That our education system wasn't resilient to that well-funded propaganda machine is what reflects poorly on it. That such a machine is allowed to exist reflects poorly on our institutions more broadly. I'll never blame human greed. Systems are designed for humans, if they fail to account for human nature then they're bad systems. I'm not really interested in litigating whether humans as a species are bad.
>Systems are designed for humans, if they fail to account for human nature then they're bad systems.
Systems will always be bad. It's why corporations will always be bad. The complexities are too much for humans. You will never account for all variables. Account for one, with that you are exposed to another. This becomes clear to me when you look at government and the systems it tries to use, since forever. Climate change is another great example. Requires coordinated change across the globe. Many many many factors why that will never change. Change in the system of that size is too hard. So is it the system that is bad, or maybe it's just a reflection of limitations within us as a species, today?
A terribly defeatist attitude. The same could be said about, say, death during childbirth. For hundreds of thousands of years people tried methods of midwifery to ease that process and reduce deaths to little effect. People considered that to be women's lot, an immutable fact of human nature. Then we figured out how to reduce deaths during childbirth to a relatively tiny fraction of all-cause mortality, and that level of care became standard, at least in parts of the world. Why would you be so convinced that systems of organization are unsolvable? Where is your hacker's spirit?
Competition on its own is a very bad system for improving organizations as is selects for the most ruthless and underhanded, not the best for society. Unless you can 100% ensure that companies don't externalize their costs then the company that learns how to will win the competition game.
> Competition on its own is a very bad system for improving organizations as is selects for the most ruthless and underhanded, not the best for society.
If a company is ruthlessly screwing you but you have 50 other viable alternatives, nothing is forcing you to continue using them, which is a disadvantage for them, not an advantage.
If a company is lying to you, there are already laws against that, and on top of that actual competition means you also get to stop doing business with them.
Which companies screw people the most, the ones with limited competition (Comcast, Microsoft, Boeing) or the ones with lots of competition (Costco, Framework, IKEA)?
They also happen to be designed by humans, and if you're just begging to have the system fix people's beliefs about corporate greed for you but don't think people themselves are at fault I have no idea why you'd think the systems would be fixed.
Always these complains about corporations or systems or institutions, the responsible person is never "I". If you're unwilling to take responsibility for your institutions why do you think they'd fix your problems? The beauty is people always get the institutions and rulers they deserve, it's not some mysterious system that allows these things to happen, it's you and I.
This doesn't sound like a meaningful critique. You're basically arguing for a culture-first approach to a systemic problem, but insisting that that culture should be one of individual responsibility. I contend that it's exactly that culture that divides the oppressed and justifies exploitation. You've decided a priori that people get what they deserve. I see injustice and try to spread understanding of how our systems create that injustice in hopes that people will change these systems to rectify them.
I'm not at all opposed to the concept of personal responsibility and accountability. In one's personal life it's important to be responsible for yourself. It's also important to understand the context you exist in, and how your actions affect others. It's bad to, say, litter on the streets, and I'll reprimand someone interpersonally for doing so. But if you live in a world where a company comes by and dumps truckloads of trash into your park every week and your government lets them, no amount of personally refraining from littering or scolding your neighbors will get you a clean community. In this case those who need to be held accountable are whoever decided on the dump-trash-in-the-park policy and whoever was supposed to stop them and didn't, and the only solution is a change of policy and creation of accountable enforcement mechanisms.
I'm not just talking about individual responsibility, but collective responsibility emerges from individual responsibility. You start with yourself, then your family, then your community, then your state, then your country, bottom up.
When the company dumps garbage in the town you don't blame the company, you and your neighbors go and put a stop to it. If you're both individually and collectively indifferent then you indeed get what you deserve. That' not an a priori assumption, that's a logical fact. You either take control and self-govern or you're governed. This idea that education or social life works like McDonald's where you yell for the manager if something broken is pathetic.
Vague complaints about 'the system' or crying for some hero CEO, strongman president or influencer or activist of the week to save us poor souls isn't how a free people act. These are problems that can be solved locally from the ground up. You don't need to wait for 'policies' to change, you and your neighbors drag whoever is responsible for that out, or even organize the garbage disposal yourself if need be.
Fun little exercice: How is education funded (not just school, the rest as well) ? What does the salary scale look like ? Would you jump into that boat if had the qualifications ? (and probably: why haven't you jumped into it until now ?)
Once you've got through all of that, how resilient do you expect the system to be ?
Human systems have a critical bottleneck, it's run by humans. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a flaw, but it means all systems are corruptible if it's run by corrupted humans.
And I mean this for any sort of system from corporate, nonprofits, dictatorships, oligarchs, and democracy. Democracy is still a human-run system and that people seem to think democracy is somehow this bastion of freedom is a delusion.
If we want better systems we need better people running them, but that's a conversation that's emerging so we'll see how it goes.
right-wing ideologies are meant to augment concentrated wealth and power, which means there are incentives for the rich and powerful to create right-wing propaganda machines.
left-wing ideologies are meant to create diffuse wealth and power, which means there's no incentive for individuals to create such propaganda machines.
This is why there are enormous amounts of right-wing media, and almost no left-wing media in America.
So all the media that Trump calls "Fake news" is not-left wing?
> left-wing ideologies are meant to create diffuse wealth and power, which means there's no incentive for individuals to create such propaganda machines.
Maybe this was true at some point.
But I think today the left ideologies are used largely as a front, by the people who just want to "augment concentrated wealth and power". I think these are the truly malicious people, because they hide behind the a large mass of gullible population.
They use these shallow "left" idelology to mobilize the masses, and they are shallow exactly because it have to be relatable to the least common denominator. So no nuance, no balanced perspectives, no risk/benefit consideration. Anything that sounds nice on the surface will do (even when it is truly evil after a moments consideration)...
You speak as if Stalinism and the Great Leap Forward are anywhere near the Overton window for mainstream left media discourse.
When in reality it's too busy trying to outdo itself on how hard it is willing to sanewash and give an equal platform to truly insane far-right-authoritarian bullshit.
I asserted that there is very little left-wing media today, because it is far more profitable to make media intended to enrich specific individuals.
And your counter-argument was that... there is very little left-wing media today, because it has been hijacked by specific individuals who want to be enriched.
Cool.
Side note: your decision to claim that trump attacking something means it is left-wing shows both that you are completely detached from any sort of reality, and that you lack even the tiniest hint of thought.
Ok so let me get this straight. According to you, the news channels that tries to make Trump administration and republicans look bad, is actually "right wing"?
> the existence of an immense right-wing propaganda machine
The biggest trick corporate oligarchs have managed to pull off is convincing people that consolidated markets are "right-wing". Adam Smith is in the public domain, you can read it for free:
A core premise of the book is basically that competitive free markets are good, antitrust is important and government regulations have a tendency to favor cronies and impair competition.
The cronies, of course, don't actually like competitive free markets, so they pervert this as "government regulations including antitrust are always bad" whenever someone wants to do some trust busting. Which in turn sets up their own misconstruction as the straw man to knock down whenever they want to demonize competitive free markets in order to sustain or create regulations propping up their monopolies.
America's right-wing has never wanted competitive free markets, and has never been represented by Adam Smith, the man who said:
"the disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
America's right-wing has always been about enriching the connected and the already powerful. Nothing more.
How can we end up blaming the right wing when the propaganda machine is bigger on the other side and even bigger on the government side It's always someone else
I think the idiocy required to agree with the some of ideas of the "american left" vastly exceeds what is required for a complete lack of self reflection.
Ah yes, the left wing propaganda machine. On one side you have Fox and Newsman, on the left you have what? Hasan Piker's Twitch channel? Zeteo maybe? Who are we talking about?
