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I will say, it must be nice to spend so much time worrying about problems that don't exist instead of all the ones that actually do. Seems like it'd be a real c

I will say, it must be nice to spend so much time worrying about problems that don't exist instead of all the ones that actually do. Seems like it'd be a real comfort.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 6y ago
If you had told me 25 years ago that in my home country (Bangladesh) people were going to be demanding removal of a statue of lady justice from in front of the Supreme Court, and that the court would oblige, and that veiling women would go from being nearly non-existent to commonplace, and that secular journalists would be getting murdered, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Islamists got control of education, and all of those things happened. So imagine my alarm to read that 20% of social science professors self-identify as Marxist. A third of college students embrace communism. In 2017, the nation’s premier newspaper ran a sympathetic retrospective on a century of communism. Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. A bunch of people on a website associated with a startup incubator are going to read the preceding sentence and go “yeah, that makes sense.” So it feels like gaslighting for you to say it’s a “problem that doesn’t exist.” Maybe I’m being paranoid, but in my experience civilization is fragile. Better safe than sorry. But obviously, ranting about it on HN won’t fix the problem.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  > Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. It was, though, at least if you're talking about early modern slavery. Slavery in the ancient world was a substantially different model, but the early modern African slave trade was fundamentally driven by rich, increasingly centralized farm owners with a business model dependent on unpaid workers.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. Chattel slavery of the type practiced in the early US and elsewhere was part of the dominant Western system of the mid-19th century for which critics coined the term “capitalism”; what else would it be but capitalist?
  - zo1 6y ago
    It may be "capitalist" in the sense that things are being bought/sold/owned sure. But it's being portrayed as a concept/occurrence that is mostly if not entirely a product of capitalism. Which is plain wrong because we've had slavery and various forms of it in a multitude of situations and political systems throughout history, a lot of which were in no way capitalist. It's white-washing a lot of our collective history and suffering just as like claiming that slavery was purely done by "western", "white" or "imperialist" nations. The debate is very muddled because we're breaking standard definitions and using them each in our own way. I struggled to phrase the above properly, and no doubt I'm probably misusing some of the terms on some level.
    - jahaja 6y ago
      It doesn't matter if there's a historical precedent. Each system is defined by the incentives it sets up. The incentives set up by capitalism are clearly instrumental to the vast expansion of slavery.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - bickeringyokel 6y ago
    Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. The means of production is usually defined as tools, machinery or technology, not people.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. No, capitalism is a particular real-world economic system that existed in a particular time and place; it is true that private ownership of the means of production is a central element of that system, but it's not it's only feature. Slavery was, in fact, an element of that system identified by the people who identified the system and coined the term capitalism for it, critics like Marx, whom wrote in Capital: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.” Capitalism, and it's evolution from feudalism, includes the development of commercial, rather than patriarchal, slavery, wherein slaves are chattels rather than, while subordinate, bound up in a system that, at least in tradition and theory, involves mutual-though-asymmetric obligations and responsibilities.
- throwanem 6y ago
  > A third of college students embrace communism This sounds a lot scarier when you don't realize that, among the same set, there is all but ubiquitous contempt for "tankies", i.e. the very same Stalinist-style sort of thing you're worried about. Newsmax won't tell you that, because why would they? Keeping you frightened keeps you doomscrolling their ads. I know about the tankie hate because I know a bunch of the people you're scared of. They're not going to burn your house down or kill you. But they do understand that they're getting a raw deal, and they have a pretty good idea of why and from whom, and they're not willing to take it lying down. Good for them, in my opinion, and seeing as they are getting a raw deal - worse than my own generation did, which is saying a lot - it's with them that my sympathies lie. Especially in a time when the US federal government is violating its own laws at will, up to and including illegal arrests carried out Gestapo-style with no probable cause and no due process - if you can't tell the difference between a generation of young people defending their interests and the potential collapse of civilization, you really do need to read less Newsmax, because it's making you paranoid. Mostly the kids are just looking to roll back as much as they can of Reaganism, and they're quite right to want to do so. This forty-year experiment with totally unchecked capitalism has gone on too long. It's past time to curtail and start repairing the damage. > slavery was capitalist Well, what else would you call it? Considered in purely economic and thus amoral terms, a chattel slave literally is capital, in the same sense that a mule or, later, a tractor, would be. That's quite literally what I was taught as a child in public grade school, growing up in Mississippi thirty years ago, and if you want to argue that the rural Mississippi school boards of the 1980s had been subverted by communists, that's fine, but you need to know up front that if you do I'm going to start calling you Joe McCarthy and I'm just never going to stop. In any case, I have a very hard time conceiving of a world in which "slavery is capitalist" is in any way a controversial thought. Are you perhaps confusing it with "capitalism is slavery"? Because you're citing the former, but it's the latter you seem to be arguing against, in the sense that you can be said to be making any argument here at all. You're right that ranting, on HN and elsewhere, rarely fixes anything. Have you thought about why you're impelled to do so anyway, and whether the impetus is a wholly rational one?
  - rayiner 6y ago
    I appear to arguing on HN with people who are repeating Marxist critiques of capitalism back at me, so I don’t think my fears are at all irrational. Also, see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/was-mccarthy-right-about-the-left/a0dc6726-e2fd-4a31-bcdd-5f352acbf5de/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/w... > McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism. Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn't know their names. (Note that this was written by a prominent left leaning journalist based on declassified intelligence information.)

I will say, it must be nice to spend so much time worrying about problems that don't exist instead of all the ones that actually do. Seems like it'd be a real comfort.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 6y ago

If you had told me 25 years ago that in my home country (Bangladesh) people were going to be demanding removal of a statue of lady justice from in front of the Supreme Court, and that the court would oblige, and that veiling women would go from being nearly non-existent to commonplace, and that secular journalists would be getting murdered, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Islamists got control of education, and all of those things happened. So imagine my alarm to read that 20% of social science professors self-identify as Marxist. A third of college students embrace communism. In 2017, the nation’s premier newspaper ran a sympathetic retrospective on a century of communism. Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. A bunch of people on a website associated with a startup incubator are going to read the preceding sentence and go “yeah, that makes sense.” So it feels like gaslighting for you to say it’s a “problem that doesn’t exist.” Maybe I’m being paranoid, but in my experience civilization is fragile. Better safe than sorry. But obviously, ranting about it on HN won’t fix the problem.

crooked-v 6y ago
> Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. It was, though, at least if you're talking about early modern slavery. Slavery in the ancient world was a substantially different model, but the early modern African slave trade was fundamentally driven by rich, increasingly centralized farm owners with a business model dependent on unpaid workers.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. Chattel slavery of the type practiced in the early US and elsewhere was part of the dominant Western system of the mid-19th century for which critics coined the term “capitalism”; what else would it be but capitalist?
- zo1 6y ago
  It may be "capitalist" in the sense that things are being bought/sold/owned sure. But it's being portrayed as a concept/occurrence that is mostly if not entirely a product of capitalism. Which is plain wrong because we've had slavery and various forms of it in a multitude of situations and political systems throughout history, a lot of which were in no way capitalist. It's white-washing a lot of our collective history and suffering just as like claiming that slavery was purely done by "western", "white" or "imperialist" nations. The debate is very muddled because we're breaking standard definitions and using them each in our own way. I struggled to phrase the above properly, and no doubt I'm probably misusing some of the terms on some level.
  - jahaja 6y ago
    It doesn't matter if there's a historical precedent. Each system is defined by the incentives it sets up. The incentives set up by capitalism are clearly instrumental to the vast expansion of slavery.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- bickeringyokel 6y ago
  Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. The means of production is usually defined as tools, machinery or technology, not people.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. No, capitalism is a particular real-world economic system that existed in a particular time and place; it is true that private ownership of the means of production is a central element of that system, but it's not it's only feature. Slavery was, in fact, an element of that system identified by the people who identified the system and coined the term capitalism for it, critics like Marx, whom wrote in Capital: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.” Capitalism, and it's evolution from feudalism, includes the development of commercial, rather than patriarchal, slavery, wherein slaves are chattels rather than, while subordinate, bound up in a system that, at least in tradition and theory, involves mutual-though-asymmetric obligations and responsibilities.
throwanem 6y ago
> A third of college students embrace communism This sounds a lot scarier when you don't realize that, among the same set, there is all but ubiquitous contempt for "tankies", i.e. the very same Stalinist-style sort of thing you're worried about. Newsmax won't tell you that, because why would they? Keeping you frightened keeps you doomscrolling their ads. I know about the tankie hate because I know a bunch of the people you're scared of. They're not going to burn your house down or kill you. But they do understand that they're getting a raw deal, and they have a pretty good idea of why and from whom, and they're not willing to take it lying down. Good for them, in my opinion, and seeing as they are getting a raw deal - worse than my own generation did, which is saying a lot - it's with them that my sympathies lie. Especially in a time when the US federal government is violating its own laws at will, up to and including illegal arrests carried out Gestapo-style with no probable cause and no due process - if you can't tell the difference between a generation of young people defending their interests and the potential collapse of civilization, you really do need to read less Newsmax, because it's making you paranoid. Mostly the kids are just looking to roll back as much as they can of Reaganism, and they're quite right to want to do so. This forty-year experiment with totally unchecked capitalism has gone on too long. It's past time to curtail and start repairing the damage. > slavery was capitalist Well, what else would you call it? Considered in purely economic and thus amoral terms, a chattel slave literally is capital, in the same sense that a mule or, later, a tractor, would be. That's quite literally what I was taught as a child in public grade school, growing up in Mississippi thirty years ago, and if you want to argue that the rural Mississippi school boards of the 1980s had been subverted by communists, that's fine, but you need to know up front that if you do I'm going to start calling you Joe McCarthy and I'm just never going to stop. In any case, I have a very hard time conceiving of a world in which "slavery is capitalist" is in any way a controversial thought. Are you perhaps confusing it with "capitalism is slavery"? Because you're citing the former, but it's the latter you seem to be arguing against, in the sense that you can be said to be making any argument here at all. You're right that ranting, on HN and elsewhere, rarely fixes anything. Have you thought about why you're impelled to do so anyway, and whether the impetus is a wholly rational one?
- rayiner 6y ago
  I appear to arguing on HN with people who are repeating Marxist critiques of capitalism back at me, so I don’t think my fears are at all irrational. Also, see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/was-mccarthy-right-about-the-left/a0dc6726-e2fd-4a31-bcdd-5f352acbf5de/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/w... > McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism. Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn't know their names. (Note that this was written by a prominent left leaning journalist based on declassified intelligence information.)