Rationalskepticism,lol part III.

[DaveDodo007]

That said, I agree with you rEv, being "elite" is very, very subjective. Those who actually are elite know it and don't mention it. Those who aren't at all elite label those who are better off than themselves as "elite" as a part of the practice of class warfare that Marx touted as the way to get the proletarian masses stirred up enough to kill the bourgeoisie merchant class, who themselves suffered under the thumb of the privileged aristocracy by rule of law.

The elite are waging class war on the vast majority of the population. Only cowards back down in the face of an existential threat like that. I love this idiotic rhetoric pumped out by conservatives that mentioning the unravelling of the stability of society (i.e. pointing out massive wealth inequality and corporate/wealth hijacking of our "democracies"), that it's somehow a war by a small group of aware progressives against the power of the elite. Talk about David and Goliath.

There will always be an elite (hierarchy) if communism has shown us anything it is that we will get just another elite.

[pErvinalia]

Well blaming other people for all your problems predate Marx by a long way, anyone in the who earns about $30k is in the top 1% of economic power, sure you might not be in the top .1% or the top 0.01% but it sure beats being in the bottom 99% and the other reason people who are in the elite want blame even more elite people is quite simply guilt.

FFS, Hermit rebutted this simplistic bullshit pages ago. It's a shame you don't read what others write to you. "Elite" does not equal 'minority'. Is it possible you can get this exceedingly simple point into your head??! The concept of the "elite" refers to wielding power over society. You wield virtually no power at all over Africans, unless you take your money and move over there. The elite in your society wield all the power over you (which is what you crave :insane: ), and even more prodigious levels of power over the 3rd world. Repeating the same misunderstanding of what it means to be elite and dominate politics and the moral discourse isn't going to make it true. FFS, try and read what others are writing to you and actually thinking before mindlessly replying with empty platitudes.

They prosper from the system but they can ease their own guilt by blaming others who prosper even more, such high morality. Tonight a few African children will die tonight due to starvation, I might put a small donation into a charity shop, a few coins in the charity collection but beyond that I'll get over it and so will the morons who claim to be on the high moral ground, they care no more than I do because if they did they wouldn't be on these forums they would be in Africa risking their necks

This shows a ridiculous level of misunderstanding of the causes of third world poverty. It was initially colonialism and is enforced through effective colonialism to this day (instead of guns, germs and steel, these days it's - money as a weapon). If you want to help third world poverty you need to bring down the global elite who think the third world is a resource for them to exploit and extract as much wealth as possible from before they drop off the perch.

Simplistic thinking does you no favours, Jonno. Make an effort, FFS.

[pErvinalia]

This is as idiotic as Seth's claim that the vast majority of people are secret Marxists.

And once again, you don't address what I wrote. You do have way more money than the average African, but that doesn't afford you any power as you don't interact with them directly. You do however interact directly in your own socio-political system, a system in which you have very little power at all. You are slave to the elites in your society. Exactly how you like it, of course.

Seth hides behind psuedo moralistic bullshit while being a selfish cunt (sorry Seth not meant to be an insult in this case) , I'm just a selfish cunt like everyone else

A socialist describing someone as a "selfish cunt" is based on the as-yet unsupported assertion that as a precondition to social intercourse the individual somehow owes society more than what he consumes of society's benefits.

Are you off with the fairies?!? Jonno is in no way a socialist. He's an authoritarian conservative. You forget it's not a simple case of dividing the world into right libertarians and left authoritarians. There are both left libertarians (like I am, ideologically, not pragmatically though) and right authoritarians like Hitler and Jonno.

[pErvinalia]

I just act in my best self interest it doesn't bother me if I'm called a selfish cunt or not but it obviously bothers others

I've come to the conclusion the best way you win a political argument is to be everything your opponent despises and thinks you are. If someone calls a politician an evil murder then that politician should say yes I'm an evil murder, I'm a fucking good one and this country needs an evil murderer. When they get elected on that basis where does your opponent have to go?

Who ARE you and what have you done with MrJonno!

This just shows how blinded you are by your biases. Jonno hasn't been a progressive since RD.net. He's been an authoritarian conservative for nearly a decade now. You really need to fucking wake up to yourself.

[pErvinalia]

Democracy has pretty much died in the UK, you have a moderately right wing political party (the Conservatives) but the Labour party has been taken over by real Trots and terrorist sympathisers (genuine ones not Seth ones). These people are currently the real enemy and all energies need to devoted to defeating them.

The other sad conclusion I've come to is while I'm pro-immigration, pro gay rights, pro freedom of speech pro-internationalism, anti racism most the poor underclass are not. One day they will vote for a left wing party the next they will vote for an openly fascist one (UKIP in the UK). I've come to the conclusion these people aren't poor because they are oppressed they are poor because they are uneducated scum. I don't want to be associated to such people. I'm happy to support unlimited tax funded education (still a leftie) but the obligation is on the poor to take advantage of it and to cease to be poor instead of being vermin blaming everyone else for their problems

"I'm not a social Darwinist, but..."

[pErvinalia]

As usual, this is becoming a polarising argument, with both rEv and MrJonno being forced to the extreme ends of their own arguments.

There is some truth, albeit a depressing one, in Jonno's pessimistic view of the innately selfish motivation of most people, in at least many circumstances.

Is there really?! How about one of you clowns who keep making this assertion actually back it up with evidence? Observing that it is often so, is correlation not causation. You need to separate out social learning from genetics (i.e. your innate bullshit). Can any of you lot do that?

And it is not impossible to make at least some moves towards a more progressive society, with some clever policies, and a little luck, but it will still be, as always, an imperfect compromise.

The value of Greens, anarchists, Corbyns, Sanders etc, are that even if they don't actually succeed in getting to power, they maintain a fight against the constant tide the other way. Without them the centre would be WAY more to the right than what it is today. Then people like Jonno and Seth and could just openly blame poor people for their own lack of opportunities. Oh, wait, they already do that. Well, we'd be well on the way down to fascism, which is exactly what Jonno and Seth want. In Seth's defence, at least he's ambitious and probably clever enough that he would be in the elite in such a society. Jonno would still be a snivelling suck arse worshiping his betters.

[pErvinalia]

A progressive society for whom?, the poor they are the one who hate the progressive society the most. It's not the middle classes that are bothered about foreigners or gay people they are just customers or employees, its the poor who are the real bigots

You just have such a non-understanding of human psychology. What happens when an adult bullies a child? The child then finds someone worse off than them in some degree and bullies them. This is simple shit. Even in your ultra-simplistic universe there should be room for such simple truths.

[DaveDodo007]

I just act in my best self interest it doesn't bother me if I'm called a selfish cunt or not but it obviously bothers others

I've come to the conclusion the best way you win a political argument is to be everything your opponent despises and thinks you are. If someone calls a politician an evil murder then that politician should say yes I'm an evil murder, I'm a fucking good one and this country needs an evil murderer. When they get elected on that basis where does your opponent have to go?

Who ARE you and what have you done with MrJonno!

This just shows how blinded you are by your biases. Jonno hasn't been a progressive since RD.net. He's been an authoritarian conservative for nearly a decade now. You really need to fucking wake up to yourself.

Mr Jonno is the unacceptable face of capitalism.

[pErvinalia]

But in the case of Corbyn, Sanders et al, these people are overtly anti-elite. So supporters of them can hardly be elite, let alone a tool of the elite. The reasonable question is: does the political system we have inevitably lead to corruption and elitism? I kind of suspect that it does, and the events in Greece and Syriza selling out bear truth to that.

I wouldn't call them anti-elitist, they just want to usurp the elite position. Commissars and apparatchiks, that's the ticket. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Such is the human condition. The biggest Bernie supporters I run into here are university students, and anyone who has ever been a university student knows full well they can't find their own ass with both hands and a GPS. Plus they're utterly doomed to failure. No society has ever been even remotely "fair", not on the playground nor in the hallowed Halls of Power. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The trick is to figure out who the next boss is and position yourself as a little remora to their Great White, protected by their bulk and feeding off their scraps. Well, either that or go live on a trawler.

Well said, I don't understand people who don't get this. Every person who wants to govern you is a sociopath and they have just picked your demographic as useful to get them elected. The best you can do is vote for the politicians whose views at least alight mostly with yours. As it got them power and so they will stick with it whilst it is useful to them.

Edit: People like rEv and the like who think there are really politicians who care about them are so naive it is untrue. They just want our vote end of.

But as a conservative your brain is telling you that everyone is like you - i.e selfish. You don't have the internal experience of people who aren't conservatives and aren't destructively selfish. There really are people in the world who care about others in principle. My usual thing is to, as I did in this or the other thread, ask the question: If you or I ran for politics would we initially be doing for the power, or for a genuine belief that we could make things better? That question doesn't work so well for conservatives, as conservatives are usually into things for their own selfish benefit. But if you could accept for a minute that some progressives are truly altruistic in their beliefs (to an extent), can you accept that if someone like me went into politics it would be for the benefit of society? The most interesting question is as I've mentioned: would we all (including Corbyn, Sanders, Tsiparis, Australian Greens, etc) end up a tool of the system and basically corrupt and liars if we got to power? I suspect this is the case. If I entered politics I would drop out before that point. It will be interesting to see what Corbyn does on the small chance he becomes PM. He seems to be sticking to his anti-elitism guns at the moment, but can it pragmatically last?

[pErvinalia]

A progressive society for whom?, the poor they are the one who hate the progressive society the most. It's not the middle classes that are bothered about foreigners or gay people they are just customers or employees, its the poor who are the real bigots

Totally unfair assessment, the working class are the least educated to deal with mass immigration yet bare the blunt of its effects. As in they (by over demand) drive down wages and over burden the housing and welfare state in their area which they live. They are totally right to give the finger to the progressive (regressive left) though I would like to see you justify the claim that they are homophobic?

This is interesting. DD shows more political and social awareness than Jonno. That shows how far you've sunk, Jonno. Well done, champ!

[pErvinalia]

I don't claim that the vast majority of people are Fascists, I clam that capitalism is Fascism, which is the absolute truth enunciated by Bergson himself. As for the "vast majority of people," only those who are, or approve of capitalism have nexus to Bergson et al, but they aren't actually Fascists, a category limited to those who are smart enough to places themselves in the elite leadership status of Mosca's Ruling Class, instead that vast, seething majority of disorganised swine are the useful idiots Mosca referred to who spend their lives mindlessly fighting each other for the meagre slops and spillages from the trough of capitalism, too innately stupid to understand that they are being starved and slaughtered to secure the ivory towers of their Lords and Masters.

OK when I get time I'm really going to tear this comment a new one but I need to hear more on how capitalism is fascism as even at its most basic level it just wants your money?

You need to learn how to fucking read and realise it is a parody of an earlier comment by Seth.

Fuck, this site is a real dumb cunt attractant.

[pErvinalia]

That said, I agree with you rEv, being "elite" is very, very subjective. Those who actually are elite know it and don't mention it. Those who aren't at all elite label those who are better off than themselves as "elite" as a part of the practice of class warfare that Marx touted as the way to get the proletarian masses stirred up enough to kill the bourgeoisie merchant class, who themselves suffered under the thumb of the privileged aristocracy by rule of law.

The elite are waging class war on the vast majority of the population. Only cowards back down in the face of an existential threat like that. I love this idiotic rhetoric pumped out by conservatives that mentioning the unravelling of the stability of society (i.e. pointing out massive wealth inequality and corporate/wealth hijacking of our "democracies"), that it's somehow a war by a small group of aware progressives against the power of the elite. Talk about David and Goliath.

There will always be an elite (hierarchy) if communism has shown us anything it is that we will get just another elite.

Yeah, that's possibly true. But it's not necessarily guaranteed. So we should always fight against injustice and corruption and sociopaths. Whatever side of the political spectrum they fall.

[Hermit]

I don't claim that the vast majority of people are Fascists, I clam that capitalism is Fascism, which is the absolute truth enunciated by Bergson himself. As for the "vast majority of people," only those who are, or approve of capitalism have nexus to Bergson et al, but they aren't actually Fascists, a category limited to those who are smart enough to places themselves in the elite leadership status of Mosca's Ruling Class, instead that vast, seething majority of disorganised swine are the useful idiots Mosca referred to who spend their lives mindlessly fighting each other for the meagre slops and spillages from the trough of capitalism, too innately stupid to understand that they are being starved and slaughtered to secure the ivory towers of their Lords and Masters.

OK when I get time I'm really going to tear this comment a new one but I need to hear more on how capitalism is fascism as even at its most basic level it just wants your money?

You need to learn how to fucking read and realise it is a parody of an earlier comment by Seth.

How I wish you had shut the fuck up about that. I was waiting for DaveDodo007's destruction of that post with glee because I intended to rework it so it addresses Seth's original rubbish. Damn.

[pErvinalia]

[DaveDodo007]

I don't claim that the vast majority of people are Fascists, I clam that capitalism is Fascism, which is the absolute truth enunciated by Bergson himself. As for the "vast majority of people," only those who are, or approve of capitalism have nexus to Bergson et al, but they aren't actually Fascists, a category limited to those who are smart enough to places themselves in the elite leadership status of Mosca's Ruling Class, instead that vast, seething majority of disorganised swine are the useful idiots Mosca referred to who spend their lives mindlessly fighting each other for the meagre slops and spillages from the trough of capitalism, too innately stupid to understand that they are being starved and slaughtered to secure the ivory towers of their Lords and Masters.

OK when I get time I'm really going to tear this comment a new one but I need to hear more on how capitalism is fascism as even at its most basic level it just wants your money?

You need to learn how to fucking read and realise it is a parody of an earlier comment by Seth.

How I wish you had shut the fuck up about that. I was waiting for DaveDodo007's destruction of that post with glee because I intended to rework it so it addresses Seth's original rubbish. Damn.

That will teach me to skip a page and jump in and comment but my opinion of the left is so low right now I don't know what is parody anymore.