Andrew Yang

version

Well-known member
I'm not sure what to make of him. He's running as a democrat, Fox News actually seem to like him, Nick Land says he's a fascist, some of the alt-right love him or at least pretend to, Alex Jones says he wants to implement a Chinese-style social credit system and somehow he's talking about socialism and UBI in America without being shouted down by conservatives.
 

luka

Well-known member
I pay no attention to politics, it's the other part of the forum and I like to stay away, give that community a safe space to enjoy, but I'd never heard of this guy until this thread but last night I had a couple of pints and the two men next to me were talking about Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and the article Yang wrote about young men and video games (which I read and told me all I need to know about Yang, to put him in a box, a known quantity)
 

version

Well-known member
The thought of people talking about Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson in real life is really jarring.
 

luka

Well-known member
Right, "well it's certainly distasteful but at least its confined to the internet. They aren't allowed to go outside after all" tbf it wasn't an entirely uncritical discussion. They recognised that there is an irresponsibility and a disavowel there. That the libidinal engagement with those speakers doesn't come from a passion for ideas or a concern for disembodied ideal rationality or some chimera like that. Still put me off my pint though.
 

luka

Well-known member
I know this is one of my paranoid conspiracy bugbears but it does seem to me that the meaning of money changes when it's given out by the government. You can see this by looking at the way benefits work. They become survival tokens which can be witheld for 'bad' behaviour, for example drug use. It then becomes a control mechanism. I'm not necessarily against the idea of UBI and it seems reasonably likely something like it will become necessary if the promised automation revolution arrives. I'm just suggesting it probably won't be as peachy as it sounds. You'll have to 'earn it' in some other way.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
there will be no full automation. it is a bourgeois hobby horse which leftists who can't get a blowjob cos of their bacon smelling spunk have a hard on for. Whilst we are seeing a breakdown in capitalist production in that the quantity of labour being expelled is far greater to that being reabsorbed capital has to always counteract this tendancy (relative surplus value) by making us work more within the same amount of time. that is all the automation thing will be. more fictitious jobs and the like social media comment moderators are a good indication of this, we're entering a new period of panopticon-like surveillance, and of course many will concede as they see it as a free choice. that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

As for what will happen to that vast quantity of unabsorbable labour that is expelled? ruthless contraction of the production of the species. state mandated euthanasia by any other name. in fact this is how capital will deal with climate change. this is why i stopped taking psychedelics. ive gone too far out. in fact for all of Mark's brilliant style as a prosist this was always something i recoiled from in his politics. there's no way of claiming accelerationism for an emancipatory politics, that's not how the transformation from formal to real subsumption works. ironically for all his banging on about radical sobriety he never hit that point where you'd gone beyond depression into the fight or flight response of oh shit, this trip is gonna go bad.

There will of course be more and more proletarian revolts in the future but if the 2010s is any indication from syria to ukraine to m15 to the gilets jaunes to Algeria and Sudan these revolts have been overwhelmingly expressed in moral terms and the terms of reconstituting a moral representative economy, not its negation. this is all we have after the class has been disarmed. the question is will it be enough to hault this trajectory? unlikely.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I know this is one of my paranoid conspiracy bugbears but it does seem to me that the meaning of money changes when it's given out by the government. You can see this by looking at the way benefits work. They become survival tokens which can be witheld for 'bad' behaviour, for example drug use. It then becomes a control mechanism. I'm not necessarily against the idea of UBI and it seems reasonably likely something like it will become necessary if the promised automation revolution arrives. I'm just suggesting it probably won't be as peachy as it sounds. You'll have to 'earn it' in some other way.

Well this is why the right love it, people like Milton Friedman etc. squeeze the middle poor (lower middle class if you will) under the facade of helping the poor. then when the absolutely dispossessed fail to advanced blame it on lack of moral virtue and thrift. the clowns at harvard who dream this shit up do all the high speed nano trading trading whilst this goes on, of course.
 

luka

Well-known member
The Freedom Dividend has a very Newspeak ring to it. I wonder what Craner makes of this. I doubt it feels ancient and evil enough to grab his attention though.
 

Leo

Well-known member
hard to say how he'll do. he's obviously got a high name recognition from his presidential run and probably lots of money to spend. other candidates are more local government insiders, so they might have the lock on important support from unions and other city groups and organizations.
 

Leo

Well-known member
after early fanfare and fawning from the press, he got his ass kicked in the NYC mayoral race.
 
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