"The worship of billionaires has become our shittiest religion"
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
“Money as a measure of value,” Marx tells us in Capital, “is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time.” Money, then, is for Marx a form of sedimented time. But if this is true, then having one billion dollars (or pounds, or whatever) takes one completely beyond all human time.
One billion dollars is far, far more money than anyone could realistically spend, on their needs, within the span of a human lifetime. If you have one billion dollars, you are completely shielded from all ordinary human concerns: Never again will you know hunger, or lack shelter, or suffer from inadequate medical care. Of course, there may very well be lots of comfortable, middle-class people who will also be lucky enough to never know those wants again, but the difference is that the billionaire is isolated even from the possibility of experiencing those wants. They are like the Christian who has been saved from despair in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, who is eliminating the possibility of despair at every moment. If you have in your possession one billion dollars, then almost literally anything you desire — anything anyone might possibly conceive of desiring — can be yours, just as soon as you happen to desire it. But with no real friction between desire and reality, how does wanting even function? Can someone who lives like this even be said to know desire, anymore, at all?
And just as nobody can spend a billion dollars in their lifetime, nobody can earn it either. People have taken to saying “every billionaire is a policy failure”, because that sort of money makes nakedly obvious the truth Marx tells us about all wealth accumulated under capitalism: that it’s part of a process that is only possible because the people who own the means of production are, effectively, stealing it from their employees,"
Reasons why you should kill a rich pig as soon as possible >> https://theoutline.com/post/8187/billionaires-are-not-people/ Rr Sent from my Androgyne dee-vice with K-9 Mail
On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 06:11:40PM -0800, Razer wrote:
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
“Money as a measure of value,” Marx tells us in Capital, “is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time.” Money, then, is for Marx a form of sedimented time. But if this is true, then having one billion dollars (or pounds, or whatever) takes one completely beyond all human time.
One billion dollars is far, far more money than anyone could realistically spend, on their needs, within the span of a human lifetime. If you have one billion dollars, you are completely shielded from all ordinary human concerns: Never again will you know hunger, or lack shelter, or suffer from inadequate medical care. Of course, there may very well be lots of comfortable, middle-class people who will also be lucky enough to never know those wants again, but the difference is that the billionaire is isolated even from the possibility of experiencing those wants. They are like the Christian who has been saved from despair in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, who is eliminating the possibility of despair at every moment. If you have in your possession one billion dollars, then almost literally anything you desire — anything anyone might possibly conceive of desiring — can be yours, just as soon as you happen to desire it. But with no real friction between desire and reality, how does wanting even function? Can someone who lives like this even be said to know desire, anymore, at all?
And just as nobody can spend a billion dollars in their lifetime, nobody can earn it either. People have taken to saying “every billionaire is a policy failure”, because that sort of money makes nakedly obvious the truth Marx tells us about all wealth accumulated under capitalism: that it’s part of a process that is only possible because the people who own the means of production are, effectively, stealing it from their employees,"
https://theoutline.com/post/8187/billionaires-are-not-people/ Reasons why you should kill a rich pig as soon as possible >>
Ironically, although non-ironically also, your position is perfectly aligned with Juan's. When turmoil strikes, the left eats its own. When turmoil strikes, it becomes politically correct, hallowed even, to let loose envy and jealousy, to decry the "wealth" of others and to blame those who collect money of any sort as evil and "to be blamed for all our ills". From the linked article above is the classic envy programming, with the end goal of "murder and mayhem on the streets": Two students purportedly overheard in a cafe, talking about someone having a billion dollars: "People actually have that amount, like that amount of currency — in money? And they’re just allowed to sort of... have it?" To portray such unthinking, such envy, such base human nature, to play on this in service of The Almighty Democratic Party etc etc, is absolutely, utterly despicable! Jordan Peterson is absolutely right about this particular point (notwithstanding his personal failings). This line of thinking, this "logic" if we can call it that for a moment, is an upholding of base human natures which ought be acknowledged and handled, not let loose as some "unspoken conspiracy, get out your torches and pitchforks now!" We don't handle the "problem of guns" by banning guns. And despite London Mayer Khan's limp brain and aural effluence to the contrary, we don't handle "the problem of knives" by banning knives. In EXACTLY the same way, we don't handle the problem of selfish or "insufficiently good" billionaires, by a Marxist revolution murdering every wealthy and intellectual human in sight. This call (as implied/ espoused in the above linked article) is absolutely pathetic! Marxos is perfectly on topic where he persistently reminds us of the Holodomor and its fundamental causes, where "wealthy" farmers who owned a cow (literally one cow), were murdered for their evil gotten "wealth", and those greedy mothers who collected the remnant grains left over after mechanised harvesting, were also murdered for their "thievery". "When we leave unchecked 'our' base human nature, we support bringing forth evil into our world." This endless call to "kill all the BAD people" is the Marxist Pol Pot regime reborn, nothing but Stalin's gulags in new robes. We HAVE to find a different way to transition between hierarchies other than widespread bloodshed, because as soon as the blood of one "bad oligarch" is justified, we co-incidently/ commensurately, justify our own murder; and we well know that in that case, murder, of millions of humans, will ultimately prevail. There's an old old saying "live by the sword, die by the sword". There is a flip side to every coin. Are we even capable of finding another way?
Russia's Fundamental Disagreement with the West About WWII, Hitler, Jews and Race https://russia-insider.com/en/russias-fundamental-disagreement-west-about-ww... https://www.unz.com/tsaker/our-fundamental-disagreement-about-wwii-hitler-je... http://thesaker.is/our-fundamental-disagreement-about-wwii-hitler-jews-and-r... ... What we can immediately see is that there are significant differences between what took place in modern Russia and in the modern Ukraine, including: An example of a crucial geographical difference would be “pogroms” which, contrary to western propaganda, pogroms all took place in what would be the modern Ukraine today, never in Russia. There is also a difference in time: Russians in the Ukraine were persecuted by Poles and Jews for centuries whereas Russians in what is modern Russia today were primarily persecuted by Bolshevik Jews “only” between 1917 and Stalin’s purges of the party in the late 1930s. And then, there is the crucial, truly immense, difference which WWII made. Next, a look at what happened during World War II and the Nazi occupation When the Nazis launched their attack on the Soviet Union there were a lot of Russians and Ukrainians who welcomed the Nazis, not necessarily because they liked the Nazi ideology but because many of them hated their Bolshevik oppressors even more than they disliked the Germans. After all, the horrors of the Civil War and of the Collectivization were still present in the mind of millions of people both in the (newly created) Ukrainian SSR and in the Russian SSR. Sidebar: I would like to remind all those who nowadays try very hard to forget it, that the Nazi ideology characterizes both Russians and Ukrainians as subhumans (Untermensch) whose sole purpose would be to serve their Aryan master race overlords (Herrenvolk) in the newly conquered living space (Lebensraum). Simply put: Hitler promised his followers that they would be very happy slave owners! It is no wonder that the prospective slaves felt otherwise… In the course of the war, however, profound differences began to emerge: First, in the Ukraine, the Nazi ideology DID inspire a lot of nationalists for the exact same reasons that Nazi ideology inspired nationalist Poles (who were Hitler’s first most loyal allies only to later be betrayed by him). Over the centuries the Papacy not only created the Ukrainian nationalist identity, it then actively fostered it every time Russia was weakened (if that topic is of interest to you, see here https://thesaker.is/ukrainian-nationalism-its-roots-and-nature/ ). The bitter truth which folks in the West don’t like to be reminded of is that the regimes of Petain, Franco, Pavelic, Pilsudksi, etc. were all created and supported by the Papacy which, of course, also supported Bandera and his Ukronazi deathsquads. As for Hitler himself, he was initially strongly supported by the UK (just as Trotsky was supported by the Jewish bankers in the US). Indeed, russophobia has a long and “distinguished” history in the West: western leaders change, as do their ideological rationalizations, but their hatred and fear of Russia always remains. https://thesaker.is/guy-mettans-book-on-russophobia-is-a-must-read-for-any-p... ... Last, but certainly not least, the demented and outright genocidal policies of the Nazis in occupied Russia resulted in such a blowback that the war to liberate Russia from the Nazis became a war of national survival which the vast majority of Russians fully supported. For the Ukrainian nationalists, WWII began as a God-sent chance to finally bring about their dream to “drown all the Polaks and the Moskals in Kike blood”, and then this dream was crushed by the Soviet counter-attack and subsequent annihilation of most (about 80%) of the German military machine. And while many Ukrainians (and Poles) did see the Soviets as their liberators from the Nazi horrors, the Ukronazis obviously saw the Soviet Army solely as an occupation force which they resisted for as long as they could (after the end of the war, it still took the Soviets several years to finally crush the Ukronazi underground). And while most Russians felt like they were the real victors of WWII, the Ukronazi nationalists felt that they had been defeated. Again. The same goes for the Poles, by the way (this trauma gave birth to something I refer to as the “Pilban syndrome” https://www.unz.com/tsaker/how-russia-should-deal-with-the-pilban-syndrome-p... ). Now for the self-evident truism about Jews: while many Russians remained acutely aware of the Jewish role in the Bolshevik revolution and, especially, in the class terror which followed, they did not see ALL Jews as enemies of Russia, especially not when 1. There were plenty of patriotic Jews who loved Russia and/or the USSR 2. That Hitler’s demented racism inevitably had to bring Jews and Russians together, even if only for a while and mostly under the “common enemy” heading. 3. Many (most?) Russians know for a fact that Nazi concentration/extermination camps did, in fact, exist even if they did not kill 6M Jews, even if they had no gas chambers and no crematoria (except to deal with insect-born diseases). Why? Because it was the Soviet military which liberated most of these camps and because there were plenty of non-Jewish Russians/Soviets in these camps. Finally, besides the camps themselves, most Russians also know about the infamous Einsatzgruppen which probably murdered even more Jews (and non-Jews) than all the concentration/extermination camps combined. The fact is that Nazi atrocities are not seriously challenged by most Russian historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen The bottom line is this: whatever (at the time very real) hostility history had created between Jews and Russians, World War II had a huge impact on these perceptions. That is not to say that the Russians have forgotten the genocidal policies of Lenin and Trotsky, but only that after WWII, most Russians justly felt that they were victors, not defeated losers. The Ukrainian nationalists, in contrast, were “multi-defeat” losers: they were defeated by the Germans, the Russians and even the Poles (who rarely attack anybody unless their prospective victim is already agonizing or unless there is some “big guy” protecting them – Churchill was quite right with his “greedy hyena of Europe” comment!). And now, more recently, they were soundly defeated not once, but TWICE, by the Novorussians. That kind of “performance” will often result in a nationalistic reaction. ... How could a person (Hitler) and an ideology (National-Socialism) be both declared uniquely evil AND, at the same time, undergo at least a partial rehabilitation in the same society? Simple! The only condition necessary to make that happen is to condition people to accept cognitive dissonances and not to be too troubled when they happen. The average citizen of the Empire has been conditioned to accept, and even embrace, such cognitive dissonances quite literally since birth and he has become very, very good at that. But there is also a historiographical blowback in action here: Following WWII and, especially, following the 1970s, the Zionists made what I consider to be a disastrous mistake: they decided to present Hitler and his ideology as some kind of special and unique form of evil which supersedes any and all, past or even future, imaginable forms of evil. And just to make sure that this claim would stick, they decided to add some highly specific claims including the “official’” figure of 6 million murdered Jews, the gas chambers and crematoria being the most famous ones, but there were many more (including electrocution pools, human skin lamp shades and human fat soaps – but which had to be ditched after being proven false). Eventually these claims all came under very effective attack by the so-called “revisionist historians” who have since proven beyond reasonable doubt that these specific claims were false. That did not make these historians very popular with the rulers of the Empire who, instead of allowing for of a healthy historical debate, decided to make “revisionism” a criminally punishable thoughtcrime for which historians could be jailed, sometimes for years! The reaction to that kind of abuse of power was inevitable. ...
https://theoutline.com/post/8187/billionaires-are-not-people/ Reasons why you should kill a rich pig as soon as possible >>
...
When turmoil strikes, the left eats its own.
When turmoil strikes, it becomes politically correct, hallowed even, to let loose envy and jealousy, to decry the "wealth" of others and to blame those who collect money of any sort as evil and "to be blamed for all our ills".
From the linked article above is the classic envy programming, with the end goal of "murder and mayhem on the streets":
Two students purportedly overheard in a cafe, talking about someone having a billion dollars:
"People actually have that amount, like that amount of currency — in money? And they’re just allowed to sort of... have it?"
To portray such unthinking, such envy, such base human nature, to play on this in service of The Almighty Democratic Party etc etc, is absolutely, utterly despicable! Jordan Peterson is absolutely right about this particular point (notwithstanding his personal failings).
This line of thinking, this "logic" if we can call it that for a moment, is an upholding of base human natures which ought be acknowledged and handled, not let loose as some "unspoken conspiracy, get out your torches and pitchforks now!"
We don't handle the "problem of guns" by banning guns.
And despite London Mayer Khan's limp brain and aural effluence to the contrary, we don't handle "the problem of knives" by banning knives.
In EXACTLY the same way, we don't handle the problem of selfish or "insufficiently good" billionaires, by a Marxist revolution murdering every wealthy and intellectual human in sight. This call (as implied/ espoused in the above linked article) is absolutely pathetic!
Marxos is perfectly on topic where he persistently reminds us of the Holodomor and its fundamental causes, where "wealthy" farmers who owned a cow (literally one cow), were murdered for their evil gotten "wealth", and those greedy mothers who collected the remnant grains left over after mechanised harvesting, were also murdered for their "thievery".
"When we leave unchecked 'our' base human nature, we support bringing forth evil into our world."
This endless call to "kill all the BAD people" is the Marxist Pol Pot regime reborn, nothing but Stalin's gulags in new robes.
We HAVE to find a different way to transition between hierarchies other than widespread bloodshed, because as soon as the blood of one "bad oligarch" is justified, we co-incidently/ commensurately, justify our own murder; and we well know that in that case, murder, of millions of humans, will ultimately prevail.
There's an old old saying "live by the sword, die by the sword".
There is a flip side to every coin.
Are we even capable of finding another way?
On 2019-11-09 12:11, Razer wrote:
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
Without billionaires, we don't get the kind of technology that needs a billion dollars. Some people, quite a lot of people, get rich by stealing it, for example Biden, Obama, and the Clintons. But most rich people get rich by creating wealth, or inherited it from parents that created wealth.
jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
On 2019-11-09 12:11, Razer wrote:
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
Without billionaires, we don't get the kind of technology that needs a billion dollars.
Some people, quite a lot of people, get rich by stealing it, for example Biden, Obama, and the Clintons. But most rich people get rich by creating wealth, or inherited it from parents that created wealth.
You forgot the pirates of Silicon Valley in your list, and every single startup that ripped off PARC and Netscape. There's no reason technology should cost billions of dollars except for the desire of, not the creators... They fled as their 'hobby-with-bennies' was being hijacked... the 'investors' and their satraps that moved in to infest the industry, to be billionaires. They don't care about computers. They care about the money. Similarly not one single stupid motherfucking engineer at Seagate I ever worked with gave one fuck about how a disc drive worked. Didn't have a full picture of how it all happened. The lack of creativity in any sense but creatively making money showed in 'double-letter' blueprints, and the unceremonious canning of any 415-D spec they couldn't make. Rr Ps. Google could drop their entire internet operation tomorrow and their execs would do just fine dealing all that SF Bay real estate they own. Who knows? Maybe they will?
On 2019-12-13 10:52, Razer wrote:
jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
On 2019-11-09 12:11, Razer wrote:
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
Without billionaires, we don't get the kind of technology that needs a billion dollars.
Some people, quite a lot of people, get rich by stealing it, for example Biden, Obama, and the Clintons. But most rich people get rich by creating wealth, or inherited it from parents that created wealth.
You forgot the pirates of Silicon Valley in your list, and every single startup that ripped off PARC and Netscape. There's no reason technology should cost billions of dollars except for the desire of, not the creators...
Without billionaires, no access to space. Without wealthy people, no transistors. Every transistor, every integrated circuit, is built by an engineer who learned from an engineer who learned from an engineer ... who learned from the fairchildren, who learned under Shockley, who arguably invented the transistor, and certainly invented how make reliable transistors, and make them in large numbers. Lenin discovered that all industry, including all steelmaking, had been shut down because the people who made steel were dead or fled, so he had to hire a bunch of people from big American companies to re-open the steel foundries and train people to manage the making of steel.
On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 11:15:15AM +1000, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
On 2019-12-13 10:52, Razer wrote:
jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
On 2019-11-09 12:11, Razer wrote:
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
Without billionaires, we don't get the kind of technology that needs a billion dollars.
Some people, quite a lot of people, get rich by stealing it, for example Biden, Obama, and the Clintons. But most rich people get rich by creating wealth, or inherited it from parents that created wealth.
You forgot the pirates of Silicon Valley in your list, and every single startup that ripped off PARC and Netscape. There's no reason technology should cost billions of dollars except for the desire of, not the creators...
Without billionaires, no access to space.
Without wealthy people, no transistors.
Every transistor, every integrated circuit, is built by an engineer who learned from an engineer who learned from an engineer ... who learned from the fairchildren, who learned under Shockley, who arguably invented the transistor, and certainly invented how make reliable transistors, and make them in large numbers.
Lenin discovered that all industry, including all steelmaking, had been shut down because the people who made steel were dead or fled, so he had to hire a bunch of people from big American companies to re-open the steel foundries and train people to manage the making of steel.
Every truth, when contended as universal, shall be proven false in the exceptions. Stallman and GNU. In the age where creativity can be manifested in "digital space", for the cost of a second hand computer and some electricity, the creative individual can create, and share wholely and fully, without shekels. Typically, said individuals sell out for 30 pieces of silver. Occasionally a Richard Stallman appears. Richard inspired many.
HI TAZOR -;) -------- Original Message -------- On Dec 12, 2019, 4:52 PM, Razer wrote:
jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
On 2019-11-09 12:11, Razer wrote:
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
Without billionaires, we don't get the kind of technology that needs a billion dollars.
Some people, quite a lot of people, get rich by stealing it, for example Biden, Obama, and the Clintons. But most rich people get rich by creating wealth, or inherited it from parents that created wealth.
You forgot the pirates of Silicon Valley in your list, and every single startup that ripped off PARC and Netscape. There's no reason technology should cost billions of dollars except for the desire of, not the creators... They fled as their 'hobby-with-bennies' was being hijacked... the 'investors' and their satraps that moved in to infest the industry, to be billionaires. They don't care about computers. They care about the money. Similarly not one single stupid motherfucking engineer at Seagate I ever worked with gave one fuck about how a disc drive worked. Didn't have a full picture of how it all happened.
The lack of creativity in any sense but creatively making money showed in 'double-letter' blueprints, and the unceremonious canning of any 415-D spec they couldn't make.
Rr
Ps. Google could drop their entire internet operation tomorrow and their execs would do just fine dealing all that SF Bay real estate they own. Who knows? Maybe they will?
On Fri, 13 Dec 2019 08:10:37 +1000 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
Some people, quite a lot of people, get rich by stealing it, for example Biden, Obama, and the Clintons. But most rich people get rich by creating wealth,
Notice the crass stupidity here : "quite a lot of people, get rich by stealing" <--- that's correct. "But most rich people get rich by creating wealth," that's a stupid lie AND furthermore, it contradicts what troskyte donald claimed 2 seconds ago. So back to the correct part : "quite a lot of people get rich by stealing", that should actually read : all people with more than a rather low amount of 'capital' got it by stealing.
participants (5)
-
jamesd＠echeque.com -
Punk-Stasi 2.0 -
Razer -
rooty -
Zenaan Harkness