- analognoise parentOperation: Epstein Distraction is go.
- We’re one step from harvesting organs from people in rural areas, or hunting them for sport from helicopter, and they’ll cheer as long as “their side” is the one hunting them.
- Did anyone actually buy the line about “industrializing America”?
It’s pretty clearly a criminal enterprise meant to enrich the president, his family, and the already wealthy.
- This is such a painfully American response.
Nobody can ever imagine a better system, even if it’s used in literally every advanced nation in the world. Nope, instead we have to let Grandpa die painfully to keep those stock prices up.
I’m starting to think Capitalism as it’s practiced here is a death cult of some kind.
- Yes, and we absolutely should.
- Taxing the living shit out of billionaires won’t fix everything, but it’s absolutely the first thing we should do.
- It's funny to me that 1% of poor people is "corruption we need to root out" but having worthless billionaires pay less tax than a school teacher is well and good.
If we're going to work out corruption, let's take everything the billionaires have and actually fix some of our systems.
- Most of the basic medical research is funded by tax dollars.
Also, are you sure the bureaucracy isn't exactly the point? If you're too sick to fight off a denial and die, they keep the money.
I think we're subsidizing Wall Street's profits with our garbage system, but the sooner people realize our system is totally failed maybe we can knock it down and do something else.
- There's no reason we should pay 2x what everyone else does, and live 10 years less (for healthcare).
We could accept a good deal of socialism into our system and see only benefits; there are a number of things which should not be profit-motive driven at all.
- No, he’s the opposite of that.
But next time people say “we could just seize it”, we have precedent. From a Republican, no less!
- > The free market could do that without unions.
I suggest doing some reading about labor movements, the Gilded Age, or about current issues - wealth inequality, housing costs, environmental impact, healthcare costs, enshittification.
The free market has failed miserably across multiple dimensions - even Trump has the government owning companies now (Intel). The “free market” has been a failed idea for a long time.
> In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him.
We have archeological evidence that contradicts this directly! What are you even talking about?
This isn’t a good way to structure a society, but your whole point about mixing morality with capitalism is perhaps the worst one.
If you can’t look at the damage to people (and the environment) under our current system and point out how it is broadly immoral, I would suggest taking a closer look at the very least.
- If our markets weren’t corrupt, everyone in the AI space would be bankrupt by now, and we could all wander down to the OpenAI fire sale and buy nice servers for pennies on the dollar.
- I mean is this kind of thing really convincing?
The side that thinks vaccines are a hoax, RFK Jr discovered the cause of autism, wants to burn up satellites we’ve already paid for because the carbon numbers are bad, suggested injecting bleach (remember that?), stared at the solar eclipse, constantly makes noise about how women should have fewer rights and maybe the 10 commandments belong in school… are not who you want in charge of science funding. Obviously.
Remember the sharpie path of the hurricane? No need for a supercomputer, we’ve got sharpie.
Team “windmills cause cancer” obviously isn’t better for science, get real.
- Is America under Trump/MAGA is really “the West”.
If we’re using the federal government to shut down comedians, I think we have more in common with China/Russia/N. Korea? Especially when you consider illegally using the military to murder boats full of civilians, and banishment (not deportation) to random places.
- The techno-libertarians I’ve interacted with were always painfully naive, with a simplistic worldview (that they thought was extremely learn’ed - mistaking their technical skill for broad intellect that understood politics to be “simple”).
If they haven’t grown up thus far, I doubt yet another logical inconsistency will puncture their shallow and hermetic understanding.
Or as I read it somewhere, “We’ve created a group of technical people who can solve any technical problem but can’t explain why Nazism is bad.”
The only thing that might pierce that veil is this: they believed they were not workers, but more like a priestly class, “self made” but immune to the travails of “everyone else”. The massive spike in layoffs, the economic slump, our increased taxes (via tariff), the rights erosions - might get them to recognize their mistake in understanding, but only if it strikes them personally (this gets back to the naïveté mentioned above).
- We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock.
I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?
- Didn’t the President of the United States say he didn’t care about bringing the people together, and has wished violence upon people who don’t support him politically?
Where do you think this comes from, and, rather than arm ourselves with similarly martial language, we should be expected simply to lie flat?
Ridiculous.
- I thought empathy was optional?
- This seems a bit too “both sides” for my taste, given Trump being a disaster for America.
- Can we stop sanewashing these people?
They clearly don't care for legality, constitutionality, anything positive or good.
- Agreed; it’s an embarrassing argument.
- The Laffer Curve is frequently cited by the same people who refuse to see the failure of conservative-style economic policy over the last 40 years, for some reason.
It’s clear all that “don’t tax the rich, they create jobs!” Is just trash. Noise. We have 40 years of data, it doesn’t work.
But still, someone ignores all that to tell me the Laffer Curve, every time. What’s also amazing is that they don’t really understand it themselves. Wild.
- Some people tried to evade the system - that’s why we have helicopters. We can just grab them and bring them to court, no problem.
I don’t think “some people didn’t abide the rules” is reason not to make sensible laws.
- That used to be “industrial policy” - it doesn’t need to be individuals at all. In fact it shouldn’t be - they’re concerned with returns, not jobs and certainly not with any technology that requires a longer timespan to complete.
The Biden administration had excellent industrial policy. Trump had the government steal a 10% share of Intel.
Watching people realize he’s just a criminal loser has been heartening.
- Considering our success so far, it’s obvious it’s succeeding. You’d have to ignore your eyes and ears to think a multiracial secular democratic country can succeed.
What’s amazing is that racists seem to be trying to screw it up on purpose, then to claim it doesn’t work. “Starve the beast” but for social cohesion. They’re always surprised when they get bitten by the monster they created.
The rich never had “noblesse oblige” - we used to shoot at the factory owner when they didn’t pay us.
I’m not sure what to do with such a limited understanding of history and such an obvious blind spot as this, but then I remember: you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
- What?
When America was strongest, we had a large and increasing middle class, and the top marginal tax rate was above 70% - it was in the 90s.
We don’t need “the elite” - they don’t actually “create jobs”, and the “engine of the economy” is just a convenient vehicle for the rich (and private equity) to ruin the middle class further - it was never about “efficient markets”.
If anything what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is that we need better systems.
- As soon as we start prosecuting the rich for "social murder" and things like it, things will improve.
We just need to get over that hump. You pay yourself 300x what your average worker does? That's fine, but we can also try you for social murder. Like if you're a healthcare executive that denies coverage and increases costs without delivering care (serving as a worthless middleman who actually prevents care), you go to prison. That sort of thing.
We need to move in that direction, imo.
- If the “national self determination” is that masked men run around terrorizing families and workers, they deserve to be fought.
- We need Congress to nullify this "unitary executive" noise, fully.
This mistake with Trump and others like him cannot be allowed to happen again.