@Ithillid , I have a question.
What would we have to do, or what could we have done, to create a situation in which we could have a grant that gets us a Capital Goods trickle?
I'm curious.
The bar is so low it touches ground.
And yet, people trip over it while attempting to pass over it.
By market I mean system of distribution where it matters more if you have money, then if you have need.
Under a sufficiently aggressive wealth-redistributing government that provides universal income, the desires the market is incentivized to fulfill will tend to converge towards "needs first, widespread optional desires second, narrow optional desires third."
The core objective of the market socialist project would necessarily be to force the market to converge on this condition, by removing concentrations of wealth, and by removing any means of
obtaining wealth that do not involve genuinely catering to a widespread need.
It matters little if a famous football player is overpaid because there are fifty million people each willing to spend one dollar a year to keep him working. It matters much more if a corporate lobbyist is overpaid because there is
ONE person willing to spend
merely five million dollars a year to keep him working.
My assertion: if those who think in bigoted ways, and who have spent decades with bigoted thought-modes and worldviews were to be placed in a situation where those beliefs were challenged in a way that they can not avoid or disregard then one of two main things would happen:
1. Their minds would break, or
2. They will compartmentalise for a while, and eventually they will (without noticing it happening) wake up one day and realise that they believe 'previous outgroup has many different types of people' and will extend to that outgroup a similar level of charitable assumptions that the bigot extended to their ingroup.
Example: an islamophobe is put next to a muslim family in a new arcology and due to circumstances they interact over time. Years later the bigot wakes up and realises that their neighbours are just people trying to live their lives and also they work extra shifts the sonic fencing factories.
My read of your your post is that it treats at bigotry as if it is foundational. I assert that bigotry is a result/expression of something more fundamental, and that if circumstance were changed so that a person's bigotry against any given outgroup were to be undermined, that person who is used to looking at the world in that way will find a new outgroup.
Hrrrrm. That's a fair point. The same person who would have been in the Klan in the American Deep South will, if he is evacuated to a Blue Zone and living with a racially mixed community for ten years until the racial prejudices wear down under the sheer weight of society around him, may well relax on
that prejudice, only to find a new one.
So. The newness of the yellow/blue zone divide resulted in it being marginally harder to get people to passively accept/not notice anti yellow zone bigotry, sure.
I assert that with NoD attacks, and where the recruitment base is, and how the GDI approached yellow zones before this quest started, that this 'new well' is currently, after the 'duration of the average adult's lifetime', about 60-95% as impactful as our IRL 'deep wells'.
Syncretism/transference is thing, and it's easy when the actual point is to have an easily conceptualise 'group' to blame, and I think what group a given bigot hates is (over the course of a few years) influenced by if that person feels like they might be able to take actions that 'stop'/'frustrate'/harm who they see as foes.[1]
Basically; a large portion of Institute First supporters are going to feel more strongly about yellow zoners than they do about Nod/Kane.
Because they don't really feel like they can do anything about Kane, and they don't think Kane and Nod's core membership are really "their problem," but they
do see the Yellow Zoners as a group that they can do something about, or as the 'sheeple, evil subvariant' who give Kane his power in the first place?
You do have a good point, here and overall.
Although I think you kind of missed what I was getting at, which may well be my fault in the first place. What I was trying to get at was that I don't expect
all of GDI society to be as passively cooperative in promoting Initiative First's agenda as would be the case in a world where the Blue/Yellow Zone divide had existed for a hundred years and there were widespread rumors equivalent to the "race science" in our own history and so on.
It's not about the motivations of Initiative First's actual core supporters, it's about their potential for expansion. I think most Blue Zoners only went along with policies that excluded the Yellow Zones in the wake of Tib War Two because the world had come very close to ending, and they were shocked and in a bunker mentality. The people who for whatever reason
must be bigots to answer whatever demons drive them? They found a new way to be bigoted in the form of the Blue/Yellow divide. But I think a lot of people just tacitly accepted "we have to concentrate on protecting what we've got" as a valid narrative, which Ozawa and his ilk presumably managed to promote with some success. And they never caught the weakened version of the Blue/Yellow bigotry themselves.
But Ozawa and friends made this happen (and, probably, co-opted the Hawk Party) by promoting propaganda that connected "exclude the Yellow Zoners" and "this is what we need to be safe," in a population that craved safety and strength regardless of whether it was activated by bigotry or not.
With Granger opening up a path to security and strength that
includes the Yellow Zones, I think IF will find it hard to win many more supporters purely on the strength of resentment against good things happening in the Yellow Zones.
ftfy
The market is a tool/framework. A business is a tool. What FMP supporters care about is ownership, the power that comes from that, and how that power might be bent towards accumulating more power.
The average Market Socialist voter is more likely to be 'pro business' in idealised terms, than any given FMP voter.
Fact: Nothing is forever.
People who advocate for Market Socialism as system; for view it as their actual 'end-goal', as a thing to aim for and a system worth maintaining because they believe it to be the best system possible for us confuse me.
----
As someone who does not like competitive business, our species' (general) current conception of "ownership", or when people/individuals have power over others, fuck appeasing the FMP for the sake of appeasing them.
I'd say they can suck a bag of dicks, but a lot of people like sucking dicks so: no! The FMP can't have any dick bags. Those go to the non-FMP people that want them.
1) Advocates for market socialism generally don't believe that there is a
practical condition of affairs in which a complex economy can be organized without a market, except at grave loss of efficiency. The proposition appears to be that on the one hand, by effectively abolishing individual ownership of the means of production, one can eliminate the vast majority of oppression that comes from having a market on the grounds that the oppression comes from the ownership, not from the market. And on the other hand, that
economic inefficiency can itself be a form of oppression, in that people can be in effect "oppressed" by the circumstances of material scarcity just as surely as they can be oppressed by being a wage-laborer. And, furthermore, they may argue that the practical realistic alternative to market socialism (assuming private capitalism is off the table) is a command economy, which then becomes state capitalism and replicates many of the abuses of the capitalist system in some form, as the USSR demonstrated.
2) I don't think there's anyone actually participating here who desires to appease the FMP for its own sake. However, the idea of confusing and weakening their support structure by creating a viable alternative that can do what they
say they want without actually pursuing their agenda?
That is widely appealing. Beat the bastards at their own game. And indeed
we did that, we did
that exact thing and that is why the FMP calved off a giant party of market socialists and faded into a weak opposition fringe. Because the market socialists are the former members of the FMP who cared more about the FMP's nominal goals than about laissez-faire capitalist ideology. As such, they are mostly comfortable with Treasury existing as it is now, and are quite comfortable with megacorporations and billionaires
not existing... But they may wish to slightly alter Treasury's policies to transition Treasury to act more in the role of oversight for the economy, and less in the role of managing it. Notably the Market Socialists are not capitalism's friend, though they may not be
Treasury's friend at all times.
3) The great majority of people who would like
one don't want
a whole bagful, I think. While it is not a taste I share, so I can't comment from personal knowledge, I imagine that a bagful would be an embarrassment of riches. And, I suppose, as per my comments to Shard, arguably something to be subject to progressive taxation...
