403 karma · joined June 19, 2021
Unexplained labor still exists deep in the Amazon and elsewhere, but mining companies finding new traces of valuable minerals are extinguishing the last of the old free way.
I'll take OP's assessment on its own merits and validate it and say the screwy work situation out there can be depressing.
Another interesting thing with replier is how he is trying to isolate you. You are alone in his view, or at least marginal, and have some deeply rooted defective aspect. The truth is OP is not alone in his thinking, as other posts in this thread can attest, and link to places like /r/antiwork where you can find more who think like this. You can see the move here to try to keep you isolated, and dull you on organizing together with others of a like mind.
Hunter-gatherers deep in the Amazon have a lot of control over their lives but you do not. Work in your context is alienating and for someone else's benefit. The main "benefit" for you is taking away enough of the wealth you're creating to survive until the next day so that you can continue to enrich the heirs who collect the profits and dividends of your labor.
My advice is to become more aware of this and then go to work full time. Realize your boss is your enemy. Realize your coworkers for the most part are in the same boat as you and are generally allies. Expecting your company is your family, and that your boss is looking out for you, that your work is not alienating and fulfilling will lead to depression.
There are things you can do to make your life more tolerable as time goes by. There are things you can do to join with workers all over the world to end capitalist exploitation, which can at times be very fulfilling. A lot of it is contained in this thread. One common thread is deal with the company like any other unpleasant thing - clock in, don't expect anything back from it but misery and a percentage of the wealth you create. Anything positive you feel or do will be on your own, or with other workers. Company are mechanisms to expropriate surplus labor time from workers to benefit heirs. How can you expect fulfillment giving so much of the time of your life to such an enterprise?
That's not what Karl Marx said
In 2018 the CIA was again planning a coup, or disruption at least, revolving around the planned December 2018 elections. The Venezuelans got wind of this and bumped the elections up a few months. The CIA was caught flat footed somewhat, and the December plans went into effect early. The idea floated that the 2018 elections were rigged doesn't really fly. Even Trump didn't like the puppet the US was trying to push as the real head of Venezuela, Guaido. He called him the Beto O'Rourke of Venezuela.
Wilson's peers were people who studied ants and other insects, or maybe people who write popular science.
If he wants to jump into his views of the human brain, she is as much a peer as he is.
You see, Wilson, like Gallant in Highlights magazine cartoons, was someone who looked at the evidence, and used logic and the scientific method to lead him to his conclusions. He only sought the truth. Which in his case, was that the white race is superior to the black race.
Gould and Lewontin were like Goofus. They were just engaging in academic politics.
Easy case to win when one side is all science and logic and the other is "political". Not sure why everyone hasn't come around.
SEIU finally won two elections recently. Actually they slipstreamed behind the work of the Wobblies to some extent. Other stores were already organizing so we will see. These things take effort and time.
Wilson was being called racist by many back in 1975. I agree with them. He was a racist who tried to dress his racist political views up in scientific jargon. Like William Shockley.
If you don't want people knocking you after your death, don't write books saying whites are genetically superior to oppressed races in the US and that slavery is natural.
It is not a new criticism of Wilson, people in the 1970s saw it for what it was.
Funny to see mention of Lysenko. Lysenko mainly talked about plant germination. Wilson talked about human brains and how one race is superior to another. It seems Lysenko was more modest than Wilson. It's odd to bring Lysenko up as Wilson is completely ideological and politicized - you'd think they would leave out mention of Lysenko. Of course if you right a political book about one race's superiority to another's and want to pass it off as science, first strategy is to accuse anyone who questions any aspect of it of being ideological.
I'm glad old bastards like Wilson, who would prefer to go back to his youth of segregated buses and drinking fountains, are dropping dead. Of course the day will come that this wack job on Medium foaming at the mouth about inferior blacks and communists will one day kick off too.
Huh? Routing around? You are advocating for the "central locus of control that serve as gatekeepers to keep people down". You don't eliminate that by "routing around" it. You eliminate it by organization, education and then agitation around it. Advocating that people unhappy with this scurry about trying to "route around" their central locus of control is exactly what they want.
With "some guy in the government" being the US secretary of state.
Russia invaded Crimea back when British red coats were stationed in New York City. The Russian military has been there ever since.
When did the US invade the Guantanamo section of Cuba?
So the thing which is "unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional and violates a person's right to self-determination and other human rights" is not what the heirs did, but what the workers doing all the work and creating all the wealth did. No questions about the province of the heirs. You're dealing with both these groups but questioning the paternity of only one of them, the ones actually doing all the work and creating all the wealth.
Me and my co-workers create wealth, a portion of which is sent off in dividends, the majority of which is going to heirs who have never worked a day in their life. I am more concerned about that than that the guy working next to me isn't killing himself more to fill that heir's pockets.
Organized labor is made up of the people working and creating wealth. Of course you don't mention the indolence of the idle class expropriators who the people doing the work are organizing to combat.
If someone looks at this OP, you see most of the flagged and dead posts are from the few people who question the continual US anti-China (anti-Iran, anti-Cuba, anti-Venezuela, anti-Palestinian...) rhetoric. So it is pretty much all posts raging about China, with the few posts questioning this killed off, but the paranoia is about "infiltration" against the US China bashing, when anyone can just look at this whole post and see the opposite is true.
The US military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about sucks away my taxes to do evil on other lands, its propaganda organs saying US workers and taxpayers like me questioning its parasitism and belligerence is alien.
It's amusing how the US's coup de grace in Afghanistan was a massacre of innocent Afghans, and the corporate press and pundits tear their shirts we're still not there killing Afghans, yet their heart bleeds for China dealing with a terrorism problem within China. The US can go around the world and bomb whoever it wants, but China is not allowed to deal with a terrorism problem within its own borders.
"Ponchaud’s book is serious and worth reading, as distinct from much of the commentary it has elicited. He gives a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge."
So a book about the barbarity of treatment by the Khmer Rouge is "serious and worth reading". That is what Chomsky actually wrote back then if anyone is actually curious. Does not sound like what you claim he was saying.
The US militarily intervened in Europe 75 years ago and has bases in Germany, Italy etc. No need to have military come in for the first time since it is still there.
Italy had NATO violently suppressing protests in Italy for years with Gladio.
This was actually revealed by the center-right government in Italy in 1990, because they were more scared of the US/NATO involvement in Italian domestic affairs, then their own left leaning working class.
Can't imagine Americans ever saying the US invaded South Vietnam when it's various puppet Saigon governments asked for fraternal assistance.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia and the US began arming Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s and 1980s, which again the Times covered, although slightly obliquely. Chomsky condemned the US arming Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
So you have upper middle class Europeans, and some upper middle class Europeans living in their media bubble. Other views outside this bubble are heretical and suspicious.
Even YC founder Paul Graham touched on this lightly in his essay about how "submarine" PR articles about men's formal suits make it into the press. Noam Chomsky (who also writes books about the language of Turing machines) covers the corporate media more thoroughly. People who actually talk about what the US is doing like journalist (and former programmer of open source port scanners) Julian Assange are imprisoned.
Also, Kazakhstan has troops coming in from Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia and Russia. So just mentioning Russia in the headline is already a slant.
So the notion that massive intergenerational wealth is innate to humans and natural is absurd. Or if it is innate and natural, then the lack of that is innate and natural as well. Most of behavioral modernity had none of this at all, it is a relatively new phenomenon, not "innately human".
Let's take visuo-spatial ability. Men do better in testing than women generally. So for arguments sake let's say they are correctly measuring a deficiency.
So now the question is, is this for cultural reasons or genetic reasons? Laszlo Polgar was a psychologist who raised his daughter to train on visuo-spatial thinking, mostly with chess. She became the youngest grandmaster ever, the youngest person to break into the FIDE 100. She became the 8th best chess player in the world. It's anecdotal, but if she is capable of this, presumably other women are genetically capable of this level of visuo-spatial thinking, so the tested deficiencies might point to culture over genetics.
As Gould said, it's not just IQ but the blanket if assumptions around it - it is genetic not cultural, it is not remedial etc. As I said, people don't get this worked up over light year measurements.