And of course, the best behavior will be the behavior that poses zero threat to the people in power. What a great future we have ahead of us, my colleagues.
1) Me and my entire family starves to death
2) I make 600k per year building surveillance systems for whoever wants them (as long as they're aligned with Peter Thiels and/or government interests)
"I was just doing my job. ... I was just following orders".
Got it.
Patrick Star, in response to SpongeBob asking him to refrain from eating a candy bar, following a closeup pan of Patrick's extremely overweight body, "what do you want me to do, starve???"
Something children can understand the humor in. Being used to excuse marching us into totalitarian dystopia.
If you had a weapon which is powerful, you better use it sparingly. Fear of the weapon is more important than the weapon itself.
Public surveillance is an attack on the Fourth Amendment.
Power is silencing other people. Follows from the problem of coordinated action. Foundation of asymmetric law enforcement, a cornerstone of tyranny. Even in a society ostensibly governed by the "rule of law".
What's new is how concentrated the reins of power have become. Paradoxically, could lead to a period of major instability. The year of four emperors.
One of the bigger lies ever told is that free-market economies help democratize nations. They don't. If they did, we would have made massive investments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist governments there. Instead we decided to invest in China and, later, Vietnam, among others. These are two very non-democratic nations.
Why did we do that, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Because it better fit the needs of capital. The last thing they wanted was to set up shop in a bunch of countries where the people had organized against authoritarian regimes for change. If they can get rid of the likes of Ceaușescu and Honecker despite their brutality, they could certainly do things like strike for better working conditions and a greater share of their employers' earnings.
Ellison's just another in a long line of guys with far too much money and far too little empathy. If you get out-of-line in a way that financially or politically inconveniences him, he wants you dealt with as severely as possible. China does that, and now he wants that in the US and other Western countries.
There is the old video about the mistake of anthropomorphizing Ellison. You don’t get angry at a lawn mower either when you stick your hand into it.
That's the problem: we take that story and use it as an excuse to act like he's not a human. "Oh, ol' Larry, he's just a lawnmower". No, he's a person, one who doesn't get enough in the way of negative consequences for the harm he brings to society.
My former employer was bought out by Oracle. I didn't stick my hand in the lawn mower, the lawn mower drove over my hand.
Ummm, what? Have you been to Eastern Europe lately (minus Ukraine, Belarus and Russia)? They're basically the west, except cleaner and less crime-ridden.
Imagine what those countries would be like if they'd received the investment that the Chinese did 35 years ago.
How much richer do you think Czechia and Poland would be if they received more FDI in the 90's versus the 00's?
They received way higher investment per person than China did as well.
Also, China has some natural advantages, like being able to employ a ton of ultra cheap labour to engage in nation building projects. While the appearance of China is that of a rich country, they remain significantly poorer per capita than Europe.
If capital wasn't authoritarian, we would have found out.
How about 25-35 years ago when the wave of globalization truly hit?
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a1f4622-aea4-83e8-838a-0c3ac69b26...
No it didn’t
Yes you always had people snitching on each other but it was inefficient and hard to centralize. Today is different.
Huh?
"oh yeah we're developing something super fucked up but you know what the problem is? cHiNA", every single fucking time
And I bet all of you clowns wouldn't even be able to name three living Chinese people. The greatest threat to the west right now, and especially the US, is the American government, not China