Well quite. A mere conflict of values. A melodrama of middle class manners. You don't seem to appreciate just how much some people love being alone in their little cars. Driving up and down. They do. They really do.
The left needs a broad mass-narrative: Suggest themes, methods and strategies
- Thread starter taffboy gwyrdd
- Start date
Really? That's hilarious. I can understand that five minutes in central Paris on a monday morning would dent the enthusiasm of even the most determined petrol-head.
Oh no. Don't tell me we've got socialism built into our species-being, ready for democracy to unleash. If that were the case, then democracy would be a formality, as the policy would be a forgone conclusion.
Labour, and internationally social democrats generally, were the architects of the modern consumer society.
Currency controls were accepted by more or less all shades of mainstream political opinion until the ascendency of the neo-liberal ideologues.
See Immortality and Slowness.
I don't think Kundera has ever particularly been an enthusiast of capitalism, as opposed to being a critic of the Communist alternative to which he once belonged.
As Sid James said in "Carry on Abroad".
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Mmmm, neo-objectivist verbiage. About as interesting as watching paint dry.
Going for a drive can be a pleasurable experience, but it's a bit like smoking; for every one that you really relish with a paper and a decent cup of coffee you smoke ten standing in the rain outside some dreary building gasping the fucker in, 'cos you've bought into that lifestyle and it's not easy to get out.
People are also quite poor at gauging what they enjoy and what they don't. One exercise that depressives are often asked to do is to keep a diary of what activities they engage in, how much they expected to enjoy them beforehand, and how much they had actually enjoyed them afterwards. To see how this operates with cars you only have to deconstruct the average car advert, which is seldom without a picture of a car swooshing along through some idyllic countryside that was probably quite a nice place for a picnic before it had a huge fucking road built across the middle of it, as if it was the only car in the universe. The reality is more likely to be sitting in a tunnel of licquorice-coloured air leaning on the horn until the person in front finally snaps and stabs you with a screwdriver, which is why the swooshy advert scenes are all filmed on closed roads or in the wee small hours of the morning in midsummer.
What results from all of this is something like Nystrom's philosophy of futility - it's a tightening spiral where the generalised malaise that a marxist would identify as alienation fuels the desire for consumer products, but because the commodity can never satisfy the need for that which it displaces, the malaise intensifies, and with it the desire for further consumption.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
It's interesting that you've essentially created an anti-ad that has exactly the same bearing on reality as the actual ad! Other than that, pretty much in agreement with your last few posts on the subject at hand...
Another way of putting it is that everything becomes tedious when you've done it a few times (except, perhaps when you've taken a break from it,and even then only for a short time.) Eventually, some people end up addicted to internet forums.
Life is fairly tedious under capitalism. It would be fairly tedious under communism. But compared to death it's a party.
It's the way it is, suckers.
Consequence of the way reward is generated, the same stimulus repeated results in decreasing levels of activation in the right bits of the brain. Still, if that weren't the case we'd be a pretty boring lot, just find one fun thing and keep doing it forever. Come to think of it, I think I might know a few people like that....
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Perhaps instead of marketing communism as being the society where everyone can be fulfilled it should be approached as 'Communism - the society where life will be tedious but farier'...actually no, that just conjures up images of the equality of misery of the Eastern Bloc...ah well, that's that idea kaput...
So uninteresting it's triggered your obsessive compulsion to post.
I hate driving. It interferes with my psychedelics hobby for one thing. Your post above is certainly highly plausible, we alter our beliefs to be consistent with our behaviour. That’s why we develop a pride in the NHS, because we prefer to think we want to pay tax for it rather than confront the fact it’s really coerced out of us. The question is if people have such flawed faculties, as you suggest, what then do you get from advancing a humanitarian political philosophy? Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to harness their short comings to your advantage?Fruitloop said:
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Can't believe not one of you smilied at my new slogan for the left, 'We're all in this together' joke, you po-faced bastards 
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Can't believe not one of you smilied at my new slogan for the left, 'We're all in this together' joke, you po-faced bastards
It made me think of that arse-nosed wanker and made me do this face ---->
They poorly gauged how much they enjoyed it.Can't believe not one of you smilied at my new slogan for the left, 'We're all in this together' joke, you po-faced bastards
They werent that miserable, they spent most of their time shagging, drinking vodka and pretending to work.
glenquagmire
Rightwing NuLab apologist
Having read all the way through this thread, I am tempted to block everyone on here who makes a grand sweeping generalisation about "the left" (treelover first, obviously).
And also anyone who turns a discussion about public ownership round to British Leyland and the Trabant.
And enjoy the silence.
And also anyone who turns a discussion about public ownership round to British Leyland and the Trabant.
And enjoy the silence.
Exactly. There was an businessman from the former East Germany on the radio a while ago, talking about how pleasant his life was as an employee who knocked off at four o' clock on a Friday, drove his family to the weekend 'dacha' type set up and spent the weekend boozing and fishing with his neighbours without a thought for work.
And then all the theatres and cinemas were dirt cheap, and the fare on offer of a high quality.
There's a Russian joke about that, where a guy goes to buy a car and asks how long it will take to be delivered. 'Seven years', comes the answer. The guy asks 'Will that be in the morning or the afternoon?'. The puzzled car salesman asks 'How can it possibly matter?' and the guy replies ' Because the plumber is coming in the morning'.
I'm not advancing a humanitarian political philosophy at all. I'm not even advancing a philosophy particularly - if anything I have more sympathy for the anti-philosophical tradition, whether you want to found that in an Anglo-American lineage (Dewey, Rorty, Putnam) or a European one (Wittgenstein and various others too numerous to mention). As to my personal advantage, that returns me to the question of what I want, and what I do want is primarily social in nature, which I think is probably the case for pretry much everyone. If that constitutes humanitarianism then I guess I would have to plead guilty, but it's a broader definition than the one implied by the normal understanding of the term.
likesfish
You can't park here sir
The rather important thing is state planned economys failed miserably at providing material stuff.
Constant queues for food hassle to get clothing etc etc. Zero choice and take it or leave it service level.
So what?
It sounds like a fine start to me, although I could probably manage without the gold provided there was a reasonably-sized garden.
I haven't got any values as far as I know, and when other people talk about theirs in the abstract they are usually either on a dating site or the telly. In both cases they are invariably stupid and annoying.
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