VictorPath

Hannah Arendt

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Scientific studies that ingesting chemicals like THC are one of the reasons we have things like the Rockefeller drug laws. Activism from some in the scientific community is one reason people are rotting in jail for selling marijuana (while tobacco companies donate to politicians and in return get trade deals where it is illegal to have a law requiring warnings on cigarette packs.

People can be arrested for ingesting mescaline from peyote plants like Native Americans used to, scientific studies and activism is one reason for this, but scientists asking for people not to be imprisoned for getting mescaline from a cactus is not "appropriate".

(I have never tried mescaline but don't want to be imprisoned if I ever do)

The heirs who do not work but expropiate dividends of profits from those who do talking about inefficiency is a laugh.

Why should the worker's creating the wealth care what the idle class owners think?

How about corporations damaging unions?

> The common portrayal of unions as good and corporations as evil is over simplistic and often backwards

One has the workers who created the wealth keep the wealth they created, the other expropriates surplus labor time from workers, sending it off to the idle class heirs who inherited shares in the corporation.

I know the US has interrupted the Grammy's broadcast to denounce Russia, or started the Saturday Night Live broadcast denouncing Russia, or fired various opera singers or pushed Russians out of sports federations so I guess tech is just another base to cover. After weeks of Russia bashing I guess it's time to get back to bashing the Chinaman's yellow peril.

Other than that the US kidnaps people from various countries, often without approval of the country where the kidnapping happens, brings the rebel (patriot?) to Guantanamo Bay without even trial by US legal system and waterboards and tortures them and holds them indefinitely - although some are realized to be the wrong identity and let go - there is another point...

...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in.

Finland would be in more danger if it joined NATO, not less.

This is one of the main points of Marx's Capital.

I went into a shoe store recently and the salesman showed me a shoe that had Bluetooth which I could hook into my phone. I guess this is the kind of innovation being spun out nowadays.

One sign someone is naive is if their crusade to change the world depends on what corporation they choose to work at.

If I am being paid a lot at one place, and very little at another place, I might feel more of my surplus labor time is expropriated from the lower paying place. If I program, and one place pays more, it is an indicator (although just one, and not a solid one) that they exploit their workforce once.

A handful of companies might be even more distasteful than the other ones, but I look at all of them as exploitive - so I may bypass a few companies, but all corporations employing people are exploitative, and I am a wage slave.

The concept of anything changing due to individual choice does not add up to me. Things happen due to mass action, not some individual choice with some liberal moral reasoning. Amazon exploits their factory workers, but the factory workers who organized and voted to join a union in Staten Island have improved the lot of all Amazon workers, and other workers by their organizing and mass action. Some individual moral liberal reasoning to not join Amazon would not have been better. I'm sure most joined because it was the best and highest paying job they could find.

Also, I don't see the work I do at a corporation as being something that is not causing harm in the world. It is inherently exploitative. The notion of a woke corporation doing good in the world is a contradiction. If I am doing something good it is when I am not working - organizing, educating and agitating. Primarily so that workers have more control over their labor.

The US did indeed arm the "Khmer Rouge", whatever that is, after its era in power.

(I could tangent into Russia...)

Like bombing Libya?

(there is more about Russia vis-a-vis Libya but no need for me to Tangent into that)

After accusing the "Khmer Rouge" (whatever that is) of genocide up until 1979, the US began arming them and fighting for them to keep their UN seat, which Chomsky opposed.

So who is the Khmer Rouge apologist - Chomsky, who did not want the US arming the "Khmer Rouge", or the US government?

> No such promise was made, ever, it was floated but it was never written down in any treaty or even publicly announced. It's putins propaganda

In 1995 the New York Times reported that former US ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock said "we gave categorical assurances" that "NATO would not be moved eastward".

So what you call "Putin's propaganda" is what the former US ambassador to Russia said, as reported in the New York Times.

Like the people in Derry marching to protest the internment of Irishmen without trial in concentration camps? Guess not, the Parachute Regiment shot into the crowd in 1972 and the Queen pinned medals on them.

How about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India, or the Batang Kali massacre in Malaysia in 1948, and so on.

As the US passed a law to invade the Hague in case the ICC ever tries to accuse the US of war crimes, I'm assuming the US is not a "peer".

> Defending this monstrous state with your "concerned" deflections while mothers and children lay raped and dead on the earth of Ukraine is not defensible. Please don't do this here.

Israel was murdering Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza last year, backed by the US. Accounts of that posted here which managed not to be flagged were heavily "defended" with concerned deflections, where are your comments all over those threads to not deflect and do that here? Or the ongoing Saudi massacres of Yemeni, which the US backs and are happening now. Or the US drone attack on children in Kabul last August? When are those war crime trials starting?

Also the Russians made a peace treaty with Germany after the UK and France had. Neither the UK or France would agree with a mitual self-defense treaty with Russia prior to the Ribbentrop peace treaty.

The US and some of western Europe was involved at various levels with Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine. You can watch video of John McCain with pre-9/11 Chechnyan jihadists, or Victoria Nuland handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev to the people forcibly overthrowing the Ukraine's elected government.

Insofar as democracy and autocracy, you can also watch videos of Clinton and other Americans celebrating Yeltsin's shelling of the Duma, as Russia's elected representatives were heeding the wishes of Russian citizens to not be in a mad rush to sell enterprises to western companies and dismantle the social welfare system. The US put all its energy behind forming a strong Russian presidency including armed attacks on Russia's parliament by the presidency, and the presidency got molded the way the US advocated. Now the Applebaum turns around and whines the Russia presidency and Russia is autocratic.

The last statement is correct. For the most part, Kekkonen did whatever the USSR wanted. He was the architect of Finlandization.

The USSR was in a totally different state in 1945 than during the Winter War. It could have rolled into Finland at the end of the Nazi funded Continuation War, reinstated as the government the losing side from among the worker parties of the Finnish Civil War, and Finland would have been another Warsaw Pact Comecon country. But the USSR did not. Because Germany and the buffer states between were seen as a possible threat but Finland was not. Finland had no means of standing up to the USSR, and Kekkonen did the opposite.

South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, a country that itself has a 6.1% private unionization rate. A Boeing executive said to the Seattle Times Boeing was opening a production line in South Carolina to avoid unionization and strikes. South Carolina has anti-union laws that Washington does not.

Boeing purposefully moves to the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina".

Most large companies have massive amounts of dividends being siphoned off from the workers who created the wealth, to heirs who are stockholders. Talk about dead weight.

While productivity increased over the past half century, inflation-adjusted hourly wages are about what they were 50 years ago (it goes up and down - they were slightly lower in 2018 than 1972, a few cents higher in 2019). All productivity gains have been hovered up by the heirs and aristocracy.

As it was in the Silicon Valley wage cartel which collapsed in 2014. So FAANG wages have been high for 8 years, which is a historic anomaly.

Then we get pictures of the My Lai massacre, or Abu Ghraib, or video of Rodney King and George Floyd. Actually your fringe tends to argue nothing wrong happened with Rodney King or George Floyd, or they were asking for it, fueling fires of the inevitable upheavals that follow.

https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t...

Putting aside books like the Pragmatic Programmer and Lean Startup, big authors in order were Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Yuval Harari, David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Haidt, Henry Hazlitt etc.

Kind of the typical middle-brow stuff you'd expect some white college educated FAANG L5 to be reading on the weekend at his house in Sunnyvale.

Steven Pinker wasn't high up on the list but someone like him would be typical. He has studied the brain and linguistics and visuo-spatial thinking and writes about that (actually I think he's wrong about adaptationism, but anyhow...) Then he writes some Hegelian type books about how human history is a series of progressive steps to our current state, the best of all possible worlds. He's in the same boat as his typical readers - he has some specific technical knowledge, and that plus the weltenschauung of a 67 year old son of a lawyer who got a doctorate at Harvard results in his books.

It's living in a bubble. It's good someone like Pinker rejects some irrational views, the problem is when he can't see his own prejudices and irrational views.

It was not approved by the UN, it was approved by the UNSC.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children lacked medical care and were malnourished under her crushing sanctions. Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes asked her about this, Albright said "the price is worth it".

The "well-funded character attacks" are words out of her own mouth, compliments to her blood-soaked actions around the world.