The Sage Garden

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

True Leftists are nothing but bands of thugs and killers. They're proving that now with parroting the propaganda of fellow thug and killer Putin.

Because "progressive" presidents have squeaky-clean records, right?

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Shame that Hollywood is dominated today by vapid bourgeois liberals (not to mention the literal Pentagon propaganda that is most action films) instead of the good old days when half of them were card-carrying Communists.

Both parties are controlled by the bourgeoisie.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

he's probably the Senator with the closest relationship w/ both AIPAC and Wall Street.  a great example of the neoliberal degenerated Democrat.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

No, it's because of NAFTA, entering the WTO, PNTR for the PRC, the destruction of Yugoslavia, NATO expansion, killing welfare, the Brady Bill, DADT, and DOMA

I'll give you trade, welfare, and to a lesser extent DOMA (and our disagreements on gun control are more on the philosophical side), but how is NATO expansion "sociopathic"?

It's a global military outfit that robs US taxpayers to fund wars and subsidize weapons contractors.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Because the ruling elite doesn't want a middle class. Middle class is wealthy enough to be free from control from them.

It's why the Elite is using lots of money to convince people to destroy the welfare state. To dissolve middle class in order to return to their previous exclusive rule.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

All human systems are, at their core, ideological constructs. To reject the system, one must reject the ideology.

...that doesn't even make sense.

Wikipedia is a good of a place to start as any:

en.wikipedia (dot) org/wiki/Constructivist_epistemology

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

AggregateDemand's problem (and I realize this is going to be a 'sagepost', and I don't really care) is that he's enslaved to bad metaphors. E.g.:

If you eat 3,000 calories per day, you're going to have to burn calories to maintain healthy weight. You can lift weights to increase work output and gain muscle mass. You can run and do cardio training to increase work output and endurance. You can walk around in circles, which burns insufficient calories, and only makes you good at walking in circles.

Republicans are the people who say "If we're not going to change our workout regimen, we might as well cut government caloric intake to 2,000 calories per day, and stop walking circles". Democrats are the people who say "I can't believe Republicans think there is something better than walking in circles".

Explaining government nutritional science to American liberals is like trying to fell Ironbark with a dull spoon. Of course liberals think Republicans are anorexics. Anyone who stands between them and the buffet is fascist pig...

This is an incredibly bad set of metaphorical imagery for a few reasons, not the least of which is that society is not a metabolic organism; it does not function in predictable ways - contra the Enlightenment-era tendency to view society through a framework of essentially static images - and so there is no equivalences to 'exercise', 'overeating', 'caloric intake control', and so on. The economy is not physiological.

This is a problem with most contemporary political frameworks, and I genuinely think a lot of problems could be solved if we simply had a different imaginary vocabulary to express them in. My conception of things is much closer to smoke circulating in a fan blade, or maybe some of the more chaotic concepts emerging out of quantum physics. Conceiving of society as an essentially predictable pattern of cause-and-effect correlations is so eighteenth century.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

3. Cons constantly sabotage libertarian and neoliberal policy, which helps the left-wing machine retain some bureaucratic power.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

It's not so much that most Muslims aren't ready for democracy, it's that most Muslims aren't ready for human rights.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

College used to be inexpensive enough that students could work their way through college on menial jobs without becoming laden with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Is it so much better now that one can justify the price increase?

I think not. I have seen depictions of colleges from the old days -- and the college classroom looked about as austere as a high-school classroom of similar time. What great infrastructure does one need for the old, reliable Great Books approach to education? Maybe the Great Books themselves are next to nothing in cost as downloads from Project Gutenberg.  There could be some twentieth century writers whose works are not yet in the public domain (let us say Kundera)... but that should not pose much of a difficulty. Full literacy now requires exposure to film and other 20th-century media, so maybe a fully-educated person needs five years instead of four.

Colleges are preparing young adults to be members of some Leisure Class by exposing them to 'luxury' that never was a part of education. How large a Leisure Class can we afford? The focus was on preparation to be a full adult ready to take on grown-up roles in the economy. College grads might often end up with such unglamorous careers as "teacher", "circuit preacher",  "fish and wildlife officer", "forest ranger", "traveling salesman", "county agricultural agent", or "librarian" -- but those all required some level of intellectual sophistication, and colleges had to accommodate such people who sought such careers.  People may have been attending college because they knew that they could never tolerate the grinding, mindless sameness of factory work even if it paid better than "circuit preacher".

So colleges are competing with each other to offer nicer dorms, successful athletic teams, bigger libraries, more concerts by bigger stars, and better college sports teams? Why? Is such the purpose of education? Next thing you know they will start building horse tracks.  

Anyone can learn materialistic hedonism.  Just look at pimps and pushers. Know also why you aren't one of those scum even if you are a file clerk with a huge student loan to pay off.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

China and Vietnam have been at war for 1,000 years. This specific incident is part of Obama's "Asian Pivot" to contain China/expand American influence in the Pacific.

This is not sage.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Normally I wouldn't consider that post Sage except for that he blames Obama for that specific incident.

Blaming Obama is not sage. It's well-known that Obama has an Asian pivot, and I guarantee you that if I posted that instead of Snowstalker, then this wouldn't be here.

This, especially the first paragraph, is one of the most sage posts I've ever read here.

I hold that we are still in early capitalism, and that the system will not enter middle age, as it were, until technology reaches the point that manufacturing capacity in some form is available to everyone - likely sometime in the second half of this century. (Desktop manufacturing, three-dimensional printers capable of material conversion, rapid fabricators, etc.)

At that level of personalization, the concept of investment capital should slowly begin to dissolve.

More precisely -- the ruling elites of a bureaucratic-capitalist order seek a return to the norms of "early capitalism" -- that is, the harsh rules that allow luxury for elites and deprivation for others that allegedly created the rapid growth of the Gilded Age. Such rules must be iron-clad -- enforced with murder, torture, and travesties of justice.

In fact, a return to early capitalism takes away the assumption that the proletariat has a role as a market for the objects that they produce.

I once saw a book by a Soviet dissident (Andrei Amalrik?) who discussed the concept of economic alienation. Unless people can associate their economic activities with potential improvements of their lives, they endure economic alienation. This transcends even the relation between employer and employee.

Thus a slave in ancient Egypt who is compelled to clear an irrigation canal that will bring water to get more food for himself and his family is not economically alienated in that work. A slave compelled to carry stones to build the definitive show project of the time (a pyramid as a tomb for a pharaoh) is in an activity of economic alienation.  

So if you are a German worker in an armaments factory in WWII and your production is to go into the subjection of people who don't want to be ruled by "your" Fuehrer, then your production is alienation. If you are a Soviet worker in an armament factory that produces munitions for driving out the Nazis once and for all, then your effort is not alienation.

But those have nothing to do with capitalism.

If you are producing the ordinary dinnerware of fellow workers while working at a Wedgwood facility in the early 1800s, then your effort is not alienation -- if you too can afford to use those dinner plates in your daily life. That happens when capitalism needs a mass market. Work in a Ford plant was hard and regimented -- but it produced cars that people could afford. Henry Ford may have been a piece of work, but he wanted his production workers capable of buying the vehicles that he produced.

The work may be indirect. So nobody in a steel mill could ever be a customer for raw steel -- but if the steel is going into consumer products such as refrigerators, into the construction of buildings and transportation --  it's not alienation. If it is going into military weapons to be used to mow down strikers then it is alienation.

Services? If one works for a motel chain that one can afford as a traveler, then it is not alienation. Out of range of the hotel worker by price? I trust that the high-end hotels ensure that their employers can afford to stay in them on occasion. In essence, if one works for the "Luxury Hotel" chain even if it is beyond reach on the pay -- well, if one works for "Luxury Hotel" in  Pittsburgh, one can afford a heavily-discounted stay in "Luxury Hotel" in  Boston, Chicago, Miami, or even San Francisco. "Luxury Hotel" might want its employees to understand what it is like to be a customer.

The state highway patrol officer who spends most of his time nailing speeders and intoxicated drivers uses the road, too.  The secret policeman who beats a dissident ultimately destroys his possibility to oppose the thug regime that hires him.  The public-sector DA who prosecutes meth traffickers does good. The private-sector PR executive may be paid well for his ad campaign "Pollution is your Best Friend", but his worth is ultimately contrary to the public interest.

Whether it involves private or public activity, the relevance of one's work to the public good determines the health of the economy. To the extent that what people do does good for people like them is the norm, the economy is healthy.
 

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Pakistan has, for most of its short existence, been governed by reactionary autocrats who manage to combine the regressivism of Islamic traditionalism with the over-the-top pageantry of British Raj-style military government.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=profile;u=1442;sa=showPosts

I'd imagine this would what Snowstalker smoking weed would be like.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

There is no sage wisdom in that post.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

What a moronic tautology.

Buying individual shares is hardly ever profitable for single workers; a salaried worker doesn't make enough to buy enough shares to take in any kind of regular income from it. There is unequal investment capacity between an already well-heeled (or even already middle class) investor, who can afford the initial outlay for stocks, and the proletariat, who rarely can and who will almost always make more, and more immediately, with a used truck.

You are a retrograde.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Not Atlas, but whatever:

One time my uncle said that Obama would be a Reagan Republican if he was in the 1980s.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

I didn't find memphis' post to be sage, but the posting of it here sure has been a good catalyst for sagery.

Preach. If anything, this saved me quite a lot of effort.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

ITT: Socialists cheering on the rise of extremist theocratic reactionaries because they'll stick it to America.

That sound you hear is Marx rolling in his grave.