The spectacle is hypersensitive to its own needs.

The spectacle is hypersensitive to its own needs. This is something of an understatement — its means and its ends are one and the same. But its physical diction over men, lonely crowds ruled and united solely by their own economy, allows it to shift its locus and blur its tracks so that any analysis of its history becomes discredited by the present.

When labour is reorganised to accomodate for automation, the commodity produced is both immaterial and fundamental to the spectacle, a contradiction which reflects its nature as having its own non-realisation as the only permissable goal. In colonised territories, hyperdeveloped societies at the periphery of spectacular absolution distort the native population to the point that every continued aspect of their unintegrated existence becomes a commodity, along with each negation in turn. This produces unique markets, accompanied by their typical dialogues, which, as well as buttressing the reigning order — as do all other commodities — can become exports to serve any needs of the spectacle across the planet. Whether these needs — the drive for “homeland security,” for example — arose because of the repercussions of commodifying colonisation or not is impossible to distinguish, as our orders are perpetually articulated a step ahead of our awareness.

Hear me out.

While this may discrdedt my arguement, I draw my conclusions from the universe of Star Trek. Hear me out.

In the Star Trek universe, human beings no longer work for the pursuit of money or material gains. This shift in attachment to physical objects stemmed from the invention of the replicator and the elimination of the need to work to provide sustinence. Once the basic needs of the population was met, society shifted.

Now, take that point, that changes in attitudes towards money and accumulation of wealth can only change when the means of acquiring that wealth changes. No longer were people defined by what they did or what they had, but by who they were. When no one was starving and everyone had shelter and clothing readily available to them, not to mention that any luxury items were a click away, the world was a better place.

Now lets assume we extend that model to our own universe. If the government places itself in a position where it provides all the necessities of life to its population, regardless of social class or wealth, then materialism diminsihes. People are happier and more content with themselves when they know that they are not being forced into an unhappy situation so they can simply survive. No one should have to be put into a situation like that.

Once the government starts to provide universal health care, reduce or eliminate rent in many developing communities, and increase funding and access to food re-distribution programs then the general population will become happier and move more towards a society that would accept socialist rule.

Basically, we can’t change the way people act without first changing the conditions they are in.

I mean there’s 2 levels of evil in cheating: 1)

What I really find weird about this is that it’s still somehow more acceptable to cheat then then to outright state that you are unhappy with your SO (or maybe just your sex life) and go on a break. I mean there’s 2 levels of evil in cheating: 1) The fact that you are not honoring your original promise of exclusivity to another person and 2) The fact that you don’t even respect them enough to tell them that.

The main big-time benefit of a monogamous relationship (now that economics plays barely any role) is that you have this other person upon which you can rely over the long term. There are precious few things left in modern life that are that reliable. The “family clan” seized to exist as a reliable structure of support a while ago (how exactly this happened is also interesting and maybe worth another thread). People change jobs far more often now, and also move around far more often. It is incredibly hard to have some sort of long-term social and emotional support, and it is increasingly the case that people get desperately lonely because they ignored this problem. So long-term monogamous relationships, IMO, have real and practical benefits that make them worthwhile.

The hard part about monogamy is that human beings (some more then others) get bored easily and crave new experiences. Societies which are less developed economically don’t really notice this I think because, simply put, they are too busy working to meet their basic survival needs. Getting bored is a symptom of an affluent economy and thus it manifests itself much more often in the west then elsewhere. So now you have this problem, and it’s obviously very common (even people who don’t actually cheat almost certainly have some desire to do so after, say, 30 years of marriage). Fulfilling this desire can sometimes be a non-issue if both parties happen to experience it at the same time, but of course, even in those cases that doesn’t happen, because (for lack of a better explanation), it is culturally unacceptable. Yet, by cheating, the trust-bond I describe above is completely demolished.

The culturally acceptable way to deal with this problem of ‘novelty seeking’ is to 1) Deny that it exists (I’m going to go ahead and assume we can thank our long history of state/religion-enforced monogamy for this) and then 2) Do it any way, destroying the idea of long-term relationships in the process.

I think this is an absolutely terrible ‘social norm’ that causes observable damage. Cheating is seen as an ‘indiscretion’ – a small lapse in judgement that we are all prone to. It is generally speakable an easily forgivable offensive (probably because it’s easy to see one’s self in a cheater’s shoes, even if we never act on it). Yet, someone who breaks-up with their <wife|husband> by stating outright that they are no longer happy with the relationship (for whatever reason) is seen as a horrible person and is not so easily forgiven. Someone who stays married but sleeps around with their partner’s consent is an even bigger pariah.

Even if you could begrudgingly accept that your partner can sleep with other people, the social pressure against this is enormous. There are few embarrassments worse then having this sort of thing become public knowledge.

And yet, all of these are much better solutions then the current norms, because they do not necessarily destroy the long-term trust of a relationship. They actually deal with the problem. They won’t always succeed of course and envy is arguably an even more difficult emotion to overcome then novelty seeking, but at least it actually deals with the problem at hand in a somewhat more realistic manner.

Another aside:

If you don’t mind, I’d like to take the discussion back to this point. One of the critiques to command economies is that central planners (no matter how benevolent) lack the capability to efficiently allocate resources (input, labor and capital) towards the production of goods of value (private and public). This ‘lack of capability’ is because economic decision making is centralized under a single bureau or institution rather than between millions of private firms and households (like in a decentralized market system). It’s mainly a computational problem that has to do with an overload of information rather than the lack of perfect information. It has been said earlier that communism may have never had a fair chance because it didn’t have access to computers or information technology and I think there is some truth to this.

A stronger critique (I think) is that command economies suffer from agency problems . These problems arise when there’s a significant incentive for managers to simply lie to the owners of the means of production. Under capitalism, it’s when CEO’s lie on accounting statements and under communism it’s when factory managers lie to the government. Even if your democratically elected communist leader had the purest of intentions, even he needs accurate information as to how many inputs each factory is to get to meet his quota. Factories have significant incentive to under-report capacity to make quotas easier to attain and to avoid the steep punishment for not being able to meet them. Communes have an incentive to lie about their census to receive more resources from the government. In the end, what does this mean for the central planners? Any forecasting model can only work as well as the quality of the information put into it (garbage-in garbage-out as computer scientists would say) so the lack of quality information received by economic planners severely hampers efficiency which in the end translates into corruption.

Both types of problems are magnified once the economy becomes more sophisticated and intricate because the oversight mechanisms themselves could collude with factory managers. This is why I believe the USSR, China and Vietnam eventually switched to decentralized, open economies but Cuba and North Korea didn’t (or still havn’t) Note their relative sizes in terms of population.

As an aside (because this is a thread about the shortcomings of communism, not capitalism): large corporations and multinationals under capitalism have similar analogous accounting problems (world com et al), it’s just that most of the economy isn’t run by them (yet). Also, these problems are mitigated since there’s an incentive to under AND over-report financial statements. One is for tax purposes, and the other is to make your company stock look better. When stock options come into play however, that’s a different story.

I agree with McCaine when he says that ideologically based decisions aren’t unique to communism nor are bad policy decisions. But someone else on this thread already mentioned that bad policy decisions under communism/a command economy has a much worst effect than a decentralized/market one. This is because the functions of decision making and resource allocation are covered with a high degree of redundancy under a market system so if one firm fails or goes bankrupt due to bad decisions or misallocation of capital, not everyone suffers and only the people who made the poor decisions suffer for their mistakes.

Another aside: There are many policies in the States and elsewhere that is highly motivated by economic ideology rather than practicality. Many people would vote lower taxes despite the fact that taxes fund social programs that benefit the majority of the population at the cost of the minority of the rich simply because it is the complete opposite of socialism or the stigma of communism.

No, you don’t understand what’s going on.

No, you don’t understand what’s going on. The situation you just described is explained in Def. 5-8, among other places. As I’ve noted before, although this principle is assumed it is certainly not what is being demonstrated in the example I posted. This particular principle you’re thinking is being described is illustrated by means of a bucket of water spinning around, I believe, and is only a stepping stone to the example I posted.

The phrase “inertial reference frame” appears no where that I can find in my edition of the Principia nor is it listed in the index; I also highly doubt its just a translational issue. This leads me to believe you’re just spouting shit that’s been spoonfed to you instead of actually knowing anything about what Newton said for himself.

By the way, Galileo’s understanding of relativity is a far cry away from the kinds of motion Newton discusses at least in this opening scholium (at least regarding his Two New Sciences and the Principia); same goes for Huygens which is much closer to the what you’re trying to make Newton say. Unfortunately the name has stuck leading to all sorts of misconceptions concerning the subtle differences among these three authors.

read this about 8 times and then remember that for Newton, there are absolute spaces: “It is certainly very difficult to find out the true motions of individual bodies and actually to differentiate them from apparent motions, because the parts of that immovable space in which the bodies truly move make no impression on the senses. Nevertheless, the case is not utterly hopeless. For it is possible to draw evidence partly from apparent motions, which are the differences between the true motions, and partly from the forces that are the causes and effects of the true motions.”

“True motion” is earlier equated with “mathematical” or “absolute” motion; it is defined as “motion from one absolute place to another” in the third paragraph of the scholium. If you can somehow take this as meaning “there is only relative motion” have at it; that is all I am trying to ask.

The freedoms and transmissions of open dialogue

The freedoms and transmissions of open dialogue are a testament to a society that holds if at least it’s own founded beliefs sacred.  The actual methods of political interchange between politicians, lobbyists, and especially the public, are demeaning to the system, and the reliance on psychological manipulation and subversion and not the open deliberation of ideas is jawdropping.  In a system that has been so bureaucratized that it has lost complete relevance to its intended purpose, you have to wonder when it will ever change to represent more than pushing capitol and arrogance.

In what you can read in history books, by no means has the US democracy been errorless, but it’s easy to see that in relation to the previous eras of the country where it continued to evolve in a manner that reflected the ideas of the day and intentions, this one is perversely manipulated by an absolute undermining of the system that was established to keep it fair and intelligible.

Opening the ability to “wire-spy” on anyone does not seem like a step backwards, but a step in a different direction of progression towards a much less democratic state.  I agree that it is a failure on the part of the democratic representation to sell their liberty for a chance of security.  Perhaps the own freedoms of democracy are inherently subject to the exploitation of itself.