Rationalskepticism,lol part III.

[pErvinalia]

FBM mentioned a month or so before he cut all ties that he was really wanting to get on his motorbike and hit the mountains. I think he was sick of the state of the world (including the state of some idiots here at ratz) and he just snapped and cut that part of his life out. He's probably in a monastery somewhere in the Korean mountains happy as a pig in shit.

[laklak]

Some of us are still doddering along.

[pErvinalia]

You're better on here than on facebook, Lak, as I had to be careful what I said on your page on Facebook. It seems you live a slightly double life... you're only slightly dodgy on facebook, as opposed to here where you are full on sick bro! :p

[Jason]

People still use facebook?

[pErvinalia]

Us young cool kids do.

[Jason]

Hmm I deleted myself from facebook two years ago.. yet I continue to exist. It's the strangest thing.

[laklak]

FB is for mass consumption, Ratz is for the real me. Except for the real parts on FuckAPiggy.com, of course. I can't talk about FuckAPiggy.com on FB.

[pErvinalia]

I cracked the shits a month ago or so and defriended half my "friends", and then eventually deactivated my account. But I have a politics and photography pages that I still needed to manage and luckily I had a second account from a year ago or so when facebook was claiming my username wasn't my real name and then kicked me off the site. So my new account now only has about 8 friends on it. I like it like that. The bigger the crowd, the more I act like a bearded lady at a freak circus. I was getting sick of the theatrics and I'm sure my "friends" were too. Well I fixed that. I can keep up with a couple of good friends now and get all my news feeds. It's working well with only a handful of contacts. Some people have like 500 to 1000+ "friends". What a joke.

[laklak]

Know what you mean. I've got about 160 "friends" and I don't even know half of them. I probably need to cull, for the safety of the herd..

[Hermit]

Haha. My daughter got me to open a facebook account around seven years ago. I have never added anyone to my contact list whom I have not met in person. We know each other, warts and all. There are no surprises and there is no pretense outside a bit of tact out of deference to the sensitivities of some, just like in meatspace.

[Forty Two]

How can people who claim to be rational and skeptical believe an idea and ideology can never be questioned, that is just seriously fucked up.

Because they are moronic, mindless Marxist idiots who aren't even all that useful to Marxism, that's how.

Ah yes.. it always comes back to the "Marxists" doesn't it?

Unfortunately ,much of modern "progressive" thought these days is decidedly Marxist in character. Class. Identity Politics. Oppression. You see various turns of phrase, like "nothing to lose but our chains" bandied about quite readily, and a massively anti-capitalist and authoritarian bent.

There may be a Marxist flavour to some of the analysis about how human societies work, but there is one huge difference to the heady early days of Marxism - very few Marxist thinkers want to follow the analysis with a serious desire for violent revolution, and "rule by the proletariat". The example of the Soviet Union, showing that totalitarian regimes are almost inevitable in such a case, and that total state control of economies is usually a disaster has greatly tempered most leftist thinking, as it should.

I agree, and that's because they are making headway within the State, rather than having to act against the State. They've discovered that if you cry out for the "protection" of the State, it will gladly give it to you.... gladly....

In the 1960s counterculture protest movement, the leftists were anti-authoritarian -- "fuck you and your rules, man! I'll say what I want and do what I want!" It was rebellion against authoritarianism. Like from the musical Hair -- I got liiiiifffe mother! I got Life sister! I've got freedom, brother!" As Treat Williams gets up on the family's dinner table and sings about is arms, and legs and tits and ass, and such. The authority being rebelled against there is now the force to which the "protest movement" today appeals for governance and protection.

Today, who are the protesters at Yale and University of Missouri and in Berkeley calling out to? The State. The Administration of the colleges. And, are they calling on them to fuck off and get off our/their backs? No. The opposite. They are inviting them in -- no -- demanding that they come in and regulate, govern and "protect" us all from freedom, which is now considered racist and a facilitator of white, male privilege against the oppressed classes.

No longer are the oppressed defined as the economically poor against the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Now it's women, brown "races", gays, trans and such, against "white cis male." The ally of the oppressed is now the State, which, to me, would suggest that those claiming that oppression are not, in fact, oppressed. Because if the State is on your side, you must have some political clout.

[Forty Two]

Utterly alone in the world? Join the club! :-)

We are born naked and alone, and we die naked and alone.

But, if we're lucky, we get 75 or so years on the planet to feel pleasure, pain, joy, happiness, sadness, jealousy, envy, compassion, kindness and all the rest. We are the lucky few who even got to be alive in the first place.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” - Richard Dawkins.

I actually really hate that quote as it's overtly dualist. I can't believe he ever thought that was a good argument to prosecute.

How can "existence vs. nonexistence" be anything but dualist? Or, is your complaint that there are some DNA iterations other than the one an individual has that would still be that individual?

If I understand you correctly, you don't like the duality of you are here as DNA combination A, and that any other DNA combination is another person who by happenstance did not come to exist. I think that's a fair question, although, it certainly would be a foundational question -- would a person born with ALMOST my DNA combination still be me? Would my "consciousness" be the same or similar enough to still be perceived by me as me? Is that where your objection lies?

[Sean Hayden]

-dumped Facebook earlier this year and I felt really good about it, I still do. I'd still like to see some of the people I only ever saw there.

FBM

[Forty Two]

Because they are moronic, mindless Marxist idiots who aren't even all that useful to Marxism, that's how.

Ah yes.. it always comes back to the "Marxists" doesn't it?

Unfortunately ,much of modern "progressive" thought these days is decidedly Marxist in character. Class. Identity Politics. Oppression. You see various turns of phrase, like "nothing to lose but our chains" bandied about quite readily, and a massively anti-capitalist and authoritarian bent.

There may be a Marxist flavour to some of the analysis about how human societies work, but there is one huge difference to the heady early days of Marxism - very few Marxist thinkers want to follow the analysis with a serious desire for violent revolution, and "rule by the proletariat". The example of the Soviet Union, showing that totalitarian regimes are almost inevitable in such a case, and that total state control of economies is usually a disaster has greatly tempered most leftist thinking, as it should.

I've been telling you for a long time that the pure end-state Marxism you describe has never occurred and will never occur and indeed cannot ever occur because of the basic facts of human behavior, and Marxism always grinds to a halt at State Socialism, despotism, tyranny and usually mass murder, so your claims, while largely correct, are small comfort to those who die at the hands of Marxists in pursuit of socialistic amity and equality...something that has never existed in any socialist society.

I think foundational to Marxism is the notion that the proletariat are already without freedom and opportunity, and they are basically slaves/serfs who are "in chains" to the artistocracy and bourgeoisie. So, they literally have "nothing to lose but their chains." The point of Marxism is not to free people, though. The point of Marxism is to equalize, and thereby the proletariat would still be poor but at least they won't starve.

Note all the points that Marxism brings up -- it's all about equalizing and smoothing out society as completely as possible. Recall that Marxism posited a society that would abolish the distinction between the city and the countryside, and distribute the population rather evenly across the land. Recall that Marxism posited abolishing the family unit and raising children in common. All distinctions of class and social groups are to be abolished in favor of uniformity. That's why religion was to be abolished -- not because it was bollocks but because it constituted a group holding private power and also constituted a social group creating a distinction between members of the group and nonmembers.

Abolish all sources of private power not controlled directly by the community (with State sitting in the shoes of the community), and then distribute resources equally in accordance with "need" while demanding of each individual that they contribute what they are able to give. This is supposed to smooth out economics to make it equal - nobody has more than anyone else, and contribution, everyone gives what they can - a stronger person can give more than a weaker person.

The despotism is not something that is an outgrowth of Marxism gone awry. It's not Marxism being put in practice and going wrong. Despotism is INHERENT in Marxism. It is specifically called for by Marxist ideas. You CANNOT live where you as an individual want to live, because you have to live where the "community" thinks best. You can't do as much or as little as you like, based on your own assessment of what you can and should do -- you must give to your ability. You don't get what you would like or can accumulate via your own efforts. You get what you need. You don't raise your kids as you see fit. You raise them in accordance with the community requirements. You don't get to do what you want with your house - you can't rent it, because all rents are abolished except if the "community" collects the rent. You can't even own private property, because private property is abolished. You can't produce anything for sale or resale, or fill economic needs that you see in your community, because the community controls the means of production.

These are principles written into the fabric of Marxism. Marxism isn't something is good in principle but goes wrong because of the defects in human character or behavior. Humans are fine. Humans are basically good, and tend to self-order into survivable and effective communities. It's Marxism that is bad.

I don't get why anyone thinks it's good, or why anyone thinks it makes sense.

[Seth]

I've been telling you for a long time that the pure end-state Marxism you describe has never occurred and will never occur and indeed cannot ever occur because of the basic facts of human behavior, and Marxism always grinds to a halt at State Socialism, despotism, tyranny and usually mass murder, so your claims, while largely correct, are small comfort to those who die at the hands of Marxists in pursuit of socialistic amity and equality...something that has never existed in any socialist society.

I think foundational to Marxism is the notion that the proletariat are already without freedom and opportunity, and they are basically slaves/serfs who are "in chains" to the artistocracy and bourgeoisie. So, they literally have "nothing to lose but their chains." The point of Marxism is not to free people, though. The point of Marxism is to equalize, and thereby the proletariat would still be poor but at least they won't starve.

True, but I'm not sure that the motive is to keep people from starving. Marx never seemed concerned about the plight of the starving poor, and Stalin deliberately starved 12 million Ukrainians to death circa 1932-33. Scant is the evidence that Marxism or Marxists care about the survival or even the plight of any individual. What Marxism cares about is, pretty much exclusively, class warfare and destruction of the bourgeoisie. Marx's entire philosophy is predicated on the fallacious assumption that capital is not labor, and that to have capital is to have stolen it from someone else. Marx never acknowledged that anyone in the "bourgeoisie merchant class" had achieved that status through individual labor and that the capital thus created is the fruits of that person's labor. One definition of "bourgeois" that I found is " a person with social behavior and political views held to be influenced by private-property interest."

Private property interest is the particular enemy of Marxism. Marx himself came from families of considerable wealth (his mother's family founded Philips Electronics) and so could be called "bourgeois" himself. Despite this middle-to-upper-class life (he was a lawyer-cum-philosopher) his edifice is built on a foundation of envy and jealousy and exploiting that in the proletarian class for the purposes not of advancing the well-being of the proletarian class, but rather for the purposes of destroying the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. He once wrote, "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." This is of course pure fallacy and a flatly ignorant zero-sum proposition upon which his entire philosophy is built.

Note all the points that Marxism brings up -- it's all about equalizing and smoothing out society as completely as possible. Recall that Marxism posited a society that would abolish the distinction between the city and the countryside, and distribute the population rather evenly across the land. Recall that Marxism posited abolishing the family unit and raising children in common. All distinctions of class and social groups are to be abolished in favor of uniformity. That's why religion was to be abolished -- not because it was bollocks but because it constituted a group holding private power and also constituted a social group creating a distinction between members of the group and nonmembers.

Marx posited that capitalism would destroy itself through internal conflict between the capital-owners and the proletariat and he advocated active and violent actions by the proletarian to hasten this "advancement through class struggle" to his theoretical classless end-state of Communism.

Abolish all sources of private power not controlled directly by the community (with State sitting in the shoes of the community), and then distribute resources equally in accordance with "need" while demanding of each individual that they contribute what they are able to give. This is supposed to smooth out economics to make it equal - nobody has more than anyone else, and contribution, everyone gives what they can - a stronger person can give more than a weaker person.

Actually, Marx thought of the State as being the enemy of the proletariat because it controlled everything ostensibly in the name of everyone but factually it supported those with power, privilege and money (capital), and he sought to abolish the state entirely, and he didn't really care how that happened or what the immediate consequences of doing so might be because his eye was on the long game of Communism. The problem with all iterations of Marxism, including socialism and communism, is that in denying the legitimacy of capital, which itself is nothing more than acquired wealth, on the argument that private property is a bad thing, the motivation to labor to create wealth (capital) to improve one's economic or social standing is muted if not deliberately destroyed.

Simple natural law should inform us that the primary interest of any living creature is the the search for, acquisition, and defense of those resources necessary to sustain the life of the individual and allow for reproduction. Food, shelter and reproduction are basic needs that must be met, and humans are no less individually interested in securing those things than is any other creature.

Thus, the creation and exclusive possession and use of capital (wealth, material possessions) necessary for survival is a basic human instinct, and the stockpiling of capital is a natural offshoot of this instinct that supports reproduction and the raising of progeny. So, we see that "private property" is not merely a capitalistic bourgeois theft of labor from the proletariat, it is a manifestation of a fundamental biological imperative: the need to survive and propagate.

It is this innate, instinctual biological behavior that makes a complete mockery of Marx and his ideology. Marxists insist that by being "fair" and redistributing all goods equally to everyone that this represents a utopian "advancement" of human civilization. It doesn't. In fact, such "equalization" is anything but an advancement, it is devolution of the species that causes the genetically inferior to survive and propagate when they should instead die off because of their inability to seek out, acquire and defend their exclusive possession and use of those resources necessary for their survival and propagation, which is the definition of private property.

So, what actually happens in Marxism is that the productive class, or as Marx pejoratively called them "the bourgeoisie merchant class", who through individual labor and above-the-proletarian-minimum ability to create wealth in greater measure than is strictly necessary for their own personal survival, is stripped of whatever wealth, which is actually the fruits of that individual's labor, which is redistributed to the dependent (proletarian) class who are unable to even provide for themselves and, biologically speaking, ought to die as inferior examples of evolution and genetics.

When this happens for long enough, and severely enough, members of the productive class realize that their input of labor in excess of the minimum required to enjoy an "equal share" of society's goods is pointless futility and does nothing to satisfy their biological imperatives to make things better for themselves and their progeny, they simply stop inputting the extra labor and become part of the dependent proletarian mass. And why shouldn't they? Human altruism and charity in the form of inputting labor for the benefit of others only manifests itself once the basic biological needs of the individual have been met, except in the rarest of circumstances.

What then happens is that the State, which is the proxy for the proletariat, sees declining production of even the necessities of life, much less goods that advance the standard of living, but the burgeoning dependent proletarians still demand not just a "fair share" of what's available, but "their share" of what they believe should be available to them from the State.

The State cannot of course supply any of this without the labor input of the proletariat itself, and there is no motive for any individual proletarian to work harder than any other proletarian, and substantial biological motivation to work less than other proletarians if possible in order to conserve energy so that what resources are available, even if distributed "fairly" provide greater biological benefit to the more-torpid proletarian than to the hard-working one. This inevitably results in a slow, painful decline in productivity that threatens the entire system of production, regardless of who "owns" it and who doesn't that the State must deal with or face rebellion, riot, disease and starvation.

So, the State then implements increasingly harsh measures to compel and ensure that each individual provides labor "according to his ability" so that no one "unfairly" gains a biological energy advantage over another by working less hard and consuming an "unfair" share of the available resources. This creates a spiral of doom for the society as production drops because workers are trying to minimize their output while the State acts more and more violently to try to force workers to work harder, which alienates the workers, who feel put upon and denied what Marxism originally promised them, which was a utopian system of amity and plenty where nobody had to work hard but got everything they needed from the labor of others...or from the labor fairy perhaps.

So the State, to maintain social order, begins liquidating the dissenters of society both to quell resistance and "counterrevolution" but also simply to reduce the population in hopes of staving off starvation and open rebellion. And that's where Stalin went.

Then end of this Marxist fallacy is as inevitable as entropy and is seen in every single Marxist/socialist/communist state that has ever existed, even if people within the system cannot recognize the inevitability of the path to social decay, destruction, death, disease and eventual genocide.

The despotism is not something that is an outgrowth of Marxism gone awry. It's not Marxism being put in practice and going wrong. Despotism is INHERENT in Marxism. It is specifically called for by Marxist ideas. You CANNOT live where you as an individual want to live, because you have to live where the "community" thinks best. You can't do as much or as little as you like, based on your own assessment of what you can and should do -- you must give to your ability. You don't get what you would like or can accumulate via your own efforts. You get what you need. You don't raise your kids as you see fit. You raise them in accordance with the community requirements. You don't get to do what you want with your house - you can't rent it, because all rents are abolished except if the "community" collects the rent. You can't even own private property, because private property is abolished. You can't produce anything for sale or resale, or fill economic needs that you see in your community, because the community controls the means of production.

And the simple biological instincts and behaviors of human beings cries out in fury and denies such despotism as a function of nature for those reasons, which ultimately leads to the failure of all Marxist states.

These are principles written into the fabric of Marxism. Marxism isn't something is good in principle but goes wrong because of the defects in human character or behavior. Humans are fine. Humans are basically good, and tend to self-order into survivable and effective communities. It's Marxism that is bad.

I don't get why anyone thinks it's good, or why anyone thinks it makes sense.

It's because first-stage Marxism, which is to say "democratic socialism" always begins in a time of economic plenty where the bourgeoisie merchant class is economically separated from the proletarian working class. Marxism depends for the impetus that sets it into motion upon "income inequality" and the existence of great wealth held by "capitalists" who, according to Marx, are "vampires" and their capital "lives only by sucking living labor" from the proletariat. This intentional class warfare has the express purpose of inflaming the dependent class through envy and jealousy while pandering to the dependent-class proletarian desire for "equality" with the productive class without suggesting, and indeed denying that the path to economic equality and prosperity is withing the grasp of the dependent class if it chooses to labor in pursuit of that goal, and do so wisely and with the voluntary assistance of capitalists and their available-for-investment capital.

Socialists never look into the actual future, they view socialism through rose-colored glasses that lead them to believe that economic equality through forcible redistribution of capital, being what they, in their class-warfare mindset, believe to be "fair" will lead to universal economic prosperity when exactly the opposite always, always, always, without exception, actually happens. Socialism as the transitional state of Marxist utopian communism, like a virus, depends on it's existence and it's ability to spread on the capitalist "energy" available in the society upon which it can feed. That capital may be identified as "OPM" or "Other People's Money," and socialism, including so-called "democratic socialism" simply cannot survive without the ability to forcibly access and consume the available OPM in any economy.

But OPM is not a perpetual motion source of wealth, it has to be created and recreated constantly through the input of labor. When the labor input ceases, the OPM becomes a rapidly shrinking pool of socialist energy, just as when the body is sapped of nutrients and its means of producing more energy for a virus to feed on is destroyed by the predation of the virus itself, eventually the life is quite literally sucked out of the organism/economy and it dies.

And that's what socialism does, each and every time, without fail, because it is a fact of nature that there is no such thing as a free lunch. That some socialist societies last longer than others is irrelevant because the longevity of any socialist state is entirely dependent upon how much OPM exists at the time the socialist virus invades and how quickly that OPM is consumed. But once the OPM runs out, the system must and can only fail, as it always does.