Maggie's Farm

stupid, stupid people. just stupid.

dunno where you live, Phil, but unless it is also near a mile above sea-level, you're gonna feel a little trippy in Denver literally on the atmospherics.

"commodities" are those basic materials the production and sale of which is entirely price-driven. No brand matters. so, the money flows to the lowest-cost (or you say 'most efficient') producers.

IOW, lefties are trained to support higher-cost, less-efficient producers because that's what unionization creates.

IOW, that phrase on the poster is part of the "America First!" movement on the left.

take a look at the anti-Walmart campaign -- current theme is "the high cost of low price". do a search on that -- you'll see it all.

Thanks for nice comment, ian. Your graphics are excellent, too. Do you think you'll ever get another USSR-type situation, where you can avoid the grave errors made by the original, and thus bring bona-fide Marxist utopia to the world?

MN, i wuz just trying to learn something about the new model you folks have in mind. i do hope i'm a little beyond the Disney version of USSR. i do know that in modern history, collectivism has never found any way, or any need, to evolve past the authoritarian stage and i wonder if that is just chance or if perhaps there's something more to it. After all, the sad fact is that class conflict and organized terror historically rise, not fall, in countries where anti-capitalist revolutions have won and taken control of governments.

USSR is the standard laboratory for such examinations of how political theory must either be of no value other than academic, or prove itself by holding up in practice, because it's simply the largest and most persistence instance of applied anti-capitalism.

Anti-capitalists always blame Stalin for ruining the anti-capitalist alternative, but as many (my favorite on the topic is Robert Conquest) historians make clear, terror was not endemic only to Stalin’s reign--"...it began under Lenin, during the first show trials of the Social Revolutionaries in 1922. The crucial disparity between Lenin’s terror and Stalin’s is that the former made no attempt to conceal that it was a matter of the ends justifying the means."

Anyhoo, since the current western capitalist system has managed to avoid the errors (AKA "miserable humanitarian disasters") of history's anti-capitalist reactions, via answering the question “who will rule?” in a manner other than "whoever wins a faction fight confined to a narrow section of 'by any means necessary' leadership”, i wuz just wondering if youse guyz had found a reliable third way, and if so, what safeguards you have in mind to make sure we don't find out irreversibly too late that we have jumped from this frying pan--which ain't so bad, as a system for providing long-life and material wealth-- into some hellish collectivist pol-pot-ish fire.

And BTW, since politics is about persuasion, and persuasion doesn't usually work via trivialization ("disney", "should you want a clue"), please just skip the assertions and instead explain why it's "absurd" to pair the word 'utopia' with that anti-capitalist revolution which billed itself as the "worker's paradise" and "dictatorship of the proletariat"?

well, MN, the cubed stupid didn't refer to brainpower, it referred to tactics -- look at your poster: "no rnc" ?

Right, crash the repub national convention, break it up, so there's no convention. what a great way to close 300 million ears to your ideas.

As far as the unfounded premise problem, i was first struck by ian's

"his/her "choice" is essentially between starvation and finding a capitalist who would do them the favor of renting them."

Surely you realize that most humans throughout history have lived short, nasty, brutish lives terrified that the weather might turn bad and starve them to death?

Granted working for da man's wages ain't very glam but the fact that almost anyone would trade it for starvation (or the starvation of their children) is proven by the fact that almost everyone who has ever had the choice has in fact made that one.

If ''upward mobility'' wasn't a, or even *the*, primary attribute of the social justice of the capitalist system, then you & ian would very definitely have a point. As is, anti-capitalism as social justice assumes static roles for all players in the economy -- an assumption demonstrably false.

Along that line, your

"as far as the concept of utopia generally, i am not opposed..( i do not take the hobbesian vision of human nature as at all accurate.) but i would suppose that will come long after human beings have passed away from ideas like borders and countries. pure intellectual constructions employed to enrich parasites and grafters. (again, the ownership, management, and political classes.)"

has a premise or two imbedded. Hobbesian you aren't, okay, fine, neither was Robespierre, man by nature is cooperative rather than competitive, that's beutiful man, i believe that too, or would like to, anyway, for what it's worth. And who could oppose utopia? No borders, no nations, all wonderful visions, like heaven on earth, what's to argue.

But you say that humanity has mal-organized due to the 'intellectual constructs of parasites, grafters, owners, managers, elites, etc' and imply that this error isn't a function of nature but is rather a conspiracy to profit by preventing that better world you (and everybody else) can conjure in the mind.

heck, you may be right -- that's the 'strong man' anthro theory -- but how will anyone ever know, there being no parallel Earth to test the hypothesis.

So, imho, such a position is a sort of faith-based religious "repent for the end is near" complaint that while harmless as a backdrop for the imagination is very dubious indeed as a plan of action to improve the lot of mankind.

After all, many of today's haves were yesterday's (and tomorrow's, alas) have-nots, and many of today's have-nots are tomorrow's haves. Movement is always and everywhere in the medium of time, tho much political boilerplate seeks to imply otherwise.

So since the world is already moving out of poverty and famine, by the statistics (check the numbers), isn't the best that anarchy could offer is to do it faster?

And in this newtonian world of risk vs reward, isn't there a risk, in radical revolution, of losing ground, of going backwards, instead of doing it faster?

I enjoyed the discussion of USSR and I think we largely agree what it was, but still i'm wondering, if not something that will necessarily evolve toward that model, then what exactly do we put in place of our current system? A more moral new man? Hey, that WOULD be nice!

But your

"the possibility of encountering another dystopia is hardly a good reason to avoid discarding the dystopia that now presides"

assumes the 'presiding dystopia' could not be worse. Especially coming from you, an obviously keen student of 20th century mal-politics, such an assumption strikes me as very dangerous and foolish indeed.

Maybe it was simply rhetoric, for effect?

And there's nothing wrong with that, either -- it's political talk.

But, crashing the conventions, glorifying Chicago '68, isn't political talk -- it's something else. Politics assumes good faith in seeking compromise. Rioting is might-makes-right.

As far as those military bases, at least you haven't been dispatched with Zyklon B or a shovel in a Cambodian ditch. Maybe that's an angle you should consider alongside the other.

if i miss it, clue me somewhere upthread -- i'll return. i'll keep yammering along the lines of

(1) history has seldom for long offered any secular option to a natural envy/hatred of the rich. USA is a truly radical experiment, from the founders on up to us, in that there IS a secular option other than envy/hate. It's "why bother hating that rich guy when i -- or my kid if not me--can get rich too?"

long/short, that little thing right there is what creates our vast material progress.

(3) if it's 'material progress' that is wrong, then what the hell we're all doomed because the clever ape will keep building and inventing and creating capital (the token of transfer of value through time), unless he's kept in bondage.