The landlord fucking charged me a cleaning fee for the sheet left on the bedbug infested mattress

this specific image is good and upsets that actually

What?

the fact this is downvoted while a meme that explicitly just dunks on anarchists without any real critique to it is just sad

I don’t think there’s any meaningful distinction that’s reliable. The most fucked up goals do seem to be mostly external, though. Toxic things like success aren’t things people chase because they’ve developed an irrational love of being successful, but because they’re physically punished and socially ostracized for not being that.

In other words, the most harmful desires aren’t desires anyone actually has, but impossible goals they think they should want but don’t even pretend to want in reality.

People want to do art. Nobody actually wants to be a successful businessman, though. They want all the stuff that comes from being a successful businessman but being a successful businessman is actually universally perceived as quite shitty and unenjoyable in reality.

I looked up Marcuse and on a really primitive reading of his Wikipedia article, while I disagree with his negative views of the USSR, his views seem to be way more in line with reality than Ted’s

It’s not pathologizing, quite the opposite, OP is saying that the industry is necessary because a normal human behavior exists that the constant drive for commodity production interrupts

Capitalism doesn’t cause differences, it makes behavior that isn’t strictly in line with the norm much more dangerous to the person having it.

I find it fascinating how the Unabomber and, to an extent, anyone who advocates weird, “every society not built on killing and eating is bad” worldviews, they can see this concept of surrogate goals but immediately jump to invalidating them. What makes the desire to become the best rock thrower in the world any more valid than the desire to survive? More people certainly want the latter, but in the absence of a god or higher power to give us some sort of direction, these surrogate goals are as equally valid as any human endeavor ever ventured upon.

What I suggest seems superficially preposterous, I mean, anyone can tell that not starving is more important than becoming the best rock thrower. But that’s the thing- we only think that because the majority of people do not want to starve. Both the desire to throw rocks and the desire to eat are rooted in our biology, one is just more popular and therefore well supported (and, to be clear, should be supported, I think not starving is more important than rock throwing too)

In fact, most of this is pretty much just nonsense. Most “surrogate” desires never reach the level of toxicity or self harm that exists today in corporate culture or even religion.

Also art is not a fake desire ffs

I would go as far as suggesting that these supposedly fake desires only exist or become truly fake when people are forced to submit to them. When someone is pursuing a “surrogate” or supposedly fake desire without being forced to by conditions or the current mode of production, they’re usually pretty content with it, or experience it as an enjoyable vibe rather than a painful goal, therefore something that can be truly satisfied, like eating or sleep. See art communities for this. There are examples of toxic behavior and attitudes in art communities but they always seem to coincide with a desire to commodify one’s art or as a side effect or the idea of productivity.

There are a lot of examples of things in Capital which absolutely do not need so many paragraphs to explain them.

I’m used to everything pro-Ukraine on this instance being downvoted to hell. Everyone who supports Russia is being downvoted instead. What is going on?

Anti-capitalism is technically a single issue movement.

I’ve always been supportive of publicly funded dating apps, it would open up a whole series of dating app maintainer jobs and that would be objectively the funniest

We have to be there, proving to these people who are becoming alienated that our alternative works. Otherwise, they’ll fall to despair or fascism. I believe that the principle of mutual aid is one thing that anarchists got objectively right.

Nothing you’ve said here is something I was arguing against. There’s a huge difference between mathematically calculating a good labor economy and basing an entire moral system on arbitrary calculations. Labor hours are concrete, “happiness” isn’t.

Also I agree that landlords suck and that was the point of what I was saying with the example. That a statement as nonsensical as “landlords good actually” can be justified with mathematical utilitarianism because of it’s inherently arbitrary nature

The objective of most ethics isn’t to “do what results in the best world”. What makes up a “best world” is already complicated enough by itself to have generated entirely different schools of thought. And whether that’s a worthwhile goal is just as complex

The refutation of utilitarianism is that happiness cannot be measured. Neither can the value of a human life.

The entirety of “utilitarianism” as it is currently practiced relies on the idea that you can, and, because of the lack of concrete numbers for these things, you can literally argue for anything you want with it.

For instance, someone could say that working one hour as a landlord is more painful than working for ten hours as a tenant, because the landlord is less used to working, so landlord work hour = -20 happiness units and prole work hour = -3 happiness units, and then go on to conclude that a worker working for 5 hours is justifiable if it prevents a landlord from working for 1 hour. The problem with this is that everything I just said was entirely made up (and the premise is blatantly false), and the units themselves are never defined, not even in actual examples from self-described utilitarians, fundamentally meaning that this nonsense, outright reactionary take I just used as an example of the flaw of mathematical utilitarian thinking, is exactly as valid as every other equation anyone has done to calculate utilitarianism. The entire concept of calculating happiness is vague nonsense and can only make sense in our commodified world where we’ve reduced everything down to a value.

Utilitarianism sort of works as a general principle, but even then, none of this is getting in to the numerous different kinds of utilitarianism that also argue for entirety different actions at different times, and even entirely different premises

IQ is basically an ableist conspiracy theory (or so I’ve heard), but otherwise I agree

But a significant majority of that evil and injustice is perpetrated by the bourgoisie, giving weight to the idea that our philosophical outlook has been greatly darkened by capitalism

All of these are, like you said, pretty hard to answer, except for

2 b. Is objective meaning the same as objective truth or objective knowledge?

No. Objective meaning refers to the idea of objectively correct goals to life. “Meaning of life”. This can’t exist unless there is a god or designer that created the universe