BF2S Forums Communism for the lazy and stupid?

oug wrote:

Iconic Irony wrote:

Anyone who argues differently is an idiot.

A pity you guys weren't there to tell Marx he was an idiot and be done with it. It would've made history so much easier.

If I could go back in time I wouldn't kill Hitler or Stalin, or see if Jesus was real or anything else like that. I'd go back to shortly after Marx was born and smother him with a pillow to save the world from all his infantile theories that otherwise intelligent people like to prattle on about.

Varegg wrote:

So you basically think your genes are responsible for all your behaviour and that your skills are preset?

What is left for enviroment and upbringing to decide your personality?

Me or him? I think environment is just as important as genes.

Varegg wrote:

So I guessed wrong

Even with brothers there are a million variables that affect their lives and can drive them in different directions. I joined the Army after high school to pay for college but my brother didn't have to because my leaving the house lifted an economic burden from my mother and she was able to help him pay for school. He's now working in the Gulf of Mexico as a 2nd Mate on a supply ship which is something I would never want to do. Only 2 1/2 years separates us so there isn't a big gap. Heck, how often do identical twins choose the same career path? Would be interesting to study and I doubt that the percentage is very high.

JohnG@lt wrote:

oug wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

No, I'm just suggesting we shouldn't do anything more than the bare minimum to ensure their survival. To set them up as an equal of our most successful people doesn't do anyone any good and in fact, does a lot more harm to society.

Don't forget about Stalin who killed way more people than Hitler or the Spartans combined in order to achieve communist utopia.

What is the bare minimum?
Are you suggesting that successful people have more rights than unsuccessful ones? Are not all people equal?
And finally, the Stalinist regime had nothing to do with what Marx advocates in his Manifesto. One cannot use Stalin's actions against Marx's ideology. They are two separate things.

Not all people are equal. Yes, in places like America they all have the same basic rights that allow them to live their lives reasonably well. They all have the right to vote and they are all granted the rights granted in the Bill of Rights but to say all people are born equal is a falicy. It's also not something that can regulated or controlled. Now, if you want to talk about value to society then yes, more successful people are more valuable to a society than it's failures.

You can take two kids, give them parents of similar wealth and education (or even two brothers for that matter) and they will more than likely turn out vastly different. Not everyone is born with the same personality type or the same level of intelligence. These are disparities based on the genetics and environment the child is raised in. Some are more jealous than others, some are more passive, some are more aggressive and some are more greedy. These are all human traits and they are what make us different from each other.

All a system like communism tries to do is destroy these individual traits, or mask them, so that those born with better traits, or raised in better environments don't have an advantage over those that don't. In fact, they are burdened with other peoples wants, needs and desires just because they happen to be able to be more productive people. In the end you end up with a system based completely on mediocrity and the only happy people are those at the very very bottom. By attempting to mask the traits that make these people human it instead brings them forth with gusto and you end up in a society where everyone is grasping and clawing at each other instead of living in harmony.

The entire system of communism is one big flaw dreamed up by an angry idiot.

But the entire system is built up buy the intelligent and the morons, the strong and the weak. Without the people in today's low-paying jobs, the system wouldn't work.

And this is what the communistic ideology is based on - the fact that everyone is a vital contributor to society. The idea is that everyone is to work at their full potential, thus using a country's human resources as fully as possible. One could call it a perfect society, as someone else said, on paper. With everyone being a vital part of this society, equality is key. With everyone contributing as much as they possibly can, why should the guy born with a smart mind earn more than someone born with a weak mind?

But of course, due to a lot of factors, among them greed, this isn't possible to pull off. Real humans in a true communistic system would do everything they could to work less and leech of the system. Human's need incentives to work harder, sadly.


One could say 'true' communists are blind followers of their own ideology, but calling it bullshit is... bullshit.

Jenspm wrote:

But the entire system is built up buy the intelligent and the morons, the strong and the weak. Without the people in today's low-paying jobs, the system wouldn't work.

And this is what the communistic ideology is based on - the fact that everyone is a vital contributor to society. The idea is that everyone is to work at their full potential, thus using a country's human resources as fully as possible. One could call it a perfect society, as someone else said, on paper. With everyone being a vital part of this society, equality is key. With everyone contributing as much as they possibly can, why should the guy born with a smart mind earn more than someone born with a weak mind?

But of course, due to a lot of factors, among them greed, this isn't possible to pull off. Real humans in a true communistic system would do everything they could to work less and leech of the system. Human's need incentives to work harder, sadly.


One could say 'true' communists are blind followers of their own ideology, but calling it bullshit is... bullshit.

Yes, both parts make up the system but one is vastly more important than the other. One can be replaced with machines while the other designs the machines. Worker bees are generally easy to replace whereas the leaders in a given system are not.

DrunkFace wrote:

That's debatable.

Not really. They've prototyped a computer that can drive a car without human involvement. If I then adapt that system to be able to drive a semi-truck I can replace all truck drivers in the country. My brain has then replaced the work done by 100,000 people.

Last edited by JohnG@lt (2009-11-18 13:01:27)

oug wrote:

It's not a fallacy, it's an ideal. It's what things should be like and it's what we should be striving for. And of course it's something that can be regulated and controlled. The laws of society weren't given to us by fucking god, we make them and we see them through. Unless of course you think that we're not all equal, in which case I'd love to hear your logic on that.

It's a fairy tale. If you choose to believe in fairy tales that's your problem. Don't sit around and talk like it's a viable alternative to our current society. It's not. It has a gajillion holes in its theories.

oug wrote:

Define success and failure. Value is relevant. What's considered valuable now is worth shit tomorrow etc.

Success is defined differently by different people. I will define my own life as a success if I leave my kids better off than I was as a kid.

Value is relative, yes, to a point. In our current society your value is determined by your wages and wealth. It's imperfect, but the more valuable you are to your company, the more money you will make. The better the company does, the more you will make. If you're not useful you will be replaced or you won't get promoted, or receive pay raises. It's very simple, and very logical. It also is dictated by supply and demand factors. If a job can be performed by many people, or many people wish to do the job, the lower the wages because there are many replacements to be found. Example would be advertising and journalism jobs. They make a pittance for wages because so many people graduate college with degrees in english and journalism. On the converse side, the fewer the people in a given industry, the more wages they make (generally). An example here would be professional athletes. Very few people on the planet can do their jobs, it's an industry with a lot of profit, and athletes then make high wages. I wouldn't necessarily place more value on a professional athlete versus a kickass newspaperman but society has dictated their relative values.

oug wrote:

So you're saying that if for example I'm a less intelligent person than you or weaker in bodily strength then I don't get to have the same rights as you? Are you insane?

I said they had the same rights. They also have the same opportunities. If one fails and another succeeds the one that succeeds has a higher value for society. The failure is a dime a dozen.

oug wrote:

Communism is not interested in your character or anything that differentiates you from others. The goal is to make a society viable for everyone and then move on to other things. What you're saying is that peoples' wants and desires are more important than their lives. You're prepared to sacrifice lives to get what you want, all in the name of perfection as opposed to mediocrity. Well if capitalism is perfection then I'll take communist mediocrity any day so long as everyone's basic needs are being met. Like I said before, the primary goal behind every society is that all its members survive.

Your thoughts, insights, and musings on this matter intrigue me.

oug wrote:

That's very nice. So what about a person who is unable to contribute to society? Do we let him die? His company sure would because like you said they only care about profit. That's cool. The question is should "we" do the same? What would you do if you had the power to decide. What you're saying right now is that you'd let him die because he is unable to cater for himself. So should a society allow for its members to live or die depending on how much money they're worth?

Who's letting them die in the streets? There are soup kitchens and charity and a whole slew of other things keeping them alive in a civilized society. I just don't value a bum on the street as much as I do the CEO of a corporation or a professor at a university. You're placing equal value on all three and by doing so you're devaluing those who are valuable and giving value to someone who has none. It's stupidity. Value is earned, it's not something that's handed to a person just because they managed to survive a trip through a uterus and down a vagina.

Jenspm wrote:

For the sake of debate:

Does a naturally healthy, strong and intelligent person have the right to a financially better life than a person born with a mind or body of less power?

No, because there are plenty of men of genius that lived their life in the gutter, the same as there are many men of limited intellect but with other skills that made it to the top. A person has potential at birth but no real value. Nothing should be given to a person just because they have more desirable traits, that's silly.

Jenspm wrote:

So, in a nutshell, what you are saying is the everyone (well, most anyway), has the potential to make it to the top.

But of course, not everyone can be at the top, society needs "workers". Why should those that are lucky enough to get a top position earn more than others if indeed, as is the premise of a true communistic system, everyone does everything they can to use their full potential?

Firstly, there's no such thing as luck. Because there is no luck it takes a lot of hard work and skill to reach it to the top. Sure, some of those positions are handed out via nepotism or connections but the vast majority are not. The reason those people on top deserve higher compensation than the people on the bottom is because there are very few that can perform those jobs, while there are many that can perform the lower tier jobs. Supply and demand dictates their compensation. How many mail room clerks can perform well as a CEO? None, or they would not be mail room clerks. How many CEOs can perform the job of a mail room clerk well? All. While everyone may be working at capacity, the capacity of those at the top of the system is obviously greater, and more valuable.

oug wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

Who's letting them die in the streets? There are soup kitchens and charity and a whole slew of other things keeping them alive in a civilized society. I just don't value a bum on the street as much as I do the CEO of a corporation or a professor at a university. You're placing equal value on all three and by doing so you're devaluing those who are valuable and giving value to someone who has none. It's stupidity. Value is earned, it's not something that's handed to a person just because they managed to survive a trip through a uterus and down a vagina.

So when you say you don't value a bum as much, how can that be translated in a real life situation? Say you just ran over someone in your car. Does it matter what his job is? Is the life of a bum worth less to you than the life of a big time CEO?

In real life terms a life is a life no matter who it belongs to in the eyes of the law. I value my own life so I will not take the life of another because it would lead to my imprisonment. Now, if I were to read a story in the newspaper and it was about the death of a bum I wouldn't really care. If it was a professor that I respected, then I might feel sad for a bit. Same goes for a CEO.

But really, this is a straw man and has absolutely nothing to do with your argument for communism being relevant now does it?

oug wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

In real life terms a life is a life no matter who it belongs to in the eyes of the law. I value my own life so I will not take the life of another because it would lead to my imprisonment. Now, if I were to read a story in the newspaper and it was about the death of a bum I wouldn't really care. If it was a professor that I respected, then I might feel sad for a bit. Same goes for a CEO.

But really, this is a straw man and has absolutely nothing to do with your argument for communism being relevant now does it?

I only started this conversation because you and Macbeth insinuated that there's two kinds of people, successful and unsuccessful, and that the latter were less important within a society and that basically we shouldn't care about them, whether they live or die. Now you say that they are one and the same...?

So basically what I'm saying is that every society's first priority should be the well-being of its members, and that Communism as a system of government has that in mind - regardless of whether it succeeded where it may have been implemented. At the same time, and from what I've seen in this thread and in another I made recently, there's lots of people today - fans of capitalist systems - who have basically forgotten about that primary function of society. Somehow the flawed among us, the lazy and the stupid as is so eloquently put in the title, seem to be less human, and we no longer care whether they live or die. Well fuck that.

And for fucks sake, I'm not exactly in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat either (or any dictatorship for that matter), but damn if I'm gonna let some ignorant child tell me that Marx was an idiot.

But he WAS an idiot. A jealous one. He didn't even finish the third book of Das Kapital because he knew that his system was flawed and didn't work but people still eat it up and treat it like it's gospel.

You and I have different views of what society is and should be. I believe a society only exists because there is a common need for defense and justice. A system of trade that capitalism provides eases the burdens that a barter system entails and makes things as a whole run smoother. Capitalism itself is just a set of economic principles, a set of ideas that make trade between individuals easier. There's nothing more to it. There's no morality involved in the system or anything else that you can attach to it. It's not a form of society. To say that a country has a capitalistic society is an falicy. It's a society that uses capitalistic principles in order to simplify exchanges of goods between people. Nothing more. When you try to intertwine government with the economy you run into problems of morality and control and all the other nasty stuff people like to do to each other if they have the opportunity.

What Marx proposed was an entirely new society where the economy was controlled by the people. Instead of CEO's we'd have committees of 'concerned citizens' running things. We all know Suzy Homemaker knows how to run a digital media company, yes?

Do I think that we as a people have a responsibility to take care of the less fortunate among us? No, it's not a responsibility but it's a nice thing to do. But, using the old teach a man to fish parable, there are plenty of people in our society that have been taught how to fish but they choose not to. Everyone goes to public school. Everyone is fed as a child if they are born into a poor family and their family can't afford to feed them. They get free breakfast and lunch in school, at least they do in my hometown. Some people are just broken inside and can't function properly no matter how much people try to 'fix' them. It's just life. To completely turn everything on it's head just to try to fix the bottom feeders is stupid and it's why Marx was an idiot.

JohnG@lt wrote:

But he WAS an idiot. A jealous one. He didn't even finish the third book of Das Kapital because he knew that his system was flawed and didn't work but people still eat it up and treat it like it's gospel.

You and I have different views of what society is and should be. I believe a society only exists because there is a common need for defense and justice. A system of trade that capitalism provides eases the burdens that a barter system entails and makes things as a whole run smoother. Capitalism itself is just a set of economic principles, a set of ideas that make trade between individuals easier. There's nothing more to it. There's no morality involved in the system or anything else that you can attach to it. It's not a form of society. To say that a country has a capitalistic society is an falicy. It's a society that uses capitalistic principles in order to simplify exchanges of goods between people. Nothing more. When you try to intertwine government with the economy you run into problems of morality and control and all the other nasty stuff people like to do to each other if they have the opportunity.

What Marx proposed was an entirely new society where the economy was controlled by the people. Instead of CEO's we'd have committees of 'concerned citizens' running things. We all know Suzy Homemaker knows how to run a digital media company, yes?

Common need for defense? From whom? Is the whole planet in need of defense from aliens? Or is it in terms of countries? And if it's the latter, why? Is it because of the differences in the quality of life maybe?
Saying a country has a capitalistic society is not a fallacy, the capitalistic system of trade etc does have an effect on society's ethical principles and does formulate its character to a great extent as you have clearly shown throughout this conversation by valuing the life of a successful person more than that of a not so successful - in capitalist terms always.

JohnG@lt wrote:

Do I think that we as a people have a responsibility to take care of the less fortunate among us? No, it's not a responsibility but it's a nice thing to do. But, using the old teach a man to fish parable, there are plenty of people in our society that have been taught how to fish but they choose not to. Everyone goes to public school. Everyone is fed as a child if they are born into a poor family and their family can't afford to feed them. They get free breakfast and lunch in school, at least they do in my hometown. Some people are just broken inside and can't function properly no matter how much people try to 'fix' them. It's just life. To completely turn everything on it's head just to try to fix the bottom feeders is stupid and it's why Marx was an idiot.

Well then in your opinion should this nice thing not be the foundation of our society? If not, why. Btw what you're describing - public school, food for everyone etc - are things that have been provided by a system of government that to some degree redistributes wealth - or in your terms punishes successful people and rewards failure. And of course if you think that everyone can have free education and a free dinner then you're living in fantasy world.