balance_factor

An easy way to test this article's hypothesis would be to sit down with the old hands who help organize these protests - let's say, some of the old former SNCC and Black Panther types advising the younger Black Lives Matter organizers, and ask them if they think a series of demonstrations are the means to change things. I am pretty confident, because I have spent a lot of time around organizers of different colors who go back to the 1960s (or 1930s) that 99% of the time, they are going to say no. It's a very easy way to falsify this hypothesis. I mean, you might get this reaction from some 16 year old who has come to their first demonstration, but you would rarely get it from someone seriously involved. New Yorker articles about such matters usually have some flaws, but this one is much worse than usual as he didn't do a very simple thing to falsify his hypothesis.

> polarization

What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles? How people feel about transexuals? I don't see any polarization. The two parties are close together on almost everything. As the real differences fade, unimportant differences must be heightened. Trump is of that type - he makes a big show, but on what big issue in which he can get anywhere is he substantially far from the Democratic (or Republican) party? As real differences fade, the showmanship of there being a difference must increase, thus, Trump.

Even healthcare has no polarization. Both parties are agreed on what it should be. Any party acting as if it will do single player or scrap Obamacare is just showboating. Any changes that get through will be minor ones. It was a 60 Senator consensus vote of the middle-of-the-road consensus view of what healthcare would be. McCain's thumbs down to any major overhaul.

In the past two centuries the US went from a civil war to the intitial struggle of how to deal with the Great Depression. There hasn't been much polarization since that. Even the big squabble in the 1960s was over a non-issue - over a small, peasant country in Indochina. The cold war began cooling off in the early 1950s, and stayed cool, aside from occassional flare-ups in certain areas. By the 1970s, US conservatives were trying to figure out how to heat the cold war up again against the background of SALT and the Helsinki accords.

The political establishment is less polarized than ever nowadays. It's not like post-war France, where Joliot-Curie, Picasso, Sartre etc. were members of the largest political party in France - the PCF.

Six years ago Chomsky wrote an open letter that said actions Hugo Chavez were taking were an "assault on democracy". How exactly is that "torturing the data to make Hugo Chavez sound like a good leader"? When Chavez was elected and freed the oil money of Venezuela from the hands of a small, corrupt, European-descendant aristocracy, being shared with poor and working class Venezuelans of all races, Chomsky was enthusiastic. Six years ago, when the government began taking actions that Chomsky thought were anti-democratic and authoritarian, Chomsky was critical.

I'm not sure what you mean by how "he has been proved devastatingly wrong about Venezuela". When Chavez was first elected, Chomsky noted how the oil wealth of Venezuela was finally being shared beyond a small coterie of wealthy European descendants, and was now accessible to the poor and working class Venezuelans of various races. Then six years ago, Chomsky said in an open letter that the Venezuelan government was beginning to take measures that were an "assault on democracy" ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/03/noam-chomsky-h... ).

I don't know how Chomsky "has been proved devastatingly wrong about Venezuela". Do you think these two reactions he had to events in Venezuela were incorrect?

Insofar as human rights, Chomsky saw respect for them beginning to dip six years ago, and reacted accordingly. I should note that eight years ago, Honduras had its first left-leaning president in living memory ousted by a coup from US-trained, US-funded military officers, after which, the US stood alone being supportive of the coup against virtually all other Latin American nations. Actually Wikileaks cables show the US knew what was going on and how they supported this. Elections were scheduled for 2013 and dozens of candidates and supporters were killed. The murder rate of Honduras has exploded, as has immigration from it. You never hear it in the US news though, unless unaccompanied Honduran chidlren appear at the border, and then you never hear why, just arguments between the Trumpites and anti-Trumpites about what to do with them.

Insofar as Venezuela's economy, it has been similar to other economies heavily dependent on energy. Including the energy-dependent areas of the US economy that voted heavily for Trump. It is why Venezuelan minister Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo helped found OPEC in 1960. Venezuela had decades of an up and down economy along with the price of oil before Chavez came along.

One of the ironic things about this is the right has fought for years to empower corporations, and disempower workers, then goes apoplectic when Google Inc sees him as a liability and disposes of him like a used tissue. Damore sees the left as the problem, then files an NLRB complaint to try to protect himself. The biologically IQ-superior Damore might be surprised to find that the worker protections of the NLRB have been systematically hollowed out over the preceding decades by his conservative pals.

Conservatives and Republicans fought decades to enshrine the power of corporations and the 1%, and to undermine any worker autonomy. I have to roll my eyes at all this. I guess Damore found out the hard way that he's not part of the biologically IQ superior clique he thought he was part of.

When the military threw out the elected Chavez in 2002 and replaced him with the head of the business federation, who promptly dissolved the parliament, the New York Times applauded.

The 2009 coup of the elected Honduran government, by military officers trained in the US and financed by the US, followed by the murder of many candidates trying to run in the subsequent election, didn't elicit hand-wringing by the US administration. The flow of money and weapons to the Honduran military continued. Murder and political repression in Honduras skyrocketed. All you really heard in the US news was complaints about how Hondurans and Honduran children were now crossing the US borders.

It doesn't even rise to the level of farce that the Tribune/Tronc corporation's expression of America's military ambitions in its Monroe Doctrine backyard has some lofty motives or whatever nonsense they're putting out.

The zeitgeist has shifted? The zeitgeist hasn't changed since 1847, when Marx wrote about the character of monopoly in The Poverty of Philosophy. It hasn't changed since President Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. It hasn't changed since Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, over a century ago (with Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York recombining in 1999, the broken up monopoly come back to life).

It hasn't changed since the breakup of Ma Bell in 1982, the Baby Bells having re-formed into two companies: Verizon and AT&T, who control the last mile of wire and wireless, the network neutrality of which they have been fighting against. It hasn't changed since the big eight accounting firms became the big four accounting firms. It hasn't changed as Google and Facebook swallowed up all online advertising, search, social networks etc.

The idea that the zeitgeist has shifted from monopoly is absurd. Billionaires from Warren Buffett to Peter Thiel seem to think otherwise. In every industry, mergers and acquisitions leave an increasingly fewer companies with control of more and more of their markets. The data is out there and quite obvious, you really have to put on some kind of ideological fantasy land kool-aid trip to see otherwise.

> the vibrant art and propaganda narratives of Soviet children's books

The media children consumed in the Soviet Union was a propaganda narrative.

Luckily for us in the land of freedom, the media children consume on television in the USA is not a propaganda narrative.

> Funding is not the issue. There are all sorts of issues around mental health, drugs, tolerance in certain neighborhoods, political corruption, inefficiencies in government

Ho-hum. People become homeless because they don't have money. I've worked alongside more than one tech who has been homeless at some period in their lives. Some slept in their cars, some slept on park benches. Jim Carrey talks about how he was homeless as a teenager, what was the "mental health, drugs" etc. problem he had? He was actually working a full time job as a janitor after school.

San Francisco is full of white, upper middle class prep school assholes who have been handed everything their whole lives, who are parasites like Ron Conman, sucking vampirically off the labor of the young people working at the various startups. They sit in Atherton with their trophy wives and little brats and think up ways to fuck over the homeless people in the city. This is what the czar and his family did in Russia before the Bolsheviks lined those parasites up against the wall in 1918.

In the case of RenTech's Medallion fund, the capital is provided by the people managing the fund, so the provider and customer are the same person.

The capital in RenTech's flagship fund is 100% from the employees of Rentech. These guys are managing their own money. So the idea they're screwing customers on it is false, they are the customer. I think they have some other funds as well, but not the flagship Medallion fund.

I did IT at a Wall Street investment bank. Jim Simons and these math and CS guys at Ren Tech made a paradise for math and CS people over there. At investment banks you make money for heirs, and as IT are treated like garbage, and their IT and quant operations are garbage at investment banks (relative to hedge funds). Rentech, DE Shaw etc. did quant math, IT infrastructure etc. right and are kicking investment banks ass. Rentech manages employee capital instead of handing it to heirs and underpaying IT and treating IT like shit and having a shitty IT infrastructure like even the top investment banks often do. So these hedge funds are demonized by traditional Wall Street, who are trying to hang some populist halo around the criticism. It would have to be a populist or liberal/soc-dem criticism, because it's certainly not some kind of Marxian criticism. Marx explained how exploitation happened in capitalism, and it's not by a bunch of machine learning gurus managing their own money figuring out how to trade commodities better than Wall Street investment banks who manage the money of heirs.