Do you want your children to live in a world with +4 degrees because some purely financially motivated people stopped progress on the environmental protection front?
I want my children to live in a world where they are free to think and to read and to listen to a wide variety of opinions, and not just parrot those that come from the loudest voices.
Is the chance of this higher or lower in a world where scientists with opposing views are allowed to deplatform one another instead of applying the scientific method?
The scientific method deplatforms. It is skeptical. It is observational. It is experimental. It refines and eliminates failed hypotheses. It is not fair to all viewpoints.
For example, the scientific method deplatformed geocentrism.
It's been sad to watch such a storied institution reduced to another Murdoch mouthpiece over the last 10 years. The WSJ never had much of an ideological bent other than "capitalism" until News Corp took over.
Spiking that story would have delayed Theranos's collapse a bit (it isn't like if one news organization doesn't report a story no one else will ever find it), but had Murdoch spiked the story and unloaded his stock while it was still worth a lot, he could have been in legal trouble for trading on inside information, something only sources within the company knew.
This kind of spiking backfires badly when discovered (NBC blocking Ronan Farrow because they had their own related problems, he wound up taking the story elsewhere).
That still feels like a "wheels of capitalism" thing -- the writing was on the wall and someone else would have run the Theranos article if the WSJ hadn't. But the overall editorial tone went from centrist to hard-right in the course of a decade, to the point it's not taken seriously as a financial publication anymore.
You’re german, you should be very well aware that CCC always has been political and that being Antifa is a stance a lot of folks support. Don’t try to muddy the waters here.
In the US it’s a different case but here we’re explicitly speaking of the CCC.
I think the intent is to reality check some of the marketing coming out of Google/IBM/Intel/Rigetti that seem to be trying to imply that quantum computers actually exist today (as opposed to laboratory science experiments which are what actually exist now) and are just a few years away from commercialization after which some form of Moore's Law will take hold. I've seen a number of Pop Sci articles that say things like "today's quantum computers fill an entire room like 1960s mainframes" or "today's leading edge quantum computers contain 53 qubits, experts say we'll need n-qubits to solve x problem which is intractable on a classical computer". All of this is intended to imply we just need to figure out how to shrink these existing quantum computers down while expanding the number of qubits available and we're about to have a quantum repeat of the PC Revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The pop-sci headlines hinting that quantum supremacy shenanigans means that we are close to some new paradigm of general purpose quantum computers. I suppose.
Capitalism is consensus. Even Europe, which experimented with soft forms of socialism in the 1960s-1980s, has settled back to various forms of capitalist welfare system with free markets, low business taxes, and reduced regulation. Tatcher, Reagan, Merkel, Clinton, Blair, Harper, Howard, Johnson-these people weren’t passing fads. They represent the consensus view of the most prosperous and successful societies in the planet.
I find it very difficult to care what privileged people from capitalist countries have to say about the problems of capitalism. There is a blueprint to prosperity. It involves free markets, property rights, individual freedom, respect for investors, the rule of law, and an abiding skepticism of radicalism or social upheaval. Countries like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, etc., have followed that blueprint to prosperity within the lifetime of people who are around today. Countries like Bangladesh, where my family hails from, are seeing massive development by moving (imperfectly) in that direction. People like “Owen Jones” May be well intentioned, but in their nativity are a threat to the potential for a free and prosperous world.
We’re all on a boat. There are reasonable debates to be had about which way we should steer the boat or how fast to go. But the people espousing socialism (not like Macron welfare capitalist, but as contradistinguished from capitalism) are trying to poke holes in the boat.
> If you’re going to defend oligarchies (US, France, UK) I don’t know what to tell you but ‘consensus’ and ‘majority view’ are definitely not the keywords here.
The catastrophic effects of most (all?) revolutions that wanted to change that should really be emphasised more during history lessons in school. Without it, people are clueless as to the dangers of trying to change the status quo.
I wasn’t talking about revolution, just about acknowledging critique. I highly agree that capitalism brought the most prosperous period for humanity but there’s still lots to do and we all _have_ to listen to the poor, the disenfranchised, the ones getting the short end of the stick (ie Gilets Jaunes).
We should listen to everyone in a democracy. But France is not in the mood for what the yellow vests are selling. In the 2017 first round, 70% of votes went to center-left Macron (a banker who promised economic liberalization) or center-right or far-right candidates. Yellow vests are protesting because voters are rejecting their policy preferences.
I'm not sure I'd call France a free-market capitalism. They're dead last in Europe in many rankings regarding taxation, ease of doing business etc.
It can be argued that the protesters are actually protesting about the shortcomings of the system that France has - a highly rigid and bureaucratic welfare state with uber-taxation levels, which over long periods of time causes prosperity to dwindle for everyone. Of course, there are some fat cats that are profiting and doing extremely well - but every system, even the best functioning ones, has these people, which suggests that they are actually not the problem.
who would have thought that capitalist realism wasn’t the antidote to all of the world’s problems? certainly not thatcherite or reaganite policy building ideologists!
I've never heard this term before, but it's perfect. The implicit assumption that certain capitalist economic theories are literally the real world (rather than limited and imperfect models) is something I've been noticing more and more, but never had a term for.
