Actually Marx talked a lot about automation. Marx's prediction was this would lead to a lower rate of profit for invested capital which - mainstream establishment sources say is what has been happening.
Yes I have no idea why Paul would say this. I guess he realised he was wrong and thus he deleted it, but he won’t admit that. So many people online who make fun of Marx haven’t read any of Capital
It's not like a socialist country could invent things like a satellite, and be the society that figures out how to send a man into space, probes to the moon and other planets - oh yaa, a socialist country is the first country to figure out those things.
The argument he is arguing against is that the workers create the wealth, and profit is that unpaid surplus labor time that the LPs/VCs/founders expropriate from the workers creating wealth. You can't "share" profits with workers when workers are creating all the wealth, the LPs/VCs etc. expropriate profits from workers.
So if the people providing the funding weren't there, where would the salary for the workers who are currently getting their surplus labor expropriated come from? If these workers are getting unjustly exploited, then what's to keep them from starting a co-op together where they share all profits? Plenty of co-ops exist in modern day capitalist societies, including several successful ones like WinCo in the US and Mondragon Corporation in Spain. No one is forcing these employees to give up their "surplus labor" to investors.
It's a strawman argument for founders, but I am fairly sure it is made out of ignorance.
Let's say a sole founder buys $100,000 worth of Amazon Cloud, Nvidia cards, smartphones etc. Yes, one person is at the company, but others made those goods. The founder may not have directly exploited the person who made the smartphone they're using, but someone did.
Also, let's say I sell my small company which is well positioned in a fast growing market. The buyers are not buying based on what happened before, but on the future work and revenues that will be acquired from people working on the product.
At the end of the day there are people who work and create wealth and get a wage or salary, and there are idle class heir LPs who do not work or create wealth. The heirs survive on the wealth created in expropriated, unpaid surplus labor time of workers who do work. VCs front for the LPs, and founders deal with the VCs.
I don't think Graham even knows what he is arguing with. I'm not trying to make a convincing argument for the other side, but a clarifying one.
Incidentally, pretty much every economist up until the mid 19th century agreed with my view in some form - Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, David Ricardo - all the people who made economic arguments which economists still use. They said they studied political economy. It wasn't until the 1870s that arguments against new value being created by labor were started in full swing, although some of the ideas go back to the 1830s.
Chomsky condemned the US ground invasion and carpet bombing of Kampuchea, which destabilized the country and I'm guessing the mass death of civilians from does not fit into your genocide definition.
In 1975 the coalition led, nominally or not, by Sihanouk gained control of Kampuchea (again, in the case of Sihanouk). The US and west said a genocide was happening between 1975 and 1979, but immediately somewhat covertly, and then openly, began arming the coalition with Pol Pot and what the west called the Khmer Rouge.
Read the section on Chomsky. I have no desire to engage with someone who does not acknowledge what Chomsky himself admitted. It is the equivalent of saying that Jews were lying about the Holocaust because the allies happened to be the ones who liberated them
I read this and Chomsky says what I said - the civilian deaths due to the US ground invasion and carpet bombing are ignored.
Also, as I said, the US began arming the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and began openly arming them in the 1980s. So if the Khmer Rouge had committed a genocide, then that's who the US was arming to put back in power.
I have to laugh about all these comments talking about the left and pedophilia, as if conservative religious organizations are not rife with child molestation.
Mostly because the idea that children are sexual and can consent to sex was carried by movements and organizations that later became the German Green party. They're socially progressive (and economically center-left, I'd say, but clearly much less on the left spectrum about economic issues) and are generally considered to be part of "the left".
Helmut Kentler, the psychologist mentioned in the article, was also generally considered to be part of "the left".
I have to burst your bubble here. Conservative institutions suffer from much less child abuse accounts than progressive, "leftist" institutions. If you want a good example, compare rates of child abuse between the Catholic Church and US public schools. The latter is rife with such accounts, both in relative and absolute terms. I say there is an association where the greater the deviation from conservative, traditional values, the more scandalous idiosyncrasies of the individuals manifest.
Is this funny to you? Or are you using some rhetorical flourish to morally grandstand? Either way, your style of retort is what I dearly hate about the present world. Maybe spend less time laughing at strangers on the internet and consuming raw propaganda; and more time education yourself on the statistics of the topic your are weaponizing.
Just a thought. Let me know if you want me to substantiate any of the points I mentioned.
It's incompatible to compare 1 institution that is as broad and govern by different bodies of rules, regulations and laws in contrast with another institution that is whole private and is mostly run as a decentralized club.
Especially when a teacher is not arbitrary put into the position, which is why people and the media is more pissed with religious institutions rather than individual teachers.
As a Catholic, it's interesting because we (Catholics who pay attention to this drama) all know exactly where the pedophilia scandal originated from and how it happened, and we know that it was several orders of magnitude smaller than the ongoing child abuse that happens in public schools. I hate to sing this same song, but the media really does use this scandal as a headline grabbing tool because the Catholic Church is still a somewhat powerful institution in the United States. And so people imagine or invent a meme of the Church as some kind of pedo factory, when in reality you can identify a specific cohort of people who all went to Seminary at the same time for specific reasons and spread the disease.
Can you substantiate that a little? I do not doubt you! But I'm from a more-or-less agnostic protestant household and my perception has been that the Catholic thing is a pervasive issue, meanwhile I've heard very little/nothing systematic about public schools.
But I recognize this could just be me succumbing to headline bias because I'm very low-info about the whole thing.
I think the key difference is that "the left" is more open to adding previously taboo activities or beliefs into its mainstream which can be used as a vector to legitimize abuse. While on "the right" it's more about abusing the power and trust that already exists in conservative communities. Which is worse? I don't think it matters to the victims, but in terms of discussions a difference certainly exists.
> Prepare to wait for another 30 years until this can be openly and honestly discussed in Germany: until the perpetrators and their then-allies are all dead.
In 1977, a date the article mentions, the president of the Confederation of German Employers Associations was a former SS Untersturmfuehrer. The BND was founded by former SS/SDers under Gehlen. Talk about waiting years to discuss openly.
The Russia military was "occupying Crimea" back when there were British redcoats occupying New York City. The Russian military has been there since that time. The only new development has been the US, UK, with some continental support, demanding the Russians leave in recent times and pouring financial and military supplies into the Ukraine to accomplish this.
Also if we want to go back to the 1700s, then Russia should hand Crimea over to Turkey, not the Ukraine, because Ottoman Turkey is who occupied Crimea before Russia.
> Fertility rates in the US cratered after 2008...These women would probably have more kids if it was easier to have a single income household...Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family.
You might as well talk about how women might raise their children on Mars. Outside the Amazon jungle, for the past 10000 years women have been raising children under class-based society under class-based relations of production. The ruling class makes decisions about production, that's the point of a class-based society. Thus the world is turning into a place where the purpose of women's fertility is reproduction of labor, not an increase of it. The ruling class prefers two educated, productive children to three or four less educated, less productive children.
It doesn't matter what working class women want in terms of children, because this is a class-based society, and the ruling class has things aligned to what is good for them, not her.
If that is true, then cookie cutter expected gender behavior can be "learned" as well. In fact much of it was illegal in the US a few decades ago.