regularization

If the mullahs are so bad, why did the UK and US back them against the democracy of Mossadegh in the 1950s? Then Savak with CIA help slaughtered the secular left in Iran into the 1970s.

Westerners work to slaughter the secular left in a country, then use that as their entitlement to take over the country - "there is no secular force to take over".

This just happened in Syria - the West forced out a secular leader to replace him with a now celebrated al-Qaeda leader who the US had a $10 million bounty on fourteen months ago. Who is currently slaughtering every minority ethnicity in the country.

Like trying to treat his cancer with ivermectin?

Doesn't seem to have worked.

It was almost certainly used for agriculture. Observation of hunter-gatherer bands in modern times, and archeology have little in the way of skirmishes or warfare prior to the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. Not that it never happened, but violence and war are much more endemic to the modern (past 10000 years) era.

What countries helped overthrow prime minister Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize Iran's foreign owned oil, and installed a dictatorship?

What countries backed the mullahs against Iran's secular and left opposition, helping SAVAK kill the opposition?

In 1979 the US was working to prevent anti-anti-Russian forces from coming to power, not the mullahs.

In 1967 the Chinese people in Hong Kong were fighting against the English, English officers killed dozens of Chinese to retain their control on their "democracy". A city they had violently seized decades earlier to push opium and heroin on Chibese people, against the Chinese authorities wishes.

Now white, professional westerners who lost control of China weep and gnash about their supposed moral superiority over China.

The US is currently expelling students, firing professors and college presidents and so on, not because they aren't US aligned, but because they allow people on campus to criticize Israel.

CBS just got taken over by the same cabal.

Amidst ICE grabbing people out of Home Depot parking lots in the US, China is just doing the same thing over there.

Yes, I watched the BBC a few years back and saw bureaucrats ranting about what the Chinese owed the English due to English sovereignty or treaties over territory in China. Colonial craziness.

Of course this guy isn't sone factory worker but a CEO. He met with Mike Pence, Pompey and Bolton, i.e. the West so he's "pro democracy".

ICE is in my city pulling people out of their cars, then releasing them with no charges days later. Wish there was some democracy in this country.

I don't know of any thimble recent (or non-recent) where Gould was "caught fabricating details or whole results".

In 1981 Gould accused Morton of fabricating details. Gould died 20 years after that. Nine years after Gould died, some said Morton had not fabricated details.

I should add Morton was a phrenologist who did not believe in common descent.

Who does not have a market? In the USSR people went to markets to buy radishes, just like we do here, except paying with rubles not dollars.

What was different was not the market but the production, or control over production. In the US heirs own the majority of the Fortune 500 and thus control it, their things worked differently.

So why is production not discussed but a market? Or not even a market but a "free" market - I suppose to be in a free market you buy radishes in a market with dollars and not rubles.

> to ensure AI development strengthens democratic values globally

I wonder if that's helping the US Navy shoot up fishing boats in the Caribbean or facilitating the bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps in Gaza.

Six months ago five members of a group called Palestinian Action broke into an RAF base and spray painted two refueling planes involved in surveillance of Gaza. They were charged with a crime.

Then, mainly because of this, the group Palestinan Action was classified as a terrorist group. Since the thousands of people have been arrested in the UK for support of terrorism, for holding signs that say "I support Palestinian Action" and the like.

Since you have to ask, your resentment against tech employers is unconscious.

You resent being a wage slave being forced to do this.

What can you as an individual do about this? As you already know the answer is nothing. Which further demotivates you.

The answer is to separate the concerns.

With regards to demotivation, resentment etc. - read some Noam Chomsky or Karl Marx or Bernie Sanders. Go to a few local Denocratic Socialists of America meetings and talk to the one or two people there who are not just the usual weirdos who show up at political events. If you want to hit back at companies forcing you to do this, and be able to stand proud and not be a wage slave slug doing unpaid grinding of Leetcode without a paycheck, this is the only way to hit back, if only in a small way. These things change collectively, not individually. You might feel better.

Then - suck it up and start grinding Leetcode. Think about how it's cool you just learned to implement Dijkstra's flag algorithm and the like.

The USA is a strange place - in 1964 you had blacks and whites legally required to not sit together on buses, and mobs which attacked and beat people who broke this convention and law. And of course slavery before that. It still rules US politics, the airwaves are filled with politicians denouncing DEI, Black Lives Matter (or peripherally ICE raids dragging mestizo immigrants to prison).

It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism.

Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs.

The new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, has been publishing genocide denial pieces, pointing ro various children dying in Gaza as false stories. That happened this week, you seem to be concerned that Chomsky signed a petition for Faurisson on the 1970s, that he should not be jailed for publishing his book on the holocaust. Chomsky signed hundreds of letters for jailed Soviet dissidents, Turkish authors on trial etc. That he did not want Faurisson jailed for his book is seen as a bad thing by those who don't believe in free speech and believe authors should be jailed by governments.

Regarding Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge coalition was pushed out in 1979 and the US began arming the KR coalition, providing UN support for it etc. You would think the US and Reagan arming the Khmer Rouge coalition more heinous, if you don't like them, than Chomsky saying the US should not bomb Cambodia in the 1970s etc.

The UN and every human rights organization in the world says the US has been and is involved in a genocide in Gaza. The denial of this in the US has been incredible, but now that the first stage is done the Press is more forthcoming about it. Something Chonsky opposed, the establishment supported.

Yes, the CIA sent young women like Marita Lorenz to try to seduce Castro and even have involvement in plots to assassinate him, this is the definition of a honey trap.

> ny advice to anyone working at EA or any unionized white collar jobs in this nidustry and relate to keep your heads down and don't post your thoughts in public.

I'd note that the workers creating the wealth and doing all the work are among the vanguard of workers doing the best in the world, but the advice given sounds similar to advice that could have been given to slaves on a plantation, in case the masters be upset.

The workers do the work and create the wealth of these companies. The apparatus over them is just parasites sucking their labor off into profits.

Whatever the immediate strategy should be, organizing, educating and agitating is the order of the day, for anyone with any sort of backbone or self-worth (of course narcissistic notions to consider oneself a genius and everyone else is dead wood, as someone put it here, has been encouraged).

> not a single Jew has been allowed to live in Gaza for 20 years, per Hamas

Israeli law in the past 20 years says Israelis can not live in Gaza. Something you neglected to mention.

DP is corporate funded and exists to squash movements from the left. Most people have to see this up close to see it though.

Yes, Churchill's second term as prime minister is not a good example.

Picasso's output in his last 20 years is not considered in the same way as his previous work.

1% of people make decisions of what to build and how in any real sense. A movement ("abundance") to exclude the other 99% from having a say is not a left movement, the left is the opposite of that. Only in the US where class relations are so lopsided on the side of the heirs over the workers could that idea be called left.

I remember in the 1970s when the Soviet Union was called a gerontocracy. Gorbachev becoming general Secretary at the age of 54 was seen as a breath of fresh air. As your chart shows, one third of the US Senate is over the age of 70. We have people like Biden and Trump as president. Sign of the times (who are respectively 10 and 7 years older than Xi). Incidentally, Xi is the oldest member of the Politburo Standing Committee.

Not really. Don't know about what really happened here, but if a place is performative, and mostly unneeded and irrelevant, it tends to blow itself up, and then the problem clears itself away. Movements that stick around and achieve things have their vicissitudes as well, but they get through them.

In February 2022 the fed funds rate was 0.08. In October 2022 it was up to 3.0. From November 2022 to January 2023 Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce laid off tens of thousands of people. They were no more or less productive then the day before they were laid off. At this time hiring basically stopped for everybody, and wages did not keep up with inflation. So this affected all SWE'S on some level. Nothing happened to their productivity, the system just changed.

Some say some of these people never should have been hired to begin with and they weren't being productive, but that was just another anomaly of the system.

Some defend the system and so-called market at every turn, with workers racing around to be productive at its whims, but it kind of becomes like Calvinists trying to satisfy a fickle god to ensure their salvation.

The unproductive, parasitic heirs at the top use the unproductive business cycle crises endemic to their system to discipline workers - jacking up unemployment and freezing wages.

I look at the new Acela trains in the US, currently slower than the old ones, the power problems and RFK Jr's new health mandates, and I compare them to China's five year plans, high speed rails, solar and wind rollout and capacity, and wonder where the US will be in a few decades, or even one decade.

Years ago the French elites supposedly decided to so solve the global warming problem by suddenly putting a big tax on gasoline, which hit rural France hardest, and in a quick manner. I don't even see it as sincere from the beginning, I think they made to seem like they were doing something so they could seem to do it differently. Mélenchon could implemented the needed measures without any backlash - except from the bourgeoisie.

> concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability

Biology seems to be the destination for smuggled in quasi-religious beliefs. Lysenkoism, creationism and in the case of a segment (or more?) of the western professional-managerial class, this kind of Bell Curveism.

In the past people were satisfied with the divine apotheosis of people into a superior Brahmin class, or chosen people, or even in more modern times a Calvinistic elect, which this is an attempt to smuggle in as a secular, "scuentific" basis.

If we were watching elementary particles smash together in an accelerator, the idea that a brain could be boiled down to a number and ranked in order, and said this be due to differential genes and such would be seen as absurd. Especially considering human behavioral modernity happen two to three thousand generations ago, if one knows a genetic time scale. For our version of biological Lysenkoism or creationism, this all goes out the window though. Speaking of Lysenkoism, it is akin to the Marxist idea of false consciousness - the people who believe such ideas can see the errors of Lysenkoism or creationism, but the crank idea tied to their particular system makes a lot of sense to them.

I think of al-Andalus in Spain the 1450s, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Until a few centuries ago, Europe could barely keep itself free of Arab or Turk rule (and often didn't). Change back a few centuries and this would be about the genetic superiority of the Arab brain over the Caucasian. It's all quite silly.

> But in the 2010s we helped Cambodia transition into a democracy, build an independent press

History of US-Cambodia relations -

1970 - CIA aids Lon Nol coup against government. US invades Cambodia. US kills 4 student protesters against invasion at Kent State, 2 at Jackson State

1970-1973 Operation Freedom Deal, US drops 250,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia

1975 King Sihanouk, overthrown by CIA assisted coup in 1970 returns to power, in coalition with communists. The destabilization of the country by the US is what is seen to help bring the communists to power

1979 Split in Cambodian communists, Vietnamese-aligned side comes to power. US immediately begins to arm the coalition of Sihanouk and the so-called "Khmer Rouge". The US also fights to keep the Khmer Rouge coalition as Cambodia's UN representatives. The New York Times reports on the arms shipments in the early-mid 1980s

[...]

"2010s we helped Cambodia transition into a democracy"

From 2004 to 2009, the inflation rate was less than 4% each year. Gold was $443 an ounce in March 2005 and $975 an ounce in March 2008. Yes rich people had to put their money somewhere as banks and then corporate America started to collapse during the surprise crisis, they took them out of equities for banks offering subprime mortgages and put them into assets like precious metals and the like.

Also in 1999 MSFT was $57 a share. In 2009 it was $16 a share. It cracked $57 again in 2016. 17 years to go sideways.

Cisco never reached its 2000 peak again. Of course companies like Pets.com just went out of business.

Karl Marx used the British government Blue Books he found in the Reading Room of the British Museum to write Capital. If the British government wasn't publishing Blue Books in the 19th century, he would have had more difficulty forming his theories.

This is all tangential to the idea that "capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others".

The heir who doess not work, and who has never worked, often the same being true of their parents, and their parent's parents, is eating food grown by the labor of others and so on. There are those that work, and there is also a parasitic rentier class who does not work.

I encourage people to read both of those Wikipedia biographies, not just the one who also doesn't believe in evolution.