No not abandon the fight. We need to be smarter about how we structure society. Humans are pretty good at figuring out how to optimize around what they are being incentivized to optimize around. We need to figure out how to give the worker leverage in negotiating for wages and fair treatment on the job. What we don’t need is a Union centralizing that leverage in one place where it can be used for corrupt ends (mostly rent seeking, which is usually what power is used for honestly).
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I mean when something has never not been trash… For thousands of years… At some point you have to admit that there’s a pretty strong correlation between being human and fundamentally being a piece of shit.
You’re asking him to cite an incident where someone didn’t murder someone else? Did every fossil human get hit on the head with a spear? Every single person who gets old in a primitive society (and it is common enough) is testament to how people take care of one another.
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I don’t disagree with some of what you’re saying - clearly humans have been massacring each other unnecessarily for thousands of years - but your brushstrokes are way too broad and miss many cases that don’t conform, and those cases are viable, sustainable small communities with very little crime, delinquency etc, that are a counterpoint to your belief that humans are inherently bad.
No it’s not. It’s a 19th century philosophy of government that has been tried many many times and it always falls apart before it gets to any remotely useful scale. It would be better if you guys stopped reusing old words if you meant something different.
There’s a reason why I’m a huge UBI advocate. It’s the only way I see to give the power directly to the citizens instead of their power coming from them joining some powerful group.
Unfortunately one of the constants for having any larger population of humans is there being a monopoly on violence, and whoever has that monopoly is going to have quite a bit of power… and power is always used to benefit the individuals with the power. So the question becomes how to structure society with the minimum amount of power necessary that still gets shit done.
The key word there is small. Amazingly when they have plenty of room to spread out and don’t come into contact with other humans all that often humans have fewer opportunities or reasons to be shitty. But even those communities are going to be riven with blood feuds if you look one layer deeper.
Humans naturally covet what other humans have. This isn’t even an envy thing because the wealthy covet everything the poor have down to their physical bodies.
Yes there’s a part of me that thinks the first farmer made a terrible terrible decision… but then I remember the fossil with the spear through its skull.
This part is false in many cases, but you need it to be universally true to stop your belief from falling apart, hence its appearance in your post.
“Are going to be” is just unscientific, unsupported bilge.
This whole discussion is a great big pile of
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I’m not sure… we can’t even agree on what is.
I don’t need it to be universally true. There are plenty of populations of a few hundred people or less that haven’t broken out into blood feuds. But that’s definitely the exception.
I’m not an extremist there are plenty of perfectly wonderful humans and with ideal conditions many humans that aren’t wonderful are perfectly capable of living in peace.
Those conditions aren’t what humanity has ever optimized for though.
And imagine calling my posting unscientific bilge because you can find a few situations that encompass way way less than 1% of lived human experience since the invention of writing and telling me that because that exists my entire point is null and void. You’re the same guy who delights in shitting on America from checks notes again the UK. You wear your own biases on your sleeve for all to see. My point has always been about the macro reality of humanity, which is that we are an invasive species of fire monkeys run amok that is currently reshaping every dynamic in the natural world to our immediate extremely myopic benefit.
No, it’s more like BS’s version of history is the nightly news’ version of current events. It’s like thinking you see a car chase every time you go on the freeway in LA. It’s like thinking there are no-go zones in San Diego.
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No it’s just about every history book ever written. It’s amazing to me that all you guys can produce is a bunch of hand waving about places, peoples, and times that you don’t name to refute literally all of recorded human history. You guys want to tell yourselves that humans are innately wonderful creatures that got ruined by capitalism? That’s the beginning of the book of genesis lol. This lie you’re telling yourselves about how great we are as a species is pretty stale at this point.
Capitalism hasn’t even ruined people. Most people are nice.
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Beat me to it. And often they are only nice because they have cops to do the brutalizing for them. Be homeless or the wrong color in their neighborhood and see how nice they are. Not being required to see the ugliness that underpins your lifestyle is a luxury that some people can afford to buy, myself absolutely included.
Viewed from the perspective of white upper middle class suburbanites the cops are hero’s because they do the ugly shit required to keep the undesirables out. Order is maintained and they directly benefit from that.
Also I absolutely despise nice people. Very hard to tell if they like you or not.
I’ve seen friends shaking hands, saying “how do you do?” They’re really saying “I love you”.
You are like the conservatives who think progressives are always virtue signalling. You have a bitter disposition and can’t imagine anyone is genuinely different.
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Most people aren’t evicting anyone - in response to your previous post.
In response to this one…sure…absolutely…of course. Damn it’s easy not to think about how the tomato you’re eating might have been picked by an indigenous farm worker in Mexico literally locked up behind barbed wire during harvest and a million other things like that. Big problem with modern industrial society and the alienation that it causes. That’s not just capitalism, but it’s being so detached from so much and being surrounded by far more people than we could ever really know or connect with.
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This does go towards a way in which capitalism does make people worse. We are told over and over that these things are business, not personal. We are told to get ahead. Told to look out for financial security and interests and not be suckers. We are given permission by just about everything around us to make “business” impersonal and feel sorry for someone, but do something to harm them anyway.
I’ve watched people pretend to be ‘different’ my whole life. The louder they proclaim their goodness the more rotten they are. The actually good people are rarer and usually have pretty low self esteem weirdly.
And the other side of this argument hasn’t posted a single factual thing after going on a day of this conversation. You guys want to win this argument you’re going to need to do more than tell me I’m wrong. I’ll take the console log of humanity over everyone elses personal feelings for figuring out how things actually are thanks.
Your truth is a feeling you have with no data to back it up. You don’t like my truth because it makes you feel bad. That’s fine you can choose to live in an alternate reality. Most people do. In actual reality you’re a fire monkey living through the boom part of the boom/bust cycle that invasive species go through. At some point in the probably not very distant future we will run out of easily accessable natural resources and our population will crash. Or we’ll find a way out of the current jam and buy ourselves some more time. No animal ever got where we’ve gotten with tools before so there’s no way to know how it will go.
My personal favorite hypothesis is that humanity is life on Earth’s attempt to spread itself to other planets. That’s because it’s as optimistic as I can bring myself to be about our purpose. In reality we’re most likely just a random mass extinction event that will burn itself out.