You mention the word God. That strikes me as how you use capitalism. To you capitalism is evil. To say "down with evil" and enjoining everyone to eschew it, strikes me as pointless.
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As I say, it's not going anywhere. Much like religion post secularism. It just needs outing in its box, out of harms way.
If I use it like God, it's because I see others using it thusly.
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It just seems to me like a super vague, unweildy, super emotionally charged word.
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Conservatives use "socialism" almost the same way you use "capitalism" to connote everything they see as bad. In reality we have a mix of both.
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I do think all forms of capitalism are bad. Now.
It's a system born of knowledge and culture as it was a few hundred years ago, and is now horrifically outdated, anachronistic, and destructive.
It wasn't always thus. But context is all.
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Isn't this an argument across levels of analysis?
Ted seems to be contending that you are overassociating negative characteristics of social reality with capitalism (I agree), and you that capitalism is a dysfunctional system of governance in need of replacement (I also agree).
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How can one over-associate an ideological label that refers to an economic, cultural, and social hegemony?
It influences everything.
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Extremely easily, in fact.
All it takes is conflating sociopolitical hegemony with biological or technological hegemony.
Does capitalism steer all human impulses, including negative ones? Is it a defining cause of ecological destruction. I say no, not even remotely.
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I just look at our birth rate and think we're pushing away at the timeline of when we'll be totally fucked, not if.
But I'm also so stubbornly fatalistic about extinction that it doesn't bother me much.
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I keep thinking that the most useful idea to come out of the entire body of human philosophy is to really drill down on the fact that you're gonna die regardless, so there's no need to be a total asshole about it.