That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers. If you don't like facebook, don't go there. If you don't like particular site, don't go there, of if you absolutely can't control yourself, install one of a thousand programs that let you block specific sites, and block that site. It's completely within your control. It's your responsibility to do it, to control your own actions and to bear the consequences.
You just don't want to bother - you want the Central Committee to take over, so whatever happens if not your responsibility but theirs. It is an extremely infantile approach.
> Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.
OK, let it be People's Democratic Central Multi-Party Committee is that makes you feel better. The point is not how the committee is called, the point is that it would decide how resources are allocated, thus eliminating the whole pesky free will issue.
> Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.
Somehow socialist babies have been always surrounded by Soviet bathwaters, sooner or later. If one were empirically inclined, one would be tempted to conclude that there is some strong relation between the two. But of course one shouldn't forget that True Socialism (TM) has never been tried.
Take drug addiction as an example. Sure, we can tell addicts 'well you shouldn't have done drugs' or 'just quit' to an addict. Do we then ignore those who have engineered a system to get people hooked? Many health experts point to the over-prescription of opiate painkillers led in part by a medical industry hoping to maximize profits. All the while their dependence creates negative externalities to others in society through crime and poor decision-making.
At the end of the day rationality is an abstraction of actual human behavior. We can make decisions that are 'rational' in a neo-liberal economic sense, but that we ultimately regret. When profit rules all else, businesses will exploit this discrepancy.
This is simply a fallacy. You can’t decide to switch off selective psychological mechanisms in your brain.
Facebook, Snapchat etc. are weaponizing and exploiting these against us/humanity in ways similar to Vegas casinos.
It is easy to not drive to Vegas, enter a casino and engage in a psychological loop designed to hack my brain.
It is not so easy to escape the all-permeating tentacles of social media and its finely tuned intermittent rewards etc. mechanisms.
Given that willpower is a limited cognitive resource, your proposition is not realistic.
I have no idea what the thing you call "structural inequality" is, so I can't say whether I believe it exists or not. It could be you call by this term some well-established phenomenon, and then I'd agree it exists, or it could be that you call some imaginary bugaboo like engineers taking your free will with their evil algorithms, and then, absent any empirical evidence of its existence, I do not believe in it. Hard to say without understanding the term.
> Without an acknowledgement of the massive power imbalance between mass media corporations on the one hand and the citizenry on the other, there's no possible discussion here.
I certainly see discussion going on right here, so it is possible, but if you mean by that "without you accepting my point as an axiom without proof, I am not ready to continue because my winning is not guaranteed and I have no means to prove my claims" then I agree that continuing the discussion in this situation is not the best move for you. If, however, you are ready to prove your points, you are welcome to do it anytime you like. Free will, you see :)
As far as I can see, there's no "massive power imbalance", on the contrary - the press is often criticized for catering for the basest instincts of the masses and being too easily swayed by a short-term fads and frivolities of the public. Scandal-of-the-day, however minor and vapid, often supplants more deep and important topics. If this criticism is true - and I believe evidence suggests to a large measure it is - then the public is the one to hold the power. If nobody wants to click on clickbait, if nobody comes to your site to view and click on the ads, if nobody reads whatever content you are providing - where is your power? What is your power? You can publish anything and nobody would even know about it, and pretty soon you couldn't publish anything because your servers will be shut down for the lack of payment.
I would say if we can see anything, it is that media corporations are too timid, foolish and cowardly to do anything but what the lowest common denominator demands from them. Clicks and ad impressions are kings, and who makes those clicks? The citizenry does. Nobody stands with the gun to your head and demands you to click or visit certain site. You decide it on your own power. If you don't like the result - maybe time to think what you can change?
The best version of the OP’s arguing is for individual ability and choice, and the ability of a person to make a difference of their own volition.
This is a fundamentally important right because without it, we are all automatons.
The issue is that in many cases we humans make bad choices, on a truly unimaginable scale.
This is also very much a part of being human - good choices exist only if bad choices exists.
The issue is that sometimes we can agree that people will consistently make poor choices, for a variety of forgiveable reasons.
While we could conceivably go after each individual, explain and educate them in precisely the way required to convince them that they should wear seat belts - it’s is often practically impossible to do so.
Which is why we introduce laws and regulations. All cars must have seat belts - and you must wear them.
Because as a species we are able to make meta cognitive calls or simply- decisions about decisions.
As a species we don’t want our people dying, for something as trivial as not wearing a seat belt.
It causes families to lose parents, parents to lose children - often because they were just at the wrong place and time.
Getting people to wear seat belts causes large scale good, over an individuals choice to put themselves and others at risk.
>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."
>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:
"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."
Yeah, and in some way or another, every single one of them seem to end in a bloody dictatorship.
Thanks, but no thanks, please keep your "alternative possibilities" to yourself.
Lots of workers' blood was spilled to ensure the capitalist systems we see in the US and other countries, too. All sides in the history of politics and economic systems are bloody-handed monsters.
It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.
The world has never been in a better place, and has never improved as fast as in the last 60 years. If that's your argument to try something different, your argument doesn't make any sense.
> It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.
Indeed, let's not try to implement socialism again. Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships. Let's learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes.
It is very much worth studying why this has happened and what kind of methods can be used to avert it. Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian. Allende, Sankara's Burkina Faso, the Paris Commune, revolutionary Catalonia, and most recently Rojava are examples of the Socialist project experiencing some faults but not nearly as uncharitably as you are painting them here.
I'm dismissing failures because every single time it ended in bloody dictatorships, but no, This Time It Will Be Different®.
No, it won't. Funny how you talk about learning with the failures of history, but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
And again, that's when the world has been the best that it has ever been. In 60 years, extreme poverty went from ~60% to <10% of the global population because of free trade and globalization. Free trade was the largest income distribution process in history, shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
Sure, there is still a lot to be done, but the current system has worked miracles. It can be improved, but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Keep your disastrous social and economic experiments to yourself. Socialism has done harm enough.
Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.
>but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.
Not really; have you heard of Badiou's concept of the Communist Hypothesis? His argument is that Socialism, well, Communism has existed as an Idea for centuries, it is always the force to break down the "present state of things", it is the first element of society, the subversive one, to oppose the action of the State. To dismiss thirty years of research into Communism, creating branches such as anarchist Communism, communalism, feminist anarchism, Socialist technocracy and others with faux-empiricism is a little heavy handed in my view.
As for your support of the wonders of capitalism, neither I, nor Marx, Engels or any contemporary Communist denies its push to reduce poverty.
>shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.
"Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
>but the current system has worked miracles
So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
>It can be improved
So can Socialism.
>but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.
Capitalism itself was extremely dramatic, it came "soaked from head to toe in blood" as Marx put it. In fact, he dedicates two chapters of his magnum opus to detailing the bloody history of capitalism and the laws passed in Western Europe that allowed it to flourish.
But that's the essence of your argument. You are proposing to try again something that 100% of the times led to bloody dictatorships, claiming that this time it will be different due to some vague, hand-wavy reason.
> "Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.
Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".
> So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).
No. Unless one of those systems did something like removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century. Neither did. Not only that, the Soviet system purposefully murdered millions. And the key word here is "purposefully". Every system results in deaths, the Soviet (and all socialists) fall into a special category where death is part of the governing process. See Holodomor. Killing Fields. Etc.
> So can Socialism.
I'll say "maybe" to give you the benefit of the doubt, but do we need to kill millions again to find out based on your "hunch"? No, thank you very much.
> as Marx put it
And you keep citing Marx as if he is a reasonable source, that puzzles me. He's long dead, just as his economic theories. Keep them dead.
I'm sure you believe if you controlled a country, you would do a much better job and not make the same mistakes that lead to a bloody dictatorship and worse outcomes for the poor. Excuse us if most of the rest here don't believe that.
I've seen similar ratings for Roman emperors as well but confess I don't remember the details, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has further compiled information to address exactly this question for other European lines of monarchs, the various Chinese dynasties, Japan's weird history, etc. (https://archive.is/I42xd is a good reminder of the excesses, no form of government is innocent.)
That's one way to describe an "industry [that] employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers [that] go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower." From the article.
"People's Democratic Central Party Committee" Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.
There is an entire world of alternative possibilities out there for economic and governance systems. Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.