feedforward

> Isn't it just as crazy how much people care about Palestine when much worse atrocities are happening around the world?

What are the much worse atrocities than Gaza that are happening?

> Why do they care so much about just that one instead of the many others?

The US is centrally involved in supporting the slaughter in Gaza.

The Economist polled Americans if what is happening in Gaza is a genocide and the most given answer was yes. The US and Israel stand alone in the UN on Palestinian self-determination (other than US compact member Micronesia, and the 10,000 people of the island of Nauru). US and world popular opinion is against what Israel and the US government is doing.

> We don’t know how to value the work of a corporate employee but we’re simultaneously all being paid less than we’re worth.

A number of people do work and create wealth, and then every quarter a dividend is sent off to some heir. "Being paid less than we're worth" as you characterize it. There are people who work, and heirs who parasitically expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work. Workers work and create wealth, and then whatever remains of that after external expenses is divided into wages for the people who did the work and created the wealth, and the heir who does not work expropriating their profit. This is the being paid less than they are worth part - if the heir was not sent their dividends, the workers who created the wealth would not send off those dividends and that portion of the division would go to wages as opposed to dividends.

That they don't know how to value the work of a corporate employee doesn't trouble me in regards to the just mentioned fact.

If two workers create $240 of wealth in a day, and $60 is sent off as a dividend, and the one who worked 8 hours made $120 in wages, and the one who worked 6 hours makes $60 in wages - then there are methods that might approximate their actual work. One would be to take the $60 going to the heir and give $20 more to who worked 4 hours and $40 more to who worked 8 hours.

The entire world was socialist from the time of the Lubang Jereji Saleh cave paintings 40,000 years ago until 10,000 years ago. Societies with different classes only sprung up 10,000 years ago. They only scaled with force, and the literature from 4000 years ago to now attests to this.

> Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried.

Hunter gatherer bands in the Amazon live the way they have for 50,000 years - even prior to crossing the Bering Straits. Whereas societies where the capitalist mode of production predominant were barely even formed less than 500 years ago. Also from the time of the Paris Commune to the Cold War until now, it has been racked with threatening crises. Even in the US we see self-described socialist politicians being elected nowadays.

It's hard to make capitalism sound permanent when it has been so impermanent.

As the chart shows, the real spike in grade inflation is when the US government effectively used GPA as a measure for whether or not young men were sent off to patrol villages next to rice paddies in Vietnam.

> X Edward Guo, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, said that part of the problem is that, unlike in the US, military research does sometimes take place on university campuses. “

Yes those dastardly Chinese universities which do military research on campus, unlike in the good old US.

Of course this is ridiculous, military research is happening on campuses all the time. The Internet I'm sending this through was a DARPA project, never mind the thousands of even more military specific research projects at universities. In fact there are a host of laws requiring the US military on US campuses ( https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/high-court-rules-in-favor-... )

> fiat money is granted value by the assent of all (backed by the monopoly on violence of the government)

But most left economists do not think this. I think the modern idea is that "fiat" currency has been implicitly backed by gold since 1971, whereas before the backing was explicitly. Otherwise, why does the Federal Reserve pay to store tons of gold? Why did Germany repatriate its gold in 2013?

Gold makes a good currency, by there's nothing magical about it as some in the right sometimes think. Silver or another precious metal will do too. Or even slightly less currency friendly commodities.

> The problem is that Hamas fighters don't wear uniforms

Hamaa doesn't wear uniforms because Hamas is a political party. The al-Qassam Brigades do wear uniforms, as I have seen in GoPro and other footage from October 7th and after. There has been a blockade on Gaza for a decade so some don't get the full uniform, and make do with a headband and military fatigues instead.

> Which US military intelligence offices were those? I don't recall anything of that sort from the 9/11 Commission report.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-cia-lost-office-in-wtc/

> I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.

So you're against capitalism

So Musk whose father owned diamond mines is not an heir.

Arnault whose father owned Ferret-Savinel is not an heir.

Gates father was a prominent lawyer, his mother was an heiress who was on a board with the chairman of IBM.

Even looking at those who are not classified as heirs - Zuckerberg's high school currently costs over $50,000 a year. Buffett's father was a congressman and his family owned grocery stores. Not billionaires, but people with more wealth and connections then even our minority of upper middle class people.

I find the level-headed realism and appreciation of those of us who work in OP's post refreshing, and the solipsism and wishful thinking of your post depressing.

Of course you're correct, but forget about that - two thirds of the team that started Viaweb and then Y-Combinator crashed, according to then contemporary reports, 10% of the machines on the Internet for the fun of vandalism or a prank or whatever. The one who was charged did no jail time - Graham wasn't even charged.

He then goes on to exploit young techies to put himself in a very prime position in the relations of production. Nowadays he tweets minimally veiled racist tweets about the supposed biological superiority of his brain compared to the rest of us, especially other races. Talk about privilege.

Being as an article was just posted talking about an Economics Nobel Prize in its title, the comment seems certainly needed, and if it is not novel, then its repetition would seem necessary.

There is no Nobel Prize in Economics. 67 years after the Nobel Prizes were given out, the bank that Alfred Nobel entrusted his estate to started handing out prizes to Milton Friedman, Fredrick Hayek and so forth. Even the bank doesn't call it a Nobel Prize, it calls it the Bank Prize in Nobel's memory.

Prizes are given to people like Fleming for discovering penicillin, then over a half century later it's accolades are diverted to these fabulists.

I spent much of 2020 trying to find things like bread in US supermarkets. It's funny how people harken back to Russia 40 years ago as if I was not walking through empty supermarkets four years ago.

I've been reading endless headlines about how hard it is to do business in China because the Chinese courts subpoenaed business records from Bain's China offices etc., wonder if I'm going to see endless articles about how hard it is to do business in the US.

And as others have said - no privacy protection laws for Americans passed - only if the company is Chinese.

> The situation for Arab Israeli citizens, fraught as it may be, is not comparable to that of Black Africans under Apartheid, or that of Black Americans in the 1950s. There are Arab Israelis in the Knesset.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and William Dawson were in the US congress in the 1940s and 1950s.

We see endless posts about the Chinese, the Russians and so on - now it is about Israel though so no more "political posts".

Perfect encapsulation of this lack of sovereignty - not only is OP not sovereign, for all the reasons they mentioned, but OP is being imperially instructed that they are not even allowed to mention that they are not sovereign any more.

> I could have said something in my talk about the Uyghurs

What a laugh to point a finger at Chinese treatment of Muslims when the NATO countries are arming the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The original Likud charter said from the river to the sea should be Jewish domination. Netanyahu recently affirmed that.

Funny to speak of genocide when the self-described Jewish state is committing genocide in Gaza and is being brought up on charges of genocide at the ICJ. The words Jews and genocide will be linked from now and in the future - the genocide the Jewish state is committing against the Palestinians.

In November the UN voted recently Palestinians have the right to self-determination. The only countries who voted against were Israel, the US, US compact member Micronesia, and the 10,000 population island of Nauru which gets a UN vote although the US blocks Palestine from having one. 70% of Americans want a ceasefire incidentally.

The world and 70% of Americans stand in horror against the genocide the self-described Jewish state is committing.

Where is the freedom in China.

Could you imagine if the US Congress called the heads of its most prominent universities in, and lambasted them for not cracking down on student groups critical of US imperialism, and then those university heads were fired? Things like that don't happen in the land of the free.

China, please look to the American example of freedom.

> The core problem we face is overproduction. Vastly more can be produced than can be consumed.

Varoufakis agrees overproduction is a problem and alludes to it in many places. The Global Minotaur - "Profit can only be envisaged if the level of overall future demand is strong. Unfortunately, the future is unknowable. The only thing business folk know for sure is demand is never strong for long..."

Luckily I live in the US - you'd never see things like the government demanding the heads of our most prominent universities be fired because they're not cracking down on anti-imperialist student groups hard enough.

Europeans crossing the oceN, committing genocide against the native population and having a slave and Jim Crow society in the resource rich third biggest land mass country in the world is what made America rich.

(China has the fourth largest land mass and on some measures is wealthier than the US)

This is the argument conservatives made in the 1950s and 1960s against blacks having the right to vote, drink from water fountains, swim in public swimming pools, sit anywhere on a bus etc. They said they were not against blacks per se, but against federal encroachment, communists in the civil rights movement etc.

> The workers of the world may think the chains were made to bind them, but in truth the chains bind the military and security apparatus.

The last quarter millenia of history stands in contradiction to this. The country with the most extensive security apparatus in 1916 was Russia, and that did not help the czar and his family in the end.

Among the young in the US, socialism is now as popular as capitalism ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capita... ). As Marx predicted, short sighted big business functionaries yet press ahead with removing the few scraps they toss from the table in response. It is not the working people who have to fear, but the aristocracy. Besides, the enlisted soldiers abandoning the front and marching back to St. Petersburg and Moscow is what really ignited the revolution.

That's right there are no differences. The UK nabbed a 17 year old English girl named Carole Richardson in 1975 and tortured her until she confessed to bombing pubs that soldiers frequented in Guildford. Her detention without charge for many days was allowed due to then recent legislation stripping those civil liberties. Her and three Irishmen she knew who were also tortured and who also confessed under torture were sentenced.

In 1977 the Balmcombe Street IRA ASU was arrested, and proclaimed the Guildford Four were innocent. It later came our that police had lied and submitted false evidence during the trial.

All to further the British occupation of Ireland which is similar to the Russian occupation of the Ukraine.

Yes UK prison cells are the same. The British tested torture techniques on Irish they arrested in the 1970s, there is a book called the Guineapigs about it.

Glad the New Yorker is going through the dirty linen and family tabloid stuff of a foreign writer who has been dead for over a half century.

Harold Ross never ran a great magazine, but even he kept such dreck out. This is more of that post-Gottlieb Tina Brown change.