6 karma · joined July 30, 2020
Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries. In the US, with two economic crises in the past decade, Covid at a peak, global warming, racial strife, riots on streets etc., I am not sure what is working in the real world with the economic system here.
In those seventy years it has led a country which grew to have the second largest GDP in the world.
-- writing this from the USA, where Covid is spiking, where there are armed right wing Covid open for business riots at statehouses, as well as against police kneeling on black men's throats killing them leading to nationwide blm antifa riots, where the president won't concede the election, where U3 unemployment is currently 6.9% etc.
(I heard about the Hong Kong riots in the US News until the open-business/blm/antifa riots happened with a much higher body count)
I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report from the 1980s where the author tried to project that if the US and USSR had a full scale nuclear war, US GNP would be back to normal within five years.
Who knows what government bureaucrat had a program requiring an Orwellian report like to justify whatever policy.
Who is this we? If you want to store up MREs and tin foil hats and build a bomb shelter, be my guest. Most of our efforts will be to prevent a large-scale nuclear war from happening or needing to happen.
You're talking as if they rejected the idea. They don't even know what the idea is.
A sizable amount of working class Americans have no idea that people die. They have no idea that their grandparents died. They have been to wakes and have seen the corpse of their grandparents or whomever, but when I talk to them they say their grandparents are elsewhere and enjoying themselves. They do not mean this metaphorically, or that they live on via children or their works or memories. They have no concept that these people are not around any more, permanently. They go to churches where a man stands in front and says this, I guess they believe him. This would be part of false consciousness, although not a needed component of them. They are as ignorant of death as they are of their economic exploitation. They are ignorant and uneducated. If you want to call them stupid as you do, that's your right.
Inflation protection? Bitcoin lost one third of its value in the past three years. How is that inflation protection? You would have done better to hold most commodities or most currencies in that time period to protect from inflation, other than Bitcoin.
I moved from one state to another in June. I did not have four years to prepare. I was also not allowed to register immediately, you must reside for some months to register. Also this state has voter suppression to make registration more difficult. They certainly do not have online registration, but they piled on extra Covid difficulties lately. I did manage to register however. What you are saying is ridiculous.
Yale has policies to give slots to legacies, effectively the same thing.
Only this time the federal government and Justice department is what fights to keep the handful of those of African descent going to Yale.
It's what America means. It's what the flag stands for.
Like who, Umkhonto we Sizwe? Patrice Lumumba? The MPLA?
> African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective
Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.
Benedict Arnold ended up not sharing the anti-colonial attitude of his fellow Americans. Nor did Vidkun Quisling of his fellow Norwegians share anti-colonial attitudes. We are not unaware these people exist.
New Zealand has two large islands, and some smaller ones. Lockdown worked there. 5 million people, 3 Covid deaths since June. From yesterday to two weeks before yesterday there were 28 new cases. Those sprung on from a mysterious outbreak that started August 11th near a facility that receives refrigerated and frozen foods. New Zealand went into lockdown and tracing and it has been contained so far.
Great Britain is also an island, but it prioritized differently. In New Zealand, social life is open right now, but also the economy is less constricted, because the disease has been contained.
Cicero was a man who fought against the tribunes representing the vast majority of Roman citizens, and for the power of the idle class aristocracy which did not work.
He also was like an ancient embodiment of QAnon (which sees the US Democratic Party leadership as involved in a child sex conspiracy) - he accused populare aligned senators like Catiline of defiling the sacred Vestal virgins in Senate hearings.
The black unemployment rate - 13% according to the Federal Reserve - is higher than it was a half century ago.
In our modern day, where the average worker works more hours per week than those people (see Marshall Sahlins), with the default trajectory being continual global warming, with missile and nuclear treaties tossed as more states become better nuclear armed, and US, Russian, Chinese, Indian and Pakistani troops having minor incidents all over, as large mammals undergo extinction worldwide, Bolsanaro cutting down the rain forest as Covid spreads over the US and Brazil, as BLM and Antifa and MAGA and anti-lockdown riots happen across the US, it's asked how it is imaginable we go off our current course. As Slavoj Zizek says, the culture of corporate media can more easily imagine the end of the world than it can the end of the 10000 year reign of the hereditary idle class.
Murray, and the AEI he works for, have fought against higher wages for workers and social mobility for decades. I don't take seriously him bemoaning the results of what he has helped do.
You are writing in English, and thus aimed at a US/UK audience - the president of the US (Clinton) and PM of the UK (Major) celebrated the 1993 shelling by the military of the Russian parliament that consolidated Yeltsin's power, and that of his chosen successor, Putin. Putin didn't consolidate power and destroy opposition, this was done in 1993 to celebration in the West.
The problem with this in the West really started in 2007 when Putin announced in Munich that Russia would no longer tolerate the US's continual encroachment against Russia. Suddenly all these events going back to 1993 which had been celebrated were cast as nefarious.
An old engineer friend of his asked Holt about several topics, and I think his answers were interesting, including what was baked into early Apple that made it succeed at what it was trying to do over the years.
https://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-jobs/
(The beginning of the blog post are comments by the old friend about the Jobs movies, followed by Holt's two replies).
Someone should tell the record companies who say when you pirate a song, you're stealing from the artist who will not be properly compensated for the time they labored to write and record that song. I see corporate spokesmen expounding the labor theory of value all the time.
The actual problem is social relations. The heir expropriates the surplus labor time of the worker. That is the real problem.
Wealth redistribution is, in a dialectic sense, a goal of those who own the most wealth. It is a goal set by this elite. Workers controlling our own labor time has been the clear goal of the worker's movement for at least a century and a half, if not longer.
When you think of the black ships of the Perry expedition, and then forward to the Japanese attack on England's Hong Kong colony, the French colonies in Indochina, America's colony in the Philippines (and Hawaii!) - then you see the above blurb is a perfect encapsulation of the western bourgeois mind.
Your link belies what you said. That survey was not in "every western country", but fifteen western countries. The Czech Republic is west of Finland (surveyed) and less than 20% of its population is religious.
Also you say from that survey people believe in God or a higher power, but it does not limit to that, they include people who believe in a spiritual force. That could be a Buddhist.
The US (and UK) replaced Mosaddegh with the Shah. Then the Shah and SAVAK (with CIA help) launched a decades long attack on the secular, parliamentary oriented forces in the country. Initially the Shah supported the ayatollahs, and in turn was himself tacitly (sometimes openly) supported by them. Eventually they turned against the dictator under the spell of a foreign power.
Also, Iran had a large communist movement, and it is obvious in 1978 and early 1979 that the US, UK and France saw the communists as the enemy, Khomeini as someone to disempower but not destroy, and the Shah as who to support as long as they could. So that stance helped Khomeini on some level. France would not have allowed communists to sit in France and work successfully to undermine a friendly power (even Indochina, although that stance loosened in the 1950s).
Insofar as other efforts, there was wiretapping in Berlin ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gold ), undersea cable tapping ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells ), the Gamma Gupy monitoring of Soviet leaders car phones etc.
Actually they don't reveal this at all. The cables mention someone in New York, then someone else comes in and says that must be Julius Rosenberg, and thus the decrypts reveal he was working with the Soviets.
Even Rosenberg was working for the Soviets, there is no solid line between the decrypts and him.