amw

This speculative nonsense adds nothing:

We know that state actors have invested heavily in understanding and exploiting these divisions. Russian active measures campaigns have been documented doing exactly this kind of work: identifying wedge issues and creating content designed to inflame both sides. North Korea has demonstrated similar sophistication in their social engineering operations by targeting academics and foreign policy experts

What about "read Twitter in between bouts of using one susceptible user's API key to spam other users for their API keys" _really_ requires the sophistication of a state-level actor? Statements like this aren't journalism, they're exactly the same kind of manipulation being used by the phishers.

Donating to reduce the government debt is such a wildly dumb thing to exist. The US is currency sovereign! It has no risk of default on any debt denominated in USD!

The only reason a site like this exists is for politicians to distract from the fact that the budget of a nation with currency sovereignty does not actually have to raise revenues with taxes in order to spend money on services (and thus, be an excuse to cut services).

OP, if you're reading this, the animation pegs my CPU. Relying on your readers to engage reader mode is going to turn away a lot of people who might otherwise enjoy your content.

There is more authoritarianism in your life in the US than there is for the average person in Cuba. I know it's hard to believe, but it turns out spending almost half your waking hours selling your labor for a wage to a much richer person than you doesn't actually end up with a life defined by agency.

Cuba isn't poor because of an inefficient command economy. Cuba is poor because it has been denied access to its largest trading partner (and more) for over half a century. And people _still_ have a better healthy life expectancy in that country than in the US. Imagine what it could be like there if the US did more than pay lip service to world prosperity and peace.

They don't, this is a lie from the country that's been embargoing Cuba into oblivion for sixty years.

Absolutely. I feel like the most important infographic for understanding the last fifty years or so of our economy is the one where productivity skyrockets to the moon while wage stays put.

And the most important _book_ for understanding that _infographic_ is Capital Vol. 1.

Most of us are raised from a young age to not steal, the existing environment encourages those who do that get away with it, at the expense of those that follow ethics, morals and rules. Cheating and academic dishonesty is rampant because fraud & corruption is endemic to the system.

This is not new, but I do agree it's more noticeable, and probably will continue to be so as real wage continues to drop. People get more desperate and less socially inclined as financial stress increases, and it has been doing so with _less_ social safety net for at least as long as anyone who reads this has been alive.

I don't think it's demonstrated that at all, simply that it was better than feudalism. But China has built 15000 miles of high speed rail in ten years, and has functionally eliminated homelessness by the admission of the World Bank (not a pro-Communist organization!). Cuba (and China) had its healthy life expectancy surpass the US for the first time (despite over a half-century of the worst sanctions regime on the planet, save perhaps the one imposed on Palestine). The USSR went from a society of peasants to beating the US in space milestones over five decades. All of these successes have happened over the backdrop of a massively hostile international capitalist presence--imagine how different it could all be if said capitalist societies felt like they should compete on making their citizens happy, rather than by building hundreds of military bases around the world and being involved in violent conflict all but a handful of years out of the last two centuries (the US has eight hundred military bases and spends almost a trillion a year on its military!).

Any time you hear about how terrible ("authoritarian! undemocratic! oppressive!") a society that gives socialism a shot is, remember that it is coming from a context that has baked Cold War propaganda into _literally everything_ we have consumed from it, our entire lives. Question it!

What horror that it might be on the market to be bought as an owner-occupied residence instead.

When people justify landlords as providing housing, it always seems to be without consideration to the particular financing/market circumstances that make "buying a house" something that is difficult for a lot of people these days, a thing that was not true not even that long ago (and did not become true due to simply neutral market fluctuations).

It is not useful to individualize this. Even if you could make a solid argument that being a landlord might sometimes take more effort than working a job does for someone else to pay your mortgage for you, corporations holding many properties at once (with just a couple of companies holding up to 5% of the rental stock) are going to have a bigger economic impact on the market, and the small-time landlord's experience isn't really relevant to that, vis effort, risk, or graciousness to their lessees.

It's also the only thing that produces new construction

It's not, though. People constructed housing for thousands of years without landlords. There are plenty of ways to fund constructions without markets. We have built a society that prefers to organize it that way, but that is also a society with more vacant units than there are homeless, where it is _normal_ to spend 50% or more of one's income on rent. Those outcomes, I argue, are inhumane, but also, maybe more controversially, avoidable in a system organized around something other than profit.

My logic is that just as you don't change the movement of a cloud of gas by changing the velocity of individual molecules one at a time, you also do not change society by imputing moral weight to individual actions. People constantly live in precarity and _should_ seek to exit it. We should also seek to build, _collectively_, a society where that precarity is minimized, and in the meantime, societies where the more deleterious ways to exit it have less incentive for being pursued.

The term that applies here is "petite bourgeoisie". They are nominally rentiers, but without the scale of economic control given to the actual bourgeoisie by their relationship to the means of production.

but anytime you buy stock, the goal is to benefit from the profits of the company without doing any work yourself.

Which is arguably also bad for the same reason. Not bad, morally, though, and that's kind of the key thing. When you live in a society where scarcity (either real, or cultivated) creates constant precarity for you and your family, doing what you can to exit that precarity is not a bad thing to do, even if the thing you end up doing ends up being something that leads to an overall trend of society into more misery for more people. After all, it's not like you individually choosing not to be a landlord means society would suddenly turn into one that hadn't created a social niche for landlords to occupy.

Individual landlords can be moral, upstanding people, and the incentive structure around deriving your income from rents can systemically produce inhumane outcomes. They are not mutually exclusive.

In Marx's usage (the common usage of the time), dictatorship just means "leadership", and doesn't have the same connotation of "ruling over others without their consent". Which is his point, really: socialism exists to take the reins of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (whose contradictions are propped up by a force-monopoly in the form of "a state") into a dictatorship of the workers so society can be transitioned over time into one where a state no longer needs to exist ("communism").

So, yes, in the meantime, the state takes control over some amount of enterprise and manages it for its own goals rather than to generate profits for a small number of owners. Is that a bad thing? In a world where for-profit healthcare in the US is famously more expensive and less effective than nationalized healthcare in any other OECD country, where the (unionized!) USPS is one of this country's most-popular and most-reliable services even despite years of meddling from capitalists in government pushing to gut it, in a world where famously most of our R&D is publicly funded, is it really so hard to imagine that it might be an effective way to manage production?

They're legendary to people mostly exposed to capitalist-owned media, that is.

These responses are the worst of bad-faith every time I see them. If you live in a place, with family and friends and social ties, but it has some stuff you want to change, why would the solution ever be "move away" rather than "stay and make it change", except that the former is more convenient for assholes who are fine with how things are?

As far as getting "shot" in Cuba, you're more likely to get shot by a cop in the US than in Cuba for any particular reason. Stop just soaking in wild propaganda uncritically.

Trump wasn't particularly special for this. In fact, by tanking TPP, he actually stopped at least one massive tool for curtailing IP sovereignty.

Not making a flattering statement about Trump here, just that _he_ wasn't _the problem_, in this and other things.

That said, "jk guys actually you can forget about what we said" would be fantastic for this and many other things our government has made part of its international doctrine, and might be a thing it would even do if our government had any interest in governing for our benefit rather than for a tiny minority.

is something that might be defensible.

I would like to propose that it never is, and only seems so sometimes because our society is insane.

The West invests money in things that it expects to see generate a return. Sometimes this results in the Marshall Plan, a massive development effort whose main strategic goal was to isolate newly allied Russia and China in the post-WWII era, and gave the foundation forward strongholds for capitalism could use to thrive at the doorstep of the powers challenging our assertion of a ruling world order.

(Never mind what Chiang Kai-Shek was doing to the citizens under his government-in-exile. Never mind that killing some 200k people in a nuclear conflagration in Japan was already known to be unnecessary, and that those people died as a simple show of force against the USSR. Never mind that the Korean War that devastated that country didn't have to ever be fought in the first place. The Bad Communists™ must be fought.)

Usually, the investments don't have those happy endings--I don't think anyone who frequents this site could be completely blind to the abysmal record US interventions have for world stability and economic development, that three relative successes in that mass of bloody failure counts as barely a drop in the bucket.

Finally, I think taking statements about the CIA or NED or the Open Society Foundation or Radio Free Asia or VOC (etc, etc, etc) doing the work they do as statements that "remove local agency" misunderstand how the "West" works: Nobody in the countries that color revolutions happen in has to be given orders from the CIA to make their own country a horrible place to live, the investment is always structured as finding the people _most_ willing to seek an extreme solution and amplifying their voice and reach further than it would get on its own, if left to itself in the local context. We always propagandize this as "supporting democracy", but we absolutely know that a reverse effort of a theoretical CPC-affiliated NGO funding some adventurist Commie group with millions in ad funding and logistical support would be treated as an enemy attack against our government, and that that treatment would _be correct_.

Demand doesn't really drive supply, not the way we're told it does. The manufacturers want to make devices that give them a further income stream, and they just have a marketing budget for making sure demand doesn't drop too low for what they're making.

Because chasing those quarterly returns will always trend toward taking money out of the comfort of the workers. Certain individual companies at certain individual times might get a temporary advantage by actually investing in themselves, but eventually they will all either start financializing that away for share buybacks, or get bought out by the company that did.

Sorry, I missed this reply when you made it 11 days ago. Happy to respond:

Automation of manual labor _should_ result in a _lot_ of benefits to workers. But here's the thing: Automation is, largely, capital. And under capitalism, ownership of capital is private. That means that the benefits from automation are largely under control over the owners of it. And that ownership is for the purpose of making a profit. It is more profitable to automate as much as possible while simultaneously working the workers who are left as hard as possible, while paying the minimum amount to successfully do so.

This leads to a situation like we have in the U.S., where productivity has massively skyrocketed while median real wage has actually _decreased_ since the 70s. That median real wage means workers who can pay for less for a given hour for work, which means workers who need to work more _somewhere_ in order to support their conditions of work (pay for a place to live, pay for food, etc). Working more hours means getting less rest, which means less recovery, which means ::drumroll:: more chronic pain. The stats bear this out, and it's trivial to corroborate: The lowest-wage earners work more hours for less pay than they did fifty years ago, while percentage of take-home that goes to mortgage/rent has increased. This is a recipe for misery, and the most unbelievable thing about it is that it's not patently obvious to everyone. "Over-prescription" exists in those conditions: Pharma both has the incentive to sell more than is necessary, and no incentive to cure the actual _cause_ that bring people to seek a remedy for pain in the first place. "Partying", in this analysis, is not just a thing people "like to do" that they are now suddenly doing with more-abundant pain meds--it is a thing people are doing _with pain meds_ because those meds are _the thing that makes the general pain of being alive easier to deal with_, a thing large-scale abuse of substances (notably, alcohol) has been doing for thousands of years, where increased consumption has correlated strongly with increased human misery.

It's worth reading the response from a person in China. That's not to say you should believe it _more_, but that you should hear what the objections are and whether they make sense (and whether that critique calls into question anything else in the original report, which, by the way, you should also read http://english.scio.gov.cn/xinjiangfocus/2020-09/14/content_...).

That said, "non-governmental" and "non-U.S." coverage can be suprisingly illusory. Pay attention to the sources next time you see a Xinjiang story, whether in or out of the U.S., and report back if you find out that it ultimately sources someone other than Zenz (of course, make sure to do this recursively).

It's also worth pointing out that non-governmental organizations get their funding from somewhere, and, surprise, the places most critical of China tend to get their grants from sources that are ultimately government funds. The National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Asia are particularly infamous for distancing themselves from their government ties (Allen Weinstein, a founder of the former, famously said in a 1991 interview that "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.").

Not the way America is, no. China gives loans with minimal terms to build infrastructure, and has a record of forgiving the debts when they become unpayable. The US (via the IMF) lends money for infrastructure under terms that require concessions in government policy like "repealing wage laws" and "spending less on healthcare", and rarely discharges debt, instead lending out more money at worse interest with even more austerity concessions. If a government pops up thay doesn't like the terms, we coup them. China does nothing anything like that.

Most of those "actions" are reported to us by our government, whose ability to report objective fact has not been demonstrated. To take Xinjiang, in particular: do a deep dive into the reporting and see where it comes from. You'll discover that it all boils down to a report by one guy, a fellow of the Victims of Communism org named Adrian Zenz. His report has been responded to in various places, and whether you take the responses at face value or not, they bring up good points worth investigation that call Zenz into very serious doubt.

Update since i posted: chinese foreign ministry has confirmed, says it's for scientific purposes

Not that China needs to be contained anyway. The only worldwide threat to national security is the country with 800 military bases worldwide and a hundreds-of-years-long history of invading someone every few years.

I understand why the State Department hyperventilates over "Chinese offensive capabilities" but no normal person ever needs to. China is not a threat to everyday Americans.