I don't think we're in disagreement here. I clarify Marx on the forum when others bring up Marx, but I generally don't bring up Marx myself in talking about policy in the here and now. Just as I would clarify Kant or Anselm or Aristotle or any other thinker if someone tosses them in and I thought it's a debatable point.

I do, however, find it relevant the fear of Marx and the popular intellectual game of trying to rediscover Marx's points without ever crediting Marx and insisting that Marx was about something completely different and wrong ... by people that haven't read Marx.

The issue for me here is more to do with propaganda; sometimes, as you suggest, there's no need to bring up propagandized names and new names can be coined for the same concept to out-maneuver the propagandists (such as saying 1% instead of capitalist ruling class). Other times, I think it's useful to call propaganda's bluff and unpack propaganda's game and explain what the words meant to the people using them at the time, or that still are, as this can strengthen individuals as well as the community's critical thinking skills in being more aware of how propaganda works.

So I think we agree here that both points of view are legitimate.

That willingness to play is obviously a part of Marx's observations of class but it does not make all other observations along those lines "Marxist." — Valentinus

Yes, my goal is not to retroactively expand Marx's writing to include everything arguably that fixes problems or then is a compatible extension with it. As I mention above, I wouldn't bring Marx into any specific contemporary policy debate, unless someone else does inaccurately and it's an opportunity to expose their ignorance and so undermine all of their other claims too.

However, since this is a philosophy forum, as mentioned above, my view is Marx is a relevant thinker to understand like all the other important thinkers. It's useful to know when and where an idea originated and how it has developed since and what historical actors and movements, explicitly or implicitly, used or were influenced by the idea and what happened to those people and movements. Though name dropping long dead thinkers can seem like haughty erudition, my view is the opposite is more confusing as it leads people to believe that everything was thought of yesterday (a laziness that leads to an endless stream of rediscovery fever and praise).

The heads of states. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, etc... The individuals that really took power, for me, they only used Socialism as a mean to inhibit their egoism, because they didn't accepted who they really were. — Gus Lamarch

Which is why I asked you to clarify what you meant by socialism. Most people do not qualify socialist as referring to the the leaders of dictatorships, but you are free to do so if you make your meaning clear.

As for your statement here, if you read a biography of Stalin or Mao, for instance, they seemed fairly lucid and accepting of their tyrannical ambitions. Indeed, when Stalin got word from his agents in China (in charge of helping to organize the soviet sponsored communist revolutionaries there) that there was a sadistic and crazy Mao guy killing and raping and torturing (and really enjoying it) as well as ruthlessly getting rid of potential communist leader rivals (who doesn't even seem to believe in communism, just opportunism for power), and so these agents recommended needing to deal with or sideline Mao in some way, Stalin sent word back: That's my guy, put him in charge!

However, that sadistic tyrant use social crisis and movements to take power is a constant throughout history, there is no special relationship to socialism.

"Socialist revolutionaries" (at least as described by their opponents, whenever convenient) also brought the 40 hour work week, child labour laws, worker safety, and built the social welfare states in Europe that have the highest quality of life (Finland now the happiest place on earth).

More so, the socialist movement that brought Stalin to power was explicitly vanguardism (the idea that a revolutionary elite need to seize power ... and ideas are pretty vague from there), which was an offshoot of more mainstream socialism in central Europe that was more democratic and incremental rather than revolutionary (that whatever socialists want to achieve, it must be first through sharing ideas and organizing with normal people and second through creating or strengthening democratic processes and third through those democratic processes; and if this results in compromise, especially in any short of medium term outlook, then that's fine).

Vanguaridism was fairly fringe and just not that popular in central Europe, which is why Lenin and co. went to Russia during a chaotic civil society collapse (due to WWI) and tried the Vanguardism theory there (which, mind you, is not what the "Soviet" movement was about; the Soviets were local democratic units wanting more local rural self-management and at least some representation at the state level, and the first Russian revolution resulted in a compromise situation with the aristocracy, of having a democratic representational house as a check on a house of Lords (that controlled the military), but in the wake of disastrous military defeats due to aristocratic incompetence, the Bolsheviks (still fairly fringe) just seized the parliament buildings and managed to cut deals with enough police and military units to consolidate power; most people didn't know what was going on at this point, and keeping the Soviet name was a good marketing tactic to undercut potential opposition.

My point is, social democracy or democratic socialism is just that, socialist and democratic and has a very different history than the Soviet Union and the CPP and it's also pretty clear why vanguardism would and did immediately produce dystopian totalitarianism states, and socialist opponents of vanguardism made all those arguments at the time (what they called the delusion of capturing the state).

Now, you can decide not to call it a form of socialism if you want, it doesn't matter to me, but what I wish to draw your attention to is that there is a historical project of self-described socialists that resulted in very different conditions than the Soviet union and has developed lot's of policies that we now have the benefit of being able to simply check that they work empirically (universal health-care, free and equal funded education at all levels, robust public transport systems, rehabilitation based justice systems, paid vacation, paid maternity leave, homes for the homeless, ownership participation of key industries by the state, hyper strong labour union protection laws ... and collectivist defense programs such as conscription that provide a credible deterrent to invasion at a reasonable cost).

PS__I didn't intend to disparage Marx, but to promote the linked article. — Gnomon

Yes, that's why I say you didn't need to preamble with a digression about Marxism, just talk about the article, but if you do preamble about Marx then it's fair to expect more digression about Marx. I have no problem with just considering the linked article's merit and implications; likewise, I have no problem discussing the Marx critique of capital and relation of it to this paper as well.

Both are "old news". Any 21st century solution to the problem of economic inequality will have to take into consideration the "invisible left hand" of the market casino. — Gnomon

But this is what Marx is talking about: capital accumulation has no natural balance, market transactions are not fair (favour the owners of capital) and the system destabilizes itself.

What the casino paper seems to be doing is simply a numerical simulation of Marx's model of unregulated capitalism. I see nothing in the paper nor in what you present to lead to the conclusion that such a numerical simulation is needed to arrive at the conclusion (just as numerical simulation wasn't needed to find Neptune or to tell us the sun will rise in the East tomorrow, though will of course simply confirm these conclusions).

Again, I have no need to digress into Marx to discuss the casino paper's content or implication, but if you want to disparage Marx, for whatever your reason, this seems like a poor choice of disparaging. Perhaps I'm wrong, that Marx has the right conclusions for preposterous reasons and this casino model finally brings us the right conclusions for the right reasons, but that seems far fetched.

This definitely describes the kind of people that enjoy the egoism of Socialism, but my point is that they use their rethorical power over lies to govern over the masses, i'm not saying that this is wrong or otherwise, i'm just pointing out that they don't accept their own greed. — Gus Lamarch

But who are you talking about?

If you're talking about Stalin, sure.

If you're talking about every single person that has tried to unionize (take some degree of control over the means of production) or that has founded a cooperative for socialist beliefs or the people who overthrew the Russian Tzar (not knowing yet the Soviet Union would become a totalitarian nightmare) or the communists that resisted the Nazi's (and were tortured when found), I'm just not seeing the greedy hypocrisy in all these cases.

You'll need to provide some argument that collective ownership somehow leads to the mental state you describe as a tendency, or then that the theory you are concerned with has an inherent contradiction such as self-interest based theories, we seem to agree, do have.

In regards to the discussion of the fetishism of commodities, it seems pretty clear from Marx that he was chastising identification of personal fulfillment with the acquisition of particular things. — Valentinus

I agree it is also a prerogative, a chastisement as you say; my elaboration was is simply to clarify that it's not prerogative in a way we understand fetish today (for obvious reasons). It's also not without philosophical content.

In my opinion, the philosophical content is that Marx is drawing attention to the religious transition happening in the development of capitalism: between devotion to the church and the immaterial well being of the soul and devotion to science and material wealth (all while claiming the previous social relations were also due to material conditions), in using fetish in the context of capital accumulation: that money is the new object of worship with mystical significance in a capitalist economy (greed of course existed before, but was not approved of; and church and monarchy could dominate merchants, and lords and priests could of course be accused of greed, but gold and power in feudalism operated differently than capital accumulation in capitalism).

However one interprets his program to make the world better, that observation is his rebuke to others and the device by which his insight is turned against him. — Valentinus

Could you elaborate on this?

I mean that all socialists (at least the politically active ones) use the method of hypocrisy to their advantage and this is the "doublethink", they know that what they say in most cases is not true, but they accept it as the only truth, because for them, that "truth" is the best one in the immediate case. — Gus Lamarch

Are you going to even define socialist for us?

Would you agree with the first paragraph of Wikipedia:

Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production and workers' self-management,[10] as well as the political theories and movements associated with them.[11] Social ownership can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.[12] There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them,[13] with social ownership being the common element shared by its various forms. — wikipedia

So please, defend why "all socialists (at least the politically active ones) use the method of hypocrisy to their advantage and this is the 'doublethink', they know that what they say in most cases is not true, but they accept it as the only truth" for this large class of theories, or then define socialism if you don't agree with the above definition.

For instance, does socialism to you include regulation and progressive taxation? Or only collective ownership of one form or another as the wikipedia entry?

I think a better theory of hypocrisy is with regards ideologies that view self interest as fundamental to market transactions and deregulation and lower taxes as good things that also happen to benefit the private interests of the speaker. Isn't it by definition self-interest to propose an ideology that, if implemented, furthers' one's self interest, and therefore, by definition, a hypocritical position?

Not to say you are a proponent of such a theory, though you are welcome to elaborate your own view, but rather, because you have a keen eye for what kinds of people and theories are hypocritical, wouldn't this be a better fit to the hypocritical pattern: belief that self-interest is justified, therefore reasoning backwards to what ideologies promote one's self-interest (regardless if the ideology is true or not)?

Marxism is old news, based on outdated science. — Gnomon

For example, Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" theory suggested a more positive interpretation of self-interest inadvertently producing unintended social benefits. — Gnomon

Why is Marx old news but not Adam Smith?

Furthermore, Adam's Smith's invisible hand was about patriotism stopping capital flight from the imperial center, England towards their colonies.

And on this point, Marx was right that capital will relentlessly go where it's gonna get the best returns; i.e. patriotism be damned, to which any modern economist will say "of course". So Marx seems to have the modern view of things on the invisible hand business you bring up.

Furthermore, the central economic prediction of Marx is that capital accumulation is relentless and without an internal limiting natural balance (until the system destabilizes itself), exactly the same prediction the casino market arrives at.

Adam Smith also has this basic prediction and a large part of the Wealth of Nations is about what the sovereign needs to do (what state intervention is necessary) for the system to keep functioning.

Where Marx disagrees with Smith are on these potential fixes. Marx is a market economist who sees the market as more efficient than the previous feudal order.

As such, Marx and Smith are in complete agreement on the production capacity of free markets (for this reason Marx views the early stages of capitalism as a good thing). Marx's prediction that free markets will lead to large iniquities (large capital accumulations) and labour arbitrage and other advantages of capital will out-maneuver "parliamentary" (first-past-the-post representational systems) was essentially immediately proven correct in the 19th century leading to the predicted "destabilization" of WWI (which included a "communist revolution" that predictably failed due to not being global enough) and then repeat of the same processes leading to WWII with massive Smithian sovereign interventions that stabalize the system ... but, as predicted by Marx, capital accumulation wins out in first-past-the-post representational systems (but there are much more equal society's in direct democracy systems, that Marx viewed favourably).

Marx also has extremely modern elements to his economic theory such as the roll of psychology in the free market: that the desire to accumulate more capital is a psychological feature that will dominate the market; in contrast to the "fair Aristocrat not motivated by money but rather honor and justice etc." view of the elite; that the Aristocratic elite of the time definitely viewed themselves as, going so far as to having a game of not touching money to symbolize this. Only recently are economists bothering to deal with this obvious fact (that people who have read Marx have pointed out but also people with a knowledge of philosophy) that simply because something has wide utility, such as money, doesn't justify accumulating as much as possible (one still needs a goal to justify this process and if one has a goal, one will presumably spend money on this goal rather than accumulate it indefinitely). It's fairly recent and extremely modern accepting indefinite capital accumulation is a psychological feature of the market and there is a modern psychological explanation for it which is people compare themselves to their peers and as they get richer they just continuously update their peers as equally rich. Marx doesn't have this modern scientific explanation, but the conclusion is accurate (that there are enough of these people to always push capital accumulation further, and whoever doesn't loses) and this psychological feature in his economics was proven correct with time and with modern psychological and sociological methods.

There's of course a lot of completely wrong predictions Marx makes and Marx mixes moral judgments into economic theory (again a very modern twist, but I agree not scientific in either case), but the unfair position of workers (most people) leading to ever greater and global concentrations of capital and so an oligarchic tendency of unregulated markets is pretty much the essence of Marx's critique of capitalism; the predicted market crashes happened, and the organizing of labour also happened, but the global communist revolution did not (and I don't think will) happen (rather I disagree with Marx's view that industrialism is good and workable, regardless of who owns the means of production, and so I predict either ecological collapse or de-industrialization and a return to more local economies that do not really fit in the Marxist conception of the future).

Now, I understand that in the States it is safer to approach foundations of social policy with "Marx was wrong ... but" or "socialism is wrong and can never work ... but" and also just assume Marx is all bunk without ever reading Marx; however, this is a safe space to get to know any thinker. It's a safe bet that Marx is not likely the most negatively propagandized (non-religious founder at least) thinker of all time because he had nothing accurate to say. The creation of the middle class was a Marxist project by people self-consciously using broad elements of Marx's economic theory, just differing with Marx on the moral objective of economic policy; and, inline with Marxist theory, almost immediately after the purpose of creating the middle class (avoiding Soviet expansion through communist revolution) disappeared, capital is immediately dominating labour through global labour arbitrage and even more intensely in first-past-the-post representational systems and the middle class is dwindling leading directly to labour agitation and instability (where is the middle class rising in contemporary times that proponents of capitalism point to as success? China, where every economists has read Marx and the sovereign intervenes extensively as Smith recommends).

This doesn't really have anything to do with your post, but if you want to preamble your with a digression about Marx I thinks it's fair to then expect responses that digress about Marx.

No shit. Been learning philosophy since 2005 on online forums. That makes it 14 years of interacting with people. — Wallows

Yes, my point was to just learn the things you want in the dialectical manner you prefer; but perhaps get more structured about it. I.e. do what your doing but at the next level of intensity and challenge.

You know what makes me mad, apart from losing the old database, which I will buy back from Porat once I get enough funds. It's seeing people come and go. What the fuck is with the turnover rate here? — Wallows

The old database is for sale?

I recently ordered Kripke's Reference and Existence and feel like a fucking moron for not being able to even read some of it. Infuriating shit in my little world. — Wallows

Kripke won't make much sense unless you are really concerned about how language works and the history of the problems he's trying to solve. They are all unsolvable in my opinion, but it's useful to be aware of them. What are called "solutions" are, in my view, just pointing out how previous solutions don't work, and none of them do and none can. Language is fundamentally mysterious to us, as is our process of decision, as is our consciousness and experience, as is our existence, as is existence in general.

It's easy to check this, in my opinion, in considering primitives such as "truth". We cannot define truth without claiming our process of definition is true, presupposing we already have the concept of truth to then claim each step in our definition process is true and likewise our conclusion about the truth is also true. There is simply no way to abstract out of our concept of truth. We can describe the operational affects of what deciding something is true or not-true would be, either for ourselves or for others, but this doesn't solve how and why we come to actually believe something is true or false nor again explain how we could attempt an operational definition of truth without following through with the predicted pattern of presupposing our reasoning process is true at each step and so on. The concept of truth is one of many primitives that "boot up" our entire reasoning ability, and that we can then turn our reasoning towards these primitives is a bizarre feeling but does not allow us to escape them.

I have a question to you to just spark a debate. Is the number 2 an empty name, and if not what does it signify? — Wallows

In sticking to the "rules and primitives" approach to language, we learn "discrete entities" in this primitive real experience associated with words way. However, there is no logical basis to assume discrete entities exist to begin with (indeed, we can follow discrete logical steps to conclude two is an illusion and all is one or then continuous flow of indivisible substance, quantum fields or contextual relations or whathaveyou, within which no discrete thing can properly be delineated from the whole, and then double back and claim our discrete step reasoning process was likewise equally illusion.) That we understand what two means does not guarantee that two discrete things actually exist, in substance or conceptually. So, two maybe a primitive that we understand, but all options are still on the table as to what individuality means from which there maybe only one thing ... or maybe two or more things. In terms of foundation of mathematics, the situation is even worse as there is nothing even to find.

My business with language is to understand it insofar as it is needed to increase the effectiveness of my political consequence (as the utility of language assumes other people are around), and again it is a mysterious process that words have consequence, but insofar as it is the case, they must be cared for.

I learn in a dialectical manner — Wallows

Then just learn on this forum.

Assuming you want to learn philosophy as you're posting here, get acquainted with a philosopher or philosophical position in whatever brief way you enjoy, and then just post your thoughts here and discuss with others, or then jump into conversations already started.

If you are interested in your own reasonings, this is a good place to test if they hold up to scrutiny and to learn new things and issues to include in your reasoning.

As for books, there are lot's of collections of the key parts of "a bunch of philosophers", on one theme or another, that bring together the famous passages of the authors in question.

There are also philosophical traditions that value brevity and don't value much which order things are presented, such as the Tao and zen. In the western tradition there are famously brief authors such as Spinoza and Wittgenstein and famously disordered non-systemic writers such as Montesquieu and Leopardi. There are also modern "intense reasoning" essayists such as Russel. There's also a philosophy magazine (philosophynow.org) that provides short articles on philosophy subjects. There's a podcast History of Philosophy without Any Gaps (historyofphilosophy.net) that delivers the goods fairly impressively in roughly 20 minute episodes per philosopher (mostly).

If you like the Republic I can almost guarantee you will love Boethius.

I somehow did not see this reply so am replying now, rather late in the day. — Bartricks

I'm not convinced of this statement, but that of course does not make it untrue.

No I didn't. Why might a surgeon sometimes be justified in performing surgery on someone who cannot consent? When not doing so would result in a great harm to the patient. — Bartricks

You don't seem to have bothered to have read the argument.

Greater harm according to who?

Isn't letting the unconscious person just die avoid harms? Isn't this a lucky case where a person has returned to pre-conscious state and without intervention we can avoid all the harms that this person may experience if they continue to live?

This is the point in this example. The surgeon cannot know what the patient's definition of harm and not-harm is; the surgeon may also even have a basis, in some situations (such as attempted suicides), to assume the patient does not want to be saved.

Saving the patient cannot be based on the patient's consent and guarantees further suffering of one sort or another.

Therefore, if we don't know, and lack of consent is "default wrong", then the default position should be to do nothing for the patient if "default wrong" is to mean anything at all.

The surgeon is imposing their idea of morality on the unconscious patient without any thought at all of what the patient may or may not consent to. If the surgeon considers the the consent of others it will not be the patient but first the governing laws and who applies them, and only if these laws allow family members' thoughts to matter (cutting life support in brain-dead cases for instance) will the surgeon consider the thoughts of family.

You previously stated it's default wrong if there's no consent and it significantly affects the person; isn't the unconscious patient in such a position of no consent and any life saving action significantly affects them?

Aren't parents doing the same thing? Aren't they imposing their idea of morality on their future children in deciding to have and birth a child, without any thought of consent?

You have not explained how "default wrong" affects the case of parents but not of surgeons.

You want to fall back on "of course surgeons will save the patient, more good than harm" and have a completely normal view of the thing, but the normal view of parents having children is likewise viewed by society as, in itself, a good and happy thing. Most people, such as yourself, are not concerned about the consent of unconscious patients, but, likewise, most people are not concerned about the consent of the yet-to-be-conceived.

Furthermore, now your position seems not to have to do with consent but is:

Now, compare that to a procreation case. Does not creating someone result in a great harm to them? No. — Bartricks

Not only is this the consequential argument, not having children avoids harm to them, but it's an extreme version where it is assuming all children suffer great harm.

Parents obviously disagree. If you're argument is the birth process is painful to the new-born and there will certainly be other instances of pain, regardless of whether on the whole the infant grows up to be happy about life or not, as stated above we can say the same for the unconscious patient.

Please note, this seems to me exactly the same as for the unconscious patient: recovering from surgery will be painful, one maybe in chronic pain indefinitely, if living is generally bad we can assume this person's life will be generally bad if revived. Doesn't letting the unconscious person just die avoid these harms?

If you're argument is that others would be sad, isn't that incompatible with your Kantianism as everyone should actually be happy that all further harms to the individual has been avoided? And it's certainly not a Kantian's business if people are mad about being wrong about something?

Are you reverting back to your original argument that it's the lack of consent that's the problem? Or are you changing your argument to the extreme consequential argument that living entails lot's of suffering?

Please clarify.

So, sometimes - sometimes - we are justified in doing something that significantly affects another person without their prior consent when failing to do so would result in a great harm befalling them. — Bartricks

First, to simply recap what I say above: doesn't letting the unconscious person die avoid further harm, especially if life in general is more harm than good? Where exactly is the harm if the surgeon let's an unconscious person drift off to death?

Second, whatever your answer to the above, why isn't having children one of these exceptions?

If a couple invokes your exception rule because either not-having children will make themselves sad and the potential-grandparents sad, or then because they view life in general more good than bad, or then because without children the old will suffer when there is no new generation to keep society running, or all of these and more reasons, seems they can just invoke your "sometimes - sometimes" rule.

Furthermore, if "more avoiding greater harm" can overrule consent, isn't avoiding greater harm the default principle? I.e. consent doesn't matter, what matters is the avoiding harm principle as the usual consequentialist anti-natatlist position?

And none of your answers even addressed the issue of government significantly affecting people, both currently living or yet to be born, all the time without consent. If you're reverting back to consent being the real issue rather that the presumption that being born is harmful (which seems to be the basis of your argument now), why are you fine with government disregarding the consent of children, the yet-to-be-born, anyone who rejects the social contract and refuses to consent to anything, why does "lack of consent is default wrong" not bother you in essentially any other case where we ignore consent without a second thought?

No need to apologize.

We seemed on the same page, but it's a page worth discussing in fine detail in my opinion, which is why I asked more clarification.

In my first comments I did not make the distinction between honest and dishonest critical thinking.

For, one can engage in critical thinking in order to create propaganda to circumvent people's critical thinking defenses. Likewise, a community of this sort of critical thinking can exist.

So your point about dishonest intellectuals I completely agree with (why used "arguably critical thinking" to leave room to make this distinction).

I completely agree I would not equate "intellectual" with "honest critical thinker", as you suggest; for an intellectual can be dishonest and using critical thinking skills to undermine an individual's or even public critical thinking.

Which is why we are here having this debate.

Dishonest intellectualism has taken over large portions of the public sphere, and not simply intellectuals (that are part of a cult like Randianism) being dishonest about what they think is a good argument, but the whole hearted embrace of doing away with even the pretense of trying to be intellectually honest -- because, in my view, intellectual honesty had started to adapt to "dishonest pretending to have an argument that passes even cursory scrutiny" (reality was catching up with the lies) and so it was necessary to just jettison the entire framework of critical thinking, get behind Trump, to stay politically relevant (to keep and, if possible, get more power).

As you point out, it's not at all clear how to deal with it.

Essentially all of my posts here are with the objective to develop a better methodology than current practice to deal with this collapse in trust in critical thinking (which is different than trust in institutions, which may very well no longer deserve to be trusted; the root cause of our predicament in my opinion).

The community of honest critical thinkers, precisely because dishonest critical thinkers usually avoid them or must anyways be ignored for practical time constraint reasons or then get too angry to deal with so require self-censorship to be around -- the community of critical thinkers does not have, based on our usual debates among ourselves, the skills needed to deal with the collapse of critical thinking as an obvious public sphere objective. How do you debate the idea that critical thinking can simply be ignored?

It's not simple and not necessary with regard to finding the best critical arguments as-such (non-serious arguments, such as computers programmed for gibberish, can simply be ignored), but, due to circumstance, it has become politically necessary (just as if a large group of people suddenly started to believe the random ramblings of a computer, it would suddenly be relevant to discuss what the computer is actually saying and why it doesn't pass critical scrutiny nor should we expect it to).

In other words, in such times, it becomes necessary to form "team critical thinking" (which, almost by definition, is addressing other critical thinkers) and to craft arguments that are as immune as possible to critical-thought-rejection (arguments of which the basis is calling out the intellectual dishonesty of the opposing side: lot's of people are working on this, and I think progress is being made; engaging in this forum is one of my contributions to this effort; that not only are arguments wrong but dishonest).

In this particular conversation, the piece of this methodology I am trying to fashion is "how far can one reach out with the fig leaf before falling over". My purpose is that any methodological improvements I make can be used in other contexts; for instance, useful source of content to benefit your students or then useful reflection upon which to create such content.

I agree that arguments should be made as accessible as possible, useful tools in the trenches as you put it. Likewise, not everyone has the ability and time to become a widely read and sharp critical thinker. I place no moral value on having such abilities and time, only the responsibility to use that ability and time to the benefit of others (how to craft arguments that protect people from manipulation without leaning into manipulating them). In other words, how to use critical thinking to benefit less-powerful-critical-thinkers? Not an easy question, as I'm sure you're perfectly aware, and it is more a question of interpersonal trust than the content of such arguments in themselves, as I'm also sure you're perfectly aware, but, that being said, it is still better for the critical thinking community to craft the best arguments for the task possible (in an open way that anyone can review and improve upon) for the benefit of those that happen to trust them.

Thanks for clarifying further.

Although I'm still not sure what your position is and where you disagree with my points.

I was careful to chose the words "arguably critical thinking course or group or forum" since I'm aware we can argue who and where honest critical thinking is found, but in so arguing we are attempting to create a critical thinking community about critical thinking communities, and in so doing we will inevitably find some arguments are serious and other not. For instance, we would probably agree that programming a few computers to say gibberish to each other is not serious critical thinking discussion; there maybe a grey area between what we agree are serious criteria for a critical thinking community and what's permissible, but, based on our conversation so far, I think we will be largely in agreement.

Precisely because we have limited time, as you point out, we must inevitably make a serious / not-serious distinction to organize our time; positions that can't be taken seriously, because they simply don't pass basic critical scrutiny, are not discussed, not because it's important to discuss every world view in exhaustive detail, but because other people believe it and it's politically important.

If a large number of people weren't racists or fascist, you wouldn't mention it at all. Likewise, if a large number of people didn't subscribe to "altruism is evil ... but a government that neutrally protects my property rights rather than the selfish interests of the people that control said government is still possible" we wouldn't be discussing it.

I'm not sure if you're trying to edge-wise defend Mormonism as credible or "credible light" (a apologetic of why other people believe without defending the underlying beliefs are believable), but if so, why not Scientology? Is it because thetans don't pass critical scrutiny better than Jesus flying to North America? Or just because it's been largely discredited in popular culture and can be more easily dismissed (popular culture has managed some level of critical scrutiny that can be relied on in this instance).

If you are trying to defend the ancient wisdom contained in the Bible and not Mormonism, then I would suggest making a distinction between what might be ancient wisdom and worthy of review and reflection and what is not ancient wisdom.

There are approaches to theism, the Bible, other religions, that pass my definition of "can stand-up to critical scrutiny, or, at least, very difficult to demonstrate not withstanding". If you have what you believe is a serious argument for Mormonism, post it in the religious subforum and I'll engage.

I am a theist and a Christian, but I have no problem with the idea there are lot's of cults around of all sorts of kinds, some referencing the bible. I have no problem arguing why the book of Mormon is not seriously compatible with the Bible.

I, likewise, have no problem requiring myself to resolve any internal contradiction, in doctrine or factual claims, in the Bible by appealing to symbolism, historical development of the key themes, or by taking the position that a passage, or entire books, that I cannot resolve reasonably, has been selected or miss-transcribed due to political motivations and I simply remove it from the Bible (i.e. I cannot critically defend the selection criteria that led to what's in the Bible, and so do not defend the content selection).

However, as points out, we cannot simply assume to have the truth, either specifically or as "one of the serious things in our serious basket" and work our way backwards; in making a distinction between serious and not serious critical arguments, the epistemological position is taken that critical thinking is the path to the truth. It can be explained why things in the "catalog of not-serious arguments" don't pass critical scrutiny but it cannot be explained why such things are 100% for sure totally wrong; one is, at the end of the day, betting on critical scrutiny, perhaps for reasons that pass critical scrutiny but such reasons are not compelling for those who reject critical thought.

So, if one of the not-serious-things is correct, such as my lampshade as god, then it is correct in a way that all "serious critical thinking" turns out to be incorrect.

My world view is constantly adjusting itself according to the information/knowledge I acquire, and I don't think much of the idea of a rigid, unchanging, unshifting world view. It will crack and break. — uncanni

But is this really true? Or an attempt to extend the olive branch to various communities that don't really care about critical thinking, or then an edge-wise criticism of supposed critical thinkers that are not open minded enough to "really engage" in critical thinking (for by definition we must open our minds to new ideas to be able to critically review them).

Are you willing to shift in your use of the law of non-contradiction? Or are you rigid and unchanging about that? If you discovered a unresolvable contradiction in your worldview would you entertain the idea that it's simply not a problem, that you can shrug it off and keep on defending a position you know to have an unresolvable internal conflict? For my part, I am completely inflexible in this regard, so we may simply be differing on this point; I maybe wrong about this, perhaps condemning myself for having faith in it, but this is my position, that resolving contradiction is the bedrock of reasoning and the truth, whatever it is, must be something that can be built upon it.

I don't understand your point, can you expand on it?

I don't think I have said anything that suggests I disagree with what you are getting at here. — ZhouBoTong

Yes, my point was simply to make the starkest possible contrast, precisely because you are here, on a forum right now arguably welcoming of critical thinking -- and discussing theological and other matters. Serious philosophical theists will argue they are not "starting with the 'truth' then using critical thinking in an attempt to justify or prove the already known 'truth?", but rather starting with first principles, whether that passes critical scrutiny will be what's up for debate.

Here is where I am getting confused. Can you point me to the best example of "serious theology" using critical thinking to find the truth? — ZhouBoTong

By "serious theology" I am not assuming here theists are correct. A theology course or group or forum will also deal with arguments that all theist arguments are wrong (either as a category or then one-by-one theist arguments turn out to be wrong) and likewise arguments that we cannot possibly know.

Nor am I assuming that that any position with respect to serious theology, taken seriously by critical thinkers, is correct. For instance, I could claim on the theology sub-forum right now that this lampshade is god (to the exclusion of other lampshades and material configurations); I wouldn't be taken seriously, but not because I "am for sure wrong" -- maybe god did decide to be contained in this lamp-shade -- I wouldn't be taken seriously because my argument does not pass critical scrutiny.

My whole point here is that critical thinking cannot out right own the truth. It is a faith based assumption to assume the law of non-contradiction is true as well as other argumentative methods (that we generally try to either derive from non-contradiction or at least pass credibility by showing consistency with it).

In other words, the critical thinking community is a faith-based community, labeling arguments as "serious" and "not-serious" and "maybe serious with significant amount more work or evidence (i.e. if my god as lampshade tells me the future of sporting and political events without fail and intimate details of your life and thoughts, and I'm able to demonstrate this, maybe you'll take my argument more seriously ... but I can't demonstrate this, which is the point you'll be making meanwhile)", in relation to what passes critical scrutiny, or then, at least, very difficult to show does not pass critical scrutiny.

This faith maybe wrong, things that don't pas critical scrutiny (my lampshade is god and you should believe it even without any supporting evidence) maybe the truth. If so, however, the entire critical thinking community is on the wrong track, critical thinking is a barrier, potentially a permanent barrier, to knowing the truth.

If I want to develop my lampshade religion I will need to address myself to people that do not have such a barrier to belief; but perhaps I will have luck with those enticed by confident assertions, material benefits and longing for a sense of community -- perhaps their innocent eyes can see the light.

The novice critical thinker will say "but without critical thinking there is no way to identify as special one absurd theory from the next; why is your lampshade god but not my spoon" but this may simply be the case, that critical thinking isn't helpful and the best that can be done is to roll the dice between lampshade and spoon and everything else: that those people who I find and manipulate to believe in the lampshade will be saved, and the critical thinkers who scoffed will be doomed.

Otherwise, your argument is fatal, we must assume to possess the truth from the outset before critically reviewing anything we consider a candidate for the truth in our bag of tricks; which is a position that does not pass critical scrutiny. It may very well be that the truth is behind none of the doors we are trying to open nor might ever try to open, but rather behind us, through what we have come to believe is a solid impermeable wall that presents no visible pathway nor any special identifying features compared to all the other solid impermeable walls, that we stroll by obliviously. It is only in throwing oneself without hesitation or doubt at one particular wall that one can take the train to Hogwarts, and those that do not are forever lost in the labyrinth and are eaten by the snake.

Those that have a different faith, to critical thinking, will hear such things and say "yes, yes, the critical thinkers are no better; their faith leads them astray, their own words condemn them; they have been deceived by the prince of deception, do not listen!"; which is not what I'm saying here, but they will not bother to think things through any further, that is what I am saying.

Completely agree, boethius is amazing.

After that, when all resources are exhausted and we have to get diabolical about it because we really have no choice, we're lucky if we have a Republican in charge because they're good at that. — frank

Republicans are good at running a tight governmental ship where nothing goes over budget?

I understand the cleverness you thought you were getting at, but it's based on the myth that republicans are efficient at what they just keep saying they are efficient at, and when you start to implicitly accept not simply myths but myths that are empirically false as part of your thought process, you have a garbage-in-garbage-out analytical framework.

You would still want a sane person motivated to do what's right in charge, even if times are tough ... probably you'd want it even more in tough times.

I don't disagree with much of what you have said, and yet I was certainly inspired to learn more about philosophy after arguing with Randians. If something seems obviously wrong, but is embraced by many, one can be compelled to research. — ZhouBoTong

Sure, but we can say the same about smoking, alcoholism and drug addiction, obesity, Trump's various statements (whatever you want to call the collection of them), activities leading to ecological collapse, slavery, organized crime, the KKK etc. whatever seems wrong I very much hope inspires research about why exactly it's wrong and what can be done about it. Doesn't make any social ill somehow 'kind of good' or a segue to philosophy that we should appreciate.

If there were no social ills and because of this people didn't philosophize much, just enjoyed life. I would take that bargain.

And by the way, haha, have you had a few bad experiences with the mormons? Why are their ideas more ludicrous than the rest of the christians? — ZhouBoTong

I didn't mention other Christians, though please, post why "Bible + Jesus showing up in america and planting some golden tablets (and cursing the native Americans etc.)" is just as consistent as just "Bible" in the religion sub-forum. If you bother to actually backup such an argument, I'll bother to respond to it.

If not, I did mention theology (philosophical theology) compared to how a cult operates: enticing people to join not with reason but claiming to satisfy what modern society does not provide (mostly a sense of community, but also networking for jobs etc.) and coercing members to stay (hassling and excommunication) compared to critical thinking about theology topics and what are serious arguments and approaches.

Please, join a course or group or internet forum that can be argued to be welcoming critical thought on religious and theological matters for a year ... then become a Mormon for a year ... then report back on the appreciation of critical thinking and exposure to challenges to beliefs and assumption in each group.

My point is, maybe Mormonism is right (Jesus flew to the Americas to spread the word to the lost tribe and then cursed the natives with red skin and gave permission to a latter group of preachers to marry (rape) as many minors (children) as they want and have as many wives as they want, even taking other men's wives, as it's gods will ... until it became gods will to bend to political expediency, while not actually, in principle, abandoning the previous position that's the real gods will; sure, it's in the realm of ontological possibility), but, if so, what we understand as serious critical thinking is entirely wrong: the approach, the methods, the content. If mormonism is right it is not the case it was a serious approach to theology that turned out to be correct, but rather that "serious theology is entirely wrong, that critical thinking is not a path to the truth".

We’re not playing a Sims City video game where you pick and choose your designs of society, you have to deal with institutions in the current existing world in order to reorient and change the established order step by step. — Saphsin

What do I say that contradicts this?

My point is that if industrialization is not sustainable then, if you care about future generations (if you don't this isn't an argument for you), industrialization will collapse along with the ecosystems.

Maybe this isn't possible to avoid, that all attempts will fail.

However, your argument seems to be "well, people like industrialization, and whether it's sustainable or not, we have need, for political expediency, to continue with it". Now, if you finish that argument with "... we need to continue with it until the ecosystems collapse", then your argument is sound and I have no analytical criticism. Our difference is one of values, I don't want the ecosystems to collapse.

You can argue industrialization is sustainable, this is an an empirical claim and requires empirical investigation and a lot of time; if you care about the ecosystems and future generations you will carry out such an investigation, if you don't care you will not bother to investigate (you can claim to care anyways, but critical thinkers might not agree that's consistent with your actions). My point is that our view of the current system depends on whether we think it's sustainable or not. If you make an empirical review you can't come back to the myth of progress and just patch it up with "ok, maybe it's not sustainable but that doesn't matter".

If global industrialization isn't sustainable, and if we view sustainability as a moral imperative, then we must try to change our production methods to something else regardless of the political enthusiasm from western populations, either due to not having time to think about it or due to being a beneficiary of the current system or due to profoundly not caring about sustainability. Such a political project is not guaranteed to succeed but if it's a moral imperative then it's simply the reasonable course of action to people who have that world view and ethics.

I don't have analytical criticism of people who don't share my world view and ethics. If someone doesn't care about future generations, wants the status quo and reasons that they should just promote the myth of progress regardless if it's true or not, I have no analysis for them. Makes sense.

My analysis is not directed towards people who don't care about future generations, but people who do, trying to untangle the myth of progress that might otherwise lead them to believe there is no alternative than an unsustainable system and that there are as good moral arguments for continuing an unsustainable system (graphs of gdp and whatnot) as there are for trying to become sustainable (even if it means dismantling global industry as we know it today, and rich people throwing their little rich people tantrums about it).

If you show me the best path to sustainability is more global industrialization, that what has caused the problem will solve it, then I'll accept that's what we should do. But such an argument requires more than hand-waving and vague references to "political feasibility", it requires a very deep empirical investigation that our problems can, in fact, be solved with more industry and small changes to the status quo. My investigation into this subject, so far, leads me to the conclusion that it cannot; that the energy required to run global industry, in particular transportation of large amounts of material, has no industrial fix, and the only solution is shorten the length material travels as much as is feasible (and, importantly, that internalizing the costs of global industry makes shorter-material-flows more competitive; it's not a radical change to the status quo in terms of using markets, but rather a radical change to the status quo in terms of letting the rich and powerful disproportionately dictate the regulation of global markets through their various known schemes to avoid sustainable regulations -- the throwing the hands in the air and saying "ah, well, we can't do anything about that" is simply not true, we can do something about it).

When I look at what is described when people mean by de-growth, you have to practically abolish the global market economy as it is to make it happen. — Saphsin

The issue is "what is good growth" and "what is bad growth". This requires an understanding of the system and where it's going but also a moral theory to be able to decide what's good and bad about where it's going; with an understanding of the economic-ecological system as it exists today and a moral theory it is then also possible to decide what is feasible and justifiable to do about it.

De-growth of globalized industry while growing local production, from the perspective of most people, is actually higher growth in terms of more activity, more things to do; if there is suddenly no mass imports made with slave-labour from China this is going to create room for local fabrication of a lot of things; an activity boom in most places importing from China (perhaps a total collapse of the Chinese economy, but overall more activity).

The core problem with "free-trade is always good" is that it does not account for the ecological costs of the infrastructure and ecological cost of the energy spent to physically trade globally nor the political cost of being dependent on a potentially coercive force (i.e. economists who present free-trade as "efficient" without considering the negatives, are just propagandists -- they are certainly aware the negatives can outweigh the positives, they just choose to ignore reality to fool their gullible students).

For a very large amount (though not all) of products, if you perform an an analysis where the negative externalities are internalized, suddenly it is not at all clear-cut that local production is not-competitive. So why not internalize those costs?

The only argument for not internalizing the cost of negative externalities is:

1. deny such negative externalities even exist (which is not an argument against the principle that negative externatilities should be internalized, just a coping mechanism for being unable to think critically when confronted with empirical evidence one is in denial as well as existing protection from negative externalities that one does not want removed) or

2. not valuing future generations that are most affected by those negative externalities (nor any poor person today affected by those externalities). This is a sound argument to not internalize externalities, but it is not compelling to people who do care about future generations and the poor.

3. society has no right to protect itself from negative externalities from individuals and companies (there is so many problems with this I'll need to make another post if people don't see the obvious fundamental contradictions).

Now, if negative externalities (ecological, social and political) are internalized (which is a case-by-case empirical question requiring empirical investigation), and a product is still competitive being centrally produced, I have no argument against it. For instance, if computer chips simply can't be made locally and all the pollution externalities are internalized into the cost, I have no problem with a centralization of this process. However, if you imagine a world where only things like computer chips or similar complexity are being transported globally, this is a massive reduction in global transport: yes, basically dismantling what globalize industry as we know it today.

A regulated market is trivially easy to render sustainable: you just enforce internalization of costs. It's also not even that disruptive to do this to most people, life improves without those negative externalities (that's why it's negative; the myth of progress is the idea that negative externalities are somehow good for you or intrinsically tied to good things). Who it's not good for are the economic elite who's wealth is tied to global scale infrastructure and material flows.

Now, I agree that the first step is social democracy, we need government able to regulate in the interests of people. But I disagree (with Marx) that capitalism will fail resulting in a socialist uprising that then results in communism. Capitalism (laws dominated by capital rather than people to allow those profitable negative externalities to continue; i.e. "money should be equal to votes, ideally directly but failing that through unconstrained ability for money to influence politics") will fail, in terms of internal contradictions, due to ecological collapse (something that has been revealed empirically, not knowable in principle), and if we want to avoid ecological collapse we need to do something about it before capitalism collapses due to ecological collapse, not afterwards.

And I also agree that part of this step is distribution of wealth (social safety net) so that people aren't subsistence wage slaves and have time to think about global issues and future generations and be able to review what really are negative externalities and how best to internalize those costs.

Vis-a-vis the OP, if communism results from this process it is not because of the failure of markets and revolution, but because enforcing negative externalities in a reasonable way simply makes local production more and more competitive until (most people) are living in relatively small communities and are no longer alienated and, through these direct relationships, money is no longer the principle medium of relation (might still be around, just not a dominant force).

I've answered all this already. — jamalrob

You haven't. My criticism is exactly the fallacy you continuously repeat such as in your next sentence:

We choose to measure specific metrics because they're the things we value, the things we want more of. — jamalrob

Yes, I get that your measuring things.

It's reasonable on this basis to describe their increase as improvements, and this doesn't entail ignoring the context. — jamalrob

This is your mistake. It is not reasonable to describe their increase as improvements in themselves, even less make the leap to "therefore things have improved generally" that "life has improved generally or for most people".

It does entail ignoring the context, that's exactly what it entails. You can only bestow a "moral satisfaction" about the metrics if you ignore the context, if you include the statement "all else being equal" (this is the catchall phrase to say exactly this: if we ignore anything in the context that might lead us to another conclusion, then we would conclude this metric going this way is a good thing) otherwise, the context can lead us to another conclusion.

If the growth comes at massive ecological costs in the future that are far more onerous than all the short term increases in the various metrics, then we can question that growth represents an improvement for humanity.

It's not something that can be resolved in principle, you actually have to go out and check. If you value sustainability then you need to actually go and checkup on the metrics that tell us something about sustainability and if the economic growth you find pleasing comes at an ecological cost you have to make an argument that it was worth it, the argument "I look at some metrics because I care about those metrics ... but I also care about a context out there ... but I don't bother to look at metrics representing that context" doesn't make sense.

If you don't look at ecological metrics: it's because you don't value the ecosystems! Otherwise, by your own logic you would look at metrics that inform us of the state of the ecosystem because you care about the ecosystem. If those metrics are going in a bad direction, you can no longer say "look at this growth, look how everything is going up, certainly a good thing". You need to make an argument that the trade-off is worth it, otherwise your argument is simply "if you only look at things that are going in a good direction then you conclude things are going in a good direction and we can assume will continue to do so".

You can't just throw in a patch-up that "ok, I care about other things too ... I just don't look at them closely ... but I'm sure things are ok over there and in the future". That's what your argument boils down to, a completely baseless assumption that whatever the costs have been, whatever they will be, we don't need to look at those costs closely.

You throw up a graph of growth as I'm sure you've been itching to do as soon as you sense the myth of progress has stood it's ground. But you don't put up a graph of "level of free speech in China" of a graph of "bio-diversity" or "a graph of global forest cover" or "a graph of cultivatable land" or "a graph of remaining seed diversity" or "a graph of ground-water stores" or "a graph of top-soil". You simply assume, if these really are problems, that we'll solve those problems. This is an empirical claim and requires an empirical investigation to know anything about. There are physical limits to what we can do.

However, if industrialization is inherently unsustainable -- that it's industrialization, whether capitalist or socialist or a mix of the two, that has caused the ecological crisis in a physical "cause-effect" relationship (the actual physical objects that make-up industrial civilization) -- then it's simply not reasonable to say "well, more of the same will certainly cure the disease it's causing". Maybe it can! But you need very powerful arguments to convince someone more of what's making them sick is actually going to cure them.

If industrial civilization is not sustainable, you can put up as many graphs as you want showing things, that I agree "all else being equal" are good things, but if the system those metrics are describing is not sustainable then all those metrics are going to crash (that is what not-sustainable means) so not only will you lose the things you haven't bothered to throw up graphs about you'll also lose those things you do like looking at graphs about. You can argue "ok, things may crash for future generation, sooner or later, don't really care; I value people today and an industrial way of life for those people", then your argument is sound, but what follows it that it's not compelling to someone who does value future generations.

And there is an alternative: non-industrial technological civilization, meaning local production and consumption -- which can include doctors, literacy, democracy, low infant mortality, longevity -- but with the critical difference that it can be sustainable and the critical problem that it is a very radical change. However, that it's a radical change and politically difficult to implement (departs from the industrial status quo) is not a counter argument if the thesis that industrialization (large infrastructure with globally integrated material flows) is not sustainable, is correct; it becomes inevitably the only option (again, that's what non-sustainable means), the only questions are "do we get there at all" and "how much damage do we let industrialization do to the planet before making these changes". In other words, if industrialization is not sustainable then we have taken a wrong turn and the further we go down that path the worse off we are.

It does make sense. If I lost my washing machine (income) and didn't have access to a launderette (infrastructure or economic development, not part of the HDI but significant for my example), it would make my life worse. To measure things at all requires the isolation of specific metrics. The ones we choose to measure here are based on the things we all value; they are factors that contribute to freedom, opportunity, health, leisure, and so on. — jamalrob

This is exactly what @Isaac is saying in the what you quoted. I'm pretty sure he doesn't disagree that a metric can be measured, but to say that it is therefore good or bad, the change requires extrinsic factors (an understanding of the system that isolated metric is apart of).

You cannot say an "to measure things at all requires the isolation of specific metrics" to the conclusion "therefore that metric has improved" and from there "therefore the system that metric is apart has improved", without more context (as well as a moral system from which to judge what is good and bad).

Which is exactly why you bring up yourself, "and didn't have access to a launderette": this is an extrinsic factor!

If we see laundry machine ownership is going down we need context to understand if this is good or bad, even from the perspective of just laundry. If people are replacing laundry machines with a more efficient laundromat service (new and cool uber for laundry) we may conclude "insofar as laundry is concerned, it's getting better", but again it's only a "judgement that it's good" if it excludes other extrinsic factors tied to laundry in general.

Now, if both laundry machines and laundry services are going down, you may say "well certainly that's bad" but again we need context. What if people were unnecessarily doing too much laundry and a campaign of awareness was able to decrease the laundry metric and we'd look at the decrease and say "this is great, the program is working, resources are being saved".

What if someone invents clothes that never have to be washed or can be just produced a new every time! Sure, doesn't seem plausible, but it's not plausible due to extrinsic factors, due to context, we must actually go and check this context.

Just as isolated metrics about a patient aren't sufficient to claim the "patient is improving", just like isolated metrics about a corporation finances isn't sufficient to claim "the company is improving".

If the context of all economic development is unsustainable, or comes at the cost of greater 1984 style tyranny, then, yes metrics have gone up and down, but there is no way to jump to the conclusion that "therefore things have improved". If you want to make a claim such as "life for most people has improved" isolating a part of "what life means" such as tracking a metric or two, doesn't get to that conclusion. The myth of progress gets to that conclusion through the various fallacies I have been deconstructing.

By definition to make the distinction between money and capitalism is to comment on the history of capitalism.

I'm not poo pooing the wheel. — frank

Yes I agree with your point about not equating money to capitalism, but your phrasing "It's not so much capitalism that unleashed human potential. It's money." seems to put special emphasis on money as unlocking human potential; seems a very ambitious statement relative other critical technologies (unless the author is saying the same thing about them too). Since this thread is on socialism and communism, I'd be interested if the author you cite, writing on the history of money and capitalism, is aware that, at least as how you phrase it as "unleashing human potential", seems an example of the fetishism Marx was talking about; does the author deal with this idea?

It's not so much capitalism that unleashed human potential. It's money. Read Jack Weatherford's book: The History of Money. He explains why money and banking transformed human life. — frank

But you can say the same thing about writing, or metal work, or the wheel, or essentially any technology required for our economy to work and the history of it's development. Money is a useful technology and has an interesting history, but it's one out of many such technologies.

You have done everything you can to deny that these improvements are improvements at all
— jamalrob

Well that's as good an example of begging the question as you're going to get, you've actually described them as "improvements" when what is at issue is whether they are or not. — Isaac

I've described them as changes in a metric, which I agree the various metrics discussed have changed in the proposed way (infant mortality, longevity, average material comfort).

I've described that to go from the observation of the metric over a given time to the idea of "improvement" is a moral judgement. It's this moral judgement that begs the questions: "improvement overall or improvement in one area at the expense of other, potentially more important areas" as well as "improvement for who".

For instance, China has recently announced that facial recognition will be required to get a phone number and each time you access the internet, in addition to existing mass surveillance, crackdowns on dissidents, and no free speech. It's a question that must be answered whether the increase in average material comfort for the average Chinese is worth while exchange for zero free speech and zero anonymous internet access (a freedom we are both enjoying as we have this conversation). Most of the reduction of poverty in the last decades has been in China, so if we are referencing China to support "progress of metrics" to support "capitalism and/or modernity has improved people's lives", we must actually resolve the question of "is it worth it to the average Chinese, the increase in material things at the expense of even more intimate surveillance and thought policing than existed before?" This is not a trivial question to answer. If you say "well millions of Chinese say it's worth it" well my question for you is "first are you sure it's worth it and they're not mistaken, and, second, do they even really believe this or do they just say it due to coercion from the Chinese state ... and people who disagree we don't hear much from".

I've also detailed how I have zero problem accepting some metric really is an improvement (a moral judgement of goodness) from some perspectives, with the analogy of the embezzling CEO, if he gets away with it and views selfish self-serving as a good thing then life has improved for the embezzling CEO. However, that an improvement exists from one perspective does not entail it exists from all perspectives. If a system isn't sustainable it is by definition "not a good thing" from the generations that will suffer the consequences of an unsustainable system. If we don't care about those generations, then I agree it's possible to conclude "life has improved", but this is just the tautology of "life has improved for those who think life has improved", and if millions disagree later, tough for them.

You know very well that I did not claim there was anything dishonest about repeating your argument and dealing with criticism. This is tiresome. — jamalrob

What then is dishonest? You've made this claim:

which seems likely based on the intellectual dishonesty of your recent posts — jamalrob

I'm defending against this claim not by claiming that you believe responding to criticism is intellectually dishonest but with the argument "I am responding to criticism and therefore intellectually honest".

It' you making a claim without any supporting arguments, my argument is those supporting arguments don't exist. So, back up your claim or then retract it, or then explain how "not willing to backup a claim nor retract it" is anything other than intellectually dishonest.

This is gibberish, but from what I can make of it it's full of baseless assertions, and baseless attributions of what you see as the enemy position. Diversion tactic? What are you talking about? — jamalrob

It's not gibberish. You've made the "baseless assertion" of "which seems likely based on the intellectual dishonesty of your recent posts" and "you missed the point, or else you're intentionally ignoring it".

And you qualify "intentionally ignoring" with "which seems likely based on the intellectual dishonesty of your recent posts", yet you have no supporting arguments for this, nor citation of where I'm being intellectually dishonest.

I point out your claim is baseless and provide an alternative claim, that I'm being intellectually honest with in addition to this the supporting argument that I am responding to criticism, and you view this as baseless and gibberish.

Ok, please also support your arguments here about why my argument with supporting argument is baseless and gibberish, yet your argument that lacks any supporting argument is honest philosophical work.

You missed the point, or else you're intentionally ignoring it (which seems likely based on the intellectual dishonesty of your recent posts). — jamalrob

What's dishonest about repeating my argument and dealing with criticism?

How do you know it's not that you have missed the point and how is argument I'm intentionally missing the point more credible than the argument you're intentionally missing the point and pre-emptively accusing me of what you're doing as a Trumpian-style diversion tactic that has proven to be extremely effective on those that lack critical thinking skills?

Please, share your reasons why we should assume prima facie that your argument throwing shade on my intentions is more credible than a similarly structured argument throwing shade on your intentions of throwing shade on my intentions.

The point is not simply that millions disagree with you, but that those millions disagree with you because they have benefited from the massive improvements that I mentioned. — jamalrob

This is in no way a problem for my argument. Drawing down the capital of a company to increase the income of executives, or even workers, benefits those executives and workers. If they have no analytical ability to question the long term affects of this or if they simply have no interest in the long term affects, then it's perfectly reasonable that they see such a management decision as beneficial to them and would be willing to argue it's "just a good thing in general".

Their lives have improved. For example, they have lost less children thanks to their improved access to improved healthcare, they've been able to send those children to school, they've lived longer and healthier lives, they've been able to buy washing machines to release women from day-long drudgery, and so on. In saying that these millions disagree with you, I wanted you, or people reading this, to see what you are saying, namely that these improvements are not really improvements at all--and thus to see just how misanthropic and reactionary your position is. — jamalrob

I totally understand that you want to play this gotcha game of catching me denying "children not-dying is good". And I totally get why you will simply continue down this path rather than engage in the criticism of this analytical framework I have brought up. The myth of progress is a foundational myth of our society, as with foundational myths in the past, society simply no longer makes sense without it and undermining the myth is to undermine the prevalent conception of society and invite disruption (and potentially the loss of what people who believe in the myth view as the ultimate purpose of society, and therefore cannot conceive of any change with respect to the myth as a good thing under any circumstances; i.e if you believed in sacrificing to the gods the whole purpose of society is to sacrifice to the gods and there simply is no potential criticism of the status quo of sacrificing to the gods from within the mindset of belief in the myth). However, as with previous foundational myths, the fact that "millions believe it" doesn't make it true.

The mistake you are making is only considering local rate of change. I believe the local rate of change of infant fatality is decreasing, I I believe this "all else being equal" or "without considering other metrics" is a good thing (decreasing child fatality is one of my priorities, just not the only one and improving this metric in a way that works only over the short term is in my view not a real improvement), but if the system that has made these changes brings us to an ecological collapse then we are worse off than we were before, the short term benefits were illusions in any general sense.

A CEO that embezzles money from their company and gets away with it is benefiting in a local sense -- I am not denying that there is a benefit from the perspective of the CEO, a benefit does exist in at least one conception of the world -- and if that CEO shares the loot around (perhaps to undermine people's vigilance to question him or go over the books that they otherwise might do) then those people benefit too in a local sense, but it is false to then infer there is a global benefit to the company, much less humanity as a whole.

There is simply no way to divorce the concept of "life improvement" from the concept of sustainability; you can say "well, maybe our system is not sustainable but it's improved my life and some other people's lives and that's what I care about" but that is to admit that there is no improvement in a general sense and also to admit that one's argument is by definition not compelling to people who do not exclude future generations from the concept of "what improves people's lives". If you tell me "look, the boomers made bank and capitalism was the main cause of that and a lot are now dead or will be dead before we even see what happens to the environment when pushed to the limits" I would agree with the conclusion that therefore, capitalism was good ... for the boomers (who only cared about themselves), I would not agree with any attempt to generalize to young generations now that will experience the consequences of past resource extraction and pollution dumping nor subsequent generations.

That is why the myth of progress is foundational, once the claimed progress has a cost attached there is no way to short-circuit the argument to "therefor capitalism is good" in any form of modernity, it becomes necessary to look into this cost and do a cost-benefit analysis over the number of generations that you care about. If capitalism comes at a cost of corruption and tyranny down the road as the concept of civic duty is dissolved in a corrosive sea of self-narrow-material-interest, ignorance-praise and wage-slaves simply not having the time to understand their political situation, or transferring a large proportion of the global means of production to communist China, then that cost has to be understood and factored in; one has to actually go and check what kind of system capitalism creates down the road, the argument that "well these metrics have gone from here to there" doesn't tell us what will happen in the future about other metrics nor even that metric!

If capitalism is not sustainable then by definition it cannot be good in any sense for future generations; so, again, one has to actually go and check if it's sustainable or not. You can argue capitalism is in fact sustainable, but this is a empirical argument that has to actually be made; you can argue that you don't care whether it's sustainable or not, you just want people to agree that some metrics have gone from A to B so far, but then you can't expect people to conclude anything particular about the system as a whole and its future.

What the myth of progress provides the proponents of the status quo is a reason to not check; if we believe some things have gotten better and those some things represent the whole and if we believe the future resembles the past then we conclude things will continue to improve and don't need to check any of the available empirical checkable things about the whole other than a few "some things" that serve as input to the argument, and if anyone disagrees we first accuse them of not caring about that metric (the gotcha I'm referring to) and then second we wave our hands around and claim science and technology will solve all problems in the future as they arise, even getting off planet if need be, while simultaneously dismissing the work of any scientists that claim our problems are here and now.

Well, only if they agree with her, haha. I get that even if one disagrees, Ayn Rand is inferior philosophy, but she spews some crazy shit that could spark philosophical interest — ZhouBoTong

Though we agree on what's wrong with Ayn Rand's arguments, I disagree here that Ayn Rand is "useful to get interested in philosophy". Ayn Rand is simply propaganda and Randians form what is in essence a religious cult. Saying Rand is a segue for "serious" philosophy is like saying Scientology is a segue to serious history or Mormonism a segue to serious theology. Now ontologically we can accept "Randianism maybe true" or "Scientology maybe true" or "Mormonism maybe true" but if they are, separately or together, the true-true would then be completely incompatible with "serious" philosophy, history or theology; to entertain these religions is to entertain the idea that serious philosophy, history and theology are totally wrong (otherwise academics, or whatever your standard for serious is, would be devoting a lot of time to the analysis of Rand, Scientology and Mormonism as a serious way to approach philosophy, history and theology).

All three groups operate as a cult, protecting members from outside criticism and the main reasons for joining the cult are either being born into it or nebulous notions of "benefit and community" apart from the content of what the cult professes to believe. When the Randian SCOTUS judge makes Ran prerequisite reading to be a clerk, it's an invitation to join the cult and not an invitation to disagree and seriously debate what Rand preaches and go over the criticism found on forums like this; if you come back a "Rand fan" then you maybe of some use to the Randians, as your behaviour can be controlled insofar as it leads to the most money compared to the alternatives (no principled objection would oppose bribes or blackmail) which the rich and powerful are in a position to engineer, and if you are already a Rand fanatic you maybe very useful indeed willing to do anything for money without any other ethical ideas that might muddle you up.

Are you saying that these are not improvements at all, because other problems somehow make them illusory? Millions would disagree. — jamalrob

Millions disagree with a lot of things I believe, doesn't bother me. I'm pretty confident we can find many things you believe where we can see millions disagreeing with.

Yes, other problems make many increased metrics (not all, specifically facets of industrialization) under modernity illusory (whether you attribute the increase to capitalist or socialist policies, or a mix leaning on way or another; which is also an important debate).

If an increased metric is due to a system that is not sustainable, then the idea that the increase in that metric (the objective observation) is actually an improvement (a moral judgement that what we are seeing is actually good), then it is an illusion that the metric increase represents an actual improvement.

It is a trivial exercise for an organization to draw down capital and spend the proceeds in a way that seems like income; but it is not the case that the organization is improving through such a process.

Executives and even workers may benefit in the short term by selling or mortgaging core assets and paying themselves a higher wage or even reducing the cost of their product or service (and so buyers also seem to benefit), but it is simply unsound to look at such metrics and say "things are improving; this is good business".

Of course, organizations do sell and mortgage assets, moving that money to the revenue side of the books is not what we'd base a judgement of whether it's a good idea or not: but rather, is that part of a sustainable plan? If it's not sustainable we'd say it's bad business, criminal if the plan wasn't even trying to make the business sustainable but just embezzling money out of the business to benefit a few, we would say it is then defrauding the shareholders.

The shareholders in this analogy are the people alive today but also future generations. If what we do today is liquidating the earth's assets and calling it income, we are defrauding future generations of those assets. It's trivial to show that by liquidating assets we can improve quality of life metrics in the short term (just as it's trivial that management can liquidate assets and pay themselves, and workers if they feel like it, a great salary today), and the faster we draw down those assets the higher the quality of life in the short term we can create.

For a while (since capitalism emerged) the organization "western civilization" and later "humanity" was doing bad business, drawing down assets without realizing it's not sustainable (not creating equally good assets for future production), but now the evidence is overwhelming that our plan isn't sustainable and so we have moved since a few decades to the defrauding the shareholders side of the analogy.

I said that "economic growth in capitalist form has made life better in several measurable ways", not that "there has been an overall improvement". If you accept that some metrics have increased, and that these increases have improved life, then you agree with the statement you said your were debating against. — jamalrob

This is the myth of progress in a nutshell.

The mistake you make is "that these increases have improved life". This conclusion does not follow from the premise "some metrics have increased".

A patient who's fever has gone down has this improved metric, so the patient does indeed have this going for them, if the patient's fever is decreasing because the patient died (which other metrics tell us) we cannot conclude the life of the patient has improved. The "improvement" of the reduction of fever is an illusory improvement, it "would otherwise be a good thing" if the patient was recovering.

You must add the qualification of "all else being equal" or "insofar as we are only looking at these metrics" to "that these increases have improved life" to turn it into sound tautology of just reiterating that the metrics have indeed increased.

This is the bait and switch fallacy, you are in the first part of the argument considering a narrow definition of improvement and then switching the meaning to "improvement of life" which is far more general. You want to catch opponents of the myth of progress in a "gotcha" of saying that the metrics in question are not an improvement; the way to deconstruct the myth is by proper analysis of what we might otherwise include in the idea of "life improvement" (such as social wealth) and that even if we agree on "human quality of life" what may seem like quality of life improvement, if is only short term, is potentially a metric of harm and not benefit; the local rate of change of a metric does not inform us of where that metric is ultimately going (the distance as the crow flies between you and your destination does not necessarily indicate how quickly you will get to your destination nor whether you will go over a cliff on your current distance-minimizing rate of change).

First you say you're arguing against the claim that "economic growth in capitalist form has made life better in several measurable ways" but then you appear to accept it in the next sentence. — jamalrob

I don't accept it in the next sentence. I accept that some metrics have increased, that is not the same as saying there has been an overall improvement. I go onto explain how this is possible with the example of the nurse and then later again with the example of cocaine.

I was trying to point out that any critique of capitalism that doesn't accept, or that disapproves of, the improvements that capitalism has enabled is worthless, or worse, reactionary. — jamalrob

I agree that we should look at whatever historical metrics are available objectively. Pretty much every post I've made has aimed to dismantle the myth of progress you are inferring here: that a few metrics prove a general point (a few cases a generalization does not make).

I do not view improvements that are not sustainable as improvements, they are the illusion of improvement, just as the rate of walking or running on the wrong path is not advancement; the more you go the wrong way the worse off you are regardless of how efficient you travel.

Otherwise I completely disagree with your basic argument that industrialization and urbanization are bad, but I didn't really intervene here to debate it. — jamalrob

The badness is in the non-sustainability of these systems, that has simply been the empirically verifiable result of what has happened in developing these systems. "You cannot argue with nature" as Feynman reminds us in the context of a small technological disaster, and industrialization is (in the context of human history) an argument with nature we are losing incredibly fast.

Marx does not use "fetishism" in this sense, and he arguably doesn't even use the word pejoratively. — jamalrob

I would argue Marx uses the term pejoratively (just not only pejoratively), and of course not using the sexual connotation "fetish" has today but the connotation the word had in the 19th century, which I agree you correctly refer to as "reification".

But to those not aware of the context of fetish when Marx was writing:

A fetish (derived from the French fétiche; which comes from the Portuguese feitiço; and this in turn from Latin facticius, "artificial" and facere, "to make") is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the emic attribution of inherent value or powers to an object.

The concept was popularized in Europe circa 1757, when Charles de Brosses used it in comparing West African religion to the magical aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Later, Auguste Comte employed the concept in his theory of the evolution of religion, wherein he posited fetishism as the earliest (most primitive) stage, followed by polytheism and monotheism. However, ethnography and anthropology would classify some artifacts of monotheistic religions as fetishes. For example, the Holy Cross and the consecrated host or tokens of communion found in some forms of Christianity (a monotheistic religion), are here regarded as examples of fetishism. — Wikipedia

I completely agree with Marx's use of the term fetish, the basic point that money becomes "a human-made object that has power over others [...] the emic attribution of inherent value or powers to an object" and that this psychological relation to money in a capitalist society is why it makes sense to accumulate money indefinitely "for the purpose of accumulating yet more money" being sufficient reason to do so (that there is never "enough", no other natural end point of capital accumulation other than what is possible to accumulate), whereas other commodities it would be bizarre to devote one's life to accumulating and storing a maximum quantity of grain or copper or beanie babies (without making any use of such commodities other than to accumulate more of the same); that if anyone one in capitalist society that met someone who lived meagerly and efficiently to simply increase a large store of beanie babies we would view as wack, accumulating a large store or grain when people are hungry we'd view as immoral, and someone just making a giant store of copper we would suspect of perhaps illegally trying to corner the market -- but if we met someone fully devoted to simply making as much money as possible we'd view as completely normal, in fact laudable.

I think we agree on this point.

It is this same psychological relation I levy at Marx's idea of a industrialized scientific society which he takes for granted as a good development. Marx does not realize that science and technology also has this fetish kind of power over us. What is the material view of history other than this fetish.

Generally, economic growth in capitalist form has made life better in several measurable ways for people all over the world. — jamalrob

This what I'm debating against. This argument reduces to "measurable if you choose to measure metrics that have increased", which, sure, I grant that. But that some metrics have improved is not sufficient reason to conclude capitalism or modernity in general has been an overall improvement. For instance, a nurse that measures a fever has gone down in a patient is right to note this change as a good thing ... but if the nurse then measures that the patient's heart has stopped, there may not be overall improvement.

This is the core of the myth of progress, of using very broad terms like "wealth" and "life improvement", then choosing a narrow metric of measurement of one or a few aspects included in these things, and then claiming that any arguing about other metrics is immature and childish and shutting down the discussion.

My view of capitalism, or just modernity in general that would include soviet communism, is that it is akin to ever increasing doses of cocaine; there are short term "good effects" but at a massive long term cost; the short term "life improvement" is an illusion. If you have ever argued with someone in the honey moon phase of cocaine or other stimulants who think it's great and made their life better, you get the exact same structure of argument as the myth of progress (it's seems pretty good right now bro) and my argument against capitalism and modernity is exactly the same as you will be trying to make cocaine.

Yes, productivity has gone up (just like with cocaine) but if it is a dynamic that moves towards ecological collapse (cardiac arrest) then the goodness of this productivity is wholly illusory (just like cocaine addiction). Marx and Marxists after him were keen consumers of the cocaine of industrial civilization. That the soviet union devoted itself to industrialization is not a rupture with Marx; where we can argue Marx would not have approved of the soviet union is not "endorsing forced collectivization, terror, and the use of slave labour (and environmental devastation, as you point out)" as you point out.

The industrial revolution and urbanization, in my view, are entirely a mistake, the pathway to the destination that goes over a cliff and breaks all your bones.

In saying this, I am not against literacy, democracy, medicine, science and increasing our technological powers; but all these things are independent of industrialization in my view (they are historically tied together, but not intrinsically tied, we can have these things without urbanized industrialized civilization; and we will have these things without industrialization as it is unsustainable and so will come to an end one way or another: localized decentralization of production or complete ecological collapse is the choice facing us, from my point of view).

I haven’t attempted to debate. There is no tactic. I was gauging the worth of a discussion with someone whose opening gambit to me was to call me mind-bogglingly naive. — I like sushi

Well if you really are not concerned about debating what's true and what's false, great tactic to avoid challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

Or make your own suggestions? I don’t care what you don’t agree just yet. I’m only interested in what we can agree on (see above). — I like sushi

This is really a poor debate tactic to avoid clarifying your position.

I've already stated that if you're not making a distinction between capitalist and socialist policies then you're essentially just referring to modernity (whatever happens to be out there in recent times).

My position is that your position is inherently contradictory, you want to support the statement "things have gotten better for people due to capitalist economics" while appealing to performance under a mixed economy a la "Social policies are predominant in all capitalist economies (that’s why they’re referred to as ‘mixed economies’ - which is a very mixed bag from nation to nation and trade deal to trade deal)".

And you want to avoid teasing apart what is due to socialism and what is due to capitalism.

So, I disagree with the analytic framework of viewing contradiction as totally fine.

I also disagree with the statement that life has gotten better. If you spend all your capital today on renting a yacht and champagne it maybe true that today life is good, but it doesn't follow from this that your life has gotten better if you are destitute tomorrow.

Sustainability is inherent in the notion of wealth. Someone who is spending "like a rich man" but unsustainable we would not consider to actually be a rich man, rather creating the illusion of being a rich man.

We do not agree that life has gotten better for most people. This is the myth of progress, it is essential to nearly all arguments supporting the status quo, because the status quo today is inherently dynamic it is required to assume that this dynamic change is good, is progress towards better things. If you start with the premise the status quo is good, of course you quickly end with the conclusion that the status quo is good. The myth of progress is that starting assumption that the status quo is good.

Knowing this, you will now be able to spot it whenever you hear things, such as has happened already in this conversation, that 'child fatalities have gone down' due to progress, due to capitalism, therefore progress has been good and capitalism also, or 'people are wealthier' on average, or 'our technology is super good'. The goal in all these arguments is to short circuit the concept of wealth, which has a broad meaning basically representing "good things", and tying it to a single metric that has increased, such as child mortality, and excluding things like political wealth (one's power to affect government, in other words ownership of your government, and in turn what your government owns that you therefore share if you have power over it) and sustainability.

Note: If you don’t believe things have gotten better for people due to capitalist economics then the worlds problems must be due to socialist economics or communism. — I like sushi

This is not a logically sound argument. If A is composed of B, C, D and you discover A is poisonous, it does not follow that B, C and D must all be poisonous.

'Communism' as represented by totalitarian Soviet Stalinism, definitely was no more ecologically sound than capitalism, being just as dependent on oil and doing things like draining whole lakes to grow cotton along with other catastrophes. (And there is a seed of this in Marx who does not question the goodness of industrialization; an industrialization fetishism to use Marx's language.)

However, the ecological failure of totalitarian Soviet Stalinism does not provide much evidence against proportional democratic socialism with heavily regulated markets. These proportional democratic socialist countries with heavily regulated markets nations are, however, a small minority of economic systems, so it's difficult to argue are a cause of global ecological exhaustion. Furthermore, if you go to these countries, there is far sounder ecological policies internally than compared to countries where capital dominates policy making; the theory lines up with what we find in practice.

Wealth, in term of economics, is not a broad term. We’re primarily discussing economic theory, so I meant value of assets owned. — I like sushi

Wealth is a broad term, your share in public institutions is part of your asset base. Public institutions are assets owned by whoever controls those institutions.

I certainly wasn’t equating ‘wealth’ with ‘income’, but they’re are inevitably related. — I like sushi

I am not equating wealth with income either, I don't know where you get that.

I will say though that painting proponents of capitalism as being against social tools is pretty much the kind of talk I was looking to avoid. Social policies are predominant in all capitalist economies (that’s why they’re referred to as ‘mixed economies’ - which is a very mixed bag from nation to nation and trade deal to trade deal). — I like sushi

I've already said that if you want to discuss "what's happened" without making a distinction between capitalist policies and social policies, then a better term is modernity.

What is a "mixed economy" a mixture of? It's a mixture of capitalist and socialist based policies. The proponents of a mixed economy are not the proponents of capitalism, they are the proponents of a mixture.

The proponents of capitalism want to minimize the socialist part of the mixture, if not get rid of it entirely, that's what makes them proponents of capitalism and not proponents of a highly regulated welfare state with very strong unions.

At the same time, proponents of capitalism want to claim basically all good things are caused by capitalism (market forces). If Finland is the happiest country in the world ... well that's because of capitalism! nothing to do with strength of social democratic institutions, welfare state policies, rehabilitation based justice system, publicly owned utilities and other market intervention, or that unions have increased in number and power over the last decades rather than decrease.

But, as I have gone over, modernity is not sustainable, what economists that support status quo capitalism (i.e. paid propagandists) identify as private wealth represents converting humanity's capital base and spending it (i.e. destroying the resource base) and calling that process wealth creation. Wealth creation, under any definition of wealth private or social, must be sustainable to have really been created. A company that is drawing down it's capital faster than it makes income can appear stable in the short term but is, by definition, going towards bankruptcy. The faster an individual or a company liquidates assets the more, in the short term, that company or individual can appear to act like a truly wealthy individual or company (doing things expected of the truly wealthy), but it is an illusion (the "truly wealthy", in a narrow materialistic sense, buy the startups and the yachts and the champagne and throw the parties with income that their capital base yields not by liquidating that capital base overall; if humanity as a whole is liquidating it's capital base to pay for the party, this is not real wealth but illusory wealth).

I’ll wait for some response to my request for common ground. — I like sushi

There is essentially no common ground along the lines you point out.

The myth of progress is just that: a simplistic myth, essential to short circuit any thorough analysis and to conclude "well, whatever modernity is, it's been pretty good!" which is why you wait for the myth of progress input to carry out further reasoning for the desired outputs. Without the myth of progress, all sorts of claims must actually be checked empirically (can private wealth increase at the expense of public wealth? must be checked. Is wealth production, of any kind, at the expense of the resource base happening? Must be checked.).

To make an analogy, if you are trying to get to next town over and plot a course that takes you over a cliff and instant death, moving towards that cliff is not progress towards the next town. Status quo economists (i.e. paid propagandists) want to be able to simply measure how fast the economy is walking (how much is being produced) and claim that therefore that's how quickly it is progressing; that the purpose of an economy is to progress in this way and that lot's of progress has already occurred. However, if this rate of change of production represents a process that brings disaster relentlessly closer, rather than farther away, then it is progress towards disaster.

Wealth is not a narrow term, it basically represents "goodness", but by defining it narrowly in it's measurement, economists that are proponents of capitalism (i.e. paid propagandists) can use all sorts of bait and switch fallacies (don't we want to be more wealthy? don't we want to support wealth creation? aren't therefore wealth creators good things and we should let them create more wealth? all of which is garbage-in-garbage-out arguments if the measurement of wealth is only one narrow aspect of what is meant by wealth) and also derail any constructive conversation into meaningless imaginary games of moving wealth around in charts that represent no actual data points about the real world.

I’m not entirely sure what this means. — I like sushi

"Wealth" is a very broad term, and proponents of capitalism generally only focus on privately held wealth, usually material things and their direct proxies. However, if this isn't the whole story of wealth, then it's not straightforward to say when and where "wealth has increased".

If we can be both materially poor as well as politically poor (disenfranchised), then it is not clear if one improves at the expense of the other that wealth has really increased. For instance, consider a political revolution that brings democracy but not very strong democracy (high likelihood of a coup bringing things back to despotism) and during this revolution many things and livelihoods were destroyed; it may not be clear that the slight increase in political wealth compensates the large decrease in private wealth (people may say "we are worse off than before"). Likewise, consider an increase in private wealth in a despotic state that reinforces that despotism (because the state is now also stronger), people who don't like that despotism may feel they are actually worse off than before (democracy is actually further rather than closer and they are more, rather than less, likely to be imprisoned and tortured for their political beliefs).

Now, if a country has both very strong democratic political institutions and also a high average private wealth, then I would definitely agree that country is very wealthy. But how many countries are these? Not very many. A key contention of the proponents of capitalism some decades ago was the completely unfounded theory that market processes create increase in average private wealth which creates democracy -- that the more there are "markets" the more there will be democracy. History has proven this theory false and the proponents of capitalism generally don't even bother with this claim anymore.

This private and public wealth distinction I mention as it is very fruitful to think about.

However, where you maybe unsure how public wealth, in terms of one's share in institutions, can be measured and what trade-offs (increases in average private wealth at the expense of in institutional wealth), the ecological criticism of capitalism is far stronger and easy to measure.

There is simply no refuting capitalism (market forces) have lead to a high rate of consumption of natural resources (unless one is uninterested in science) that is unsustainable.

There is simply no reasonable economic argument that can justify being unsustainable. This is why the proponents of capitalism simply ignore or deny the science of these issues while simultaneously asserting that our science is so good it's going to simply solve all ecological problems if they exist (which they don't, climate scientists are corrupt, but if ever there was a problem, which there isn't, then technology, created by our amazing science, is going to fix it).

In economic terms, if the average standard of living today is due to drawing down the earths capital stocks (the basis of production) and simply consuming that capital, then this is the characteristic of an extremely inefficient economic system. If you live off your capital, destroying it and pretending it's revenue, then at some point you will run out of capital and be destitute. I.e. if you sold all your belongings and lived like a super rich person for a day, renting a yacht, hitting the clubs, buying everyone champagne, this does not make you a super rich person, the wealth is completely illusory; we would call you a fool for buying us campaign with the money you got by liquidating all the assets your future depends on. The rate of consumption of drawing down a capital stock isn't really relevant. The higher the rate you consume your own capital the more you can appear wealthy in the short term; if you spend all your capital in half an hour people around you will be more impressed than if you spent it all over a year, but that doesn't really matter.

If capitalism is simply converting the earths capital basis (life sustaining systems required to produce any standard of living whatsoever) and pretending the consumption of that capital is income, then if wealth measurements ignore this and you simply measure short term average material wealth then you will conclude that average material wealth is going up that "people's income is going up". The higher the rate of drawing down the earths capital basis and pretending it's income, the higher the average private wealth is going to be. But if a narrow measurement of wealth is a garbage measurement, then the conclusion you get out if is garbage also.

Yes, many people around me. I’ve noticed the change quite quickly where I live (not in what most would call a ‘developed’ country - one that was until fairly recently regarded as third-world: maybe it still is in some circles?). — I like sushi

Well, you should definitely give Marx a go then, as this is one of his predictions: that capitalism definitely seems good at the start.

Plus, I’m also aware that on a global scale ‘wealth’ has dramatically increased. — I like sushi

This is up for debate.

In questioning this assertion there is first the consideration of what constitutes wealth; do we mean only privately held goods or public goods too? Obviously, proponents of capitalism will say "oh, oh, only privately held wealth counts!" in which case, indeed, if we add it up it has significantly increased on average.

However, if we suspect we are being fooled by a garbage-in-garbage-out analysis, and consider public goods too, then the situation is very different.

First, if we consider social institutions protecting political freedom a social good, then we now have to question whether increase in private wealth on average for a nation and increase in national power and technological sophistication that comes at the expense of political freedom a worthy trade-off. What if some increases in average private wealth come at the expense of a sort of Faustian bargain with totalitarianism and the increase in general wealth translates directly to an increase in totalitarian power? If public institutions are undermined by capitalism -- either leading democracy towards totalitarianism or reinforcing totalitarianism whenever it can make use of capitalist systems -- then it is not a given that increases in average private wealth compensate decreases in public institutional wealth.

Second, if increases in average private wealth come at the expense of the earth's capital basis of production (ecosystems) -- that we are in affect drawing down our capital base and spending those resources flippantly -- then there is no basis to argue that the increase in wealth is, overall permanent. It is not a given that increase in technological and scientific knowledge wealth always exceeds decreases in ecological wealth. If, overall, we are actually just drawing down the earths capital and pretending it's revenue, this is not a "macro economically justifiable" situation, just a plunder based system that leaves a bad situation to future generations (as well as many living today who feel the effects of these negative externalities). Small is Beautiful is a depressingly old book that explains this pretty well.

That is why proponents of capitalism, such as libertarians or neo-liberals, eschew empirical investigations into these questions, social and environmental, and just throw out extremely simplistic metrics of progress (hence the term "myth of progress": it must be believed without question or else the whole intellectual edifice collapses). If questioned they have no empirical arguments, just the assumption that 'technology is going to fix everything soon'.

My point was that capitalism has, although in fits and starts, moved everyone up the ladder over all. This is undeniable isn’t it? This is undeniable isn’t it? I’m not saying social action hasn’t helped too (far from it!). — I like sushi

Above is the basis on which to deny it, however, if you accept, even the benefits you do see around you, also caused by socialist policies, then you haven't really formed an argument for capitalism, just modernity in a general sense.

Once we get to a certain point then the idea of ‘money’ will begin to dissolve: I don’t mean next week though or in 10 years. — I like sushi

A point in capitalism or a point in socialism? Either way, look backwards and compare technology now to 50, 100, or 200 years ago, wouldn't people at any of these times certainly believe, given a description of our level of technology, that we "no longer have poverty" and "no longer have money" with such amazing powers and productivity levels? If you lived at those times making a similar argument to what you're making now upon what basis would you say anything different to what you're saying now?

What specific military actions in question? Are you causing "using excessive force" a "specific military action"? — Terrapin Station

Yes, to come to the conclusion that the military in question is using excessive force, it is necessary to observe, directly or indirectly, specific military actions. If no specific military actions occurred then it is difficult to argue excessive force occurred. Maybe the OP has no information on any specifics nor any knowledge of living in a country with a military, it's all just assumed with no evidence of any kind; if so, it is best to address the OP if that's your contention.

I'm set to enlist in the military but I have the option of not serving if I want to (by acquiring an exemption) so I was debating whether it would be morally right to serve or not. I came to the conclusion that it would be morally wrong to serve because the military in question causes a lot of unjustified harm by using excessive force. But here's the problem, if I think it's immoral to serve if given the option not to, — SightsOfCold

He is proposing the premise here that the specific military actions in question are unjustified and hence immoral to serve. That's the OP's premise.

If your plan is to quibble about something, go ahead.