‘Obvious Troll Is Obvious’ is less of a cliché than your obvious trolling.
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I disagree. People say communism is evil because of Stalinist and Maoist purges. No matter what ideals communists had for themselves, the reality of communist states is that they seem to exist only as a result of violent revolutions, and that as a consequence people who don’t mind throwing away lives for ideologies end up in charge.
It’s not an accident that those plutocrats are the ones defining the rules of American capitalism. They did it in the past too, though it was a little less visible because of the lack of organization against them. There was a nice period where they were reigned in and taxed at 91%, but then they sold the public on letting them accumulated their vast wealth again. Money is power, the market consolidates money, the people who have the money consolidated under their control use their power to buy new rules that favour themselves. We have the data, we know money flows to the top faster than it is created at the bottom, and that’s a positive feedback loop, not a negative one.
Capitalism is a system that assumes greed and then finds greed everywhere. Capitalism is a system that recognizes the existence of greed and then hands it the keys. It runs on greed from the ground up. That might not have been the aspiration, but the aspiration of communism wasn’t people starving because their idiot dictator gave them stupid farming policies. The reality is that most people aren’t really that greedy, they care about other people, and they are strongly motivated by the desire to feel helpful. Capitalism exploits those resources until they break rather than nurturing them.
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It is “only talk” in the same way that a maker forum is “only talk”. There are probably always some interlopers who don’t actually make anything themselves, but are there for aspirational or social reasons. The whole point of a DIY ethic is that participation is up to the individual, so whether or not it may be real-world activity or dancing about architecture depends upon what each would-be participant does. If you don’t do anything with it, then it is not real to you. But doesn’t serve as a blanket refutation of its reality for others. That’s like saying “I bought my birdhouse, so DIY is a fraud.” Well, perhaps for you it is.
You seem to accept that social activity and organizations are real, but you seem oddly invested in insisting that people should be mediated in this by others.
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BBS moment of the day. Two regulars, engaged in an all-out thread-swallowing battle of intellectual differences, pausing briefly to, within minutes of each other and in perfect harmony, bat away a drive-by idiot troll.
You guys…you guys are my friends.
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I too am skeptical about the worth of small business. Most of them are too small to assure their workers a decent income and stability. I think that the GOP pushes the myth that small business is going to offset the wealth gains made by the Big Businesses the fund its campaigns, the energy and financial companies. If you look at who had gained the most, the blame comes very close to home if you are in tech. Engineers and Technology people may eventually get the blame, because it is the digital revolution that created many of the productively advantages that the one percent. The reason Ronald regan cane to power it 1980 was that financial people were clamoring for breaks that would allow them to reinvest in digital technology. This didn’t know of care that it would depreciate most people in the Middle Class, And because the economics IG of most American is low, they don’t see the connection. I would be very concerned if you are in tech the rgw majority figures out what the real net disadvantage is.
Maybe this is keyed on the fact that since you are completely unwilling to talk about yourself or your life in any way, all of your talk is pretty abstract. It isn’t clear to me how it isn’t just some person in a basement typing on a keyboard and ideas for a better world.
When I’m on a Maker forum, I’ll post pictures of builds or ask functional questions arising from issues I’ve encountered while making something. I’ll probably give some context to these discussions as well.
Talking philosophy without any clear context in a lived life very easily sounds like a bunch of people in a coffee shop or a bar having a salon. It isn’t terribly practice and I’ve felt this way, for decades, about a lot of philosophical talk (even though I have a graduate degree in it). I want to know how people who have grand ideas for changing the world actually put them into day to day practice which proves it isn’t just the talking a good game on the Internet but actually trying them out as lived things in the world.
(This isn’t all directed at you, BTW.)
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GROUP HUG, PEOPLE!!!
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I am sorry for all the typos. I have to zoom the screen because of poor vision and all the icons go away, great web design!
Well, at least you are a verbose troll.
I have a degree in philosophy as well. Isn’t it the stupidest?
Yes, and that is the effect that sellers hold out to appeal to the top of a market even if they are denying the mean of the demand. I would like to prove the contention that in any price distribution when a small number of people willing to pay at the high end enter it, the whole prices distribution goes up. This is because sellers (driven by greed) hold out for the inflated price. It has gotten worse up in SV because there is a natural cap on supply and too much demand. I first saw this way back in 1974 when I realized that Stanford was turning out EEs who were eager to pay an inflated price for housing in the area.
I enjoyed it and Microsoft paid for it.
Actually, it is technically a MA in “Interdisciplinary Humanities” but my thesis committee chair and immediate supervisor was the head of the Philosophy department. My topic is actually on the nature, construction, and role of the soul in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in Edwardian Britain…
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ha ha ha. I’ve been here for years. I don’t recognize you. I think, by definition, if I was driving trollies, I wouldn’t be that terribly verbose for as long as I have been.
Sorry that I’m not up to your standards though.
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I definitely enjoyed parts of it. I’ll debate ontology for hours. Still, philosophy strikes me as the height of nonsense. It makes me think of a professor I had, who was asked who his favourite philosopher was. He responded, “Aristotle! Of course everything he said was empirically wrong,”
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It is the program that got me reading William Morris, among others.
Surely not all of it? I think Charles Mills, George Yancy and Shannon Sullivan, for example, are the shit.
Sorry, pal. I might have gotten confused by the context of the remark thinking it was directed at me. Can one quote from another reply to create context, that is with some copy and paste quote mechanism? I have seen that on Reddit with its Markdown support. That would be nice here if it isn’t available already.
You could cut and paste and put real quote marks around something in a blog post, but it would be much more effective to get it through a cut and paste, like on Reddit. The other problem with doing it purely manually is that yo u tend to lose attribution.
This place is designed to be Not Like Reddit.
Poke around and see if you like the differences.
There are threads about it, too, and the search function works.
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I don’t know if you’ve studied “Philosophy” in university. I think I literally didn’t read anything by a non-white (or honorary white - as if ancient greeks were anglo saxons) person while getting a degree. I believe there was exactly one woman. A friend has a masters in “feminist theory” and one day we conferred to confirm that she was studying philosophy, it’s just that they didn’t call it that so they could stay away from philosophers. Generally if people have something meaningful to say, they don’t call it “philosophy” anymore.
Only some individual courses, but I see what you’re saying, and my understanding was indeed that the field is still incredibly Euro- and phallocentric. Those three I listed don’t actually seem to wear a “Philosopher” hat in their writings much, now that you mention it.
