About time

There Are 9 Responses So Far. »

1. Comment by erik on 5 March 2007 at 9:09 am:

   closing a post about capitalism with a dead language that has little relevance to anyone’s life anymore. how poetic.

2. Comment by tet on 5 March 2007 at 9:42 am:

   Heh, heh, heh.

   I figured that any goddamn Marxists wouldn’t have the brains or education to translate it, so that my final comment would be effectively in “smart-person” code.

   Tom

3. Comment by Brandon on 5 March 2007 at 2:23 pm:

   “goddamn Marxists”

   Such acrimony and anger while at the same time generalizing a whole group…sounds almost anti-uberindividualist-Tom to me…

4. Comment by tet on 5 March 2007 at 2:39 pm:

   Well, actually, Brandon, Marxists can be divided into three smaller groups as a rule….

   Applying Marxism has inevitably led in the real world to an increase in human misery and atheism that has often resulted in democide and a cheapening of human existance. It is therefore thrown off in exchange for capitalism as soon as the despots enforcing it have died or been defeated.

   Therefore someone who is loudly espousing Marxism would have to be one of the following three kinds of people:

   1) Evil–a person who enjoys increasing the amount of human suffering in the world.

   2) Stupid–a person who either is incapable of understanding human history and human nature or is ignorant of facts

   or

   3) Insane–following the standard definition of “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

   I feel extremely sorry for folks who are insane or merely stupid. On the other hand, I have a great deal of anger and acrimony for those who are evil and willfully ignorant.

   Although I espouse individuality, I reserve the right to find certain individuals disgusting.

   Tom

5. Comment by tet on 5 March 2007 at 2:52 pm:

   Oh, and one last thing….

   Do not EVEN come at me with the “Marxism hasn’t really been tried, it’s been this or that or the other thing….”

   Sorry, Charlie. In every case where Marxism has failed, it has begun by being referred to as such, and afterwards the apologists claim that “it really wasn’t Marxism.”

   Capitalism, even when it is imperfect–hell, even in the cases such as Mainland China when it’s evil and slave-holding, results in a general increase in the standard of living of the people in the state using it as an economic system.

   It’s an inevitable side-effect, just as misery is for Marxism.

   Tom

6. Comment by J. Prescott on 5 March 2007 at 5:08 pm:

   Real quick Tom -

   While brandon is not straight up marxist, he is pretty socialist in terms of social programs and big government.

   You referred to those “marxists” as insane, stupid, or evil. you already said brandon is the smartest guy here. So would his views make him an evil genius, or one of those crazy geniuses with the tin foil hat?

7. Comment by Brandon on 5 March 2007 at 11:19 pm:

   Tin foil hat baby. See here’s the plan. You get a woman pregnant ok? And you have her follow this plan. Ok, so she has a kid and goes on government cheese. OK? So she collects the cheese for months and makes a huge block of cheese. Then you carve it into the shape of a rocket ship. Then you get a monkey and a dog and you put the monkey in a tinfoil hat. Ok? Then you shoot them off to the moon and make sure you have a remote control camera on the outside. Then you let out the dog and the monkey and you let the dog chase the monkey and you capture it on camera and sell the live feed to all the major networks. You’ll make millions. It’s brilliant!

8. Comment by erik on 6 March 2007 at 5:51 pm:

   bullshit like this is the reason that i don’t really post on here anymore. your post was, to me at least, offensive and thickheaded, not to mention illogical. since i assume you know why i found it offensive (in so many words calling me disgusting and stupid/evil/insane/ poopoo face), let me start with the logic:

   in spite of what you say if off limits for debate, past “attempts” at marxist society do not disqualify it from discussion. first off, i’m an anarchist, so i oppose state power. my “marxism”–YOUR (persistent) LABEL, NOT MINE–could more accurately be called marxism, that is, marxism. it is a way of describing the world where we bear in mind the distribution of the resources which control our very lives, including the freedom of INDIVIDUALS.

   but let’s pretend to live in the mancave, where the failure of something nominally based on marxist philosophy is enough to condemn the lens of marxism as a whole. mind you, we are now pretending that the massive bolshevik bureaucracy is representing the people and the then-popular idea of marxism, not using “marxism” to prop up its own elite bureaucracy.

   god, this is so fucking tiring and pointless. if i misspell a word you will proclaim yourself winner; if i present a thorough, articulate, watertight case you will vanish.

   for the first years of the ussr, to take one example, the economy did extremely well. this was in spite of the fact that russia was an agrarian country with virtually no industrial infrastructure to speak of coming out of a devastating war of attrition in which nearly 2 million men of industry age were killed, nearly 5 million injured. the ultimate demise of the ussr? getting into the business of empire and ultimately imperial competition with the united states. of course this may have little or no relation: perhaps it was just the inherent stupid, insane evilness of marxist philosophy that had survived lenin’s tweaking and stalin’s mangling that finally caught up with gorbachev and brought down the ussr, but we really can’t know because none of this happened in a vaccum.

   now onto another one of your rude slanders. i hope you are just some creepy townie in urbana and not a professor.

   ARE MARXISTS EVIL BECAUSE THEY ENJOY INCREASING THE AMOUNT OF SUFFERING IN THE WORLD? no more so than any capitalist who would say something like “Capitalism, even when it is imperfect… results in a general increase in the standard of living of the people in the state using it as an economic system” (in fact, you used the word “evil” under my elipses). The late 19th and early 20th centuries were chock full of leaders with brilliant dreams for future utopias where wealth would be shared equally amongst a race of supermen. the nazis were creating their paradise, the fascists were creating theirs, the social darwinists and libertarians were creating theirs (and still are…). in each case state power (sometimes in conjunction with the market, sometimes in conjunction with the military) becomes the force which breaks the eggs for the communist/capitalist/nationalist utopian omlette. in condemning the evils of stalinism (or whatever, and i assume we are talking about mass starvation, genocide & the like, things more palpable than your abstract notions of god-given property rights or mine of ecocide) you are condemning the popular “ends justify the means” thought of the time, a thought that extends to your very own logic.

   …that is, unless you are hiding your secret method for quantifying human suffering and balancing it against human joy.

   i suspect it has to do with some coefficient n applied to x, where x is the rate of purchases of some new technogadget like a iphone or perhaps a luxury like a previously unavailable fast food buffalo wing, and n is a coefficient based on the ultimate, inherent value of this trinket such that more purchases of cooler things=better society. to this we add q, (which is of course based upon the rate at which capitalism is churning out newer, better technogadgets, fast food and other disposable culture that we can sell to each other), and finally we subtract (M*Y) where y is the rate of some measurable form of human suffering like death, starvation, disease, infant mortality etc and m is a coefficient based on the evil’s relative badness. the resulting eqation brings us to
   Nx+Q-MY=V, which will be very positive if society is doing well and very negative if society is doing bad. stated as a logical equation it goes something like this:

   iff
   it pleases tet’s most immediate desires
   then
   it is good

   i probably sound like i think i’m soooo smart, but the truth it that i’m fucking bored of this and hungry and sick of staring at a computer. i’m not really done, but maybe i’ll post more later. feel free to respond, but this isn’t the end of my argument.

9. Comment by tet on 6 March 2007 at 9:28 pm:

   I don’t believe that I ever mentioned joy in my statements.

   I also was not aware that standard of living was measured in the number of iPhones, SUVs, wall-sized televisions or Big Macs purchased.

   Standard of living refers to things like percentage of the population who live in poverty, the access to medical care and real income per family (and the shape of its distribution among the classes.)

   The joy part comes in with “quality of life”–something that is not necessarily produced by capitalism (my guess is that it is ultimately dependent on religious faith), although the converse, “misery of life” is produced by Marxism.

   I hate arguing with you, erik, because you share my total disdain for government in all of its forms. If I could just get you to abandon this 20th Century economic version of phlogiston, I could go to my grave happy.

   As far as the personal stuff goes, I have never really been considered as creepy, I don’t think, (engagingly charismatic, perhaps) and I wouldn’t be caught dead living in the People’s Republic of Urbana. As far as the professor part of it, I suggest that you read my bio–it’ll give you a better idea of who is toying with you.

   Tom

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