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Read about how a 25 year old American girl, Ronni Moffitt, who was a fundraiser and opponent of Chile's dictatorship, was killed by car bomb, along with Orlando Letelier, in Washington DC in 1976 by Chile's intelligence service. Convicted of the murder was Michael Townley, a US born man who moved to Chile and worked for Chile's intelligence service. Lots of interesting aspects of the case.

> often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery.

There is no slavery in migratory hunter-gatherer bands, I can't even conceive how that would function. Slavery arose with the agricultural revolution. This is not "oft-dicumented" or even documented

> internal tribal

A hunter-gatherer band is not in a tribe.

I am talking about migratory hunter-gatherer bands and you are talking about slave societies and then tribes.

How many hours a week does an adult man in a hunter gatherer band deep in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa work? Anthropologists say usually less than forty hours, which means less than most people here.

Not much money, but they don't pay $2000 a month or more for rent or a mortgage. No taxes. No profit from their labor sent to some class expropriating their surplus labor time. It's a basis of comparison any how.

If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is.

There was an economist who predicted this in the 19th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

In 2010 there was an international campaign of clemency for an Iranian woman who was going to get the death penalty. The campaign said she was imprisoned for adultery. She was in prison for adultery - and also murdering her husband, with her lover's help. This part was always left out of the news reports on this, at least initially.

In 2006, a satellite repairman in New York City was imprisoned for allowing people to watch the television channel al-Manar, which is run by a political party which holds over 10% of the seats in Lebanon's parliament - Hezbollah.

Maybe they'll do a report on the Free Liberty USA passing a law to put Tiktok censoring in their hands.

A common western rebuke to countries that had communist revolutions were that the revolutionary leader stayed in power for decades until their death. Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong. Fidel Castro's power passed to his brother five years before he died, so he does not fit the cookie cutter mode fully.

Another rebuke is how the communist party filled a religious or even feudal void to some extent - Lenin's tomb in Red Square being a perfect example. I can assure you that though the Politburo felt that was a needed measure, they did feel a bit silly and embarrassed about having to do it.

Why was all of this felt necessary within the Politburo? The answer is simple, in fact the answer is somewhat answered in this essay, if parallels are allowed for. Before the revolution, all revolutionaries were true believers who faced prison, exile and death fighting against impossible odds for years and decades. Those who join the party after the success of the revolution are always feared to be the parallel of the middle manager MBA managing up. A Gorbachev, a Yeltsin. The cadre around Deng Xiaoping who reversed his purge from the party and then put him in power.

A very different circumstance, but in many ways analogous.

> There's nothing about the Muslim Brotherhood pertaining to "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties..."...Better to deal with a secular dictator

The Muslim Brotherhood has no appreciation for multiple political parties in Egypt. Nor do you, as you are openly supportive of a dictatorship.

You and yyyk both support my point - the West does not support for Egypt what the original poster called "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state".

So what you're saying is the West wanted (and funded and armed) tough governments that kept a lid on things as opposed to "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state".

People can be on your side or not, but at least you are rooted in the real world and actual history.

With regards to central planning, neither China nor the US is fully in or out of it.

China still has Five Year Plans and some central planning, but Deng Xioping took steps away from it in the 1980s.

There's a mythology the US has no central planning, but it has had a lot of central planning since 1932 and certainly since 1941. Market makers watch for the presidentially nominated Powell to come out and announce the fed funds rate for our fiat currency, and the economy either speeds up or slows down in response. We are typing on a network the government paid BBN and other companies to create, on chips descended from the Fairchild chips that Air Force contracts funded. For various historical reasons, much of the central planning in the US is done via its very well funded military (then well funded military contractors pay think tanks and politicians to go out and say they're not so well funded)

> While I'd love to see many parts of Africa and the mideast embrace the enlightenment values that have created our modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state, etc. I don't think those cultural values are in place.

Anyone who knows the history of the past decades and centuries of western interaction with the Middle East and Africa knows what a laugh this is.

The US is currently paying Egypt's current rulers billions a year to prevent and violently crack down on anyone who wants "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state". I watched former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd question whether it was wise for Obama to allow the Arab Spring to push out the violent dictator Mubarak. Speaking of capability for "enlightenment values" - the citizens risk their bodies and lives to go out in the street and fight for free elections and such, while the US arms the dictator fighting against those values.

And what would a free Egypt do? It certainly would not be as cooperative of these people "making aliyah" and then slaughtering Palestinians on Egypt's border in Gaza, that's for sure.

As you mention Africa, I think back to when I watched Reagan cooperating with the apartheid South African government, again fighting against those who wanted "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state, etc."

I could go on and on over the past decades - speaking of rule of law and all of that, I won't even go into what Israel is doing right now - they're showing Israeli soldiers raping Palestinians on Israeli TV now (and on Twitter too, for now at least) - nor will I go.into the US support of all of this.

> The heritability of IQ, from twin studies and via other traditional methods of measuring heritability, is way higher than the author of that article implies. It's as high as 0.8.

No one here can seem to be able to prevent an LLM from saying 3+5 is something other than 8, yet you talk about "IQ" as if some test cam boil down human brains to one integer and then rank them.

Also if one person is born in a stable, educated house, and another in a poor unstable house where they are not educated, how is environment separated from heritability? People try to make social science studies to do this, but the problem is they have limited data to draw on.

This ideal of a Calvinistic Brahmin chosen people is rooted in parasitism and idleness. We can have a meritocracy society where everyone starts on the starting line, or we can have one where at birth someone is either on the worker bee or rich kids of Instagram born on third base path. The idle class aristocratic parasitic view favors the very weak idea of heritability - some hidden genetic change in the past 50,000 years after behavioral modernity.

These studies are very flawed for several reasons, the main one being "separation" which is a very loose definition of separation. If identical twins grow up together but some time in childhood one is sent to live with a relative, before a later reunification, this is called "separated". It does little to separate nurture from nature.

Which makes sense - how many identical twins are separated at birth? Even if they were, it is unlikely one would be sent to Cambridge and one to rural Nepal (one of the lowest places for these IQ studies).

> I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch.

> And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while.

The USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, and yet Americans like this say crime is out of control, and say the police and prosecutors are not putting enough people away. Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.

Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration, and much nicer prisons, yet less crime. In fact, people don't even lock their bicycles up in Norway outside of Oslo. If you want to lower crime, ask a Finn or Norwegian how they did it. Americans just double down on what has failed them over the past half century.

"Defense" spending (the US is currently involved in "defense" by its involvement in bombing Yemen, Gaza, Russia and other countries) is considered very narrowly - you don't count veteran's benefits as military spending. You don't count interest on the debt for past military spending as military spending. You don't consider international affairs spending, very wrapped up in military spending, as military spending. You don't count NASA's military work as military spending.

It shows what kind of economic system we have that the parasitic idle class has imposed upon the class which works, when the one kind of loan you can't shake is one you sign up for before you're allowed to drink alcohol, under high pressure from society at large if you ever want a job. Whereas corporations go bankrupt discharging debts, get PPP Covid government handouts, bailouts etc.

In Europe students get free college. Up until 1981 there was free public college in parts of the US, but that kind of New Deal / Great Society thing has ended.

That would mean lifting the Venezuela sanctions, Cuban embargo, and so on. I'm for it.

The US has a dry foot policy specifically for Cuba, encouraging people to seek asylum in the US.

The US involvement in Central America - from Honduras in 2009 and before that encouraged migration and asylum servers, but that bell is hard to unring.

You see this in cross-Atlantic history education too. In US and European history, everything seems to flow out of Europe, or at least the Mediterranean. Menes becomes king of Egypt around 3150 BC. Then we fastforward to Honer and the Olympic games in 7th century Greece. Then there are the Punic wars and Rome wins the Battle of Cornith in 146 BC. Then the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and so on. With some things like the revolts in Judaea against Rome as a kind of dialectic counter-narrative.

If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different history happening.

From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has been fading, and the narrative is facing too.

That would make this whole article bogus.

Actually it didn't add up to 106%, although the reality doesn't matter. That the mud the CIA, NED etc. throw on Venezuela is all that matters.

Lapham: "America in 1957, I sought enlistment in the CIA and sat for an interview with a credentials committee...prepared for nothing less, I had spent the days prior to the interview reading about Lenin’s train...the width of the Fulda Gap, the depth of the Black Sea. None of the study was called for. Instead of being asked about the treaties of Brest-Litovsk or the October Revolution, I was asked...questions bearing on my social qualifications for admission into what the young men at the far end of the table clearly regarded as the best fraternity on the campus of the free world:

'When standing on the thirteenth tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club does one take from the bag? On final approach under sail into Hay Harbor on Fishers Island, what is the direction (at dusk in late August) of the prevailing wind?'"

> Gen Z are the richest generation in all of American history on a median per-capita real income basis, compared to older generations when they were the same age.

Per capita? Not at all. What source says that?

More of Generation Z lives with their parents than previous generations, often because they can't afford housing, or even rent, high college debt etc. They live with their parents, and thus in households with higher income, so only in that sense are they "rich" - the household income is higher than if they could afford their own house.

Per capita real income higher? No. What source claims that?

Every time someone says this, if there is a source, this always come back to them living with parents and household income being higher. Not per capita.

> per-capita

Anyone looking at this chart can see the asterisk in it - adjusted by household size

This is not a per capita income chart. It even says it is not in the chart.

More of Generation Z lives at home in their 20s than baby boomers, so the income of their household is higher.

They can't afford a house or even rent, and live with their parents, meaning a richer household, and are said to be richer.

This was discussed (elsewhere) three months ago when this Economist article came out.

This discusses what "elites" think a lot, but does not discuss why that matters

From 1950 to 1979, times we think of more stable families, the Gini index in the US never went above 39. From 1993 to 2019 it never went below 40. There has been a shift where working class men were more on par with the heirs of the USA, but things have shifted so this is less so. The shift in power to what elites think is more important coincides with a shift of income and wealth to these heirs.

Another problem cited is a lack of "a submissive attitude toward the boss". From the 1930s to the 1970s, US workers had larger union representation, and engaged in sit-down strikes and wildcat strikes. This does not sound like a submissive attitude toward the boss. As the heirs have successfully cracked down on worker organization, this becomes individualized, with submissive workers getting low pay (according to this) getting work, and those not "submissive" as this says, who seek higher pay not being connected to production, leading to instability outside of the workplace.

There has been a conscious shift by the mentioned elite to remove workers representation, power, organization, pay and stability. These are seen as less of a problem than some supposed lack of a paternal attitude from the elite to lecture the working class about their lack of a "submissive" attitude as this says.

It's the same nonsense we've heard since 1980, from funded think tanks and various establishment institutions, it goes hand in hand with the policies and shift in income and wealth disparity which led to this.

CIA-backed groups in Miami were bombing Cuban hotels in the 1990s. They were bombing Cuban passenger airlines, killing many civilians. They were burning sugar fields. Of course there was also the Bay of Pigs invasion, the theft of Guantanamo harbor etc.

> externalizing a threat

Yes, it's illustrative of the USA. Due to monopolies, lack of local control of infrastructure etc., a feature is rolled out that grinds hospitals, airports etc. to a halt. Surely due to forces we're surely familiar with - a rush to get profit-making features out, a neglect of correctness and stability, cost cutting etc.

Then we have the New York Times, considered the sober voice of the establishment. What is discussed? Reflection on how entirely US-internal corporate processes led to this? No. A thought experiment about what if some external actor, perhaps one tired of US imperialism or something, had performed this.

I read this after seeing Hulk Hogan rip his shirt off at the RNC in an Idiocracy prophecy manifested, while the other presidential candidate immersed in the dementia of the gerentocracy clings to power amidst his cohorts pleading he step aside.

As I watch the US arming the Ukraine to fight Russia, I think back to 1986 and Gore Vidal's plea for an alliance with Russia lest Americans become either farmers or just entertainment for the more efficient Asians. Another prophecy which seems due to come to pass.

> taking a risk

You are only taking a significant risk in production investment in an unplanned economy.

So it is tautological, circular reasoning. Capitalists want an unplanned economy and then say they deserve their profits for the risks of an unplanned economy.

(Theroretically - of course, the US economy is not unplanned, but semi-planned - we type on chips paid for by US military spending sent to Fairchild, over IP packets on a network created by DARPA handing taxpayer money over to BBN etc.)

At least half of the recent YC batch is in AI, and building models is not cheap (or startup cheap any how).

The US had a tax rate of over 90% for the wealthy in the 1950s (although with loopholes they could push it lower, like now). Didn't seem to have much of an effect on the wealthy, and the US working class did very well.

> they can still buy stocks on the open market

Well that's my point - people who do the work and create the wealth don't get that wealth in wages, it is parasitically expropriated by stockholders.

I am arguing on the side of those who work, that the wealth they create is kept by them. You argue for idleness and parasitism - that those who don't do the work can be rewarded via these various mechanisms, by being parasites on those who do work.