I mean, i think noone will say that it’s a worse system than anything else out there, even though it has flaws.
The part about minority discrimination that @JelouGaming was taking about interests me. There are many issues/ideas about the rule of law and social construct out there so representation by majority seems to be the way to go about theses things. You have to make a decision on way or the other or the other or the other…and it will benefit some people more than others because of their current situation in society. It would seem that minorites are out the loop in these proceedings, buy how can that be fixed if society is so stratified? I think for the most part democratic process tries to make a just system, but inadvertently it benefits the majority because that the best order for most folks. Minorites have to be given opportunity for social mobility and i think democratic societies offer that. It’s a work in progress, but it’s there.
i like your post.but you forget one thing in all seriousness: monoculturalism and how it works. can’t build strong economies without such things. And industrializing modern, multicultural is strung by what americas are trying to build based on faith. I’m not saying the united of americas. but the North american. and in the end it includes north and south. Its a web, the only web that exists. The other part is war…there is no web there. just oil lands vs fertile lands.
Perhaps and this is most certainly one to thing to consider. Balancing maintaining culture & history with societal progression. An argument can be made that to truly advance as a species we would have to adopt more Monocultural beliefs because many cultures are just inherently incompatible with progressive ideals & would hold us back. Which in of itself is ironically regressive because this results in one culture overtaking others. It’s a very delicate balancing act & I am not well educated enough or well-travelled enough to make a solid opinion on the matter: especially because I do believe in keeping culture alive & respecting history.
Its boils down to technology, its implications in space, and modernizing the globe with the benefits. Its space baby and technologies in the nanotech, quantum, bio tech. it drops into atomic scales of geo-politics. No matter the culture it boils down in the science of Terrestrial life.
The first sign of change now is the viral tech, the nanotech. We discovered this with Covid 19.
Quantum tech is the motivation to arrange our AI driven databases and use the internet to structuralize the time industry. Time makes the human race move fast. Motivate ourselves against our own demise by facing disease at lightning speeds.
The final is bio-tech, in which we use our understanding of cultural farming to destroy the redundant DNA in the world that is keeping us behind.
Absolutely. Our modern life today is radically different even to what we had in the early 2000s. Technology is ever rapidly progressing & becoming more & more integrated into our daily lives, our societies & our culture. For better or worse, the world is & never will be the same as it was 20 years ago, let alone 40 or 60, etc. We live in interesting times, troubling times even. Humanity has not seen such rapid advancement since the Industrial Revolution.
The most pressing matter I feel is how Governments & the Media use technology. MGS2 went into great detail about such things, and we are now seeing such events & topics unfold in real time before us. They want to use Technology to create Context, in this era of Information & the Digital World: misinformation & propaganda is at an all-time high, it is around every corner & in every aspect of our daily lives.
Combating poverty is all an good, but it’s more like a side effect as opposed to a direct goal. It is a big achievement as just like with lack of civil rights, lack of resources will get you nowhere in terms of improving your situation. And also the interdependence of counties based on economy and resources helps keep the world at peace more or less as we are all in this together. Still, the power of corporations and the very rich is something to be concerned about as @JelouGaming pointed out. Perhaps we’ve become like more free, better living slaves. There is some other factors at play here as some counties (Finland, Sweden) have this system work for it’s people, while others USA for one uses a good part of it’s resources in questinable ways, neglecting it’s people.
I can certainly see the POV, but then I would also have to point to my own life experience to offer my opposition to such a view. I don’t believe we have become better living Slaves simply because of the opportunities presented before each & every one of us. People can own small business; they can own land. They are allowed to become their own Bosses. Some make a living creating works of arts, some come from nothing and sell their ideas & work to make a life for themselves. I do not believe us to still be slaves in modern times because every man & woman today has the equal opportunity to put their ideas, their work on the free market. I see before us an age of people being able to make a name for themselves on their own hard work. It is true many still work for others, and some even go on to work for those who build themselves up from nothing: but everybody does in theory have the chance to be more than what they were born into.
Not everybody will succeed, but that’s okay. Equal Opportunity does not & should not ever mean Equal Outcome. Some people don’t succeed. Some don’t have what it takes, others are just unlucky for a lack of a better term. Not everybody has the same potential or talents but what’s important is everybody gets a chance to show what they’re made of.
From that point of view i agree. I was more critical about political process in general and the corruption there and how rich get richer and more powerful. Perhaps it’s a small price to pay for large improvements to the rights and opportunities of the individual.
It’s a messy & complicated topic. I don’t have the answers. I don’t think anybody really does. Like many things in life, we’re sort of stumbling around in the dark at the minute trying to find solutions to a lot of problems: problems humanity has never really faced before. But hey, that’s Tuesday for us, always something new.
Whilst it is true Power corrupts, part of why I don’t actively seek political power and such as I have told you before I know for a fact that I could not be trusted with it & in my pursuit of ensuring freedoms above all else I worry I could become a monster, I do think it is ultimately better that you can work for power & wealth through hard work & ideas. I would much sooner put up with a bunch of CEOs than royalty. A lesser evil one might say.
That is the dilemma we appear to be faced with these days. Let’s call it a two-sided coin. On one side, the ability for anybody to gain wealth & status means that anybody also has the capacity to become a great monster. On the other, if people were not to have such opportunities, then we would not be free or progressing as a society as we would still be enforcing strict hierarchs & limiting the lives of many impoverished people. But suppose you flip a coin enough times. Perhaps one day it lands on its edge.
Going to go ham with my democratic socialism background here.
Capitalism inherently cannot sustain the overall world due to the inherit need of always increasing the bottom line more and more in a world of finite resources, using the power of the state to make it happen. Infinite growth cannot exist in a world of dwindling resources and this in turn encourages others to keep others down in order to take said resources to upkeep their growth. That’s why you see so many developing nations struggling to keep up as their history has shown that it always originates from countries that take for thier own, such as how Britain took over the land and resources of Africa and India, and you see how they are struggling today. No to mention the side effect of harming the global environment in order to get said high profits, hence the gas and oil companies creating over 90% of the pollution of our world.
It’s why when I state the notion of socialism is when it gives power back to the people to properly work for their own needs without having to rely solely on one person who solidities the power into themselves and not shared among the working class. The proletariat must be able to access the product of which they make without getting crumbs for all the hard work they do and in turn not screw over anyone to achieve success such as toppling other countries in order to take and then force them to rely on their resources.
Of course this is layman terms, there is much more to it, but it’s my starting point.
Except we can do exactly that in our Capitalist society. Every day people create their own works & reap the rewards for it. Again, refer to my post above about how since the move towards Global Capitalism, Poverty has dropped from being the financial status of 82% of the human population to as little as 36%: even more impressive when in that time our population has sprung from only 1 billion to 7.8 billion. Capitalism & Capitalism alone has allowed such things to transpire, not Feudalism, not Socialism, not Communism.
I stand before you myself as someone whose family worked its way out of poverty through hard work & effort. Even now I turn down Government Hand Outs out of SHEER OVERWHELMING Pride to pay my bills without such in my eyes, dirty money. And here still I am, living in a full house with no lack of resources. Meanwhile every Socialist Society has failed time & time again throughout human history to sustain itself. Communist Societies have gone out of their ways to punish the worker, look to their treatment of farmers & the working conditions of the people in them.
How is it then if Capitalism is in your eyes a weaker & more flawed system that it has outperformed & outlasted every single attempt at the so called Alternatives?
Except that most of the working class are not business owners and do not either have the means or want to create their own business. Not to mention if there is to be business, there must be customers and if everyone is a business owner, then who would be the consumer? Do we just ignore them and leave them to rot?
Yet it’s a slow killing pill that is going to bite us in the ass due to the very nature of vampirizing from their own people and people from other countries. Hence why we call it Late Stage Capitalism. You see it with how we cannot afford healthcare here in the states due to how the prices keep rising and wages keep lowering. The bottom line must always keep growing and meet profit incentives but if the people do not have enough to afford such things, then they will be left behind to die, all in the name of profit. You see how insulin costs for a standard unit of insulin in 2018 was more than ten times the price in a sample of 32 foreign countries:$98.70 in the U.S., compared with $8.81 in the 32 non-U.S. OECD countries. Why in the hell does it costs so much and the price keep rising? Gotta meet that profit margin, poors and sick be dammed.
In addition, what I said before, there is not only the cost of damaging other countries but also the world’s ecosystem to meet its needs. How much more can we rely on oil and gas till it runs out? How much oil and gas must we rely until we damage so much of our green earth that we cause our own poison? How much more oil and gas do we need in order to raid other countries for it, cover it up for something such as “weapons of mass destruction” and keep damaging the land and all it’s people for it, and soon cause these people to have great resentment towards us? Perhaps it did raise people from poverty, but it sure hell did put many others in poverty and even death on different parts of the world.
There is so much to cover in this topic alone, but these are examples of how capitalism relies on harming others for constant profit growth and that in turn will harm us alongside everything around us.
Pride will not pay my bills and thanks to the new student debt removal Biden has presented, now I am able to help myself and my family more with the money I have saved instead of paying them off. I’m more financially stable then I would be paying off to the government. Hell, I would go further to say that the government is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, helping out it’s citizens by providing to their needs.
Why people think it’s a bad thing, I will never know. People have value and should be aided when need of help, government is just one way to do it and when it works, fucking thank god it’s giving money for those in need instead of putting money into funding wars like how bloating our defense budget is, but somehow we don’t have enough to ensure proper medial care and education? Nah I don’t buy that one bit. A community should always help one another, and I’m not talking about the ones who are lazy, I’m talking about the ones who are sick, old, or work hard as they can and cannot catch up with no matter what methods they try themselves.
Yeah, once upon a time a country known as Guatemala had this going on for 2 years and it went well until the USA decided to topple it and install their puppet “pro-capitalist” leader that lead to ruin of the country due to creating a civil war that creating over thousands dead which in turn ruined the economy into the weakened state you see before:
On 1 July 1944 Ubico was forced to resign from the presidency in response to a wave of protests and a general strike inspired by brutal labor conditions among plantation workers.[108] His chosen replacement, General Juan Federico Ponce Vaides, was forced out of office on 20 October 1944 by a coup d’état led by Major Francisco Javier Arana and Captain Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. About 100 people were killed in the coup. The country was then led by a military junta made up of Arana, Árbenz, and Jorge Toriello Garrido.
Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown in a coup planned by the CIA, The United Fruit Company had lobbied the U.S. to overthrow him.
The junta organized Guatemala’s first free election, which the philosophically conservative writer and teacher Juan José Arévalo, who wanted to turn the country into a liberal capitalist society won with a majority of 86%. His “Christian Socialist” policies were inspired to a large extent by the U.S. New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Arévalo built new health centers, increased funding for education, and drafted a more liberal labor law, while criminalizing unions in workplaces with less than 500 workers, and cracking down on communists. Although Arévalo was popular among nationalists, he had enemies in the church and the military, and faced at least 25 coup attempts during his presidency.
Arévalo was constitutionally prohibited from contesting the 1950 elections. The largely free and fair elections were won by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Arévalo’s defense minister.Árbenz continued the moderate capitalist approach of Arévalo. His most important policy was Decree 900, a sweeping agrarian reform bill passed in 1952. Decree 900 transferred uncultivated land to landless peasants. Only 1,710 of the nearly 350,000 private land-holdings were affected by the law, which benefited approximately 500,000 individuals, or one-sixth of the population
Despite their popularity within the country, the reforms of the Guatemalan Revolution were disliked by the United States government, which was predisposed by the Cold War to see it as communist, and the United Fruit Company (UFCO), whose hugely profitable business had been affected by the end to brutal labor practices. The attitude of the U.S. government was also influenced by a propaganda campaign carried out by the UFCO. As I stated before, they installed their puppet and In 1966, Julio César Méndez Montenegro was elected president of Guatemala under the banner “Democratic Opening”. Mendez Montenegro was the candidate of the Revolutionary Party, a center-left party that had its origins in the post-Ubico era. During this time, rightist paramilitary organizations, such as the “White Hand” (Mano Blanca), and the Anticommunist Secret Army (Ejército Secreto Anticomunista) were formed. Those groups were the forerunners of the infamous “Death Squads”. Military advisers from the United States Army Special Forces (Green Berets) were sent to Guatemala to train Guatemala’s armed forces and help transform it into a modern counter-insurgency force, which eventually made it the most sophisticated in Central America.
In 1970, Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio was elected president. By 1972, members of the guerrilla movement entered the country from Mexico and settled in the Western Highlands. In the disputed election of 1974, General Kjell Laugerud García defeated General Efraín Ríos Montt, a candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, who claimed that he had been cheated out of a victory through fraud. More shit followed soon that turned into a civil war and massacre of many indigenous people living there but that’s going father into history. Basically, there was a moment in time where it was going well but then the USA stepped in because they aren’t about that shit.
Luckily I said socialism and not communism. I don’t exactly see eye to eye with them either due what points you said.
I will also say again, that the Red Scare did it’s best to topple anything with the name socialism and communism so how can anything work when the US did it’s best to remove such notions form the country, leave it weakened, tell them to take capitalism instead but also force them to rely on USA work labor and product to supplement themselves in addition to taking their resources to make said labor and product and with what capital can the locals get if they can get rich off their own resources taken by a stronger force? It’s why I’m happy that the Bolivia is standing up against the US and taking back their land and resources because enough of US imperialism taking what is not theirs and “trading” them democracy and capitalism, even though they got that and want to go a different route that isn’t completely capitalism.
Again. Not everybody has or will have the talents & capability to be successful. The goal is not Equal Outcome, it is Equal Opportunity: which is what we have & strive towards. It is harsh but some people will never be better than the standards they start in, no matter how much you aid or don’t aid them. The point of the Free Market is that everybody gets a chance. Everybody gets an opportunity. It is up to everybody else to decide who succeeds & who fails.
A Doctor is worth more than a Garbage Man for example. A Farmer is worth more than both combined. You can’t make a world where everybody is on the same level & gets the same outcome because some people are inherently more valuable & talented. Some people are ultimately going to fail, they’re going to be consumers, they’re going to be stuck in dead end jobs. But they still have the same opportunities as everybody else to be more than that, if ultimately it turns out they can’t be more: then that is sadly how things are. We have seen it as far back as the earliest Hunter-Gatherer societies.
Which is why Capitalism works. It is why it outlasts & outperforms all attempts at Socialism. It’s not perfect, it has flaws. But it has lifted the majority of human civilisation out of poverty. It allows anybody to pursue their dreams, their artistic passions. It has led to some of the best technological advancements in history.
Competition. Breeds. Excellence.
You can’t advance society without competition. People seek challenge, they thrive off of it. If the Free Market is there & everybody has a shot, then the best/most liked idea or product shall ultimately rise to the top and sadly that ultimately requires some people to be failures. Not everybody can be a winner. But we can all have a chance to be. I know for a fact I would still be in a poverty in a socialist society. I cannot hate Capitalism because it is literally the only way my family was able to attain more wealth through hard work.
Nobody is born & owed anything, we must all earn & work for every bit we have. It is nature running its course, and no matter what we are still a part of nature.
Why do we have to meet profit margins and perpetuate the cycle of inequality and raising costs? Maybe the should be oversight in terms of profit and saving for rainy day take sure that business grow moderately and keep prices stable. If some businessfolk protest then I’m sure there will be others who will still do business under such conditions.
The reason Socialism is unsustainable & ultimately always crumbles in on itself is the fact that it works off of the assumption that 1. All people are all inherently equally skilled & talented & 2. That all work is worth the same. Which are both categorically untrue statements & contradict basic human nature. So long as a SINGLE human being is required to work a job, ANY job, Socialism cannot come to fruition. It is a literal Utopian idea. The only way in which a Socialist society could ever work on a fundamental level is when ALL labor, all forms of work are handled entirely by machines. You would need machines to farm; machines to cook, to clean: to deliver mail, to teach, to police. You would even need robots to create art.
That last part alone is terrifying and why we should never push for full automation. Imagine such a world where all forms of art, of expression is made by cold, soul-less machines. You literally need to remove the core essence of Humanity to begin to approach this goal.
Oh and most importantly you’d need robots who create more Robots, who repair & maintain them. A literal self-sustaining & reproducing robot species. Which ya know, could then lead to them overthrowing us, replacing us entirely & taking the planet & any other potential worlds we have in this hypothetical time for themselves. That’s terrifying too.
We are going in the direction of robots so rather than fear it we should try to make it work and consider how to solve the problems that will come with that.
Absolutely. We’re going to have think extremely long & hard about how we are going to handle Robotics & Artificial Life because I’mma be real, AI is more of a threat to the survival of our species than nuclear weapons ever will be. One is a weapon, the other is playing God: and if there’s one thing human history has taught us, people will inevitably rebel against their Gods.
