The U.S. Olympic team is one of a handful that will supply air conditioners for their athletes at the Paris Games in a move that undercuts organizers’ plans to cut carbon emissions.
U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland said Friday that while the U.S. team appreciates efforts aimed at sustainability, the federation would be supplying AC units for what is typically the largest contingent of athletes at the Summer Games.
“As you can imagine, this is a period of time in which consistency and predictability is critical for Team USA’s performance,” Hirshland said. “In our conversations with athletes, this was a very high priority and something that the athletes felt was a critical component in their performance capability.”
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that Germany, Australia, Italy, Canada and Britain were among the other countries with plans to bring air conditioners to France.
No, you just don’t understand that “means of production” doesn’t exclusively apply to industrial production, it talks about all capital, including financial. Lenin talks about this extensively as far back as the early 1900s, and it applies extremely well.
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A society can’t be run on smartphones, this was patently obvious during the COVID pandemic, when governments had to decide which were the “essential jobs” that society literally wouldn’t keep running without. Were these the smartphone jobs? Or was it agriculture, education, transport of goods, supermarket cashiers, infrastructure, and trash collection among many others?
I’m fully aware that SOME people can get rich using a smartphone. Hell, I’m a lucky individual who had access to high level studies, and who fortunately enjoyed STEM, and my life is pretty dope, I consider myself very successful. I’m just not stupid enough to think that’s a sustainable, or even desirable model of society, where SOME people can be “successful” (assuming that your metric of success is income) by moving around numbers in investment funds or programming databases so that banks can surveil us and squeeze a few dollars more out of our pockets.
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Lenin does sound awfully like socialism propaganda. Or more in essence, the desire for egalitarian utopia written by pseudo-philosophers (neither economists, nor engineers, nor mathematicians, nor any based-in-logic scientific field) without having any such social system in place and only dreaming. USSR did not go well, in any way, as an aside.
I can understand the desire for a push for more socialistic government reforms, but what needs to just happen is European semi-capitalism semi-socialism to just be more controlled, especially with regards to tax avoidance, and anti-monopolisation, and then to government mandated climate-change-fighting policies such as heavy (and unavoidable) taxing on pollution.
Looking back into old books and spouting the same-old propagandist battlecries does not do much to the conversation, and actually tries to derail it, instead of simply pointing “yeah that’s bad, maybe they should have done this, I did the math [or maybe this other person <link> did the math]”.
Again, you’re not bringing any remotely new pseudocriticism to the table. Friedrich Engels outlines this in his essay “Socialism: utopian and scientific” from 1880, in which he explains the difference between utopian socialism, and scientific socialism. Your criticism is outdated by 144 years.
Again, showing us how you haven’t read a single essay or book on Marxism, and all you’re doing is regurgitating anti-communist propaganda. If you think Marxist writers aren’t well-versed in economics, you’re absolutely delirious. Marx is best known for his “Capital”, a 3-volume treaty on economics which is still used to this day in economics faculties. There ARE things wrong within the book such as the understanding of money which Modern Monetary Theory has extensively criticised and improved upon (if you’re interested in the field of economics), but it’s a key work in explaining many of the functionings of economics, being the first work (to my knowledge) to properly describe the process of revalorization of capital and doing a great job at analyzing economics under the light of the industrial revolution. I’m currently reading Lenin’s “Imperialism: the higher stage of capitalism”, and like half the book are references to economists or geographers, most of them non-marxists, showing economic trends in the concentration of capital, in the specifics of the distribution of colonial land among some industrial powers of the world… Even if you’re not a Marxist I suggest you have a look at it, it may change your mind about which degree of science Marxists are using in their analysis, and it’s quite short.
The Russian Empire in 1917 was a backwards, feudal, unindustrialized state incapable of winning a war against a recently industrializing Japan and requiring massive French loans to even attempt to fight it, where the vast majority of the population were quite literally serfs working the land for an aristocracy. If you’re interested in Russian history up until the 1917 revolutions I recommend “The Empire Must Die” by Zygar, a non-marxist writer (in fact very critical of bolshevism) in which he examined an immense amount of documents starting from 1900 and describes the period that led to these revolutions in extremely good detail.
The USSR managed to come out victorious of a 4-year-long civil war in 1921 against the Tsarist loyalists which were aided economically and militarily to the point of Russia being invaded on their behalf by 14 countries including European powers such as England, France, and Italy. By the early 1940s, only 20 years after beginning to industrialize, the Soviets were capable of defeating the industrial powerhouse of Nazi Germany (a country that had begun industrializing around 150 years prior to that). By the 1970s, the USSR had gone from being the feudal state I describe, to being the second power in the world. This is not a defense of everything the USSR did as there was massive oppression during Stalinism, but saying that “the USSR did not go well in any way” is again delirious.
I disagree. Capitalism inevitably leads to the concentration of capital and the establishing of monopolies. It’s literally the tendency of markets, since it’s a “winner-takes-it-all” system, in which once a big share of the market is consolidated by the “most competitive” company, economy of scale makes it quite literally impossible for other companies to outcompete it in a free market. The best alternative to a free market isn’t a “regulated free market”, it’s a democratically planned economy which actually goes where the population wants it to, and not where the invisible hand guides it.
“Regulating” companies into stopping their polluting and monopolistic behaviour usually amounts to allowing the companies of other countries to outcompete them (as you can see with the current cries of the EU and the USA against Chinese electric vehicles or solar panels), and that is if the capital-controlled media and elected officials even dare to attempt this in the first place. For a very recent historical example on how capital won’t allow a progressive government, you can read the case of the Spanish political party “Podemos” (I’m bringing it up because I’m well-versed in everything that happened because i happen to be Spanish). Wanting to apply this exact type of regulation to improve workers’ rights and social rights and legislating progressively towards a clean economy, there was a collaboration between private media and the state apparatus, in which a false report of corrupted money from Venezuela to Podemos and its leader Pablo Iglesias was fabricated by a rogue corps inside the National Police, and was leaked to private media. All of this is already confirmed to be true by judges, and again, you can look all of this up. The result was a multi-year campaign of smearing in private media which led to the practically total disappearance of the party, in one of the most flagrant cases of lawfare in a European country in the recent times.
Another Spanish example of capitalism refusing to be regulated is the Second Spanish Republic, in which a democratically elected leftist government in the 30s wanted to regulate for a redistribution of land to peasants to improve on the massive inequality at the time, together with labour protections and workers rights. The result was a fascist coup that sunk the country in a half-decade of civil war, and ultimately placed Francisco Franco as the fascist dictator of the country for the following 35-ish years until his death in the 70s.
The anti-scientific and ahistorical thing isn’t saying that communism can be obtained, but to say that regulations aren’t only possible, but even better. You’re just showing us that you don’t understand the history of class struggle and workers rights movements, which achieved the concessions they achieved in the western world not by electing progressive reformist representatives, but by organizing labor and striking and disrupting until their demands were met.
From my coarse perspective, given your input, what Engels wrote (which would be even more dated) maybe takes in more perspectives. But then, we weren’t entirely talking about Engels before. Scope broadens.
My very first comment was about your (not entirely hidden) socialistic propaganda style of writing. The points you tried to make in your very first post would likely be valid, but instead they were railing the discussion in a direction of socialistic revolution, because of ACs.
In no way was my response anti-communism propaganda. I just disliked the phrasing which clearly shows your desire to drop the old-school battlecries without a directed objective. (Unless you desire to just include all objectives without second guess, from books, but then be sure to include all).
The general problem I have (which is empirical and not substantiated here) is that Lenin himself, while likely incredibly intelligent, was not, by trade and thus biggest chunk of his time, a mathematician, or an economist, so while he can read the papers, having a fully informed opinion on the matter is a dubious idea.
Reasons why I am so jaded and critical is that many fields these days (especially lacking rigorous peer review) fall victim to innability to discern fact from fiction. Specifically for philosophy, feels like the field has diverged from mathematics and physics in an ununderstandable way, where philosophy tries to be a voice of reason in humanity’s subjective reality of society while ignoring mathematics and pure formal logic. To me this is insane. Especially for a field that was once exactly that: mathematics, physics and trying to understand the natural world. In general, the field has been critiqued for empirically arguing that its education is actually formative for logical thinking 1 2.
The reasons I am jaded at dated books, is because the way of thinking can be so different, even in physics, many papers from early 20th century have god in the picture or see the human as some kind of special consciousness in the picture of the universe.
The first paragraph I completely agree.
Nazi Germany was indeed defeated by allied forces. And Russia definitely played a large part in it. However, the way it did, was not due to industrialization. It was due to an insane amount of conscription that is well-known as a meat-grinder. 9 million military dead (versus 4.3 million military from Nazis. Note: Nazis weren’t only fighting USSR.) was not a mark of an industrialized nation cranking out well-prepared, well-rationed, well-equipped soldiers, it was a feudal state throwing meat at the problem (or rather opportunity). Among other atrocities such as forced famine Holodomor.
The time of the cold war, Russia was barely scraping by to keep the narrative of “Great superpower” alive, it was only until Chernobyl, Gorbachev that USSR finally imploded and all was slowly unraveled. If 1970s USSR was this great superpower, then somehow 10 years later it fell to stagnation and then collapse? What? With people coming out from the iron curtain amazed at how simple people in foreign countries had lived, the variety of food, the quality of engineering, of clothes they had.
All the while illegal speculators were a huge problem, and simple food items were “always out of stock” throughout the whole USSR’s life. You just had to know the right people and pay the right money to live normally. That is, after you waited for 3 hours to get bread.
Personally, USSR achieved limited industrialization, while funneling unfathomable amounts of money into shiny things such as space exploration, while people had a hard time getting bread. To me, this is still close to feudalism.
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life in the world not by a planned economy, but by mediating the inherent problems of capitalism (monopolism, elitism, class warfare) and complete socialism (government overreach, lack of freedom, lack of democracy). This is what I said is most prudent to continue, but it requires maintenance from strong-willed people.
That is indeed a central problem, slightly reduced by import taxes. Obviously a full solution should include some international cooperation, and if it isn’t possible (and seems it isn’t) sanctions and heavier import taxes should follow. Or some taxes on import that take into account pollution at the importing source.
I don’t see how your example of corruption is novel. Corruption is indeed something that must be fought, and it wouldn’t disappear in a socialist society, as it didn’t USSR (where you could get anything for favors if you knew the right people).
The 20th century period across Europe was indeed a rough one, many countries went fascist (Spain, Portugal, Russia, briefly: Austria, Greece, Germany, Italy). Still, I don’t think it’s a novel example. And it’s also not an example against the current state of Europe, it’s an example of the inequality and volatility of European countries at the time.
The idea behind representative democracy is that I cannot do the work of a law-maker, deal with tax policy details while also living a life, so I elect someone whom I think I can trust.
If I have no trust in the system, I will go to the streets, as it was always the case. And yes, in this sense, we hold a lot of thankfulness for those that went to the streets before us to bring us to where we are now.