You only just worked this out? — Banno

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."
~Warren Buffet (2006)

Interview 2015:

and Thomas Piketty (synopsis)


↪dclements I'm an economic democrat, so ... :mask: — 180 Proof

"The only war is the class war." The rich get richer by making the people poorer.

Workers create wealth through the various processes of their labor. The owners collect a portion of the worker-created wealth and keep it. The workers retain enough to maintain themselves, but not enough to become (even remotely) rich.

What about social and economic mobility?

There is some social and economic mobility in capitalist countries within the working class. Education, skill acquisition, brains, luck, hard work, thrift, and cooperative financial institutions can enable one to move up the economic ladder, but only a few get from the working class into the top tier of wealth. Home equity is one way many families have achieved upward economic mobility. However, there are numerous social and economic institutions making that upward mobility possible.

Post-1930s depression-era legislation and post-WWII programs created a lot of the opportunities that enabled many families to accumulate wealth. Without billions invested in road and infrastructure construction, without billions made available to finance the suburban boom (in the 1950s and 1960s), without FHA and VA loans, without expanded college education opportunities, a lot of upward mobility wouldn't have happened.

We like upward mobility, but there is also downward mobility, a less cheerful topic. — Bitter Crank

To give the devil his due, my hunch is it (discrimination against the poor) isn't intentional/deliberate - it can be likened to crime, but not organized crime if you catch my drift.

Again, like I've always said, the flaw is in the system and not the people. Can you blame people for taking bribes if their salaries/pay ain't enough to make ends meet? — Agent Smith

There isn't class warfare only because of the hopelessness of the situation. The poor have foregone hope.

No one should be poor in a nation this wealthy, but we aren't really a nation -- not in the most meaningful sense of the word.

And, yes, a big part of the joy of being elite is to have as many people beneath you suffering as much as possible; that's what gives your privilege substance. Of course they don't want us to be happy. The goal is to keep us only as subjugated as humanly possible without a revolution.

Lift us up, put us down, lift us up, put us down. And we're so saturated with media bliss, we don't even realize how wrong it is that so many of us truly live lives of fear and desperation. We feel alone; everyone else is happy. Most people are so desperate to be positive, because they want so badly to escape their personal hell, they'll even convince themselves everything is okay.

But yeah, this is no nation. We're divided at the core of what makes us human. For the people at the top, "America" is just PR. They feel no allegiance to this country (which is its people, not its resources.) — neonspectraltoast

I believe I already mentioned this before.

Supernatural, interpreted as something extraordinary, elecits/begs one of two responses:

1. Revision of our theories pertaining to the supernatural event: Science [we could be wrong, back to the basics].

2. Maintaining the theories pertaining to the supernatural event, but hypothesizing an entity/being that caused the supernatural event: Religion [we're right, but now there's something else, god(s)] — Agent Smith

“Supernatural” means above and beyond the natural world. It’s a valid, internally consistent concept. It’s also an empty, useless concept because we do not know the limits of the natural. We do not possess the means of verifying that some phenomenon is, in fact, above and beyond the natural world.

We have yet to discover all that is possible. We may believe phenomena such as lightning, walking on water, riding a winged horse, or rising from the dead are phenomena beyond nature, but we cannot know it. In the past, we might have believed someone in Africa could not have a real-time conversation with someone in South America. We might have believed that we would never be able to ask a tiny handheld box for directions home. Today, mobile phones routinely perform both tasks.

Old Theology ontologies often include supernatural beings and places: Gods and demons, heaven and hell, Bodhisattvas and nirvana. New Theology has no use for the concept of the supernatural. Until we know for certain the limits of the natural universe, we cannot know if something is beyond its limits. — Art48

:fire: You should be a billionaire! — Agent Smith

To demonstrate, here are some attempts at questions/ observations I think do have substantial interest.

What is generally understood, and what do I specifically understand, by the concept of God, and why? — SatmBopd

What phenomena is morality trying to comprehend/ address? Is it possible to comprehend/ address these phenomena in other/ better ways? — SatmBopd

What are the differences between my worldview and others’? Are these differences reconcilable? How or why not? — SatmBopd

What is the furthest extent of the capacities/ limitations of humanity? — SatmBopd

What are the capacities/ limitations of argumentation/ philosophy? Is there anything else that can exceed these capacities/ limitations? — SatmBopd

Excellent points, all.

In a rational world, that so many people of such divergent views can recognize how silly an argument is would give the proponent pause — and perhaps be inclined to open his mind to new vistas.

I’d like to think an old dog can learn new tricks. I’m proven wrong again and again. — Xtrix

The reason The Wealthy purchase or influence power is because the people with power are selling it.
— NOS4A2

Imagine actually believing this.

Put yourself in these shoes and consider it.

Frightening, isn’t it? — Xtrix

Laissez faire: cover for corporatism. — Xtrix

You should probably double check what that word means. — NOS4A2

That is what it means. — Xtrix

If anyone in a discussion with us is not concerned with adjusting himself to truth, if he has no wish to find the truth, he is intellectually a barbarian. That, in fact, is the position of the mass-man when he speaks, lectures or writes. — Jose Ortega y Gasset - The Revolt of the Masses - p.72, footnote 1

The reason The Wealthy purchase or influence power is because the people with power are selling it. If the state didn’t have that power The Wealthy wouldn’t be able to purchase it. The Wealthy do not have the power you claim they do until the people with power afford it to them, and even then it’s just the promise that the state will use its power to benefit The Wealthy. — NOS4A2

The Poor, with no wealth, can only purchase or influence power through less-costly means such as voting or protest. — NOS4A2

Both seek to influence power, actual power. Both desire the same ends: to use state power to benefit their preferred group of beneficiaries. — NOS4A2

A police officer has the legal right to use force against you. The bureaucrat has the legal right take your children, your home, your wages. They can put you in prison. I don’t think any other class of people has that sort of power in the statist system. — NOS4A2

Methinks the OP is onto something really important. It happened to Christianity. Church Councils were convened in which Christian doctrines were adopted not by argumentation but by vote (argumentum ad populum). The next generation of theologians then went to work on these tenets, reasoning backwards to axioms that would support them. This is just a hypothesis of course; cum grano salis. Modern psychology has a term for this: rationalization! — Agent Smith

Maybe you really are just too dense to get the point being made, so I'll bite and state it explicitly:

Corporations are run undemocratically. Unlike the government. To argue the former is OK and the latter not because the former is associated with "voluntarily" is simplistic, in the same way that arguing one is "voluntarily" associating with a state is also simplistic.

Millions of people have to work, otherwise they starve and become homeless. When you're poor, you take a job anywhere. This is why Amazon moves their facilities to places like Bessemer, Alabama or to a poor country. Paying people meager wages, giving them no say in what happens within the company, and hoarding 90% of the profits they all help to generate is unjust. At least on par with an income tax.

The problem is that you're too sick to see any of this, and find a way to bring it back to the state or ignore the problem outright. — Xtrix

Putin is the leader of a state. Yours is an example of an agent of the state getting away with such activity. But the phrase “the wealthy” also applies to people who are not agents of the state. — NOS4A2

Elon Musk, for example, doesn’t have the monopoly on violence, and any middle-class cop can toss him in jail should he break a rule. — NOS4A2

If the richest man in America and the poorest cop in America were to draw guns and point them at each other, which one could shoot the other and be applauded for doing so? — NOS4A2

It’s true, I do not equate the wealthy with the state because there are plenty non-wealthy, middle to low-class people who are agents of it. Similarly, not every wealthy person is an agent of the state. — NOS4A2

You keep telling me things are a given but on closer examination we find they are not, and are in fact the opposite of the case. It makes all this condescending language about my thinking and naivety all the more precious. — NOS4A2

I take in a lot of information daily and all of it I hear and understand, even if it is incorrect.

I cannot justifiably say any claim is NOT data, nor can I say it's data that points to a precise meaning, therefore all claims are justifiable.

I mean, what is printed here may be all I want you to hear, but any fray may give an imperfect address.

If you are uninformed laterally in all cases, is any case residual?

If a person means more than what they say, can a claim ever be justified?

But not all art is interpreted the right way... — Varde

This is a paradox one might come across if they consider God's omnipotence. If the answer is yes, then there is one thing he can't do (lift a heavy enough rock), which contradicts the definition of omnipotence (being able to do anything). The same applies if the answer is no. How would you solve this paradox? — Cidat

We can compare our naivety. If I’m so naive on the topic it should be easy for you to name a wealthy person who has committed murder and violence “just as much as the State has”; or name one wealthy person in Russia or China who has arrested someone and confiscated his wealth. I can give countless examples of States engaging in such behavior. — NOS4A2

It’s a good thing there are compassionate, not-so-wealthy people such as yourself out there spending your efforts to help the elderly, disabled, the poor etc. to compensate for the lack of wealthy concern. But in effect you’re not helping, but advocating that the state and the wealthy—others—should help the poor wherever you refuse to. Equating compassion with tax-paying and statism is one of the greatest evils in the history of mankind, in my opinion. — NOS4A2

The wealthy don’t posses the monopoly on violence. The state does. The state, not the wealthy, can murder you in the street with impunity, throw you in jail, or confiscate your wealth. . — NOS4A2

Slavery is still legal in the United States constitution, for example, so long the slave is the property of the American justice system. But if you’re fine with being controlled by politicians and bureaucrats, and those politicians and bureaucrats turn out to operate in the service of the wealthy, I guess that’s just too bad. — NOS4A2

I’m not sure why any community requires the wealthy or the state to help them. It’s not “a given” that this should be so. But I can go to any large city in North America, wherever the state is at its most powerful, and look around to see what your state help amounts to. Not a whole lot. — NOS4A2

Good collection. :up: Some videos have already been mentioned here.

If one doesn't have the time to read and someone is totally new to the subject, I urge looking at those (or listening while doing something else). — ssu

I get a similar feeling about statists. Since there are ways to care for others that do not involve state authority, I lean to the belief that those who are dependent on the state to care for others don’t really care for others. It’s just that they’d much rather have someone else do it for them. This isn't a liberal or objectivist critique of statist charity, as far as I know, but a Marxist one. As I mentioned earlier, the absence of a state would lay bare your compassion for what it really amounts to, and so far it’s not looking pretty. — NOS4A2

The state is mostly controlled by Capital to moderate, or manage, the economic imbalances produced by Capital's exploitation of Labor and Nature. The larger the scale and more complex / dynamic the economic activity, the more dependent dominant economic actors are on "the evils of the state" for more (cyclical) periods of stability in markets and society than would occur without the state; thus, it's not only in their respective and collective class interest to capture state policy-making but also to perpetuate the state's 'Capital-facilitating' functions (e.g. corporate welfare, socializing costs/debts of private profiteering, etc).

In this current corporatocratic, post-mercantile era, NOS, advocating "separation of state and economy" – pure ideology (Žižek) – is no less delusional than the notion of "separation of structure and dynamics" in engineering (or no less incoherent than "separation of mind and body" in theology / metaphysics). No amount of rightist-libertarian sermonizing can change this political-economic fact (vide A. Smith, K. Marx ... J.M. Keynes ... D. Schweickart). — 180 Proof

I’ve never understood the criticism of laissez-faire. Economic history, if there is such a thing, has invariably been one of statism and state intervention. Fascism, communism, progressivism, socialism—all demand the regulation of the economy, providing posterity with examples spanning the gamut of oppression and exploitation, ranging from annoying to despotic.

So what’s to fear in the separation of the state and economy?

Poverty, overconsumption, monopoly, wealth inequality, seem to me the common objections. Keynes said as much in his essay “The End of laissez-faire”. But all of the above are apparent in all systems, including in those in which Keynes was the architect: capitalism “wisely managed”.

But why should it be managed at all? Why should one serve the interests of the state instead of his own and his neighbors?

Upon thinking about it, Oscar Wilde was at least honest when he said that “Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others”. This attitude, I believe, represents the inherent egoism beneath the fear of the separation of state and economy. Without a state tending to the ills of the economy we would be required to confront that “sordid necessity” and to cooperate with each other based on our own personal initiative and resources. Instead of passively paying a tax or promoting this or that government service we would need to act and to do so voluntarily in order to affect any change. To “let us do” would be to lay bare our conscience and morality for what it really amounts to.

The state wedded to the economy is by now ubiquitous, and state intervention commonplace. It has absorbed all spontaneous social effort, as Ortega Y Gasset once predicted, leaving us to not fear the social ills, which are still with us every day and in every society, but the absence of the state and what we are to do in its stead. — NOS4A2

On Russian state TV: host (and modern day Goebbels wannabe) Vladimir Solovyov threatens Europe and all NATO countries, as not only Ukraine has to be denazified: — ssu

The idea runs around of loading minds up in computers. It's a recurring theme in SF culture and thought about the technological possibilities in the future. We can read on Wikipedia:

"Mind uploading, also known as whole brain emulation (WBE), is the theoretical futuristic process of scanning a physical structure of the brain accurately enough to create an emulation of the mental state (including long-term memory and "self") and transferring or copying it to a computer in a digital form."

I wonder if this can be done, even in principle. It presupposes that mind can be extracted, collected, and injected. I think mind is bounded to a living brain, and the living body and world the body walks around in.

Also, a simulation isn't the same as that what's simulated. Even if the causal structures of neurons are visible in the simulation, if you replace my brain by the computer on which its simulated, so my body behaves like me, there would be no mind left. It may seem so by the body's behavior but looks can deceive. In a dream you encounter people that behave as if they have minds but they don't. I can be conscious without showing but showing doesn't imply mind. The brain simulates. So a simulated brain would be a simulated simulation device. And what to think of the impossibility to create a neuron in a lab, let alone 80 billion connected living ones?

So what to think of the conjecture about mind uploading? — Haglund

Dammit, Spock! I'm a doctor, not a metaphysician! :nerd: — 180 Proof

Given the word philosophy is in the very title of this forum, it seems like a fairly straightforward question, "What is philosophy?"

The term itself, as we know, means "love of wisdom" from the Greek. But that doesn't help much until we know what "wisdom" means.

Interested in hearing various interpretations. — Xtrix

Can the notion of god or some form of all encompassing entity be reconciled with the fundamental basis for religions and then natural sciences? Need spirituality and science be at odds with one another or could they indeed both be describing the same thing from different perspectives? — Benj96

Yeah, that video pretty much sums up most of it. The main part is that people genuinely seem to be unable to understand that reasons don't equal justification. Putin can delude himself and his minions all he wants with his reasons, but there's nothing about Nato expansion nor his dreams of the old Russian empire that justifies any kind of invasion or war of any kind.

It all boils down to a simple question of national freedom: does an independent nation have the freedom to build its own security, including joining a security alliance? If the answer is no, then people can argue for Putin's justifications. If the answer is yes, then the debate is over and Putin is essentially the bad guy here. If no, then that leads to a whole bunch of follow-up questions that need to be addressed. What Russia wants, what it fears, how delusional it is about Nato or whatever argument there is for Putin's justification, it doesn't matter because, as the video ends with, Putin proved the justification for Nato's existence. It even forced Sweden and Finland to radically change opinions 180 about their will to join Nato. If Russia could just, like, fucking stay within their borders and do whatever they want in there, that's totally fine, then Sweden and Finland wouldn't have to think about Nato like this. But since Putin threatens the world as he does, even if that is just his Russian bullying bullshit methods, it really justifies having an alliance of security against such lunacy. There's no justification that can be done on Russia's or Putin's part, none. — Christoffer

If Russia wants to be alone, they can be alone, no one really cares about them as a nation, especially not now. If Russia wants to be cared about, if they want to be a global player, then no one is actually stopping them from it. It's just that they have to be involved with lots of globalization things that they just didn't like. And they can't have the cake and eat it too. They either join the rest of the globalized world, be a true partner, someone people likes, not someone they fear. Or they go down the route they've gone down now, to be someone to fear, to gain "respect" through that. It's bullying mentality really, the gangster/mafia method of gaining respect. It also means no one wants to deal with them anymore, no one wants criminals around them. If someone is consistently acting like a criminal, bullying, beating people up, and never stops even when everyone tells them to chill, then in the end people will turn their backs. To then be pissed because people don't trust them, to be pissed that people want security from them, so pissed that they attack in full force... that isn't in any shape or form justified. It only justifies their own demise and gives every justification for an alliance of security. — Christoffer

I find it remarkable the amount of defense Russia and Putin get on this forum. From the uneducated, the illogical apologists and the confused irrationals, not seeing how actually non-complicated things have become by the acts of Putin and Russia. We now have much more insight into Russia and Putin than ever, fully seeing what he has built up towards. Over the years there's been lots of apologists as well as fear-mongers and the discussions and debates have been raging without any real conclusions being able to be drawn since neither side had much to back anything up. This war really sided with the fear mongers, there's no question Putin lived up to their arguments and ideas. But still, the debate is ongoing for some reason. It's hard to look at bombed children and think there's any grey area to the justification Putin had for this invasion. It's crystal clear he's become the first superpower dictator since the cold war or even WWII. And there's no defending that, however people think they're clever arguing for it. — Christoffer

So the West is fully entitled to undermine the safety of others, but others may not even defend themselves? — baker

Well, I don’t think Tibet was an aggressor, or the Kurdish people who are under Turkish occupation. It seems to me that the West is applying some blatant double standards.

Also, if the West’s intention is to prevent Putin from using NBC’s, as it allegedly did in Iraq, then Ukraine is an unrelated issue. — Apollodorus

From what I see, NATO has been constantly expanding, taking in new members like the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, followed by others ever since. IMO it doesn’t look like a “dead man brought back to life by Putin” at all. — Apollodorus

And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does seem to have scuppered NATO’s plan to incorporate the country.
More to the point, as has been observed by some, Putin’s actions have put a brake on America’s plans to make Russia part of its NWO empire – at least for now. — Apollodorus

There is no need for Kolomoisky to be worse. I think it’s enough for him to be like or close to Putin. And with Ukraine being next after Russia on Europe’s corruption scale, it looks like it’s perfectly OK to be corrupt as long as you are a friend of America, as can be seen from the case of Saudi Arabia and others. — Apollodorus

I’m totally against any one power having total or almost total world dominance. My position is that each country and each continent should be free and independent. A multipolar world order is necessary to prevent the emergence of worldwide dictatorship. — Apollodorus

I was looking at the connection as way for the autocracy of the regime to be seen as serving the culture of the believers. Whatever sincerity may or not be involved, the appearance of service can be a strong element of social control. Putin seems to have been successful at getting others to think he wants what they want. The extremity of this action pulls the drop cloth off that action. The grinding destruction of what was supposed to be saved is not going back in the box before Pandora returns. — Paine

Absolutely fabulous! :100: :up:

If there's a video telling what I've tried to say, this one is it!

The only thing it left out was a) NATO's war in Kosovo and a) The Chechen Wars.

Thanks for finding that! — ssu

It's not clear, though, whether China wants Taiwan for itself, or whether they just want that Taiwan wouldn't come into US' hands. Because it's questionable how long Taiwan can maintain relative independence, even as it has ties both to China and the US. Would China still want Taiwan if there would be no US or similar power? Perhaps not. — baker