SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
While the Net has certainly scored a point or two against the State, the State has scored a lot more points against the Net. If the State wants your domain name, it takes it. If that's independence, what does utter defeat and submission look like?
Worse: whatever state tyranny exists, it's obviously dwarfed by the private, free-market, corporate tyrannosaurs that stalk the cloud today. We can see this clearly by imagining all these thunder-lizards were actually part of the government. "Private" and "public" are just labels, after all.
Imagine a world in which LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and the NSA were all in one big org chart. Is there anyone, of any political stripe, who doesn't find this outcome creepy? It's probably going to happen, in fact if not in form. While formal nationalization is out of fashion, regulation easily achieves the same result, while keeping the sacred words "private enterprise."
How do today's technologists win freedom from State control?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @10:38PM
Cool quote, bro, but what does that have to do with this thread?
Reading comprehension. This is why you fail.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 02 2015, @01:43AM
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday November 02 2015, @05:40AM
Plus, even if we were speaking of fascism,
Oh, but we are! Or perhaps you never heard of the movement from the 1920's called "Futurism", where all the techies of the time allied themselves in very strange ways to technical "final solutions" to all kinds of problems? There is a certain attraction among technical people, almost to the same extent as with military people, to quick and dirty solutions to problems, and so for them the real problem becomes the actual solution to problems: government. What our "seriously damaged goods" is saying here, is that the problem is not as you have posed it, between choosing to give power to corporations or to give it to governments, for they are already the same thing. The total ignorance of this is what makes sad puppies of all the Ayn Rand following authoritarian Libertarians. (You know, as I certainly do, that really is a total irony. Libertarians that end up supporting Fascism, because, individual freedoms! Hope it works out well for them. "Arbeit macht frei!", I alway say!).
So I hope we have remedied your lack of education about political theory, 20th Century Communists, and what all this dreaming of "freedom" from government actually is. Yes, it is Fascism. Almost Crypto-Fascism, but I like to think of it as Hipster-Libertarian-Fascism.
So, time for another quote that you will not comprehend? Ok!
He rejects bourgeois culture by destroying libraries, museums, and academies, by replacing the image of female beauty with the idealized image of the machine, and by purifying language through the removal of syntax and grammar. The Futurists were at once a joke and a threat to established powers in Italy and other parts of Europe. They caused riots, spread rumors, and disrupted public events as part of a campaign to install into Italian culture a resolute fascination with technology, power, and (above all) war. "We will glorify war–the world's only hygiene," Marinetti writes, "militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women"
http://www.hauntedink.com/ghost/ch3.html [hauntedink.com]
Ah, sexbots, warmongers, technophiles, and misogynists. What was old is new again. Thus the world turns. But now it is on the internets, and Futurists and Libertarians just look like fools. So sad, and angry, puppies.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 02 2015, @04:09PM
Oh, but we are! Or perhaps you never heard of the movement from the 1920's called "Futurism", where all the techies of the time allied themselves in very strange ways to technical "final solutions" to all kinds of problems? There is a certain attraction among technical people, almost to the same extent as with military people, to quick and dirty solutions to problems, and so for them the real problem becomes the actual solution to problems: government. What our "seriously damaged goods" is saying here, is that the problem is not as you have posed it, between choosing to give power to corporations or to give it to governments, for they are already the same thing. The total ignorance of this is what makes sad puppies of all the Ayn Rand following authoritarian Libertarians. (You know, as I certainly do, that really is a total irony. Libertarians that end up supporting Fascism, because, individual freedoms! Hope it works out well for them. "Arbeit macht frei!", I alway say!).
And the straw men arguments come out. More irrelevant junk.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 03 2015, @05:33AM
And the straw men arguments come out.
Straw men calling kettles black! What is the world coming to? Perhaps it was the argumentum ad ignorantiam that you had in mind? Or the much vexed Reductio ad absurdum? That's a good one. But most likely, we were looking for the Tu Quoque fallacy, the "you, too" fallacy. But really, what do you expect in response to irrelevant junk? Less irrelevant junk? Not likely, mon Frere!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 03 2015, @12:57PM
But most likely, we were looking for the Tu Quoque fallacy, the "you, too" fallacy. But really, what do you expect in response to irrelevant junk? Less irrelevant junk? Not likely, mon Frere!
This is not even funny.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:34PM
Or perhaps you never heard of the movement from the 1920's called "Futurism"
Notice that at no point do you ever tie this to libertarianism or fascism. It's just something you say. We have to shrug and move on, ignoring yet another Aristarchus non sequitur and waste of our time.
What our "seriously damaged goods" is saying here, is that the problem is not as you have posed it, between choosing to give power to corporations or to give it to governments, for they are already the same thing.
It doesn't matter if you use moderately flowery Marxist/Leninist nomenclature or not. A wrong statement remains wrong no matter how you say it or how many times you say it. It's painfully clear that businesses or "corporations" as you put them are not the same as governments. They have different interests, different constituents, different resources, etc. It's quite easy, for example, to distinguish what is Walmart from what is the NSA, for example.
The total ignorance of this is what makes sad puppies of all the Ayn Rand following authoritarian Libertarians.
This assertion is typical of your bullshit. You just say it without even a feeble attempt at justification or evidence.
So I hope we have remedied your lack of education about political theory, 20th Century Communists, and what all this dreaming of "freedom" from government actually is. Yes, it is Fascism. Almost Crypto-Fascism, but I like to think of it as Hipster-Libertarian-Fascism.
In other words, it's more of your doublespeak bullshit. And I am no more enlightened than I was before.
He rejects bourgeois culture by destroying libraries, museums, and academies, by replacing the image of female beauty with the idealized image of the machine, and by purifying language through the removal of syntax and grammar. The Futurists were at once a joke and a threat to established powers in Italy and other parts of Europe. They caused riots, spread rumors, and disrupted public events as part of a campaign to install into Italian culture a resolute fascination with technology, power, and (above all) war. "We will glorify war–the world's only hygiene," Marinetti writes, "militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women"
Notice this criticism uses the same over-the-top language as Marinetti did. I doubt Marinetti destroyed a single library, museum, or academy, for example. He merely advocated for that policy. Similarly, it would be foolish to claim I caused humanity to go extinct, if I merely advocate for it (such as the voluntary human extinction movement does).
We also see some glaring bias on the part of the critic such as claiming that Marinetti rejects "bourgeois culture" (which is signaling for having drunk the Marxist kool aid). Marinetti never made this distinction in his manifesto. Let's look at the planks [itu.edu.tr] of Futurism:
Manifesto of Futurism
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
He seems to have a thing for continual and rapid conflict, aggression war, and change. In comparison, libertarianism tends to advocate legally conservative democratic values, has the very contrary non-aggression principle, and be pacifist. No libertarians advocate war especially not on the basis that it's great for housecleaning. Half the points are just shit on a page with no relevance. Libertarians are not keen on destroying museums, libraries, and academies of any kind. If you want to make a museum devoted to showing the deep but non-existent connections between some Italian kooks of the early 20th Century and libertarians of today, go for it. We don't care, as long as you don't force other people to pay for your obsessions. And libertarians sure aren't "singing" for real or metaphorically of pointless revolution and riot because steamers are cool.
In summary, there is no such connection between futurists of this time and libertarians of the present. It's not even wrong.
Once again, you have claimed that there is something which I don't understand, but when we dig a little, we see that there is nothing to understand. It is another shining rhetorical monument of irrelevance. I hope this preening and status signaling is getting you laid, because otherwise I'm afraid that no one is getting anything out of this exercise.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 03 2015, @09:09PM
Well done, khallow, well done!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:12AM
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:29AM
First, not my fault, you do not have to respond.
Second, not a waste of time! You may have learned something, even if it hasn't surfaced yet.
Third, should not you apologize to me for saying bad things about governments?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 04 2015, @03:50AM
Third, should not you apologize to me for saying bad things about governments?
You aren't a government and thus, don't have standing in any sense of the word. And if you were, then I would be of the opinion that the bad things I said about you were deserved and thus, not warrant an apology.
When I say bad things about something, I state why. If you can convince me those reasons are wrong, then I will apologize.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:00AM
Point Number One is irrelevant, I take it. Alright.
Actually, I am a government. So are you. Supposedly this is more the case if you or I live in "democracies", but it is true nonetheless. Governments are people ruling themselves. Government is not some foreign entity that imposes its will and extracts taxes from the supine masses. Even a dictatorship is a people's way of governing theirselves, since all power rests on the consent of the governed.
Now when you say that government has too much power already, you are saying that about me. Frankly, I don't think it is true. Yes, I understand how you could think that. But that is the point of the theory of fascism. If Romney can say "corporations are people", we must respond that "governments are people, too!" So it cannot be the case that government has too much power.
Your defense of libertarianism was cogent. The points I was hitting, however, were the technophila and misogyny that characterized the Futurists, as a precursor to Fascism. Do you not think that we can spot tendencies, minor, yes, but still tendencies, to that today?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:58PM
Actually, I am a government. So are you.
The "sovereign individual" eh? Completely ignores what we call "government", authority that does not operate at the individual level.
Governments are people ruling themselves. Government is not some foreign entity that imposes its will and extracts taxes from the supine masses.
Well, except that it is. When you speak of taxes, you are no longer speaking of people ruling themselves, but of some authority ruling people. If I choose not to pay taxes, then it won't be an arbitrary fellow man who attempts to force me to comply. It'll be a member of a relatively small bureaucracy who does. This separation between your claimed government and actual government is what makes actual government a foreign entity (which happens to be extracting taxes from a group of subjects, who may or may not be supine).
Now when you say that government has too much power already, you are saying that about me. Frankly, I don't think it is true.
And the obvious rebuttal is you aren't exercising or abusing the power that I worry about.
Yes, I understand how you could think that. But that is the point of the theory of fascism.
Not at all. If we look at actual fascist systems, they have a powerful central government, businesses are merely tools of the state with superficial private parties responsible for running the businesses according to state dictates. It is a description of a rather nasty form of government. But if we look at how fascism is described in this thread, we first see the warblings of some communist stooge about "financial capital". It is noise so divorced from meaning as to be not worth the effort to copy and paste. Now, fascism is supposed to be merely erroneous opinion about whether government has too much power? Not even wrong.
If Romney can say "corporations are people", we must respond that "governments are people, too!" So it cannot be the case that government has too much power.
I can't be bothered to categorize these fallacies. But I'll just make some rather dirt simple observations: Romney's opinion doesn't require us to do a thing. Just because governments consist of people doesn't mean that they don't have too much power. We have plenty of historical examples of governments (of people) which do a fine job of oppressing their citizens - a firm indication that they have too much power.
Your defense of libertarianism was cogent. The points I was hitting, however, were the technophila and misogyny that characterized the Futurists, as a precursor to Fascism. Do you not think that we can spot tendencies, minor, yes, but still tendencies, to that today?
Don't forget the desire to erase the past, to create conflict where none needs exist, and to impose one's will on others. Sure, I see those tendencies, but not in libertarians. I see these tendencies in the communists (such as the one quoted in this thread), in the variety of ideologies and cultures that dominate academia, and in anyone who defaults to imposing force on others whenever they see a problem, real or imagined, that needs addressing.
Let's look at these examples in more detail. The Marxists/communists of the 20th Century were generally not known for misogyny. But they exhibit the other symptoms in spades with an obsessive worship of central planning (see for example, this peculiar example [wikipedia.org] from Chilean communists during the reign of Allende. It's sexy looking technology, but why would you think it would even work? And the communists were notorious both for actually destroying the past once they got into power and interpreting everything in terms of their stilted ideology. And the class conflict narrative is a notorious conflict creator. There's always going to be conflict between have mores and have lesses. But throwing gasoline on the fire with the aggressive rhetoric, revolution worship, and the notorious dehumanization of rich people, the communists try to escalate these conflicts. Finally, there is the terrible history of what happened when communists actually achieved power with deaths of tens of millions of people. This is the great tragedy of the 20th Century and one which we have partly rectified.
Moving on, academia is notorious for its hypocritical misogyny. There is the "rape culture" which strangely seems to never go away no matter how much you oppress young male adults. And there is the condescending institutional treatment of women as present and future rape victims rather than as human beings. Feminism as it is practiced in academia takes this bizarre hypocrisy to its peak with remarkably crude ridicule and shunning of women who don't publicly show the proper deference to the ideology. I don't see a notable technophilia for the most part aside from the STEM fields where it would be expected and education (which seems partly captured by business interests and subject to ill-advised budget cutting). Rewriting history is a common hobby with whole new fields often created merely to rewrite history towards a particular ethnicity or ideology. Creating conflict is probably the primary political activity of academia. In recent times, we have such conflict enhancers as anti-rape rules (which have a variety of needlessly adversarial provisions such as generously expanding the definition of rape to near uselessness), micro-aggression (which conflates subjective slights with objective ones), and the class warfare stuff.
And of course, bright, perky college students know what's best for us. We get them all the time on these discussion forums.
Then there's the final group of people I mentioned, the "there oughtta be a law" people. Sure, we all occasionally fall prey to the hubris that a little bit of law in our favor will make the world a better place. But there's a certain class of people who never get past that, whose first and last impulse is to impose law and regulation on our very behavior. For example, we have the nannies like Michael Bloomberg who as mayor of New York City, banned 32 ounce soft drinks and who currently is astroturfing some gun control advocacy. They don't show misogyny per se, but do show a profound condescension and/or disdain for the people whose behavior they wish to control or punish. Racism is common. Technophilia may or may not be present. They do have a tendency to interpret the past in a way that exaggerates their desired goals or obsessions. The real similarities with those Futurists are their tendency to create conflict by being busy-bodies and imposing their will on others by passing laws that control others.
But somehow I doubt you had any of these people in mind, having only mentioned libertarians as a contemporary group. But among libertarians there's no notable misogyny, moderate technophilia, considerable lack of conflict (there is a remarkably lack of care about what you do with your life or what you say), maybe a little reinterpretation of history (eg, ignoring certain inconvenient historical figures like Alexander Hamilton or Andrew Jackson in US history when considering "what the founders intended"), and if they achieve their ultimate goals, you get to do what you want subject to the usual mild libertarian constraints. It's just another ludicrous comparison with no sense of proportion.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 10 2015, @07:12AM
Notice I am increasing the interval of my response. . . this means something!
And what it might mean is that my estimation of your learning potential was severely overestimated.
Yes, government does not operate at an individual level. We agree on something! Sovereign citizens, and the alluvial variety, are batshit crazy. No man is an island, John Donne, I believe. What I have been trying to get into your head is that the radical individualism of the libertarian dogma is wrong. And of course, this applies equally to the run of the mill liberal, who shares the same perspective, radical individualism.
Government is the General Will, as defined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Communitarianism means we all get to decide what should be public policy, but that means what we decide is a communal decision, not a aggregation of individual decisions. This is what looks like oppressi of on with taxation to our benighted libertarians. But it is inclusion in this whole that makes us part of a government. You are part of my government, and you are part of mine! Now this is the real split between the right (individualist) and left (communitarian), although there are right wing communitarists (Catholics and Fascists), but it is the overcoming of the dichotomy between individual freedom and communal freedom that defines the left. Not that I expect you to get this. Talk to your mom.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 10 2015, @12:14PM
Government is the General Will
Except when it's not. There's way too many examples of special interests taking precedence over general interests in any government to take Rousseau's abstractions seriously. The innumerable defections and distortions from Rosseau's ideals can't be ignored.
Communitarianism means we all get to decide what should be public policy, but that means what we decide is a communal decision, not a aggregation of individual decisions.
Get back to me when you've fit the NSA into that.
This is what looks like oppression of with taxation to our benighted libertarians. But it is inclusion in this whole that makes us part of a government.
I think the problem here is that I want to be more than just a food source. Nobody starts yapping about inclusiveness until they want my shit. The simple solution is not to give them my shit.
Now this is the real split between the right (individualist) and left (communitarian), although there are right wing communitarists (Catholics and Fascists), but it is the overcoming of the dichotomy between individual freedom and communal freedom that defines the left. Not that I expect you to get this. Talk to your mom.
No, this is wrong on several levels. First, individualism is not a "right" ideal any more than its opposite, authoritarianism is a "left" ideal. Second, there is no dichotomy between individual and communal freedom, this is just an artificial distinction made by Rosseau. Among other things, the latter is just individual freedom which is enabled by some degree of communal action/cooperation which makes it a subset of the former. The "dichotomy" is actually just a slight trade off between a ridiculous degree of individual freedom and important rights that most libertarians support. For example, for the sacrifice of the "right" to arbitrarily kill anyone and take their stuff, we get property ownership, a communal right (and a standard example from Rosseau as I understand it).
Now look at a typical left cause: a public pension. I grant the idea could result in greater economic freedom for old people who can no longer work. The gotcha is that public pensions are notoriously inefficient and ineffective at their intended task. It is common for them to promise too much and then fail to deliver to some future generation on those promises (particularly when the older generations vote themselves more pension than is their due). Is it really to my community's benefit to take wealth from ourselves, making us poorer now and then dump it ineffectively on the elderly (or whatever special interest/business manages to intercept those funds before they get to the elderly, plus fraud)? This example not only weakens both individual and communal rights, but it also results in a net loss for society. As the sardonic observation goes, that's an awful big mess just to keep Grannie from eating catfood.
This is the third issue. In order to grant a rather insignificant right, we trampled on important individual and communal rights and ignored various other terrible economic and law enforcement consequences. That is not the sort of "overcoming" I respect. This sort of thing incidentally remains the key difference between government and an independent private business. Someone who can't rely on a vast, permanent captive revenue stream in turn can't afford to make generations of bad decisions.
Not that I expect you to get this.
When you discuss Rosseau's ideas on governance, you are not even wrong. You aren't speaking of real world governments, real world people, real world decisions, or real world rights. When we actually look at real world left schemes, we typically see huge sacrifices of freedom in exchange for paltry benefits, which often don't even surpass the strictly economic costs of the scheme. In turn, all this talk of we being our own governments is cover for you taking my stuff for your special interests. This environment also leads to the very problems that people in this thread claim to be concerned about, like government/business collusion. Businesses which can devote a small, very competent army to lobbying and bribery are far more effective at taking stuff from others than the left is. And businesses have more to offer to their government counterparts than some clueless leftist flunky does.
I suppose fundamentally, the problem here is that there is no feedback. If you touch a hot stove, the pain you receive (presuming a normal sense of touch) is sufficient to warn you that you are hurting yourself. At the business level, cash flow and the profit motive provide a weaker, but still effective feedback mechanism for avoiding really dumb activities. But at the government level, the feedback mechanisms are particularly weak. It's hard to connect attempts to protect or strengthen workers with the resulting destruction of worker freedom and power. It's hard to connect the gargantuan morass of regulation with unaccountable and unsupervised intelligence agencies. It's hard to connect the creation of an environment where taking things from others for what appears to be good reasons with taking things from others for bad reasons (such as creating a government/business complex and massive corruption). Rosseau and his adherents can be wrong forever and yet never associate the consequences with the actions.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:03AM
Yes, you get my point, but do not understand it. I am willing to accept that. But more importantly, a recent conversation with someone else reveals that you actually have completed a Doctorate? I am somewhat impressed, and now realize why you are, as Stephen Colbert would say, a "formidable opponent". Dr. khallow. This will take some getting used to.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:37PM
Plus, in the hypothetical, purely theoretical scenario where I'm talking out my ass, I really don't want to hear endless mockery about my degree rather than the foibles of the moment.