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Author Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread  (Read 1286183 times)

Reelya

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10065 on: May 01, 2015, 11:31:20 am »

That's just passing the buck on how things are going to work. You have to explain your structure at every level of granularity or it's just pie in the sky. How does that scale from the level of the individual to the world?

Even in a cooperative that includes the whole world. You'll still get e.g. multiple people who want to make the same thing, hence competition, and the need to swap resources between people who make different things, hence trade. You can't just hand-wave these things away by saying everyone's in it together. That's why I pointed out competition / trade will always exist even within one commune/collective/cooperative or what-have-you.

Any time you get resources that need to flow from one person's possession (in the immediate "i have this thing" sense) to another, that's trade. Any time one thing is better than another, e.g. you like one person's shoes better than another - that's competition. People are going to want the better shoes more than the worse ones, so somehow we have to decide who gets the better shoes, who gets the worse ones. Assume we only make what society needs, and we keep all shoemakers in a job. Someone has to accept the worse shoes, and they should be justly compensated for missing out on the better shoes. Hence, we implicitly recognize that the better shoes have higher economic value, even if we don't have money or barter. Maybe we say "only make the better shoes then!" so we don't have to value the shoes differently. But we are definitely putting the worse-shoe-maker out of that job if he's unable to make the better shoes, which is competition again.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2015, 11:40:59 am by Reelya »
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SirQuiamus

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10066 on: May 01, 2015, 12:00:19 pm »

That's why I pointed out competition / trade will always exist even within one commune/collective/cooperative or what-have-you.

So, uh, you're saying economic inequality will always exist?

So much for the utopia. It was inevitable.

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Helgoland

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10067 on: May 01, 2015, 12:08:31 pm »

I keep telling you - Reelya's just a left-wing Social Democrat with a thing for Marxist terminology. There's really not much of a critique of Capitalism itself in what she (your name ends with an a, so in my head you're female until you correct me :P ) writes. It's more or less just a vision of an alternative mode of Capitalism.
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SirQuiamus

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10068 on: May 01, 2015, 12:21:28 pm »

I'm not questioning anyone's political orientation, I'm just stretching my powers of comprehension beyond breaking-point. :P
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Angle

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10069 on: May 01, 2015, 01:36:13 pm »

I too like the "Worker run communes" idea, though I'd say they should also explicitly be charged with benefiting society as a whole. For managing interactions between them, I'd have a series of "logistics organizations, which are charged with figuring out how to distribute goods between them. The communes could subscribe to whatever logistics organization they thought best, or could even subscribe to multiple or ignore them entirely and deal directly with the other communes, or any combination they thought best. Not everything needs to be a commune, either - a space program, for example, would probably benefit from a different model. This system would be pretty tolerant of mutants - if you want to go and start some weird organization that does things seriously differently, that's fine, so long as you're not doing anything immoral or dangerous. And another note, I wouldn't actually abolish capitalism in this model - I'd merely regulate it very thoroughly. But if you want to go and start your own capitalist craft beer microbrewery or whatever, that's fine. This system also doesn't need to be all or nothing - you can start it with just a single commune, add another couple in a few years, add a logistics organization after that, etc, etc.

This is, of course, merely an incomplete first draft. I'm sure there are all sorts of special cases that require individual attention, and it needs to be properly peer reviewed and tested and all that. But it's a nice start, I think.
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hops

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10070 on: May 01, 2015, 04:07:04 pm »

Ah money. Worth everything until it's no longer used, at which point it's not worth what it's made of.
That's... kind of the point?

Money is an abstraction created to represent the value of commodity so that if I wanted a steak and you wanted a loaf of bread we don't need to want each other's stuffs and trade things.

I mean, if money had some intrinsic power then we could just print infinite money and achieve a post-scarcity society.
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SalmonGod

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10071 on: May 03, 2015, 12:26:43 am »

my response is that any examples more than 20 years old are not relevant to modern day.
This is not categorically true. Sure, there may be/are past failings that may be circumvented by modern technology, but you'd have to do an in-depth analysis to find out whether that's true of each and every one of them.

Sure, but to point that out immediately moves the discussion beyond the scope of a forum debate.  I believe that if you did in-depth analysis of all the details, it could in the end be summarized as true in a broad sense.  That is my unbacked assertion, and to back it, I'd need the details of most interest to analyze.

Sadly what you or him or I want out of society hardly matters. What matters is what most people want - and material comfort is pretty high on that list. If your ideology (I don't use that word with a negative connotation, by the way) does not account for that, it will never pick up. The Soviets had to learn that lesson, the aristocratic industrialists had to learn that lesson. There's no way to impose a societal order for any significant amount of time if it is not accepted by a broad majority.

Yeah, and this is an unfortunate character flaw of mine.  I've come to very much understand that I don't connect well with most of humanity.  I simply do not value the same experiences, and the society we have is really bad at offering the things I do value.  The only luxury I really care for is a nice computer, which isn't a material comfort in the same sense as a big house, expensive car, etc, and I've never felt the need for those things.

The thing that's never made sense to me is that even granted people's interest in material luxuries, what's the point in accumulating them if the process of doing so allows very little time for actually enjoying them?  Yeah, you've got a nice house full of nice stuff, but you only spend a few hours a day with those things.  So is it just about the satisfaction of knowing that something is yours?  That mode of thinking is completely alien to me.

But it doesn't matter, because I don't think a societal order can be imposed.  It has to be adopted.  It doesn't matter how vividly you detail another way of life if the transition isn't tangible and natural to people from their current position.

The sharing economies that have sprung up from the internet are a great example.  They're completely counter to the existing order of capitalism, but they make sense from the day-to-day life perspective of people who are otherwise still living in capitalism.  When you put the tools in front of people to conveniently both contribute to and take from a freely shared resource pool, the internet has proven that they don't need any special encouragement to do both.

You forgot a third component: Structuring and prioritizing said information. A huge infodump is worthless: Wikipedia without links would be a perfect example. Sure, one could try to get the collective to do the structuring, but then you'll run into the problem that the 'uniting goals' usually aren't that well-defined when it comes to the details.

Information can be structured organically by collective input without the need for manual guidance.  Every social media network already does this on massive scale.  Nobody's bothered to make one that's geared towards facilitating practical exchanges yet.  We have software that essentially builds communities.  Now add functions that help those communities to make collective decisions and work together.  It all exists already in separate components.  No one's put forth the effort yet to combine Facebook, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Reddit, and some basic consensus tools to see what happens.  I bet with widespread adoption, you'd see it replacing the functionality that capitalism and government currently offer.

Leadership, which is the interpretation and adaption of said uniting goals, turning abstract goals into concrete commands and orders - or guidelines and practices, if you want a less militaristic rhetoric.

I think leadership is something that arises naturally or something that can be imposed, and I think it's only necessary to design for leadership in an organization if it's going to be of the imposed variety.   I don't understand why you believe leadership is necessary for any of the functions you've listed, unless we have conflicting ideas about what leadership really means, which is likely.

and our ability to communicate today is completely incomparable to our ability to communicate more than 20 years ago.
Again, don't underestimate 20th century bureaucracies. This smells like hybris. (IIRC there were similar utopian ideas floating around during the revolutions of 1789 and 1917 - it's hardly a new phenomenon. The rule of thumb remains: We probably aren't that special.)

I think this works both ways.  There are always people saying that things will never change, but they always do.  I'm basing my assertion on precedent.  Social revolution and communication technology revolution have always coincided.  We're absolutely in the middle of one right now, and there are already big changes happening.  The only question is how deep those changes can go, and how we will direct them.

We have the potential now to organize in ways that have never been possible before in history.
What ways? Quit using abstract terms and get into the details! Unless you provide plausible examples, this is a mere assertion.

To share information instantly and globally on any scale!  To combine and filter the information from any number of inputs of any depth on any number of questions.  Big data.  Memetic culture.  Stand-alone complex.  I have the majority of mankind's collected knowledge tucked in my pocket every day, and can instantly fact-check anything anyone says to me.  I can interact with people in so many ways that have never been possible before, including what I'm doing right now.  An internet video recorded and uploaded by one person can turn into a thousand people rioting in a matter of hours.  Or it can make them famous to the entire world in a matter of days.  A small publication normally only read by a few thousand can suggest an action that goes viral and explodes into millions of participants around the world in a matter of weeks (Occupy Wall St).

You can argue that our existing structural paradigms still can't be replaced to any satisfactory effect, but it would be just weird to act like this isn't a very different kind of world we're entering into.

How does the ability to communicate faster make those 'shitty workarounds' obsolete?

Because all our organizational paradigms thus far have been for the purpose of gathering and disseminating information to a population indirectly.  Information was passed up through a hierarchy, and decisions flowed back down.  Because there was no effective way for large numbers of distant people to share information with each other and make collective decisions.  Now we have those capabilities.  It's not just about communication faster.  It's about communicating with any number of people in any number of various locations all at once, and being able to receive and digest information in sophisticated ways from all of those people as well.  It's a kind of social agility the world has never had before.

The mere existence of the internet doesn't provide anyone with an incentive to do something.

And what incentive do people need?  If people want something, they'll work for it.  If they have to work together, they'll work together.  All capitalism does is influence what people work together on, and how the benefit is allocated.

(I also don't know why you call those workarounds 'shitty' - they appear to have worked out pretty well, haven't they? At least in Europe - that America is such a shithole in some places is hardly the fault of capitalism, but rather of the English because they drove all those religious nuts out of the country and to the colonies.)

I refuse to judge a system that operates by a network of global interactions by how well it serves a small region.  Plus, human beings have only managed civilization for about 2% of its history, and it's already on the verge of destroying itself via the environment.  I don't call that very successful.
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Helgoland

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10072 on: May 03, 2015, 11:53:35 am »

I'll reply when I'm in less of a hurry, SG - in the meantime, here's a comic I think you'll enjoy.
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penguinofhonor

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10073 on: May 13, 2015, 04:47:41 pm »

.
« Last Edit: December 07, 2015, 02:50:26 pm by penguinofhonor »
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TheDarkStar

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10074 on: May 13, 2015, 04:52:48 pm »

I mean, if money had some intrinsic power then we could just print infinite money and achieve a post-scarcity society.

Step 1: Print money.
Step 2: Burn money for energy.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
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wobbly

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10075 on: May 14, 2015, 12:26:23 am »

@SG - I've read your post a few times now and I'm still not sure you aren't proposing the exact same thing your complaining about in the 1st place.

Mostly it's so vague in the details that it could mean a lot of things. However you've spent several posts talking about how there collecting so much information from social networks, then it seems you go on to suggest running things by collecting masses of information from social networks....
« Last Edit: May 14, 2015, 12:43:09 am by wobbly »
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Bauglir

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10076 on: May 14, 2015, 01:03:34 am »

Near as I can tell, the gathering of information is not a problem. What's a problem is the asymmetry created by the power imbalance, the difficulty of controlling any of that information, and the degree to which people manage to be unaware of it because nobody makes an effort to obtain informed consent.
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Angle

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10077 on: May 14, 2015, 01:28:44 am »

Personally, I'm not so much concerned with information gathering, as I am with the massive power imbalance. That's what I feel needs to be addressed. Information gathering is a secondary concern, in that it contributes to said power imbalance.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2015, 01:39:03 am by Angle »
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10078 on: May 20, 2015, 12:16:23 pm »

An article on emotional labor, the increasingly common and invasive practice of requiring your employees to pretend to be happy and enthusiastic as part of their job. This example they give is pretty disturbing:
Quote
Meanwhile, in The New Republic, Timothy Noah observes that the sandwich shop chain Pret A Manger aggressively monitors its employees’ displays of enthusiasm. If any worker at any particular store seems insufficiently pleased to see their customers, he and all of his coworkers could suffer the consequences. Pret CEO Clive Schlee even monitors whether his employees are making enough affectionate physical contact with each other.
“In other workplaces, touching a co-worker may get you fired,” writes Noah, “but at Pret you have to worry about not touching co-workers enough.”
It's always felt like having to pretend you love your shit job that you're getting paid shit money for is an extra level of demeaning. And it's just assumed that you'll do it for free, and anything that could affect your emotions is less important than reassuring the guy buying a burger that people don't work crappy, unlikeable jobs to make his cheap food possible.
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Truean

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Re: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #10079 on: May 27, 2015, 01:17:42 pm »

https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/dad-defends-39k-birthday-party-for-3-year-old-119944904737.html

 ??? :o

$39,000 for a 3 year old's birthday party. Extravagant 1st birthday party tradition also somehow equals 2nd and 3rd too. Be sure to post it online to brag....

Also I'm not sure a 3 year old will both remember and currently enjoy, "a menu the included tempura scallops, truffle arancini, pork belly, cognac and a Disney cake." Well maybe the cake.... Still somehow I don't think she'll be gushing over the cognac.... I hope not anyhow.

I'm sorry but this party was never about the kid. I mean really? If your goal is for a 3 year old to enjoy the thing, then I don't think Tempura Scallops and Cognac quite fit the bill. More Disney Cake, less damn Congac.

And this is my favorite offense: "As for next year, Lembo says he can’t wait for Lauren’s big day. 'I am going to inject more money back into the community next year, for Lauren’s fourth birthday.'"

O ho ho, so we should all kiss the rich people's rump and beg them for their graciousness for bragging about spending their money on their luxuries "for the good of the community?"

Maybe we should tax it, before the afluenza spreads.
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