Mastodon isn't sludge in any way, mate... sludge is hardcore punk + (proto) doom metal. It's what the Melvins, the B-side of Black Flags's My War and early Flippers spawned, so mostly the NOLA scene (Eyehategod, Crowbar, Down, Acid Bath, Buzzoven, etc...) and "others" (Grief, Floor, 16).
Perhaps we need a word to disambiguate "atmosludge" from actual sludge, for the same reason "skramz" was invented.
Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.
Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.
> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.
So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.
>Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
Lenin preached for state capitalism as a transitory state towards socialism. It's an integral part of the communist ideas, part of the direction even if not part of the ideal final state.
Sure. Historically, at times people had free trade. At times we had no monopolies at all. At times there were really few laws. We had democracy and free speech and more. Various components of "The West" had been tried before.
All these did not compare with the sheer effect of capitalism: let's concentrate the production, let's scale it so big that every worker will become a hyper-narrow specialist. You bet it's unsexy take today, but it was universally understood in Lenin's times that it's a path not possible/feasible to withdraw from. That's the one magic ingredient that seems absolutely required.
I suppose it depends on your perspective. I guess I mean broken kind of in the gaming sense, where a gameplay mechanic is 'broken' if you can exploit it to completely subvert the entire intended way it's supposed to work.
You could argue that capitalism was very not broken in 1960, when you could get a job at 18 selling shoes, driving a cab, or delivering milk or whatever, and support a family of five on your salary, save for retirement, and go on yearly vacations.
It's arguably somewhat broken today, when gestures around things are like this.
I'd say it would be entirely broken if AGI means a few hundred billionaires who have ownership stakes in an AI company simply capture all the wealth in the world while most of the rest starve, but the robots help you put down the peasant uprisings and farm and raise crops for you.
I agree with you though that technically, capitalism will still be 'going strong' unless the peasants are able to overpower the AI robot billionaire industrial complex and burn it all down.
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