Trump hits new low in approval poll

[treehugger]

The very same Communists who hate private businesses then turn around and scream that the Soviet Union failed because the USSR had government capitalism.

WTF?

[Captain Genet]

(02-27-2021, 01:00 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: At this point the fascistic Right might be more dangerous than "Islamofascists".

The season for Islamist terrorism is over. The Middle East had an Awakening in the 90s and 2000s, and the al-Qaeda suicide bombers are similar to anarchist terrorists during the Social Gospel Awakening in the US. Of course Bush's troop surge in 2006-7 and Obama's drone strikes in 2014-16 have done a lot to terminate this perverted movement.

[Einzige]

(02-27-2021, 06:42 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 06:12 AM)Einzige Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 05:53 AM)treehugger Wrote: Didn't the Soviet Union fail?

The Soviets were (State) capitalist.

That's pretty big news to people who actually lived there.

Quote: While the revolution in Germany is still slow in “coming forth”, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, without hesitating to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism. If there are anarchists and Left Soeialist-Revolutionaries (I recall offhand the speeches of Karelin and Ghe at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee) who indulge in Karelin-like reflections and say that it is unbecoming for us revolutionaries to “take lessons” from German imperialism, there is only one thing we can say in reply: the revolution that took these people seriously would perish irrevocably (and deservedly).

At present petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”. Those who fail to understand this are committing an un pardonable mistake in economics. Either they do not know the facts of life, do not see what actually exists and are unable to look the truth in the face, or they confine themselves to abstractly comparing “socialism” with “capitalism” and fail to study the concrete forms and stages of the transition that is taking place in our country.

- Lenin, The Tax In Kind

[pbrower2a]

(02-27-2021, 05:42 AM)Einzige Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 04:38 AM)treehugger Wrote: If Nazis and Communists both support wars, debt, and tyranny, what's the difference?

I'm a Communist. I support international class war, the abolition of money (and debt with it) and the class dictatorship of the proletariat.

I am a humanist and I consider a social market (as opposed to the high-tech feudalism that America's economic elites dream of that is in practice a toiler's nightmare) and have been close to reaching. I can imagine such a world having both the crushing elitism and economic hereditarianism of a feudal order, brutal repression (anyone who challenges it is killed) even to the extent of having a bureaucratic elite well paid yet completely devoid of responsibility toward the masses. It would be as crushing of the human spirit as a composite of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Nineteen Eighty-Four.  It would support Christianity as offering the reward of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die as a reward for compliance with the demands of the elites including a slavish servility but offer Hell to anyone who runs afoul of it. Perhaps it even revives the sorts of spectacles of Roman times in which religious dissidents and recalcitrant slaves are offered to bears or Big Cats or otherwise destroyed in analogous entertainments.   

The novel would be called Acirema, a nightmare in which recent trends keep heading in one direction to a paradise for a hereditary elite and a Hell for everyone else. It would be a consequence of attitudes that I associate with followers of the cult of Ayn Rand. Is there a dark side to the utopianism of Randism? It is the social opposite of Marxism, and its believers are extreme "anal sphincters". My brother tells me that the people who invest the time in which to read Rand's Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead become insufferable pricks for six months. Then they discover that they have no friends, and that all delights are available for sale -- at dear prices. Because one is a vile "anal sphincter" one gets no love and has no connections to humanize life as might someone with a different set of beliefs. 

I am satisfied that:

1. No prosperity is possible without capital. Capital makes possible the labor-saving devices that make toil productive enough to allow prosperity for people other than owners, administrators, and enforcers, the people who fare well in all systems -- even those in which hunger and exposure are the norm for people who work... and work... and work... within sight of the ostentatious indulgence of elites.

2. A market promotes economic sanity. A market punishes ineptitude that can range from sticking with obsolete techniques of production, product design, managerial style, and distribution with losses. It is possible to look wistfully upon business entities (Penn Central, Sears, Radio Shack,  Steak and Ale, Tower Records, RKO, and RCA) only to realize that they no longer exist for very solid reasons. Profit at its best rewards innovation and service, and losses punish incompetence. 

3. People choose, whatever their religious or ideological heritage, between Good and Evil. The vast majority of people find that human goodness pays off better than does evil. It is impossible to set official rewards for kindness between people, and not even a market can establish that. This said, kindness creates community and indifference breaks it. Marxists and Rand cultists alike ignore this at the peril of their ideologies.

4. Capitalism depends upon thrift, personal restraint, adaptability, and stewardship of scarce resources. It's always tempting to cash out on a business and join some debauch. Some people think it wiser to plow some profits back into the business. Capitalism fares best when the capitalists do not go for unimaginative extravagance. That is the difference between a mom-and-pop business that pays its owners about what a skilled craftsman earns and some drug dealer, pimp, or other racketeer. This assumes that the model of the small-business order who is not so much an exploiter as a rational actor. Systems informed by Marxism obviously include those from Stalinist nightmares to the relatively mild one of Yugoslavia under Tito. Tito recognized that the small-business owner who lacked the means of lording it over the workingman wasn't the bogey of Marxism. Mom-and-pop businesses thrived. Bureaucratized behemoths became state property and remained such. If one is not an exploiter one is not an Enemy of the People under Tito.  

5. Although economic privilege may be a necessary requisite of extraordinary achievement, it rightly comes with responsibility for more than preserving a political order that fosters the system. In a well-run armed service, senior officers live quite well, but they have codes of behavior more rigid than those of the soldiers and sailors. One can be dismissed from the armed services for conduct unbecoming of an officer. A sailor at sea on a naval tour of duty had few means of spending money at sea... but once in port, and once one had some back pay, the bars, bordellos, and casinos awaited. An enlisted naval officer avoided that because the expectations are different. Senior naval officers live quite well even away from the delights of a commercial world. Still, one must act rationally and with some personal restraint. (The Armed Services are now more likely to pay people electronically into a bank account than to pay soldiers cash every month). Officers dare not do such things as go bankrupt, cheat at cards, or contract VD.

6. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains much about human desires. 



This explains much. The most wretched state in life is to have some brutal master deciding whether one lives or dies or either experiences degrading pain or gets some transitory relief from such. Such could be penal servitude in which even survival from day to day is in doubt. Such could be the experience in a torture chamber. That one has title to property or nominal affiliation with a lucrative activity means nothing unless one is compelled to surrender those for the next meal... or not feeling an electrical shock upon one's genitals. Or being whipped by a slave-master. It could also be a terminal situation in life, such as Stage-4 cancer, for which nobody is personally at fault, or being in a burning structure. At this point, you will give anything to get out of the situation. You may confess so that the beatings and other obscene treatments of your body end. You will sign over property and perhaps accept hereditary enslavement. Things might be so bad that death solves all problems. Such an existence is a denial of even the right of an animal. Heck, I can only imagine what a mouse thinks as it is ensnared in a trap or as a cat shreds it alive. That one has the means for an escape to the French Riviera means nothing if stage-4 cancer makes such impossible.    

Safety is something that even a household pet might experience in America. Economic security might be enough to keep one working in mind-numbing, soul-crushing work. "It's a living"... "it puts food on the table" ... "it pays the rent"... "it allows me to attend college so that I can make something of myself"... if one is reasonably competent and diligent it might allow one to work there until one is worn out.  If there is a pension or Social Security, or one has salted away adequate savings, one might get some rest in retirement and perhaps splurge a bit before ending up in the prison known as the "Home for the Golden Years" (there actually is an entity that gives itself that Orwellian moniker). Don't believe everything that  you see in advertising.

Maybe one develops some friendships and love. Perhaps one's employer encourages some family life. You might become a better worker, and if you are in a healthy marriage, you might be more willing to work overtime instead of going on a "hot date". But you are also more dependent on the caprice of the boss. You may become more deferential, and you might now sell off some dreams so that you might get some chance at a promotion. If you are good with words and figures you might become a traveling salesman instead of a factory worker.  On the other hand... you are still a prole, and everyone knows that. Your kinship network and circle of close friends may be the only people who care about you. But that may be enough.  

Feeling good about oneself is trickier. Such may require that one sacrifice some temporary indulgences for the development of skill or professional attainment. This may depend upon connecting to institutions (religious bodies, social clubs, service clubs), and doing things for them for vague rewards. You feel good about what you are doing. 

Self-actualization? I have never been there, so I do not understand it. I doubt that that is possible with Asperger's syndrome. 

There are few cheats.  Religious ecstasy might be one of the few available, which may explain why Death Row is allegedly the most religious place in America. 

7. Human nature is too complicated for facile explanation. Shouldn't that be obvious? The smart people read great fiction to catch some of the complexity of human existence. People whose lives are to simple to reduce to pleasure and pain, economics, and consumerism are mostly pitiable losers. Maybe such people think that they are improving their lives through some sacrifices such as latching onto work that they hate; for this I hope that they succeed. Success will depend upon getting out of a dreary situation without ending up in something worse. Material gain and indulgence goes only so far. Did gangster John Gotti or drug kingpin Pablo Escobar self-actualize? Not in the least. People highly successful at creative activities but otherwise too troubled to fully enjoy their success (Maslow suggested Richard Wagner and Vincent van Gogh as examples) certainly didn't. Neither, as I see it, such authors as Jack Kerouac, pop musicians such as Whitney Houston (cocaine!), or the early film star Fatty Arbuckle. Donald Trump obviously can see nothing higher in life than publicity, power, and indulgence; he is a pathetic failure. Having a good reputation in one's community, getting a reputation for consoling people in distress, and giving solid guidance to people in struggles for life? That might be local clergy or some K-12 school teacher who needs no mansion, flashy clothes, or yacht as one might expect from someone who does get-rich-quick infomercials, as did the late Don Lapre... who committed suicide as the Feds closed in on him for fraud.

[Einzige]

What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.

[David Horn]

(02-27-2021, 10:26 AM)Einzige Wrote: What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.

According to whom, exactly? Accusation by declarative sentence seems more the style of Fox News.

[pbrower2a]

(02-27-2021, 10:26 AM)Einzige Wrote: What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.

I can think of far worse than a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia, like a feudal reality in which every one is born into unshakable roles that any attempt to escape is treated as a crime. It is better that those who own the assets not wield the economic power as is true in the plutocracy in which we live.

[Einzige]

(02-27-2021, 12:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 10:26 AM)Einzige Wrote: What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.

I can think of far worse than a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia, like a feudal reality in which every one is born into unshakable roles that any attempt to escape is treated as a crime. It is better that those who own the assets not wield the economic power as is true in the plutocracy in which we live.

That feudal reality is what the drive to attain the petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia actually achieves.

[Einzige]

(02-27-2021, 12:30 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 10:26 AM)Einzige Wrote: What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.

According to whom, exactly? Accusation by declarative sentence seems more the style of Fox News.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...7376900386

Quote: A large number of cross-sectional studies showed no clear evidence for Maslow's deprivation/domination proposition except with regard to self-actualization.

It's human resources department capitalism-justifying bullshit.

[David Horn]

(02-27-2021, 01:08 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 12:30 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 10:26 AM)Einzige Wrote: What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.

According to whom, exactly? Accusation by declarative sentence seems more the style of Fox News.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...7376900386

Quote: A large number of cross-sectional studies showed no clear evidence for Maslow's deprivation/domination proposition except with regard to self-actualization.

It's human resources department capitalism-justifying bullshit.

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, it's undeveloped unless you wish to pay $41.95.  The synopsis seemed more than a little like gibberish, but it's outside my wheelhouse. Maybe all sociological narrative sounds like this.

[pmc]

WTF?

Defending freedom doesn't mean that you are a Commie.

The government is not your mommy.

The government is not your daddy.

Freedom is the absence of government.

Someone who smokes weed near you is not tyranny.

Tyranny is when the government says that you can't smoke pot.

When Libertarians say free speech is good, traitors who attack Libertarians are not defending freedom.

Those who scream Trump is a holy god for supporting wars, debt, and tyranny sound like hypocrites when they turn around and say Obama was evil for embracing wars, debt, and the police state.

If you think Trump should declare martial law and use the military to shoot protesters, what will you say when Biden uses the military to shoot protesters?

Can't you defend your own property?

Why not just end the tyranny that causes people to protest?

Do you think freedom doesn't benefit you?

Do you really think that you are exempt from the police state?

What country is this?

Why fight Nazis and Commies and then become Nazis and Commies?

[David Horn]

(02-27-2021, 10:05 PM)pmc Wrote: WTF?

Defending freedom doesn't mean that you are a Commie.

The government is not your mommy.

The government is not your daddy.

Freedom is the absence of government.

Someone who smokes weed near you is not tyranny.

Tyranny is when the government says that you can't smoke pot.

When Libertarians say free speech is good, traitors who attack Libertarians are not defending freedom.

Those who scream Trump is a holy god for supporting wars, debt, and tyranny sound like hypocrites when they turn around and say Obama was evil for embracing wars, debt, and the police state.

If you think Trump should declare martial law and use the military to shoot protesters, what will you say when Biden uses the military to shoot protesters?

Can't you defend your own property?

Why not just end the tyranny that causes people to protest?

Do you think freedom doesn't benefit you?

Do you really think that you are exempt from the police state?

What country is this?

Why fight Nazis and Commies and then become Nazis and Commies?

I see you're back. Try behaving this time.

[pbrower2a]

Kathaksung or someone similar. Someone about his age with the same name (Kat Hak Sung) who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area died about two years ago. I remember him from the long-closed old New York Times forums. The paranoia has imitators who need not put on an act because such is their character.  


TOP DEFINITION

kathaksung


A man persecuted by Feds. Used to be labelled as "conspiracy nut", "paranoid"....
Judge by yourself by read his journal story "The dark side of US".
kathaksung is persecuted by Feds and a target of sully.

by Sung Kat Hak July 10, 2008

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p...kathaksung

[newvoter]

You know that you live in the Twilight Zone when the US is a bankrupt warmongering police state and Americans look you in the eye and say that the USA is a peaceful and free country with a balanced budget.

[Einzige]

(02-28-2021, 09:06 PM)newvoter Wrote: You know that you live in the Twilight Zone when the US is a bankrupt warmongering police state and Americans look you in the eye and say that the USA is a peaceful and free country with a balanced budget.

Nobody says this, retard.

[newvoter]

Americans lose their minds when China sends police into Hong Kong, but no one cared when Trump sent the Gestapo into US cities.

Americans think DHS agents who shoot protesters in the face and patrol cities with black vans while kidnapping Americans without warrants is just a funny little game, but what will Americans think when the DHS starts door-to-door mandatory gun confiscation?

[Bob Butler 54]

(03-01-2021, 02:57 AM)Einzige Wrote:

(02-28-2021, 09:06 PM)newvoter Wrote: You know that you live in the Twilight Zone when the US is a bankrupt warmongering police state and Americans look you in the eye and say that the USA is a peaceful and free country with a balanced budget.

Nobody says this, retard.

What?  We agree on something?  Is that allowed?  Will the moderators have to take action?  

[newvoter]

Americans think that they'll be safe from tyranny by joining the Gestapo, but the traitors will need to live with their consciences. Will you kill your family and friends?

What happened to Nazi war criminals?

What happened to the rich doctors in Cambodia in 1975?

No one is safe in a police state.

[pbrower2a]

(02-27-2021, 01:05 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 12:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(02-27-2021, 10:26 AM)Einzige Wrote: What you want is a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia. Your opinions are nothing more than the expression of your class interest. Also, Maslow's hierarchy is now widely regarded as pseudoscience.

I can think of far worse than a petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia, like a feudal reality in which every one is born into unshakable roles that any attempt to escape is treated as a crime. It is better that those who own the assets not wield the economic power as is true in the plutocracy in which we live.

That feudal reality is what the drive to attain the petit-bourgeois small proprietorship utopia actually achieves.

Do you want to know the dirty little secret? The rottenness of our economic order depends upon a super-abundance of energetic young people who know that just to survive they must make people already filthy rich even more filthy rich while remaining poor. Young adults find few opportunities unless they have family connections, and the established  elites have highly-profitable models that depend upon people buying over-priced and questionable services, or people working themselves to exhaustion for little pay. We all know about the fast-food business and "casual dining". 

Consider that we have largely gone from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Many of the services (pre-paid legal services, timeshare vacation plans, over-priced cable TV, rent-to-own marketing, gym memberships or dance-lesson plans that they don't use, and predatory lending). All of these are vulnerable in any economic downturn.   People find that they can do without something and try to sell it off if they have some alleged value or quit spending the money. A prime example was golf-course memberships that people could afford when the economy was humming along... but it was easy to not renew. Golf might not be a classic rip-off, but it is a luxury.

Pre-paid legal services make sense if one has assets or a career at risk. Some kid might think that the teacher has a crush on him or her and build the fantasy into a case of sexual harassment. But if one loses the assets, what can a legal defense do one? We do not have debtors' prisons anymore unless for non-payment of child support or taxes. Visit Hawaii and you will get a little something for attending some lecture on how great it would be to visit every year (truth be told -- Hawaii is boring. My parents visited there once and did not go back). A time-share is a tiny apartment with beach access. So what! Michigan has plenty of beach access and it is delightful for six months of the year (late April to late October) and iffy for roughly another month (mid-April and late October and early November, as the state has some spectacular fall foliage...  New England without the mountains). Michigan winters are nasty, but one can rely upon inside entertainment then or take about a two-day drive for some relief. For Michiganders who hate the bleak, snowy winters, relief is spelled 

F-L-O-R-I-D-A

...People lose their jobs, and they cancel the rent-to-own plans. Maybe they quit paying on the jalopy that they bought from a tote-the-note lot. They cut the cable and rely upon books and video from the local library. Gym memberships? Not renewed. Overpriced I-phone and service plan?  There are pre-paid phone plans for poor people, resembling the old measured service that one used to get on a land-line. You will need one for applying for work, but make sure to constrain your talking time. Rent-to-own? You don't get ownership until you have paid for a new Cadillac and ended up with a Yugo that is grossly obsolete and worn out. 

The factory used to be the most reliable way of getting a middle-income life (factories were everywhere, and people could get jobs locally without having to go to the giant city unless working for the giant auto or aerospace plant) without having to get a college degree. But what does one do with a college degree now? Quite often the sort of work that one did to put one through college. So you have a degree in history... and you are still a barista. You might be one for another ten years. Or maybe you apply yourself selling questionable products like cable TV for $200 a month. When cable is overpriced, people often realize that they are no happier with cable-TV than their great-grandparents were with books that leave something to the imagination. Or sell people an overpriced telephone plan. Or sell time-share property. Maybe you sell cars at a tote-the-note lot that is more profitable than a new-car dealership because the entity sells a car with perhaps two years of life remaining at 40% interest where you make "convenient weekly payments" that, if you miss them, the lot-owner still has a key to your car and can drive it away. So the car breaks down? No problem. Get another one good for perhaps two more years at 40% interest. 

There are opportunities in the initial raw deal that is the norm in about every aspect of hypermodern capitalism that makes the old sort look more attractive. (History is cyclical and it is not always onward and upward). One can be overworked and underpaid and believe that holding onto a job that nobody else wants is security... until the Big Bosses decide that some other place has even-cheaper labor. One can make the original raw deal that rips off a customer by selling a questionable or overpriced commodity and go through intellectual contortions to try to retain customers whom one must convince that abandoning something inadequate is either too difficult, harmful, or wrong. American workers are underpaid, so they can no longer save for a dream; they must sell their soul to the company store just to keep going.   

We have been through an ugly time for working people, quite possibly the worst in American history. At the least the Gilded Age was a time of innovation in economic life. The neocon era has been one of limiting opportunity and gouging the customer as much as possible -- and committing people to miserable roles in life while telling people to count their blessings. Oh you have run out of blessings to count? Then start over with the count. Or maybe remember to be thankful that you aren't in North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, or whatever nightmare then exists. 

What began with Reagan may have died in Trump. The only problem is that forty years is a whole time in the workforce, which is probably so for people born from about 1955 to about 1970. Be born early in that range, and you were ill-prepared (you may have had GI-like assumptions about life) for the era of maximal inequality and least opportunity. Be born fairly late and things start to improve about as you approach retirement age and have yet to salt much away. Either way, hope that your children are fond enough of you to take you in when you can no longer work in what is available.

Capitalism is not the problem. Pathological elites are, and the narcissistic creeps who made a monstrosity of private-sector entities would have been no less creepy @$$holes under a 'socialist' order. America's executive elite is much the same as the old Soviet nomenklatura. Tycoons, urban landlords (where the economy is at all vibrant), and large-scale farmers are no better than the magnates of feudal times. Creative people create assets on behalf of such entities as Sony, Warner, Disney, CBS-Paramount-Viacom, and Comcast -- so they can't really share. They might do well and even get gaudy, but that is it. If you are thinking of criminals -- then Mafia-like groups are the worst of all. 

I doubt that you have read Piketty, and as someone who really has read Capital,  I see Piketty as practically writing a sequel that recognizes technological and social change that has followed Marx' depiction of an era now no more. Piketty sees contemporary capitalism as having elites too large and too demanding. Elites taking everything that they can is hardly new, and that has always been a social menace. That is the contemporary problem. Such people can mess up socialism and capitalism alike.

[Eric the Green]

(03-01-2021, 05:22 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(03-01-2021, 02:57 AM)Einzige Wrote:

(02-28-2021, 09:06 PM)newvoter Wrote: You know that you live in the Twilight Zone when the US is a bankrupt warmongering police state and Americans look you in the eye and say that the USA is a peaceful and free country with a balanced budget.

Nobody says this, retard.

What?  We agree on something?  Is that allowed?  Will the moderators have to take action?  

Neither one of these trolls say anything but their prescribed ideology. But at least Einzige engages in conversation.