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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Capitalism has zero benefits whatsoever

    Even Marx didn’t believe that. Capitalism is an outgrowth of industrialization, repetitively turning low-surplus undeveloped real estate into high-surplus improved real estate. If you’re not generating and then reinvesting your surplus, you’re not going to move past a feudal agrarian economy into a post-scarcity socialist state.

    you have American brainrot

    This is, at absolute worst, British/German brainrot. The Americans fetishized the idea of capitalism and hid from its excesses with westward migration. But the Old World scholars were shoved into the maw and out the anus of it a century earlier.



  • Provide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.

    Any government that has the power to grant these goods/services will have the power to take them away. Unless the public can directly own and administer the property through local councils and administrative bureaucracies, they are banking on the largesse of national socialist leadership to continue indefinitely.

    Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don’t make people depend on the market.

    All of that is predicated on a continuously expanding surplus of raw materials, advanced technologies, and an educated labor force.

    You can either import these as luxuries, in which case you’re operating an export-oriented economy predicated on the market price of your domestic surplus. That requires a bigger economy you’re effectively beholden to. Looks good in the moment, but over the course of centuries you just end up as a West African / Middle Eastern / East India Tea Company-controlled kingdom, wherein the bottlenecks of trade produce oligarchs of immense personal fortune.

    Or you produce domestically, in the Juche model, and live within the means provided by your real estate and your people. But that requires an economy that can plan and organize resources on the order of decades (if not centuries) and invests domestically rather than keeping an eye towards meeting the needs of foreign import markets. It won’t work as a capitalist system, because the capitalist demand for growth will push you back into the export-oriented model that foreigners exploit.

    “Free” markets follow the bubbles in credit and compel local economies to chase short term speculative bubbles at the expense of long term economic needs. Planned economies can build infrastructure in advance of future needs and plan social policy to curb economically regressive short-term profitable impulses with long term costs (opium consumption, coal/NGL power grids, cash crops that deplete arable land and water reserves like tobacco and pistachios).

    They aren’t durable. They produce rapid consolidations of wealth and political capital. And they create intergenerational risks that the current cohort of investors have little reason to acknowledge or prevent.


  • Capitalism has its benefits. Namely, the rapid economic growth afforded through exploitation of natural resources by unemployed labor mixed with cash-rich / debt-friendly entrepreneurs. You don’t want an economic system that loses the benefits of industrialization and domestic improvement.

    On the flip side, capitalism also has a huge problem of wealth distribution. Bottlenecks within the flow of revenue create huge pools of malinvestment, squandered natural resources on vanity projects, and a strong incentive for public sector militarization / police violence as a tool to maintain the disproportionate wealth distribution.

    We need a system in which individuals can still cooperatively administer an economy with an eye towards long term economic prosperity, but one in which the surpluses aren’t horded or wasted by a rigid hierarchy of generationally wealthy lenders and carnival barker entrepreneurs. Communism provides a roadmap for redistributing titles and incomes across entire populations, while still socially reproducing a bureaucracy capable of managing industrial-scale and national-scale projects.



  • The elites generally don’t give a crap about ideologies

    As a person raised Catholic in a wealthy Houston suburb, I’ve got to disagree. Lots of the business and social elites take their mysticism and mythology very seriously.

    they chose to wrap their personal upside maximizing policies in (for example, the excuses that German politicians chose to give to yet again support a Genocide) say a lot about what they expect will work best with the riff raff.

    There is definitely a big element of class warfare in the German endorsement of Israeli genocide. But when you get under the skin of the European antisemetic ideology, it isn’t far from what the 30s-era fascists genuinely believed. Jews are supposed to be this race of insidious, cannibalistic, goblinoids that invade your land, slaughter your men, defile your women, steal your riches, and enslave your children. The opinion of Germans towards Jews (in the moment) is simply above that of Arabs. So Jews genociding Arabs fits within the ideological rubric, just so long as the Germans can continue to purge these same “impure” Arabs from within their own borders.



  • the mindset of the 40s and 50s, which was deeply Racist

    Racism wasn’t confined to that historical moment. Go forty years in either direction and you’ll find it in abundance.

    This would explain things like Germany politicians supporting yet another Genocide along racial lines and justifying that support by the race of the genociders, the support of Israel by the very same countries which supported the white colonialism in Appartheid South Africa and Holocaust rememberances completelly ignoring the victimization of people who are not seen as part of a “white non-christian” ethnicity.

    Israel isn’t just a nation of Jews, its a nation of a Western-friendly military camped just around the corner from one of the three most lucrative trade passages on the planet. NATO states “support” an independent Israel for the same reason they “support” Singaporean and Panamanian independence. We drape our endorsement of the country in liberal language (or, in the more modern moment, conservative language) as a rhetorical convenience for the sake of international propaganda.

    The modern learning of the lessons of the Holocaust would’ve been “Never again shall this be done to anybody”, but the 1940s/50s learning which is the one which clearly (in light of the actions of Israel and the support for it in many countries) ended up encoded in most Rememberances and is still interiorized by many was instead the Racist version: “Never again shall this be done to the Jewish People”

    If you get into the origins of the NATO block and the politics of the post-WW2 period, one of the first missions of the Allied nations was to guarantee that Germany - as a nation - never enjoyed the kind of regional military supremacy it had accrued in the early 20th century. That mission evolved into containment/destruction of the USSR. And the ostensible reason for the policy was as a condemnation of the Holocaust and the continued rights of Jews (and later Arab Muslims, White Afrikaners, and Cuban exiles as realpolitik demanded).

    But the root reason was containment of rival military powers and control of post-war territorial gains.







  • you’ve helped elect the orange felon

    I never see liberals say this shit to Obama or Clinton, despite Barry and Hildawg being the two most invigorating force behind the 2016 Trump climb to the top of the GOP Primary. I don’t see them flinging it at the Starmer campaign staff, who popped across the pond to neatly derail Harris’s poll climb with their shitty advice. I certainly don’t see any mention of the DNC, the Dem donor class, or anyone who actually ran for office taking blame.

    But hey, maybe cuddle up closer to your friends the Cheneys next election cycle. Maybe they’ve got the secret sauce that wins elections.