Capitalism is concerned with the profit motive about all else, including sustaining the human species. Any attempts to regulate it will be fought tooth and nail and torn down eventually-- that’s been borne out by the last 40 years of America pretty well, I think.
I don’t see climate change being meaningfully addressed until we build a society whose core value is the dignity and sustainability of human life, not profit.
Aside, Americans criticizing socialist or communist countries would do well to consider the degree to which they’ve been drowned in propaganda their whole lives about how capitalism means freedom and America is the world’s most moral actor despite invading and overthrowing more countries-- again, for the profit motive-- than the rest of the world combined since WW2.
Just my .02; I can’t tell you how to set up the perfect society, but I have a pretty good idea what is going to happen if we keep going the direction we’ve been going.
Sabo is not incorrect because he’s not even making a point. It is pointless to drag capitalism into a thread about climate change unless you have a better idea. Get rid of capitalism, replace it with ???, then underpants gnomes solve climate change - isn’t a plan.
@R.C - of course the US isn’t some guiltless bastion of freedom. We’re utterly horrible. And capitalism is terrible for the environment, sure. But so is every other economic/governmental system ever tried on a mass scale. That was the whole point. Sabo turned a climate change thread into a referendum on capitalism and then got evasive when asked what he’d replace capitalism with that would do a better job.
Every other system that has been tried has had the United States putting the full force of its resources to undermining or overthrowing it, whether to steal the country’s resources and labor specifically or to break the idea of public / worker ownership-- or the idea of a system that genuinely valued all human life over profit-- generally. Part of the point of my first statement was to get people past “OK, the US is bad, but so are those other countries,” and get them thinking “How much of what I think of as bad about them was in direct attempt to defend themselves from the efforts of the US?”
I’m not a details guy, I’ll admit. I am a guy who’s good at the fundamentals, seeing the core values of people and their society, what they will ultimately choose when push comes to shove. All I’m saying is that we cannot solve anything without a system that puts human life over profits, and capitalism by definition will never be that, because it is defined by its need for constant growth and profit. And when push comes to shove, it will always, always choose that growth and profit, even if human extinction is the tradeoff.
This isn’t exactly what you’d call “on topic,” so I’ll stop here (and because it’s late). I’m happy to keep discussing the details of this sort of thing (despite my earlier statement about details) somewhere else or by PM. Like I’ve said, my only real problem in talking politics is with people who immediately condescend to me and treat me as stupid and naive because I think the human race needs better than the Joe Biden Democrats.
I don’t quite agree with this, but even if I grant it for argument’s sake, I can’t begin to see where it builds to “And that’s why Sabo should be permabanned”. Like if I think someone is engaging in a pointless line of argument, my response is to stop engaging with them.
That’s most people’s response. But you get one guy responding and before you know it there’s just pages of nonsense everywhere and guys stop bothering to sift through them all for a few nuggets of normal conversation and the place turns to shit. Good posters stop posting, lurkers even stop lurking, the place dies on the vine. Relying on everybody’s individual responsibility to not feed the trolls is naive, not everybody will do it all the time. So sometimes the most egregious trolls need to be disinvited. And it’s perfectly rational to look at a poster’s body of work as a whole, looking for a smoking gun is semantikesing and worse than useless – it’s obfuscating and a huge time sink. If a poster’s participation consistently leads to content free acrimony and has done for years the a ban is overdue.
Hard disagree that Sabo is a no content poster. Just because he asks you to think a little and doesn’t hand you things doesn’t mean he should be ignored imo. And certainly not perma’d lol
I think almost every poster on this forum agrees with this.
But turning thread after thread into capitalism-bashing, then getting evasive when asked to offer a better solution, isn’t really helpful. Sabo seems to be asking us to take a leap of faith into his brave new world, while offering zero ideas about what that world might look like, other than absence of capitalism.
For the record I think Western Europe is coming about as close to doing something about the environment and climate change as any system that’s existed on earth until now (after being largely responsible for fucking it up with high-income lifestyle, just like us). Scandanavian-style highly-regulated wide-social-safety-net democracy is far from perfect. But it still beats anything else I’ve seen attempted on mass-scale imo.
I think it’s fair for people to rail against the framing of Democrats vs Republicans when they see the real fight as capitalists vs anti-capitalists. I’ve spent a good part of my political online life arguing that, in the long run, anti-government libertarians are a greater threat than religious conservatives and that allowing social issues to be the litmus test for left vs right in America is a huge mistake. I can use pretty much any thread on here to get in some libertarian-bashing and probably have, although I don’t usually seek to dominate a thread.
That’s not what happens, though. What happens in that case is that the thread stops getting replies and people go on with their business. This schism/civil war/whatever hasn’t happened because a guy was engaging in pointless argumentation, that’s absurd to suggest. What’s been tearing this place apart, more than anything, is a kind of honour culture surrounding bans. Demands for bans as revenge for bans sought as revenge for other bans. Outrage and drama over bans. Outrage and drama over outrage and drama over bans. That has little to nothing to do with someone having a mildly irritating posting manner, which really is all that’s being described.
Even granting for the sake of argument that Sabo is a troll (which I consider an absurd claim and I doubt even most of the people pushing it genuinely believe it), he can hardly be among the most egregious, can he? I don’t think the most egregious trolls get a 45/55 split on a vote to perma them, right? They get 95/5 splits if they get a vote at all.
Sabo, from what I can make out, posts here as a leisure activity and in doing so advocates for a particular political position. His style is part of what people find irritating about him, but imo it’s a very small part. Most of what irritates people is their sense that well, here’s this crazy crusty anarchist, surely I’ll have no trouble at all cashiering his entire worldview, that’ll be a fun five minutes… and they find they can’t do it. Not that they can and it’s tougher than they thought, but that they aren’t actually able to satisfactorily dismiss his views at all. I think that’s what leads to the heatedness - a sense that they should be able to dismiss him easily and frustration that they can never quite manage to.
That’s what I think, and if I’m right - in fact, if I’m even in the right ball-park - then what we’re ultimately looking at is banning him for having different views from the median forum consensus and stubbornly refusing to be easily bested in discussion. That would say a whole lot of things about this place, and none of them good.
None of us can get into sabo’s secret inner heart but I might buy Flynn’s argument if it wasn’t for two things,
Our coauthored thread where he does the exact same thing and there was literally zero actual political discussion. He trolled his own thread about changing the discourse here. I am glad our PMs became public about that because I literally begged him to self-moderate the tiniest bit and he just refused to acknowledge he ever did anything wrong.
the use of my name, and ongoing use of other forum members names, at his new site.
Those two things are simply pure trolling meant only to create division and fights.
I won’t be debating this point with anyone as it’s not something that can be resolved. I am utterly convinced he doesn’t believe a word he types and only wants to create chaos. Nobody will convince me otherwise and I won’t convince them. I just couldn’t let the record stand that people don’t like sabo cause he is an anarchist. That is just plain silly. Micro is an anachist. Nobody reacts to him the same.
Also the vote was meaningless to answer the question Flynn claims. Many of the no votes could be people opposed to all permabans, a very common belief here.
Would you feel any better if Sabo offered Maoism or whatever (I don’t know his personal leanings)? My guess is no. My point being that you know perfectly well what the alternative is, you just aren’t comfortable with it for xyz reasons, which I’m sure you’d be happy to share. By being vague he avoids that unproductive step
The thread below, which I had muted but I can now see it went on for a while without me, is a perfect example of how sabo drags the forum down. Bit by bit these kinds of threads erode the enjoyment of the forum and run off good posters. I will give him credit for actually trying to state a position here a few times, between the stream of insults. I had completely forgotten about this thread.
The thread began from a post I made in the LC thread, not directed at anyone, making fun of a failed libertopia in New Hampshire. I made one off-hand comment about how I thought alternative govt systems could be great for small communities but break down in large groups - precisely because of bad actors like in bear-topia. (This forum is becoming another example of how a few bad actors can wreck a small community imo.)
Sabo went on the attack, out of the blue and completely out-of-line compared to the tone and content of what I posted:
And then of course all hell broke loose and the LC thread descended into name-calling and rancor until it was excised to it’s own thread. Completely unnecessary. Instigated by Sabo, as usual.
This repeated pattern of immature antagonistic behavior is a huge net negative to the community imo. Microbet and MysteryConman both manage to make their points in that thread in a completely non-offensive way. But it’s easy when your goal is to actually engage in discussion, as opposed to just pissing all over the forum to mark your territory.
The posts from jmakin that you screen grabbed are MUCH worse than the posts from Sabo. And you do have a habit of straw manning the left while making no effort to learn about what they’re advocating. See, for example, all of the times you say things like “oh I’m not for murdering all landlords so that means I’m a terrible conservative according to the lefty posters” or whatever.
My first bizarre experience with Sabo is when he started a thread asking for me to be banned because I had referred to him as a communist in the landlord thread.
I had written a post in the 4-hour cooldown period, I won’t post most of it because it’s laboring the point, but it contained this:
You can’t “argue against” Sabo because he is never actually prepared to argue for anything. Suzzer’s post is not exactly arguing against the proposition that capitalism is a cause of climate change, it’s pointing out that while it looks like Sabo is arguing this, he is actually not.
Snap.
Man I really like your posts, but this is hands down the worst one you have ever made. What is annoying about Sabo is that he pretends to be willing to have a discussion about something, but if you try to engage you discover that what he’s actually planning to do is ignore everything you write, post the same thing over and over and adopt a supercilious “you just don’t get it, do you” tone while doing it.
The problem here is not actually that the community has a line over which posters are deemed a detriment to the forum, it’s that you disagree with where it has been placed. You’re wrapping yourself in the cloth of “defending the community” here but the actual reason you have spent hours writing legalistic guidelines and even more hours arguing about how they are applied is to attempt constrain moderators into moderating the forum in the manner you think it should be done. You will not accept that different people have different and equally valid ideas on how moderation should work. This characterisation of not banning people as some sort of moral imperative, like it’s a transgression of their human rights, is another attempt to position your opinion on how moderation should work as the only valid one.
Like PocketChads is the one who banned Sabo and he shares this view of yours that the community is important to a lot of people, I know this because he said so in the PM megathread. So while I’m fully aware the paragraph above is going to piss you off, I think you’re being arrogant in casting a difference of opinion as a moral failing on the part of the rest of the forum.
