If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/effect-corporate-taxation-investment.html

Among the 130 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results in this earnings season, capital spending increased by 39 percent, the fastest rate in seven years, data compiled by UBS AG show. Meanwhile, returns to shareholders are growing at a much slower pace, with net buybacks rising 16 percent. Dividends saw an 11 percent boost.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

Ugh is George Mason soooo bankrolled by the Koch Brothers. We'll see how it pans how in any case. As much as I opposed the tax cuts, I wasn't exactly against cutting the corporate rate (not that any of the giants ever paid anywhere near the old rate, nor will they being paying the full current rate). Much better would have been an increase on high income to offset some of the hit on the deficit.

 

[Dak]

Ugh is George Mason soooo bankrolled by the Koch Brothers. We'll see how it pans how in any case. As much as I opposed the tax cuts, I wasn't exactly against cutting the corporate rate (not that any of the giants ever paid anywhere near the old rate, nor will they being paying the full current rate). Much better would have been an increase on high income to offset some of the hit on the deficit.

My experience has been that the same people who think invoking the name of Soros is stupid conspiracy theorizing will also invoke the Koch Brothers at the drop of a hat. The research cited was not done at/by professors at George Mason/the Mercatus Center.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

My experience has been that the same people who think invoking the name of Soros is stupid conspiracy theorizing will also invoke the Koch Brothers at the drop of a hat. The research cited was not done at/by professors at George Mason/the Mercatus Center.

Please. One is the parroting of tropes in echo of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (often adding as well that Soros is an accomplice in the holocaust while simultaneously denying the holocaust without the faintest awareness of contradiction), and the other involves actual billionaire reactionaries looking to enrich themselves personally at the expense of social and economic equity.

I'll admit that's not quite a fair analysis, but we'll never agree anyways, so I may as well get my rocks off a little

 

[Dak]

Please. One is the parroting of tropes in echo of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (often adding as well that Soros is an accomplice in the holocaust while simultaneously denying the holocaust without the faintest awareness of contradiction), and the other involves actual billionaire reactionaries looking to enrich themselves personally at the expense of social and economic equity.

I'll admit that's not quite a fair analysis, but we'll never agree anyways, so I may as well get my rocks off a little

Well I'll easily agree that the Koch brothers are not contributing resources towards a goal of outcomes equity in any given domain. Such a goal would be a fool's errand in even the most charitable of terms, with the caveat that by fool's errand I don't mean it cannot be rather easily achieved. Global nuclear war would provide an efficient and rapid transformation of the globe to a more economically and socially equitable state.

 

[rms]

http://www.nydailynews.com/amp/spor...t-article-1.3967964?__twitter_impression=true


“When I’d have a list of potential freshmen, the first question I’d be asked is if they were white or black,” he said. “I was confused about why the question was, ‘How can we get more white players in the program or on the field?’”

 

[Dak]

Weird right? No one has a problem with the overrepresentation of black athletes in football and basketball. In fact to do so is apparently racist. I mean, I'm not bothered by it, but I am not a member of the equality religion.

 

[Dak]

I missed this the other day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opinion/karl-marx-at-200-influence.html

Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.

We have become used to the go-getting mantra that to effect social change we first have to change ourselves. But enlightened or rational thinking is not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations of society.

To cite Marx, “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

The transition to a new society where relations among people, rather than capital relations, finally determine an individual’s worth is arguably proving to be quite a task. Marx, as I have said, does not offer a one-size-fits-all formula for enacting social change. But he does offer a powerful intellectual acid test for that change. On that basis, we are destined to keep citing him and testing his ideas until the kind of society that he struggled to bring about, and that increasing numbers of us now desire, is finally realized.

 

[rms]

Weird right? No one has a problem with the overrepresentation of black athletes in football and basketball. In fact to do so is apparently racist. I mean, I'm not bothered by it, but I am not a member of the equality religion.

I saw something on the Sam Harris reddit that cracked me up but obviously isn't perfect in its representation.

 

[Dak]

That pretty much nails it.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2001323873521259/permalink/2046862682300711/

This video is everything.

 

[rms]

dude is gonna get sued

 

[Dak]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691817305917

In the finite-horizon repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, a compelling backward induction argument shows that rational players will defect in every round, following the uniquely optimal Nash equilibrium path. It is frequently asserted that cooperation gradually declines when a Prisoner's Dilemma is repeated multiple times by the same players, but the evidence for this is unconvincing, and a classic experiment by Rapoport and Chammah in the 1960s reported that cooperation eventually recovers if the game is repeated hundreds of times. They also reported that men paired with men cooperate almost twice as frequently as women paired with women. Our conceptual replication with Prisoner's Dilemmas repeated over 300 rounds with no breaks, using more advanced, computerized methodology, revealed no decline in cooperation, apart from endgame effects in the last few rounds, and replicated the substantial gender difference, confirming, in the UK, a puzzling finding first reported in the US in the 1960s.

No surprise.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

I missed this the other day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opinion/karl-marx-at-200-influence.html

Well, racial and sexual oppression have been a central fulcrum point of class exploitation since the foundations of the capitalist economy in the 1600s. It hasn't been added to it. It was built upon it. Limiting myself to the American sphere, the fallout from and sequence of Bacon's Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution to the creation of the Virginia Slave Codes articulate the development of racial oppression and its relation to class exploitation quite well, and regarding sex, one could point to a number of examples, from women's financial and political disenfranchisement until only relatively recent history to the Factory Girls who supplied the first cheap factory labor in the US in Lowell, MA in the early 19th century. So yeah, he's way off the mark there.

I was planning on going out grilling and drinking in the park with friends on Saturday for Cinco de Mayo. I didn't realize Marx's birthday was the same day. Maybe I'll bring some cake, just for you Dak

 

[Dak]

Well, racial and sexual oppression have been a central fulcrum point of class exploitation since the foundations of the capitalist economy in the 1600s. It hasn't been added to it. It was built upon it. Limiting myself to the American sphere, the fallout from and sequence of Bacon's Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution to the creation of the Virginia Slave Codes articulate the development of racial oppression and its relation to class exploitation quite well, and regarding sex, one could point to a number of examples, from women's financial and political disenfranchisement until only relatively recent history to the Factory Girls who supplied the first cheap factory labor in the US in Lowell, MA in the early 19th century. So yeah, he's way off the mark there.

"Exploitation" across all sort of categorizations of humans is prehistoric in origins. It's only under conditions of capitalism we have begun to even marginally reduce exploitation. This popular leftistperspective of exploitation as emergent and endemic with market theory appears to me as an ignorance of history before the Wealth of Nations, or something. "In the beginning, Adam Smith encoded exploitation as a new precept of market relations".

I was planning on going out grilling and drinking in the park with friends on Saturday for Cinco de Mayo. I didn't realize Marx's birthday was the same day. Maybe I'll bring some cake, just for you Dak

 

[Einherjar86]

"Exploitation" across all sort of categorizations of humans is prehistoric in origins.

You're naturalizing exploitation.

The point isn't whether capitalism causes such ills or whether they occur "naturally," and you're right that we've reduced the amount of suffering in the world. The point is that modern capitalist society produces the capacity for reduced suffering while also systematizing suffering. It encodes exploitation as part of social reality despite providing the means of ameliorating it. These means weren't available to your supposed "prehistoric" examples, and so it doesn't matter that "exploitation" existed in prehistoric times.

And if I'm being hyper-critical, it makes very little sense to call prehistoric suffering "exploitation" due to the contextual semantics surrounding that word. Again, you're apologizing for exploitation by naturalizing it.

 

[Dak]

You're naturalizing exploitation.

The point isn't whether capitalism causes such ills or whether they occur "naturally," and you're right that we've reduced the amount of suffering in the world. The point is that modern capitalist society produces the capacity for reduced suffering while also systematizing suffering. It encodes exploitation as part of social reality despite providing the means of ameliorating it. These means weren't available to your supposed "prehistoric" examples, and so it doesn't matter that "exploitation" existed in prehistoric times.

And if I'm being hyper-critical, it makes very little sense to call prehistoric suffering "exploitation" due to the contextual semantics surrounding that word. Again, you're apologizing for exploitation by naturalizing it.

Acknowledging is not apologizing for it. However, I will say that the lengths to which some people in the US go to to strain material oppression/exploitation, in often the most hyperbolic of terms, out of some of the most both historically and even presently luxurious living (looking at global poverty/living conditions), is what gets more dismissive responses to there even being a problem. Throw on top of that, imo, really bad, recycled policy proposals for improving the situation of those in lower SES situations, and the whole potential for dialogue is torpedoed from start to finish.

 

[Einherjar86]

The way you phrased it is an apology. Your comment implies that modern social exploitation is just a part of life, thereby implying that there's nothing we can do about it. And you may be right that we can't ameliorate all exploitation, but your phrasing makes it sound that we shouldn't even do anything about the exploitation we can ameliorate. That's an apology.

 

[Dak]

The way you phrased it is an apology. Your comment implies that modern social exploitation is just a part of life, thereby implying that there's nothing we can do about it. And you may be right that we can't ameliorate all exploitation, but your phrasing makes it sound that we shouldn't even do anything about the exploitation we can ameliorate. That's an apology.

Maybe that's your reflexive interpretation of anyone pointing out that exploitation has prehistoric origins, and maybe such a point has been used as support for ignoring exploitation. That's not my purpose, and is beside my original charge that plenty of "SJWs" say things like "white people invented slavery" or capitalism created slavery or that wage work is inherently slavish etc etc. That sad thing is that the people who do need help are probably least likely to get any as long as they are maintained as little more than semantic totems for ingroup-outgroup ideological shibboleths, whether from the angle of that Marxist professor or from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

 

[Einherjar86]

Maybe that's your reflexive interpretation of anyone pointing out that exploitation has prehistoric origins

Literally everything has prehistoric origins. I just don't see the point in even making the comment as a response to BO's post, since it's an effectively meaningless remark. Even making the comment carries apologetic implications in what it elides, i.e. that exploitation has prehistoric origins as much as computers do, or fruit smoothies, or congress. There's nothing useful there.

 

[Dak]

Literally everything has prehistoric origins. I just don't see the point in even making the comment as a response to BO's post, since it's an effectively meaningless remark. Even making the comment carries apologetic implications in what it elides, i.e. that exploitation has prehistoric origins as much as computers do, or fruit smoothies, or congress. There's nothing useful there.

I said why, and it is useful when there's a strain of thought that says oppression is not prehistoric in origin, but originated with capitalism. Forms of noble savagism. I don't see the point in trying to compare to modern technology though. There is actual prehistoric/historic style slavery on the earth today, but how many people are using axes made from chipped rock?