VictorPath

This is what the West has supported in the Arab world. The enemy for the west was pan-Arab socialism or just anti-imperial secular nationalism - Nasser, George Habash, Qadaffi, Mossadegh. Israel supported and funded Hamas against the PLO, the right wing sheiks and Savak and the Shah against Mossadeg and Iran's secular patriots. It sent Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen to fight Afghanistan's secular socialist government.

The west still does this. The big enemy is Assad, the last detritus and remnants of the old Nasserite anti imperialism. The US is a strong ally of Saudi Arabia, most of the tensions it has had recently were due to oil prices ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-saudi-tensions-ease-as-conc... ).

The West helped successfully destroy much of the secular left of these countries, and backed/backs and armed/arms the reactionary Muslims against them. Then it throws its hands up like here about how Arab culture is inherently the way the West helped mold it as.

Eugenics research is disruptive?

Why not phrenology?

> people born with family whealth (sic)

Most successful Phillips Exeter graduate doesn't quite have that ring for the Horatio Alger idea that is being pushed.

Ok let us go down Forbes 2022 billionaires list

Musk - father owned diamond mines

Bezos - alluded to in article - big loan from parents

Arnault - father owned Ferret-Savinel

Gates - born with million dollar trust fund, grandfather ran bank, mother on board with IBM's Opel etc.

Buffett - grandfather owned chain of stores, father a congressman

The US military just shifted its bloody campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya to a bloody war against Russia, a focus of its new massive military budget while it cries poverty regarding the needs of even its own workers for domestic programs.

That the Christian holiday is tied into the US military apparatus with its imperial bases and adventures throughout the world is no surprise.

This article goes on about progress for blacks in the US...a half century ago the New York City magnet school Stuyvesant had hundreds of black students (over 300). In recent years the number accepted each year has been 7 or 8 each year, with a student body of over 3000. Efforts to bring students in from different neighborhoods have resulted in massive political efforts against that. This is just one data point, but would shape local people's perceptions toward progress, and opposition seems even more vociferous in other parts of the country.

I put my trust in how the average person thinks things are going, not from people on high telling us everything is great and why don't we recognize this. In the past year our industry has seen stocks tank, and layoffs increasing along with the fed funds rate. Someone having to push a story of how great everything is will get a cool response. People can assess how things are going, despite efforts from on high that people are mistaken in how great things are going.

The security clearance he was stripped of was set to lapse a day afterward anyhow. After all his effort and contributions, he was attacked out of spite.

The Russian military has been in the Crimea since the time there were British redcoats stationed in New York City, before the USA existed.

Karl Marx said unemployment was a foundational necessity of capitalism (although not the feudalism that preceded capitalism), so I don't see this program lasting long ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ).

This was published seven years ago. Its arguments are very sketchy - as if settling nurture versus nature for humans were not social science, as opposed to science.

If identical twins are raised in a wealthy household versus a poor household, how can one determine traits coming from inheritance versus environment? This analysis does not really answer it.

The data of identical twins separated at birth is very light, as one can imagine. A look at the data of the major studies shows there really is not a lot of data - twins are separated at the age of 9 or so, or sometimes are separated at birth and then reunited.

Many of these twin studies are funded by the strange but well-funded Pioneer Fund. You can check out what they were up to in the 1930s if you're interested.

> The only body that makes decisions about Taiwan is the Taiwanese government. It has 100% control of the land within its borders.

Being that the Taiwanese government claims Beijing and Shanghai as being within its borders, I don't think that this is the case.

> Taiwan as a sovereign state

Does the USA recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state? No.

Does the PRC recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state? No.

Does Taiwan recognize itself as a sovereign state separate from mainland China? No.

> we can _learn_ to want to be another gender

If that is true, then cookie cutter expected gender behavior can be "learned" as well. In fact much of it was illegal in the US a few decades ago.

Actually Marx talked a lot about automation. Marx's prediction was this would lead to a lower rate of profit for invested capital which - mainstream establishment sources say is what has been happening.

It's not like a socialist country could invent things like a satellite, and be the society that figures out how to send a man into space, probes to the moon and other planets - oh yaa, a socialist country is the first country to figure out those things.

It certainly is a dystopia village - in the US a hunter gatherer band a century and a half ago provides for their own needs, with no social classes. Now the descendants of those natives must sell their labor power in order to live. That they have a supposed choice from who in an oligarchic cartel they can do it with means little.

The argument he is arguing against is that the workers create the wealth, and profit is that unpaid surplus labor time that the LPs/VCs/founders expropriate from the workers creating wealth. You can't "share" profits with workers when workers are creating all the wealth, the LPs/VCs etc. expropriate profits from workers.

It's a strawman argument for founders, but I am fairly sure it is made out of ignorance.

Let's say a sole founder buys $100,000 worth of Amazon Cloud, Nvidia cards, smartphones etc. Yes, one person is at the company, but others made those goods. The founder may not have directly exploited the person who made the smartphone they're using, but someone did.

Also, let's say I sell my small company which is well positioned in a fast growing market. The buyers are not buying based on what happened before, but on the future work and revenues that will be acquired from people working on the product.

At the end of the day there are people who work and create wealth and get a wage or salary, and there are idle class heir LPs who do not work or create wealth. The heirs survive on the wealth created in expropriated, unpaid surplus labor time of workers who do work. VCs front for the LPs, and founders deal with the VCs.

I don't think Graham even knows what he is arguing with. I'm not trying to make a convincing argument for the other side, but a clarifying one.

Incidentally, pretty much every economist up until the mid 19th century agreed with my view in some form - Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, David Ricardo - all the people who made economic arguments which economists still use. They said they studied political economy. It wasn't until the 1870s that arguments against new value being created by labor were started in full swing, although some of the ideas go back to the 1830s.

I read this and Chomsky says what I said - the civilian deaths due to the US ground invasion and carpet bombing are ignored.

Also, as I said, the US began arming the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and began openly arming them in the 1980s. So if the Khmer Rouge had committed a genocide, then that's who the US was arming to put back in power.

Chomsky condemned the US ground invasion and carpet bombing of Kampuchea, which destabilized the country and I'm guessing the mass death of civilians from does not fit into your genocide definition.

In 1975 the coalition led, nominally or not, by Sihanouk gained control of Kampuchea (again, in the case of Sihanouk). The US and west said a genocide was happening between 1975 and 1979, but immediately somewhat covertly, and then openly, began arming the coalition with Pol Pot and what the west called the Khmer Rouge.

I have to laugh about all these comments talking about the left and pedophilia, as if conservative religious organizations are not rife with child molestation.

> Prepare to wait for another 30 years until this can be openly and honestly discussed in Germany: until the perpetrators and their then-allies are all dead.

In 1977, a date the article mentions, the president of the Confederation of German Employers Associations was a former SS Untersturmfuehrer. The BND was founded by former SS/SDers under Gehlen. Talk about waiting years to discuss openly.

By that measure, the citizens of the Crimea and Donbass picked their leaders as well, which were people the Russians could work with. An organic process they are fighting for now.

It's not like the US assistant Secretary of State was in Euromaidan Square handing out food to the people organizing a coup against the elected government, then getting on the phone and saying "fuck the EU" as she was helping decide who should run the country...oh yaa, that did happen.

> a blind eye to Russia occupying Crimea

The Russia military was "occupying Crimea" back when there were British redcoats occupying New York City. The Russian military has been there since that time. The only new development has been the US, UK, with some continental support, demanding the Russians leave in recent times and pouring financial and military supplies into the Ukraine to accomplish this.

Also if we want to go back to the 1700s, then Russia should hand Crimea over to Turkey, not the Ukraine, because Ottoman Turkey is who occupied Crimea before Russia.

> Fertility rates in the US cratered after 2008...These women would probably have more kids if it was easier to have a single income household...Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family.

You might as well talk about how women might raise their children on Mars. Outside the Amazon jungle, for the past 10000 years women have been raising children under class-based society under class-based relations of production. The ruling class makes decisions about production, that's the point of a class-based society. Thus the world is turning into a place where the purpose of women's fertility is reproduction of labor, not an increase of it. The ruling class prefers two educated, productive children to three or four less educated, less productive children.

It doesn't matter what working class women want in terms of children, because this is a class-based society, and the ruling class has things aligned to what is good for them, not her.

Well let's see which health experts signed it...

Roger Severino, vice president of the Heritage Foundation.

He's a lawyer with no medical training. I guess his credentials for health is Trump appointed him as an HHS lawyer to undo what Severino called the "radical gender ideology" of Obama.

Coronavirus hit New Zealand in 2020, and by May 2nd twenty people had died. New Zealand implemented lockdowns and ordered vaccines, although they took a while to come. By the end of October 2021, 28 people had died of Covid in New Zealand. They had massively attended sporting events at the height of the world pandemic as coronavirus was undetectable in the country. Once pretty much who wanted to be vaccinated got vaccinated, they loosened the rules.

Whereas in the US you have immediate resistance from these Christian fundamentalists (Hillsdale is Christian fundamentalist). Over one million Americans are dead of Covid, lots of people have long Covid, and anecdotally hospitals were full and all hospital patients saw delays in care, so I am sure people who could not get cancer treatments died due to these nuts.

In France the largest political party until 1956 was the communist party. In 1948 the communist/socialist alliance was almost elected to power in Italy, and the communist party was getting over one third of the vote to 1976 (the Italian socialist party with hammer and sickle logo got about 10% of the vote, and Maoist parties got hundreds of thousands of votes). Too much widespread support at the time to ban.

Not in West Germany which reinstated the Nazi ban on the communist party. Not the USA which banned the communist party, criminalized the party and jailed its leaders ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_195... ). South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia wtc. all followed the same path.

Dissenting parties were outlawed in western and western aligned countries all over the world, and many of them like Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Australia etc. became one party led states.

Australia did not outlaw the Labour party, but we can see what happened when the Liberal party interrupted the 1949 to 1983 Cold War rule led by the Liberal party - pressures national and international undermined any ability to rule until a foreign monarch had her footman toss him out.

> Enough people think Gough was bonkers

There is much discussion about how in the cold war, a swath of countries from East Germany to China ran as states led by one party. Not much discussed is how many western aligned countries did as well. As the Cold War heated up, from 1949 to 1972, the Liberal coalition ran Australia. In 1972 another party is elected into power, and an extraordinary amount of energy from within Australia and without (UK and US) went into undermining anything but the old one party led coalition. Whitlam was undermined every day for his less than three years in power, then ousted by the retainer of a foreign queen, so that the one party led rule would continue to 1983. Of course the undermined <3 year interruption to one party led rule was "bonkers" to those supporting decades of one party led rule.

One party led rule from 1949 to 1983, with the one elected other party with less than 3 years ousted by a representative of a queen. These people then had the gall to criticize the one party led coalitions running China and East Germany as being one party states that blocked political pluralism.

The same thing happened in the other western aligned countries in the Pacific during the Cold War - Japan, South Korea. The same case in South Africa, Italy, France etc.