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What is it about the whole of market-based society that tries to force us into being normal, when the reality is that all of us are distinctly different in certain ways, and we feel stress because of this pressure brought to bear on us to be normal?

The man is arguing against markets because they force us all to be the same, have the same?

Eh?

40 thoughts on “Umm”

  1. He’s definitely going for the “wise old sage” persona.

    “I’m so wise and just and kind and patient and virtuous and clever. I live above the petty squabbles of a tawdry world. Listen to me, children, as I generously dispense my wisdom”.

    Vomit inducing when you know the vile little man for what he really is.

  2. jeff is tearing murphy a new one on the QE thread.. murphy misses the point WE is about manipulating interest rates not pure money printing.

    i suggest we get on there and lend our support

  3. The Meissen Bison

    What is it about the whole of market-based society that tries to force us into being normal?

    If that is the objective of a “market-based society”, then it will have to mark Captain Potato down as a signal failure.

  4. It sheds new light on Spud’s incompetence that he thinks “normal” is a synonym for “conformist.”

  5. Doesn’t he usually complain that the market gives too many choices, too many options? Especially when they don’t agree with his prescriptions?
    Didn’t he once complain about too many brands of deodorant or something?

  6. @jimmers – he did complain that Dominoes had too many pizza toppings on offer. Many on the list were ones he’d never choose.

  7. You’re not normal.

    Nor am I.

    I’d have to say that that statement is hard to argue with. Not many of us have devoted our lives to acting on behalf of evil in the same fashion. It’s hard to know many that would feel as comfortable with it as he does. Definitely not normal

    And that’s good for both of us. Because, frankly, we don’t want to be normal. We want to stand out from a crowd. We want to be different. We want to be identifiable. That’s called having character. And why not? Doesn’t everybody want to have a little bit of themselves to display to others?

    So is wanting to keep more of one’s own resource or perhaps reduce the size and scope of the state ‘having character’ or are we dastardly ‘Far right’ ‘neoliberals’ who need to be opposed?

    So why then is society so determined that we should be normal?

    I’d argue that the likes of DIE and Big Trans are saying the exact opposite – you need to be different and if you do you will get preferential treatment in housing and the job market and even under the law. There’s now 273 Genders and 700 personal pronouns in use – is that ‘determination that we should be normal’?

    They advertise as if there are stereotypical people.

    Perhaps he has been watching ‘Bill Hicks on Marketing’ and is trying to capture that spirit?

    They sell us products as if we all want to look the same. Just watch fashion and you’ll see what I mean.

    Whereas under the Courageous state the state will determine what your existing clothing inventory is and will redistribute it and allocate it accordingly?

    What is it about the whole of market-based society that tries to force us into being normal, when the reality is that all of us are distinctly different in certain ways, and we feel stress because of this pressure brought to bear on us to be normal?

    If he looked at the most significant real world example of a ‘Non Market based’ society (North Korea) then I think he’d see the drive to uniformity is far, far greater – to the point forgetting to wear a pin with one of the leaders could land your entire family in jail. However, I am guessing he’d be fine with that as he envisages himself in the role of one of the Kims.

    As the peerless Andrew C points out – these videos are genuinely nauseating, to the point where they really ought to be censored as a genuine threat to people’s well being. I am tempted to report them to Youtube tbh.

  8. “murphy misses the point WE is about manipulating interest rates not pure money printing.”

    So all that QE during covid was just to suppress interest rates, and nothing whatsoever to do with the State’s need for stupendous amounts of cash to pay half the country to do nothing for a year or so?

  9. What is it about the whole of market-based society that tries to force us into being normal,
    That’s not even logical. The market will deliver what most people want. But it will also deliver what minorities want if there’s a profit in it. Since there’s often more profit in supplying minority needs, suppliers are constantly looking round for minority needs need satisfying. You can’t consider the market without the profit motive. It’s why it exists.
    And he totally gets fashion wrong. Fashions start by some individual trying to be different. People like it & copy it. If it’s popular enough, then the mass market will pick it up & make it available to everyone. But everyone is buying it because they want to be different from the people who haven’t. And then the cycle repeats with some individual wanting to be different.
    There’s a long history in the fashion business of manufacturers trying to create trends. Mostly unsuccessfully. That’s what the fashion shows are about. About 95% of what’s shown won’t catch on for the mass market. Or any market. Often what does catch on comes off the street.

  10. The Meissen Bison

    True enough. If there’s an identifiable market segment then sooner or later someone will cater for it but Capt. Potato suspects that there’s an element of compulsion in this process rather than a desire to make profit. Compulsion is something over which he would seek a monopoly.

    When it comes to niche, how about <a href="https://www.diversityinadvertising.co.uk/"<this for niche?

    (People with a nervous disposition or delicate digestion are advised not to follow the link)

  11. @TMB
    The car market behaves like that. Because it’s so capital intensive & the necessity of regulatory compliance, you get the cars manufactures want to produce. Hence the ghastly SUVs. Although one notes Volvo seem to be reviving the estate. Not before time.

  12. Dennis: Oppressor, Warmonger, Capitalist and Consumer of Petroleum Products

    Murphy claims to be horrified by the lack of choice available in a market based society. This is a complete lie. What actually horrifies him is that markets provide choices. He’s all about coercion and compulsion. In Murphy’s ideal world there is no freedom of choice: The state either guides, or failing that, compels the individual into taking actions for the state sanctioned Greater Good. Whether the individual wants to take such actions is irrelevant.

  13. So what exactly was it about the USSR that provided such an individually tailored lifestyle for the population?

  14. The potato is a bland looking, elderly man. Bland pompous arrogant attitude in his own genius and mission to change the world.

    He’s completely normal for a pub bore setting the world to rights from his bar stool (if he could find a pub to serve him).

    His deluded “ideas” = more tax and regurgitated reports are completely normal fodder for his type who have no solutions other than throwing more confiscated money on the fire.

    However he does indeed distinguishes himself amongst that crowd as someone who doesn’t understand the logic of his own arguments and frequently contradicts them.

    He excels and genuinely does have abnormal talent as a conman. Despite the sorry state of higher education it takes some grifting talent to talk yourself in to a professorship and pass yourself off as an authority when you have zero knowledge.

  15. BIS:
    ” Hence the ghastly SUVs.”
    I love mine. It is spacious, comfortable, versatile and economical. Wonderful piece of kit, I can’t remember how I used to get by before I had it.

  16. “I suggest my trolls need better sources of economic instruction than the website that is probably driving them here.”

    Somehow, I imagine the website implied by Murphy is that of genial host.

  17. We’re all saved – and have been for some time apparently – from the post ‘Economics is not alchemy’

    Economics is about what we can do. But we don’t need to believe in alchemy to do those things. Because the possibility of achieving them exists because the government can enable them. In other words, we aren’t, as Labour is trying to do at this moment, hanging their hat on the belief that somehow, in wild celebration of the Tories being out of office, business and consumers like you and me will spend so much more money that growth will happen.

    Instead, economics says that, well, governments can deliver that growth by delivering the things that we really need. Like, as I’ve just mentioned, decent healthcare, education and so on.

    So, there’s nothing magic about economics. Economics is about what is possible. And we have to decide what is possible and what we want.

    But nothing about economics says you can’t have what we can do because we can always afford it.

  18. Bravefart

    That entire post has given me a warm glow that the readers here have forced him to waste his time and again expose his complete ignorance of how Capital Markets actually work. I love this idea:

    Almost no company has issued equity shares for the purposes of funding new economic activity for decades. If new shares are issued, they are almost always related to merger and acquisition activity, which is a notoriously bad source of new economic activity in any economy, because it usually results in a reduction in rather than a growth of the scale of the overall entities involved.

    As the excellent Boddicker points out – the notion that someone this ignorant and indeed bitter and twisted would be appropriately employed in the filed of higher education would ordinarily be cause for alarm if there weren’t sundry others employed in the sector with similar, if marginally less ignorant and less evil outlooks.

  19. @Stonyground
    Like always, depends what you use it for They’re really just a bigger hatchback. But they don’t have the loadbed of an estate. 4WD? If you need 4WD in the UK you probably don’t know how to drive.

  20. BiS – I like a large car because I’m a large man.

    Hatchbacks don’t have enough leg or head room. SUVs are great, because it’s a more comfortable driving position.

  21. “You’re not normal.”

    No I’m not. I’ve never wanted be average.

    I would have assumed that he believes that the Efficient Markeet Hypothesis doesn’t work yet this implies he thinks it does hold.

  22. “But they don’t have the loadbed of an estate. 4WD? If you need 4WD in the UK you probably don’t know how to drive.”

    My previous car was a Saab 93 estate. The Korando has a far bigger load area and there is even more space under the floor. 4WD is an option but mine doesn’t have it. When used as a passenger car, both the front and rear legroom is wonderfully generous which makes long journeys much more relaxing. One cool touch is that it came with an old school 7″ X 2″ Kenwood stereo which could easily be swapped out for a state of the art top of the range Kenwood with Bluetooth, digital radio, and mp3 cd player.

  23. I tried to agree with Spud and pointed out how horrendous it is that there are 43 different “women’s” magazines in my local Co-op – I counted them! He banned me.

  24.  “He banned me.”
    I think that it shows that even he knows that he’s full of shit. He can’t defend his position and he knows it.

  25. Stony ground – he’s blocked about 30,000 over the years – and I note his attempts to introduce some kind of ‘check’ on new commentators lasted about a week. Here’s an example of his argument.

    jeff says:
    June 27 2024 at 5:55 pm
    you have lost the plot Richard well and truly.. the correlation between long term interest rates and QE and then QT is practically 1 !!!!!!

    +1
    Reply
    Richard Murphy says:
    June 27 2024 at 6:29 pm
    Oh dear….such a basic confusion about causation and correlation.

    You are wasting my time, Jeff.

    Don’t try again.

    +4
    Reply

  26. What I don’t like about SUVs is if you use them for shifting stuff, inevitably you end up having to reverse in confined spaces. The two nigh on go together. The high window line means it difficult to see backwards, particularly in the quarters. Yeah I know. Cameras & mirrors. Except the amount of SUVs I see with rear panel damage. And you can see it’s been caused by the vehicle itself, not other vehicles. By the where, the height & direction.
    There always was a market for a stretched saloon at an affordable price. But of course they don’t now make a saloon shape that’s stretchable. Since all modern cars are basically the same shape. An aerodynamic solution. Except the aerodynamics of cars are largely irrelevant. Mostly they aren’t travelling fast enough for it to be. The drag curve really only steepens over 70mph. The motor industry has railroaded its customers into favouring a particular look.
    It’s like low profile tyres. There’s no particular advantage in normal use. There’s all sorts of disadvantages. As people hitting pot-holes are finding. Same’s true of alloy wheels. Unsprung weight only starts mattering near the limits. Or didn’t you know that’s why they were on performance cars?

  27. SUVs are awesome. You sit higher up and less stretched out. Easier to get in and out of as an adult and even better if you have small kids that you need to put in car seats. Larger kids also prefer them as they sit higher up and have a better view out.

    SUVs are very much a case of demand and not supply as they even cost more than the equivalent station wagons.

    (I live near to the alps and go skiing 30 days each winter so 4WD is important to me but a station wagon would (with 4WD) do just fine for that part)

    People have different taste and the market loves it

    (My secret dream car is a Ford Ranger pick-up – completely irrational but hey)

  28. SUVs are NOT more aerodynamic than station wagons!!!!

    I had a Mercedes B klass 8 years ago. Awesome car, lots of internal space for the external volume and really aerodynamic. Superb with 1 small kid (tall doors, not having to bend too far down, etc). Still boring as hell compared to my current mid size SUV with 4WD and 200hp. Much less aerodynamic and consumes a lot more but still prefer it

    Station wagons just look wrong

  29. I have been assured that the socialist and communist countries are bastions of vibrant cultural and personal diversity and not street after street of shitty concrete hi-rises. I have been assured of this.

  30. What on earth do you want 200bhp for? I used to rally competitive cars with half that. Prosthesis?

  31. Totally OT.
    I see Bolivia’s had a coup. It’s a possible future, isn’t it? To avoid an inevitable Haiti.

  32. Bolivia has had a failed coup. The same would happen here, I suspect, in the highly unlikely event one was attempted.

    Besides, why would you want such avoidance? Becoming Haiti is part of the cunning plan, isn’t it?
    “It’s intended to be a disaster & cause as much harm as possible.” – bloke in spain

  33. If you need 4WD in the UK you probably don’t know how to drive.

    Or maybe, like me, you live on a 1:6 hill and need to be able to leave the house when it snows.

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