You’re better off unplugging entirely. Forgo all forms of news and pop media for at least 6 months and focus on your life. You’ll be happier and you’ll get shit done.
I think a lot of this has to do with the West not really doing anything to address death. It’s out of sight and out of mind, so when it’s knocking at our door we are feeble minded and scared because we are ignorant of the cycle of life and death. Everyone you know will die, but confronting this fact head on breeds a very existentialist kind of anxiety that we’ve failed to address in our societies.
This is the underpinning of doomer type behaviour. Eastern philosophy tends to have meditations where people remind themselves every day that today might be their last. You might think this sort of thinking breeds depression, mental illness, etc, but it works out for them very well.
The West could learn a lot from this, but alas that’s a pipe dream.
There is certainly a Western philosophical/religious tradition of meditating on death, for what it's worth. It's why I love Lent and the traditions/rituals around it - "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
You might also enjoy The Slavery of Death by Richard Beck, who blends his training in clinical psychology with his religious background to argue basically what you're arguing - that we try very hard to pretend death doesn't exist and that it works poorly - and from there argues that our fear of death should be understood as the primary problem of humans from a theological perspective, and that sin is a result of that fear, not a root cause. (He does draw on Eastern Orthodox thought to make that point, but I think that's not as far east as you mean by "Eastern," if I understand you right.)
Yeah, I think it's specifically the modern, secular West that has this terrified, anxious relationship with death. The more religious communities seem to think about it much the same way as they always did, and people on social media keep using this to make clever gotcha arguments about how religious people aren't really "pro life" because they're not desperately freaking out about death and trying to stave it off however they can during the pandemic. Somewhere along the line, the idea that death is an inevitable part of life and that sometimes trying to desperately stop it no matter what is a futile act of hubris became so alien to parts of the population that they can't even understand how anyone could think that way.
Yeah reading hacker news since 4 hours and didn't even planned to open it. Now the world is more dangerous and don't know if people are commenting or GPT-3 bots.
Exercise helps, a lot. I'd spend my days riding my bike, if I could. Helps get rid of some of the despair and worry and I definitely sleep better. And ... yeah, can't really check twitter while out on the bike!
Do something offline that avoids giving your brain the sense of "Something new must be happening and I need to know what it is." I like video games, which is sort of a compromise (there's still more to do, you can see the number go up, etc., but there's no realtime pressure), but reading a physical book or listening to music are both good options to (and avoid emitted light, for bonus points).
Read a really charming and escapist novel. Worst case, you end up staying up too late because the book is so good, but I haven't found anything more reliable for making me disconnect from the world and its churning. Substituting a book for Twitter for the hour before bed has markedly improved the overall quality of my life.
To get yourself into the habit, don't read anything on your "to read someday list of important books." Just pick the most notorious page turner you can think of.
Blood Meridian has dark moments in the narrative sure, but it’s a beautifully written book and very easy spaghetti western adventure to get lost in before bed. It’s not like you’re dozing off reading The Necronomicon, c’mon.
It's my favourite book but it's hardly easy-reading for many people. It's grim and would challenge a few people I bet. I could read writing like that about the desert forever, but not everyone is so inclined.
I think everyone should read it, but I can also appreciate an "easy there, Satan"-type joke about it!
Yeah, I've read most of Cormac McCarthy's books, but I've never gotten past the first 50 pages of Blood Meridian. Even compared to Child of God, it just hit me in the wrong ways whenever I read it. Still hoping to get to it someday though!
Completely agree. Reading a book before bed slows my mind and removes the days anxieties. I’m currently reading The Lost Fleet sci-fi series. Pure entertainment.
Anecdotally, I've had much better sleep when reading a book just before bed than anything else. Even just cutting of twitter/ screens before bed didn't get me the same kind of relaxed, gentle sleep as reading, say, 50 pages of sff.
When I can, I try to get off my computer. Go do some woodworking or read a book or go for a walk. Get some hobby, any hobby, that gets you away from screens and utilizing your own brain instead of looking things up on the internet or over analyzing stuff cuz you read too much about it online. Just get away from the damn machine. Then, when it's time for bed, I don't even think about scrolling, my mind if off in whatever I was doing, and how I'm going to do it different/better/what i'll do next. I do find myself falling into the same traps and roped back at times though. Or just clear out all your reddit subs and replace em with porn ones. Clears out the "doom scrolling" real quick anyway...
Put down your phone - stop staring at it at the gym, in line, on the toilet, at any time there's a lull in the activity - try just observing things around you. Read novels, especially before bed. Stop feeling like you have to be an informed and empowered member of society at all times on all issues. Develop hobbies that aren't related to tech - especially ones that force you to get outside and don't require high tech, expensive equipment. Get hobbies that force you to interact with people who aren't college educated and who aren't highly liberal tech people in a coastal bubble. Train for something hard - a marthon, a weightlifting competition, a martial arts tournament. You'd be amazed at how quickly all this shit becomes noise when you have things to do, and you get away from the bubble you're in.
> Stop feeling like you have to be an informed and empowered member of society at all times on all issues.
This probably isn’t entirely the point you were trying to make with that sentence, but I feel like reading a book about an issue instead of trying to inform yourself through doomscrolling social media will actually do more to being an informed and empowered person.
> Stop feeling like you have to be an informed and empowered member of society at all times on all issues.
I think this is an underrated comment. Nothing wrong with staying informed to an extent but when it becomes all consuming (esp through social media and 24/7 news), it is essentially taking on the world day in, day out. That's a large burden to absorb for any individual and the loss of control one feels breeds anxiety.
I don't "doomscroll" much but I definitely "FOMO scroll". I'll scroll through HN and my multi-reddit of programming subreddits to see if there's anything cool and new to learn or see what's happening in the tech world. I don't feel anxiety but it's definitely something I don't need to be doing right before bed
I thought sleeping to a podcast was crazy until I found Sleep With Me, and I ended up putting it on pretty frequently, 2-3 nights/week. It's really calming. Guy incoherently recaps episodes of shows.
A few weeks ago I identified doomscrolling, particularly in bed, as a major source for my recent sleeping issues. As a result, I took a major step back from Twitter in general, and especially forced myself to stop reading Twitter in bed, or even in the late evenings. This produced an immediate improvement in both sleep quality and overall mood.
Even better is to physically turn your phone off at least one hour before bed. If you need to be available for emergency calls then in do not disturb mode with your family set to punch through Do Not Disturb.
Added bonus of the alarm going off in the morning across the room helps that 2-3 seconds of initial wake up to be more "productive" in waking up - gotta stand and walk for a second before the alarm goes off. Less likely to fall back asleep after just that little interruption.
As a rule, I don't check anything but HN before bed simply because they usually don't have those types of stories. Tonight it had an assassination attempt on a Judge working a high profile case who's 20 year old son is now dead and a husband in a hospital. In the United States.
In my experience reading on the smartphone is an underrated cause of sleep issues. No matter what I read and no matter how dimmed and red my screen looks - it certainly helps - but it still impacts my sleep negatively. The desire to keep your mind busy even right before or actually while intending to fall asleep is also an indicator for other underlying issues. If I stop engaging in these distractions I get a chance to actually face those and deal with them.
Just as a recommendation, if you're on iOS, also use the whitepoint reduction feature in the accessibility settings. That reduces the brightness of the device further, even if you are already on the lowest brightness setting.
Also, depending on the person, it heavily depends on what you are reading. With Twitter you are jumping from topic to topic. That's something completely different than reading a book.
Distractions in general hurt sleep. I'm not convinced using the phone is any different than other distractions. Of course, sleep researchers say that doing anything at all in bed other than sleep and sex is a bad idea, but distracting yourself while not in bed too isn't helpful.
Naturally, I ignore that advice and still use my phone in bed. But switching from Twitter to doing other stuff helped significantly, because I can monitor myself and put the phone down when I get calm enough and sleepy enough to sleep. Twitter was preventing me from getting calm/sleepy due to producing anxiety. I do still read Discord, which sometimes can have the Twitter problem depending on what people are talking about, but it helps me keep from feeling completely socially disconnected due to using Twitter less.
I really realized it a few weeks back as well. I found a few things helpful. I turned on the Digital Wellbeing settings on Android. Limited Twitter to an hour a day. It makes me much more cognizant of the time I spend, and I end up not doomscrolling the comments and stuff like that. I also turned on Bed time mode, so its all black and white by the time I am in bed. I can still do it, but with limits and help me not fall into never ending holes as much. Also playing with Focus mode, so I can't really check it in the day until after dinner. Might bump it up a little earlier so I get out of bed faster too.
the hypocrisy of this story is thick, from a news organization where every other story (and that's not much of an exaggeration) is about how we're all going to die from covid because everyone else is being a jerk in endlessly various ways.
but to their credit, they did air a story recently featuring maria hinojosa, founder/host of latino usa and the first latina host at npr, that was not especially kind to npr itself (spoiler: she left and was more successful as a result).
Not to mention the journalistic malpractice of calling victims of being threatened with a firearm and having their vehicle attacked randomly "right-wing extremists", and then wiping the evidence of their false allegations from the internet without retracting or apologizing for it. The individuals who attacked the victims were charged by police. [1] [2]
NPR is in the same class as the rest of the mainstream media who don't bother to vet stories they lather with political bias.
You're extrapolating from the evidence of one event to all (or most) events. What you're calling "journalistic malpractice" is possibly an editor with a story in need of a picture (everything has to be visual to sell the story), asking the photog pool for a suitable image. This happens all the time. Timing matters though. In the instance you quote, if the original story was published before the police charged the attackers, then the journalists made an honest mistake. Otherwise we'd have to wait for the entire judicial process to reach completion before making any comment. E.g. you seem to implying that because they were charged by police, the attackers of the vehicle were in the wrong, but that can't be known until a conviction is reached. The point, I'm making is that journalism is an exercise in trying to parse and publish what is known 'at the time'.
I think your comment about mainstream media is mostly unfair, as the same accusations can be made against most non-mainstream media. I'd also suggest that NPR are one of the better mainstream media orgs, but that's just my opinion. The parent poster made one case for why - they are willing to host their own critics. Not too many news orgs are willing to do that.
The story was posted after they were charged, and it doesn't seem like they retracted or apologized for a libelous allegation against victims, no less.
Sadly, I think that the expectation that news is "free" has driven far more of this (across the board). It's particularly evident in previously "staid but solid" news orgs as they cut costs to survive. I don't know if there's a practical solution at the news-production end. At the news-consumption end, I guess the "grain of salt" is needed more than ever. But I would hesitate to read malice (i.e. an explicit intention to misrepresent) into most news orgs (for most of their news. Clearly owners have interests that may become apparent with the way they cover some news). The intersection of cost-cutting, and "knowing" and playing to your audience leads to lots of this sort of thing.
No, they had a narrative they wanted to push: "right-wing attackers victimize noble protesters", and since there were only a few examples available, they had to pull stories and footage from the many instances of when protesters attacked vehicles.
I don't know you personally, but if you're like 99% of left-leaning urban professionals, you're not aware of those instances, because you're only exposed to a portion of what's happening. I'd suggest following a broad spectrum of people on social media from the left, center, and right. You'll be surprised what the mainstream left media leaves out.
Right-wing media does the same thing, by the way. You really have to watch both to give anything resembling reality. It's a big problem, and it's getting worse.
Even (decidedly left-wing) Brian Stelter featured this problem on this week's Reliable Sources on CNN. For example, mainstream media is happy to cover what they view as the malfeasance of the federal law enforcement officers in Portland, but they fail to show the acts of the rioters that played a role in their deployment (burning buildings, destruction of property, menacing cars, etc). To be clear, I personally think their deployment was probably unwise, and that politics played a large role. However, Portland's mayor has consistently refused to crack down on whatever label you want to put on the violent protesters wearing black. That adds significant complexity to the situation.
NPR was the most neutral of any major news organization up until the past 2-3 years, when they've undergone major changes and now put out mostly ideologically-driven pieces like other outlets on the left.
I do give credit to many local media outlets, who are often the only ones asking the hard questions, like this local outlet in Portland:
> "NPR was the most neutral of any major news organization up until the past 2-3 years, when they've undergone major changes and now put out mostly ideologically-driven pieces like other outlets on the left."
it's been more like 5 years, at least since the snafu of the last presidential election. but even as i criticize npr, i expect them to change for the better, being "public" and certain shows/hosts providing valuable news without spin (at least not much intolerable spin).
certain hosts/shows on the other hand are basically unlistenable, like michael barbaro on nyt's the daily, with all of its melodramatic, self-righteous cynicism designed for the superiority-complex set. it's disgusting pandering.
I got a Nokia 8110 4g to use as a secondary phone during not-work times. Can't browse much on a phone with a tabless browser. Also, it is very 90s cool.
I don't like the implication that mental health is just feeling good. Maybe if more people would read and understand the news, and feel bad about it, they'd be willing to do even trivial things like wear a mask.
In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes to make it better.
The issue is that understanding the news and understanding the real world can be very, very different things. An endless stream of anecdotes about rare crimes and individual misbehavior will upset anyone, but it can't help anybody understand the real world.
Also, it doesn’t sound healthy to me to read news with the attitude that a lot of the bad stuff that happens is because you just didn’t research enough and vote hard enough. The point of democracy shouldn’t be to blame the people for bad government policies and actions. It should be the government that is accountable.
No. They think they're voting for the good policies and actions. We can legitimately disagree over the good/bad of policies and actions.
Is instituting/increasing minimum wage: providing a livable income for those at the bottom? or denying jobs to those at the bottom (being unable to produce >= $MINWAGE)? Good/bad of the topic seems obvious, yet differing views are widely held.
I think that's a bad example, has anyone gotten elected over the corona hoax thing?
Besides, "I would rather accept the risk of virus X than the inconvenience of wearing a mask," is a perfectly legitimate position for many viruses, and deciding which ones it applies to is the exact same kind of utility balance and value debate as any other policy choice.
We all agree that it would be wrong to poison the reservoir. We all agree it’s wrong to pool our money to hire someone to poison the reservoir.
If I vote for the mayoral candidate who promises to poison the reservoir, why should that suddenly be a completely morality-free decision on my part? Just because a lot of people made the same decision I did?
I have spoken to people who have admitted their racist ideologies and motivations for voting. And I’ve interacted with people who knowingly vote for their own economic interests at the expense of society’s interests because they fundamentally believe they should take whatever they can get.
The latter example especially takes place in local elections regarding things like zoning and local ordinances and work contracts.
>I’ve interacted with people who knowingly vote for their own economic interests at the expense of society’s interests because they fundamentally believe they should take whatever they can get.
This should hopefully be balanced out by the fact that everyone gets a vote.
It’s evidently not, especially since votes aren’t equal in the US since voters in certain states have more sway in electoral college than others. Which is how we end up with leaders that the majority did not elect.
This is the United STATES, a democratic republic - not to be confused with a popular democracy outright. We recognize that in national issues, a few blocks in a major city should not be able to out-vote (and thus overrule) entire states having very different needs/interests. Issues which are appropriate for popular vote should be decided within suitably local jurisdictions. Without this balancing of "tyranny of the majority" vs "tyranny of the minority", low-population states would not have signed onto, and would not remain in, the overall federal system.
In a country so large and with so much diversity (!), no region should be able to absolutely dominate another simply by having a larger population.
Wearing a mask in completely about politics in the USA. Most if not all social media posts about people wearing masks have people wearing completely useless fashion items on their faces. I'm sure it is mostly because they don't know better and partly to virtue signal.
In any case there hasn't been any studies related to efficacy of wearing a mask in public to reduce the risk of infection, so not wearing a mask is not as crazy as some people make it out to be.
This all said if I would use public transport I would be wearing a mask (just not a cloth mask or a surgical mask) or if I visited other places which were packed with people, but best solution is to just not go to places which have a lot of people in them.
As a trans woman, I wish more people thought like you do.
I see so many trans men or women that don't pass (as their gender identity) because parents or healthcare doctors kept them from transitioning; before puberty disfigured their body and prevented any chance of them passing as their gender identity.
The foregoing situation happened more in the past. Especially depending on where they lived and how the healthcare laws allow doctors to deny patients treatment because of religious reasons. I think nowadays that's going away with self consent treatment.
Anyway my point is these people are suicidal because they don't pass with constant social reminders everyday while trying to function through normal everyday tasks that require interacting with strangers. They likely will never pass to strangers and unless they get the finances to attempt aesthetic surgeries.
Well in the meantime people just tell them "do therapy" and while most have already tried but that's just not changing whats required for reality to be better. Nevertheless they're continuously told "just keep trying" and oh try another therapist that works for you!
Makes me think that the mental healthcare is mostly for public image. Since sure some people benefit but for the ones that don't nothing improves and the professionals are fine with that reality.
Therapy can help some trans folks, but what they really need is a community that supports them regardless of how well they pass.
Trans passing messageboards are absolutely brutal. Brutal honesty is necessary for some, for whom passing is a matter of physical safety. But for a lot more, it can amount to self-harming. Any deviation from sometimes pseudoscientific models of "man" and "woman" is seen as a tell, an imperfection. This is made worse by the fact that gender-affirming surgery is utterly unaffordable for most people, let alone most people struggling with dysphoria and depression.
In addition, passing politics by nature excludes many nonbinary people, for whom it is by definition impossible to pass. Not long after I came out I kept trying to find references for how to be myself. It shouldn't be that way.
Where might we be if trans bodies were seen as natural variation instead of deviance?
> Therapy can help some trans folks, but what they really need is a community that supports them regardless of how well they pass.
I don't know if I necessarily agree with that part.
Therapy can help people starting out with blockers. Basically, young trans people that will pass but going through the social process is still difficult. Therapy isn't a universal solution and there is no proof that it works for everyone. The older population of trans people won't find therapy helpful depending on the following factors of did they get on on blockers at all, was HRT & good genetics in early 20s an option, and is it possible for them to pay for surgeries needing to eventually pass. Finding the "perfect community" for trans people is a flattering way of expressing segregation. They should be able to feel safe anywhere is what the solution should be. Otherwise they won't ever feel normal and possibly be assaulted or killed in society.
I'm unsure why nonbinary people are relevant in a discussion about trans people and since they don't have a concept of passing to other people as a certain sex. Sure, they prefer to be nonbinary in regard to how they look or be received.
Trans bodies aren't natural. Every trans person will express how they wish they could have started before puberty in an ideal life. The perfect life would have been just born cis as the sex they identify as or not have gender dysphoria.
It's better to be honest than to hugbox someone into a dangerous situation. I've seen some trans people just want assistance in dying because passing is everything for quality of life to not be poor for them. I think they should be able to get it but only if passing is not going to be an option with HRT and surgeries are not going to fix anything. I remember reading a trans person has received assistance in dying somewhere in Europe for Gender Dysphoria. It's sad but that's how it is for some people in life.
Nonbinary people are trans. Failure to assimilate != segregation.
I get the sense that you're a generation or so older than me and have consequently had to put up with a lot more medical gatekeeping than I did. If I'm right, I salute you. But I see nothing good in letting myself being defined by my dysphoria or in turning myself into what feels to me like a cardboard cutout of a woman just so I can feel like not a guy. Down that way all I see is more of what I had before I realized I was trans. No thank you.
What you were writing in your previous post is segregation.
How old are you when you were able to start HRT and did you get to go on blockers?
Your viewpoint of not letting yourself be defined by dysphoria is typically expressed by anyone able to start in early 20s or younger. I find your opinion perfectly fine for people in that foregoing situation. Starting that young has little in comparison with the previous generations' experiences and realities.
It shouldn't be a situation of forcing a universal ideology upon everyone. People gravitate to whatever solution works for them and it can be pleasant or unpleasant for others.
What I consider a cardboard cutout of a woman might just be a woman to you. In any case it doesn't matter because neither of us own anything that's just non-physical/judgement(s)/opinion(s).
People just get assigned a life and observe whatever story they get. No free will exists and obviously some people are in Heaven while others are in Hell. Life is predestined for whatever outcome. I think majority of trans people will have better outcomes after our generations die out.
edit: if you want to chat on discord whenever. I always enjoy chatting with trans people I meet online and learning their views compared to redefining my own. Alizée#4723
Half the people doomscrolling are sitting up worried about a different set of things. The point of the article is that it’s not healthy for anyone. You’re not going to cut off resurgent Marxism by refreshing Newsmax in a loop in a loop.
You’re also overlooking a very important fact of life. Overlooking other people’s suffering is an inherent human defense mechanism, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You invoke it every time you spend a few grand on a vacation—an amount of money that could save a human life from malaria or feed a child in Bangladesh for a decade.
I will say, it must be nice to spend so much time worrying about problems that don't exist instead of all the ones that actually do. Seems like it'd be a real comfort.
If you had told me 25 years ago that in my home country (Bangladesh) people were going to be demanding removal of a statue of lady justice from in front of the Supreme Court, and that the court would oblige, and that veiling women would go from being nearly non-existent to commonplace, and that secular journalists would be getting murdered, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Islamists got control of education, and all of those things happened.
So imagine my alarm to read that 20% of social science professors self-identify as Marxist. A third of college students embrace communism. In 2017, the nation’s premier newspaper ran a sympathetic retrospective on a century of communism. Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. A bunch of people on a website associated with a startup incubator are going to read the preceding sentence and go “yeah, that makes sense.” So it feels like gaslighting for you to say it’s a “problem that doesn’t exist.” Maybe I’m being paranoid, but in my experience civilization is fragile. Better safe than sorry.
But obviously, ranting about it on HN won’t fix the problem.
> Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist.
It was, though, at least if you're talking about early modern slavery. Slavery in the ancient world was a substantially different model, but the early modern African slave trade was fundamentally driven by rich, increasingly centralized farm owners with a business model dependent on unpaid workers.
> Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist.
Chattel slavery of the type practiced in the early US and elsewhere was part of the dominant Western system of the mid-19th century for which critics coined the term “capitalism”; what else would it be but capitalist?
It may be "capitalist" in the sense that things are being bought/sold/owned sure. But it's being portrayed as a concept/occurrence that is mostly if not entirely a product of capitalism. Which is plain wrong because we've had slavery and various forms of it in a multitude of situations and political systems throughout history, a lot of which were in no way capitalist. It's white-washing a lot of our collective history and suffering just as like claiming that slavery was purely done by "western", "white" or "imperialist" nations.
The debate is very muddled because we're breaking standard definitions and using them each in our own way. I struggled to phrase the above properly, and no doubt I'm probably misusing some of the terms on some level.
It doesn't matter if there's a historical precedent. Each system is defined by the incentives it sets up. The incentives set up by capitalism are clearly instrumental to the vast expansion of slavery.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. The means of production is usually defined as tools, machinery or technology, not people.
> Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production.
No, capitalism is a particular real-world economic system that existed in a particular time and place; it is true that private ownership of the means of production is a central element of that system, but it's not it's only feature. Slavery was, in fact, an element of that system identified by the people who identified the system and coined the term capitalism for it, critics like Marx, whom wrote in Capital: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in
England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the
transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery,
into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the
veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its
pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.”
Capitalism, and it's evolution from feudalism, includes the development of commercial, rather than patriarchal, slavery, wherein slaves are chattels rather than, while subordinate, bound up in a system that, at least in tradition and theory, involves mutual-though-asymmetric obligations and responsibilities.
No one is gaslighting [1] you. People are arguing that your interpretation of current events is in error. By calling that "gaslighting", you implicitly claim that disagreement with you is in itself an abusive act.
Calling anyone who disagrees with you abusive seems like a pretty wild flex.
Well I guess it depends on what you mean that my stated concern is a “problem that doesn’t exist?”
Do you mean that Marxist ideas aren’t finding renewed currency? Nobody seems to deny that efforts to equate slavery with capitalism are critiques pioneered by Marx. Instead they seem to be arguing that Marx was correct. So the ideas do seem to be having renewed currency, in which case denying that fact is gaslighting.
If you’re arguing that it’s not a problem that Marxist ideas are being incorporated into schoolbooks, then in that case we just disagree.
What I mean is, where you seem to see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as evidence of some sort of vast generational conspiracy to subvert the US and replace its current government with some kind of Stalinist totalitarianism, I see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as a totally unsurprising and if anything long delayed response to the mounting evidence that four straight decades of untrammeled capitalism on the Reaganite model has had catastrophic results for almost everyone in the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
What I don't see is any need to assume that, because Marx's critique of capital is serving as a source for those developing a modern critique of capital, Stalinism must necessarily follow. I think that's really where we disagree, and I'll admit, I feel no nearer understanding the wellspring of your fear now than I did when I started this conversation.
Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.
Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale. The kids just aren't listening any more, and I see no reason why they should be.
> What I mean is, where you seem to see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as evidence of some sort of vast generational conspiracy to subvert the US and replace its current government with some kind of Stalinist totalitarianism, I see Marxist ideas re-entering the sphere of public debate in the United States circa 2020 as a totally unsurprising and if anything long delayed response to the mounting evidence that four straight decades of untrammeled capitalism on the Reaganite model has had catastrophic results for almost everyone in the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
I didn't say I was worried about Marxism as a pre-text to Stalinist totalitarianism. Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone. In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled. In that same time period, Singapore's and Hong Kong's increased by more than a factor of 10. That was the legacy of putting Marxist ideas into practice. Capitalism, by contrast, particularly the Anglo-American variety, has been responsible for turning at least three poor countries into rich ones in the 20th century, and is on pace to turn a dozen more into at least middle income countries. These ideas have been the most powerful engine of enabling prosperity in the 20th century. Having seen the suffering socialist ideas caused in my home country, and seeing how much life has improved after we abandoned those ideas, I regard their re-introduction as an alternative to the basic Anglo-American economic system to be extremely alarming. (Note, I'm not talking about, and you don't appear to be talking about, the notion that everyone should pay "a little bit more" in taxes to fund more social services. My understanding is that we are talking about something more invasive than that.)
> Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.
The story of the 20th century is that academics with ideas are often very dangerous people. (We don't think of fundamentalist Islam as academic, but in many respects that's what it is. It's a set of ideas borne out of theory, in that context theological theory, rather than learned experience, and transmitted by teaching it in schools and radicalizing young people who lack the life experience to know better.) In Bangladesh, people who had grand visions of a better world used schools to replace our practical, moderate version of Islam with a radical one. That makes me tremendously skeptical of people who want to tinker with the basic structure of society, and in doing so invoke theories that exist in books rather than the learned experience of successful societies.
> Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale
I think you fundamentally misperceive the conservative viewpoint. We point to Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as the logical outgrowth of Marxism in practice. But our concern isn't merely the Stalinist outcome. We think that Marxism is dangerous in and of itself. Western Europe's lost decades of stagnation under socialist ideas, or India or Bangladesh's lost decades, wouldn't be as bad as Stalinism, obviously. But they'd be bad, and insofar as Marxists want to tinker with the basic s...
> Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone.
Marxist notions have been one of the key driving forces in the transition between late 19th Century capitalism and modem mixed economies in the developed world (though never without compromise), and haven't been even attempted to be applied anywhere outside of advanced capitalist democracies directly, only through the lens of Leninist (and later, derived from that, Stalinist and Maoist) totalitarianism, since robust capitalism with developed working class consciousness is a prequisite for the post-capitalist development in Marx’s theory, a pre-requisite abandoned and replaced with the vanguardism in Lenin’s work and it's derivatives.
> In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled.
Not sure what that has to do with Marxism, since Marxists (even in the sense of Leninists, etc.) weren't in charge most of that time, and were violently targeted by right-wing military dictatorships for substantial stretches of it.
I mean, unless you mean that Marxist notions are dangerous because holding them might get you murdered by right-wing dictatorships, which I'll grant is valid point, though not the one you seemed to be arguing for.
I suppose I don't understand what you're saying about the situation you saw in Bangladesh. Were the fundamentalist Islamists you described having taken over the country, via the educational system, also ideological Marxists? Is there a history of some sort that I can read, to understand better what you're describing? Just based on what you've said today, it sounds like you're adjusting the goalposts to suit the argument of the moment, but I'm sure that can't be the case. So I'd definitely appreciate the ability to develop a better understanding of the events that seem to form the basis of your argument.
With regard to the whole Marxism-and-BLM thing - I have to say, at this point, I honestly don't know. On reflection, I decided it might be better, instead of just taking your word (and Newsmax's, and it turned out also Breitbart's!) for what's in that video, if I saw and heard for myself what it contained. So I did that [1], and found that your representation of what it contains (and Newsmax's, and Breitbart's) is, and I say this with all possible charity, extremely tendentious in a way that leads me to suspect it's been deliberately stripped of context in order to sound maximally frightening to people already predisposed to be suspicious of BLM activists' motives.
In particular, when I investigated the quote of which you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) make so much, I found that it was said in the context of answering a question raised by among others Jalil Muntaqim (born Anthony Bottom) [2], a former Black Panther imprisoned since 1974 for the murder of two police officers, over whether the Black Lives Matter movement has a coherent enough ideological direction to avoid simply "fizzling out" as Occupy Wall Street did.
Cullors' answer is, as you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) imagine, a political one. But it's not political in the way that you think it is. Here's a transcription I made just now from the video, covering the entirety of Patrisse Cullors' answer, rather than just the part that has been so frequently taken out of context with what appears to me very strongly to be deliberately deceptive intent.
"I think that the criticism is helpful; I think a lot of things. The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame; myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers, we are trained Marxists, we are super versed on sort of ideological theories, and I think that what we really try to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk. We don't necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement; I think we've tried to put out a political frame that's about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the Black community, to really fight for all of our lives, and I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don't believe it's going to fizzle out; it just gets stronger, and we see it, right? We've seen that after Sandra Bland, we're seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation Presidential Forum. What I do think, though, is [that] folks, especially folks who've been trained in a particular way, want to hear certain things from us, [and] we're not framing it in the ways that maybe another generation has. But I think it's important that people know the Black Lives Matter movement doesn't just live online, although there's many people who utilize it online. We're in a different set of circumstances, a different generation, [and while] social media may feel like it's diluting the larger ideological frame, I argue that it's not."
The reason I say that that's a political answer is, again, in the context of it being a response to critique by someone who is widely regarded as a political prisoner and, as the show host notes, an "elder of the struggle". It really comes across as kind o...
Chattel slavery adds certain people, namely those owned as slaves, to the "means of production" column. It's not incompatible in any way with capitalism.
Why would that be an impediment? As far as I understand it, the principle of voluntary exchange relates to buyers and sellers in a market, not to the commodity in which the market is made. The moral enormity inherent in chattel slavery, namely that it reduces human beings to a commodity in which a market is then made, has nothing that I can see to do with whether such a market can operate in an economy run on capitalistic principles.
After reconsidering my statement, I think you may be correct. Slavery can be capitalistic if you only include the buyers and sellers as members of the market.
"Slavery is capitalism" is most certainly wrong though.
"Capitalism encourages slavery in plantation economies" would be a better argument, but might also be refuted given the gradual abolishing of slavery despite the continuance of capitalism.
The term “capitalist” was not coined by critics of capitalism. For example, David Ricardo used the term decades before Marx. Criticizing capitalism by linking it to slavery was pioneered by Marx, and accepting that point of view is Marxist rhetoric.
It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist. By that logic, slavery is Christian and Islamic too—even more so. I’m not interested in debating Marx’s criticisms of capitalism: the fact that we’re even having this conversation proves my original concern—the resurgence of Marxism in America. I will point out that, in contemporary usage “capitalism” assumes a free market, which is incompatible with slavery both in theory and in practice. (America got richer after it abandoned slavery, which is what free market theories of economics would predict.) Trying to link what people understand capitalism to be today, to the proto-capitalism practiced in the American south, is layering specious argument upon specious argument.
Are you honestly going to try to weasel your way out of this by laser-focusing on the semantic and etymological differences between capitalist and Capitalism which so far in the discussion have been used inter-changeably?
> accepting that point of view is Marxist rhetoric.
So if one agrees with Marx on a single point one is spouting Marxist rhetoric just because he wrote about it first?
You just can't surgically remove selective things from Capitalism to get some wholesome version of it today. The patient would bleed out.
I'm sorry, but you might be the most dishonest user of HN, a constant barrage of cherry-picking, diversions, omissions etc, woven into a, albeit articulate, good news narrative about Capitalism, the US, and conservatism.
> The term “capitalist” was not coined by critics of capitalism
The term “capitalist” for people who control capital was not, the term “capitalism” for a politicoeconomic system (from which comes “capitalist” in its other sense of an advocate/defender of that system, or, as an adjective, pertaining to that systemas, opposed to labelling a particular economic class) was.
> It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist.
It would.be, but that's not the argument. Early modern chattel slavery evolved alongside capitalism, was imposed exclusively by capitalist powers, and reflects the apotheosis of the capitalist commodification of labor from the mutualism of feudal relations, even beyond wage-labor, and the evolution beyond capitalism in the direction, if not by the means, advocated by critics like Marx that led to the modern mixed economy displacing the system for which “capitalism” was coined began with abolition of slavery.
Early modern chattel slavery (not slavery more generally, such as feudal or ancient patriarchal slavery, including serfdom) was a distinctly and exclusively capitalist institution.
A massive and obvious flaw in the "capitalism is slavery" argument is the fact that American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished.
After the Civil War ended, as soon as the labor costs had to be factored in, it became increasingly clear that cotton is a dumb crop to plant at the scale it was being planted. Planters moved to other crops that could be profitable. Slavery essentially held capitalism (the efficient allocation of capital) back. This is why the Great Plains are the most productive agricultural land today, not the South. Syria or Libya, with actual, present day slaves are noticeably unable to produce much agriculture
The abolition of slavery exposed the essential government subsidization of a misallocation of capital, which is inherently un-capitalistic.
> A massive and obvious flaw in the "capitalism is slavery" argument is the fact that American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished.
“Capitalism” and “maximizing systemic, aggregate profitability” aren't even related concepts, much less so intimately linked that not doing the latter proves that something is not an element of the former.
And "slavery" and "private ownership of the means of production" are similarly orthogonal.
If the means of production were owned by the government, and the government forced its citizens to work uncompensated against their will, with no option to leave, could one then contend that socialism/communism is inextricably linked to slavery? No, that's absurd. Involuntary servitude can exist in any economic system, whether the means of production are owned by the people or by the government.
Slavery can only exist if the government actively enforces the ability for one to own another human being against their will. While it's absolutely correct that capitalism is rooted in private ownership of property, it by no means presupposes that humans MUST be considered property. On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary, which is anathema to slavery.
> On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary
That condition has not been true at any time in the history of Capitalism. Since that's only possible if the two parties are perfectly equal, which obviously is almost never the case, and certainly not a state of affairs that the proponents of Capitalism wants or have ever wanted.
In reality, unless born into property/wealth, one is not a voluntary party of such a transaction, and its voluntariness decreases in proportion to the socioeconomical situation of the party at that time.
Of course, nobody is credibly arguing that we are anywhere close to the platonic ideal of a capitalist system — in the same way that at no point in the history of humanity have we had a truly communist or socialist system.
If your argument is that the inverse relationship between "voluntariness" and socioeconomic status is anathema to capitalism, that reinforces the idea that literal slavery is even further from that platonic ideal.
As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason: it gets us that much closer to truly universal voluntary transactions, because when one is no longer worried about starving to death, they can rationally participate in all economic transactions in a free society.
But the point remains the same: slavery (or more abstractly, involuntary servitude) is orthogonal to the underlying economic system. It can exist in any economic system. Most of the developed world today is largely capitalist, and without slavery. Conversely, some of history's most well known efforts in installing Marxist communism also notably featured forced labor camps where people were compelled to work involuntarily.
As I've said in another comment in this thread; each system is defined by the incentive structure it sets up.
The Stalinist structure is set up to be ripe for corruption, abuse of power, etc. That is what it will be rightly remembered for.
The Capitalist structure is set up to be ripe for exploiting whatever there is to be exploited at that particular time to accumulate capital. That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise. We can see the same pattern today; exploiting whatever is possible until the moral outrage hurts profits too much or may land the execs behind bars.
> As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason
It's a very big assumption that a capitalist UBI would be little else than removing social security and then go on devaluing the UBI year by year. Once again, the incentives suggest exactly that. You're somehow imagining an altruistic capitalism that primarily looks for true voluntary transactions while still concentrating power and privilege in the hands of the few.
> That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise.
But that's factually untrue, slavery held back the accumulation of capital. American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished. Once the actual cost of manufacturing had to be factored in, planters were forced to find more productive crops to grow. That process led to:
1. the decimation of the economy of the South, where slavery was rampant. The South had to quickly learn to industrialize to keep up
2. the steep increase in market capitalization of agricultural businesses once capital was forced to be more efficiently allocated, resulting in the agrarian revolution of the Great Plains, which remains one of America's dominant agriculture centers
Slavery quite literally does not allow the incentive structure, by your own words, to flourish.
That's outrageously ahistorical. The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.
If you're interested in not just regurgitating propaganda you can read this book:
"Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".
Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.
You do realize that both slavery and wage slavery have a cost of manufacturing right? Both needed to compete with that on the world market. What's the reason to exclude that even a slave-owning South wouldn't have switched to a more profitable produce?
First of all, there's nothing "ahistorical" about the simple fact that the South's economy was decimated after the abolition of slavery, and to this day the industry that utilized slavery the most continues to be weaker than elsewhere in the Union. That is your original allegation here: that slavery necessarily flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure. That's plainly untrue, because at the same time you had no slavery in the North, and its industrial economy outpaced that of the South (read: accumulation of capital, in your words).
You see this happening today as well: in countries where slavery is unfortunately still legal (Syria & Libya), they don't have any greater accumulation of capital or output than capitalist nations that do not have slavery (nearly every first world industrialized nation). On the other hand, nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They are also notably devoid of indentured/involuntary servitude while also enjoying some of the greatest accumulation of wealth and capital in recorded human history.
> The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.
Sure, nobody is arguing that people in the South were suddenly "free" after the abolition of slavery. You're absolutely correct that sharecropping and other practices essentially continued to ensnare black people in the South. The point is that this DID NOT translate to greater rewards in the capitalist incentive system. During Reconstruction, planters that exploited former "free" slaves LOST the agriculture race to the Great Plains, and the industrial race to the North.
> Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.
There is nothing unacceptable about "low labor costs" in a society with robust social safety nets. Countries like Switzerland that have close to 0 poverty, the highest median wealth, and among the highest standards of living in the world also see variation in labor costs between a janitor and a doctor, or a fast food cashier and a civil engineer. Not all labor is equal in value, and the capitalist incentive structure prices labor as a function of the value that it creates for others. If your argument is that this is somehow tantamount to chattel slavery, then it's you who is regurgitating propaganda.
What I called ahistorical was the massive omission of how little changed in practice for the former slaves. In fact, it's important to establish how much the cost of labour even went up after all the manipulative methods to ensnare former slaves into a new servitude were applied?
Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.
There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.
> What I called ahistorical was the massive omission of how little changed in practice for the former slaves
Yes, and what I am saying is that it has nothing to do with the central argument: that "slavery is capitalism" or "capitalism encourages slavery" or "slavery flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure" (there are N iterations of your argument, pick one and commit to it).
The fact that, after the abolition of slavery, the former slaves still continued to be exploited doesn't tell us much about the presence of a causal relationship between capitalism and slavery, because of course if the state sanctions slavery, you can't expect things to go back to normal by themselves without some state intervention in the opposite direction.
Further, your argument loses teeth for the following reasons:
1. We have the counterfactual in the North (successful wealth/capital accumulation + no slavery) that refute your central argument that you are yet to address. The North's capitalist economy grew more than the South even while having abolished slavery.
2. The fact that in the modern world, among the top 30 most capitalist countries in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...), only one has some form of slavery, the UAE. This refutes your central argument, and you are yet to address it.
3. The fact that in the modern world, the bottom 3 least capitalist countries in the world (same list), there are forced labor camps (North Korea) or decrees (Venezuela, Cuba). This doesn't directly refute your central argument, rather it shows that capitalism isn't a strict prerequisite for slavery. You are yet to address this.
4. The fact that agriculture became more profitable after the abolition of slavery is a direct refutation to your central argument that you are yet to address.
> Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.
This is borderline word salad, but we are applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that slavery and capitalism are two orthogonal systems that are unrelated. Slavery has existed in socialist systems (gulags, labor camps) as well as capitalist systems (international slave trade). If using historical facts to make a point is considered "using the benefit of hindsight", then using the benefit of hindsight is a valid strategy...
> There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.
You need to specify where the cherry picking is happening, because by and large the trend is universal. You also can't just hand-wave a correlation/causation argument just because you're unable to refute it.
For fuck sake mate. How many times do I have to repeat myself to make you stop replying with "It's not the most efficient/productive way, so it can't be capitalism"? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
What are you not understanding? You seem to have completely made up my "Central Argument".
I'm NOT arguing, and have never argued, that slavery must be more productive and/or more profitable than non-slavery.
I'm NOT saying, and have never said, that Capitalism must exhibit slavery.
I'm AM saying that in an environment where slavery is socially acceptable, as it was in the US South during that time, the incentives of Capitalism will make it flourish - and it obviously did.
That Capitalism exploits people and resources, if it's socially acceptable (and often even if it's not), it perfectly obvious and the historical record of it is indisputable:
> What are you not understanding? You seem to have completely made up my "Central Argument".
I literally copy/pasted your own words, but it appears you've finally settled on one argument (emphatically so), great job!
> I'm AM saying that in an environment where slavery is socially acceptable, as it was in the US South during that time, the incentives of Capitalism will make it flourish - and it obviously did.
Capitalism is just an economic system of allocation of scarce resources by maximizing the output of production while minimizing the input resources required to produce a unit output, while also preventing a tragedy-of-the-commons. So you're superficially correct that in a regime where slavery is legal, this type of resource allocation might find an equilibrium that coexists within the rules of that regime, which may include perpetuating slavery. Hypothetically, if murder was legal, capitalism might allow the murder industry to "flourish", through hitmen for hire, private armies, and mercenaries.
It's an observation that has few useful implications in our modern world today where slavery (and murder) are broadly illegal.
You could even go so far as to argue that because socialist economies do not do a sufficient job of allocating resources / production to adequately meet the needs of its people (just empirically speaking), that the allowed use of involuntary servitude will thrive under a socialist regime, where the social need for forced labor outweighs the individual liberty to voluntarily refuse it.
That is to say, "in an environment where slavery [by the state] is acceptable, the incentives of [socialism (severe shortages)] will make it flourish". We saw this play out in the past[1], and we see this play out today[2][3][4]. If you think that this is an absurd analogy, then you finally get the point: drawing causal relationships between abstract economic systems (whose sole purpose is to solve the resource constraint problem) and specific institutions (like slavery) that have existed for thousands of years under the backdrop of many different economic systems, is an absurd endeavor.
> Capitalism is just [...] armies, and mercenaries.
That was not borderline word salad. But you seem to finally have recognized that there's an incentive structure to Capitalism that can and does create negative results.
> It's an observation that has few useful implications in our modern world today
A few of the points I listed are still alive and well today.
> You could even go so far as to argue that because socialist economies [...] voluntarily refuse it.
Not sure what the point of going into a what about discussion about the former Stalinist regimes? Anyway, those regimes were/are in practice state-Capitalist and the same incentives apply, along with the ones that comes with authoritarianism.
> That was not borderline word salad. But you seem to finally have recognized that there's an incentive structure to Capitalism that can and does create negative results.
THAT was how you comprehended that statement? In the hypothetical I posited, capitalism didn't create the negative results, they just exacerbated them because capitalism is able to take an existing system and form supply chains around them that maximize output while minimizing input. If murder is illegal, and capitalism creates a thriving industry around it, you clearly have a problem, but the root cause of that problem isn't capitalism, it's that murder is legal.
To contend that capitalism is the root cause is the epitome of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Property rights are only one of several central characteristics of capitalism.
Central characteristics of capitalism include private property and the recognition of property rights, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets.
Chattel slavery is at odds with voluntary exchange.
To simplistically suggest that private property rights necessarily extends to ownership of people against their will is like suggesting that purely state owned means of production (socialism) necessarily extends to ownership of people against their will by the government.
Since you seem to be unwilling to follow a thread, let me guide you where I assumed we currently are:
1. You seem to recognize that there are incentives: "which may include perpetuating slavery"
2. I wrote that you seem to do exactly that, that they can "create negative results".
3. You took issue to my use of "create", you only think Capitalism exacerbates negative results because it's just so brilliant that it can't help itself.
4. I argue that in fact, capitalism does not only exacerbates, but also creates and enables the incentives because of the institution and enforcement of private property that comes along with Capitalism. Without private property the incentives that create the negative results would not exist.
5. You nicely list some other characteristics of Capitalism and then change the subject to chattel slavery and "voluntary" exchange again. You also make up some argument that I've apparently suggested (which is false): "private property rights necessarily extends to ownership of people".
The supposed “wealth” of the anti-bellum South is based on a rhetorical fallacy: that by categorizing human beings as “property” you could treat their long term earning power as an asset. But that’s now how economies work. We can label things whatever we want, but they are what they are. (For example, the entity that ultimately bears the economic burden of a tax in practice doesn’t depend on who the law nominally assigns to pay the tax.) Put differently, if you draw a box around the economy, you can’t increase the productive output of that box by imposing slavery. It might change the distribution of wealth within the box, it not for the economy as a whole. Economic theory says the productive capacity of the box will be maximized when labor is not coerced.
> On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary
That depends on whether by “capitalism” you mean “the real-world economic system which emerged through the relentless pursuit of class advantage by the mercantile class as they displaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class and which was named ‘capitalism’ by it's critics” or “the aspirational ideal that defenders of that real world system rationalized it as striving imperfectly toward to distract from the characteristics of the real world system itself in a perpetual game of ‘No True Scotsman’”.
For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that.
For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.
> For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that.
Nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They also happen to have robust safety nets where the exact sort of economic coercion is difficult to carry out. To argue that slavery is somehow inextricably linked to the dominant economic system of these countries is plainly absurd, in the same way that it's plainly absurd to claim that slavery is inextricably linked to communism/Marxism just by virtue of the practical manifestation of it we've seen in the 20th century, and not the theoretical ideal as posed by Marx. The whole point here is that slavery is orthogonal to the economic system, not an underlying prerequisite for it.
> in a perpetual game of "No True Scotsman"
> For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.
You either need to compare the platonic ideal of communism to the platonic ideal of capitalism, or stick with comparing the empirical outcomes of capitalism as it has been tried all over the developed world today with communism as it has been tried in the real world. You appear to be trying to compare the platonic ideal of communism with the empirical manifestation of capitalism, and then balk when I counter with my own platonic ideal. Compare apples to apples.
This sounds a lot scarier when you don't realize that, among the same set, there is all but ubiquitous contempt for "tankies", i.e. the very same Stalinist-style sort of thing you're worried about. Newsmax won't tell you that, because why would they? Keeping you frightened keeps you doomscrolling their ads.
I know about the tankie hate because I know a bunch of the people you're scared of. They're not going to burn your house down or kill you. But they do understand that they're getting a raw deal, and they have a pretty good idea of why and from whom, and they're not willing to take it lying down. Good for them, in my opinion, and seeing as they are getting a raw deal - worse than my own generation did, which is saying a lot - it's with them that my sympathies lie.
Especially in a time when the US federal government is violating its own laws at will, up to and including illegal arrests carried out Gestapo-style with no probable cause and no due process - if you can't tell the difference between a generation of young people defending their interests and the potential collapse of civilization, you really do need to read less Newsmax, because it's making you paranoid.
Mostly the kids are just looking to roll back as much as they can of Reaganism, and they're quite right to want to do so. This forty-year experiment with totally unchecked capitalism has gone on too long. It's past time to curtail and start repairing the damage.
> slavery was capitalist
Well, what else would you call it? Considered in purely economic and thus amoral terms, a chattel slave literally is capital, in the same sense that a mule or, later, a tractor, would be. That's quite literally what I was taught as a child in public grade school, growing up in Mississippi thirty years ago, and if you want to argue that the rural Mississippi school boards of the 1980s had been subverted by communists, that's fine, but you need to know up front that if you do I'm going to start calling you Joe McCarthy and I'm just never going to stop.
In any case, I have a very hard time conceiving of a world in which "slavery is capitalist" is in any way a controversial thought. Are you perhaps confusing it with "capitalism is slavery"? Because you're citing the former, but it's the latter you seem to be arguing against, in the sense that you can be said to be making any argument here at all.
You're right that ranting, on HN and elsewhere, rarely fixes anything. Have you thought about why you're impelled to do so anyway, and whether the impetus is a wholly rational one?
> McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism. Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn't know their names.
(Note that this was written by a prominent left leaning journalist based on declassified intelligence information.)
It's hardly Marxist to note that slavery and capitalism are compatible, although he may have been the first to explicitly do so. Capitalism isn't special in that regard; slavery can exist, and in various forms has existed, under every economic system known to man. Chattel slavery appears to work especially well with capitalism, as indeed has been amply demonstrated in US history, so that was what I talked about.
Granted, any such discussion omits the moral enormity inherent in any form of slavery. Economic discussions are like that. I'll grant you that the moral and economic dimensions of the slavery-and-capitalism question tend not to be too clearly separated in the public discourse of the moment, but that neither surprises nor concerns me. As I mentioned earlier, what you misidentify as "resurgent Marxism" is in fact a reaction to the totally untrammeled capitalism I called by the name "Reaganism". Considering the myriad and grievous harms that system has produced in four short decades, and considering also that that system's own proponents happily describe it just as "capitalism" without the courtesy of such qualifiers as I use, whatever misidentification or misblame it may receive seems to me well earned. Besides, it's not as if counting slavery among the crimes of Reaganism is in any way erroneous. Have you seen the US prison system?
To the rest, it should be hardly a surprise to anyone that there were Soviet agents in the US government at any point from about the early 1930s through the late 80s. Just like there were US agents in the Soviet government. And Chinese agents in both, and vice versa, and so on. The existence of espionage, and the existence of a vast Red conspiracy of subversion on a national and generational scale, are in no way the same thing, and to argue from
one to the other requires a good deal more substantiation than either you or Tailgunner Joe appear inclined or indeed able to provide.
Granted, one can sometimes use the former to frighten uninformed people into believing in the latter, despite a total inability to demonstrate that the latter actually exists. You seem to want to talk about gaslighting. Has it occurred to you that, unlike merely having people argue that you're wrong about something, this sort of specious, fear-based deception may in fact qualify as such?
Btw, I just spent a little while poking around Newsmax, something I hadn't previously done since the Bush administration. I don't know whether you really do read a lot of that stuff, but if you do, maybe seriously consider cutting back, and replacing at least some of it with something from outside the filter bubble it appears strongly designed to create and enforce. Or, I don't know, use an ad blocker at least? If you're going to let that stuff monopolize your brain and your political philosophy, I'd at least like to think you're doing it for its own sake, rather than so that somebody can make money off of you.
Multiple time you omitted or avoided to respond to the obvious fact that what you call "Marxist" (which you use to evoke a negative red-scare emotion) is in fact Democratic Socialism - the attempt to extend democracy - not a Stalinist dictatorship.
The issue is that extended democracy implies an extension to the economic sphere, and thus an overhaul of private property relations. This is the actual threat that is attacked by capitalists, and the Stalinist regime is used to paint all threats to these undemocratic institutions in a totalitarian light.
I'm using Marxism in exactly the same sense you are: people advocating for "an overhaul of private property relations." That is, as a I understand it, what "democratic socialism" really means. I don't use the term "democratic socialism" because its proponents in America have co-opted that term to mean Nordic-style "capitalism with a robust welfare state" (which I think would be fine). As far as I can tell, though, those economies do not embody the "overhaul of private property relations" you're talking about. After all, Article 73 of the Danish Constitution declares: "The right of property shall be inviolable." (Heritage Foundation ranks Denmark one of the 10 freest economies in the world, ahead of the U.S.) The concept is likewise enshrined in Article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The "overhaul" you're talking about is in and of itself a totalitarian violation of human rights.
I think your reply proves my point that it's not really about democracy at all. It's just about a fervent defense of the current undemocratic and unjust private property relations.
What do you expect to find in constitutions written by free market economies?
> The concept is likewise enshrined in Article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
False, it was left intentionally vague to not explicitly endorse private property in the capitalist sense.
> The "overhaul" you're talking about is in and of itself a totalitarian violation of human rights.
That's also on point for Propertarianism. Where private property has been sacralized and to argue against it is against the law of nature, even if it's wrong and unjust. "The King declared that absolute monarchy is a divine right and any resistance is thus blasphemy and shall be dealt with accordingly".
> I think your reply proves my point that it's not really about democracy at all.
I never said it was about democracy!
> It's just about a fervent defense of the current undemocratic and unjust private property relations.
I would characterize it as a fervent defense of British constitutionalism, tracing back to the Magna Carta, but yes, the current system of property relations is a part of that.
But it seems like we're not in any disagreement about my original post: I expressed worry that Marxist ideas were resurgent. We seem to be on the same page about what I mean by "Marxism." And you don't appear to disagree that those ideas are resurgent--and therefore my originally stated worry was not baseless after all.
Well, I certainly hope they are, but I doubt that they are as institutionalized as you seem to suggest.
I also think that using "Marxism" for a democratic movement and ideas is done to intentionally associate them with the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century.
reality is what a person experiences, not what they read in the news. the nano second, global reach of news has led to a warped reality that is heavily tilted towards doom. something bad that happened half way across the planet is instantly served up on a global scale. the scope of the news is no longer human scale, thus our inability to ever find balance in our perception of reality. put more influence in the immediate reality you personally experience and the balance will return. i haven’t looked at the news in two months and now get my news by asking friends and family whats going on. if something interests me, i will actively seek out more info on the subject/event. good luck.
True, but in moderation. Looking at a homepage twice a day or reading a newsletter and responding accordingly is a very different habit than scrolling an infinite, constantly updated feed.
The media have been particularly bad at explaining that our best knowledge changes with time, as we figure out any test things, and governments even more so.
Our understanding of the way the virus is transmitted changed quite a lot in 6 months. At some point we thought it was mostly spread by direct contact; then by droplets; now we believe it is airborne, to a certain extent. Governments also had the incentive to limit use of PPE to critical workers because of the short supply. It was also obvious that several governments were clueless. So yes, you were told not to wear a mask, whilst at the same time you were provided with facts that contradicted it. This was obvious if you were following the news, particularly the evolution of the then-epidemic in China, Taiwan and South Korea.
Well, for that you need to follow real news, not Fox, the Mail, or disinformation campaigns spread by social media. You also need a grip on how science works, because journalists won’t explain, and often don’t seem to understand.
Not really. Almost all of the research that supports masking was done years ago. I spent March getting shouted down in various places because I read that research and concluded that people should be wearing masks. It took a machine learning researcher of all people to bring people around to what was obvious to anyone who spent a few hours reading scientific research.
The average reporter for a newspaper simply doesn't have the time to actually understand a topic. They talk to a few people, and with the current political environment, everything they hear is agenda driven.
Spend your information gathering time in a more productive way. If you really feel you need to be up to date, read the week in review section of one of the national newspapers.
It's not like the "news" is the source of truth etched in stone, is it?
I imagine most people were reading and probably understanding the "news" in March.
That's when Dr. Fauci, the U.S. Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all made "news" by stating there was no reason people in the U.S. needed to wear a mask. Politicians making the "news" by eating in Chinese restaurants. I recall the "news" taking time to chastise the hoi polloi who chose to ignore the "news" and wore masks anyway. I think the general mantra was something on the order of "masks only help frontline professionals, blah blah blah... you uniformed morons". I'm sure it's healthy to have a healthy skepticism of the "news".
Why take a cellphone into the bedroom when you're trying to sleep? Just don't do it if you are weak to the temptation of doing it if you do take it into your bedroom.
I put mine on quiet (basic Android feature) during sleep time, and its my alarm in the morning. It also gets charged overnight, and in case of emergency I can call emergency services. Its a no-brainer to take my smartphone with me to bed.
This is a big one for me. Not so much the bringing the phone into the room to scroll through before bed, but working from home physically leaving it in another room so I can't instinctively reach for it and be distracted by it.
From my own personal experience: back in March, when COVID started getting out of control, I found myself desperately trying to get access to more and better information from experts in the field. I turned to twitter, to try to get more and better information on the subject. This inevitably turned into 'doomscrolling'.
I felt that there was a lot of nuanced scientific opinions that reporters were doing a poor job of communicating. I get that often deeply technical topics are complicated, but I think more than anything else COVID has helped how unprepared media has been in communicating these complex topics.
And it's not just COVID; it's been a range of subjects such as law (Trump's immigration ban) and elections (in particular the 2020 Democratic primary and all the media coverage over Bloomberg's supposed supremacy in the race). I think overall journalists are well intentioned and can be trusted in most situations, but it's clear to me that there are systemic failures in communicating complex subjects.
I have found it useful to RTFAs on Twitter/Facebook, not just read the clickbait, anxiety inducing headlines.
Not always, but many stories have some nuance that’s missing in social media outrage and replies.
Like I said, not always, but it does help anxiety to get all the facts. Especially when I ruminate on something after seeing just the headline or the replies.
Social media is addictive by design and it's easy to slip into these bad habits. Gloomy, sensational news/opinions is good for "engagement" metrics and that's what people inevitability find themselves drowning in if they don't create clear boundaries around usage.
At times, I've become so miserable from it that I've had to jump into a cold shower to snap out of the doom and gloom. Thankfully, the cold shower usually works and provides incentive not to fall into the habit again.
> You see that coronavirus infections are up. Maybe your kids can't go back to school. The economy is cratering.
Anxiety is a normal response to these external pressures. And anxiety isn't going to go away until we address these pressures.
I'll throw in some other amxiety-inducing but solvable external pressures: homelessness, affording rent or health insurance, being forced to choose between going to work and getting coronavirus vs getting fired, precariousness, and so on.
Maybe people should utilize social media for things they enjoy instead of solely sources of news. Of course people you follow will end up posting news anyway but it won’t be solely stream of ‘doom and gloom’.
On the second thought, it seems like that's a very good question, for these two processes are maybe in a positive feedback loop. This year we pay more attention to news, and this makes us both more susceptible and more exposed to things like "the moment to act is now".
Sure, but sometimes the history involves a superpower teetering on the brink of fascist dictatorship, or a once-in-a-century pandemic wreaking havoc around the world. Events that will define the space of possibilities for decades to come.
At those times it’s a bit more important to stay at least partially informed than when the biggest crisis is a new highway project going over budget or a political leader’s extramarital affairs.
Agreed but as a slight tangent history is not about just recording the major events but the little ones too. Who knows what will be important in the future. Maybe that little startup that just got ignored on demo day is gonna change the world as we know it.
I agree, stay informed. But really.... How many times a day do you need to be updated on the recent developments and the current status?
In the past people would get their news once a day in the paper and then later at certain times on the radio and early TV. Is that enough to stay informed?
What has happened in the last 12 hours that I must know now instead of just catching a summary tomorrow morning?
In a nutshell, the article says that reading a lot of scary news causes anxiety, and if you listen to your therapist and steeply limit that reading and spend your time eating ice cream and watching cat videos instead, you can reduce that anxiety.
Sometimes anxiety (fear, rage) is well justified. Sometimes large-scale threats are real.
It does and it's important and I'm not suggesting people purposely ignore it, I just don't know how you get to the point where it's saturated your social feeds so much that you get this kind of phenomenon. I get a lot of news or people posting political commentary, which I enjoy seeing, but it's also mixed in with a lot of music or design or game dev stuff or whatever.
Like another comment here mentioned, the diversity of content (and maybe slightly less political news) is why people like HN, so maybe I've just been lucky to be able to 'curate' my Twitter similarly.
I had to uninstall twitter as it was just too frustrating and utterly useless for conversation, but that's how I make Reddit work for me - I joined a bunch of subreddits I was interested in and dropped the rest. If I want to, I can browse /r/popular or /r/all, but otherwise I'm just looking at what I want.
I deleted my Twitter a few months ago and my life is better for it. The need to be “in the know” was powerful, but I realized that I was consuming vast amounts of shallow information that resulted in shallow, uninformed opinions. I’ve been reading a lot more long-form articles and books; I’ve finished reading three books in the last month or so. When my Twitter habit was strong I would often start a book and give up 30-50 pages in, never to return.
I believe deleting Twitter also helped my mood. I am feeling more upbeat than ever. While circumstantial, I do attribute some of this change to no longer being bombarded by the negativity and one-shot-kill Tweets that are prolific on the platform.
This is basically why I deleted my Facebook account, which was the one social network that I was really ever on. I was checking it non stop, but there wad never anything good. It was a huge time suck.
I'd read news of how Facebook keeps people addicted or how they try out psychological experiments on its users which left me uneasy. Finally, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and revealed that Facebook sells access to your personal messages, thst was the final straw. The biggest problem with deleting your account is that your contacts assume that you just deleted them and think that you're mad at them or something. It can have a real world impact. But I've been way happier texting friends and family and talking with them directly. It's been so much healthier than leaving "likes" on wall posts. I'm never returning to social media.
> The biggest problem with deleting your account is that your contacts assume that you just deleted them and think that you're mad at them or something. It can have a real world impact.
That's one reason I deleted my Facebook 5 years ago. I unfriended a casual acquaintance (who continually posted political rants), and they confronted me in person at a nightclub, demanding to know why. That just isn't healthy behaviour, and I don't need to be around people like that or on a network that encourages it.
I personally kept my facebook account. I check it maybe once a month. When I do look I find I have a very low tolerance for the crap on there (maybe 10 mins). They have a nice 'timeout' feature where you can basically shadowban people from your feed. I have been having to use this on some of my family and friends. My count on there is really low. If you are friends with me on facebook you are friends in real life. But I want to ask them why they went on a six post rant of something political and what would make them think their 700+ 'friends' are interested? Facebook is however 100% banned in js/cookies/html/webbugs using ublock and no-script. They do not get to follow me around. In exchange I sometimes look at their adverts when I am on their site.
Facebook did not make our timelines toxic. Our 'friends' did.
The feeling of reading through well-written long-form articles is very satisfying. Do any HN’ers have recommendations for websites with well-written long-form articles?
I couldn't get past two headlines before hitting the X in the forner
With the first thing you see being a request to pay (buy in print!!) and the second being a headline like "feminism needs capitalism like a fish needs a bicycle", well, I can't take it too seriously or "different".
Given that most newspapers have a pay wall, the half-screen pay-fence doesn't seem so egregious to me.
Regarding the article title, I'm not sure what was the problem. The Jacobin is a leftist newspaper, so critiques of capitalism are to be expected. If you dislike the style of the title, I can appreciate that, everyone has their own tastes. But there is also a quick summary of the thesis of the article, in case the title was too unclear:
> The inclusion of more women at the top of oppressive power structures shouldn’t be confused with women’s liberation. We need a radical, socialist feminism, not a repackaged version of Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate-friendly "lean-in" brand.
Is it still trying to bring back phrenology and "race science"? That's the short list. Quillette had a couple of okay articles, but I didn't want to wade through all the nonsense to find more.
The Notre Dame Review of Philosophy provides book reviews of contemporary philosophy books, in ways which are good pointers to knowing if you want to pick up a book yourself. I'd also recommend The New Left Review, though it's subscription-based for most articles (though comparatively cheap for a subscription).
> The need to be “in the know” was powerful, but I realized that I was consuming vast amounts of shallow information that resulted in shallow, uninformed opinions.
I'd like to applaud you for admitting this to yourself. I feel like a vital part of successfully navigating the internet age is to realize this very fact.
This is a good way to look at it. I’ve given up Twitter and much shortform news for mental health, and haven’t had a good response to others saying it’s my “duty” as a citizen to stay informed.
You can stay just as informed without giving in to doombait articles. You are just as valuable in the public sphere if you don’t succumb to attaching yourself to the firehose of daily information and tweets.
Another way to view it is that being “informed” isn’t some singular state you can achieve. People who read every article churned out by a news site daily are no more “informed” than people who just read the laws as they are voted on by the government.
The latter will not seem “informed” because they won’t know about some controversial statement that set the Internet on fire, but they will certainly be more informed about the consequential actions being taken by the government.
TLDR - being “informed” has no relationship to following what currently classifies a news - at least from an “informed citizen” perspective.
The problem I've been facing recently is that long form also turns out to be a waste of time after you go through the most informational/influential pieces.
Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them.
For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.
That applies even to some of the stuff recommended directly here on HN. I would not even dive into aggregators recommended here.
> For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.
actual new things are by definition rare. each thing can only be done once for all of humanity. after that, its an iterative process with the occasional leap forward.
if you're thinking about technical or even worse self-help books: yes - there are very few that actually bring anything worthwhile to the table. thats simply because it becomes common knowledge if its correct to a degree where it has a significant effect.
if you're however thinking of story-books than ... you're just reading similar things.
there is a lot of written stories around - they admittedly usually have things like `conversation` in common, but how else would you write a book? by leaving everything blank?
The incentives on the web are skewed, and I believe the same is true for print. Nobody will be happy to pay the same price for a 50 page book as they would for a 200 page book, even if the information is the same, so if you have a 50 page book, you have every reason in the world to add fluff and stretch it to 200 pages.
For many articles on the web I believe it's an issue because of Google. Google does punish short pieces, so if you want to write about how to do X with Y, you need to start of with a history of Y, lay out a couple of use cases of X and then explain why doing X with Y is difficult, to finally explain how to do it.
Every time I come across a piece in that style I want to smash a screen. It could be a one-paragraph solution, but I have to scroll past three images and five paragraphs of worthless blather that assumes I'm a moron.
Unix man pages are amazing. Every technical help resource should be like that.
I think the long form is really good actually, but it needs to be done by people who wrote it out of love. HN will sometimes lead you down that path, like that story about the diver who survived for many minutes on the floor of the North Sea without oxygen after his umbilical cord was severed. Mostly though, almost everything linked to by HN didn’t really need to be written and was likely written for clicks.
HN is still valuable for me because it sometimes leads to me discovering new frameworks I can actually use that I wouldn’t hear about anywhere else because people in my part of the world use JAVA, PHP or C#. But HN is mainly a social media and all the attention seeking that comes with that.
I came to the same realization not so long ago. Most of the content being produced is pretty much deja vu. That lead me into questioning what creativity is but that I could not find anything interesting to read about the topic. So if anyone has any pointer please share.
It is exacerbated by the fact that there are so many ranking on the internet. I most often start by the top 10 and then the rest seems boring in comparison.
Platforms don't help either. There are hundreds of thousands of creators on Youtube and Instagram and they somehow manage to all produce the same thing...
As a simultaneous question and example, Kipling is often given as an example of a British Empire writer with condescending attitudes to the very people he wrote about.
The names of Indian authors never reached me because my parents thought the Empire was unadulterated good, and they thought that because my grandparents were born near the peak of the Empire — one of my grandmothers was, for a period in her infancy, living in a military base in the British Raj.
They whose names I do not know could very plausibly be Kipling’s equal or better. I know from various examples that various cliques will have hidden the names of good authors from me.
That leads me to the question: can anyone here recommend a good Indian author from the same era as Kipling? (Yes I know Kipling was born in India).
> That leads me to the question: can anyone here recommend a good Indian author from the same era as Kipling? (Yes I know Kipling was born in India).
While not a direct answer to your question, I think The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha is relevant in the sense that it addresses why your question is difficult (perhaps impossible) to answer.
I suppose rather than asking for a “good” author (subjective, for example I’ve met an Oxbridge English Literature graduate who thought Shakespeare was overrated), I should have asked for a “famous” author from the same era.
The sort of author whose works a current-day Indian politician would have on their shelves, or perhaps quote from, to signal how cultured they are — in the same sort of way UK PM Johnson tried to show how cultured he was by quoting Kipling.
This is very true to me. That’s why I believe it’s important to know when to skim or even call it quits on an article; particularly when the information on the event is limited and every platform seems to cover it with the same details and slightly different fashion. That way you don’t waste time.
I'm struggling to understand your comment about books. There are many thousands of very high-quality books written about lots of different subjects. Is it possible your book recommendations are all too similar, like only reading novels written in the past ten years or something?
There are lots, and lots, and lots of books. With those that have been filtered by time and decades to centuries of fans and specialists, if you can’t get something out of them usually that’s your fault—which is fine and normal, since for most people getting acquainted enough with literature from a different place or era to enjoy it takes some deliberate effort, just like learning to appreciate new genres of music, or film of a style you didn’t grow up with, or a genre of video game that’s not immediately rewarding. And that’s just fiction!
Maybe try poetry? Though, same applies. Anything that’s not popular, recent fiction aimed at a grade 8 reading level is going to take some effort and practice to learn to appreciate and fully understand. Literacy is a very wide spectrum.
[edit] incidentally, for whatever reason, I find drawing book recommendations from strangers online nearly useless. This goes double for genre fic and non-fic. For other media it works fine. Dunno why but I think part of it may be that people read more differently, and for more reasons, than they watch movies or listen to music play games. I also find it’s easier in other media to quickly spot people with tastes that are very contrary to mine, and so ignore them.
One thing that seems to help is that more people are able to say “this is trash, but it’s my kind of trash, but hey, here’s this other thing like it that’s actually good” with film than with books. Something about books seems to make people use a much broader and less-differentiated or less-well-tuned definition of “good” and then just apply that same label to everything they read and don’t hate.
> For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.
I assume you’re referring to fiction ... there’s actually a whole field of study around this rooted in psychology, they’re called Jungian Archetypes. There’s a really fantastic book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I’m not sure what the current state of study is, its been a few years since I personally studied the concepts. It might be a nice change from the mundanity you seem to be describing
Agreed about shallow articles. On that note, for someone seeking to browse current topics but with good, quality information sources - what news/etc sites do you enjoy?
Eg, i actually like "current events", especially news. I want to know what my political actors are doing, good or bad - but only concrete information. Especially with the current administration. Rumors / weak leaks are wasted cycles in my brain.
I find that a lot of people in the software field confuse maximizing information density with finding valuable learning materials.
Almost all books have relatively low information density. You can condense "How to Win Friends and Influence People" down to a page of chapter headings, for example, or a history book into a 2-3 page timeline. The point of all of the anecdotes and details isn't to convey more information, it's to force the reader to slow down to think about the topic and provide more memory hooks to help with recall later.
Whenever you read a book, if you think "that was obvious, I knew that already," observe if you are actually acting on that knowledge the way you want to. After reading the book, do you act on that knowledge you already knew more easily?
Even books that are outright bad can be useful if they force you to think more about a topic and re-evaluate your own opinions. For example, I try to read 1-2 general software books a year. Some of them are terrible, most of them tell me things I already learned, but the spaced repetition makes me re-evaluate my own recent choices to see if there are any areas where I have been getting lazy and cutting corners I shouldn't.
It can be sane. Just be very selective who you allow. I maybe follow a hundred people or so, but my block list is probably ten times as long. Even blocking anybody with "pronouns" in their Bio already helps a lot.
No, blocking anybody with pronouns in their bio will eliminate a lot of progressive and most LGBTQ voices. It’s not a personal attack, it’s an observation of how you are scoping your feed.
It will mostly block a lot of the neo-left, people who are "identity" focused and as racist as people on the far right. I don't want to have anything to do with them. I don't give a f about identity, I care about merit.
My opinion of Twitter is ambivalent. It is actually the only mainstream social platform I use. And I use it with a fake account where I change name and photo every couple of weeks.
Having said that it seems to me that Twitter - opposed to FB and YT - comes with the advantage that you can quite easily specify what you want to see on your wall. I have a lot of investigative journalism outlets on my Follow list and special interest groups. So it seems to offer some value.
Then again it is indeed inviting to endlessly scroll in boredom hoping to find something that triggers some Dopamine.
Twitter has been orders of magnitude more harmful to society than any *chan and Twitter bluechecks should be thought of and treated like Twitter bluechecks think of and treat chan users. All those articles about how scary chans and the ~~~dark web~~~ are and how they corrupt people's brains -- in a sane world they would be about twitter.
I had a similar realization recently. When you truly think about it, the vast majority of news you read/hear isn't even remotely actionable information for the average person.
At best, it'll be something interesting and feeds into our natural curiosity. Other than that, this idea that it's our responsibility as citizens to stay constantly informed on what's happening in the world is nonsense.
Ask yourself, what was the last time you read something in the news that contained information you could actually act on in a meaningful way? Our biggest opportunity to act on information as regular citizens generally comes with elections, at which point you can just read up on the candidates views/proposals before voting.
We really don't need to be obsessively keeping up with the news, the world will keep moving whether or not we know about it.
> Ask yourself, what was the last time you read something in the news that contained information you could actually act on in a meaningful way?
The what in question would be the news item I had read. The meaningful action was the public protest I chose to join, or the campaign donations I decided to make, or the phone calls to my elected representatives. Elections aren't the only way citizens can (or should) interact with their government.
Mastodon is like that but with far less noise per signal. You have insightful toots and most of the time, great tips and URLs. Also, it moves a far slower pace, you can just check once or twice a day and be done.
Doomscrolling at least is passive. The active version I think would be “Doomsaying”, which I have become addicted to I feel.
Going through my comment history, I often find it littered with comments that give a sense of hopelessness and inevitable misery. Highly cynical, sometimes toxic, wouldn’t feel out of place among the lamentations of the undying. Not sure how I got this way, but probably came after a long history of doomscrolling.
While I wish I have more will power to actually stay away from my phone, especially at bedtime, the second best solution I found useful is to set timers for addictive apps. If I use up the allotted time for an app, it will be disabled for the rest of the day. Also there is Focus mode on Android that disables distracting apps while working.
This is the reason why I added a sentiment filter to the rss reader I built. Now I can put together a few rss feeds in a folder and filter out bad news, needs some more work but it gives good results already. (Https://aktu.io)
I need Twitter for support for my product, but I don't really use it that often. So a while ago I set it up to be basically write-only: I use Zapier to send me emails for @mentions and relevant search terms, and I reply to those from a TweetBot instance which only has columns for mentions and the same search terms. So I can reply if something needs replying to and send product updates, but otherwise I don't see Twitter at all. It's been a huge time saver and mental health improvement.
I'm curious if there's any existing effort to provide media on smartphones without scrolling. Not just “non-infinite scroll”, actually no scroll. Like, you have a page of text and to get to the next you swipe to flip, or tap a region (like on ereaders).
I think that would be an excellent addition to the iOS Safari reader mode, where your intent is already to change the behaviour and look of the web page. That reader mode has saved me from a really badly formatted web page many times.
One thing I found useful was installing Sudoku on my phone. If I feel the urge for a dopamine hit from the internet I play a have of Sudoku instead. It gives me a hit but without the anxiety and I find the focused thinking it causes very helpful if I'm procrastinating.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadI think a lot of this has to do with the West not really doing anything to address death. It’s out of sight and out of mind, so when it’s knocking at our door we are feeble minded and scared because we are ignorant of the cycle of life and death. Everyone you know will die, but confronting this fact head on breeds a very existentialist kind of anxiety that we’ve failed to address in our societies.
This is the underpinning of doomer type behaviour. Eastern philosophy tends to have meditations where people remind themselves every day that today might be their last. You might think this sort of thinking breeds depression, mental illness, etc, but it works out for them very well.
The West could learn a lot from this, but alas that’s a pipe dream.
Here's a very contemporary take on it that I came across recently, blending the eremitic nature of the Covid lockdown and the cause of praying for those who have died of it: http://www.stbedeproductions.com/office-of-the-dead-revisite...
You might also enjoy The Slavery of Death by Richard Beck, who blends his training in clinical psychology with his religious background to argue basically what you're arguing - that we try very hard to pretend death doesn't exist and that it works poorly - and from there argues that our fear of death should be understood as the primary problem of humans from a theological perspective, and that sin is a result of that fear, not a root cause. (He does draw on Eastern Orthodox thought to make that point, but I think that's not as far east as you mean by "Eastern," if I understand you right.)
Any solutions to find sleep?
To get yourself into the habit, don't read anything on your "to read someday list of important books." Just pick the most notorious page turner you can think of.
Blood Meridian has dark moments in the narrative sure, but it’s a beautifully written book and very easy spaghetti western adventure to get lost in before bed. It’s not like you’re dozing off reading The Necronomicon, c’mon.
I think everyone should read it, but I can also appreciate an "easy there, Satan"-type joke about it!
Last one I read was Suttree while over in the US camping in the South-East.
Although with a little more thought, 1Q84 might be more upsetting now than it was last year.
This probably isn’t entirely the point you were trying to make with that sentence, but I feel like reading a book about an issue instead of trying to inform yourself through doomscrolling social media will actually do more to being an informed and empowered person.
I think this is an underrated comment. Nothing wrong with staying informed to an extent but when it becomes all consuming (esp through social media and 24/7 news), it is essentially taking on the world day in, day out. That's a large burden to absorb for any individual and the loss of control one feels breeds anxiety.
No Dan Carlin, though. That man's voice is caffeine.
I'll log in at a conference, otherwise keeping it off your phone helps.
Also as others have said keep your phone away from your bed, preferably in another room.
Also, depending on the person, it heavily depends on what you are reading. With Twitter you are jumping from topic to topic. That's something completely different than reading a book.
Naturally, I ignore that advice and still use my phone in bed. But switching from Twitter to doing other stuff helped significantly, because I can monitor myself and put the phone down when I get calm enough and sleepy enough to sleep. Twitter was preventing me from getting calm/sleepy due to producing anxiety. I do still read Discord, which sometimes can have the Twitter problem depending on what people are talking about, but it helps me keep from feeling completely socially disconnected due to using Twitter less.
but to their credit, they did air a story recently featuring maria hinojosa, founder/host of latino usa and the first latina host at npr, that was not especially kind to npr itself (spoiler: she left and was more successful as a result).
NPR is in the same class as the rest of the mainstream media who don't bother to vet stories they lather with political bias.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbEIlsUUcAACYht?format=jpg&name=...
[2] https://www.wave3.com/2020/06/18/protesters-arrested-followi...
I think your comment about mainstream media is mostly unfair, as the same accusations can be made against most non-mainstream media. I'd also suggest that NPR are one of the better mainstream media orgs, but that's just my opinion. The parent poster made one case for why - they are willing to host their own critics. Not too many news orgs are willing to do that.
Sadly, I think that the expectation that news is "free" has driven far more of this (across the board). It's particularly evident in previously "staid but solid" news orgs as they cut costs to survive. I don't know if there's a practical solution at the news-production end. At the news-consumption end, I guess the "grain of salt" is needed more than ever. But I would hesitate to read malice (i.e. an explicit intention to misrepresent) into most news orgs (for most of their news. Clearly owners have interests that may become apparent with the way they cover some news). The intersection of cost-cutting, and "knowing" and playing to your audience leads to lots of this sort of thing.
I don't know you personally, but if you're like 99% of left-leaning urban professionals, you're not aware of those instances, because you're only exposed to a portion of what's happening. I'd suggest following a broad spectrum of people on social media from the left, center, and right. You'll be surprised what the mainstream left media leaves out.
Right-wing media does the same thing, by the way. You really have to watch both to give anything resembling reality. It's a big problem, and it's getting worse.
Even (decidedly left-wing) Brian Stelter featured this problem on this week's Reliable Sources on CNN. For example, mainstream media is happy to cover what they view as the malfeasance of the federal law enforcement officers in Portland, but they fail to show the acts of the rioters that played a role in their deployment (burning buildings, destruction of property, menacing cars, etc). To be clear, I personally think their deployment was probably unwise, and that politics played a large role. However, Portland's mayor has consistently refused to crack down on whatever label you want to put on the violent protesters wearing black. That adds significant complexity to the situation.
NPR was the most neutral of any major news organization up until the past 2-3 years, when they've undergone major changes and now put out mostly ideologically-driven pieces like other outlets on the left.
I do give credit to many local media outlets, who are often the only ones asking the hard questions, like this local outlet in Portland:
https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1218
https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1022
it's been more like 5 years, at least since the snafu of the last presidential election. but even as i criticize npr, i expect them to change for the better, being "public" and certain shows/hosts providing valuable news without spin (at least not much intolerable spin).
certain hosts/shows on the other hand are basically unlistenable, like michael barbaro on nyt's the daily, with all of its melodramatic, self-righteous cynicism designed for the superiority-complex set. it's disgusting pandering.
In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes to make it better.
Is instituting/increasing minimum wage: providing a livable income for those at the bottom? or denying jobs to those at the bottom (being unable to produce >= $MINWAGE)? Good/bad of the topic seems obvious, yet differing views are widely held.
One can be understood through the lense of conflict and mistake theory. The other requires a conspiracy.
Besides, "I would rather accept the risk of virus X than the inconvenience of wearing a mask," is a perfectly legitimate position for many viruses, and deciding which ones it applies to is the exact same kind of utility balance and value debate as any other policy choice.
If I vote for the mayoral candidate who promises to poison the reservoir, why should that suddenly be a completely morality-free decision on my part? Just because a lot of people made the same decision I did?
The latter example especially takes place in local elections regarding things like zoning and local ordinances and work contracts.
This should hopefully be balanced out by the fact that everyone gets a vote.
In a country so large and with so much diversity (!), no region should be able to absolutely dominate another simply by having a larger population.
In any case there hasn't been any studies related to efficacy of wearing a mask in public to reduce the risk of infection, so not wearing a mask is not as crazy as some people make it out to be.
This all said if I would use public transport I would be wearing a mask (just not a cloth mask or a surgical mask) or if I visited other places which were packed with people, but best solution is to just not go to places which have a lot of people in them.
I see so many trans men or women that don't pass (as their gender identity) because parents or healthcare doctors kept them from transitioning; before puberty disfigured their body and prevented any chance of them passing as their gender identity.
The foregoing situation happened more in the past. Especially depending on where they lived and how the healthcare laws allow doctors to deny patients treatment because of religious reasons. I think nowadays that's going away with self consent treatment.
Anyway my point is these people are suicidal because they don't pass with constant social reminders everyday while trying to function through normal everyday tasks that require interacting with strangers. They likely will never pass to strangers and unless they get the finances to attempt aesthetic surgeries.
Well in the meantime people just tell them "do therapy" and while most have already tried but that's just not changing whats required for reality to be better. Nevertheless they're continuously told "just keep trying" and oh try another therapist that works for you!
Makes me think that the mental healthcare is mostly for public image. Since sure some people benefit but for the ones that don't nothing improves and the professionals are fine with that reality.
Trans passing messageboards are absolutely brutal. Brutal honesty is necessary for some, for whom passing is a matter of physical safety. But for a lot more, it can amount to self-harming. Any deviation from sometimes pseudoscientific models of "man" and "woman" is seen as a tell, an imperfection. This is made worse by the fact that gender-affirming surgery is utterly unaffordable for most people, let alone most people struggling with dysphoria and depression.
In addition, passing politics by nature excludes many nonbinary people, for whom it is by definition impossible to pass. Not long after I came out I kept trying to find references for how to be myself. It shouldn't be that way.
Where might we be if trans bodies were seen as natural variation instead of deviance?
I don't know if I necessarily agree with that part.
Therapy can help people starting out with blockers. Basically, young trans people that will pass but going through the social process is still difficult. Therapy isn't a universal solution and there is no proof that it works for everyone. The older population of trans people won't find therapy helpful depending on the following factors of did they get on on blockers at all, was HRT & good genetics in early 20s an option, and is it possible for them to pay for surgeries needing to eventually pass. Finding the "perfect community" for trans people is a flattering way of expressing segregation. They should be able to feel safe anywhere is what the solution should be. Otherwise they won't ever feel normal and possibly be assaulted or killed in society.
I'm unsure why nonbinary people are relevant in a discussion about trans people and since they don't have a concept of passing to other people as a certain sex. Sure, they prefer to be nonbinary in regard to how they look or be received.
Trans bodies aren't natural. Every trans person will express how they wish they could have started before puberty in an ideal life. The perfect life would have been just born cis as the sex they identify as or not have gender dysphoria.
It's better to be honest than to hugbox someone into a dangerous situation. I've seen some trans people just want assistance in dying because passing is everything for quality of life to not be poor for them. I think they should be able to get it but only if passing is not going to be an option with HRT and surgeries are not going to fix anything. I remember reading a trans person has received assistance in dying somewhere in Europe for Gender Dysphoria. It's sad but that's how it is for some people in life.
I get the sense that you're a generation or so older than me and have consequently had to put up with a lot more medical gatekeeping than I did. If I'm right, I salute you. But I see nothing good in letting myself being defined by my dysphoria or in turning myself into what feels to me like a cardboard cutout of a woman just so I can feel like not a guy. Down that way all I see is more of what I had before I realized I was trans. No thank you.
Be well.
How old are you when you were able to start HRT and did you get to go on blockers?
Your viewpoint of not letting yourself be defined by dysphoria is typically expressed by anyone able to start in early 20s or younger. I find your opinion perfectly fine for people in that foregoing situation. Starting that young has little in comparison with the previous generations' experiences and realities.
It shouldn't be a situation of forcing a universal ideology upon everyone. People gravitate to whatever solution works for them and it can be pleasant or unpleasant for others.
What I consider a cardboard cutout of a woman might just be a woman to you. In any case it doesn't matter because neither of us own anything that's just non-physical/judgement(s)/opinion(s).
People just get assigned a life and observe whatever story they get. No free will exists and obviously some people are in Heaven while others are in Hell. Life is predestined for whatever outcome. I think majority of trans people will have better outcomes after our generations die out.
edit: if you want to chat on discord whenever. I always enjoy chatting with trans people I meet online and learning their views compared to redefining my own. Alizée#4723
You’re also overlooking a very important fact of life. Overlooking other people’s suffering is an inherent human defense mechanism, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You invoke it every time you spend a few grand on a vacation—an amount of money that could save a human life from malaria or feed a child in Bangladesh for a decade.
So imagine my alarm to read that 20% of social science professors self-identify as Marxist. A third of college students embrace communism. In 2017, the nation’s premier newspaper ran a sympathetic retrospective on a century of communism. Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. A bunch of people on a website associated with a startup incubator are going to read the preceding sentence and go “yeah, that makes sense.” So it feels like gaslighting for you to say it’s a “problem that doesn’t exist.” Maybe I’m being paranoid, but in my experience civilization is fragile. Better safe than sorry.
But obviously, ranting about it on HN won’t fix the problem.
It was, though, at least if you're talking about early modern slavery. Slavery in the ancient world was a substantially different model, but the early modern African slave trade was fundamentally driven by rich, increasingly centralized farm owners with a business model dependent on unpaid workers.
Chattel slavery of the type practiced in the early US and elsewhere was part of the dominant Western system of the mid-19th century for which critics coined the term “capitalism”; what else would it be but capitalist?
The debate is very muddled because we're breaking standard definitions and using them each in our own way. I struggled to phrase the above properly, and no doubt I'm probably misusing some of the terms on some level.
No, capitalism is a particular real-world economic system that existed in a particular time and place; it is true that private ownership of the means of production is a central element of that system, but it's not it's only feature. Slavery was, in fact, an element of that system identified by the people who identified the system and coined the term capitalism for it, critics like Marx, whom wrote in Capital: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.”
Capitalism, and it's evolution from feudalism, includes the development of commercial, rather than patriarchal, slavery, wherein slaves are chattels rather than, while subordinate, bound up in a system that, at least in tradition and theory, involves mutual-though-asymmetric obligations and responsibilities.
Calling anyone who disagrees with you abusive seems like a pretty wild flex.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
Do you mean that Marxist ideas aren’t finding renewed currency? Nobody seems to deny that efforts to equate slavery with capitalism are critiques pioneered by Marx. Instead they seem to be arguing that Marx was correct. So the ideas do seem to be having renewed currency, in which case denying that fact is gaslighting.
If you’re arguing that it’s not a problem that Marxist ideas are being incorporated into schoolbooks, then in that case we just disagree.
What I don't see is any need to assume that, because Marx's critique of capital is serving as a source for those developing a modern critique of capital, Stalinism must necessarily follow. I think that's really where we disagree, and I'll admit, I feel no nearer understanding the wellspring of your fear now than I did when I started this conversation.
Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.
Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale. The kids just aren't listening any more, and I see no reason why they should be.
I didn't say I was worried about Marxism as a pre-text to Stalinist totalitarianism. Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone. In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled. In that same time period, Singapore's and Hong Kong's increased by more than a factor of 10. That was the legacy of putting Marxist ideas into practice. Capitalism, by contrast, particularly the Anglo-American variety, has been responsible for turning at least three poor countries into rich ones in the 20th century, and is on pace to turn a dozen more into at least middle income countries. These ideas have been the most powerful engine of enabling prosperity in the 20th century. Having seen the suffering socialist ideas caused in my home country, and seeing how much life has improved after we abandoned those ideas, I regard their re-introduction as an alternative to the basic Anglo-American economic system to be extremely alarming. (Note, I'm not talking about, and you don't appear to be talking about, the notion that everyone should pay "a little bit more" in taxes to fund more social services. My understanding is that we are talking about something more invasive than that.)
> Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.
The story of the 20th century is that academics with ideas are often very dangerous people. (We don't think of fundamentalist Islam as academic, but in many respects that's what it is. It's a set of ideas borne out of theory, in that context theological theory, rather than learned experience, and transmitted by teaching it in schools and radicalizing young people who lack the life experience to know better.) In Bangladesh, people who had grand visions of a better world used schools to replace our practical, moderate version of Islam with a radical one. That makes me tremendously skeptical of people who want to tinker with the basic structure of society, and in doing so invoke theories that exist in books rather than the learned experience of successful societies.
> Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale
I think you fundamentally misperceive the conservative viewpoint. We point to Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as the logical outgrowth of Marxism in practice. But our concern isn't merely the Stalinist outcome. We think that Marxism is dangerous in and of itself. Western Europe's lost decades of stagnation under socialist ideas, or India or Bangladesh's lost decades, wouldn't be as bad as Stalinism, obviously. But they'd be bad, and insofar as Marxists want to tinker with the basic s...
Marxist notions have been one of the key driving forces in the transition between late 19th Century capitalism and modem mixed economies in the developed world (though never without compromise), and haven't been even attempted to be applied anywhere outside of advanced capitalist democracies directly, only through the lens of Leninist (and later, derived from that, Stalinist and Maoist) totalitarianism, since robust capitalism with developed working class consciousness is a prequisite for the post-capitalist development in Marx’s theory, a pre-requisite abandoned and replaced with the vanguardism in Lenin’s work and it's derivatives.
> In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled.
Not sure what that has to do with Marxism, since Marxists (even in the sense of Leninists, etc.) weren't in charge most of that time, and were violently targeted by right-wing military dictatorships for substantial stretches of it.
I mean, unless you mean that Marxist notions are dangerous because holding them might get you murdered by right-wing dictatorships, which I'll grant is valid point, though not the one you seemed to be arguing for.
With regard to the whole Marxism-and-BLM thing - I have to say, at this point, I honestly don't know. On reflection, I decided it might be better, instead of just taking your word (and Newsmax's, and it turned out also Breitbart's!) for what's in that video, if I saw and heard for myself what it contained. So I did that [1], and found that your representation of what it contains (and Newsmax's, and Breitbart's) is, and I say this with all possible charity, extremely tendentious in a way that leads me to suspect it's been deliberately stripped of context in order to sound maximally frightening to people already predisposed to be suspicious of BLM activists' motives.
In particular, when I investigated the quote of which you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) make so much, I found that it was said in the context of answering a question raised by among others Jalil Muntaqim (born Anthony Bottom) [2], a former Black Panther imprisoned since 1974 for the murder of two police officers, over whether the Black Lives Matter movement has a coherent enough ideological direction to avoid simply "fizzling out" as Occupy Wall Street did.
Cullors' answer is, as you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) imagine, a political one. But it's not political in the way that you think it is. Here's a transcription I made just now from the video, covering the entirety of Patrisse Cullors' answer, rather than just the part that has been so frequently taken out of context with what appears to me very strongly to be deliberately deceptive intent.
"I think that the criticism is helpful; I think a lot of things. The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame; myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers, we are trained Marxists, we are super versed on sort of ideological theories, and I think that what we really try to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk. We don't necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement; I think we've tried to put out a political frame that's about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the Black community, to really fight for all of our lives, and I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don't believe it's going to fizzle out; it just gets stronger, and we see it, right? We've seen that after Sandra Bland, we're seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation Presidential Forum. What I do think, though, is [that] folks, especially folks who've been trained in a particular way, want to hear certain things from us, [and] we're not framing it in the ways that maybe another generation has. But I think it's important that people know the Black Lives Matter movement doesn't just live online, although there's many people who utilize it online. We're in a different set of circumstances, a different generation, [and while] social media may feel like it's diluting the larger ideological frame, I argue that it's not."
The reason I say that that's a political answer is, again, in the context of it being a response to critique by someone who is widely regarded as a political prisoner and, as the show host notes, an "elder of the struggle". It really comes across as kind o...
Resurgent Marxism in the developed world is a real thing, largely due to the geberal collapse of state-backed Leninism.
The fact that slaves are not free means that exchanges couldn't possibly be voluntary.
"Slavery is capitalism" is most certainly wrong though.
"Capitalism encourages slavery in plantation economies" would be a better argument, but might also be refuted given the gradual abolishing of slavery despite the continuance of capitalism.
It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist. By that logic, slavery is Christian and Islamic too—even more so. I’m not interested in debating Marx’s criticisms of capitalism: the fact that we’re even having this conversation proves my original concern—the resurgence of Marxism in America. I will point out that, in contemporary usage “capitalism” assumes a free market, which is incompatible with slavery both in theory and in practice. (America got richer after it abandoned slavery, which is what free market theories of economics would predict.) Trying to link what people understand capitalism to be today, to the proto-capitalism practiced in the American south, is layering specious argument upon specious argument.
> accepting that point of view is Marxist rhetoric.
So if one agrees with Marx on a single point one is spouting Marxist rhetoric just because he wrote about it first?
You just can't surgically remove selective things from Capitalism to get some wholesome version of it today. The patient would bleed out.
I'm sorry, but you might be the most dishonest user of HN, a constant barrage of cherry-picking, diversions, omissions etc, woven into a, albeit articulate, good news narrative about Capitalism, the US, and conservatism.
The term “capitalist” for people who control capital was not, the term “capitalism” for a politicoeconomic system (from which comes “capitalist” in its other sense of an advocate/defender of that system, or, as an adjective, pertaining to that systemas, opposed to labelling a particular economic class) was.
> It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist.
It would.be, but that's not the argument. Early modern chattel slavery evolved alongside capitalism, was imposed exclusively by capitalist powers, and reflects the apotheosis of the capitalist commodification of labor from the mutualism of feudal relations, even beyond wage-labor, and the evolution beyond capitalism in the direction, if not by the means, advocated by critics like Marx that led to the modern mixed economy displacing the system for which “capitalism” was coined began with abolition of slavery.
Early modern chattel slavery (not slavery more generally, such as feudal or ancient patriarchal slavery, including serfdom) was a distinctly and exclusively capitalist institution.
After the Civil War ended, as soon as the labor costs had to be factored in, it became increasingly clear that cotton is a dumb crop to plant at the scale it was being planted. Planters moved to other crops that could be profitable. Slavery essentially held capitalism (the efficient allocation of capital) back. This is why the Great Plains are the most productive agricultural land today, not the South. Syria or Libya, with actual, present day slaves are noticeably unable to produce much agriculture
The abolition of slavery exposed the essential government subsidization of a misallocation of capital, which is inherently un-capitalistic.
“Capitalism” and “maximizing systemic, aggregate profitability” aren't even related concepts, much less so intimately linked that not doing the latter proves that something is not an element of the former.
If the means of production were owned by the government, and the government forced its citizens to work uncompensated against their will, with no option to leave, could one then contend that socialism/communism is inextricably linked to slavery? No, that's absurd. Involuntary servitude can exist in any economic system, whether the means of production are owned by the people or by the government.
Slavery can only exist if the government actively enforces the ability for one to own another human being against their will. While it's absolutely correct that capitalism is rooted in private ownership of property, it by no means presupposes that humans MUST be considered property. On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary, which is anathema to slavery.
That condition has not been true at any time in the history of Capitalism. Since that's only possible if the two parties are perfectly equal, which obviously is almost never the case, and certainly not a state of affairs that the proponents of Capitalism wants or have ever wanted.
In reality, unless born into property/wealth, one is not a voluntary party of such a transaction, and its voluntariness decreases in proportion to the socioeconomical situation of the party at that time.
If your argument is that the inverse relationship between "voluntariness" and socioeconomic status is anathema to capitalism, that reinforces the idea that literal slavery is even further from that platonic ideal.
As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason: it gets us that much closer to truly universal voluntary transactions, because when one is no longer worried about starving to death, they can rationally participate in all economic transactions in a free society.
But the point remains the same: slavery (or more abstractly, involuntary servitude) is orthogonal to the underlying economic system. It can exist in any economic system. Most of the developed world today is largely capitalist, and without slavery. Conversely, some of history's most well known efforts in installing Marxist communism also notably featured forced labor camps where people were compelled to work involuntarily.
The Stalinist structure is set up to be ripe for corruption, abuse of power, etc. That is what it will be rightly remembered for.
The Capitalist structure is set up to be ripe for exploiting whatever there is to be exploited at that particular time to accumulate capital. That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise. We can see the same pattern today; exploiting whatever is possible until the moral outrage hurts profits too much or may land the execs behind bars.
> As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason
It's a very big assumption that a capitalist UBI would be little else than removing social security and then go on devaluing the UBI year by year. Once again, the incentives suggest exactly that. You're somehow imagining an altruistic capitalism that primarily looks for true voluntary transactions while still concentrating power and privilege in the hands of the few.
But that's factually untrue, slavery held back the accumulation of capital. American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished. Once the actual cost of manufacturing had to be factored in, planters were forced to find more productive crops to grow. That process led to:
1. the decimation of the economy of the South, where slavery was rampant. The South had to quickly learn to industrialize to keep up
2. the steep increase in market capitalization of agricultural businesses once capital was forced to be more efficiently allocated, resulting in the agrarian revolution of the Great Plains, which remains one of America's dominant agriculture centers
Slavery quite literally does not allow the incentive structure, by your own words, to flourish.
If you're interested in not just regurgitating propaganda you can read this book: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".
Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.
You do realize that both slavery and wage slavery have a cost of manufacturing right? Both needed to compete with that on the world market. What's the reason to exclude that even a slave-owning South wouldn't have switched to a more profitable produce?
First of all, there's nothing "ahistorical" about the simple fact that the South's economy was decimated after the abolition of slavery, and to this day the industry that utilized slavery the most continues to be weaker than elsewhere in the Union. That is your original allegation here: that slavery necessarily flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure. That's plainly untrue, because at the same time you had no slavery in the North, and its industrial economy outpaced that of the South (read: accumulation of capital, in your words).
You see this happening today as well: in countries where slavery is unfortunately still legal (Syria & Libya), they don't have any greater accumulation of capital or output than capitalist nations that do not have slavery (nearly every first world industrialized nation). On the other hand, nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They are also notably devoid of indentured/involuntary servitude while also enjoying some of the greatest accumulation of wealth and capital in recorded human history.
> The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.
Sure, nobody is arguing that people in the South were suddenly "free" after the abolition of slavery. You're absolutely correct that sharecropping and other practices essentially continued to ensnare black people in the South. The point is that this DID NOT translate to greater rewards in the capitalist incentive system. During Reconstruction, planters that exploited former "free" slaves LOST the agriculture race to the Great Plains, and the industrial race to the North.
> Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.
There is nothing unacceptable about "low labor costs" in a society with robust social safety nets. Countries like Switzerland that have close to 0 poverty, the highest median wealth, and among the highest standards of living in the world also see variation in labor costs between a janitor and a doctor, or a fast food cashier and a civil engineer. Not all labor is equal in value, and the capitalist incentive structure prices labor as a function of the value that it creates for others. If your argument is that this is somehow tantamount to chattel slavery, then it's you who is regurgitating propaganda.
Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.
There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.
Yes, and what I am saying is that it has nothing to do with the central argument: that "slavery is capitalism" or "capitalism encourages slavery" or "slavery flourishes under a capitalist incentive structure" (there are N iterations of your argument, pick one and commit to it).
The fact that, after the abolition of slavery, the former slaves still continued to be exploited doesn't tell us much about the presence of a causal relationship between capitalism and slavery, because of course if the state sanctions slavery, you can't expect things to go back to normal by themselves without some state intervention in the opposite direction.
Further, your argument loses teeth for the following reasons:
1. We have the counterfactual in the North (successful wealth/capital accumulation + no slavery) that refute your central argument that you are yet to address. The North's capitalist economy grew more than the South even while having abolished slavery.
2. The fact that in the modern world, among the top 30 most capitalist countries in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...), only one has some form of slavery, the UAE. This refutes your central argument, and you are yet to address it.
3. The fact that in the modern world, the bottom 3 least capitalist countries in the world (same list), there are forced labor camps (North Korea) or decrees (Venezuela, Cuba). This doesn't directly refute your central argument, rather it shows that capitalism isn't a strict prerequisite for slavery. You are yet to address this.
4. The fact that agriculture became more profitable after the abolition of slavery is a direct refutation to your central argument that you are yet to address.
> Your entire reply are still ignoring that I'm not talking about what the best and most profitable "production method" turned out to be. You're applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that the former method was in-fact outside of the incentive structure of capitalism. That makes no sense. They are obviously not mutually-exclusive.
This is borderline word salad, but we are applying the benefit of hindsight to prove that slavery and capitalism are two orthogonal systems that are unrelated. Slavery has existed in socialist systems (gulags, labor camps) as well as capitalist systems (international slave trade). If using historical facts to make a point is considered "using the benefit of hindsight", then using the benefit of hindsight is a valid strategy...
> There's a lot of "correlation is not necessarily causation" points to explain in your argument too, but I don't want to be further ensnared in a "what was the most profitable" discussion since it's beyond the point. You can't cherry-pick the best outcome and dismiss all the other ones.
You need to specify where the cherry picking is happening, because by and large the trend is universal. You also can't just hand-wave a correlation/causation argument just because you're unable to refute it.
What are you not understanding? You seem to have completely made up my "Central Argument".
I'm NOT arguing, and have never argued, that slavery must be more productive and/or more profitable than non-slavery.
I'm NOT saying, and have never said, that Capitalism must exhibit slavery.
I'm AM saying that in an environment where slavery is socially acceptable, as it was in the US South during that time, the incentives of Capitalism will make it flourish - and it obviously did.
That Capitalism exploits people and resources, if it's socially acceptable (and often even if it's not), it perfectly obvious and the historical record of it is indisputable:
* Slavery
* Colonialism
* Child labor
* Horrible working conditions
* Environmental/Climate destruction
etc etc.
I literally copy/pasted your own words, but it appears you've finally settled on one argument (emphatically so), great job!
> I'm AM saying that in an environment where slavery is socially acceptable, as it was in the US South during that time, the incentives of Capitalism will make it flourish - and it obviously did.
Capitalism is just an economic system of allocation of scarce resources by maximizing the output of production while minimizing the input resources required to produce a unit output, while also preventing a tragedy-of-the-commons. So you're superficially correct that in a regime where slavery is legal, this type of resource allocation might find an equilibrium that coexists within the rules of that regime, which may include perpetuating slavery. Hypothetically, if murder was legal, capitalism might allow the murder industry to "flourish", through hitmen for hire, private armies, and mercenaries.
It's an observation that has few useful implications in our modern world today where slavery (and murder) are broadly illegal.
You could even go so far as to argue that because socialist economies do not do a sufficient job of allocating resources / production to adequately meet the needs of its people (just empirically speaking), that the allowed use of involuntary servitude will thrive under a socialist regime, where the social need for forced labor outweighs the individual liberty to voluntarily refuse it.
That is to say, "in an environment where slavery [by the state] is acceptable, the incentives of [socialism (severe shortages)] will make it flourish". We saw this play out in the past[1], and we see this play out today[2][3][4]. If you think that this is an absurd analogy, then you finally get the point: drawing causal relationships between abstract economic systems (whose sole purpose is to solve the resource constraint problem) and specific institutions (like slavery) that have existed for thousands of years under the backdrop of many different economic systems, is an absurd endeavor.
[1] http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/07/venezuela-new...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-ppe-exports-uighur-lab...
[4] https://www.prisonersdefenders.org/2020/01/08/united-nations...
That was not borderline word salad. But you seem to finally have recognized that there's an incentive structure to Capitalism that can and does create negative results.
> It's an observation that has few useful implications in our modern world today
A few of the points I listed are still alive and well today.
> You could even go so far as to argue that because socialist economies [...] voluntarily refuse it.
Not sure what the point of going into a what about discussion about the former Stalinist regimes? Anyway, those regimes were/are in practice state-Capitalist and the same incentives apply, along with the ones that comes with authoritarianism.
THAT was how you comprehended that statement? In the hypothetical I posited, capitalism didn't create the negative results, they just exacerbated them because capitalism is able to take an existing system and form supply chains around them that maximize output while minimizing input. If murder is illegal, and capitalism creates a thriving industry around it, you clearly have a problem, but the root cause of that problem isn't capitalism, it's that murder is legal.
To contend that capitalism is the root cause is the epitome of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Central characteristics of capitalism include private property and the recognition of property rights, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets.
Chattel slavery is at odds with voluntary exchange.
To simplistically suggest that private property rights necessarily extends to ownership of people against their will is like suggesting that purely state owned means of production (socialism) necessarily extends to ownership of people against their will by the government.
1. You seem to recognize that there are incentives: "which may include perpetuating slavery"
2. I wrote that you seem to do exactly that, that they can "create negative results".
3. You took issue to my use of "create", you only think Capitalism exacerbates negative results because it's just so brilliant that it can't help itself.
4. I argue that in fact, capitalism does not only exacerbates, but also creates and enables the incentives because of the institution and enforcement of private property that comes along with Capitalism. Without private property the incentives that create the negative results would not exist.
5. You nicely list some other characteristics of Capitalism and then change the subject to chattel slavery and "voluntary" exchange again. You also make up some argument that I've apparently suggested (which is false): "private property rights necessarily extends to ownership of people".
Can you please follow the thread of discussion?
The supposed “wealth” of the anti-bellum South is based on a rhetorical fallacy: that by categorizing human beings as “property” you could treat their long term earning power as an asset. But that’s now how economies work. We can label things whatever we want, but they are what they are. (For example, the entity that ultimately bears the economic burden of a tax in practice doesn’t depend on who the law nominally assigns to pay the tax.) Put differently, if you draw a box around the economy, you can’t increase the productive output of that box by imposing slavery. It might change the distribution of wealth within the box, it not for the economy as a whole. Economic theory says the productive capacity of the box will be maximized when labor is not coerced.
Almost all of the “slavery was economically efficient” notions come from a handful of scholars, who are historians and not economists: https://economicsdetective.com/2019/09/cotton-slavery-and-th...
The work is not only methodologically flawed, but depends on shifting definitions of “capitalism”: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=3191210060650810...
A leading NHC scholar has refused to define what he means by “capitalism” preferring to let the term “float as a placeholder.”
It's still controversial even if you label the other side as Marxist.
That depends on whether by “capitalism” you mean “the real-world economic system which emerged through the relentless pursuit of class advantage by the mercantile class as they displaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class and which was named ‘capitalism’ by it's critics” or “the aspirational ideal that defenders of that real world system rationalized it as striving imperfectly toward to distract from the characteristics of the real world system itself in a perpetual game of ‘No True Scotsman’”.
For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that.
For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.
Nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They also happen to have robust safety nets where the exact sort of economic coercion is difficult to carry out. To argue that slavery is somehow inextricably linked to the dominant economic system of these countries is plainly absurd, in the same way that it's plainly absurd to claim that slavery is inextricably linked to communism/Marxism just by virtue of the practical manifestation of it we've seen in the 20th century, and not the theoretical ideal as posed by Marx. The whole point here is that slavery is orthogonal to the economic system, not an underlying prerequisite for it.
> in a perpetual game of "No True Scotsman"
> For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.
You either need to compare the platonic ideal of communism to the platonic ideal of capitalism, or stick with comparing the empirical outcomes of capitalism as it has been tried all over the developed world today with communism as it has been tried in the real world. You appear to be trying to compare the platonic ideal of communism with the empirical manifestation of capitalism, and then balk when I counter with my own platonic ideal. Compare apples to apples.
This sounds a lot scarier when you don't realize that, among the same set, there is all but ubiquitous contempt for "tankies", i.e. the very same Stalinist-style sort of thing you're worried about. Newsmax won't tell you that, because why would they? Keeping you frightened keeps you doomscrolling their ads.
I know about the tankie hate because I know a bunch of the people you're scared of. They're not going to burn your house down or kill you. But they do understand that they're getting a raw deal, and they have a pretty good idea of why and from whom, and they're not willing to take it lying down. Good for them, in my opinion, and seeing as they are getting a raw deal - worse than my own generation did, which is saying a lot - it's with them that my sympathies lie.
Especially in a time when the US federal government is violating its own laws at will, up to and including illegal arrests carried out Gestapo-style with no probable cause and no due process - if you can't tell the difference between a generation of young people defending their interests and the potential collapse of civilization, you really do need to read less Newsmax, because it's making you paranoid.
Mostly the kids are just looking to roll back as much as they can of Reaganism, and they're quite right to want to do so. This forty-year experiment with totally unchecked capitalism has gone on too long. It's past time to curtail and start repairing the damage.
> slavery was capitalist
Well, what else would you call it? Considered in purely economic and thus amoral terms, a chattel slave literally is capital, in the same sense that a mule or, later, a tractor, would be. That's quite literally what I was taught as a child in public grade school, growing up in Mississippi thirty years ago, and if you want to argue that the rural Mississippi school boards of the 1980s had been subverted by communists, that's fine, but you need to know up front that if you do I'm going to start calling you Joe McCarthy and I'm just never going to stop.
In any case, I have a very hard time conceiving of a world in which "slavery is capitalist" is in any way a controversial thought. Are you perhaps confusing it with "capitalism is slavery"? Because you're citing the former, but it's the latter you seem to be arguing against, in the sense that you can be said to be making any argument here at all.
You're right that ranting, on HN and elsewhere, rarely fixes anything. Have you thought about why you're impelled to do so anyway, and whether the impetus is a wholly rational one?
Also, see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/w...
> McCarthy, as his subsequent history would show, knew little about communism, on this side of the ocean or the other. This loutish, duplicitous bully, who carried, not the names of Reds but bottles of hootch in his briefcase died in disgrace and of alcoholism. Yet, in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn't know their names.
(Note that this was written by a prominent left leaning journalist based on declassified intelligence information.)
Granted, any such discussion omits the moral enormity inherent in any form of slavery. Economic discussions are like that. I'll grant you that the moral and economic dimensions of the slavery-and-capitalism question tend not to be too clearly separated in the public discourse of the moment, but that neither surprises nor concerns me. As I mentioned earlier, what you misidentify as "resurgent Marxism" is in fact a reaction to the totally untrammeled capitalism I called by the name "Reaganism". Considering the myriad and grievous harms that system has produced in four short decades, and considering also that that system's own proponents happily describe it just as "capitalism" without the courtesy of such qualifiers as I use, whatever misidentification or misblame it may receive seems to me well earned. Besides, it's not as if counting slavery among the crimes of Reaganism is in any way erroneous. Have you seen the US prison system?
To the rest, it should be hardly a surprise to anyone that there were Soviet agents in the US government at any point from about the early 1930s through the late 80s. Just like there were US agents in the Soviet government. And Chinese agents in both, and vice versa, and so on. The existence of espionage, and the existence of a vast Red conspiracy of subversion on a national and generational scale, are in no way the same thing, and to argue from one to the other requires a good deal more substantiation than either you or Tailgunner Joe appear inclined or indeed able to provide.
Granted, one can sometimes use the former to frighten uninformed people into believing in the latter, despite a total inability to demonstrate that the latter actually exists. You seem to want to talk about gaslighting. Has it occurred to you that, unlike merely having people argue that you're wrong about something, this sort of specious, fear-based deception may in fact qualify as such?
Btw, I just spent a little while poking around Newsmax, something I hadn't previously done since the Bush administration. I don't know whether you really do read a lot of that stuff, but if you do, maybe seriously consider cutting back, and replacing at least some of it with something from outside the filter bubble it appears strongly designed to create and enforce. Or, I don't know, use an ad blocker at least? If you're going to let that stuff monopolize your brain and your political philosophy, I'd at least like to think you're doing it for its own sake, rather than so that somebody can make money off of you.
The issue is that extended democracy implies an extension to the economic sphere, and thus an overhaul of private property relations. This is the actual threat that is attacked by capitalists, and the Stalinist regime is used to paint all threats to these undemocratic institutions in a totalitarian light.
What do you expect to find in constitutions written by free market economies?
> The concept is likewise enshrined in Article 17 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
False, it was left intentionally vague to not explicitly endorse private property in the capitalist sense.
> The "overhaul" you're talking about is in and of itself a totalitarian violation of human rights.
That's also on point for Propertarianism. Where private property has been sacralized and to argue against it is against the law of nature, even if it's wrong and unjust. "The King declared that absolute monarchy is a divine right and any resistance is thus blasphemy and shall be dealt with accordingly".
I never said it was about democracy!
> It's just about a fervent defense of the current undemocratic and unjust private property relations.
I would characterize it as a fervent defense of British constitutionalism, tracing back to the Magna Carta, but yes, the current system of property relations is a part of that.
But it seems like we're not in any disagreement about my original post: I expressed worry that Marxist ideas were resurgent. We seem to be on the same page about what I mean by "Marxism." And you don't appear to disagree that those ideas are resurgent--and therefore my originally stated worry was not baseless after all.
I also think that using "Marxism" for a democratic movement and ideas is done to intentionally associate them with the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century.
The actual actionable news is like 1/1000th of the news if not less...
Our understanding of the way the virus is transmitted changed quite a lot in 6 months. At some point we thought it was mostly spread by direct contact; then by droplets; now we believe it is airborne, to a certain extent. Governments also had the incentive to limit use of PPE to critical workers because of the short supply. It was also obvious that several governments were clueless. So yes, you were told not to wear a mask, whilst at the same time you were provided with facts that contradicted it. This was obvious if you were following the news, particularly the evolution of the then-epidemic in China, Taiwan and South Korea.
Well, for that you need to follow real news, not Fox, the Mail, or disinformation campaigns spread by social media. You also need a grip on how science works, because journalists won’t explain, and often don’t seem to understand.
The average reporter for a newspaper simply doesn't have the time to actually understand a topic. They talk to a few people, and with the current political environment, everything they hear is agenda driven.
Spend your information gathering time in a more productive way. If you really feel you need to be up to date, read the week in review section of one of the national newspapers.
I felt that there was a lot of nuanced scientific opinions that reporters were doing a poor job of communicating. I get that often deeply technical topics are complicated, but I think more than anything else COVID has helped how unprepared media has been in communicating these complex topics.
And it's not just COVID; it's been a range of subjects such as law (Trump's immigration ban) and elections (in particular the 2020 Democratic primary and all the media coverage over Bloomberg's supposed supremacy in the race). I think overall journalists are well intentioned and can be trusted in most situations, but it's clear to me that there are systemic failures in communicating complex subjects.
Articles here point to the real diversity of what is happening.
Not always, but many stories have some nuance that’s missing in social media outrage and replies.
Like I said, not always, but it does help anxiety to get all the facts. Especially when I ruminate on something after seeing just the headline or the replies.
At times, I've become so miserable from it that I've had to jump into a cold shower to snap out of the doom and gloom. Thankfully, the cold shower usually works and provides incentive not to fall into the habit again.
For the vast bulk of the human experiences, our approximate level of situational threat awareness wasn’t all that much different.
It’s unsurprising that unmediated, we expand that circumference and simultaneously experience a proportional increase in our general level of anxiety.
Anxiety is a normal response to these external pressures. And anxiety isn't going to go away until we address these pressures.
I'll throw in some other amxiety-inducing but solvable external pressures: homelessness, affording rent or health insurance, being forced to choose between going to work and getting coronavirus vs getting fired, precariousness, and so on.
On the second thought, it seems like that's a very good question, for these two processes are maybe in a positive feedback loop. This year we pay more attention to news, and this makes us both more susceptible and more exposed to things like "the moment to act is now".
At those times it’s a bit more important to stay at least partially informed than when the biggest crisis is a new highway project going over budget or a political leader’s extramarital affairs.
I agree, stay informed. But really.... How many times a day do you need to be updated on the recent developments and the current status?
In the past people would get their news once a day in the paper and then later at certain times on the radio and early TV. Is that enough to stay informed?
What has happened in the last 12 hours that I must know now instead of just catching a summary tomorrow morning?
Boy, did you miss the point of the article and discussion
Sometimes anxiety (fear, rage) is well justified. Sometimes large-scale threats are real.
Like another comment here mentioned, the diversity of content (and maybe slightly less political news) is why people like HN, so maybe I've just been lucky to be able to 'curate' my Twitter similarly.
I believe deleting Twitter also helped my mood. I am feeling more upbeat than ever. While circumstantial, I do attribute some of this change to no longer being bombarded by the negativity and one-shot-kill Tweets that are prolific on the platform.
I'd read news of how Facebook keeps people addicted or how they try out psychological experiments on its users which left me uneasy. Finally, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and revealed that Facebook sells access to your personal messages, thst was the final straw. The biggest problem with deleting your account is that your contacts assume that you just deleted them and think that you're mad at them or something. It can have a real world impact. But I've been way happier texting friends and family and talking with them directly. It's been so much healthier than leaving "likes" on wall posts. I'm never returning to social media.
That's one reason I deleted my Facebook 5 years ago. I unfriended a casual acquaintance (who continually posted political rants), and they confronted me in person at a nightclub, demanding to know why. That just isn't healthy behaviour, and I don't need to be around people like that or on a network that encourages it.
Facebook did not make our timelines toxic. Our 'friends' did.
* https://logicmag.io/
https://jacobinmag.com/
Regarding the article title, I'm not sure what was the problem. The Jacobin is a leftist newspaper, so critiques of capitalism are to be expected. If you dislike the style of the title, I can appreciate that, everyone has their own tastes. But there is also a quick summary of the thesis of the article, in case the title was too unclear:
> The inclusion of more women at the top of oppressive power structures shouldn’t be confused with women’s liberation. We need a radical, socialist feminism, not a repackaged version of Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate-friendly "lean-in" brand.
Well, if that's all you can do, thanks for the effort.
I'd like to applaud you for admitting this to yourself. I feel like a vital part of successfully navigating the internet age is to realize this very fact.
You can stay just as informed without giving in to doombait articles. You are just as valuable in the public sphere if you don’t succumb to attaching yourself to the firehose of daily information and tweets.
The latter will not seem “informed” because they won’t know about some controversial statement that set the Internet on fire, but they will certainly be more informed about the consequential actions being taken by the government.
TLDR - being “informed” has no relationship to following what currently classifies a news - at least from an “informed citizen” perspective.
Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them.
For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.
That applies even to some of the stuff recommended directly here on HN. I would not even dive into aggregators recommended here.
actual new things are by definition rare. each thing can only be done once for all of humanity. after that, its an iterative process with the occasional leap forward.
if you're thinking about technical or even worse self-help books: yes - there are very few that actually bring anything worthwhile to the table. thats simply because it becomes common knowledge if its correct to a degree where it has a significant effect.
if you're however thinking of story-books than ... you're just reading similar things. there is a lot of written stories around - they admittedly usually have things like `conversation` in common, but how else would you write a book? by leaving everything blank?
Maybe you don't.
https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
/s
For many articles on the web I believe it's an issue because of Google. Google does punish short pieces, so if you want to write about how to do X with Y, you need to start of with a history of Y, lay out a couple of use cases of X and then explain why doing X with Y is difficult, to finally explain how to do it.
Unix man pages are amazing. Every technical help resource should be like that.
HN is still valuable for me because it sometimes leads to me discovering new frameworks I can actually use that I wouldn’t hear about anywhere else because people in my part of the world use JAVA, PHP or C#. But HN is mainly a social media and all the attention seeking that comes with that.
It is exacerbated by the fact that there are so many ranking on the internet. I most often start by the top 10 and then the rest seems boring in comparison.
Platforms don't help either. There are hundreds of thousands of creators on Youtube and Instagram and they somehow manage to all produce the same thing...
Reading old books is worth it. New ones are hard to filter and many will turn out to be completely unnecessary.
Leaves you on the sides of contemporary culture but at least you're reading efficiently.
As a simultaneous question and example, Kipling is often given as an example of a British Empire writer with condescending attitudes to the very people he wrote about.
The names of Indian authors never reached me because my parents thought the Empire was unadulterated good, and they thought that because my grandparents were born near the peak of the Empire — one of my grandmothers was, for a period in her infancy, living in a military base in the British Raj.
They whose names I do not know could very plausibly be Kipling’s equal or better. I know from various examples that various cliques will have hidden the names of good authors from me.
That leads me to the question: can anyone here recommend a good Indian author from the same era as Kipling? (Yes I know Kipling was born in India).
While not a direct answer to your question, I think The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha is relevant in the sense that it addresses why your question is difficult (perhaps impossible) to answer.
I suppose rather than asking for a “good” author (subjective, for example I’ve met an Oxbridge English Literature graduate who thought Shakespeare was overrated), I should have asked for a “famous” author from the same era.
The sort of author whose works a current-day Indian politician would have on their shelves, or perhaps quote from, to signal how cultured they are — in the same sort of way UK PM Johnson tried to show how cultured he was by quoting Kipling.
Maybe try poetry? Though, same applies. Anything that’s not popular, recent fiction aimed at a grade 8 reading level is going to take some effort and practice to learn to appreciate and fully understand. Literacy is a very wide spectrum.
[edit] incidentally, for whatever reason, I find drawing book recommendations from strangers online nearly useless. This goes double for genre fic and non-fic. For other media it works fine. Dunno why but I think part of it may be that people read more differently, and for more reasons, than they watch movies or listen to music play games. I also find it’s easier in other media to quickly spot people with tastes that are very contrary to mine, and so ignore them.
One thing that seems to help is that more people are able to say “this is trash, but it’s my kind of trash, but hey, here’s this other thing like it that’s actually good” with film than with books. Something about books seems to make people use a much broader and less-differentiated or less-well-tuned definition of “good” and then just apply that same label to everything they read and don’t hate.
I assume you’re referring to fiction ... there’s actually a whole field of study around this rooted in psychology, they’re called Jungian Archetypes. There’s a really fantastic book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I’m not sure what the current state of study is, its been a few years since I personally studied the concepts. It might be a nice change from the mundanity you seem to be describing
Eg, i actually like "current events", especially news. I want to know what my political actors are doing, good or bad - but only concrete information. Especially with the current administration. Rumors / weak leaks are wasted cycles in my brain.
They also have a companion magazine, 1843, that dives into longer-form cultural articles.
Almost all books have relatively low information density. You can condense "How to Win Friends and Influence People" down to a page of chapter headings, for example, or a history book into a 2-3 page timeline. The point of all of the anecdotes and details isn't to convey more information, it's to force the reader to slow down to think about the topic and provide more memory hooks to help with recall later.
Whenever you read a book, if you think "that was obvious, I knew that already," observe if you are actually acting on that knowledge the way you want to. After reading the book, do you act on that knowledge you already knew more easily?
Even books that are outright bad can be useful if they force you to think more about a topic and re-evaluate your own opinions. For example, I try to read 1-2 general software books a year. Some of them are terrible, most of them tell me things I already learned, but the spaced repetition makes me re-evaluate my own recent choices to see if there are any areas where I have been getting lazy and cutting corners I shouldn't.
I'm curious about how old you are. I think the problems you mention get worse, the more life experience one has?
Nowadays I think all 1st person shooters are mostly the same and get bored.
You seem to prefer personal attacks and ideology, so yes, I'd block you for sure.
Having said that it seems to me that Twitter - opposed to FB and YT - comes with the advantage that you can quite easily specify what you want to see on your wall. I have a lot of investigative journalism outlets on my Follow list and special interest groups. So it seems to offer some value.
Then again it is indeed inviting to endlessly scroll in boredom hoping to find something that triggers some Dopamine.
The thing that worked for me was simple: don’t use it on mobile. It promotes doom scrolling and shallow consumption.
I also continuously curate my list and mute plenty to keep garbage out. The result is a fairly positive and inspiring feed
At best, it'll be something interesting and feeds into our natural curiosity. Other than that, this idea that it's our responsibility as citizens to stay constantly informed on what's happening in the world is nonsense.
Ask yourself, what was the last time you read something in the news that contained information you could actually act on in a meaningful way? Our biggest opportunity to act on information as regular citizens generally comes with elections, at which point you can just read up on the candidates views/proposals before voting.
We really don't need to be obsessively keeping up with the news, the world will keep moving whether or not we know about it.
The what in question would be the news item I had read. The meaningful action was the public protest I chose to join, or the campaign donations I decided to make, or the phone calls to my elected representatives. Elections aren't the only way citizens can (or should) interact with their government.
Going through my comment history, I often find it littered with comments that give a sense of hopelessness and inevitable misery. Highly cynical, sometimes toxic, wouldn’t feel out of place among the lamentations of the undying. Not sure how I got this way, but probably came after a long history of doomscrolling.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS395T/2009fa/papers/ferr...
HN thread of its launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936742