cloudfifty's comments

cloudfifty | 3 years ago

That's caricature level gaslighting, even when accounting for your terribly low standards.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

You alone can't do anything about the demographics and their biases here. Buy if you honestly believe that HN is somehow politically neutral you're deluded.

It does't require a sociologist to realise that when certain topics degenerates into 500-1000 comments of bullshit and others doesn't even register that this user base has a certain bias.

Finally, what is seen as ideological warfare naturally follows the overton window. I could directly translate liberal/conservative folks posts here into a equivalent socialist narrative instead and it would be seen as ideological warfare because it's simply out of the ordinary.

You can just look through my comment history and the users I've replied to if you're genuinely interested.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

What a sad state of affairs when pushing back against the bullshit spread by the very prolific reactionaries, albeit polite (which is all that matters here), of this site sooner or later gets one banned. To add insult to injury most of them have been posting on HN for many years.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> considering Marx was a literal man child

I must ask. Why, according to you, was he a "literal man child"?

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

It's funny how reactionaries have gone from "it's not really happening", "it's not man made" to "it's too late anyways" in no time. The same goal remains; to keep doing nothing.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago | on: The End of Uber with Cory Doctorow

The difference is that it's cheaper by Uber pushing down labour costs, a.k.a the driver's compensation. But since that reason isn't as pleasant, vague rationalizations are used instead.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> Given the specific word use makes a particular claim, that is the basis for your other claims, it's extremely important.

No, but it's always nice to focus on semantics if you got little else to say.

> No, this is just your projection. You're engaging in historical revisionism. The standard use of the term 'capitalism' is synomous with free markets.

Are you really suggesting that a system of private property rights is not a fundamental part of 'Capitalism'? And that it's historical revisionism to claim that?

> formed as juries

What jury? Do you think this issue would be treated by a jury if reported? Even if it would be in-front of a jury, a jury is supposed to follow the law, it's not acting in an objective vacuum. That's ridiculous.

> Courts deem children to not have the ability to provide consent, which is unlike adults, so your example shows nothing.

Yeah, and that's obviously a subjective interpretation? The same can easily be said about adults forced to work by the conditions put in place by the system they live in. Currently under capitalism it isn't seen as non-consensual, since that clearly wouldn't work, but maybe it will be seen as obviously so in 100 years?

> That's a totally absurd claim: there were no societies that didn't have free markets / capitalism / work-for-wages and did "just fine wrt food".

What's absurd about historical societies not having capitalist wage-labor and did fine without it? No societies? Haha, that's so ridiculously obvious historical revisionism it's entertaining.

>That you see no need to get emotional about socialist tyranny shows the lack of conscience behind your crude ideologically motivated position.

I'm not sure what socialist tyranny I have promoted in this thread?

> oh yes, Bastiat addressed that too:

What part of that quote more specifically do you feel addresses some point? It's mostly low signal-to-noise gibberish.

> You were earlier implying any one employing someone is an oppressor

Yes, and that was regarding trivial semantics that doesn't remove the core of this discussion namely the non-free nature of capitalism.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

Yeah, the US needs an anti-capitalist opposition that can see through the PR. Like most European countries have.

Coopted is surely hyperbole though, as it suggests control, more like riding the wave.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> Like checking to see if the word 'authoritarian' applies to employers

Have you never heard someone calling their boss "authoritarian"? I used it as a description of an unfree, undemocratic, top-down system that's used in our economic sphere under capitalism, if you don't like that one, pick something else that describes that. The specific word used is not what's important here.

> Capitalism is synonymous with a free market economy in most contexts that these terms are used. > No, capitalism is synomous with free markets, and concentration of wealth is totally orthogonal to a free market economy.

No, it's not. That's just historical revisionism. It's a system based on exclusive ownership of property etc. Societies have traded stuff throughout history without Capitalism and its institution of private-property rights etc.

> People being forced by nature to work in order to feed themselves is not 'non-consensual' in any legal or social sense

Well, it is already illegal for children and legality is still not a guide for morality. It's definitely in a social sense, which I have already explained.

Also, I've already explained - you even quoted it - that it's not "forced by nature" like some natural law. It's man made. Proven by the fact that societies through history didn't have capitalist wage labour and did just fine wrt food.

> This propaganda is intended to depict human liberty as unnatural, and socialist repression as the natural order of things.

> It's extreme deception motivated by a delusional utopianist fantasy.

> to enforce the incoherent moral principles of socialist ideology.

> Objective reality deems socialism a crude ideological narrative.

> like socialism, that rationalize tyranny,

> As for your mental gymnastics to try to discredit a free society

More of your non-emotional objectiveness I see.

> You have provided no evidence that someone offering a job

Well, of course it's not the the act itself of offering a job, it's supporting and perpetuating the system - Capitalism - that sets up those conditions in the first place. Why do you have such a hard time of keeping this on a systemic level?

> You're accusing employers of being oppressors based on the flimsiest of logic

I'm discussing this as a systemic issue, not an individual. That should be obvious by now. And some employers certainly are oppressors, but the edge is towards the capitalist-class, not the local shopkeeper or whatever.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> You're incorrectly putting a person's right to their property, i.e. their right to make exclusive use of what they produce, into a different category from a person's right to make exclusive use of their body.

Yes of course I do? Because I just explained why they are different things, which you haven't responded to.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> is the external circumstances that involve no violence or threats of it

No, it's common sense. Do you honestly believe asking 100 people on the street that most would deem that voluntary? No, they would just say something like "yeah, it's sad, they had no other choice the poor fellas". That's not voluntary by any reasonable definition that's not self-serving.

And in fact, it does involve the threat of violence, albeit indirect, in the form of starvation. Just because your notion of violence only conveniently recognizes direct violence doesn't mean that that's the objective truth.

> The law here is that voluntary contracts are valid

Once again, you're using the law to support a moral common sense question, "court of peers" are bound to judge according to what the current law says, not what they think is obviously true.

> Employers did not create conditions that limited the options of job applicants.

Well, of course not all, but certainly the largest one and the owners behind them. This is a system issue, not an individual one.

> that seeks to demonize the successful to rationalize robbing them

Sigh, more suggestions to envy as motivation.

> It's a blatant lie that makes the logical leap that not assenting to mass-socialist expropriation is tantamount to depriving others of their legitimate rights.

That's not really explaining to me what the lie is, just a temper tantrum.

> It's a degenerate claim based on perverse ideological premises.

What makes my claims "degenerate based on perverse ideological premises" but not yours?

> You believe what others earned belongs to you

Earned is subjective, and in many cases not even remotely true under Capitalism due obvious things like inheritance.

> , and that you have a right to threaten them with violence to coerce them to forfeit it.

It's actually the exact opposite. Abolishing private-property rights removes the owners right to violence. No need to do any violence from the side that are abolishing them. For example: land that one was forbidden to enter under the threat of violence from the property-owner is now free to pass through. Only the property owner's threat of violence has been removed.

> you are the only one here advocating blatant violence and imposition

Uhm, what's the blatant violence I'm advocating?

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> as to "who" is the authoritarian left, hmm lets start with this definition. Blue Checkmarks on Twitters, and.or has Pronouns in the bio of any social media platform, and.or rides alone in a car with mask on.

Wow. That's even a worse reply than I imagined.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

You haven't supplied any context into "any position of the authoritarian left". Who are they and what are their positions that you can't disagree with?

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> instead anyone that disagrees with any position of the authoritarian left is now "alt right"

Reading that over-the-top hyperbole I firmly believe that you're the one that's been moving around.

cloudfifty | 4 years ago

> You're not fact-checking and trying to be objective

What fact-checking have I missed? In what way do you even begin to imagine that this discussion can be objective?

> or a free market economy to operate

I wrote Capitalism, not a "free-market economy" which is a entirely theoretical concept that can never exist in practice. Only Capitalism and its concentration and wealth and power can actually exists.

> Like I said, people having bad options doesn't make the situation "authoritarian"

The CEO of the company is the authoritarian ruler of that company, that's pretty obvious? Yes, if you're privileged, you may be able to switch to another authoritarian instead. If you want to use another word for that relationship, I'm fine with it, the word isn't the important point here. But it's lack of freedom and democracy in the economic sphere and thus under Capitalism.

> according to your crude socialist narrative is ANY ONE who has been successful

That doesn't sound very objective.

> Like I said, people needing to pick one of the several difficult options available to them, in order to earn enough to eat is, as Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years, the nature of reality, that exists with or without authoritarianism:

No, it's not "the nature of reality". Other societies throughout human history didn't require selling your freedom most of your life. So that's objectively false. These are systematic conditions intentionally created by humans to the primary benefit of a subset of them.

> It's that the person providing the "less worse option" is not doing anything to worsen the other options available to the person they are making their offer to.

But they are? If they support the concentration of wealth and capital into the few, making it exclusive use to them, forces others to accept their offer.

> and it's irresponsible for you to not consider the harm to an innocent party that is done when you make a wrongful accusation, and critically analyze the validity of the accusation, before you make it.

What? What are the harm, innocent party, wrongful accusation supposed to be here?

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