid for by a transaction tax on trades, which makes sense because of microtrading and speculative trading. A little bit of friction is ok with many conservative economists. The net tax effect is easier, because there is no welfare component to the plan.
This is not utopian socialism! It is a legal framework for transition to worker owned industry which is PRACTICAL and LEGALLY ACHIEVABLE in every modern industrial economy, with the existing legal system. Each measure can be supported and passed by a legislative body individually, and collectively it produces no more barriers than the New Deal measures, or Medicare.
The issue of discrimination between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism was of whether there was an economic analysis of the mechanism of consolidation of capital, and of the production of class structure, and the influence of the class structure on politics. The only “scientific” contribution of Marx was in the analysis of consolidation of capital, and in this respect, he created Keynesian economic theory.
The remainder of Marxist theory is an extrapolation of future development to a state where all production is monopolized, and the empoverished workers overthrow the owners, and control the monopolized industry using
revolutionary committees. Both the monopolized state of production AND the revolutionary state of communist party ownership of the monopolized production are NEARLY EQUALLY TERRIBLE, and must be avoided at all cost.
The only solution is to avoid the monopolization and concentration of capital in the first place. The same scientific principles that Marx identified that show you how it happens can also be used to engineer a system where
it doesn’t happen, and where it happens in reverse, distributing capital more broadly rather than more narrowly.
That’s what Sanders election is all about. Introducing a candidate who is openly hostile to some of the interests of the capitalist class, and getting him elected. Each election needs to introduce progressively more reform, but only when there is public consensus, and this is extremely difficult. This is why people ask for your support, instead of complaints that the platform is not sufficiently progressive at present.
Marx invented macroeconomics, and in doing so created the theoretical foundation for Keynesian economic theory, and he never gets academic credit for it. That doesn’t mean he was a Keynesian, he wasn’t. He was a revolutionary. It just means he understood the theory behind Keynesian economics, because he was responsible for nearly all of it.
The way to transition from Marxism to Keynesianism is simply to say “Ok, Marx is right. There is a problem in capitalism due to unemployment driving down labor wages. What is the minimum policy you can adjust to fix this problem and fix nothing else?” If you ask this question, you are immediately led to minimum wage reform, maximum working hours, and stimulus spending to reduce unemployment including unemployment insurance. That’s it. That’s how Keynesianism was really born.
Marx was much more far reaching in his vision of what to do, but the Keynesians were reacting to the realities of both the great depression and the USSR. By the 1930s, the depression made it clear that Marx’s analysis was spot on. It was possible to have overproduction and a general glut. It was possible for unemployment to go sky high while capacity was underused, it was possible for wages to drop to subsistence even when productivity intrinsically stayed the same.
But it was also clear that a Marxist revolution along the lines of the USSR leads to political difficulty in allocating resources and power internally. In 1932, the USSR had a collectivization famine. The first five year plan worked, but it was entirely managed by bureaus, and there was terrible repression, show trials, and complete loss of civil liberties under Stalin.
So Keynes ripped of Marx’s analysis, did not give him credit, hired Marxist associates to advise him, and put out policy prescriptions which essentially borrowed all the economic points Marx made, with nonsense justifications from Capitalist marginal analysis, justifications which were not coherent, because they ignored the class segregation and capital aggregation which are central to Marxist theory. But the prescriptions work anyway, more or less, despite Keynes justifications being full of holes, because Marx had the analysis right.
Every serious Keynesian knows this, by the way, they are just not allowed to say it, because Marx is taboo in mainstream economics to this day. This despite the fact that all modern mainstream economics (at least in the dominant Keynesian tradition) is built on Marx’s analysis, in obfuscated form, with a lot of nonsense added too.
I refuse to go along with this academic charade. Whatever Marx would have thought of Keynesian policies, he is the intellectual father of macroeconomics, and not Keynes, and he deserves the academic credit. As far as I know, I am the only one saying this. Politically, Marx followers don’t want credit for Keynes stuff, and Keynes followers don’t want to be associated with Marx.
At the moment, that is true. You need consensus against imperialism to emerge among the entire population, and this takes time. We don’t have the time right now, please support Sanders, flawed as he is regarding this issue, because all the other candidates are worse.
I am hamfisted because I am not subtle. I am engaging in petty bourgeoise moralizing because I don’t know how else to ask for your support. You are free to do as you like, as always, consider this undignified begging.
I am not taking anyone anywhere, I am not a politician or even a serious activist (wish I were more active). I am simply describing the problems I see with the dominant revolutionary idea among the Marxist fraction in the left, and urging the Marxists to please consider the development of Marxist theory throughout the 20th century as it occured outside of Marxist states, developments shared with some dissident libertarians inside Marxist states like Dilas or Dubcek. It’s alternative ideas for discussion that I think achieve what I consider superior outcomes within a legal framework which is not fundamentally radically changed from the one that we find around us, but where the ownership structure of capital is radically changed anyway.
I also support Bernie Sanders, because I think this is a step forward. But I am positive Sanders doesn’t agree with all the ideas I’m throwing out on this page. I support him because he is most clear on the need to zero out unemployment, or at least, to get as close as possible.
It couldn’t be, because I looked at the numbers and they are 100% sound. That’s a first for any candidate in history. Numbers are something that every person can independently check.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t have optimistic growth estimates. The person who made 5-6% growth estimates is an independent economist in Massachussetts. That economist is probably actually underestimating the growth that would result from Sanders’ policies.
The growth estimates are not so important in checking Bernie’s numbers, because his proposals are internally balanced between taxes and spending. The resulting growth is just an (intentional) side effect.
Economists are not really on both sides of this. Any serious economist who isn’t 80 years out of date is on Bernie Sanders’ side.
With Bernie Sanders platform, you have real committment to getting it passed, and that means real donation and real mobilization in midterms. This type of mobilization and committment is not possible with milquetoast policies like what Obama tried to get. Obama’s policies were better than the Republican nonsense, but not better by enough to get people organized and mobilized around.
Paul Krugman doesn’t oppose the policies. He just opposes the politics. He knows these policies lead to growth.
Down compared to what? There were independents out voting for Trump too, all the attention was on the Republican side, and still the turnout was great on the Dem side, and Sanders turnout was better than the pre-election polling predicted.
The midterms are where you need the revolution, and it doesn’t require all that high turnout, just more turnout than the Republicans get. It’s not like the Republican turnout in midterms is all that stellar.
The goal of the revolution is money and turnout for midterms, and both primary challenges to bought Democrats and getting Sanders supporters elected, wherever they come from politically. There are libertarians who support his platform too, believe it or not.
The strategy is the same as the NRA, and the NRA is unstoppable in the US, with only 4 million paying members. Sanders has better money, and by the time he gets elected, he will have more people.
He’s not against the policies, I don’t need to try. I know Krugman’s writings. He believes in progressive taxes, universal health care, subsidized college, and employment stimulus. What he doesn’t believe is that there is political will to win the election.
He doesn’t like using multipliers for economic predictions because Republicans misuse them for false predictions of economic growth from tax cuts for the wealthy. But the fact that quack economists misuse a tool doesn’t mean that you need to discount a person who is using the tool properly.
Keynesian stimulus doesn’t give a multiplier when the money goes to the wealthy. Everyone knows that already, and there’s no reason to continue along with an academic fraud just because some prominent quack economists are paid to believe it.
Friedman’s analysis is too conservative. He is using CBO numbers and conservative multipliers. The effect on unemployment alone should increase wages by a ton, not just through spending, but through actual competitive wage increases, and he doesn’t take that into account. If anything, he is understating the growth Sanders’ policies will lead to.
Nobody is going to make a revolution for a new Democrat, sorry. I voted in 2010, but I stayed home in 2014. I will not only vote in 2018, but I will donate money to races in other states, and there will be millions like me, because the policy is seriously progressive.
They aren’t opposing it either. If you ask them, they will probably support it, as it reduces unemployment, and all economists know that this is the most important thing to do.
Because of the Sandy Hook hoax and the Boston Bombing. I don’t vote for hoaxes.
The people “trashing” Hillary are simply pointing out a record of corruption. An example is travelgate. Now, it was perfectly legal for her to bring up those bogus charges against the white house travel staff. It was just incredibly scummy and I don’t want to vote for her. Likewise, it was probably legally ok for her to set up her own secret server for emails, but why in heck would she do that? That’s what Nixon would do to send email to his plumbers. Her policies in Ukraine were atrocious, her policies in Libya were terrible, and while I don’t blame her for the Benghazi attack, I do blame her for lying about that stupid video on YouTube. That video had nothing to do with the attack.
It doesn’t require conspiracy to pull of a hoax anymore. That’s why they happen.
I don’t know whether they had him murdered or not, and I don’t care. The stuff I DO know they did is shady enough that I don’t want to be forced to vote for her.
That’s because half the stuff was justified, and the rest was overreaching to try to get a conviction regarding awful unethical stuff that wasn’t technically illegal. She should have endured worse.
I don’t care what he said. Anyone who had access to secret internal documents knew that it was for a prisoner swap,as leaked by Petraeus’s girlfriend. Saying it was about a video, and then asking for internet censorship, when you KNOW that the video is just a ruse, that’s not acceptable. It’s totally legal. It’s just unacceptable.
The “jobs” growth is in entry level corporate positions paying about $26,000 annually. This is what Sanders’ policy is addressing. $26,000 is better than sleeping on the streets, but only marginally.
Why not point to it? It’s a good analysis, although slightly too conservative regarding growth. It’s not his fault that his policy leads to best-possible economic growth. Wait. Actually, yes, it is.
Those Democrats should be ashamed of themselves. They just know that Sanders is not vindictive, and Hillary is, so they don’t have the guts to stand up and express a proper opinion.
And gold is heavier than lead, and bananas are yellow. It’s still a ridiculous system.
Donations don’t work by quid-pro-quo. They work by silencing those who would be predisposed to vote against you, by an implicit threat of withdrawn funding.
With a true progressive, the opposite happens.
That’s unfortunately philosophy. While I agree with Marx’s philosophy, it is hard to design policy around this. The change in consciousness is through discussion, deliberation, consensus forming, and choices about the future. It helps the discussion if people are social equals, and nobody is sitting on a mountain of capital. I don’t know what more to do with public policy beyond ensuring that this is so.
Of course! That’s the whole point of Marx. But I’m not going to go around arguing about philosophy with Republicans, just go about changing the material conditions.
I didn’t, thank you.
Sanders is not just a progressive, he is also a strong liberty candidate. This is why he is so strong in the general election, many libertarians also find a lot to support in his platform, and they know where he stands even on the parts they disagree with, because he is straightforwardly honest about it. That is what every politician should be like, but unfortunately, today, it’s just him.
But the tax is contingent on getting health care. A tax contingent on a system that saves you money is not the same as a pure tax increase, because you are saving money in net. If the program doesn’t pass, nothing happens to your taxes. That’s the only real tax increase in the platform.
Low income workers and unemployed workers are supporting him in large numbers, and that’s an oppressed and marginalized group that you are blind to.
In this case, there is experience with single payer in every other country on Earth, and it is certain that it does work out like that. The taxes Sanders is proposing are actually more progressive than the health taxes in other countries, which are often a regressive VAT. So workers in Sanders’ plan pay genuinely less, the payroll and income tax for them amounts to far less than even the reduced cost of single payer, let alone the higher costs of current private insurance, because a significant fraction is born by general income taxes on the wealthier folks. This is the best designed single-payer system I could have hoped for from a candidate.
Bernie Sanders has recieved first a complete blackout, then, as it was clear he would be competitive despite the blackout, a wave of ridiculous attacks. There is noting positive about the media coverage. The positive coverage is in the online discussions from regular people, not from big media.
There is nothing to question in what he says. It’s honest and sensible stuff.
Come on, you are talking about a tax scheme for 2017 and worrying about future reductions of income inequality that will take at least a decade. Incomes don’t just go down just like that, it’s not confiscation or a salary cap. You just have CEOs and top managers paying more taxes.
If Sanders’ policies do lead incomes do become roughly equalized, that means the US had the most terrific growth you could ever imagine, because that’s the only way income equality ever happens under these sorts of reforms, it’s roughly what happened in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
He didn’t change anything, he and Paul see eye to eye on the Fed, except Paul wants a zero inflation policy, while Sanders wants a zero unemployment policy. Sanders is right on the zero unemployment thing, Paul is wrong. Sanders turned Paul’s proposal from a recurring audit that would never pass into a one-time audit that passed, and made a permanent audit of the Fed a major plank of his platform.
There is nothing to question. All his numbers are dead on accurate. That is a first for a presidential campaign from any side in pretty much all of human history.
The reason I don’t is because use value is equal to exchange value in economic equilibrium, as is the “labor value price” and the “exchange value price”. Any discussion of the difference can be subsumed into the more general question “What does equilibrium look like, and how do we get to it?”
I’m not a Keynesian or a post-Keynesian. I read MARX, not Keynes, and I reproduced Keynes from Marx for myself, because it is trivial to do, and for sure this is how Keynes originally did it. Except of course, I didn’t come up with the “sticky prices” nonsense Keynes made up, or anything like that. I just used class segregation and capital aggregation, like Marx explained, as post-Keynesians sometimes do.
The Keynesians are not socialists, and their reforms do not aim to produce a socialist society, with equalized roughly uniform ownership of capital, up to a factor of 10 or so related to personal productivity, and workplaces owned by employees devoid of alienated labor. They are ok with a small class of people owning all the capital and directing workplaces from above, as they must be to be hired as bourgeoise economists in the first place.
I am not ok with that, because it for sure is not so in perfectly competitive economic equilibrium, it just is true in the real world. Economic equilbrium is something that is not hard to reproduce, with appropriate policies, because it is the outcome of competition without concentrations of power.
Much as housing reform led many Americans to land and home ownership, and to a large extent eliminated rentier behavior, workplace reforms can lead to workplace ownership and eliminate capitalist behavior. The latter is much harder, because it really does dismantle the source of power of the bourgeoisie, and eliminates them entirely as a class.
No bourgeoise economist would ever propose such a thing, but no revolutionary Marxist can propose it either, because it maintains the legal structure of capitalism. This is why I feel I have to do it, because there are political barriers to this position from either side.
I didn’t know who Hudson was until you asked, but now that I googled him, I guess the reforms Hudson advocates put a mild tax on rent seeking, and does not aim to radically alter capitalism’s structure. The things I am suggesting I believe really can radically alter capitalism’s structure, in that it will reproduce the undisputed success of real existing Marxist-Leninist economies— zero unemployment and fair wages for everyone, along with the undisputed success of the anarcho-syndicalist societies: non-alienated labor and self-management.
Nobody will give them a loan, as it is not clear they will be able to pay back the principal, let alone the interest. Negative income tax creates a dependent underclass, it wastes people’s potential labor, and keep people depressed and on drugs. When someone’s labor is not used by anyone at present, you need to find a way to use it, or else you are wasting the most important resource— a human being. There’s no argument that this is good for growth, no matter how marginally useful the product of the labor, because the person would have been doing NOTHING otherwise.
Infrastructure jobs absorb unemployment for useful labor, the government jobs can be construction, software, laying down high-speed lines, fundamental research, highways, windmills and solar power, nuclear plants, anything at all which requires labor that is unused. Absorbing all excess unused labor pushes you to a free frictionless labor market immediately among those not employed at a state job.
I am not ‘looking inward’ or denying the distance between real existing capitalism and perfect competitive equilibrium. I am simply using competitive equilibrium as a normative ideal, as Marx implicitly did in crafting the policies in the “Manifesto”. The use of competitive equilibrium as normative is standard in economics, even in Marxist economics, and it was also implicitly used in the allocation programs internal to planned Marxist-Leninist economies. The most progressive planners, like Alexei Kosygin, advocated for the use of market equilibrium norms, as did other mathematically oriented planners.
I do not use any “dialectic”, because I don’t think talking to other people is useful in coming up with ideas, especially not sterile Hegelian dialectic type discussion, which is just a mind-numbing intellectual onanism. I believe in engineering practical solutions to practical problems, not in discussions with a bunch of philosophers. That was also the consensus that emerged among the rank and file, non-ruling-party non-elite in the USSR since the 1930s. They didn’t bother with questions of dialectic, they bothered with “how can we make more steel”.
“Your socialism manages to address only the problem of labour as a commodity and only tangentially at that because your ideal workplaces are embedded in a larger profit system.”
Only! That’s Capital I. That’s the intractable problem. Marx tells you that it is impossible to address this problem. He knows how to address all the other problems. I am showing you that it is not impossible to address the central intractable problem too, it is just monumentally difficult. I am not dealing with the other problems because other people are thinking about them, and they can be solved within standard bourgeoise thinking.
Regarding the return of rentier behavior, there is no barrier to bourgeoise economists solving that problem, as they partially did in the past, because rentiers act against bourgeoise interest as well as everyone else’s interest. That they haven’t done so yet, allowing rentiers to dominate, is due to the economic quacks who seek to protect capitalist profits, which are secretly rentier profits, where the rents are extracted from capital stock. There was a time not so long ago when any American could go to college and own a house, so this problem is not unsolvable for standard thinking. There was never a time where worker owned business became normative in the US, and the few Union owned companies like United Airlines never became the majority. United Airlines was one of the targets of the 9/11 attack, it was bankrupted by the attack, and the employee ownership was destroyed. American Airlines likewise stopped worker profit-sharing, from 2002 until 2014, when it was partially restored.
The real problem is in preventing the concentration of capital stock, and thereby solving the labor/owner relation, as this requires a concerted effort.
I don’t deal with the other problems, because I didn’t think about them. I take my problems one at a time.
“If they were willing to work for any wage, they would’ve gotten a job already!”
That statement shows you don’t understand macroeconomics. It is possible for people to not find a job because there isn’t enough demand, not because they aren’t willing to work for any wage. Reducing minimum wage, or removing it, makes unemployment go UP not DOWN. This is essential to understand, because it is one of the simplest way to see that marginal equilibrium analysis is entirely bogus for the economy as a whole, and it is a prediction verified with decades of data. This has been understood for 80 years, and I don’t understand how you can continue to pretend microeconomic predictions for unemployment and minimum wage work.
The number of places where the private sector is deficient is effectively as infinite as the number of possible private sector jobs. Anything where the benefit is public and cannot be recouped except with a tollbooth is a good target for infrastructure projects. The essential point is that once you absorb excess labor, workers can negotiate pay equal to productivity, and once this happens, macroeconomics doesn’t exist anymore, the labor market goes to equilibrium, and you can use marginal analysis. The existence of unemployment wrecks equilibrium by reducing wages and undercutting demand. This is the foundational observation of macroeconomics.
Sanders is 74, and just missed the cocaine orgy that created Reagan.
The basic principle in projection of policy impact on growth is what the effect is on unemployment. Sanders’ policies have an impact on unemployment in three ways: there is a jobs program which directly reduces unemployment, there is a college program which indirectly reduces unemployment by increasing the number of students and qualified applicants, and there is a minimum wage increase which produces stimulus by incresing demand. Under these conditions, it is not difficult to forecast best-possible growth, these are the best-possible growth inducers, as they reduce unemployment by the most possible. You can’t know what the detailed numbers are going to be precisely, but Friedman’s analysis is conservative and CBO based, and is likely as close to accurate as you can get.
The criticism of Friedman is based on the fact that there are right-wing economists who make up Keynsian multipliers for tax-cuts, which is crazy because money to wealthy people does not increase demand significantly, rather it can increase investment. That type of economic fraud is what gives multipliers a bad name. But with Sanders policies, the multipliers are both theoretically and empirically justified. You can’t let bad economists crowd out the good ones using politics. You need to look at quantitative data to decide which analysis is correct.
Increasing minimum wage DECREASES unemployment until the point where the minimum wage is so high (like $30/hr) that it starts to produce inflation instead. This only superficially looks like a paradox, it is a fundamental principle of macroeconomics. It is the “perihelion precession of Mercury” for depressed aggregate demand— a counterintuitive prediction that is uniformly correct that you simply can’t make with pre-1930 economics. Pre Keynesian economics predicts the opposite, and fails.
The reason is that lowest wages are always not anything close to their equilibrium value, they are depressed by competition with the unemployed. This prediction is the clearest demonstration.
The jobs program is the infrastructure program.
Sanders doesn’t advocate eliminating free trade, rather he advocates fair-trade policies that raise wages in the other country. This creates a better competitive trading field, and creates consumers for American goods, which are produced by a more specialized workforce.
Except that the mechanism of “Verdoom’s law” is understood— the loss of purchasing power due to unemployment driving down wages is a mainstay of economics for nearly 100 year. The projection is overly conservative, when you drive down unemployment by offering jobs, there is a lot of pressure on wages in industries where you don’t do anything, simply because workers are more empowered to demand better wages.
The point of fair trade is that it is conditional on working conditions improving in the other country. It’s not all that restrictive, and it is good both for foreign and domestic growth. It also slows the loss of industry.
There are a bunch of factors, but there are general principles which you need to be aware of, and one of these is the relation of unemployment to wage growth.
Bernie Sanders does not propose to cut military spending in such a way as to remove it’s stimulus effect, he proposes to redirect it toward more productive avenues. Away from nuclear weapons, for instance, and away from large weapons projects. There is a lot of discretion in military budgets, and the internet and LFTR were both designed on military money.
The goal of Sanders is to produce low unemployment. There is no surprise that this induces the maximum possible growth, as fundamentally, unemployment and underemployment are the original source of economic underperformance.
Go Dem now and help him win it.
Bernie Sanders plan does not call for a massive federal government in the sense of government intrusion into private decisions, the policies are not designed to meddle in individual business or personal decisions. There are designed to remove unemployment, help students in college, and get rid of health care worries for small businesses. These are pro-growth policies. He is surprisingly the most libertarian Democratic candidate, as he does not support intrusive government surveillance, he is not about crony contracts, and he does not get money from large donors. The main Republican point is that government is corrupt, and this won’t be fixed until we elect a non-corrupt person to office.
That’s not how it works. The economy is complicated, and wages at the low end are depressed by unemployment. You need to have a strong minimum wage and a strong anti-unemployment policy to have an economy where workers can negotiate for better wages. Without this, there is no economy, it is permanent depression. This has been understood since the 1930s, but willfully denied by the anti-Keynesian party.
Right. As for the label, he’s stuck with it, as he has maintained the same label and same principles for the past 30 years. He is trying to remove the stigma from a whole sector of philosophical thought that has been tarnished by association with terrible totalitarian regimes. The real socialists are George Orwell and Albert Einstein, not Lenin and Chavez. He is also a Liberty party candidate, and has strongly supported the independence of small business and small farmers. There is no tradition more thoroughly American than his unique brand of social democracy.
He is not assuming real productivity growth will be stellar in the sense of producing new industries, he tells you that the 5-6% growth is mostly due to redistribution and better purchasing power, and maximizing existing capacity. This growth must necessarily peter out after a few years, when production is maximum and people are getting paid reasonably. His predictions are due to share of income going to the workers who spend the money, as opposed to the investors who drive down the wages.
At the end of the 90s, when unemployment dipped below 4%, wages begin going up steadily at that point for all workers, and entrepreneurship became more easy and common when workers were not concerned about employment. This growth in small decentralized business was reversed by conscious decision to invest in large defense industry after 9/11, by Bush and co, and this is the real tragedy of the 21st century economy. I don’t know the exact productivity growth in 1999, but it was very strong.
What?? Are you even serious? NO!
Friedman is CONSERVATIVELY assuming that a stimulus program will maximize production quickly. That’s standard economics for nearly 100 years. It is certainly true.
The rate of growth he gets is high because the stimulus is large. It is probably an UNDERESTIMATE, as Sanders policies are targeted at unemployment, and produce as low an unemployment rate as the infrastructure funding and political will allows.
At zero unemployment or close, wages rise. Right now, the American economy is lumbering along is a half-depressed state due to lack of purchasing power. The precise numbers are not predictable, but Friedman did as good a job as possible.
There’s nothing vague here. The purpose of Sanders’ plan is to remove unemployment. US capacity is not maximized right now, there is a significant amount of unemployment and underemployment, and wages are catastrophically depressed. The economy is restructuring around large firms that employ large numbers of people at minimum wage, as opposed to smaller businesses with fair wages. This only helps the individual large corporation’s bottom line, it reduces spending.
If the platform is enacted, a conservative estimate is that the economy will be producing at the last peak level. There is nothing wacky about Friedman’s growth estimates, he is probably understating the growth.
He not only got the Ron Paul vote, and a large chunk of everyone else’s vote, he also got the Ron Paul treatment. Given the outrageous behavior of Clinton’s union supporters in Nevada’s caucus, it is clear that Clinton should suspend her campaign, as it looks more and more certain that Sanders’ supporters will not unite around her, and she will divide the party.
The arrest photo and film show you viscerally that he is not a pretend protester. He meant it then, and he is the only candidate deserving of your vote now.
The only tax increase that Sanders proposed is contingent on a universal health care plan which will save you and me and nearly everyone else lots of money. The stimulus plan is a redirect of corporate subsidies to infrastructure workers.
Secretary Clinton does not share his values. Her HHS secretary will find ways to expand WalMart and Uber in 50 states, until every employee in the US is a low paid wage laborer.
Sanders doesn’t claim that all issues of inequality are economic. He believes that the economic issues are fundamentally the ones that are most important to fix, so they should be the top priority. Once you address the economic component, and produce access to capital for all groups in the US, it becomes so much easier to address the other components. In this view, he is following Martin Luther King Jr.
When a group of people have equitable wealth and equitable power, the remaining racism against them becomes socially unsanctioned, and becomes viewed as an abberant mental disorder. There were Jewish quotas in the US 60 years ago, and most powerful business leaders and top academics were causually anti-semitic. But when the wealthy folks had to deal with Jewish colleagues, that became difficult to continue.
But Sanders also proposes strong criminal justice reform and strong policing reform, because we can’t wait on those things when people are dying in jail and in the custody of police. He is the strongest candidate on racial justice.
Dan is neither racist or ageist. He is a Clinton propagandist, cynically attempting to divide the voters.
The likely RFK shooters were recently identified milling around the hotel in old footage of the incident. They have nothing to do with Israel, and a lot to do with CIA and MKULTRA. They are certainly not “zionists” as both rank and file Israelis and the Israeli government were happy with the Kennedys. The US in the 1960s was still significantly anti-semitic, and Jews could not be too powerful in any capacity.
Your view of Jewish conspiracy is annoying, because it places blame for corruption on a religious minority which is not powerful enough to do any of the sort of things you want to blame them for. Zionists can’t make the air-defences stand down, nor can they order military drills. Only non-Zionist protestant administration members could do that.
You aren’t going to make him anything, because you aren’t going to win.
Free college is not that expensive compared to health care, it is about double the Pell program, and it is paid by a small tax on trading. That helps to remove microtrading, which is used to levy an effective rent on stock and commodity transaction by the brokerages which can put their servers a few microseconds closer to the stock exchange, and capture requests early, and pre-empt them. This is one of the worst forms of fraud, and it starts losing money with even the smallest transaction tax.
He hasn’t promised any other “goodies”. He promised a policy to remove unemployment from the economy, so that wages equalize.
If you ever see a Sanders increase, you just got universal health care, and you’re saving a lot of money on insurance. No health care, no tax increase.
The cost of college has gone up tenfold, for no reason other than capturing rent at the door to higher income.
If the health plan is a fantasy, so are the taxes.
He was against Dimona, so what. Lots of Israelis were against Dimona too. The assassination of RFK is understood much better than the assassination of JFK, as I explained, we know who was at the hotel now. The folks behind it were the same folks sending exploding cigars to Castro. The US has a large covert operations division which has it’s own money, is completely unaudited and untracked, and does whatever it wants. For example, Oliver North. Israel is a small country, and it would be insane to assassinate any American, the US is its biggest ally. Please try to be more rational, because we have real problems in the US that are not caused by any Jews.
They are not modelled on European countries— there is no real social welfare in Sanders plan. The Health-care is just shifting existing spending around and removing bureaucracy, the college program is removing students from the labor pool, and the infrastructure program is getting rid of unemployment, in the Eisenhower way.
The projection is conservative. It’s not “nefarious forces” that prevent stimulus, it is the structural rejection of Keynesian economics of the past 40 years. The reason you can’t pass stimulus anymore is that Republicans rejected Keynesian measures due to the 1970s stagflation. They didn’t understand how inflation works, they followed some “Philips curve” mumbo-jumbo, and believed that stimulus always drives unemployment to zero, even without a jobs program, and without investment. The stagflation showed you needed new investment, a jobs program is a stopgap until that investment shows up.
The programs need to get enacted, and the projections of growth in Friendman’s model are not surprising, considering the anemic rate of growth in the last decade and a half. Sanders’ policies are better than those in Europe, they are better than any Keynesian measures enacted since the 1950s, because they really target unemployment. There is no reason to lie about the growth potential of such measures.
If it feels “too good to be true”, then just pretend it isn’t.
I don’t, no. I have never made an economic projection in my life. But I do know what happened to economies at low unemployment, and it’s all good stuff. It is next to impossible to project what kind of growth you will see with an unemployment of 3% or 2% or 1%,, since we haven’t been there since WWII. People have been scared of trying due to NAIRU and Philips curve voodoo. The experience of the 90s with the first tech boom showed that inflation is far away even at very low unemployment. Keynesian theory is moribund, and ignorant of its own foundations. I welcome any estimate that says “I don’t know for sure, but I know it’s a heck of a lot of growth”. because, given the knowledge we have, it’s a heck of a lot better prediction than “I don’t know, but it’s a heck of a lot of inflation”. The effect of stimulus is always one or the other, and given that most new jobs in the US pay $25000 a year, and all the productivity gain is going to empty capital return for the wealthy without real new investment, it’s more accurate to project growth in response to rising wages than inflation.
It’s not fun, and it’s not about purity. It’s about policy by policy change, with an organized opposition. The first election past Sanders’ election will simply be about minimum wage, or stimulus, and it will be about money to target ten or twenty house seats of any members who vote “no” with ads and a get-out-the-vote program in 2018.
The reason Obama couldn’t mobilize people is that he simply didn’t want to. His policies were corporate compromises from the start, and could not get public support behind them. The last years involved many of the same sort of covert nonsense operations and interventions that characterized Bush.
That group of people for Clinton is wealthy donors, who are rattled by the populism. It’s a small fraction of the population, and their votes are insignificant. It’s their money that talks.
There’s something called “appointments” which allow you to delegate power.
The President elect is not just a leader of the nation, he is also the leader of the party, and can appoint members to positions, and push in a certain direction. The influence can be rather large, depending on the ability to influence elections.
In order to have a consistent message for transformation, the internal party appointments have to be made without corporate control. This has not been possible for Obama, due to the constraints of having to appease corporate contributors for various races, so you get nominees who are weak, even for nominations to public positions, like FDA chair.
Nobody is voting for Clinton out of passion. It’s strategic voting, with a misplaced corporate strategy. If she is nominated, It will be a hard choice between her and Trump, despite Trump’s insanity.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz must have slid right by the Senate committee. I am talking about the party, not just the government.
There is no purely money-based metric which you can use to predict “full capacity” ahead of time, because it’s not a monetary call— it’s a question of whether you can make more real actual stuff, or whether people are already producing as much as possible. The only pure-money based metric you can use is AFTER you pass a stimulus, and then you can ask “How much of the rise in wages was negated by extra inflation?” And if the answer is “nearly all of it”, then you’re at full capacity, and it’s pointless to stimulate more. That kind of inflation hasn’t happened in the US since the mid 1970s.
But that money-metric doesn’t help you predict anything ahead of time. So you need to look at the actual production in detail. You need to survey companies, and look for potential backlogs in production, where companies are stressed to deliver goods and services. An example of the kind of thing you look at: are warehouses full or empty? Are service providers working full-time or part-time? Are factories working 24/7 and struggling to fill a backlog or working 10% of the time and laying people off? The US tries to gather these types of statistics. Right now, the justified consensus is that it is safe to say that stimulus won’t produce inflation.
The main problem with trying to make such predictions using existing factory stocks and so on, is that when unemployment is low, and labor becomes mobile with public health insurance, you have no idea what new businesses will form, how quickly they will form. Maybe they will form very fast, as there is a potential vast empty uncharted space still for internet business. If new businesses form quickly, then you can produce a lot of potential new services and products, and prevent inflation even when the old measures of capacity are closer to fully loaded. It’s too complicated to answer in any glib way, and the way I think about it is “when you see inflation, then complain”. It also depends on foreign demand, and all sorts of things you don’t control directly.
There is a strong political resistance to stimulus, because it increases workers’ negotiating power, and decreases the influence of old industry. In the late 90s, the main stimulus was the EITC expansion under Clinton, which was a stealth stimulus, in conjunction with the Clinton tax increase, which balanced the budget (it was supposed to pay for health care that never came). At the same time, internet private ISPs appeared, and workers had rising incomes for years, because unemployment was low.
Internet business valuations eclipsed those of old established business, due to the projections of complete transition to online services. This was a product of a deliberate policy to expand small online business, and people call it now “the 90s tech bubble”, as if it were purely speculative rise in asset prices. It wasn’t speculative like that, it was pumping money to new internet ventures that tried hard to innovate with delivery of services. You can see it wasn’t a bubble, because the same types of businesses are being created today, ten times slower.
The collapse of the internet economy in 2000, I believe, was largely a matter of politics. After Bush won the election, it was clear there would be no protection for the new industries from the old, and their entire valuation collapsed instantly in a gigantic crash. All the new companies were either out of business in the bust, or consolidated into large monopolies by the middle of the decade. At the same time, government expenditures were backing large military contractors and enormous businesses, and cable monopolized ISPs, while wireless remonopolized communications. It was just the 90s in reverse, deliberately, thanks to Bush.
You’re assuming a fantasy economy where everything is in equilibrium. In a real economy, the “median” is sort of meaningless, the median wage might equal productivity (to pick an extreme example) because the unemployment is 49% and the median employed person happens to be employed at a wage equal to the GDP/population, which is really half the GDP per productive worker, because the actual population is double the working population. That situation is terrible, and in a closed economy, a stimulus could employ everybody. What you say would be right assuming a closed economy (no imports/exports), enough capacity to more than employ everybody, and all capital divorced completely from income. But that never happens in real life, it’s always complicated by extra stuff, so I think you just have to do it gradually, and look out for signs of inflation.
In a real economy, it is a mistake to say you’re only at full capacity when unemployment is 0%, that’s the false prediction that right wing Keynsians made (they aren’t real Keynesians), and it is disproved by “stagflation”. You can have stimulus produce pure inflation at 8% unemployment or 10% unemployment if there aren’t enough industries to employ everyone. Then you need new investment, and this is not produced by increasing wages, but by increasing investment capital, like what Reagan did with the tax cuts to the wealthy. Unfortunately, this type of business growth is at the end of large business consolidating and getting larger, it’s not like the Clinton growth of small business forming ab-initio. So it’s not like the Reagan nonsense did anything except produce lots of “Woolworth”s and “KMart”s, and large chains. It wasn’t like real imaginative economic growth, like in the 90s.
There’s also the serious problem of international production, and lack of international monetary coordination. For another extreme example, suppose all your production of consumer goods is in China using cheap labor, and this production is totally maxed out due to demand from Europe or somewhere. Now suppose you make a stimulus that goes to workers in the US. Then any rise in US demand can only be met with a rise in price of the Chinese goods in dollars (by the fall of relative value of the dollar), because the Chinese factories are already making as much as they can. Eventually, the inflation weakened dollar, makes it more productive to have the business form in the US, but at that point, the wage of workers has declined to Chinese levels in terms of the weakened dollar. This is why international trade without international monetary policy or international wage policy is problematic for wealthy nations, and why you need fair trade agreements which raise wages overseas, and ensure that the capital gains of international trade is not being pocketed by wealthy individuals at the top of transnationals. But there are still lots of US industries, they’re just weak, not everything is produced overseas. There’s local energy now, and local food, and local manufacturing to a certain small extent, so I don’t worry about it.
The $25/hr is not mine, it was Sanders. It’s just taking the minimum wage at 1979, considering it’s relation to average productivity, and updating it for inflation and productivity rise in the US since 1979. The inflation producing minimum wage should not be less than this. There is a problem with international production and stimulus, as I said, so it is best to err on the safe side and that’s a $15/hr minimum wage. That’s the Australian minimum wage, and it can’t be that Australia is more protectionist.
The recent massive election fraud in the Nevada caucuses has confirmed to me that Clinton must never get near the White House. She possibly could have won that one fairly, but she chose not to.
I am a democratic socialist. I have never yet voted Republican in my life, and I thought I never will. But with Clinton, I’m so aghast that I’m telling you that I will have to ponder between staying home or actively voting for Trump, as impossible as it is for me to believe, simply against the fraud and covert operations bundle that is Clinton.
And I think Trump is the worst candidate in my lifetime.
Oh, I see. I don’t have figures for what full employment looks like in terms of the real potential labor pool, but of course you’re correct. Come to think of it, this is I suppose the point of Sanders talking about real unemployment in the US, as opposed to official unemployment, that’s a main concern in his stump speech.
Sanders is also progressive on trade, and I believe he is willing to let the dollar weaken somewhat, and negotiate from strength about trade issues, help local small or medium sized business that is export ready, and in general do anything possible to help.
It should be possible to make international trade a lot more “adiabatic”, as moving products between regions with different mean wage is analogous to moving heat between sources at different temperature, just touching the two together is not a good idea. When it is done by transnationals, they just pocket the difference in wage. It is best if you do trade with a heat pump, so that it is closer to equal in either location, in this way you still build up industry overseas, but you introduce as little inefficiency as possible in intermediate stages in the form of outrageous profits and depressed wages.
Not all that much is made in Bangla-Desh, or else their wage wouldn’t be 50c/hr anymore. A lot of things are made in China. But it’s not everything, and the US still maintains industrial knowledge and some infrastructure for it.
Google is your friend: http://usuncut.com/politics… (see also this for Harry Reid’s role: http://www.theblaze.com/con… ). This stuff was all over social media on the caucus day, it was reported by caucus goers all over the state. It seems to have been organized by members of unions who have sided with Hillary.
Policy matters, of course. But this level of corruption trumps policy. I don’t want another Oklahoma City, or 9/11, or voter fraud, or covert international operations. Trump is a dunce, but he is an honest dunce.
It’s not speculation. Unregistered caucusgoers is the surest sign of fraud there is, it’s pretty much the only way to make fraud in a caucus, where the caucusgoers can audit the process in real time. A union can get a lot of unregisted people to bias the delegate count by several percentage points in each district. I really don’t know who had more support, given the statewide irregularities. In Iowa, the irregularities were localized, and the final count is certainly correct to within .01%, so the results are clearly accurate.
Regarding “Hillary was behind it herself”, that’s a nonsense question. Was Bush behind the vote-fraud in Florida? Of course not. But Kathleen Harris got a congressional seat for a term for organizing some of it. Fraud happens when a political organization tolerates or rewards it, and unlike the Clinton campaign, the Sanders organization has been very strict in controlling any suspicious behavior from supporters once it is brought up.
What do I need to seek help for? Is Trump not a dunce? Is Trump not spouting brain-damaged nonsense every day? I can’t stand his positions, I can’t stand his brand of politics, but it isn’t controlled by money, and it isn’t controlled by the Republican party. He is an independent lunatic.
I don’t believe his racism is sincere, he’s a New Yorker. He is simply spouting off nonsense, without a brain, so as to appeal to the stupidest Republicans. I am not sure he is even a Republican, he was a friend of Clintons, he supports universal health care, he is a complete mystery.
Of course his racist statements are completely unacceptable. But what else is there to do? One has to make a decision regarding this sort of thing, it can’t come without consequence. Bernie can’t run for president as independent, that guarantees a loss both for him and the Democrat, and it guarantees he also loses his Senate seat. It’s not easy to determine the lesser evil from public statements, unfortunately, no matter how clear it seems to you in Europe. Trump is not Le Pen, he isn’t articulating a consistent racist position for years, he is simply saying whatever he wants that he thinks will get people to vote for him.
That’s what millions of voters are going to do come election day if you don’t wise up and nominate Sanders.
Yes. It’s sitting under the rock of “there’s no demand for it”.
I meant “honest” in the sense of “not bought”, not “honest” in the sense of “doesn’t lie”. He’s a continuous stream of unreliable crap, it is not clear he even knows what is true and what is not. It’s just obvious that nobody is pulling his strings, because of the stream of consciousness campaigning (also, the repulsive consciousness in the stream).
If I am honest with what I will do in a voting booth, and I am not sure that I am, given my outrage at this moment, I guess I am only reliably reporting more on what other voters will do given the situation rather than myself.
I consider not voting or voting Green an effective half-vote for Trump. If I really couldn’t vote for Clinton, most likely I will vote for Stein. But many more will go more than halfway and vote for Trump.
I thought you were in Spain, sorry!
I’m an asshole, not a nice person, sorry. Try to ignore that.
The only two serious economic works I read cover to cover are “The Communist Manifesto” (when I was 15) and “Capital I” (when I was 30). I understood what they were saying. I also read some Soviet planning documents when it was current, and a bunch of Maxist essays, some Chomsky, a little bit of this and that.
I worked out standard bourgeoise economics for myself, although it is clear Marx understood it. The points I am making are not incompatible with Marx’s mechanisms, but they are not travelling along the path of development of Marxist philosophy, because I consider philosophy a total waste of time. In this, I don’t think I am out of the mainstream for people living in real existing Marxist Leninist societies.
I’m not a nice person, sorry. Try to ignore that.
The only two serious economic works I read cover to cover are “The Communist Manifesto” (when I was 15) and “Capital I” (when I was 30). I understood what they were saying. I also read some Soviet planning documents when it was current, and a bunch of Maxist essays, some Chomsky, a little bit of this and that.
I worked out standard bourgeoise economics for myself, although it is clear Marx understood it. The points I am making are not incompatible with Marx’s mechanisms, but they are not travelling along the path of development of Marxist philosophy, because I consider philosophy a total waste of time. In this, I don’t think I am out of the mainstream.
I do not claim to be well read. I worked this stuff out myself. When I said “the stage of monopolized production is nearly equally bad to the stage of state control under communist party rule”, I mean “bad” as in “inefficient” and “non-innovative”.
My ideas live or die on their merits. They certainly don’t have any pedigree, like Marx’s or anyone else’s. All they are doing is translating Marx’s obervations to the mathematical language of modern economics, and noting that they are all amounting to “we are not in capitalist equilibrium”. Therefore, a transition to capitalist equilibrium is tantamount to a transition to socialism.
This was appreciated to a certain extent by some Keynesians, but I don’t read anything, so I don’t know who said it first. I know the policy proposals I gave are 100% original, so it’s best if you respond to them without prejudice, because some of them really are new, in particular the graduated corporate tax, which unlike a tax on individuals encourages splits naturally, without oversight.
First, I made a mistake, due to having forgotten what “use value” meant in Marxist economic. It’s not equal to “exchange value”, it’s something else. In bourgeoise economics, it’s called the “monopolist’s price”.
The identity of the labor and nonlabor theory of value is just philosophy. In what bourgeoise economists call “economic equilibrium”, the two are the same. It’s just that bourgeoise economists are under the conceit that economic equilibrium somehow resembles real existing capitalism, rather than an idealized anarchic socialism. They are wrong about this, and the model itself tells you.
I’m not young anymore, I’m 42, and I came up with most of this stuff after a long solitary struggle with Marxism and Capitalism about 10 years ago, talking to exactly zero people, and reading only Marx (the bourgeoise side is just mathematics, and I could figure it out without reading anyone). I only come at if from Marx, but I use the language of bourgeoise economics, because the ideas are invariant to language, and it helps to translate Marx to bourgeoise language, because then you find that you are approximately a “post-Keynesian”.
“You think that some “genius” new idea or approach or “prescriptions” could change stuff? You think all those people who came before you didn’t even try similar approaches?”
Yup. I don’t think my own ideas are some particular genius. I think ALL THE OTHER PEOPLE who thought about this stuff are morons
It’s not their fault, they were working before an internet, and they needed propaganda structures to spread their ideas, so the ideas needed to be standardized. With an internet and a few hours, I can explain the whole thing, and then just wait for you to catch up. The same is true of capitalists, by the way, who have no idea that economic equilibrium looks just like socialism until you tell them. They are also stupid.
Right. Now you got it. Just please don’t call it “Maimonism”, I don’t want to get shot.
Yes, this is partly true. But there was a third reason for the adoption of abstract art by the CIA and bourgoisie. The third reason is that the USSR put in all the initial revolutionary time and effort to develop this art, and then stupidly suppressed it by government bureaucracy. Like all other socialist innovations, like space and modern physics, the bourgeoisie saw that it was the best thing evar and decided to steal it, and the groupthink of the Stalin led party let them do it. The only really significant thing the USSR did in art after that was Tarkovsky.
Picasso was a traditional European communist, and the modernists who followed, the actual artists, were by and large socialists of one type or other. It’s just that their style was not welcome in the USSR.
It’s worse for the undergrads. It’s hard to resist even when you know your Marx and cling to it like a bible.
Hillary Clinton decided to blame the Benghazi attack on a video on Youtube, then she called for censorship on YouTube. The video had nothing to do with the attack, it was for a prisoner swap, this was leaked by Petraeus’s girlfriend. It’s not illegal to do, she won’t be prosecuted. It was just unethical, and completely unacceptable. In the 90s, she decided to press bogus charges against the White House travel staff. These charges led to a trial, and exoneration in record time. It wasn’t illegal to press those charges. It was just immoral, and unacceptable.
Her flip on bankruptcy reform was unacceptable. Her foreign policy in Ukraine was supporting a fascist coup, and led to the Russian invasion. Her foreign policy in Honduras involved supporting a coup against a Democratically elected leader, and is also unacceptable. Her interventionalist foreign policy led to collapses in Libya, in Syria, everything there is poison. I will be voting for Sanders in the primary, and I am not sure if I can support such a person in the general. I am not alone on this, and if you want to win the general safely, Sanders is really your only bet.
These were not exactly private servers in their basement, they were just outside the government. The question with Hillary’s server is why she would put a server in her basement? It’s something Nixon would do to communicate with his plumbers. There is no excuse for this sort of thing, it is a sure sign of terrible corruption.
That stuff simply doesn’t work with Sanders, it was tried all the time against him before, and the election season is long. It is very easy to repel a “socialist” attack, because he is really just an FDR Democrat, and the attack looks as silly as the “socialist” attacks against Obama did.
There’s a reason more independents support Sanders, and that is that his philosophy is really more supportive of liberty than nearly any Democrat. He gets many Republicans to support him, especially the libertarians, the Ron Paul voters. The election with Clinton will not be a sure thing, even long-time Democrats are a wary of her corruption.
Some of them believe this, some of them don’t. But in any case, they are wrong. The “socialist” label is simply a false avenue of attack, it bounces off, because Sanders is simply not into taking over industry by the government, and he is more libertarian than Clinton is, and Republican voters can smell a libertarian a mile away.
The principles of governance that Bernie Sanders provides are not those of socialism, but of Keynesianism and social democracy, which are not at all related to the Kibbutz experience, and are tested in economies of any size.
That type of sloganeering doesn’t work, and the superdelegates are incapable of overruling the voters in the primary. There is nothing to this “superdelegate” count, it is simply a propaganda point by hacks and shills for the Democratic party. Sanders and Clinton are tied in elected Delegates, despite the significant and probably decisive voter fraud in the Nevada caucus. The fraud itself is enough to push me to not vote for Clinton in the general.
Chicago school economics is an academic fraud. It is based on a concept of equilibrium which is fundamentally not there is markets as a whole. The concept of “voluntary” and “involuntary” only work in economic equilibrium.
When a state or municipality raises minimum wage, there is a possibility for producers to flee to another state, or out of the municipality. This is much more difficult when the raise is nationwide. This is why to test the microeconomic predictions, you need to look at national raises of the Federal minimum wage. The rising Federal wage decreases unemployment, and that is a sign that the unemployment was NOT voluntary, it was simply a function of lack of equilibrium.
The issue today is that there is no such thing as an international minimum wage, and trade policies lead to similar effects between nations, exploiting the lack of equilibrium internationally, which is much worse that the lack of equilibrium within each nation. There is no solution to this except fair-trade negotiations, which tie imports to higher wages overseas, and better working conditions. Without this, you reproduce the macroeconomic problems of a single nation worldwide, where there is no government that can ever save you.
>>> … secular trends which prevent the system from returning to equilibrium…
Those secular trends require political power, which is derived from economic centralization and the emergence of separate classes. The mechanisms I gave for splitting up capital are financial incentives, and they should work on any profit-making entity to split up power among several entities, which are never so large as to influence such trends individually.
There is no substitute for the mathematical theory of capitalist equilibrium, which right now is only being used and misused by capitalists who have no idea what kind of equilibrium it actually predicts. Marx was using it to form his critique, but he detested the language because it was used to justify atrocities, like the 80 hour workweek and subsistence wages.
Any attempt to approach an economic equilibrium is difficult, but there is a mathematical theory to guide you, so you always know where the problem is, and when your policy is fixing it or making it worse. That’s what gives it so much weight, and you cannot surrender this tool to the right. But when you are on the left, it is rare that you see someone take the time to study the mathematical ideas, because these mathematical ideas are learned by elites, and the elites are structurally biased to always advocate for their own privilege. Marx took the time to learn the mathematical theory, and this is what made him so powerful as a commentator.
It is very simple to judge when someone is overpaid from equilibrium considerations— would someone else who is equally competent be willing to submit a bid to work the same position at 30% less salary? If the answer is yes, the only way that person maintains the high pay is because there must be political class barriers or barriers of monopoly set up around the position. This is true not only of business owners, it is true of media stars, of high-level managers at publicly traded corporations, and of some government contractors and appointees. It is not true of most small business owners, as they labor under competition. This demarcation is for me the line between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat”, and unlike in Marx’s time, there are many small owners who do not go past the threshold, who are your natural allies.
This principle, competitive vs. monopolist wage, to my mind subsumes and replaces the Marxist social class division. The predictions for what to do about it are substantially the same in any formulation, but when you are guided by economic equilibrium, people who are on the right listen very attentively, and you don’t get suckered by policies that give power to a separate bureaucratic elite, as the Soviets did.
I read your links. They’re long. Ok, the first one is about epistemology, and I don’t see the point, sorry. Quantitative predictions about prices, wages, and production are the fundamental epistemology for economic systems, and the ontology you have is only interesting to the extent that it predicts economic numbers, and their change in response to policy.
The theory of economic equilibrium just tells you what everything should be priced (supply/demand at equilibrium), what everyone should be paid (the wage of the next competent bidder in line at zero unemployment). How ownership should be distributed (eventually to the workers), how business should be structured (in as small units as possible), and how decisions should be made (by democratic consensus of those that they affect). The reason is that when any of these conditions are broken, there are disgruntled employees, and new people will enter or leave, at equilibrium, until these conditions are met. When these conditions are violated systemically, as in the current centralized ownership structure in existing capitalism, you get furious oppressed majorities. The only way to violate these conditions is to have a punitive system in place of unemployment and homelessness, which allows you to force people to work for a heirarchy in workplaces which are unresponsive.
Regarding the second link, I don’t accept “60 year cycles”, as there isn’t enough economic data to find any of these. I don’t accept cycle theory at all, because economic ups and downs don’t go according to cycles. They go like a random walk, with some growth and periodic crashes. Any cycle theory requires inertia, which isn’t there in any obvious sense.
>>> “It’s simply the fact that the competitive stage of capitalism, which seems like a dynamic equilibrium to bourgeois economists, is not stable. It has nothing to do with the “economic equilibrium” resembling “idealized anarchic socialism” – that is a utopian vision of society “as it should be” according to you.”
All of this is false except the statement about instability. There is a dynamic equilibrium in price markets for commodities, as you can see if you sit down and try to sell anything in a market. If you try and raise the price above that of others around you, nobody buys your stuff. If you lower your price, you don’t make enough to justify your time. You have a price imposed on you by the surrounding structure, a price which, in equilibrium, more or less exactly compensates you for your labor in acquiring the commodity and finding the buyer.
This situation is what defines the microeconomc equilibrium, and it is only unstable to concentrations of capital and power forming. This instability is real, and it is what Marx wrote about. When capitalists aggregate ownership into large industries, they can siphon off profits into their pockets, and this is a breaking of equilibrium, and it naturally induces unemployment, and the unemployment induces a collapse of wages for the workers in the same industry, who cannot negotiate the equilibrium wage, to subsistence. This is what the 19th century industrial economy looked like, and what every capitalist economy looks like until you adopt Keynesian measures.
The breaking of equilibrium is due to the ownership structure, which is not determined by free economic competition exactly, as the compensation of the owner is through the roof. If you ask someone “what salary would you take to run Google”, the competent bids would be far less than that of the owners or top managers. In equilibrium, that means that they should be replaced by those with a lower bid.
But of course this never happens, the owner’s income is derived from capital infusion and the structure of ownership, from sitting on top of a gigantic power structure created by capital ownership, and there is no competition for top wages. This power structure is derived from the infusion of capital which creates the industry or resource in the first place, it goes to the few who have the potential for a monopoly, and the regulation of public corporations is not sufficiently strong to induce competition of wages at all levels.
The capital exchange markets do not produce equilibrium structures of power, they produce oligarchical structures. This trading process can only be kept safe from competition by producing enormous firms which are immune to competition, because they either undercut it in price to drive it out of business, or else acquire it. Without this you get bodegas, or small industries, which are completely competitive, and where ownership only produces a modest rise in income. The essential competitive fairness of cottage industry was noted by Marx, who contrasted it with industrial production.
The nature of competitive equilbrium is not determined by me idealistically from prior principles. I didn’t have any prior principles. It is determined by asking what the actual predictions are for wages and prices in a true free market equilibrium would be. You could write a computer program to determine this, it’s something that is not adjustible except by fanciful thinking and distortion. That’s unfortunately what bourgeoise economics does, because it is largely a product of the elite class.
The structure of the ownership in equilibrium is also more or less determined from the model, because in equilibrium, no one individual can make more than another, except to the extent that they invest more hours, or acquire a special skill. I didn’t make that up, that’s a famous failed prediction from economics textbooks, except in the textbooks, they ignore the fact that it fails.
The structure of the society that you want to attain is found by taking the mathematical model seriously. When that model conflicted with my own preferences, I changed my preferences, and I will continue to change my preferences to match the real predictions of equilibrium, and advocate changing policy until the economy looks like an equilibrium, and not like a Marxian catastrophe.
>>> That’s … a problem (meaning ignoring Marxists)
No! The exact opposite. Not doing this is the problem. Groups of people are not able to formulate new ideas, they are simply doing propaganda to promote old ideas already formulated by some individual a long time ago. Political organizations are lousy at understanding ideas or fairly promoting them, and the reason is the “philosophical parts of Marx”, the parts you claim I don’t understand.
The ideas people promote come from their economic class, and their class-interest gets in the way of dispassionate evaluation. That’s true of members of powerless classes also, it is just less true, because the philosophy of the powerless doesn’t give them power. But certain parts of Marxist philosophy can potentially give you power, the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of a vanguard. Because the revolution transfers power to the vanguard, so being part of the vanguard is a decision with a power-interest component.
To evaluate things which have objective answers requires a period of isolated study, and ignoring the teams. I don’t have any team on my side, and even if such a team emerges, I would still be powerless.
I understand the philosophical parts of Marx, that was what kept me sane all my college years. I could sit and repeat “these people are thinking and acting this way because of the power structure”, so that I could continue to function in a bourgeoise environment, shifting more and more to the right after the failure of the USSR. I rejected traditional Marxist philosophy mostly I guess in response to the internet, which showed that it is possible to organize systems organically and efficiently in a decentralized manner, that’s the example of the design of the Linux kernel. Marxist ideology has reached the limit of its usefulness for prescriptive change, because it demands “all power to the Soviets”, which doesn’t help anyone at all, except those on top of the Soviets.
The mathematical side of Marx, however, the consolidation of capital in a few hands, remains true, and can’t ever become obsolete. Part of this theory is subsumed into Keynesianism, except Keynes couldn’t touch the ownership structure. I am trying to fix this oversight. The point of Keynes is to only regulate the wages and monetary policy to work around the ownership structure, not to fundamentally decentralize the ownership. In my opinion, it is important to advocate for decentralized ownership right now.
The Republicans are sometimes sincere, and I believe that all Republicans would rather see a principled and unbought Sanders rather than a crooked Clinton, even if this leads to more policy that they disagree with. It’s not like Republicans are attacking Hillary because they want a Republican, they are attacking Hillary because they don’t want a corrupt president. I am not a Republican, and I don’t want a corrupt president either. If this was Sanders vs. O’Malley, it wouldn’t be an issue, but it’s not.
She is entirely a product of her donations. Her bankruptcy reform bill is an obvious example, but so is her foreign policy in Honduras and Ukraine, her support of TPP and private prisons, her support for welfare reform, everything. Donations are insidious, because they come to candidates who are susceptible to malleability vote by vote, not to principled candidates who can’t be bought. That drives the principled candidates out, gradually, election by election.
And $15 minimum wage.
They have free healthcare, the minimum wage is $15/hr American equivalent, the median wage is $60,000, 50% higher than American, and the GDP per capita is lower than in the US. I don’t know the cost of college (ok, later I found an article talking about college in Australia, and it’s free at point of entry for students), but it can’t be anywhere near as expensive as ours, the US is off the charts. Australia might as well be Sanders’ model.
The only failure of education is for economics professors, who have yet to learn that aggregate demand is not a myth, and that markets are nowhere near equilibrium in real life, as wages are not roughly equal and unemployment is not 0%.
Regarding market equilibrium, exactly! It is a state of “perfect competition”, and this idealized state must be held up as the normative ideal, and produced, even in situations when it is difficult to do so. The USSR produced this perfect competitive market as far as labor in concerned, and this was their most notable and nearly only success.
The sale of labor at perfect competition is not to an owner, because at perfect competition, there is no owner! Everyone is equally laboring. The predictions of perfect market theory is that if person X owns more than you, you just go and do what that person is doing, until you own the same amount, and the competition between you and the previous owner drives your competition stake to equality, more or less.
The way this is produced in real life is by strong ownership negotiations at point of hire, where you sell your labor to a small company in exchange for a small but growing stake. The ownership becomes widely diffuse, and there is no capitalist to exploit you.
The aggregation of capital is then only in the businesses themselves, and this is controlled (in the system I described) by the graduated corporate tax, which forces a split in companies for profitability above a certain size where maintaining the size is costlier than splitting. Even the smallest graduated tax will produce splits, because companies are perfectly profit-seeking, and have no other consideration.
The rest of what I was talking about was contract reform to prevent false-splits, and to prevent concentration of ownership in individuals, and labor reform to prevent unemployment, so that employees are negotiating from a position of strength.
The “government deed” and “one time exchange” refers to the fact that ownership comes from a government enforcing it, and the exchange that produces a monopoly like Google or Facebook is a one-time IPO, and there are no competitors after that one-time act. The capital is granted to Facebook, they become a monopoly, and at no point do they ever face competition. I realized it was poorly worded, and rearranged it.
Regarding doing science, I know how to do research, thanks. It requires isolation. As Einstein said, “The best job for a theoretical physicist is a lighthouse keeper”. It requires social collaboration also, but not the “dialectic” kind, where you talk to people, but the reading and thinking kind, which is best done by individuals reviewing literature and attending seminars.
I did review some Marxist and non-Marxist literature, but nothing serious. I don’t think there is too much out there that is serious, because the Marxists don’t understand competitive equilibrium (except Marx), while the capitalists don’t understand it any better.
You simply don’t understand macroeconomics. When you employ everyone, you bring demand up to what it would be in competitive equilibrium, because people can demand higher wages. We are not in competitive equilibrium right now, because there are unemployed people, driving down wages for everyone except those who have an inside position with owners of capital.
Raising minimum wage must be done at the Federal level, to avoid companies running away across state borders. Now it must be done in conjunction with trade deals, to avoid companies running away across international borders.
The internet does not work, at least the parts run by large corporations. These horrific sites are an example. The only good stuff is done by small independent folks, as always.
The claim you make about “running at a loss” is known to be false for infrastructure. It is very hard for companies to produce public infrastructure, because it is difficult to recoup the benefit by charging tolls. This is why you can have a public works project that brings tremendous benefit which the private sector theoretically should do, but realistically won’t. Whenever a private company owns infrastructure, it is simply for the purpose of making a monopoly. For example, the building of wireless towers is designed to produce a monopoly for Verizon. If you want a competitive market, you need to separate the infrastructure from the service, and find a way to pay for the infrastructures companies share either by contract or by taxes. That’s what the telecom deregulation act of 1996 did, and it’s what the airline deregulation act of 1979 did. There is no substitute for this.
I’m voting for Bernie, and you should be too.
Bernie Sanders is the best the Democrats or Republicans have ever nominated. He is pretty much the last principled politician in America, and the only one who understands economics.
Jim Webb had his shot, so did Martin O’Malley. Sanders is the only candidate worth our time, or yours.
Sanders will capture the Libertarian vote, and he understands Keynesian economics. That in itself is a slam dunk.
They will never do that, they just threaten that to demoralize you. Obama won the nomination process, so the superdelegates flipped, the same will happen with Sanders.
Except we’ve been through this before in 2008, and no they won’t. If they do, they will face a mutiny.
Bernie Sanders is that moderate, and he is going to be swept into office.
He’s more of an FDR Democrat, like JFK.
Marc Cuban doesn’t know what he is talking about, nor do you know your history.
I’m 42, and I know more history than you ever will, silly.
The vote turnout is extremely good by any historical standards. The independents split for Trump this year, and among Democrats, there is little enthusiasm for Hillary. This is why Sanders numbers are super strong, as he is drawing independents and youth in good fraction. There is a surfeit of excitement for his candidacy, although it is not reflected in the opinions of the media elite, for obvious reasons.
Bernie hasn’t been put up, he’s been put down. And he’s smashing through the barriers anyway.
That is entirely false, or else the vote fraud in Nevada wouldn’t have been necessary. He will take the nomination if he gets the majority of the popular delegates, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop him short of further fraud. The Nevada fraud by itself is enough to ensure that his hardcore supporters will not break for Clinton, so it’s Sanders or bust from here on in. You should join, it’s nicer on the other side.
Nevada’s caucus was marred by significant fraud, that probably flipped the outcome and more. The only thing it did is ensure that Sanders voters will not jump on Hillary’s bandwagon should she take the nomination.
You don’t understand what “socialism” is academically and historically, in economics. The starting idea is that there is a failure in markets to reach market equilibrium, due to unemployment reducing wages below what they would be in the theoretical ideal free market. This observation is simply true, it means that there is less “aggregate demand” in the market than what would be the case in a perfect competitive market, where nobody is too rich. This observation was first made by Marx in “Capital I”, but nobody gives him credit for it. The reason nobody wants to cite him for this idea is that he wanted the state to seize all industries, and that is not a good idea.
Nevertheless, the observation that aggregate demand is depressed in markets is simply true, and it is now standard economic lore, at least since Keynes took up the theory, and made it axiomatic that governments need to prop up aggregate demand (Keynes made up nonsense explanations for this, because Marx is taboo in economics). The result is that people were able to get out of the depression, by simply hiring people in government jobs, or spending government money, to restore economic equilibrium. All economists understand this since the 1930s.
This observation is the cornerstone of macroeconomics, and it is fundamentally “socialist” or “Keynesian”, or whatever term you want to use for it. It is a statement that markets are not self-correcting in this respect, when aggregate demand is low. The prediction that this theory makes is that when you increase minimum wage (or otherwise stimulate the economy), the unemployment goes DOWN, not up, as you would naively predict, until the minimum wage becomes high enough that any further raise produces inflation. There is no way to predict this observed behavior from microeconomics alone.
The point is that there is a serious market failure, which is not due to monopoly exactly, or externalities, just due to labor having to compete with unemployed people, when ownership is concentrated. The Keynesians (FDR, Atlee, DeGaulle, Mussolini, Eisenhower, Hitler, Nixon, etc, everyone except Reagan and Bush II) advocate fixing this by reducing unemployment and increasing aggregate demand.
Bernie Sanders proposes policies which decrease unemployment. The stimulus jobs program decreases unemployment directly, the subsidize college reduces unemployment indirectly, because students don’t compete with the employed, and the $15/hr minimum wage reduces unemployment by stimulus (remember the behavior of unemployment and minimum wage in real Keynesian life). In this, he is proposing policies that have been disallowed by the political consensus in the US since Reagan decided that Keynesianism is something he doesn’t like.
Sanders is a Keynesian, like all sane economists. There are no other types of economists who are able to predict anything quantitative with any accuracy.
The picture was taken when I was in my early thirties, I’m 42 now.
The type of “socialism” Sanders advocates is purely “more freedom”. He and Ron Paul see eye to eye on the Patriot act and the constitution. His economic policies are not interventionist in the sense of picking winners and losers, or subsidizing big business, like Obamacare does. He simply has the government reduce bureaucracy as much as possible. Universal health care increases freedom, as it removes a layer of corporate bureaucracy in private insurance, and allows you to switch jobs without worrying about taking your care with you. It is not anti-market, because you can always get supplemental insurance. It does not pick winners and losers, because the government is simply acting as a billing agency.
Sanders’ Keynsian policies are pro-growth and are the minimal intrusions to restore wage growth. The candidate himself does not take corporate contributions. He is the Libertarian’s best candidate, as he will not favor big businesses, as all the other candidates are bound to do by contributions.
Libertarianism, despite what you read about in America, was originally developed as an anti-Marxist offshoot of socialism. The goal was to minimize both state and large corporate power at the same time. This is very tricky, and Sanders policies are the best possible in this direction. They are aimed at concentrations of private power without unduly increasing state power in such a way as to favor this or that private party. It is difficult for a person indoctrinated with Republicanism to understand this, so I’ll just defer to his strong record on constitutional protections, auditing the Fed, avoiding foreign entanglements, and all the other areas of overlap with Ron Paul.
Yes, that one.
Not 33% less than “usual”, 33% less than 2008. All the attention in 2008 was on the Democrats, and independents went to the Democratic primary then. Now there are a lot of independents drawn to the Republican race, who are voting for Trump. The turnout Sanders gets is very good, except in Nevada, where it was suppressed deliberately by long lines, and the voting was marred by fraud (unregistered Clinton caucusgoers). This type of election fraud is very worrying, as it was not small and incidental, as in Iowa, but it seems to have been organized by the Clinton-supporting unions, in conjunction with Harry Reid.
Rigged or not, it simply requires a majority of voters for Sanders. He can get many more than that, if people are not demoralized by your nonsense defeatism.
Clinton is not in any way a socialist, she is what one would call a “moderate Republican” in the Nixon sense. Unfortunately, her kinship with Nixon is a little closer than it should be.
Sanders is an actual FDR Democrat, which is what people would call a social democrat today, or “Democratic socialist”, as he says it.
OF COURSE minimum wage is against the naive interest of both small and large business! They would like to pay as little as possible. When there is a state with a $15 minimum wage and another state with a $10 minimum wage, they will relocate whenever they can!
The reason that minimum wage works ANYWAY is because the wage structure is not in economic equilibrium. In equilibrium, the worker is supposed to be negotiating a wage equal to his or her productivity, no matter what the position! The reason that this works is because in equilibrium, there is no unemployment, so anyone paying too little can’t find anyone to work for them.
That doesn’t happen in real markets, because there is no real competition for ownership positions. These are divided at a higher level, nobody asks for resumes to fill the position of CEO of GM,let alone do they take lowest competent bid. Nobody competes with Facebook, or Google in any meaningful way, reducing their profits.
This means that the equilibrium is broken, there are non-competitive compensations. That means conversely that there is less demand in the labor market than there would be in equilibrium, and therefore unemployment. This stuff is very hard for you, because you are unable to understand that global equilibrium is VERY FAR AWAY from what you see around you, even though each small-scale local economic transaction looks like a local negotiation at supply and demand intersection. That’s not true for the economy as a whole, because it is not really true for owners, and it is certainly not true when a worker has to demand wage at nonzero unemployment.
At nonzero unemployment, without minimum wage, the lowest wages collapse to subsistence, and all the demand from those workers essentially vanishes. This is why minimum wage brings you closer to equilibrium, because in equilibrium, nobody is forced to work for below their productivity, which in reality is always far far beyond minimum wage.
One way to ensure that all employees are getting an equilibrium wage is to take all the corporate profits and divide them among all the employees according to their decision on what to keep, and what to invest in growing the company, leaving the management with a salary negotiated by bid and competition. That’s what happens in a worker-owned business, and in an economy with worker owned business, you can imagine an actual economic equilibrium without any government intervention. The reason is that economic equilibrium does not allow for serious inequality, beyond some small amount related to personal hours invested and personal productivity. This is why the equilibrium mathematical model does not have anything much to do with real markets.
I am sick of repeating these things. Read a book about macroeconomics. The best is the first, and that’s “Capital I”, although you need to translate the concepts to modern mathematical language.
The superdelegates have never voted against the electorate, and never will. That will split the party and guarantee a third party run. Everyone knows that. The only people who mention superdelegates as a problem are party hacks shilling for Hillary.
That’s “popular economics”, it has no relation to real economics. The fact is that without Keynesianism, Capitalism exerts a downward force on everybody. The economies of the postwar consensus produced a lot of wealthy people, and the economies of Reaganomics only produce concentrations of industry and monopolies.
That’s why Sanders doesn’t call for welfare, but reductions in unemployment.
Bernie is one of the last two true Democrats, along with Warren.
Sanders never praised Venezuela. You are confusing Venezuela with Nicaragua. Sanders never praised Nicaragua too much either, he just decried US meddling in their internal affairs.
There’s some fraud, but the public opinion polls and exit polls keep it from departing from public consensus too much. I know this, because there is a long history of voting in these primaries, and the superdelegates are simply a tool to demoralize voters in intermediate stages. They are unable to do anything significant in the end, because they are beholden to the same voters, and the same voters revolt if the superdelegates vote against the popular will.
I read “Dreams from my Father”, and Obama’s views are nothing like any socialist’s of any kind. He’s basically a moderate centrist Democrat, working with Democrats who are fundamentally moderate Republicans in their views. The view of Federal mandates was worse under Bush, who started intrusive surveillance and imprisonment policies, and move to a police state. Obama has simply moved to try to implement stimulus, and was prevented from doing so by congress, in a cynical attempt to “make the American economy scream”, so as to produce consensus against Democrats. This type of action against the national interest is inconcievable in a major political party, and means they don’t deserve anyone’s vote.
You haven’t read Marx, you are quoting Lenin, wrongly. The Quora answer is doing the same.
To understand Leninspeak— what Lenin calls “socialism” is what everyone else calls “communism”. What Lenin calls “communism” is what everyone else calls “utopia”. Lenin said “the goal of Socialism is Communism”, meaning, in Lenin-speak, “The goal of Communism is utopia”.
Lenin called “democratic socialism” by the name “Capitalism”, as he didn’t discriminate between any two non-communists any more than you discriminate between people on the left.
Bernie Sanders is a reformer, and reformers have no relation to revolutionary socialists, and are detested by them. This is a problem in revolutionaries, they do not believe in reform of anything, they believe in destruction and revolutionary committees. There’s nothing you can do to talk to them. Sanders is not that kind of revolutionary, he is making a Democratic electoral revolution, where people vote in moderates, instead of bought out corporate lackeys.
Yup. Bernie is a Democrat the moment he declared. He has run with Democratic blessing and without Democratic opposition since 1994, and has voted and caucused with the Democrats since. His independent streak is why, like Eisenhower, he is so strong in the general. He is a true moderate, who understands libertarian concerns with government overreach. This is why he is so popular with independents and moderate Republicans.
That’s the exact opposite of the truth. Keynesian economics is just “macroeconomics”, it’s what every successful prediction of economic numbers is founded on.
The failed predictions are from the Chicago school. They predict rising unemployment in response to rising minimum wage. The opposite is seen. They predicted tripling of prices in 2008, nothing happened aside from business-as-usual inflation of a few percent. These predictions are as wrong as Aristotle’s predictions for falling bodies.
The Chicago school quacks also willfully misinterpret Keynesianism to add “Philips curve” and “NAIRU” voodoo to it, so they can attack it. Economics must stop being a poiticized field. It’s a quantitative predictive endeavor, and those who predict numbers correctly must be listened to, and those who predict wrong numbers must be ignored.
Keynesianism explains unemployment as a result of misallocation of what should be wages at equilibrium to corporate profits. When wages are not sufficient, demand is too low, and unemployment happens. Keynes wasn’t allowed to say that, because that’s straight out of Marx’s mouth. So only “post-keynesians” say that. But Kenyes (and everybody else in 1934) knew that, because they all knew their Marx.
Your interpretation of what I said is confused nonsense. Please read a book. “Naive self interest” is the exact same thing as “rational self interest”. It is naive, because a uniform minimum wage helps all businesses through economic growth. But given a choice between a low-wage location and a high-wage location, any individual busienss will choose the low wage location.
The market did NOT decide anything about the allocation of positions of CEO. The decision was made entirely by other CEOs and other directors of the board. It is never a market decision.
If you took CEOs by lowest competent bid, there would be a bidding war so hard, their salaries might even become negative.
It’s not exactly propaganda. It’s something you have to hold your nose over to vote for Hillary Clinton. There is no reason, as Sanders is a better candidate.
Not yet. I’m looking forward.
Then, considering he no longer calls himself an independent, but a Democrat, he’s a Democrat. Eisenhower was an independent until the Republicans nominated him, and Sanders is the Democrat’s Eisenhower.
Venezuela’s socialists are Marxists, and they wanted the state to take over their economy. This drives away business, and it is not good for anyone. The only good thing they did, which is done in Alaska too, is redistribute profits from the oil industry. There are now serious problems of corruption in Venezuela.
Bernie Sanders is not a state-takeover guy. There are hardly any socialists like that in the US, even on the far left. He is less meddlesome than most Democrats and Republicans, as he does not have special interest money pulling his strings for special tax exemptions and subsidies. His record with small farmers and businesses in Vermont is very strong, and he has protected important businesses from political shutdown, even when it came from his friends on the left.
His politics are about supporting the middle class from predations of large power structures, and preserving the rights of small business to compete in an environment free of monopoly power, as explained by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This type of FDR Democrat is not seen anymore, Sanders is one of the handful left.
You’re checking on his Senator’s page, where he was elected as an independent last time he ran. The proper place to check is with his presidential campaign. But you already know that, you’re just talking nonsense.
Polls are not a joke. The superdelegates are not important, as I explained. This is the same as for Obama, where the superdelegates were forced to flip once all the counting was done. You are talking out of your rear end, deliberately so as to shift a percent or two Hillary’s way. The superdelegates are just a stupid party trick, they don’t matter, they vote with the voters in the end, they always have, and they always will.
He’s living a reality of having been elected as an independent. It’s not about courage, he can’t flip his party designation as a Senator— the people of Vermont, the ones who voted for him as Senator, voted for an independent, not a Democrat. The people backing him as a presidential candidate back him as a Democrat. If he doesn’t get the nomination, I expect him to go right back to being an independent Senator.
I know Bernie Sanders’ politics very well, having followed him vaguely since the late 80s. He is not about state-takeovers of the economy, nor is he about handouts. He is very good for independent small business, for small farmers, and for restoring competition to industries that are monopolized. He has no handouts as part of his policy, he is not a handouts kind of guy. He is about reducing unemployment through sensibly designed policy that mimics that in Australia, which ranks higher than the US in the Heritage Foundation’s economic freedoms index. He intends on refocusing the economy away from enormous monopolies, and renegotiating trade agreements so that they improve wages overseas, and protect employees in the US. These are essential reforms, they needed to happen in the 90s, not today.
The mainstream media is extremely biased against Sanders.
Health care reform is about reducing costs of health care by at least 50%, to bring it in line with spending in other countries, like Norway and Australia, which beat the US in economic freedom according to the Heritage Foundation, hardly a liberal mouthpeice. There is no excuse for the lousy US health care system, a public minimum insurance, plus private supplemental insurance, gets you all the beneifts of both public and private systems without any cost, it’s cheaper than what we have now.
As far as “Libertarian”, on the Fed, on foreign policy, on campaign contributions, on Guantanamo and surveillance and on “the war on terror” in general, Sanders and Ron Paul are in near perfect agreement. The only difference is that Ron Paul wants a zero inflation target for the Fed, while Sanders wants a zero unemployment target, which is more sensible if you understand Keynesian economcs, which Paul refuses to do.
While some of the nonsense about Hillary is coming from right-wing sources, some of it is not. The “travelgate” scandal is an example of a real problem— she had bogus charges pressed against the White House travel staff in the 90s. That’s not illegal, but it’s not good either, and I don’t want to vote for her. That’s not made up, the travel guy went to court to prove his innocence and succeeded. She is not responsible for the Benghazi attack, but she did blame the attack on a video on YouTube, and then called for internet censorship. That’s not illegal either, but it’s unethical, considering that everyone in the administration knew the attack was for a prisoner swap, as leaked by Petraeus’s girlfriend. She was responsible for Ukraine meddling which supported a far-right neo-Nazi coup, which preceded the Russian invasian and led to it, she supported a coup in Honduras, her policy in Libya was destabilizing and no good. Sanders is a clean candidate, Hillary simply isn’t, no matter how much the far-right embellishes her misdeeds.
No, it’s a stab in the dark. It might require simultaneous negotiations for better wages overseas, and Sanders supports this also. The best I can say is that Australia has a $17/hr minimum wage without adverse effects, aside from a higher median income than the US, despite GDP per capita lower.
His policies have never been passed in the US. They are tried outside the US, in every other modernized nation, and they work everywhere they are tried. The Australian minimum wage is $17, in Finland, college is not just free, they pay you to go to college, and that’s how Finland produced Linux. Public health care is standard around the world except for the US, and the US has the worst system of any modern nation by far. These policies are long overdue, and if you avoid them now, it is doubtful that the US can stay competitive in the future.
That all depends on whether Black voters can trust him. I hope his arrest photos from 1963 will help in this regard, that was an incredibly fortuitous find.
The US health care system is terrible, as anyone who has ever been treated outside the US knows. I got better treatment in Hong Kong. The reason is that doctors here have a perverse incentive to over-prescribe and over test, and they get paid for it by a third party whose hands are tied. The only reasonable part of the US system is cash-practice, but this is hardly affected by a shift to single payer. Single payer is just to ensure that you aren’t held hostage to a hospital which decides what they will do to you, and then bills your insurance as much as they want. This is a disgraceful situation. My daughter went to the hospital with croup when she was 2 (a very common condition), and she was subjected to a battery of tests, one every 15 minutes, until I finally stepped in to say “no more”. This type of behavior is disgraceful, and it is what the US system is all about. It’s simply a way to soak insurance companies and the public.
I’m 42, and I’ll tell you that if the superdelegates decide this the wrong way, after the voters decide Sanders’ way, then Sanders would be justified in running as Independent, and under that circumstance, he will have the legitimate backing of the majority of Democratic voters. This type of split is why the superdelegates never vote against the public, they don’t want a Bull Moose on the loose.
I believe that Sanders’ policies ensure that the politicians won’t control the economy, as they are uniform, and he is not beholden to corporate backers to pass special tax-breaks and incentives. This is what leads to the corruption.
I understand you point about long-term unemployed, and I include them as “unemployed”. Sanders does this too. He is aware that the growth in jobs of the last years is in low-paying corporate retail jobs, which pay $26,000. This is why you need strong policy to fix the concentration of retail business, the concentration of banking, the concentration of communications, and Sanders is really your only hope for this.
Sanders is not proposing any squeeze of the middle tax. His only tax on the middle class is contingent on a health care plan that ends up saving you money.
If the plan doesn’t pass, nothing happens to your taxes. He is a serious candidate, and his policies are serious policies. Please read them, and think about their effect on unemployment.
I will vote for Bernie in the NY primary, and I will probably vote for the Democrat in the election, unless the stuff you are saying actually happens, in which case, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. There is no alternative for moderate reformists in a system like in the US, that’s the way it works. Parliamentary systems are a little better, but not by much, and there are problems in those systems too, due to the outsize influence of small coalition members preventing decisive action by the plurality party. There is no perfect system, I know that. But the current economic situation is an emergency. There has not been a healthy growth in small business since the late 90s.
First, Saul Alinsky was not a communist either. He was a “New Left” guy who was organizing to produce political power for leftist politicians. This type of nanny-leftism, with it’s pet causes and constituencies, led people to lose sight of the fundamental economic insights of the left, which is Keynesianism and loss of economic equilibrium.
Sanders is a hard-headed Keynesian, and he is not running on an Alinsky platform. The closest to an Alinsky Democrat is probably Obama actually.
Hillary Clinton was only schmoozing around with Alinsky and leftists because she sensed that this is the key to getting into power. Her actual policies have not been particularly on the left at any point. She supports or opposes corporate policies depending only on who is giving her money, and whether other people are paying attention or not, see bankruptcy reform.
All the stuff you linked is hysterical propaganda that misses that Clinton has never been on the real left. It is not clear that Alinsky was either. The place to go for real left stuff is Chomsky, who is the furthest left American commentator, and is respected for it worldwide.
It’s no more of a pretense than Eisenhower running as a Republican, or even Trump running as a Republican today. His independent past is part of why I respect him, and likewise Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s policies departed from Republican dogma where it mattered— he financed highway spending and stimulus. Sanders departs from Democratic party dogma on surveillance and intrusions on privacy, and on fine-tuned targeted tax breaks. His policies are best-possible because of the independence. His party affiliation, however, is clearly appropriate, just as Eisenhower’s was, and Trump’s is.
Google is your friend. For Nevada, google “election fraud unregistered caucus nevada”, here is a random link of dozens or hundreds: http://www.addictinginfo.or… . This nonsense was happening all over the state. It turned out (from an article) that union backers of Clinton were given paid leave to caucus, and they showed up en masse, without registering, whoever they were, out of state, illegal, whatever. These were not isolated events. There were long lines in Sanders districts, there were too few registration forms, there were organized union supporters packed in, and STILL Hillary only won by the slimmest of margins. Most of this is Harry Reid’s fault, but in any case, it shows you that the establishment must be defeated.
Or worse. Covert operations, a repeat of PATCON, who knows what else.
Gitmo should never have been opened in the first place. There is no real terrorism, just crazy individuals and organizations which are fighting for various powers. The last real terrorism was the Red Brigades, Basque separatists and the IRA. This modern stuff is made up covert nonsense, like the Contras, except now ISIS is self-financing.
Regarding the economy, Sanders is aware of the bad shape we are in, and will take larger steps than Obama has taken. Republicans are incapable of doing anything about it, because they don’t understand the fundamental laws of economics.
Surveys can be taken, you can find public opinion, but it’s really not telling you what policy people will favor. The Sandors policies are the best in 40 years, and you would be missing an opportunity of a lifetime to let them pass you by.
That’s nonsense. He isn’t proposing to raise taxes beyond 1984 levels, that was already rather low, as it was after the first round of Reagan tax cuts. The flattening of the tax beyond that point has been counterproductive, and even the original flattening is not useful anymore, as we have plenty of investment capital, just very few opportunities to find new demand.
The rich folks will definitely pay more, this is why they are so busy doing propaganda against Sanders.
This is incorrect. Increasing minimum wage increases hiring and spending. The process must be tied in with foreign trade negotiations which raise wages overseas, to allow an expanding market for domestic goods which are exported, and this Sanders also promised to fight for. There is no substitute for this, otherwise the economy is distorted forever.
FDR did not prolong the depression, that’s an insane right wing lie. The Keynesian policies FDR introduced were done more fully and completely in England, in Italy, in Germany, and they ended the depression immediately wherever they were implemented with zeal. In the US, it took a decade for the Republicans to stop obstructing these measures, and only the war allowed Roosevelt to implement full employment through armaments productions (lend-lease helped). The war spending was a stimulus also, except it was passed by necessity. The same Keynesian policies were used in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and in part in the 1990s, and were used overseas in every modern economy. There is no sense in denying the efficacy of Keynesian measures, it is a denial of economic fact. As Eisenhower said, “there are a few people who deny these things, but their numbers are small, and they are stupid”. Unfotunately, their numbers have grown since Eisenhowers’ time, and they now control one of the two major political parties.
Eisenhower maintained political independence as a general, and only declared as a Republican when he was nominated for President in 1952. Bernie says he is a Democrat in the exact same way Trump says he’s a Republican. Trump has less of a pedigree with his respective party than Sanders does.
That’s nonsense. Tort reform has negligible impact on medicine, that old saw was last used in the 90s, when tort was the same as now, and costs were significantly lower. The risk is not bogus lawsuits, it is that there is no entity which can negotiate with providers from a position of strength.
The causes of high college education is that it is a way to levy rent on entering high-paying occupations. The cost is ballooning because the cost is borne by future earnings. There is no similar rise in other countries, and the education system in the US suffers from the outrageous costs. Private universities can charge whatever they like, but it is outrageous that public universities are not low cost. The competition with low-cost public universities holds down the cost of college, ensuring that people can pay, this is the experience in other nations.
By stuffing unregistered Hillary voters into Nevada caucusrooms. The amount of fraud in that caucus was unbelievable, and it was probably decisive in swinging the state her way. Sanders won the Latino vote, at least the Latino vote that went out to talk to exit pollsters.
They used to import cocaine and distribute LSD for much the same effect.
He doesn’t need to be more aggressive. His supporters do. We should write about it, he shouldn’t need to do it. He’s not an attack dog, he’s a serious candidate.
A real stimulus hasn’t happened since the 1950s either. Sanders probably won Nevada, by the way, he won the Hispanic vote. He lost the unregistered caucusgoer vote, that all went to Hillary. That caucus was fraudulent.
She also needed fraud to win NV, and even with the paid-leave for union workers, and the enormous numbers of unregistered Hillary caucus-goers, she was only able to secure a small win.
The numbers that take the fraudulent caucus data, and try to split it up into Latino districts. The caucus was skewed by unregistered caucusgoers, and union-members who were given paid leave to caucus for HIllary. The exit pollsters were sampling actual registered Democratic voters. It was the most serious case of primary election fraud I have ever seen.
There is nothing to dig up, or make up. This type of attack doesn’t hold water, it’s a false avenue, and they will waste a lot of effort doing this nonsense, when any voter can easily be assured by seeing Sanders’ long record of supporting small business and independent farmers in Vermont, and opposing intrusive big brother in Washington.
Sanders << Clinton ~= Trump < Bush II << Cheney
The turnout is not low at all, just lower than in 2008, when there was no Republican contest worth discussing. These are open primaries, and the independent turnout is split with the Donald. Sanders has been getting excellent turnout, except in Nevada, where the voting was marred by massive fraud: large numbers of unregistered Clinton caucusers, Clinton union on paid leave, long lines at Sanders supporting locations. Sanders has his turnout, and more.
AFL-CIO did not endorse, but a lot of other unions did. Sanders has a great chance, just vote for him.
It produces economic growth and reduces unemployment. Counterintuitive but true, and verified by repeated experiments in this country and abroad. The Australian minimum wage is slightly past $15/hr, and they have a lower GDP/capita and a higher median income.
You have google. Use it: observer dot com/2016/02/harry-reid-rushed-home-to-nevada-to-help-rig-caucus-results-for-clinton/ and usuncut dot com/politics/the-nevada-caucus-is-a-complete-fiasco/ and many others (replace “dot” with “.”, links hold up comment).
It’s not that catastrophic, the same forces that lead them to sell out can force them to toe the line with a Sanders presidency. Just look out for the next wave of candidates in 2 years.
Sorry, I was totally out of line. I just meant his supporters need to work on this stuff. As a candidate, it is not great for him to do. It came out weird.
I don’t think it is possible to say with definitive confidence that Bernie Sanders knows any more than the public about Hillary Clinton’s past. I am not sure that Hillary Clinton is a criminal exactly, she just does shady things. I know the type of shady things, filing bogus charges against the White House travel fellow in the 90s, PATCON, the covert things in Ukraine and Libya, claiming that a video was responsible for the Benghazi attack, and then asking for YouTube censorship because of this bogus claim. Are these things illegal? Not really. But they certainly are not good things, and they don’t make one confident in voting for a candidate.
Her secrecy penchant, like the secret server, is troubling, because it can be used for illicit deals that nobody knows about, especially not Sanders.
That’s nonsense. Reducing income inequality increases economic growth, that’s why the high taxes of the 1950s were adopted in the first place. The reason to tax very high incomes is because there are no high incomes in economic equilibrium, the kind you read about in textbooks on economics.
But despite this, his proposed top rates are nothing like Eisenhower’s, they are 50-ish, the same as after the first round of Reagan tax cuts.
The comments on underarm deoderant are making a statement about priorities. There is a lot of nonsense corporate attention to diversifying products that are essentially the same product in different cases (look at the ingredients in ostensibly different deoderant products), at the same time as major social issues are ignored sytematically. It’s a statement about the priorities of society, not about economic efficiency.
I agree the attacks will happen. I disagree that they will work.
Anyone who reviews what Reagan and his government was doing with the Contras can see that he was right about this. He was not a Marxist Leninist, but he respected the right of self-determination in Nicaragua. Ortega was reelected president recently, as a moderate Christian, rather than as a Marxist. Ortega disputed that he was a Marxist Leninist even back in the 80s, that was just the label the media in the US stuck on him.
The nuclear freeze movement was trying to prevent the Reagan administration from placing missiles in Europe that could reach Moscow in about seven minutes. The existence of Pershing II missiles in Europe nearly made me lose my mind, at age 10, 11, 12, 13, from constant terror of accidental war, until Reagan and Gorbachev got rid of them. Haing a five-minute retaliation time was Reagan taking a tremendous and monumentally stupid risk of the end of the world for next to no gain for anyone. That’s something else that’s clearer in hindsight.
In 1980 a million people marched in New York City, in the largest demonstration in US history, against the nuclear arms race, and Reagan’s beligerant attitude toward the USSR. In Europe, 4 million nuclear freeze activists were marching at one point. They were the only light at the end of the tunnel regarding the awful inexcusable cold war tensions of the 80s, which unlike the tensions of the 60s, were simply caused by a single irresponsible person— Reagan. I would recommend you take a look at the made for TV film “Threads” to get a sense of my nightly childhood dreams (it’s a bit milder than the horrors that a 10 year old subconscious produced in 1983, but it’s the general ballpark).
It was impossible to be a leftist in the 80s without meeting Marxists. It was impossible actually to avoid meeting Marxists in any capacity, they were everywhere. The difference in the left is that they didn’t have the illusion that the communists had some sort of special secret sauce, or were going to take over the world. The left and the communists parted ways largely in 1956, with the Hungarian revolution.
Sanders was never a Marxist-Leninist, and he was always supportive of small business and small farmers, as the left in the US always has. The US left is very libertarian, and Sanders is a great example.
Reagan was right about what? Pershing IIs in Europe? He himself reversed course in 1985, and agreed to pull out intermediate range missiles. He was nothing but a reckless madman in 1983 and 1984. He changed when he saw “The Day After”.
Nicaragua wasn’t communist in the 80s, any more than it is communist now. Ortega was more authoritarian in the 80s, but the opposition was a bunch of US funded Contras, and Pinochet style fascists that enjoyed pulling leftist’s fingernails out.
The Iran Contra affair justified Bernie Sanders’ position completely. Reagan’s administration was using dirty money not authorized by Congress to finance the Contras without congressional approval. It’s the same covert nonsense that gave you all the other atrocities in US history, from the Iran coup in 1956 to the recent coups in Honduras or Ukraine.
They paid a ton of taxes, although there were loopholes. The biggest loophole was simply not taking a high salary, and gaining property instead. This is still the preferred way to amass a personal fortune.
He did very little to change Russian spending on anything, that’s a conservative myth, which began propagating in the mid 90s. You people never read internal Soviet documents, I did, in the late 80s, when they were current (I think I was the only one, actually, they’re very boring). The USSR was restructured in 1986 or so to allow market oriented profit-based self-allocations in state industries. This immediately led to shortages, because the industries were all monopolies, so they would just jack up the price to meet profit quotas. This led to grumbling, and further reform, and the system was so unstable from the decades of repression, that it collapsed by itself. Reagan happened to be the guy in charge when it happened, or more accurately, Bush I.
The Soviet system could not sustain itself because it was grossly inefficient. Gorbachev knew this because he was in charge of Ukraine farming in the politburo, and he was aware of the productivity gap between the factory farms in the USSR and Western agriculture. He was introducing market reforms to close the gap. Those reforms were originally suggested in 1965, but people didn’t listen inside the USSR, because they were worred that the system would collapse. They were right. The moment there were free-markets, there were folks like Yeltsin who supported the free-marketeers, and they dismantled the system and privatized the state industries at the first chance they got, creating the Russian oligarchy practically overnight in 1991.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not a well managed transition to Capitalism, unlike Poland, or Hungary, or Czechoslovakia.
Don’t trust the New York Times. They didn’t nationalize anything, and they didn’t make 5 year plans.
Russia was producing missiles at the same stupid plodding pace it always did, until the START treaties. Nothing changed in spending with Reagan, the only thing that changed is that the Soviets became incredibly paranoid that Reagan was planning a first strike.
Yes I do. The increases in budget were relatively small compared to the US arms buildup. The budget wouldn’t have helped had it been all thrown into agriculture— Soviet agriculture was crappy because it was state managed top-down, the same reason Soviet everything was crappy, except science and big industry, which are top-down in the West as well.
Gorbachev didn’t bother throwing money at the problem, he just introduced market reforms. That was recognized as necessary by top planners since the mid 1960s, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… . The “Gorbachev” in 1965 was Alexei Kosygin, who wanted to make profitability tagets for state enterprises, to mimic capitalism completely. That was only introduced by Gorbachev.
It’s not flailing. They are simply not communists, and never were. Sanders pointed this out in 1986 or so, in an interview about the role of the press. The statement that Ortega is a communist was denied by Ortega, and if he had been, he wouldn’t have been re-elected.
What’s the point of the link? I am telling you the truth, as best as I remember it. I was following it closely at the time.
He denied it by not implementing communist policy. That sort of makes him “not a communist” by definition. Chavez has a better claim to be a communist than Ortega does.
I didn’t claim it was a right wing think tank. The Universities are not great on this stuff either. You need to read dedicated historians and people writing at the time, and even they are not very good. The Russians are especially terrible, as they are structurally more biased to distort the events of the late 80s, because they all hate communism (with reason). But it doesn’t help to have ideological historians, even if their ideology comes with justification, as they are talking about a system that made their lives miserable for 70 years.
If you revere him as one of the greatest presidents, I don’t think you’re going to be voting for Sanders no matter what the ad.
He was a transformative president, that’s true. But Sanders platform is a counter-revolution in that regard, and is meant to undo the damage that the supply-side economics caused. If people still believe in that voodoo, then Sanders has no chance, but then again, the US has no chance either, because that stuff doesn’t work.
Reagan was sane on science, unlike Bush II, he preserved civil liberties more or less, unlike Bush II, and he wasn’t completely owned by corporations, unlike Bush II. But his policies were only benefiting large entities, not small business. I don’t think Reagan was a catastrophe, because the US needed investment, but I think his legacy is problematic, as his economic doctrine is simply false, and it has become dogma in the Republican party.
Single payer health care makes health-care cheaper, and subsidized tuition at public universities makes universities cheaper. That’s from the experience of Australia, which is ranked higher than the US on the Heritage Foundation’s list of countries with economic liberty. Their minimum wage is also $17. I didn’t see any other “free stuff” in Sanders’ platform.
His platform is not about “free stuff”, it is about reducing unemployment, and introducing sane Keynesian economic policy.
There hasn’t been a capitalism functioning without Keynesian stimulus since the 1930s. The Keynesian interventions are really based on a theory of “aggregate demand” which is really straight out of Marx. I mean, not that Keynesianism is Marxism, but the concept of aggregate demand stimulus is derived from the observation of Marx that worker wages don’t generate sufficient demand for the products they produce.
Not really. The health care taxes are probably less than what you are paying in premiums. The college is coming from a transaction tax which is necessary for other reasons, and the jobs program is coming from corporate taxes, it’s really a redirect of corporate welfare to jobs. Sanders is very careful about not overtaxing people. He is really determined to reduce bureaucracy. I mean it when I say he’s a libertarian. He’s just a left-libertarian.
Nonsense. In 2008, the Democratic nomination was the only contest period. A lot of independents were out voting in the open Democratic primaries and caucuses, now they are split between Trump voters going to the Republicans and Sanders supporters going to the Democrats. The turnout was exceedingly high outside of Nevada, where it was deliberately suppressed and the counting skewed. Trump supporters are flaky celebrity-chasers, so you don’t know what they’ll do.
Ok, I’ll help you: observer.com/2016/02/harry-… and usuncut.com/politics/the-ne…
There were hundreds or perhaps a thousand or two of unregistered caucusgoers for Hillary, that’s the surest sign of election fraud there is in a caucus, you can’t rig a caucus any other way, the people in the room serve as an automatic audit. You can see these unregistered Clinton people appear in videos, this stuff was all over social media on the caucus day, and has been reported in several newspapers.
The way the fraud was done is that the unions supporting Clinton arranged for paid time off to caucus, the Sanders supporters had to arrange for time off themselves. They then got everyone to the location regardless of qualification for voting in Nevada, the folks included illegals and out-of-staters for all we know, they were unregistered, and they made sure they all supported Clinton. These people were placed in the caucus room to skew the result, and amounted to a large fraction of the caucusgoers, more than enough to reverse the official results.This was combined with the usual nonsense of long lines for Sanders people, deliberate push-registering for Clinton,miscounts, etc.
I was never anti-union before that caucus. I guess I am now. Unions are not set up to act as a mechanism for election fraud, they are for collective bargaining.
The TRUE “wage productivity gap” arises from innovation in industries with potential for growth. That true gap is allocated to growth in the industry until the innovation is spread around to the entire sector. The FALSE “wage productivity gap” is due to crummy wages, and this is the margin of the wealthiest people in America, the Walton family. There is nothing innovative about WalMart, it is the opposite of innovation. There is nothing innovative in traditional oil and natural gas, they are innovation killers, they don’t even accept that oil is abiotic. The companies with the largest profits are in old industry today, or in monopolized communication, or in banking with ties to central banking, not in innovative new industry.
Marx’s observation is that the violation of Say’s law comes from competition with the unemployed, and it is true whenever you have unemployment. The unemployement means that employees cannot negotiate a wage equal to productivity, because they are afraid of getting fired and replaced by someone desperate, and that means that Say’s law is a complete fantasy in any real economy. That’s why Keynesian measures are needed.
There is no innovation explanation for the productivity gap, there is no equilibrium explanation for the gap, it is purely due to the fact that ownership is concentrated, profits are extracted at the top, and there is no bargaining power for employees at the bottom to negotiate a fair wage, because of threats of firing individual workers who negotiate, and nowadays threats to worker collectives of shutting down plants and moving overseas.
Marx agreed with you that corporate profits would fall to zero, because he also understood equilibrium economics. This is a mistake you both made. Marx couldn’t foresee that governments would step in to shore up aggregate demand with spending and redistribution, and at the same time maintain the skewed distribution of corporate income to the top of a heirarchy. He was writing in 1867.
Profits only go to zero in worker owned industries, where workers decide to split the profits after allocating capital for investment. Then the workers have the power to negotiate wages equal to productivity. Profits going to zero can also happen in publicly owned companies with strong unions and strong stockholders organizations, because of pressure from the public stock owners to redistribute profits to the stockholding public through stock buybacks and/or dividends. But this shareholder power is negated by the ability of managers to issue new stock or low-cost options to themselves, which is really something that should be illegal, as it is a form of fraud by devaluation.
We have never seen a market where Say’s law is true, and this is the reason Keynesian measures are used. With a transition to employee ownership and a competitive management recruited by resume and paid in salary, you would have the type of market you are thinking about. But this market resembles voluntary libertarian anarchic socialism, with worker ownership and distribution of profits, in conjunction with public corporations with diffuse ownership and public distribution of profits, more than any previously existing capitalism. That’s what economic equilibrium looks like.
There is no chance of Say’s law ever becoming true in any other kind of ownership structure. The violations of Say’s law are mainstream economics, and as I said, it requires willful suspension of disbelief, and ignoring a mountain of quantitative data, to blind yourself like this. I don’t want to have a conversation with someone who chooses to blind himself, so I’ll bid you a good day.
He was right to listen to the BLM protesters, he protested the same way when he was younger. The measure of a politician is not how well he fights the powerless who raise their voice, it is how well he fights the powerful interests that get in the way of change. Sanders is the strongest politician there is.
Minimum wage is not about cost of living, it is about closing the gap between productivity and wages. It cannot be addressed locally, because corporations flee from a region with higher minimum wage to a region with a lower minimum wage. This is why we have a Federal minimum wage, and this is why it should be increased to at least Australian levels of $17/hr. The productivity per worker in Australia is lower, and yet their median income is higher.
Sanders policies are duplicating those existing in Australia, which ranks higher than the US in the Heritage Foundation’s list of countries ranked by economic liberty.
I didn’t forget anything.
The reason Sanders compares college loans to secured loans is because college loans are guaranteed by the Federal government for years, and represent no risk to the lender. They are secured by the Federal government. The interest rates, however, have not gone down to reflect this fact. That means you need to step in and make sure that it happens anyway.
Loans for credit cards and college are being given at usurious rates, due to consolidation in banking and credit. There is no competition for lending rates since the 90s, when all the banks raised their credit-card rates in tandem to 20%. Credit cards used to be competitive, they aren’t any longer. Payday lending is not a competitive industry, and it is charging outrageous rates to those that can least afford to be paying them. This is why postal banking is important, and why Sanders has proposed to introduce this in the US.
I am adding the employer contribution and yours together, and comparing to the current cost you pay in copays and deductibles (and for drugs), and your employer pays for insurance. Together, you end up paying 30-50% less with single payer, because there are lots of negotiators who are no longer necessary in single payer.
The decrease in transactions in the Wall St. tax is taken into account. Part of the reason for the tax is to eliminate the fraud of microtrading, where a broker sets up a server a few microseconds closer to the trading floor, and intercepts requests for purchase early, and pre-empts them by a purchase and resell at a few pennies more. This process is one of the worst frauds in markets, and it is eliminated entirely by even the tiniest tax on transactions. The income from the transaction tax is estimated at between $100 bn and $200bn depending on which transactions survive, it is far bigger than $200bn if you assume nothing changes, but nobody does that. The public college thing costs $70bn, there would be money left over under any reasonable estimate of the effects.
You are simply repeating the nonsense talking points Republicans say, without thinking about them to see if they make sense.
Relax, this is a preview of the main election arguments against Sanders. It isn’t even 100% clear Noesis1 is a Republican, he probably is, but if he isn’t, he is simply testing the propaganda the Republicans will use. I could have written his side just as well as he did, he is doing a good job going through the points Sanders will need to counter.
It also matters how persuasive Sanders is. His moderate gun stance, his unwavering support of civil liberties, and his strong support of small business from monopolistic competition, these given him enormous credibility with moderates and Republicans. The negatives come from sloganeering and smears, which can be less effective if you counter them point by point, but it takes effort.
You already explained to me about Chavez, I got it the first time. I was just saying that he had more of a claim to being a Marxist Leninist than Ortega, because he nationaized the oil industry, and had planning of development. He’s not a communist either, just more so than Ortega, who wasn’t a communist at all.
This is simply not correct. The economics Friedman does is accurate, the economics critics do is not. This can be tested by simply doing Sanders’ policies and noting the resulting growth, and hopefully it will be, because it will go as Friedman predicts.
No country in the world is doing as badly at income distribution as the US. Fixing this produces immense growth, and this is not fantasy. The reason the growth projections are so high is because the US economy is so broken.
Except that’s not how economics works. The nations just harvests more timber. The economic policies in the US have not aimed at maximizing growth since the 1960s.
What you are missing is that something can be a gross violation of ethics without being illegal. Her private server is not illegal probably, but it is a violation of ethics— it is what Nixon would use to send email to his plumbers. Her Travelgate indictment, the pressing of bogus charges against the White House travel agent, that was not illegal. But it was extremely unethical. She wasn’t responsible for the Benghazi attack, but she was responsible for blaming it on a video on YouTube, a video that had nothing to do with the attack, as everyone inside the administration knew, it was for a prisoner swap. This was leaked by Petraeus’s girlfriend. She then went on to call for censorship of YouTube because of this. That does not add up to an honest politician, it is impossible to support her and support clean government.
He means “liberals” in the classic definition— laissez faire marketeers, not in the twisted US definition, where it means someone pretending to be on the left.
That’s what “liberal” means in academic discussions outside the view of the general public.
One step at a time. There are ways to ensure capital is distributed more broadly too, just we aren’t ready for this until Sanders’ plan is implemented.
Capitalism works as intended when workers are not kept in line, but demand higher wages and reduced profits to the top.
Should have been “normative”, typo.
The theoretical model of market equilibrium is a real mathematical thing, it’s as real as any other mathematical construction. It can be analyzed independent of power structures, because it is objective and mathematical. You can make up computerized fake simulated economies and study how they respond to perturbations. It has merit, because it tells you how much resources to allocate to any one industry independent of political considerations, just from the demand generated, and the price per unit in equilibrium, and the profitability at equilibrium. It’s just that markets in real life are always terribly far from the idealized equilibrium due to the ownership structure.
The idea of using market equilibrium for organizing the planned (non-market) economy is something that was advocated by Alexei Kosygin and Alexander Dubcek, and implemented by Tito and Kardelj. Planning by profitability and local decisionmaking was the goal of the failed 1965 economic reform in the USSR and of the collapse-inducing 1985 reforms. It is next to impossible to produce this reform within communist party rule, because it requires independent decision making and purchases at the local level, and this conflicts with the power of the nomenklatura to direct overall economic planning. The failure of these reforms, and all other attempts, are what led to widespread justified belief that a communist party revolution cannot end at an efficiently self-directed economy and political liberty.
The 1965 reforms were difficult to implement because the state directors kept skimming enterprise profits for big projects, while even the enterprises that got to keep enough capital that should have had capital for expansion weren’t able to get construction or machinery for their expansions justified by their profitability, because they were not embedded in an economy of small independent businesses that could fill their orders. But even with the supply limitations induced by the lousy economy they were embedded in, the enterprise growth under the half-hearted reforms was still better than the top-down planned monstrosity that existed in the USSR pre 1965 and in 1970-1985, when the reforms were reversed.
I don’t have patience for philosophy or theorizing. The problems of the left are problems of economic efficiency and innovation, problems which are largely solved in capitalism, at least when it isn’t dominated by large monopolistic firms. The problems of capitalism is in concentrating ownership to a few, producing monopolistic firms, which end up paying unfair wages far below productivity, and overall demand drops from the low wages. The band-aid for this failure is Keynesian spending. The real fix is employee ownership and systemic anti-trust policy in a graduated corporate tax.
It is not reasonable to ignore the successes of capitalist theory, Marx certainly didn’t. He used idealized competitive capitalist equilibrium to organize his critique.
That’s an theory regarding political systems. I don’t have an opinion or a theory regarding political systems, they are too complicated for me to claim to understand, and I don’t think Wallerstein understands them so well either, there is very little you can do to test these theories, unlike in economics, where you can measure inflation and growth, and unemployment. I trust quantitative predictions more than vague social ones, although I understand that vague social things are necessary too. I just don’t care about that stuff. I care about predicting numbers accurately.
I read two of the three articles already, they are interesting, and I have nothing against Wallerstein. I am trying to propose practical solutions to pressing immediate problems, that I think need to be implemented right now, as reforms, regardless of what else we choose to do in the future.
You mean Ilya Prigogine. The theory of strange attractors, bifurcations, and chaotic dynamical systems is not very useful for economics or sociology, except as a source of loose analogy, because societies are complex computational systems, not simple dynamical systems. Within economic behavior, there are dynamical systems which can be analyzed this way, but they are better analyzed in terms of “we do this, and then this happens” marginal analysis rather than in terms of cycles and response, because they are either simple responses or unanalyzable complex human systems.
I don’t believe in 60 year cycles, or cycles of any sort. Schumpeter is writing a long time ago, before the random walk and Levy flight aspects of markets were introduced (that was the late 60s, by Mandelbrot and others). The idea of cycles is problematic, although there are certain cyclical things, they are better modelled as stochastic bubble-bust (which is not a cycle, although it is a predictable collapse). The idea of “cycle” implies inertia, like a mass on a spring, and I don’t see any inertia in markets at all. I would like to see the data regarding the 60 year business, even as a link, I don’t believe it exists.
I don’t believe in grand theories. I believe in fixing the problems that appear. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the economic doctrine of market equilibrium, and it will never be replaced as long as humans have economies, because it is just an allocation prescription. It doesn’t dictate that the few must control the many, it actually shows you the opposite.
Infinite growth is possible because labor is not just about producing material things, it is also about producing software, film, music, books, designs, pictures, and other commodities whose resource requirements are relatively negligible. There is also growth in applying recycling techniques, and extracting energy from nuclear sources, which are unused by nature.
The same institutions that have no ethical system are driven purely by profit, and can be controlled by profit using economical prods set up by law. It is not sensible to argue that profit is an unethical motive, it is simply a motive of economic efficiency without consideration for those aspects which must be imposed externally as a system of costs and constraints, to prevent environmental destruction and to prevent concentration of ownership.
These measures are not being implemented today, I believe this is because there is no consensus on what measures need to be implemented. I think that must change quickly, so that we can concentrate on passing the measures which ensure sustainable growth. The problems of environmental destruction are not solved by a socialist revolution, as the leaders of a socialist state are no less motivated by considerations of increased production over externalities of pollution.
Sanders won NV except for the widespread fraud. Remember that you only need a well informed 5% to sway others, but it requires social interaction, and young people who are online working to persuade ignorant older people who aren’t.
Thanks, I did enjoy it. I want to add that the revolution will require nuclear power.
Poor whites, yes. Blacks, no. This is the first time. Historically, black voters have always supported the most progressive realistic candidate. Until now.
He’s too far left for the moderate Democrats. He is not too far left for the Republicans. The thing you don’t understand is that the Republicans are not hostile to “the left”, they are hostile to political cronyism. Sanders is not about political cronyism, his policy is sincere, and he can easily win a significant number of non-ideologue Republicans.
‘Tis a pity you are too stupid to understand Chomsky’s sentence structure. Generative grammar is what you use to construct the “C” programming language, and every other programming language on Earth, and the recursive structure of modern written language is undisputable, except by the irremediably uneducable.
Chomsky has not championed anti-Semitism, he just doesn’t like Israel’s colonial policies. The only person who should be ashamed of himself is staring you in the mirror.
Of course he supports the first amendment, you conservative fool, he opposes unlimited money going to election organizations affiliated with candidates. Corporations are not people, and money to candidates or affiliated superPACs is not speech, it is bribery. This had been established law for decades before Citizens United.
He has never interfered with universities’ decisions, but universities should never set up “Milton Friedman” institutes, of their own free will, the same as their shouldn’t be setting up “Bernie Madoff” institutes. Friedman is a quack and a fraud.
>>> “Oil is abiotic” what? Nobody takes that Soviet crap seriously anymore…
You are right! Western scientists are stupid about this still. This is a demonstration of the corruption of Western science. Oil is abiotic, that’s a fact of nature, and it is demonstrated by oil in deep boreholes 10km down, in the USSR and in Vietnam, by He dissolved in oil (the He is produced from alpha decay in the mantle), by the chemistry of formation demonstrated in pressure anvil experiments first performed in the USSR (methane is unstable to form hydrocarbon chains in the mantle) and reproduced in the West by Thomas Gold in the 1990s, again in the 2000s, and again last year. Each of these by themselves is conclusive evidence. The Soviets were right about this, which is why the Russians and Ukrainians are the only ones still who know anything about oil formation.
The two points of evidence in favor of biology are extremely weak: there are trace biological markers in oil, a few proteins, these are due to deep Earth bacteria and archaea, and there is carbon isotope segregation in oil, which is not due to biological origin, but due to percolation a long distance through narrow channels (this was an isotope separation method at Los Alamos incidentally). These are the only two pieces of evidence which support biogenic theory, and they are both extremely weak. There is no chemical path from living chemistry to oil, the historical path goes the other way— life is originated in petrochemical hydrocarbons in contact with atmospherically generated amino-acid chains in the early Earth.
WalMart reduces prices by bad contracts. The wages at small stores include the owners profits, you don’t know what you are talking about, and you are repeating yourself without learning anything. I don’t have patience for propaganda from simpletons.
When employees get together to purchase a business, as for example in United Airlines, the government stages a false flag to bankrupt them. Nevertheless the employees will do so anyway, it is required to have a sustainable future.
Economic growth is not something you can localize. When you raise wages in Minnesota, and not in Idaho, business which can relocate will relocate, and those that can’t will pay the higher wage. This reduces tax reciepts and employment in Minnesota. This is why minimum wage needs to be national.
Competition only forces corporations to pay higher wages when there is no unemployment. When the alternative is destitution, they will pay minimum wage. This is “kindergarten obvious”, which is why this discussion is pointless.
You need to read and understand Marx. Marx is the only economist worth reading, the rest are only writing in their self interest. You can reproduce all 20th century economics from Marx’s writings for yourself, it just requires translating to modern mathematical economics language. Then you find you are a Keynesian.
You are not a Keynesian, or anything else. You are just an idiot. I don’t approve of your comments getting deleted, but I don’t want to listen to you gibberish anymore. I explained to you what to read, Capital I, it’s online, it’s free, it’s out of copyright, it’s up to you to read it and understand it.
Grayson is not a socialist progressive, he’s an unethical Democrat. He is simply scamming the Sanders people to send him money. He wants Bernie’s email list, so he fishes for emails with a poll, then he spams the Sanders people with calls for money. I would recommend donating to Tulsi Gabbard instead, she is a principled Democrat. Grayson is being investigated for ethics violations for running some sort of investment scam while in Congress.
Grayson does not sincerely support Sanders, he cynically wants sanders supporters to support him with donations. He is trying to reproduce Bernie’s list of donors, by using an online poll, and then scams the donors for money by impersonating DFA and Sanders campaign emails. He is under investigation for ethics violations, his conduct shows that these accusations aren’t baseless, and he doesn’t deserve a nickel. Tulsi Gabbard would be the one that does, and if Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, it is heartening to note that she will be available for many years.
Global warming will still be a problem even with 2bn people and reliance on carbon fuel, even with a transportation overhall and compact communities, and I am sure you are not advocating genocide. Good nuclear, like LFTR or fast-neutron breeders is sustainable indefinitely, despite the propaganda one hears. I emphasize this, because this is a blind spot on the left.
You are impossibly dense then, if you don’t recognize the recursive structure in natural language. I learned generative grammar as a small child, from specifications of computer languages. It’s dead easy to specify natural language grammars using it, for toy languages. For real languages, one needs an extension of BNF, which is something I made up as an adult— the commutative context free grammar (another person in Poland made it up at the same time for other reasons, and he called it “partially commutative context free grammar”, and didn’t apply it to natural language, just studied it theoretically).
The point is that generative grammar is here to stay, if only for the structure description of artificial languages. But in the “partially commutative” form, it describes natural language to a tee. This is something you are too stupid to get, whatever education you have, or don’t have.
Chomsky is dead on accurate on Israel. I am a Jew born in Israel, I have experience. There is no double standard, Israel has behaved badly since 1967, they weren’t atrocious before then, despite the horrible ethnic cleansing, since they were forced to balance the needs of millions of Jewish refugees with that of native people, but they weren’t great in 1948 either. But since 1980, when the Likud took over and decided to treat the occupied land as permanently occupied, they have been committing war crime after war crime, and since 1987, I believe it is impossible to serve in the Israeli military without selling your soul to the devil.
You don’t need a link for travelgate— she filed charges and the fellow went to court to get his name cleared, and won. Likewise you don’t need a link to know that she blamed the Benghazi attack on a video on YouTube and then called for internet censroship— that wasn’t so long ago that you would have forgotten. You also don’t need a link to know that she set up her own server, she admitted that she did this. This is already a sign of corruption. But if you demand a link, look at Elizabeth Warren’s characterization of her vote on bankruptcy reform. Clinton is corrupt, there are no two ways about it, and if you want Nixon IV for president, God help you.
Nicaragua wasn’t communist in 1985.
The USSR didn’t have any real gulags after 1955, there were a few political prisoners, but mostly the dissidents were kept quiet by losing their job, or by the intimidation that they might lose their job.
The Soviet labor system was not slave labor, people could choose their jobs, the salary was set by administrators using heavy incentives to draw the right number of people in to difficult positions. Actually, the labor system was a hidden pure free market, as the planners were operating by supply and demand (although nobody in the USSR would admit it). This labor system was set up in the mid 1930s, and under this system, unemployment went to zero, and never came back. That was the one of the only successes.
The labor system was not amenable to foreign investment, but the USSR did all the heavy industry themselves, oil, steel, natural resources, nuclear, etc, so the only investment they desperately needed was small business. This was not possible within the Soviet system, and it hampered independent devlopment, and destroyed consumer goods. Yugoslavia did much better in this regard.
The American mentality must change, and these is no way to change it without a serious challenge. Reagan faced a similar problem in selling his John Birch brand of Goldwater conservatism, and he succeeded. The American public is not as brainwashed as it looks, at least, not anymore. Clinton is a corporate candidate, and it is difficult to see her doing anything useful.
It’s not different from the US, except the government is slightly more authoritarian.
It’s not that active anymore, it just has a few decrepit state businesses. All the development is private, and this started in the free enterprise zones in 1980, and they never looked back. The state has 5 year plans, but they are mostly in purchasing high speed rail, things like this, normal Keynesian spending like in the US.
Ok, so Bernie is outraising all the candidates of 2106, but it’s not a fair comparison, because the 2106 race is Senate and House only.
All his stuff was accomplished in Australia. Are they better at politics than us? It just requires a bit of imagination, and a movement with money, and Sanders is building that. The NRA has only 4 million members, and they can get anything they want, because they are willing to dump money on House and Senate races. Bernie is aiming to build a movement as big as the NRA, and with deeper pockets.
Because you don’t want another Oklahoma City bombing, another Waco, another “I killed Bin Laden” moment, or another “I invaded a country in the Middle East” moment either. Trump is insane on policy, but I can see why people vote for him. He has all but promised that he will prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes.
I will vote for Hillary (sigh) if she is the nominee, but I understand the attraction. If she would promise to prosecute Cheney, great, but she won’t, because she would be next in the docket.
It’s not about food stamps. Voters in the South don’t share Sanders’ “New York Values”, if you get my drift (taps hooked nose).
Sanders is a better constitutionalist than Cruz, as he does not support government privacy violations, or Guantanamo, nor is he complicit in murdering American citizens with drones, or noncitizens either, nor does he support targeted tax breaks.
He isn’t promising anything that isn’t standard in Australia, and he isn’t about gimmies. He’s about reducing unemployment through Keynesian economics, something only the US has forgotten about.
I meant that there is still a lot of anti-Semitism in the South.
Guantanamo is a terror tactic, there is no guarantee that citizens will not suffer. It violates international conventions for treatment of POWs too. Sanders is similar to Rand Paul, except his vision is to aim monetary policy at zeroing out unemployment. Unlike Paul, he is a Keynesian, meaning he understands economics. Paul is not a Keynesian, so he doesn’t understand economics.
There is no serious expansion of government in Sanders plan, the health care is a payment reshuffling that reduces bureaucracy, while the transaction tax on Wall St. is required to halt microtrading (which is really a form of computerized fraud). The college stuff is about payment to state and city universities, it doesn’t require picking winners and losers.
Sanders is very strong on all the points of liberty, despite the knee-jerk reaction you might have to someone on the left. The far left were the original libertarians, the American version is a perversion that removes the provisions that liberty requires reducing large corporate power, as well as government power.
I’m sorry to inform you, but it’s not the government. The reason college costs have gone up is that colleges charge rent on high-paying jobs, and they can do that because there is a 10 year window for repaying student loans.
In other countries, costs are kept down by competition with public universities, which are free. That’s the model Sanders proposes to import.
The tax increases are contingent on a health plan that will save you money.
If your taxes go up under Sanders, your health care bill, or that of your employer, just disappeared. In net, your take-home pay will go up. It’s ridiculous to complain about this.
She can’t realistically do that. If Sanders wins the elected delegates, he will be the nominee. It’s as simple as that. Everything else is fear mongering to keep people from voting their conscience.
If he wins, it probably won’t be a squeaker. Even if he wins by a squeaker and the superdelegates don’t flip, he will be justified in running as an independent, and his supporters will not go to Clinton. She needs to win fair and square. So far, the fraud in Nevada’s caucus is not a good sign for party unity. I was considering voting for Trump for a day after the NV fraud, even though I think Trump is the worst candidate I have ever seen.
I will vote in the NY primary, it’s late. I am not a sir, more of a “dude”.
Zero percent of his money is from Republicans. He will defeat any Republican, he runs strong with Independents, because of his own history as an independent. I mean, even the right-leaning Ventura supports him strongly.
Yeah, subtract out the superdelegates, and you get the proper picture. Sanders can win, but it won’t be easy.
His plans are on his website. College is cheap, and is covered by a transaction tax, which is required to end microtrading anyway. Health care is expensive, but your taxes will be less than the sum of your and your employer’s health care bill, at least if you are not a millionaire. Both plans are implemented in Australia which outranks the US in the Heritage Foundation’s measures of economic freedom (Australia comes in at no 5).
It doesn’t have to be illegal to disqualify you from winning a Presidential race. Having your own private server is a sure sign of corruption. It’s mostly legal (except for classified stuff, but let’s presume she can wriggle out of that), but it’s no good. The same about pressing charges against the White House travel staff. It’s legal. It’s just incredibly corrupt, and should be disqualifying. The same about blaming the Benghazi attack on a video. Legal. But atrocious. You can go on for quite a while with that lady.
They are not united in Australia, they just have a cleaner legislature. All of Sanders’ policies are poll-tested with ordinary Americans, and they all have a majority. Health care is the least universally popular, at 52%, but it’s still a majority. You are too used to a Congress that doesn’t listen.
Clinton tried to pass universal care, it’s true. So did Truman and Nixon. But the experience with Obamacare has made it clear that nothing else will work, and, paraphrasing Churchill, Americans only do the right thing after trying everything else first.
Sanders’ money-raising power scares the bejeesus out of Congressional candidates (disclosure: I am responsible for .0004% of his campaign) . With the ability to raise 40 million in 1 month, he can steamroller any individual opponent out of Congress or the Senate in any election, by simply pumping money into the race. If you think this is not a motivator, I will point you to the success record of the NRA.
Oh boy. I don’t know. I hope to God he isn’t serious about the racist crap he says on the campaign trail, but I think he would be a bigoted son-of-a-bitch anyway, and he wouldn’t know what a civil-liberties violation looked like if it smacked him on the head. The only positive thing I can say about him is that he is the first to squarely blame Bush for 9/11 (although not in the usual way, he is not a truther, but he associates with them sometimes), so it follows that there is a chance that he might investigate Bush administration officials for war crimes. He might not. I think it’s 50/50. But I think that’s as good a chance as you have with Sanders. That’s the only point of sanity I can see in his otherwise repulsive campaign, but it’s a biggie. I believe voters in the US are sick of being manipulated by absurd lies.
No they weren’t. The Sandanistas didn’t nationalize anything, and they didn’t issue 5 year plans. They were somewhat authoritarian leftists. Ortega was reelected again, this time as a Christian, not a Marxist, and he wouldn’t have won the second time if he had been a communist the first time, as communists are not popular when in office. The claim that Nicaragua was communist was nonsense in the 1980s American press, nonsense which Sanders called out. Not that Nicaragua was a picnic in 85, but it wasn’t anything like the USSR in economic policy.
Nonsense. The Travel agent was there for Carter, and Ford too. The Clintons just wanted to place their own people there. They did not drop the bogus charges, the guy had to go to court to clear his name. He won with a record short jury deliberation time, because the accusation was absurd. He didn’t steal anything, he didn’t commingle anything, he was just politically attacked because the Clinton’s wanted to give their friends a job. Not illegal. But immoral.
There is more than one road to tyranny, and the one that America is most in danger of doesn’t lead down the path of total government control. It ends with enormous corporations running the entire economy, and controlling the form and type of government through their financial dealings. This is just as dangerous a tyranny, it is the fascist type.
The George W. Bush years were the worst for fascist measures, you had surveillance and state repression, the fourth amendment was ignored, dissidents were actively recorded and spied on, and 9/11 truthers were threatened with charges of supporting terrorism (it wasn’t so long ago, please try to remember). The government itself became a servant to Halliburton, and awarded multimillion dollar contracts for Iraqi bases with showers that didn’t work, and for mercenaries that committed atrocities on the battlefield.
Socialism is just a method of identifying and correcting market failures, because those failures are real. The failures are due to concentration of ownership, and the charging of rent, leading to an economy which is stagnant, because nobody can get financing for a new idea, nor can anyone get an education or own a house, because they are forced into low wage jobs and debt peonage.
The path to correcting these failures can be the state-path, where the state confiscates all property, and then you end up with monstrous states that control the entire economic production and are even more inefficient than what they replaced. But it can also follow the libertarian path, what used to be called “anarchism”, before that meant purple hair and a safety-pin in your nose. The type of socialism that American socialists talk about involves workers owning more capital, small farmers and small manufacturers independently working and supporting one another, industries being less dependent on special government contracts, and the social ideal of a market that doesn’t concentrate wealth at the top. This is not easy to make happen, the natural state is an oligarchy with a handful of Morgans and Rockefellers and Rothchilds ruling over everyone else.
Bernie Sanders isn’t even talking about socialism, just social democracy. His politics also aim to save small business from monopolistic competition. If you don’t want every store in your neighborhood to be a McDonald’s a Denny’s or a Walmart, you should be voting for him.
You are only right if he loses, and the delegate count is not yet hopeless. There is still a path going forward, especially considering his extremely strong and surprising showings in Minnesota, Oklahoma, and especially surprising Colorado. He won those states at levels that approach or exceed his New Hampshire win, Colorado by 20 points, Minnesota by 22 points, after close polling, and with extremely strong turnout.
Sanders will not win the southern black vote, this is becoming clear, for whatever reason, I won’t speculate. But it is clear that he can win big with everyone else, including Hispanics out West, black voters outside the South, and that’s a lot of people altogether. So if he wins the rest of the country by the margins he showed he can get in Minnesota and Colorado, he wins the whole thing.
It’s much harder without the support of black folks down south, this is true, but there seems to be a real roadblock there that can’t be overcome. Perhaps it is due to the Clinton’s long history in the region, perhaps it is due to the Christian fundamentalism that poisons the whole region. I don’t know, but it is possible to win still, so one must fight on.
The voting was remarkably pro-Sanders, except for the black vote in the deep south. It’s a big hit to lose the South, but it’s not insurmountable.
He’s getting his message out fine. It just isn’t appealing to black folks down South. It’s ok, it is possible to win without their support, although it is exceedingly difficult, but for the life of me, I don’t understand it. Sanders is the closest thing to MLK himself running that the US will ever see.
He’s not against black people, or Hispanic people. He’s against people voting for corporate candidates against their self-interest. It’s hard to criticise someone else without sounding like a condescending prick, but how can you understand or sympathize with Southern liberals voting against a modern-day version of 1968 MLK? Give him a break.
He got great results with all demographics except Southerners. He’ll have to press on without the South. With the margins he is getting in the states that he won, it is still possible for him to win, but just barely. It will be a hard slog.
You are forced to do business with a company you hate when that company acquires monopoly position. I am forced to buy internet from Time-Warner. There is no other choice, they drove everyone else out of the market. If I lived in certain communities, I would be forced to buy at WalMart. I cannot shop for clothes at small providers anymore because they have been suppressed by the Gap, Urban Outfitters and so on.
I already fled to New York, because it was pretty much the last place in the US you could go to and still avoid the large businesses. Now it is going too, the last decade has been terrible for New York business. Rents have been driven up by chains and national retailers in order to bankrupt the small businesses on the same block. Now huge chunks of Broadway and Columbus Avenues are gone to the dark side, and I can no longer shop there.
There are real market failures, the most obvious of which are the people sleeping on the streets of my city, people whose labor is useful, and who can contribute in thousands of ways, but their labor is superfluous. The reason is simply that the economy has concentrated wealth, and does not generate demand sufficient to employ everyone.
There is a further market failure in monopolistic business, the kind that delivers internet in the US. France gets twice the speed at a third the cost, as do other nations with a sensible telecommunications competition policy. The US pioneered this in 1996, it was part of the telecom act to have competitive carriers. But Bush allowed it to get remonopolized. The infrastructure and services must be split up, and the service companies must be able to rent the infrastructure at an equal rate.
The same policies apply to retail. I don’t care if you choose not to shop at a store, but if you shop at eBay or Amazon, you are supporting even more monstrous monopolies than anything you see in your neighborhood.
I refuse to support monopolistic business, it is a matter of religious injunction for me. That means I actually will be forced to leave the US when New York falls, all my previous hometowns have already fallen to the chain cancer. There is no place left to flee in the US, except maybe Vermont.
It’s a matter of degree. Bernie Sanders is as truthful as a politician can get. His “superPAC” money is a nurse’s union, which derives its money from members. If you can’t see the difference between that and a Goldman Sachs funded PAC, that’s your problem, not Sanders’.
These things are standard all over the world, and standard for a reason.
I’m only half European, silly, although I usually pass as white. You don’t know anything about MLK’s economic policy— full employment, single payer, subsidized education. It’s 100% Sanders, whose economic views were formed in the civil rights era. The message is not being sold with traditional Democratic factional politics, this is true, but this is a plus for getting elected, not a minus.
It’s not racism, it’s insulting people who disagree with him. Racism is a power structure, not insults.
What black voters down South think they “know” has to be challenged, much as what I know has been challenged. I agree that there is a space for polite disagreement. The fact that there is a tremendous amount of structural racism and discrimination does not mean that you need to base a campaign solely around this fact, because the policies required are not a simple function of helping out people who are discriminated against. Helping those discriminated against is a band-aid, it doesn’t make sure that the structural empoverishment ends. Sanders policies take a first step to actually doing that. This is why MLK tied race to economics so strongly by the end of the 60s.
He hasn’t disowned his son, his son is working on his campaign. The “catering” of his message is aimed at winning votes, his message appeals to all demographics, because it is true. His policies are stronger in their benefit to the Black community, and he also targets institutional racism directly, while Clinton panders to it. I can’t understand the voting pattern, except in a very cynical way, which to put it bluntly says “A Jew won’t win”.
It’s not his superPAC, it’s a union supporting him that he can’t control, whose PAC money comes from members.
MLK was a democratic socialist, and his top priority was targeting unemployment to zero, with a jobs stimulus, and targeting lack of educational opportunities, to attack the structural inequality in many disenfranchised communities with emphasis on the black community he was a part of. This vocal socialism was the reason that he was villified by the media when he was alive. His post-death sainthood among the bourgeoisie airbrushes away his democratic socialism, and makes him sound like a 1960s version of Al Sharpton, an opportunist riding to power on racial issues. That’s not what MLK was, he was a great thinker in the American democratic socialist tradition, like W.E.B DuBois or Cornel West, or Bernie Sanders.
I admired the sensible strategic voting in the black community down south, and I figured the people in the community know the path going forward, so in the past, I personally always voted whichever way they voted.
Southern black voters used to vote for the most progressive realistic candidate. This time, they chose not to. This, despite Sanders clear progressive voice, despite his strong chances with independents and Republicans. That’s anti-strategic voting, and that’s a total surprise.
I expected Bernie to lose the black vote to some small extent due to Clinton’s history in the south, but not by 80 points! Not with a candidate who was a civil rights activist, not by the only candidate who addresses structural racism with real policy. Not when his opponent is a race-baiting triangulator.
The only reason I can see for his failure to connect in the south is the his non-Christian background. That’s not sensible voting, sorry. That’s just bigotry.
Let me be blunter with the innuendo. It’s not about “good” or “bad”, it looks like it’s more about “Baptist” and “Jew”.
Land redistribution is a non-communist leftist policy in response to feudal land-distribution. It was implemented in Japan by Douglas MacArthur. The construction of cooperatives subsidized by the state is something that other leftist governments do, for example, Israel and the kibbutsim, it’s not a communist policy exactly. The limited nationalizations are consistent with a mixed economy and private business, 30% is not 100%, which is what communists advocate, it is more like France or England.
The nationalization policy was probably necessary, as those economies are dominated by enormous landholders, who keep the population in serfdom, although I don’t know anything about the situation in Nicaragua in the 1970s. Communist policy is top-down planning and heavy industry, and this is not the type of policy that was implemented. I know that in the US every leftist government is automatically “communist”, but the Sandanistas just don’t qualify. A true communist would have been disappointed.
I don’t know why you place me at Vassar, I’m a dude, dude. It’s also been 20 years since I went to college.
First, I am a registered Democrat, and I have never voted for a Republican and never will. The fellow named “Billy Dale” was charged with embezzlement and acquited after a record short deliberation time. The charges were preposterous, and the cronies installed in the travel office were just being rewarded with jobs for political support. It was a patronage operation, you have no clue about how politics works.
It’s not the worst thing that Clinton did, but it’s indicative of the type of operation that they have.
He’s not a very typical Jew, but anti-semites don’t care how typical a Jew you are, any more than racists care that Obama was brought up by whites.
There is nothing racist in Dickmaster’s comments. I pointed this out before, got 15 upvotes, and then my comment was removed. Probably because I told you to “grow up”. I will now also tell the moderators to do the same.
Clinton’s major reform was the EITC expansion. This impacted poorer communities more than anything else. That was attached to welfare reform. But the real problem is the inability to build up capital inside cities. All the capital goes into suburban housing, and cities are dominated by sleazy landlords. Clinton doesn’t propose anything to fix this, there is no mechanism to provide capital to city-dwellers. Sanders pioneered community owned housing in Burlington, and I trust he knows what he is doing with regard to urban policy.
What nonsense. The photographer confirmed it is Sanders in the picture, and you can find pictures of him getting arrested online. This is a level of corrupt lying campaigning that would even give the Republicans pause.
Of course I’m subhuman to Duke, I’m a jew. He has Jews dead-center on his paranoid target. But Trump isn’t Duke, he just got endorsed by Duke, and Trump’s racism has so-far mostly been the ridiculous law-and-order Nixonian pandering type. It isn’t even clear he knows what he is talking about when he says it, it’s all stream of consciousness campaigning, with the aim of “looking alpha”. That’s his big schtick, look like a powerful insulting domineering big man with a big stick, and this is the Hitler electioneering method. It’s the same Hitlerian domination business with his violence. Of course it scares me, it’s straight out of the fascist playbook, but I still can’t take his fascism seriously, maybe that’s a mistake.
He’s a New Yorker, and I just can’t imagine how he could possibly be as racist and ignorant as he pretends to be, he must have grown up with experience of diversity all his life. Anyway, I don’t think he has any chance against Sanders, and only a little tiny chance against Clinton, depending on the indictment situation, but even an indicted Clinton can beat him, I think, so I try to think about him very little.
As I said, the only thing he said which I think justifies his Republican support is blaming Bush for 9/11. That’s a big deal. If he leads the Republican party, that’s the end of the Bushes as a political force forever, and that’s something. That’s why I want him to win the nomination and lose in November. But God help us all if he wins the election. It’s a terrible risk.
I understand the danger, and I hope I’m not underestimating it, but nothing ever happens the exact same way twice, and analogies are tricky. The US has already had it’s Hitler regime, and it’s not Trump, it was Cheney. Trump has come out strongly against the previous fascists, that’s 99% of his appeal. The rest of his campaign is racist pandering and stupidity. I’m not voting for him, but I don’t agree that you can tar him by his backers. The US communist party supports Sanders, that doesn’t imply that Sanders will have show trials and gulags. Likewise, Duke supports Trump does not imply that Trump supports Duke.
I know the violence of the era very well, I’m not that young. When MLK was leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and preaching non-violent resistance to segregation, he was applauded by the press, and he was a media darling. Then he won the Nobel Peace prize, and he became a part of the controlled opposition, and he was a hero to both the right and the left, as he is today. You must remember that the Republicans back then opposed segregation, starting in 1954, segregation was terrible for business, nobody wants to have to deal with segregated hotels and restaurants, it drives away black customers and anti-racist white customers both. Eisenhower led black troops too, and American racism reminded people at home of Hitler. There was no love of it anywhere except among ignorant southerners.
MLK stopped being a darling and became a controversial figure when he expanded his critique from segregation to economic power and the war in Vietnam. This made him a real radical, and from this point on, he began to be attacked as a communist. He was assassinated by the CIA in 1968, because his voice was inspiring a new generation of anti-capitalist black voices. Many of those folks were assassinated too, some in their beds as they slept.
The economic program MLK was proposing was based on a zero unemployment policy, through a permanent stimulus jobs program. This was a staple of American democratic socialist thinking. The Democrats preferred to cut people checks rather than provide jobs, as welfare is a mechanism of control rather than empowerment. MLK aligned himself with various international movements that supported anti-colonialism and indigenous rights, and was on the real socialist left, not in any controlled opposition. That’s what makes him great, and that’s what makes his modern whitewashing into a bourgeoise anti-segregationist so revolting.
Cornel West would not be assassinated because he is not a leader of a movement. God forbid, Sanders might be, he is taking a chance. So please vote for him, as he is really the proper continuation of MLK’s economic and political policy, as West would tell you, and anyone else who is deep into the civil rights movement, like Harry Belafonte.
The statement is obviously true. Romanians, French, everyone has better internet service, because US service is monopolized by incompetent big business, Comcast and Time-Warner.
They aren’t easily offended, they are formerly communist, and they are now dominated by obnoxious anti-socialists that are knee-jerk pro-capitalism and don’t recongize the economic problems that democratic socialists solve. You can’t listen to people from the East, they are brainwashed against socialism by dictatorial communism, it’s like listening to a former cult-member’s opinion of religion.
They’re not brainwashed by communist propaganda, they’re brainwashed by anti-communist propaganda! They are fooled by thinking that opposing communism means opposing the left.
Communism is a terrible system, that poisons you against the left, because you think you recognize communist tendencies in the sensible non-communist left. Communism to the left is like a cult compared to a normal religion.
The Western left is nothing like the communists, but neither the communists or the anti-communists understand that, as they have their own groupthink. The communists executed all the leftists and anarchists first.
I know how those fools think, my mother escaped from Romanian communism in the 1960s. People from former communist countries have no ability to reason objectively, they are too traumatized by communism to understand the value of the left.
I don’t believe that guy who wrote that is even black. This is a white person or a sellout pretending to be “real”.
Sanders support for the black movement didn’t end in the 60s, he was a great supporter of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, and delivered Vermont for him. Sanders has opposed the policies that marginalize America’s cities, and has stood against the Clintons when they were race-baiting. The Clinton’s race-baiting was a calculating move to win elections, but some of it they really mean.
I agree with the author that black voters are not so liberal on social issues, especially down south. That’s as far as I agree with that nonsense. I don’t even think it was written by a black person.
What you experienced as “socialism” meant government control of all business, the inability to do anything independently without okaying it with a party member, the inability to buy cloth, make clothing, and resell your excess to others, the loss of your job if you dared criticize the government or apply for a visa, the lack of independent venture capital from anyone other than the state, the lack of political independence from Moscow, and a trade system based on the decisions in Moscow of what your country will be made to manufacture.
This system is a totalitarian monstrosity, and it only pays lip-service to the ideas of socialism, for propaganda purposes. It differs very little from the Western system of large firms dominating industry, because in this case, the only firm is the government, and this is run like one gigantic business. It is no more extreme socialism than the US is extreme capitalism. It is extreme governmental control.
Actual socialists, the ones outside the USSR, advocated for preventing the consolidation of capital in businesses by distributing ownership widely. Only a small minority of these people wanted to structure the whole society as a single corporation, those were the Marxist Leninists, and these were the worst of the bunch. These folks could never win elections, so they took over governments by force.
The goal of socialism is preventing the problems of capitalism. The people in the Eastern block don’t know the problems of capitalism, they only know the problems of communism, at least, that’s what it was like 20 years ago, now some of them have experience with the problems of capitalism.
The point of socialism is to fix the problems of capitalism, and the goal of socialists is not to reproduce the Marxist Leninist state, but to make sure ownership and decision making are decentralized. Centralizing all power to the Soviets makes about as little sense as centralizing all power to Lockheed Martin, or Halliburton.
Even within the East, there were those who knew this, but they were outside of Romania. The progressive Soviets were Kosygin and Dubcek, and also to a lesser extent Tito and Kardelj, and more pointedly Dilas, they knew that the system could not persist as a top-down planned economy, that capital allocation needed to be decentralized, and corporations needed to be free to expand through local purchasing, and hire, fire, and redesign without top-down constraints. These ideas were suppressed within the Eastern block as ruthlessly as any other deviation from orthodoxy.
I see Fred Hampton as a slightly more radical counterpart to Martin Luther King. I don’t believe King would have been shot had he been a simple anti-segregationist, the opposition to the war is what made him a pariah, and his socialism made him a “communist” to Hoover and therefore a menace. But it’s much the same, the past is past, and your position is reasonable also.
What I think is unarguable, however, is that King’s economic prescriptions were based on a full employment policy, this is the holy-grail of the left. Once you have full employment, labor becomes strong enough to win better wages, and better conditions. This is what Sanders is making in his platform, through stimulus, education subsidy, and increases in minimum wage. Those all decrease unemployment. In addition, Medicare-for-all makes health care portable, allowing workers to switch jobs.
Jesse Jackson continued MLK’s economic legacy, and Sanders supported him in ’84 and ’88. Now it is only Sanders himself who is continuing the legacy on the national stage. The details of the assassination, we can disagree about, I don’t know for sure what is right. But on the question of Sanders’ economic prescriptions mostly agreeing with King’s (although somewhat less radical, as they don’t guarantee full employment), I don’t think you can reasonably disagree with that.
If you’re from the former USSR, you are the one who is brainwashed. You have the mistaken impression that leftists are out to take over the economy using the government. That is not what the left was about anywhere except the USSR and it’s Marxist-Leninist sphere of influence.
The reaction of those from formerly communist countries to the left is the same as a former cult-member encountering religion. The fact that you were brutalized by a terrible system doesn’t make you an expert on the problems of the left, or on the problems of capitalism. It makes you an expert on the problems of communism, and that’s useless to you, because nobody on the American left is advocating communism.
We refer to him as “Mr. President” at our Seder.
That’s not from the Torah, it’s from the Haggadah. The wicked child, by the way, is you.
Everyone who survived engaged in such work, or similar, it all benefited the regime. If you protested, you were shot. The protesters were the socialists, and Sanders would have been shot.
It’s systemic policy to reduce unemployment, so that everyone can find a job, together with policies to ensure that people have social insurance. It’s a form of Keynesian economic policy with the further goal of reducing concentrations of power in big business.
Sanders visited the USSR at the same time Reagan did, during the Gorbachev era, as part of the sister-city program. He wasn’t an advocate of Marxism-Leninism at any point in his career.
I know where all these people were, thanks. These people were the closest things to progressives within the Soviet block. They were aiming to reduce state control and create a real decentralized economy. They all failed, except for Tito. Tito’s socialism was very far from Soviet communism, at least past 1950, because he experienced the total economic collapse caused by Soviet policies in 1948, and he didn’t want to continue this. He reprivatized farming in 1949, after only a few months of collectivization, and he introduced private industry, and formed the nonaligned block. That’s as progressive as you get for the communists.
Capitalism is not “imperfect”, it’s even more horrible than communism if it isn’t mitigated by Keynesian measures. The West knows this, and implements minimum wage and enormous amounts of expenditures in R&D, military, and roads, to keep consumer demand from collapsing. This is the extent of the West’s ability to manage capitalism so that it doesn’t decend into a permanent depression.
The point is that this is not enough. The idealized situation in an economy is self-directed enterprises, which reinvest their profitability in their own expansion, and where workers have a say. The only way to achieve this is to encourage small business, worker owned business, and decentralized ownership of stock in publicly traded companies, with strong bargaining power for employees. Any other option is terribly destructive, you can’t see it, because you have no idea what the struggles against concentrations of capital in the West were, you only know the completely unrelated struggles against concentration of state power in the East. You need to know what happened in the West’s struggles too, to get a picture of why so many people were fooled into thinking the USSR represented some sort of left-wing. The Soviets were like a monarch butterfly, mimicking the socialist left without doing anything useful to help.
Republican Spain was a relative economic success compared to either the USSR or Franco, the economic parts that were free Spain were ok, the worker cooperatives were relatively productive compared to either capitalism or communism. Free spain was only problematic in that it still didn’t have independent small business and capital allocation independent of large collectives, in that case labor unions. The capital allocation structure wasn’t structured entrepreneurially as in developed capitalism, it was structured according to political union decisions. But the system didn’t stick around long enough to see what the unions would do with capital allocation.
The USSR was left wing in foreign policy only. The internal policy repressed the left wing, which as I told you consisted of dissidents. The Soviet left was Dilas and Dubcek, and to some extent Kosygin, at least in the 60s, and Gorbachev, in the 80s. The Soviet left was marginalized.
I am happy you credit the “theory” to me, but it is the universal idea of the anti-communist left. That’s pretty much the whole of the Western left, and anyone from the East both knows nothing about it, and thinks they know everything, because they assume it has a relation to what they experienced as the communist left. The communist left is dead, get used to it.
Reagan visited the USSR about a year after his “honeymoon”, Bernie Sanders is always first. Sanders, as mayor of Burlington, had an independent foreign policy which was set up as a critique of Reagan’s idiotic one. Unlike Reagan, he didn’t support the fascist movements, and he criticized the communists based on the fact that their system didn’t work, not based on ideological paranoia that they were taking over the world. Everyone on the left knew that the communists were not taking over the world.
“Everyone can find a job” was implemented in the USSR in the 1930s— if you went to an active shipyard, or to a construction site, chances were always good that they had work that was unfinished, and you would be put to work immediately. This was in the interest of the managers, who were paid to recruit. The only people who couldn’t find a job in this situation are seriously ill, and the official unemployment of 0% was roughly accurate. There were, in later years, a few people who collected unemployment checks because they couldn’t find work in their own field, but this was due to the later generous unemployment packages, which didn’t exist earlier. There are no unemployable people, sorry.
There was no real unemployment past the 1930s in the USSR, the last unemployment offices closed in the mid 1930s, because there was nobody out looking for work. This wasn’t government propaganda. It was a product of the effective free labor market set up in the USSR. The problems of communism are serious, but unemployment was not one of these, solving that problem was the most notable and nearly only success.
the problems were in capital allocation for new business, in centralized decision-making that prevented people from implementing independent ideas, in lack of ability to hire construction firms for independent expansion, because top-down projects were taking all the people, in lack of ability to resell “government property” independently without getting arrested, in the lack of a floating price for consumer goods and tradable commodities, in the lack of floating currencies, in the top-down planning of international industries, in all the problems that the dissident progressives inside the East were noticing and complaining about, and getting arrested and marginalized over.
The one success of the communists was that anyone who wanted a job could easily find one. This was reproduced in the West without dismantling capitalism, whenever there was a jobs program for eliminating unemployment, or sufficient stimulus to absorb nearly all unemployment, as in the US in the 1950s, or in England in the 30s and 40s and 50s, or in Germany in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, or in France, or anywhere else. The production of unemployment is the major structural defect in the functioning of capital markets, and it is completely unnecessary. Temporary jobs for those looking for work can allow full employment even when people are looking for a suitable job, an unemployed graphic designer in the East could work construction or cleaning for months, or even in bookkeeping, while looking for a position. It was always easy to find a job even in communist Romania, unless you were a political dissident.
It’s not ridiculous, it is true. The socialists often protested within the camps, and were taken out and shot. At least, that was what my grandfather explained to me happened in the labor camp he was assigned to. The best people were killed, the survivors lived under crushing guilt of having been forced to collaborate.
It doesn’t change anything. The only survivors were complicit, it was impossible to survive without helping the regime, that’s why all the survivors felt guilty. They knew that there were partisans out there who were able to survive without collaborating, somewhere in the woods, but these people were all communists, and nobody usually knew how the heck they did it.
They will probably fare better than you will.
The new-left was purged from universities and institutions in the 1980s and 1990s, the purge was entirely completed by the mid 2000s, helped along by 9/11. There is no left anymore in any US institutions, which is a pity, because it means there are no more serious scientists or serious humanities academics.
The handful that remain are either very old, like Chomsky, or very isolated, like Cornel West. They need to make do by using media to get an audience outside of academia, because the academics have been taken over by right wing think tanks. It’s worst in economics, where the purge of leftists means that all the Keynesians were eliminated in most institutions of economics. Since only the Keynesians understood inflation, unemployment, and monetary policy, it meant that there was no one left in 2008 who knew what to do regarding the financial crisis. This catastrophe has had to slowly be reversed, and there are a few leftists in some institutions again, the ones that came to their senses in 2008.
I don’t point to Scandinavia today, because Scandinavia today is highly capitalist, after the right-wing governments of the 2000s reversed many of the pro-employment and distributed ownership measures that were tried earlier. The development of Scandinavia is very complicated, and many of the successes have nothing to do with the welfare state. But the universal health-care, subsidized family leave, and free college are no-brainers, these are implemented in the most capitalist states also, and this is what Sanders is pointing too.
The “new man” of communism is very different from the “new man” of the left, although they are both an attempt at changing political consciousness. The communists wanted a good worker who fit into a slot, the new left wanted a long-haired pot-smoking individualist who could make revolution. Neither vision is particularly radical today, it is not clear either vision was ever radical.
The political theorists on the left in the late 1960s were responding to the failure of collectivist visions in producing actual radical social movements. The role of collectivist movements is complicated, there is some role for such collectives in pressing for better wages through unions, but the general idea that collectives manage better is, I believe, completely false. The left is not about collectives, it is about sane economics, which doesn’t concentrate power and capital to the top.
The proper leftist theory is simply to encourage decentralized ownership, by having and protecting small business, encouraging distributed ownership of workplaces, and decentralizing decisionmaking as far as possible. This model was developed successfully in Scandinavia. Not by the government. By a student at a subsidized university in Helsinki, by Linus Torvalds. The decentralized model is what gave you the Linux operating system.
That’s easy to say from the comfort of your computer, but my grandfather was breaking rocks at a landslide on a railroad, and one point of pride when he spoke about it (he hardly ever did) is that they never finished the work before the war ended, the railroad never functioned. The partisans were not only all communists, they were taking orders from the USSR, who organized the brigades in a loose intelligence collective with orders coming from Moscow. This continued until the end of the war, when the Yugoslav partisans split from Moscow in an acrimonious rift, due to the insistence that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria be joined to keep Tito out of power.
Calling Sanders anti-semitic is as absurd as calling Obama an anti-black racist. It shows that you have no ability to criticize Israel’s policy now that it is the strong party, not the weak. Judaism is about respect for the weak and oppressed, not the strong and oppressive, regardless of ethnicity. In that, Sanders is quite a bit better Jew than most of you folks.
There was no mention of socialist resistance, because the socialists were executed quickly. The ones who survived were partisans in the woods, like Tito, and they survived through raids on farms, stealing food, asking for help from various people in the countryside, and so on. The ones who were caught were shot. The ones who sympathized in the camps stopped working and were also shot. The Jews were also executed at random times and for no reason, as there was no recognition of Jews as human among the guards.
One way to do that is to judge others less, especially those like Sanders who are actively trying to help weaker parties survive.
That might be true, I am sure there were at least a few among them who personally dreamed of owning a pastry shop after the war, but one of their jobs was distributing anti-fascist communist propaganda. When an organization is run by Moscow, I think it can be safely called a communist organization.
Obama is not a socialist, he is a moderate right-leaning Democrat. That’s what he ran as, that’s what people voted for. It was as far as people could go in 2008. If he were an actual socialist, Cheney would be on trial for war crimes today.
Thanks! But I suspect that I would be a terrible politician, I am a scientist by training. Sanders is a good politician, Tulsi Gabbard also, and I think they deserve your vote more. There are lots of people who agree, and if any of us come to office without baggage, there’s no barrier to good governance. This stuff is not rocket science, you just need to get sensible people to the proper positions without getting corrupted in shaking the money tree.
I agree with what you wrote, but there is a subtle sense in which Clinton is a Southern Baptist, and therefore “one of us”, while Sanders is a Jew, and therefore “one of them”, and this subtle feeling of otherness is 90% of what anti-Jewish sentiment is all about. It’s just a vague feeling that “that guy is not one of us, and won’t support us” among those who are deeply Christian. I hope that it is clear that this is nonsense, but I am not sure that this is so, considering how hopeless all of Sanders real outreach to black communities down south has been so far.
You are deluded if you think Trump is like Nixon. He’s more like Andrew Jackson. Bigoted, nativist, and populist. He’s also got some Mussolini in him. It is Clinton who is like Nixon. If it comes down to Mussolini vs. Nixon, your’e giving people a hell of a choice. Vote Sanders, so we have a proper choice.
That’s complete nonsense. The leftists are suppressed and marginalized even in technical fields like physics and engineering. The ones who are pumped full of money support capitalism. The folks actually being purged are 9/11 truthers, leftists who oppose “The War on Terror”, and academics who dare to oppose American foreign policy.
The campus protests and unrest comes entirely from the students. They are not so easily fooled as those in power.
Keep telling yourself that 2008 was caused by Marxism, and you will sleep better at night.
On trial for what?
9/11 is a war crime.
Obama probably never even read Marx, he’s not an economist. He’s more of an Alinsky Democrat. Alinsky wasn’t a Marxist either, by the way. Obama passed Republican policy from the 90s as compromise toward Democratic positions from the 90s, he’s not even pushed hard for a public option in his health care law. That makes him a right-leaning centrist, or a Rockefeller Republican, not even a JFK or Carter Democrat, let alone an FDR one.
I only need to read the first paragraphs of the summary to know that this book is spouting ignorant nonsense. I read Stalin when I was a kid. Stalin made himself famous by the slogan “socialism in one country”, which meant Russia needed to build up everything for herself, without reliance on any imports or exports. Unlike Lenin, who wanted heavy industry in Germany and Hungary to support the USSR, Stalin didn’t want or need a worldwide socialist revolution, because if there were a revolution in Western Europe, Russia would be marginalized by other socialist countries. All his efforts were to make sure Russia would be completely self-sufficient for all raw materials and oil, and in all basic industry. He also wanted to make sure that all the other Marxist countries would be dependent on Russian steel and Russian oil. That’s what he did in 4 five year plans. By 1960, Russia was entirely self-sufficient, and had the industrial base for development. This part of communist development was largely economically successful, in terms of production quotas met or exceeded, and in comparison with the West. That’s not much of a surprise, because the Soviet and Western large firms were largely the same in structure and planning.
The development of consumer goods and general plenty, this part was what failed, as unlike heavy industry, successful light-goods and consumer goods production requires independent small businesses and independent decisionmaking. This was already clear by 1965 to mathematically oriented planners inside the USSR, like Kosygin, but they didn’t succeed in freeing up the system, because by then it was a dictatorship of the nomenklatura. The freeing didn’t start until 1985, by which time the population was so sick of the repression that the whole system was dismantled.
Whenever there was an independent socialist revolution, Stalin squelched it by force and infiltration, whether in Spain or in Greece, or in Yugoslavia. He was happier for the fascists to take over Spain that independent non-Leninist labor unions take over. He allowed partisans to be killed by the Nazis in Poland, rather than send the Red Army to help, because then there wouldn’t be an independent leadership. He threatened to execute Tito in 1950, but failed, because Tito’s was actually an independent revolution.
Stalin was not interested in any revolution not under his direct control. In that, he was different than Khruschev or Brezhnev, who actually supported truly independent Marxists all over the world.
My view of history doesn’t come from my family, I am just telling you that part because it is interesting. Most of my mother’s side of the family did not survive, of course (we are Jews). One of the only really good source for concentration camps is Primo Levi’s account written right after the war concluded.
It says that, but I read the Torah. In Hebrew. It’s not there.
The “rearranged and given another meaning” part is what makes it original. The Haggadah is very nice, but it isn’t a rewrite of the Torah. It includes a lot of later commentary, very nice and wise, but having no origin in the Torah specifically.
I’m calling you a wicked child because you are opposed to Sanders.
I am not a good person. Sanders is.
That’s nonsense. He hasn’t even judged Clinton on her server, and he paid his family what looks like less than minimum wage. If I were Jane, I would have sued him for exploitation.
Of course I mean them. But not exactly them primarily, as they are more powerful than the average Palestinian in a relocation camp. There are those in the PA who got their villa and their volvo and their Israeli money, and now shut up about oppression.
Marxism is a philosophy of helping the oppressed, in that, there is some overlap with Jewish philosophy, although there is more overlap with Catholicism. Actual Marxists could become Catholics without changing a whole lot, for example Ortega.
Sanders is not a Marxist. He’s more of a Keynesian. If by Marxist, you mean “read and agree with Marx”, then I am more of a Marxist, as I read and understand Marx’s critique of capitalism. I am also a Jew. But I think it is best to call a person who supports the legal property-rights structure of Capitalism a “Keynesian”, so I call myself a Keynesian. The names are not important, only the policies matter.
It’s not about genetics. It requires a serious brain-disorder for a Jew to be anti-semitic, as this requires disowning their own family. An example of a true Jewish anti-semite is Bobby Fisher, you have to be that level of disturbed. Sanders is simply not an anti-semite, and neither am I. I am to the left of him on Israel, as I was born there.
No Jews supported Hitler.
Capitalism worke better when there are no rich people. The people running the USSR were not wealthy, their salary was below average. The only thing they had was some access to Western goods on occasion, which is a perk, but not that much of one.
You don’t know anything about other systems. You only know about one other system.
“everyone had a job” wasn’t the only thing that happened in the USSR. It was pretty much the only good thing. The only people that think Reagan was a good president were those that didn’t have to suffer under his rule.
You used to receive reasonably good education, under communism, except you didn’t learn anything about economics, politics, or social movements, because communism suppressed all this stuff. Now you receive terrible education, and your lack of education in economics, politics, or the history of social movements is showing.
No one pays the left. There is no funding source. I pay Bernie Sanders.
Committed by Cheney using his military drills.
It’s not an incorrect argument. There were “hundreds” of political prisoners in the late USSR, you could probably find an approximately equal number of political prisoners in the US in the 1970s. The Gulag prison system was not even that big in Stalin’s time, it had about a million people back then at any one time. It was always a negligible part of Soviet labor.
The people who could choose their jobs were ordinary citizens, not prisoners. The wages for the jobs were set by administrators by pure supply and demand. Nobody will tell you that, not the communists, because they don’t want to admit it, and not the capitalists, because they don’t know anything about the USSR labor system.
I am not a communist, I am just telling you the proper history. There is no point in listening to anyone in Russia, or to anyone other than me, personally, I mean myself, because everyone except me is either ignorant about this stuff, or lies about it. I am unfortunately the only reliable person in the whole world.
*sigh*. What a burden.
“They marched like cattle to their doom”— the vast majority of the people were extremely hungry and listless, they were cold and sick, they had clog shoes that hurt their feet, they were taking care of small starving children, and they had absolutely no power, even in groups. The situation of a typical Jew in a camp was that of a homeless person on the street, and I don’t see you going around distributing AK-47s to the homeless, or asking why they don’t rise up in revolt.
The communist Partisans took individual Jews, they liked Jews as they could be certain Jews were not double agents, they just couldn’t take families with elderly and small children, and most of the victims were family units, not young individuals capable of fighting. There were also sporadic resistance movements set up by zionist Jews in their 20s, who were trying to save their family. They could tunnel out of ghettos and steal food and get a few handguns from the communist resistance, but most individuals were trying to get their families out to safety in any way possible.
The elite in Germany provided Zyklon to the camps to be used as an insecticide, it was diverted in relatively small quantities to kill people, most of the Zyklon was used to kill lice, you only need a little bit of Zyklon to kill a million people, and Zyklon was only used at Auschwitz. Treblinka used carbon monoxide, and the Jew-exterminators on the Russian front used bullets. The people providing Zyklon averted their eyes from the genocide, the same way nobody talks about the homeless in the US, or nobody talks about Native Americans. The elite in the US was extremely Protestant and extremely anti-Semitic in the 1940s, and they dismissed the reports of genocide as propaganda until 1945, despite the mounting evidence. I agree with your sentiments, but I think you are insensitive to the issues of power, and Jews in the 1940s had none, despite the propaganda from Germany blaming them for all the world’s troubles.
I like BDS. I think “safe zones” are stupid, but colleges do stupid things, and this one doesn’t hurt anyone.
You mean “Linus is rude”. Yes he is! I am too. He’s a product of internet culture of the 90s, and the internet is rude. It’s not his face-to-face personality, it’s how he communicated with the world. He blames it on being Finnish, just as I blamed it on being Israeli, but the truth is, it has nothing to do with any of that, it’s just because we grew up on Usenet with real free speech.
I read the email discussions, they are useful for explaining the culture. The same rude culture can be found in physicist’s discussions from the 1950s, see Wolfgang Pauli’s comments and personality, or more recently David Gross’s. It was also found to a certain extent in technical fields in the USSR.
Sowell fails to understand economics. Horowitz just sold out for money. The left is about correcting market failures, because the economic model of capitalism simply concentrates power to an oligarchy. That’s undeniable today, just as it was undeniable in the 1930s.
The disillusionment with Marxism and the New Left is largely justified. The only proper leftist philosophy is anarchist and libertarian, and has the same distaste for the kind of elitist power concentrations that drove Sowell and Horowitz away from the left.
If Sanders had dropped acid, or even smoked marijuana, he would not be functioning mentally at the age of 74.
It’s not a lie, what’s going on in Israel. There a ton of Jews in Israel who refuse to serve in the occupied territory, it is now a standard unwritten checkbox for the Israeli draft whether you are willing to enforce the occupation, and the leftist Jews are reassigned to other duties, far from any Palestinians. There are those who will not serve at all, and they are now quietly given a release form instead of being put in prison. There are those who actively protest, and those people are marginalized and discriminated against. I am not in Israel anymore. I would never serve. I realized this in 1987, when the first Intifada broke out, and I was 14. Thankfully my family took me back to the US before I was 15, so my draft status never became an issue.
My mommy was an extreme anti-socialist and my daddy was a Lt. Colonel in the Israeli army. They moved to the US because they love capitalism, not because I was saying I wouldn’t serve in the military. My parents didn’t take me seriously when I said I wouldn’t serve, they laughed and said I would change my mind when all my friends were drafted. Of course I did not change my mind, and those people who were drafted are no longer my friends.
I was not afraid of the IDF, I was against the IDF, and at the time, I was the only one in my family and in my school and in my community, there are many more today. I will continue to speak out, because the Israeli blindness to Palestinian suffering is comparable only to the German blindness to Jewish suffering in the second world war, or to South African blindness to native Black suffering in the 80s, when Israel and South Africa were jointly developing atomic bombs.
I am mentally and emotionally frozen at age 15 because it is impossible to go any further within the social order, that’s largely what happens to socialists it is true. Thankfully, there are technical fields, like physics and mathematics, where being emotionally 15 doesn’t stop you from contributing to humanity.
I don’t spread any lies. My family happened to be visiting a West Bank town a month or two before the 1987 intifada, and a car went by spreading leaflets. My father can read arabic, but he wouldn’t translate the leaflets, he just said “time for us to get out of here”. I have to use my imagination to reproduce what the leaflet was saying, but it was clearly a call to organize and strike against the occupation.
The first months of 1987, like the years of the Lebanon war, did more to alert Israelis that their government was no longer representing the best-interest of the people than all the protest and theory in the world.
When I was 15, I wanted to join the intifada, and lob stones at the occupation. The “missiles” are a joke, and perhaps even a false flag— the “Hamas rockets” are completely absurd, they are meter-long pipes filled with fuel. I don’t believe they are significant, and I believe the proper response to these things is “hey, look! You built a toy rocket.”
The Palestinian people is a legitimate group, they are just as real as “Israeli Jews”, who had never been a people before 1948 either. The anger and hatred is justified, as the Jews refuse to pay reparations, go back to 68 borders, open the borders, and live in peace with their neighbors.
Some of the Israelis want to slaughter the Palestinians, they are in small minority parties. They are not significant, they are only there like the racist Dixiecrats were there, to say “Hey, look, things could be worse”.
I will not grow up, I will martyr myself first. I will die at peace with myself, unlike you.
I am totally sane. When I actually had a paranoid attack for a week or so about 10 years ago, I couldn’t do math. I just read Nik Weaver’s “Forcing for Mathematicians” the last few days both to keep me sane, and because it’s amazing. I’d recommend that for everyone, as it’s the math book of the decade.
Oh, he’s just a modern day physicist who asks rude questions at seminars when people say wrong things. It’s the same with York, Tye, Susskind, Banks. You can look at Motl’s blog to see a right-wing version of these people. It’s not significant to read the individual comments, they’re mostly of the nature of “The ghost field gives a contribution which cancels out too many of the polarization modes to make your theory physical, it must be adjusted with scalars…” and other stuff like that which won’t help the uninitiated.
Yeah yeah, you think what you want. But the libertarian and anarchist philosophies developed on the far left, in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a reaction to Marxism. The spit among communists was along the lines of Marx/Bakunin, with Marx and Engels advocating total state control, and eventually this turned into Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”, while Bakunin was advocating for a distributed power structure with independent organizations coming together to form a communitarian society.
The anarchist faction was dominant in 1936 Spain, while the communists won in Russia, and suppressed and executed the anarchists.
The anarchist philosophy has transmuted in the intervening time to a sort of libertarian left, which advocates worker control of industry, and distributed ownership. American libertarians just took the “little government power” aspects of classical left-libertarianism, and removed the “little business power” aspects to make their nonsensical inconsistent philosphy. American libertarians don’t notice that their version of “liberty” devolves into fascism with gigantic corporations taking over the world. Rather, they do notice, but they like it, because they are paid by the heads of those corporations.
You are brought up in total ignorance, because you only read American libertarians. So you don’t know jack sh*t. Your suspicions will always be confirmed because you are illiterate.
OOPS! Fixed, thanks.
What he writes is typical of the degeneration of academic history in the East after the collapse. The ridiculous nonsense started in the mid 90s, as former Soviet officials scrambled over themselves to curry favor with their new oligarch overlords. There is nothing reliable in anything post-Soviet from Eastern Europe or from Russia, all of you are compromised by justified but useless anti-communist sentiments into fabricating absurd counterfactual histories.
His campaign is based on policies that are all standard in Australia, which ranks higher than the US on the Heritage Foundation’s list of countries by degree of economic liberty. The main parts are Medicare-for-all single payer, tuition-free public college and universities, and $15/hr minimum wage. That’s Australia in a nutshell.
Wow. You really are a theorist! Sure, I think you’re totally right about everything, but it’s a really academic way of saying it, and online, this type of speech is time-consuming to read through, and is less effective as propaganda, no matter how accurate and insightful. I think that’s partly due to your insistence on using neutral words, and avoiding “loaded words”, that’s the foundation of academic conventions, and it’s also the first thing the early internet got rid of. There was no point in avoiding propaganda when anyone is free to respond with counterpropaganda, it’s just a waste of time in that context , as propaganda becomes useless when there is no power structure dictating who gets to speak. That frees it up to be useful as a rhetorical flourish, instead of a power-reinforcement device.
Personally, I think that it’s proper to use loaded propaganda words so long as you use them in a way that isn’t boring. With a surprising twist, so that they subvert the authority they are intended to support, instead of supporting it by silent consensus. Words don’t dictate meaning by themselves, the author can use them to create the opposite meaning. This is how the word “Queer” was repurposed. You can do it with just about anything.
I call Linus “rude”, not because I’m asking him to stop. I’m asking you to be rude also. The same with “notable” on Wikipedia, that stuff started in 2008, it destroyed the encyclopedia, as all the most comitted contributors (including myself) were driven away or blocked by 2011. Wikipedia is extremely easy to fork, anyone can set up “Forkipedia”, taking all the pages to another site, but they don’t, because it’s a hassle. If it were a true political fork, with a different political structure than the one at Wikipedia, I think it has a good chance of replacing Wikipedia. The current “forks” aren’t forks, but new projects with incompatible goals.
Leftists are marginalized in technical field for NON-obvious reasons, you probably don’t even know who the marginalized leftists are. Most of the great Soviet research was ignored for political reasons, inflation theory is Soviet, it is due to Starobinsky and Mukhanov, lasers are originally Soviet, conformal field theory is largely Soviet. The theory of quarks was spun off from the “Sakata model”, and the reason you never heard of Sakata, unlike Gell-Mann and Zweig, is largely because he was a Japanese Marxist.
Even completely non-Marxist leftist physics work, like the S-matrix theory of the 60s and early 70s, what eventually became string theory, was so deeply marginalized, from 1974 to 1984, that all the theorists were driven out of academia, or literally driven mad, or driven to suicide. I never learned about “Regge trajectories”, “The Pomeron”, “Unitarity cuts”, despite this stuff being required to reproduce high-energy (and low energy) near-beam QCD scattering. The Pomeron hypothesis was spectacularly confirmed in 1996 when P-P and P-Pbar cross sections became equal, as Pomeranchuk predicted (in the USSR, in 1960), but nobody said anything about it, except noting it at the accelerator.
When string theory was taken up again, it was by a politically dominant class of right-wingers, who avoided crediting the radicals that made the theory in the 60s and 70s. That only changed when the internet came along, and people could review the original references.
Having been in technical field, I not only witnessed the marginalization of the best work by leftists, I also personally witnessed a certain amount of racism and sexism. It’s hardly ever intentional, although with sexism it sometimes is (the intention with sexism is not usually to oppress anyone, the intention is to get laid). Most of the time it’s usually just a subtle dismissal of people.
The sexism has been a deep problem for decades, it’s why Choquet Bruhat took so long to get recognition for GR initial value problem, that’s also why the wavelet revolution took so long, wavelets are “female mathematics” (as nonsensical as it sounds, but wavelets have a mother, not a father). Racism was less of a problem, but only because technical fields were not at all diverse until last decade, I mean ethnically diverse. Hardly anybody from a poor or marginalized background would go into a field like mathematics where you can’t make money despite working 100 times harder than any CEO. But they are diverse now, as you can’t really stop people from learning math.
Regarding racism, I do remember a materials science seminar by the person who was, at the time, the only black female student in the department. It had a few new ideas, but there were mistakes too, I thought, and the mistakes made it overall mediocre or bad in my opinion. Now a white dude delivering the same material would have been harassed mercilessly, allowing him to defend himself and fix his mistakes. But the black girl was left alone, no questions, despite having made what I thought were obvious mistakes.
This type of kid-glove treatment is NOT being nice, it is preventing the type of challenges that improve your ideas. I was a student too. So at the end of the seminar, when nobody else challenged the nonsense, I got up and savagely tore apart what I saw as the wrong stuff. Some were actual mistakes. Sometimes I misunderstood something, or she had different conventions, as always. But because my tone was hostile, as always, everyone at the seminar room looked at me like I was George Wallace or something. She came up to me afterwards, and thanked me for the tough questions, so it’s not like black students want special treatment. They just get it anyway.
Part of racism is ignoring people instead of challenging their technical mistakes. I don’t think mandatory diversity training would hurt anyone, I certainly could have used it.
Quoting you: “Since leftism (increasing governmental control) and anarchy (no government) are diametrically opposed, you evidence absolutely no grasp of anything political.”
This statement is so ignorant, that it justifies the claim that you are illiterate. If you were to read anything at all, you would see that the anarchists were an offshoot from Marx, led by Bakunin. They were as left as left can get, they were further left than the Marxists were.
Leftism is NOT about increasing government control, it is about DECREASING big-business control. You don’t have to do that by increasing government control, you can decrease both business and government control at the same time. It’s just tricky to do. Anarchists are not exactly “no government”, they are “no authority”, and it is possible to reduce the degree of authority in society by using laws uniformly applied, by a (*gasp*) anarchist government!
Regarding “highly educated”, I am self taught. Regarding “not being challenged”, I’m here, aren’t I? It’s impossible to not be challenged online. I agree that you are capable of reading online comments. I disagree that you have read anything else of substance.
The Israelis are only responsible for setting up a collaborator system and a collaborationist government, but that’s bad enough, it’s like Vichy France (as explained by the architects of the policy in “The Gatekeepers”).
Hamas is not a collaborationist government, they are actual representatives. They are oppressive in other ways, similar to the horrible things that the ANC did under apartheid, or the partisans did in the second world war. When you have a network of paid collaborators, they are going to get executed eventually, and sometimes innocent people will get executed too, as in South Africa. The solution to that is for Israel not to have networks of paid collaborators, but that’s not going to happen, so best to boycott, divest, sanctions, and so on, like in South Africa, until Israel comes to its senses, retreats to 67 borders, pays reparations to displaced persons, and makes reasonable treaties for water rights.
Nonsense. American Jews do not experience significant anti-Semitism anymore, as all the anti-semites are powerless now. Their self-image is perfectly fine, and we are usually happy to be Jewish. Some of us can’t stand Israel’s policy, that’s all.
The reason labor is entitled to surplus value is because in economic equilibrium, wages rise so that there is no profit. In economic equilbrium, wages are negotiated at zero unemployment, so that you are forced as an employer to pay the highest possible wage to keep workers from leaving to your competitor. Under these conditions, the workers make just enough to purchase the total output at peak production. This is called “Say’s law”.
What Marx noted (in Capital I) is that “Say’s law” is completely wrong! The workers are NOT making anywhere near their equilibrium wage, because they are competing in the presence of unemployment. When unemployment is at 0%, then Say’s law would become true (Marx doesn’t say this, but it is clear he knows this). That’s because when unemployment is at 0%, then workers wages start to rise very quickly due to the strong bargaining position of workers, and wages rise cutting into profits until profits are only as far above zero as is required to justify capital expansion and paying corporate bonds and dividends. This situation actually started to happen in the late 90s when unemployment dipped below 4%, it happens every time unemployment is very low, it’s the ideal that Keynesians aim for.
The failure of Says law in an economy with unemployment means that there is too little demand in a capitalist economy, because workers are chronically underpaid, due to competition with the unemployed. In Marx’s time, that meant a 14 hour day at subsistence wages, there were no regulations back then. Without a policy that takes unemployment to zero, if you want an industrial economy to not decend into depression, that means you are forced to prop up demand by massive state spending, by minimum wage laws, and by negative income taxes (like the EITC). These policies help the situation, but Say’s law still fails even with these measures, and it is failing today.
You can tell that Say’s law is failing through the effect of minimum wage rises, or stimulus spending. If Say’s law were really true, then any minimum wage rise would be immediately offset by inflation, and any stimulus spending would decrease private production, as production would be near peak. In real life, it’s the opposite— raising minimum wage has no effect on inflation until the minimum wage gets absurdly high (it never got there yet), and government stimulus spending does not produce inflation or decrease private production, it just reduces unemployment and gets the economy going.
The evidence for Marx’s observations that Say’s law is entirely false has been overwhelming and incontrovertible since the 1930s, it is the foundation of Keynesian economics. Due to political pressure, Keynesians can’t say “Marx”. But their theory is founded on Marx’s critique.
What “being a Jew” means to me is respect and preservation of certain Jewish writing, and being respectful of its offshoots, like Christianity. I only realized how Jewish Christianity is when I read Carriers “On the Historicity of Jesus”, before that, I had a totally wrong view. I also suspect I agree with Sanders that you can’t be a real Jew and support Babylon at the same time.
I don’t “feel” that David Horowitz sold out for money, I can see the evidence in his stupid conservative writing. I don’t “feel” that Sowell doesn’t understand economics, I listened to him pontificate for over an hour without understanding that Say’s law is false. I don’t need to “feel” that the left was purged from academia, I MET the purged leftists, including friends I personally know who couldn’t find a job.
The safe spaces are from leftists, but they are stupid and harmless. Berndardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were great hires, but they were hired in 1980, they would never get hired today. The reason universities hired leftists is because that’s where all the new ideas are. When universities are infiltrated by political right-wing people like you, the new ideas stop coming.
I don’t “feel” that you don’t read, you explained yourself that you don’t know anything when you said that anarchism isn’t of the left.
The reason Republicans have lost their right to exist as a party is because they staged 9/11. Their response to it is to nominate a fascist. It is not clear that the Democrats haven’t also lost their right to exist, as they staged the Oklahoma City bombing, and Waco, and Sandy Hook nonsense.
When I dislike something, I just explain why it is dumb. The barriers to free speech today come from large corporations and their rudeness codes, not from governments or the left.
The way the anarchist left prroposed to decrease business power is by STOPPING the government from enforcing property rights. This means people take over their own houses and factories, the ones they live and work in, as absentee landlords and owners are no longer able to enforce their authority.
I personally don’t think that’s a great idea. I prefer a government that enforces property rights, but also enforces graduated tax and ownership policies that have the effect of distributing ownership widely, for instance by making payment of rent or salary contingent on regulated equity gains. I’m not quite as radical as the anarchists. I see the value in enforcing property rights, because it allows a stable development of new authority and business centers, which are not terrible as long as they are competitive or temporary. Then again, maybe the anarchists would have developed in this way, if they had been allowed to survive.
Asinine arrogance is not the problem in the world. Stupidity is the problem.
It doesn’t have a salutary effect on human nature. It gets people to stop acting like pigs in public, and it intimidates people who want to act like pigs, because they are cowards and they know that what they do is wrong.
The race is front-loaded for Hillary because she wins the south. The pledged delegates don’t count, and if Bernie continues to win the non-Southern vote with the margins he is showing in Colorado, he can pull it off. The Southern vote is demoralizing, but not insurmountable.
I spend plenty of time with my daughter, this internet stuff takes me a few minutes to do. Impact does not require time.
On Usenet, people were actually crazy. Sometimes on strong amphetamines, sometimes on LSD, sometimes schitzophrenic, and a few times, it was Jeffrey Dahmer, who was a homicidally insane gay-cannibal. That was a trial by fire for sanity, this stuff is just tame. It’s hard to be brief, it takes editing.
You’re still at liberty after diversity training. You just probably will choose to act like less of a pig. Or not. it’s up to you.
That’s nonsense. The point of socialism is that in market equilibrium there are no rich people, because if someone else is making more money, you just go and do what that person is doing, and then you compete and reduce their income. The reason that doesn’t work in the real world is because there are class barriers to competing with people. There is no point to rich people, they are a waste of money.
The “handful of party bosses” didn’t live so much better in the USSR, you are thinking of North Korea. The goal of modern socialism is mostly to fix the problems in capitalism, not to produce total state control as in the USSR. What you are saying is nonsense propaganda.
I have nothing to think about. I see asinine arrogance as a virtue, as it is the cure to asinine stupidity, by asinine arrogant education.
He’s not talking about genocide, foolish person, he’s talking about criminal trials for people who broke the law.
Clinton also has well-informed professional staff commenting here, as opposed to Sanders, who relies on independent individuals unaffiliated with the campaign, who make honest mistakes. She only “touches” the part of me that revolts against covert government operations, like the Oklahoma City bombing or Sandy Hook.
Wait to see whether her lead evaporates when the voting leaves the South.
It makes a lot of sense when there are 12 candidates, as it allows people to switch allegiance when their candidate is not viable, and get persuaded at the caucus room. A switch to instant runoff voting would allow caucuses to become obsolete, but this is resisted in the US so far, perhaps because it would make third parties instantly viable.
Only ex-post-facto, a few months after he was arrested. It was a repost of “How I cooked an arm”, which looked originally like extremely lame gross-out junk-writing, but in retrospect was a horrific true life account. Nobody saved most of his stuff, because it was really awful writing. But the druggies were writing even more disturbed stuff, minus the real life murder of course.
The current tyranny you have is dictated by property rights, which are government enforced deeds. I don’t see you railing against the government forcing people to pay exorbitant rents under pain of forced eviction, or the government forcing people to take down websites due to copyright claims, or the government preventing people from reading and distributing scientific papers, or software.
Fixing society is a matter of redesign of property rights for efficiency, so that they work for the improvement of society, not for the enrichment of a minority. We already know what the target is— it’s described by free-efficient market theory. That target is not even approximately realized. If it were, people would not be making enormous amounts of money, as the competition would drive their wages to the mean.
That strongly depends on whether it’s the police doing the shooting, or crazy powerless people with no community support. Anti-semitism, like any racist power structure, consists of policies that keep Jews out of boardrooms, out of professorships, out of power. That stuff is ancient history in the US by now. Nowadays, pretty much the only anti-semitism in the US is the actions of individual psychopaths, and that’s about as much as you can ask from a society, short of utopia. Of course, I live in New York City, where anti-semitism makes about as much sense as being anti-Irish in Boston, so I might have a skewed picture of the deep south.
Copyright, as conservatives emphasize, is an artificial government granted monopoly, and constitutes one of the few exceptions to free speech. It is granted in the Constitution with the express intent that it is limited to a fixed term. Its purpose is to allow publishers to make a differential profit based on their unique material, and this used to incidentally also allow for authors to make a living. The original terms were 20-25 years, and that made a certain amount of sense at the time. Now there is an internet, and the publishing model is entirely broken.
The purpose of restricting freedom using copyright is to encourage innovation. But various industries, especially Disney, have lobbied the government to extend copyright, so that now the terms are the life of the author plus seventy years. Even in the print era this made no sense. The creation and maintenance of the public domain is an essential part of the preservation of works which are old enough that they are harmed by copyright rather than helped, as their dissemination is no longer profitable, so they rely on public institutions and historically minded individuals for preservation.
For scientific publishing, copyright stopped making sense the moment the internet switched on, as in this case, the author is not making money, the author is paying the publisher, and with electronic distribution, the publisher does nothing except collate the work and manage the scientific review process, it doesn’t even pay the scientific reviewers. This is why physicists revolted from copyright publishing in 1991 (and even before, if you consider the informal university samizdat preprint network of the 80s), and set up Arxiv. Now they are seriously considering suing publishing houses like Elsevier out of existence. Elsevier charges libraries upward of $10,000 per journal per year, it does absolutely nothing except manage unpaid authors and referees, print out papers and collate them. It is actively stifling the progress of science by sitting on a hoard of old papers from the 60s, 70s and 80s, which, frankly, should be confiscated, as it never should have belonged to them in the first place. These belong to their authors, whose only interest is public dissemination.
The model of copyright doesn’t work anymore, it’s only useful purpose now is to protect free-software in subverting the copyright act against itself. The terms of copyright needed to shrink to 5-10 years, and a different method of paying authors more directly needs to be considered. The publishing industry is on its last legs, and the music publishing industry has already collapsed.
That’s complete nonsense. ALL the serious cases of intentional plagiarism were scientists in the West plagiarizing those the East. There are a thousand examples of outrageous deliberate plagiarism by Western scientists, and these were invariably rewarded by recognition and rewards (before the internet made the plagiarism obvious). It is always clear which way the plagiarism goes, because the original work is always better and more complete, while plagiarized work always adds some wrong nonsense.
For two obvious examples: Sharkovskii’s theorem was deliberately stolen to write the nonsensical paper “period 3 implies chaos”. It’s clearly stolen, because “period 3” doesn’t imply “Chaos”. The only real result in that paper is just Sharkovskii’s theorem. The other example is the Soviet theory of Abiotic oil, which was deliberately stolen in Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere”, including stealing pressure anvil results and passing them off as his own. Gold read Russian fluently, he has no excuse. Unlike “Period 3”, Gold didn’t add nonsense, his own additions were valuable and correct, and in this case I think it was an independent rediscovery, but that’s no excuse.
Soviet science didn’t steal anything as a matter of policy, the scientists in the East were more diligent in citing sources than scientists in the West. There were rare cases of individual scientists engaging in what could be construed as plagiarism in the East, for instance, Bogoliubov and Shirkov reworking Gell-Mann and Low, but these cases were certainly unintentional, and the B&S cite GM&L properly.
“Diversity training” and “challenging people on their mistakes” are THE OPPOSITE of contradictory! The people who ignore and marginalize black women scientists when they speak are never leftist activists. They are all conservatives without diversity training, who just ignore anyone who isn’t a white male, because, in their stupid mind, this person lacks authority. The people with diversity training just say “you made a mistake”, or “I see, you’re right”, ignoring authority structures and paying attention to the content.
The diversity training is just there to make sure that you become aware of authority structures, so that you learn to ignore them. The authority structures are imposed unconsciously on you, from the bias you picked up from the society, and you need to actively fight against authority, by LISTENING to the people who have little authority, engaging in honest debate, and checking the arguments on their merits, without authority blinding you. The default for conservatives is to go by whoever has authority, and you need to fix that with diversity training, so that you stop following the big men. Big men say dumb things.
You must never go around “treating people equally”, because authority is real, and people have different amounts of it. If you “treat people equally”, that means, “listen to those with authority”. You have to treat people equally AFTER SUBTRACTING THEIR STUPID AUTHORITY. You learn to do that in technical fields, because in technical fields authority counts for nothing. A ten year old kid can beat you at chess.
Campuses have a lot of what to you look like “lefties”, because universities are reliant on government. The radical left used to get hired, back in the 70s and early 80s, because that’s where all the new good ideas are, but that’s only a few people, and they were all purged later. What you think of as “the left” on modern campuses is just a bunch of dumb conservative people who vote Democrat. That’s not the real left, that’s a bunch of conservatives who delude themselves. The left on campus is nonexistent, you just have a warped view of what constitutes the left.
I don’t need to ask anyone, much of my family and associates grew up in communist Romania. Bernie Sanders is not advocating communism, he is a western leftists, and nobody on the Western left advocates communism. I know what the USSR was like, although that video is ridiculously bad.
Copyright is not an example of personal property, it is an extremely intrusive state measure which prevents others from duplicating your data. This kind of draconian law is constitutionally limited for a reason, it violates the principle that anyone should be free to compete with you by duplicating what you are doing. This kind of restriction on competition is only useful to the extent it encourages innovation.
The lapse of copyright is an example of how to design property rights so that they encourage innovation. It worked ok in the period 1790-1990, it stopped working when the internet made publishing essentially free, and then copyright became a hindrance rather than a help.
I agree that copyright should not be sellable, rather rented to a publisher for the exact period that the publisher is publishing the works exclusively. But that’s not who controls the power it the society. The publishers could change the laws, not the authors. In the past, authors were forced to sell or give away the copyright to a publisher to get published. This is how publishing worked. After publication, the rights were traded like a commodity, despite these being artificial government enforced constructions, and nowadays, useless ones.
It is not sufficient to restore copyright to the original author, as authors die, and authors sometimes disown their own work and seek to destroy all copies, as for example George Lucas did with the 1977 versions of Star Wars (see the “Star Wars Despecialized Editions”), or more significantly, Grothendieck seeking to destroy all his old mathematical papers. Grothendieck does not have a right to un-write his old papers, because their existence prevented their results from getting discovered by others, which means he doesn’t get to go around and stop them from being disseminated and read. But this is what he tried to do in the 2000s, until he thankfully died. Likewise, the estate of Christopher Marlowe can’t suddenly decide that “The Jew of Malta” makes their ancestor look bad, and get rid of all copies, like Disney tries to do with “Song of the South”. Material that is historical needs to be preserved free of restrictions.
The publishing model needs to be redone in a way that encourages artists to make a living in the new media era. We don’t have such a model. The old model does not work, and nobody is making a replacement. I personally like the old British Television model, since I think British socialized television was the only good thing in the whole history of that rotten medium.
The primary cause of tyranny is not the property rights of individuals, it is misdesigned property rights which do not approach economic equilibrium. Property is justified by a mathematical model of economic competition leading to equilibrium, and if you don’t see an equilibrium, you aren’t doing it right.
Property is constructed for a reason, and you need to know the reason to know how to design the property contracts. The design needs to lead toward economic equilbirium, not away.
Diversity training is not imposed by government, it’s private decisions by private entities. The paper on glaciers is about the effect of ice on culture, it’s none of your business, you’ve never studied the effect of ice on culture. Conservatives don’t read academic work, they are not clever enough to understand any of it, so they parody it when the title strikes them as funny.
I can’t judge, and I don’t care. It’s not my field, and I don’t have any interest in the topic.
It’s not logical or factual, it’s made up nonsense.
My surname indicates nothing, except that some Jew a long time ago read some Aristotle. I don’t have brilliant ancestry, I do my own thinking.
I am not explaining Marx’s choice of slogans. I explained why labor is underpaid in excruciating detail. This observation is originally due to Marx, but is now standard economics. It is due to unemployment driving wages below their equilibrium value.
Einstein didn’t make that quote. Trying something over and over again and expecting a different result is called “research”. I have no patience for a person who refuses to read.
I know some of the Russian party elite had fancy houses. They sometimes had fancy cars too. They sometimes had access fancy Western stuff also. They just didn’t live all that well compared to Western politicians or business leaders, because their salary was abysmally low and they couldn’t accumulate property. That wasn’t so in Yugoslavia, for instance.
The Russian party members started to live much better once they privatized the state industries into their own control and became oligarchs. That’s not a justification for either communism or oligarchy, it’s just the facts of Russian history.
Einstein didn’t say that. Marx predicted the failure of Say’s law and the possibility of a “general glut” (great depression). He was the first to do this, and his observations about aggregate demand are the (actual, not stated) foundation of Keynesianism.
Freud didn’t rely on Judaism, he was just a cocaine addled fraud. Marx didn’t rely on Judaism, he relied on Ricardo and Adam Smith, plus mathematics.
TV tax plus grants. That’s Monty Python and Dr. Who.
You have no intrinsic right to restrict people from doing whatever they want with data in the first place, except if the government is out there preventing them from doing so using police state measures .That’s why copyright is a difficult law, and why it requires special provisions in the constitution. It’s a serious violation of free speech.
Information is not a chair, it can be copied endlessly at next to no cost. “Creators” can’t pull their own work, because it’s not “theirs” in any sense except owning the original manuscript. There is no natural concept of property rights regarding information, that’s a delusion you have created in your head.
Kafka could only destroy his work when it was in his physical possession. It’s not up to you what people do with published work, you have no right to infringe on the freedom of others.
If you want to pay people, pay people by grants. If you want decentralized decision making, have a usage count determine the grants. Paying people by ads produces awful work
You can’t restrict someone from using anything else “you made”, if you give someone a chair, they can sit on it, and if you repossess it, you are breaking the law. Once you elect to distribute your data, it just isn’t yours anymore in any sense of property.
The “work” is not limited to a piece of paper, the notion of property regarding the work is limited to the piece of paper.
The OTHER notion of “property” regarding works is copyright, which is a promise of government action to restrict others from copying data in their possession. To sic the government on people requires a justification, and the justification for copyright in the print era was that publishers incurred a cost in soliciting new original work, and they needed a fixed period to recoup the costs, the length of the period being adjustible by Congress to balance the need for protecting the public domain and free speech with the need of publishers to remain viable. It’s pretty much the same as the justification for patent protection— you give the industry a fixed period of monopoly to recoup the costs of invention. It’s not the best way to reward invention, because monopoly is a very indirect way of recouping costs.
Recouping the invention or creation costs is the only justification for any sort of monopoly, there is no other purpose. Nobody on the left or on the right has ever claimed that authors have some sort of abstract “right” to their own work, not once copyright lapses, not even before. This is not a conservative position or a leftist position. It’s just a nonsensical position I have never heard anyone advocate except you here.
There is no philosophical justification, no “just rights” argument regarding this stuff, there is no “property” notion here, there is nothing except the government preventing others from copying a work for a fixed period.
Further, you are completely deluded if you think the copyright culture is built to reward creators. It only does so indirectly, and it doesn’t work to reward original creators at all. What it is designed to do is maintain a publishing industry with reasonable reward to publishing houses that solicit and distribute original work, as opposed to publishing houses that simply republish old material. That’s it. It’s a protection for industry, not for individuals.
The US has a terrible history with the artistic creators themselves, the most original “creators” in the US often labor under extreme poverty, authors like Philip K. Dick and Charles Bukowski, mathematicians like Yitang Zhang or Grigory Perelman. There is no functioning market mechanism for actually rewarding “creators”, the mechanism rewards capitalists who mass-market publications, and the most highly original creations are not usually best-sellers immediately, they take a long time to build a market, usually after a string of far more successful rip-offs that go halfway. The next-in-line rip-offs sell better than the originals, so that the incentive for original work is quite skewed, you’re always better off in a market being second in line with a watered down idea than being an Einstein who is first with a radical idea.
To counteract this tendency to reward second-in-line authors, academics make a strict honor-code regarding citations, and enforce it by ostracism and penalties. The popular review article or textbook authors are not given credit for the results, rather original authors are, despite the fact that 99% of people don’t read the original papers in science either, they also read the more popular second-in-line less radical folks.
Copyrights serve to enrich non-creator corporations, and those who can siphon off control over the product. There is no actual mechanism of significant reward to creators under the corporate system in the US, which is why all the creation happens by people who are young and naive, or else hopelessly poor.
The “give” in the case of a copyright work is transferring the data to their hard-drive, at this point it can no longer be said to be “yours” in any sense except artistic originality. This is made obvious by the degree of state intrusion required to enforce the alleged property right. You don’t need a police state to know when someone steals a chair, the person who lost the chair will tell you. You need a de-facto police state to enforce copyright, as you can see around you today. Police state intrusion into everyone’s data devices just can’t be justified under any circumstances, and that’s what it means to enforce an imaginary right to an abstract pattern on someone else’s physical property.
The social utility justification has historically been the only one people used for copyright, from the right and left. There simply never was any basic property justification.
I would believe in “IP anarchy” if the GPL didn’t exist. Since we desperately need the GPL, and it’s piggybacking on copyright law, I hope that copyright on GPL works lasts until the sun burns out. Since software becomes obsolete so quickly, the current copyright term is infinite enough.
If I were dictator of the universe, I would replace the copyright law entirely, by a very complicated system of citations and grants, with decentralized user-measured approval, distributed internally to creators by weighted voting on originality and usability, similar to the voting model used on physicsoverflow.org. It’s extremely complicated, and it requires criteria for citation, which are enforced in a guild-like manner by the organization which recieves grants. The grants I envision as matching-funds (or 5x matching funds) for user contributions, but internally redistributed according to the citation pattern the authorial guild settles on. It may sound extremely elaborate, but it’s basically how science works internally. I don’t have any experience with non-scientific publishing, so I am not a good person to design a system, obviously.
Data transfer makes it yours. You can’t “lend” data, the concept does not make sense, you can’t erase the copy in my brain. If you don’t want people to have your data, keep it to yourself.
If the data is a specific industrial process, or a significant government secret, make each individual sign a specific non-disclosure agreement you negotiated specifically with that individual, and that you can sue the individual for violating. Even this secrecy negotiation is rife for abuse, as the government classifies half its documents, to protect itself internally from embarassment, while the secrecy surrounding many industrial processes just prevents economic growth.
You can’t distribute a work to everyone in the world and expect them all to abide by a universal non-disclosure agreement. There is no property right there, there is no social utility in that, there is no natural right there, and it requires a police state to enforce. Even before the DMCA, just enforcing old-style copyright became impossible without looking at everyone’s computer, as it is very easy for me to capture a stream you send me by just taking screenshots and recording the sound-card output, then sending a copy to all my friends on a memory stick. Nobody would normally know about this without an intrusive state, as everyone benefits from this process locally, including, by the way, the original artist, who gets a wider viewership.
It is absurd to imagine property rights for old mathematical papers, because you can’t stop someone from using a mathematical theorem you developed 40 years ago, or distributing the original paper you wrote, no matter what you think of the theorem today. Groethendieck does not have a right to get rid of his old papers. He has a social right to be given credit for the result, but that’s not the same thing as getting paid, except indirectly, and you don’t need a government to enforce that, it’s enforced by mathematician conventions of the guild of mathematicians for citing results. It’s not enforced by ANY law, the mathematicians will just look at you funny if you claim that you proved the Grothendieck Riemann Roch theorem. They’ll say “no you didn’t. Groethendieck did that”, and then send you a copy of his paper.
You are not making a principled individual rights argument, you are making an unprincipled justification for a police-state using a nonexistent individual right to control everyone else who has a copy of data they created.
All individual credit for scientific results are determined by scientific consensus, and are NEVER enforced by government decree or law. There is no law preventing me from claiming I invented universal gravitation. It’s just that I didn’t, and the scientific community by consensus credits Isaac Newton. There is a plausible claim for Hooke to the same result, and how to weight the two claims for originality, that’s a complicated process that never involves the law or government, and is done entirely informally by the scientific guild.
I explained one such credit dispute with Starobinsky and Mukhanov. Why do they deserve credit for inflation theory? If you read their papers from 1980, you see that they do not have an inflaton like later inflation papers, they imagine the effective cosmological constant is created by a fourth order term in the gravitational Lagrangian. The modern mechanism was by Guth, and it uses a scalar field as the inflaton. Is that really different? Is it different enough to be a new idea? Does it mean that Guth created inflation?
By guild conventions, the scalar inflaton IS different enough to be considered a new additional idea, which is why Guth gets some credit, but the actual physical RESULT of a fourth order term is roughly the same sort of inflation as a scalar inflaton, and the predictions of inflation were worked out by Mukhanov simultaneously with Guth’s original paper, and quite a while after Starobinsky. Guth’s idea also doesn’t work, due to inhomogeneities from a first order phase transition, and Linde also adjusted Guth’s model so that there would be no phase transition, and inflation would end smoothly. That’s another new idea. So when people distribute scientific prizes, they end up crediting Starobinsky, Mukhanov, Guth, and Linde, and not, for instance, Stephen Hawking, who was instrumental in popularizing the result throughout the 80s.
The scientific guild determines originality by consensus, by discussions. I expect similar artistic guild decisions are made regarding authorship style, and production of new novels, as they were in the science fiction community in the 60s and 70s. These decisions are non-binding regarding distribution of publishing profits at the moment. I expect that just as grants interact and are advised with the scientific community, grants for publishing will interact with the authorship community, and that the community of authors will make complicated internal decisions regarding originality and credit for novels and poems without any legal mechanism controlling them, and without gigantic publishing houses using monopoly generated money to lobby regarding the results. That’s essentially how old literature is evaluated, the stuff that is out of copyright already.
The process of granting monopoly rights simply does not credit original authors. If science operated by “copyright” regarding scientific papers, and money distributed by paying people according to the distribution count of the number of copies of copyrighted works, then Hawking would have gotten rich off of inflation, as the original results of the 1983 Inflation Workshop roughly reproducing and checking Mukhanov’s results (which Hawking took part in) would have made Hawking rich, and Guth, let alone Starobinsky and Mukhanov, would have been ignored and not gotten a penny.
Even in terms of guild credit, Starobinsky and Mukhanov were unjustly ignored for a long time. But that’s just the usual nonsense for scientists from the USSR, people in the East were ignored and stepped on by people in the West. That part fixed itself last decade, as people reviewed the history.
The most successful are the Northern European social democracies and Australia, these are the model for Sanders. I am much further left than Sanders, and I look to Linux, which mirrors the anarchist experience in Spain in 1936-1938, and in modern day Kurdish Rojava.
Only someone clueless would lecture anybody on the benefits of capitalism.
The type of revolution Sanders talks about does not involve imposing state power on individuals, it has already happened to a certain extent in Burlington, without infringing on anyone’s business rights. It is about a change in voting patterns which makes people aware of the ties of big-business and government, and reduces the ability of business and government to collude to exclude consideration of the best interest of the public in the deliberations of Congress.
The rhetoric of revolution is appropriate, it is like the “Gingrich revolution” or the “Reagan revolution”, a shift in composition and attitude in those holding public office, a shift which allows much wider ranging policy changes than what usually gets through the gridlock. The revolution is enforced by activism and mobilization by citizens, as opposed to corporate interests, in favor of not-so-radical policies which benefit the public as a whole, although they come with no coporate sponsors. These are election law reform, universal health-care, and subsidized college, policies which are standard in Northern Europe and Australia.
Your paranoia is due to some delusion that the left is out to impose an agenda which restricts the rights of individuals. Sanders has been mayor in Burlington, a Congressman, and Senator, and has no secret agenda. His agenda is his public agenda, and that’s more than you can say for anyone else running for president, or for Congress for that matter.
There are no benefits to capitalism. There are benefits to markets, free trade, and independent small business.
You can’t restrict access to data inside a general purpose programmable computer system, you need to prevent the computer from being programmable by the user in order to do that, because a coder will write a code to extract the data when it is displayed. This is a large part of why modern machines are moving backwards, becoming less generally programmable, with various barriers to users and developers. This tendency is a massive regression in freedom and an unacceptable regression in technology— an iPad is less programmable than a laptop, a laptop with Windows is less programmable than a laptop with LInux. A TV box is not programmable at all. The loss of general programming ability is a destruction of technology so as to reproduce corporate control of data in an era when it is clear that this is no longer possible or desirable.
I explained to you that there is no natural right of property to data you create. You still can’t get this through your skull. Data is not property, it doesn’t have any of the traits of the things you naturally call property. Copyright is just a government contract that restricts others ability to help others. You can’t lend data, you can’t take it back. There is nothing you can do to express a property right regarding data, it’s not property. It’s something else.
Everybody wants to get paid. There is no reasonable way of tying payments to the act of copying and distribution, because it has become decentralized with universal computers. It is also not clear that this process of restricted monopoly was ever the right way to pay authors.
That’s insane. Ponomarenkoto was the head of the Belarus Partisans, who had a ton of Jewish units. The Jewish Partisans were a large fraction of the total number all over the German occupied territory, they had the most to lose, and fought the hardest. Even the somewhat anti-Semitic Stalin recognized the Jewish issues in 1948, voting to establish Israel in light of the genocide. You should stop reading right-wing propaganda, and start learning some history.
This is “history” that you and your friends made up in your warped heads. It never happened. There was no such policy. It didn’t exist. You made it up, and you’re stupid.
There were lots of entirely Jewish partisan units in Belarus and all over the occupied territory. Stalin did not perform genocide on Jews, his anti-semitism consisted of the doctor’s plot, and purging Jews from the party.
Computers are not made by “capitalism”, they are made by markets, free trade. In the case of my computer and OS, I made sure when buying it, to the best of my ability, that it was provided by independent small business, right down to the microprocessor. Of course I had no choice in paying for the copy of Windows on the machine that was there before the company I bought from deleted it and replaced it with Linux, but that corporate imposition is next to impossible to avoid.
Capitalism is a power structure of tradable property deeds imposed on top of markets, free trade and small business which allow a handful of people to take over those markets so as to prevent free-trade and swallow up the small business. That’s what people oppose, not the fair frictionless market equilibrium that would happen in the presence of markets and free trade.
Data is not a commodity, because unlike other real commodities it is not scarce. This is what makes the treatment of it as a commodity completely problematic.
You have to find another way to “monetize” the creation of data, and scientists have gotten really good at that in the past 100 years. Scientists don’t starve, but they don’t get rich when they have a “hit” paper either, they just get a more comfortable position with tenure.
Sanders is firmly in the libertarian left, in case you haven’t noticed. He just hasn’t make as big a deal about it during the primaries, because his gun stance hurts him, as do some of his policies that contradict targeted subsidies that Democrats traditionally support. His fair-play language is criticized by some black leaders as ignoring racism, which it isn’t, but there’s little he can do to change the perceptions, because traditionally fair-play policies have deliberately excluded blacks, for example by targeting capital growth to suburban housing and neglecting cities. I am 100% positive this is not the case with Sanders’ policies, but it is very hard to persuade black voters of this, because they have experience with GI bill discrimination, mortgage subsidy discrimination, and public works discrimination under previous Democrats.
He wasn’t “praising Marxist dictatorship”, he was comparing them to the alternative then, which was fascist dictatorship. Castro governed better than Somoza, and Ortega was marginally better than what’s-his-name in Nicaragua. The US was committed to destabilizing any leftist governments, Marxist or not (remember that Castro wasn’t even a declared Marxist before the US interventions pushed him to seek help from Russia), and replacing the leftists with horrific governments like the one recently in Argentina, that destroy the economy, and allow foreign multinationals and gigantic agribusiness to control the whole economy.
Sanders is very committed to healthy American business, but he is fair about it, he doesn’t want subsidies, and he certainly doesn’t seek to impose governments on other countries, which is as it should be. He always governed as a libertarian socialist, which is more or less what he is, or as close as you can come in a messy real world and get elected.
I thought that too, at one point, about Trump, that he’s just out to wreck the Republicans, he doesn’t believe his own nonsense. But now, I don’t care. When you pretend to be a fascist for long enough, it stops being pretend.
The most important similarity is the spontaneous violence toward protesters at the rallies. The SS was the organization Hitler set up to quell protests at rallies using violence. In addition, the scapegoating and marginalization of ethnic minorities and immigrants, and also the intense obsession with the phallus and sexual authority. Fascism is like an S&M game in politics, except this is not a game, this is the worst catastrophe for any country.
The other similarities are shared with “normal” Republicans: the complete disregard for civil liberties, like the 1st and 4th amendment, invading other countries on trumped up excuses, and the support for torture of political opponents.
Shared with Republicans and Democrats both is summary executions of political opponents overseas, and inviting large business leaders to craft policy cooperatively within the government, excluding from the policy table workers and consumers both. This is the original definition of fascism, created by Mussolini and adopted by Hitler, Franco and all the rest: substituting “class cooperation” for “class struggle”. What that means is that elite business leaders and government officials would sit down together and tell everyone else what to do. Excluding Sanders, that’s both political parties in the US in a nutshell.
I usually throw around the word “fascist” for partial fascism, as Bush II was already about halfway there, and the Clintons were 30% there in the 90s. In case you don’t remember, in the 90s, right-wing people were targeted by the IRS and ATF for harassment, by selling them guns and then arresting them for illegal posession, this was the procedure at Ruby Ridge and Waco. This PATCON operation culminated in the catastrophic Oklahoma City bombing, which was the harbinger of 9/11. But Trump has deliberately gone all the way to full throated fascism. Whether it’s pretend or not doesn’t matter, it’s unforgivable.
I can’t vote for Clinton with a clean conscience, but Trump is a horror beyond anything else that has ever been nominated. Here’s a more eloquent article: http://www.salon.com/2016/0…
It’s not that vague, Cheney was in charge of all the drills on that day. It can’t be many more than one person, because such a conspiracy isn’t stable, the jig is pretty much up if significantly more than one person knows about it. So I tend to think it was Cheney acting alone, maybe with a handful of advisors.
That criticism is brain-damaged. The first claim is that JP Morgan didn’t recieve $390 billion, as Sanders says it did, because, the fellow argues, the bank repaid the loan so quickly, that the effective value of such a short loan is only worth $31 billion.
Nonsense! This criticism is a blood-boiling lie. There were two components to the bank bailout, the TARP, where the government publicly bailed them out, and the monetary part, where the Fed pumped new free money into them. The less publicly visible part was this second monetary trick. You should think of it as the Fed creating money from nothing, and then handing it out to a bunch of large banks. The actual mechanism was a sort of complicated bond sell-resell trick, which gave the banks a no-work automatically profitable transaction loop. The point of this monetary process was to reinflate the deflated balloon, to pump capital into the banks so they would lend again.
The short terms of the TARP loan, the only reason they were paid back so quickly (or at all), is simply because the Fed did this. The banks also knew it was going to do this. So once JP Morgan got this new-money infusion, it could “pay back” the loans, and then award its CEO and board lavish bonuses. This is an absurd situation, as the board did nothing at all except receive a free Fed stimulus. This type of fraud not only makes leftists angry, it also made conservatives extremely angry, consider the “End the Fed” movement.
Creating money and then distributing it doesn’t change the situation regarding the size of the bailout, it actually makes it larger. Except there is an invisible component, which is the Fed bailout, which is not responsive to the public.
Sanders proposes to change this by making the Fed operations transparent, with addition of labor representatives. The idea that these people are “unqualified” to handle something so ridiculously simple as monetary policy is laughable. If you explain it properly, a person who took high-school algebra would be able to do it.
The real issue is that the Fed is a power-center which is not really responsible to the government. It’s independence has been taken over to produce wealth for the few, keep that wealth stable from inflation, and forget its mandate to reduce unemployment. I would prefer hyperinflation to that.
The symbolism is the baptism of Jesus.
Close enough for everyone to get it, including us Jews.
It’s the symbolism, whether you like it or not. I would suggest to you that if you are religious in the superstitious sense, although I am not, you would be prudent to heed the signs.
Karl Marx was also a figure of Jesus. Jesus is an archetype for social transformation through individual transcendence, martyrdom, and community. In the Roman empire, that meant eliminating a heirarchical slave economy over 600 years. Sanders is more like Jesus than Marx was, as I sense the potential for a passion.
Karl Max didn’t create communism, he wrote about Capitalism. He didn’t die for our sins, but Bernie might, he’s taking a real chance running a campaign so transformative. The death tolls you cite for communism are bad numbers, by the way.
What Lenin calls “socialism” is what everyone else calls “communism”. What Lenin calls “communism” is post-scarcity utopia.
The Communist Manifesto does not advocate communism, it advocates standard policies (nowadays) like progressive taxation, regulation of industry, and minimum wage and maximum working hours. The creator of 20th century communism was Lenin.
The difference is that I read the Communist Manifesto (and Capital), I would suggest you do the same. They are not about Marxism, it wasn’t developed yet.
What’s the issue with the English? I can’t find any errors.
Bernie wants less concentrated ownership, not more. That makes him a left libertarian, what used to be called an “anarchist”, before that became pejorative.
It doesn’t need to be made. It just is.
You don’t need to believe God exists to believe in His signs.
The sign is not so much from the event itself, as from the interpretation of the onlookers, which is conditioned by past experience. The sign reveals itself when all your attempts to discredit it turn into senseless rationalizations. The only question is what the event immediately conjures up, before the rationalizations, and why.
Ending concentration of media ownership in large companies, supporting small and medium size business, reducing the bureaucracy for health-care and college loans. All of his policies are secretly libertarian friendly, that is not by accident, it’s by design. It’s why he attracts independents as well as leftists.
Theft is paying $50/month for internet, when French folks get it for 1/3 the price and 3 times the speed. The point of socialism is fixing the failure of markets, when corporations consolidate, and fixing the failure of markets in shunting incomes to a small population of moochers at the top.
We didn’t make it. It was made for us.
It was used to fabricate a narrative to support a fictitious government story with otherwise nonexistent evidence. On the other hand, if you had waterboarded Bush and Cheney, you might have gotten some actual actionable intelligence.
Life would be so much easier if what you are saying were true. But it’s not.
Which readings are indefensible specifically? For the Jewish texts, he uses an ancient Targum to justify that the references in Isiah 53 to the suffering servant were originally interpreted (by some) as referring to the messiah. I don’t remember anything about midrash, but my memory is fading.
I agree with your statements, but not the conclusion. The point of the Targum is not that the folks who wrote it were Christians, and expected the messiah to suffer, it is simply that the figure in Isaiah 53 was interpreted as the messiah. That makes it completely reasonable to find Jews who interpreted Isiah 53 more straightforwardly than the Targum’s torturous rereading, and just went ahead and considered it a straightforward prophecy of Jesus.
This is a very weak piece of evidence by itself— Carrier isn’t saying “The Targum proves that Jews expected the messiah to suffer”, what he is saying is that the Targum makes it clear that Isaiah 53 is talking about the messiah, and given that, the probability that Jews would consider a suffering messiah is not small, so the argument that it is impossible to have a suffering messiah is neutralized. It is not at all impossible, it is in fact likely that some Jews read Isaiah 53 that way. How likely, you can quibble, but I think it’s likely enough to not affect Carrier’s conclusion.
The point is that the probability-talk makes it clear why he is bringing up the Targum. It’s a glancing blow against the argument “no Jews would come up with a suffering messiah unless they actually knew a messiah person who suffered”. That argument is not right, as a simple reading of Isaiah 53, and the context of the figure being the messiah (from the Targum) shows. That the Targum doesn’t go that way doesn’t change the probabilities all that much, it still leaves it pretty likely that there were very likely some Jews back then who read it the way modern Christians read it today.
Regarding Paul, I agree with your statements about Paul’s philosophy, and I suspect Carrier agrees with your statements also. I just don’t see why they are relevant to historicity— all that Paul needed to believe is that Jesus, the divine celestial high-priest angel-like figure, decended from heaven to get a body of flesh that was then crucified, so as to restore God, etc, etc, he didn’t need Jesus to be a particular historical person, nor did he need that person to be a friend of his colleague Peter. The less historicity the better.
Carrier further insists, with some specificity, that the crucifiction happened in the lower heavens (“outer space”), but I don’t see that as absolutely necessary, although it is supported by his evidence. I agree with him, it’s just that the evidence is not as strong for this hypothesis.
The figure of Jesus in Paul doesn’t have to be a historical person attached to Paul’s circles, it is just a figure that can end Temple sacrifice and bring personal revelation to the practice of Jewish religion. That’s it. There’s nothing about actual historicity, just about flesh-incarnation, which is an extremely important part of the Carrier mythicist position. The flesh incarnation is what makes the blood sacrifice redeeming, and allows temple sacrifice to end.
The “brother of Jesus” is a “brother of Christ”, which is really “brother in Christ”, as Carrier explains, and simply means that James was a non-apostle Christian. That’s all. It was later reinterpreted to mean that he was literally the brother of Jesus, which is not historically accurate. Carrier’s reading is more defensible in context.
This is not about “there is a god” or “there is no god”, it is about history of religion. Unfortunately the scholarship in this field is exceedingly biased by groupthink and delusion, and one must counter it by redoing everything from scratch, as Carrier did, thankfully.
Carrier’s argument is based on the fact that Paul never references Jesus as a person that anyone knows, but as a figure whose sacrifice ends temple sacrifice. He makes no mention of a historical Jesus, and this is the original observation on which mythicism is based. It is sufficient evidence by itself to give the hypothesis a fair hearing.
Paul simply doesn’t speak about Jesus as a historical person. He speaks about Jesus as a figure in the celestial realm who was incarnated in a body and sacrificed. This doesn’t mean that Paul knew anyone who knew the embodied Jesus, it doesn’t mean that Paul is reporting historical events, his main thesis is that one must communicate with the RISEN Jesus to understand Christianity. This is what people did, and then the rest follows, including the unintentional fabrication of historical records to place Jesus in history. The reason I say unintentional is because the earliest gospel, Mark, does not only have a historicist reading, but it can be read as allegory, which Carrier notes, and only by the time of the latest gospels, Luke and John, do we have historicism established as dogma as opposed to allegory.
In my opinion, you would be a better Christian if you didn’t believe in a historical Jesus.
The problem with this hypothesis is that there is a much more plausible explanation for the rise of Christianity which is simpler and more consistent with the data: some Jews decided to end temple sacrifice because the temple was corrupt. Now, all Jews decided to do this after the destruction of the temple, but THESE Jews had foresight, and decided to do this before. The only way to end temple sacrifice is by an uber-sacrifice which makes sacrificial redemption unnecessary, and therefore they are looking around in scripture for what that could be. A proper reading of Isiah 53 provides the suffering servant, and the Psalms describe something like a crucifiction, so they decide that a heavenly Jesus, the heavenly high priest, incarnated in the flesh, got himself crucified, and then resurrected to let everyone know the good news, that the end times have arrived, and temple sacrifice is no longer necessary. The historical story got tacked on later, when the destruction of the temple showed that the Christians were actually prescient.
The rise of Christianity is not well explained by a historical Jesus. It is theologically next to impossible to imagine Jews deifying a real person, it is contrary to all Jewish teaching. On the other hand, it is very sensible to have Jews historcizing a celestial figure. The proper history links the two religions together in a continuous line of evolution, and is much more plausible than the standard story, which frankly is bizarre.
It is relevant to everyone because it is a case where a scholarly consensus is unjustified by the evidence. This means it needs to be attacked until the consensus is broken.
James is not the “brother of Jesus”. This is another old saw that Carrier puts to rest for good. There is no solid evidence that James is a flesh-and-blood relative of a historical Jesus, the references to “brother of Christ” is just as easily read as a reference to a “brother in Christ”, as Carrier does. James is just the most notable of the early non-apostle Christians. It is also not clear to me that he ever led the Church, he was just martyred at some point, that’s all I know, but perhaps he did lead the Jerusalem Church at one time, I don’t know. It’s not that important I think.
Your fundamental postulate is that the divine status of Jesus was actually resisted by the Jerusalem branch. This is problematic, it is almost certainly not true, as we know that Paul’s view of Jesus is as a divine figure, perhaps not co-equal to God, but certainly like a high angel. This is ALSO the point of view expressed in Peter I, and it is a severe stretch of the documents to believe that the Jerusalem Church and the Rome Church could disagree on something so fundamental and still call themselves member of the same religion. They disagreed on the role of Jewish dietary laws, on Jewish law in general, and on the relative weight one should place on the teachings of Jesus vs. the OT, but that’s expected. They can’t reasonably disagree fundamentally on what Jesus is.
One of the nice things about Carrier is that after accepting his position, you can view Peter I as authentic, as Church history suggests, and only Peter II as inauthentic, as textual analysis reveals. This is not something Carrier says explicitly (he mentions Peter I a lot, and I’m sure he knows this, he just doesn’t emphasize this as a selling point), but it is something I noticed after reading his book and rereading Peter I. I believe now that Peter I is probably authentic.
The problem with this hypothesis is that it is a claim based on pure speculation, just to resolve the theological mystery in the rise of Christianity. There are no sources which can support your claim, the only possibly authentic document we have from the Jerusalem church is the first Epistle of Peter, the rest is hearsay or reported via Paul, and in the stuff reported by Paul, there is no dispute regarding the role of Jesus or the figure of Jesus in the path to salvation, or the divine status of Jesus (although not necessarily co-equal with God, as Jesus is later).
The doctrine of the Jerusalem Church is also independently attested to in the Talmud, extremely indirectly, where it is mentioned that there is a sect of Jews who worship Jesus with a different historical figure attached than the usual one. These Christians follow Jewish law, and are very likely the last 3rd or 4th century remnants of the now extinct Jerusalem church, and this attestation is pretty much the only purely independent evidence for the very existence of the Jerusalem Church! So you should take what the Talmud says seriously, you have no other source. They do not seem to differ much from other Christians regarding the role of Jesus, they seem to consider themselves Christians just as much as Pauline Christians.
The postulate that Carrier gives, that Jesus was constructed from textual interpretation, without a clear historical precedent, is further muddied by the fact that later historical figures can add their say to the Gospels, but in a composite manner. So there is a martyrdom of James recorded somewhere, where James says “forgive them, for they know not what they do” while being stoned, and this ends up being placed in Jesus’ mouth. LIkewise for teachings of John the Baptist, and perhaps the legends of other documented figure, like the crazy guy who cut some cloth in the temple right before the destruction, saying “The end is nigh!” which is reported in Josephus.
The creation of a false historical narrative is something that is easier to spot than it looks, you just keep looking at the sources, and trying to figure out what is myth, and what is history. In the case of Jesus, the end tally is 100% myth, with a little bit of composite history of various figures.
In that case, the figure of Jesus is divine right from the start, although not initially coequal with God, as the trinity makes it out to be. It is possible for the Jerusalem church to oppose making Jesus a co-equal figure with God, but I do not accept that it is possible for them to reject the divine nature of Jesus and be Christians, or be compatible with the known theology of Paul. I would have to see the evidence. I did not read “Christian Beginnings”, but such works are usually marred by following traditional scholarly assumptions, and producing the weighted average of various opinions. I prefer someone like Carrier who goes back to the original sources, and does a rigorous analysis of what we can know and what we can’t.
Paul considered Jesus a person, but a sort of celestial person, who was crucified to end temple sacrifice, not as a specific historical figure. The earliest Church figures thought of Jesus the same way, and didn’t specify who he was historically, but after Paul died, when the Gospel of Mark came out to proselyze, in around 70AD or so, the historical interpretation started becoming dominant.
Mark was most likely written as pure allegory, but it could marginally be read as history, it has a structure like the passion plays of Romulus common in Rome. You could even act it out and stage it to get converts.
It’s a success, so then the competing Gospels got written, first Matthew, to give a more Jewish character to the gospel, and to write a better allegory (and fix the ending of Mark). Then, due to the growth of the Church, most new members just accepted it as a history, by taking it too literally.
By the time the Gospels of Luke and John were composed some decades later, the idea that Jesus was a historical person was firmly a majority opinion, and since it does no harm to the essential theological points, it doesn’t matter to the Church leaders what people believe about history. For all they know, the stories are authentic, the authenticity is not a driver of the narrative, just it’s efficacy in gaining converts.
The same process happened again with Cargo Cults, as Carrier documents extensively, where a fictitious person was turned into a historical character with a consistent narrative over one generation of worship. It’s not only possible, it’s by far the most likely origin story for the gospels.
Carrier is a skeptic, and when you’re a skeptic, you get some right and some wrong. There is no shame in getting something wrong, you just recognize it eventually and move on. It is a worthless argument to say “this person got this point wrong, therefore this completely unrelated point is also wrong”. Einstein made similar mistakes, for instance, his completely bogus superconductivity paper in 1917, or “black holes can’t form” from 1938. Einstein also wrongly thought that quantum effects can emerge from GR. He didn’t get everything right. Research requires bold ideas and patient review, and that demands the acceptance that you will be wrong sometimes, but also demands that you don’t give up until your opponents demonstrate it conclusively. The ego is good, it allows you to continue when the political consensus is against you.
The experts of the 1950s agreed with Carrier that the Big Bang was probably wrong, and some form of steady state was right, for essentially similar anti-theological reasons. This, despite the overwhelming evidence from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis in Gamow’s papers from the 1940s. Sometimes the consensus of experts is totally busted, and there is no recipe to tell you when. You need to do a painstaking review.
Unlike the Big Bang, where we have nuclear abundance data and microwave background, regarding the Jerusalem church, there is no evidence. There are NO DOCUMENTS! Nothing. It’s all gone. There’s nothing I can see which support the claim that they viewed Jesus as a human first. I would appreciate it if you could list the original sources that Vermes uses to support his assertion, I didn’t read his book.
There is simply no evidence from the Jerusalem church. We don’t know what they thought, and the stuff in the NT which describes their doctrine, and the stuff in the Talmud, are both strongly compatible with Carrier’s position.
The “argument from personal incredulity” only goes so far— it is possible that the Jerusalem church was following the more ancient human Jesus from the 1st century BC, and Paul introduced the divine-figure Jesus, but then, how did they reconcile their theology? How is it consistent with the reports of the mass visions of the risen Christ in the pentacost? These things are consistent with Carrier’s version.
These historical reviews require judgement. I don’t think this debate has any relevance to the atheism debate— it’s not about atheism at all. This is about scholarly bunk. There are cases where you have a gigantic field founded entirely on bunk, like Freudian psychoanalysis or Phlogiston theory, or Aristotelian physics. It seems that “Historical Jesus research” is the same sort of thing.
I think I have seen every single original document in this case, and in my own judgement, Carrier’s position is the most logically sound position. You can make more speculative scenarios with a historical Jesus figure, but they would be pure speculation, and the historical figure would have no relation at all to the stories in the Gospels, which would have to get composed as Carrier explains they were.
Paul believed Jesus was born of woman, as an embodiment of a celestial figure, from the seed of David, whose role was to get crucified to end temple sacrifice. Being flesh-and-blood, born of woman, is what allows him to be both celestial and messiah at the same time.
Paul simply doesn’t associate Jesus with any specific historical person. He only knows the celestial Jesus, and the only purpose of the flesh incarnation is to provide messiah and atonement sacrifice. As far as Paul is concerned, even JESUS wouldn’t have to know who he was on Earth so as to make the theology work. He wouldn’t have to be named Jesus. He could be some random crucified person. Just as long as after the crucifiction, the celestial Jesus resurrects and announces the good news to the apostles, the theology is complete. There is no historical narrative attached to the theology.
The comparison to John Frum is appropriate, because the early Church was an illiterate society. Only the Jews were literate, as universal literacy is an essential part of Jewish religion. Other than Paul, there were extremely few literate members of the Roman Church, only Paul, and some much later converts, which is why we have so few documents from the era.
The synoptic gospels are allegories of the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ. This process is abstract at first, and it is revealed to apostles by visions of the resurrected Christ, much as happens to modern-day Christians.
The historization process places a human Jesus wherever they feel like, and include a somewhat consistent historical background. It’s no more consistent than any other fiction.
I am not really an atheist. I am a mythicist because it is historically more likely to be accurate. I believe that the visions of the mythical Jesus were authentic, and I am fine with it when people accept the mythical Jesus as a personal savior, I am just not willing to lie about history to get them to do so, unlike the later gospel writers. In their defence, it is not 100% clear they knew they were lying.
Real blues is not pentatonic. It’s just that old classical music theory can’t classify it, so they said “pentatonic”.
How you break up the banks depends strongly on the range of interpretation of Dodd Frank and the Sherman act, both of which are nebulous. It’s all best left vague until you start to do it, and then if there is a lawsuit, you let the SC rule on it, and try something else if you fail. It’s impossible to fail if you really try. The big banks are effectively public as they get free money from the Fed, except they misuse that power to transfer wealth to their executives, rather than improve the economy.
I was late to that party. Not much original from me on that.
Um, I call “not real”.
Plenty of Jews IN ISRAEL have the same quarrel with their own government. It’s no more anti-semitic than the anti-apartheid movement was anti-Dutch.
They left a documentary record— the epistles of Paul and perhaps Peter I, if it is authentic (I think it is). These are consistent with the writings of this gang. The later writings are a different gang, who create a literal-headed historical story to justify the beliefs of the original gang, by stages. The process is described well in Carrier’s book, and it is, despite superficial impressions, much more parsimonious than the standard story, and is almost surely correct.
I like stuff like Sonny Shotz “Neon Hooligans” or Keny Arkana “Planquez Vous”, I’ll check out Doom, thanks!
I like Sonny Shotz “Neon Hooligans”, Keny Arkana “Planquez Vous”, non-traditional stuff like that. I’ll check out Doom, thanks!
You’re missing the point of single-payer— it isn’t imposing anything much on you, it simply reshuffles the payment system. It needs to be universal, but there are no barriers to a libertarian buying private additional insurance, or paying out of pocket for a doctor, although it would be silly. This system is used all over the world for a reason, the health care industry is not regulated well by patient choice, and produces ridiculous profit at zero innovation, as the patient chooses the treatment, and the insurance company pays for it.
If the US did what you said, in a few years, nearly everyone would be a registered Democrat.
I agree with nearly all of what you say, except that what you describe Paul believing in is simply not what the term “historical Jesus” means. A historical Jesus is not just a Jesus that becomes embodied in flesh and lives as a man and gets crucified, that’s universal to Christianity. A historical Jesus means that Jesus is a very specific man, whose life and history in some way roughly matches the historical sounding parts of the gospels.
This is what Paul never claims in any authentic surviving text. What he tells you is that Jesus is a celestial figure who acquired a body of Davidian stock, suffered and was crucified while inhabiting this body, and returned from the dead to spread the gospel. But Paul is not specific that this embodied Jesus was a personal friend of Peter’s, nor that he had a brother named James, nor that he had a mother named Mary. He doesn’t claim to have met any person who knew Jesus in any unambiguous way. Most significantly, he doesn’t base any of the theology on claims of firsthand experience with the historical person. Jesus’s embodied experience is an abstraction, a source of theological inspiration, not a memory of a historical event.
There simply is no historical person there. The embodiment of Jesus is not in a specific person, nor does it have to be. It is sufficient for Christianity that the embodiment took place, when and where is not so important. It could have been on Earth, it could have been in “outer space” (as Carrier claims), it could have been anonymous, and Jesus did not need to be a famous preacher, he could have been any innocent person crucified by Romans. The details simply don’t matter, they are added later as the dogmatic story become solidified around the core theological points.
He is probably too incompetent at Kurdish or Arabic to be anything but a nuisance as a front-line fighter.
The risk of death is sufficiently high, it is approximately equally likely for a YPG fighter to die as to live, that it is impossible for a volunteer to not be committed at the moment.
You mean that poor people pay less for the products made by low-wage labor? Sure, it’s true. But better yet is for the products to be more expensive, and people to get paid more. In free-market equilibrium, there are no wealthy people.
sellouts.
None of the Pentagon videos have been released, and nothing is consistent with the hoax government story.
Actually, you can get a good picture when you have at least two competing narratives, like during the entire cold war. There was always the Russian and American view, and they rarely agreed on anything. You need multiple competing narratives to tease out the historical facts, but it is possible. In the case of 9/11, there is only the government nonsense, but it is still possible to tease out more or less what happened by reviewing the drills, and looking at the information presented on truther sites, especially Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, and Scientists for 9/11 Truth and Justice.
The government story is a lie substantiated by unprecedented journalist intimidation. This is the worst perversion of American media in the history of the country. The parallels in the Clinton and Obama administrations are minor by comparison.
The US doesn’t imprison holocaust deniers, they are fully protected by the first amendment. They are just incorrect on the facts of the matter. The 9/11 truthers, on the other hand, are correct on the facts.
America can certainly handle it. In NYC, it almost goes without saying that it was an inside job. The transition was rather sudden, and recent.
There was an engine that fell on Murray St, and it matches the model used in military aircraft. It is false to claim no plain wreckage at WTC. There was also wreckage in Pennsylvania, scattered over many square kilometers, consistent with a plane blown up at 30,000 ft by a missile, not with a crash. This is also consistent with witness testimony.
The concept of “freedom of contract” is ridiculous. The government enforces the contract, not you, so the government sets the terms. For example, I can’t sell myself into slavery. Freedom of contract is really the freedom to ensure that the government will enforce your long term trade agreements, and the government can do that without simultaneously enforcing the absurd legislation-as-contract that businesses today impose on consumers and labor.
Freedom of exchange only leads to concentrations of money if you choose to not construct the tax system to naturally distribute capital broadly. That’s a social choice. If you structure the tax system to distribute power broadly, for example, by taxing business at a rate determined by the degree of distributed ownership, you will produce widespread distribution of power, as businesses restructure to maximize profits. If a company is taxed more when ownership is concentrated in a few than when it is distributed to many, it will choose to distribute ownership spontaneously. There is nothing immutable about the social relations produced by free exchange, they are determined by the decisions made about the taxation structure and the social structure. They seem immutable to a conservative, because a conservative is only concerned with preserving currently existing power structures, because of their position in the heirarchy and their limited brain.
These are valid or not according to whether they are ethically compatible with other revelations. It’s a limiting self-consistency in the infinite future. There is no limit on the different types or numbers of mutually compatible revelations, only that they reveal a convergent system of superrational ethics eventually, which is essentially unique. There is no serious contradiction between, say, Buddhist revelation and Christian revelation if you are careful to stay logically-positivist about the meaning of the revelations and not interpret these things in historical or material terms. That’s why spiritual resurrection is just better theology than material resurrection.
The ethical compatibility is essential, as it is the distinction between the gods people reject today and those that survive. Hinduism is compatible with monotheistic ethics (it was probably the original source of monotheism historically), so it continues. Other religions, like those that demanded child sacrifice or widow-burning, were deprecated and died, or else evolved to remove the parts which were ethically shown to be false by other insights and experiences, like (some) Christianity jettisoned its anti-gay and anti-women teachings recently.
The point of Carrier’s view of the resurrection is that it is completely compatible with the one other monotheistic faith in the region around at the time, which was Judaism. In standard Christianity, Jesus being both a historical human and a spiritual deity makes for a serious incompatibility with Judaism, which leads Jews to see Christianity as a completely impossible belief system and completely unrelated to Judaism, which it really isn’t and wasn’t.
Personally, I think that I am a full believer, except perhaps not in the exact same way you are, as I don’t believe any scientifically impossible material events ever happened, nor do I think anyone needs to believe such things to fully understand religion. In fact, I think such a belief in supernatural nonsense is detrimental. Perhaps if you could read my mind, you would conclude I am still an atheist because of this, I don’t know, but I do know you’d be wrong. Experience of spiritual communication with Jesus is simply not sufficient evidence for changing anyone’s beliefs about what happens in the material world. It is, however, a good start to changing your beliefs about the structure of the Platonic world of ideas, especially ethics.
Partly due to a personal experience, partly due to reasoning about its interpretation, I ended up accepting that Christian theology is a true religious system (appropriately interpreted, and there are other true religious systems also). But at no point did this experience suddenly compel me (or even suggest to me) to believe in materially impossible events. At one point during this revelation, I did ask myself “is it reasonable to lie about material events to get people to understand this revelation better?”, but introspection said “heck no!” At least for me, the constant claims of impossible material events were the main barrier for me to understand this revelation business, and since there is no requirement to believe in nonsense that comes from this experience, why would I make it harder for other people who are scientific literate? Knowing science doesn’t change the spiritual message one bit, one way or the other. It just gets you to be less obtuse about the stories you tell people to get them to understand it also.
As a matter of fact, because I found it so easy to do, as I said, at no point was I even TEMPTED to change anything about my understanding of the material world, I don’t believe that anyone could possibly have any difficulty either. There was nothing in the experience of communicating with Jesus which demands that I believe that a material human body rose from the dead. The communication only was about ethical and aesthetic things, relations of people and ideas, it was not about history or cosmology, or anything like that. In fact, whenever I tried to reason about history and cosmology or mathematics, the experience of communicating with God just went away, and I found myself alone again.
Akin’s arguments simply show that he didn’t read Carrier’s book. The emergence of Christianity is completely explained through revelation. The “brother of Christ” is simply a term for non-apostolic Christians, while the relation of Peter to Jesus is similar to that of Paul. The founding human figure of Christianity is Peter, and the “untimely born” one is Paul, who received the revelation late. The mythicist position is consistent with the evidence, while the standard story is not.
You are missing the main point of monotheistic religions. The monotheistic religions introduce a notion of morality which goes BEYOND the simple requirement of producing a social order which is stable and self-propagating. The requirement of stability is the endpoint of the Roman Empire. They had ethics, for sure, but it wasn’t monotheistic ethics, so it was wrong from the point of view of any future time, especially so from our point of view two thousand years later, when the monotheistic idea is so deeply embedded.
In the Roman empire, you had a strict caste system, with slaves, landowners, free-merchants, powerful imperial appointees, senators, military folks, and so on. Each caste was rigidly determined and nearly strictly hereditary. There was nothing wrong with this from a social or evolutionary perspective, but from a monotheistic perspective it was abominable.
What it meant was that you had people tortured in arenas for entertainment, women sold and raped, other slaves who were forced into a life of illiteracy and drudgery and thrown to fend for themselves when their productive labor period was over, slaves who toiled in mines and fields, and others who lived off the labor of these slaves. This ancient economic system was extremely stable, it was evolutionarily productive, the Roman economy was growing until Christianity arose, and very self-reinforcing. The point of monotheistic ethics is to shatter these stable but abhorrent fixed points and move to a better equilibrium, and to do so, you can’t rely on logic or evolution, you must be guided by a transcendent idea of what it means to be “better”. This is what monotheism is all about. Notice that I never said anything about omnipotent beings.
In the case of Judaism, this was achieved by a series of accumulating gradual reforms, which on their own seem arbitrary and unrelated but together transform ancient society to something much different. There was a law that required you to circumcise all foreign slaves, another law that required Jewish slaves to be manumitted every seven years, another law which required property to be restored to its original owners every 49 or 50 years (the way the Jubilee worked is debated). There was a labor law requiring a day of rest, strictly enforced, a law requiring the sharing of the Passover lamb with strangers and wanderers (meaning non-Jews). There was a requirement of reading and writing to be able to read and understand these laws, there was abolition of temple prostitution, and the introduction of a slave-narrative of the exodus, which required all Jews to picture themselves as slaves. Taken together, these laws essentially ended chattel slavery in Judea, gradually, as slaves converted to Judaism (it was easy as they are circumcized), and were manumitted.
The Christian transformation is based on personal revelation, through Jesus, and takes this idea further, into an open-ended project of continual transformation, based on the insights one gains through the holy spirit (this is also true in Judaism, but it is disguised, as when you change something, you are supposed to pretend it was always this way in the holy book, leading to more and more tortured interpretation of the texts over time).
In the Christian method, you don’t demand manumittence every seven years, rather there is an even stricter expectation, which is not enforced by any law: you just expect the Christian slaveholder to release their slaves voluntarily! On their own schedule, but to do it. This is explained in the Epistle to Philemon. There is a marked transformation of the Roman economy in the Christianization period, which is likely a serious economic decline, and I personally believe this is caused by the gradual end of slavery. Does this decline mean that Europe was going backwards? Not exactly. Sure, it was harder to run the mines and make those sculptures. But you didn’t have to be a slave anymore. Only the monotheistic ethics allows you to make such a tradeoff calculation, and do it right.
The sixth century European edicts made this an explicit— you were not allowed as a Christian to own Christian slaves at all. Jews also abolished slavery, so the reintroduction of slavery in the late middle ages was through captured Muslims.
The point of the revelation is to get you to understand that there is a large unique mind which tells you what is right and what is wrong, that you can access this mind both personally and through collective religious discussion and congregation, and that while your knowledge is never perfect, the ideal ethics is NOT something that the social order will naturally converge on without a lot of hard work convincing people to accept the transcendent insights. This is why people make up fairy-tales about impossible events and force people to repeat them, to make sure that they are forced to accept the NON fairy-tale of the actual process of producing better ethics. It should be possible to do this without this kind of lying when people are universally literate and have an internet.
You are confusing the form of the Jewish laws with their intended effect. If you read the text of the law, it is stupid and barbaric, obviously, as all written ancient laws are. But the point of the Jewish law is that it is not fixed secular law, but religious law, which means that it was designed to be interpreted by people with a teleological goal which is something like a communist utopia. Like modern Marxism-Leninism, it came with a lot of restrictions on individual liberty.
The family exception was not a way to avoid releasing slaves, it wouldn’t work anyway, as the slave would simply refuse to marry until the seven years were up. The point of this is to keep families which are dependent on the owner for subsistence together. The Jewish children of such unions would be free. The point of this “temporary regulated slavery” business is that it has the EFFECT of eliminating generational slavery, replacing it with a system of 7-year periods of indentured labor, where you pay off a debt, and then do something else. This release from debt over seven years is preserved in modern law in the periodic writing off of debt in all modern countries. Using these roundabout methods, the Jews successfully rid their society of the pestilence of ancient slavery, and the Christians did the exact same thing. The Jews also achieved universal literacy in ancient times, as attested by certain passages which don’t make sense unless it was expected that everyone could read and write.
The Christians had a debate regarding the elimination of slavery in the 3rd-6th, and there were several proposals during this period. One of them was to copy the Jews and have temporary slavery, and this was rejected. Instead it became an outright ban sometime in the 6th or 7th century, which is much better (by that point, of course, Jews also did not own slaves). This is the main social transformation from ancient economics to medieval economics, and it’s why Christmas is celebrated all over Europe like a Juneteenth.
Your misreading of the Epistle to Philemon is the usual one for both ancient and modern slaveholders. The Epistle is grappling with a serious problem— a Christian slave has run away from a Christian slaveowner. The letter is extraordinary, because it says to Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, “Go back to your master”. It says to Philemon, the master, “accept him back, but you are no longer to view him as a slave, but as an equal.” Then Paul says that Philemon must consider the debt of Onesimus in relation to the debt of Philemon to Paul, for saving his soul. Paul asks him to consider the relation of these debts, and asks him to do the right thing.
Philemon accepts Onesimus back, and at some point, releases him from slavery. The free Onesimus becomes a Bishop of some large city (I think Antioch). This was the Paul method of dealing with slavery— assert that it is wrong, assert that it is the law, demand that you obey the law as a slave, but demand that the Christian master recognize the evil and release the slave.
The hewing to the letter of the law made Christianity less subversive than Spartacus. But the insistence on moral truth made it both more subversive and more successful. Modern anti-slavery movements point to the Epistle to Philemon as a emancipatory document (which it is), but it is a work of genius, in that it is written in such a way that a non-religious person will see it as justifying slavery. It is a remarkable document, the only one of its kind. It is doubly remarkable that it was canonized at a time when slavery was still around.
I don’t think Biblical slavery is a good thing, it’s terrible. I don’t think the Bible is inerrant or infallible. I am trying to explain the main point of the text.
I don’t use secondary sources. Everything I write is 100% original, although in this case, I am sure that I am not the first to say these things. I read parts of the OT in Hebrew (I had to, in grade school), and the entire NT in English translation on my own time. For 6th and 7th century abolition of Christian slavery, I just did some googling around, the edicts are well known. The “7 years” is just a rough number, I don’t care about the minutiae of Biblical law. The reference for universal literacy is in Kings somewhere (I learned it in grade school, I don’t remember specifically), where a peasant boy is offhand asked to take down a message to some character or other. The implicit presumption is that the peasant boy can read and write. The reciting of the law is not a substitute for literacy, it is a formalized way of ensuring it, by requiring reading of a standard text as a process of socialization. It is clear that Peter and Paul are literate, as are poor essenes in the desert, etc, while by contrast almost all the gentile members of the early church are illiterate. The high rate of Jewish literacy is tied to the injunction to learn to read the texts, although, of course, today universal literacy is not something unusual.
The Biblical injunctions on slavery are the start of a very slow process of reform, whose extremely long-term goal to get rid of the institution step by step. The observation that ancient Hebrews didn’t have chattel slaves follows from the structure of the law, I didn’t read it in a book, I noticed myself after reading Exodus. The law only recognizes slavery as a manner of paying off debts for a limited time, or else a voluntary submission, or for an enslaved person who has married a member of the household. While I don’t know anyone who mentions it specifically in the literature other than me just now (although I am sure I am not the first to notice), under these limitations, you can’t have a stable hereditary slave caste, everyone is effectively free, aside from those who voluntarily choose it. This does not apply to women, who were treated as property.
Slavery is a very difficult thing to get rid of, as it is self-reinforcing, evolutionarily stable, and is viewed as a positive good by slave-owners and it embeds itself in the very foundations of society, much the same way that people today view capitalism as a positive good. Imagine, for an analogy, trying to get rid of the capitalists in modern society. That’s what it means to get rid of slaveowners. In the ancient world. Common wisdom held that slavery was essential for society. The Christian reforms gradually got rid of slavery, and it wasn’t all rosy, a lot of industries simply vanished as they couldn’t exist without slaves. The whole ancient way of life vanished.
Philemon didn’t die without heirs, Onesimus becomes Bishop because he is freed by Philemon. You are misunderstanding Paul when he says “Charge the debts to my account.” This is not a bank account he is talking about, nor is he talking about paying literal money for literal debts (not like Paul could pay any debts anyway, he wasn’t so wealthy). He is talking about paying down Onesimus’s slave debt with purely spiritual currency, the value of which is Philemon’s soul.
The Onesimus who was Bishop of Antioch (or whatever city) is certainly the same runaway slave fellow, in tradition, and in plain understanding. You don’t understand the Epistle, because you don’t understand the point of Christianity. It is creating a new society in which slavery becomes impossible. Much like Marxists try to create a society in which wage-labor becomes impossible.
Wow!!! Thanks for finding it! I did learn it in grade 7 or so, and forgot the exact passage. I think that the most parsimonious assumption is to take it at face value, that it is not remarkable that the boy can read. That’s consistent with the historical evidence of the literacy of otherwise random Jews, like Josephus, or Paul, or Peter (these didn’t start off as high-up people). The same unremarkable literacy is assumed when you hear about random citizen Jews nitpicking over the meanings of obscure verses. This is not the case for random citizen Christians. The early Christian Church is underdocumented, because it is a largely illiterate society, and this is one of Carrier’s major points regarding the fidelity of the Gospel narratives to history.
I don’t know the standard consensus among historians regarding ancient Hebrew literacy, but I think I am stating a mainstream position when I say it was universal. But again, I didn’t read secondary sources for this.
What could you possibly mean about no advancement regarding slavery? Slavery in Christendom was abolished in the 7th century, reintroduced in the 11th century, became widespread in the colonial era, and reabolished in the 19th century, in large part due to the contributions of religious Christians. It was reintroduced by the Nazis, and you know how that turned out.
Your examples are not the most brutal in Leviticus, I could show you much worse. In Leviticus 27, you can see that slaves could be pawned to the priesthood as collateral for a loan, and could be killed if the loan was not repayed. This is not obvious in most translations, the text is opaque in Hebrew. I did a translation myself found here: https://en.wikisource.org/w…
Paul DOES ask Philemon to consider Onesimus’s debts as charged to him in full. That’s the point. There is no money changing hands, he is saying the slave debt is as nothing compared to the soul-debt. That’s the point of the epistle, and it is 10 thousand times more clear about the goal of ending slavery than any Jewish law, which, in my opinion, is why Christianity is more popular than Judaism today.
Regarding Paul’s finances, he is recieving payments from the Church, probably like a salary. The Church had finances, and provided finacial relief and aid to members who were struggling. There are some verses which are mystifying regarding finances which become clearer when one understands this, like Jesus saying “He who shall not work, neither shall he eat”, and a sentiment along the lines of “it is better to give your last penny to the church than to use it to buy bread”.
I know that Christians would disagree with me about the point of Christianity. I think Karl Marx would agree, but I am not sure, I have not read this in Marx. This is a hypothesis regarding the social forces that drove the acceptance of Christianity (and also Judaism to a lesser extent) in Rome. These religions had injunctions which prevented stratification of society along socio-economic lines.
I am not saying this to argue that the Bible is written by supernatural forces, or that it is inerrant. I am trying to explain that there is a certain transcendent truth which it is trying to explain, that I think is more easily explained using modern game theoretic ideas, like superrational decision making.
Yeah, that’s about right. The notion of God here is an abstract disembodied “desire” which is constructed from the self-consistency of the universal ethics. This God is “one”, because the ethics is universal. This God is “omniscient” by definition, because in order to construct a universal system of perfect ethical decision-making, you need to know every nitpicky detail about everybody. The omniscience is not necessarily omniscience of future events, by the way, it could be or not without changing the ethics, because God’s knowledge of the future doesn’t change the ethical decisions WE must make, when WE are ignorant of this future. So aren’t required to say “God knows the future”, but you could say that if you wanted to, as some Protestants do, it doesn’t change anything practical. The two positions are only superficially different, they are equivalent in logical positivism. God is “omnipotent” in the sense that whatever God wants will get done when people get around to doing what they should, which they will eventually get around to doing (and they better hurry up!). That’s about it, all the rest is exegesis with fanciful storytelling. This concept is found in Hinduism also, in the Brahma idea and monotheistic ethics, which is likely either originally Hindu, or an offshoot of Hinduism (Hinduism is still ethically monotheistic, despite the superficial polytheism of many manifestations and visual representations— this is a point made by many religious Hindus who get annoyed with Muslims or Christians claiming the religion is less sophisticated than theirs).
The way one recieves “revelations” is by your head extrapolating the will of God using your own experiences and intuitions, in an attempt to put them together into a consistent universal ethics. Your brain does this automatically, but it doesn’t always do it right. If you tune in to this system with self-awareness, it can sound like a person “talking” to you from outside, about ethics. You can receive what appear to you to be revelations about immoral things because, unlike God, you are NOT omniscient, and have imperfect knowledge of absolute ethics, even in cases where your intuition is firm.
The Muslim slavery codes are absurd, of course, like the Jewish slavery codes, but both were written at a time when much worse practices existed, which might explain why it is that otherwise kind and inspired people were led to consider them ethically superior. That’s not to justify them, but to explain that the Koran was doing ethical reform the same way the Christians and Jews did earlier. You can argue that the Muslims didn’t go as far as the rest in 600AD, but the argument is really stupid now that we are out of the middle ages and we have advanced so far over all these systems. The modern “Jihadist” nonsense is not Islamic in any modern sense of the religion, it is barbaric nonsense resurrected by secular people to gain power and money from foreign donors, and you can’t say it belongs to religion really, it belongs to pure secular politics.
The way to know that God is NOT ok with stuff like that is just the same way you come to understand that this stuff is immoral, as “being immoral” and “being against the will of God” is tautologically the same thing.
One reason people reject religion is because it comes with a lot of nonsense anti-science stuff. I also reject this aspect. But the main idea is valid, and needs to be preserved. This is just the statement that the perfect ethics can and must be identified with the disembodied will of a unified perfectly omniscient being. You can’t construct this abstract will perfectly in your meditation and cogitation, or having intuitive flashes (revelations), but you can do better with time, individually and collectively, and achieve a certain confidence that some things, like sexual slavery, or the caste-system, are absolutely completely unethical, while other things, like Hindu drawings of Ganesh, or Krishna Bhajans, are holy and beautiful. Most of the time, like regarding bigamy or weird sex, you just have no clear idea, and you have to not be so dogmatic, because we’re all muddling through fog.
Solzhenitsyn is a stupid propagandist. The “gulags” closed under Khruschev. The later Soviet Union’s human rights violations were placing dissidents in mental institutions and drugging them, preventing mobility, censoring media, and so on. But there were no real camps anymore. Khruschev was a fan of “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, as was I, but this was the last time Solzhenitsyn told anything resembling the truth.
I am not a communist, dude, I am just a person who followed the literature, unlike you.
I just celebrated my 43rd birthday a week ago. The picture is from 10 years ago. You can tell that I am not young, because I know something about the USSR. All the information about that country was dumped into the memory hole in 1991.
That’s not evidence, that’s propaganda. WTC-7 collapsed by demolition.
Whatever you say. The building collapsed by demolition, as is obvious. It is also obvious that WTC 1 and 2 collapsed by demolition, but there, it is less obvious, because the supports were gradually disconnected by thermite, so the building collapsed from the weak spot down, not as WTC 7 collapsed, from the bottom.
Neither of these collapses are the strongest case for an inside job, since demolition by itself does not require that the whole thing was a sham. Maybe dangerous highrises are all secretly rigged to go down in emergency? I don’t know. Considering what happened at WTC in 1994, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise, and it would just be criminal negligence to bring them down on 9/11, not a false flag.
No. The real smoking-gun evidence for an inside job is the simultaneous drills which were occuring on the morning of 9/11. These drills simulated hijackings, messed with air-traffic control computers, and pretended to fly airplanes into buildings. Regardless of demolition, these drills demonstrate that this was an inside job. The demolition itself happened as I said.
Your use of technical words is gibberish. The collapse of WTC 7 was simultaneous, therefore all the columns had to collapse simultaneously. That can’t happen by fire, it requires explosives. Nothing at all can happen to that building by fire, and structural weakness leads to a collapse that looks like WTC 6. But this as I said is not the “strongest case”, as demolitions are not the main proof. The drills are.
The part about thermal expansion due to long-span floors is gibberish, thermal expansion is negligible stress compared to structural weakening, it just causes beam deformation. But, let’s suppose, just for argument’s sake, that the thermal expansion can stress a column somewhat, and suppose one of the support columns collapses, let’s imagine. It still requires a miraculous coincidence for two columns to fail at once, and an even more miraculous coincidence for three to fail, as they are not linked by the same beam. In building 7, all the supports gave way at once, ALL OF THEM.
Likewise point 5 is gibberish, about the colums going through the station. It doesn’t matter where they were placed. There is no need to give fake abstruse comments about engineering, you clearly don’t understand the first thing about it.
The only thing you need to know about the collapse is that it was simultaneous, meaning that the failure of the columns at the far left side of the building happened within a fraction of a second of the columns at the far right. That’s all the columns, however many there were, 12, 15, 17, I don’t know and I DON’T CARE. When all the columns fail at the same time, this is an engineered collapse. In natural collapses, the columns fail one by one, or, sometimes, rarely, when there is a coincidence, in groups of two. They don’t fail all at the same time, everywhere.
Your previous points are therefore also gibberish. The firefighting efforts are unimportant, as is the fire itself. The sounds the building made was unimportant. The damage from debris was unimportant. When the collapse happened, all the supports gave way at the same time, and this means it was explosively demolished. With timers. It’s not easy to get a building to collapse like that.
The natural collapse that day was building 6. I suggest you take a look at that, to see what a natural collapse looks like. Your methods of propaganda are obvious and worthless. You should give it up, and start doing propaganda for the good guys.
It’s not that I didn’t understand your gibberish, it’s that there’s no point to a detailed analysis of the foundations or the beams. It doesn’t matter how the beams were attached to each other, or to the foundation. The whole facade came straight down, at free-fall.
The way to see that this is not a natural collapse is simply to observe that the supports “on the facade” at the left of the building collapsed at the same time as the supports “on the facade” at the right end, as I can see with my own eyes. If you examine cases of natural collapse, e.g. the delft building:
a column fails, a part collapses, the rest of the building stays standing, and the collapse is asymmetrical and incomplete. In the case of the video, the left of the Delft buidling collapsed, the rest stayed up, as expected from localized failure.
That’s always the case when buildings have natural collapse, a column fails here, another there, and they fail at different times, and some don’t fail at all. The building becomes a hollowed out wreck, similar to what you see in postwar pictures of Germany.
The heat expansion coefficient of steel is such that even for heating of the entire span of steel to 700 degrees (which is absurd, it’s like placing the whole building in a furnace), the steel would expand by some centimeters, or tens of centimeters. This leads to a noticible “sagging” of beams, as you can see in the steel-framed high-rise fire, because a few centimeters of extra length translates to some meters of bend in the beam.
Your claim is that the thermal expansion pushed one column out of it’s seat, and then, like a domino, this column magically collapsed the next columns, from the inside out, until it reached the outer columns at PRECISELY AND EXACTLY THE SAME TIME to produce a completely symmetrical collapse. That’s preposterous, it would require a miracle of coincidence, and I don’t believe in miracles. This building was engineered to collapse.
I believe there was a real danger of a natural collapse, and to prevent the problems of a natural collapse, people triggered whatever demolition system they installed years or months earlier. If there would have been a natural collapse, it probably would have happened the way NIST says. But then only the area around the weak column would collapse, leaving a building with a hole in it, or else a section would collapse, or else a part would topple outward, or else the left half would collapse 2 seconds before the right, so that it would tilt. None of these are observed.
I see you like to impress people with engineering terms. That’s very nice. You are not explaining the collapse, you are simply regurgitating horseshit. It is not reasonable for you to claim a natural collapse from the invisible inside out, when I see a symmetrical simultaneous collapse from the bottom up.
NIST stopped the computer simulation after the failure of the first beam, so there is nothing to be gained from reading their report. If you would like to point to a simulation of the collapse of the building from a failure of the column, one which shows a magic domino effect where you get failure of the outer columns at exactly the same time, I will be glad to look at it, run it on my computer, and laugh at it. Until you have such a model (you never will), I will continue to scorn your nonsense.
I am not a truther because of this demolition, as I said, I don’t think it matters much one way or another. But because I think I know something about structures, I don’t accept your facile just-so-story. I want to know how the building collapsed for real, not in your fantasies, or those of NIST.
The distance is illusion. The same internet that reveals uncomfortable truths about Shakespeare (where there is no political impact) also reveals uncomfortable truths about 9/11. It is a question about whether the un-peer-reviewed publicly generated information you find on random web-pages can be MORE reliable in some case than the stuff you read in official reports. In both cases of Marlowe/Shakespeare and for 9/11, the answer is a surprising yes.
In both cases, the science supports the unpopular view, and in neither case is it much of a conspiracy. In the case of 9/11, the drills allow the drill-coordinator to pull of the sham without any significant conspirators, and in the case of Shakespeare, only Shakespeare and Marlowe and their patrons are guilty of using a front for a disgraced and exiled author. Neither requires suspension of disbelief in the laws of human organization.
You really aren’t answering fire with fire. You are producing a superficially convincing, but fundamentally incorrect, analysis, by copying the NIST report.
I didn’t claim that the twin towers were destroyed by traditional demolition methods, only WTC 7 fell that way. The most plausible explanation for WTC 1 and 2 is that the steel at the towers center was melted at the joints using thermite, and the buildings just came down by themselves once there was no significant support left. That explains NIST’s model results for the time of collapse, which I did reproduce (in a few minutes) by calculating the time for fall starting at the location of the impact and slowed down only by the inertia of picking up new stationary floors. To have that weird kind of collapse like you see in the towers, you need to get rid of the stress in the central steel structure and do nothing else. That’s weird, because this collapse starts at the point of impact, not at the base.
Building 7 is different, because it collapses at the base, and simultaneously, and at EXACTLY free fall, without even the inertial lag business. That means the supports are all cut at the same time, and that requires a traditional demolition. It’s a much easier case to analyse than the towers, and this is why truthers focus on it.
it does.
exit polls were used to call every state in every election the instant the polls closed in 1980 ,1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, and after working perfectly, suddenly failed in ONE state in 2000. Then in Ohio in 2004, with the introduction of electronic machines, Now they fail all the time. The reason i massive systemic fraud, by Republicans, who no longer are capable of winning a national election fairly.
Sorry, the divergence of exit polls and results started in 2004 and never stopped. It happens in states where republicans count the vote, and there is no paper trail.
No. Wherever counts and exit polls don’t match, this is overwhelming evidence of fraud. This is the standard used worldwide, You need paper ballots and hand counting, like every other modern state,
It’s not done by trump, it’s done by unscrupulous vote tabulators hired by the Republican statehouses.
Sorry, but the experience of all nations around the world is that exit polling is always, 100% SPOT ON, with accuracy about .1%. Except, that is, for American states with Republican legislatures and governors.
Sorry, it is the elections that are discredited. The pollsters are pretty good. The discrepancies in Pennsylvania are particularly statistically impossible, but those in NC are also outside the boundary of reason, and the rest. The vote in red states is not counted correctly, with statistical certainty. This is a growing effort that started with a serendipitous event with Kathleen Harris in Florida, who was rewarded for her fraud with a congressional seat in a safe Republican district. It continued into 2004, and hasn’t stopped since. Obama was popular enough to overcome it, but this is unusual.
Don’t “suspect”. The exit polls are enough evidence for dead certainty.
Ridiculous. The electoral college is fine. You just need audited elections with paper ballots in all 50 states. This should be a march on Washington, to demand a Federal requirement that Federal elections be paper and verifiable. Then you won’t get this nonsense. We also need a new voting rights act, to ensure that the lines on election day in poorer districts are not interminable.
He complained about the primary too. But it is impossible to make a Federal mandate for a private election. You can mandate paper ballots in Federal elections, and a quota of polling places per registered voter in each district, fairly spaced.
Nice try, but exit polls are anonymous, and all you have to do is repeat what you did in the voting booth. It’s ridiculous to make such theories, exit polls are accurate in much more strongly contested elections in Iraq, Afganistan, Venezuela, and Israel.
Exit polls are anonymous, you place the paper revealing your vote in a box, along with thousands of other papers.
Off by 5 percent. The Colorado election needs to be audited again.
No, it was the case then too. And in 2008.
You need to audit the Spanish election, then, unless the exit poll was informal. This “exit poll failure” phenomenon is entirely ridiculous, and the excuses for it are absurd. The exit poll difference has favored the Republicans in every election, in every district where there is a discrepancy. It’s not statistical error, or “shy voters” (as if that makes any sense with anonymous polls). They trotted this bullshit out in 2004, when Bush won Ohio after losing definitively in the poll, that election was less divided, and my own feeling from pre-election polls was that Democrats had it in the bag. In my own experience with American elections (before electronic voting was forcibly introduced by post-9/11 Republicans in 2002-2003) and Israeli elections, but also recent elections in Iraq, Ukraine, wherever, exit polls NEVER fail by any significant amount, and in any election with a margin of 1% or more, they are definitive. Their samples are approximately 100,000 voters, their accuracy is of the order of .1%. It’s the easiest circumstance to poll, and a discrepancy of even 1% is enough to check again.
This is a fascist coup, America has fallen. My suspicion is that in three months, ostensibly to protest the election of Trump, weekly “terrorist attacks” will begin. ISIS is already “threatening Trump” in the press. Then the Muslims will get their ID badge, a few Democrats will protest and get arrested for “material support of terrorism”, the rest will get in line. The protesters and the Muslims will get “temporarily” interned (there are many black Muslims in America, so this will help to solve the “black problem” as well as the “muslim problem”), then “criminals” will be given show trials and summary executions, the immigrants will be deported, and those that harbor them arrested. It’s a 1933 style nightmare, the rhetoric is identical, and the surveillance network is much better. Except in this case Trump doesn’t make his ideology himself, his right-hand man is Bannon, and Bannon does the ideology. Bannon is a run-of-the-mill white supremacist.
The press will do nothing, because newspapers will be sued by the president, using new libel laws, he has promised to do this, he can do this, and he has started by threatening to sue a Senator who opposed him. All the things I am saying are actual promises from Trump’s campaign. He was supposed to lose by a few votes, the votes for him were protest against Clinton (who deserved it). But when a party can change the counts by 6%, as it seems was the result in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, etc (the blue states Trump won), it is impossible to hold a fair election, as any legitimate protest by voters is converted to a win. Remember that in 1933, Hitler only won 40% of the German vote, he converted the plurality to a dictatorship using the “emergency” of the Reichstag fire, and arrested all the communists.
Even if we get lucky, and none of this happens, Trump has appointed a white supremacist to office, and this guy is leading the Trump selection of people. He will turn the cities into wastelands, and his economic platform is batshit insane. There is nothing to do. Trump will get 80% margins in 2020, because there will be no opposition, they will all be sued or in prison.
The electoral college is a sweetener for small states so that their farmers and ranchers won’t be ignored. It’s not a real problem, it worked fine in all the cases before the systematic election fraud started in 2004. This was something that needed to get fixed in Obama’s adminstration, but he wouldn’t be able to do it after Lieberman’s defection, he only had 2 months.
That’s what firms do today, because elections have been coming out wrong since 2004. There were no problems in exit polls in any previous years they were conducted. In 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000, the networks would simply call the election the moment the last polling place closed using the exit polls, and they never had to correct any announced result in any state, that is, except for Florida in 2000. You know the story in Florida, Kathleen Harris purged voters and threw out tens of thousands of votes, gave Bush a tiny win, and was rewarded with a congressional seat.
You do have to adjust for total turnout, and the populations that turned out, but that’s an easy adjustment for any pollster, and you can do without official results, just using your samples, and turnout figures for districts (without having to adjust using official counts). The polls in the US no longer serve the purpose of checking the election, and this is simply because the elections are fraudulent.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s done by individual party members in individual districts, and Republicans either simply turn a blind eye, or reward someone who does it with a post. They reward fraud with positions of power, especially large roll-purges of black voters. I’ve had it with a party that doesn’t give a shit about Democracy.
The press does not like to report on this stuff, and it is dangerous and destabilizing to talk about it, but the fraud is more blatant this year, and the candidate that won is more dangerous and destabilizing than any uncomfortable truths.
Not most! ALL of the discrepancies have occured after electronic voting and compiling have come into use, and they came into use right after 9/11. Further, the discrepancies occur only in states with Republican control of the state election office, and always favor Republicans.
I am not unhappy, I am terrified. I do not believe the results, not because of my feelings, but because they are not consistent with exit polls. I will never except a result inconsistent with exit polls outside the margin of error of the poll, unless the election is paper and audited. It is unprecedented, and this is the standard used by the US to evaluate foreign elections.
“Power” is not the one rigging the elections. Republican controlled states are. The discrepancies are all in states where the election is run by Republicans. The state of Virginia is the single exception in the south, and also the island of blue. There is no chance that the election is counted fairly, it is impossible by any reasonable standard of statistical certainty.
That antichrist is not my president, and I expect New York State to build a fortress wall to keep those God damned voters in red states from ever crossing over into ours.
If you love American democracy, you better not use mealy-mouthed hedged statements. Do some research, come to sound conclusions, within the best of your ability, and sum it up in up in a punchy soundbite, which is accurate. Your propaganda skills are required, as your opponents are making punchy propaganda up without doing any research at all.
I don’t know which state you live in, but you have three months to petition your state to do something about federal presence, to assure the safety of their citizens. I think it is reasonable to ask for a temporary NY quarantine of all FBI offices, all Homeland Security, all drone-fly-overs, all internal espionage, so that if it takes place in NY, a New York appointed official will be involved at all stages, and the public will be informed of all the internal documents, with any sensitive or private information redacted. Just temporarily, to guarantee the safety of New Yorkers.
It would also be a good idea to require security clearance for state officials so involved, so that no excuse of classification will be used to prevent people from seeing the charges against people.
Further, I think it would be good for New York State to issue a statement of non-compliance with Federal arrest of its local and state government officials. The state can also guarantee habeus corpus protection which have been gutted at the Federal level. Any Federal FBI or terrorism case should be cleared with a state office before being allowed to proceed, and all arrested people must be subject to a state controlled trial before being handed over to a Federal agency.
We were one step away from fascism with Bush II, all it would take is one massive terror attack in DC, following a homeland security drill, for Trump to have an excuse to arrest all his political opponents and enshrine a permanent Republican majority, by simply inventing some more imaginary terrorists. I don’t give a shit about terrorists, I am afraid of Trump, not of foreign terrorists.
These state measures can be relaxed at such a time when the Federal government is sane again, but I think they are good to keep around permanently, just in case. New York can’t rely on DC to protect it’s citizens, it needs to do it’s job by itself. Our state representatives are not beholden to anyone except their voters, and you can meet with them and ask them for help. Please do so before Jan 20.
Only the Democratic party can fix Democratic party elections, they are a private organization. Tampering with Federal elections, however, is a catastrophe, because there is no recourse. He wasn’t silent about it anyway, he mentions the exit poll discrepancies in the primary, which are inexcusable.
The “power” to do this is not in Republican power brokers. This is done by individual Republican state election officers, armed with a memory stick and a text editor. They are responsible for tabulating and certifying the election, and also for doing the audit. They have no Federal oversight, or any oversight at all. These are rank-and-file Republicans, and they have been adjusting the tabulation in their favor for a decade now, regardless of candidate, as can be seen by the gradual divergence of exit-polls and results over the decade, only in Republican controlled states.
The effect is much more corrosive, as people vote to make the vote come close, in the case when both candidates are hated, as in this case. This election must not be accepted if you don’t wish to live in a police state. Not that Trump wants a police state, mind you, he’s just too stupid to see through whatever his underlings will tell him is happening. With 3 or 4 terrorist attacks, his underlings can get him to shut up the entire press. With a simple repeal of net-neutrality, he can guarantee that only big-business can stream internet content to you, and slow-down any opposition content to the point that it disappears. With sufficient surveillance, he can arrest almost anybody, for example, for tax evasion regarding non-reporting of a $100 birthday gift as income. These are the tactics used in authoritarian states, and these tactics were his public campaign positions during the campaign.
You can’t trust the Republican party to punish election fraud, it rewards it. It also spreads idiotic stories in the media about nonexistent kinds of election fraud, like voting twice, dead-people voting, etc. Ballot stuffing used to happen in the 1960s, but it is a much smaller effect, and can only tilt close elections. This election was not all that close, the discrepancies were enormous.
The reason is that constitutionally, it is up to the states to certify elections, and it is within each state that the challenges have to happen. The red states have been Republican so long, and this tactic so enshrined, it was legalized by the 2002 “help American vote” act, and the 2013 rejection of the Civil-Rights era voting rights act. This means that elections are state-level again, and it is basically impossible to audit and demonstrate fraud nationally, aside from looking at exit polls. Hence the Republican Jim-Crow tactics and simultaneous attack on exit polling (and polling in general). The Democrats have very little presence in these states, they can’t do anything to fix this, you basically have to trust the Republicans. This was Karl Rove’s strategy—take over one state election board at a time, until you produce a permanent Republican majority.
One must not trust Republicans anymore. Not since they gave Kathleen Harris a job after her work in 2000. Not on this, not on anything. I should add that Democrats did similar fraud in an earlier era.
It simply means that you can’t have a meaningful Democratic governance in a union including these states. Until such a time when you can trust their election boards, they will impose their one-party system on the rest of us, and with candidates increasingly more atrocious.
I accept that isolated polls can make a mistake with new parties, because they don’t know who or where to ask. I accept that there was a margin of error in each state. But ALL the discrepancies for 16 years have favored Republicans, and they are largest in states with no paper trail. The results of this election suggest tampering at the 5% level, as cumulatively, the one-way shift in votes is too improbable to occur by chance.
Generally, exit polls in the US are pretty thorough and well tested for systematics, because the methodology is steady over decades, and the party situation is extremely stable. The media polls were used for decades with no problem, because they know the statistical adjustments. Despite the horror of both candidates (Trump was only about ten times as horrible as Clinton— she has also supported police state measures, including limits on internet speech, surveillance, homeland security, and used Gestapo tactics against Republicans in PATCON) Still, in terms of results, this was a relatively standard Democrat/Republican election.
The only window of opportunity for grassroots movement is when people aren’t being terrorized and deported left and right. I was around in 1999, and 2000. I had a friend who protested this, protested that. She asked me to protest, and I said “I’m not that dissatisfied at present”. In 2001, after 9/11, the Iraq war, detentions, etc, I asked her where to protest. She didn’t know, because there were no protests left. Everyone had been intimidated into silence. There were no protests again until Obama allowed freedom.
This is what happened in Nazi Germany as well. There was no protests, there were partisans in the woods.
The MSM knows that reporting election fraud is the road to destabilization and riots. It has led to revolution in several countries. So by a “gentlemen’s agreement”, they simply don’t write about it. The only way to fix Democratic party primary fraud is to get the leadership ousted, which we did. Then to put progressive leaders in, which we are doing now. There’s no recourse from the government.
But Federal election fraud makes a country unliveable. Kerry would have been able to reverse Bush era measures more than Obama has. I don’t like this guy’s silence during the primary, but that’s not the issue at present. The issue at present is that there are two months left until you get Giuliani doing whatever he wants with homeland security, and staging whatever number of Reichstags he needs to get a one-party state.
Sorry, Democratic voters outnumber Republicans for at least a decade now. The closest we were to 50/50 is in 2000. Democrats, including myself, REALLY hated Clinton. I only voted for her to keep THIS from happening. But I did so without hesitation.
Listen, you gullible fool, I know Trump’s VOTERS are by and large not explicit racists! I know Trump himself is not explicitly racist (he is only too stupid to understand bigotry well enough to avoid unconscious spontaneous bigotry), but his CAMPAIGN MANAGER and MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA Bannon is a white supremacist, and he dictates the tone. He also can control the policy through staff choices, and he can implement a white supremacist agenda very easily.
Bannon is mostly anti-goodness, and anti-monotheism. Like Hitler, his hatred is not exactly of Jews as a race, but of the “weakening” philosophy of inclusion, loving your fellow man, and unity. He is a separatist, and believes there is a separate God for white people.
The small number of minority voters who voted for him assumed he is attacking SOME OTHER MINORITY, not them, and think that only THEIR OWN PERSONAL BIGOTRY is being supported. Hispanics think “Oh, he’s attacking illegals and terrorists.” Blacks think “Oh, he is attacking Jews”. Jews think “Oh, he is attacking Muslims”. Every group is blind to the hatred toward themselves, because they don’t hear their own dog-whistles. The only ones who see through the crap are moderately educated people or nearly all black people of any education level.
There is no mistake here, this pestilence of Bannon has to be removed immediately, and it’s practically impossible, because Bannon delivered. The impossible win was delivered by fraud, but you still score points for that.
Your link is stupid regarding exit polls. The election was closer than 2012, but the anomalies are only consistent with fraud, not with any trend or systematic error in polling. Also, you are an apologist for the fascist, and you have to stop. You have three months to do something, before you’re toast.
The discrepencies favored Bernie in all instances except Brooklyn, where the Clinton campaign mistakenly thought that Brooklyn would go for the senator, and suppressed the vote to shoot themselves in the foot. The tampering most likely cost Sanders the primary, but not certainly, it was nearly evenly split in reality, although the elections were so skewed (especially in the South) that it made it look like a Clinton landslide.
It didn’t favor Hillary. All the discrepencies in the primary favored Bernie, by sometimes ridiculous margins, as in NY, where Bernie lost by 4 points in the exit poll and by some astronomical amount in the official count. Some Southern states reported official margins of 90/10 or 80/20, when the exit polls had 70/30 or better.
Hitler didn’t blame Jews for Jesus’s death. He blamed them for Jesus. He considered universal ethics “sentimental” and “weakening”, it was to be replaced by a Neitzschian “triumph of the will”. The philosophy is similar to Ayn Rand, except more collectivist. The same philosophy, more or less, is shared by Bannon and the white supremacists.
Hitler had no problem with individual Jews, he had a Jewish doctor. He had a problem with what he considered the infestation of Western civilization with Jewish influence. Trump is the same regarding Muslims. The only possible resistance is at the state level, to audit any Federal government activities, and threaten withholding Federal tax reciepts if state-level audits of all Federal activities are resisted in any way. One must also invest in arming the state national guard, and preparing for possible strife. Only the threat of insurrection can work as a deterrant, otherwise there will be weekly terror attacks blamed on “Muslim terrorists” until there are no more civil liberties. This election was conducted fraudulently, you must examine the exit polls to see this, Trump got no more votes than Hitler did (44%), and one cannot submit.
Except this is not misuse. The Trump campaign was nearly identical to the Hitler campaign, down to the last detail.
The charge that the protesters are paid is a terribly frightening omen of things to come. The charge allows you to imprison leftists for “material support of terrorism” because they donated to Democracy for America. Tea party protesters were paid indirectly, by Koch brothers financing the organizations so involved, and when Obama audited these organizations finances, he was accused of using the IRS for political payback. Trump is not threatening to audit the protesters, he is threatening to put them away.
It’s not illegal to pay people to protest, but none of the people protesting Trump are paid a dime. This wave of propaganda is the first attempt to control the opposition and set up a police state, and nothing like this kind of accusation has ever been floated before in American history.
This is not foreign propaganda, it’s home grown. Know your enemy.
The different human circumstances are insignificant. The campaign was run by Bannon, not by Trump, and Bannon supplies all the personel and ideas. Bannon is not a billionaire, and shares Hitler’s philosophy. Trump himself could be substituted with any mega-star, or a blue cartoon character, as in the British television series “Black Mirror”.
The substance of the campaign was identical to Hitler’s, down to the last detail. Hitler won a 44% plurality before a fake terror attack allowed him to take absolute power, Trump won a roughly 44% plurality (adjusted by Republican controlled election offices to his margin of victory in various states). The opposition doesn’t matter anymore, this is a fascist coup, they will be silenced and ignored.
The parallels are exact, and your ridiculous rationalizations are insincere and unhelpful.
You are not taking the proper point of view. The DP is not going to help you now, you need to talk to your state representatives to try to audit Federal activities. Every state law which is not directly contradicting a Federal law is constitutional. You need to make sure every Federal office in your state has a state officer reviewing all communications with Washington, with the same security clearance. You also need to ensure that homeland security activities are monitored and controlled inside each state, and issue a state-level statement of a moratorium on Federal presence if the audit is not complied with. You need to forbid homeland security from conducting exercizes of any sort in your state, to prevent false-flag attacks. You also need to arm the state national guard, and raise emergency taxes to pay for it in each state, because the Feds aren’t going to pay anymore. I am not optimistic any of these measures will pass anywhere, but they must get done before Jan 20, you need to know EVERYTHING the Federal government is doing at the state and municipal level, down to the last detail. This is a non-partisan proposal, it makes the Federal government more accountable to local officials, and it allows you to know when it is time to stop sending tax reciepts to Washington and focus on protecting your own citizens.
I agree with you, I worded my post poorly. When I said “the discrepancies favored Sanders”, I meant that the exit poll results consistently showed a larger Sanders percentage, and by margins which are far beyond the margines of error of the poll.
Nonsense. The same 10% that loved the goose-step in Germany love the goose step in America. The question is about power and self-interest. Once there is arbitrary arrests, you won’t find anyone protesting.
The only solution is to threaten Trump with civil war, by arming militias state by state, and temporarily “quarantining” Federal agencies in each state. If the Federal government tries to stop you, you threaten to withhold taxes. The threat of civil war is the only way to get anything at all out of this group, and I am not sure it will be an empty threat. In any case, you need a weapon at home.
It is not illegal to pay people to protest, you numbskull. But as a New York resident who is going to protests, you can rest assured that any “paid protester” is outnumbered 1000 to 1 by unpaid protesters. This is not the tea party, I am going to protest to save my state and city of NY. I have no interest in the rest of the country, as my state was the biggest victim last time you put fascists in power.
The only way to prevent a hundred new 9/11 style attacks, all blamed on non-existent terrorists, is to quarantine Federal agents in NY with state-appointed folks who will read all their communications with DC, and exercize a veto over any decision to hold a drill, to eavesdrop on communications, or intern or arrest anyone. The state officials must be appointed by my governor, and they must recieve the same security clearance as those they audit. Nothing the Federal government does in New York can be assumed to be safe.
If the Federal government protests, New York state will withhold all Federal tax dollars and use the surplus between the expenditures and payments to institute a state militia draft and arm the state national guard. It would also be good to print a local currency for the state, just in case there is some Federal pushback. This is the only reasonable step, it should be constitutional, as the constitution guarantees all rights not enumerated to the Federal government to the states. Printing a currency certainly is OK.
I don’t want to see a single FBI, ATF, CIA, or Homeland Security office in my state without a swarm of state agents peering over everyone’s shoulder, looking at every order from DC, and every document. I don’t want a single drill, a single Federal arrest in NY which is not authorized by the state, a single deportation not authorized by the state.
NY must threaten civil war in order to get safety for it’s citizens. As for the rest of you, you can pass similar measures in your own states, or go fuck yourselves, I don’t give a shit. You dumped this horror on us after what we suffered under Bush, I don’t think you are particularly deserving of our pity.
You won’t be fighting an army, if people are getting arrest warrants, the military support for trump will be shallow. The point is to have the infrastructure to resist in place, along with totalitarian state oversightover everything the Federal government is writing and doing, to tell us when the rights violations start. The weapon is for your own protection, you might never have to use it. The state national guard, the state militia, will need to be expanded using local state taxes.
You need to THREATEN seccession to bring these Nazis to heel. You need to mean it, and you need to carry it out if they don’t back off. But those spineless wealthy fascists will not want to break the union, they’ll just throw Bannon under a bus, agree to state supervision of all Federal communication, and agree to voting reform and fair counting of paper ballot elections.
We HAD fair elections until 2004, I swear to you. I am old enough to remember. You would “just know” who was going to win on election day, and it would always come out the way that you knew. The 2000 election was a tossup, the elections from 2004 onward were fraudulently skewed conservative.
That’s funny, until you find yourself living in a fascist dictatorship, with ash on your face from incinerated muslims.
It makes no difference what the democrats did. You are facing a fascist coup in your country! You need to fight until it takes power, and if it takes power, you need to run.
STOP BLAMING RUSSIANS. This is domestic, the Republicans have been rigging elections in their favor since 2004, it is an explicit strategy favored by Karl Rove— take over the election offices, state by state. You can’t rely on the results at all, and it is best to ensure your state is protected from the Federal government by layers of oversight and h threat of armed secession.
The military doesn’t operate inside the US, it is unconstitutional. The national guard is like the state militia. If there is an armed national guard presence, the army would have to come back and choose sides. Each individual soldier will presumably side with their home state, not with the Federal government. That doesn’t mean Trump won’t use the military inside the US, but if Trump understood and gave two shits about constitutional provisions, all this would be senseless panic. But he doesn’t.
If he decided to oppose state laws and use Federal law enforcement against the states it would cost politically, as it would require making it obvious that there is a police state. An audit of the Feds by the state is neutral and bipartisan, it doesn’t contradict any Federal law (yet). They would need to make it illegal to have state level audits of Federal activities, and this would lead to an outcry, and perhaps outright seccession.
I think Republicans want Federal audits by their own states too, and it could pass all 50 states but I think it is politically impossible. But so was Trump winning, so I will try until Jan 20th, and then I’ll cut and run.
There is an upper limit to election fraud before it becomes obvious and leads to revolution, and Trump’s election is right on the border. It is impossible to skew elections by more than 5 percent without people noticing the discrepancy, so your work is not useless. It’s just that it’s not Democracy the way it was traditionally practiced, it forces total polarization, because the consensus point of 50/50 split in support is not the same as the breaking point for the election. It’s like a broken thermostat, and it leads to instability.
Not irony. Apocalypse.
Because the STATES have to fight this! You live in a Federation, which only grants the Federal government authority through the states. If the states’ trust is shattered, you can take back a large measure of power for 4 years, and prevent the Federal government from doing anything, by state non-cooperation.
Talk is never treason, unless you are revealing state secrets.
Letter to a State Assembly representative:
I am contacting you, with a prayer in my heart, as a last ditch effort to try to avert what I believe to be a constitutional catastrophe, and severe crisis in the state of New York, and a threat to our democratic traditions.
I am sure that you are as concerned as your constituents are about the results of the Federal Presidential election. My concerns are not simply about outcome, but about process, as the exit polls in the states of Pennsylvia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin disagreed with the official results in a way that is not reasonable to attribute to chance. The election was, with some statistical certainty, not conducted honestly, and it is impossible for New York State to allow itself to be swallowed up by darkness by following other states’ certifications blindly, without some measure of resistance.
I am aware that you are not operating at the Federal level, I am asking you to act at the state level. I will ask my mayor to act at the municipal level as well, but a city is more limited than a state. I would like to impress upon you the urgency. We have very little time.
It is possible, perhaps likely, that the incoming Federal administration will lack the scruples of previous administrations, and will use their position to commit illegal acts, atrocities, or mass casualty terror, and violations of human rights not seen in America since the trail of tears. I do not wish to point out the parallels with Europe in the 1930s (and the US in the 1820s), but I feel I must. This is what it looks like when a constitutional republic is threatened.
I am asking you if you could ask your fellow Democratic and Republican Assemblymen and Assemblywomen to hear the voice of protest of the citizens of the state of NY. It will be a risk, but I hope you agree with me that doing nothing is not an option. I believe measures such as the ones suggested below constitute a best last chance to spare NY from the consequences of authoritarianism. Please consider how democracy died in Germany a long time ago and in Russia, recently. Don’t let it happen to our beloved New York.
I would hope that New York can declare an emergency session of the Assembly, and announce an extraordinary circumstance, in which it finds itself unable to find full faith that the Federal government shall continue to fulfil its Constitutional obligations to the state of New York. New York asserts its compliance with all Federal obligations, but requests, during this extraordinary period, full verification over Federal activities taking place in the state, or over its airspace and coastal regions.
Under these circumstances, please, if you could, raise the question of setting aside funds for the following extraordinary measures, to be implemented by the governor.
1. Monitoring of Federal activity in NY state: the governor shall appoint independent inspectors for each FBI, ATF, IRS, and Homeland security offices, with overlapping scope, to monitor each Federal agency in NY state. No communications from outside New York to the employees of these agencies shall be admitted which is not viewed by the inspectors, in full, classified form. The inspectors shall be granted the required security clearance, and if the background check fails, they shall be replaced, but repeated undue denials of security clearance over any period of time longer than two days, or for more than five appointed inspectors for a given position, by the Federal government, will be considered non-compliance with NY state law. The inspectors will monitor all activities in the agency, and report directly to the governor. They will be given access to all work-related documents and communications with the Federal agencies, and shall be informed of the whereabouts of all Federal employees when they are tasked with doing their duties, at all times that they are on duty in New York state.
2. A suspension of all extraordinary activities by any Federal agency, including the department of homeland security in NY, including: a. drills or exercises simulating any mass casualty terror attacks or response to such, b. interception of any NY state communications which do not leave the state without a state-review of the Federal warrant process and evidence, c. Federal search and investigation not explicitly authorized by the governor after review. d. fly-over of unauthorized aircraft.
3. An amendment to NY defamation law: any defamation lawsuit coming from a Federal official regarding any potentially defamatory article in the New York press, or any medium distributed in the state of New York, will be considered a grave violation of constitutional norms, and will be null and void in the state of NY. Suits brought up in other states will be considered a violation of constitutional obligations by the state of NY, and will trigger provision 6. The party bringing up the lawsuit shall be responsible for damages and legal fees, to the extent determined by the court. Any such usage of a federal defamation law will be treated similarly.
4. A quarantine of Federal power to detain and deport within the state of NY, without approval from the Governor. The facts of the matter regarding each detention shall be presented to the governor’s appointed representatives, who will make a determination of the validity of the evidence. Any classified material shall be presented in non-redacted form. No New Yorker shall disappear into a Federal prison without Habeus Corpus protection, or assassinated, and if it is determined ny the governor that a New Yorker’s rights have been violated, a 2/3 vote of the assembly will trigger measure 6. Any arrest of political officeholders by the Federal government will have to be approved by the state of NY. During the period in question, an attempt to replace the governor of New York by Federal arrest will, with 2/3 vote of the assembly, trigger provision 6.
5. The state shall call for volunteers and institute a temporary part-time draft on all military age males, by lottery, to allow state milita to patrol the state, for the duration of the emergency period. The state officers will be appointed by the governor, and draftees shall be compensated for their time, amounting to one hour a week. In the event of an escalation of emergencies, draftees might be called to greater hours, or full time active duty. In the event of such an emergency, NY residents in the armed forces overseas will be called to return.
6. If the state determines that the obligations of the Federal government have not been met, if there is a mass casualty event which the governor of New York is unsure of provenance, if there is any use of US military forces or lethal drones within the borders of New York State, or in the event of a determination of gross deliberate constitutional violations in other states, at the discretion of the governor and with 2/3 vote of the State assembly, the governor shall be authorized to quarantine of US mail, and individual citizens and corporations registered within the state of NY will no longer provide tax payments to the Federal government. The movement across the borders of the state of NY shall be temporarily suspended, at the governor’s discretion, and the militia shall enforce this provision with force of arms, for the continued duration of the state of emergency, or until the restoration of constitutional norms.
7. A future Federal election for president, conducted with verified and audited voting in all 50 states, with hand counted paper ballots and with fair access without undue lines and delays to all registered voters, between any candidates put up for election, and conducted according to past accepted constitutional norms, shall permanently end the emergency period, and void all these provisions.
8. The Governor of New York State is authorized with these powers. Any legislation, executive order, or lawsuit by the Federal government regarding these provisions in Federal court shall be considered noncompliance with the provisions of this act, and due to the unfortunate breakdown of trust between Federal and State government, it will provide sufficient cause to trigger article 6.
I beg you to consider that your constituents are helpless in the face of what amounts to a fascist coup. I do not believe this government is above doing the unthinkable, including arbitrary arrest, arbitrary assassination, and staging mass-casualty terror attacks. If NY stands tall, and declares tough security measures, it is possible that a minority or majority of our 50 states will follow suit, and the continual monitoring and threat of repercussions might be sufficient to insulate our fellow New Yorkers from catastrophic violations of democratic norms. It is too late to pass such measures after your members have been arrested and replaced, or, God forbid, disappeared. This has happened in other nations with national governments which do not make a good faith effort to assiduously follow constitutional norms.
State monitoring of Federal activity is not currently forbidden by the Federal government, so it is a right explicitly granted to the states by the US constitution. It can be a bipartisan issue, as Republicans have no more reason to trust this administration than Democrats do. The fear of totalitarianism is nearly universal in the US, it is nearly everyone save those who have been appointed by the incoming Federal administration. The expense of the measures will be mitigated by the security you will grant your residents during this extraordinary period, and you will earn their gratitude and their vote. If you are first to introduce the measure, you will personally benefit from national exposure.
Please make sure we are not led like sheep to the slaughter. Remember that we have suffered already one mass casualty attack not too long ago, and we can ill afford an administration who not only does not seek to avoid such attacks, but potentially looks forward to them. I beg you to listen.
I am not optimistic I will be heard, but I must try. I implore you, do not wait and say “it will pass”, because all our history shows it will not pass. Please do not attempt to work with DC, the power structure of fascism makes it impossible to work with DC without corrupting your oath to the citizens of NY. Please hear me when I say that the evil of fascism must be resisted, at its birth, because the longer it is allowed to grow, the harder it is to resist. I ask you to pass this measure before Jan 20th. If such a measure or similar is not passed, I shall no longer feel it is safe to remain in NY state, or in the United States of America and I will emigrate, along with many of our more fortunate residents. I fear for the safety and future of my fellow residents who are not so fortunate to have friends and relatives overseas.
I am aware that a negative outcome is possible, that such a measure would spark national attention, and would be risky to yourself and your fellow Assemblymen and Assemblywomen. I am also aware that Federal colleagues of yours in your party in the House and Senate might advise you to wait and see. Please do not wait and see, please declare these measures. The monitoring and threat (not execution) of separation will be enough to force constitutional behavior from those in office, even if these people are determined to violate the law, as Bannon and our incoming president have all but assured the press they are.
We are opposed to this president, because he is the known path from electoral democracy to totalitarian one-party government. We are also suspicious of the exit poll disparities that suggest that the vote in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin was not tallied correctly. This is an unprecendented assault on our rights as citizens, and New Yorkers can’t wait, but must immediately vote oversight over the Federal presence in their state for the duration. There is nothing needed at the Federal level beyond compliance with the constitution, a request that the incoming administration has shown no inclination of honoring.
Clinton also won the electoral college, but for irregularities in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and possibly Florida.
The incoming administration will do this, which is why we need to resist.
I agree with you regarding Waco, Oklahoma City, and all of the Patcon fiasco (including Ruby Ridge), and I voted for Clinton ANYWAY, because Trump threatens far worse. I mean 1930s Germany level worse.
Please don’t rebel individually, it is up to the people in individual states to rebel as a unit, and not immediately, you need to hope for the best, and a peaceful end to the crisis. But simply the threat of rebellion is enough to keep fascism at bay. I wrote this letter to my state representative yesterday, if I am alone, it will be ignored. But please, if your state is red or blue, it doesn’t matter, you need to put the thumb screws on the Federal administration to respect the constitution, and you need state auditing of all Federal activity for the duration of this presidency, with threat of secession and armed conflict in case there are violations. Here is the letter, please use it. If nothing gets done by Jan 20 in NY state, if there is no ARMED militia in the state ready to enforce NY state’s will, I will cut and run:
Dear Mr. O’Donnell,
I am a registered Democratic voter in your district, and I am contacting you as a last ditch effort to try to avert what I believe to be a constitutional catastrophe, and severe crisis in the state of New York, and a threat to our democratic traditions.
I am sure that you are as concerned as your constituents about the results of the Federal Presidential election. My concerns are not simply about outcome, but about process, as the exit polls in the states of Pennsylvia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin disagreed with the official results in a way that is not reasonable to attribute to chance. The election was, with some statistical certainty, not conducted honestly, and it is impossible for New York State to allow itself to be swallowed up by darkness through the election boards of other states without some measure of resistance.
I am asking you to act at the state level. I will ask my mayor to act at the municipal level as well, but a city is more limited. I would like to impress upon you the urgency. We have very little time. It is possible, perhaps likely, that the incoming Federal administration will lack the scruples of previous administrations, and will use their position to commit illegal acts, atrocities, or mass casualty terror, and violations of human rights not seen in America since Jackson and the trail of tears. I do not wish to point out the parallels with Europe in the 1930s (and the US in the 1820s), but I feel I must. This is what it looks like when a constitutional republic ends.
I am asking you if you could ask your fellow Democratic and Republican Assemblymen and Assemblywomen to hear the voice of protest of the citizens of the state of NY. and pass a risky measure. I hope you agree with me that doing nothing is not an option. This constitutes a best last chance to spare NY from authoritarianism. Please consider that in Trump’s America, the press will be silenced by lawsuits and all Democrats will be intimidated out of office.
I would hope that New York can declare an emergency session of the Assembly, and announce an extraordinary circumstance, in which it finds itself unable to find full faith that the Federal government will continue to fulfil its Constitutional obligations to the state of New York. New York asserts its compliance with all Federal obligations, but requests, during this extraordinary period, full verification over Federal activities taking place in the state, or over its airspace and coastal regions.
Under these circumstances, the state will set aside funds for the following extraordinary measures, to be implemented by the governor.
1. Monitoring of Federal activity in NY state: the governor shall appoint independent inspectors for each FBI, ATF, IRS, and Homeland security offices, with overlapping scope and mutual oversight, to monitor each and every Federal agency and Federal employee in NY state. No communications from outside New York to the employees of these agencies shall be admitted which is not viewed by the inspectors, in full, declassified form. The inspectors shall be granted the required security clearance, and if the background check fails, they shall be replaced, but repeated undue denials of security clearance over any period of time longer than two days, or for more than five appointed inspectors for a given position, by the Federal government, will be considered non-compliance with NY state law. The inspectors will monitor all activities in the agency, and report directly to the governor. They will be given access to all work-related documents and communications with the Federal agencies, and shall be informed of the whereabouts of all Federal employees when they are tasked with doing their duties, at all times that they are on duty in New York state.
2. A suspension of all extraordinary activities by the department of homeland security in NY, including: a. drills or exercises simulating any mass casualty terror attacks or response to such, b. interception of any NY state communications which do not leave the state without a state-review of the Federal warrant process and evidence, c. Federal search and investigation not explicitly authorized by the governor’s office after review.
3. An amendment to NY defamation law: any defamation lawsuit coming from a Federal official regarding any potentially defamatory article in the New York press, or any medium distributed in the state of New York, will be
considered a grave violation of constitutional norms, and shall be null and void in the state of NY. Suits brought up in other states will be considered a violation of constitutional obligations by the state of NY, and will
trigger
provision 6. The party bringing up the lawsuit shall be responsible for damages and legal fees, to the extent determined by the court.
4. A quarantine of Federal power to detain and deport within the state of NY, without approval from the Governor. The facts of the matter regarding each detention shall be presented to the governor, who will make a determination of the validity of the evidence. Any classified material shall be presented in non-redacted form. No New Yorker shall disappear into a Federal prison without Habeus Corpus protection, or assassinated, and if it is suspected that a New Yorker’s rights have been violated by the governor, a 2/3 vote of the assembly will trigger measure 6. Any arrest of political officeholders by the Federal government will have to be approved by the state of NY. During the period in question, an attempt to replace the governor of New York by Federal arrest will, with 2/3 vote of the assembly, trigger provision 6.
5. The state shall institute a temporary part-time draft on all military age males and females, by lottery, to allow state milita to patrol the state, for the duration of the emergency period. The state officers will be appointed by the governor, and draftees shall be compensated for their time, amounting to one hour a week. In the event of an escalation of emergencies, draftees might be called to full time active duty. In the event of such an emergency, NY residents in the armed forces overseas will be called to return.
6. If the state determines that the obligations of the Federal government have not been met, if there is a mass casualty event which the governor of New York is unsure of provenance, if there is any use of US military forces or lethal drones within the borders of New York State, or in the event of gross constitutional violations in other states, at the discretion of the governor and with 2/3 vote of the State assembly, the governor shall be authorized to quarantine of US mail, and individual citizens and corporations registered within the state of NY will no longer provide tax payments to the Federal government. The movement across the borders of the state of NY shall be temporarily suspended, and the militia shall enforce this provision with force of arms, for the continued duration of the state of emergency, or until the restoration of constitutional norms.
7. A future Federal election for president, conducted with verified voting in all 50 states, with hand counted paper ballots and with fair access to all voters, between any future candidates put up for election, and conducted according to past accepted constitutional norms, will permanently end the emergency period, and void all these provisions.
8. The Governor of New York State is authorized with these powers. Any legislation, executive order, or lawsuit by the Federal government regarding these provisions in Federal court shall be considered noncompliance with state law, and provide sufficient cause to trigger article 6.
I beg you to consider that your constituents are helpless in the face of what amounts to a fascist coup. I do not believe this government is above doing the unthinkable, including arbitrary arrest, arbitrary assassination, and staging mass-casualty terror attacks in order to seize absolute power. If NY is brave, and declares tough measures which threaten, but do not yet amount to, separation, it is possible that a minority or majority of our 50 states will follow suit, and the continual monitoring and threat of repercussions might be sufficient to insulate our fellow New Yorkers from catastrophic violations of democratic norms. It is too late to pass such measures after your members have been arrested and replaced, or, God forbid, disappeared. This has happened in other nations with national governments which do not make a good faith effort to assiduously follow constitutional norms.
State monitoring of Federal activity is not currently forbidden by the Federal government, so it is a right explicitly granted to the states by the US constitution. It can be a bipartisan issue, as Republicans have no more reason to trust this administration than Democrats do, shopkeepers, academics, and a majority of US voters, including those that voted for the Republican candidate, are united in mistrust of the Federal government under the incoming administration. The fear of totalitarianism is nearly universal, it is everyone save those who have been appointed by the incoming President. The expense of the measures will be mitigated by the security you will grant your residents during this extraordinary period, and you will earn their gratitude and their vote. If you are first to introduce the measure, you will personally benefit from national exposure.
Please make sure we are not led like sheep to the slaughter. Remember that we have suffered already one mass casualty attack not too long ago, and we can ill afford and administration who not only doesn’t seek to avoid such attacks, but potentially looks forward to more of them, for an excuse to implement ethnic cleansing. Remember that the US has deported millions of people before, in the 1820s, and millions of people died.
I am not optimistic I will be heard, but I must make an effort. I beg you, do not wait and say “it will pass”, because all of history shows it will not pass. Please do not attempt to work with DC, the power structure of fascism makes it impossible to work with DC without corrupting your oath to the citizens of NY. Please hear me when I say that the evil of fascism must be resisted, at its birth, because the longer it is allowed to grow, the harder it is to resist. I ask you to pass this measure before Jan 20th. If such a measure or similar is not passed, I shall no longer feel it is safe to remain in NY state, or in the United States of America and I will emigrate, along with many of our more fortunate residents. I fear for the safety and future of my fellow residents who are not so fortunate to have friends and relatives overseas.
There will BE NO ELECTION, the press will be silenced by lawsuits which have already started, the protesters will be arrested for sedition as has already been promised, Democracy for America and Bernie Sanders’ organization will be broken up by Federal investigations into God knows what, probably “racketeering”, prominent Democrats will be arrested for Federal corruption charges, then they will hold the election. The candidates you run will be no-names without a platform, and too timid to speak about fundamental change, and you will lose by 80% in 2020. You must fight now. There is no future if you let this administration get power without resistance at the state level, draconian and unprecedented state oversight over all Federal activities, a local state draft in each state, and a threat of separation if there are violations of constitutional norms. Remember, Bannon can stage as many terror attacks as he needs to institute martial law and intern all my Black American Muslim neighbors. He has the ideology to do it, and his role models are Dick Cheney, Satan, and the unspoken one. Adolph Hitler.
Who gives a damn! Stop with the high-minded debates and talk. This is not a normal election, this is an adminstration which clearly does not care for 200 year old democratic norms.
When you give power to someone outside of the constitutional norms, you can end up without a press and without a Democratic party in 4 years. He will sue the press to become his propaganda outlet, and he will sic the Federal law enforcement on Democratic officials until he has a one-party state. Without Obama’s net-neutrality, the internet presence of the left will be decimated, because they will have to pay to stream. His genocidal power-hungry lackey, Bannon, will stage terror attack after terror attack, maybe an atomic bomb in DC? Maybe Sarin gas in Portland? Anything with mass casualties, and so acquire absolute power. Like his hero Cheney. Bannon will convince him that the attacks are not self-inflicted, but that Muslims are in a plot against the government, and that’s concentration camps and “deportations”. Deportations to nowhere, you understand, like the Jews were deported to Poland. You have to raise arms state by state, and audit all Federal activities, because you have no idea whether your government is constrained by constitutional norms. Hillary Clinton was terrible, but anything is better than this, including a temporary collapse of the Federal government, just until we can figure out what is going on.
You might not have a Democratic party in the future. He could win with 80% of the vote in 2020, after the terror attacks and voting laws the congress will pass. This is not an administration constrained by constitutional norms.
Bannon could do a homeland security exercize, explode an atomic bomb in DC, blame it on Muslims, convince that piece of shit president to put them in detention camps, and then round up Sanders and Warren and accuse them of material collaboration with terrorists like the ACLU, who are trying to get the Muslims out, and who harbor them. You are crazy to elect someone who doesn’t operate under constitutional constraints, and you need state level action to bring the Federal government to heel. Now. Before Jan 20th. The first terror attack could come on Jan 21, for all you know Bannon is setting it up right now with two of his buddies appointed homeland security. You must get state legislation getting all homeland security out of your state, and audited.
You need to vet the people at homeland security, because the next terror attack will come from BANNON, not from Muslims. He will just blame it on Muslims. This is straight out of Hitler’s playbook, as was everything else in this campaign and transition.
I didn’t know about the governor, but the election board in Pennsylvania is certainly controlled by Republicans, because they just instituted the new paperless voting machines, with private corporations controlling the data, they now have no audit (they used to) and they now have a discrepancy. I am positive that the PA election board is Republican, without checking. If it is not, the Democratic election board is new, and didn’t bother changing the system back. The results were fraudulent, Diego, it’s been happening for a decade. It doesn’t matter anyway, because states are allowed to do it.
The election board is not always run by the same party as the governor, it depends on how it is put in place, by election, or appointment, and how long the term lasts. Likewise in Minnesota (MI is Minnesota not Missouri)
I am not going to chill, I am going to leave the country on Jan 19th. I am petitioning my state for audit of Federal activities, with threat of secession if there is any mass-casualty attack within their border.
Do not have faith— Bannon is no more ethical than Goebbels or Goering. The presidential administration, unlike actual terrorists, has access to nuclear and chemical weapons. The last time around, it was Cheney running around claiming nuclear attack was imminent, he was running the drills and exercizes around 9/11, and Cheney, unlike Bannon, had no ethic cleansing goals in mind— he just wanted the US to control Middle East during what he considered to be “peak oil”. Bannon says “ethnic cleansing does not have to be so terrible”, if he wanted to attack black America, rounding up and deporting Muslims (and their relatives) would do it, as millions of American Muslims are native born blacks.
When you “deport” the native born, you are deporting them to nowhere, you understand. You are insane to chase after foreign threats and then install the worst possible domestic threat into office.
I do not trust these people, they have never held public office, and they have shown only disdain toward the constitution of the United States. They need to be AUDITED from the only power above them, which are the 50 states. The states have leeway to ban Federal exercises in their borders, to audit all Federal activities, and to arm their citizens in a militia. They better do it, or else you will leave yourself open to Bannon terror. If the audits go well, and 4 years pass, maybe you can relax your guard. But in NY state, you would be crazy to admit anything from Homeland Security without complete inspection.
These are not conspiracy theories, as they do not require any conspiracy. An appointee of Bannon could pull off a Sarin attack essentially alone, and Bannon himself could manufacture Muslim suspects out of nothing, he can put whatever he wants into the classified intelligence network. I am not telling you false-flag attacks are going to come, I see it as 50/50. But, quoting, I don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
I see. Don’t bother with proving fraud, it won’t change anything. Just please try to get rebellion noises from states which are willing, and make sure nobody can pull off a false-flag in your state, and make sure to blame BANNON not Muslims for any mass-casualty attack which isn’t some nutcase shooting people.
Stop impersonating someone who knows me. I am perfectly sane, and perfectly safe. I am concerned about the future of my country, and my daughter. We can’t have people operating outside of constitutional norms without an armed drafted militia in all 50 states, patrolling, and auditing every Federal office. This is a catastrophe in the Federal government, and it must be resisted by the states.
The national guard is state level, and there is no way state level government is going to be corrupt enough to fight their own constituents. You need to petition your state capital to institute a draft for the state guard, and to monitor all Federal activities for noncompliance with the constitution. I wrote a letter requesting this, it is in comments I wrote elsewhere on disqus, it can be bipartisan, it doesn’t require violating the constitution, simply a state by state draft and vigilance.
On the contrary, someone who is sane does not put white supremacists with no history in government and a stated preference for ethnic cleansing in charge of weapons of mass destruction. They have a propaganda apparatus capable of blaming Muslims for any atrocity that they choose do. A nuclear bomb in DC is extreme, but it does kill a lot of people who didn’t vote for them. Perhaps it will be a Sarin attack, or just weekly bombings. Either way, Bannon will be responsible, and Muslims will be blamed, until you have martial law, and internment camps. It’s not certain this will happen, of course, Bannon might be incompetent at staging such things, he might be happy with legal methods of making people’s lives hell, but I don’t think he will be. The point is, you have no protection except your state assembly and governor’s office, and they don’t have the power right now to oversee federal activity, nor do they have the armed militia, under their supervision, to implement separation should crimes begin to happen. If they did, I would not worry about the crimes happening.
Yes, I will. There is no outrage, this country is not growing up, it will need to learn the hard way.
What? No. I meant Bannon would hire people to do false-flags in homeland security. They wouldn’t be random skinheads, and you would never know. It doesn’t matter, as I have talked to Americans who are not online, who watch TV, and they aren’t outraged, they are just taking their lumps and believing all the horseshit they hear, and regurgitating it. So it’s hopeless. I tried, I’m outie.
Trump ran Hitler’s campaign, if Hitler was alive today, he would sue for royalties. Trump plagiarized Hitler for the most memorable lines: “On the night of the reichstag fire, there was dancing in the Jewish quarter”, “On 9/11 Mulsims in NJ were dancing in the streets”, “we need an end to Jewish immigration”, “we need an end to Muslim immigration”, “make Germany great again”, “we will put germany back to work on infrastructure”, etc, etc. The Hitler was evident to anyone who has ever read Hitler, which is why so many people made the comparison.
Practically every theme was stolen from Hitler, either indirectly, by funneling through the alt-right, or because he read Hitler and successfully used him as a role model for a campaign. The biggest difference is that Trump is much stupider and less eloquent than Hitler was, and repeats himself a lot. Globalist replaced Jewish/Bolshevik, as usual in the alt-right, but the idea was the same: we are different and we need to be apart. Deportations of Mexicans replaced deportations of Jews, but the idea was the same: they are corrupting our pure culture. The white supremacist streak was completely unchanged, except I would rather say it more precisely: in Trump it wasn’t exacly racial, the racism was automatic and incidental to the mentality, the main theme was the wealth-supremacy, the idea that rich people know best. Hitler used less of that, because he wasn’t running in a culture that celebrated wealth. But it’s the natural translation to America.
The theme of the campaign was disunity, the hatred of others and their exclusion. He advocated police-state surveillance, violence against protesters, and he projected POWER, power over the weak. His intended image was that of a charismatic superman, and his claim was that once you give him power, he will fix all the problems. He said this without giving details, and the few details he did give were absurd. This is also Hitler. The parallels were so exact that I couldn’t understand why ANYONE would even CONSIDER voting for him. Then I realized as election day neared, nobody else remembers Hitler anymore.
After getting elected, he immediately calmed the country down by dropping all the racist rhetoric, and talking about unity. He put forward economic stimulus packages to let the economy recover. He asked extremists to stop harassing minorities, all the while making sure that the domestic appointments were made by rabid white supremacists. Again, exactly what Hitler did in 1933.
Then he invited members of the press to a private meeting, where he told them that they were spreading lies, and needed to control themselves. Then by intimidation and power, he gets them to write fawning pieces about him, making it out that he is not so radical, that this is just like any other administration. So far, exactly following Hitler.
The next stage of the Hitler game-plan is to install cronies in every newspaper, and shut down those that won’t do it, in Trump’s case, via abuse of anti-trust power and lawsuits. That silences all media critics permanently. In Trump’s case, that would need a repeal of net-neutrality as well, to silence online voices which are unfriendly. The next step is to install friendly generals, local governors, and friendly administration bureaucrats, over about 6 years. Hitler went after socialist labor leaders, Trump will go after Mexicans and Democrats, removing them from power.
Kristallnach came in 1938, and the concentration camps for Jews. The mass murder started in 1940, and the gassings in 1942. That’s a long time, nearly a decade.
Of course I don’t predict gassings and mass murders, that’s unique even for fascists, but I can easily foresee deportations even of Muslim citizens, after a few staged terror attacks. The adminstration can attack it’s own people, and blame others for it. This was a favorite tactic of Hitler, it was used to attack Poland in 1939. If Trump decides to deport Muslim citizens, that’s a deportation to nowhere. Deportation to nowhere is the recipe for mass murder— when a bureaucracy has people it can’t place, it will just make them disappear as cheaply as possible. And nobody knows about it, because nobody is talking. People just go away.
You won’t see anything except consolidation of power for the first few years. If he succeeds, there is no Democratic party anymore, the leaders are in jail for corruption, and he is reelected with something like 70% of the vote. That’s what Putin did, and that’s terrible enough. It’s the end of American democracy.
Since he promised to run the government like a business, and since businesses are run exactly in such an autocratic way, I expect him to consolidate power. I don’t expect him to get impeached for it, because the party in power doesn’t care. I just expect him to succeed. What he does with the power, who knows. That depends on his hidden formula for making America great. But it certainly has something to do with making the white people strong, because his policies are about social darwinism with the implicit expectation that the ones who survive the culling are the most deserving, and usually, although not always, have pale skin. This is the Trump way, it is the exact opposite of Christianity, it is also the opposite of good morals, and it is simply evil. Evil in the most base and repugnant sense of the word.
The comparisons to Hitler are there because the comparisons are exact. If you don’t see it, you simply don’t know Hitler’s history.
Ask your friends to prepare for an assault on civil liberties, to find ways of communicating off the grid. Hitler was also supported enthusiastically by the Church in 1933, because the opposition was atheist communists. The Catholics only lost faith in Hitler in 1942. In the US, there are no communists to speak of, there are no socialists in numbers, there is no historical awareness of the methods of fascism, there is no organized defense against totalitarianism, and the militias in the South and South West are often racists on Trump’s side, although I pray they believe their own statements about commitment to liberty.
It is imperative to elect people to election boards across the country who are not corrupt, and who will install paper voting systems which are verifiable. Fascists manipulate the vote, Hitler held a manipulated election a year or two after he took power, where the Nazi party swept the whole thing. If the midterms are corrupted by venal officials who refuse to count votes correctly, DC will be all Trumpists in 2018. Don’t look to Washington, look to your State Capital, ask your governor to watch out for DC, to monitor all Federal activities, and most importantly, if there is a terrorist attack, to BLAME WASHINGTON DC, not Muslims. The terror attacks will not come from Muslims, they have no incentive.
You are probably living under a criminal regime, at least for the next 4 years. The criminals will take over by infiltration, and after 4 years of propaganda, the majority of people will believe the craziest lunatic nonsense, Breitbart will be their news source. They will believe there is a Muslim conspiracy against Trump, A Jewish conspiracy against America, that African Americans are “naturally Muslim” and have a bloodlust for whites, that blacks and Jews are planning to destroy white culture. You will see fewer and fewer brown faces on TV, and the ones that are left will be the most craven and paid-off collaborators. You will find Jewish and Asian quotas at universities and government agencies, and eventually, it can turn into the worst catastrophe any nation ever has to face. It can also be a world catastrophe, if Trump changes his mind and decides to invade other nations.
I don’t expect him to leave the country’s borders, because he is a complete nationalist and isolationist. But this was also true of Stalin, who believed the USSR was large enough to be self-sufficient, and didn’t need to trade. Stalin used methods nearly identical to Hitler, and the consequences for Russia were catastrophic. Even if he is merely Putin, this is the end of democracy.
Please, start working NOW, please, I beg you. You need to work to alert people to the danger, to the methods, to buy weapons, and learn to shoot them, just in case (I don’t know how to shoot and have never owned a weapon). You need to ask governors to stand firm in the face of illegal orders, and threaten mutiny to the point of outright secession, threatening to withhold taxes. You need to be suspicious of all media stories, it is a terrible time to be an American. I wish I could temper this with moderation, but I can’t. Don’t wait and see. If you resist, he might just be an administrative incompetent, with one term who is forced to follow the law by mass vigilance. If you don’t resist, his appointees will poison this country with a racism so virulent, you will wish you were out of this country, or never born.
I am speaking with historical memory, as I am Jewish, and my grandparents were in Europe. My grandfather was enslaved in 1940-41, and they only survived because they were in Rumania, which was Axis aligned. If they had been in their ethnic homeland of Hungary, chances were 3 out of 4 they would have been deported to Auschwitz in 1944.
Get rid of the Bush Republicans. It’s enough for two peace prizes. Unfortunatly, the fascists are back.
Replace Bush.
The problem is that secret documents are not peer reviewed, and do not contain the whole story. They are full of unsupported groupthink and assumptions, because they are not public. Further, those with a security clearence think they know so much more, when the extra information is unvetted. There is no secret document saying anything different about 9/11 than what we were told, they are just as clueless in secret as they are in public.
Tunisia is a democracy, and Rojava is free.
I’m a Trump hater, and I deny that anyone died at Sandy Hook. It’s fake, whether you’re left or right.
There are no dead children there. You’re a fantasist, tugging on the heartstrings of Americans. I don’t care about your fantasy dead children.
I will go and join them gladly in that hell, to keep away from liars like you.
Because it was a false flag.
Jones doesn’t want a dictatorship, he’s a strict constitutionalist. I am afraid he has been following a pied piper in Donald Trump, who is probably neither a truther or a believer in constitutional government. I suppose we’ll find out. If he investigates Sandy Hook, repeals the 2012 propaganda law, investigates the Boston Bombing and pardons that patsy, investigates 9/11, investigates Oklahoma City, and begins to dismantle the surveillance state (despite his promises to do the opposite) then I just might come back to the US. On the other hand, if he intimidates the press and stages his own false flags, I’ll stay out of the country. I think 4-6 months should be enough to know.
That’s just Nazi-like propaganda. There are no pedophile rings, this is fantasy straight out of 1930s der Sturmer, who accused Jews in Germany of “white slavery” (human trafficking), pedophilia and child murder. These Nazi tactics are why I couldn’t understand why anyone voted for Trump. There is no excuse for making such slander against a Pizza place, no matter what “incriminating photos” you think you find (they are all obviously innocent).
You saw nothing. You are lying.
My family lives in Connecticut, about 20 miles from Newtown. I don’t want to talk to those who claimed they lost children. I want to talk to the JANITORS at the school, the cafeteria workers. The kids who weren’t shot, and their parents. The parents of kids who were friends of those children that were shot. There should be a network of people around the massacre, and I haven’t found anyone, except for policemen who say they were called in on that day. Not that I tried too hard, mind you.
The only people you see are the same set of three distraught parents. I am not interested in those people, I want an interview with all 80 people who worked on the periphery. There is no such interview, not with one janitor, so I don’t believe this nonsense, and neither should you.
I am sincere.
The trick to 9/11 is that it was done using military drills simulating the events. That means that thousands of people are involved, but all that these people know is that they were doing a drill which suspiciously matched the event at the same time. This could be a coincidence, they rationalize, so they aren’t sure they are involved. In this way, you can pull off any attack without a large conspiracy. In the most extreme case, you could do it completely alone, as an individual in charge of secret drills.
Since the drills are secret, talking about them puts your job at risk. Still, despite this, brave people leaked the drills of 9/11 in 2002, to the consternation of Bush officials, so that we have a relatively complete picture of how the attack was carried out from the inside. It is pretty certain that George W. Bush did not know what was going on, and it is certain that Obama wouldn’t find anything suspicious by reviewing the secret documents that survive. The only person in the administration which needed to be involved is the person in charge of the military drills. All of them were under the authority of the vice-president.
Most of the drills leaked in 2002, other drills dripped out here and there. Once you know that drills simulating multiple hijacking and crashing airplanes into buildings were going on that morning, it really takes willful self-deception to deny it is an inside job.
I did not vote for Donald Trump, partly (but not mostly) because I do not believe he is a truther (mostly because I believe he is a fascist). Alex Jones was an early Truther, but he is also conspiratorial minded and believes other things that are nonsense. Webster Tarpley is the main academic person who cracked the mystery, and catalogued every single drill going on on that day, or around that day, which is relevant. Unlike Jones, he comes from the left, and unlike Jones, he doesn’t support other stuff which is more dubious.
Alex Jones was talking about an inside job against New York and Washington DC in JULY of 2001. He is the first truther, almost by default, because he was talking about it before it happened. But the real intellectual father to the 9/11 truther movement is certainly Webster Tarpley, who explained most of the logistics of the inside job. I think he is spot on, but I am sure he is overstating the size of the conspiracy— I think it involved basically one person, perhaps a few low-level friends as well, so that technically it doesn’t look like a conspiracy at all. Just a plan.
If you disagree with the truthers about 9/11, you simply are not rational.
I hope Trump has an interview with the janitors and cafeteria workers at Sandy Hook, and with parents whose children were not killed. Just to make sure there are such people, because I have never seen them.
It’s POSSIBLE, it’s just incredibly stupid, and nobody would ever do it. It’s a risk of arrest for Federal crime for a chance to negligibly influence an election with a single vote. The number of illegals who voted is most likely in the single digits.
I have a child already, and I am not sure what happened. I am frightened of living in a society where I can’t trust the media. I go not far from Sandy Hook, and Alex Jones is right, it is like “Children of the Corn” when you try to get personal connections to it. I am not a troll, I am sincere.
It’s simply not worth it— you can only get a single vote. There is no organized conspiracy to register illegals, it is much easier to register legal black voters, and transients, and it doesn’t carry a risk of getting exposed. This idea is pure fantasy— every registration form requires you to swear to your citizenship status, and there is no gain from voting. The ID is idiotic, you don’t need ID to vote, your neighbors are there and recognize you. The people smashing up windows in front of law enforcement do not vote, and are not protesters. You are mentally retarded, or else a propagandist, please shut up.
I dispute such studies, please show them. You would have to be mentally ill to register as an illegal. If the Democrats tried to register illegals they would have a scandal a mile wide. Each illegal would be a potential witness, so if 3 million voted, one of the 3 million could sell their story of how they were registered by some pushy party operative to the NYT for $100,000, and that’s that for the illegal registration drive. It’s a stupid allegation. Even permanent residents don’t register, let alone illegals. It’s not worth the risk of being caught in Federal election fraud, just for the right to cast one stupid vote.
Regarding the “victory speech”, if Donald Trump was ACTUALLY a 9/11 Truther, and a constitutionalist who defended freedom for all citizens, I would have voted for him, despite his crazy economics. But he’s a bigoted muslim-baiter who thinks we should be MORE surveilled, and that drone attacks should be taking out relatives and families. These are Nazi policies. His victory contradicted exit polls showing that he was losing, and the discrepancy was greatest where we cannot check or recount, because the data is proprietary. This administration has a potential for outright fascist rule by actual neo-nazis. I wish I were exaggerating, but I am not, so I am getting out, and trying to get my family out. I hope to God he’s an actual Jones guy, with actual healthy skepticism and an independent mind, but I am certain that he is not. He is just a fascist.
SnakeTrapper simply means that the carbon fuels are not from fossilized anything, like Stalin, he subscribes to the Soviet abiotic petroleum origin theory. This theory is correct, but it doesn’t change the fact that CO2 warms up the planet, and human CO2 will warm up the planet catastrophically.
Any hypothetical “fudging of data” is irrelevant— it’s a 1-parameter system with solid theory, solid historical data and solid experimental data (the past 40 years). An extra unit of CO2 produces such-and-such warming, and we’ve done the experiment and we see that it’s about 1 degree of warming for the industrial output until now. The amount of warming is verified from polar ice-core data, which can’t be fudged, and reforestation won’t help you, because it’s the oceans that do most of the CO2 recycling, and deforestation is happening simultaneously with greenhouse gas emissions.
The best immediate solution is pure nuclear power, with LFTR or other breeders, such a system can eliminate all climate concerns, replacing them with more manageable proliferation and waste management concerns. Using a good breeder, the waste is completely recycled. This research is underfunded, and both left and right wing refuse to move forward on a transition to next-generation nuclear power, because it conflicts with vested interests, and because older nuclear power has been unsafe. This needs to change quickly. Making nuclear power safe and waste-free is much easier than cooling down a planet warmed by 3 degrees.
He doesn’t believe the lying lie one, not the truthy truth one.
Just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s false either. There is no network of people around that school, there is just a set of grieving parents. There are no janitors, no cafeteria workers, no parents of friends of these children, nothing but a set of grieving parents trotted out on TV whenever there is a debate on gun control legislation. It looks like a hoax, and it is plausibly a hoax, because propaganda is legal in America now. That doesn’t mean it’s a hoax, but the reporters need to do their job and interview all the janitors and cafeteria workers, not the same set of parents twenty times.
Maybe he’s an Alex Jones Breitbart hating gun-despising alt-right smashing nra-rejecting fear-denying anti-fascist Bernie loving climate-change zealot, and you’re the brainwashed bigot.
Alex Jones is not insincere— he sent people to Newtown and you can bet all your money that were he able to find janitors and cafeteria workers he would have changed the conspiracy theory from “hoax” to “inside job” (as would I).
In the past, he was not purposefully dishonest, aside from things related to commercial activity, although this election cycle saw an amount of dishonesty from him that is troubling. During 2014, he was meticulously honest, though borderline insane as always.
I have relatives that live in a neighbouring town in CT, and when I visited I asked around. They know some people linked there, and they don’t have an indirect link to anyone whose friends were affected, or who worked on the periphery. The news media weren’t able to find anyone who know the killer to interview, no friends. If they found janitors and cafeteria people, it was obviously their day off, because none of them were interviewed. Journalists stopped doing their job.
It really does look like a hoax, which is why otherwise sane people claim it is a hoax. Unlike Columbine, you don’t see interviews with people on the periphery, only documents talking about dead children, no photos, and the same set of three fake-ass looking distraught parents each time.
Next time I am in CT, I will go to Newtown and try to find a school worker unaffected by the shooting, a parent whose child attended the school. I haven’t done this directly yet, but you can be sure Alex Jones has, and he failed. I am sure I will fail too, like all the journalists and Alex Jones, but I will try for real.
He’s not a truther, I am. Truthers don’t believe Saudi Al Qaeda members infiltrated our government, they believe our government infiltrated Al Qaeda.
It’s Bach that discovered the algorithm, the machine is only describing it precisely. A machine can verify the proof of Fermat’s last theorem, it’s not the same as generating it.
In a nominal curency enviroment (like every modern nation), the effect of raising the minimum wage to $25,000 an hour (and enforcing it) is NOT skyrocketing unemployment, rather it is instantaneous inflation. The businesses simply raise prices by a factor of 1000, so that the wage is effectively about $25 an hour, all bank savings are wiped out, and the effect is to destroy capital, not jobs. The negative effects of minimum wage increase are purely on capital, not on employment, and raising wages in this way is a method of ensuring hyperinflation, assuming there is sufficient money produced by the central bank to pay the government employees the new minimum wage, and sufficient injections of capital into banks to allow businessowners to take out loans for the first months to cover their suddenly higher expenses. After the first weeks, the higher prices and wages come to a new equilibrium at a thousandfold higher price range, but all money-savings are wiped out.
The effect of minimum wage is paradoxical, because it is macroeconomic. The microeconomic response is higher unemployment, so if you try it out locally, for example, raising minimum wage in a state or a city, jobs shift out of the state or city to other locations, increasing local unemployment somewhat. The paradox is that if you do it everywhere, globally, raising minimum wage DECREASES unemployment! This completely paradoxical and true prediction is the main result of Keynesian economics, it is a unique counterintuitive prediction, it is Keynes’s parahelion precession of Mercury.
If you keep raising the minimum wage forever, there is a crossover point where it stops reducing unemployment and starts producing pure inflation. This crossover point is at full employment (relative to minimum wage perturbation), and this is the maximum efficiency point for a minimum-wage intervention.
This effect is completely opposite microeconomic predictions, because the economy is not near equilibrium. When you raise minimum wage, you partially fix the main market failure, which is that low-wage job wages are not determined in competitive conditions of near-zero unemployment. When you increase the wages past the point where this failure is fixed, meaning when there is already full employment, you produce inflation.
This was worked out in the 1930s, and that there is a debate about this TODAY shows that the field of economics is bankrupt.
The minimum wage does not produce unemployment even if you set it at $100 an hour. At no point does increasing minimum wage cost jobs. If you raise minimum wage to $100 an hour, you get nearly instantaneous inflation the next day to produce an effective minimum wage of (maybe) $25/hr, and simultaneous contraction of 75% of all the money capital. This is basic Keynesian economics. Unless you pay your employees in actual gold nuggets, raising minimum wage to infinity never has a negative effect on employment, it only (eventually) has an inflationary effect on capital. This is counterintuitive, and it is true, and it is why macroeconomics exists as a field.
If you economic education doesn’t include the basics of macroeconomics, you have no business pontificating on minimum wage.
It’s not “zero job loss”, it’s job GAIN. The macroeconomic effects of raising the minimum wage are always positive. It can only be negative in the sense of causing inflation. The inflation signals are what people look at when assessing minimum wage hikes, not unemployment. To look at unemployment is ridiculous quackery. At no point in the process of raising minimum wage to infinity do you expect larger unemployment, because the central bank always produces enough money to cover the temporary expenses to business, until the higher prices make up for the hike.
Keynesian economics 101 explains that wages are too low in economies, and when you raise minimum wage, this brings you closer to economic equilibrium (where there is no unemployment). In a modern economy, where there is no gold standard, raising minimum wage DECREASES unemployment, until it produces pure inflation. This is both theory and experience.
Minimum wage increases cause job gains. I say it, and I repeat it. It is standard Keynesian economics that it is true, and it is idiotic to deny it today.
You have to raise the minimum wage everywhere, otherwise jobs will move to places where it is lower. When you raise it everywhere, unemployment goes DOWN, not up. This is the central counterintuitive prediction of Keynesian economics verified by countless experiments over the entire world.
That’s because you didn’t take macroeconomics.
When the minimum wage is raised to $15/hr, these restaurants might turn a profit again.
Minimum wage never produces unemployment. Minimum wage (counterintuitively) DECREASES unemployment until it produces pure inflation. This is Keynes 101.
Even when minimum wage is increase to $1000/hr, $100,000/hr, any ridiculous amount you like, all that happens is that there is simultaneous inflation to reduce the value to the market equilibrium. The reason is that the businesses get loans to cover the monthly bill, and they raise prices to ensure profitability, and the system settles down to an effective sensible real wage. They aren’t paying in gold, and the central bank makes enough money to cover the increase.
Due to unemployment, wages in an economy are systematically and chronically too low to buy the entire industrial output. This is the main disease in capitalist economies. When you raise the minimum wage, you are partially correcting this market failure, and so decrease unemployment due to the increased economic activity. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true, and you can’t understand this phenomenon without understanding macroeconomics. This is the main prediction of Keynesian economics, it is why macroeconomics exists as a field.
The main question to answer from a policy standpoint is at what level does increasing minimum wage produce accelerating inflation. It never produces unemployment.
There is a second question, of whether high inflation is in itself a bad thing. When inflation is left unchecked for long enough, personal investment become more difficult, because individual cash holdings are wiped out. Institutional investors like banks and businesses with solid capital are not affected as severely by inflation. So inflation shifts power from individuals to institutions, and reduces the influence of the wealthy, by partially inflating away their wealth.
Whether you believe in “communism”, “freedom” or “slavery” not is not the question. The question is: when you raise the minimum wage, does unemployment go UP or DOWN. This is a question about facts and numbers, not about personal beliefs.
The classical economic prediction is that when you raise minimum wage unemployment can’t do anything except go UP. It’s supply and demand. If you find that this is not true, then there is something seriously wrong with your economic beliefs. Classical economics predicts that the more you raise the minimum wage, the more unemployment goes UP.
The Keynesian/socialist/Marxist prediction (they coincide) is that as you raise the minimum wage, unemployment goes DOWN. Then as you reach a certain level, unemployment stops going down and inflation goes up. Keynesian economics predicts that at no point does the unemployment go up.
Which prediction is correct? Now this is a matter of experiment. The experiment verifies that the classical prediction is busted.
One reason the classical prediction is wrong is because wage is not paid in gold, but in printed money, and in a modern economy, the extra money to support a higher wage can always be produced in a central bank, and distributed through lower banks.
But even this is not enough to explain what is going on. The classical prediction says that, even with new money, intervening with an artificial price must always produce more unemployment, simply because it prevents positions from being filled at the economic equlibrium wage.
The reason this prediction is wrong is because YOU AREN’T AT THE ECONOMIC EQUILIBRIUM WAGE. This wage is the wage at zero unemployment, where employers have to beg to find employees. At this point, it is hard to hire anyone, and wages go through the roof, and profits reduce to zero. This is the situation where a minimum wage would be “harmful”. I put “harmful” in quotes only because the minimum wage in such a situation of full employment is unnecessary, as all wages are sky-high and approximately equal, as threats of walkouts make it impossible to pay anyone significantly more than anyone else (aside from extremely specialized skills, sporadic work, high-risk, etc).
The failure of classical economics is made obvious every time you raise the minimum wage and unemployment fails to go up. The claim that classical economics is wrong about this is not about philosophy or freedom, it is about facts. You are wrong on the facts, and therefore deplorably stupid.
Your mentally retarded opinion is shared by most of your educated countrymen, which is why I no longer live in the US.
Shakespeare didn’t write any of it, it was all written by Marlowe. It takes a real tin-ear to not see that the Marlowe works and the Shakespeare works are written by the same person, if you do what hardly anyone does, and read them.
The things you say are believed by many in the American upper classes. They are what destroy the American economy. They have been known to be false in the entire world for the past 100 years. You are living in a fantasyland of stupidity and economic illiteracy, and people such as yourself must never be in charge of any economic policy.
The mechanism by which raising the minimum wage decreases unemployment is by CAUSING economic growth. Without the minimum wage increase, a modern economy will collapse. You can see this by successively raising and lowering the minimum wage, and seeing the unemployment go down when minimum wage is higher, and go up when minimum wage is lowered. When minimum wage is removed entirely, the entire economy collapses, and people move into slums.
This Keynesian prediction is completely OPPOSITE of the classical economic prediction, it is COUNTERINTUITIVE and SURPRISING, and nevertheless it is ALWAYS CORRECT, as verified in 100 years of minimum wage increases in hundreds of countries (and occasional minimum wage reductions through inflation, and occasional minimum wage elimination during periods of hyperinflation). There is no way to see this if you believe the nonsense you are spewing.
The reason the naive prediction you gave doesn’t work is relatively complicated, but it can be summarized simply as follows— in the economy, wages are not in economic equilibrium. They are NEVER in economic equilibrium, because wages are separate from capital, and never equilibrate with it. This is why increasing the amount of capital threefold, as happened in 2009, does not increase prices threefold (or, for that matter, hardly at all). Capital and wages are completely decoupled, they are independent. This can’t be understood classically.
The fundamental reason is that the people who use capital are completely separate from the people who work for wages, and the two classes hardly intersect. The separation between money wages and capital means that wages are driven to zero by competition with unemployed. This means that an increase in minimum wage brings you CLOSER to classical equilibrium, despite it being an intervention. It immediately leads to greater spending and greater economic growth, because it is FIXING A MARKET FAILURE. The failure is that wages and capital never come to equilibrium, because owners and managers never compete for their position with people who submit resumes and take a wage.
It is impossible to run an economy when these ancient facts, long established, are denied by a major political party. This is why it is best to leave the US when the Republican party takes power. I have already done so, and I suggest you do the same.
I don’t understand your mentally damaged response. I have explained to you that your Republican party believes total economic bullcrap, and explained in detail what the mechanism is that makes them bullcrap. I am writing this from a border-town in Israel, where I have returned after 30 years in the US. In Israel, these basic facts about economics are accepted without comment by every educated person, and are applied by all political parties, on the far left and on the far right. I assure you that these economic basics are likewise accepted in every other country in the world, by every party on every side, with the possible exception of North Korea (not Cuba or China).
The economic stupidity of your country’s Republican party is a catastrophe which threatens the entire world. It no longer directly threatens me personally, and I suggest to you to adjust your life so that it no longer threatens you.
When you say “no one else”, you ignore the totality of all modern economists outside the US, and more than half the economists within the US. The only ones who deny Keynesian facts are right wing idiots who make completely crazy predictions. Nobody in the world proposes such garbage since the 1930s, except the Republican party starting with Reagan. Even then, in the Reagan and Bush administration, they only pretended not to understand economics for propaganda purposes. Now they are sincere, as a new generation has forgotten that the anti-Keynesian posturing was simply an idiotic crackpot lie.
I am not talking about opinions, I am talking about measurable facts. When you inject a sum of money equal to twice the total current money supply into banks through the central bank, pre-Keynesian predictions, modern Chicago school predictions, are that prices would (quickly) triple and stay there at triple level forever. Keynesian predictions say that this only happens at peak capacity, and in a recession, there is no significant increase in prices. Nothing happens. This is a clear difference you can test.
We did the experiment in 2009. The money supply tripled. Inflation that year was around 4%, a little bit higher, but in the ballpark of every other year. It was the same the next year and the next. The classical prediction for prices was “~200% increase”, the Keynsian prediction was “~0% increase”. Which is more accurate? This is not a matter of opinion, this is a clear test. Keynesian theory, by the way, does not have a prediction about asset prices. The main thing it DOES talk about is the response of prices to money injections, and the response of the economy to wage regulations. I’ll get to that in a second.
When Galileo dropped balls in the 16th century, the Aristotle prediction was that a ball 10 times as heavy would fall 10 times as fast. When the balls were dropped, the ball which was 10 times as heavy hit the ground “a few fingerwidths” ahead of the light ball. The Aristotelians saw in those few fingerwidths confirmation of their theory, because they did not go by observation. You are repeating this stupidity with hard data.
The second prediction the classical school makes is that when you raise minimum wage (or institute any form of wage regulations), unemployment can only go up. This is a hard prediction. If you keep raising minimum wage, unemployment keeps going up.
The Keynesian prediction is that unemployment goes DOWN as you raise minimum wage, until you raise it so much that every increase in minimum wage just produces commensurate inflation. So that if you double minimum wage again and again, at first, prices less-than-double (because people buy and spend more, increasing economic activity), and then after doubling again (once you are at peak capacity), then prices just double and all you have done is halved rich people’s capital. The thing to look at regarding minimum wage is ALWAYS the inflation rate, it is NEVER the unemployment. There is NO positive unemployment response to minimum wage increase EVER, it NEVER goes up! All unemployment can do when you raise minimum wage is go DOWN, due to stimulus induced growth.
This is an INCREDIBLY counterintuitive prediction. It is saying that wages are COMPLETELY out of equilibrium! It is the exact OPPOSITE of the classical prediction. Yet, this behavior is not only observed, it is taken for granted by now in every nation on Earth. To explain this to you, when I first arrived in Israel, I debated a right-wing uncle of mine. We disagreed on everything, in much the same way that a typical Republicans and Democrats in the US would disagree (he, like most Israelis today, is further right than Republicans and I, like most Israelis of 40 years ago, am much further left than Democrats). But when I explained to him the Republican position about minimum wage, to my surprise, we agreed completely. Outside the US, even the far right has not forgotten the basic principles of 100 year old economics.
And it shows in policy. Australia’s minimum wage is $15/hr American, for example. Israel’s is comparable to America’s despite the per-capita GDP difference between the two countries. Every country on Earth uses inflation to gauge minimum wage, not unemployment. For a reason. Because you aren’t paying people in gold, but in money that is distributed to businesses through banks. If they can’t make payroll, they just borrow for that month, and raise prices. If the volume of sales goes up, they don’t even raise prices, you just get economic growth for nothing. That’s Keynesian stimulus, and it works until you are at peak capacity, at which point, minimum wage hikes just produce inflation.
The “catastrophe” of ignoring Keynesian economics already happened and will continue— it consists of degradations of standard of living, concentrations of wealth, monopolization of industry, and horrific crashes. These things are not solved by easing government power, or by removing interference in the economy, because they are a product of the market itself.
The theory that markets are efficient in the absence of regulation and government interference is based on a MODEL, a mathematical model. This model predicts that wages are roughly equal, that unemployment does not and cannot exist, and that capital and money are interchangable. It predicts that injections of capital (like in 2009) are the same as injections of money (like raising minimum wage), it predicts that artificially raising wages must always reduce employment. These predictions are categorically false, and verified to be false hundreds of times since the 1930s. These ideas were understood by both Republicans and Democrats in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and even most Republicans in the 1980s. The Republican party lost it’s mind now, and practices what can only be called economic fraud.
The fundamental reason that markets don’t come to equilbrium the way that they should is simply that capital and money are largely separate. The people who invest are not the same people as those who work and spend and buy. There is no competition for capital positions, they are filled by an old-boys network. This situation in the US has been intolerable for a long time, and it will only get worse.
I don’t need to be God to predict the outcome of anti-Keynesian policies, they have been tried with HORRIFIC results in South America, in parts of Africa, and recently in parts of Europe (Greece, Spain), usually due to American imposition of “austerity”. In the case of Greece and Spain, it is due to the unified currency preventing local currency injections, and the lack of an all-Europe mechnism for redistributing income. So they end up redistributing PEOPLE, by migration, with horrific consequences.
Anti-Keynesian ideas are disingenuous claptrap which are designed to protect individuals who hold capital from inflation. They destroy the economy, predictably, every time, in every nation. They have destroyed the US to a large extent.
If you want a policy which will help restore your ability to be an entrepreneur, you should push for rigorous anti-trust enforcement, differential taxes to tax large corporations more than small ones, and local blocks of WalMart, Cosco and every other national chain by regional boycotts and local zoning boards. You also need a heavy, heavy income tax to redistribute capital, and a stiff inheritance tax. These policies were constructed for a reason, they are the only way to get a market to effectively treat money and capital alike. Your business will benefit, large corporations will not.
I am sorry to lecture you, but I already left the US, I had enough. Americans cannot evaluate ideas on their merit, they believe whatever rich people believe. It always helps an individual to believe this voodoo you believe, it is just empirically false. This is why Republicans cannot be trusted with an economy.
He’s not a NAZI, you imbecile, he just blindly believes what everyone else does. Like Eichmann. Except not evil. Just stupid.
This is not about “cultural subversion”, it is about “academic incompetence”. Like Phlogiston, or the early days of relativity. What the great majority of academics say is factually and provably WRONG, and they must have their noses pressed against their own feces until they learn to stop defecating in the literature.
The ludicrous hysterical language is just how you point out obvious things on the internet. It doesn’t change the content of the argument. The cultural subversion is from the internet, not from Shakespeare being a front. That’s actually one of the LEAST subversive false facts out there, I mean, Marlowe was even more bourgeoise than Shakespeare.
or you download gogui and pay nothing. Go is a game made for computer screens.
This is a subtle class marker.
If you want to stop terrorist attacks, vote for the party that doesn’t benefit politically from them. They are more likely to stop them than the other guys.
Obviously it wasn’t the Tories themselves who did it. Some rich people who don’t want to see Corbyn win did it. If you want to stop terrorism, don’t elect the people who benefit politically from more of it.
If you want to put an end to terrorism, stop electing people who benefit from it politically. It’s not like they organize the attacks themselves, but when you have a low-tax party which benefits from terror, the people who are likely to get taxed will pay to organize whatever atrocity is required to see their tax rates go down. Without asking Theresa May.
If you don’t like abortion, convince women not to have them. The main job of government is not convincing or coercing people to avoid abortions, it is to regulate the economy. The only thing you should consider is the main course, the conflict over the appetizer and dessert are distractions. And the Tories exploit these stupid distractions, not because they are such ethical people, but simply for personal financial gain. You can prevent an abortion by not having one. No individual can successfully oppose gigantic industrial businesses alone. Only labour can restore Britain to sanity, and prevent the capitalist apocalypse the US has already endured.
It is not valid, nor is it ethical. Labour is simply leaving the choice to the woman, you can easily persuade them not to do it, by using concerted anti-abortion propaganda. This can reduce abortion more than anything the government does.
Corbyn is always right. On everything.
I am speaking from that perspective. If you lived in a society where infanticide was legal, your first priority should not be to vote for the party which tries to make it illegal against stiff odds, rather, you should talk to the people doing it and tell them that they should stop, until you get 99% consensus. This is what happened regarding infanticide in the past, it used to be a common practice until the majority of people came to see it as a crime. Your vote should go to labour, and your preaching should go to those who do wrong things, especially in cases where they don’t know they are doing wrong, and it is hard to be certain.
There are lots of things wrong in society, which lead people to needlessly die by the thousands. You are living in a society in which it is considered ok for a bunch of homeless people to die, and in the US, not only is this true, but it is considered ok for thousands of people to die of lack of access to health care as well. In both societies, it is considered ok to roll around places carrying several tons of steel around you, despite tens of thousands of people dying from smashing these devices. Isn’t 40,000 traffic deaths the most absurd preventable tragedy? Still, I’m not going to vote for the “abolish private automobiles” party. I would vote labour, and use my power as a private citizen to talk to people about only using transit which is driven by professionals. I don’t expect to succeed, by the way, so these deaths will continue into the indefinite future. But I personally won’t own a car.
You need to vote about the things governments are supposed to do, and are realistically able to deliver. The Tory “wedge issues” are copied from American Republicans, and allow people to fall into the trap of voting for the worst possible economic outcome, all the while feeling morally righteous, despite their actions being collectively the worst possible.
Homelessness is legalized murder. As is war. As are cigarettes and drug abuse more generally. Still, I think cigarettes should stay legal, because, although I never take any, I think propaganda (like those awful pictures on cigarette packages) is more effective than prohibition in preventing harm. The act of dissolving the USSR killed millions of Russians and Ukrainians, as many or more than all who died in the horror of Stalin’s rule, look at a plot of Russia’s population. Does that mean that it was wrong to remove the communists? I don’t think so.
Regarding American politics, in the 1880s, hard as it is to believe, the Republican party was a Marxist party (by that I mean that Karl Marx supported the Republicans, and members corresponded with him and with the European worker’s movement). The Democrats were a right-wing pro-slavery party back then. The Republicans and Democrats switched sides in the 1920s and 1930s, and the switch wasn’t complete until 1964 and the civil rights act, and the Republicans only went completely crazy in the 1980s.
Abortion happens before consciousness begins (as does infanticide, incidentally). It is similar in that sense to assisted suicide, which sometimes occurs after consciousness ends. The question of ethics is difficult in such cases, especially in cases of rape, severe genetic deformaties, danger to the life or health of the mother, incest, and even when there is no ability to raise the child properly. That doesn’t make it right, but it does make it difficult to legislate. Propaganda is very effective in such cases, much as in the case of cigarettes and drugs. While in Israel, I saw a bus ad with a picture of a depressed looking extremely young women, with superposed text saying “Abortion isn’t child’s play, you will be left with permanent regrets”. Such propaganda is effective, perhaps as in the case of drugs, more so than legislation.
The best policies of the progressive left were distorted in the 1970s due to the pressure for totalitarian state solutions coming from the USSR and Leninists. Nobody believes in top-down state solutions anymore, the Corbynites believe in worker owned industry, in prevention of monopoly, in selective nationalization in industries where competition has already failed, and in careful adjustment of market regulation to avoid concentrations of capital in the good markets that remain. To a certain extent, these competitive ideals were shared by Reagan and Thatcher as well, deplorable as I find those two.
But the right is structurally unable to make progressive change, simply because it is the right. They don’t imagine new things, they copy the past, in this case, the 19th century. There is nothing to copy in Britain regarding worker ownership, it wasn’t Atlee’s idea, it must be built from scratch, and quickly. It happened in Yugoslavia and Scandinavia, with great success, and to a much lesser extent in modern Germany, so you aren’t totally in the dark regarding what to do.
The economic problems of the 1970s were largely offset by the social gains, and in my opinion, Britain lost more than it gained on net in the 1980s. Perhaps I am only comparing 1970s King Crimson to 1980s King Crimson. The resultant change in the British left, if you are not familiar with it, it is documented in novels by Doris Lessing, was very healthy for the left, it makes it impossible to fall into the totalitarian statist trap again in the future. At the moment, the main problem we are facing isn’t totalitarian leftists, it is incipient fascism from corporate rule. The US is already likely past the point of no return, don’t let Britain destroy itself as well.
The right believes in a society that penalizes those who make the right decisions in life, and rewards those who behave most unethically. When you grow up, you will understand that.
Because the laser is replenished thousands of times in the time it takes for one oscillation of the arms. The gravitational wave oscillates over a time about a hundredth of a second, while light crosses the arms in a vastly tinier time of a microsecond, so the mushing of the light wave is negligible when considering the measurement of the distance of the arms.
Not only should he resign, anyone who voted for him should be permanently stripped of the right to vote.
Carter was the greatest postwar president of the US.
It’s true. He brought the 1979 peace deal between Israel and Egypt, he began to address the Greenhouse Effect (nowadays called global warming), he tied foreign policy to human rights, he pardoned Vietnam draft escapees, he implemented tough austerity to stop inflation, he deregulated the airlines, he fought union over-extension to prevent locking wages to price index (this can cause hyperinflation), he basically did everything that Reagan would later claim credit for. Carter’s austerity cost him his job. but it ended inflation. Carter is the “sensible right wing” of the US. The Republican party just added absurd tax cuts and religious extremism.
I am not as far right as Carter, but I recognize that his policies were necessary at the time.
Everything you say is true, but you’re named after a bunch of teenage girls who slept with George Harrison, so it’s hard to take you seriously.
the Apple Scruffs were a collection of Beatles groupies, all girls. It’s been a little white-washed in the telling on google.
It was a great presidency, but attacked by the folks who wanted tax cuts. You don’t need to explain, I vaguely remember.
I am telling you the truth. They would wait around hoping to sleep with a Beatle. That’s what they were. It’s ok. At least we agree on politics.
The UK knows that the citizens are being cut up by people sent by folks who want Theresa May to win. Terrorism is never a serious problem, even in Israel, where it’s a monthly occurence. What’s dangerous about terrorism is the political power it gives an unethical scumbag to make people vote for the lunatic right.
Einstein was describing the common-wisdom of turn-of-the-century German socialists. They advocated centralized ownership of the means of production, in practice, nationalizing everything, and then offering everyone a job at a more-or-less egalitarian wage. This was more or less implemented in the USSR during the first five year plan, roughly 1930-1935, so you can see what was happening with this model.
Did incentives disappear? HELL NO. In the USSR during the Stalin era, your total pay was determined by how much you produced. If you worked double time, you got double pay. If you worked at a job which was demanding, where there was too few workers, your pay was much higher than others. to give people incentive to switch jobs. The allocation of wages was by a pure bureaucratic version of supply and demand, and it was pretty effective. The highest paying jobs were precision machinist, good applied mathematician, technical engineer, and the like. Pure managerial positions were lower paid, but you would get incentive bonuses for recruiting more people. Recruiting people became very hard, because unemployment vanished very quickly, as unemployed people were snatched up by recruiters, motivated to increase their pay.
The result was favorable to heavy industry— steel production soared, tractors were produced, agriculture became factory farming, dams were built, and so on. By the end of the second five year plan, the heavy industry was sufficient to win WWII against a traditionally capitalist German enemy that controlled more factories. So the socialist model initially works for heavy goods, and continues to work for such things when it has been tried elsewhere. But there’s a catch.
The centralized production method put all small business out of business, including small producers of agriculture and small producers of heavy goods, This led to a complete collapse of farming in 1932, leading to a terrible famine, and even though factory-farm production caught up in 1933, even then, it led to a catastrophic decline in all consumer good production. If you were talking about umbrellas, balloons, toys, paper-towels, everyday light items, the production was always terrible. The goods were produced at one central office, the results were of inferior quality and very uniform, and the products were chronically underproduced, so that shortages developed, and they were always stagnant— they hardly got better.
These phenomena are due to the nature of government centralization, and Einstein was aware of the issue even in 1949. He, however, is unsure if this is not a product of the OTHER property of the USSR, namely mass-murder, overwhelming bureaucracy, and lack of democracy. By the 1970s, other societies had experimented with government ownership of various industries, most prominently England, and the results made it obvious that the problem was in the state-ownership itself. In nations with nationalized phone industry, you would have to wait months, sometimes years, for a phone line. In nations with private phones, you wouldn’t. It wasn’t just phones. Nationalized cars, nationalized anything, produced serious problems with service and efficiency that didn’t happen in private firms.
The origin of these terrible inefficiencies is in the lack of ability of the government offices to restructure and advance, due to complete lack of accountability or competition. New ideas require a certain displacement of old ones, a “creative destruction”, and in cases where an office is in charge of, say, phones, the new ideas will be resisted by the higher-ups, who cannot abide losing their positions of power due to an influx of new ideas. Under capitalism, you just start a competing company, so you can’t stay still to survive.
The same effect meant that the Soviet heavy industry, brand new in 1940, was an out-of-date creaking monstrosity by 1975, and started falling behind the West for the first time. Advances like transistors, which were developed in the USSR science also, moved into industrial applications at a GLACIAL pace there. The whole innovation cycle of product development was lost, and Soviet industry was entirely reduced to copying the West, even, most damningly, in cases where the USSR was the first to develop the science. Lasers were first created in the USSR, but commercial lasers only appeared in the West. The USSR just studied Western fasion, and didn’t produce anything original. Likewise in music trends, despite the ideas often emerging in the USSR, the widespread commercialization was always in the West.
The reason for such phenomena is that you need to be able to split and compete. The role of these operations is to produce economic efficiency, by trying out all options until you learn which is best. There is no substitute for this process.
But that’s it! That’s the only modification one needs to Einstein’s essay from the last 70 years. The ownership of ventures does not need to be concentrated in capitalists, it can be broadly owned by all the workers. That doesn’t stop competition, it doesn’t reduce incentive. The firm might even be totally publicly owned, so long as you can split the venture and compete. An example in the US is Charter Schools, which are split and compete, but are publically financed and owned. There is no justification for capitalists, but there is a justification for market competition. The competition is something that it is hard to convince a government to do.
Socialists by and large came to understand this in the 1970s and 1980s, and advocated a system of worker ownership, rather than centralized ownership. In an ideal world, where you can actually have government bureaucracies split and compete, maybe Einstein’s thing would be ok. But in the world so far, it seems you need to have worker-managed non-monopolized industries. This is still socialism, as Marx would understand it, because it doesn’t have classes of capitalists, and the essential problem of chronic unemployment and boom-and-bust cycles caused by dropping demand disappears.
What Marx is talking about is a “general glut”, i.e. when you have too low pay for people to buy the industrial production. This is what is known in Keynesian economics as a “demand slump”, and it is corrected by extra government spending. The effect is real, and it was Marx who described it precisely for the first time. You are getting a mangled version from the socialist website, the version in Capital is correct and modern.
The phenomenon Marx is describing is well known and true. It is remediated by Keynesian measures in all modern economies, but these were cribbing his work.
The argument is that mathematical analysis of Marlowe and Shakespeare fail to find a good separator between their styles, despite much effort. This is unprecedented for two separate authors, it is overwhelming evidence that Marlowe wrote the work. Together with the Sonnets and the Shakespeare Guide to Italy, this tells you that the work is written by an exiled Marlowe. Shakespeare wasn’t a writer, he was a paid front.
The “collaboration” argument is a false compromise with currently accepted history, sort of like Tycho Brahe’s compromise, that Mercury and Venus go around the sun and the rest of the planets around the Earth. Brahe was wrong, there is no compromise. Marlowe wrote everything.
You’ve obviously never read them. Just read them in order of date of composition, and you will see there is absolutely no difference between the two. I have done so, and it stood out even before I was a Marlovian.
There is no plagiarism. Shakespeare repeats Marlowe constantly, but only in the same way that Joyce repeats himself. It’s the same person.
On the contrary, you can’t read Dr. Faustus, Edward II, or Jew of Malta, and not see they were written by the same author as Richard III, Henry VI parts I, II, III, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, or Taming of A Shew. Even Julius Caesar and Macbeth are still in a similar enough style, although, as Shakespeare, Marlowe advances as fast as he did as a youth. The Early Shakespeare works are completely continuous in style and substance with Marlowe. They are also talking about the same themes, have the same types of characters, and identical staging ideas. More importantly, the mathematical markers are continuous between the two in ways that are not reasonably plausible to admit if there are two separate authors involved.
I am not a literature student, I never studied literature, as I usually don’t care about it. I only read the full body of work of Marlowe and Shakespeare (in order of composition date) after understanding that they are the same author. I am a physicist by training, and my evaluation of evidence is only by numbers, not by listening to humanities people. My main interest in this began when I reviewed the stylometric evidence compiled by Peter Farey and noticed that the stylometric data was strong enough to overwhelm any historical argument. This judgement has only been reinforced as new stylometric studies have come out, and the “Shakespeare Guide to Italy” provides the final straw, as it shows you Marlowe spend the years immediately past 1593 in Italy.
You can’t shock and awe me, dude. I read Marlowe, I read Shakespeare. It’s the same author. You need to read someone else, like Jonson or Middleton.
The echoes from Faustus are all over the Shakespeare canon, including repeated lines and sentiments, similar characters, and most obviously, “The Tempest”, which can be thought of as a sort-of sequel. If you can’t see it, I think you should stop directing theatre, as you have a tin ear for it. I hope you refund the theatre tickets to your audience, and let a competent reader direct the next play.
Your argument IS more persuasive. It is also objectively wrong. Being wrong doesn’t stop it from being persuasive, like all untruths which come with the pedigree of an elite class.
Abiotic oil is not really a theory anymore, it was demonstrated to be correct in the 1960s USSR, and it became dogma there (correctly). There is no such thing as biological petroleum, all of it is abiotic, none of it comes from ancient life.
“Sausage Party” is a concise and precise summary of all that the United States of America stands for. It should be required before citizenship, it is a precise summary of what the USA is all about.
Jesus wasn’t an earthly man, he was a manifestation of God. Peter and Paul both left writings. The most powerful instruction bequeathed by God to mankind is Marxism,
Marxism is religion made material, and that is not a criticism, it is a sign that it comes from God. God will now allow only atheists into heaven.
The “100 million people” is made-up nonsense. 30 million people died in Mao’s collectivization famine, maybe 2-5 million in Stalin’s collectivization famine, it’s hard to be sure because famines are hard to estimate, because there are also deferred births in addition to deaths. But the numbers I give are accurate to best reconstruction. These are the biggest death tolls. The number executed under Stalin is about 750,000, including Kulaks and other “enemies”, and that’s terrible enough. Mao didn’t execute people so much, he “re-educated” them, so the terror was a different kind. The rest of the nonsense is made up figures by irresposible and stupid people. Cambodia wasn’t communist, it was invaded by the Vietnamese, who were. A serious account would say “2.5 million executed, about 35 million starved”, which is roughly the death toll for capitalism in the Indian famines, or the Irish potato famine. I am not justifying either evil.
I believe in Marxism in a religion, it’s MY religion, but I also believe in separation of church and state. I don’t believe in theocracy, and the USSR was a theocracy, with the communist party taking up the role of church. That’s exactly how it operated.
The reference to Jesus being a manifestation of God is from Richard Carrier’s marvelous new work “On the Historicity of Jesus”, which explains what Jesus is, and why he is God.
God gave the world Karl Marx, what Lenin, Stalin and Mao did is an abomination. On the other hand, there were Lunacharsky, Kosygin, Kardelj, Dubcek, and other real leftists in communist states, and I prefer to side with them over the abominable and the strong.
Because I LISTEN to Jesus, and side with the weak and the powerless against the strong. I suggest you do the same. You can do better than an atheist, can’t you?
The Black Book of Communism is stupid, I read it. I gave you the correct numbers — about 35 million famine deaths, and about 2.5 million people shot. There is no reasonable dispute about these numbers, except to within 40%, and your sources are not scholarly.
“Jesus” or “Yesus” (his name appears in Greek, not Hebrew) is a figure associated with the Epistle to Philemon, which eliminated ancient slavery.
You are right that every belief system does not have equal measure. Marxism is the one ordained by God.
I am not afraid of divine retribution. Fundamentalist damnation is something that God reserves for the fundamentalist religious.
Religion and faith requires much more careful reasoning than anything else, because you are working in a domain where exact proof is difficult. It is not good enough to follow the past, because all past ideas are imperfect, as all of them are man made. When people say texts are “divinely inspired”, they don’t mean that they are omniscient or perfect, simply that they contain within them a spark of an immortal idea, like a work of Shakespeare is immortal, and so contains a spark of God.
The nature of God is difficult to understand, except if you are a fundamentalist, in which case you got it all wrong. God is not a magician with a magic wand, as the current Pope has explained. God is a very abstract idea.
The proper view is of a limiting structure, a sort of super-entity, a super-smart brain which tells everyone what to do, so as to act perfectly morally.
Such an entity emerges when entities play games with one another, and strive to make their collective decisions coherently with mutual recognition that they need to work together. This monotheism, the idea of everyone ultimately working together, means that they are supposed to make their decisions as if an infinitely wise agent who knows everything about everyone is telling everyone what to do.
To make this idea precise, you should explore the concept of superrationality in game theory. When you believe that all decisions in all games must be made superrationally, and universally so, so monotheistically superrationally, then you realize that people are to act in accordance with the will of a super-agent who doesn’t play any games, but stands on top of everything, defining absolute goodness.
This entity is mathemtically consistent, but it is a limiting idea. So the only way we acquire knowledge of God is through debate. Hegel defined the notion of progressive debate, where ideas fight it out, and the best ideas survive, while the worst ideas are lost, and theses and antitheses merge together to produce progress. The progress defines a limiting idea of God in the infinite future.
Marx’s religious idea was to take Hegel’s teleology and apply it to society. He imminentized the eschaton, he made heaven a future time, where people would act in accordance with God’s will. Except, since this is not the supernatural view of God, he didn’t even call it God, he just called it “communism”. This idea of striving toward a harmonious society, was Marx’s starting point.
He then criticized capitalism by pointing out that capital accumulation is incompatible with ideas of economic equilibrium, and eventually leads to deep and permanent depression, where workers get paid less and less, and all capital is concetrated in a small owner class. He identified the struggle between the owner and worker class as the fundamental Hegelian battle of his time, and of ours.
His progressive idea is that the workers must win this battle. He didn’t say that this is historically necessary exactly, he said it is possible that the capitalists will triumph. Marx just explained that in this case, the result is calamitous ruination for everyone, worker and capitalist both.
The identification of God within the Marxist scheme was begun by Lunacharsky. These ideas were suppressed by Lenin, and only gradually revived after Stalin’s death. The USSR was more horrible to sincere progressive Marxists as it was to former capitalists, who mostly were able to maneuver themselves into positions of power in the party, at least after Stalin’s time.
Stop with the apocalyptic bullshit and start working for progressive change.
Communist USSR grew in population every year except the famine year of 1932. It was post-communist Russia that lost tens of millions of people from premature death, to alcoholism, suicide, general despair.
No it didn’t. The gulags and purges consumed about half a million people in 1932 (Ukrainian revolt) and another half-million in 1937 (great purge), but that was nothing like the end of communism, where literally tens of millions of people died, and Russia’s population declined drastically. The Ukrainian famine claimed an indeterminate number of victims, perhaps 2 million, but the population growth after the end of the first five-year plan disguised this.
No, it was real communism. I am not a communist exactly, just explaining the figures.
The 1921 famine was the cannibal one. The 1932 one was much more limited, it was the response to collectivization and a revolt against land-seizure in Ukraine. The goal of this was to get people to come to cities to build industry, and it worked. The 1933 harvest was good, and the famine ended.
As I said, I am not an apologist for communism, I think I have a rather fair view of it as my family lived under it. I am just explaining the figures and history, because the media is full of ridiculous propaganda.
No, people in communist Russia generally believed in progress. Deaths from alcoholism and suicide or general despair were extremely rare, as the country was visibly improving every year.
The communist state was not a system of slavery. You were free to choose your job, and applications for going to different places were generally not that hard to get. It was just overbearing and relatively empoverished, not slave-like.
The Gulag of your imagination is a Western myth. The prison system in Stalin’s time wasn’t used for labor, it was used as prison. There was no real gulag after Stalin, the crimes of the state were firing people unfairly from jobs, blacklisting them, imprisoning people in mental institutions and rarely forcibly drugging them.
I just know the history, man. I studied it in the late 80s, when the archives were opened up. All the nonsense you believe is Western propaganda.
That’s not the main reason for the population decline. It’s only a few million people. The main reason is early mortality, due to alcoholism and despair. Life expectancy in Russia in the 90s dropped to the mid-50s.
Sorry, I was ignoring them. But USSR population grew after, there was a baby boom there too.
Vietnam didn’t have any cleansing, and it was Vietnam who saved Cambodia by invading it when the crimes of the Khmer Rouge became intolerable.
There was a famine in 1932 in Ukraine and the wider USSR, due to collectivization, but it wasn’t accompanied by widespread cannibalism. The pictures you are showing are from the earlier 1921 famine. This was used in the Hearst yellow press in 1932 as anti-Soviet propaganda. The famine was real however, and it’s effects were analyzed in the Gorbachev era. The number of victims is extremely hard to determine, because the victims of famine are generally children and the elderly, which are hard to disentangle from natural deaths and postponed births, which also happen during the same period. I would guess 2 million victims is accurate, half the demographic drop (which includes postponed births).
The famine under Lenin was not “forced”, nobody suggests that. The famine that people say was “forced” was the 1932 famine, during the revolt against collectivization, under Stalin, during the first five-year plan. Get your history straight.
Also, in 1921, the Soviet Union was not yet socialist. It teetered between different economic systems, first hyperinflation and “war communism”, then NEP (capitalism). The Soviet Union became a socialist state in 1930, with the end of NEP and the start of the first five year plan.
I am not a Stalinist. I just know my history. I actually studied it, in the 80s, in school. When the archives opened up under Gorbachev, and everyone got excited.
I support the punishment of collaborators. That happened in Yugoslavia too. Anyone who worked with the Americans in Vietnam deserved to be jailed, of course. Like those who collaborated with the Nazis in Yugoslavia.
No, I have not been, as I was too young. Of course it caused a shudder! Those “few” deaths were millions of people! It led to the collapse of the government, and the deaths of many more millions of people.
They collaborated with the French. And I wouldn’t call it extermination.
Then why do you get everything wrong? I mean, it’s not hard to be level-headed about communist history. It wasn’t great even without the embellishments and propaganda.
Your claims are absurd. It’s like claiming that all the Spanish speaking Mexicans in the territory conquered in the Mexican American war were slaughtered and destroyed, because they all speak English now and are American citizens. They just assimilated to the majority culture.
It’s not like the Native Americans, who actually were exterminated, by being herded onto lands which could not support their numbers, and removing the Buffalo.
This thing you are pointing out in Vietnam is a cultural domination problem, not genocide exactly, but cultural imposition, and it has nothing to do with extermination of people, and everything to do with government monoculture and lack of diversity.
The Gulag Archielago is pure fiction, it has no relation to reality. I skimmed it. The good book by Solzhenitsyn was “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, which is an accurate portrayal of Stalinist prison, and which was admired by Khruschev for that reason. Read that book, it’s worth it.
The Gulag Archipelago was propaganda for Westerners. It was hated in the USSR, because the author stopped being a truthteller and was only interesed in revenge against the state which imprisoned him, like Ivan Denisovich. Sozhenitsyn was destroyed by hate and Naziism.
I didn’t say they never hurt anyone, I just dispute your claim that they engaged in Stalinist type crimes. Vietnam, like Cuba, and most post-Stalin communist states avoided the worst of Stalinism. All except China, which had Mao, who repeated Stalinism over a bigger popultion.
Those were collaborators, and sorry, they deserved punishment, although I don’t support the death penalty. Ten years of prison sounds fair.
I am not a communist, you dick. I am just correcting propaganda.
In a colonial situation, it’s easy to see who the collaborators are— they’re the ones receiving tons of money from France and USA for services rendered. In a colonial war of independence, those people are executed. It’s what you did to Benedict Arnold. British sympathizers weren’t treated too well in 1790. I don’t support the death penalty, and if Arnold was sent to a re-education camp (i.e. prison), it would have been more humane.
They were exterminated like the Jews in Europe, ten million farmers in 1800 were turned into 300,000 nomads in 1900.
I was criticizing the Vietnamese government for insufficient respect for diversity. This was a problem in the USSR sometimes too, but less so.
I didn’t study the archives directly, of course. I just read the academic stuff coming out, and whatever Soviet press I could get my hands on. I am not a primary researcher. But the literature was polluted with propaganda starting in the mid 1990s, with the “Black Book of Communism” and similar fabrications.
I believe that there is such a thing as facts, and that one must be honest, even when you don’t like a system. Soviet communism was very interesting— it ran a huge economy top down as if it were a single corporation. It had a labor system which was in some sense an efficient free market (prices floated to attract the right number of people), the science was excellent, better than the West in most areas, and the general progressive idea was infectious. It was a very interesting country, and definitely what came after 1991 in Russia was a step backward.
He said it, but he didn’t mean it was a good thing. Stalin wasn’t out to kill millions, he genuinely thought he was building socialism, like Mao. He also studied very hard. The monstrosity of his rule was basically the same as any other brutal dictatorship, it wasn’t unique. The thing that was unique was the management ideas, which didn’t come from Stalin, but from millions of Soviet citizens desperately trying to industrialize, win a war, and build consumer goods. Those ideas weren’t terrible, some were copied in the West.
You have no actual leftist teachers in the US. They were all purged.
Kulaks were not killed, they were “exterminated as a class”, meaning their property was confiscated and they went to a city and got a job, or to a factory farm. The Kulaks that were killed were the ones who decided to protect their farm from confiscation with rifles. There were a few hundred thousand of these, this is the Ukrainian revolt. They refused to have their property confiscated.
Because I agree with Djilas, Dubcek, Kosygin, and other communist dissidents. The socialist figures I admire are not Leninists, but socialists like Atlee, people who didn’t impose their ideas by dictatorship, but by persuasion.
The New York Times is not leftist, it is writing about communism because it is trying to preserve historical memory. It is doing so badly, from a bourgeois point of view.
The thing to remember about communism is that the science, education, health care, and wage-compensation system were much much better than what you have in the west. The rest was terrible.
Stalin was a criminal. Just not in the way described in the Western propaganda. In the way described by Khrushev and Gorbachev.
Your claims are a hodgepodge of truth and Western fiction. First, most of the claims you make are reasonable, and supportable, so I have nothing against you most of the time. The one exception is “dozens of millions”. There are no dozens of millions as a quick survey of Russians and Ukrainians can show you. There were on the order of a million famine deaths in 1932, and half a million executions in 1932 and another half-million executions in 1937, and THAT’S IT. That’s bad enough.
The Soviet Union formed in 1921 or 1922, pre-USSR the population did decline. The Leninist government in the immediate post-war years was fighting a civil war, and confiscated grain and property. The famine was a result of mismanagment during “War communism”, but “War communism” was not a coherent econmic policy. Once the USSR formed, Lenin stabilized the currency by issuing gold backed bills, and stabilized the economy by legalizing capitalism.
The famine during 1921 was a result of war, and was acknowledged and remediated. The famine in 1932 was a result of confiscation of lands, and the revolt was in response to the confiscation of land, not in response to famine. Stalin redirected food away from revolting areas, so as to subdue them. But the famine was widespread, it affected many areas.
The “work camps” of the USSR post Stalin were negligible, and had nothing to do with the productivity of the USSR economy. You have to understand that Americans are SO STUPID, they believe that the USSR was run by slave labor in Kulak farms. They have no idea how people found jobs or got paid in USSR, how the labor assignments worked, how pricing worked, they don’t know anything. So they imagine a gigantic slave labor system. It’s into this mythical nonsense in the Westerner’s mind that the Gulag Archipelago plugs in.
Your claims about Lenin’s famine are reasonable, but I believe they are wrong. My goal here is not to debate the finer points of pre-Soviet history, just to remove the obvious propaganda from the comments here.
The claims I made about Soviet population growth can be easily supported. There was a decline in 1932, due to famine, the obvious war-causalties in WWII, and that’s it for obvious demographic drops. The post-Soviet declines are also easily seen in a chart of post-Soviet population of every Soviet province, and most ex-communist Eastern European states.
Mao didn’t starve 20 million people to death. Mao starved 30 million people to death. Not with his “five year plan”, that’s industry, but with his collectivization during the “great leap forward”. I get the figure from demographic data, 60 million people are gone, which is usually half deferred births, half deaths, so I divide by two (that’s also what I do with Ukraine famine). I also can confirm the widespread death from conversations with Chinese relatives, who witness whole villages starving to death in this era. It was the worst famine since the Capitalist Indian famine, or the Irish Potato Famine.
One reason is that Mao was far more incompetent at industrial planning than Stalin, Stalin’s infrastructure supplied factory farming tools to the Kolkhoz’s to remediate the famine, and they had a good harvest in 1933 (thank God). So the USSR collectivization famine only lasted one year, and that was the last famine. Mao’s famine lasted three years straight. That’s how you get such huge mass deaths.
No communist country adopted collectivization after the experience in China and the USSR. Instead, they prefer to divide property among peasants in individually owned plots. This has the advantage of being more efficient for farming, but the disadvantage is that it doesn’t free up a huge labor force for industrial projects. The point of Stalin’s collectivization was to free up labor.
Mao’s famine is the worst crime of communist regimes. Mao was stupid enough to have no idea why it was happening.
That is not true. They acknowledged all his murders. It is Westerners with property who made up millions of deaths by counting every person whose property was confiscated as a death.
I lived in the US, and there was a systematic project, still ongoing, to remove all the leftists. You don’t see it, because you’re part of it. The leftists are the only good researchers, because Marx founded the modern humanities. Removing leftists from humanities departments is like removing Newtonians from physics departments, and putting back Aristotelians.
Reading “The Gulag Archipelago” as historical is like reading Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and using it to infer how women lived in mid-80s New England. It’s a dystopia, written by a man who became a fascist, it had nothing to do with Soviet reality. I haven’t read anything published since 1991, and I don’t intend to read anything further. The objective information which became available in the late 80s has been polluted by the bourgeois idiot takeover of Western academia. Almost everything you read past 1991 is pure propaganda.
How many times do I need to say it? I am not a communist! I am a socialist, just like Orwell. Orwell hated Capitalists more than he hated Stalinists, something you forget.
The retard is all from the right. You are apologists for capitalist lies.
What you mean is “I wish honest people were censored”. You’ll likely get your wish.
I know you are an American, I can always identify them by the level of stupid. I also hold American citizenship, to my shame, and I lived and studied in your country for 30 years before it disintegrated, so I know the pathetic level of your academic discourse.
Ethnic minorities in the USSR were universally treated better than they are in America. There was formal equality on paper, with some discrimination against Jews (but not, say, against Uzbeckis). The “liquidation of the autonamous Jewish Oblast” was a failed experiment that was shut down, not a murder project. There were no significant camps after Stalin died, and at no point were the camps a significant contributor to Russia’s labor pool. The main labor was all free labor, seduced for this project or that, using money incentives.
The way you can figure out how many people died in 1932 is by reviewing statistics for how many people starved and were shot. Quoting you “… the population was still breeding at replacement rate or well above, so you don’t get a good sense of the death tolls simply by subtracting one headcount from year to year to another…” That’s exactly how Ukrainian mortality in 1932 was estimated, by subtraction. It assumed all internal migration was a death, that every lost birth was a death.
The USSR had no significant population losses outside of 1932, nothing to compare to 1990s Russia, which actually suffered a holocaust. You invented the figures, you made them up and manipulated them, and now you repeat them, with propagandistic intent.
I am not a true believer in totalitarianism, but I am a true believer in academic honesty. You lack it.
I am not a Stalinist either. I am just an honest student, correcting you propagandized American nonsense. If I were to vote, I would vote against a communist party, and for a European socialist party.
The black book of communism is a fabrication. This is not contestable by any serious researcher. The analog of Lysenkoism in the West is your belief that oil comes from living things. The difference is that Lysenkoism ended in the USSR as science self-corrected after Stalin’s death, while in the West, the science never self-corrects, due to the influence of capitalists.
I support pure capitalism for the US. Those who live by the sword deserve to die by the sword.
Oh dear me! What would I do in the US? If I wanted it to succeed, I would probably first put Dick Cheney in prison for murder, censure Obama for like, reduce military spending to zero, raise upper-bracket taxes to very high level, institute laws to regulate equity sharing in hiring and rent, so that all renters eventually became owners. I would institute a progressive corporate income tax (big corporations pay a hell of a lot more tax than small ones), progressive personal income tax, medicare for all, universal public education. I would go on a draconian anti-trust spree, breaking up Walmart, Comcast, Verizon, into competing firms. I would institute mandatory union laws, to require unionization at all large workplaces, I would forbid ownership of stock by those who work in a publicly traded company, I would subsidize and encourage worker-owned co-ops (using the equity sharing regulations, worker co-op private corporations, not publicly traded ones), and I would generally make sure any imports to the US must be made with employees paid at least half US minimum wage.
But I don’t want the US to succeed, so I would just vote Republican and ensure pure capitalism.
Ho Chi Minh wasn’t using terror to rig the vote, the Vietnamese generally preferred Ho Chi Minh to the West. It’s like Tito in Yugoslavia, who won 70% of the vote. Nobody wanted Western puppets anymore.
The elections in Yugoslavia were certified as fair by observers, and the level of popular support for Tito’s rule was at 70% from opinion polling, mostly because the opposition were the fascists, who were just defeated. Tito maintained popularity by breaking with Stalin and instituting massive economic reform, created by radical leftists Djilas and Kardelj, who are the two heroes among communist leaders. Those guys actually implemented the only true Marxist government anywhere in the world.
Tito’s steps toward liberalization were only possible because the economic growth and trust in the system meant the citizens were not on the verge of rebellion. Yugoslavia remained a model socialist state until it’s dissilusion in 1990 into that genocidal civil war.
VIetnam’s government was not as liberal as Yugoslavia.
Regarding fair elections, it is difficult for me to accept accusations of vote-rigging from a country where exit polling regularly diverges from official results in ways that always favor Republicans (or, in the case of the recent Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton). The elections in Yugoslavia and Vietnam reflected popular will.
Vietnam’s government has governed relatively responsibly, including liberalizing it’s economy, and allowing for investment and growth. I would prefer if it were more socialist, but it is very difficult to organize large-scale economic projects without billionaires pulling the strings.
The entire USSR infrastructure was a miracle, as it was constructed without a single billionaire getting involved, all by technocrats. The issue of lack of competition, stifling bureaucracy, lack of innovation, should have been fixed by the Kosygin reform. But since it was a decentralizing reform, it wasn’t taken until Gorbachev’s time, by which time the bourgeoisie reformed and overthrew the whole government.
you are using wrong figures. Stalin’s murder was not visible in population statistics, only the 1932 registers. Barely. Because it was only one year. You listen to propaganda, instead of demographers.
Lysenkoism was opposed by many prominent Soviet geneticists (obviously) and by 1970 was entirely discredited, as the USSR began serious genetic work. They never caught up with the West in this field.
Oil never comes from living things. This was proposed in the USSR in the 1950s, during the All-Union push for petrochemical sources, the Stalin version of the Manhattan project, it was tested and debated throughout the 1960s, and it become dogma by 1970, as deep boreholes proved the theory correct beyond the level required for scientific certainty.
Although the Soviets weren’t keen for stupid Westerners to catch up, some people did try to publish these findings in the West. They were universally heckled and derided. It is still dogma to this day that there is a biological source for petroleum. This is a pure lie. Petroleum is formed in the mantle, from methane, whose source is the same as the methane of Titan, it’s primordial. It is more correct to say life is a petroleum product than to say that petroleum is produced by living things. The chain of formation only goes one way.
But because oil science is not public, it is nearly all in the hands of a heirarchical oil industry, this is impossible to say.
Similar Capitalist stupidity in the West is “Global Warming denial”, “IQ”, “String Theory is Bullshit”, and all the other flat-Earth level denials of Soviet scientific advances. Reading Soviet science is like reading Hellenistic science in the Roman Empire— it’s a lost world that makes you weep for the civilization that has just been lost forever.
Like the Greeks had Jesus to spread the philosophy to the world, albeit in mutated form, the Soviets will need their Jesus.
Regarding the “Black Book”, the number of starvation victims in 1932 is about 2 million, let’s say 4 million (just to be on the safe side), the number of victims in the great leap forward is 30 million (let’s say 40 million, just to be safe), and these swamp everything else by an order of magnitude. That’s the end of the Black Book.
It wasn’t a “manmade” famine exactly, it’s a collectivization famine. When I say “Westerners”, I mean “Bourgeois”, I don’t care if they are ethnically Russian, the Russian bourgeoisie is just as stupid as the American one. The 1932 famine was the shortest collectivization famine, it only lasted one year, which means it took about 2 million lives, which is a terrible estimate. I get it from demographic data. It could be 4 million, it could be a hundred thousand, it’s extremely hard to tell, because demographic data is terrible to source and very hard to convert to famine effects.
The stuff you find in post-Soviet Russia is stupid. The Katyn massacre is weird, who knows what happened. I genuinely don’t know who killed those poles. The transfer of Germans postwar killed half a million Germans, as was acknowledged in Khruschev’s time.
Listen, you dipstick, I am not a communist, I am being honest, not trying to push the system. Yugoslavia’s elections past the first one (which was certified by the UN as fair) were NOT fair, as the opposition had no access to media, and Tito instituted one-party rule. He JAILED Djilas for many years, he resisted nationalist leaders and shut down free-speech in the 1970s. But the economy was worker owned, industry was owned by worker unions, plant by plant, and central planning was abandoned in favor of decentralized Marxist socialism. This system led Yugoslavia to be the second best performing economy of the 1960s (after Japan), and the economy was the star of the East. This is why Dubcek wanted to copy it in Prague, and why the Hungarians introduced Gulash communism int he 70s (and also broke free of the growth constraints of central planning). Gorbachev was doing the same in the USSR in the 80s. The liberalism is compared to other communist countries. Yugoslavia in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, was approximately as free as today’s US, although not as free as the 1970s US, or Britain, or Italy.
The elections in Italy and Greece were shut down by the US and British because the communists were poised to take a majority. I would not vote for them, but they were popular in 1946, because the Nazis showed the endpoint of capitalism, much as Trump does today.
The claims you are making about rigged elections are absurd in a communist election— you can’t have a free election when the opposition doesn’t have access to media. It’s always going to be 90/10.
Regarding American elections, your elections have been distorted since 2001, when exit-polls and results first diverged significantly (in Florida). By 2004, the exit poll discrepancy spread to Ohio, and by 2012, it affected a half-dozen states (although it didnt change the outcome). Today, the exit poll discrepancies are so regular, that they changed the formula for the exit polls.
There is no “Shy Tory” effect, exit polls are anonymous. This is a fabrication to disguise election tampering.
It is extremely difficult to hold fair elections in a communist country, because of the ability of capitalists to finance people who wish to dismantle the system. An example of such an attempt was Ortega in the 80s, when American advertizers ran a campaign based on his Rolex, not based upon his policy. Free elections work best when there is no individual able to buy them out, foreign or domestic.
So I am sympathetic to the difficulties of elections in socialist states. But it is possible, barely. You need to institute careful controls of spending and money sources, and you need to instill a deep awareness of the importance of socialism in the population. Then you can avoid the attacks from outside.
But in addition to these attacks from outside, there is the usual mismanagment and cronyism that accompanies socialist rule.
The leaders of the USSR were not wealthy in any material sense. Including all the perks of office, they made the equivalent of a high four-figure salary in the west. It was the resentment of their relative low pay and perks that were a major motivation to switch to capitalism in the 80s. Stalin wasn’t wealthy, and neither was Khruschev, Brezhnev, or Politburo members.
Tito, on the other hand, was wealthy. This distinction was not lost on the Soviets, who saw Yugoslavian worker-ownership as a way to sneak in a capitalism for the ruling class.
I don’t need any sources at all! If 20 million people died, I would be able to see it by polling about 5 Russians and Ukrainian acquaintances and hearing about their starving and murdered relatives and acquaintances. 20 million people is a limited nuclear war. It’s a catastrophe. It’s what you see in post-Soviet Russia in the 90s, where every Russian knows someone who died of alcoholism, suicide, or drug-overdose. Every single one has multiple victims in their network. Because it actually was a holocaust.
You see, I did this poll, with dozens of Russians and Ukrainians (I make a point of asking them about family history in the 1930s every time I meet one), and I know the order of magnitude of the death quite precisely. It’s of the order of “I knew someone whose coworker disappeared”, and “I heard about hungry people here and there.” Using no sources at all! Of course, it matches the 1980s figures compiled by responsible people, and not the stupid propaganda in that little black book. The figures I give are accurate. No matter how many books and sources you cite, they remain accurate.
Lysenkoism was NOT an “utter dead end”! You have no idea how complicated biology is. Lysenkoist THEORY is wrong, but Lysenkoist METHODS worked to produce winter-ready seeds. Nobody knows to this day how it works in detail, or how well it works. But it did produce winter-hardy seeds by exposing plants to cold! That’s the problem— it was crap theory, but it worked in practice for limited gains. That’s why it took forever to get discredited. It’s also why Stalin just sided with the guy who got results over the people who knew theory. Lysenko actually produced winter seeds, the theorists who opposed him just knew that his theory was wrong. It’s a difficult situation. Some went to jail over this, others lost jobs, I don’t believe anyone was executed (not justifying the repression, of course), it didn’t rise to the level of an execution crime.
If you actually knew chemistry, you wouldn’t fall for the nonsense you read. There is Kerogen, which has Nitrogen and Oxygen (like all living things), and there is Tar-sands oil which is just long C-H chains. They don’t look alike chemically. Tar-sands “kerogen” (it’s not kerogen, but your idiot pseudo-scientists call it that) is just dehydrogenated petroleum. Real Kerogen is biological residue. There is no link between them, and all petroleum is C-H chains without Nitrogen or Oxygen, and can’t come from living things.
Further, Petroleum is produced in the USSR from boreholes which go down 30 km, where living things have never been buried. That’s one smoking gun. In addition, these deposits are contaminated with HELIUM, which is produced from alpha-decay. All commercial Helium is produced as a byproduct of petroleum extraction. Alpha decay is Uranium, Thorium, the stuff in the MANTLE, not the stuff in the crust.
There is absolutely no shred of evidence for the biological theory, this was understood in the USSR in the 60s. The oil companies are not engaged in conspiracy, they simply continue with their bullshit by inertia and based on who the successful people were in finding oil that’s easy to exploit. That is, just like Lysenkoism. It’s structural corruption.
The USSR was equally and arguably more advanced than the US in nuclear physics. Nuclear physics is usually a mess, but if you are a physicist (that’s my field), the Soviet contribution is obviously the greatest of any country. Physics was the Soviet science par-excellence.
I am sorry, but you simply made up the millions of victims. They don’t exist. There were famine victims in 1932, and about a million people shot in 1932 and 1937. The rest was usual state blundering. You don’t know the USSR, and you listen to propagandists.
String theory is partly Soviet, and wholly leftist. It was started in the USSR as S-matrix theory, and in Berkeley as “New Age Leftist physics”. It was suppressed because of it’s Soviet and leftist origins. Likewise for inflation theory, which is Soviet, Lasers (Soviet), Liquid He research (Soviet), Dispersion relations (Soviet), Conformal Field theory (Soviet), Chaos theory (Soviet), Computational Complexity Theory (Soviet), I could go on all day. Scientific progress in the hard-sciences mostly depended on the USSR for inspiration. The end of the USSR coincided with a dearth of inspiration.
Jesus is pushing Platonic philosophy of afterlife into Jewish religion. It’s a Jewish-Greek hybrid.
When I say “I don’t know” I mean “I don’t know”. I don’t mean “I am trying to propagandize for Stalin” I mean “I didn’t read about it, and I only have vague secondhand crap to go by”. I could believe Stalin signed the order, it’s totally in line with what happened in 1944 in Eastern-Europe. I can also believe that the Germans did it. I didn’t look into it, because I was only interested in Soviet economics and culture, not in the war. I accept your research is accurate. It doesn’t change anything regarding death tolls, because all these war murders are swamped by the famine deaths in 1932.
The 1937 census was scrubbed because it showed the 1932 famine. That’s the only serious demographic drop in the USSR from the repression. It is swamped by the 1990s catastrophe, from capitalism. I am telling you the truth about the death tolls. The worst death toll by far was 1991-2000.
Western Academia is generally useless until Einstein and Dirac, the radical Marxist socialists, took it over. I am a physicist by training, and my standards for academics is that they be at least aware of Marx, Einstein, Turing, and follow Mach positivism.
The academic work from the 19th century is dated and worthless, and post 1991, American leftists were purged, so most of the new humanities stuff is worthless as well. The feminists were gone, the solid economists were replaced by Chicago school fantasists. The Marxists historians like DuBois and Foner were out, replaced by a new generation of fascist story-tellers. It’s all garbage.
There is no sound academic work without Marxists around to at least advise you. American academics tolerated the bourgeois clowns, so these eventually took over and drove out the serious people.
Post 1991 was “my day”, I wasn’t an undergraduate until 1991. I studied the USSR from my US high school, for history projects. Every era was better than my day, which was objectively the worst.
Einstein was a “Marxist” in the sense of following Marx. He wasn’t a Leninist, he was a Marxist like modern Marxists, like myself.
There were no millions of deaths in the USSR, this is your FANTASY. There were about 2 million deaths in 1932, and half a million shootings in 1932 and 1937. That’s Stalin’s death toll, and it SWAMPS the rest.
I say it, without sources, I repeat it, without authority, and I stay right. All your citations, all your authority can’t change it, because these are objective facts about objective numbers.
There is no point in academics in the US, there are Republican idiots who took it over. In some sense, it’s a relief, because the US was becoming too powerful acedemically, as it poached former Soviet universities.
30,000 (Katyn) is much much less than 500,000 (1937 executions) or 300,000 (1932 executions), or 2 million (1932 famine deaths). The death toll of Soviet communism is 2 million famine deaths and a million people shot, all in Stalin’s time, with all other eras negligible. The death toll is nothing like the 1990s, which was an actual holocaust in Russia, with millions of people dying from poverty. These are the correct numbers. I said it, I will repeat it. You have no counterargument, because you have no other mass deaths except in your imagination. All your millions of victims are imaginary.
The achievement of the USSR is that it created jobs for everyone at a fair wage. It industrialized and matched the science and research and technology of the West, for the most part. It was more advanced in materials, but less advanced in microfabrication (although it was catching up). It was more advanced in petroleum (by light years), but less advanced in pollution controls.
But the reason there was any competition at all is because the West immediately adopted socialist methods alongside the USSR, in 1932 for the economic wealth distribution, and in 1957 for science funding. All the major problems of concentration of power in the USSR appeared in the West as well.
The cause of death in post 1991 USSR was POVERTY. The same cause of death for tens of thousands of Americans every year. Death by poverty was nonexistent in the postwar USSR.
The deaths under Stalin were 2 million famine deaths, half a million shot in 1932 and another half-million in 1937. Every other death is negligible in number compared to these catastrophes. They showed up in the 1937 census, and that’s why it was scrubbed.
The little black book is a fabrication, and if you don’t acknowledge the numbers I gave as roughly accurate, you are a propagandist and a liar.
Katyn is negligible in your figures. I explained to you that all your figures are propaganda. Your literature claims that dozens of millions died in the USSR from repression, two dozen million before 1945, and another dozens of millions after! This is outrageous fabrication.
As was pointed out, the demographic methods used in the USSR show that Hoover and Roosevelt killed 10 million Americans in the early 1930s. Hard times lead to deferred births, although a million Americans did die in the great depression, and a million die today, of opiod addiction, or lack of medical care, i.e. from poverty.
Khruschev didn’t admit the Katyn massacre was Soviet, but he did a fair internal review of the 1932 famine and of Stalin’s cult of personality, and the attendant executions in the party. This is sufficient to include 98% of all the murders, the figures don’t change by a factor of 10 or 100 because of it.
I said it once, I’ll explain it again. 2 million people died of starvation in 1932. Half a million people were executed in 1932, and another half a million in 1937. That’s the end of the significant mass murder in the USSR. The rest is fabrication by propagandists.
I knew you were an American from the beginning. I only maintain my American citizenship because I have a daughter in the US, and I intend to stay an American until I get her out.
You are a stupid American Republican, you have no idea about Stalin’s policies. The USSR didn’t do the insane stupid things China did, and the USSR warned China not to push with Maoist policies. Instead of listening to their comrades, the Chinese nearly started a war.
The supply of industrial tractors and new seeds in 1930s made the agricultural revolution possible. In addition, the “green revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s, which has been credited with saving billions of lives, this was largely a Soviet project. The Americans pretend they contributed.
The Cambodians were not communist in the Soviet sense, they were agrarian anti-technologists, following a splinter group of a splinter group of Maoists. The Soviet communists were Vietnam.
I am tired of repeating the same things again and again. Your mistakes are deep, and of principle, and you push propaganda against my corrections. I have explained to you what happened, it is up to you to say “Sorry for the idiocy, we goofed, we were making up millions of victims to make propapaganda”.
It’s really insulting to the millions of Jewish and Native American victims of actual holocausts to make up millions of victims. It is also insulting to the millions of people who died of capitalism in 1990s Russia. You are shameful people, with bankrupt ethics. American turd.
The victims were not clustered, you are a liar. This is the type of self-serving fantasy right-wingers tell themselves. It’s anti-scientific, like flat Eartherism. The political victims were randomly scattered, the famine victims were regional, and like all famines, claimed elderly and children.
The number of people who died from Stalinism was about 3 million. The number of people who died in post-Soviet Russia was around 10 million. You are complicit, as you are involved, and I’m sorry, but it seems you are damned.
Sorry, the rape accusations against Beria are not believable, they are like the baby-smashing propaganda from the Yugoslav war. Let’s put it this way, unlike 1945 rapes in Berlin, for instance, I never saw interviews with victims. I am more inclined to believe that Richard Branson raped someone than I can believe that sexless Beria did. He was a torturer, so his victims made up sexual deviancy, as is common in victims of atrocity. People made up sexual deviancy stories for puritanical Hitler too.
Lysenkoism didn’t lead to crop failures. It was a way of introducing seed diversity. It worked in practice for miniscule gains, it was just junk in theory. The USSR breeding program was the model of the world, it produced the seeds of the agricultural revolution which saved the world. Fritz Haber wasn’t responsible for anything but nerve gas. The Soviets created the fertilizer/seed combination that saved the world from starvation.
The perks of the USSR high command were not material luxury. They were equivalent to a company car, a summer house, and being able to afford a fancy suit. This is equivalent to a high four-figure salary in the West. An elite precision machinist could match the salary and perks with assiduous saving.
There was no class system in the USSR, the leadership didn’t get into it for material gains. If they wanted that, they could just defect. Defectors like Korchnoi were showered with money and favors. They did it because they were true believers. The system collapsed when they stopped believing.
Your claims about the USSR are simply propaganda. The claims about the US are blind. The states with no paper trail are the ones with the exit poll disparities, and there is no possible way the elections are not distorted, as the exit poll discrepancies are one-sided, always favoring Republicans, in exactly those areas where one cannot verify. That’s not a conspiracy of voters to mislead pollsters, it’s systematic election rigging, now made worse by purging voter rolls and instituting mandatory unverifiable electronic voting. This is possible in any state with a Republican controlled election commission, and if you took out the election commissions of those states and beat them with sticks, I don’t know if that would be unjustified. They should certainly be jailed.
I have a daughter in the US, so I maintain my citizenship until I get her out. The US is no longer free, it is a police state worse than Tito’s Yugoslavia. To give you an example, Anthony Weiner was just sent to jail for imaginary sex-crimes. He was forced to tearfully recant in court, and the whole show-trial was tinged with atrocious anti-semitism.
The communist and the fascists were both fighting for what you would call the “White working-class voter”, the difference being that the fascists instituted a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, what they called “class cooperation”, which means industrialists tell everyone else what to do. Communists took out all the rich people and shot them.
If I was forced to choose between American capitalism and taking out all the rich people and shooting them, I would have to choose the latter. But of course, we now know how to confiscate their wealth, peacefully, and put the rich folks in their proper place.
Marxism rejects the concept of damnation, but God doesn’t. I genuinely am sorry, nobody deserves to be damned.
I love how you accept Soviet sources only when they are making a show-trial talking about hundreds of rapes by a public official, precisely when we know Soviet sources are LEAST reliable.
Officials don’t like to commit rape. They like to commit seduction, they commit sex. Like John F. Kennedy. Consensual random sex. It can be easily turned into rape accusations after the fact, so long as women don’t testify about rape. There was no testimony from victims, so I don’t accept the accusation.
Anothony Weiner’s crime is literally imaginary, he was having sex in his imagination. He didn’t actually have sex with anyone except his wife. The remaining people in Congress are the exact opposite. His trial was used to demonstrate the moral degeneracy of Jews, much as Marion Barry’s occasional drug was used to kill his career and demonstrate the degeneracy of Blacks. Get this through your head: other people’s sex lives or drug use are none of your goddamn business.
The reason I can’t get my daughter out is that her mother supports Trump. I know many people in my circles who supported Trump, I cut off all contact with those degenerates.
Americans don’t need to confiscate anything, I enjoy watching America turn into a third world country. The advice for confiscation is for the rest of the nations of the world.
There were an average of 1-10 political murders a year post-Stalin. There were an average of 1000 political prisoners postwar. In the 80s, there were zero, the USSR was a free country in 1985-1991, like Yugoslavia.
The Stalinist era dominates, and the numbers I give are accurate.
The figures of 10s of thousands of deaths in the US come simply from those who die from lack of medical care, That’s tens of thousands under the ACA, it was 40,000 annually in the 50s,60s,70s,80s,90s,2000s. That’s 2.8 million people dead, more than Stalin. Add to that the thousand of homeless deaths annually, the thousand deaths from obesity and poor nutrition, from suicide and drug abuse, then you get an idea of the toll of American capitalism. This toll is a comparative zero in Europe.
That stuff is not a fabrication, because I personally know several people who were dying of treatable illness due to lack of health care, i.e. poverty. There was no such death in the USSR until 1991.
I left the US Jan 20th 2017, idiot. My daughter’s mother is a Trump supporter, and a worse idiot than you. The numbers for those who die of preventable diseases is 40K annually before ACA, and I knew such people personally when I lived in the US. The USSR didn’t execute thousands of people at any point post-Stalin. They didn’t even arrest thousands of people. There were about 1,000 dissidents, each a celebrity in the West, and the imprisonment rate was one of the lowest in the world. The reason was just that there was no property crime, because, no property.
The USSR death toll post-Stalin simply does not exist. It wasn’t 10,000 people a year (like those dying of lack of health care today in the US), or 40,000 people a year (like those dying of health care before Obama), or 1,000 a year (dying of homelessness), or 10,000 a year from bad nutrition (obesity), or 1,000 a year shot by cops. It was 10 a year imprisoned for being dissidents.
I would not be imprisoned for anything as I do not live in America. But if I were too persuasive, I might get murdered by drone.
The USSR’s innovation in petroleum was immensely deep boreholes, which allows them to extract petroleum ANYWHERE. They could go to any country in the world, and find petroleum using their method. It’s because they had the right theory.
You really don’t understand God or damnation. God exists, and is a Marxist.
I never heard of Kolyma, and, before you explain, I don’t need you to explain. My goal was not to defend the USSR system. I don’t support even the low level of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment post-Stalin. I am not a totalitarian, and I recognize the brutal repression of speech and writing in the USSR postwar. I know the chilling effect it had on speech, and I can see the consequence in the state of the humanities departments in the Eastern block, which unlike the science, was atrocious. Precisely because academics were not free to speak.
All I am saying is that the claims of right wingers that millions of people were in slave labor is a LIE. The claim that thousands of people were rounded up and shot is a LIE. The dissidents were abused and persecuted, and it’s terrible, but it simply wasn’t thousands of murders, and it doesn’t show up in population growth charts.
The end of the Soviet Union, however, DOES show up in population charts, as a catstrophic decline for two decades. That’s because people suddenly were unemployed, empoverished, without health-care, drug-addicted, prostituted, and generally miserable. It happens in the US too, it’s the steady drip-drip of death of the underinsured, the street-people, the drug-addicts.
That steady drip-drip is worse than anything that happened post-Stalin in the USSR, it is in fact, what is happening today in the former USSR. It doesn’t happen in sane social Democracies, let alone socialist states.
The health care in Soviet prison camps under Stalin was atrocious. We’re not talking about that. The only goal I have here is to correct your WRONG NUMBERS about the death toll of communism, and to correct your WRONG NUMBERS about the deaths from poverty in post-USSR Russia.
I have not looked at a single reference work in doing this, I have not looked at a single book, or web page, or literature source. I won’t do it either. Because it’s not a point you can sanely contest. I simply assert the true death toll, and repeat.
I am not a supported of Soviet Communism. I agree it was totalitarian from the beginning until a few years before the end, when it was finally free.There were political prisoners, and repression until the mid-80s, and people were everywhere afraid to speak out until the mid-80s. It’s just that the NUMBER of political murders was extremely small past Stalin’s time, and the NUMBER of political prisoners was relatively small, and doesn’t contribute to the total death toll, simply because it is negligibly small compared to Stalin’s time. I am contesting the absurd numbers in the black book of communism, and pointing out that the total death toll is 2 million famine deaths, and 1 million political executions, all under Stalin, and all later deaths are negligible in comparison. That 2 million famine deaths, 1 million political executions is still intolerable. It’s just not the absurd numbers of 20 million, 40 million, 60 million, 100 million Solzhenitsyn makes up from year to year, and your right wing buddies repeat. These absurd numbers expose the abominable Western propaganda system. Isn’t a million executions bad enough? That’s what actually happened.
I don’t know and I don’t care about Kolyma. Soviet citizens didn’t die of treatable illnesses, and neither do Italians, Czechs, Swedes, Danes, British, Mexicans, Iranians, or Chinese. That’s a problem unique to the United States. It costs on the order of 10s of thousands of lives every year, and it continues until this day.
I witnessed people dying on the street daily in New York City. I can’t live in that kind of society, sorry. You can have your hell, and lie in it, but don’t blind yourself to your own damnation.
God is a Marxist, and an atheist.
The USSR did go to vietnam and produce petroleum by simply digging deep enough. The reason people don’t do this is that surface oil is cheaper. It’s not EVERYWHERE that the Soviet method works, but it’s sufficiently likely in any region of the world that you’ll be able to do it in any country willing to invest the resources.
The practical consequences don’t change the facts. You’re falling into the Lysenkoist trap again.
There was no Gulag Archipelago. There was a small contingent of a few thousand political prisoners post-Stalin, and general terror. People were NOT taken out to the woods and shot. People were NOT summarily executed. They were put in prison, sometimes dying of bad conditions.
That’s not to justify the totalitarianism, just to explain the figures.
The complement to that is that in the USSR, as in Sweden, Mexico, Canada, China, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, England, Israel, Spain, South Africa, Australia, nobody dies of preventable disease. Further, in most of the third world, food is not processed and commercialized to the point that 50% of people suffer from obesity due paradoxically to malnutrition. The food distributed to poor folks in the US is so nutrient poor, you need to overeat to get a reasonable dose of nutrients. In other countries, poor people have good nutrition. This was also true in the US in the 1950s, before the food industry replaced the legumes and grains with processed stuff.
Your system is responsible for killing thousands of people every single year, from poverty. You imposed it on the USSR in 1991, and it killed millions from poverty. The only proper comparison of the 1990s is with Stalin’s time, the 90s was arguably worse, just from death toll.
So in the 90s, to disguise this, you simply increased Stalin’s death toll. First by a factor of 10, then by 20, then by 30. Keep doing that, perhaps you’ll sleep better at night. Stalin’s gone, his deaths are over. Your deaths still go on.
You need to read Marx, instead of speaking for God. Those of most faith are those that are destroyed first. It’s not a punishment from God, it’s the wages of faith. That’s what Christianity is all about.
You can continue to blather, but all those incidents, the Winter War, Katyn, etc, don’t change the numbers for Stalin— 2 million famine deaths, one million executed. They also don’t change the fact that the post-Stalin USSR didn’t have any comparable death toll. That’s the end of your propaganda.
I do not covet that which the wealthy have, I pity them for having it. I wouldn’t want to be Jeffrey Dahmer, no matter how tasty human flesh is.
The reason Marx identifies duopoly or triopoly as indistinguishable from monopoly is that people in the owning class of the big firms can come together and act in concert, as if they were one person. It’s something that religion says is a good thing— cooperation. But it ruins the economic equilbrium assumptions. In modern capitalist economies, all large business leads to ridiculously out-of-equilibrium compensation. It’s theoretically very easy to see, because in theoretical equilibrium people all make a Soviet-style wage, determined entirely by supply and demand. That looks nothing like a Western economy, because investment profits are not in equilbrium, but concentrated at the top.
This concentration of investment wealth does not make me covet, it makes me unhappy. Because it destroys the investment potential in an economy. It distorts the industries that get funded, and it distorts the political system. To get rid of it, you need to ensure that investment ownership is distributed about as broadly as small business ownership is, at least. That is, at least 50% of the workers should own the company they work at. That was not only a goal of Marx, but it was a goal of Reagan and Thatcher. You forget.
The book to read is “Capital”, which is not going to be found on Marxists.org (although a lot of that stuff is interesting). Marx’s work is easier understood if you get a good background in standard economic ideas of equilibrium.
You simply don’t understand Marxists. I don’t COVET your house and pool, I don’t give a crap! I don’t envy your lifestyle, I’ve lived with and around rich people, I went to fancy schools. Your lives are miserable, and you wallow in brain-damage and sin.
What a Marxist is afraid of is that Bill Gates’s control of stocks and bond stifle the computer industry, and that Linux is a better idea for free development. It’s not a matter of taking away your money or house, not from a moderately successful person who works. It’s a matter of restructuring large industrial ownership so that industries don’t end up controlled by 3 people, destroying whole sectors of the economy. It requires that people who work at a factory should eventually end up owning the factory. That’s the basic principle.
If rich people who work actually understood what Marxism is about, they wouldn’t be opposed to it. It’s not designed to make rich workers poorer, just the opposite. It’s designed to free up business from consolidation and monopolization, thereby making everyone richer.
The USSR decided that it meant “The state takes over everything”. The reason to study that experiment, as un-Marxist as it ultimately is, is to see what happens when a state takes over everything! Given the atrocious concentration of power, the incredibly bad idea of doing that, the interesting thing are not where it failed, but where it succeeded.
Numbers do add up, but they unfortunately add up to more after 1991 than during the entire Soviet period.
I don’t have ignorance. The order of magnitude is correct, and you need to learn to add.
No Marxist is out to take away your stupid rolex or Mercedes Benz. That’s PERSONAL PROPERTY, it’s not PRIVATE PROPERTY. A Marxist is interested in private property: a billionaire’s network of factories, in an industrialist who owns 20 large newspapers and 4 TV networks, in a billionaire who owns a sports team. It’s the power associated with private ownership of means of production that the problem and the target, it’s not coveting of STUFF. Nobody wants your shitty stuff.
This is why moderately wealthy people can’t understand Marxism. It’s not about YOU. It’s about people with investment and power which you can’t even imagine.
It has no relation to “coveting” because the property is simply a state-awarded contract with no intrinsic meaning, aside from the social convention. When you say “I own a sports team”, what you mean is you own a piece of paper that allows you to take money out of other people’s labor from the ticket prices. It’s the society itself that grants you that paper, and unlike stuff, that contract is not beneficial to anyone, and should not be respected by the state.
The structure of economics is entirely determined by which contracts are enforced and which are ignored. The Marxist approach is to redesign the contract structure so that labor ends up in the owning position, not some ridiculous idiot who happened to get his paws on the property deed. There is nothing to covet in a property deed, it’s like a feudal lord. You don’t need to covet their position, they shouldn’t exist, and you must revolt against the very concept.
I know it’s difficult for you man, you’ve been brought up to reify the idea of property so that Koch owning 500 oil-wells and deriving profit from them strikes you as being as natural as water being wet. There’s nothing
natural about it.
He who does not work, neither should he eat. That’s talking about Koch.
I speak modern and ancient Hebrew fluently, idiot. The structure which grants contracts is the state, and what the state grants it can also restructure.
God isn’t found in the Bible, idiot. God is abstract. The Bible is a quaint little fiction book about God, like “The Gulag Archipelago” is quaint little fiction book about what would have happened had Stalinism expanded. God, on the other hand, is a real thing, a concept which is understood much better today than back then. There is no authority to be found in the Bible.
Karl Marx is the second coming of Jesus Christ. Your reading of Hebrew is stupid, and yes, when Exodus was written, wives were property, like slaves. It wasn’t “coveting your neighbor’s property” to free your neighbor’s slaves, although it did deprive your poor neighbor of property. Actually, perhaps it could be construed as coveting, freeing his slaves, in which case the 10th commandment is criminal, and you are a goddamned criminal for following it.
I am also a native speaker of Hebrew, idiot. I am writing this from Israel. Wives are referred to as a class of property identical to slaves in Exodus, Leviticus, and the entire Bible. The ownership of people is objectively a sin, and the gradual recognition of the evil is why slavery is limited to 7 years in Exodus, but only for Jewish slaves. In the Epistle to Philemon, we find out that St. Paul doesn’t accept any slavery at all. He expects all people to free their slaves, whether the law requires or not. Just because of their soul-debt to Christ. This is now the universal position of all religions, because it’s the right thing to do.
The Bible is NOT the source of the teaching of Jesus, the source of the teachings of Jesus, as St. Paul explained is TALKING TO JESUS. By hallucination. Jesus is a hallucination that informs you about ethics. The way to do what God wants is not to read and re-read the Bible, but to use your ethical antenna to figure out what the right thing to do is, and then to do it. The Bible won’t help you, rich man.
I am referring to the content of that hallucination, the real Jesus, the one that talks to you in your head, not to the garbage written in ancient books, or to the made-up magic Jew man. The Bible is a story book about God, it’s not a good set of laws, it’s only an incremental improvement over previous more barbaric codes.
The 10 million farmers lived on the East Coast. You can’t count them because they were so thoroughly exterminated. They were killed and their property taken, village by village. They were driven out of the east to Oklahoma in the trail of tears. The genocide you acknowledge in the West is the tail end of a worse one on the East coast. That’s why none of you Americans look at all like native Americans, while everyone else on the continent does. In Canada, your story is roughly correct, as there were very few natives relatively.
The authority to be found is by considering what is right, not by considering what is written down. Redistribution of investment income is absolutely required for economies to function, and the elimination of slavery and power-relations is the central purpose of the teaching of St. Paul, i.e. the historical Jesus.
Your comments are brain damaged nonsense. The key thing for population density is agriculture. If a society is nomadic, it has a low population, because the resources are thin. An agricultural society has 10 or 100 times the population density, because it can support it. Most of the disease deaths from smallpox came in the 17th century, and the Native populations generally rebounded by the 18th century, as people acquired immunity. Genocide of agricultural people is much, much worse than genocide of hunter-gatherers, because it is an intensive robbery of land, and massacre of people by starvation and resource war. Genocide of hunter-gatherers can be understood as displacement of hunter-gathering traditions by more advanced agricultural practices, and it can incorporate the few hunter-gatherers organically into a growing population. With agricultural people, there is no space. You must kill to take the land.
Native Americans had extremely advanced Native agriculture throughout the continent. Tomatoes, potatoes, squash, beans, thousands of varieties of maize, domesticated llamas and turkeys, all this stuff we have today, show you that it was a centuries old tradition, because it takes centuries to invent such breeds, they aren’t magically created by nature. About half of the modern world’s crops were developed by Native American pre-European agriculture, it was the most developed plant-breeding program in the world, only exceeded by the USSR of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The reason? They had fewer domesticable animals, so their plant breeding needed to produce a full protein diet from strictly vegetarian sources.
The Native agriculture was copied by new settlers in the 17th century, which was the only thing that allowed them to get a foothold in the New World. During this time, they raided villages for crops when their own crops failed, murdering Natives village by village, taking slaves and massacring women, children, infants. They displaced and destroyed the Native agricultural communities, village by village, all along the East coast, until finally, the remaining people were herded into camps, and then, in the 1830s, those remainders were driven to Oklahoma.
This process was at its peak at the moment of establishment of the US. Your second amendment is not a protection against tyranny, it is a protection of the right of settlers to murder natives, who the government did not protect with anti-murder laws.
The practice of genocide is explicitly promoted by George Washington, who spent his life committing such genocide. It is given a scientific patina by Benjamin Franklin, who argues that Europeans have an obligation, as the superiors, to take over the land of the inferiors. It is the central supremacist myth of the founders, even more so than slavery. The split with the British was partly because the British wished to protect indigenous rights, and refused to allow the genocide to spread West.
The result is that the entire population of the 17th century East Coast, which is certainly as dense as any other agricultural society, it’s millions of people, and the nomadic central regions, was reduced to a few hundred thousand by 1900. The remaining Natives were herded into camps to erase their culture.
I am sorry if you are ignorant of your own history. I suppose you should read some accounts from the era.
And while the practitioners of such genocide talked about how justified it was, by quoting the biblical mythological genocide of the Canaanites, and justified their own nation as the New Jerusalem, I assure you that George Washington is turning over to complain to Benjamin Franklin today, in the pits of hell.
You don’t seem to get this— the Bible doesn’t help you in knowing what God expects of you. The only way to do that is to “talk to God”, which means, having an informed, and reasoned, ethical conversation, without words, with the Jesus that appears in your head, after consulting all the history and science you can get your hands on, and recognizing that your introspection is limited and fallible even when it feels otherwise.
This process is not “I’m doing what I think it best”, because it explicitly networks with other people’s wishes and desires, and aims for a universal brotherhood.
The role of St. Paul was to explain how to make such a community of universal brotherhood, among 1st century illiterate Roman slaves. Without Paul, they would have gone to Judaism, because it gave them hope.
The purpose of Paul was to make heirarchical relations between people impossible, because they are forced to be brothers.
When Paul says to Philemon “charge the debt to my account”, he isn’t claiming to have money, nor that Onesimus stole anything. The debt is slave-debt, people sold to slavery owed their value to their owner. The account that Paul has isn’t money, it’s the soul-value of redeeming you into the community of Christ, and that redemption is priceless. He didn’t pay Philemon any money, Philemon frees Onesimus anyway, because it’s required ethically.
It’s very hard to do what is right, and reading law doesn’t help you, except by the example of showing you what it means to do the right thing. So when you look at what was going on in 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, you know that God is out there with the homosexuals and transvestites, rooting for their cause, and not with the goddamned corrupted police shaking them down. Even though the bible says the opposite.
Similarly, the corruption of money heirarchies requires remedy. And if that remedy requires violating the 10th commandment, it must supersede it, because that, and not the tenth commandment, is what God demands.
You have some misconceptions here. I am not dependent on any Judeo-Christian tradition, it is ancient and much of it is ridiculous. One needs to reformulate the ancient tradition to a modern person, who has a logical positivist naturalistic philosophy, and doesn’t believe in superstition, like such and so getting up from the dead. The concepts of religion are not really superstitious, they are primitive folk-tales made to explain the teleology of ethical behavior, that the notion of right and wrong is defined by allegiance to a larger mind than any one individual.
The way in which such larger minds form is much like the way your mind forms from the activity of neurons. Like all the neurons in your head make up your brain, and their collective activity is your consciousness, likewise, the individuals making up a social group make up a god-brain, and their collective activity forms the god-consciousness.
These gods are local and mortal, they are born and they die. The monotheistic notion of God is a God of gods, meaning the infinite mind formed in the teleological limit of infinitely large and infinitely ancient cooperating gods in the infinite future. This is Hegel’s evolutionary view of the 19th century, explained more concisely here, without Hegel’s upper-class bullshit. Removing the upper-class bullshit was done by Marx, who played the role of Jesus to Hegel’s formal, musty, obsolete, old-testament.
Marx took this teleology and made it a practical agent of change. First, he identified the main social dialectic, the conflict in society, as a class conflict— people who control vs those whom they control. Then he delved into mathematical economics, and explained why the system of control in capitalism leads to economic inefficiency. Every dollar of profit that a capitalist makes individually (as opposed to getting distributed broadly in stock) is a market-equilibrium distorting inefficiency, and when added up over all the wealthy folks, it creates unemployment and recession, the boom-and-bust cycles which were inexplicable before Marx.
The economics described in Marx is simply objectively correct. That is independent of the teleology or religion. The prescriptions you adopt, however, depend on your religious teleology— whether you are willing to forgo a ruling capitalist class, or not.
To see which method is appropriate, it is now instructive to take a look at Christianity. In the Roman empire, slave owners played the role of large industrialists, owners, while the mass of people worked as slaves. The main point of Christianity, ignoring positivistically meaningless superstitious nonsense, was to force the slave-owning master and the slave to share an equal social standing in the Church. Under those circumstances, the Epistle to Philemon explains, you are forced to recognize the evil of slavery, and free your slave. The Epistle to Philemon both explains Christianity’s success, and how it differs from Judaism. In Judaism, freeing the slave was also accomplished, but by a process of law, that took 7 years. The Christians eventually abolished slavery outright, by the 7th century, in Europe.
The teleology of the Bible is that God demands that people do what God says. That is a circular definition, so people read the Bible and think that helps them know God. The teleology is what defines God, and to understand a teleology is the most difficult thing in the world. You can’t get it by reading books, especially not old books. You need to inspect the situation, and construct the best approximation to a future social contract which is optimal compared to the one we have today.
You are not doing that, instead, you are simply doing propaganda.
The reason I don’t include Katyn or whatever else, is because it doesn’t change anything. The simple objective fact is that I, without citing any sources and without giving you any social reason to trust me, am giving you the correct numbers, as a simple google check will show. Stalin’s 1932 famine claimed about 2 million victims, Stalin’s purges and trials claimed about a million victims, a bit less. The rest is negligible in comparison. Your sources are lies, and propaganda lies, designed to minimize Hitler’s crimes against humanity by making up large impossible numbers for other people.
The only larger number than Hitler is in America, in the genocide of the American natives.
And as for damnation, that is the Christian word for choosing the wrong teleology. It is worse than physical death, because once the proper teleology appears, it is eternal.
There were not 6 million Jews killed by Hitler. There were 5.2 million Jews killed by Hitler, that’s the postwar estimate, that’s the “five million” claimed by Eichmann, that’s the population data, them’s the facts. The number of Gypsies, Homosexuals, disabled, and Soviet POWs murdered might add to these to give 8 million total deaths, but considering that Jews were by far the main ones systematically exterminated, it’s not going to add up to 11 million, archives unseen. The estimate of Jews murdered might be high by 500,000, because its demographic, Jews in the Ukraine might have died as Partisans or from dislocation, but it doesn’t suffer from the “deferred birth” problem, because the death toll is more than half the pre-war population, and the results are pure subtraction, not subtraction after extrapolating using natural birth rate.
All these numbers, including the Nazi ones, suffer systematic inflation in modern sources, I am giving you the original figures from the late 1940s, which are most accurate. 21 million is absurd anti-Nazi propaganda, and while I agree with most anti-Nazi propaganda, this numbers game must be rejected outright. I would say 5 million Jews, 2 million POWs, that’s about right, and less than a million other, meaning Roma, Homosexuals, Disabled, adding to between 7 and 8 million murder victims is about right for the third Reich. That’s a fair estimate.
There is no significant difference between a collective of talking humans and a collective of talking neurons, they operate much the same, the bandwidth/internal-computation ratio is similar.
The deaths of the Winter War are less than the 1932 famine by order of magnitude, and are not crimes against humanity exactly. The deaths from all other Soviet events are swamped by the 1932 famine and revolt, and the 1937 great purge. Those two events together account for 90% of victims at least, and they amount, at best estimate to 3 million.
Any attempt to inflate the numbers is dishonest, and evil, and you should go to your room and be ashamed.
Regarding the superstition justifying the teleology, it’s the exact opposite. Once you recognize superrational decision making is the right way to make decisions, the teleology comes first, and the superstition is just a barbaric tool to get stupid people to follow along based on threats and lies.
You are unfortunately numerically illiterate. Let’s say you have a Katyn and a half, 50,000 murders, every year, for 50 years. That’s 2.5 million people. Remember that people are claiming 10 million, which is 4 times as much, 20 million, 8 times as much, 40 million, 16 times as much. I don’t think you understand order of magnitude. It’s ABSURD numbers. They are pathetically made up. You would need to have massacres every year to do it.
The original intent was to make “Stalin was worse than Hitler” memes, that was Solzhenitsyn, who supported Hitler. The rest follow him to justify 90s propaganda which followed him. It’s all bullshit.
There was only ONE Katyn size massacre, which was Katyn. It’s negligible in the total, like everything else, except for the ONE massive famine, the Ukraine famine, which claimed demographically 6 million from extrapolated population figures using normal birth rates, which amounts in real life to about 2 million dead during the actual famine (the rest being postponed births, dislocations, etc). There was only ONE great purge, which was the great purge, which claimed an exact known number of victims (all their names were recorded), of about 300,000. I add to that the executions in 1932, which are another 500,000 or so, perhaps double-counting the demographic drop, which includes their execution and lost births.
That total, 1932+1937 is Stalin’s total death toll, give or take 10%. Everything else is NEGLIGIBLE. It’s INSIGNIFICANT IN COMPARISON. The only other event is the mass deportation of Germans postwar, which claimed about 500,000 people from starvation and illness. You could add that, but then please remove the double-counted Ukraine victims. It’s a wash in the end. The end result is about 3 million, 2 million famine, 1 million executions.
These other fictitious tens of millions of victims simply don’t exist. Conservative brainless numerically illiterate liars like you just made them up, and justify them using anecdotal stories of this massacre or that massacre, which are negligible compared to the main story. The main story, for total numbers, is 1932 and 1937.
Any murders past 1953 (really, past 1941, when Stalin’s power was diffused by WWII) are negligible compared to what came before. You don’t understand “negligible”, and you don’t know how to do numerical estimation.
The numbers I gave for the Nazis are accurate, because they are immediate postwar figures. This is what was used in the Nuremberg trials, when it was seriously investigated. Later writers are simply doing propaganda, and inflating numbers. It is not acceptable to say “6 million”, because it is not accurate.
About 5 million Jews were murdered, 2 million Soviet POWs, and about a million Gypsies and others. The total is 8 million, and no further. That stays true no matter who your sources are and how much you trust them. It’s DAMN HARD WORK to kill a million people, as I tried to show you.
That’s why it’s so fucking INSUFFERABLY ignorant and INSUFFERABLY insulting when people throw these humungous numbers around like they don’t mean anything. A MILLION people is US traffic fatalities over 20 years, it’s US uninsured deaths over the same period of time, it’s US homelessness deaths over several centuries, it’s US police shooting deaths over 500 years. It’s comparable in the postwar USSR, you would need to wait many tens of thousands of years to get millions of political murders in the postwar USSR. The order of magnitude is wrong
The lack of numerical competency in you is hopefully not mirrored in other readers of this posting.
Solzhenitsyn didn’t support Hitler in 1941, he supported Hitler in 1975, meaning, by then he “understood” how justified Hitler was in opposing communism, he “understood” that Jews were behind the evil of communism, and therefore how much worse communism was than fascism. To justify his absurd position, numerically illiterate Solzhenitsyn inflated the Soviet death toll to tens of millions, and began anti-semitic conspiracy in post-war Russia. He died a full-fledged fascist, and embarassed several hosts in the US with his delusional raving when they invited him after the wall fell.
All the executions in the USSR were documented and recorded. Births were recorded, people were documented, family histories are known, and the analysis of the archive show a million executions during Stalin’s era. I am not going to argue it with you, it’s true, all you need to do is look.
Any further deaths you have to attribute to famine from mismanagement, which gets recorded as death by disease. The big famine was 1932. I will not continue this discussion, as I have explained the figures several times, and you continue to say stupid things. Please learn some math.
Whether it’s rape or not depends on whether the consent is real or coerced. Her consent is obviously real in the film, and you must accept that it is not coerced, even though in real life, a similar situation can coerce consent.
And it can always be reasserted too, which is what she is doing, after he forces her to make an independent human decision for a change, without doubting her nature. Human beings are complicated, and rape is not a set of rules. If you came in that room and broke them apart, she wouldn’t thank you.
The scene is not “hot”. It’s not meant to be “hot”, it’s revealing about the characters. It’s not about sex, it’s about love. About asserting your own feelings, despite pre-programmed instincts you don’t control.
And he stops her from being scared by showing her he isn’t going to hurt her, or force her to do anything. He asks her to assert her own will.
“Dangerous territory”? Good films are not educational material for 10th graders on how to behave! They are designed to be revealing about the human condition. In the context of this film, Dekkard is not raping her, he is forcing a decision, showing how to give consent, because she doesn’t know anything about sex, and then demanding her to give free consent, because he will not force her. It’s a very human scene, made more graphic using the non-human characters. The situation is informed by the fictional parts of the scene, the subtext of her implanted memories. The fact that it resembles rape in real life does not detract from the scene, rather it gives it much more emotional weight, and makes it more revealing, and better. It’s not only replicants weighed down by implanted instincts in their DNA, not of their own choosing.
Yes, a lot of older scenes are correctly realized as rape. Just not this one, which is not.
That scene is extremely powerful, it jolts a person, because it is so violent for a brief second, and then so controlling, dominating. But it is not a rape scene, it is a scene which is appropriate with a replicant who is unable to trust her own humanity. It’s like a crash-course in human sexuality for a month-old adult, with all the domination aspects, and the consent aspects, and then a demand for a free decision, not coerced. It’s a very difficult scene, because in real life, it would easily be coercive rape. In the film, it just isn’t. And to see that, you need to see the whole film, and understand the emotions of all the characters.
That’s not Blade Runner’s problem, it’s theirs.
Those women need to be sued for garbage harassment claims. None of these claims constitute sexual harassment, there is not an iota of sex or power about them.
He shouldn’t have apologized. He should sue. This is the left’s weakness in confronting bullcrap accusations from the right, They need to fight tooth and nail, like Tito in the woods, there is a class war against them.
He was doing what politicians always do, which is false-flirtation and false-intimacy. It’s obviously paid garbage, and you need to wake up to the fact that there is a class war, and people will pay to destroy those on the left, because it is profitable for them.
The accusations against Al Franken are mentally damaged made up bullcrap. If the left can’t see through this, it will be in trouble.
But each position is evaluated with a full monte-carlo search until the end to determine its value. The comparison is misleading.
Yes, that’s important. Remind me about this again in a million years.
Religion is social reconciliation of previously accumulated self-projections as God. You’re expected to know how to do this by St. Paul, and you’re expected to know how to do this by Karl Marx. Since it’s 2000 years old, you should know how to do it too.
He is not coercing consent, although if YOU did the same thing in real life, you might. It’s a very subtle scene that talks about rape’s existence, without being a rape scene. It needs to to introduce the standard human psychological elements to this very new situation. It has nothing to do with coercing sex in real life, it really doesn’t, although it purposefully and deliberately references it, and also references back to actual coercive sexual encounters in older films. It just does so in a different context, where it isn’t coercion, although you don’t see it. In the older films, for instance, the Maltese Falcon, it is coercion.
I was an atheist, and remained an atheist throughout the whole process of experiencing God directly. Afterwards, I had to understand the experience rationally, and nothing about my rational world view changed, except I got a better idea of what God means, and what religious texts are talking about. It was extremely weird, to be an atheist going through a religious experience, but I can assure you that it wasn’t culture specific, much the opposite, it was entirely universal and personal at the same time, like learning how to prove pi is irrational, or some other mathematical proof. it’s just that each culture has their own mythology and stories attached to this sort-of universal experience.
I wrote a detailed description in my answer here: https://www.quora.com/Whats… . It was easily recognizable to me as what St. Paul went through, or the figure writing Lamentations, or the experience in Jewish Psalms. It felt like talking to a figure.
These people who disagree with Carrier are simply stupid.
I don’t need my God to turn into matter to be relevant.
It was hundreds of thousands, 52 hundred thousand to be precise, you dumb Nazi.
The Beatles were really great, really really great, until they each pickled their brain with drugs. The path downward was interesting, and that’s what made them enormous. It’s interesting to watch 4 people kill themselves slowly over 6 years.
I don’t minimize anything. The 2 million people who starved in 1932 are a crime against humanity, the ~600,000 executions in 1932, and the roughly equal number in 1938 are crimes against humanity. The ~500,000 German nationals killed at the end of WWII are a crime against humanity. These are the Soviet crimes against humanity.
I just give you the right academically justifiable numbers, and don’t make up absurd nonsense out of thin air and then proceed to repeat them like Goebbels.
Israel itself can’t coordinate military drills, and Cheney isn’t Israeli, or Jewish, although he shares interest with the assholes here. Maybe the operatives who set up explosives were Israeli? But they wouldn’t know the whole thing is a fraud, they couldn’t coordinate airspace nonsense. I don’t know man. I would have guessed “none” before living in the right-wing hellhole that Israel has become in the last decade. Now, I’m not so sure. Just please don’t call these human vermin that run Israel “Jews”, because these assholes are just circumcized Nazis.
Thomas Sowell is a sell out tool, part of the Reagan baby-boom disgusting pigsty of a generation, that got rid of the postwar values of socialism, science and shared growth. He doesn’t understand the first thing about Keynesian economics, he says the stupidest things about the relation of minimum wage and unemployment (raising minimum wage to a million dollars an hour doesn’t cause unemployment to go up, it cause massive inflation which obliterates all cash reserves). He sold his intellectual independence for cheap respect and cheap money, because he joined the conservative idiots that prop him up, as their token black guy. He’s the worst sort of imbecile, the kind that doesn’t care that he’s dishonest.
I know, I know. But it isn’t about phonics or first grade reading. It’s about fifth grade, when you learn to read complex materials! This article is pretending that the problem is in first grade, when it isn’t. When first grade teaching is abysmal, the parents take over and teach the child to read themselves (as I have seen a parent or two in Harlem do, and as my grandmother did to my mother).
One is puppet to the devil, the other is puppet to God. The one that is puppet to the devil is the one that keeps talking about God. The left is not the Democratic party, by the way. It’s the LEFT. The Marxist left.
What are you talking about? Marx is popular in academia because he made a nontrivial prediction in economics, regarding the dynamics of wages and profits during recessions (he didn’t say it this way, but the mechanism is the same). The predictions of classical/neo-classical market equilibrium models was totally wrong, and Marx discovered the correct “formula” for wages in unregulated economies, and for profits, and the division of wealth. He demonstrated that his laws held in England using numbers for weekly wages of various industrial workers, which he painstakingly gathered in an era where such statistics were not commonly used for economic analysis.
In doing this, he revolutionized economics and founded modern sociology. His ideas were foundational for all the following innovations in the humanities: first feminism, then racial justice, then gay justice, etc, all the various seeds of the modern ethnic/gender studies come from Marx.
His thinking allowed one to consider for the first time MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCE in analyzing the works of authors, and considering which authors are allowed to survive. For example, Dickens was born a working class fellow, but was extremely bourgeois in attitude, and this is important for understanding his writing (e.g., the Cheerables in Nicholas Nickleby). The 20th century was defined by a self-conscious attempt to avoid falling into the Dickensian pattern of celebrating economic success.
There has been absolutely no one promoting Marx in academia. He succeeded despite attempts to bury him, which started while he was still alive and writing. His work is simply the foundation of all the modern humanities, and of modern economics. It was ripped off by Keynes to create modern macroeconomics. Keynes took the “falling demand” part, made up nonsense non-Marxist reasons for accepting it (his reasons are bullshit), and then created all the non-trivial counterintuitive predictions of modern macroeconomics, using Marx as a tool. Marx, of course, didn’t do that, because he wanted to end the system, not fix it. But he understood all the Keynesian effects.
For example, before Marx, using supply/demand, you would predict that raising minimum wage gradually, over, say, a few months, to a million dollars an hour, would lead to 100% unemployment. After Marx, you find that it just leads to inflation (assuming a printed currency) and destruction of monetary wealth. Raising minimum wage never produces unemployment, it first stimulates the economy, then it leads to inflation. This is something you understand from Marx’s ideas, as stolen and elaborated on by Keynes.
Marx is revered in academia because he was the greatest genius the humanities ever produced. It is not the academics fault that various dictators pretend to follow his writings and take over entire economies with their political parties, that’s not what he was writing about. He was analyzing capitalism, and class structure.
There’s a difference between understanding Marx’s objective predictions and following his “ism”. Marx wasn’t a Marxist, as he said himself. The writings of Marx are foundational to economics, sociology, colonial and ethnic/gender studies, and power relations. Marxism is something like the first secular religion, sort of like a Christianity 2.0. It isn’t too good for making a theocracy, because any theocracy of any sort is stupid, even when the religion is true (especially when the religion is true!). But Marxism is good as a personal source of economic, social, and critical ideas about the humanities, because Marx’s ideas are by and large true, and extend older ideas nontrivially.
Of course morality is older than religion. But it’s WRONG MORALITY, it’s just a “sustainer of schemes of social cooperation” between the clique of people who form the ruling elite. It doesn’t have the presumption of producing a unified ethics for all of humanity which treats all members as equally valuable, including those outside the tribe.
The WHOLE POINT of monotheistic religion, the kind people talk about, the kind whose archetype is Christianity, is that in order to make ethical judgements, you consider the actions which are morally right to be the will of a unified entity, whose opinions are self-consistent, and who treats every individual as a part of the whole. This idea means that the master/slave dichotemy becomes unsustainable, and this is the main effect of monotheistic ethics, to remove institutional slavery. That’s what the Jewish reforms did, making slavery temporary 7-year debt-bondage, that what Christianity did when it forbade Christians from owning Christian slaves in the 7th century.
The pre-monotheistic ethical systems made judgements similar to the Nazi moral code– if it’s good for the social order, it’s good, if it’s bad for the social order, it’s bad. That is the kind of thing that leads to crucifixions and murder-entertainment in the colloseum. It can be argued that both are justified for “greater good” and “stability” arguments.
The idea of monotheism is that there is a unified universal ethical system suitable for everyone, in which nobody is counted out as irrelevant. All have a part to play. This is the idea of “The Body of Christ” central to Christian doctrine. Everyone has a part to play, and the least significant members, the ones with the least social standing and power, are the most important, if only simply because there are more of them (but it’s not only that).
The monotheistic morality is simply the correct notion, and it displaced the older notions of morality, because they are garbage. That’s why there was a monotheistic revolution starting from the 1st century in Rome, to the 20th century, as universal social-justice morality, this time under the guise of Marxism rather than Christianity, spread the idea to China, Vietnam, and Japan, places that Christianity wasn’t able to penetrate.
The Green New Deal is the most important legislative proposal of our time, but you don’t hold a serious vote without committee hearings, amendments, debate, alternatives, culling ideas, and so on, especially when Republicans think of it as a joke. This is not a joke, it is only this kind of investment that can confront the threat of climate change and allow a sustainable future with a healthy economy. It also requires international coordination, to make sure Russians and Chinese meet their targets. It’s extremely important, it’s not something you hold a political vote over, that is selling your children down the river.
You don’t “pass it into law” by holding a political vote, you pass it into law by debating it seriously, getting people on board, proposing amendments, talking to international treaty negotiators, getting input from unions, and so on, over a period of months and years, to allow the proposal to accurately reflect the best path forward. This is the most important legislation of this era, it isn’t something you frivolously go “yea” or “nea” on, you need a legislative process, like every other serious bill.
AOC is the only representative fully on the side of the working people of the US. She is not being groomed for anything, but she should be as powerful as possible, because she is the only hope for a real future.
Because I don’t want my children to be jobless in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, that’s why.
This bill is not a joke. It is spending comparable to the level of WWII. How did we pay for WWII? The answer is, we didn’t. We just inflated away the debt over the following decades. The Green New Deal does not violate the constitution any more than war-spending does, it respects private property rights, it compensates people for lost property or opportunity, it tries to make sure that the economy is healthy and growing, it is good for American industry, and it seriously is, by far, the most important initiative that the US has ever seen, this is not hyperbole, it’s more important than the original new deal. There is no future without a sensible path to zero emissions, and that requires enormous amount of coordinated reconfiguration of industry, a lot of research and development, a lot of deployment, and international treaties to make sure all other nations are on board. It’s not possible to continue living as normal without this proposal, or something equivalent, the drying out of the midwest alone will lead to food shortages, let alone the refugees from India and the Middle East. This is not a joke, you really can’t survive without this, and you can survive indefinitely with it.
The Green New Deal wants to make sure people in the US have jobs, and that those jobs make the US carbon neutral as quickly as possible. The Chinese are already thinking about things like this, although their deployment and R&D isn’t as advanced, they can do a green new deal, and it looks like they might do it first.
There aren’t many jobs, one of the jobs is rat-catcher, for your rat stew. It’s not kool-aid, this is the road Trump is taking you down. There really is no future if you keep dumping CO2 into the air.
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That’s not how you pass legislation. You go through committee, you add amendments, you get input from all members, that’s how you hold a serious vote. A vote like this is a stunt, to be able to do politics with. First rule of Congress-club should be: don’t play political games with your children’s lives
It’s not funny, illiterate baboon. Every degree of further warming is death and dislocation on a massive scale.
You don’t vote on a bill until it gets through a serious committee process which makes it into a serious proposal. Voting on an initial proposal is a stunt, and doing politics like that with your children’s lives is the kind of irresponsibility I would expect from drug addled reckless boomers with no conscience or ethical core, or faith in God. i.e. Republicans.
New York would be better off opening a clone website called “New York-AZON”, and forbidding Amazon from doing business in the state entirely, through punitive sales taxes. That would be vastly healthier for New York businesses than inviting this monstrosity into the city. It is madness to allow one man to own all the retail in a country! Have all of you gone mad?
Rushed means you hold serious committee hearings, get input and suggestions, have everyone consider the various ideas, and propose additions, not hold an idiotic vote with no meaning. It’s not like we have 12 years, we’re already going to have a catastrophe under any circumstance, just based on what we didn’t do thirty years ago. The 12 years is to avoid an apocalypse from feedbacks and uncontrolled warming which will lead to sterile oceans, no more insects, and maybe no more people.
That’s not how you pass legislation. This how you kill proposals. Mitch McConnell looks like the kind of zombie that cocaine produces, he obviously has no religion, or responsibility, or ability to think. But I think he achieved this state using other drugs, or perhaps just through coordinated evil.
If you want to vote on it, send it to committee, get comments, get negotiators to work through the ideas, and put together a real new deal. It’s not going to happen with McConnell in charge, that’s for sure. The green new deal is too important to play political games with, it’s the future of your children. But you probably don’t care, being a drug-addled godless conservative.
AOC is on the side of working people in the US, except for those named “Goldman”, who obviously don’t belong in the US. Go back to Poland, Goldman.
In 12 years, you don’t get another chance to avert the release of methane from the arctic, and the death of coral. That’s what the 12 years means, and that’s what she said. And it wasn’t AOC who said that first, the scientists did, and they are right, and so is she.
If you wait too long, more than a decade or so, the warming will not be controlled. It will release methane, it will kill the coral, the arctic will become dark and warm, and there will be a mass extinction and mass migration for sure.
If you act now, there is a chance to halt it and reverse it, through carbon capture, over the next century. It’s really tough, even if we act on a massive scale, it’s no sure thing.
I believe one should declare war. This is an existential threat to the united states. Our allies should be every other nation. Our enemy is CO2 emmission. We win when the world is reducing the CO2 in the air. Private industry will be compensated, just as it was in WWII. WWII didn’t end private industry.
This is not a personal issue, it can only be solved by working together. My grandfather didn’t fight WWII by finding and killing a random German.
Okay, then, go through the procedures to turn it into actual legislation, by holding a hearing in a committee, by getting input from the senators, including McConnell. They must take this seriously, it’s not a joke. This is the kind of thing that is needed to reconfigure US industry for the threat of warming.
What?? The world as we know it is already ended. The question is only how bad it will get. The longer you wait, the worse it will be.
If you want it passed, get it through committee, get input from senators and congressmen, don’t hold a political vote. That’s playing games with your children’s life.
The way to “take it up” is to discuss it seriously, propose amendments, think about it, not mock it and reject it out of hand. There is language in there that is no good, and must be fixed, there are proposals that are too broad. It needs to be fixed and passed, and quickly, because we don’t have time to wait. Grow up,please, we don’t get two chances to save our future, we’ve already screwed up the first chance, in 1989, don’t throw away this one. Each chance you throw away makes the problem infinitely and qualitatively worse.
You will never belong in the US with a name like Goldman. Sorry to break it to ya. Try changing your name to Thornberry or Wexmoreland. You are trying to pass, but you’re failing.
Oh you fool. Can’t you see that Amazon is BIG BROTHER? New York can have a Thousand thriving PRIVATE businesses with one coordinated website! That’s not quite socialism yet, comrade.
I am not oblivious to markets, I just live in a place where Amazon is kept out using taxes, and private businesses still exist. For now. Amazon is a monopoly, and those were declared illegal 100 years ago. Under Teddy Roosevelt. Not quite a free market there, comrade.
I am not politically pandering. I am 45, and I have a child, and I understand the climate very well, as I am a physicist by my professional training. The climate is driven by one parameter, CO2, and we just passed a serious threshhold, and we can’t pass any more without irrevesible terrible damage. I can tell you are not a college professor in a science, or in mathematics, or in climate, or in anything else techical, or else you would be saying the same thing.
AOC isn’t experienced, nor is she the most well-studied. She makes a grammar error once in a while, she sometimes uses a word out of context. But, to complement this, she has a SENSE OF URGENCY regarding our problems, an EAR to the ground, hearing her constituents, and and an INSTINCT for putting together the right coalition to pressure for change. That’s far more important. The rest, she will learn quickly. Her vision, that can’t be taught, and it is easy to lose through the blindness that comes with holding political office too long.
In this case, it is a coalition between those who want a jobs program to help poor Americans who can’t find a job, and those who want to avert catastrophe. This is a good political call, it is an act of vision. it should be supported, even by Republicans, because it is an act of vision
In this time, we need all the people to join together, and not call each other names. I don’t really care what you are, just help avert climate catastrophe, and help get this jobs program passed. It will help the economy, really. Like the first new deal did.
The golden goose that made Americans prosperous was the new deal, and it’s already been destroyed. AOC is proposing to reinstate it.
Marxism was purged from the US educational system in the 70s and 80s. The purge was complete in the 90s. There is no more Marxism in schools and media. AOC isn’t pushing government takeover of the economy, she is pushing a green new deal. It’s not the same thing.
No, in 2028 the arctic will be ice-free, most of the coral will be dead, the ocean plankton will be reduced by 80%, and fish stocks will collapse. We’ll still have farming, but there will be famines here and there. It’s just that we won’t be able to do anything to avert the catastrophe in 2050, and the worse catastrophe in 2080, and the calamity in 2100, and the apocalypse in 2200. That’s why you need to act early.
There is no local solution to a global problem. The US has to lead, not China.
No jew ever got any reparations from the United States. You're high. What reparations? For what? What did America ever do to Jewish people?
This is a Trump supporter trying to split Jewish Democrats from Black Democrats, so indeed, as you say, a low IQ bigot.
The US gives arms subsidies to Israel, to the tune of 4 billion a year, which are then used to BUY AMERICAN WEAPONS. It's a subsidy to American weapons manufacturers. It's also pointless and stupid, and Bernie wants to use it as leverage. But it is NOT REPARATIONS and has nothing to do with holocaust reparations paid by GERMANY (not by the US) to survivors of slave labor camps.
The only problem I have with this essay is the claim that the "adoring gaze of the nymph" is imagined. Women are prey to sexism just as badly as men are, even more so, because they think they are immune, and will fawn adoringly over men that are socially vested with the impremature of genius, and this can be used to exploit a certain number sexually by any male figure of authority. The antidote to this is of course to separate sexual attraction from authority in formal settings like university, but it is important to recognize that the role of (imagined) social authority will still be all-important in informal settings, such as bars and cafes.
In macroeconomics, the reason for unemployment is made up nonsense. It has nothing to do with 'sticky wages', it's because the employee wages have no relation to the supply/demand price which is the price at zero unemployment.
The actual reason you get rising unemployment and demand slumps is that the money is being sucked out of the economy and into profits, because workers have no leverage to demand more.
The reason Keynes doesn't say this, but invents nonsense about sticky wages is because this observation is due to Marx in 1965, in Capital Vol I. Keynes was trying to take Marx's prescription for more government oversight without agreeing with Marx's explanation for the unemployment/demand slump.
The startling predictions of Keynesian economics are not what you say. The most startling prediction is that increasing minimum wage leads unemployment to drop. This is not emphasized in Keynesian courses, precisely because it shows that it's not 'sticky wages' that cause the problem in the first place--- INCREASING wages gets you out of the demand slump, not DECREASING them.
When you force an increase of wages, the Keynesian effect means that unemployment at first goes down. If you then keep raising minimum wage, at some point, inflation begins. Then, if you keep raising it, inflation follows in lockstep. At no point does unemployment increase.
This is an extremely surprising prediction, verified to be true all over the world since the 1930s. It both justifies macroeconomics as a field, and disproves the 'stick wage' hypothesis at the same time. The reason for demand-slump is too-low wages, as explained by Marx, not too-high wages, as theorized incorrectly by Keynes.
It's incredible how you right wingers just invent bullcrap to follow the political wind. Employers do not 'cut back hours' in response to wage hikes, they pay the wages. If there is outsourcing, you need to slap a heavy tax penalty on it equal to the difference in average wages across the two countries.
The rant you give about immigration, tying it somehow to this discussion, is hilarious. I can see I am talking to a paid human robot.