Sports writer kills himself, leaves behind website describing how and why

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Dumar_sl

shitlord
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Cad_sl said:
Dumar, lets say you had your way, and you destroyed all the theme parks and contrived entertainment that exist today.

What do you replace them with? What would you rather people be doing? I'd like concrete answers to this not some vague "THEY WOULD CREATE THEIR OWN CONTENT LOL!"
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Sorries, just saw this and the comments below it. I'll shoot an answer later this evening, as it's a question most people eventually get to in these conversations (and as equally interesting, how if you 'don't make products' you 'have nothing to do' as a consequence of our modern socioeconomic way of life on our psychology).

bixxby_sl said:
I don't think that's right. Dumar never said we were automatons, he said in modern life everything has a price, and that diminishes the emotional value of everything.

Equilibrium was sweet as hell though.
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My thoughts are not represented by Equilibrium at all. In fact, modern society is more like the movie than anything else: people in modern socioeconomic capitalism are closer to automatons (and it's in literature, citations abound if you'd like them) than truly any other society ever has been: thoughts, activity, and my thesis in this thread, their feelings, are regulated and expressed for them, not by them.

How is a pill suppressing emotions any different than a football game providing the same emotion to millions of people? It's a form of proxy or control, either way. If you fed that pill to millions of people over a long period of time, then suddenly took it away, they would likely go clinically insane. The same with major sports: take that away from society today, tell me what happens.

This modern society is not a mentally healthy one.
 
hodj

hodj

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How are products produced in a capitalist society different from products produced in a non capitalist one?

What magical mechanism of mass productions and sale for a profit makes products reduce us to automatons and zombies, that is exclusive only to capitalist societies?

Not to mention your second question is contradictory, it asked how suppressing emotions is different from having emotions. That should be plain on its face. One is the absence or dulling of emotions, and the other is experiencing them in full force. Seems not just different, but 180 degrees opposite to me.

added:

In a non capitalist society, if you do not produce products based on demand, but rather based on social mandate or government dictat, how will you prevent shortages of major commodities people require, such as vehicles, computers, cell phones, etc?

You use terms like products and commodities as if they only exist in modern, capitalist societies. As if a rock banging native tribe exchanging carved totems aren't engaging in the production of objects aka PRODUCTS and the exchange of them for perceived value aka MONEY. Making them...commodities. A pet rock is as much a commodity as a computer. You can't strip this away from human society. What you're essentially saying is that you want to remove the pricing mechanism we call supply and demand, but every time that has been tried, what ended up happening was that demands could no longer be met, the governments became overwhelmed, collapsed into what amounts to Mafia styled criminal states where the common people, the people you claim are mentally unfit and unhealthy and controlled and manipulated by the powers that be, end up suffering the most, and becoming literally peons on the plantation of their masters.

If you fed that pill to millions of people over a long period of time, then suddenly took it away, they would likely go clinically insane. The same with major sports: take that away from society today, tell me what happens.
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Retarded edit to try and correct your contradiction is detected. So you've gone from claiming that nulling or removing emotions is the same as experiencing them in an overwhelming amount to trying to claim that what you're really talking about is control. But the most controlled and dictated societies in our world today are the ones who tried to remove the pricing mechanism of supply and demand from the greater portion of their economies. Your logic does not follow on observable evidence.

If you took sports away from people, they would just make new ones. Just like when people stopped playing cricket and started playing baseball instead. Why would anyone take sports away from people? Why do you care that people enjoy sports or video games or movies or any other type of entertainment? What's worse is that you're arguing for collectivist lifestyles, which decrying that people are able to get collective emotional fulfillment by mutually sharing in mass media entertainment events. Your entire dogma is one confused muddle.

What about these entertainment mediums makes them so unhealthy, and what alternative that would exist in your system wouldn't be subject to the same exact phenomena you decry here?

Why do you think sports are what keeps people sane?

Further, most people who are given pills are given pills because they are clinically suffering from a medical condition which requires medication in order to help stay sane, so yes, if you took away their medication, they would certainly act out. That has nothing to do with modern capitalistic society, and everything to do with their biology. People aren't bipolar because society made them that way, they're bipolar because they have a fucking physiologically based medical condition related to their genetics that leads to a chemical imbalance which causes erratic, non normative social and other behaviors. You aren't going to fix that by stripping them of football and proxac, and it isn't evidence that the entire nature of our society is fundamentally broken that people like to be entertained and have to take medication for psychological illnesses. Its a sign our society is functioning well that we're able to discern these medical issues and address them, and provide entertainment to the masses that doesn't involve mass executions in gladiatorial arenas or mass sacrificing to make the Sun come up the next morning.
 
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Dumar_sl

shitlord
3,712
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hodj_sl said:
How are products produced in a capitalist society different from products produced in a non capitalist one?

What magical mechanism of mass productions and sale for a profit makes products reduce us to automatons and zombies, that is exclusive only to capitalist societies?

Not to mention your second question is contradictory, it asked how suppressing emotions is different from having emotions. That should be plain on its face. One is the absence or dulling of emotions, and the other is experiencing them in full force. Seems not just different, but 180 degrees opposite to me.
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It's not magical, but it lies in the specific properties of a commodity. A painting for example, has different properties when it becomes a commodity to be bought and sold on a market, when money becomes involved. This isn't necessarily a unique feature of capitalism, but the mass production of all types of commodities in relation to capital, is. And this feature of our modern socioeconomic way of life, then, has psychosocial consequences.

Another example is viewing relationships as business transactions. You consciously may not view it that way, but your behavior may suggest otherwise (such as the SMV chart, etc).

The pill and the football game have the same effect on society. Whether you're not feeling anything or feeling something manufactured for you, and that manufacturing isintended to provide that emotion. Again, the emotion wasn't felt because of something you did. You had no involvement.

Reflecting upon it, the football game is a much better device than that pill ever could be.
 
hodj

hodj

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Dumar_sl said:
It's not magical, but it lies in the specific properties of a commodity. A painting for example, has different properties when it becomes a commodity to be bought and sold on a market, when money becomes involved. This isn't necessarily a unique feature of capitalism, but the mass production of all types of commodities in relation to capital, is. And this feature of our modern socioeconomic way of life, then, has psychosocial consequences.
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Citation required. Not some fucking qualitative opinion piece bullshit. I want quantifiable evidence of a mechanism by which commodities in capitalist societies strip people of their humanity, reducing them to automatons, that does not exist in stone age societies exchanging fertility symbols for bushels of grain and communist systems where you are alloted a certain quantity of goods per period of time based on accumulation of work credits.

The pill and the football game have the same effect on society.
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Conclusion with no supporting premise. What effect? There is no effect.

You better start barfing up some fucking peer reviewed research supporting your blanket assertion that there is a magic effect from pills and football that hurt us psychologically that didn't exist when Aztecs were playing Nahuatl and taking all sorts of mushrooms and peyotes and the like

Mesoamerican ballgame - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aztec use of entheogens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Which, by the way, involved killing people who won the game as sacrifices to the Sun God.
 
A

Astral Projection_sl

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I'd like to think that socialism can exist without authoritarianism. However, every other numb nuts commenter on The Blaze, Breitbart, Free Republic, etc. says that "socialists = authoritarian power trippers". Dumar, the biggest proponent of Socialism on this board, now confirms their fears with "we should ban the NFL, Disney, and every other form of entertainment I don't approve of". GG.
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khalid

khalid

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Dumar_sl said:
It's not magical, but it lies in the specific properties of a commodity. A painting for example, has different properties when it becomes a commodity to be bought and sold on a market, when money becomes involved.
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Let's suppose I make a beautiful painting of a boy playing with his dog. I absolutely love it and hang it up on my wall. Then someone comes into my house and remarks on how beautiful the painting is. He offers to buy it for cash. He hangs it up on his wall and enjoys the heck out of it. I then buy myself a painting I saw online that I liked.

At what point did the painting I made gain extra properties? Why is the other person's enjoyment of my painting less real than my enjoyment of the painting? If he offered to trade for it, lets say his own painting for my own painting, would we both end up "losing" in the deal? Or would that be fine because we didn't actually trade cash for it?
 
hodj

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I don't think that's what he's saying. What he is saying is equally absurd, however. He isn't calling for the death of football, or maybe he is, but what he's saying is that there is some unique mechanism, which he cannot quantify on any level, inherent in the capitalist production of goods for sale at a profit, that makes them uniquely damaging to the human social and psychological state.

However, his entire argument is predicated on a series of presumptions that don't hold up to scrutiny. The first being that a mechanism he can't name and can't describe exists without any validation of that assertion. The second that this mechanism is a unique product of modern, mass produced society. Third that he could remove this mechanism by removing money and production of goods, products or commodities, and that removing this mechanism wouldn't undermine the whole of society as supply of the goods and services we expect (not even talking luxuries here, just talking basic necessities like food and clothing and transportation) dries up.

Each time he makes a post I'm reminded of my favorite Heinlein quote

One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.
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There is nothing unique about our sports except that they're especially TAME compared to past entertainment venues in some of the world's most powerful and longest lasting empires. There is nothing unique about our attempts to cure mental and physical illness through the use of medicine, except that we're intelligent enough to synthesize and extract key compounds and apply our vast pool of knowledge to address illness at a level of accuracy and comprehension never before achieved in human society. That's not to say that we couldn't benefit from a more SOCIALIZED health care system than even the one we have now, of course.

Dumar, like many die hard communists, is very careful to identify what he thinks are the problems, but he provides no specific answers, only vague appeals to emotion and overuse of scientificy sounding words without considering the context or the consequences.

Commodities, or the production of surplus goods for exchange, mostly in the hopes of getting a better deal than the person you're trading with aka profiting from said exchange, is a fundamental part of human existence. It has been a fundamental part of human existence since we were exchanging fruits and nuts and berries for mating rights in the trees. It will remain a fundamental part of our existence, until we either cease to exist, or our technological prowess and tool making abilities afford us the luxury of being in a situation in which resources are no longer limited. Like when we're terraforming Mars as a giant fucking farm and bringing in asteroids to replace raw minerals and shit.

And its going to require a whole fucking lot more exchanging of limited products and commodities for a profit to get to that point.

Its really just that simple.
 
khalid

khalid

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This thread is pretty hilarious though. Dumar every once in awhile gets bored, hops in and again announces he will "explain it all again" but then only restates his theory without proof. We ask for proof, or in my case ask for a specific example, all of which he will ignore. All we need now for the cycle to repeat again is for Tanoomba to show up and claim we are all intentionally misunderstanding him or don't have a proper grasp of English.
 
khalid

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Bumping this thread now that Mikhail posted again. Hopefully he can jump on Dumar's side here and we can get this thread back to rollin.
 
hodj

hodj

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Its gonna take an awful lot of multi post quoting and insulting people's intelligence for Mikhail to dig Dumar out of the hole he dug himself in this thread, bro.
 
D

Dumar_sl

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I've been quite busy IRL and haven't been around much. I'll address the statements posited and questions asked, includingsomeof hodj's, but especially Cad's post that actually tried to move the conversation forward, instead of playing around for pages in the same tar pit of hyper-positivism: asking for 'citations' and 'peer reviewed research' was answered by myself on more than one occasion long ago, especially by giving explicit definition of the school of thought relating to this issue itself. I can link those answers if you've forgotten or just habitually choose to ignore, which is more likely. But regardless, being a broken record goes nowhere but in circles.

Post #666(!) is one of the posts referenced. So I'd request of hodj to remove the junk from his posts that I've already shot down before responding to me again, which will then unfortunately probably leave his posts empty.

(edit: and my next post shall be long, so prep accordingly if you're inclined.)
 
khalid

khalid

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You haven't shot a single thing down nor made one credible citation in this entire thread. Keep believin though.
 
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DMK_sl

shitlord
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hodj_sl said:
I don't think that's what he's saying. What he is saying is equally absurd, however. He isn't calling for the death of football, or maybe he is, but what he's saying is that there is some unique mechanism, which he cannot quantify on any level, inherent in the capitalist production of goods for sale at a profit, that makes them uniquely damaging to the human social and psychological state.

However, his entire argument is predicated on a series of presumptions that don't hold up to scrutiny. The first being that a mechanism he can't name and can't describe exists without any validation of that assertion. The second that this mechanism is a unique product of modern, mass produced society. Third that he could remove this mechanism by removing money and production of goods, products or commodities, and that removing this mechanism wouldn't undermine the whole of society as supply of the goods and services we expect (not even talking luxuries here, just talking basic necessities like food and clothing and transportation) dries up.

Each time he makes a post I'm reminded of my favorite Heinlein quote



There is nothing unique about our sports except that they're especially TAME compared to past entertainment venues in some of the world's most powerful and longest lasting empires. There is nothing unique about our attempts to cure mental and physical illness through the use of medicine, except that we're intelligent enough to synthesize and extract key compounds and apply our vast pool of knowledge to address illness at a level of accuracy and comprehension never before achieved in human society. That's not to say that we couldn't benefit from a more SOCIALIZED health care system than even the one we have now, of course.

Dumar, like many die hard communists, is very careful to identify what he thinks are the problems, but he provides no specific answers, only vague appeals to emotion and overuse of scientificy sounding words without considering the context or the consequences.

Commodities, or the production of surplus goods for exchange, mostly in the hopes of getting a better deal than the person you're trading with aka profiting from said exchange, is a fundamental part of human existence. It has been a fundamental part of human existence since we were exchanging fruits and nuts and berries for mating rights in the trees. It will remain a fundamental part of our existence, until we either cease to exist, or our technological prowess and tool making abilities afford us the luxury of being in a situation in which resources are no longer limited. Like when we're terraforming Mars as a giant fucking farm and bringing in asteroids to replace raw minerals and shit.

And its going to require a whole fucking lot more exchanging of limited products and commodities for a profit to get to that point.

Its really just that simple.
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I gotta say your posts are really impressive and enjoyable to read.
 
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Dumar_sl

shitlord
3,712
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khalid_sl said:
You haven't shot a single thing down nor made one credible citation in this entire thread. Keep believin though.
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On the contrary, I've had to explain the definition of a commodity because that was used incorrectly, reinterpreted for him hodj's misunderstanding and misapplication of Marx (and you both have never read him, yet claim I'm a Marxist, communist somehow - which I debunked in a post I provided to you previously), pointed out to him that the foremost and leading academic in the field he claims to study is, in fact, a strict Marxist that dedicates an entire series of courses and an online lecture series just to one book that, again, hodj has never read, and finally, have shown most patiently and tirelessly that positivism has no role and is purposely discarded in critical theory, which I laid out in the beginning was where I was beginning my analyses.

But none of those posts ever mattered since you ignored them, and your responses are just accusations of zealotry. You and he just latch onto the words Marx and communist as some weapon to wield, and any post I make going forward will be greeted by the same broken record wielding the same tired weapon, just as pages before. I said I wouldn't respond to it after I put it to rest, and I should do as such.

Shot down doesn't adequately describe it, you're right. Nuclear payload.
 
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