The US doesn't need to annex them, it just violently installs a capitalist government and then US companies buy everything.
2,348 karma · joined October 8, 2012
The parent didn't say "Don't you know this will kill people!?" they said "This will kill people".
Any communication of information will inevitably be limited, and the way that limitation manifests will be influenced by the subjectivity of the person communicating.
The documentaries may present the facts they choose to include in a more dispassionate style than other sources, but this should not be confused with objectivity.
But is that really reasonable or fair? What decides who will find an audience to listen to them?
Free speech advocates seem to believe that the "best" speech will always find an audience, but I don't personally see any reason to believe that's true.
When a rich person can pay for a political advert on a major television channel, and a poor person can only publish to a blog no one has any reason to know exists, do we really believe that the latter's ideas will spread more widely if they are "better"?
I think people are starting to realise that access to an audience is far more important than the simple freedom to say something, and that this access is already heavily restricted in a variety of ways other than government intervention. But unlike the mere ability to speak, access to an audience is fundamentally limited. It's physically impossible for everyone to hear everyone else's views. So a simple idea like "Freedom of Speech" is not sufficient to allow us to decide how to structure our societal discourse.
That's more like the liberal social democrat solution.
The Socialist solution is to abolish exchange based production of goods so there's no longer an incentive to lie to increase sales of poor quality products.
My argument is not equality of outcome is better, but that the dichotomy is not that coherent. If people truly have equal opportunity to choose good outcomes they will do so.
If they do not, they are either being influenced by society towards bad outcomes, in which case we should consider changing society, or they are influenced by innate aspects of themselves towards bad outcomes, in which case our society is structured in a way that privileges certain innate traits.
>That doesn't feel too meritocratic...
Well honestly, I'm not as sold on the idea of "meritocracy" as most people here. I think the idea that some people "deserve" worse lives than others is pretty distasteful.
When people say different outcomes are necessary to motivate people and produce better outcomes overall, I can at least understand that argument. I don't personally agree: I think in reality most people are far more motivated by a sense of purpose and achievement than material wealth (beyond essentials). But the argument does at least have the goal of producing the best outcomes.
But when people start to elevate this inequality to morality, and say that "inequality is good" and that some people "deserve" worse lives because they have less "merit", I think that framing discards the goal of achieving the best outcomes, and I find that misguided and self-serving at best, and evil at worst.
It's easy to say their unequal outcomes are "not necessarily a bad thing" when you're a STEM graduate living in San Francisco on a $200k, not quite so reassuring when you're an English Lit graduate struggling to make a living as a barista.
And when you look at that massive difference in outcomes and say "well you chose skills that aren't in demand" then what you are saying is "you made the wrong choice if you wanted a good life".
EDIT: Or alternatively, to finish the analogy, you're saying "some people just inevitably want to study English Lit even though our society doesn't value it, guess it sucks to be them!".
If everyone were given equal opportunity to achieve good outcomes for themselves, the only way we could end up with inequality of outcomes is if people choose to have worse outcomes than others. But why would anyone ever choose bad outcomes?
People try to explain this by saying some people are "lazy" or "impulsive" and thus make suboptimal choices, but does this really make sense? If a significant portion of society is consistently making suboptimal choices, are there societal changes we could make to convince more people to make better choices?
If we think there are societal changes we could make that lead more people to make better choices, then can we really say those people had "equal opportunity" to make those choices before the change?
And if we think there aren't any societal changes we could make that lead people to better choices, then what we are saying is that there is inevitably some portion of people who will not achieve good outcomes within our system. And if that's true, is it really a good system for humanity as it exists?
That's what they try to achieve, but they fail to do so, because the labour relationships are still fundamentally transactional.
Workers aren't working for the common goals of the company, they're working for their salary. And since the primary goal of the company is profit, they are fundamentally in conflict with the goals of the company.
The goal of the employee is thus to seem valuable, and get promotions. Sometimes that means working harder, but often it means making sub-optimal decisions for their own benefit. This isn't always conscious or intentional, but nonetheless, it's what people end up doing, and it leads to a lot of inefficiency: Workers not mentioning difficulties for fear of looking incompetent. Managers insisting on impossible deadlines and so on.
Competition pushes systems to be more efficient, but the problem is it never stops pushing.
>These examples are on a governmental scale, but the same thing happens in industries where startups are fighting to compete against entrenched competitors.
And if they win, they become the new entrenched competitors and abuse their market position just the same, because that's exactly what they were "competing" for in the first place.
>Innovation, technological advancement, and a higher standard of living for all spring forth from competition and necessity.
I think the best way to drive technological advancement and standards of living would be an economic system that actually values those things directly.
Crowd-funding models don't necessarily require paywalls. Many creators release their primary content for free.
>selling sponsorship opportunities that aren't ads
How can a sponsorship not be an ad?
>I don't think there is a viable alternative and they will simply cease to exist.
I think if you can't get people to pay for it, it probably wasn't that valuable anyway.
Just because something involves a measurement doesn't mean it's completely objective. All the medal tells you objectively is who ran fastest in that particular race, on that particular day, out of the people participating.
There are many subjective factors contributing to that result, and any "excellence" we infer from it is still highly subjective. Indeed, the very notion that running the fastest is something worthy of prestige is a subjective one.
Would you still say everything's fine and we shouldn't make them less efficient because we're worried about hypotheticals?
I see Philosophy more as an exploration of the shape of our thoughts. It identifies particular vague ideas we have, defines them in more detail, and gives them names so we can discuss them. This gives people who study it exposure to a wider variety of ways of thinking, and often makes it easier to spot assumptions in other contexts.
Indeed, at the point where you're doing an experiment to determine if a claim is false, you've already made a bunch of philosophical assumptions, such as the existence of a consistent material universe, and the validity of empirical inference. Which is not to say those assumptions aren't reasonable, but it's important to recognise that we're making them, rather than asserting that the results of science are "something we know for sure" and dismissing anything else as "just so stories".
And since we are forced to compete for work, we feel the need to present the best possible version of ourselves, which is inevitably just slightly beyond the level of "merit" we perceive ourselves as actually having. I believe this disconnect is the main cause of imposter syndrome.
I think it's also the cause of so much bullshit in business environments. Since labour relations are fundamentally antagonistic, people feel unable to communicate problems or inefficiencies for fear that it will reflect badly on them. Especially when that problem is "I am not good at doing this task". Workplaces try to introduce blame free cultures to avoid this, but they will always struggle, because a business relationship is necessarily judgemental.
And I don't think there's an easy way to fix this without challenging the idea, entrenched in so much of our economic and political discussion, that competition will always produce the best results.
I don't think it's necessarily limited to that, but I do think all such situations are coercive. Whether someone is having a gun pointed at them, or being denied healthcare, they are being coerced. That said, I do think most coercion does ultimately amount to the threat of death or suffering, even if it becomes very indirect in practice.
>Do you or do you not believe that doctors in the UK are coercing the government by demanding a fair salary in exchange for the lifesaving services they provide?
Trying to evaluate the actions of individuals in a wider system is not very helpful. Are the doctors being coercive? Yes. But they're also being coerced in turn by the individuals they rely on for survival (i.e. the people they buy food from) so it's hard to ascribe blame. It's the system as a whole which is coercive.
And this is my point. Both market based healthcare and state provided healthcare rely on coercion to function, so you can't distinguish them morally on that basis.
The only hypothetical system I know of that would actually be free of coercion would by something like anarcho-communism, where people have free access to the means of survival, and it is produced by people's free choice to work for the benefit of others. But I'd guess you think such a system wouldn't work.
And I don't think that "ceases to have a useful meaning". I think it just doesn't let you argue that your system is better based on absence of "coercion".
And if you examine the community, you'll quickly find that they don't think sex work "counts". Because what they want isn't sex, it's the status they imagine it confers, and if you had to pay for it, you didn't "earn" that status.
It doesn't directly prevent insecure systems, but discouraging companies from storing information they don't need and transferring it on to third parties for whatever reason they feel like massively reduces most people's exposure to this risk.
>The data about my order isn't my data to control.
If you believe people have a right to privacy, then you believe they have a right to decide who gets to know what information about them.
>It's a tiny minority who are truly bothered.
I don't think women feeling harassed by men's advances is remotely "outside the norm", or a "tiny minority". It's very common, which is exactly the problem.
>What about the discomfort faced by the many many women who like being chased?
If people like this kind of courtship, they should be willing to communicate that, rather than making it impossible for anyone to say "no" just so they can get their kicks. If there's no safeword for this "chasing" it shouldn't be considered consensual.
I can't say I find your examples particularly justifying. I think we should leave agoraphobic introverts alone if that's what they want. I think sales and advertising are obnoxious and society would be better without them. And I think people should be free to explore different views at their own pace, as long as they're not hurting anyone. Or if they are hurting someone, then that discomfort caused by challenging their views is justified, but it's still a bad thing in itself.
Sure, some people won't mind being asked out repeatedly, or maybe even find it flattering, but some people will find it very uncomfortable, and forcing those people to deal with that just so some people get to enjoy a silly courtship ritual is not really fair.