SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Capitalism is in trouble – at least judging by recent polls.
A majority of American millennials reject the economic system, while 55% of women age 18 to 54 say they prefer socialism. More Democrats now have a positive view of socialism than capitalism. And globally, 56% of respondents to a new survey agree "capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world."
One problem interpreting numbers like these is that there are many definitions of capitalism and socialism. More to the point, people seem to be thinking of a specific form of capitalism that deems the sole purpose of companies is to increase stock prices and enrich investors. Known as shareholder capitalism, it's been the guiding light of American business for more than four decades. That's what the survey meant by "as it exists today."
As a scholar of socially responsible companies, however, I cannot help but notice a shift in corporate behavior in recent years. A new kind of capitalism seems to be emerging, one in which companies value communities, the environment and workers just as much as profits.
The latest evidence: Companies as diverse as alcohol maker AB InBev, airline JetBlue and money manager BlackRock have all in recent weeks made new commitments to pursue more sustainable business practices.
[...] A 2017 study showed that many companies with climate change goals actually scaled back their ambitions over time as the reality clashed with their lofty goals.
But businesses can't afford to ignore their customers' wishes. Nor can they ignore their workers in a tight labor market. And if they disregard socially responsible investors, they risk both losing out on important investments and facing shareholder resolutions that force change.
The shareholder value doctrine is not dead, but we are beginning to see major cracks in its armor. And as long as investors, customers and employees continue to push for more responsible behavior, you should expect to see those cracks grow.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday January 24 2020, @05:47PM (17 children)
Even when you give them free money to improve society, they still don't. You still have to check up on them.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/01/23/2323210#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
I am surprised anyone would even ask this question after I had been posting this link here for so long:
thesesystemsarefailing.net
Raw plutacracy is just tyranny. You have to have separation of powers with accountability to prevent autocratic idiocy, you can't foist that off onto the free market and call it a day.
And 50% of the people in the united states don't know what socialism even is, they use it interchangeably with Totalitarianism(and now soon Terrorism), including the erudite(lol j/k) Jordan Peterson.
Everyone having these thoughts should read my website and educate themselves before they rehash a bunch of closed arguments with outdated, propaganda terms that were planted there to shred your ability to process information about political economy.
https://jmichaelhudson.net/important-definitions/ [jmichaelhudson.net]
And could you really say this was some kind of fair, or reasoned debate, where both parties are just seeking the truth, after looking at this chart that demonstrates the people arguing against me are nothing more than stinking leaches?
https://archive.is/ZinJT [archive.is]
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday January 24 2020, @08:05PM (12 children)
As to the Socialism thing, this is your definition:
What's missing is the mechanics of how this is done. That's how evil gets in. A recent example is the profoundly dishonest Gross National Happiness [wikipedia.org] index of Nepal. They utterly fail traditional economic measures, so they invented their own softball metrics.
Meanwhile important metrics are outright ignored. The majority of the world is getting better at a rate never seen before in history: more wealth per capital, more people who can feed themselves, less war and disease, better technology, etc. Instead problems are interpreted in insolvable ways - for example, wealth inequality instead of poverty, presence of wars and pollution instead of how many people are harmed, and here purporting that a society which prioritizes society over it's people will be less evil than one that doesn't so prioritize - democide metrics are showing that's not working out so well.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday January 24 2020, @11:10PM (6 children)
You idiot, khallow! Bhutan has the GNH index. And, they are Buddhists. Nepal has the earthquakes and a thriving capitalist market in surrogate pregnancies for first world same-sex couples.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:55AM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:28AM (4 children)
Seriously? What about all the other errors I have corrected you on? Well, this is progress. Welcome to the liberal-biased reality, khallow!
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:31AM
OH, almost forgot! The hilarious (Hilary) part is that the IMPOTUS, D. John Trump, pronounced Bhutan as "Button", and Nepal as "Nipple". President needs to be given the latitude to run international relations as he, and John Bolton, see fit, even if he cannot pronounce the names of nations, or find them on a map, like certain NPR journalists seem to be able to do.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:19AM (2 children)
As to the rest of the alleged errors, what was there to apologize for? I recall years of inability on your part to articulate what these errors were supposed to be. I can't be bothered under such circumstances. The present correction was refreshing in its directness and relative good faith.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:56AM (1 child)
Ah, good faith! That is good! And faithful. Now about that backhoe and rent on capital, which is exploitation, not profit!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:35AM
Apparently, that's quite irrelevant since "exploitation, not profit!" != error.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:27PM (4 children)
Venezuela - starvation, artificially imposed
China - pestilence, first days used to combat mention of it on asocial media rather than quarantine
Yemen and Israel - Permanent War, by choice
Doomsday Clock - closest its ever been in human history, as of this very day.
I have no idea what you are talking about with your metric talk, 'presence of wars and pollution instead of how many harmed', have you not seen the gyre in the ocean? Have you not seen the bubbling methane? The harm for that pollution is just getting started, and it was all predicted, all of it.
As I have memed elsewhere, I am aware of the problem that if the wrong people get into the positions of power, everything fails:
https://archive.is/2gVPq [archive.is]
That is the entire point of
decultification.org (and the urgency of my antizionist position, which is the decultification situation sadly most effecting my country as demonstrated by epstein)
and this series of diagrams, which I updated and put together in a new hot decopage yesterday:
https://archive.is/ws6XQ [archive.is]
You should know all of this stuff by now, I have been saying it all year.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:31PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:31PM (1 child)
If you think the doomsday clock is a crass moneymaking scheme from opportunists, that is a wilder conspiracy theory than I have ever even heard.
If your 'conspiracy detecting sensor' is set to nearly automatically go off on small public groups of scientists warning us about the danger of wmd's, your head must be exploding with literally everything else in the world.
If you were real, but I already know you're not, so this is just review.
Tactics in play here:
4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent’s argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.
7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could so taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 26 2020, @03:35PM
Sorry, it's a conspiracy only if it's secret. This isn't secret.
Fake news and climate change too. They hit several sexy topics when they rationalized that. We'll see if it's good for their funding or not.
That's not a straw man. Cherry picking perhaps. But it illustrate the oddity of inserting a bit of propaganda as if it were on the same level as the rest, which were things which killed people. Which is how I presented it. I still see no point to discussing the rest of your list because they aren't relevant. I didn't claim the world would be perfect so one can always come up with such lists. When one then extends that to mere, exaggerated perceptions of harm, such as the 100 seconds to midnight nonsense, then it goes from merely being irrelevant to delusional.
Not a fallacy when the motives are relevant and transparent. There's no way that we're as close to global catastrophe at present as we were right after the development of the fusion bomb in the mid-50s with no idea how that was going to turn out (the last time the Doomsday clock was at 2 minutes). So why did the recent push to 100 seconds happen? Free press and the generation of funding is the obvious answer.
Needless to say, the Doomsday Clock needs serious recalibration before I'll take it seriously as an opinion of the state of global risk.
And have I questioned your motives?
4. There's a real example of a straw man. "I don't have to take you seriously, because you're faking it."
I'm pretty good at filtering out the crap. For example, sure I remember that the Doomsday Clock is set to 100 seconds, but that irrelevant trivia will get dumped at some point for information I care about. In a few months to years, I'll neither know or care what they're setting that clock to, unless someone brings it up again.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:33PM
What was so hard to see? I haven't seen the "gyre" because there's nothing to see. Sure, there's elevated levels of plastics in ocean gyres. But those don't look like much. It's impossible to see most of the plastic particles in the first place because they're at the millimeter to micrometer scale.
The bubbling methane? It's been doing that for the entire history of liquid water on Earth. Natural methane seeps happen. And just because there are predictions doesn't mean that there's huge harm involved. Those predictions are conveniently back-loaded with the "harm" occurring well after the deaths of the people making the predictions. Their funding won't be threatened by bad predictions for decades. An example of this is ignoring global sinks for atmospheric CO2 and methane. A big part of the reason climate models are "running hot" these days is that there's less CO2 present than predicted for the level of historical emissions. It got sinked somehow.
There's no magic "wrong people". It's the flaws in the system that make people "wrong" not some quality of the person.
Sounds like you need a better class of problems. I get that there are criminal organizations, cults, and whatnot. And sometimes these secret things are problems for us. But I think decultification would be better served from fairly mundane reform of law (like legalizing recreational drugs and prostitution in the US), eliminating most of the need for such secrecy and crime, than by obsessing futilely over Zionism.
I guess you need to figure out how communication and other peoples' interests work. I say things all year too, why aren't you fully agreeing with me?
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 24 2020, @08:24PM (1 child)
Wait, you mean some people here click on your links? Learn something new every day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:15PM
Some people have curiosity and are sociable, I would suggest you try it but I have given up on you.
(Score: 0, Troll) by fustakrakich on Friday January 24 2020, @09:52PM
:-) Want their heads on a pike, Mr. Trump?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:27PM
Troll mod??
Dude! That's all you got?! You really are weak sauce. Stop and think, maybe that's why nobody is kissing yer ass and thinks your shit is stupid!