7 ms·

Zizek phrased it kind of nicely once, in a way that stuck with me. He probably borrowed from somewhere, and I'll continue to lossily reproduce whatever the sent

Zizek phrased it kind of nicely once, in a way that stuck with me. He probably borrowed from somewhere, and I'll continue to lossily reproduce whatever the sentiment was, but it goes something like this. How is it possible that we are completely and utterly optimistic about breaking all sorts of physical barriers, like landing on Mars, and reusing rockets, and communicating worldwide via little handheld microcomputers, and reattaching body-parts, and aiming to live forever, and do all sorts of crazy biological engineering. And yet trying to imagine a world were you don't have billionaires having lavish parties while people starve or drone in soul-sucking jobs, or where sweatshops are deemed "bad but better than the alternative", or indeed any sort of radically different social arrangement is seen as hopelessly naive or regressive. He had better examples, something about a dude with a bifurcated tongue. But the idea stuck with me- what's up with the bounds of our imagination? How come they're limitless when it comes to facing off against gravity, and completely defeatist when it comes to erasing class distinctions?

natrius 11y ago
Communism happened. It killed lots of people, and made radical changes in the social order unappealing to most. Now ideas don't just have to sound plausible, but you also have to prove that they won't lead to the deaths of millions.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Have you heard of social democracy, i.e. taking those ideas and not implementing them by being a murderous crazy dictator? It's working out just fine for the countries which are consistently ranked as the best to live in in the world. As opposed to the US, which is closer to third world status when it comes to things like low median wage, little to no maternity leave, expensive and poor healthcare system, school shootings, poor literacy rates, high drug use rates, etc etc.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    US median wages aren't low compared to Western Europe. Modestly lower than the Nordic countries yes, but modestly higher than France and Germany and so forth.
    - collyw 11y ago
      What is the US median wage? All I ever see are SF developer salaries on here, which are way higher than most parts of Europe.
      - maxerickson 11y ago
        There's a choose your statistic problem, but it is ~$28,000 or $29,000 (that's based on the estimated median individual wage among employed persons (which I think wage implies employment)). https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 I guess income inequality measures result in less favorable comparisons than basic measures of wages.
  - natrius 11y ago
    I like social democracy. (I was just establishing the burden of proof, not taking a position.) I'm skeptical that America has enough social cohesion for such a thing to be fully implemented here. Literacy and median wages are fine for the white majority, so we've got most of the trappings of a social democracy for white America. Why would Americans use the state to benefit all people when Americans aren't even willing to put agents of the state on trial when they kill unarmed black people?
    - iofj 11y ago
      First thing that needs to happen to social cohesion in America is stopping focusing everything on race. Yes, minimum wage affects different races differently. But so does everything else. And one thing I'm pretty sure about : the rich are pushing down minimum wage for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with race. Even if the people involved are racists, it still would have little to do with why this is happening. So race is absolutely not relevant to this discussion. The way this works is that money is being used to make a subgroup of our society desperate enough to do whatever a number of rich folks want them to do, no questions asked. Nobody really cares who's in this subgroup, as long as it's not them and they're sufficiently desperate. So can we please shut up about whether the amount of melanin in the upper epidermis of some subgroup of the poor is small, medium or large and start talking about the economics at work here ?
      - natrius 11y ago
        The reason I mentioned race is because so many people around here want to ignore it. To ignore it is to ignore the reality that most Americans do not relate with minority groups. Bad news in a minority group is like bad news from the other side of the planet. If your solution to a problem requires unity, you probably need to find another solution. America is not united.
      - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
        You seem to accept that the powerful elite will work to push down wages (broadly including providing healthcare and the modern social democratic benefits) but are ignoring the possibility that the quickest and easiest way for them to achieve this is to divide and conquer the poor by race, and its working beautifully for them.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    After government transfers, the bottom income quintile in the US makes more than in the UK and many other wealthy nations. Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better, with a less healthy more diverse population than just about every other country (the top ten hospitals with the best cancer survival rates are overwhelmingly in the US), maternity leave may not be mandated, but is available to many if not most. 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. And how is the US so different from a social democracy? Massive transfers of wealth to the poor, strong regulations, large government influence in industry, and of course democracy, with strong protections against a "murderous crazy dictator".
    - collyw 11y ago
      "Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better.." No it doesn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_health_care_outcome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_heal...
    - DanBC 11y ago
      The US does well on cancer, but that's because cancer is mostly a disease of old age and the US spends a lot of public money via medicaid on older people. > 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. There's a lot of illiteracy in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." Further, this study showed that 41% to 44% of U.S. adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale (literacy rate of 35 or below) were living in poverty.[2]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jqm 11y ago
  You don't have to prove that ideas won't lead to the deaths of millions at all. Right now there are a bounty of ideas floating around, many the basis of whole civilizations and governments which very possibly could lead to the death of millions if left to finish course. And nary a peep.
- MisterBastahrd 11y ago
  Communism never happened. Communist propaganda happened.
  - clarky07 11y ago
    haven't we mostly proven that communism isn't a thing that can work given human nature?
    - collyw 11y ago
      This is a dumb argument when the alternative also involves the exact same human nature.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      What do you believe communism is and how do you believe it goes counter to human nature? It's an impossible thing to discuss without nailing down exactly what it is you are talking about as most people haver wildly diverging ideas of what it implies. But most people seem to tend to think that communism requires some kind of pure altruism to work (and to be fair, there have been socialist and communists that also believed that), but a central aspect of Marxism is the opposite: The working class must learn to value its own work and not buy into the subjective moralism of the capitalist classes (that tend to ascribe virtue to wealth: if you're rich, it is generally assumed to be an indicator you have worked hard, while poverty equally is suspect), but be willing to grab the proceeds of their labour. Marx spent a considerable amount of time ripping to shreds early "utopian socialism" (Fourier, Owens et. al) for failing to understand this amongst other failings. The very insistence of revolution as the mechanism for social upheaval in Marxism is explicitly that Marx did not believe that the ruling classes would be willing to give up privileges willingly even in the face of election defeats, and so once a sufficient working class majority comes into being, sooner or later there would be conflict. An egalitarian system according to Marx is a desirable, advanced stage of society, but it will come into being, he argues, not because it is the right thing, but because it is the only possible next step: the working classes can only overcome the power of the capitalist classes through sheer numbers, and can unite only because capitalism eventually creates a situation where carving up the pie equally becomes a net improvement for a rapidly growing majority: The rational choice for most of us to maximize our own wealth is an equal distribution the moment the majority of wealth is health by a minority of people, because most of us will otherwise be in the majority that receives less (and for this reason he was insistent that a socialist revolution would fail if attempted somewhere not advanced enough to allow redistribution to eradicate poverty - if it instead merely spread poverty out, class struggles would resume).
paulddraper 11y ago
We're talking about getting a couple volunteers to Mars one time, not forcing billions of people there permanently.
grecy 11y ago
>what's up with the bounds of our imagination? How come they're limitless when it comes to facing off against gravity, and completely defeatist when it comes to erasing class distinctions? In my experience, that's only true in America. People in Canada, Australia, England and Argentina and perfectly happy to discuss and debate ideas and ways to remove (or drastically reduce) class distinctions. Politicians even enact policy to do it. I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly, it's not only un-American to suggest a change to the status quo, it's also considered utterly impossible.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  The US redistributes enough money to the poor to make them richer than the UK, and likely many other wealthy nations in the world. It's not like the US is some Mad Max universe where the poor are forgotten and left without aid.
  - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
    >The US redistributes enough money to the poor to make them richer than the UK Source? Also what do you mean richer than the UK?
    - tempestn 11y ago
      I'm guessing parent means that the poor in the US are richer than the poor in the UK. (Not sure whether that would be in an absolute sense or relative to cost of living, nor have I verified it in either case.)
brbsix 11y ago
I was under the impression that Keynesian economics is/was said limitless facing off against gravity. However as was already mentioned, when these sort of experiments go wrong (e.g. Communism), they tend to go terribly wrong. It would be nice if we could actually perform these experiments on a local, entirely voluntary scale however the Fed seems to have captured that market already.
applecore 11y ago
Here's the explanation for this phenomenon: the former is an example of man versus nature, whereas the latter is man versus man. We're rational animals, so we can try to use our intellect to overcome the insurmountable physical odds of living in an otherwise uncaring universe. However, when we're pitted against each other, we have no such luck.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
The standard left wing complaint is that billionaires don't have enough lavish parties, but instead reinvest their wealth in new productive capacity. See, e.g., Picketty, Krugman, or anyone favoring stimulus directed at the bottom of the income distribution. Do you dispute this? As for erasing class distinctions, consider the possibility that we already have. Imagine telling a person in 1915 about the world today; the children of rich struggling hard in school with the goal of getting a job where they can work hard in order to provide consumption for the poor (who mostly don't work). These rich people will wear the same hoodies and turtlenecks as anyone else, live in moderately larger houses than the poor (or at least in moderately nicer locations), and have virtually no goods and services that are unavailable to the poor. Would this modern world not count as wildly imaginative?
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I think you are describing the upper middle income rich. The ultra rich are nothing like us in the main.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    They use the same iPhone, have access to the same chemo, and watch the same movies. The only difference is they fly in private planes instead of commercial, drive high end Mercedes instead of Fords, live in mansions instead of apartments. But their HVAC cools just the same as my window unit, it's just quieter. Yeah, they have lots of things we don't. But the difference is smaller than between a rich person in 1915 and a poor person today.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      I think the life of the ultra rich is fundamentally different to the average middle income person in the same way that royalty lives a different life to a commoner. Sure we all breath, eat, sleep and procreate, but the differences in the concerns of the ultra rich and the rest of us is quite large. A poor person today is richer in many ways to the rich of 1915 thanks to technological advance, but there still is a huge gap between the opportunities of the poor today and those of the ultra rich. More fundamentally I just don’t think it is good for the ultra rich to live a life that is so different to the rest of society. These people have an enormous amount of power and it is not good for the rest of us if they live a life detached from the worries and concerns of us common folk. You just can’t make good decisions on the basis of bad information and if this is formed from the worries and concerns of your ultra rich friends and you then you are going to end up with a warped perspective of what life for most people.
chongli 11y ago
How come they're limitless when it comes to facing off against gravity, and completely defeatist when it comes to erasing class distinctions? The key distinction in this problem is between overcoming fixed barriers of nature and overcoming the dynamic, highly adaptable nature of human beings. Personally, I don't believe we're ever going to come up with a fixed set of laws that could constrain the infinite range of human behaviour to the realm of fairness and make cheating impossible. At least not without eliminating all freedom for everyone.

natrius 11y ago

Communism happened. It killed lots of people, and made radical changes in the social order unappealing to most. Now ideas don't just have to sound plausible, but you also have to prove that they won't lead to the deaths of millions.

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Have you heard of social democracy, i.e. taking those ideas and not implementing them by being a murderous crazy dictator? It's working out just fine for the countries which are consistently ranked as the best to live in in the world. As opposed to the US, which is closer to third world status when it comes to things like low median wage, little to no maternity leave, expensive and poor healthcare system, school shootings, poor literacy rates, high drug use rates, etc etc.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  US median wages aren't low compared to Western Europe. Modestly lower than the Nordic countries yes, but modestly higher than France and Germany and so forth.
  - collyw 11y ago
    What is the US median wage? All I ever see are SF developer salaries on here, which are way higher than most parts of Europe.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      There's a choose your statistic problem, but it is ~$28,000 or $29,000 (that's based on the estimated median individual wage among employed persons (which I think wage implies employment)). https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 I guess income inequality measures result in less favorable comparisons than basic measures of wages.
- natrius 11y ago
  I like social democracy. (I was just establishing the burden of proof, not taking a position.) I'm skeptical that America has enough social cohesion for such a thing to be fully implemented here. Literacy and median wages are fine for the white majority, so we've got most of the trappings of a social democracy for white America. Why would Americans use the state to benefit all people when Americans aren't even willing to put agents of the state on trial when they kill unarmed black people?
  - iofj 11y ago
    First thing that needs to happen to social cohesion in America is stopping focusing everything on race. Yes, minimum wage affects different races differently. But so does everything else. And one thing I'm pretty sure about : the rich are pushing down minimum wage for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with race. Even if the people involved are racists, it still would have little to do with why this is happening. So race is absolutely not relevant to this discussion. The way this works is that money is being used to make a subgroup of our society desperate enough to do whatever a number of rich folks want them to do, no questions asked. Nobody really cares who's in this subgroup, as long as it's not them and they're sufficiently desperate. So can we please shut up about whether the amount of melanin in the upper epidermis of some subgroup of the poor is small, medium or large and start talking about the economics at work here ?
    - natrius 11y ago
      The reason I mentioned race is because so many people around here want to ignore it. To ignore it is to ignore the reality that most Americans do not relate with minority groups. Bad news in a minority group is like bad news from the other side of the planet. If your solution to a problem requires unity, you probably need to find another solution. America is not united.
    - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      You seem to accept that the powerful elite will work to push down wages (broadly including providing healthcare and the modern social democratic benefits) but are ignoring the possibility that the quickest and easiest way for them to achieve this is to divide and conquer the poor by race, and its working beautifully for them.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  After government transfers, the bottom income quintile in the US makes more than in the UK and many other wealthy nations. Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better, with a less healthy more diverse population than just about every other country (the top ten hospitals with the best cancer survival rates are overwhelmingly in the US), maternity leave may not be mandated, but is available to many if not most. 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. And how is the US so different from a social democracy? Massive transfers of wealth to the poor, strong regulations, large government influence in industry, and of course democracy, with strong protections against a "murderous crazy dictator".
  - collyw 11y ago
    "Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better.." No it doesn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_health_care_outcome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_heal...
  - DanBC 11y ago
    The US does well on cancer, but that's because cancer is mostly a disease of old age and the US spends a lot of public money via medicaid on older people. > 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. There's a lot of illiteracy in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." Further, this study showed that 41% to 44% of U.S. adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale (literacy rate of 35 or below) were living in poverty.[2]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jqm 11y ago
You don't have to prove that ideas won't lead to the deaths of millions at all. Right now there are a bounty of ideas floating around, many the basis of whole civilizations and governments which very possibly could lead to the death of millions if left to finish course. And nary a peep.
MisterBastahrd 11y ago
Communism never happened. Communist propaganda happened.
- clarky07 11y ago
  haven't we mostly proven that communism isn't a thing that can work given human nature?
  - collyw 11y ago
    This is a dumb argument when the alternative also involves the exact same human nature.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    What do you believe communism is and how do you believe it goes counter to human nature? It's an impossible thing to discuss without nailing down exactly what it is you are talking about as most people haver wildly diverging ideas of what it implies. But most people seem to tend to think that communism requires some kind of pure altruism to work (and to be fair, there have been socialist and communists that also believed that), but a central aspect of Marxism is the opposite: The working class must learn to value its own work and not buy into the subjective moralism of the capitalist classes (that tend to ascribe virtue to wealth: if you're rich, it is generally assumed to be an indicator you have worked hard, while poverty equally is suspect), but be willing to grab the proceeds of their labour. Marx spent a considerable amount of time ripping to shreds early "utopian socialism" (Fourier, Owens et. al) for failing to understand this amongst other failings. The very insistence of revolution as the mechanism for social upheaval in Marxism is explicitly that Marx did not believe that the ruling classes would be willing to give up privileges willingly even in the face of election defeats, and so once a sufficient working class majority comes into being, sooner or later there would be conflict. An egalitarian system according to Marx is a desirable, advanced stage of society, but it will come into being, he argues, not because it is the right thing, but because it is the only possible next step: the working classes can only overcome the power of the capitalist classes through sheer numbers, and can unite only because capitalism eventually creates a situation where carving up the pie equally becomes a net improvement for a rapidly growing majority: The rational choice for most of us to maximize our own wealth is an equal distribution the moment the majority of wealth is health by a minority of people, because most of us will otherwise be in the majority that receives less (and for this reason he was insistent that a socialist revolution would fail if attempted somewhere not advanced enough to allow redistribution to eradicate poverty - if it instead merely spread poverty out, class struggles would resume).

paulddraper 11y ago

We're talking about getting a couple volunteers to Mars one time, not forcing billions of people there permanently.

grecy 11y ago

>what's up with the bounds of our imagination? How come they're limitless when it comes to facing off against gravity, and completely defeatist when it comes to erasing class distinctions? In my experience, that's only true in America. People in Canada, Australia, England and Argentina and perfectly happy to discuss and debate ideas and ways to remove (or drastically reduce) class distinctions. Politicians even enact policy to do it. I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly, it's not only un-American to suggest a change to the status quo, it's also considered utterly impossible.

merpnderp 11y ago
The US redistributes enough money to the poor to make them richer than the UK, and likely many other wealthy nations in the world. It's not like the US is some Mad Max universe where the poor are forgotten and left without aid.
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  >The US redistributes enough money to the poor to make them richer than the UK Source? Also what do you mean richer than the UK?
  - tempestn 11y ago
    I'm guessing parent means that the poor in the US are richer than the poor in the UK. (Not sure whether that would be in an absolute sense or relative to cost of living, nor have I verified it in either case.)

brbsix 11y ago

I was under the impression that Keynesian economics is/was said limitless facing off against gravity. However as was already mentioned, when these sort of experiments go wrong (e.g. Communism), they tend to go terribly wrong. It would be nice if we could actually perform these experiments on a local, entirely voluntary scale however the Fed seems to have captured that market already.

applecore 11y ago

Here's the explanation for this phenomenon: the former is an example of man versus nature, whereas the latter is man versus man. We're rational animals, so we can try to use our intellect to overcome the insurmountable physical odds of living in an otherwise uncaring universe. However, when we're pitted against each other, we have no such luck.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

The standard left wing complaint is that billionaires don't have enough lavish parties, but instead reinvest their wealth in new productive capacity. See, e.g., Picketty, Krugman, or anyone favoring stimulus directed at the bottom of the income distribution. Do you dispute this? As for erasing class distinctions, consider the possibility that we already have. Imagine telling a person in 1915 about the world today; the children of rich struggling hard in school with the goal of getting a job where they can work hard in order to provide consumption for the poor (who mostly don't work). These rich people will wear the same hoodies and turtlenecks as anyone else, live in moderately larger houses than the poor (or at least in moderately nicer locations), and have virtually no goods and services that are unavailable to the poor. Would this modern world not count as wildly imaginative?

danieltillett 11y ago
I think you are describing the upper middle income rich. The ultra rich are nothing like us in the main.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  They use the same iPhone, have access to the same chemo, and watch the same movies. The only difference is they fly in private planes instead of commercial, drive high end Mercedes instead of Fords, live in mansions instead of apartments. But their HVAC cools just the same as my window unit, it's just quieter. Yeah, they have lots of things we don't. But the difference is smaller than between a rich person in 1915 and a poor person today.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I think the life of the ultra rich is fundamentally different to the average middle income person in the same way that royalty lives a different life to a commoner. Sure we all breath, eat, sleep and procreate, but the differences in the concerns of the ultra rich and the rest of us is quite large. A poor person today is richer in many ways to the rich of 1915 thanks to technological advance, but there still is a huge gap between the opportunities of the poor today and those of the ultra rich. More fundamentally I just don’t think it is good for the ultra rich to live a life that is so different to the rest of society. These people have an enormous amount of power and it is not good for the rest of us if they live a life detached from the worries and concerns of us common folk. You just can’t make good decisions on the basis of bad information and if this is formed from the worries and concerns of your ultra rich friends and you then you are going to end up with a warped perspective of what life for most people.

chongli 11y ago

How come they're limitless when it comes to facing off against gravity, and completely defeatist when it comes to erasing class distinctions? The key distinction in this problem is between overcoming fixed barriers of nature and overcoming the dynamic, highly adaptable nature of human beings. Personally, I don't believe we're ever going to come up with a fixed set of laws that could constrain the infinite range of human behaviour to the realm of fairness and make cheating impossible. At least not without eliminating all freedom for everyone.