Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "HasanAbi"
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@bobpope3656 I don't think you understand how economists classify middle class. Yes, someone with 5m net worth is way outside the middle class.
Here's BI estimating that a millionaire will he considered middle class by...2215 at best or 2609 at worst.
https://www.businessinsider.com/when-will-the-typical-american-be-a-millionaire-2019-8?amp
So much for that.
What you're noticing is that more wealth is held the higher up you go in society. The top 10% owns most of what the top 20% owns, the top 1% owns most of what the top 10% owns, the top 0.1% owns most of what the top 1% owns, etc.
Just because a millionaire owns less than Bill Gates doesn't ipso facto make them middle class (although that is certainly what they seem to think, according to polls). https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/30/70-percent-of-americans-consider-themselves-middle-class-but-only-50-percent-are.html
"We’re a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment bankers, M.B.A.s with opaque job titles, and assorted other professionals—the kind of people you might invite to dinner. In fact, we’re so self-effacing, we deny our own existence. We keep insisting that we’re “middle class."" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
According to the NYT, a net worth of 1m puts you around the top 10%. A net worth of 5m puts you in the top 5%. https://nyti.ms/2YUwEtr
It boggles my mind that I have to spell this out for all the out-of-touch bootlickers here thinking most Americans are millionaires. Pure ideology, man.
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@Mintberrycrunch982 The complaint against JP is not that he's a recovered ideologue returning to warn all of us of its dangers. It's precisely that he is the exemplar of the ideologue, the man who claims to be speaking Truth untainted by ideology (like it or not, bucko!), but Peterson's views on life, sexuality, society, when they aren't just triviality gussied up as wisdom (pet cats, clean your room), are saturated with ideology, particularly a conservative, quasi-Christian, patriarchal, hierarchical ideology.
Ideology is not some great evil or confusion to be avoided. People who believe they've escaped ideology and only encounter reality "as it really is" are often the most prone to dogmatism and the more pernicious aspects of ideological thinking. Peterson seems to be one of those people. Instead of confronting his own ideological position, he says he's not ideological. His ideas are supported by a "nature" that he's carefully butchered to conform to his design while ignoring the abundance of evidence that falsified or at least complicates his antiquated worldview.
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@levihuerta9393 Communism advocates for the free association of producers, so no one would be forced to make anything. A planned economy requires that demand is indicated through workers' federations and communities. It's important to recognize that what is called "demand" in capitalist economics is not actually a measure of demand as need but demand as possession of resources. A homeless man needs a house, but his need has no impact on the market demand for a house, nor can it stimulate the construction of new houses.
And of course communism intends to abolish money and the wage form, so no one is "paid" anything. It's also unlikely that people would take on single professions—one is a coal miner, another a poet. A major concern of classical Marxists and anarchists was to eliminate the division between manual and intellectual labor. In that sense, something like Parecon's balanced work profiles, where workers in an industry assume both menial and empowering tasks, might be desirable.
You can't understand communism by expecting it to behave like or meet the constraints of capitalism. Because then it wouldn't be communism; it would be capitalism. The point of proposing new paradigms, as Raymond Geuss says, is not to answer the questions of the old system but to dissolve them and pose new questions. Asking how people will be paid in a communist society is a bit like asking an 18th century capitalist how capitalism will address ownership of serfs or the divine right of kings.
It always strikes me as strange that when addressing the issue of providing necessities for everyone, so many balk at the idea that the currently well-off might not be able to own their own personal boat, fancy car, McMansion, etc. I'm sure these are not the concerns of Bangladeshi garment factory workers, Mexican farmworkers, African miners, or the average American pulling minimum wage. Even if communism precluded the production of boats for personal, recreational use, but could provide for human sustenance and culture, it would be worth it. To put more value or address more concern to the boatless seems immensely cruel, and exactly what the capitalist notion of "demand" instructs us to think: those with money have a greater innate value.
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@coletrain546 They're pretending that we can erase values from political or social decisions and have "objective" ways of knowing and deciding what to do. They just follow data or science or common sense without acknowledging how those things still reflect our biases, priorities, commitments, and beliefs. What they don't say is what those "rational" things are for, who benefits, and why.
Graeber:
"Neoclassical economics is notorious for making this kind of move. When an economist attempts to prove that it is “irrational” to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say “irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, or the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage.” There is absolutely no reason why one could not rationally calculate the best way to further one’s political ideals through voting. But according to the economists’ assumptions, anyone who takes this course might as well be out of their minds.
In other words, talking about rational efficiency becomes a way of avoiding talking about what the efficiency is actually for; that is, the ultimately irrational aims that are assumed to be the ultimate ends of human behavior."
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@MrHammerman97 "The proximal origins of Sars-CoV-2," KG Anderson, Nature.
"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."
"Scientist opens up about his early email to Fauci on virus origind," NYT
"Over the past year, Dr. Andersen has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the theory that the coronavirus originated from a natural spillover from an animal to humans outside of a lab. But in the email to Dr. Fauci in January 2020, Dr. Andersen hadn’t yet come to that conclusion. He told Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, that some features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered, and noted that he and his colleagues were planning to investigate further by analyzing the virus’s genome.
"The researchers published those results in a paper in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, concluding that a laboratory origin was very unlikely. Dr. Andersen has reiterated this point of view in interviews and on Twitter over the past year, putting him at the center of the continuing controversy over whether the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab."
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