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Comment by norikki | Hacker News Reader

TLDR; All you proles stop complaining about corporate corruption, problematic immigration, and stagnant wages because everything is great and you have us to thank.

Fascinating to see all the globalists' brazen propaganda messages condensed into one article. Thanks New York Times, we really needed that.

PS: If you're not a globalist, you're a Nazi for having loyalty to your fellow countrymen. ("Fascism, racism, eugenics and nationalism are ideas with alarming recent popularity.")

There is no wikipedia page for "The Great Enrichment" because it's not an academic term (yet). It was invented for the purpose of propaganda. Just search for the phrase "Great Enrichment" and you will see who the kinds of people using it are...

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For a little bit of perspective on this, this is helpful[0]. If you can stomach the demeaning of brexit voters ("the world's losers") the graph showing the percentage change of real income shows that the "99%" middle and working class-- which were really in the top quintile world wide--have seen little growth in income while the top 1% and everyone else has seen substantial income percentage increase. Of course, in absolute numbers, the top 1% had a larger share to begin with, so percent change signals a substantial increase in wealth in absolute terms...which also means the bottom 80's increase isn't that much absolutely too.

I feel like despite the abrasive manner of norikki, s/he brings up an important side of this story. I personally am in the top 5% of income in the US, so I can say my place is comfortable, but we should be mindful of the working-middle class in the first world too.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/27/the-l...

> All you proles stop complaining about corporate corruption, problematic immigration, and stagnant wages because everything is great and you have us to thank.

It's better than it otherwise would have been. As Margaret Thatcher noted decades ago, people concerned about inequality would be happier if everyone were worse off, so long as everyone were equal in their squalor. That's just insane.

I've seen my parents' childhood toys, and my grandparents'. I've seen items in museums from centuries ago. I've been to third-world hellholes just barely beginning to liberalise their economies. I've seen the famous video of an 'upper-class' Soviet supermarket which was worse than the worst supermarket I've ever been to in the poorest part of town. The past was immensely poorer than the present; illiberal economies are immensely poorer than the West.

It may make you emotionally happier to drag down the wealthy, but it will make you actually poorer.

I completely agree with Margaret thatcher. She was a great leader who wasn't afraid to stand up to the parasitic labor unions.

The problem with globalists is that they are not capitalists who want to get rich by competing with each other, they want to get rich by using the power of government to literally take money from the poor and middle class through corporate wellfare, inflation, wage depression and immigration.

This Harvard profession in testimony to the Congress should shed some light on how this has nothing to do with what Thatcher was talking about.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Bo...

[see Table 2 on page 9 for his conclusions]

I read your summary first and thought it might be a bit biased. So I read the article in full and your summary does indeed capture its gist fairly. I'm a little surprised such a terrible article was written by an economics professor.

Then you don't understand what has happened to academia. Oil and tobacco companies are not the only people paying to have their propaganda given a sheen of credibility. The movie 'Inside Job' narrated by Matt Damon, for all of its faults, makes a fool out of the dean of Columbia business school for shilling for the banks during the bailout.

You're right, the evidence for this kind of corruption is clear. It's time to stop being surprised and start being more constructively disappointed.

For readers who are (fortunately) unaware of alt-right symbolism, "globalist" is a code word for "Jew".

I don't know anything about alt-right symbolism. I do have an aversion to essentially calling someone a Nazi for expressing what appears to be, at face value, a legitimate opinion.

Free speech is under more and more pressure every year, and unless you have been living under a rock you are aware of the mounting evidence of that. Right here, one thing that seems evident is that the way to win any argument, or shut anyone up, or in other words essentially censor them is to call them a racist or a Nazi.

Maybe you're not wrong, and I hope I am not enabling anyone to spread hate, but I guess my gut feeling is that I just want to express an opinion that we should be very careful about labelling people or ideas as basically racist or Nazi-esque without hard evidence they are as such, because we otherwise easily censor them--I don't believe there is any better way to do so? Right now it appears it is perhaps too easy to accomplish this.

I think people have a right to freedom of expression and I don't want to see that go away.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a jewish nationalist. George Soros is a jewish globalist.

There are two survival strategies for groups of people. The first is to live in an ethno-state where only your own people are favored. Examples of this strategy are self-evident. The second is to rule over another group of people as an ethnic minority. The Normans in England are an example of this. They maintained a distinct racial identity for centuries. They were of 'noble blood' ie: a genetically distinct ruling class. (Also the Brahmin in India) If you can't rule, then you will advocate liberal and tolerant treatment of your group, at least as long as you are a minority. For example, many muslims in America bitterly criticize when they are discriminated against because of their chosen religion (islamiphobia), while at the same time want to throw people in jail for criticizing Muhammad. Clearly many muslim majority countries are not tolerant of non-muslims (christianity is often illegal), but they demand tolerance when living in the west as minorities.

Nationalism and globalism respectively happen to be two methods of promoting and justifying these long-term strategies. I'm not making a judgement, just an observation.

Today, globalism is being most successfully pushed not by any ethnic group, but by multi-national corporations who just want to increase short-term profits without caring how demographic changes will affect long-term stability and productivity.

So globalist does not mean jewish.

No it isn't. It refers to supporters of globalism rather than nationalism, and in some cases it refers to the elites who push the globalist agenda - who may or may not be Jewish.

What fraction of people using the word intend it in that sense, and what fraction do not, and how are we ever to discover these numbers?

I saw this rhetorical move once before, where someone complained that the concept of "SJW" -- as in "Social Justice Warrior" -- was racist, as Nazi forums used it to mean "SJeW" (whatever an "SJeW" is). In that particular case it was obvious the obscure meaning was basically unknown. In this case it's slightly less clear, but I still suspect most people using the word "globalism" have something like its obvious meaning in mind: globalisation, open borders, etc.

Which groups equate 'globalist' with 'jew'? I hadn't ever heard of alt-right until very recently, out of Clinton's campaign.

> If you're not a globalist, you're a Nazi for having loyalty to your fellow countrymen

Mind elaborating?

I'll take a stab at it. In the US, the protectionist/isolationist policies (building a wall to keep out undesirables, bringing jobs back into the states in order to re-greatenize our economy, heavy tariffs on imports) that some people want are being advocated for (in earnest or not) by the republican candidate. The globalists here are represented by the democratic party. TTIP, pushing for transnational corporate benefits at the expense of the country's citizens, etc.

I think that norikki is alluding to the fact that the republican candidate has often been compared to hitler due to his demogoguery and penchant for blaming the 'others' as the source of the country's woes. There's also the issue of the actual neo-nazis who support him but that's a little off-topic in this context.

Essentially the globalists/capitalists/neoliberals are the puppeteers of the democratic party and their strategy has been to smear the opposition as nazis, when really they are patriots who just want what's best for their own country. (Yes, I know how this sounds.)

I don't take a position on any of it but this is my interpretation of the views that people have about the political state of things.

Not to mention what is going on around the world.

Imagine being German. My friend, she is German, living in Germany. Her very young sister (barely a teenager) was sexually assaulted at their community swimming pool by migrant refugees. Of course, on the one hand, migrant refugees of German descent could also commit this dastardly behaviour, but on the other hand, speaking out against allowing refugees is seen as politically incorrect in both Germany and globally. That answers the question here.

My friend says she used to go to that neighbourhood swimming pool without her parents - because they had lifeguards there, and everyone felt safe letting their kids go there. Now, no locals go there, according to her -- and especially not children -- after that happened.

Somehow we live in this world where the above ultra-tolerant politics exist, yet I sat on an airplane with a 20-something hispanic women's studies girl who told me "yea but my neighbourhood is ghetto," and as she described it, she said "you'd be beat real bad if ya' ever came through there," and I said "wow, that's a shame," and she said, "no, it's right that way, because you discriminated against us so it's right that now we are taking what's ours and if you or your people come to my neighbourhood you will be shown what's up." No one bats an eye at that, WTF is this shit. How did it come to be that our media, politicians and education is shaping the world in this way?

The real scary thing is, even just saying this, I have this real fear of pressing enter, that someone will take this post and label me, somehow, through some twisted logic, a racist, and that my career, friendships, and life will be ruined.

The thing to note is that the republicans are American exceptionalists, and their policy doesn't match the bark. The same Senator barking about Mexicans is stuffing his pockets from agribusiness and other donors who need cheap and exploitable labor.

That's one of the reasons we had the parade of clowns running for president -- the conservatives that actually believe in insanity like deporting 10M people are sick of hetting lied to.

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