Moderation

[mukdukaluk]

I remember the poor leading us into the oil wars. Never again amirite

[mukdukaluk]

I just think you’re reading too much into rhetoric on the site. I doubt anyone on the site would be lynching landlords or instituting red terror 2021 if they were able to though maybe I’m wrong.

[All-InFlynn]

@simplicitus

I think that depending on the workers of the world to get you there is how you end up with Trump.

This is just an article of faith, though. There’s nothing in particular you can point to that empirically supports it, and you’ve already been shown the statistics that tend to contradict it. Maybe it’s uncharitable to suppose that you simply think of the working classes as crude and boorish, and associate Trump with them because Trump is crude and boorish. But the charity you’re afforded is partly a function of your history, and you do not strike me as one of the deserving poor of posters.

[clovis8]

The idea that the poor are some kind of monolith incapable of rational thought is just as dumb as the idea that rich people are all self-serving evil masterminds.

[All-InFlynn]

@clovis8

The idea that the poor are some kind of monolith incapable of rational thought is just as dumb as the idea that rich people are all self-serving evil masterminds.

Absolutely. Plenty of rich people are thick as pigshit lololol.

[Sabo]

Post here instead: This thread is just an unreal dumpster fire… please.

Defamers Disrespecters since 2020-5-19 4:52 am pdt… @ zarapochka (3), @ All-inFlynn (2), @ mukdukaluk (2), @ Clovis8, @ Sabo.

Please post here instead: This thread is just an unreal dumpster fire… pretty please.

[Trolly]

Feel like Sabo is just trying way too hard.

[Sabo]

Sure. Why I put in any effort at all is beyond me. It’s certainly not for any appreciation.

But at least I’m trying to make UnStuck a better place to chat. Who else can say that since April 1st?

[jmakin]

I make unstuck a better place by not posting a ton in it. Maybe you should do the same.

[simplicitus]

@clovis8

The idea that the poor are some kind of monolith incapable of rational thought is just as dumb as the idea that rich people are all self-serving evil masterminds.

I think some have misunderstood my general viewpoint. I don’t think the poor tend to be any less able or virtuous than the wealthy. My problem is not with “the working class” or “waiters” or “old people” or what have you. I regard Trump as an indictment of humanity in general, not just the working class,* but damn if he did not garner much of their support, but if my broader point sometimes gets blurred it must be because I occasionally criticize those who find particular virtue in the poor and working class. The poor are just as bad as the rich, only poorer.

*Way beyond the scope of this post, but I think the distinction between the “working class”, bourgeoise, and ownership class and their particular interests is better suited to England in 1850 than the modern world. (To say nothing of intellectuals, who Maxists always had difficulty trying to pigeon hole in their correct role and strata. See Gramshi, Antonio; for a contrary perspective, see Pot, Pol.) It would take like 10k words to elaborate on this, but I suspect the standard categories of leftist social and political analysis are flawed and ultimately not real, and trying to construct and account of politics and society as a battle between the poor and the wealthy is ultimately fruitless. That why I supported Warren over Bernie. Where the rubber meets the road for improving the lives of real people is law, policy, and taxation, not ideals.

[simplicitus]

@microbet

Ok, I’m just going to outline this.

1. I’m hardly an inveterate optimist. All you really know about me (that’s relevant here) is that I like local and worker organization, direct democracy, independent and direct action and such - not anything about how likely I think it is to have widespread success and influence in the world.

I generally support these things, but I think it’s important to actually have formal political power, as that’s how you could enact widespread improvements, like broad healthcare coverage and the representation of employees in corporate management and policies. Hell, I would like to make some general rule that corporations must be run for the benefit of 1) their employees, 2) the general public, 3) and their owners/shareholders. Lots of people, especially business people, think the law requires they they only be run for 3). That’s false and pernicious.

However it comes about, whether it’s from “elites” or “bottom up” or a combination of the two. Though social change, especially in any form of democracy, always results from a combination. Someone like Obama becomes “elite” as soon as he gets educated and gains any power, when one could just as well think of his as a once 25 y/o fatherless guy living in some shit apartment having regular meetings with the poorest people in Chicago as a community organizer. And when he does not take radical action because he’s worried about broader effects and unintended consequences, he becomes an “elite sellout.” It’s much easier for folks like Bernie, who never gain any real power or real responsibility.

2. What utopian colonies are you talking about? Sounds like religious groups that are extremely hierarchical (as you mention). What non-hierarchical utopian experiments ended up like that? The kibbutzim more or less became either regular businesses or faded out as the next generation became normies. That’s not a failure though. The Spanish Revolution got destroyed by Franco and the Russia dominated communist party who had no interest in anything non-hierarchical. Rojava is still a work in progress, but is being attacked pretty relentlessly from the outside.

I’m talking about every utopian colony. They were big in America from like 1830-1880. You raise kibbutzs, you might have also mentioned the Amish. These are the most successful utopian communities I’m aware of (though I don’t know much about either). I do know that they require a shared belief in false religion to structure relevant conduct and practices, which is probably ultimately oppressive, though it may promote overall well being among believers. That’s fine, we can also live in a society based on radically false ideas where science and technology locked into some bygone era where people died, on average, at age 45 or so. My basic point about utopian communities, like utopian politics, is that wishing something to be doesn’t make it real.

3. The cries about “populism” are all complete bullshit/bad faith. Maybe in a multi-party system or maybe congressional representatives can be something other than populist, but every single presidental candidate and president ever is and always has been a populist. Don’t tell me Obama or Bill were not populists. All candidates try to carve out some segment of the voting population that is big enough to win. “Empower the masses”??? You’re really making an argument for ending democracy and reverting to an aristocracy? And that’s better? I dunno, I really have no idea what you’re suggesting if it isn’t something like “people who are fighting for $15/hr are morons and hate science”, but that’s not how Trump got elected. As you already agreed, hating Mexicans and being white Christians is what got Trump elected. And if you want to split the intellectual branch of the Democratic Party from the Progressive Branch and ask who believes in science, I’ll ask you to look up Barack Obama and clean coal and then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal.

I don’t really get your point here. I guess I would respond that populism has always had negative connotations with me, but ya, hard to get elected in a democracy without the support of the people.

4. Something on tactics/strategy. If it’s 1918-1922 and you’re in Russia or it’s 1945-1970 China, it’s probably a good idea to say “wait a sec, let’s not idealize the worker or the rural peasant”, but if you’re in 1930 Germany you sure as hell should not be going around warning people about the threat of organized labor. There is no threatening left in the US. Ask zikzak about the attendance of any kind of radical left demonstrations. On the other hand there’s an immense right, whether you mean right-wing Trumpy kind of stuff or just massive corporate power and culture. The ship needs to be steered and if you are scared to steer in the direction it needs to go and resisting that, you’re effectively steering in the wrong direction. And you say you like the way they handle things (corporations) in Germany (something you may have seen me post about)??? We’ve got a LOOOOONNNNNNG way to go to get anywhere near that.

Again, I’m all for progressive reform. Look at the world of 1920 vs 2020, even just in the US, and life is massively better based on any scale you would have chosen as a metric in 1920. Things were getting incrementally better for a long time based on the slow boring work of democracy, government, and law.

I think we really backslid hard with Bush in 2000 and really, really backslid with Trump. I think if things are going to get better we need more boring incremental reform, and maybe some “radical” reform like overhauling the tax code, getting single-payer, protecting voting rights, making sure crazies don’t get appointed to the Supreme Court, etc. The way we do that is by beating the republicans. The way the republicans prevent reform is by getting dumb people and racists to vote for them by tapping into their lizard brains and demonizing minorities and encouraging conspiracy theories, telling them that that there is a “them,” and they are out to get “you.” (Sounds familiar, almost like standard leftist politics).

I wanted to write some reply, as you made some effort in your post, but I don’t think the above really gets at where we differ. I think I have a much more jaundiced view of humanity and a somewhat different general perspective generally.

We live on a 5.5 billion year old planet in a 15 billion-year-old universe. We were hunter-gathers for 50-100k years, invented farming about 10k years ago, literacy about 5k years ago, the heliocentric perspective like 500 years ago, efficient communication like 170 years ago, biology like 140 years ago, modern physics like 110 years ago, modern medicine like 90 years ago. If we make it another 200 years, the social and political world will be radically different and render most political thought of today completely unrecognizable. If we are truly lucky (unlikely) we will have de factor world government and a more or less common language, massive productive capacity, and a general belief that our interests and fates of human beings are inextricably intertwined. I don’t think we get there by the workers of the world uniting but by continuing the slow continuous (if uneven and often wildly destructive) progress we’ve seen over the last 400 years or so. And that’s 200 years from now. What will things be like 1000 years from now? Will we be still be concerned with things like the evil of landlords? I suspect such issues will have been surpassed by more interesting concerns. Then again, if Trump can be elected president of the most power nation on earth, who knows. Then again, again, I think demographics point in a generally favorable direction, at least for the next 50 years.

[microbet]

I’m not a Marxist or a communist and I don’t like people united at all in large groups, even workers. In the battle between rich and poor the rich are often pretty united (largely because immense multinational corporations function as a single entity and industries are good at coordinated efforts). It’s probably necessary that the workers of the world do some uniting in order to keep up. I’d rather see less uniting along class lines though and have the rich communes broken up.

[All-InFlynn]

@simplicitus

if my broader point sometimes gets blurred it must be because I occasionally criticize those who find particular virtue in the poor and working class

No. If your broader point sometimes gets blurred, it’s because you occasionally say things entirely at odds with the self-portrait you’re painting here. I’ll give some allowance for online rhetoric and, frankly, I’ll give a little extra allowance for a guy with your background who confuses masculinity with contempt for women and finds his desire to be masculine at odds with the mores of his social peers. If you find that those allowances aren’t enough to rehabilitate your image, that’s your problem, not mine.

You said you back the candidate favoured most by mathematicians and not by waiters, and I think that’s a useful articulation of a particular liberal viewpoint. A viewpoint from which class — socioeconomic status, or what a full-blowm Marxist would call relation to the means of production — has been mostly if not completely removed. I won’t take you at your word that you don’t actually despise the waiters, because you’ve said too many things that suggest you do, and I’m more inclined to believe people when they’re saying things like that than when they’re hedgingly apologising for having done so, but I don’t think that’s especially important, mostly because this is a message board and nothing said here is at all important. I think it’s quite informative, though.

Politics is a contest for resources, for how they will be used and how they’ll be distributed. Painting that contest as solely between the poor and the rich, the haves and have-nots etc may be incomplete. Shit’s complicated, yo. But it’s far, far less incomplete than dismissing that analysis entirely. If you favour redistribution, you have work to do if you want to justify discounting the avowed opinions of those who would benefit from it. More work, certainly, than merely pointing to your own socio-economic status can do.

It’s Gramsci, btw, not Gramshi. It’s funny how the internet can sometimes judo-flip those old shibboleths.

[lovemuffin]

I think the war of position is a pretty cool idea, but have you ever tried to read Prison Notebooks? Tough, imo.

[MysteryConman]

@simplicitus

but if my broader point sometimes gets blurred it must be because I occasionally criticize those who find particular virtue in the poor and working class. The poor are just as bad as the rich, only poorer.

You may wish this to be true, but it’s not.

No poor person has ever been a slumlord.

No poor person cashed in stock options at Perdue pharma.

No poor person has bankrolled for profit prisons.

No poor person has funded think tanks that crank out climate change denial propaganda.

It’s an near infinite list, and if we wanted to keep score in this game of who acts worse, rich or poor–it’ll be a blow out. And I only listed legal things that rich people do that poor people don’t.

Our currently existing system is designed to prioritize profits over people. So, you are left with a choice: acknowledge that allowing the rich to commoditized and profit off of everything from shelter to health care to inflicting pain and suffering onto others to destroying the environment is in fact the rich actively acting worse than the poor.

Or keep equivocating, and pretend the score is tied.

[All-InFlynn]

Rich people are less empathetic, less compassionate, less responsive to social cues and more likely to violate social norms.

[olink]

@zarapochka

Come on. Think russian revolution. Think Hitler.

Which Russian Revolution? And exactly what to you blame on poor people then?

Hitler was backed by the business elite. Everything about the nazis can be blamed also on the wealthy class, not the working class.

And even if you were right about these cases (you’re not), you’re still wrong.
That desperate people are sometimes violent in their own defense doesn’t make them as bad as those who are routinely violent in their opprsssion.

[clovis8]

Honest to god people. We are pretty sophisticated group here. How about we stop with the level one “everyone in group X is Y” discussions. They are so stupid and lead only to lazy thinking.

[tabbaker]

Poors did the holocaust what a take

[microbet]

Tldr, but you want to play this both ways. With Hitler you are using his personal economic status because that suited your point. You ignore that he was bitterly opposed to the working class (labor unions were a primary target). With Lenin it works better for you to ignore his personal background and blame the people he claimed to support. (He did not support them in reality. Within a couple years he was sending in tanks to settle labor disputes.)