165 karma · joined October 25, 2018
Huh? The PRC has said Taiwan and the mainland are one country since 1949, and the Taiwanese government has said the same since 1949. The previous Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, said this all the time.
Neither is burning people alive in Caracas, but that doesn't stop Macron from supporting the riots in Venezuela.
It's quite a feat to lessen your capabilities, and still be able to repel an invasion by all of Europe (sans England, as well as smaller countries like Switzerland, Ireland etc.)
The other view is Stalin had loyal cadre around him during the war, and did not have lieutenant colonels with links through the high command making bomb attempts against him.
Fascism comes from the Italian (and Latin) word fascism. Mussolini talked little about an ethnic monoculture - in fact there were even some prominent Jewish fascists before German influence over Italy began to increase.
Also Chomsky never used the word fascism, fascist etc. here
Sure - but we could live in an alternative universe where Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and all the other billionaires conspired to drive down their workers salaries. Where Eric Schmidt sent e-mails instructing they be deleted as they pointed to an illegal cabal crushing wage competition between companies.
Of course - this alternative universe to yours is the one we actually do live in.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/jobs-and-schmidts-gentleme...
The point is that there is a class of humans who do not work for their food - the heirs. The Saint Grottlesex aristocracy who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. Who are calling right now in the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek to increase unemployment and enlarge the industrial reserve army, no doubt then to bemoan the grain then handed to those workers left idle, like the optimates of two thousand years ago.
Chomsky's whole argument is against the parasitic elite who do not work expropriating from those of us who do.
As in what, calling an economic system the "free market"? Which has nothing to do with markets as one could buy potatos with rubles in Soviet markets just as one could buy them with dollars in US markets. So it is a misdirection - the commanding heights of the economy - production, not the market - controlled by the government (or in Yugoslavia or China, other mechanisms), not by heirs and the Vanderbilt type aristocracy. I don't have to go into the propaganda term of "free" for the system (versus a presumably "unfree" system where government or workers control the means of production).
Or let us look at the word economics. The field was called political economy - until it became political and supporting the status quo. Then the word political is dropped and the word changed more to like physics. The bank of Sweden even drudged up that old dynamite maker Nobel's prize and started granting it to economic commissars in the 1960s, which I'm sure has Nobel rolling in his grave.
There are innumerable other examples. A "right to work" law does not mean a right to work, it means the government can interfere in a union/business agreement, that a union not be able to get an agreement for a workplace monopoly (of course, companies like Verizon have no such monopoly restrictions). Or "earnings" are what the money, the expropriated dividends of worker's surplus labor time, is called as it is sent to the heirs controlling the corporation.
The flip side of this is what was once called wage slavery is now called career opportunities. The heirs expropriating surplus labor time from the workers who create wealth at as joint stock company are called "job creators". Even the AFL used to call for industrial democracy.
Chomsky isn't shifting the language, he just remembers the language of the Depression before the language shifted.
People on the left who are not part of the machine of the Democratic Party - Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, many lesser known people in that orbit, have said all along that this whole Trump/Russia thing has been overblown.
The Democrats lost the 2016 election. Trump railed against NAFTA and TPP and campaigned around working class people in the Midwest and said the US was in too many wars abroad and steel workers needed help. Hillary took money from Wall Street, initially supported TPP, didn't visit the Midwest despite Michael Moore's entreaties - he was saying at the time which states she could lose, all of which she did.
Nader said, paraphrasing - "The Democrats had unappealing policies in 2000 and lost, and in 2016 and lost. They could be self-critical and see US workers did not support their policies, and change them to be more appealing to US workers. Or they could keep taking corporate PAC money and find a scapegoat. They chose that option. The scapegoat was me (Nader) in 2000. In 2016 it was Putin."
In a move to try to be less appealing to voters, the DCCC just passed a number of policies trying to prevent local Democratic parties from running primaries against incumbents. They want control to be held by incumbents and corporate PACs and party hacks - any body other than the local Democratic voters who do all the leg work and voting.
It's also putting a number of people into the same boat. People may agree or disagree with Steven Pinker about various topics, but at least he makes rational arguments. Search the New York Times and he is treated as an intellectual worthy of respect, although points may be right or wrong. I don't see him being excluded from anything. If anything, the nurture over nature argument is what is blocked from the establishment discourse.
Left leaning Paul Krugman sees MMT as nutty
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/opinion/running-on-mmt-wo...
Even further left, Doug Henwood is down on MMT
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/modern-monetary-theory-is...
It's not just conservatives who are down on this. Left and center-left economists see MMT as wishful thinking.
It is hard for me to grasp how the Tom Perkins class of people see themselves as victims, but as Barry Switzer used to say, lots of people born on third base think they hit a triple.
There is no lack of continuity though. In 1609 the English stole land from Irish people during the plantation of Ulster. In 2019, the six counties vote to stay in the EU, but the Monarch's parliament across the sea decides otherwise. A garrison of the occupation troops remain in the Thiepval barracks.
Six county Brexit (against the will of six county voters) and the Thiepval barracks are a sign of a continuity that is very current but unfortunately not very local.
The majority are those who work and create wealth. The minority are the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those who work. It is an old idea, James Madison wrote the initial draft of the US Constitution and said it was meant "to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority".
Hand outs and taking people's money at the point of a gun is what the heirs do from those who work and create wealth. Larry Page talks about how the police encircled the auto plant his hammer-armed grandfather was on strike at.
"By the time your (sic) 30, it's mostly what you did in life that got you there" - sure like Trump and his small million dollar loan from his dad, W. Bush and his drinking and failed businesses before a government deal for a sports stadium. We see these self made by 30 men as our recent presidents.
We have income earned by labor, and "income" expropriated as a Rentier - rent, interest, profit. We know this as workers pay higher taxes on their earned income than heirs do for their unearned income.
The parasitism is by the heirs who do not work upon us who do work. It has not much to do with money or material - it is a relationship - the expropriation by the heir of the surplus labor time of the worker.
> Y Combinator...Thirteen of them had an altruistic or international development focus
SSC mentions criticism, and then counters with the couple of hundred grand of "altruistic" money YC hands out every year. As puff statements like this are as easy to predict as anything, it seems analogous to several hundred grand to a PR department. As his very statement is a usage of it as PR.
Of all the most awful big organizations and groups in the world, I can't think of any that don't engage in such "altruism" PR.
Then he goes on to say that fault found in Silicon Valley is psychological projection, a "deeply good person crusading for a better world enters Silicon Valley, she'll find herself surrounded by deeply good people crusading for a better world" (Jesus, who swallows this?) and a narcissist will see narcissists.
He admits an "invasion of rent-seeking parasites and empty suits".
How about another tale - a naive young 21 year old MIT grad who wants to be a "deeply good person crusading for a better world". They are shown PR projects, maybe a "peer-to-peer lending service in India" (odd to hear the Christian and Islamic sin of usury being praised as altruism), or cool tech like 3d printers. Then they get put in a FAANG division, or dedicated startup, spying on people for better and targeting. Or generating flamebait headlines to get more clicks. Pulling the strings behind all this are the rent-seeking parasites and empty suits - "activist" investors and hedge funds, LPs, VCs, seeds and angels, executives and management etc.
A lot of talk about what is happening and not who controls it. And who controls work ain't the 21 year old MIT grad paying $2000 a month for a small apartment in Oakland. Who does all the work and creates all the wealth. Who gets the bulk of the fruits of his labors, and to a very large extent what he does is determined by said expropriating suits. That the grad has some choice, although not much, is the reason for the 3 card monte shill game of cool tech and altruism. The kid will be setting up the ad spying networks Kubernetes containers, not doing altruism and playing with cool tech.
Of the people working in Silicon Valley, the main victims of expropriation are the people working in Silicon Valley.
Strange this is mentioned as the communist manifesto contains a whole chapter criticizing Utopias.
Also - establishment intellectuals from Hegel to Fukuyama to Pinker talk about how we are in Utopia now, at the end of history with capitalism and liberalism triumphant.
Marx said not only was capitalism self-destructive, with crises (like the 2008 government bank/insurance/etc. bailout), but that socialism would be self-destructive too. Hard to call someone postulating the next system will self-destruct is utopian.
Also Marx replied to socialists wanting utopian plans from him by replying he was not August Comte, and he did not want to "write recipes for the cookshops of the future".
Marx was about as unutopian as you can be, other than he thought the progress of production and technology over the millennia would continue, with effects on relations of production. Something you read on HN regularly.
There are no modern uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands to observe. The Sentinelese have everyone from local fishermen to American Christian fundamentalists invading their island. The bands in the Amazon are being murdered by miners. Modern people attacking and threatening the Sentilenese and getting a hostile response says little - if they were invading other islands, that would be a different story.
Prior to 500 years ago there was little modern contact with the Americas, Australia, parts of sub-Saharan Africa etc., so observation of lack of conflict in hunter-gatherer bands there is more evidence. Obviously I mean hunter-gatherers, not the Aztec warriors.
I don't see what chimpanzees have to do with humans, unless chimpanzees are sculpting Venus Madonnas and drawing buffalo on caves.
The first link is shot through with holes, I would not know where to start. The Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances says otherwise.
The second link is obvious on the face of it - in a country with 325 million people, if you look at 11 million firms, the majority are not run by 1%ers. The data parameters make the outcome a foregone conclusion. Of course the owner of the median firm out of 11 million will be more middle class than the heirs who own a lot of stock in Walmart.
He mentions tribes, and there is no evidence of tribes existing prior to 10,000 years ago. Which is about 25,000 to 30,000 years after the cave paintings in Chauvet and El Castillo.
Not that conflict never happens between hunter-gatherer bands, but evidence is it was, and is, fairly limited.
Real conflict and war started ramping up 10,000 years ago, with the dawn of slave societies and empires.
Far below them is a work force which is split in different skill levels. Only a handful of top school STEM majors graduate every year, then there are the rest.
Since in your universe larger social analysis is excluded, the answer comes down to each individual - their motivation and such.
As I said, when, after the electricity bill etc. is paid, created wealth is split between dividends to heirs and wages to those who worked and created the wealth.
If in your hypothetical situation there is no split - if the person who worked and created wealth keeps everything - there is no expropriation.
The expropriation is the last few hours of work he does, of the wealth he creates - none of it going to him, the one who created the wealth and did the work. All of the profit going to the heir. But if there is no split, this expropriation does not happen.
There is an easy way to see that and it is if the median inflation-adjusted hourly wage has risen in the US since the early 1970s. Or if inflation-adjusted weekly earnings have risen. They have not, with GDP growth, both have fallen.
That this even has to be discussed shows the deep control those heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from workers have over discourse, the media, forums like this (run and controlled by an accelerator) etc.
Workers create wealth at a mature company. Some of that pays the electricity bills etc., but then the rest goes to either dividends to the heirs, or to wages. That is the "preclusion". The heirs expropriate the profits of the surplus labor time from the workers creating the wealth. They are shorted on their wages. Sometimes this is explicit like the cabal between Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt that came out in the lawsuit.
Insofar as Bill Gates and invention - it takes a hell of a lot of gullibility to swallow the fantasy you concocted. Kemeny and Kurtz created BASIC. Gates hacks into a military research computer at Harvard and steals computer time from it according to Paul Allen's book (and Harvard admin found out and had proceedings) - they port BASIC to the Altair.
Then IBM comes to Microsoft. IBM got wealthy with computers on taxpayer funded government contracts and a monopoly which was lightly overseen. Gates's mother is on the United Way board with IBM CEO Opel who helps makes this meeting happen. Microsoft sells Seattle Computer Product's Qdos to IBM (Gary Kildall said it was a complete ripoff of his Drdos). A purchased ripoff of another product, sold thanks to family connections. So much for "invention".
At times like the current one, with real wages falling since the early 1970s despite economic growth, that this is even discussed is a sign of how the heirs have bought and paid for the narrative as well.
The liable chemical company responsible for atrazine said they could not replicate the study.
> Alex Jones
What layman commentators say about a published paper has little bearing.
> a few videos
Looking through their videos they have "The Young Turks are Morons", "You should not fund Greenpeace", "Kyle Kulinski - Lazy", more anti-Greenpeace videos. Ok.
The video text says the EPA wanted to repeat Hayes findings. This was not the process the EPA fostered (incidentally, the EPA is currently run by a coal industry lobbyist, taking over for another fossil fuel advocate who said he was the "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda").
The last YouTube text paragraph is correct - Syngenta, the company which makes atrazine did experiments and said atrazine was not harmful.
The text also says Hayes "resisted...answering questions about his data". Syngenta had a formal ethics complaint launched against Hayes at Berkeley, had his personal life investigated by private investigators (as legally obtained documents show), tried to get his papers retracted etc.
Also it should be noted - Syngenta/Novartis hired Ecorisk to fund Hayes and others to look at atrazine. Hayes found these problems, and there was a subsequent conflict between Hayes and them.
Any how, the OP paper is independent Australian scientists.
Are you joking? Look at the Forbes 400 richest. Look at the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances.
The person with power in San Francisco is not the 24 year old MIT Grad FAANG SWE who can barely afford his mortgage, but the LP for the VC who has founders coming to try to get that series A. Or the activist investors making Apple give a dividend.
Billionaire heirs are "winning so hard" all over the place in index funds. S&P 500 2008-2018 return is 167% on low inflation. Even factoring in inflation it's over 100% - billions more than doubled in a decade. 2008 was an off year, but even factoring around that is still a huge win.
Doing nothing for a decade, and more than doubling a few billion after inflation? Yes that is winning so hard.
The biggest beneficiaries are the heirs who expropriate labor time from those who work, not those working and creating wealth.
Like Lula in Brazil? Trump and the US are celebrating Bolsanaro.
Lula is lucky, the opposition leaders have been murdered in Honduras, where the US helped overthrow elections.
I'm happy the US is committed to human rights - except in Guantanamo Bay, or its allies chopping up reporters in foreign embassies, prior to the press vilification program against said reporter.