266 karma · joined September 27, 2013
Also you attribute statements to me that I did not make, then say these statements you made up and attribute to me are wrong.
You keep using this word market. A market in the US was the same as a USSR market. Yes, other things varied, but markets were the same.
Also you are attributing and inferring some statements to me that I did not say.
There is no being coy at all, I can't even twist my head around how these similar places in the US and Russia are not the same. What is his "alternate definition" where such a place in Russia is stripped of the word market?
Well having the US send $1 billion a year, year after year to prop your country up ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Colombia ) helps.
The Federal Reserve, bank bailouts, the government spending and government-backed monopolies that created the Internet we're typing on etc. The US "government regulates the economy or large pieces of it".
Venezuela has been very heavily dependent on oil for decades and this happens every time oil's price plunges for a long period in Venezuela, look at its history since WWII. The same is happening to every oil-dependent region in the world (except Saudi Arabia, which is doing the market flooding).
The article opening lines talking about how unique the situation is without mentioning what is happening in Honduras this moment is a laugh.
The PRC just surpassed US GDP on some measures, whereas in the 1940s it was a western and Japanese occupied backwards basket case. Is that the downfall you mean?
Or do you mean Russia, which couldn't win a war with the Japanese in 1905, never mind Germany a decade later? The New York Times columns of 1918 said Mr. Lenin's government would fall any day now. What actually happened is as Europe and the US fell into depression in the 1930s, Russia was surging ahead and industrializing. It repelled an attack by a military alliance of virtually all of continental Europe in 1941 and Red Army soldiers planted the red flag in 1945. Then it launched the first satellite, man in space etc. After becoming a superpower, the central committee of the CPSU decided to pack it in in the late 1980s, and attune itself to the economic and political system of the rest of the world. Even Molotov never believed in "socialism in one country", and he was the one proclaiming it.
Some downfall, foreign-dominated backwaters rose to become world superpowers.
One thing they say is the hunter-gatherer bands of 10,000 years ago (or the small handful which remain in the world's remaining wilderness today) are not as bad as they say.
One thing is - the men in some of these bands work less than 40 hours a week. So in some respects, they are better off than a lot of people here (in some respects worse off).
The basic idea is against the Panglossian idea that Voltaire talks about in Candide - that we're currently living in the best possible economic/political/etc. system. One counterpoint to that is every political system since the dawn of time has held up people like Pinker who say we're living in the best of all possible systems and the other ones are awful, people need a strong government to keep them in check, and so forth.
People didn't need a strong government to keep them in check 10,000 years ago, 20,000, 30,000 when they were painting buffalos in caves and so forth.
No, I said the Language Instinct talked about science and the brain, and Better Angels talked about political questions. One is scientific, one is polemic.
Pinker refers to Noam Chomsky in his scientific books, and he is an author of similar note. Chomsky writes mathematical formulas to describe human and computer languages, which are widely used - so there is no argument to their validity (unless you have some logical proof that Chomsky normal form can not describe context-free grammars). Chomsky also writes in other books about what he thinks about Israeli foreign policy - which is political and polemic.
I don't know how much more I can explain how there is a difference between an error-free mathematical proof and a controversial political opinion. They are apples and oranges.
What the "classified documents" said were that the government is secretly violating the constitutional "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". Innocent citizens are routinely having their e-mails and phone calls watched, and recorded in archives permanently.
The "classified information" you keep referring to is that the government is violating its own constitution.
I agree with the Language Instinct since it sticks with our current scientific understanding of how the brain scientifically and mathematically creates grammar. I disagree with much of The Better Angels book since it contradicts many anthropological and archaeological studies of human societies.
Many see the EU as constituted as something concocted by bureaucrats in business and government, for their own ends, a view which I think is correct. So the UK or Greece and the like being fed up with the EU should come as no surprise.
I think the EU as organized is a bad idea. I don't think European integration is a bad idea, but it was done without much consultation of the populace of Europe, and things like this are the result.
In the US, the popular candidates with mass rallies bucking against their party establishments have been Trump and Sanders, although Sanders was pushed aside for the establishment candidate with the help of superdelegates etc. Congressional job ratings for 2016 fluctuated between 13% to 18% approval, 75-84% disapproval. The average American feels alienated from Washington DC because Washington DC is unresponsive to the desires of the average American. The situation is not dissimilar from Europe.
> Enemy nations can then go rampant
The main enemy of the FVEY agencies has always been the population of the FVEY countries. This goes back a long time - in the era that US Republicans actually did believe in smaller government and Stimson was shutting down the Black Chamber, British intelligence was manufacturing the Zinoviev letter to bring down the Labour government in 1924. Peter Wright discussed more modern efforts by MI5 against the Labour party in Spycatcher, especially in the 1970s, and this has been discussed in other sources.
Similar machinations were happening in the USA in the 1970s, with Nixon using ex-CIA operatives to, among other things, break in to the national Democratic campaign headquarters in order to rig the election his way. That's against the background of COINTELPRO, spying on blacks seeking their civil right to vote and such, or that part of the electorate that wanted to withdraw from a war in Vietnam that the top brass and chiefs were privately saying was a lost cause. FVEY intelligence also helped bring down Gough Whitlam's Australian Labour government in the 1970's, an American, Christopher Boyce went to jail for, among other things, revealing this news to the Russians.
Insofar as enemy nations, England has had a litany of enemy nations in the 20th century - Indians who wanted independence, Argentinians who wanted the Malvinas returned, Irish who wanted English troops out of Ireland and on and on - think of John Cleese in the Meaning of Life waning on about efforts to "keep China British!"
US intelligence caused Daoud Khan to turn his back on the Soviets who had helped propel him to power, and when the Russians backed another horse and their former friend was ousted, the US said the "enemy nation" of Saur Afghanistan with Soviet backing was "going rampant", so the US helped launched a mujahideen-led jihad against secularizing Afghanistan, financing and arming Osama bin Laden and other proto-Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Then years later the US decided to plant military bases in Saudi Arabia, causing this Arab nationalist to send his fighters with planes into the Pentagon.
Now we're told we need we need to work and be taxed to finance these FVEY agencies to protect us from these dangers which they themselves created. Whereas the real enemy they are fighting against is their own populations - as MacDonald, McGovern and Whitlam could all attest to.
If success is defined as not working, but parasitically living off the labor time of those of us who do work, as heirs and VCs and their LPs do, then yes, there is a hatred of "success". We who work don't need heirs parasitically living off our work and sweat.
Nor did he intend to say much. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the kitchens of the future". He gave advice to organizers in his day, and left the future for those in the future, with the material conditions and relations of production they would have.
> there isn’t a proletariat any more
In the world of 1867, the proletariat was rather small. The world just shifted from majority rural to majority urban/suburban a few years ago. The proletariat is larger than it ever was. You can argue if it will ever be a vanguard revolutionary class or not, but it has not disappeared.
One point Marx and Engels made is the world has seen several economic systems over the past 10,000 years - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. The last three systems all collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Marx and Engels believed capitalism would run its course and eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions just like the previous economic systems. Capitalism has only become predominant relatively recently historically.
At one company, a married black director, my boss, had hired a black woman as an assistant. A newly hired older white executive was asking around if she was hired because she was his side girlfriend.
At another company an executive went to a bar with one of the younger guys, and advised him to always hit on the "ethnic" women.
There's nothing new to what you're saying, plenty of white people in the U.S. south said there was no civil rights problem back in the 1950s and believed it. Most of those people thought some Jewish rabbi from 2000 years ago came back from the dead. People believe what they want to believe.
He is not wearing a keffiyeh in that picture. A keffiyeh is a square scarf that is worn on the head.
In that picture he is wearing a non-square (fringed) scarf, and around his neck.
Only a nut would look at that scarf and make the leap "Yasser Arafat" -> "Palestinian Liberation Organization" -> "terrorist" as you do.
TV cook Rachel Ray made an ad for Dunkin Donuts a few years ago, in which she wore a scarf around her neck. The Trump-supporting type nutcases came out of the woodwork and said she was wearing the scarf to support the terrorists. You can see a sample of it if you Google "Dunkin Donuts" "Rachel Ray" and "keffiyeh". Most of the articles are by people who appear on Fox News regularly.
Only a wack job makes the leap from a math professor who is presumably an American of Italian descent that wears a scarf to the scarf being a keffiyeh! That Yasser Arafat wore! Who was in the PLO! Which is proscribed as terrorist! By make the leap I mean make the leap like you did.
Then these people go out and cry about how they can't find talented developers.
I guess you are unaware of the activities of Golden Dawn in Greece, or some of the more reactionary groups when meeting Syrian refugees in Europe etc. Or in the West Bank Kahanist hilltop settlements for that matter.
Until 10,000 years ago, the entire world was communist - not socialists saying they were working toward communism, but actual communism.
Is it OK for the communist hunter-gatherers in the Amazon wilderness to be the communists they are? Or should they get on their knees and say mea culpas for what some Laotian commissar did during a party purge half a century ago?
What fails during implementation? When leftists of his time demanded plans from Marx, he scoffed and said he was not August Comte, and refused to "write recipes for the kitchens of the future".
Marx and Engels did note changes in production led to changes in relations of production, and the superstructure (society). Some scientists think human hunting and fishing being what is was may have led to behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago. This led to a different form of primitive communism. 10000 years ago slavery and agriculture arose. 1600 years ago feudalism began to arise. 600 years ago capitalism as a dominant economic system began to arise.
Since men began painting pictures of horses in caves 50,000 years ago, the world has seen four major economic systems. The current one is capitalism. You seem to say it is immutable, the three previous ones were flimsy, but you seem to say our current economic system is the final one (although the previous one said that as well - the czar was claiming God, the creator of the world, ruler of a life after life had appointed him to his throne - claimed this until he was felled by the bullets of Bolshevik soldiers).
We are entering a world where I film a video, or record audio, or write code, push a button and with almost no cost in replication, can have it distributed to billions. We are entering a world where with continual improvements in robotics and AI, there may eventually be no job a human can do that an AI robot can't do (and perhaps do better - my memory, prefrontal cortex processing etc. is limited by bandwidth, space and this sort of thing in a way that a neural network translating speech to text is not). When there is no need any more for humans to farm, or mine, or even to program, will the world still be under a system of capitalism?
I have been reading in the press about how the NSA, the CIA, the FBI etc. want an encryption backdoor in everything Americans use, so we can be spied on at will. I don't see why this isn't totalitarian and somehow anarchism is. Anarchism means no state, whereas totalitarianism means total state control, yet you're saying no state control means more state control. It makes no sense.
In Fanshen, its is noted in pre-PRC China, poor peasants in the countryside could not afford livestock, so peasants used their own shit as fertilizer. Sometimes peasants would even steal one another's shit.
That is poverty. Taiwanese families who are getting press because they want their kid to get into Harvard by taking the place of the poor black kid whose family was in the US before 1808 are not poor.
So open the borders and let anyone who wants to come in come in and work any job they want - let them vote as well.
Until that happens, I have a problem with this.