regularization

> Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others.

Heirs are made rich every day by being born.

> young men are choosing at an alarming rate to follow people like Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk.

The message of Bernue Sanders gained a lot of support in 2016 and 2020 from young men. They were denounced in an Atlantic article as Bernie Btos. A New York Times article painted them as crude. Bernie was asked why his supporters were (supposedly) sexist young men on a debate. He was denounced for being interviewed by Joe Rogan.

Some young men were leaning toward the Democratic party and were denounced by the Democratic establishment and corporate press. Meanwhile Trump and his cadre encouraged such support.

Now the talk in Democratic circles is how to gain back the massive losses they've seen from young men. They've been going out of their way to alienate the support from young men they had over the past nine years. Now their polling numbers are at historic lows.

I can't imagine not just one, but two women coming forward and making such accusations against me. People here are acting as if he is the victim, not them.

Insofar as the letter signed - UK law has it so the letter worded as it was, with the burden of proof on the signers, could be held as libel if signed - so the UK signers got caught up in their country's law, due to the accused being litigious.

One pleasing thing to me is, however casual some people's attitudes to all of this is, out of control behaviors can cause legal and PR problems for corporations, and that is a move forward that, despite ebbs and flows, will not be moved back in any substantial sense. Woe be the CEO or HR director who thinks they can ignore bad behavior.

> how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed.

Matthew Stoller called the people Derek Thompson called, and some said Derek had misrepresented their opinions. So shoe leather caused the narrative of this so-called reputation to collapse as well.

The verse Netanyahu quoted said to blot out even the memory of the Amaleks, after comparing Gazans to Amaleks. How is this a misquoted? This is the verse he cited, although the other verse you mentioned is just as bloodthirsty.

People have protested the US bombing Yemen

https://x.com/davidmryder/status/1746049132027150672

The duration (mostly over already) and death toll are less as well.

> Israel left Gaza a long time ago

So who are those people with guns in between Egypt and Gaza for the past decades? Or blocking Gazan fisherman from fishing for decades?

The Zionists leave a settlement in northern Gaza and call that "leaving Gaza".

The Zionists brought this on themselves when they decided to take over Gaza in 1967. 33 of the victims of the Zionist aggressions in 1967 were those brave US Navy sailors on the USS Liberty that the Zionists killed then.

Yes..people in the past were celibate until marriage - what? Maybe some were, like som are now.

From World War II into the 1960s, the median age of a married woman in the US was 20. So maybe many were virgins, if they didn't get together with their fiancee. The median age of first marriage for women in the US is now 28.

About seven years before he was sending letters to the British Foreign Office of who to blackball during the UK's version of the Red Scare - people like Charlie Chaplin.

He even wrote a book a year before this (1984) denouncing societies that had people denouncing each other for political heresy. Psychological projection. What a htpocrite.

> I know Israel has attempted a 2 state solution 3 different times since 1947, unsuccessful because they were subsequently attacked. That's history.

I agree a two state solution has been derailed by attacks. Full implementation of the Oslo accords were derailed by the assassination of the Prime Minister of Israel. He was assassinated by a right wing Kahanist Jewish Israeli! And now the Israeli cabinet has Kahanist MPs. That's history.

> I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists

Netanyahu prefers Hamas, he was propping them up prior to the current battles, according to the New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...

Also, if, as in the recent New York City mayoral debate, US politicians are supposed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which it recognizes itself as, then I don't see the big deal over Palestine as an Islamic state. I myself would prefer to see a secular PFLP state, but the Zionist entity, US, Canada etc. fight against the PFLP, proscribe them as "terrorists" etc.

> And in a crisis likely won't be useful for buying things that do.

In a crisis, the value of gold holds more than that of the Papiermark, or even the US dollar - I can buy only one egg for the two I could have bought five years ago. Gold is uniform, portable, divisible and durable - useful attributes in a crisis, and worth more than Confederate dollars.

Gold is useful - for filling teeth, for electronic coating. It's value has stayed normal for thousands of years - although in times of inflation or crisis it might become a little overvalued temporarily as people flee to its safety. One could switch to other precious metals like silver, but this happens to them too.

You're correct this does not matter this year. But in the 2013 German election, AFD got no seats, and now it has the second most seats. BSW was not around in the 2021 election, they got about 5% of the vote but Die Linke managed not to lose their vote to BSW. BSW probably picked up voters who would have gone to either AFD or Die Linke (kind of like voters in the early 1930s who switched between the KPD and NSDAP).

This is the future of European, and US elections. Undermining Russia is important to the rulers of Europe and the US, but not as much to workers and voters. You can see the sea change with Trump in office and socialist candidates like Bernie, who is getting huge crowds in Idaho and Oklahoma, or AOC and Zohran in New York. Young people can't afford houses, even programmers are having trouble since the 2022 layoffs - can you imagine the Amazin RTO in Seattle mandate would be possible in 2021? Wealth inequality leads to disruption, and political parties are made to appeal to the masses - either fascist or socialist. The political tendencies arising are no anomaly.

> makes it much harder for Russia should they invade

If taking over Finland would help Russia, why didn't it do so in 1945 when it was there for the taking, to little protest from the UK and US? Russian had no use for it then, or now, other than the Karelian isthmus, which is part of Russia. Russia didn't raise much protest of Finland joining NATO. These notions of Russia having designs on Finland are loony.

> The linked Musk comment where a minor political leader is singing kill the white farmers

You say he's singing about farmers, so tell us what lyric mentions farmers? There aren't any, you're inventing stuff. The news article you linked to is closer to accuracy than you.

From 1901 up to FDR's election in 1932, 5 Americans won Nobel Prizes in the sciences. There was not much government funding back then, and not much was going on either.

> Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.

How do you think the railroads were built in the US? The bonds of the Pacific Railroad Acts date back to the 1860s. Pretty easy to build a railway line when government foots the bill.

Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey.

It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.

Mexico began celebrating May Day in 1923, before Germany.

The way they math is presented is off. The US is deficit spending this year, yet you present the interest payment as something separate from the military. Obviously that interest is partially from the military spending the US makes this year that it has not paid for, military payments from last year it has not paid for etc. The billions sent to Israel, the Ukraine and the hundreds of military bases the US has spanning the globe are not cheap.

Also, a lot of other military expenses are not counted as military expenditures in your math. A veteran whose leg was blown off overseas going to a VA hospital is not a military expenditure in this math.

If you have an extremely narrow definition of military spending, you can make it look small, but if you count veteran's benefits, interest on past military adventures etc. It looks larger. Why are Navy ships being shot at off Yemen, to cover for what the UN committee investigating it found is an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Which is also helping bankruptcy the US, as you pointed out

> Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation.

According to the New York Times, Netanhayu was propping up Hamas in the weeks and months before the current conflict ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... ). This has been happening since the beginning of Hamas.

The government over there has been supporting Hamas since the beginning, because they don't want to deal with Fatah going to the UN. Everything recently is the result of that. So don't come around talking about Hamas. Especially since Netanyahu and his US counterparts are trying to sideline Fatah, and are persecuting secular Palestinians like Samidoun and the PFLP more than Hamas. The US, Canada, Germany etc. crack down on the seculat, left-leaning Samidoun so that only Hamas is left standing in Gaza.

Trump is supported by the people running Silicon Valley (Musk, Thiel, Andreessen - with Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos financing his inaugural), hedge fun titans like Robert Mercer, heartland industrialist like the Uihleins. Plus white, Christian, married families who don't live in large coastal cities support him in the majority.

So I take this in the dialectic sense - that it is not destructive but self-destructive.

Also the opposition's obsession with Russia points to their loss. The average American doesn't give a damn what Putin thinks. Trump is focused on the US (or maybe Canada or Greenland) while the opposition is focused on Russia. Liberal Denocrats disliked Russia when Khrushchev was in charge too, they just have some anti-Russian animus that you can read about in the New York Times back to 1925 and before.

Maintaining imperial outposts like Thiepval and Holywood in the north of Ireland, Mount Pleasant in las Islas Malvinas etc. ain't cheap.

> The cost of servicing this debt — paying interest rather than reducing principal — is already a major budget item, surpassing Medicare, approaching Defense and Social Security levels.

Military ("defense") expenditures are always understated. Over $180 billion in veteran's benefits were paid last year. This is not counted as military expenditures. Also the debt you talk about is to not only pay for the money sent to Israel and the Ukraine last year, but still for the adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq etc. That just becomes generic debt in the skewed analysis, alienated from its past military adventures. The military budget is higher than stated.

The article goes a lot into puzzling about the ancient past, but we have the last few centuries of descriptions of Europeans meeting hunter-gatherer bands. In virtually all encounters they lived peacefully. Where there was violence they were already agriculturists, or had European loggers who were trying to kill them.

I don't understand the discussion of psychopathy. The New York Times had an article about how Netanyahu had the Mossad head urge the Qataris to bankroll Hamas in mid and late 2023. Now both US political parties celebrate the destruction of all of Gaza's hospitals, the further invasions of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. The killing and starvation of Gazan children. This is just normal American behavior. Look at Trump. The majority of Americans elected him because he is a reflection of what America is.

Trump is not doing things that different than Biden in foreign policy - how much more damage can Trump do the Palestinians in Gaza that Biden didn't do?

Trump is just more honest, and this embarrasses the professional-managerial liberals who support US imperialism. He's just saying what's happening as opposed to some nonsense about how he is neutral between Palestinians and Israelis while Biden was helping slaughtering Palestinians, Yemen, Syrians, Lebanese etc. while talking about peace.

No need for propaganda outfits when you're being honest.

The lies of upper middle class white liberal imperialists have been exposed - how the US treats Palestinians hasn't changed at all.

Plus some minor things - Trump is more anti-China, which is why he's winding down the Russia thing. From a geopolitical realist standpoint it makes more sense - maybe not to neocons.

Some other factors -

In 1916 the communists dud not want to take over Russia. In 1917, Lenin said they should take the opportunity to take over Russia, and wait for Germany to become a left wing government, the real revolution. This did not happen, big business at the 1933 Geheimtreffen decided to back a right wing government in Germany, and the divided left was pushed aside by a united right when the Catholic Center party signed the Enabling Act.

Russia knew from 1917 it needed political winds in the west, but they blew the other way. Continental Europe invaded Russia in 1941.

Then in 1953, Khrushchev shifted capital spending to consumer spending, one of the main blows to the Sividt economy which was humming along from 1933 to 1953.

Karl Marx basically said communist revolutions can't succeed in backwards countries, only the biggest and most advanced countries.

Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly.

Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.

> It's in the interest of the USA to cooperate and be part of defensive alliances.

Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania are in NATO. "Defensive alliance" means the US bankrolls and guarantees their security, there is no two way street with them, they can do nothing for us.

Finland is the most ridiculous case as Stalin could have easily swallowed it up in 1945 if it was in Russia's interest to do so, with little a peep from the West. Them joining NATO in 2023 is an absurdity. A military alliance which should have never existed in the first place - which both Taft and former VP Henry Wallace said in the 1940s.

> Goodbye to the dollar hegemony and the industrial military complex. Goodbye military industrial complex? Hallelujah!

> USA fought hard with the USSR to achieve hegemony

It's more absurd thinking. In 1917 Russia's economy was about Brazil's size. It was like an NFL team playing against a high school team for over a century. Russia barely even had influence over the communists in China.

I am tired of being taxed and having the money go to forever wars in other countries. Slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, destabilizing Russia, and on and on. At least Trump is winding it down in one place. If Europeans think a hardline against Russia is important, then they can pay for it. We're on the other side of the ocean.

This is why the Democrats lost. All they care about is war in the Ukraine. Bernie Sanders supports the war too, but at least he says a few scraps from the table should go to US workers. But he is thrown aside. The Democrats were for the Ukraine war, Jill Stein and Trump were not, and Americans voted for this.

Americans voted for this, Trump is implementing it, and all the warmongers and war profiteers and neocons have left is some neocon press and downvotes here for the majority American opinion which screwy old Trump is implementing.