Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SalmonGod]

If social issues were the only thing that mattered, I'd be favorable towards the Democratic Party.  I'm not ok with slow progress, but I would also not be willing to be recklessly throw that slow progress into a gamble, either... again... if it were the only thing that mattered.

For economic issues alone, I'd also be hesitant.

But creeping oppressive dystopian surveillance/police state authoritarianism and environmental apocalypse on top of we-can't-even-put-this-on-a-graph-anymore levels of wealth inequality is just too much for me.

[smjjames]

I'd rather have slow progress than a rollback to the past, which is what the GOP is trying to do.

[Culise]

What is this accelerationism? I think I've heard of it before though. *wikis it*

Pretty sure both left- and right-accelerationism would lead to a technological singularity as they both try to transcend in different ways.

Yeah, the Wiki article seems to be focusing more on transhumanist ideas of accelerationism rather than the political ones I was thinking of.  It's not a huge leap, but that which I learned about is basically what I wrote presented in an unironic fashion: by actively supporting and developing the worst excesses of capitalism, you provoke a violent reaction that leads to the formation of a communist state.  It's sort of a weaponized strawman argument where you work to make the strawman real in order to increase support for your actual platform.  SalmonGod's assessment of it is rather sound, and an accelerationist focusing on climate change would point to something like, say, the terrible air pollution problem of China resulting in the recent strong push by the central government to clean up by closing steel mills, coal mines, aluminum smelters, and pushing for new methods of green energy, and they might even begrudgingly note that China is also switching to natural gas from coal.  They would point to the infamous stories of the Cuyahoga River on fire in Ohio that served as an impetus to clean up the river, or Upton Sinclair's "accidental blow to the nation's stomach" as providing the impetus for food health standards.  They would argue that only by intentionally creating pollution in a way that's blatantly obvious to the public can they make people recognize the need for climate change, and thus they'd roll back all regulation on pollution, encourage the use of cheap water pipes and cheaper coal, and otherwise make things as nasty as possible in the hopes that the people, thus motivated, would push back twice as hard and bring us not only to where we are now, but even further.  Some issues, among others, are (a) all the damage that is done in the interim, and (b) the assumption that the pushback actually causes more long-term progress than steady progress would, rather than simply creating a new, worse baseline from which standards are now measured. 

[smjjames]

So, basically make things worse to make people notice? That sounds insane and counterproductive. Especially since making things worse is NOT what we need to do right now to the Earth.

[Frumple]

It's generally insane and counterproductive, yes. Sympathy for the folks that are fed up enough to be blinded to the point the bet looks worth it, or thinks things are bad enough the shithole that inevitably results is worth the risk, but it's not a particularly reasonable or helpful position if you don't think your house on fire is a good idea, or like the thought of dying of old age instead of something else.

Yeah I sort of went overboard on the sarcasm :3

It's hard for me to choose between the GOP and the DNC. The GOP is the Doctor Doom style of outright giddy evil, and the DNC is basically Elysium. Each election for me it's "which one of these will hurt my family the least".

Please don't piss on Doom like that. He doesn't deserve the comparison.

Any case, it's been a damn long time since the choice was difficult, personally. Longer than I've been able to vote. Whatever its problems the DNC regularly supports and tries to push through shit that will legitimately help people, and tends to fuck up instead of fuck over when things go sideways. The liberal ground game is filled with a hell of a lot of people breaking their back to keep this country running and make lives less miserable.

Meanwhile the GOP is "fuck homeless people and everything in their direction" and has been for years, and spews mealymouthed bullshit about private charity and personal responsibility and crap while tearing goddamn everything apart. Whatever room there is for discussion on their voters, the party's politicians are a fucking blight on this country and are intentionally trying to screw the lives and livelihoods of millions.

There might still be some degree of reason to still weigh cockup against malice but the republican party of the last several decades has made the scales real damn easy to measure by this point.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's not just to make people notice, it's a logical extension of Marx's concept of historical stages and inevitability. Society only moves from one stage to the next when particular conditions have been met, generally including a through success and degradation of the previous stage. Capitalism became successful only once feudalism had completely and totally replaced tribalism, and in that success began to fail internally, allowing capitalism to suddenly and unexpectedly supersede it.

Ergo, the accelerationists believe that trying to simply organize and resist capitalist influences is actually assisting capitalism, allowing it to achieve an extended but still horrible state of existence. Rather, socialism can only be achieved once capitalism has entered into its "late-stage" and fully accomplished everything it set out to do, at which point internal faults cause it to become utterly helpless before a stage change. To accelerationists, the process of "leftism" is itself only letting capitalism avoid this and thus cause more harm overall, and thus the correct thing to do is surrender all political power to capitalist entities and watch them destroy themselves.

Not that I believe any of that. I will say that Trump has set off a sea-change among the American left, though to what end that will come is not yet clear.

[smjjames]

Pretty sure Feudalism had completely replaced tribalism LONG before it collapsed. What do you mean by tribalism here though? Groups that weren't under the banner of a single nation-state?

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, basically... except I think it's less about "making the strawman real" and more like removing resistance so that there can be no more debate over whether the strawman is real or not.

Take industries that produce toxic waste or are susceptible to environmental catastrophes, like oil, for example.  Govern them lightly so that they can take advantage of loopholes and loose enforcement, and they will slowly poison the environment forever until it is dead.  Try to speak plainly about what's going on there, and your claims can easily be accused of strawman (ex.  environmentalist claims regarding Standing Rock were regarded as over-dramatic strawmen).  Under these circumstances, toxic businesses are kept from going wild and producing meaningful backlash, and this ends up maintaining a path to a dead environment (Standing Rock produced an oil spill in less than a year, but not severe enough to produce much reaction in people not directly effected).   Now imagine Trump manages to completely do away with environmental regulations, and these businesses just totally wreck shit for a while.  Everyone personally suffers for a little while.  Sees that it's the nature of short-sighted profit motives to throw a party and trash the place if you let them.  Universally agrees to take environmental regulation seriously.

I'm not so sure about accelerationism on the environment, honestly.  But that's the logic.  It's not "make the strawman real".  It's "make everyone learn the hard way, in a way that minimizes extent of damage in the long term."

But I'm very sure of accelerationism on the need to re-invent the economy.  We're approaching a post-work model of society, but too many people are resisting it.  We keep fighting layoffs and inventing bullshit jobs that aren't really justified wastes of anyone's time to prop up a going-obsolete way of life, meanwhile the needs of the labor market keep shrinking and billionaires keep reaping all the benefits of this ongoing change and further entrenching their power.  I'm 100% about making as much work as obsolete as possible as fast as possible so that we can stop believing fairy tales and deal with reality NOW.  In the process, people will become more free to invest their efforts in other issues like social justice or the environment, without a desperate need for employment taking up all their time.  Drawing this issue out only prolongs and intensifies everyone's suffering, and allows billionaires to keep making themselves more powerful.

[smjjames]

Regardless of how you approach it, accelerationism's core assumption is that social backlash occurs proportionally to the rate of change of a social system, and the inflection point that the pushback reaches is closer to the median than where the acceleration began. That's a bold fucking assumption, and one that has a lot of mixed evidence. Maybe some additional research should go into the concept before any actual change is brought on in the hopes that this actually works, rather than playing Russian roulette with society's future.

The social backlash to change is actually correct, as we've seen the cultural backlash to various things in the US, but I don't know about the proportionality of it. Sometimes it's a big change (Civil War, Civil Rights era) and sometimes it's more of a tug of war over time.

Instead of just it happening naturally and progressing, accelerationism seems like "I'm gonna make it REALLY bad to show how terrible it is!" and expecting it to spring up to a new transcendant level when you let go.

[SalmonGod]

The alternative:  Keep hoping that demographic shifts turn out in reality to be the magic moment we've all been waiting for, and that we can keep the rampage of baby boomers acceptably minimized and reversible by voting for their lesser evils while we wait for them to die off?  I think that's risky, too.

[smjjames]

I suspect those demographic shifts have already begun. Remember those highschoolers who were protesting? a good chunk of them will be able to vote in 2020.

Anyhow, on the Feudalism to Capitalism transition, didn't Feudalism die a pretty slow death? I read on wikipedia and I guess it just decayed to the point where Capitalism started flourishing as modern Capitalism (well, the forerunners before Industrial Capitalism). Also, Capitalism didn't spring out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus's head, the start of it already existed during the medieval period. Which is kind of an argument against accelerationism where accelerationism just wants to hurry it up.

Well, we do live in a country whose electoral system is posed on "reverse everything that happened in the last 4/8 years, and hope I have enough political clout left over to try and change things beyond that". Perhaps we should wait until the 2018 midterms before predicting that only demographic change will be the electoral panacea that we desperately need.

That's kind of a more recent phenomenon? Starting with, I dunno, Reagan? It got worse from that period on.

[Trekkin]

McCabe has been fired from the FBI less than a day before he could begin collecting his pension, sparking all the expected claims of ulterior motives from all the usual people.

[martinuzz]

I wonder who is going to assassinate Trump first. The ex-FBI or the ex-CIA

[wierd]

Neither.  NRA nutjob.

[Harry Baldman]

My money's on a disaffected young man radicalized by violent video games and Youtube sword tutorials.