Kenosha Kid

But this is in a shrinking middle class. I take your point: you're more considering differences between rich countries and poor countries over a longe...

:up: A good, if depressing, reminder, that those who most need of reform will invariably end up opposing it.

Well, it is. You force an asymmetry in by hand, then claim to have discovered an asymmetry. That is circular. This is where you introduce an asymmetry...

So if a socialist country vents bodies, that's proof that socialism leads to emigration. And if it doesn't then stops being socialist and THEN vents b...

By whom, if not the state? Iceland seems a bizarre example to choose if you're claiming that letting the banks fail would be fine. That didn't just po...

Again, this isn't how they react though. Long-term falling and plateauing stock prices don't end well. The faith that they'd adapt for the sake of the...

Hear hear. You've arrived, how lovely! And yet what we see in the UK data is the opposite: birth rate is highest where the mother either has a middle-...

What you're describing is equilibrium. But what's being discussed is not an equilibrium condition. Irrespective of how individual businesses fare, the...

:up:

Likewise purists will disagree, but don't start with primary sources. Find good introductory texts on the bits you're interested in.

As an addendum to this, and perhaps an opportunity to bring it back to the OP, consider those countries for whom it was genuinely catastrophic, i.e. t...

Phew! I caught up! Time to do the dishes.

And, again, the mass exodus from former communist states after the fall of communism in Europe tells the opposite story. And let's not neglect those r...

Take a look at the typical fate of a business with falling or static stock prices. It's a problem.

Because it's not total bullshit. Growth depends on banks loaning money. After the collapse, even after we bailed the banks out, recovery was protracte...

Well, I for one welcome etc. Can you bring us up-to-date? For instance, a rebuttal to:

This is what needs to be argued. The most sustainable economy in the world is Switzerland, which no one would consider a socialist country: it has the...

To get immigration, you have to be a nation that is attractive to live in. If it were true that socialist states have more, that would suggest that th...

Should, according to capitalist theory, yes. A few banks (Barclays being one iirc) refused the bailout, but most took it (and used it to pay banker bo...

So part of the OP is on this point. Capitalism depends on growth, on consumers, and on cheap labour. If the worker pool contracts, rather than many pe...

For sure, it would be too difficult to consider every country which is why I narrowed down to my own. It would be great to consider others though, eve...

Phew! That's fine, but note I'm not arguing that the state should run everything. I'm arguing that the state should create an environment in which cap...

Although actually this is worth treating. When the financial sector self-destructed this century (due entirely to its own practices, and from which it...

Okay, it looks like curiosity has encountered religiosity and no synthesis is likely. I did look at the medium to long term, e.g. the 2008 economic co...

Actually, yes, I suppose there were general electric car battery subsidies that inevitably funded lithium ion battery research. Okay, so you are in fa...

As opposed to all of the planet being destroyed by burning fossil fuels? Also, this doesn't strike me as relevant to the question. Lithium batteries i...

No one is accusing police of genocide. A fine example of the straw men that must be resorted to when reality is too much to handle.

Another, perhaps more pertinent example of capitalism's ability to seed it's own destruction due to its inability to react to long-term problems is th...

As I think I pointed out elsewhere, this isn't obviously the case. Countries with the strongest socialist policies tend to be more reactive to problem...

Haha! Although they might also be best placed to survive the collapse of capitalism. :worry:

Says anyone who doesn't consider justice when deciding whether it's ethical to reproduce. Anyway, Says who? is not an argument for accepting a proposi...

Lawns are a bourgeoisie decadence, fill your boots.

So that's a no to my invite to the Annual Kenosha Death of Communism Lament then? There's free vodka and schnapps? Top prize in the raffle this year i...

From the materialist point of view, no, there's not really any difference. Things like energy, space, information are considered part of the material ...

Or good arguments, apparently. But congrats on the not making friends thing. You've overachieved if anything.

Again, that strikes me as a perfectly possible consequence of markets themselves, for instance a more successful trader edging out a competitor who be...

Evidence suggests love is neither basic nor an emotion. It is an aggregate of drives. :up:

Seems perfectly deserved to me. Like more traditional arguments for antinatalism, this looks circular. The asymmetry detected is in fact entered by ha...

P.S. Meant to tag @"ssu" to defend capitalism for us.

I don't think I'd agree with that. I think a more modern take has information physically encoded irrespective of its meaning, that is it is useful to ...

Meh. The physicist believes that the best theories are those that are the best tested. Quantum electrodynamics is considered quite ugly, particularly ...

Amen.

Everything material that we experience must have some mental correlate. It doesn't follow that in order for a thing to materially exist, there must be...

Physically rearranging a configuration of wooden blocks from a straight line to a ring is changing the information stored in that system of blocks wit...

Actually, yes. I think any decent person would question the morality a guy who says that women in the 50s should just get a hobby and stop whining. Bu...

I hope that in the sober light of day you reread your post with the word "hysterical" in mind, both in terms of how often you use it, and in terms of ...

I hate autocorrect. Especially after wine. I think there's a massive overlap between what you're talking about and what I'm talking about wherein a co...

I don't know. I suspect whatever his ideology he'd be equally blind. His precise ideology just means he's blind and vile. In its current guise, certai...

:rofl:

That was precisely my point: conservatives are not strictly regressives. While they tend to oppose progress, like ending slavery, civil rights, women'...