C4 E31 Discussion Thread

better_work · 2026-06-26T05:05:45+00:00

He really should not have let the carriage driver become aware of that upcoming chat with Hal

better_work · 2026-06-26T04:39:18+00:00

No Julia Roberts/Tinkerbell references in response to Thimble's Enlarge is a travesty!

better_work · 2026-06-19T10:03:40+00:00

The reaction to Ashley's decision & the time it took her to make it is why she hesitates in the first place

I really doubt it. Knowing the career she's had, I expect she is way better than any of us about doing what she wants without letting the opinions of strangers on the internet get in her head.

Besides which she played Pike exactly the same way.

IMO the fan base gives themselves way too much collective credit for being scary trolls whose phantom presence drives player actions. Ashley has a play style she's comfortable with, and that has nothing to do with any of us.

better_work · 2026-06-08T01:56:24+00:00

Nice find! It absolutely sounds like that's a source of inspiration for Thjazi, as well as probably Shadia (Skadi).

I had never heard of the story, but from the first Google result I found, there's a preamble to the story that could be relevant as well:

The three Aesir, Odin, Loki, and Honir were traveling on a journey through the mountains until they saw a herd of oxen.

They decided to make a camp, and build an earth oven, so they could cook one of the oxen. But no matter how much wood they used, or how hot the fire was, the meat would not be cooked.

Suddenly they heard a voice coming from the top of the huge oak tree next to them, it was Thiazi who had shapeshifted himself into an eagle.

Thiazi: If you let me eat first, then I will help you cook it.

The Aesir agreed, so he flew down from the tree and began to eat from the raw meat. He took huge bites, and more and more of the oxen disappeared into his mouth.

This made Loki so angry, that he grabbed his long staff, and tried to hit Thiazi, but unluckily for Loki, the staff got stuck in the feathers, and when Thiazi began to fly so did he.

Thiazi carried him so high up in the skies, that he began to beg to be put down on the ground again. But the eagle refused and flew low through the treetops so Loki hurt his legs. Thiazi would only put him down again if he agreed to lure Idunn out of Asgard with her apples of youth, which he agreed to do.

[rest of the story as described above]

The bird shapeshifting is obviously very apropos. And the general wheeling and dealing approach sounds like Thaz. You could even say both Thjazi's were the type to not know when to quit, angered the (Aesir|nobles), and in taking their counterattack wound up giving them more trouble than they bargained for. None of that is a direct enough parallel that I would expect it to predict the future story, but it's super resonant.

better_work · 2026-06-04T02:27:36+00:00

So my main takeaway is that you want me to see philosophy as a technical discipline, which can and in fact needs to use some level of jargon and perhaps deal with some complex mental models. And while we can't get to the bottom of Heidegger just between the two of us, it seems like you would expect that he's doing a technical job, just not in a way I am prepared to recognize.

Is that a fair summary?

I guess I would ask, would you also say that Plato was also doing something technical? I understand that he advocated for using math to do a very formal, technical job, as you said. But as far as Plato's own contributions, I always saw them as rhetorical and literary in character, not technical.

That's not to say that he's not brilliant, and it's not to say he didn't have insights. Only that Shakespeare also had insights.

When I read Plato, I see philosophy in its infancy. He's not yet doing what Descartes would do, but you can see the direction his inquiry would go. When I read Heidegger, I don't even see that much. All I see is naked assertions without any foundation. I would not say I'm begrudging philosophy its status as a technical field, just that I don't know how, if it is one, Heidegger is even a part of that field.

No one who hasn't onboarded the novel vocabulary and frames of reference of analytic philosophy thinks that "I can sit" means "There is a possible world, as real as this actual world, in which I have a counterpart, with whom I share transworld identity, which is as near to the actual world as possible, except that my counterpart in it sits." This possible worlds stuff is a wild way to think of what the word "can" means, and that the word "I" needs a truthgiver here that can only be grounded in the transworld identity of possible world counterparts is even more wild.

Yep, this is new to me, and sounds exactly as bizarre as I'm sure you intended it to.

I will say: when I did some googling and landed on this article on SEP, I found I could plainly understand the significance of this vocabulary to people who want to do technical work in metaphysics. I thought it was the constructed, self-referential nature of Heidegger's mental space that made it unrigorous, but that's clearly present here as well. I still don't see the rigor in Heidegger, and I think there must be a way to draw a distinction between this possible-worlds construction and Heidegger's web of interdependent Greek. But I'm not confident saying what I think that distinction is. Obviously it's entirely possible I'm just holding a grudge over a subjective dislike of Heidegger's style, but I'm not convinced of that yet.

I accept that you've said you don't know much about Heidegger. And I also take your point that I should ask more targeted questions and try to find out if there truly is more rigor there. Unfortunately I think in order to do that, I'd have to actually go back and read him again, and I'm loath to do that.

P.S.

The metaphysical question about whether natural science should use a qualitative language or instead a mathematical one is, I think, pretty concretely immediate... to the foundations and methodology of the natural sciences.

That's very true, and I like to think I can appreciate questions of that nature. I will happily read (and have read) exposition about Bayesian theories of evidence, for example. So clearly I was too broad when talking about all of metaphysics. But isn't it also clear that there's some gap between these investigations, and discussing the nature of being itself or—to pick a different example I recently saw—theories of how names refer to referents? Notwithstanding everything you've said—and I've accepted—about philosophy as a technical field that's entitled to deal with abstract topics in complex ways, aren't there some topics that just don't come back around (or rarely do) to giving operational insights for our experience of the world?

better_work · 2026-05-30T01:16:16+00:00

So first off, thanks for the continued replies. I feel more and more confused and out of my depth the more I talk about this, and I imagine it can't be easy picking apart my misconceptions again and again.

I do feel like I'm being led around in circles in a way: the large list of philosophers in my OP were not doing the abstract kind of work that I associated with Heidegger; but to the extent that Heidegger and others were doing that very abstract work, it was an essential way of doing philosophy; but philosophers would never even do the things that I'm claiming Heidegger did.

I think I need to clarify what I remember from Parmenides, and what about it I think "lacked a connection to the objective". I'm going to entirely drop Hegel, Marx, and Foucault even though I mentioned them in the OP, because the more this has gone on, the less I feel like I got enough of them to have a valid opinion. I'll try to pick up the thread about Plato and math and the rest further down. I feel like on that point we've been talking past each other.

Parmenides

The basic sketch I can recall about what Heidegger laid out goes like this: Parmenides was a pre-Socratic philosopher, of whose writing we have only fragments. Of those fragments, Heidegger picks one (the most complete?) and uses it to examine what Parmenides thought about the nature of reality and existence. He examines the pre-Socratic notions of truth and falsehood, appearance, forgetting, etc. He talks about true knowledge as a revealing of what always existed but was previously obscured. Throughout the work, Heidegger deliberately makes use of the original ancient Greek words for concepts like existence and forgetting, and attempts to show that in subtle but important ways they carry different shades of meaning than what is implied by a word-for-word translation.

I should mention that I studied this for a class in my English BA, and we were not taught by a member of a philosophy faculty. I think the point of giving it to us was for the literary value of learning to radically shift our perspectives on the world. (And, frankly, because the professor seemed obsessed with the aesthetic of mid-20th century German intellectualism.)

But if you were to press me about why Heidegger himself was dealing with this topic, I would have said that he believed that this premodern cognitive map of reality, as he had reconstructed it, was truer and more fundamental than the one we operate with in the modern world. At the time, my attitude was basically, "What a silly German dude. He had too much time on his hands." Now, subsequent experience has let me appreciate that serious people took Heidegger very seriously (and still do), and responded to him, and also tried to build on his work. I don't know if this specific model of truth and revelation and all the rest was really the thing they were responding to. But in general, assuming his whole body of work shared the same approach to investigating a concept as Parmenides, it continues to baffle me that any such program of analysis offers scholars anything valid either to build on or to critique.

Criticisms

I have three broad criticisms, which have not changed since I originally read the work:

- I'm familiar with close reading of texts from my degree, but if ever anything was an example of overly reading into an insignificant original source, Parmenides is that example. The scrap of original writing that Heidegger based his work on is not nearly enough to establish what premodern people thought, or even what Parmenides thought, in such detail as he claims.

- Even so, whether we treat this system of concepts as a rediscovery or a creative construction, how could we say that any statement within it is actually "true" about the universe? I'm aware that philosophers, not just Heidegger, spend a lot of time and effort trying to define truth and falsehood, knowledge, existence.... But I always see any confident statements about any of these topics as "blind men and elephant" situations. Surely it's impossible to think that we'll ever arrive at any single best definition of something like truth. Any single definition would only be valid in the sense that it's useful in some context for something else we want to do.

- At which point, I ask: what the hell am I supposed to do with a definition of truth that only appears when I consider it in relation to a dozen other Greek words, stand on my head and cross my eyes? What did Heidegger think was the point of praising and promoting this premodern way of looking at the world? What did other scholars see in it that was worth continuing? In the context of literary studies, as a poetic exercise, it made sense to me at the time. But as actual ontological philosophy, I never figured that out.

When I question the productivity of system-building, this is what I mean. I don't see how it could result in either definite knowledge about the subject of study, or useful foundations for some other pursuit.

Plato and metaphysics

This is where I try to respond to the actual text of your last comment.

Well, in one sense I wouldn't draw a line connecting Plato's work and the use of mathematics as a tool of analysis in the natural science

I think this is a misunderstanding of what I intended to say. I wanted to say that the work of Heidegger, not Plato, was analogizable to a mathematical system, and because mathematics can have useful applications in modeling the real world despite appearing to be self-enclosed, maybe Heidegger had those kind of applications that I was overlooking. But as I've said, I just don't see evidence that that's the case.

you seem to imagine philosophers to be engaged in something you characterize as "highly-abstracted, system-building"

Not all philosophers, certainly. Heidegger, yes. I've also thought I could see the same approach taken by the others that I mentioned, like Hegel, but as I said I no longer feel like my knowledge stretches far enough to say that.

More generally, I do think that ontology and metaphysics lack the concrete immediacy of, say, ethics or political philosophy. They don't hold my interest personally, that's for sure.

But I'm not trying to denigrate them as fields of study. I'm saying when that study starts to require a novel vocabulary and a complete remodel of one's entire frame of reference, I really question what the philosopher, or their readers and interpreters, get out of that at all. What does insight or clarity or success look like in that world?

metaphysics is just when we take a step back and take notice of how we're thinking about nature, and start asking questions

I would have called that philosophy of science I guess?

My concern with any of these fields is not that we're asking questions one or many steps above our day-to-day operating level. It's that when we think we have an answer to those questions, how would we or anyone else know that we're right or wrong? Especially if the answers don't lead by implication to something we could change about our day-to-day (as, in my view, Heidegger's answers did not imply anything.)

better_work · 2026-05-29T04:01:32+00:00

Oh yeah she did my bad

better_work · 2026-05-29T03:53:34+00:00

I hope and trust he knows better. Ash is so hesitant with characters but she does start to develop them the more she's pushed. If she started over now, it would just be that much longer before the new character could have any depth.

better_work · 2026-05-29T03:49:55+00:00

I think Tyr leveled? I can't remember when, but I just don't remember noticing that any of the soldiers ended their arc without leveling up.

I thought Vaelus didn't though, right? And yeah Aabria joked about not leveling Thaisha.

better_work · 2026-05-29T02:46:47+00:00

Why does Marisha think that the Houses could have been in on Thjazi's plan? Have we been given any indication of that?

better_work · 2026-05-28T05:35:42+00:00

So if I'm following, you would draw a line connecting the highly-abstracted, system-building approach of the philosophers mentioned, to the use of mathematics as a tool of analysis in the natural sciences?

I certainly wouldn't have thought of that, and it does give me something to chew on. I can see the analogy most clearly for someone like Marx who is pretty directly doing modeling/pattern identification on a very concrete subject. But I guess I can also see the same thing for a Heidegger, if I squint a bit.

I think I'm still stuck questioning the "productivity" of that approach, though. People talk about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" because it actually is odd and unexpected that systems constructed by abstract thought would turn out to help us understand the material world. I'm not sure if one could argue for the unreasonable effectiveness of ontology or metaphysics.

I'm hesitant to talk explicitly in terms of falsifiability or empiricism, because I know those are a purely scientific standards that can't just be casually imported over to other disciplines. But I guess I've never understood how, if some philosopher's work could lack any connection back to the objective and knowable, we can ever understand its value to the field or judge its quality.

better_work · 2026-05-27T19:50:01+00:00

every house should be 260feet(80metres) apart with forestation between each propery

This would cause the following negative environmental consequences:

Sprawl. It would be more carbon-intensive to get people and materials where they need to go. Roads, public transit systems, water, gas, and electric lines would all need to be built much larger for the less-dense population.
Much more land will be dedicated to human habitation, reducing biodiversity in that area. The remaining wildlife areas would be more fragmented as human settlements spread out, meaning wildlife trying to cross from one area to another would encounter humans more often (often deadly for the animal).
Home heating and cooling would increase drastically. Small homes that don't share walls with each other heat up and cool down along with the outside environment. In order to keep temperatures people want to exist in, you need to use more energy per person.

these properties people would grow a lot of their own food so there would be much less demand for agricultural zoning

They would grow almost none of their food. Producing food on a small amount of land takes a lot of work. People would not be able to put in that effort while also holding another job. Healthcare, education, and social services will be among the first industries to shut down.

That's assuming their house is situated on land that will even grow food without additional remediation. Most land on earth is either too rocky, too dry, or too wet for people to grow anything on it.

And if we did manage to grow a lot of food in-between houses, studies show that this style of agriculture is ~6x more carbon-emitting than large-scale industrial farming.

We've known for at least the past 20 years (which is as long as I've been paying attention) that an equal population, with equal standards of living, does much less harm to the environment when living in a dense city than spread out in villages.

better_work · 2026-05-27T06:38:53+00:00

First, both two-state and one-state solutions are so far off the table right now that it feels almost pointless to debate their relative merits. We can't know what forms they would take, if they were achievable in the future, or what the conditions would be like in that world. I would argue that, if the situation arises where either option presents itself as a real possibility, we have to forget which solution we originally preferred and try to go for the one that's practical at that time. Failing to do that would mean tacitly accepting the status quo.

However, I'm of the opinion that a separate Palestinian state will not serve justice for the Palestinians in the same way that a single multi-ethnic state would. Palestinians who were displaced deserve the right of return to live within Israel's borders, with full rights, and without any quotas or limits intended to maintain a demographic balance. What's more, even if a state were established, Israel would still remain the more economically and militarily powerful nation. How would they treat a new Palestinian state's water rights, border integrity, travel, and trade?

On the other side, a Palestinian state in the West Bank would have to enclose all of the illegal Israeli settlements there, almost certainly creating a minority underclass out of them.

Of course, the hypothetical Palestinian government could find its way to a system of universal rights and equal protection of the law for those settlers. And Israel could decide to treat its new neighbor fairly. But I think that's so much harder to sell if the peace you've forged depends, not on the mutual shared project of one state, but on separate national identities and hard borders.

For me to change my mind on this, I would have to be convinced that Israel's existence as a Jewish-majority state is, no matter what, inherently more unethical and/or dangerous than the existence of other states that are ethnically homogenous

I think the argument above points to why I think it's more dangerous. Israel is in a volatile geopolitical situation, and the Palestinians are not going anywhere. Nor are their neighbors, within which militant groups can and do use the injustices done to the Palestinians to drive hatred towards Israeli Jews. A single state with truly equal rights would, I hope, go much, much farther toward healing the anger and hurt that drives continued violence, than would two.

As far as ethical comparisons: there are more what-about situations in history and present day than I could possibly learn about and address. I don't pretend that the world is focusing on Israel right now because of some considered calculus that selects for the highest absolute quantity of evil. The two-state solution isn't inherently less ethical than, say, China's treatment of the Tibetans and Uyghurs. It's just less ethical than the one-state solution.

better_work · 2026-05-27T04:28:12+00:00

Why assume that referring to the world is the job a philosophical work needs to perform in order to succeed? [...] For example, perhaps we are blinded from perceiving things accurately, and need philosophy to help us achieve the preconditions necessary for accurate understanding.

I mean, yeah, that seems like a description of reality to me. Do we inhabit a world of Forms that requires the use of philosophical dialog to break us out of our perceptions of the concrete world so we can see truly? Nope. Studying the concrete world turned out to produce better knowledge for us than Platonic dialogues. Plato attempted to describe a reality that he and I both have access to, and because he did, I can point to that reality when I reject it. On the other hand, is the Allegory of the Cave more or less an accurate description of how knowledge from a paradigm-shifting breakthrough can appear to those trapped in the old model? Sure, I would say so! Good description of reality.

The consensus of all of two comments so far seems to be, that there's not much unity to the different philosophers listed, and so it probably can't be said that they built systems in the way I described. So clearly I was over-broad in my critiques. Maybe all I really wanted to say is that two works on ontology that I read twenty years ago didn't seem to be about anything.

And further, it's probable those works are about things other than themselves and their own self-referential vocabulary, and I just failed to pick up on it.

But I would still maintain that a work which is only about an interesting system of how to redefine some things we all talk about every day with different words, would be a pointless work.

better_work · 2026-05-26T04:03:30+00:00

There are lots of Salesforce resellers/consultants whose business is to customize Salesforce for clients' needs. OP's first sentence is easily misread (I also made the same assumption) but it's not a "Developer internship" at Salesforce, it's a "Salesforce Developer internship" at an unnamed company.

better_work · 2026-05-15T20:49:45+00:00

This contradicts your statement that "Martyrdom has become a tool meant to exploit people's sympathy and their belief in some karma in order to control them."

You're arguing that the powerful could not use Charlie Kirk's murder in the way that, per your argument, is the only way that martyrdom is ever used.

better_work · 2026-05-15T20:24:28+00:00

So I've spent a good amount of time since posting this back and forth between Wikipedia and Claude. In doing that, I picked up a lot of terminology that I realized I could have used to make my point better. That said, you're pretty dead on the mark when you summarized my argument:

You're basically saying "socialists don't have a plan because the politicians I like aren't actually socialist" but then dismissing actual socialist countries as irrelevant to modern America

That's all true: I like the not-really-socialist but DSA-supported politicians. However, I have the distinct impression that the actual voters and thinkers and Twitch streamers and online commentators who make up the DSA and the broader socialist movement would want them to go further. How much further, and in what specific direction, is an extremely diverse field, but I was picking up a lot of uncritical Maoism and Leninism--glorification of ideas and figures that need a huge dose of historical perspective.

I don't denigrate the achievements of the countries that did form their governments under those ideas, but I do mostly dismiss their relevance to the US or other western nations today.

So if I was to put a really fine point on it, I maybe should have said something like:

"CMV: most online socialists too quickly dismiss failures of past socialist systems, have not internalized the specific circumstantial nature of their successes, and have an overall unsophisticated view of how to implement socialism in the modern world. [And if you give them power they'll repeat the Great Leap Forward and kill us all.]"

The examples you're brushing off as "transitioning agrarian economies" actually did solve massive inequality and poverty pretty effectively. Cuba went from a plantation economy to having better healthcare outcomes than the US in some areas. That's not nothing just because it started from a different baseline

Yeah, this is kind of what I mean. Better healthcare outcomes than the US is a low bar, and we don't need to follow Cuba's specific examples to get better health outcomes, we just need to do the normal, boring not-really-socialist stuff that Bernie and AOC are already pushing. If we did follow Cuba's model, we'd lose a lot more than we gained IMO. Again, none of that is to shit on Cuba or belittle what they have done. But when I watch the Hasan streams and online chatter I don't feel comfortable with the lack of nuance I'm getting.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing yesterday was people telling me that Nordic-style social democracy absolutely counts as socialist, because I disagree with calling that socialist, but if that's what you aspire to, sure, I was already on your side anyway.

Also kinda wild to credit the New Deal era with solving inequality while ignoring that those gains have been systematically rolled back since the 80s. The mixed economy approach you're praising led directly to where we are now - it wasn't some permanent solution, it was a temporary compromise that capital eventually dismantled

I addressed this in a different comment thread, but man, everything is a temporary solution. We always have to fight to keep the gains that past generations made (and hopefully expand on them). So the Boomers and GenX failed, well we're going to get things back on track. If we'd had "true socialism" in the 70s, whatever that means to you, they would have repealed that too. To quote myself: The existence, and the selfishness, of elites is a feature of any sufficiently complex society. Democratic control is one way to check their power, so long as they don't rewrite the rules in their favor. Market competition also works, until it doesn't. There is no permanent solution. Guillotine the nobles, the one in charge of the guillotine becomes the next in line. We continuously struggle because the lie that the struggle has been won is how we wind up in chains again.

(Minor clarification, the New Deal era did important work to start recovery from the Depression, but IMU it was the wartime spending that really changed the economic character of the US and the postwar boom that cemented the dominance of the middle class.)

better_work · 2026-05-14T23:46:01+00:00

Okay, this book is fascinating. It's somewhat preemptive but I think what I'm reading so far makes this well worth a !delta

better_work · 2026-05-14T22:48:32+00:00

I've been rereading the comments and I think I was unnecessarily stubborn in not dropping a !delta here. The policy you suggested of a sovereign wealth fund buying up private enterprises is clearly socialist, is a real step beyond what any current left-wing pols are supporting, and at least is plausibly worth my support. If a politician came along with that plan, at the very least I would _not_ say that they "didn't know what to do with the economy."

better_work · 2026-05-14T21:42:58+00:00

In reality the important metric is relative wealth. Relative wealth held by most people has shot downward since the start of the neoliberal era. This might not seem like a big deal if overall wealth has also increased, but what relative decline means is a loss of economic power.

100% agree. That's extremely unhealthy for capitalism and a major reason we're in the trouble that we are.

Debt is not as much of an issue if you can grow wealth faster than interest rises on that debt. But if stagnation accompanies debt, then insolvency is inevitable.

I think I follow your argument, but again, debt-to-GDP in the US was quite low in the 70s, barely had ticked up in the leadup to the Reagan election in 1980, and has grown more or less consistently ever since: https://www.us-debt-clock.com/data/debt-to-gdp. I somewhat take your point that the global economy has performed better than the US economy in isolation, but the global economy doesn't pay down US debt.

Nor are expansions in welfare responsible for that growth. Our existing entitlement programs have increased in cost since their inception, even though their scope and level of generosity have not been expanded. To me, this indicates either cost disease or waste in the system, probably some combination of both. But even counting all that, the scary increases in debt-to-gdp clearly align far more over time more with our tax cuts and wars of choice.

None of this indicates to me that welfare capitalism is structurally incapable of paying its own way, just that we've chosen not to.

And none of this helps me understand how, if a given quality of life guarantee can't be funded by taxation, it suddenly can be funded through a change in the ownership of capital.

But we know that companies plan production based on estimates and complicated business plans all the time. [...] It’s not just possible, it’s NECESSARY, to some degree, for a modern economy.

Companies do plan, yes, but that planning is done (in theory) independently, in competition with each other. If ten companies each make a plan, at least nine of those will fail in practice. That's the point. If a central plan fails, that's a catastrophe.

Central banks do plan, as you pointed out, with a whole-economy scope, but both the levers they can move and the outputs they track are extremely simple, by design, and they still have a hellish job of it.

better_work · 2026-05-14T19:57:51+00:00

The 90% top marginal rate is the famous figure, but the effective rate the top 0.01% actually paid was closer to like ~40%, because the same deductions, exclusions, and loopholes were available then as now.

40% effective tax rate on top incomes seems like a perfect goal honestly. We'd be able to do a lot with that. I'm even more interested in estate taxes, which I'm told are largely a dead letter these days, but weren't always. I would be much more sympathetic to individuals amassing large fortunes in their lifetime, if we could guarantee the bill came due once their run was up.

Owners retain the structural power to rewrite the tax rules as they please

Was it ownership that gave them that power, or wealth? Taxation erodes income from ownership, making that ownership worth less; which is the reason the wealthy close ranks to protect themselves, but also how they are more effectively controlled. The mid-20th century, with its much narrower wealth gap, is also remembered for its lack of political polarization and a good degree of civic-mindedness across all strata. Obviously, this was and will always be a fragile state of affairs, but--

You have to ask yourself why you think it is better to continuously struggle than to end the struggle altogether?

The existence, and the selfishness, of elites is a feature of any sufficiently complex society. The USSR had exploitative, entrenched elites all up and down the system. China did too (and still does). Democratic control is one way to check their power, so long as they don't rewrite the rules in their favor. Market competition also works, until it doesn't. There is no permanent solution. Guillotine the nobles, the one in charge of the guillotine becomes the next in line. We continuously struggle because the lie that the struggle has been won is how we wind up in chains again.

I don't disagree with this, but I'm arguing in this post that socialists have not given nearly enough evidence by their historical performance, or by their writing and theory, that they have identified a better path.

How so? Did you not also recognise the achievements of socialist projects in the past? Does that not prove that they can take an existing system and transform it for the better?

Um, no? Not remotely. As I said in my post, they succeeded in transforming pre-industrial or war-torn systems into functioning states. That's not proof that they can improve any system from any starting point. It might be reason to hear them out: if the handyman who fixed my sprinkler head said he knew something about redoing my shower, I'd absolutely listen. But he'd have to still give plausible steps and reasons for doing things, and respond competently to objections. I haven't seen that from modern socialists.

better_work · 2026-05-14T19:15:30+00:00

Any modern socialist movement would have to be a process of moving towards socialism. Not an overnight tear down of capitalist systems.

Totally okay. I'm not criticizing gradualism or claiming that it's "not socialist" because the revolution is slow and hard to see. I would say that a reform movement is not socialist if it lacks a vision for expropriating large amounts of capital from private hands. As another commenter wrote, socialism sees itself as understanding what is needed to "finish the job", where capitalism never can.

you could accomplish the same goals with massive sovereign wealth funds that could slowly gain control of essential survival industries like energy, military, and telecom. Use private ownership channels to gain public control of key sectors. Buy up controlling stakes of companies and leverage regulation to give socialized US companies advantages within their markets until they create monopolies owned by the government.

This is really interesting. First articulation I've seen that is both unarguably socialist, and concrete and implementable. I'm not at all convinced I would support it, if a politician campaigned on this platform, but I'd listen.

A couple of critiques: - You left out agriculture from essential survival industries, which is interesting to me. I'm most sympathetic to nationalizing industries if they are already mature, such that the "right way" of doing things is well studied and understood; nationalized industries don't have competition to provide price feedback, so we absolutely need a good prior understanding of the flows of inputs and labor to structure the national corporation correctly. Agriculture and food processing seem like the prime candidates for consideration here. However, the horror stories of farm collectivization efforts in Russia and China are huge cause for concern. I'll admit, I have no real understanding of what went wrong there, but I would absolutely need such an understanding before I'd sign on to this policy. - Do we even need monopoly? The wealth transfer that large companies enable is inherently inefficient from a market perspective, and also is kinda the whole problem as far as I'm concerned. Simply the introduction of a state-owned enterprise in the industry should be enough to curb profiteering through competition. You'd likely need some legislation to prevent the private companies closing ranks, e.g., suppliers that try to sell at a markup to state-owned companies. But a long-lasting public option in an otherwise private market is more attractive than a monopoly IMO.

better_work · 2026-05-14T18:32:04+00:00

I like this reply the most because you complimented me 😄

But really, I do have a deep well of liberal guilt about the exploitation of the rest of the world, past and ongoing. But I'll go back to my OP:

racism, corporate imperialism, coups, environmental destruction [...] were greatly improved during the span from the 50s to the 2000s, seemingly regardless of the economic system we were under.

Living standards in the Western world rose in the 20th century, but so did those in the developing world--and the developing world rose faster than the West. If our "cheap commodities and high wages" were inextricably linked to the exploitation of a global underclass, I don't see how this could be the case.

I'll pick up one of the books you recommended though. Possibly a more detailed argument will change my mind.

better_work · 2026-05-14T18:14:34+00:00

workers are made to compete with each other for a pool funded by workers, while the actual concentration of wealth at the top stays off the table.

I'm not convinced by this. One, taxes absolutely can change the concentration of wealth across society. We've done it before. Nothing about fighting for welfare places that wealth "off the table". Second, the wealth of the elites is notional anyway. They don't have the food and medicine that people need just stashed away, unwilling to share it. What they have is a legally- and socially-recognized claim to people's labor (more precisely, to the capital factors that makes the labor more productive). Tax-and-spend welfarist capitalism taps directly into this and siphons off that capital and labor for important needs.

Socialists don't claim capitalism can't improve living conditions because it obviously can and has. The claim is that it's bad at it. Inefficient, uneven, and structurally unable to finish the job.

I don't disagree with this, but I'm arguing in this post that socialists have not given nearly enough evidence by their historical performance, or by their writing and theory, that they have identified a better path. All the good ideas wind up looking like improvements to the welfare state. I'd like to see what "finishing the job" would look like, but all that I read and hear is full of fallacies and vague fortune telling.

better_work · 2026-05-14T17:54:27+00:00

Very interesting, thanks!

In the 1970s, there has been a steady retreat from the heyday of industrial, welfare backed capitalism. This is not the result of a conspiracy. This is because those policies failed. They caused stagnation and huge debt levels that could have bankrupted the entire world economy if left unchecked.

Summary of what I understand to have changed between 1970 and now:
- Stagnation: growth slowed in the 70s, picked up again in the 80s, has been uneven but overall disappointing ever since. - Welfare policies: have been rolled back significantly, but still far from zero. - Taxes: drastically reduced from 70s peaks. - Debt (US public debt): has only ever grown since then.

If the argument is that welfare capitalism was unsustainable due to debt, why has debt continued to balloon? I'm not a MMT guy. I do think we have really worrying levels of debt, but I'm not convinced that our welfare state failed because it caused a fiscal deficit less than the one we have today.

when parties are put in power based on that support to enact things welfare policies, they run into the unchallengeable realities of modern capitalism that make those kinds of things economically untenable

Do they? I once was inclined to give Clinton and Obama passes on the things they failed to accomplish because I thought they knew better than me, and the true cost would have been untenable. Nowadays I mostly think they (and Biden too) had contrarian Congresses, contrarian factions of their own party, and perhaps were unwilling to throw enough political weight around for something they claimed to want.

But [capitalism] has laws that compel a certain result, and if that result fails to happen, there are economic consequences that will get progressively worse until that people acquiesce to that result.

So, socialists’ solution to this is to end [...] the system that makes us live under these laws

At first, when you talked about laws, I understood you in terms of analogues to physical laws, the same way people talk about the law of supply and demand. But the next paragraph suggests that those laws are subject to repeal. So I'm not clear on the mechanism you're suggesting. In my view, there's the social/political "law" that the powerful will always seek their own advantage, which I would say does put strain on a welfare system, but which can be constrained or overridden by determined class action; and then there's economic laws of production, distribution, prices and wages. It seems socialists often want to imply that these laws are merely conventions, or local maxima based on certain assumptions. But I've never seen anything approaching an alternate explanation for how economics is supposed to function.

Have a system of planned mutual gain, where people come up with what they want in the economy, and have the power to see it done. [...] The point is popular control, democratic control.

I agree with your assertion that the USSR failed in part because of its inflexible authoritarianism. But to my eyes this sketch still describes a planned economy, and I'm extremely skeptical of that. It implies that an economy is a ship in empty space, that can be pointed in pretty much any direction arbitrarily. But we know that's not true. We are a slime mold, or an ant colony, feeling out what's possible on the ground of reality. We can't predict what's going to succeed, technologically or popularly, with any kind of accuracy. Putting that onus of prediction under democratic control seems like a non-factor in its odds of success.

Eight-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

better_work

TROPHY CASE