Triggering the lizard brain of the angry entitled treat getter will shut down all those higher cognitive functions

It is very funny to see people suddenly remember how much trade the mainland does with the island when it comes time to blame someone for war profiteering.

You don’t think Tech oligarchs would do this? Just war-profiteer off every side in an ongoing conflict?!

But who could be behind it all?

• Israeli pleads guilty to shipping US-made avionics to Russia, violating sanctions

• Israeli metalworking tools continue to enter Russia’s defense sector in 2024, despite sanctions, with over $10 million in imports recorded.

• How Israel sold Russia drones to stop missiles from reaching Iran

Well, idk about y’all, but I blame China.

Strong leadership really can prevent wars…

Idk what “strong” leadership is supposed to mean in this context. Because, in the American context, strength is directly correlated with a leader’s willingness to inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on one’s domestic and global opposition.

shitting your pants on camera, double tapping a school full of little girls, shitting your pants on camera, starting a pointless war…

Terror campaigns have a long and historically effective track record. Whether or not you’re cotenant when you press the big red button hardly matters.

The problem with fascist governments is that they’re very good at extracting enormous amounts of wealth from vulnerable people. So they produce a vicious cycle of assault, extraction, re-arming, renewed assault. Liberals heckling from the sides with “Haha, he poopie his panties!” doesn’t change any of that.

Trump’s allies are gaining wealth, sovereign territory, and an expanded role in the state bureaucracy. I don’t see anyone willing to acknowledge that. And so, once he’s scattered his fascist seeds, I question whether anyone will remember to pull them back out again before the next harvest.

the damage this guy has done to millions of republicans

None of the ones that matter. They all got an order of magnitude richer.

Like this is the dumbest thing they’ve ever supported.

American fascists wanted to inflict horrifying torture and abuse on the rest of the world. They got exactly what they asked for and they are exceedingly happy about it. When Trump is gone, they’ll demand Trump 2. Just like when they all lined up to morn Ronald Reagan and promised to bring about his Second Coming.

Guy who is constantly lying: “Series of Lies!”

Me, a fact-checker: “I’m going to use AI to debunk these lies in meme format”.

FDR/Göring slash fiction.

FDR foot fetish

I mean, it doesn’t even have to be a race. I would happily accept a median tier bullet train network. A measly 160 MPH intercity rail, with a very stadid 60-80 MPH intracity commuter rail would be perfectly fine.

😰

Exposing the terrible inefficiencies of the blasphemous Public Sector.

Obviously, all of this work should be done by AI.

Thinking about thinking is just brain masturbation, which is the pinnacle of homosexuality.

Also, this is just plain wrong.

A greentext that’s wrong? Highly unlikely.

What about the women that is into pepe lore or WW2 theory?

They are irrelevant, because they are both Fake and Gay

Impossible. If women had choices, then they’d have a diversity of off-spring with a wide spectrum of forms, traits, and behaviors.

We know that can’t be the case, because all men are identical and perfectly interchangeable, except for a tiny variance in peak performance which they use to sort themselves from Sigma to Omega for the purpose of obtaining Da Big Sequesy to produce more Sigma clones.

Vivek Chibber has done some recent work on the incentive problems that also plague Soviet-style command economies.

He comes at it empirically - “We ought to be skeptical, as any rational person ought to be, because when you see something failing over and over and over again” - and extends causality from there. And he goes running back to price signals as the proximate cause of the failure, because he conflates market signals with efficient consumption patterns.

Planning was consciously directing the flows of investment into the sectors that you deemed to be the priority sectors, discouraging investment from sectors that you deemed to be superfluous or unimportant. And then the key — the really hard part — was figuring out how to incentivize the managers of your factories, the managers of the agricultural cooperatives that you had to follow the dictates of the plan, because you cannot rely on price signals.

Which is all true, but not unique to communist economic planners. We have a bevy of capitalist planners that live all through the corporate world, fixated on directing the flow of investment. And once an industry becomes vertically integrated, it also can’t rely on market signals, because all the company is dealing with is raw material inputs and final product outputs.

What private industry in capitalist states have achieved that communists arguably lacked was the proverbial “Manufactured Consent” of the end consumer. You take a thing that’s incredibly cheap to produce and engineer at scale - plastic or particle board or ink/paper or data - and you upsell it through marketing. So you end up with a $600B/year budget in the United States that’s dedicated just to telling people that they need to buy stuff.

And that doesn’t include the budget for industry lobbying or legal wrangling. It doesn’t include the kind of bribery and kickbacks that avoid popular resistance to industry. Or the negative externalities of waste management that are displaced onto end consumers.

Normally in capitalism, what do managers do? They want to make profits. The way to make a profit is by trying to sell at the lowest price possible, the best quality good that you can.

That’s straight foward not true. You make a profit by selling at the highest price possible with the lowest quality of good that you can. You aim for higher margins per unit sold. And then you aim to maximize volume. McDonalds would not exist in its current state if it was in the business of undercutting people making sandwiches at home with superior products.

Everything he’s writing about is just the restatement of the old economic calculation problem posited by Ludwig von Mises in 1920. And it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked with the advent of modern computer technology. But even before the invention of the microprocessor, it was on shaking footing in countries like Allende’s Chile and Deng’s China.

In fact, the reactionary response to central planning as an institution wasn’t to outcompete it but to demolish the methods by which it was achieved. Most famously, when Pinochet’s troops stormed the Presidential offices and shot the computers.

Not only is central planning possible, but it is proven successful, as often within capitalism as within the socialist sphere.

Essential China Leave Policy Requirements

• Annual Leave: 5-15 days based on years of service (5 days for 1-10 years, 10 days for 10-20 years, 15 days for 20+ years)

• Sick Leave: 3-24 months depending on service length and local regulations

• Maternity Leave: Minimum 98 days nationally, extended to 128-190 days by provincial regulations

• Public Holidays: 7 statutory holidays with additional adjusted days totaling 11-16 non-working days annually

• Critical Compliance: Provincial and municipal variations significantly impact leave entitlements

Did it fail because of the command-economy? I seem to recall the worst days of the USSR following implementation of perestroika. And then the Shock Doctrine that followed Yeltsin’s tank-ride into parliament (literally) was even worse.

The amount of complaining under the command-economy was arguably much worse. But that stemmed more from the receptiveness of the government to complaints than under the modern system, where they just arrest you and shove you into a trench in Ukraine.

China’s restrictions on free speech scare me…

I see people complain about free speech restrictions in China with this deep paranoid fervor. And then I see them dismiss free speech restrictions on Reddit or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok or Twitter as personal problems created by trolls and losers.

That’s not even to say the Chinese bureaucracy doesn’t have a rigid and claustraphobic anti-speech policy. I’ve seen ostensibly pro-China people bang their heads into it and come back complaining. I’ve also seen the kind of baby-brained content that Chinese network TV produces in an effort to be inoffensive and I absolutely agree it sucks. I’ve also seen the insane shit that gets posted in their back corners. Conspiracy theories and ugly shitposts and bonkers memes that would give Alex Jones a run for his money, give me sympathy for anyone who has to act as moderator in that asylum. Something of a running joke that the Chinese Firewall isn’t about protecting them from us, it’s about protecting us from them.

Of cousre, I’m not living in China. So my fear of Chinese restrictions on free speech are minimal because the Chinese government isn’t the one I have to worry about.

Their working class is in a meat grinder to an extent I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Then you really haven’t looked. Chinese working people have paid vacation and sick leave, low-cost public housing in abundance with nearly 90% of the population owning a primary residence, and retirement in the 50s for women and 60s for men. Per-capita debt is about 10% of the American population. The adult literacy rate is 98%, 20-pts higher than their American peers. Life expectancy is eclipsing the US, as theirs rises and ours falls. Instances of suicide are much lower. Incarceration rates are lower. Yadda yadda yadda.

Now compare the Chinese working class to folks living in The Philippines or Pakistan or South Africa or Brazil. Nevermind Egypt or Russia or Qatar or - god forbid - Haiti or Palestine. It’s not even close.