>If you don't wish to call what I just described Capitalism, call it something else then and I shall agree, because it's that system that has brought us out of the dark ages and given us everything.

how? it didnt reduce global poverty by 1 billion, fucking China did using the money we paid them.

did capitalism achieve that? if it did then it has also achieved the highest death toll of any system, belief or ideology in human history.

(using the highest possible figures ie including the nazis the ussr killed communism killed 100 million, capitalism has it beaten by several times over easily)

>I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.

you realise that half those examples own the competition right? the companies that own coke also own some 50% of global beverages (the other global player being the owners of suntory).

all markets tend toward monopoly, its the entire inevitable end point of capitalistic growth. all wealthy people want more wealth and the easiest way to get it is not innovation or competition but bribery, nepotism and corruption. as a class they bribe gov (hence why its so slow and inefficient, its paid to be) to give them access to captive markets and grant them regulatory capture to crush actual competition.

wealth is less produced and grown and more gamified and almost purely speculative (massive growth in the most captive markets ie food, housing, healthcare, energy and gov keeps letting the wealthy have more and more of it because both sides work for the investment class)

>operate at a loss? no the boss just pays themself the same amount as they pay their employees.

Their hypothetical involved every cent of revenue going to paying sales employees, leaving nothing left for paying other employees/expenses, let alone profits. As they acknowledged in their reply to me.

operate at a loss? no the boss just pays themself the same amount as they pay their employees.

its how i run my business, im not doing any extra work and im not the one risking homelessness so why i do i deserve all the rewards and the employees a pittance?

ever heard of Mondragon? largest worker coop is fucking Huawei, you dont need a traditional top-down ruled corporate structure to succeed, at all (as much as the Americans here would like to claim otherwise, they routinely try to claim huawei isnt a worker owned coop cause 'muh ccp')

I can't help but think of this comment as downright silly, unless you have an ounce of reasoning behind what you've said?

>if free will means you can do what you want, then we must ask why you want the things you want. Well, some prior causes presumably made you want those choices. Is it really free will if all your choices are caused by wants resulting from prior states of affairs? And what would free will even mean then?

yes that is free will.

those things are 'you', the prior causes being memories, culture, experience and/or neurons, genes and chemistry.

why do you all try so hard to divorce yourselves from yourselves?

the free willers think we have souls and the determinists believe the body and mind are separate.

this entire debate is pointless when both sides require what is effectively magic in order for their beliefs to function.

the most rational position is that the universe is deterministic and we make our own choices.

this, both sides really, really try hard to deny what makes up 'you'.

i make all my own choices by definition as 'i' am the sum of my memories, neurons, genes, culture etc the free willers think we have souls and the determinists believe the body and mind are separate.

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

whats wrong with it?

we are puppets, puppets who pull their own strings. what he stated is not nihilism, nihilism would go on to claim that due to being puppets we should not pull our own strings (big difference between ''theres no meaning'' and ''theres no point in making your own meaning'')

At this point I don't even know what you are saying. Meaning is just as made up as 1+1=2. You can't put meaning on a table and physically examine it to be true. Human language is all metaphoric, none of it actually exists except in one place, your mind. Anything we accept as truth has meaning because life grants it. Death kills meaning. Life does the opposite.

>If so, would one not be more than a pre-programmed robot following a pre-determined path?

its still 'you' making those choices, whether or not 'you' could choose differently is irrelevant.

even if no one could have possibly chosen differently they still chose.

to me it seems like determinists believe in souls by necessity ('you' are your genes and neurons so even if 'you' cant actively control them they are still 'you')

And that can be traced back to survival instincts. Storing extra food and supplies for the coming winter.

So what you're saying is, Be Excellent to Each Other 🎸

It's not as if what I'm advocating for could simply just pop into existence and become predominant. It would exist within the pre-existing context of the institutions we already have, and to me it is more of a cultural shift than a structural ideological one.

I think duty based ethical/moral systems are in practice passed down through generational trauma. It's all about what you need to do to get by, or live up to an ideal (an existing precedent.) Pretty common story across cultures:

Fail to live up to expectations -> shame and insecurity -> stress -> emotional outbursts and unhealthy coping -> rhetorical justification for unhealthy behavior, which even becomes common at the cultural level.

So the idea of right and wrong as it relates to our positive moral duties actually creates unhealthy behavior and the conditions for people to be more insecure and defensive and less empathetic. Helping people to realize this is therapeutic at the individual level. It helps people to love themselves as they are. So why not promote it at the familial level, or the communal level?

I am not against a punitive justice system which enforces common negative moral prohibitions, don't kill people, don't steal, etc. I am mainly focused on critiquing positive moral obligations which in practice restrict peoples freedom more than negative ones, because they obligate you to use large portions of your time in a certain way, and they create people with an insecure sense of self worth. Which does not help them function. And we learn this all from a very young age when we are taking all our cues from our parents.

Now, at the end of the day, even if we are not morally obligated to make a living, we would much rather be financially stable than financially insecure or homeless. But wouldn't you rather live in a family and culture which was not full of finger pointing, shame, and inability to cope with things like sickness, mental illness or bad fortune? Our ideas about "duty" break down in the face of the complexity of life, but that doesn't stop people from guilting and berating each other in moments of weakness and vulnerability.

>But upon further inspection, this view seems pretty hollow, and meaningless.

why?

'you' are just neurons, genes, memories, environment, culture etc therefore by definition you make all your own choices.

what magical 'you' is there that could make choices outside yourself? and how does the universe being deterministic mean that you do not make choices? (as i already stated genes and neurons and culture and memories are you, so you cannot tell me that choices cant happen due to determinism, it makes no rational sense at all)

My weekly quote to ponder:

The rise of the day, the fall of the night. Day after day was a lot of the same. The burning spear of my life is not a real problem, but I think it is worth the effort. For the good and bad, I love it all together

Philosophy Professor made us do a presentation on Marxism, ended up making an apologia of Capitalism. Professor countered with starving children. Way to get me to check my privilege.

>No "choices" really exist, except in our imagination. If possessing a mental image of imagined options is "free will" then free will means very little I think

why?

why do you dismiss yourself? i have literally no idea how it can possibly make sense to think that due our choices are constrained by ourselves we have no choice?

that is what you are saying, that due to the fact 'you' are made up of genes, neurons, culture, memories, environment, preferences, trauma and due to these parts of 'you' limiting choice that somehow magically 'you' make no choices at all.

its an entirely nonsensical position to hold in the first place (if we deleted your memories, culture, preferences and trauma then 'you' would not be able to even hold the opinion you do, those things are the very foundation of the person who is claiming to not have free will).

emergent behavior and properties may not be fun or special but they sure as shit make more sense then Determinism trying to pretend it doesnt require souls (or the free will believers thinking we do)

thats the entire free will v determinism debate in a nutshell.

both sides just hand wave compatibilism away when it not only makes sense but works. both sides of the debate have a deepseated need for humans to be special, one side thinks we have a soul and thus libertarian free will and the other believes we are mere passengers along for a ride. both require dismissing reality to believe (the focus on magic free will is pointless in the extreme, may as well debate the afterlife for all the practical effect either side would ultimately have).

I do wonder how Camus defines "meaning."

It feels that as children we recognize that it's all play, and are told by the adults that it is otherwise. Then, some of us get so involved in the game that we think it is reality, that it is not a man-made system with man-made rules that purposely benefit a certain group over others. When people begin to realize that it is all play, that it is a big, pointless game so a few can live in absolute luxury and a vast majority toil until their one life is over, we are told to ignore the truth.

All of the empires, the nations, the power is illusion. The king has no clothes, we're primates on a small planet orbiting a small sun in a universe where nothing outside of paradigm changes will ultimately matter. We're dancing a dance we know the music is soon to end hoping for an encore.

But it does not belong to philosophy. Since philosophy is the study of the world, not study of the judgments about it as not all of them are very good. We know logically that not-life is not same as death starting after life. The meaning of life is to exist. So when it ends, the discussion about something existing ends. So we don’t even need empurical dispute about it, because it is conceptually coherent to say that after life there is nothing.

Life is every one’s viewpoint but death is the viewpoint of an outsider. But it has no value to the discussion.

Here, yet again we find the conservative, that vile creature, trying to justify their own greed and selfishness

Will do what i can to live long enough to see others consider that option