Mark Blyth & Michael Roberts /Europe: Economic Crisis and Po

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techstepgenr8tion
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30 Aug 2017, 7:06 pm

I thought this was a really good presentation. Sounds like it was meant to be a debate and to a small degree it was but the analysis throughout was really interesting. The only thing that was a bit distracting was Michael's Karl Mark shirt, wasn't big on that but then again I was listening to this at work and had the visualization minimized. I went through it twice because it seemed like both Michael and Mark were making a lot of good points about the situations that the EU, US, and Canada find themselves in.

Per Mark's arguments it looks like a first-in-history sort of interest rate insanity hit in the 1970's and what we're dealing with is by and large a counter-adjustment and normalizing. He also said something I'd never heard as well - that the US, just after WWII, had 50% of the world's GDP. I think that's part of why we tend to be really hard on our baby-boomers and accuse them of having been spoiled brats.

Going forward I think a lot is up in the air and the fiscal situation as well as the future of income and distribution could shift in radically different ways just in the next couple decades. Regardless, a lot of good food for thought here.

Mark Blyth & Michael Roberts /Europe: Economic Crisis and Political Alternatives


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traven
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31 Aug 2017, 2:59 am

french & dutch referendum on eu-constitution gave no, but then it was labelled xenophobic etc and put aside ,
eu started from planned economie (and socialism) tied by controlled violence
pink ballets, gladio's Juncker, the dynasties and the holy seat, not to mention the christianised roots of zionism, the nazi roots of fashion and cosmetics, the consumersmodels -of freedom (of choice) and progress (gadget-technology/toxicmedicin)- are rooted in exploitation of the other, be it on the other part of the world and out of sight

rewind, i sense problematic problems with Hegel and Marx legacies,
marx who 'invented' leftist ideals is in fact the opposite of a friend of humanity but a disguised hand of de-humanisation, and with a big stretch schemed to implement 'impoverishment' (back to feudalsociety )
clairly marx paints a world of human have-nots, but to work for money, as being existance, he muddles quite a bit in essentialexistance and tries and finally nearly achieves, equiting existing with 'working' for some external thing,(remember it was the industrial revolution, hence he promoted the idea of have-nots having to work in order to obtain 'living-rights' in a time where most survived on their own skills and/or means of production), (un)openly advertising his ideal-logic capitalist worldorganisation, etcetc (charles dickens' hard times)

--machines, machinations and moral dust-- the tripod, any tripod - dreifuss, herzl, darwin, i'll have to check that back:

" And the religion of the Jewish State? The religion of “our fathers”? Yes, “we are bound together only by the faith of our fathers”, said Herzl? That is the “only” thing that binds us. Which faith is this? Not the faith in ADONAI of the Torah:
“I believe, says Herzl, in the ascent of man to higher and yet higher grades of civilization; but I consider this ascent to be desperately slow. Were we to wait till average humanity had become as charitably inclined as was Lessing when he wrote “Nathan the Wise,” we should wait beyond our day, beyond the days of our children, of our grandchildren, and of our great-grandchildren. But the world’s spirit comes to our aid in another way…This century has given the world a wonderful renaissance by means of its technical achievements; but at the same time its miraculous improvements have not been employed in the service of humanity”.

Herzl’s “faith of our fathers” is faith in man, faith in the gentle gentile “world’s spirit”. The religion of the future Jewish State will bear the marks of a true religion: rebirth (“renaissance”) and miracles (machines). Machines will be the new servants of Humanity. Darwin (1809 – 1882), Hegel (1770 – 1831) and Marx (1818 – 1883), the three feet of the prophetic tripod (dreifus) will hold up an edifice that not even Samson – and his God – has the power to topple.


Of the three feet of the tripod – Darwin, Hegel and Marx, Hegel was the one with the golden fus (foot) . (Marx, himself, was a devotee of Hegel). Herzl, like so many Jews of the Enlightenment, was a convert to Hegel. It was Hegel’s “World Spirit”, Herzl believed, that infused purpose and meaning into history, animating the human spirit, planting in the human heart the awareness of his right to freedom, peace and joy – and of inevitable – if very slow – progress. "

#links on demand, if you want

all that eventually leading to one worldwide trust, made possible by governmenting (eg.planned economy, money, patents)

_or, the wishfull thinking in the idea of progress is the flaw in the enlightenment, (the same flaw in social-darwinism, the 'religious' superstition of 'better')



techstepgenr8tion
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31 Aug 2017, 8:25 pm

I do think the goal of globalism, at least per the ideals of those trying to implement it, is world piece through increasing trade and then government relationships, then government merger into something closer to one world government with no borders.

The ultimate state of civilization probably would go in that direction but I think we're talking about a world that's advanced so far that no one who either doesn't want to or isn't capable of working absolutely needs to in order to life a fulfilling life. A lot of people have hoped that AI and automation would be the fulfillment of capitalism and, who knows, maybe the core idea of Marx's equality of outcome will be coming closer to fruition, without the mess of draconian government and mass murder, just by the eventual satiation of survival needs and competition for basic resources. There's a chance too that automation could spiral us into a social Darwinist dystopia of the worst kind as well. I tend to think that the elites are more practical than sociopathic, ie. they'd rather life with free movement, ability to vacation where they want, and even if begrudgingly they realize that if they reel in enough of the resources they have to buy that freedom back somewhat with our comfort.

Right now we seem like we're at least several centuries from being in a culture whose eased its way out of the survival struggle through technological success and is settling into increased peace and humanistic fellowship. To do it by either force or slight of hand right now turns us toward a place of great peril and instability of that project. What seems to be needed is for Asia, Africa, and Latin America to be pulled out of poverty to a degree that there's almost no place left in the world to be a hotbed of genocide, tribal warfare, terrorism, or organized crime at paramilitary levels of power. At the same time though the developed world absolutely needs to find a way to keep itself developed as capital runs around the world trying to find the next place where the government's become more stable and the wages are really cheap. I tend to think UBI's the best chance of dodging the civil unrest and collapse bullet. It might be the only solution and may not even be pretty in terms of how badly it would be implemented, we just wouldn't have any other choices.

Talking about the AI and automation though - Sam Harris just had a podcast with Max Tegmark and they seemed to do pretty well at hashing out the issues. I know Sam has been on top of this for a while and it sounds like Max has had his head in the game pretty well also in that he was bringing up a lot of really good case scenarios for examination, some that I'd thought of already (ie. the breakout issue) and a few that I hadn't considered in quite the same light.


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techstepgenr8tion
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31 Aug 2017, 8:30 pm

As far as what I think Jordan Peterson is saying, just from as much as I've listened to him, he often brings up Notes from the Underground and a lot of Dostoevsky's revelations.

I think human beings will always need some type of conduit - whether it's competitive sports or something else, so long as we're playing the natural selection game at all. Even if we stop I find it doubtful that our gears would necessarily stop turning in that direction, ie. the dog-eats-dog game that goes with it would probably be significantly decreased and it wouldn't seem to run culture quite the way it does even now still but it still wouldn't be entirely gone and we'd still be dealing with internal aspirations that, on some level, are relative to the people around us and needing to climb the stack.

That's where I really think human self-knowledge and really knowing our own nature as human beings, especially from the evolutionary psychology sense, is critical. Taking that into account in how we build our society, ie. giving ways to sublimate that desire as positively and constructively as possible a top priority, would be critical to having a culture that can weather the storms of human irrationality and wiring schema that really weren't built with civil society in mind.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin