this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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the_dunk_tank

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It's the dunk tank.

This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.

Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.

Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.

Rule 3: No sectarianism.

Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome

Rule 5: No ableism of any kind (that includes stuff like libt*rd)

Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.

Rule 7: Do not individually target other instances' admins or moderators.

Rule 8: The subject of a post cannot be low hanging fruit, that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views. Comments/Posts made on other instances that are accessible from hexbear are an exception to this. Posts that do not meet this requirement can be posted to !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml

Rule 9: if you post ironic rage bait im going to make a personal visit to your house to make sure you never make this mistake again

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[–] kristina@hexbear.net 80 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Priest of capitalism has a take on reality

[–] borlax@hexbear.net 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Holy shit, I have never heard an economist referred to like that. Very apt.

[–] culpritus@hexbear.net 24 points 1 year ago

If you want to deep dive of capitalist occult analysis: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/

[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 79 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Really feeling the "high priests of capitalism" on this one

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 38 points 1 year ago

Biblically accurate economists

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 19 points 1 year ago

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 69 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Ok, so this guy's account history is fucking amazing, just look at this absolute banger:

Orthodox economic practices have existed for millennia, but the concept of "capitalism" was invented in the 1840s by the same people who claimed to have invented a viable alternative.

Think of it like the word "cisgender" that was invented by people advocating something abnormal, without wanting to acknowledge that the alternative is the norm.

galaxy-brain

[–] PaulSmackage@hexbear.net 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Why do so many Russians grow their own food?"

Also, half of his posts seem to be about anti-semitism, but then he asks if people in Russia have conspiracy theories specifically about Jews, so i'm thinking projection

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You need to understand that everything bad that has ever happened was because of Russia

[–] PaulSmackage@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago

They don't want you to know this, but you know the Sea Peoples? Yeah, well their army ran off of shashlik and Stoli, if you know what i mean.

[–] GalaxyBrain@hexbear.net 32 points 1 year ago

Millenia? Really? This guy just thinks capitalism is the exchange of goods

economics is when there is money. imagine you're on a desert island and you have 5 crabs. another guy has 3 palm trees. that's economics, actually.

[–] davel@hexbear.net 19 points 1 year ago

Never go full Dunning–Kruger.

[–] FuckyWucky@hexbear.net 65 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yea classical econ is clearly not pseudoscience with recessions happening every couple of years

[–] Egon@hexbear.net 53 points 1 year ago

Economists have successfully predicted 9 out of the last 5 recessions

[–] oregoncom@hexbear.net 51 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Half of all economics experiments can not be replicated. If you go to their forums like ejmr you will realize these people are the dumbest dipshits alive. Even they themselves don't believe the bullshit they're peddling.

[–] TheCaconym@hexbear.net 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you go to their forums like ejmr

I went and checked this place out quickly and in roughly two minutes I managed to come across antisemitism, racism, support for genocide, and some sort of fake university grifters. Amazing.

[–] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A community full of money-grubbing gluttons that think ethics are for the weak and regularly plot how to sucker people into doing hard work for them, pay them nothing, so they never have to lift a finger in their lives.

Also thinks that all the environmental damage is worth it to respect 'property rights'

"Hey everyone, I just came up with a joke about how da jooz are greedy penny-pinchers!"

Do anglos not realize that they embody almost every antisemitic stereotype out there? /Pol/ is nothing but mental masturbation about how white people will dominate the earth just because they can.

[–] RollaD20@hexbear.net 20 points 1 year ago

Do anglos not realize that they embody almost every antisemitic stereotype out there?

Hilarious how even this is something Marx wrote about in 1844

[–] IzyaKatzmann@hexbear.net 19 points 1 year ago

It was so much worse than I imagined

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[–] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Reddit moment.

The right "fucking loves economics" the same way they say we "fucking love science".

[–] star_wraith@hexbear.net 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

They love it because even though neoclassical economics was discredited nearly a century ago during the Great Depression, it still lives on as conservatives’ understanding of what “economics” is. But all they do is argue from pseudo-psychological first principles like “people are always selfish” or “people always maximize their utility” and try and construct an entire reductive science around that, wholly unconstrained by empirical evidence. And that science conveniently fits in with their conservative political ideas like “giving poor people money will only be wasted”.

Meanwhile Marxian economics is the opposite. The idea isn’t to create “first principles” and try and determine everything from that. It’s overdeterministic. The point isn’t to be able to explain every aspect of the economy like why a basketball autographed by an NBA star is worth more a normal basketball when the socially necessary labor time of both is the same (we actually can, but that’s beside the point). Marxian economics tries to explain the broader trends like commodity production but is flexible enough and open to there being exceptions to the rules.

If you are involved with a real science like physics, you will understand why the first (conservative neoclassical economics) is not a science and the second (Marxian economics) is.

[–] davel@hexbear.net 24 points 1 year ago

neoclassical economics was discredited nearly a century ago during the Great Depression

And they’ve replaced it with neoliberal economics, which is even wronger.

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 18 points 1 year ago

Weirdly enough I feel like physics and Marx should attract similar people. Physics is about discovering the fundamental laws underlying seemingly disparate phenomena. The average physicist gets a half chubb talking about the unification of electricity and magnetism as a single force. Why shouldn’t every physicist also read about commodity fetishism and the reproduction of an inverted ideology in which social relations between humans appear as relations among things? It’s beautifully elegant.

[–] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's basically social science infused with anti-western Marxist pseudoscience, minus economics because Marxist economic propaganda has been discredited beyond repair

Lol. Lmao even

[–] TraschcanOfIdeology@hexbear.net 33 points 1 year ago

Someone tell this to my sociology professor who used sociology as a proxy for market research.

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is the most reddit comment I've ever seen

Holy fuck, this part especially is just chefs-kiss

the entire subject of sociology is nothing more than a conduit for Kremlin propaganda

B you live like this?

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[–] CarmineCatboy@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

just to be clear. economy is a social science.

[–] usernamesaredifficul@hexbear.net 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

except what he's doing isn't science

[–] CarmineCatboy@hexbear.net 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

and it's not economics either.

it's also anti-social

he thinks social science and sociology are different things i think. like sociology is when you do social science, but also you hate america.

He doesn't live in a society marx-joker

[–] mayo_cider@hexbear.net 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Funnily enough in my experience if you talk to anyone in academia outside of econ, it's the first field anyone makes fun of (because in it's current state it's not a serious field of study)

Even the STEM assholes I've met usually take sociology at least just as or more seriously than economics (at least as a major, they still believe in their own investment strategies)

[–] IzyaKatzmann@hexbear.net 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's the extreme rigour with which they perceive themselves, and the sentiment I've always seen of, "I know how the world works, it's money"

I don't see the need for the condescension. My background was in biology, I spoke to another friend about how competition is inefficient and cooperation is more fruitful from an ecological (read: natural science) standpoint. And he started to debate me, my claims are empirical, they don't rely on axioms on what human nature is as argued by philosophers of old (not hating on them, it's the superficial interpretation some econfolk seem to have which is what I find erroneous) and what it means to be rational. I did not bother to try and explain, the Um, akshully they came at me with was so off-putting.

[–] star_wraith@hexbear.net 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's the extreme rigour with which they perceive themselves

To get into any econ PhD program essentially requires a math degree. Which is funny because afaik the only other programs that might require that much math are like, physics and math itself.

They then proceed to develop all these intense models, which is what they say the math is needed for. And yeah, sure, the models themselves are complex. But they’re all bullshit. It’s like building some quantitively rigorous model that “proves” intelligent design or that climate change is a hoax. Just because you use a lot of high level math doesn’t mean you’re actually using that math in a correct or useful way.

[–] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 11 points 1 year ago

Epicycle models of the solar system were also mathematically complex; at least those approximated real-world patterns.

[–] davel@hexbear.net 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

CMV: No one has morebrainworms than those with Western economics degrees.

[–] the_itsb@hexbear.net 34 points 1 year ago

from the snippet in the original post, emphasis mine:

In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Levy described as “unprecedented killing”. The ratio is significantly higher than the civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead.

“The broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it,” Levy concluded. “The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand.”

This reads to me less like, "so we should definitely stop bombing them ASAP to mitigate that threat!" and much more like, "so we would probably just go ahead and kill them all to eliminate that threat," especially considering it was published in Haaretz.

also, the dude we're supposed to be dunking on is a stinky poopoo head with pennies for brains and a shriveled little heart that resembles a dirty wad of crumpled cash

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 33 points 1 year ago

Suffer not a Chicago Boy to live! jesus-cleanse

[–] commiecapybara@hexbear.net 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have an econ degree

Could have stopped right there

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 19 points 1 year ago

Should have

[–] Llituro@hexbear.net 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I know exactly one good person with an econ degree, and he does fraud watch for his state's tax office.

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[–] borlax@hexbear.net 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My favorite part is that no one asked the car dealership owner with an econ degree to chime in. No one every asks them to chime in.

[–] star_wraith@hexbear.net 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This thread reminded me of a joke my old econ prof told me. He was libertarian and so much of what he taught me I later found out was crap. BUT, the dude had a decent, self-deprecating sense of humor.

A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stuck on a desert island when they come across an unopened can of beans. They all have a discussion on how to open it.

The physicist says “I believe I can calculate the precise height from which we could drop the can where the force would be just enough to weaken it. From there, I can build a sort of tourniquet from vines that will gently pop open the top.”

The chemist then says “That may work. But I’ve been observing the various chemical reactions going on in that cave over there. I believe I could gather just the right mix of chemicals in there that would dissolve the can lid enough for us to get the beans out. Yet none of these chemicals would be toxic to us.”

Finally, the economist chimes in “Okay… assume we have a can opener…”

[–] MineDayOff@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait till they find out what classes cops have to take in college before they get to criminal justice. It's sociology.

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[–] LenonLemonLenin@hexbear.net 14 points 1 year ago

Dude has clearly not heard of structural-functionalism then

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