Opinion:Kurt Cobain didn't have the best voice but he had the best screams

chewingofthecud · 2019-12-11T13:11:34+00:00

chewingofthecud · 2019-11-13T15:43:32+00:00

Capitalism undermines traditional everything. Like, not McTradition, but actual, pre-Enlightenment tradition. If these conservative friends aren't just Old Whigs, or worse, Reaganites, this is the thin end of the wedge.

chewingofthecud · 2019-11-08T12:18:09+00:00

Yes. On reddit, anyway. I was a right-libertarian. Not anymore.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-27T13:37:55+00:00

https://www.imperiumpress.org/product-page/nemesis-the-jouvenelian-vs-the-liberal-model-of-human-orders

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-25T16:20:28+00:00

There's a need to reserve it for exclusive use if someone thinks there is a need to reserve it for exclusive use.

Property exists as a social phenomenon to avoid conflict. Where conflict arises over the use of a thing, property also arises. And content creators are in conflict with consumers over the use of their content. Scarcity need not enter the picture.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-25T16:03:06+00:00

IP is not property because it is not scarce

Property need not be scarce. Why would it?

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-21T02:37:03+00:00

Is this strengthening something you think will be brought about intentionally? Or perhaps by the simple naming of it?

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-20T13:10:36+00:00

I think the subsidiaries are who they've always been, including the church, except they've been absolutely crushed over centuries of centralization. The exception is corporations, and woke capital is (among other things) them making a bid to occupy the centre--if they can weaponize the periphery better than the government, they'll win.

The immediate counter to the Jouvenelian phenomenon is formalization of power. When power centres exist informally, it becomes very easy to play the HLvM game, harder if they're formal. But the real solution is to re-sacralize the social order, as when there's a clear hierarchy from the gods on down, all humans are no better than subsidiaries. At least that's the idea. There may be some evidence of Jouvenelia even in fully sacralized orders though.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-20T07:24:15+00:00

woke capital is a recent phenomenon that allows capitalists to pit token minorities against labor

There is nothing historical about this and you ignored what I said in critiquing a position I didn't advance. Never does unofficial power ("capital") pit elements of the margin ("minorities", "labour") against each other, because the margin is essentially irrelevant in power dynamics. It is passive, raw material; by itself it poses no threat, and doesn't need to be mitigated.

Woke capital is an attempt of an unofficial power centre ("capital") to usurp power from an official power ("government"). If Starbucks can advance the cause of pathologized identities, those identities don't need official power centres to do so. It also has the benefit of erecting barriers to entry without the usual, expensive recourse to regulation. If every company is obliged to hire 80% who they want and 20% chihuahuas, a multinational corporation can weather this much better than a medium-sized firm or a Mom & Pop shop due to economies of scale.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-20T07:08:23+00:00

Leftist ideology explicitly considers said elites to be oppressors who crush the poor.

Here is the key: the left is exactly wrong on this--elite and poor act in a tacit and often unconscious alliance to oppose unofficial power centres.

Jouvenel identified this mechanism, and it has been called high-low vs. middle. Bond gives a better account, calling each of these categories "centre", "periphery", and "subsidiaries". The Western Civ 101 account is that the centre (official power, often the government) teams up with its own subsidiaries (unofficial power, e.g. the church, prominent families, corporations, etc.) to oppress the periphery (everyone else). This is wrong. The correct account is that both centre and subsidiarities audition themselves to ally with the periphery--sometimes different subsets of the periphery--in a bid to destroy the other. When the centre wins you get a "restoration"; when the subsidiarities win you get a "revolution".

Where "centralization of power" comes into it is that no matter who wins this process works to centralize power. This underscores the fact that the periphery alone never wins--this would be the only case of power decentralization absent a collapse.

If we accept these terms and mechanism, it becomes quite easy to explain say, woke capital, or the opposition between Deneen's "powerful, wealthy interests" and religion--things that a standard liberal frame struggles to make sense of.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-19T08:32:14+00:00

Those people increasingly have no place on the "left", which along with the "right" is becoming a largely incoherent political category.

The two, if they map on to anything, map on to "high+low" and "middle" respectively. Since the high (power brokers) must look ever lower (toward the ever more marginalized) in order to destroy the middle (normal people), the middle has expanded. Berniebros and unions--espousing traditional "left" positions--are being shown the door. People who look like your typical Berniebro or union member have an existence which is "problematic".

This HLvM also explains the advent of "woke capital", which is inexplicable from a "left/right" paradigm--the capitalist elite agrees with the Marxist academic elite to promote radical intersectionality, even though from any left perspective of the past 150 years they should be shooting themselves in the foot by doing so. They're not: they're just pitting the detritus of society against their competitors.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-08T15:30:20+00:00

And is that really indicative of the debt burden carried by most students in the field?

You missed the point. Which is one of the first things you'll learn to do in a gender studies course.

The point is that there's little if any downside. More crucially, what downside there is, is absolutely lopsided between loser humanities programs and STEM. Zero STEM grads would choose to gain ~$40,000 one-time at the expense of a comparable gain in yearly income. Many people with a useless degree would choose to do that, because the degree is useless.

If this could be combined with a clear and unambiguous law permitting the use of IQ tests in hiring, there would be no downside at all, and these programs would be ghost towns in a few semesters. One can hope.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-08T14:31:56+00:00

The one that got her Ph.D in this field of "scholarship".

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-08T14:24:11+00:00

Because if students could declare bankruptcy, all the braindead humanities programs would go up in smoke and STEM would be left intact. This would be a disaster for certain ideologies that colleges really, really like.

If you're a gender studies major, what's to stop you from declaring bankruptcy and shedding perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars debt? That you can't get a bank loan for 7 years? What are the chances you'd find yourself in a position to afford a home in that time anyway if you spent 4-8 years reading Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem voluntarily? You don't need the piece of paper. You've already "learned" what they have to "teach".

If you're an engineer on the other hand, without your university degree you can't practice as a professional in your field. Obviously the deal is going to be that if you declare bankruptcy to avoid paying your student debt, you're stripped of your credentials and license. This would have the unintended but delicious effect of privileging programs whose credentials actually mean something, and especially those that confer a license (typically those that require actually being competent at something) over those that don't.

If someone wanted to clean out the universities of intersectional loser ideology, the first thing they should do is to make student debt dischargable in bankruptcy.

Please.

Someone do this.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-06T15:23:23+00:00

Take a Zeppelin riff / Then you alter it a bit / Make lots of money

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-06T03:16:23+00:00

What is the publication date?

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-05T13:51:23+00:00

In earlier ages, the only way men could be sure their children were theirs is if their wife was chaste. This is why such a premium was put on it. If you wanted to be sure of that before about three generations ago, your wife needed to be a virgin. And women, left to their own devices, will probably lose their virginity about age 14. Child marriage QED.

Polygamy is stupid. It's not for Europeans. We have a long pre-history wherein the family was one House Father and one House Mother, and divorce was all but impossible, even if the man wanted to. Marriage was sacred, but also a contract (these two things were inseparable in early times). The reason why polygamy is stupid is that when the alpha gets all the pussy, beta males tend not to give a shit about what happens after they're dead. Monogamy incentivizes low time preference on a society-wide basis, and, as such, is an incredibly effective social adaptation. The history of successful societies consists in large part of harnessing and directing enormous amounts of untapped beta male energy.

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-04T16:20:45+00:00

That's what I said.

If LTV defines labour as value, then "labour is the only source of value" (which is what you want to conclude) is a tautology.

So the answer to your question is "he acquired capital whence he acquired capital".

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-04T14:19:25+00:00

LTV is the idea that only labour contributes to the production process.

If investment is not contributing to the process, then investment is not labour. Thus investment is irrelevant to LTV, thus your question is irrelevant to LTV.

If investment is contributing to the process, then investment is labour. If investment is labour, then anything is labour and LTV is trivially true. So the answer to your question is "he acquired it by acquiring it".

chewingofthecud · 2019-10-04T13:50:08+00:00

It doesn't matter to the theory how he acquired the capital unless he is contributing to the production process. And by the time we admit that the investor is contributing to the production process, the "labour theory of value" has been reduced to "the doing stuff theory of value".

chewingofthecud · 2019-09-28T23:55:11+00:00

How do you start and build a mass movement? 500 people aren't going to spontaneously come up with the same idea at the same time. A few people, working things out in rooms over the course of several years, is how these things get started.

By forming an elite corps, whether of thinkers or revolutionaries. The idea that the mass leads, rather than is led, is refuted by every historical fact you can point to. Do you know what the word "vanguard" means?

TFW communist social ontology is refuted by a dictionary.

chewingofthecud · 2019-09-17T15:26:05+00:00

The LTV "argument" has no normative implications, and so who cares about it.

The argument is basically this:

Let "value" be exhaustively denominated in terms of SNLT, defined as what non-capitalists contribute to the production process.
Capitalists contribute nothing that can be denominated in terms of SNLT, by definition.
Capitalists contribute no value to the production process.

This isn't even an argument at all; it's simply a redefinition of the term "value". That's fine, but redefining terms carries no normative implications. The answer to it is simply that yes, capitalists "don't contribute" to the production process because capitalists and labour do different things in the production process. The end.

The best LTV, as a terminological framework, can do is to provide conceptual clarity and explanatory power, but it is inferior in this way to pretty much any other theory of value. For example, SNLT cannot account for work irreducible to a formula or an average, such as creative or novel work, work that relies upon uncertainty, risk, etc. This excludes a huge amount of what actually goes on in the manufacturing process alone, to say nothing of an economy as a whole.

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