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User3
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by User3 » Fri Jul 01, 2005 5:01 pm

It is certainly true that certain northwestern American Indian societies had a system of prestige based on giving.
And such a motivation could be the basis of a functional marxist society.
However, it should also be remembered that due to the depredations of colonial Europeans (whose culture was obviously based on taking), we don't know a whole lot about those northwestern societies as a whole.
I'm just going on memory here, but I seem to recall that such giving was generally restricted to special inter-tribal get-togethers.
I also seem to recall that their culture in general (probably the 'giving' had nothing to do with this) was so stressful that they had a signifigantly higher suicide rate than the modern-day United States. I'm not sure if they managed to beat out Japan...
The human mind is nothing is not flexible, and I'm sure there is some way to inflict the proper mindset on everyone.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Username17 » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:29 pm

If you want to get technical, the high suicide rate happened after they got colonized and marginalized by Europeans with guns. High alcoholism rates happened then too. Like Ireland.
Something about having your entire culture be systematically exterminated by a superior military force really saps peoples' will to live. I can't imagine why.
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> RC wrote:And you simply cannot have comptetion and Marxism.

Yes you can. You are talking without knowing on this one. Marxism means that the means of production are owned and controlled jointly and democratically by the whole of society.
It doesn't mean that everyone does every job, it doesn't mean that everyone is equally valued, and it doesn't mean that there isn't any competition.
Capitalism does not simply mean "people aren't equal", and the inequality of people doesn't mean capitalism. Lots of non-capitalist societies have existed that had social classes. In fact, while Marxism (and Payneism) have the stated goal of being classless, even that doesn't mean that there aren't things to aspire to within a class. Shopkeepers and Administrators are working class, although in almost every society I've ever herd of they got a better deal than farm hands (who are also working class).

> RC wrote:Until you can quash the competetive urge, humans will never believe they're equal to each other.

The "competitive urge" is a cultural value, not a universal truth. In some cultures, everyone wants to start at the same place in a foot race and finish ahead of everyone else. In some cultures, everyone wants to start as far forward in the race as possible and finish ahead of everyone else. In still other cultures, everyone wants to finish the race at the same time.
The idea that you are necessarily trying to "beat" the other people in your own culture is in no way universal. In many cultures the only thing that is important to defeat is other cultures, or non-humans, or even just non-life.
The basic human need is to desire what you regard as best for you and yours. Whether that consists of just you, your immediate family, every American, all humans, or all life on Earth is a matter of upbringing. The desire to crush the livelihood of your immediate family is present in some people in some cultures, but it can hardly be considered a universal ideal.
The fact that your culture has made you a misanthrope does not mean that everybody is, nor does it mean that people in the future will be.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by RandomCasualty » Fri Jul 01, 2005 8:37 pm

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1120246143[/unixtime]]
> The "competitive urge" is a cultural value, not a universal truth.

I'd have to disagree strongly here. Darwinism isn't a cultural value, it's an innate trait to living things.
At some point supplies of something will get short. Two people want something and there's only one thing left. And that's the point where all that 'love thy neighbor' and 'we are all equal' crap goes out the window. Then the strong triumph and the weak are crushed.
And that has nothing to do with any kind of cultural values or any of that.
People all over the world at all time periods have been competing over food, shelter, land and love since the beginning of time. You have a few oddball minorities here and there that come with a philosophy of selflessness, but base human nature, the state of being alive in fact, is completely contrary to this.
The selfless are in fact 'weak' in Darwinian standards, they're the ones that go hungry and die. If you refuse to compete then you at worst die, and at best become a servant of somebody who is willing to seize power. At no point are the meek going to inherit the Earth. It just won't happen. For it to happen, the meek would have to actively destroy the competetive combatative people and that just isn't going to happen, because the meek don't do that. They sit back and let everyone else have the food/money/houses and they just die off.
The strong conquer and the weak get conquered.
Survival of the fittest. that's a universal truth.
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Username17
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Username17 » Fri Jul 01, 2005 9:32 pm

RC, this is where you really show that you don't know a thing about biology. That's just not how natural selection works.
Natural Selection is the axiom "Those who don't pass on their traits, don't pass on their traits". That's it. There is no positive pressure, only negative pressure. Anything which is "good enough" goes on to the next generation, and the only engine that drives evolution is random chance. Natural Selection doesn't go to anything, only culture and agency can do that.
The genetic difference between you and me, or any two randomly selected humans, is basically non-existant. Humans don't exist in a world which is Darwinistically limited. Malthus is flat wrong, rich humans are not naturally better, or different, from poor ones.
The strong don't conquer. They also go on, along with everyone who isn't too weak to survive. And with the advent of modern technology that can be just about everybody. The only people who get actually Darwined out of the running are the truly unlucky or the people who take stupid risks - who are honestly your "strong" people.
Your description of Darwinism is incorrect on many minor but extremely important levels. Evolution doesn't value strength. It doesn't value anything. It's simply the tautology that anything eliminated too fast to copy itself is no longer represented in the nxt census.
Nature espouses and values no moral or economic system. At all.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by RandomCasualty » Fri Jul 01, 2005 9:50 pm

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1120253528[/unixtime]]
> Your description of Darwinism is incorrect on many minor but extremely important levels. Evolution doesn't value strength. It doesn't value anything. It's simply the tautology that anything eliminated too fast to copy itself is no longer represented in the nxt census.

It values "strength", only strength is not defined necessarily as physical strength. being "strong" in an evolutionary sense is just having advantageous traits that grant you an advantage over everyone else. In some cases, as with predatory animals it can be physical strength and speed, in other cases, it could just be a green camouflage skin coating that makes it easy for you to avoid being seen.
And while it is true that humanity has moved beyond the true natural selection where the weak truly die off, the weak are nonetheless oppressed, and the basic structure of the animal pack, with an alpha male leader is actually still very much true of humans today. We have our leaders, we have our strong pack members who follow along, and we have the weak members of the pack who get left behind and starve when there isn't enough food to go around.
The basic concept is this... when resources are limited, the stronger people are going to get them, the weaker ones won't get them.
Marxism chooses to ignore and cover up that simple fact. Even distribution of resources can only exist when you've got enough to go around. And the truth is, you never do, at least not all the time. Sooner or later you are put to the test, and Marxism is revealed as an unworkable system. There will always be shortages of something, and when there is, some people are getting special priviledges over others. And guess who is going to be getting those perks? The guys in power. The tribe chieft, the king, the big rich capitalist. Put em in furs, put em in royal robes, put them in suit and tie, it doesn't matter.
That's the way it always goes.
Sooner or later a choice must be made as to who eats and who starves, who lives inside and who sleeps in the sewer. Marxism just totally handwaves these choices. For equal distribution to exist, humans themselves need to be treated equal. Given human nature, that just ain't gonna happen.
As stated earlier, the one thing humanity truly knows nothing about is treating each other equally.
To not establish a hierarchy of some kind would be inhuman. There will always be some system that determines "who gets the food first", and having a system like that instantly invalidates Marxism.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Username17 » Fri Jul 01, 2005 10:24 pm

> It values "strength", only strength is not defined necessarily as physical strength. being "strong" in an evolutionary sense is just having advantageous traits that grant you an advantage over everyone else.

No it doesn't. This is exactly backwards. Evolution prevents the propagation of anyone who has a disadvantage so intense that they can't continue. It does not reward creatures with advantages.
Disadvantages are punished, but only if they are beyond replication threshold. Advantages are meaningless, save that sometimes they can compensate for weaknesses.
This is the basic fact of evolution. Many people get this wrong and end up asking meaningless questions like "Why do we apendixes when they don't do anything for us?"
Evolution is only an executioner's axe. And it only falls if your crimes are severe enough. No amount of good citizenship will make evolution care one way or another.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Josh_Kablack » Fri Jul 01, 2005 11:55 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:
> The fact that your culture has made you a misanthrope does not mean that everybody is, nor does it mean that people in the future will be.

Actually, I think it does.
I mean, unless someone comes up with a culture which isn't capitalist-competitive-techonological-expansionistic-psudeoabsorptive and which is buff enough to stand up to those which are.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by User3 » Sat Jul 02, 2005 6:05 am

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1120256686[/unixtime]]

> > It values "strength", only strength is not defined necessarily as physical strength. being "strong" in an evolutionary sense is just having advantageous traits that grant you an advantage over everyone else.

> No it doesn't. This is exactly backwards. Evolution prevents the propagation of anyone who has a disadvantage so intense that they can't continue. It does not reward creatures with advantages.

We need only look at the various drives for human reproductive selection in the US to see how little it has to do with what would normally be considered "advantages."
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by RandomCasualty » Sat Jul 02, 2005 6:43 am

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1120256686[/unixtime]]
> No it doesn't. This is exactly backwards. Evolution prevents the propagation of anyone who has a disadvantage so intense that they can't continue. It does not reward creatures with advantages.
> Disadvantages are punished, but only if they are beyond replication threshold. Advantages are meaningless, save that sometimes they can compensate for weaknesses.

One can say the 'faster' cheetahs survived or one can say the 'slower' ones died off. And in one case we are talking about a disadvantage and in the other an advantage. But this is just semantics. We can see the glass as half full or half empty, but it doesn't really make much of a difference.
But my point isn't really all about any kind of true animal natural selection, it is merely that there will always be hierarchies among people. Some will be 'stronger' than others and thus will get more goods than others.
The actual threshold required to die from lack of goods has gone down dramatically over the years, but just because we don't just leave the blind out to be eaten by lions doesn't in any way mean that we now treat them as equals, or believe they should get an equal share of the wealth. That hasn't changed from the dawn of time and I doubt it ever will. The weak will always be mere rungs on the ladder of success, to be stepped upon by the rich and powerful.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Username17 » Sat Jul 02, 2005 7:19 am

> RC wrote:We can see the glass as half full or half empty, but it doesn't really make much of a difference.

No. It really really does. People who think that evolution rewards advantages are easily convinced that evolution is going towards something. It's not. If you think that evolution rewards advantages, it should get rid of things you don't use. But it doesn't always. If the glass was half full, evolutionary incentives would exist. They don't.
The glass really is half empty. And everyone can muddle along with entirely useless traits and introns in their DNA, and be fine. That's how it really works.
If a trait is useless, but doesn't actually kill you, it just sits around in your DNA being passed from mother to daughter until it mutates. And in mutating, there is equal probability that it will get larger or smaller. Sometimes the first finger of the dog becomes rudimentary, sometimes a rhino has an enlarged second horn. It's fifty fifty unless one way or the other actually kills the host. And even then it won't necessarily go the way that doesn't kill - it's just that 100 years later noone will know if it went the way that did.

> RC wrote:One can say the 'faster' cheetahs survived or one can say the 'slower' ones died off.

Cheetahs are the worst possible example you could have chosen, actually. You see, all Cheetahs on Earth can accept skin grafts from each other, because they have less genetic diversity than do the Icelandic people. Cheetahs experienced a bottle neck caused by hunting, domestication, and territorial encroacment by humans.
And speed doesn't do dick against bullets. In fact, the fastest Cheetahs were also harder to domesticate for some reason and they are all dead. The slowest Cheetahs, those not fast enough to catch prey, are also dead. Only the middling-speed cheetahs who happened to also be "pretty" in the eyes of royalty were able to pass on their genes.
Speed beyond that needed to catch a running herbivore is pointless, but lots of cheetahs had it anyway. Now they don't, because of an entirely unrelated genetic bottleneck that selected on entirely unrelated traits. With no human intervention, the cheetah population would vary in speed from "fast enough" to "way faster than required", but now cheetahs are all the same speed.
Your Malthusian doctrine is quite repugnant, but fortunately it actually isn't backed up by biology in any way. I know, I am a biologist. Arguing with me about how evolution works or what it means is like arguing with me about how D&D rules interact, only more so. D&D is just a hobby of mine.
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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by RandomCasualty » Sat Jul 02, 2005 4:46 pm

Natural selection is mostly a process of probabilities. Just like not every predator is the same speed, not every potential prey is the same speed. So there's not some arbitrary cut off line that exists anywhere. "fast enough" to catch one rabbit may not be fast enough to catch another. The faster you are, the more rabbits you can catch.
Now this is by no means a guarantee anything will survive. Disease, bullets and all sorts of other intervening factors can end your life all the same. And just like sometimes animals with advantageous traits die by dumb luck, sometimes weaker animals can survive. But speaking based on probability, the stronger animals have a greater chance to survive.
If you're fast enough to outrun 90% of your prey as opposed to 70% you're a numerical favorite to survive and reproduce. And gradually over the years the 90%s will become more common. There's a point where it may not matter, because you can outrun most of your prey, but evolution after all is a long process. It isn't going to happen overnight. All the weak aren't going to be weeded out in one generation. Because dumb luck definitely plays a role. When food is abundant, you can have all sorts of animals surviving which wouldn't survive in more normal conditions.
But anyway, the semantics of natural selection really don't have anything to do wtih the main topic of Marxism, as I clearly stated earlier that natural selection is merely what we come from and an underlying principle in our society, though certainly no longer about the weak actually dying. People rarely starve to death anymore for being blind, slow or stupid. But the innate principle of "let the strong thrive and the weak perish" is still very much alive today.
The only people who want Marxism are the poor, but a government of the masses doesn't work, because the masses are fucking morons, so they need to pick people to run their government. Those people in turn become powerful, and when you're powerful you'd rather abuse your power than distribute the wealth. The people making the actual decisions for the government have absolutely no reason to embrace Marxism.
Every existing economic system there is caters to the rich people in power, because they're the ones making the rules. Even if the economic system does start out as being equal, it eventually gets corrupted. And that's what would happen to Marxism.
And given that humans themselves aren't moral beings I would prefer an honest system over one that presents the false illusion of equality.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Username17 » Sat Jul 02, 2005 4:51 pm

> RC wrote:The faster you are, the more rabbits you can catch.

But you don't have to catch all the rabbits. Catching all the rabbits is actually bad (because there are no more rabbits). You need to catch some rabbits while other rabbits get away. And the acceptable range for that is absolutely huge.
Better doesn't matter. The criteria is "good enough" or not. That's it.
And that means your entire construct of the universe favoring the strong is bullpucky through and through.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by RandomCasualty » Sat Jul 02, 2005 5:37 pm

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1120323075[/unixtime]]
> Better doesn't matter. The criteria is "good enough" or not. That's it.

Better means you've got a higher probability of surviving. There's a point where better doesn't matter, and that's where you can outrun everything, but short of that, being able to catch that extra 1% of rabbits might make the difference at some point. Of course, it might not also, but that's why evolution takes so damn long. Anything involving probabilities is going to take a while.
Evolution isn't saying "the strong will survive and the weak will die.", it says "the strong are more likely to survive and the weak are more likely to die". On a species wide level, they tend to mean the same thing, but you can't apply the former statement to the individual. The faster cheetah or rabbit is not automatically assured survival. His chances are going to be better, but shit happens. Similarly, a weaker variety may just luck out and find all the slow rabbits long enough to reproduce. That's just the way things work.
What we seem to be arguing here is whether the strong survive or the weak die. And honestly I can't see any difference beyond simple semantics. In fact, both of those things happen. The glass is both half full and half empty at the same time. The weak do indeed die off, and the strong do indeed survive. Yes, natural selection is a process based off death, but being "not dead" is as significant as dying.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by User3 » Sat Jul 02, 2005 6:02 pm

RandomCasualty, that's the exact same argument that FrankTrollman is making.
Besides, how are you going to make any sort of argument that being stronger and better will reward you in evolution? What the hell is better, anyway? Aren't the mega-awesome dinosaurs dead and the ones that survived are the shitty in-transition ones?
Think of it like high school. Assuming that you have no other goals whatsoever (no parental approval, no scholarship or college whoring, whatever) but to graduate, there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between someone who gets straight D minuses and As in this regard.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by PhoneLobster » Thu Jul 07, 2005 5:37 am

> Josh_Kablack wrote:I mean, unless someone comes up with a culture which isn't capitalist-competitive-techonological-expansionistic-psudeoabsorptive and which is buff enough to stand up to those which are.

Assuming the big running word there means what I think it does that seriously ain't hard.
As I mentioned in passing all the real big social advances in the last couple of centuries have been left wing, you know commy pinko bleeding heart liberal stuff, like rights for women and black people, welfare safety nets, pensions, public health care, public utilities, public education, unions, etc...
These things created population booms, economic booms, social and scientific revolutions and created the vast and productive middle class pretty much out of whole cloth.
Seriously it was insane deregulated capitalism that plunged us into the last great depression. And guess what? commy-pinko socialist, unionist, protectionist and regulationist policies actually brought the world economy back.
To put it more simply the current model of "rape the planet, screw the poor and dismantle the middle class" is probably not actually a particularly successful or competetive model when compared to the economic and social health of more liberal caring societies.
Heck if you want to look at a REAL society success story lets look at modern China, run by a bunch of assholes yes, but its certainly not raw social darwinist capitalism that got them where they are and thats for certain. And where are they, why only pretty much the most powerful nation on the face of the planet.
Who else is big news on the world power front these days? Surely not the lefty commy pinko pseudo socialist nations of the EU? Why surely it is.
Which nations in South America are founding what could be a new Bolivarian revolution that could well be the start of a new era of prosperity and independence for their entire continent, it couldn't possibly be the lefties that Bush and Co have derided as a new Axis of South American evil/communism or whatever it was.
What kind of policies implemented by Boris Yeltsin pretty much destroyed a former super powers potential to rise from the ashes as a triumphant and mighty western power house? Could they possibly have been rampant irresponsible capitalism and privatization? A whole sale dismantling of government regulation and the welfare system? BINGO.
And which current world super power is up to its eye balls in debt, an international pariah due to its loony policies, bogged down in an ill concieved war it isn't equipped to win, seeing its democratic institutions degenerate into election fixing and propaganda and potentially eyeing off against rather dramatic economic or even social collapse in the near future? It couldn't possibly be the all mighty USA with its stark raving nutter right wing "free trade" capitalism and social darwinism?
Don't believe me about the US? Well compare the its success on economic, trade, military, and diplomatic fronts under the comparitively very lefty Clinton compared to BOTH the raving pin up boys of the right Bush boys? Guess who wins hands down? Oddly its sanity and compassion, who'd have thunk it.
Dude "capitalist-competitive-techonological-expansionistic-psudeoabsorptive " LOSE when they compete against socialist-cooperative-(also technological, but better at it with public education and a strong middle class)-regulationists.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Neeek » Thu Jul 07, 2005 6:09 am

Interesting note: Americans, by and large, vote for what is not in their best interests. Most working class people vote Republican, when the Democratic policies are the ones that would actually improve their lives. Most middle and upper class people vote Democrat, when Republican policies are most likely to benefit them. Of course the difference is that most of the Democrat voters actually *know* they are voting against their own self-interest.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by RandomCasualty » Thu Jul 07, 2005 6:44 pm

> PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1120714659[/unixtime]]
> Heck if you want to look at a REAL society success story lets look at modern China, run by a bunch of assholes yes, but its certainly not raw social darwinist capitalism that got them where they are and thats for certain. And where are they, why only pretty much the most powerful nation on the face of the planet.

Bah. Come on China, the most powerful nation? Their quality of life still isn't anything like it is in the US. People are still riding bikes to work over there.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by dbb » Thu Jul 07, 2005 7:03 pm

> Neeek at [unixtime wrote:1120716549[/unixtime]]Interesting note: Americans, by and large, vote for what is not in their best interests. Most working class people vote Republican, when the Democratic policies are the ones that would actually improve their lives. Most middle and upper class people vote Democrat, when Republican policies are most likely to benefit them. Of course the difference is that most of the Democrat voters actually *know* they are voting against their own self-interest.

Any two people plucked off the street are unlikely to agree on what is and is not in their best interests or what would actually improve their lives, and it can be very difficult to say who is right. I am extremely leery of any argument that amounts to "we're losing because the people voting for the other side are stupid", for two reasons: one, "we" may be wrong about what's in their best interests; and two, concluding that people "we" disagree with are incapable of determining what's in their own best interest is a step in a direction I really don't want to go.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Boulie_98 » Thu Jul 07, 2005 9:29 pm

These interests include other things than just money. Apparently a lot of people were quite willing to pay good money (in terms of forfeited income) to stop men from giving ceremonial rings to other men.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Count Arioch the 28th » Thu Jul 07, 2005 9:44 pm

Personally, if I were in charge, I'd make marriage illegal anyway, as I feel that marriage is simply prostitution with a long-term contract.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Sir Neil » Fri Jul 08, 2005 6:13 am

Police in Akron, Ohio agree with you.

> Koumei wrote:If other sites had plenty of good homebrew stuff the Den wouldn't need to exist. We don't come here because we like each other.

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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by Count Arioch the 28th » Fri Jul 08, 2005 9:26 am

Heh. Almost had me going for a while, until I saw the link to the main page.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by The_Hanged_Man » Sat Jul 09, 2005 12:24 am

> PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1120714659[/unixtime]]

> > Josh_Kablack wrote:I mean, unless someone comes up with a culture which isn't capitalist-competitive-techonological-expansionistic-psudeoabsorptive and which is buff enough to stand up to those which are.

> Assuming the big running word there means what I think it does that seriously ain't hard.
> As I mentioned in passing all the real big social advances in the last couple of centuries have been left wing, you know commy pinko bleeding heart liberal stuff, like rights for women and black people, welfare safety nets, pensions, public health care, public utilities, public education, unions, etc...

What makes you think "Left Wing" = Pacifist? That's just FOX News talking.
Traditionally, liberal social policies have gone hand-in-hand w/ aggressive, dog-eat-dog diplomacy and conquering other peeps. Ever heard of the French Revolution?
Other examples. Teddy Roosevelt is the progressive, liberal leader in American history, and few presidents were as aggressive in foreign affairs as he. Franklin Roosevelt fought like hell to get the US into WWII, against Conservative opposition! Don't forget it was a liberalized Japan that bombed Pearl Harbor. Heck, stinking Prussia can be credited with inventing the modern welfare state.
The disconnect I think you make is that, like many modern conservative commentators, you are linking liberal social polices with pacifist foriegn policy. This has rarely been the case historically, and conceptually it doesn't necessarily follow. It can be argued (and IMO conclusively) that liberal social policies are the only ones that can maximize a contry's ability to dominate it's neighbors.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by dbb » Sat Jul 09, 2005 12:32 am

You're going to give PL an aneurysm if he thinks you're calling him a "conservative commentator".
--d.
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### Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Post by User3 » Sat Jul 09, 2005 1:22 am

> Neeek at [unixtime wrote:1120716549[/unixtime]]Interesting note: Americans, by and large, vote for what is not in their best interests. Most working class people vote Republican, when the Democratic policies are the ones that would actually improve their lives. Most middle and upper class people vote Democrat, when Republican policies are most likely to benefit them. Of course the difference is that most of the Democrat voters actually *know* they are voting against their own self-interest.

By convincing the 'unwashed masses' to vote in their (the rich) interests, the more wealthy can vote in a 'moral' fashion while still getting the benefit of a Republican government.
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