The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

If due to my strong and wide-ranging disagreements with ag on other issues I had ever had any doubts about his value as a poster, this post would have removed them.

You continue to ignore the point that the market for execution pharmaceuticals is so small, it makes no sense to set up a company that does only that.  Were any of those companies you pointed out were to openly admit they did so, they'd lose so much other business that they'd lose money.

Also, where would the State of Texas obtain the precursor chemicals under your scenario? The ostracism that affects drug companies presently would affect their suppliers as well if they sold to Texas to make drugs for executions.  To set up the facilities that produced drugs and their precursor chemicals only for executions would be hideously expensive.  It's not as if even Texas is executing people at a rate that would make doing so feasible.

If the State of Texas believes it is important to kill people in that way, it should pay. It is not that every other part of the death penalty process were not hideously expensive. Why should the drugs be any cheaper than the death row?  What are a few million dollars here or there? I am sure they could endow a Chair of Human Poisoning in some public university within the state, and the happy Texan professor chosen to fill it would do proper supervision. There is no magic involved in production of pharmaceuticals - it is done by regular humans, you do not have to have gone to Hogwarts to do it. And the quantities, as you say, are small: you do not need to scale the process up from a university lab, and those are pretty good in producing appropriate compounds and testing for quality.

All this whining about "bad foreigners refusing to participate in how we kill people, so they are guilty of us doing this in a crueler fashion than we want to" is ridiculous. To begin with, those foreigners do not care a fig about HOW you kill people. It is YOU who are worrying about "humane" methods of execution: not them. Nobody wants you to kill people "less painfully" - they want you to stop killing people, period. If making this appear a medical procedure makes you sleep sounder, nobody else thinks this is a positive development: they do not want you to sleep after an execution at all. If it becomes very expensive - well, nobody else asked you to do it, it is your problem. If saving money is more important than sound sleep - well, fine, it is your decision, do it the way you like. Just stop whining that nobody else wants to take part in the performance. It is your show: you do the honors, you pay the bill, and you do your prayer to whatever gods you have. All up to you and your laws.  Just don´t get excited about others thinking you are barbarians for doing it: you said you do not care about it so many times, we all believe you.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

"Society" is just the sum total of individuals interacting with one another. It has no "point" or "goal" at all because it isn't a conscious entity, just the sum total of the independent actions of many different conscious actors (individuals).

You don't think that people band together and form goverments, societies, and hierarchies to advance some sort of goal or in hope to achieve something?  When you say "sum total of independent actions" it's quite indicitive of your ideology, because the way you say it is almost in assumption that everything is done for completely selfish motivations and that it couldn't possibly be any other way.  Tell me then; and going back to the famous "state of nature", why did the first laws against stealing and killing others arise from our animalistic beginnings?  Hell, why have we ever had any laws?  Conservatives would never argue that murder or theft should be made legal, but that the modern "wilderness" (that is, economic competition) where it is determined who prospers and who dies should be subject to extreme limitations on how much can be regulated.  If the most basic of laws are a reaction to the brutal nature of reality at the beginning of human civilization, is it not true that our economic regulations and society safety nets are merely a modern extension of that?  This is why I can't understand the conservative argument on its most philosophical of levels.  The idea of protecting people from physical harm is incredibly obvious, but protecting people from economic harm is so unconscionable.  They are the same damn thing. 

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

People familiar with my occasional cultural cringe tendencies and habit of melodramatically writing off the country as a lost cause after elections whose results I don't like might be surprised that I'm posting this here, but

The only country with a flag on the moon

This is a surprising answer.

Also wtf why is Uruguay not winning?

Why is it surprising that people would vote for the country they're from?  Sure, the whole "beacon of freedom" thing can be overdone, and large swathes of our political culture and built environment are stupidly dysfunctional.  But we took your continent's (not just yours, of course) tired, poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free (hell yearning to just breathe in many cases), and more often than not have fulfilled that promise.  That's a legacy worth celebrating.

In other words,

USA! USA! USA!

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

have to give my rightist Latin American friend credit for this insight on the psychology of the death penalty.

All this whining about "not being able to get the drugs" is merely an expression of people being nervous about the death penalty. They got somehow used to the existing procedure (with its established drug cocktail), but any "tinkering with the machinery of death" that requires minimal thinking and minimal departure from the protocol approved by their forefathers is making them savagely uncomfortable. Well, that is exactly the point of death penalty opponents: they have nothing against executioners being uncomfortable. There is no "democratic" requirement that people uncomfortable about their own actions should feel a general societal support for what they are doing. 

Came here to post this.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

What does it matter what a person did in life to affect the rights of the grieving bereaved relatives of that person? Even your Lee Harvey Oswalds and Timothy McVeighs have relatives and loved ones, and while you might justifiably think that the world is a better place for not containing Timothy McVeigh, that doesn't affect his loved one's equally valid right to mourn.

In this case, an alleged petty criminal who was never brought to trial or convicted was extrajudicially killed by law enforcement, even if out of self defense. We'll never know for sure if he was actually guilty under the rules of our criminal justice system because Michael Brown never got his day in court. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not aware of "shot by law enforcement without a trial" as a valid punishment for theft in the United States.

Anyway, I thought the whole debate about the mourning of a loved one vs. society's hatred of that loved one's actions was solved way back with Antigone, Sophocles' amazing dramatic tale of the daughter of Oedipus going out of her way to give her half-brother a proper burial despite his status as a traitor and Thebes' king Creon decisions that Antigone's brother Polynices' corpse should be exposed and eaten by animals. Antigone's moving respect for her loved ones and family over all the rules of society, risking death itself to show the proper veneration of her family even in direct contravention of all the rules of the world she lived in, is directly relevant to this case. Does it matter what Michael Brown did? Does it matter who he may or may not have tried to kill? He is the child of mourning parents who have the right and even the duty to mourn publicly. Mourning and grief are fundamental and bedrock principles of any decent society, and even the wicked dead are truly unfortunate indeed if not even one person wails and moans about their passing.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I, for one, have no interest in entertaining the turgid, dry arguments that have been exchanged over this issue over the past few hundred years. The debate between theists and anti-theists reminds me of the depiction of theodicy in Candide, which is characterized as an absurd debate held between windbags who are uninterested in societal problems. Frankly, I question whether attending to this question is worthwhile: who cares?

"We must cultivate our garden."

My argument is as follows:
1. If you are an atheist, this question should not be considered important. There are social scientific methods that may yield empirical evidence about this question but no system of analytic philosophy predicated upon truth claims or physical science can disprove the existence of God because the very nature of God is predicated upon a metaphysical realm that is inaccessible. No one can be sure that their religion is correct. I'd argue that this is part of its appeal.
2. I can no longer relate to those who are religious but their response to this question, and rightly so, is that it's a foolish one. Most people who are religious are aware that they cannot be sure that their religion is correct. They understand this and don't care to debate it. The appeal of religion is that most theologies are quite explicit that there's an element of faith involved. If you want to understand this appeal, consult social science, don't engage in a Socratic discourse on epistemology and the nature of truth or whatever.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

His "conservatism" was more in the interest of taking liberal elites and social workers, while his "liberalism" was largely in the interest of getting ahead of and/or coercing liberal ideas so they couldn't campaign on them. His presidency, in retrospect, has few things policy-related that should appeal to either a liberal or a conservative, this in the political success, he contributed greatly to the rightward bent of the nation, though he can hardly be attributed with having triggered such a thing. Even discussing his personal views is a difficult task, as different aides and recordings will tell you different things. His racial policy is itself a strange phenomenon. He advanced agencies like the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, somehow became the "greatest school desegregator in history", and according to Buchanan and others had genuine concern for African-Americans, while at the same time scuttling busing, advancing various "tough on crime" tactics that would affect blacks, and is on record saying that he preferred abortion in the case of a mixed-race child. He as well signed legislation in 1974 that would be viewed favorably by proponents of "community-oriented policing". It's ironic, of course, that conservatives rebelled against Ford and not him, since Ford, while likely personally more liberal, presided over a more conservative economic approach and started rolling back detente under the guidance of Rumsfeld and Cheney, though one could reason that, regardless of who held office by 1976, conservatives would have attempted to oust him. It's as well ironic that a man who had been able to churn such vitriol and hatred from the left nevertheless almost won the presidency in 1960 and won a landslide in 1972. This irony is as well at the crux of Nixonism, pitting all sides against each other to win vast swaths of the middle and the right. Hell, in 1960, you could've stated, with history on your side, that Nixon was the candidate more favorable to civil rights. His presidency is a good example of the triumphs and failues of both ideologies on the American political scene. He was able to placate New Deal liberalism enough to not offend a good deal of its benficiaries, while also doing so in the name of a middle class conservatism. Someone to his right would have threatened the New Deal benefits that many Americans were attached to, someone to his left would have threatened the cultural sensibilities of middle America. He adopted several personas, and pursued policies to the detriment of each of them. The man who was endorsed by unions in his re-election nevertheless pursued free trade; the man who had friends in the business world and was backed by them signed into law the EPA and other environmental protections; the anti-communist who would protect you from the Soviets sought detente; the centrist who didn't threaten the status quo made himself the bedfellow of Dixiecrats and spoke to anti-war protesters at the Lincoln Memorial. My "conclusion" would be that he simply was a conservative interested in co-opting the liberal policies that were in vogue, while also taking up the mantle of the conservative rhetoric that was becoming popular. However, he goes well beyond a simple one-word or even one-sentence explanation. If you examined the presidencies of any other president after him, you might run into a similar debate, but the causes for question about their ideologies were exceptions. For Nixon, the contradictions were the rule. 

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

He doesn't seem insincere to me.  His problem is that he's morphed his voice into a sort of stilted stentorian, debating voice like he's addressing the Roman Senate.  Ted Cruz has basically spent more time talking about Constitutional law and the perils of liberalism than he's talked about anything else.  So, his real personality seems like a put-on.

Marco Rubio has a bit of the same problem.  They each have like 4 vocal intonations that they use like they have a fastball, change-up, curve ball and slider.  So, just vocally, it sounds like a kid playing a xylophone, while a more skilled speaker sounds like someone playing the piano.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Well quite. I think the trouble is we miss the forest for the trees. We see these unquestionably weird and foreign practices in the Middle East (which are carried out by most of the major indigenous religious including the old Jewish and Christian communities) and instinctively associate them with the violent jihadis. which is really a bad way of looking at things - not that I'm defending these patriarchal conservative groups, but they typically aren't the source of jihadism. Indeed why would they? Typically they are loyal to their own ancestral form of heterodox tribal Islam, not some speculative 'worldwide caliphate'. Indeed jihadi terrorists seem to come from the same sorts of sources as other non Islamic radicals: rootless, bored young men of varying incomes. They aren't especially devout normally - levels of religious piety seem to have very little correlation with 'going jihadi' or not. That's why I don't think the root cause of terrorism is as much theological as it is psychological. Obviously atm Islam is a greater catalyst to inspire terrorist acts due to a mixture of being well-funded and being a self-perpetuating phenomenon, but there is very little difference in motive between young jihadists and young, say, Shiv Sana members, or young hardcore nationalists or even gang members. People of a certain type gravitate towards ideologies to fulfill deeper longings.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Most students are studying under the pall of five-figure debt, marginal job prospects at graduation, and parents whose retirement remains totally unsecured. Nearly half of them won't finish their degrees, and increasingly large shares attend "schools" that we wouldn't recognize as institutions of higher learning in the first place. Many are "non-traditional" students, which usually entails balancing one's studies with menial service sector work, child care, or elder care.

All of which means that focusing on incidents like these as the defining characteristic of higher education in the United States is akin to claiming that the problem with race relations is that hip-hop musicians need to pull up their pants. Moreover, it's no coincidence that most of these stories originate from a handful of upper-tier universities and liberal arts colleges - rarefied institutions where the status and career prospects of students remain secure. It's indicative of some kind of national neuroses, to be sure, but it amazes me how this ridiculousness attracts so much attention and inspires such a visceral response when, across most walks of life in the United States, "higher education" has come to resemble nothing so much as Saturn devouring his young.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

The core philosophy economically of the GOP, has been what its allied business interests want. When that was protectionism and infrastructure, it wasn't hard to find socialists to take along for the ride on such a nationalist program. Keep in mind the politics of Germany following its unification as well and remember that the GOP had significant intellectual influence from German economists. Conservative elements allying with Socialism or at least coopting it to keep radicals from tearing the old systems and aristocrats limb from limb, was present in many places.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

On my drive back home, I tried to develop this line of thought further. Conservatives, at least perhaps up until the rise of neoconservatism, held that not only was "our" (the "we" being whomever) culture sacred and in need of protection, but also that it was not transplantable. Culture arose organically, it was argued, and it was useless to attempt to bring aspects of it to others (the irony being that among those cultural institutions safeguarded by conservatives in the West were originally liberal triumphs). The liberal belief was that what some might call an aspect of culture, such as democracy, could, in fact, be instituted in new lands. After all, humans were adaptable, and the spirit or history of a people was not genetic! The central ironies of thought here were:
A. While conservatives considered our own culture vulnerable, other cultures were resilient.
B. While conservatives considered culture "natural", it must still nevertheless be upheld and reinforced by rule of law.
C. While liberals considered culture easily transferable, they did not consider that aspects of other cultures might undermine our own.

Of course, since the rise of right-wing liberalism and neoconservatism in the GOP, many original philosophical assumptions have been abandoned. We can transfer our beliefs to the Near East; cultural institutions are not something that need to be protected (I'm imagining Maggie Thatcher's public ambivalence about the rise of divorce in the UK); laborers in other countries are considered "equal" to workers in our own country to such that it matters not whether one is employed or the other; and so on. The GOP uses both "traditional" aspects of conservatism--"takin' er jobs!" "OMG China!"--along with newer stances--"We can bring democracy to every country!" "Your ability to be left alone is the most important governing priority!"--in its rhetoric to piece together a nominally right-wing coalition.

As for the "illiberal" left--ranging anywhere from paleo-liberals to modern day "SJW's"--[insert attempt at explanatory paragraph].

This was probably all said in a freshman-level political theory reader already and is in no way original. Just trying to piece this together.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Can't people just kill themselves anyway in messier ways with a handgun or a bottle of pills?  If so, how is allowing them to do it with the assistance of a doctor an affront to liberalism?  Wouldn't liberalism say that people have a right to do what they want with their own bodies?

Is your point that you are afraid the government will start pressuring terminal people to kill themselves, I guess?

I have ambivalent feelings about both, but I'm much more in favor of assisted suicide than abortion.  I think assisted suicide is pretty sad for anyone not in extreme pain, but I don't know that there is a big imperative here for the state to take away someone's right to self-determination, like there is with so many other issues.

Liberalism, to me, means a belief that society and government should be built around individuals. That doesn't mean that we should not respect social norms or established standards of morality. Perhaps a libertarian society could justify suicide (of any sort) by saying people have a right to do what they want to themselves, but I don't think that is a valid justification for legalizing assisted suicide under liberalism.

Suicide laws don't prevent people from killing themselves. Suicide laws exist partly to codify established social norms. When someone tells you that they want to end their life, social norms demand that you protect that person, not volunteer to clean up the mess. The government legalizing assisted suicide sets a precedent, both in law and morality, that the destruction of human life is okay under certain circumstances, and that the government has the right to define those conditions. I think that is a very dangerous precedent to set.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

On what possible grounds is this the correct thread for that post?

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

The only possible end to bipartisan politics in the UK is the end of FPTP. See : USA.

Or Canada. Oh, wait...

FPTP + Polarized political culture. Canada is not as polarized as the US or UK (regionalism is too strong).

Ok. A little lecture on political science is in order, methinks

1. Duverger's law (DL). An empirical regularity that says that in places with FPTP electoral systems there will be at most two major political forces, at least "in a long run". Originally formulated based on the experience of, primarily US and UK, though back at the time it seemed to describe Canada pretty well as well. In fact, even India did not do too badly for a long time (that is where the at most part was relevant). The things changed.

2. Canada. That strange country that has had pretty much a stable 4-party system for quite some time, being a superficial embarassment of the DL. One of those parties is regional, of course, but 3 other parties compete in multiple regions.

3. India. A most strange FPTP democracy where a government coalition, on occasion include some 20 parties, with another 20 in opposition.

4. Clarification of Duverger's Law: it only applies election by election, and each parliamentary constituency is a separate election for such purposes. The idea here is that there may only be two serious candidates in a particular district, but that the party pairings might vary district by district. There is a further exception postulated: if it is not clear who are the two front-runners, one might get a 3-way split, but this is an unstable set of affairs. So, either the third guy is very close to the second, or very far behind - with anything inbetween being unlikely.

5. At this point, the general belief is that US is a two-party country because in addition to the FPTP for congress it has also the winner-take-all executive presidency (not quite FPTP, but close enough). So, DL applies nationwide and district by district, creating a particularly strong Duvergerian force. The reason I call it a "belief" is that US is pretty much the only such country, which is both presidential and FPTP, so proper testing of this belief is impossible.

6. There is a somewhat mixed, but, generally favorable, evidence for the district-by-district DL elsewhere. So, perhaps, we should take it as a decent description of reality. But the nationwide version is, obviously, not true.

7. Of course, this implies that the past outcomes in the UK, Canada, etc. were more of an artifact of a fairly accidental division of nations into two political camps, both uniformly present nationwide: Conservatives and Liberals (or, later, Labour in the UK). Notably, this division is not coming from DL - it is a completely different story. At some point for, whatever reason, Canada lost that geographic uniformity, replacing it with multiple regional bipartidisms. Note, that there is no theory here why it was one way, and why it changed.

8. Britain for a long time seemed to retain the nationwide bipartidism, though in recent years it has been increasingly restricted to England. One could dismiss a recent surge of LibDems as a "short-term"anomaly". Perhaps.

9. The problem is that we still have no explanation for that geographic uniformity. It is not implied by DL. Claiming it is "polarized culture" just gives it a name, but does not explain it. Nor does it, really, allow for predictions.

10. There is nothing in the systemic structure of British politics that forces geographically uniform bipartidism - Scotland and Wales illustrate this pretty well.  Claiming it is there forever is not really based on any solid reasoning.

11. Furthermore, every bipartidism (local or national) is not enshrined in politics for enternity. If new issues arise, an old party may die, a new one may be born. Labs replacing Libs in the UK is a great example. There can be also temporary upheaval where such a replacement attempt is abortive: if it is not clear, who is the second and who is the third, DL logic suggests possible short-term multipartidism.

12. One thing that might promote such changes is an emergence of a new set of issues, or some other major shock to the political system. But, of course, England has not had any major shocks recently. And, in any case, it is simply polarized... Sorry, I have just stopped being fully serious.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

First I thought BRTD was talking about the collapse of White "ethnic" culture into a general or regional (White) American identity, and I was like "okay that's a interesting discussion", then I found out he was talking about a general collapse of a collective American cultural identity and tradition, and my opinion changed to "that's the stupidest thing I have heard this month".

No BRTD the collective culture is not becoming annihilated, in fact the creation of mass media and standardised education have resulted in it becoming less heterogene. A author archetypes can through mass education become universal among a population, while mass media have allowed the spread of things like Black Friday or St. Patricks day.

That's kind of point. Mass media means people are no longer locked into a culture they are born into. They're free to select and associate with aspects of others they want to and simply choose whatever they like best. Your heritage becomes a non-factor.

I think a major problem here is that you may be the least cosmopolitan person on this board (no insult), you doesn't seem to get what makes up culture, likely because you belong to the cultural dominant culture not just in USA but also in the world. As such you have a very superficial understanding of what makes up culture. As example when I meet a Arab I don't look him into his eyes or show him the soles of my feet, not unless I want to insult him, when I meet a Dane I don't know at a bus stop, I don't talk to him no matter how long we wait side by side, unless I have a impersonal question to him ("have that or that bus arrived", do you know what bus I have to shift to and where to get to some specific place" etc), or to complain over the weather (the social acceptable smalltalk). When I go into the bus I don't sit down beside a person if there's still empty seats, where I can avoid sitting down next to a person, I don't talk in the bus and try my best to ignore everyone around me, unless of course I meet someone I know, this is seen as the proper behaviour. If I for example was a Turk I would sit down next to a person, and it would be impolite not to make small talk.

All that is make up real culture, running around playing Ingress, listening to specific kind of music or go into a specific a specific chuch are not usual part of a culture, that's part of a subculture. 

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Not only is that not properly a Good Post, it's not even a Simple Truth because it's based on a possibly-willful misunderstanding of what CrabCake meant.

It's also in incredibly poor taste to enshrine these sorts of religious insults as Good Posts and Simple Truths, especially completely boilerplate insults that read like something one of the Paisleys might say at a No Popery rally. I wouldn't put a post uncreatively attacking hipster Christianity, or Pentecostalism, or some other religion that I don't like but isn't objectively monstrous, in one of these threads. Because that actually kind of wounds people, you know?

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Not only is that not properly a Good Post, it's not even a Simple Truth because it's based on a possibly-willful misunderstanding of what CrabCake meant.

It's also in incredibly poor taste to enshrine these sorts of religious insults as Good Posts and Simple Truths, especially completely boilerplate insults that read like something one of the Paisleys might say at a No Popery rally. I wouldn't put a post uncreatively attacking hipster Christianity, or Pentecostalism, or some other religion that I don't like but isn't objectively monstrous, in one of these threads. Because that actually kind of wounds people, you know?

I get that attitude in that post can be seen as wounding, but it's also a ugly truth, I'm often the first to defend Catholicism, which I in general see as a force of good, but Catholicism is best in a plural world, when it gain  to much power and prestige, it hides things, which should not be hidden (yes I'm talking about the pedophilia) and let it fester, until we see something like this. When the Church get secular power it also behave quite horrible (see Magdalene laundries,). Which is why I think that Luther may have been the second best thing which ever happened to the Catholic Church (after Paulus), while the third was the Italian conquest ofg the Papal States, he removed secular power from the Church forced it to reform itself and develop into a institution faith and moral, rather than one of secular power.

Oh! Okay, yeah, in that context your post makes perfect sense (and is close to the perception of the role of Catholicism that I got after taking a series of mandatory courses on Christian history last year).

What's upsetting though isn't really the sentiment itself so much as the fact that BRTD, who certainly wouldn't have seen this nuance, was himself enough of a No Popery hack to goldmine the post without seeing said nuance.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Not only is that not properly a Good Post, it's not even a Simple Truth because it's based on a possibly-willful misunderstanding of what CrabCake meant.

It's also in incredibly poor taste to enshrine these sorts of religious insults as Good Posts and Simple Truths, especially completely boilerplate insults that read like something one of the Paisleys might say at a No Popery rally. I wouldn't put a post uncreatively attacking hipster Christianity, or Pentecostalism, or some other religion that I don't like but isn't objectively monstrous, in one of these threads. Because that actually kind of wounds people, you know?

You should see what Straha is saying about hipster Christianity on AAD on a forum I moderate.

How wounded am I? I haven't deleted a single one of his posts.

Good for you. You're either thicker-skinned than most people I know (in which case, sincerely, good for you) or don't really have your religion as too central a part of your little world after all.

Also I don't associate comments like that with Paisley types because I'd most likely hear it from someone in the scene or on some progressive activist forum.

Good for you.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Genuinely curious: Does God need or want anybody to fight that battle, according to these people? If so, whom?

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I think there's a middle ground between aggressive hypersensitivity and complete passivity, but maybe that means I'm not 'with it' enough.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Labor theory of value is not a Marxist theory. It goes back to, at least, Adam Smith and was the mainstay of pretty much every classical economic theory between Smith and Marx. In this sense, Marxism is simply a somewhat conservative economic theory for its age: labor theory is not a Marxist invention in any sense ("surplus value", on the other hand, was a key Marxist idea - but that is something else).

The major problem with labor, or any other, theory of value was always finding a consistent definition of value. Marx was aware of inconsistencies in Smith, etc., and was trying to deal with them. Post-Marx, some of his followers were able to produce, at least, a logically consistent version: unfortunately, the clearer they worked it out, the more obvious arbitrariness of using labor, rather than anything else, was becoming.

In parallel, many economists back in the 19th century decided to abandon, as a dead end, the search for any objective value, and replaced it with a subjective value notion: which, to avoid confusion, they called utility. Neoclassical economists (such as Marshall), thought of it as an actual measure of satisfaction, a "psychic utility". That approach has been further replaced in mainstream economic theory by the revealed preference approach (to a degree derived from the old Austrian school), in which even the subjective utility is but a mathematical tool, a convenient representation of ordinal preference, which, in turn, are revealed through actions. Finally, many of the modern approaches to decision theory go beyond even that, dealing with models which cannot be represented by means of utility maximization at all. in modern discussion of economics, value, in the sense in which it had been used 150 years ago by classical economists, is simply not a notion that anybody considers. This is not, really, about labor: it is value that the problem.

In any case, to sum up, labor theory of value was, in its time, a significan attempt at defining objective worth of things. It long predates Marx: if anything, Marx was very unoriginal in sticking to it. Eventually, economists did not so much abandon the labor theory of value specifically, as the question this theory was supposed to answer. These days no (non-Marxist - and even many a Marxist) economist would even think of some sort of objective "worth" of goods, which could be called "value".

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

One must wonder what they plan to release week(s) before the election. That shouldn't be ruled out. My money is on them releasing some real dirt sometime in late October. IF there is more damaging material from that hack, it could very well tank this election for Democrats if used right.

It's hard for me to fully express how disappointed I am in Clinton, Obama and the DNC in general:

1. Clinton knew she had huge amounts of baggage and still ran, putting us in this spot. The party never should have bowed to her, given her liabilities as a candidate.

2. Obama knew DWS was a monstrosity and a disaster waiting to happen, and he refused to force her out because he didn't want to deal with the negative press. Now look where we are. He cares so much about his legacy and yet his inept leadership of the party has put even that in danger now. I like Obama on numerous levels, but his stewardship of the Democratic party has been awful and he deserves a lot of blame for keeping Debbie on well past the average tenure of DNC chairs.

3. The DNC should have had better security on their network, and yet again proves that high-risk organizations and the old, technologically-inept leaders are utterly incapable of understanding how enormous the dangers of being hacked are. Further, proper DNC leadership should have shut down these little meddling conversations and kept the party strictly neutral. I don't think anything was rigged like people have whined about, but the emails reveal conversations and ideas that never should have happened.

Thanks Obama!

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I read in some American media that Russian trolls are paid 45,000 roubles a month for participation in Amrican  social networks. I have been active on this forum since the beginning of April. So I  could have earned 4*45,000 = 180,000 roubles. Lots of money. Enough to travel to the USA and back.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=243808