Unless I'm Misunderstanding You, I Agree With You; Everyone Thinks That Their Values And Groups Are Sacred

None of which is to say that strikebreaking is *admirable* per se. But analyzing the material precursors of our actions is the absolute bedrock of any materialism worth the name. Treating people who betray the cause – any cause – like they’re infected with some nebulous evil rather than responding to the incentives they’re presented with is magical thinking.

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.

Property ownership itself is a system of authority. If you own all the farmland in an area, I have to work on it in order to survive, or I will starve. What gives you the right to control a resource and demand that I subordinate myself to you for my daily bread?

When we abandon cooperation and democracy as a means of conducting economic activity, solving ethical questions, and relating to each other, life becomes nothing more than a nightmarish struggle to death as you have described. Without a system of authority to protect your property rights, who will stop your stronger, smarter neighbor with more friends from taking your property at gunpoint and enslaving your family?

By your own logic, there will always be someone capable of dominating you and willing to do so. You will not survive the world you wish to create.

“ (Also, I’ll grant you there’s something to *the basic idea*, but “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is actually untenable.)”

Could you elaborate more on this? I’m curious how you arrived to this conclusion when we produce more than enough food to feed the planet and when we (in the United States, at least) have more empty homes than homeless people. If those kinds of surpluses can be achieved with only small parts of the population engaged in agriculture and construction, what could we achieve if everyone worked to the best of their ability? Even with marginal returns on labor.

I genuinely mean it; to me, nothing is more untenable than the idea that allowing a small percentage of people to control nearly all resource and labor allocation will benefit humankind in the long run, except maybe the idea that unchecked productive activity in a competitive system will somehow miraculously save us from the ecological catastrophe caused by that activity.

funny thing about talking about capitalism/communism is if you don’t explicitly say ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ and take out the marxist jargon people will agree with you 90% of the time

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world’s experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

- Iain M Banks, http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

I pity them and am perfectly willing to forgive them of their sins, but I also want to democratize their property with every fiber of my being so they can stop this system before we all die from it.

tfw you don’t know whether to be envious of the upper classes for having a bunch of utilities provided for free-or-below-market by venture capitalists trying to boost growth before they find a profit model, or to pity them for relying on platforms that are doomed to ineffably disappear because they have no sustainable model.

What's interesting to me is that for all the fervor surrounding Muslims, I've never seen anyone do any deep investigative journalism on how religion is maintained across generations, and how deeply the parents actually believe in it. Kids are dumb and have short attention spans; do they have a parent at home constantly making serious comments about jihad, or is this a case of edgy lower-class humor? If the parents were genuine Islamists, you'd think they'd be sticking their kids into a private school, or not sending them to school at all, and the fact that they found it funny implies a lack of deep conviction. Or maybe it does and

Even preschoolers are radicalizing in Belgium “They threaten to murder ‘infidels’, slice their necks, call classmates pigs”

A recently started initiative “Network Islam-experts” records issues of radicalized students. Since 2016 there have been 481 cases of schools who encountered ‘problems’. Today for the first time a case-file was made public involving toddlers.

An East-Flemishs school network made an internal report named “indoctrination among toddlers”, it details problematic behavior:

“Citing Arabic verses during playtime, refusing to come to class because it doesn’t fit their beliefs, not coming to school on Friday for ‘religious reasons’. A girl refuses to give a boy a hand or to stand in line near boys.”

Sadly these are the least frightening cases:

A preschooler already has a ‘friend’ in Morocco she will be married to later. A child threatens to murder ‘infidels’. Calling non-Muslim students ‘pigs’. Making the motion of slicing someones neck.”

After conversation with parents it was concluded they support these actions and found them funny.

1, 2, 3

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

-Christopher Hitchens

Your arguments sum to "In my perfect world, there will be no Jews, no Shinto, no Hindu, no Sikhs, no nothing other than a vaguely Christian-ish 'default culture'. This to me is a positive," and you don't understand how everyone else is appalled and taking it as a negative?

Very strange that you assume "Vaguely Christian" to be a "default culture", sounds like you have some internalised Christian hegemony to deal with!

Even as a jaded adult, every so often I see a gore picture/video that deeply disturbs me. I perfectly understand the urge to protect people (and kids in particular) from beheading videos and cartel members skinning each other alive.

But I have no idea what people mean when they say they find porn traumatizing. I would definitely be disturbed by seeing a video of sexual assault, but that's because of the violence and violation of someone's consent, not the sex itself. I don't think people are consciously lying when they say they're "traumatized" by porn, but I think a better word would be "scandalized". Most Americans have incredibly repressive attitudes towards sex and nudity, and I imagine that stumbling upon large amounts of it unprompted online causes many people to experience narcissistic injury.

im pro children having privacy but if you think parents should give kids unrestricted internet access…its not 1999. in 2022 thats legitimately neglectful. do you know how many kids are out here like. watching gore and porn. its not normal or healthy. its traumatic.