I don't really fit in that well here at times because I don't consider Capitalism as having anything to do with governance. Capitalism is a market system that uses competition to drive efficiency of creation of needs and luxuries both. If your democratic system of laws is being leveraged by highly efficient non-state entities, then you should really fix that shit, but fixing it doesn't require abolishing private property nor would that end corruption.
Kings never went away, they just changed to a different form and name to remain accepted in society, as the ones with the crowns ended up in the gallows.
If anything, I'm more concerned with folks like Jamie Dimon and Satya Nadella and Andy Jassy. People who have trillions of dollars of capital at their command exert immense influence over my quality of life. Arguably much more so than any king or high priest or even any American president.
We talk about Divine Right of Kings like its a thing that came and went, but consider how a guy like Elon Musk has accrued phenomenal amounts of wealth and authority. Consider how people see him. And how he sees himself. Its chilling to consider how much power some of these people wield and how blind we all are to their intentions.
I read intense concern about the results of the next election, without seeing anything approaching the comparative concern for a private monopoly of real estate, a mass privatization of our postal and shipping system, or the horrifying prospect of a computerized administrative state run out of Microsoft's digital basement.
If you want to talk about the Divine Right of Kings, it should be noted how much of that authority was accrued through mystifying the mechanisms of authority. The modern capitalist state reinvents mysticism through contracts, borders, and advanced technologies, while working towards the same fundamental ends.
Kings and Priests would have plotzed at the power afforded by a credit card company or mortgage lender or OS vendor over one of its clients. And yet these are powers we hand over to modern capitalist institutions without a second thought.
I appreciate the perspective but nothing here says we can't be coscerbed by both positions (or all sides) of power.
I don't want kings or monopolies, or either by any other name. No need to split hairs on it.
I would also argue that "we hand powers over to modern capitalist institutions without a second thought" is a pretty loaded sentence. Who's doing that? Me? You? It's not like someone asked us. Sounds pretty dismissive to assume people are acting outside of their better interest.
Just pondering the difference between something that is practically inescapable in a finite human lifespan vs something that is surely escapable given a removal of that metric. Merely the first thought I had when enjoying the art, no point to be made of it... More mumblings of a idle fool/thinker?
I'm sure one day we'll achieve some sort of utopia if we aren't killed off by climate change or some other catastrophe, but my bones will have eroded to dust by then.
Millions of deaths compared to what alternative? The difficulty with attributing causes in history is that we have no ability to conduct controlled experiments.
"Listen, the Crusades seemed bad, sure. And the Mongolian hordes did kill a lot of people. And maybe the globe spanning feudal industrialization of Victorian Era England leading headlong into a pair of World Wars decimated whole continents. But hear me out. Maybe coulda been worse?"
Unfortunately there is no double blind studied alternative to capitalism that demonstrates without a doubt that it's statistically significantly better than capitalism as a system so I'm sorry to tell you that your children deserve to die because you're too poor, hope that helps
Unfortunately there is no double blind studied alternative to capitalism
I'll never understand why people believe clinical trials for pharmaceutical efficiency are the baseline for all forms of scientific inquiry and sociological research.
How on earth do we study astronomy, paleontology, or seismology without double-blind trials?
We just have to let the capitalist experiment play out. When this world is destroyed whatever humans remain if any will start the next trial. Trust me, capitalism still has a fighting chance.
The quote is correct, but as I recall the divine right didn't end because the people cried out for freedom. Royalty was replaced by governments of the nobility or military, neither of which are necessarily better for the people.
And how did such replacement happen? It wasn't out of nowhere but after a lot of turmoil, uprisings, and guillotines. The point being, there's people outcries, prostest, and so on. I'm not endorsing violence, but we can't just ignore that there was a process in-between. That's the whole point of the quote, is up to grassroots movement to try and find a way to open a crack and then make it grow...
I might be endorsing violence this time. You can't always make nice with a bully. We've given them plenty of chances to stop kicking over our sandcastles
The point of capitalism is that the aristocracy hated the idea of having to work for their money, like the rest of us. So, they came up with a system so brilliant that the rest of the population had to be starved, dispossessed of their land, branded, imprisoned whipped and sent to workhouses until they had the fight knocked out of them.
It was never about utopian efficiency, although it is touted to be the benefit now. The problem is, people don't realise that the "inefficiency" they look to do away with is all the people below the top having more than just enough to live on.
Now that Presidents can't be prosecuted for official acts that are crimes, Biden should enact Project 2025 EARLY give himself unitary executive power, and refuse to leave office.
This would either destroy the country, save the country, or force SCOTUS to reconsider their ruling.
Of course he could just deem the imbalance on SCOTUS a threat to national security, and write an official law saying that all major parties must be equally repressented by the judges on there (a one out, one in law).
That would also work, and run less risk of tearing the country apart.
