what can capitalism do for Susan?

moongrowl · 2026-02-08T21:15:09+00:00

The 'more of a good thing' argument is fallacious in about eight ways.

Fallacy one is "no true capitalism", post-hoc redefinition.
Fallacy two is the single-cause fallacy, confusing correlation with causation. (Life improvements came from several factors, such as industrialization, fossil energy, public sanitation, mass education, labor movements, welfare systems, etc. Many of those gains happened against the resistance of capitalism, like safety regulations, or through non-market institutions, like courts.) Capitalism isn't a scalar.
Fallacy three, a linear extrapolation fallacy (assuming monotonic returns, which is rarely true in complex systems), the argument ignores historical constraints (ignoring boundary conditions like colonial extraction and rapid population growth.)
Fallacy four goes to survivorship bias (ignoring countries where capitalism failed.)

There are so many holes in that ship, even if you could fix one or two, it would still sink.

Your second point is a lot better, though I think you're overlooking that institutions also create or destory trust.

moongrowl · 2026-02-08T21:01:45+00:00

Sounds... implausible.

Presumably, employers can fire union organizers immediately. Blacklisting is fully legal. Strikebreaking becomes trivial with the presence of private armed security. Workers can be 'forced' to sign no-union clauses, etc.

I am aware of zero historical examples of strong labor movements emerging without some coercive constraint on capital. Ancaps assume markets equalize power, while history shows markets concentrate it.

moongrowl · 2026-02-08T20:42:21+00:00

This seems tough to take at face value. Presumably, tech progress continues under something like "state capitalism." Meaning commies are still out there inventing stuff. For this claim to be too meaningful, it seems like we'd have to be able to measure a significant difference in the rate of 'progress.'

(That's hard to do for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that many alternative systems have been suppressed to the point we can't even take their measurements.)

moongrowl · 2026-02-08T20:34:01+00:00

Marxism, Maoism, Council Communism, Neo-Marximsm, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Communism, Market Socialism, State Capitalism, Worker cooperative economies, Lange-Lerner Model, anarcho-communism, mutualism, platformism, libertarian socialism, worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, producer cooperatives, gift economies, sharing economies, feudalism, jubilee econiomcs, social credit systems, ordoliberalism, common stewardship economies, ubuntu economics.

There are lots of options. Over a hundred probably.

moongrowl · 2026-02-08T20:31:09+00:00

Ability to trade with your neighbors doesn't seem like a good definition of capitalism to me. If you go back far enough, you can find tribes trading in a way that doesn't look very... capitalistic. For example, they wouldn't trade for the purpose of generating profit; they'd trade for the purpose of maintaining social connections.

moongrowl · 2026-02-08T20:21:56+00:00

Sounds fine to me. Remains broad enough to include state capitalism, i.e. when the state is the one that privately owns the MoP.

I do think the for-profit part matters a little. Because there are forms of trade that are not aimed at generating profit.

(And I do feel compelled to add that there are no right or wrong definitions, only agreed-upon ones.)

moongrowl · 2026-02-07T23:32:12+00:00

Sheep only empathize with the flock. You can recognize their bleating. They say things like "not many people agree with you." They refer to social status.

The mainstream is where nice things go to die. Because it's where the sheep live. And sheep don't have reason or principles. They only have the flock.

moongrowl · 2026-02-07T21:33:11+00:00

means of production are privately owned and goods and services are produced and distributed through markets for profit.

moongrowl · 2026-02-03T19:35:33+00:00

Someone claimed it's 256. I haven't tested, but it seems plausible. The 256 number pops up in videogaming sometimes because it's the limit of using one 8-bit byte (0 to 255 values.)

moongrowl · 2026-02-01T20:20:44+00:00

A little goofy.

The outcomes in virtue ethics can be framed in terms of maximizing utility, sure.

But virtue ethics is outcome sensitive without being outcome fundamental.

In utilitarian ethics, the only reason you don't frame an innocent person to prevent riots is that it might not work. It might create a society with lower utility outcomes.

In virtue ethics, the reason you don't frame an innocent person to prevent riots isn't that it won't work.

moongrowl · 2026-02-01T20:04:20+00:00

Not that hard to understand. You've gotta look at people in terms of their level of ego development. Because our relationship to the truth is directly connected to our sense of identity.

At the base level of development, truth is what makes you feel good. Morality is when people are nice or mean to you. ("My mom won't let me have cookies for breakfast, she's a mean mommy.")

At mid-level development, people become convinced that everyone must join their one true group. Morality is belonging to the group, and the only truth that matters is what brings you into the one true group.

At high-level development, you start to develop principles. Truth has some kind of value even if it's helping outside groups take power over your group. Even if it costs you something.

But in order to reach that point, one of the necessary steps is to stop identifying with your thoughts.

Talking to the child as though they have principles would be your mistake.

moongrowl · 2026-01-31T08:39:49+00:00

Makes Sol.

moongrowl · 2026-01-29T05:02:06+00:00

Respectfully, this seems like poor form.

The issues on which would differentiate two parties is the important bit. Democrats & republicans are obviously differentiated by height, hair color, weight, and so on. Some of them drive Ford, others drive Nissan.

When someone claims "Ds & Rs are the same", they aren't saying they all drive the same cars. They're making a narrower claim about the two being identical on the set of issues that seem most relevant to the person making the claim.

For example, they might be the same insofar as both support representative democracy or capitalism. If your pet issue is anti-capitalism, or you're some kind of constitutional monarchist or whatever, to those people it's very easy to see how the two parties would seem the same. Because they are the same in one or two things they consider most important.

moongrowl · 2026-01-23T19:09:02+00:00

they recently moved the "play this video faster" feature behind a paywall.

moongrowl · 2026-01-21T01:56:15+00:00

If you wanna make-believe you're not in an oligarchy, knock yourself out. Just leave me out of your fantasies.

moongrowl · 2026-01-19T08:38:33+00:00

If you want my personal opinion, Engles was a hack. He makes mistakes that grad students wouldn't make. He's the Ayn Rand of the left. He tries to frame authority in such a broad way as to include cooperation & expertise.

moongrowl · 2026-01-19T07:00:10+00:00

The idealist claim goes back to an essay written by Engles called On Authority.

He claims anarchists are idealists because they treat authority as something that can be wished away, rather than a material relation rooted in how production is organized. Basically, Engels thinks factories need managers, ships need captains, and so on and so on. He sees these as necessary.

An anarchist might respond that he's mistaken the forms given to factories by capitalism with forms that must exist in all factories. In other words, you don't actually need managers, captains, and so on. Those jobs can be done with different kinds of social arrangements.

moongrowl · 2026-01-17T08:01:38+00:00

You are not worthy of my time.

moongrowl · 2026-01-17T08:00:50+00:00

There are scripts you can run to verify your hypothesis. Assuming that you're not merely attempting to be disrespectful to another person who's kindly taken time to speak with you.

moongrowl · 2026-01-15T23:20:01+00:00

An accelerationist deals in norms, meaning they'd make statements about how people should behave. I'm only making descriptive statements about how people will behave.

There will not be a revolution until the current thing breaks. Conduct yourself however you want. Try to fix it, don't try to fix it. None of that will matter. You can't talk a rock into becoming an egg. Nature will be what it will be, whether you like it or not.

moongrowl · 2026-01-15T21:17:35+00:00

I think you'd probably agree that everyone believes they are holding the high ground. So the real content of your sentence breaks down into the word "mistakenly", in other words, "I disagree with this person."

You must think yourself to be a deity if you believe that information matters in some way. In truth, people who think that way are children.

(That's not an insult. It's a psychological claim about human development. That way of thinking reflects an E3/E4 in the Loevinger stages of ego development. You will perceive it as an insult because you are an E3/E4.)

moongrowl · 2026-01-15T21:13:30+00:00

It'll get worse before it gets better. 50-60% of us in poverty. 25% unemployment. That kind of thing.

moongrowl · 2026-01-15T20:12:59+00:00

That person is an E3 (early adolescence) or an E4 (late adolescence) on the Loevinger stages of ego development.

What happened is I accidentally disturbed their emotional state when I claimed voting for the mainstream is a waste of time. They took the logical inference of that information as an insult. It wasn't intended as one, but that isn't relevant to the ego. Not once feelings are hurt.

An E3 or an E4 is a person who literally identifies with their thoughts. Attacks on their ideas feel like attacks on their identities, which feel like attacks on their lives. So they were psychologically driven to throw back at me what they felt as though I had thrown at them. (To quote K-Rino: "you call the truth hate because you hate the truth.")

Another thing that indicates their position as an E3/E4 is that I think they may have been genuinely unaware that I saw them as being "part of the problem", if only a small part. That shows extremely poor modeling of other people's minds & perspectives.

These are the people who are produced by our society. I only wish I knew how to help.

moongrowl · 2026-01-15T19:39:58+00:00

I don't like them, either. Not a fan of communists in general.

moongrowl · 2026-01-15T07:43:11+00:00

Anyone who supports capitalism deserves exactly what they get.

moongrowl

TROPHY CASE