Sports writer kills himself, leaves behind website describing how and why

hodj_sl said:

Lol this is a ridiculous argument. You could make the EXACT SAME ARGUMENT that ultimately, female human prostitutes SUBCONSCIOUS goal is to reproduce.
[...] homology between cultural exchanges is a relevant and very observably real phenomena, unlike the theoreticals you operate from [...] This is why your insistence that history and evolution and biology don't matter is so profoundly flawed, and why Marx can't possibly be the answer to all life's mysteries [...]

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She has an imperative absolutely, but not with the guy or chimp she's having sex with. The third party is the market party. It's not an argument. I'm telling you a definition. But you missed class again.

I never said they weren'teverrelevant, just not relevant to the topic at hand, and they're not whatsoever. The same as if you're equally talking about quantum physics influencing the behavior of the chimps. It's not useful here for our previous discussion at all.

I'll give you another example since you still don't seem to understand.

You can purchase a girlfriend on facebook to post on your wall and send you messages. Two people are just exchanging resources, like chimps or fuck buddies in your view?This is commodificationbecause a previously defined social relationship has now been transformed into an economic, on-the-market one that didn't exist that way before. There is no biological imperative for the purchased girlfriend to engage in that activity, and the activity itself is now commodified on a market.

It's been proven that women have a biological imperative to do shit for money. Read the entire internet before responding to this post.

Tanoomba_sl said:

It's also maximized our ability to abuse any power for maximum gain, regardless of the consequences

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Wanted to specifically respond to this. This is just flat out, full stop, wrong. Capitalism has reduced the ability to abuse power, it has not increased it. I post regularly here about how egregious the abuses of various powerful corporate CEO's are, but look at the differences in what someone like say, Fuld can do, compared to a very wealthy Roman, or a feudal lord or a medieval pope or even American expansionists or British colonists. It's notevencomparable. They don't have the same level of power, even if their reach is far more broad than it was in those ancient worlds.

Are their abuses still bad?Sure, again, I make posts here regularly at how outrageous the power grabs and exclusiveness of the elite are. But it's no where near as bad as it was, and it's been in steady decline--does anyone think Wal-Mart is as bad as the Robber Barons were? Even the horrible conditions in much of China is at least on par, or superior to pre-labor movement work conditions here and in Britain. So saying it was "maximized" is an absurdity, it declined and it's continued to decline every since. If you want to get philosophical about it, the ability to recognize productive value as a physical abstraction within society for all individuals and not simply an "order of things" or "God says so", greatly reduced the elites latitude in diminishing consequences for their actions.

Which was kind of the point of Capitalism. Mid level bourgeois didn't want to be beholden to people with hereditary power, or divine power. The local blacksmith knew he was more valuable to society than the local Lord. So they created a system where power (Land) would be awarded to people whoproduce, rather than simply be given to people who are "ordained". Then they threatened to kill the aristocracy that wouldn't go along with this, in some places, they actuallydidkill them (Which was part of the revolutions that all happened early enlightenment--the poor were after more than just bread, they wanted a newlife). After the old kings were dead, or made toothless, Capitalism took hold to usher in the new "power". And yes, it was pretty brutalbutthe elite were far more constrained than previous systems because the same rules that allowed them to rise, were in place. And those rules? Continued to restrain them as time moved on. (Marx would say the slow march toward Socialism--but for now, it's still all Capitalism).

Again, I don't think you really understand just how muchpowerthe elite had before Capitalism. As bad as things seem now? There was never a time where they werebetter. That may be a very sad statement, but it's is what it is.

hodj_sl said:

So....quoting Marxist literature chapter and verse even though he never conducted any research and his entire treatise is a political document, not science, is totally relevant to this debate, but observable phenomena among primates that share 98% of our genome is not. Gotcha again. [...] Right, magic juju goes into the object in question, and transforms it by...wait...what mechanism is causing this transformation, exactly?

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Much of his treatise is about the commodity, so yes, it's wholly relevant. But I didn't bring him up, you did. I was telling you what commodification is. Thetransformationof a thing or activity into a commodity is a very pernicious thing, and since you obviously haven't read anything, I'll have to explain it in my bigger post. (Theentire conceptof a commodity and how it's transformed into such is the first damned chapter of that book you didn't read.)

The biological imperative on the girl's behalf, or the person doing the posting, is to put food on their table, or to gain access to more resources, to pay the rent, [...] If a woman sells her vagina to purchase food, then she is not engaging in the form of commoditization you are talking about [...]

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It's not commoditization. That has a different meaning.

Putting food on the table by selling your labor to create a blanket, for example, is not the same thing as poofing a market into existence by virtue of commodifying something or some activity that wasn't before, like a facebook girlfriend. Every social activity that is now sold on a market has been commodified. For another example, something broad like education. There's a market for education, but that hasn't always been the case. The poofing into existence of the market and the transformation of the activityis the commodification taking place. The argument I made previous a dozen times until a million derails took place, and one that you still don't get, is not thatallcommodification is bad or mentally unhealthy, but the continual furthering of it into every sphere of life and human experienceis.

hodj_sl said:

No, he's arguing that suicide is justified by the fact that when you manufacture a product for sale for profit that product has the effect of stripping your capacity for emotion and ability to connect at a empathetic level with other humans, leaving you a cold, zombified husk of a former human being. So basically, our society produces shitty people unable to experience real life because greed, therefore suicide is a justifiable response to this fact.

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I encourage you to read my wordsyet againif you don't understand my meaning. I never said stripping your capacity of emotion. Manufacturing a product foreverything, from football games, to religion, to facebook girlfriends more and morecommodifies all human experience: it replaces, not strips, a human being of authentic, emotional responses to the world itself, a relatedness to it and other human beings, until what you're left with is feelings and thoughts based on and created byobjects, by commodities.

That's where the feeling of emptiness comes from in one's life, and a modern narrative of a rejection of this phenomenon can be seen in aspects of Fight Club, for example, if you need itfurthersimplified.

Your logic is batshit fucking crazy and full of retarded holes you can drive jumbo jets through, would be my point.

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Maybe I can sell my logic full of crazy holes...on a market. Girls like crazy and dig pilots. There's opportunity in reification, you know.

Lithose_sl said:

the poor were after more than just bread, they wanted a newlife.

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I would like to further elucidate and provide some perspective on this point.

Another flaw of capitalism often overlooked is that its political economy is notaware of itself. And what I mean is, in all other periods of transformation, a very high level of class antagonism was the impetus for revolution and better conditions. It wasmade obviousby the mechanics of feudalism, for example, that eventually the system had to be replaced when the poor were disposed or dispossessed, while the aristocracy could still be demanding more.

Capitalism obfuscates the very conditions that were necessary for revolution previously, and I think this is a point Marx missed or didn't wholly forsee. While it has led to a greater quality of life forsome(I won't say most) and better means of production (not saying who benefits, just in terms of output), it hides the wealth discrepancy that was obvious in times past. So while most have access to bread, the gains actualized by means of increasing efficiency, productivity, output, and whatever else, is only seen at the top, and therelativewealth discrepancy could be the same or perhapseven worsethan in systems of times past. It's just harder to realize, and I would make the claim that's a serious damned flaw in the system for society to continually improve its own conditions.

hodj_sl said:

In the future we're actually going to have, aka the future of the Singularity, humans will be created artificially and grown in artificial wombs, and there won't be poor, because a stable population supported by worker drones will be what we actually have. The revolution of the proles taking over has been tried and every time it tried, the supposed proles ended up just as bad if not worse than the guys they replaced.

But notice how Dumar is off on a tangent about the evils of capitalism now? Because he's run out of corny defenses for his argument that suicide is justified because bad products make us feel things.

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Aside from my arguments that you still don't seem to understand, your first paragraph is a pretty good argument too.

I've had to spend several posts not in argument, but in providing basic definitions of concepts, things that any anthropologist should know. So unfortunately, I have to go back and define terms like what a commodity is and how it relates to human nature, in order to provide to youyet anotherargument.

But then you'll ask for peer reviews and other hard evidence of a soft science, and when I give you someone like Harvey, you'll dismiss again, regardless of his preeminence in the very field you supposedly study. You're lucky my patience in explaining these concepts equals my enthusiasm for people eventually understanding them.