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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Capitalism inherently leads to oligarchic power structures; it cannot coexist with democracy indefinitely without extensive regulation. Because the primary objective is the accumulation of capital by individual actors within the system, over time, wealth accumulates in the hands of the economics elites, as it does now, which leads to greater capture of the regulatory organizations intended to prevent such eventualities, leading a feedback cycle of sorts which dramatically heightens wealth inequality. After a certain point, even if there are free and fair elections, a capitalist democracy is effectively an oligarchy.
edited 28th May '16 8:51:12 PM by CaptainCapsase
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That's the argument I used to get one of my Libertarian friends to understand that some regulation is necessary. If you don't stop monopolies from forming, somebody wins and the very competition that's supposed to drive capitalism is destroyed.
Or as I put it at the time, if you don't have regulations of some kind, you wind up with Lexcorp.
He was a prof at Ryerson, York, and U of T before entering politics.
edited 28th May '16 8:50:51 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Libertarians and socialists actually agree on a surprising number of points regarding how attempts at regulating capitalism tend to go (regulatory agencies are inevitably captured by private interests when people think of a way around them); the disagreement is that libertarians conclude "and thus we shouldn't regulate capitalism", whereas socialists conclude "therefore capitalism is inherently flawed, and we should seek to devise a replacement where we aren't locked in a perpetual losing battle against private interests."
On a side note, regarding Sanders, he won LGBT votes, just saying. In fact, other than African Americans and to a lesser extent Hispanics, basically every other minority (Asian-Americans, religious-minorities like Muslims and, unsurprisingly Jews) favored him or was almost dead split. I really dislike it when people use "minorities" solely to mean one specific ethnic minority; sure, all of those other minorities combined don't make up nearly as much of the population as African Americans, but that doesn't mean they don't count. Which, incidentally, is something I was told (it doesn't count) regarding having Chinese ancestry when I said I was mixed race the other day.
edited 28th May '16 9:00:09 PM by CaptainCapsase
Incidentally, as far as the line of thinking "if we regulate capitalism enough, it'll work" goes, a sufficiently regulated capitalist economy is indistinguishable from Market Socialism
, and personally I suspect that's what we'll eventually end up with in a post-automation economy, though it probably won't be called that.
X6 I never said there isn't a need for regulations... In fact, regulation is needed to make sure capitalism works to benefit all people rather than a select few at the top. The issue the United States has in terms of economic policy is that it favors deregulated markets too much at the moment.
edited 28th May '16 9:14:01 PM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food Badly
I just did a sort of double take there. Initially I was like "huh maybe these people aren't too unreasona-wait what." After following the Republican primary, I suppose I subconsciously replaced "blind people" with "black people", which would be a bit on the nose for the GOP, but not particularly inaccurate.
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In the present, regulated capitalism is really the only workable economic system, that much I'd agree with (and in that sense, you can call me a capitalist pig
), but I don't believe that will be the case 50-100 years from now.
edited 28th May '16 9:29:05 PM by CaptainCapsase
Well, as far as automation is concerned, my hope is that we all benefit from a post-work society. My fear is that only the rich will benefit from a post-work society with everyone else being unnecessary.
@Captain Caspase
Did I say that Sanders hasn't gotten LGBT support? Or racial minority support? No. I said that his followers have regularly thrown derogatory slurs at those LGBT people and racial minorities who don't support him. Which is depressingly true. I've seen Clinton and those women who back her derided as "bitches," "whores," and "cunts". I've seen gay people who support her derided as "faggots" and "homos". I've seen "nigger," "spick", and take your racial insult thrown at racial minorities who won't get in line with the glorious revolution. And while that may not be coming from the Sanders campaign itself, the incredibly condescending "we know what's best for you" attitude, most definitely fuels it.
I get that political debates can get heated. I get that namecalling can be a part of the process. Most of the time, I don't mind it. If Clinton and Sanders fans want to call one another idiots that's fine. The above, however, is not fine, and at a certain point you start wondering if it really is the actions of just a few people.
I was recently called a "kike-lover" by someone who turned out to be backing Clinton, not Trump. Stupidity is pretty much a universal when you're getting into the supporters of a particular candidate, particularly on the Internet. I'd also that Clinton's supporters and to some extent her campaign have the very same "we know what's best for you" condescension going on, just directed more at the white working class than at racial minorities. What little remains of them in the Democratic Party anyway.
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Consider also, that for every person living in America enjoying the fruits of capitalism, there are dozens of people overseas working in conditions that aren't all that far from slavery. Capitalism never stopped being brutally oppressive towards the proletariat; it just moved the proletariat overseas where people in the first world generally don't get to see him or her first hand. Out of sight, out of mind.
edited 28th May '16 9:38:19 PM by CaptainCapsase
I would never deny that the Clinton campaign has its own idiots backing it. However, said idiots have not been near as prominent as the ones backing Sanders. The last time I saw an outpouring of this much bigoted malice in favour of a leftist candidate, the candidate in question worked for the (leftist, but highly xenophobic) Bloc Quebecois. And anything that reminds me of the Bloc is troubling.
edited 28th May '16 9:40:32 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Do you have a quantitative basis to make that claim, or just your own ancedotal experience? Without a fairly extensive study, other than the fact that corporate media sporadically insists that to be the case without providing any non-ancedotal evidence to back that up?
Incidentally, if you were a Marxist in high school, you've surely heard of the Herman-Chomsky "propaganda model
"; If not, it's a sociological framework which posits that, even though they generally don't do so intentionally, mass media* tend to bias themselves very strongly in favor of factions within the power structure of the state, not to the extent of actual state run media like in China, but definitively to the point where it's not completely hyperbole to call it "propaganda."
Even if they don't realize there isn't actually a bunch of cigar chomping businessmen in smoked rooms orchestrating it-just a network of people which collectively has an agency beyond the actions of any individual person in the system-that's what Sandsrs' supporters are drawing from when they go off railing against corporate media.
* In the United States at least, which is the country which the framework was built around.
edited 28th May '16 9:58:52 PM by CaptainCapsase
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I understand that, but it seems like every system humans have had so far had been oppressive to others in some form... Hell, even the automation future could end up being oppressive if the robots end up being mentally equivalent to humans. Maybe that ends up being the reason the Robot War inevitably happens in Science Fiction.
edited 28th May '16 9:57:59 PM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food Badly![]()
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I'm familiar with the concept. Not sure why you're citing it here though. As I previously stated, the media has, if anything, given Sanders far more positive coverage than they have Clinton. Whether we're talking FOX, or CNN, or even MSNBC, for most of last year the narrative of him as the scrappy underdog fighting Our Corporate Overlord Clinton was the one getting pushed be it in one form or another. Even Rachel Maddow, who I really like, got pulled into the Sanders camp for a time, constantly talking about the size of his rallies and the importance of his message, etc, etc. Every skeleton in Clinton's closet got dug out, while most of the ones in Sanders' have been ignored.
Now, the honeymoon finally seems to be over, and I'm happy about that. MSNBC in particular has moved away from treating Sanders as the one clean candidate (which he never honestly was) and into treating him as just another candidate, as worthy of criticism as Clinton. Which honestly, is all I really ever wanted them to do.
That's not getting into the Internet media, which on the left has been rabidly anti-Clinton and pro-Sanders. Pick your leftist Internet media outlet—until about a month ago, they were all happily pushing the narrative of Sanders as the much abused little guy out to save the Democratic Party, and Clinton as the corporate hack. Much of that is now coming to an end—at least outside guys like TYT where I'm not sure it will—but it's taken a damn long time. And even now, you'll still find a lot more anti-Clinton than anti-Sanders stuff. Certainly the list of leftists who are consistently anti-Sanders is short outside of websites like Blue Nation Review or The People's View, while multiple Internet media outlets remain reliably anti-Clinton.
If the media, be it television, newspapers, or even the Internet, is trying to support the Establishment candidate, they're doing a very bad job. I'm also not sure what precisely you were going for by floating the notion since it seems only tangentially related to what we were previously talking about.
EDIT: This
, by the way, is the kind of stuff I'm getting weary of seeing from the Sanders campaign. That's not some random idiot saying that sort of thing.
edited 28th May '16 10:01:52 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Online media isn't really part of that particular phenomena, not to the same extent that televised media adheres to it, and in general televised media kind of ignored Sanders and the democratic primary as a whole in favor of covering Trump's antics. The disparity in airtime dedicated to Sanders versus Clinton compare to Trump madness was very distinct last time somebody tallied it.
The coverage that was actually given tended to be fairly dismissive of Sanders.
edited 28th May '16 10:06:10 PM by CaptainCapsase
Evangicials are throwing there support behind a man who is just starting to believe in god.
The jokes write themselves.
Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.![]()
You won't find me disputing that Trump has gotten too much airtime, but that's not bias in favour of the Establishment, that's bias in favour of idiotic sensationalism.
If the media were biased against Sanders that Blue Nation Review article I posted would be the rule rather than the exception. He may not get the coverage that Trump does, but up until the last couple months, what coverage he did get, especially on more left-wing networks like MSNBC, was entirely positive.
I also think the idea that Internet media isn't a part of the "corporate media" or "the Establishment" is less than true. TYT, to pick an obvious example, is pretty damn corporate—and also pretty damn partisan. Their offer to fund a Sanders vs Trump debate is evidence of both a) all the money they have, and b) their willingness to make news, FOX style, instead of reporting on it. Other Internet media outlets are just as guilty of similar sorts of behaviour, regardless of which candidate they might support, and as more and more of our media is conducted on the Internet, their supposed separation from this sort of bias is less and less believable.
edited 28th May '16 10:09:01 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Trump got so much airtime because he knows how to play the corporate media system like a fiddle. In the normal state of affairs, corporate media tends to spin things in favor of the political orthodoxy they're aligned with. They were doing that with Trump in fact, frequently blowing things he said way out of proportion, but unfortunately that just made his supporters love him more; they're the kind of people who think him being called "the next Hitler" is a good thing.
Whether or not Trump's manipulation of mass media represents a paradigm shift in political campaigns is quite a disturbing prospect.
As far as online media goes, they still are part of the system, but there's a lot more of them, and much less centralized ownership.
edited 28th May '16 10:13:28 PM by CaptainCapsase
Personally, I don't think TYT really really gives a fuck about progressive values and intellectual discussion of how to better America.
They profited heavily off of anti-Clinton, Pro-Sanders bias. How else could they afford to sling $1 million around to try and attract a debate between Trump and Sanders?
They would've made a fuckton of money and publicity.
New Survey coming this weekend!![]()
Speaking as someone who has actually watched a bunch of Trump's little speeches from beginning to end, I think very little of the critique of him was blown out of proportion. Honestly the problems lie in the other direction—particularly since tying up the nomination, Trump is being treated increasingly like a reasonable candidate when he's anything but. One of the guys on CNN actually had to take his fellow commentators to task for this, on the air, suggesting that in treating his campaign as normal they are guilty of helping him lie to the public.
I concur with most of this. Lesser, but similar outlets like Secular Talk, aren't much better. Sam Seder and the crew at Majority Report have been better about it at least—while certainly pro-Sanders and not hiding it, they've never fallen prey to TYT style "Clinton is no different from Trump" madness, and have fought against the "Never Hillary" crowd.
edited 28th May '16 10:12:48 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
They were acting as if Trump was Hitler when the wall was the only crazy thing he said, and when everything else sounded positively moderate compare to the other candidates. If they'd just dismissed him as the buffoon he is, that would've been that, but they couldn't resist playing him up to be the big bad boogeyman to keep all the voters in line. That he lived up to the doomsayers is entirely incidental; and may not actually be true depending on how much of what he said in the primaries was sincere.
edited 28th May '16 10:22:50 PM by CaptainCapsase

edited 28th May '16 8:48:59 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar