So, Yeah, About the Whole Republican Projection Thing

Discussion in 'The Red Room' started by Tuckerfan, Apr 7, 2022.

  1. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    JFC, if the far left romanticizing subsistence agriculture isn’t a giant red flag about the far left, I don’t know what is.
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  2. matthunter

    matthunter Ice Bear

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    Do you have a point?

    Or are you letting us know Aunty Flo is visiting?
  3. Jenee

    Jenee Driver 8

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    So, everyone who lived prior to capitalism all lived in poverty?
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  4. Jenee

    Jenee Driver 8

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    JFC, if assholes with reading comprehension shortcomings blame me for their inability to understand what is being discussed isn't a red flag for poor public education, I don't know what is.
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  5. Quincunx

    Quincunx anti-anti-establishment Staff Member Administrator

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    Relative to modern times? Definitely. Even the wealthiest people in medieval Europe couldn't get air conditioning, indoor plumbing, or fresh fruit out of season.
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  6. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    Everyone? Clearly not. The vast, vast majority of people? Yes.
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  7. Jenee

    Jenee Driver 8

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    Their ability to do so now is due to expansion of the global community. Yes, capitalism expedited that. But, whether or not it was "The Best" way to go about it is unknown because there is nothing to compare it against.

    Also, just because one can't get those things is only and indication of poverty today, not then.
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  8. Fisherman's Worf

    Fisherman's Worf I am the Seaman, I am the Walrus, Qu-Qu-Qapla'!

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    This is why your high school is making you repeat US History.
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  9. Tererune

    Tererune Troll princess and Magical Girl

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    At least they were woke enough to elect him queen of the Jr. Prom. They said something about a bucket of pigs blood but I wasn't paying much attention.
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  10. Jenee

    Jenee Driver 8

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    pfft. he wishes he had the power Carrie had. King can write her off as a horror if he wants (it's his story). But, she had powers. and that can't be denied.
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  11. Tererune

    Tererune Troll princess and Magical Girl

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    I wouldn't be too worried about all that. The only super power @Federal Farmer has seems to be to tell everyone he is ignoring them in a pissbaby fit. That is all the powers he needs. If you have ever been on the receiving end of that tickle fight you will rue the day you messed with him. Mostly because laughter hurts after about thirty or forty minutes and you might get shit on you rolling around on the ground.

    You just have to remember to keep it in the red room because he is tempting as fuck down there in media central.
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  12. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    I don’t think that’s quite fair. Even the Soviet Union managed *some* technological progress without stealing from the west, so it’s possible without capitalism that they would have been invented eventually. But the question is, would the masses, not kings, be able to access them? And I think there’s a very strong argument for “no” there. Not if the leaders are fetishizing subsistence farming.
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  13. Jenee

    Jenee Driver 8

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    Started out good. But, then ignorance and a need to drive an inaccurate point spoiled your post.
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  14. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    Space travel.
    They invented space travel, and kicked our dicks at it right until we landed on the moon.
    They'll always have that.
    :shrug:
  15. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    For many of them, however, they simply had no other choice. Craftsmen, who made a living working out of their homes or shops, couldn't compete with the lower prices of goods made in factories, and so took jobs in those factories because it was the only way they could make a living. Others had been forced into such abject poverty by landlords, that they figured they could make marginally more by working in a factory than being forced to till land where they weren't allowed to keep the bulk of what they produced (or even had a choice in the crops that they grew).

    Ireland, apparently, had its first attempts at industrialization crushed by the British, because it was more profitable to keep the Irish on farms, growing crops for export, and buying goods imported from England than to allow the Irish to develop their own industries.

    Indigenous peoples in places like Africa and the Americas were often forced into capitalism at the end of the gun. When they could escape and return to the ways of their ancestors, they quite often did so. Even whites who'd spent a number of years living amongst the Native Americans frequently opted to return to living with Native Americans, rather than living in white society.
  16. MikeH92467

    MikeH92467 RadioNinja

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    The whole goddamn moon race was nothing but a propaganda exercise that ended up sidetracking the U.S. space program into the dead end that was the space shuttle. Landing on the moon was a great accomplishment thanks at least in part to the bravery bordering on insanity of the astronauts, but if space flight had evolved along the lines of the Dyna-Soar program we might have had to wait a few years to get to the moon, but it would have been more sustainable in the long run.
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  17. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Do you think subsistence farming enabled Egypt to build its empire? How about those of Greece, Rome, China, India, Babylon, Persia, or the Incas? To name but a few.

    Look up the "Gallic Reaper" (I've gone through 3 pages of Google search results and haven't found a concise description of it as one can find in this book. In short, during the first century, or so, of the Common Era, so clever Romans came up with a reaping machine that reduced the amount of labor needed to harvest wheat. It never really caught on (and was lost to history for centuries). The most common belief among academics is that it raised an issue for slave owners: If you don't need as many slaves to harvest your crops, what do you do with all the extra slaves? Freeing them isn't necessarily a good idea because they might get all uppity and decide to end the practice of slavery by force.

    The Antikythera mechanism was built ~200 BCE, and was probably the most complicated mechanical device until the Prague astronomical clock in the 1400s CE. Pretty significant achievements (aside from things like the pyramids in Egypt, the Mayan Empire, and so on), and all done prior to the development of modern capitalism (which some date from the 1600s, others about a century or so later).

    We know that in a number (though not necessarily all) of ancient societies that there were wealthy individuals who had no connection to royalty or the clergy. That there were markets where people exchanged goods and services for money (or a combination of money and barter). That's surely what most people would consider to be "capitalism," yet it's never really credited as such. Perhaps some features found today weren't around in those ancient times, but a good number of them were. So, what makes the difference between then and now?

    I would argue that it isn't an economic one, but a technological and educational one. Imagine a society where the majority of people are illiterate, and communication over long distances takes a considerable amount of time. Somebody comes up with a new alloy for making swords. If I train my assistant in how to make the alloy, he can't send a letter to his uncle in the next town over, telling him how to make that alloy (so the uncle can set up shop there, making the alloy, without giving me credit or royalties). If he wants to tell his uncle how to make the alloy, he's got to travel to his uncle and explain things to him. If I'm a paranoid sort, and my assistant says that he's going to take a couple of days off to go see his uncle (assuming I pay that assistant enough money that he can afford to miss work), I might just do something to keep him from leaving, so that I don't have to worry about competition for my business.

    When large numbers of a population become literate, and it doesn't take a long time to send messages (AKA information) long distance, then it gets harder for me to prevent information related to my alloy from spreading. I can, if I'm savvy, take advantage of the literacy and speed of communications to market my wares farther from home than I might otherwise be able to do so. However, short of something like murder, I can't prevent my assistant from slipping off to distant lands with all kinds of detailed info about my alloy that he can use to set up shop there and make money.

    Some historians have argued that the periods of greatest societal disruption have come with improved methods of communication. The invention of the printing press, the telegraph, radio, TV, movies, telephone, and the internet, all have coincided with some rather large upheavals in human history. Not to mention other technological revolutions.

    You might want to take a listen to this podcast episode that talks about some of the shit the British did to the Irish in the years leading up to the Great Famine. Up until I heard that episode, I'd always wondered why I'd run into situations where when I figured out how to do a job with the same (or even higher) levels of productivity, the same amount of quality, but less exertion on my part, that management would freak the fuck out and demand that I go back to doing it the old way. Turns out that they were most likely worried, I'd have more time to figure out how to make more money, either by forming a union, or doing something on the side, and then potentially not need that job, or become a competitor to them.
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  18. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Point-of-order, you're forgetting just how much Nixon hated JFK.

    Yes, Apollo was a bit of a sidetrack to Dyna-Soar (designed in the 1940s by a guy who had some modest impact on the automotive world), however, what fucked NASA wasn't Apollo, it was Nixon. NASA's idea was to take a two-pronged approach: Once the Apollo missions proved that we could send people to the Moon, we'd keep doing that (extending the amount of time the astronauts stayed on the Moon to months at a time), while iterating various designs of a reusable space plane so that at some point we could ditch the disposable rockets and do things that Musk has yet to be able to do with his reusable rockets (no diss at Musk, BTW).

    One of the first things that Nixon did when he took office was to kill Apollo (because it reminded people of JFK) and told NASA to figure out how to make the space shuttle seem like a better deal (even though it wasn't at the time). You know those Saturn Vs at KSC and Houston (as well as I think in Alabama)? Those weren't prototypes that were later put on display. NASA had already paid for them, but Nixon wouldn't give them the money to send crews to the Moon on them, so they were turned into display models. You know how we got Skylab? That was cobbled together out of parts for other Saturn Vs we'd paid for, but Nixon wouldn't allow to be used to send astronauts to the Moon.
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  19. MikeH92467

    MikeH92467 RadioNinja

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    Interesting stuff. @Tuckerfan. In regard to the Romans suppressing the more efficient reaping mechanism, it seems like it would also post a threat to the established slave holding classes by making upward mobility at least theoretically possible. If any, Tomus, Dickus or Marcus could stake out a farm and grow crops more efficiently and cheaply than the rich (who of course deserve to be rich because...well they're rich and must be better than poor people) then it could mean a new threat to their spot at the top of the heap. :spock:
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  20. MikeH92467

    MikeH92467 RadioNinja

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    True, but the historical moment that made the Apollo program a reality had passed by the time Nixon took over. Once it was obvious that there weren't going to be any great discoveries or massive advancements (there were plenty of advancements, but not ones that grabbed people by the throat), public enthusiasm died off. So while, I'm sure you're right about Nixon's ulterior motives, it took more than just his personal grudge against JFK to make it possible for him to do that. It also occurs to me that going to the moon with 60's/70's technology was so inherently risky that it might have been just a matter of time until our luck ran out and we lost a crew.
  21. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Don't forget what the networks told Marilyn Lovell about why they weren't going to be covering the Apollo 13 mission in real-time, "NASA makes a trip to the Moon look like a trip to New Jersey." Never mind that Gene Kranz has said that every mission had moments where if things had gone slightly different, they could have lost a crew. It was only Apollo 13 that had one that was dramatic enough to attract prime-time viewers (and that NASA was willing to be public about in real-time).

    Of course, if NASA had been completely honest about how risky things were at various points in all the Apollo missions (let alone Mercury and Gemini), public opposition might have killed the crewed space program before we ever made it to the Moon.
  22. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Fix your quote tags, Dayton. :baba:
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  23. MikeH92467

    MikeH92467 RadioNinja

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    For sure. It was dangerous to the point of insanity.
  24. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    It had to be, the Russians were willing to treat Cosmonauts like Wile E. Coyote, and they were willing to be treated that way.
  25. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    biggus.jpg
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  26. MikeH92467

    MikeH92467 RadioNinja

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    Willing?
    [​IMG]
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  27. Bailey

    Bailey It's always Christmas Eve Super Moderator

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    Capitalism is great at finding opportunities to use resources to make money. That means it has been very good at increasing productivity and building a larger consumer basis.

    Where things start getting messy is when money itself becomes the resource and capitalism becomes more of a rent seeking exercise.

    Well regulated capitalism is good, especially when it comes to natural monopolies.
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  28. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Which is the point of the very first pro-capitalism book, the Wealth of Nations. Productivity good, rent seeking destructive.

    But then, that's why they pay the best liars, to keep people confused on very obvious points.
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  29. steve2^4

    steve2^4 Aged Meat

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    Aren't retail stores and wholesale distributors rent seeking?
  30. Uncle Albert

    Uncle Albert Part beard. Part machine.

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