I just heard this part. Is it looping?

>What do you do with people who don't want to cooperate (i.e., liberals)

If you function in a society you're cooperating. Which Liberal isn't cooperating? A society without cooperation is just anarchy.

I’m so glad I’m not alone in this adverse reaction to hearing Zizek speak

When did I say anything about "competing in a Marxist society?"

What do you do with people who don't want to cooperate (i.e., liberals)? You have to reeducate them, throw them in the gulag or eliminate them. Liberal societies tolerate communists (just form a commune), communist societies are intolerant of liberals.

You can compete in a Marxist society too?

The soviet Union had plenty factories, beaureu's and individuals all competing with each other. I'm not a Marxist but that's just established history.

This is an excellent article.

Indeed. Every time I say anything pro-capitalism I get downvoted despite the fact that it’s the reason we are no longer hunter-gatherers.

Communism is the worst of both worlds because those in power become corrupt and optimize around themselves. At least with capitalism, everyone has a shot.

I feel using science as a moral system would lead too much towards utilitarianism where what is moral would be based on the amount of good to come out of the results of scientific experiments etc. There was and is still a lot of anti-moral things going on in the world is science since before the Nazi's and Japanese used science to do tests on prisoners of war or disabled people. A lot of science is reliant on animal testing which is often lethal or debilitating to animals putting the needs of humans above animals.
There are other forces which use science as a way to justify their actions, companies can gain the results they need by adjusting statistics to make for example fast food look healthy, smoking to be beneficial etc. Therefore if science was to be a totally impartial moral system, it would have to be implemented by totally impartial people who were 100% dedicated to their integrity no matter the results. I don't feel we are at this stage at all right now as most science is funded by, charities, governments, companies and enterprises with some motive to the results and outcomes.

Too many marxists here on Reddit - which is surprising knowing what we know about the communists states of the 20th century.

Which resources are not actually scarce but only appear to be? And how is the entire planet being fooled so easily?

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Capitalism is voluntary exchange between free individuals. I'm pretty sure he was referring to how this was also the case between tribes of humans 10s of thousands of years ago also.

The obvious counter to that argument is that we compete because we perceive resources as scarce, and therefore something over which to compete. As we grow closer to (and in some ways have already far surpassed) the vagaries of actual scarcity, we must be willing to make conscious change to accept that reality.

Put another way, we only have to compete today because of massive inequality and the enforcement of a scarcity mentality by power structures that benefit from the status quo.

Anyone telling you otherwise is profiting from how things are.

Coercion is not Cooperation. You can cooperate in a liberal society under capitalism, Marxism isn't cooperation it's necessarily coercive and oppressive - just ask what yourself what you do with people that don't feel like "cooperating."

What rules, like antitrust laws? In Canada there's a competition act.

Can an AI use cocaine?

He's looking better than some videos I saw of him when it was bad a few years ago, not the healthiest guy I've ever seen but he's also in his 70s now?

He seemed all there and physically sound, and (as much as Hunter asked he censor himself) was very Zizek-esque in his presentation.

Bruh the first thing I heard was: “That’s my point. I am ready to sacrifice myself. No, don’t worry, I will not be a problem. No, I am totally ecotopic and I would like just to get rid of myself and everybody else. I’ll give you an example. We know that now birds are going extinct and that it is probably because some species feed on seeds which are produced by trees which cannot live in this new climate. So the trees die and at the same time the birds die because they have nothing to eat. This is nature red in tooth and claw. So here I say, yes, if we must disappear, let's do it quickly. Don’t wait for generations. Let’s disappear quickly, because I think the worst thing would be to survive in some kind of primitive society or what have you. Survival is often worse than dying out.”

This gets deep

At this point I'm sure it's just Zizek being live on air 24/7.

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> The basics of commerce is fair trade. You value A as “= 1” and I value B as “ =1” so we agree in our trade that A = B, boiling it down to a zero-sum game.

But it’s not zero sum. Each party trades to get the best deal they can. It’s impossible to determine equality when trading corn for a good axe. I might be a good hunter but terrible at making axes. We can’t be good at everything. This is where capitalism comes in. I decide to specialize in making axes or farming because by specializing, I can create something of value more efficiently than someone who doesn’t specialize. That extra efficiency is my profit.

We do sometimes have to cooperate rather than compete when the resources are such that we can’t monopolize them (clean air for example) or when the risk of competition is just too great for all involved.

Generally speaking however, competition produces the best result.

What are these two talking about lol?! Here's a snippet of the convo I walked in on...

"I know, but this is a problem for me because “porno” has no meaning it’s an empty gesture. This is the whole problem today. Okay, so tell me, what would it be like to have sex with a robot? Because in a way you are already having cybersex if you log on onto the Internet and watch all these movies of people screwing and so on. Now obviously you don’t get the real thing, so you are totally abstracted but I think that for some men it is a new form of sexual enjoyment. So, again, we will encounter new problems: What are the limits? Will it be accepted that in a relationship with a human being, you can have sex with another person who is not there and so on?

...

I hate movies, but I love to watch porno. I cannot resist it. Yes, why not? It’s far more interesting than these old-fashioned procedures."

The blue guy really wants to die and the red one just wants the conversation to stop.

You say that capitalism is a basic economic form of competition, but capitalism is a fairly recent economic model in the timeframe of civilization. I don’t deny that from the Bronze Age and before that commerce was a regular aspect of life, but commerce and markets ≠ capitalism.

The basics of commerce is fair trade. You value A as “= 1” and I value B as “ =1” so we agree in our trade that A = B, boiling it down to a zero-sum game. Capitalism is not zero-sum but rather focuses on profit so it must extract surplus value either from an imbalanced trade or from value which does not currently exist such as paying a low wage to produce a valuable product in the case of the former or buying property that is projected to increase in value for the latter.

On the value and virtue of competition, I agree with the other commenter of the higher value of cooperation. Competition could prove useful areas for certain areas of personal or even societal growth, but it might not be the best for solving problems. Especially in such an interconnected society that we have today, the actions of one can have repercussions, many significantly negative, that can be felt across a whole scope of locales that the original perpetrator of the action could not hope to respond to and alleviate. It could be environmental damage, the devaluation of other nations’ currencies, recessions, etc.

Competition itself could become stagnant when a player becomes too large that they could hinder their competitors and keep them low on the ladder, thus turning a game of “making sure I win” to “making sure I lose.” Your example of instability driven by those who hold onto power is precisely an example of this, since holding onto power can be the end result of competition. Why would someone who already obtained the end goal give it up for the others they had always been competing against? Also, what political instability causes is that cooperation breaks down on the National level, and it turns everything into a competition of resources where the other cannot be trusted and thus it isn’t until everyone comes to cooperate again that they can come out of the rut