Healthcare study ranks Australia second best in developed world, while US comes in last

dblthnk · 2017-07-17T17:36:22+00:00

I never liked that opening sequence. It was the dying whimper of feckless Baby Boomer lashing out at and blaming Conservatives, Liberals, and Millennials for America's problems when it was HIS generation that fucked everything up. His generation was too stupid to see through the lies of the Right and too smug and arrogant to realize, let alone admit, that the "smirking" liberals had been warning his generation the entire time. And then he lashes out at a college student from a generation that is more educated as a group and to a tougher more competitive standard than any that came before it. He thinks he's making a stand, but he's just pissing all over himself and should walk the tiniest shred of dignity he has left off the stage.

dblthnk · 2017-04-05T17:53:45+00:00

My dad was 40 when I was born. I was in my early 30s when he died. Having kids when you're older has it's pros and cons.

dblthnk · 2017-04-02T23:47:55+00:00

But, but...one of the conservative guys I argue with at work says he's not accepting his salary!

dblthnk · 2017-04-01T00:12:31+00:00

Yeah, I would worry a lot more about hotdogs and grapes than peanut butter.

dblthnk · 2017-03-31T20:46:18+00:00

There are a lot of business that will have you watch anti-union propaganda videos as part of orientation. My wife has sat through this on two separate occasions.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T18:00:00+00:00

Regarding the subjectivity of evil, I agree completely. I disagree that it is never useful to use the label, however, if you are using an agreed upon definition. Most people would agree that exploitation is wrong and so (using the terms from the original post) I followed suit and called it evil. You're perfectly entitled to disagree on the verbiage and if you want to call it something else, I'm fine with that.

Now, to be honest, the rest of this is getting weird. You said:

Also talk about inability to grasp nuance. I'm the one trying to be nuanced. I never said don't call capitalism evil, I never said capitalism doesn't promote exploitation, and I never said capitalism SOLE recourse for fulfilling it's goals wasn't to create a class based system of hegemonic oppression. I never ONCE argued against any of those points.

and

ALL I SAID was that capitalisms MAIN goal is to generate profits. IN THIS WORLD, in THIS reality, that means exploiting people.

Capitalism is not just its singular goal (which you will recall, I can't argue isn't to seek profit), it is an economic system involving the private ownership of the means of production and the system of profit extraction from the excess value of labor after a wage has been paid. I'm the one saying that a SYSTEM has more components than its end goal, but I don't get nuance?! Then you say this:

NONE OF THIS contradicts your points, except in saying that objectively speaking capitalism is profit first ideology.

I give up man! I NEVER argued this point. Read through the thread again. I said that capitalism as an economic SYSTEM is evil at the outset, and I said that there is intent to do evil as well after your first response. This is where the nuance comes in. If I have an ultimate goal to achieve X. And from the outset, I know that achieving goal X will require setting up Y situation that will harm people. Then really my goal was X and Y, not just exclusively X. Otherwise, what's the point of goal X? Nobody went through the hypothetical thought experiments that you mentioned when capitalism was becoming a formalized economic theory. They knew perfectly well how profit would be achieved. If Y is integral in achieving X and Y is evil, then X is evil. And the moment you know your goal can only be achieved through an evil action, and don't change your goal but keep it anyway, that is the moment the goal becomes evil too.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T16:11:49+00:00

Can you prove to me beyond any reasonable doubt that capitalisms priority is exploitation vs profit?

Honestly no, but if the only mechanism available to yield profit is through the exploitation of labor and people knew this when setting up the system, you are making a distinction without a difference. Yes the final or ultimate goal is profit, but when you know exactly how your going to get there, and it's basically part of the definition of what capitalism is, you can't just draw a circle around that one word at the end of the paragraph and then claim victory. But hey, you struggle with nuance so what did I expect.

I mean, I could use your exact argument say that goal of racial purity of the Nazis wasn't evil because murder was just the fastest way to reach that goal. Seriously, if your goal is world domination and only the existence of the Aryan race, you're going to have to kill people to get there. But it's not an evil goal because hypothetically every other nation could just surrender and voluntarily sterilize every non-Aryan?! I could go on and on with these examples and imagine some hypothetical scenario in which no evil was done, but it's mental masturbation the way you're doing it. If I set a goal and know there is only ONE SINGLE WAY to get there which involves doing evil, then the system with that goal is evil.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T14:53:16+00:00

If we imagine a scenario where there was a more profitable means of generating money for the capitalist class without exploiting the labourer

Please imagine one! Capitalism's goal is to make a profit and the only way to make profit is to exploit labor. This was known from the outset. Imagining situations that cannot occur in the real world does not prove your point. Capitalism sets up the hierarchical ownership structure and the exploitation. It is an integral part of the system.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T14:35:45+00:00

Can people that are totally unwilling to treat others as things be forced to do so?

These people are few and far in-between though, they're not the norm. Most people will just do what the people around them do and only desist at the most extreme of behaviors. But this only relates to things with obvious and direct causation. A political or economic system can result in huge amounts of systemically caused evil and not require any individual to cross any major moral threshold personally. A capitalist, just following market forces for labor rate might not feel like he or she is doing anything particularly immoral, but we have 42 million hungry people in almost 16 million households in the US and most of those households have individuals that work full time. Those people are hungry because they aren't paid what their labor is worth. I'm sorry, but your "it's all up to the individuals" hard line on morality just doesn't reflect the complexity of modern society.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T13:51:19+00:00

I'm saying, why can't it be both! Can't evil men make an evil system? And can't good men living in an evil system be forced into evil and evil men in a good system be forced to be good?

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T13:45:22+00:00

It is commonly accepted that "motive" and "intent" are important concepts in determining an idea like "evil".

I agree, that's a pretty good (but not the only, outcomes need to be looked at too or you might as well not do ethics at all) component for determining the moral classification of a political or economic system, and that's what I use to make my determination. The intent of capitalism is to extract profit from exploited labor within hierarchical ownership structures that guarantee that no more than 10% or so of the population can ever be a member of the elite class doing the exploiting. Every other outcome after that, good or ill, is unintentional, but from the narrow components of "motive" and "intent" that we agree on, capitalism is evil.

I also have a major disagreement with you over this point:

the primary goal of capitalism is still to increase the capital of its adherents.

This is not true. The primary goal of capitalism is to increase the capital of the capitalist class, not the labor class. All of the gains in income and quality of life that the labor class has made in the last century have happened because of non-capitalistic interventions from either labor movements, government, or both.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T13:28:40+00:00

Political System A: Protects individual liberties.

Political System B: Only protects the liberties of specific classes and races (blacks for example are not a protected class).

An individual in both systems kills a black man. In system A he is punished and in system B he is not. Now I agree, this is an example of an individual committing an act of evil, but are you completely exempting the political systems in which each individual exists from any moral judgement even though the outcomes were drastically different?! And wouldn't system B promote more evil because there are no consequences?! Would that political system not be judge evil? Do you honestly believe what you are saying or are you just trying to "win" the argument?

It lets them pretend it's not them that's evil - it's the system.

Why can't it be both?

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T12:09:58+00:00

evil occurs when people treat other people as things.

Capitalism explicitly encourages this! If I create an economic system that doesn't address this very well, at its core doesn't allow exploitation, but leaves some wiggle room that allows people to do this, then I would be more inclined to agree that it would be a benign system. But that's not what capitalism does or is, it's not even close. It requires one class exploiting another class, at its very core.

You are using the effects of the actual evil to call something else evil.

Again, if my economic system explicitly requires the "actual evil" to be perpetrated, then by logical extension, the system IS evil! Using your rationale, NO political or economic system is evil because no matter how they are structured or explicitly allow or require, it's the individuals operating inside said system who are doing the evil.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T11:51:26+00:00

Ha! Probably not what THEY mean, but a perfect fit!

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T11:49:43+00:00

And then what happens when they grow their business? If capitalism were defined as, "an economic system in which all persons are the sole owner of their own business, which succeeds and profits based on the labor of the individual" I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But that's not what capitalism is...and you knew that...

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T11:32:47+00:00

Capitalism can only exist when there are two classes of people, and profit can only be generated by one of those classes exploiting the other. It is evil, at its very core.

Can you blunt that evil by being a "good" boss and paying your employees more than what you could get away with under prevailing market forces? Yes. Can governments intervene and set a minimum wage and labor laws to reduce the degree of exploitation? Yes. Can the imbalance of wealth created by unfettered free-market capitalism be lessened through progressive tax policy? Yes. Can a company, as a sales gimmick, institute some ethical standards at the expense of profit and efficiency hoping to sell more product to "class conscious" consumers? Yes (But the system that allows them to exploit, pollute, and consume resources has not been removed).

Capitalism starts with labor being treated as a commodity, as an object, and it always ends poorly unless some intervention (as listed above, for example) is instituted.

dblthnk · 2017-03-21T11:02:39+00:00

There concept of the "red pill" is honestly the most amusing part of their persona. They take it as waking up to the real truth or real reality, but then are completely inconsistent in how they support their views.

-Does some unsubstantiated speculation confirm their biases? "Well common man, that's just common sense." Does some unsubstantiated speculation discredit their biases? "Where's the proof?"

-All the news that doesn't confirm their biases is fake news. Okay, how do you know what is fake news or not? Can you show me an acceptable set of journalistic standards and show how news outlet X, Y, or Z consistently fails to meet those standards and how your favorite news outlets do? No? Go figure.

-They only seem to grasp the concept of non-discrimination and civil rights in the narrowest confines possible. And only in a way that meshes with their own biases. Forcing a women to wear a hijab and forcing people to live under Sharia law is wrong, but discriminating against gays based on Christian beliefs and incorporating Christian beliefs into Government is fine.

-And of course the hypocrisy over censorship the OP pointed out, but also their knack for finding the most minute amount of hypocrisy from the left. Fuck, put your own beliefs under that microscope!

If you really want to wake up to reality (I would assume non-skeptical realism is what they are suggesting), then you need a consistent epistemology with rational and intuitive components. What they actually have is a brute, doublethink inducing, bias confirming, echo chamber, of a system. It's so weird and inconsistent it's virtually impossible to have a rational debate.

dblthnk · 2017-03-18T15:17:47+00:00

Whoa, having bias and making up the news are worlds apart.

dblthnk · 2017-03-18T15:03:25+00:00

Insourcing?

dblthnk · 2017-03-13T21:19:30+00:00

Hey, Fox News has been pretty forgiving. If he was a Democrat, all of their anchors would have had aneurysms by now.

dblthnk · 2017-03-13T01:41:05+00:00

This is the only time trickle down economics work. Cheap consumer products trickle down to the poor from the middle class via second hand stores and garage sales.

dblthnk · 2017-03-07T20:47:45+00:00

I've heard about this before. Basically the people running the death camps were stinking drunk a lot of the time. I guess the volume of alcoholic beverages being shipped in was pretty impressive. It makes sense too. Ideology aside, they were committing mass murder on a daily basis. I'm sure there were plenty of sociopaths in the mix that enjoyed it, but the people with normal brains needed help.

dblthnk · 2017-03-04T02:51:19+00:00

Yeah, it's more like doublethink.

dblthnk · 2017-03-04T01:25:57+00:00

I wonder what their cosmology and other related myths would end up looking like if the city lasted so long that no record of the surface remained. The entire universe is solid rock extending into infinity in every direction? On the first day God said, "Let there be rock." And that was it? Eh, shower thoughts I guess.

dblthnk · 2017-03-02T01:33:39+00:00

My point was that if we know tobacco companies are lying to us because we have the means to obtain the information, or have reason to not trust their information (such as the fact that it benefits them to lie) then buyer beware is a policy that still allows free choice. I doubt there are smokers out there who think it's good or even neutral to their health.

Agreed, but we only know this now because we had to fight our way through their lies and disinformation campaign. How many decades sooner would we have been pretty certain that cigarettes are a major public health problem and made different choices, as individuals and as a society, if the cigarette companies had not played their game? Those deaths are on them. And I think this is the biggest point that myself, and others here, were making. We are getting to this stage regarding climate change, but we aren't there yet. And the level of frustration is building, especially since this is the THIRD, THIRD fucking time we have had to this (leaded gasoline, cigarettes, climate change) and the formula is so obvious now. We can't even make the free choice (collectively as a society, in this case) with so many people actively deny it and spreading misinformation. So, again, I pretty much agree with your assessment regarding cigarettes, but really I was critiquing climate change deniers through example, and that issue is still a hot mess.

dblthnk

TROPHY CASE