do you notice that #karma is introducing guilt opon those that are effected by structural opression.
@phryk the rebirth mythology makes it worse.
But #karma is already enough to introduce discrimination and pushing guilt opon those that are effected by structural opression. ...on the same it brings legitimacy to those that profit from the same opression.
You do good, good will come to you.
You do bad, bad will come to you.
like: Doesn't matter how you ended in a bad situation, you must have done something wrong.
@paulfree14 The main thing about rebirth in this context I think is that it legitimizes the inequalities at the beginning of peoples lives: If you're born poor you must've been a horrible person/animal in your previous life so you deserve to suffer poverty.
This is very important IMO since the inequalities at birth play a major role in determining the structural oppression (and thus, suffering) one is exposed to.
@paulfree14 There's another angle to this as well:
Karma means bad people get what's coming to them (it's the universes law after all).
This kind of means that any fight for a more just world has a bit of a nonsensical quality – the world (or rather universe) already delivers perfect justice.
@phryk
...oh, haven't thought about that aspect.
fuxk. this ideology is even worse.
@paulfree14 @phryk Capitalism has a very similar effect, because its adherents believe that all you have to do to pull yourself out of poverty is to work hard, so if you're poor and unemployed as an able bodied adult, it must mean you're lazy. In fact, one could even call it a form of karma.
Yeah, but in a way capitalism is even worse because the protestant work ethic glorifies work as the main purpose of life, which instills a mindset of servitude towards the system.
When you think about it on the basis of time, which IMO is what you should measure your life in – your time and how it's spent, capitalism is straight-up parasitic.
@paulfree14
@phryk @paulfree14 @seanl A lot of people have a notion of karmic justice, even if they don't use that term. Combine that with capitalism, the protestant work ethic, and the so-called prosperity gospel and you've got a pretty good (albeit oversimplified) for why the US is the way it is.
I mean, the prosperity gospel is basically karma disguised as Christianity. Forget Christian charity. If you're poor, it's because god doesn't look favourably upon you.
@phryk @paulfree14 I don't think the protestant work ethic is on its own a bad thing. When everyone is working toward a common goal and there aren't parasites at the top, it works quite well. And there can't be a lot of parasites if there isn't a lot of surplus, which characterized the societies in which it developed.
@phryk @paulfree14 It also becomes a problem when society ceases to provide opportunities to do productive work.
But that hasn't been the case for decades at least, automation eliminates more and more of the actual need for work.
Also, seeing work as an (or even *the*) end in itself means sacrificing more worthwhile pursuits and forces us to keep producing shitloads of stuff we don't need, at a big environmental and social price.
@phryk @paulfree14 People have been claiming that automation permanently eliminated jobs for literally centuries. Why should it be true now when it wasn't before?
IMO the reason it seems to be true now is that before we didn't have a central bank making automation artificially cheap compared to people by reducing the interest cost of holding capital to near zero. Fix that and it will again cease to be true that automation causes permanent job loss.
"People have been claiming that automation permanently eliminated jobs for literally centuries. Why should it be true now when it wasn't before?"
Yeah, thing is, it *has* eliminated jobs since centuries. Mechanization of agriculture kickstarted after Europe was decimated by the plague – so in a cynical way you can say those jobs were forcibly automated away, because there simply weren't any workers for them.
About a century ago, ~90%, worked in agriculture, today it's <1%.
The big difference with the current wave of automation is that we have finally reached the stage where complex cognitive work is beginning to get automated away, which means that almost no job is "safe" anymore.
@phryk @paulfree14 I haven't seen any evidence that that matters at all. A free economy will always expand to make use of available resources, including people.
People will no longer get paid to do repetitive, monotonous tasks, yes. But I don't think anyone advocating for more jobs is advocating for monotonous jobs.
Automation is also competing with people who are ludicrously undereducated compared to what their brains could support. We need to fix that.
"A free economy will always expand to make use of available resources, including people."
You know what else always expands to make use of available resources, including people?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
It's fucking cancer.
This, IMO is one of the biggest problems with capitalism, it will devour *everything* and economists actually think that's a good thing.
We need to cut down production to a sustainable level and provide *at least* the basic necessities of life for free.
@phryk @paulfree14 I was using "economy" in a very general way. It's up to us what our economy actually includes and what form production takes. "The economy" could be giving each other massages in exchange for origami cranes.
@phryk @paulfree14 "Production" is everything we do that we or others find valuable. You don't need to reduce production, i.e. make everyone poorer, to reduce resource extraction. You just need to change what and how you're producing. And the way you change what and how the economy produces is by changing the incentives.
This, to me, is government's one job. And the government is failing miserably at it because they've been coopted by industry.
@phryk @paulfree14 I think the idea that "the economy" only includes industrial production, extraction, and paid-for consumption is a delusion created by the invention of macroeconomics. We love our aggregate indicators, but they're actually extremely harmful because they can never include the things that are most important. And there is no way for the powers that be to admit that aggregates are useless because that would expose the fact that central banking is entirely based on a lie.
I never said virtual goods aren't part of the economy, but what you are describing is the creation of billions of bullshit jobs to keep the work system existing.
We need to get rid of it, not conserve it.
Work (for the lower classes, at least) is a means to put food on the table, not some romantic endeavour of bettering yourself and the world – that's what you do when you're *not* at work.
@phryk @paulfree14 I don't want to create bullshit jobs. I don't want to intentionally "create jobs" at all. The problem with the economy is a structural one. There is a scaffolding of interlocking bad policies in place that are keeping the economy from adapting to changing technology. Many of these policies were supported by existing stakeholders who wanted to protect themselves from the changes in the landscape. (Continued)
Hard #work gives people doing it a #hope for better living conditions for the #future generations, more specifically, their own descendants. That's why it is revered so much, not because it is the guaranteed way out of #poverty.
#Education, by the way, is no guarantee of anything either. — It also only gives a hope.
P.S. Yes, #Hinduism is one of the shittiest religions in human civilization, not least because of the castes.
@paulfree14 @phryk This idea also permeates a lot of christian society.
@paulfree14 In combination with the whole rebirth mythology, yes. One of the main reason the caste system largely survived in India to this day.