So this is our curse for founding a nation on tax evasion and slavery. Eventually, it doesn't matter if you're white.

The US is horrendously corrupt. That is the failing of things like the CPI, Corruption Perceptions Index. It isn’t based on objective measures of corruption, like whether policies are in the public interest, but instead it’s based on how corrupt the average citizen thinks their country is. Well, that doesn’t matter much when you are indoctrinated to believe corruption is the way things are supposed to work in government.

The US effectively doesn’t have regulation of large companies because it is completely legal for those companies to buy off the regulators. The only regulations that exist are designed to protect incumbents from upstarts, usually by creating regulatory burdens that small companies cannot reasonably meet. This is all intentional and it’s why politicians never do anything to fix it. Notice how Google and Facebook didn’t do anything about Net Neutrality this time? Because they’ve gotten a lot bigger since last time, and with Net Neutrality gone they are going to win big. It will be literally impossible for anybody to create a new YouTube competitor. Anti-NN makes Google a user video monopoly until the regulation changes. Most people know this stuff isn’t right, and they’re very angry about it, and right to be angry about it. But for every NN there are a thousand instances of regulatory capture that go completely unnoticed. I mean, Ajit Pais putting in a solid 40, and he’s not spending all of it on NN. He is the property of Verizon and there are 4 other days in the week.

The US isn’t the only country that’s like this, but it’s the richest, so it’s one of the worst.

What’s really sad is that conservatives and Republicans are going to see a lot of their own complaints in what I’m posting. That’s what I find so frustrating about them, because it’s all, well, let’s solve this problem we agree on by doing the same thing we’ve always done, only do it even more. Like, yes, income taxation is theft, but it’s specifically theft by the rich upon the poor. If we cut taxes they will find another way to steal your money, it’s what rich people do, because they do not work for a living and someone (you) will always be made to pay for their leisure. You can’t solve the theft problem until you solve the elite problem, the capitalist problem.

What's interesting to me about Google flipping on NN is just how much good will they still seem to have from the public and from the tech community. I think it will be at least half a decade (a lifetime in tech) before people even start to think of Google as being anywhere as close to, say, AT&T or Oracle in terms of their evilness.

Don't be evil... see no evil... hey, we're not evil! Still believe us?

“I hate Congress. They’re a bunch of useless criminals and we should vote the lot of em out. That’s why I’m voting to re-elect my congressmen. They really get it, they care about our district and community and they’re working hard in DC to drain the swamp. Just last year my representative brought in a whole bunch of jobs* to the district. He’s got my vote, straight ticket whatever party he’s in.”

* 400 jobs, with a tax rebate large enough to fund their salaries for 1000 years.

What really chuffs me is when they give a tax break or direct subsidy to a company that is so extravagant, it would literally cost the taxpayer less if they just paid each worker their current salary to do nothing. They did something like this in Ontario to bring a GM plant back. What the **** is the legitimate argument for this? It is a gift to the rich. Period.

What's really kind of sad is the whole point of view that conservatives take, that taxes are theft, and this is the most abhorrent thing of all. But they don't stop to consider that something much larger is being stolen in the first place, in exchange for the original wages.

I think fundamentally, libertarian ideology makes sense psychologically if you forget about all asymmetry of wealth / accumulation of capital. In a way I think it's a victory of marketing that we associate cuddly startup logos with now massive, sociopathic corporations (think Google). People might think twice about personifying such an entity if we took away all the branding. It's not so appealing to people to think of a company as a room full of effectively faceless and uncountable rich people, using the company to extract a profit without killing it in the process (which is basically what a publicly traded company is).

My mom hates Google for killing iGoogle. Said she’d disown me if I ever went to work for them.

So, sooner or later those spastic chimps are gonna kill at least one product that everybody likes, or some defective algorithm locks them out of their account, or they try to search for something that isn’t porn and realize that Google Search doesn’t actually work for anything anymore.

Until then you can always talk about stuff like, oh, the fact that they conspired with other companies to suppress wages; the fact that they steal content from websites and rehost it without paying the people who wrote it; the fact that they’re intentionally demonetizing popular YouTube videos until they are “reviewed”, stealing 90% of ad money from content creators; the fact that Google is a willing participant in censorship and state surveillance around the world, including in the US; the fact that Google has been using anticompetitive practices around the world, including predatory pricing of their phone software, using their search monopoly to promote their services and block competitors from search results, and their restructuring into Alphabet was designed to stymie antitrust enforcement so direly needed that even the US is thinking about doing it; or, hell, if they’re progressive, how about the fact that Larry Page used to date Marissa Mayer, and he pushed her out of the company after she got married?

Btw, I think I just realized that you can get cancer on the outside of your body too.

Or was it another c-word. Well, accumulation of something. Which crops up by itself now and then and needs to be cut out before it sucks you lifeless.

Does that make neoliberalism the homeopathy of social cancer remedies, I wonder.

A company is a self-managed entity that issues and promotes a fiat currency for exchange by the wealthy. The most valuable currencies are the best marketed, which is achieved by hiring skilled people to create things that can be advertised in the magazines rich people read.

Neoliberalism is trying to cure cancer by inviting foreign cancers to compete against your cancer.

These tumors have consolidated into one huge watermelon sized tumor. It is too big to fail.

Which makes me think, the US might have been a perfectly functional country, if not for want of something missing in its DNA that could have been adapted to stop these cancers from cropping up. Just like in the animal how kingdom cancer is dealt with in varying levels of sophistication between organisms.

And then you have conservatives unwittingly rooting for the cancer, in hope that they themselves will grow into bigger cancers themselves, beating an exponential process that's already got a distant head start on them at their own game. Lol

Yeah geez it’s not like a rich guy funded the continental army out of pocket, something that crazy might have really ****ed the US up

Oops, I missed that you already wrote this

Alt. Right = Nazis

Capitalists = cancer

/thread

It’s a good thing the US didn’t let their government be designed by a crackpot who was curious to find out whether democratic capitalism could work, or whether it would go completely **** up like everybody predicted at the time.

Wait a minute, I think I remember hearing about a guy from the 19th century who wrote a book that people have used to fight both of those groups. Although I only briefly read it, and its memory has been long since washed from my country's collective memory.

If the US had done something that crazy, you’d probably see horrific corruption and societal collapse every two generations or so, only alleviated after a massive destruction of capital. So you’d have done two so far, and be overdue on a third. Thank God that didn’t happen.

But, muh End of History!

Revolution, social turmoil, bread lines... Those are all things that happen in other countries.

What am I doing in this thread, sullying the name of my country with a foreign accomplice. Ugh, I am no better than a Benedict Arnold.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936624679631982594?s=17

"Developing new habits among consumers" is a nice way of spelling "****ing with our heads to jam through more ad clicks".

Oh, I have a friend who's something libertarian and much of his beliefs are the result of plain ignorance and denying facts*. Recently they claimed to not be libertarian and believe government needs to step in to fix market failures by one of my arguments. It can happen!

* for instance, he never considered why forming an implicit cartel would be more profitable, insisting it made sense only for one person to lower prices. I explained why you can have markets where competition is discouraged and why that describes several U.S. markets. He bought it! Woooo

In 2011 I started to believe Google was ****ing evil to massive resistance from all the fanboys. Now it's nearly unequivocal that Google sucks.

Just look at what various U.S. cities are doing to try and get Amazon to come. It's ****ing pathetic.

Victims of Stalinist oppression wait outside for scraps of bread (1933, Black and White):

Benedict Arnold is an American hero, who did a ****load to win the war for America and switched sides because he wasn't payed.

Oh, it ****ing passed the senate. The giant "**** you" tax bill passed, and I'm long that net neutrality is going to be repealed.

Hey Wookie, these are your men. Can you fess up to how stupid you've been these years to vote for these people? Because your idiotic, reality-resistant beliefs are ****ing us all over.

He's probably too busy goosestepping to whatever "black people are worse than you" jerkoff story is on his Facebook right now.

Well, it was a nice run being a world superpower. See you on the other side of our ethnic struggle, I hope.

Oh, I should add, my libertarian friend believed that tax cuts will "benefit all people". I made the elementary observation that it depends on how the tax cuts are structured, and can be made specifically to benefit some people over others, so you have to go read reviews of the tax policy in order to understand its effects. He had no reply.

This is why people are libertarian: they don't understand things on anything but a superficial level.

God dammit I am not rich enough for this tax law to happen yet

It turns out that maybe it was a mistake to use the same incentive system for both the economic class and governance.

agriculture was a mistake

Also liberal in general, or supportive of capitalism in general. A lot of the problem is that people don’t understand what currency means. Neoliberalism has done a lot to distort our language regarding currency: we are told it is a store of wealth, but it isn’t because even commodity currencies have no inherent value; and we are told it isnfungible, which it legally is, but socially and economically there is a difference between a dollar earned through labor and earned through capital.

A dollar is a promise of a single share in the economic output of your country. When you are paid a dollar for working, you have not been rewarded yet. You are rewarded when you spend that dollar to receive some stuff, a portion of what the country has produced. This is the social contract: you work to make stuff, you add to the nations total pile of stuff, and in return you are allowed to pick some nice stuff out of the pile for yourself.

When you are paid a dollar from owning capital - rent, dividends, day trading, passive income, whatever euphemism you want - you are also given a promise of a single share in the economic output of your country. This is where the social contract breaks down: you don’t do anything to add to that pile of stuff, but you are allowed to take from the pile anyway. (Note that, because non-workers are allowed to take from this pile, the workers get less stuff out of the pile than they put in.)

I know this is obvious to anybody reading this post, but to neoliberals it isn’t. Not really. For them, the relationship between labor expended and stuff received has gotten terribly abstract. Currency is now the reward itself, not the stuff you can buy with it. Productivity is how quickly you can make money, instead of how quickly you can make stuff. Neoliberals (and libertarians) behave the way they do because they literally perceive the passive gains of billionaires as more productive than the labors of almost the entire rest of the country, because when you don’t understand the social contract anymore, that is literally the only way you can reason about it.

I think I realized why capitalist / neoliberal / libertarian ideology is such a popular scam among conservatives (and liberals to a great extent): it's really hard to accept a cancer diagnosis, and yet the disease is ubiquitous (especially in the long run). So you have a lot of quack remedies that offer facile remedy (like Steve Jobs thinking he could cure his cancer by changing his diet). So it is with what the billionaires are scamming red state voters with: nice sounding stuff being peddled by utterly cynical charlatans, which eventually kill the patient.

The other thing about cancer is that it's apparently really hard for some cells to tell the difference between abnormal and functioning cells, because so much of the DNA is still shared. And then the cancer cells adapt to be undetectable. This is just the same way that people in a capitalist society adapt to / are conditioned through propaganda and language to accept the abnormalities of uncontrolled capital accumulation, to the point that they can't even recognize it as it silently grows.