The actual left is generally against that sort of thing, and even significant factions on the right don't want the kind of government control, what you should be concerned about are liberal centrist people.
I hate to break it to you, but Greenwald is just another "I was a teenage leftist" Republican getting ready for his book tour. He's been pandering to Trump supporters for a few years now...
He's a terrible example to cite if you want to support the actual left.
I mean, he has started spreading TERF propaganda on Twitter (because those particular brainworms always infect the new converts, for whatever reason). That and the Trump thing aren't minor ideological differences - they're fundamental, irreconcilable conflicts. There's no future for them.
Probably more like "actual left" in contrast to the milquetoast kind that passes for the left wing of mainstream US politics, which are center-right by global standards.
About as biased as a source you can find, considering this is from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute [1], a right-wing pressure group designed to spread propaganda in college campuses.
Respectfully to the moderators. I'm surprised this has decent comments given it is indeed an extraordinarily biased source and engages flagrant, extreme attacks on anything on the left.
I think that it serves to show how used the left-leaning crowd is to such baseless attacks and how patient they are.
As far as biased sources go, this one offers an interesting view and brings up the point made elsewhere, that the people who struggle daily to put food on the table may not have the bandwidth to think about global solutions to systemic problems.
Also, it prompts me to remind people that neither Engels nor Marx told anyone they should sell all their material possessions and give to the poor. That would be Jesus and it's surprising that they are so often confused.
Also, it prompts me to remind people that neither Engels nor Marx told anyone they should sell all their material possessions and give to the poor. That would be Jesus and it's surprising that they are so often confused.
Yep, that's a good point.
But ... the thing about this, the article raises things to think about in the reader. But the fact selection and the approach is essentially a standard hit piece. I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't know precisely the point you raise, that Marx and Engels didn't pretend to be Jesus. And the author is writing to other assuming that showing Engels as Hedonist will sink his appeal.
But yes, the actual facts are more interesting than OP intends. But, as someone who other contexts moderates discussion, I think this has the problem of setting a bad example. People start to ask: "If this 100% bad faith article results in good discussion, why can't we do more of it? Why can't I do it? Now everything from Turning Point USA and such is OK to post" etc.
Which is to say, you've gotten some benefits and you've paid some costs. The benefits are some OK but not extraordinary discussions of Marx and Engels, the costs are confusing your moderation policy. Even though I'm sympathetic to generally positive discussion of Engels, I don't think this is worth the cost. Just my rough calculation.
> If this 100% bad faith article results in good discussion, why can't we do more of it? Why can't I do it? Now everything from Turning Point USA and such is OK to post
That's a very good point.
It's not the article that is good. It's left-leaning HNers that are an amazing bunch that won't allow themselves to be baited by this.
It's odd to describe a person who freely accepts a lifetime of servitude in exchange for his live as a slave. They could have chosen death instead, after all.
Providing a service is not "servitude" in the context of 'slavery'.
As for working as an alternative to starving, as
Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years ago:
"Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd."
Serious question: if you pick any given surveillance state from a liberal western democracy and pick it out of a hat, and set it side by side with China's surveillance state, are you telling me you would not be able to tell them apart?
Because that's the point at issue in the thread you are replying to. And I'm personally kind of amazed that it's possible to lose sight of something I find to be an incredibly obvious distinction.
I think you may have pulled the wrong point. This thread seems more about how the US prides itself on being a role model when we are often hypocritical. If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state.
This branch of comments goes back to a commenter who made the accurate point that the US is closer to a liberal democracy than China.
>If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state.
This is conflating a differentiation for a justification. We can form coherent thoughts about the relative scale of abuses committed by different powers without that meaning we think those abuses are okay.
If we lose our ability to form coherent thoughts about abuses committed by China because we can't express them without also having to labor through false equivalences to U.S. surveillance, those valid and needed criticisms get derailed and the comprehension of China's unique status as an abuser of surveillance infrastructure gets erased. Judging different scales of moral error is important, because otherwise we can never progress from a position of moral error to positive moral standing and we get bogged down with frivolous exercises in whataboutism.
First, so that it can be privatized and turned over to the free market, for which I will offer no opinion. That can be argued effectively to no real end on both sides, similar to a discussion about Amtrak or farming subsidies.
Second, the fact that the Postmaster is a Trump acolyte in an election year where there will be a record number of vote-by-mail responses should tell you all you need to know about what the true motivations are.
Mail in ballots still need to get to the voter before Election Day. If the voter doesn’t deliver it to a post office or a poll station before Election Day it doesn’t get counted. Can you imagine how pissed people will be if Election Day rolls around and fewer than 50% of mail-in voters have been delivered ballots? Taxation without representation doesn’t go over well in the USA.
Yes, people can go to a polling place and file a provisional, but the whole point of mail-in is so we don’t have to. Also, with COVID affecting older people more than younger, there may be a shortage of poll workers.
Also prep time: The county election office needs a reliable estimate of how long the mail leg will take so they can target the process of printing and sending the voter package. They need to be able to print some of the packages on short notice for newly registered voters and party affiliation changes.
If that's an accurate description of the delay, then I agree.
However, I've seen tweets suggesting that recent (since COVID lockdowns) delays of more than a week are currently not uncommon and I don't have any evidence that the USPS is shrinking their backlog right now. Given the current trajectory (eg. the current Postmaster General is denying overtime), I expect the possibility of many ballots missing delivery by Election Day unless USPS prioritizes those deliveries.
you may be correct - however, a lot of voter suppression is comparatively soft. more along the lines of discouragement. remove polling places, cause long lines, that gets on the news, people don’t bother to go after they get off work.
At least in MD ballots just need to be postmarked by Election Day to be counted. What states require ballots to arrive by Election Day? That seems like a much less transparent policy unless there are guarantees on delivery time...
I'm imagining massive pressure on Biden to concede before mail-in votes are counted, maybe combined with a 2000-style lawsuit that delays things even more.
Not outside the realm of possible, but why do that if you can achieve the same goal in subtler ways? 2000 was a “close call” because 10s of thousands of people in primarily-black communities in florida had their voting infra degraded to the point of uselessness. Voting infra is a proven strategy to tip the scales towards the kleptocrats
Say I am an Oregon resident who can vote by mail by default. This election season, I'm stuck at my job site in North Carolina. I can request Oregon mail by ballot to my location in NC then vote and mail it back. As long as it is postmarked before the election ends I'm good and my vote makes it in to be counted.
But what if it takes 2 weeks to get from Oregon to NC then back from NC to Oregon? And then another week to be handled last mile and finally gets to the office? It gets to the right place and is counted weeks after the election ends and is effectively decided by most analysts. Or maybe it doesn't even get to me in time and my vote doesn't count.
Oregon I'd trust to open and count it accordingly as it checks all the boxes to be legit. But maybe another state is not set up for this process and hacks it together the month before the election. Maybe in that state my ballot doesn't make it to NC on time or even until after the election. Maybe once the ballot makes it home, it sits another 2 weeks in a backlog as a poorly funded, overworked team tries to catch up and confirm/reconcile votes across in person and this new mail in system. Maybe byt the time my ballot is done, it's the second week of December and the commission or Secretary of State isn't sure it has the right numbers and has to do a recount (or ignores it as clearly it's a broken system anyway, according to the president, so of course it would be off).
All of a sudden, we have another Constitutional crisis on our hands. The guy in charge has spread misinformation or full on fake news about an otherwise working system. He argued against and his party rejected any efforts to fund the mail in side of the national election even though it was openly attacked by foreign nations last time and is no more secure than then. Maybe GOP governors and secretaries of state who follow the president closely use his claims so that, due to expanded mail in voting, of course the numbers don't match polling or prior data so the election itself is a sham. Whether the numbers show Trump winning or losing, it's all a sham and can be ignored or taken before SCotUS which luckily has a few of your guys (Federalist Society picks) on the majority.
The dilemma is we need to oust any official who aims to undermine any government system or program, in words or actions, unless they are working on factually reported data and studies that indicate change is needed (which is almost always). The current administration has been lying to its citizens from day 1. Somehow that hasn't forced the resignation.
At this point UPS/Fedex should step in and offer free shipping for ballots. Voters can drop off in their stores or their delivery people/trucks can act as pick up spots too. If nothing else it might buy them some goodwill. Or conscience.
Possibly accelerated, but for several years they've been moving in the direction of assuming nobody will visit a post office unless they have no other option and have reduced hours to whatever they think they can get away with politically.
Ten years ago there were quite a few post offices open 24/7/365. Today the 24-hour locations are at best 18/7 and the more usual hours are better than traditional banker's but worse than retail M-F, limited on Saturday, and LOLGFY on Sunday. Which limits their revenue to whatever services they have a legal monopoly on, plus package services for businesses where the shipper wasn't going to the post office to mail things anyhow.
Agreed, but no one seems to know how we decouple the economy from growth without hurting or angering a lot of people. Maybe we just tear off that bandaid quickly.
The number of people who would be adversely 'negatively' affected if we said "alright, we're taking control of this situation and not just going to blindly let you maximize your profits at the expense of the rest of the planet" is pretty small. A few millionaires and billionaires. The majority of us will adapt just fine.
The resources are there but they are misallocated and the few own most of them. When push come to shove it will become more and more obvious this is one of the problems. Until the we fight on stupid things
This just means that the strategy of keeping most of the wealth with a tiny minority and expecting the middle class to bear the cost of supporting the old people in wholly separate existences and households paid for by the young isn't tenable.
Some degree of distribution of wealth and multi generational households would render it tenable again.
I dunno, looking at the fertility rates of rich countries vs. the performance of equities, it seems like increased productivity from computerization and automation is perfectly capable of offsetting much of the economic decline from a lower birthrate.
It should be who can produce the most efficient and consume the most efficient. We should go back to building solidly and everlasting. The investment may be initially more expensive but the return will compound quickly and the benefits will make a difference. We’re wasting so many resources to stir this stupid economy and it always crashes.
Yes, but that doesn't mean they are the same. Capitalism is a way to describe market efficiency which is a good thing, but people are turning the word to mean a system where people hurt each other for profit.
I agree people shouldn't hurt each other, but that doesn't mean we should redefine a word and abandon a system of marketplaces.
You see I disagree with your fundamental premise, capitalism is a means to amplify creation of money and wealth inequality which is a bad thing, but people sometimes use it for good to help each other.
The definition of capitalism: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
I wish I could edit my first comment to include the definition. I hate inequality and people hurting others through abusive practices too.
That’s what I would call the spiritual or religious definition. It’s followed by the philosophical followers of capitalism (economics majors and similar). The practical definition of capitalism is studied by the operational practitioners (business administration, executives) of capitalism and only superficially resembles the former.
