We live wasted lives
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it’s hard for people so used to the comforts of capitalism to realise this is actually luxury
being inside, seated comfortably, doing non-manual work, educated, can read, listening to music, this is a job better than 99% of people who have ever lived have had
Hell, if you're in this situation you have immediate and convenient access to potable water in your living space. This is a level of privilege beyond almost every other human that has lived in all of history.
Yeah but most humans didn't have to live around cars. I'd give up running water to get rid of cars. Cars are worse than running water is good. Sign me up for carrying barrels from the river if I don't need to worry about being run over.
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it’s hard for people so used to the comforts of capitalism to realise this is actually luxury
being inside, seated comfortably, doing non-manual work, educated, can read, listening to music, this is a job better than 99% of people who have ever lived have had
Slaves who existed before capitalism was even imagined would dream of this WaSTeD LiFe 🤪
Friend, I take it you're joking ... but I've done warehouse, construction, assembly line, and other hard labor. The only other country I've been to is Mexico, which is a nice place to leave. Believe me, it is entirely possible for a privileged American to know how well they have it.
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We probably have it pretty great compared to most of the rest of the world currently.
Absolutely. Really, if you're reading this, you are probably pretty high up on the scale.
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it’s hard for people so used to the comforts of capitalism to realise this is actually luxury
being inside, seated comfortably, doing non-manual work, educated, can read, listening to music, this is a job better than 99% of people who have ever lived have had
Hell, if you're in this situation you have immediate and convenient access to potable water in your living space. This is a level of privilege beyond almost every other human that has lived in all of history.
Ya, totally. You make an obvious point.
The only problem with that is that almost all of the humans that have ever existed ... exist right now. Until we mastered this planet, there were very very few of us. We are now the most numerous mammal on the planet, and that's by a far degree. There's more of us than there are rats. -
That's still capitalism, genius
wrote on last edited by [email protected]adjusted for people who cannot see the difference between free market wage labour in a western economy and literal slavery
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Friend, I take it you're joking ... but I've done warehouse, construction, assembly line, and other hard labor. The only other country I've been to is Mexico, which is a nice place to leave. Believe me, it is entirely possible for a privileged American to know how well they have it.
I wish some people around here had half the experience you do
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Yeah but most humans didn't have to live around cars. I'd give up running water to get rid of cars. Cars are worse than running water is good. Sign me up for carrying barrels from the river if I don't need to worry about being run over.
How much experience do you have with third world conditions? I would tend to assume from what you are saying that you've never seen what a lack of sanitation does to a society.
But you might be well familiar with all of this ... and just like it? -
I've read George Orwell's account of life in Catalonia during the civil war when the nation was communist, and that's not the picture he painted at all. He talked about music and art in the streets. People excited about the new economy. People who wanted to work, or to enlist as soldiers and fight the marxist-leninists
And yet over here it is exactly what happened. So we have 3 years during a civil war, and 60 years of a failed state.
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And yet over here it is exactly what happened. So we have 3 years during a civil war, and 60 years of a failed state.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Huh. It's almost as if all the various alternatives to capitalism couldn't be lumped into one...
Revolutionary Catalonia was Anarcho-Syndicalist, so about as far from the totalitarian soviet system as possible. -
I am not a slave or a starving medieval peasant, therefore I should be happy to waste my life in an office generating shareholder value. Got it.
Go and work for a company that gives more about other stakeholders, you see that often with smaller companies.
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it’s hard for people so used to the comforts of capitalism to realise this is actually luxury
being inside, seated comfortably, doing non-manual work, educated, can read, listening to music, this is a job better than 99% of people who have ever lived have had
Hell, if you're in this situation you have immediate and convenient access to potable water in your living space. This is a level of privilege beyond almost every other human that has lived in all of history.
Man I already hate it when I can't drink water out of the tap when I am travelling abroad.
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How much experience do you have with third world conditions? I would tend to assume from what you are saying that you've never seen what a lack of sanitation does to a society.
But you might be well familiar with all of this ... and just like it?Not the person who you replied to, but if you could trade all the cars in the world to go back to using rainwater to shower/flush toilets and buy drink water I think we should take that deal.
It has already been proven countless times that having walkable/bikeable cities with the adition of public transport is better for our health and the environment. Most countries don't even have drinkable water out of the tap anyway.
The only issue is that it doesn't rain enough in a lot of countries to keep up with our water usage for showering/flushing toilets, but infrastructure to move water is as old as the Roman's, so we would find a way again.
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adjusted for people who cannot see the difference between free market wage labour in a western economy and literal slavery
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Problems like infant mortality, disease, manual labour, the human species evolved to deal with those. That's why exercise releases endorphins. Your body is rewarding you for doing what you need to survive. It has strategies to soften those blows and keep you going. Because you have to.
There are no biological coping mechanisms for cars, city noise, pollution, and financial anxiety. These problems didn't exist in the ancestral environment. Evolution hasn't had time to protect us from them. They might not hit as hard in the moment, but we can't heal from the losses they cause us. That's why chronic stress, suicide, depression and anxiety are so common nowadays. This is worse. Maybe not in objective germs, but it's worse for a human being. It hits us in our weak points.
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And yet over here it is exactly what happened. So we have 3 years during a civil war, and 60 years of a failed state.
I don't believe your country was ever under communism in the last two thousand years. I think you're actually from a former USSR state. Not even Stalin ever dared to claim that the USSR had achieved communism, and he was an arrogant git who would have said it if he'd had a shred of evidence.
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I don't believe your country was ever under communism in the last two thousand years. I think you're actually from a former USSR state. Not even Stalin ever dared to claim that the USSR had achieved communism, and he was an arrogant git who would have said it if he'd had a shred of evidence.
No true scotsman fallacy. I could say that no country was under ideal capitalism so you can't criticize it either. You have to look at reality, not make believe nations that never existed.
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Yeah, people didn't. They didn't give a shit about the "collective" farms. They worked because they were forced to and fucked it up for everyone because there was no difference between giving it your all and slacking off. Hundreds of microfarms worked better than one large collective one because they didn't think it was "ours" they thought it was "nobodys".
The same is true for capitalism too, though.
If you work in your own little company or if you are self-employed, then the "mission" of your work might be important to you and a source of motivation.
But if you work in a huge corporation, hardly anything you do actually matters. If don't perform at 100% and instead slack off, there are other people doing the same work. And if everyone slacks off, then they just hire more people. And even if the whole department underperforms, there are other departments that rake in the money.
And whether the company thrives or goes under, your input as a lowly grunt wouldn't have made a difference anyway. Even as a mid-level manager your input wouldn't have made a difference.
Years of my work at my job can be wiped out with one email from the CEO.
Literally the only difference between capitalism and communism when it comes to that is whether the CEO wipes out my work or the state.
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No true scotsman fallacy. I could say that no country was under ideal capitalism so you can't criticize it either. You have to look at reality, not make believe nations that never existed.
Throwing around the names of fallacies that don't apply instead of actual arguments doesn't further your cause just as much as you might think it does.
The no true Scotsman fallacy applies if:
- Person A makes a generalized statement ("No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge")
- That statement is falsified by providing a counter-example ("I know a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge")
- Person A does not back away from the original falsified statement but instead modifies the original statement and signals that they did modify that statement ("Well, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge")
The main issue here is that using this fallacy, the claim becomes a non-falsifiable tautology. Every Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge is not a true Scotsman, thus the claim becomes always true by excluding every counter-example.
Let's apply that to the situation at hand.
- [email protected] made the statement that communism can work, providing an example where it apparently did work. This statement is not generalized, so the first condition for the true Scotsman fallacy already doesn't apply.
- [email protected] provided a counter-example, where communism didn't work. This doesn't actually contradict the first statement, because [email protected] never claimed that communism always works, so providing a single counter-example doesn't negate the statement that communism can work.
- [email protected] then pointed out that USSR states never actually claimed to have achieved communism, and that statement is true. According to USSR doctrine, the goal was to get to communism at some point, but that point was never reached. While this can sound like an appeal to purity, there's no basis for a "no true Scotsman" fallacy here.
Please read up on your fallacies before throwing around the names of them.
When you claim that something is a fallacy, even though the fallacy you claim doesn't actually apply, then you are doing so to discredit the whole argument without actually engaging with it. This is a perfect example of the Strawman argument, which itself is a fallacy.
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Go and work for a company that gives more about other stakeholders, you see that often with smaller companies.
Oh I'm actually quite happy with my own job in the public sector. It's varied and at times challenging work that benefits society as a whole. The pay isn't all that much, but we're talking about fulfillment here not salaries. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I posess empathy and the knowledge that most aren't as lucky. Companies either grow or die, so massive faceless corporations provide a large and growing share of all employment. And it doesn't even need to be a big corp for the job to be a bs job.
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We probably have it pretty great compared to most of the rest of the world currently.
Best of the best of the best, sir. With honors
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Not the person who you replied to, but if you could trade all the cars in the world to go back to using rainwater to shower/flush toilets and buy drink water I think we should take that deal.
It has already been proven countless times that having walkable/bikeable cities with the adition of public transport is better for our health and the environment. Most countries don't even have drinkable water out of the tap anyway.
The only issue is that it doesn't rain enough in a lot of countries to keep up with our water usage for showering/flushing toilets, but infrastructure to move water is as old as the Roman's, so we would find a way again.
My friend, we have a way. Many ways. We don't need to find one. But we keep doing that too.
You are proposing civil engineering projects to deliver water to the people. Yes, that is how we do it.
The other fine contributor to this discussion posited dragging barrels of water from the river as if that would be a good thing. This is a perspective that I cannot support.
