The General US Politics Thread

Yeah... coming from a business background, that is actually a command economy, not communism, where the community owns it all, or socailism, where the community owns some of it but the individual owns some of it, as wel

Nevermind

edited 13th Dec '17 9:32:36 PM by Nikkolas

Command economies have been the outcome when full communism has been attempted.

X3 Thing is I’m in full agreement with Amber (baring him posting something stupid while I write this post), so your arguments against him are also against me.

Unless you’re engaging in personal attacks, but you wouldn’t do that, as that would be a violation of the forum rules.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:33:21 PM by Silasw

I never said that state control of the economy was Communism, just that it was one alternative to corporations that i could come up with off the top of my head.

That being said, I feel like the fact that all existing Communist attempts ended up as command economies probably says something.

Again, I'm still totally sincere in my curiosity of what kind of economic system you'd prefer. I was thinking of Henry, but I guess I could just as much ask the question to everyone.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:35:27 PM by LinkToTheFuture

@ the fake FCC comments: Ajit Pai doesn’t care. Literally the only thing he seems to care about is doing exactly what the telecom companies want, damn the consequences.

However, he’s actually undermining his own goal here. Leaving these big suspicious problems in the wake of his rush to abolish net neutrality just leaves a really easy way for a successor to just put it back in place. Because if Pai ignored that the comments were fake and used them to justify the change (which he is doing) his argument is invalid and did not follow the rules of the FCC. Therefore, the abolishment of net neutrality was invalid and can be rolled back without having to go through the whole process.

I’m not even kidding. Pai is really that bad at doing this. Hell, a lawsuit could force net neutrality back into place and Pai would have to restart completely, this time proving that every single comment is valid.

Why are the Republicans and their appointees so bad at this? They aren’t just bad at governing, they’re absolutely awful at being corporate stooges.

This is what happens when you favor ideology over reality for years. Complete fuckwits end up running things.

The UK seems to be suffering a similar problem with their Tories. The front-bench are, as I and others have described them repeatedly, a bunch of posh broken sociopaths.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:36:15 PM by M84

Desperation, most likely. They have wasted so much time, including the nominal honeymoon period for a control swap after an election.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:35:28 PM by ViperMagnum357

Excuse me while I laugh hysterically. There are plenty of people in this thread who work every day to make the world a better place. Games And Tropes to pick one example, was heavily involved in the Doug Jones campaign, and in doing so, actively struck a blow against theocracy and neofascism.

As for me, I don't need to do anything to upend world capitalism because I have no interest in upending capitalism. Duh. I'm not an armchair revolutionary. I'm a little busy campaigning for policies and politicians that can actually work—and in the first federal election I could vote in, was a small part of the effort to take a third party social democratic party to second place in an election.

The guy you addressed that to was heavily involved in the Doug Jones campaign. So he's done rather a lot for liberalism, actually. Congratulations on invalidating your own point.

You've erased the rest of your post, so I won't say anything else, but seriously man. Know your target and remember that all caps do not an argument make.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:38:53 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

I have to say that you can't counter a general rhetorical point by replacing the generic "you" with "specifically the person being conversed with". That's deceitful.

Honestly I dislike the idea that in order to matter in the scheme of things you have to do big things. I try and focus on the community I'm in and let it be safe and full of healthy ideals, as well as passing on good political messages.

I am also very much an "anti-this" person. I don't like what's going on, although I don't have any solution to it. but I feel like there are many ways to exist in a world you want to change that isn't directly spearheading it.

Is that in reply to me? If so, I'm sorry if I came off that way. I'm legitimately interested in what everyone thinks

edited 13th Dec '17 9:39:59 PM by LinkToTheFuture

It is akin to the last minute panic a kid feels when they try to finish a book report two hours before it is due. Case in point: the tax bill with scribbled amendments.

To Ambar's response to the deleted portion of a prior post, actually. But it's something to bear in mind if you think it might apply to your own, I guess.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:41:25 PM by RainehDaze

I really hope you aren't serious with this comment...

You can own a corporation, that doesn't operate any business or profits, you realize that right?

@LinkToTheFuture: The (non-human related) problems facing planned economies were largely a matter of scarce computational resources and limited information about the state of the system. Modern supercomputers might very well be capable of simply brute forcing their way past Mises's economic calculation problem, and the current trend is towards ever more pervasive data gathering, particularly in terms of the sort of data that's pertinent to trying to solve an economy.

The issue of preventing planners from abusing their power for their own gain is by far the biggest impediment to planned economies in the present day, and replacing fallible humans with comparatively infallible machines would more or less solve that problem, resulting in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

Now, becoming what essentially amounts to the pets of some superintelligent AI is not my preferred future for humankind, but it's a highly plausible one, perhaps even inevitable, especially if our means for improving human cognitive capabilities can't keep pace with those of wholly mechanical systems.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:44:01 PM by CaptainCapsase

@ Ambar

I deleted my post because I hate arguing anything with you and the other poster was right to say enough was enough and let's move on.

However I was not addressing my post to anyone. I was giving a hypothetical about how "purity testing" somebody by what they have done for "THE CAUSE" is bullshit. Even if they weren't 18, maybe they are poor as fuck. Maybe they have five kids. Maybe this and maybe that. Demanding credentials of a poster is utterly ridiculous and rude. That's just a fact and I don't care if you're a liberal or a socialist or anything in this regard. It's just a pointless, insulting tactic.

It's actually the textbook definition of an ad hominem and against the rules since you are switching the topic to a person. It doesn't matter if the poster has literally sat on their ass for all their life, it does nothing to invalidate their points about a flawed economic system.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:46:46 PM by Nikkolas

You mean like in WALL-E?

Sure. But the more radically purist your position is, and the more you condemn others for supporting the system, the more you better actually be doing something to fight it. So if one was, for instance, the type of person who claimed that Clinton was no better than Trump and that they're all manifestations of the same evil capitalist system and your contribution to fighting that system was to vote for regressive hack Jill Stein...well there'd be an issue there.

The Culture was what comes to mind, but that's a less rosy take on that sort of society.

I believe we're still a ways away from FALGSC with supercomputers, though it'd be interesting. I think it'd depend on computers' potential to innovate themselves, which is ultimately what I want out of an economic system, one that incentives innovation and providing more and better of the basic needs. This might also be a silly thing to ask, but what degree of supervision do we have over the humans who presumably program said computers?

I don't think we want to live in a world where everything is run via Facebook algorithms.

When the poster in question has previously admitted to voting for a candidate whose positions fly in the face of their expressed ideals, the argument being made here no longer applies.

Past a certain point, there's no humans designer involved, rather we have machines self-iterating and improving upon themselves. Hence my remark that this sort of future basically involves humankind becoming pets to superintelligent AI.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:58:18 PM by CaptainCapsase

I'll be honest with you, that really sounds like a society I don't want my descendants to live in. I want a society where computers are our assistants in improving our standards of living, but where there's no question as to who's really in control.

The alternative is making humans into something decidedly inhuman in order to keep pace with machines. That's my preferred option, but I can understand why some people would be uncomfortable with it.

Though I wouldn't necessarily say your descendants; Artificial General Intelligence is likely to become a reality within the 21st century, and at that point modern humans are essentially obsolete. This is a question that will be very likely be answered in our lifetimes one way or the other.

edited 13th Dec '17 10:04:39 PM by CaptainCapsase