getfiscal posted:Most black voters support the Democrats. I guess you could say that black people are idiots but personally I think they are good people who work hard and play by the rules.
they're being paid by the cia
roseweird posted:i thought i was a socialist, then i spent a year here
Ehh if you're being honest at the outset you said you were a "libertarian socialist"
roseweird posted:i don't understand the idea of a politics or society not founded on the acknowledgement of the individual as basic unit... individuals whose behaviors must be modulated by moral teaching and restraint.
our current society is founded heavily on just such individualism without a whole lot of restraint, so you shouldn't be surprised that people talk about collective power or whatever.
what socialists talk about is not the dissolution of the individual but of preventing atomization and alienation in order to actually be free individuals in a society we all require
roseweird posted:all of the apparitions you fight have clearer names than the jargon applied to them here. greed, death, decay. this is life. if you don't like giving capitalism its proper name "greed" i suggest it is because it exposes with clarity the limited mutability of the human situation
Having lived through the past 300 years, can you really say the human situation is not almost infinitely mutable?
roseweird posted:the individual is always already the atomized individual. socialist talk is just more communication between individuals. it's good talk—it makes economic sense—but it's not salvation, and it is clear that many people here see salvation in it. alienation is alienation from a natural oneness that completely escapes us. this is the human condition. we only shed our humanity in death. and our lives are not long. when our loved ones die we miss them because they are gone forever, and no politics can erase the alienation inherent in existence. but yes let's please fix our confused, militaristic, and unplanned economy.
don't hedge the very last part please
"Bend it baby" - Bam Margera
also im really taking issue with your insistence that the "human condition" hasn't changed in ways that make it unrecognizable over the past three centuries. the things that people do all day and the things they can reasonably expect from their lives and the actions they take to try and achieve those expectations. tell me about what I in any of these terms have in common with my grandfather, who conveniently was born into a world that was close enough to that of your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather
roseweird posted:but that is the tenor of much socialist discussion and it eclipses meaningful discussion of reform and progress within current conditions, because we are waiting for a purifying revolution.
the man who counselled digging a cesspit instead of shitting in the cave was also eclipsing meaningful discussion of reform and progress within current conditions. he was completely discounting workable policies like aromatic pomades, decorative noseplugs, and transferrable shitting credits in order to incentivize stronger rectal muscles via the free market, all in lieu of some purifying dream about a big hole in the ground outside the nice clean cave
roseweird posted:i mean it depends on what you see as the raw and basic human condition i guess. we are still social animals trying to simultaneously manage resources and human relationships.
um these clearly aren't mutually exclusive, in fact our being social animals makes them both interdependent no? of course maybe you weren't TRYING to imply they're actually mutually contradictory needs that must be balanced, but try thinking for a second why you put it like you put it. who subtly jigged the conceptual space your mind occupies, so a sentence that can be interpreted thus naturally flows out?
roseweird posted:even supposing the fulfillment of one of my stupid dreams like total automation, there is no way around this, even tho of course this would radically transform the material circumstances of human lives.
you don't think the material circumstances and the spiritual dimension of human lives have a complementary and equally profound influence on each other?
roseweird posted:as long as we are plural intelligences bartering with each other it doesn't feel like anything has changed... except for the work of Progress, u know
how would you actually know, though. have you ever been anything other than a person who eats food, wears clothes, and lives in a space which has been manufactured entirely by people you can't see from materials whose flows and dependencies you'll never understand, and crucially whose personal allotment of this multitude of products is decided for her via a system of wage labor that's utterly arcane even to those who control it?