darthelmet

We live in a country that was stolen then we stole some other people so they could do the work for us. Then conquering half a continent wasn’t good enough for us, so we went around ruining other places if they didn’t want to give us all their stuff. If people think we only recently crossed a line, I’d generously hope they were just ignorant because the alternative is horrific. Every piece of the past is a step that got us to where we are.

Mostly the 2nd one. I imagine just refusing openly as an individual will have about as much impact as just resigning, but if you can gum things up a bit? Maybe that adds up. I suppose another alternative is non-individualized refusal: a strike. Same theory as any strike applies: it’d be hard for them to fire all of us at once without shooting themselves in the foot. I suppose in either case though, this only really applies if the gov wants them actively doing something bad rather than just trying to gut the department.

I wish people wouldn't just resign as a protest. Stay around and do your job terribly. Don't make it easy for them.

There's a difference though. To the extent that a communist society fails in it's goals, it's because of people's failure to achieve them.

The problems with capitalism are inevitable consequences of the system. Competition is theoretically supposed to keep things in check, but that just doesn't really pass the smell test for real life. We essentially never have markets that work like the mythical economic model of many sellers and many buyers so that nobody can be a price setter. Plus, competitions are meant to be won. Companies aren't working to keep each other in the race. The goal is to drive out your competition and become a monopoly. Maybe there are brief periods where things stay competitive, but even small differences in success can compounded to further solidify your advantage, in turn making it easier to keep doing that. And that's just if everything started our fairly, which it obviously didn't.

Then there is the divide between capital and labor. In order for there to be wage workers, there must be a population of people who don't own what they need to keep themselves alive. Otherwise there wouldn't be capitalists, there would just be people using their own property to produce their own goods. And once we've established that this is a necessary part of capitalism, we have to acknowledge that workers wanting to be paid the most possible and to buy things for the cheapest possible is in direct opposition to the capitalist's need to pay workers as little as possible and sell their goods for as much as possible. This isn't some anomalously evil behavior, it's the kind of optimization required to be the winner in the market competition. So even if you had a benevolent capitalist who decided to pay more and sell for less, they would just lose to someone else who is actually playing to win. And thus in the long term, the system filters out this altruistic behavior as a natural consequence of it's mechanisms.

Furthermore, this need to divide capital from labor is in tension with the possibility that people could just take the stuff you're hoarding. Because if they have nothing, you have an abundance, and you're just one person, then it'd be the rational thing to do to take the stuff without having to work for you. Thus, in order for this divide between capital and labor to be maintained, there must be a concept of property rights that is enforced with some kind of organized violence, either by the state or by private security.

The other symptoms of capitalism naturally flow from these core principles.

• Corporate capture of the political system? Aside from the state existing to enforce private property rights in the first place, the inequality created by the outcomes of competition and the capital/labor divide creates power imbalances that can be used to influence governments more than those with less power.

• Climate change and environmental destruction due to over-consumption? You don't make money from selling less stuff or from paying for things you don't need to pay for. So you do things to induce demand like advertising, planned obsolescence, and influencing policy to kill green energy and public transportation, etc. There's no reason for a corporation, a profit maximizing machine, to do anything that wouldn't optimize it's profits. If it did anything else, it would lose to someone who did do that.

• This meme: Privatization of public goods. If there is something you could make a profit from, a corporation must exploit that thing to maximize profits and win the competition. So there is an incentive to take things that aren't commodities and turn them into commodities. This is sort of related to the divide of labor and capital as well. In order to be able to sell people things, they need to not have those things and not have a means of acquiring those things outside of buying them from capitalists, which in turn means needing to work for capitalists. If you had adequate access to food, housing, water, clothing, and medical care, you'd have no reason to buy those things from capitalists and would therefore have way less of a reason to put up with working for them. So those things must be withheld. This is also part of why there has been a problem with loneliness and the destruction of communities. Communities support each other. If your friend is willing to drive you to the doctor (or better yet, if there's public transportation), you don't need to call a taxi/ride share. If someone is willing to help feed you when things are going bad, maybe you don't need to work another shift at some shitty job. If you have people you can enjoy socializing with by just talking or doing some free activity like taking a walk in the park, then maybe you don't spend money to buy as much entertainment as you would if you were alone. Maybe you don't have a social media account or don't spend a lot of time on it just so that you can get some kind of socializing.

These are all bad things done to us by bad people. But the problem isn't that the specific people in power happen to be bad and ruin what would otherwise be a good system. The bad people being in power is the inevitable end result of the system.

True, but also don't allow perfection to be the enemy of good.

I think this logic fundamentally misses the point. This isn't me not starting a project because I don't think I could do it perfectly so why bother. It's someone else showing me their outline for the project and telling me that I don't need to do anything, they'll get it done on time. Then it doesn't get done because they never intended to do anything, they just didn't want anyone else completing anything.

If we were just doing small things because that's all we could feasibly do for now and we're working our way up to big things, that'd be fine. It might not be enough, but it'd be what we're working with. But the small actions being taken by capitalist governments aren't designed to chip away at the problem slowly. Their purpose is to give the appearance that the current system is capable of solving the problem and someone is working on it, so we don't need to think about more radical solutions. The goal is to block progress, not merely to work on it in some slow and responsible way. "Look, the government joined a non-binding agreement saying that we're working on climate change! We should totally keep voting for them because it's better than nothing!"

It's even worse than that though. They're not just doing things for show to dampen political will for greater change. These are the same people that keep giving the military, surveillance, and police state more and more money and power. We are allowing them to build the tools they need to keep us in our place. By continuing along this path we're making it harder and harder for us to eventually do what needs to be done.

The reality is that we're not going to be able to save ourselves while capitalists are in charge. Capitalism fundamentally demands endless growth and a concentration of wealth and power. Efforts to curtail that growth will be stopped and the costs of that growth is distributed to those with less power.

As for the science/science communication part of this: I think it should be pretty clear that that isn't the problem. The science is well known at this point. The problem is that the people who have the power to fix things don't care and are so invested in the status quo that they'd sooner ratchet up violent repression before they'd actually try to solve the problem.

I think this message has good and bad uses. As a way to stop people from being doomers and not taking any action? Great. But I’ve also seen this kind of argument be used to justify an incrementalist approach to an issue that we absolutely cannot afford to go slow on or half ass. “Something is better than nothing” isn’t good enough. If we take 1 step forward and 2 steps back we’re going to lose. And that’s if the problem was linear. The fact that feedback loops accelerate the problem means we lose more and more ground the longer we wait to rip the bandaid off.

If the best allowable solution is to keep electing liberals who take money from capitalists to promote symbolic progress or “market based solutions” while continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects, then we really are doomed.

Actual greatest thing you could do for climate change: destroy the US military industrial complex. Not only is it a massive polluter, it also enables the capitalists to maintain their ability to extract fossil fuels and other resources around the world.

Quit it with the anti-human shit. If we’re not saving the environment for us what’s the point?

Same. I was also talking with some friends that have it and they also think I might. I already got a mess of other issues. I guess I'll ask at my next psych appointment and see if I need to add that to the pile.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don't even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that's already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it's had.

That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.

Yeah wouldn’t it be crazy if we created a super weapon which destroys entire ~~cities~~ planets and then demonstrated it on a civilian population? That sure would be a step too far for this beacon of peace, freedom, and democracy!

That’s fair, but I think it comes down to what the actual power dynamics of the space is. If you’re in a group that’s systemically discriminated against, just ignoring it means putting up with discrimination. Not getting good jobs, getting harassed by police, etc. you have to actively fight back against that.

Some dipshit online complaining about seeing a black person in a movie? They only have power proportionate to the attention they get. Let them scream into the void. If they get a comment, it validates what they were saying and gives them another opportunity to respond with even more bullshit that they know will have an engaged audience. If they get nothing, what are they gonna do? Reply to themselves? Keep making posts that get no attention? At some point they’ll just get bored or demotivated. If they do keep being a nuisance you block and/or ban them silently. EDIT: Oh, also, besides the personal validation, there is the algorithmic aspect to consider. Algorithms direct people to things that will hold their attention and get more engagement. The more you talk to these people the more people will get them shoved in their faces.

People talk about not platforming these people, well, every comment interaction they get is a new tiny stage for them to stand on.

We're #1!