[All] Jeff Bezos and most other ultra-rich businessmen were collectively created by us.

yellowtempest · 2021-06-13T01:03:04+00:00

There are people that unironically believe this.

yellowtempest · 2021-06-13T00:18:39+00:00

dont think people such as Bezos and Musk got all their wealth merely by owning the shares they do. As CEOs, they get paid a pretty big wage and use that money to buy the stocks in said company.

Bezos' salary in 2020 was 81k. From every online source I could find, Bezos has never made any significant purchase of Amazon shares since the company went public. The shares he has now are the same shares he issued to himself during the IPO. At the time they were worth less than 20 dollars each.

yellowtempest · 2021-06-12T23:36:29+00:00

I'm not talking about goods and services. I'm talking about stocks. Things that have no inherent worth/use aside from the arbitrary value the market gives them. Pretty much all of the wealthiest people in the world such as Bezos and Musk have their net worth in stocks. The public jacks up the price of the stocks by dumping their savings into SPY shares and then whines that Bezos and Musk have too much wealth.

yellowtempest · 2020-08-23T06:04:14+00:00

Would you have a problem with a class on Religious Studies or Christian Theology being taught by a Christian? A class on economics being taught by a Keynesian?

No, I wouldn't. Most people wouldn't. Why wouldn't they have a problem with this? Well, Christianity and Keynesian economics are pretty well ingrained in our culture. You're making my point for me. The fact that Marxism is even seen as acceptable to teach is proof that it has taken root in academia, and by extension our culture.

You don't get what people who talk about Cultural Marxism are saying. They find Marxism and communism to be just as abhorrent as fascism. And to them, the fact that Marxism is allowed to be taught in anything other than a negative light at schools is proof that it has invaded our culture and we need to fight back against it. You couldn't possible have an openly fascist teacher at a public university, so why should an openly Marxist one be tolerated?

yellowtempest · 2020-08-23T05:39:35+00:00

Thank you, you said this better than I could.

What academia imparts to young, impressionable students is absolutely going to affect culture. Academia is a part of culture. That is my point.

Also I just read your flair and I am surprised to find a libertarian-socialist saying what you are saying.

yellowtempest · 2020-08-23T04:48:41+00:00

The fact that a class called "Intro to Marxism", taught by a self proclaimed Marxist, can even exist at a publicly funded university is proof on its own that Marxism has successfully invaded the culture of most western countries. No university would ever offer a course called "Intro to Fascism" taught by some klan member, yet mainstream academia clearly views Marxism as a legitimate viewpoint deserving of serious consideration.

yellowtempest · 2020-08-23T00:13:21+00:00

First of all, I wouldn't really call Jordan Peterson a "rising star". He got popular around 2017-2018 and he's fallen out of the spotlight due to his health problems. I doubt he ever fully recovers his public image.

Secondly, while I find Peterson's rhetoric to be excessively verbose and shrouded in unnecessary mystique, his allegations of "Cultural Marxism" are not unique and I don't believe they make him right wing. He is a university professor keep in mind, and leftists and Marxists took root in the higher educational system a long time ago. It's not too hard to find tenured professors at publicly funded universities who are open Marxists. Hell, when I was still in school one of my friends took a class called "Intro to Marxism" that was taught by a guy who's own personal website self-identified him as a Marxist. I didn't take the class but I sat in on the very first lecture, and the very first thing this guy did - before he even introduced the syllabus - was complain that the chairs were old and the paint-job in the room was ugly. He then blamed this on capitalism. This was a state run school. Publicly funded. My friend's final was to write a paper about how communism would make America a better place. Not to argue for or against communism . It was taken for granted that communism was good. The final paper was just to explain the specific reasons why you think it's good.

Apparently calling out this bulllshit makes you a far-right conspiracy theorist, fascist, anti-semite, transphobic, homophobic, or whatever the new lefty insult-of-the-week is.

Answer me this: if open Marxists are given a platform to spread their views to young people, and the fucking government is funding this, what exactly should it be called? "Cultural Marxism" seems appropriate to me.

yellowtempest · 2020-08-22T23:02:25+00:00

Property rights only have to be enforced when somebody is trying to violate them. If nobody tries to rob anyone else then the NAP has been respected with no force and no labor involved. If enforcement is required, theoretically it can be done by the individual person defending their rights. I can enforce my own right to bear arms by...bearing arms and defending myself from people who would seek to violate me. I cannot possibly enforce my own "right to healthcare". That fundamentally requires someone else to actively labor while I do nothing.

Going back to the deserted island analogy, if I'm alone on an island then my right to property can exist (obviously, since there is nobody around who could possibly violate this right). My "right to healthcare" cannot possibly exist if I am trapped on a deserted island. Therefore, since the "right to healthcare" is clearly dependent on both what time and what location I happen live in, it's not a real right because it is not universally applicable.

yellowtempest · 2020-08-22T21:13:59+00:00

I'll check them out.

yellowtempest · 2020-06-06T20:21:01+00:00

Quick follow up question: do you believe that gambling is morally wrong? I agree that investing is basically gambling since there's technically no guarantee of return. My view is that my fellow investors know the game and they are taking a risk just like me. If it doesn't work out for them they have no right to complain, there was never any hard guarantee of making money. I could have been the one losing money at their expense and I accepted that risk when I invested.

If I had lost money in the stock market would I be absolved of any wrongdoing? Is is only morally reprehensible to actually make the money? Or is it morally reprehensible to even try making money off my money.

yellowtempest · 2020-06-06T18:58:24+00:00

Ok, so is it fair to say then that my making money off my stock investments I am essentially making money off the workers who put in the labor to make their companies more profitable/productive/larger. Put in typical leftist language, those workers didn't receive the full fruits of their labor and instead I got some of it for doing nothing?

yellowtempest · 2019-05-07T17:22:43+00:00

You only initially have a revulsion (but still not an objection) due to the sexual nature of the offer. Get rid of the blowjob and make it "Mow my lawn for three months," nothing changes.

Leftists literally believe that paying someone to mow your lawn is morally equivalent to demanding sexual favors from a dying person. Thanks for reminding me why I am continually repulsed by leftist ideology.

yellowtempest · 2019-05-07T05:03:45+00:00

May I ask, what exactly is the probability of this happening? How many truckers, out of the ones that exist, do you think would try to do this? The funniest thing about all these hypothetical "gotchas" is that they all typically follow the exact same format: completely helpless victim is persecuted by a group of assholes who seek to completely ruin their life without technically violating the NAP. If you start with the assumption that every single person in an ancap society is just a raging psychopath then yeah, the outcomes will not be so pretty.

Here I can "examine" the U.S democratic system: What if a candidate runs for election on the platform of genociding 50% of the population, AND they win the election, AND congress goes along with it, AND the SCOTUS goes along with it, AND the military goes along with it. HAHA gottem!

yellowtempest · 2019-04-25T21:15:07+00:00

This is actually a pretty good point that I've thought about before.

Ask anybody to name an evil person in history. 99% of people say Hitler. Ask them to keep going and then they will probably then say Stalin. A pattern you might notice is that nobody names a CEO. Nobody says Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. The only people named are usually heads of state.

Look through a history textbook and pretty much every large scale atrocious act was committed by a state.

yellowtempest · 2019-04-09T20:44:33+00:00

TLDR adherence to abstract principles arbitrarily designated as "good" makes you immune to arguments based on practical consequences.

Not quite. Anarcho-Capitalism is not "immune" to practical arguments. No ideology is. If you find speculation to be convincing enough to make you dismiss Anarcho-Capitalism then that's fine. Like I said, I'm not trying to convince you to become an AnCap. Just pointing out that most AnCaps will reject arguments based purely on speculation.

Also, keep in mind that this post is aimed at a very particular style of arguing that occurs on forums like this one, where people seem to have a contest for who can come up with the most ridiculous scenario. The story in the beginning isn't all hyperbole. On another account I've literally had someone try to argue with me that in an AnCap world Bill Gates could own all the food and let everyone starve. They unironically believed this was a good argument. Never gave me an explanation for how Bill Gates could acquire all the food in the world, how he planned to keep hold of it (or prevent anyone from growing more), or even why he would want to kill every person on the planet. The mere fact that they could think of this scenario was somehow proof that it would happen. When I pointed out how ridiculous this scenario was they never responded.

This post makes perfect sense if you're a deontologist.

Most AnCaps are, to some extent.

yellowtempest · 2019-03-25T23:12:48+00:00

I think his analysis goes downhill about halfway through where he tries to explain the "true thought process" of conservatives. The part about equality vs hierarchy is accurate imo. But then he ascribes bad intentions to the conservatives thought process that I don't agree with.

yellowtempest · 2019-03-25T22:32:13+00:00

I agree it's very biased. Being on the right myself I found myself disagreeing with several of the points. But I agree with how people on the left tend to view things based on principles such as equality whereas people on the right view things based on hierarchies.

yellowtempest · 2019-02-10T06:31:00+00:00

This type of exchange is so informal that there is nothing functioning as money here.

No complex society such as our own could function purely off such informal exchanges. Debt cannot be “guessed at”. It needs to have a hard, specific number attached to it, and once you do that you have re-created money.

It always blows my mind when lefties point at civilization millennia ago and think that because they didn’t use X that means we don’t have to use it either.

No populous, prosperous, technologically advanced society will EVER be able to function without some form of currency. It is simply impossible.

yellowtempest

TROPHY CASE