4 ms·
Sent from iPhone X
by ben_jones 9y ago
Sent from iPhone X
- Analemma_ 9y agoAre you only allowed to criticize capitalism if you own no possessions and live in a hut in the woods you built yourself?
- brucephillips 9y agoNo, but if you're enjoying products that would have never been developed without profit incentive, then there's hypocrisy in rejecting capitalism.
- Analemma_ 9y agoThere's really, really not. I think you need a refresher on the definition of "hypocrisy", because yours is badly wrong.
- brucephillips 9y agoIf you're willing to engage in respectful debate, rather than just vacuously claiming that I'm wrong, I'm happy to discuss any definition you'd like to proffer.
- Analemma_ 9y agoWe (I'm assuming you're not posting from North Korea) all live in a capitalist society, so virtually all the products we use are "made with profit incentive". Since it is not possible to live in society without consuming any products, your definition of a "hypocritical" capitalist critiquer implicitly includes all of them - which makes it useless as a definition, as it carries no informational content.
- brucephillips 9y agoBut many products would exist without profit incentive. This isn't a thought experiment. East Germany had bread and houses. They didn't have iphones. If you want the iphone, you have to accept profit incentive.
- owebmaster 9y agoThe same way if you want a welfare state you have to accept taxes.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoThe Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it. The results of the survey are difficult to interpret, pollsters noted. Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking. If you do a survey and ask if people are pro abortion, most of them will say "no." If you do a survey and ask if they support a woman's rights to have control over her body and have reproductive choice -- aka "pro choice" -- most people will say "yes." Most folks think a woman should have access to abortion services should she need one. They also think it should be an absolute last resort for when things go wrong and should not be used too casually as a primary form of birth control. The reality is that most women would never use it that way. But birth control methods fail far more often than most people imagine, plus sometimes someone is assaulted. TLDR: How you ask the question can skew the answers and also people often mean very different things with the same word. Communication R hard.
- brucephillips 9y agoBy any definition of capitalism, the iphone wouldn't have happened without it, so you can't claim that ambiguity in the question would prevent hypocrisy.
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- DoreenMichele 9y ago"The word 'capitalism' doesn't mean what it used to," said Zach Lustbader, a senior at Harvard involved in conducting the poll, which was published Monday. For those who grew up during the Cold War, capitalism meant freedom from the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. For those who grew up more recently, capitalism has meant a financial crisis from which the global economy still hasn't completely recovered. "They're not rejecting the concept," Della Volpe said. "The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that's what they're rejecting."
- DoreenMichele 9y agoOnly if you also hand built all the tools for building said hut and also also did not learn how to do any of that from instructions on websites or YouTube videos. ;)
- owebmaster 9y agoWhat happen to capitalists without capital who uses iphones built in communist States?
- Turing_Machine 9y agoIf you're going to criticize it you need to propose something better. Marxism demonstrably isn't it.
- Analemma_ 9y ago> If you're going to criticize it you need to propose something better. No, I don't. This is nonsense. "How should society be run" is an unfathomably complex problem, possibly the problem of our entire existence. Of course I don't have the complete answer. That does not preclude noticing the myriad problems with the current system, to suggest it does is a complete non sequitur. > Marxism demonstrably isn't it. Holy fallacy of the excluded middle, Batman! Where did I say I was a Marxist? I'm a confiscatory-tax-supporting democratic socialist who _agrees with you_ that Marxism was a disaster. But keep on trucking with your false dichotomy where you either love crony capitalism or you're a Marxist. It doesn't seem to be working on Millenials.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago> No, I don't. Yes, you do. Otherwise it's just whining. Illustration: I can't fly like Superman, even though it would be really, really cool if I could. It's a problem that makes my life less happy than it would otherwise be. The first option I have is figure out some way to make that possible, and advocate that society (or venture capitalists, or whoever) devote the resources necessary to make it happen. The second option, if the first ends in failure, is to conclude that it's not actually possible to do that, and just accept that fact and get on with my life. The third option is to spend all my time complaining about how "unfair" it is. The third option is called "whining".
- shameful_idiot 9y agoWow good one dude
- Crye 9y agoA product made possible by endless amounts of money being poured into state funded R&D for missile defense.
- pzone 9y agoHmm, research and technological innovation are a bit interconnected it seems. Obviously, the implication is we should toss out capitalism!