VictorPath

The basis of guerrilla warfare is using the stronger opponent's strength against them. Farmers come with scythes and staves and capture a rifle. Farmers come with scythes, staves and a rifle and capture more rifles. With rifles and the element of surprise, artillery is captured.

It goes back to Sun Tzu, and up to the present day. One of its most recent manifestations is the US equipment captured by the Taliban.

The relevant Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars

The article statements and leading questions are off. "Are you aware that Israel has considered trading land for peace many times, and it has only worked twice?" Egypt offered peace terms to Israel after 1968 but Israel wanted to keep the Sinai. So Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 and Israel was in dire straits until the US began rushing arms to Israel, which also gave the US a say in how the Sinai would be settled. Israel had little choice but to retreat from the Sinai ultimately.

Also the notion that only democratic governments were overthrown by the Arab spring makes no sense. Ben Ali was pushed out in Tunisia, Mubarak ousted in Egypt etc. If those governments are "democratic" there were nominally only - the "presidents" ruled from 1987 and 1981 to 2011 respectively, and jailed (and tortured) the opposition.

> Real GDP per Capita is almost 2x what it was in 2000, and 3x what it was in 1980

I guess that means real wages have increased almost 3x since 1980, with hours down since people have to work less to survive due to increased productivity.

Actually US real wages have been basically flat for half a century.

GDP per capita increasing is bad for the people working and creating wealth, as the workers creating the wealth see none of the increase in wages, and it gives the heirs parasitically expropriating surplus labor time from workers more power.

So that's what happened to Gough Whitlam...

> high performers in tech are allergic to unions?

High performers in tech do not have a problem with the heirs who own a majority of their corporation's stock telling them what to do, but are allergic to the people alongside them doing the work and creating the wealth from having input.

This is one of the most inane things I've read on HN in years, and that is a lot of competition.

Bush fires happening in forests throughout history happened due to lighting strikes and what have you, at least before modern times. Random natural events. Economic activity is a considered, thought out socialized activity - the central societal activity.

You're advocating the necessity of unnecessary problems due to other unnecessary problems - recessions are needed due to market inefficiencies, misallocated capital (cryptocurrency companies?), risky credit, leverage risk, riskier bets, zombie companies survive on loans, asset prices increase beyond reason, and a system incapable of monotonous growth. Your cure for this is all the maladies of a recession - higher unemployment, GDP actually shrinking etc. You list out many of the maladies of the current state of the relations of production and your solution is more maladies. This thinking is at best insular, unimaginative, limited and provincial. It is only tautological within a very limited view, where your solution for all the maladies you list out is self inflicting the malady of negative GDP growth and the maladies surrounding that.

I don't think people see that much difference between events from 78 years ago and 172 years ago.

The US expelled the residents of the Bikini Atoll in 1946 to do atomic testing. The UK was expelling Chagossians until 1973.

So those actions make the Tatar (many Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany in the Nazi invasion of the USSR) incident look like ancient history.

World population is growing 1% a year. If you go back a century, world population never grew that fast in human history (except perhaps the dawn of human history). There is no global population collapse happening or on the horizon, this past century has had the fastest human growth rate in history, including now (the peak was the world baby boom in the 1960s).

There are countries where population is falling, and policy has to account for it, but there is not a global population collapse right now at all. Only if you measure against the peak baby boom of the 1960s does it seem less.

The article you linked to says the result of the war was Finland ceded land to the USSR. It's a strange war that ends with the Victor ceding land to the defeated.

It's also a strange idea that a fully mobilized Soviet Union in 1945 could push the German army back to Berlin, but would be incapable of taking over Finland. Finland was there for the taking for the Soviet Union in 1945, but the USSR did not see any threat outside Karelia so did not pursue this. This would not have been much disputed at all back then.

If Finland was a threat outside Karelia, the USSR once mobilized could have marched in in 1945. Finland was not a threat then and it is not now.

> Related to welfare, 60% of people pay ZERO or NEGATIVE income taxes

57% of people paid no federal income tax last year, not 60%. Also, this percentage is much higher than the pre-Covid period, so this percentage means nothing outside that context.

> But pretending that the entire outside world is a dark mass of malevolent forces arrayed against you.. well, it may be psychically necessary in some Freudian, Jungian sentence, to prevent ego death or whatever, but in the long run it's neither (a) true (obviously), and (b) nor is it going to do your mind and mindset any good.

Maybe you can post this in the endless Russia threads posted here, which seem to have crowded out the endless China threads.

I guess what you're saying is that apprehension about the motives of of corporate executives is so irrational, it's akin to a psychological problem.

Labor organization is the only way a worker can keep more of their expropriated surplus time, and the wealth they created during that time, as opposed to the heir who collects dividends from AAPL.

Hairs can be split, but not on that.

Reason is correct that tariffs on Canada, pushed by Abbott, helped exacerbate the baby formula problem.

This is what happens when heirs and corporations gain too much power. When they are not responsive to working people or the government. Not only are they unresponsive to the government, they buy the government, and get rulings like Citizens United to buy the government even more.

All of this is the result of what Reason has been pushing forever. They wanted to prevent government from dealing with Abbott, and the result is these tariffs and the baby formula breakdown. The market is incapable of working due to the policies of Reason. It's like the bread shortages in the USSR after the failure of Khruschev's Virgin Lands program. Different mechanisms but same result.

That was why Victoria Nuland was in Euromaidan Square stirring up this new cold war.

> If I was not producing enough for the tribe or group I would be left behind or worse. The strong ones had the most food, women, and best spot in the 'cave' i.e. inequality.

There were no known tribes over ten thousand years ago, there were bands. In your perception, children abandoned their parents to death when they aged, which is not behavior anthropologists observed in modern hunter gatherer bands. Also, anthropologists observer modern hunter gatherer bands eating gathered berries and the hunt in communal meals. You do not have one man with multiple wives/concubines/mistresses in the manner of the class societies following this - although often all the fertile men and women who are not close relations are sleeping with one another. Your picture of pre-class society does not jibe with archeological finds of old societies or anthropological observations of modern ones.

> All attempts for a perfectly equal economy, that I'm aware of, have ended in disaster. Sometimes horrifically.

I guess the tens of thousands of years from when humans were painting on caves to the first manifestation of a class society 10000 years ago was a horrific disaster.

Yes, this idea of neoliberalism and free market reforms has meant corporations getting more government involvement in the economy. Eliminating market barriers to promote competition is mythical, it has been the opposite - most industries are oligopolies.

Look at the 40 billion that Congress just pushed to give to US military contractors en route of some of the output to Ukraine (supported by the Squad, opposed by some Trump friendly Republicans). This has been modus operandi of US pumping taxpayer money into corporations since World War II. Biden had diplomats go to Venezuela to get oil and pull back Monroe Doctrine US military operations down there as its shifting military operations from around Venezuela to the western border of Russia.

A lot of the framework is tautological. Income for work, that he receives more money for an hour of labor than him, has always been of minor concern to people who have not bought into the neoliberal system. It's a concern for some at the top of the system. Social relations between those who work and the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those who work might be more of a concern.

I don't know what market friendly psychological tendencies are or free-market reforms. Large corporations have instituted reforms to quash the market. Don't rely on me, Warren Buffett, Peter Thiel and others have said the same thing. Industries are oligopolies from music (Universal controls more than half of US music) to breakfast cereals.

I am not sure what a free market is, in the Soviet Union people were free to go to a small market owned by the proprietor and buy potatoes or radishes with rubles, just like in the UK (with pounds) or US (dollars). So what is a free market? Or are they talking about control of the commanding heights of the forces of production? But that is not a market.

Also a country can be run by FDR and he says a New Deal economy is good and this idea is promoted from the top. It can be run by Reagan, with control of the media becoming consolidated and corporatized, and promoting another view if the economy. It is no surprise if all people hear 24/7 from people from Bush to the Clinton's how great so called free trade agreements etc. are that more will echo that sentiment. The reality is working people have been and are resistant to these economic agreements which harm them, relative to the opinion of the decision makers.

> Am I the only one not interested in taking advice from someone who has largely been massively successful?

I think of Kevin Systrom selling Instagram to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Both success stories. Systrom went to high school at Middlesex, Zuckerberg to Phillips Exeter. I can think of many examples like this. Phillips Exeter high school starts at $47,000 a year, Middlesex high school starts at $54,000 a year.

So my best advice is have your parents give you $200,000 before you start high school so you can be off to a good start.

> Those institutions are managing these investments on behalf of large capital pools–insurance company float, pension funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or who are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely included? The author himself!

The Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances shows that the majority of equity is held by a small percent of people.

Various shifts by corporations and government over the years have happened to raise the social security age, disrupt job security, unions and pensions, and shift middle class retirement funds into the stock market. None of this have had much impact other than that ownership of equity on the minority side of the equation may now be more widely distributed.

An unasked question is how many of the identical twins in the original study were separated at birth and raised in very different environments? The answer is not many. A large number of the separated twins were separated at an older age, or were adopted by a close family member of a similar class background.

I don't see this study as any more muddled than the original study.

Sinn Féin is a political party over a century old, and in 1918 won an all-Ireland election, 73 of 105 seats, on its platform to leave the UK. That the mainstream media refers to Sinn Féin as the political wing of the IRA tells little about them but a lot about the media and other things. Sinn Féin is also tied for largest party at Leinster House in the 26 counties.

Instructive is https://bbc.co.uk . You can barely find news of this, it is way down the page. Superhero movies, Miami Grand Prix. dating apps, pilota, carbon bicycles etc. take precedence. England doesn't care, other than the loose ends remaining snagged Brexit somewhat.

> puppets for Putin

For non-Americans who don't know, accusing someone who wants something you don't of being a puppet for the Kremlin has been a popular activity for the past century?

Support the fourth amendment to the US constitution? Puppet for the Kremlin.

Don't want to get into a nuclear arms race? Puppet for the Kremlin.

Support the civil rights movement? Puppet for the Kremlin.

Don't want to pick up France's colonial subjugations in Indochina? Puppet for the Kremlin.

And so on. The social security act of 1935 was called a Russian plot. Those who wanted to wind down involvement in WWI a few months into US involvement were called Bolshevik supporters.

> funding the defense of a democracy

The funding coming on my back out of my labor and my taxes.

Is this the democracy which started when it forcibly overthrew the elected government, banned a number of political parties right after that, and which just banned the second largest political party recently? Some democracy.

When I say I don't want my taxes going to send weapons to the Ukraine here, I am called an FSB stooge or what have you. Yet people pile in all day and talk about how it doesn't make sense to quickly switch to wind, solar, nuclear, hydro and other renewables, which in Europe and elsewhere means gas from Russia, and somehow no one raises the FSB flag. Maybe renewable supporters just don't have that idiotic knee-jerk reaction as much.

Yes. The past half century has been devoted to exploiting the working class breadwinner and family the benefit of the idle class. Now that the working class breadwinner and family has been improvished and ground down, what is the solution? For the upper classes to hold working class breadwinner and family to account, to become more judgemental of them etc.

> You put a guy in a chaotic and impoverished circumstances. And then you decide not to expect anything of him.

How about not put them in chaotic and impoverished circumstances? Sweden does not have these problems at the scale the US has.

Also after World War II, a working class guy could get a job at a factory in Detroit, and be able to afford his wife staying home to raise kids in a house he owned, commuting in a car he owned. Maybe going to school on the GI Bill at some point. All of this is gone. People like Charles Murray spent decades attacking the US working class, and now he bemoans that wage slaves are not interested in pursuing the Sisyphean tasks he has laid out.

All of this is concurrent with the material destruction of working class life in the US, which is why the first thing Henderson has to try to knock out is it has anything to do with material conditions.

It was a hell of a lot better to be a working class man in 1960 then 2005. Two thirds of union jobs are now nonunionized etc.

This reminds me of the purge of professors who did not support World War I in the US, as well as the US purge of scientists who did not support the Korean War 15 years after this.