Bay 12 Games Forum

I personally think it can be fine to compare your own values to someone else's and judge theirs as alien or stupid, and that the inherent subjectivity and difficulties in doing this are usually overstated. The trick is to also learn to judge your own stupid values against the values of others, and I think this process happens more easily (at least from passive observation under amiable settings) than many people think.

However, this is totally distinct from assessing the degree to which people are responsible for their stupid values (and everyone has stupid values), which is a far more complicated question drawing from many more areas of thought and innumerable unknowable details of a person's life. In my opinion it isn't a question worth pursuing, and that it is far more productive to just accept that people have stupid values, concentrating on improving your own stupid values wherever you are fortunate enough to notice them.

Anyway, my main point is that if you never compare your own values to others and judge them accordingly, improvement is impossible, and that conflating this with the question of personal responsibility out of a good-willed sense of tolerance can be harmful.

Link to context?

I've been on a 19th century economist kick, and this kind of spontaneous dry sarcasm always seems to catch me off guard and get a laugh. Of course, for you it now isn't a surprise and is thus ruined.

I think antifa is squandering a potentially once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they've been handed to cultivate a stronger radical left in America. They'd have more success in times like these if they focused on building up organizations and limiting their public activities to ones that generate neutral and only slightly negative publicity, essentially just to gain public recognition and say "hey, anarchism is an option." Then when the economy tumbles again or Trump nukes American Samoa the anarchists are actually prepared to take advantage of broader public anger and make some sort of credible impact.

Instead they're focusing on indulging a ridiculous fantasy centered on a Weimar fetish and delusions of militancy, to say nothing of the wasted energy chasing marginal fascists down their own rabbitholes. I'm not even an anarchist or in favor of radical politics, but its irritating to see them so stupidly discredit their own movement.

Extraction of the Teeth

Quote from: UrbanGiraffe on September 28, 2017, 03:46:03 pm

I'm not sure what sort of a meaningful backlash you can expect when the popular outrage under such a conception of economics is so easily misdirected and wasted away on bandaids and symbolic policy, even assuming that the government is functional and accountable enough to respond to such outrage.

Well, for one thing, we're going to run critically short of expertise. We've been band-aiding over it with the H1B visa, but even that's failing now as people just go back to their country of origin. We're running out of home-grown millennials that can afford hard science PhDs, because even if the dollar amount of the tuition isn't prohibitive (and in some fields it's free), the lost wages easily can be. There isn't a fast way to restart that pipeline once everyone's leaked out of it, either, because the whole education process takes about a decade between entry into college and the end of the (effectively requisite) postdoctoral fellowship.

There will come a day when the rich finally hit a problem they can't solve economically, a disease they cannot buy their way out of not because the money is lacking but simply because there's no one left with the means to learn to research a cure for it who wouldn't be better served by going into finance instead.

I don't think this is an outcome we can necessarily expect just from a descent into Trumpish hyperplutocracy. At some point in the future business-owners may decide that the workforce is inadequate and that it is once again in their interest to politically support higher education (mostly funded by taxdollars that they didn't pay), and that policy position is politically easy to implement since it aligns with a constant pressure from the public who desire access to education as a real or imaginary means of personally higher wages.

If higher education does decline in the US in the manner you described I think it'll be more due to globalization, as employers will no longer see any need to subsidize education in their home country (the one they pay taxes to) if they can find some other country that will subsidize education and supply the necessary workers at no cost to them.

It's 6 panels and the joke is entirely encapsulated in the first two, can't blame the meme version for trimming.

Literally a semantic argument about the word semantic

I'd say the key difference is that social democrats hope to use the state to mitigate the ills of capitalism while keeping it essentially the same, while democratic socialists hope to use the state to democratically transition out of capitalism. A modern social democrat would never consider institutions like private property or wage labor to be a problem, for instance, while a democratic socialist would likely consider them incompatible with a fully democratic society.