UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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Capitalism is when there’s an owner-class controlling production via capital.

It's funny, because I've seen more than a few libertarians assert that Communism is the Worst Form Of Capitalism because any kind of regulation is just Government Ownership of Production. The only true path to socialism is a fully devolved privatization of all territory and commodities.

So you have people go out into the woods to create this ultra-orthodox free market absent any kind of iron grip of Big Government. They spend millions on marketing their liberal utopia to attract a large base of like-minded people. They take over the local government, abolish the regulations, end the tyranny of the Woke Government Leftists, and finally unleash the power of individualist John Galt style ingenuity. And then their city fills up with bears.

Part of the problem is that these theories are dogmatic. They're articles of faith.

Tariffs Bad! Make stuff more expensive!

No! Tariffs Good! Make domestic economy more stable and resilient to global price shocks!

Like, you can get under the hood and talk messy details if you're a professional economic planner doing real long-term strategic policy making. Maybe you really do want steel tariffs so that your country's last operational blast furnace doesn't shut down in the face of low priced imports and a short term domestic downturn in construction. Maybe you're trying to fight brain drain, so you try to cultivate a domestic semiconductor industry. Maybe you're a single commodity export nation and you want to try and diversify. Maybe there's a bunch of reasons why defensive domestic industry tariffs are still dumb and counterproductive.

But this conversation means dealing with educated professionals and industrialists with some fucking skin in the game. It's too easy to heckle from the sidelines by chanting "You don't know what you're talking about!"

those damned Leftist who refused to vote

Do you believe that the 6M voters who showed up for Biden in 2020 and walked away from Harris in 2024 were Leftists? Or is this just Schrodinger's Leftist? The one whose vote never matters when Democrats are winning but always costs the candidate the election when they lose?

You don’t have to tell everyone your business and why you’re right.

You don't. However, corporate media is dirty as shit. So you'll inevitably get the "Why won't you condemn the Palestinian Intifada!" heckled at a guy running for NYC Mayor, simply because he's a Muslim who also disapproves of genocide. And if you don't say "I :heart: Israel and condemn all forms of Islamic Extremism" on a loop whenever prompted (and sometimes even when you do), the inevitable NYT headline is "Radical Mayoral Candidate For Most Important Job On Earth Supports Hamas And May Be Ineligible For Office So Don't Even Bother Voting For Him".

Not entirely unlike the inevitable flood of "Politician X is Literally Dying!" headlines that we get whenever a swath of corporate media has you in their sights.

People often fall into the trap of trying to explain themselves or defend or clarify their positions. And this inevitably gets spun as "Divisions in The Left! Leftists in Disarray!" It's why you'll often find politicians talking as though they're stuck on repeat, even to the point of stumbling over the same prepared remarks on what feels like autopilot. That's because they have trained themselves to stay so rigidly on topic, in order to avoid these pitfalls.

Broadly speaking, this is how modern liberal journalism functions to degrade democracy.

100% not capitalism

Capitalism is when you... produce low cost surplus for general consumption?

What happens when you ban crypto trading and mining because its exploiting the SOE low cost electricity?

the glorification of China

The Chinese government has definitely run ahead of the pack on domestic investment. But you could play the same game with Spain or Japan or Turkiye. The numbers simply would not have been as impressive.

Their buildings are collapsing.

This is a meme from 2008. You won't find any more crumbling buildings in China than you'd find in the UK or Korea.

And the Chinese peope themselves. They suffer.

They'll never know the joys of bumper to bumper traffic

The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.

China: "We're working on our next five year plan, as part of a grand fifty year plan for full national modernization. We haven't had a recession in 40 years and we've functionally eliminated poverty within our borders. We're currently working on a network of trans-continental railroads and global shipping lanes to bring our modern industrial capacity to the planetary scale. As we slough off the productive surge of capitalism and turn state owned enterprises into the foundation of our economic model, we are enjoying an era of wealth and social stability not enjoyed by any country on earth in human history. This is just as Karl Marx predicted, two-hundred years ago."

American: "No, that's just capitalism. You're doing capitalism right now."

Also American: "We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins. Our GDP is up to 15 digits. No, we don't care about our measles epidemic, it builds character."

Americans: "Nice infrastructure. Would be a shame if we had to come over there and liberate it."

Me, as a child: "I want to eat four KitKats at once."

My parents: "You'll give yourself a tummy ache and spend the rest of the day puking and shitting."

Me, as an adult: puking and shitting noises

Everyone will have always been against this, but those damned Leftist who came in during ramp up of the genocide in 2023 and 2024 will still have been unserious and irrational and detrimental to the cause of peace.

Same with Iraq. What you said was wrong, because you said it at the wrong time and argued with the wrong people. You didn't know back then what we knew and you didn't understand what we understood and you were so rude about it when you should have been casual and polite, while tens of thousands of people were being butchered.

So yes it's a genocide, but you're still expelled from Columbia for being anti-semitic. Maybe even deported to a blacksite in El Salvador. And you have only yourself to blame.

I'm wondering how long until the ICE agents who drag me off are all on H1-B visas.

Even if you assumed the test successfully filtered out an educated voterbase

"Educated" is already doing some heavy lifting. What education are you demanding voters possess?

Because I've had an earful about "Marxist Professors corrupting our youth!" for my entire life. I doubt conservatives would consider any kind of liberal exam a legitimate test of voting aptitude.

Meanwhile, there's enough jingoism and nationalism in our education system already, such that I could see an exam question "Which religious extremist sect was responsible for 9/11? Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists" or "Is an individual with XY chromosomes a man or a woman?" that's a bit... loaded? Especially when administered right before a national election.

Barack was naturally cool, in a way the felon in chief will never be.

It was so cool, the way Barry turned a blind eye to a decade of financial crimes while overseeing the automation of the Pentagon's mass surveillance and automated their preferred tools for repression and assassination overseas. I loved how he prosecuted whistleblowers all casual and sexy, kept the torture prison in Cuba open indefinitely, and unleashed the FBI on the largest movement of black civil rights activists since the 1960s.

Trump will never be as suave or as sexy while committing war crimes, suppressing domestic dissent, or papering over the horrors of the plutocracy. I ❤️ You Obama!

That's heroin for you.

Let’s waterboard Trump.

Go for it. Nobody's stopping you, right?

Vanishingly close to letting AI fill in the gaps and running with this as is.

They want more people born into poverty and incable of understanding it’s better to wait and pay in cash than use credit and pay interest.

I've seen this theory, effectively built on the notion that Americans are losing access to pools of cheap labor overseas and are attempting to build up a human stockpile of miserables at home. But that runs counter to (a) heavy investment in automation, particularly with regard to the service sector in the belief large numbers of people can be made redundant and (b) federally funded purges of migrant populations and pogroms targeting low income counties and states intended to remove people en mass.

I'll spot you a second theory that's largely rooted in the modern American adoption of eugenics as a theory of human development. The current crop of national leaders is so heavily pilled on their Calvinism-esque understanding of Darwinism that they really do believe some number of children are "born blessed" to succeed. Merely popping out of the womb is enough for Almighty God to do his thing and lead you on the path to success.

The first thing that caught me was the radioactive symbol at the center, because my brain immediately went to "Oh good! We're de-carbonizing the electrical grid and supporting transgender rights! How progressive."

Just block it in Europe already.

The Brazil Government did this for a week and immediately extracted big concessions from Elon. Really curious to see the EU so reluctant to employ a tried-and-true tactic... assuming you believe these governments are adversarial to American plutocrats.