VictorPath

In 1910, Emma Goldman wrote "The Traffic in Women" about how the supposed efforts against sex traffic in the day had nothing to do with helping women, and were all done for other purposes.

112 years later nothing has changed from what she described - fundamentalist churches in supposed campaigns against sex trafficking, yellow journalists printing sensationalist stories - 112 years and nothing has changed whatsoever.

Is this a parody piece or are people expected to believe this whole thing?

As a worker, I create wealth. There is also a parasitic class of heirs who are LPs for VCs, or who get dividend, rent and interest checks - rentiers expropriating surplus labor time of those who work. Yes, my attitude towards them is about what Lenin's were for the tsar and his parasitical family.

I can care less what those who are parasites off my labor think of me, and their cadre who somehow benefit off this paraditism. Workers work, create wealth and have no need of these parasites. Yes we resent them, and will eventually eliminate this parasitism.

Last Sunday Wikipedia had a generic definition of recession. Then the second paragraph was changed so that the US would be in a recession under the definition. Then, as the title says "Wikipedia has blocked editing recession".

So it was made US-centric, in fact US current events centric, and now as the title says "Wikipedia has blocked editing".

In 1974, President Ford had Whip Inflation Now buttons printed up, and 1981 was seven years later. So Volcker's dramatic raise was in that context. Whereas people are more used to a more moribund economy since 2008 with very low interest rates, inflation, and lots of QE, with the subprime bailout followed by the Covid stimulus. Actual non-negligible inflation and an actual interest rate is something people have started seeing more recently.

> Arthur Miller's dull

This is more a reflection on the author than Miller. I didn't find his discussion of art and politics from the Depression to McCarthy dull, it illuminated some thinking from the period.

> self-serving memoir

This is tautological

Aside from things like Bloody Sunday where the British Army opened fire on Irish marching against internment of Irish in concentration camps without trial...

The DaSilva report, Stevens inquiries etc. showed collusion between English military and intelligence and loyalist death squads, including furnishing of firearms.

So the English armed their loyalist paramilitary death squads like the Shankhill butchers and then wash their hands of it all.

Why are English soldiers in Ireland any how?

Also as historical records show, and as some in the western braintrust noted at the time, the idea that Stalin was foisting revolution onto Korean communists, it was somewhat backwards - local Korean communists fighting the Japanese and then Americans, like the Chinese, were much more enthused about revolution in their countries than Stalin was.

> confiscation of their property and land

Observe the colonial/imperial mindset - gun-trotting French sail to the Caribbean and steal land from Taino Indians, and kidnap and enslave Africans to do the work. Then back home, the king is guillotined and eventually even Danton is guillotined. The enslaved Africans eventually rebel against the slave masters, and they get into a sanctimonious huff about how "their land" was confiscated.

> Hunter-gatherer cultures were also only ever one bad season away from starvation/famine

Huh? Famines, disease outbreaks and such were much more common at the beginning of the agricultural revolution. Hunter-gatherer bands were much safer from famine than early agricultural workers. This was true from the beginning, to the Irish famine in the UK 170 years ago. And insofar as epidemics - we are in at least one right now, if the monkey pox one doesn't get set to make two.

Insofar as general prosperity - the inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was a half century ago. This also pre-dates the recent inflation and Covid. I don't see how wages falling over the past 50 years is some sort of general prosperity.

> It seems that the smartest, most sincere, most dominant communists the world has ever seen... became capitalists.

Karl Marx said socialism would start in the most economically advanced country. Marx was just one member of the IWMA, which also included Bakunin, but Marx was remembered most. Thus Lenin's call to take over Russia surprised even the Bolsheviks initially. He maintained until his death that Russia was not the vanguard of worldwide socialist revolution - one reason the Comintern was formed.

China was even less in Marx's vision than China - the country was agricultural and essentially feudal, and the revolution was in the countryside led by peasants. Molotov called Mao Pugachev. Actually Mao realized Deng Xiaoping was a "capitalist roader" in 1962, and began working to sideline him in 1966, but Deng Xiaoping came to power after Mao died. Xi is very much in line with Deng Xiaoping. If you're saying Deng Xiaoping and his followers like Xi are capitalist readers then you're echoing what Mao realized in 1962 and expressed in 1966.

> Is this why African countries were so prosperous before the scramble for Africa kicked off in the 1870s?

African countries were prosperous. In sub-Saharan Africa, hunter-gatherer bands often worked less than 40 hours a week (as observed by anthropologists even after the Scramble for Africa). This prosperity exceeded that of many programmers working in the San Francisco Bay area today.

> Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer.

From the 7th/8th century until the 15th century, the feudal mode of production predominates in Europe. It still exists in some form today - the United Kingdom (note the name) is technically ruled by a queen, as is Spain, Holland etc. Someone in the 9th century saying feudalism would end would not have seen much of the prediction come true 500 years later in the 14th century. But then the crack-up started.

10,000 years ago slave empires arose in Sumeria, Egypt and other places. Slave latifundias in Italy lasted past the sack of Rome. Someone predicting the end of slavery in ancient Sumeria would look like a faulty predicted. Peter Mills was born a slave in the USA and did not die until 1972. So people here could have met him and discussed this with him.

Migratory hunter-gatherer bands painted in caves and carved Venus figurines tens of thousands of years ago. If you told the painter in the Chauvet cave 35,000 years ago that this mode of production would end, he might say that this would be false worldwide for another 25,000 years and that in 2022 AD, deep in the Amazon migratory hunter gatherer bands still roamed.

You seem to have a mental capacity on par with by-weekly sprint deliverables, and are looking at your watch for the end of capitalism, the commodity, bourgeois republics, Sand Hill Road VCs approaching LPs to raise new funds, corporate media, the aristocracy of heirs that send their children to Phillips Exeter, accelerating carbon into the atmosphere, dividends, rents, interest and other rentier instruments etc. I'm afraid history does not happen on this time table so you can continue to feel self-satisfied that whereas hunter gathering fell after tens of thousands of years, slavery for thousands, feudalism for centuries - that capitalism enthroned will be the mode of production henceforth and forever. History shows this is not the case. I look today at the inflation, what may be two quarters of GDP contraction, the stock market dive and firms cutting hiring and no one knowing what the year will hold amidst European and world energy potential energy crises, and think it does not look as bad yet as the subprime crisis of 2008 or dot com crash of 2000, and how Marx said such financial crises tend to worsen over time due to contradictions he pointed out, and the economic system goes on trial with each economic crisis. I see masses going out to rally for the socialist Bernie Sanders, and other masses listening to Tucker Carlson and rallying for Trump, neither of whom seem to be fond of "free trade" deals, the international migration of labor, foreign military interventions for capital etc.

In 2020 the massive crowds were for the socialist and for the other candidate lambasting free trade deals. Unlike 2016, the establishment was ready and got their candidate elected, someone no one seems to particularly care for. Young people seem to have a change of mind as well. The picture I see is quite different, but so is the timetable.

The article gives its sources, and I can go to Linkedin myself to verify its veracity.

You're making an argument from authority that I should ignore the source since some authority said to - incidentally a source discussing how "former" CIA employees are working to censor what information I can see.

There is that, and there is also the fact that the average wage has fallen in the past century.

Odd that the graph shows how much better the average family is off than in 1960, 60 years ago. As the graph shows, 1960 to 1970 was the largest boost. And most of the family income boost from 1970 to now was due to the wife having to work, not higher wages.

Not the case for Google L6s, but the economics of the majority of US workers.

90% of music market share in the US belongs to three companies. Warner Music has a 12.1% market share. Sony has a 23.4% market share.

Universal has a 54.5% market share. Over half the market share of music in the country is from one company.

It's a long way from magazines like Broadside and Sing Out and independent record labels like Folkways and Vanguard. Even songs on major record labels were influenced by this milieu. Most songs today are a corporate product packaged for consumers. The article says people seem to prefer music made before this all happened. The grunge/alternative scene that was commodified in the early 1990s is the last independent music scene that was mainstreamed that I can think of. Can't think of anything else - Reggaeton or a variety of other things never really became mainstream.

> Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots

Americans will easily hand the mantle of national oppression over to Ukrainians, but even though the US Supreme Court recently attacked indigenous communities, which barely made a blip in US corporate media, you don't hear much about America's national oppression of the Sioux or the Cherokee. You hear instead about "racism".

While Africans in the US face class oppression, they also face national oppression.

> Eastern Europe as a bunch of client states of the USA dutifully doing the bidding of somebody in the CIA

That would only be the case if Victoria Nuland was handing out food in Euromaidan Square encouraging Ukrainians to overthrow their elected government followed recently by $40 billion of arms from the US to the Ukraine. Oh, that did happen. $40 billion being the first of many such packages I'm sure.

Your argument is $40 billion this year is chump change and some Ukrainians would have liked even more?

> More recently, the Asian-American Studies Department posted to its website a statement accusing Israel of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and so on.

So they're accusing Israel of the same thing multiple UN resolutions have condemned Israel for - its occupation of Palestine's West Bank, its colonial settlements etc. Manson (appropriate name) is who is on the fringe of world opinion, not those opposing Israel's racial apartheid, and the US taxpayer's financing of Israel's racial apartheid.

Scientists have no idea why 302 neuron nematodes go left or right, the idea that a social scientific study like this is coming to the conclusions they come to are absurd.

The original Pioneer Fund funded Minnesota studies very rarely studied twins separated at or near birth and raised in very different environments. For most of the twins, the separation happened much later, or happened early but was temporary and the family was reunited, or the parents died and two sisters each raised a twin, and the like. The notion is false that the Minnesota studies all this flowed from showed people mainly raised from birth in very different environments. It did not.

It's a religious belief - we are the Brahmin, we are the chosen people, dressed up in 21st century Calvinist/liberal clothes. We are born successful or not successful, due to nature, not nurture or environment. It's scientific Calvinism. Of course some people flock to defend it in a way they wouldn't for some aspect of quantum theory - as I said, it's a religion in pseudo-scientific form. It feeds people's egos, especially people born to some form of privilege who have not accomplished all that much, and some people race to swallow from that hose as fast as they can.

The history of the funding of all of this is the old Pioneer Fund which started out showing Nazi eugenic films. They funded the original Minnesota twin studies all this field flowed from.

I should note this appeared in The New Yorker three years into Tina Brown's editorship, this kind of low middlebrow garbage didn't show up in The New Yorker much before that, but it became commonplace after she came in.

This is the real story behind the story - a giant corporation creating a dangerous situation for the sake of profit, a government which does not protect people but corporate profits, and a small town that sits by and allows this to happen, but will pitch in and carry off the bodies when tragedy inevitably strikes. One person in the town did try to prevent this, but one person is not enough in the face of everyone else. "The national tapestry that is The Great American Small Town" indeed.

> jamming people of the same age in a room for 6-7 hours at a time is far less effective...

This may be true, if one is raising a philosopher-king or something. In life I'm thrown into situations where I'm jammed together with people in an "ineffective" manner all the time. If extra-curricular programs are more effective they can deal with both environments. Personally I had some effective, good teachers in school as well as some ineffective team coaches.

As I said, "they have not been observed much to kill one another, unless humans artificially modify their feeding environments and territories". You linked to a page with a large picture at the top of a feeding station where "humans artificially modify their feeding environments and territories".

Chimpanzees certainly don't engage in warfare, unless you want to anthropomorphic chimpanzees and change the nomenclature of warfare.

While chimpanzees certainly hit each other, they have not been observed much to kill one another, unless humans artificially modify their feeding environments and territories.

> Obviously if the Saudi had been there involved in 9/11 directly or indirectly they would have been a invaded the next day

9/11 happened because al-Qaeda said the US had already had invaded "Saudi" Arabia eleven years earlier. 9/11 was successful in that it was the catalyst for removing US military bases from Saudi Arabia within two years of 9/11.

After World War II a lot of public housing projects popped up, which were nice communities for working class families. Nowadays this is almost forgotten as public housing has been starved for decades, and is only thought of in most communities as synonymous with poverty and crime. This is the direction the United States went in but not all countries. Public housing funded as it was in the New Deal era can solve this problem as well.

Local politics here is run by real estate interests and government does little. A local business wanted an underground garage, and had its curb open up onto a crosswalk. This kind of thing happens all the time. There is too little resident input into construction, and too little government oversight of it, not too much.

In the case of China, the answer would be - fight off the Japanese, then fight the US backed KMT, launching speak bitterness rallies against large landlords along the way, pour troops into North Korea in the 1950s, start a great leap forward campaign and then a Cultural Revolution. Then Mao and Zhou Enlai make some peace with the US and we carry on until Xi Jinping where you have the largest gdp-ppp in the world and the second largest nominal gdp in the world. Not in this prescription, and of course Deng Xiaoping aligned the economy to the changing world situation, but it was a different road, and other countries industrialized on this road as well.

> American armed forces and weapons (and our tax dollars and political system) are what protect all of you from annihilation.

While this sounds like something Otto said in A Fish Called Wanda, I can assure Europeans that many Americans actually believe what he is saying.

Of course we can look at the history of the US in Europe. Operation Gladio ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio ) was established to start a guerrilla war in Italy or France if the parties elected were not aligned with the rulers of the US (the US barely tolerated De Gaulle). The US intervention in Italian politics in 1948 exceeded Russian meddling in Czechoslovakia that year. The CIA spied on and stole Airbus plans for US business and does this regularly for other industries. And not to forget spying on Merkel's phone calls and all of this...as the US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland famously said in 2014 "fuck the EU".

Also, someone would have to be naive to think the US is acting in the current situation out of enormous benevolence to the Ukraine. It is, among other things, working on accomplishing what it wants to achieve for its own benefit in western Europe.

> Europe...a government and social safety net that is rapidly becoming unaffordable

Germany has had national health for 140 years, and people have said it is "rapidly becoming unaffordable" for 140 years.

I talk to older people who get US health care. It is incredibly expensive compared to other countries (which few deny), and nowadays they can barely get ahold of their doctor.

> a business climate that has produced essentially zero large companies in decade

Cisco hoovers up many network companies, FAANG hoover up startups, US mobile and land is basically either Verizon or AT&T, the ad agencies, accounting firms, media firms and on and on are all consolidating into a small oligopoly, I can't think of any major sector around a few decades where this has not happened. Europe is not much different.