What makes you think you don’t?

Throwing mud at Trump to muddy his image is like trying to dirty a mountain of ****.

At any rate, why wouldn't Trump be prone to worry about this kind of thing? He's known to be restless and mistrusting, with or without cause (Edit: and, you know, he probably knows he's massively guilty of something, like a lot of people who move around the kind of money he does). After all, he is massively insecure and is constantly obsessing over his public image, so paranoia doesn't strike me as too surprising.

Edit: also, lol, why wouldn't people close to Trump sell him out. There's no way anybody who is that close to the man has enough respect for him to honor private confidence except for purely selfish reasons. I mean, look no further at the flipping of Michael Cohen.

Your president is a 1970s Manhattan man-whore who pals around with child sex traffickers and made his name in international luxury real estate, which has always been industrialized money laundering for dictators.

But yeah it’s definitely a conspiracy that the media finds so much **** on Trump, but couldn’t find anything about a college professor from Chicago, or even an alcoholic businessman from Texas. Soooo weird.

#notmypresident

Looks like the investigation is complete



https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/22/robert-mueller-report-president-trump-russia-election-investigation/2213214002/

You can probably remove the hash tag since he's Canadian...

I know about that but I'm under the impression it's still in the realm of a conspiracy theory. Is Mueller close to wrapping up his investigation?

Sorry, didn't realize there were more posts.

"I'm the best at not committing crimes. The best. No one is more innocent than me. I'm the most innocent. Everyone knows it."
-Donald Trump probably

As someone from a Latin American country, I actually like that Trump is, intentionally or not, weaking the US's grasp on the world. I cannot, however, imagine how anyone with a brain could fail so hardly in leading the world's most influent country. I also like what he's doing with the DPRK (could be much better) but hate what he's doing in Venezuela, but again, I believe both are due to his sheer stupidity. I feel like the Trump administration figured out there was no way they could still take on the DPRK militarily, so they moved their target to Venezuela.

Venezuela was already under attack by the US years before Trump took office. I don’t think there’s anything in North Korea that an American oligarch would like to own and collect rent from, which is really the issue for them. Americans can’t tolerate a country where their rich people aren’t allowed to “invest”.

Other than the fact that Trump says the part he’s not supposed to say, he hasn’t done anything that a different Republican President wouldn’t do.

True, but it has definitely intensified more recently. Maybe it was just a timing issue, I doubt it would be very different under Bernie or Hillary (especially Hillary).


Maybe cheap labor or just new markets, plus it's strategically interesting as if the US took over the DPRK they'd be able to build bases literally bordering China and Russia.

no, no, they're spreading freedom around the globe

When American elites and intelligentsia talk about “spreading freedom” they are talking about their own freedom to exploit people and resources. Americans are literally the only people in the world who haven’t figured this out.

Man, just like David Frum warned about at least two years, Congress should not abdicate its role in conducting its own independent investigation of Trump, and now everybody is pointing fingers because there haven't been any new indictments in the final report of the Special Council. According to Frum (2017), an independent commission would have presented a better opportunity to investigate the 2016 election in order to resolve questions about the truth of the matter, rather than narrower, legal questions of wrongdoing, as the Special Council has done. And now, in the court of public opinion, people seem to be tepidly exonerating Trump and excoriating Democrats, a reaction that somewhat baffles me (and others).

yo, why is it that so many American high school students apparently have such abundant access to firearms? Does every family in Florida have an child-accessible family gun or something? These are likely preventable suicides that our gun culture is to blame for.

I mean, the founding fathers begrudgingly implemented a minimal, managed democracy as the only way to protect the interests of land owners, because kings will take your **** if they want it, and the public might vote to take your **** if they need it. Universal suffrage was never intended and frankly doesn’t even work with the US system.

Americans have just never been all that big on democracy. But you’re taught in grade school that you invented it, so I guess that’s what happened.

Sounds to me like happy customers.

It’s true that the majority of firearms expenditures are made by an extreme minority of enthusiasts and aspiring right-wing domestic terrorists, but the industry would be irresponsible to ignore the needs of the long tail of one-time gun purchasers, like murderers and the suicidal.

The world was a hellhole before America invented democracy. Don't even pretend Athens existed.

Through much of the 19th century the US actually did lead Europe in terms of popular enfranchisement. I came across an interesting argument recently that a reason why the US doesn’t have a major socialist party is that, because workers in the US were enfranchised while they weren’t in Europe during the course of industrialization, economic grievances weren’t tied up with political grievances in the US to the same extent that they were in Europe. The exclusion from the system wasn’t as total in the US, and so workers’ politics were on aggregate more moderate when it came to altering the system.

Interesting. By the way Eversor, glad you're back and posting some. Cheers.

Plus, for the most part Americans managed to avoid the depth of horrors of industrialization. The US was relatively equal through the Belle Époque and only started dipping into nightmare mode capitalism a few years before WW2 levelled things out again.

The one group that was subject to Europe-style labor exploitation is still a persecuted ethnic minority today, which probably helps white Americans ignore them.

Did you know MLK Jr. was a socialist? Weird coincidence, right?

Yeah, that had largely to do with the fact that European states had very little land while also being massively overpopulated, while in the US there was an abundance of land, and the transition away from agriculture was slow, so the domestic labor market wasn't nearly as competitive, which gave workers in the US more leverage.

(Also, as an aside: addressing the problem of overpopulation in Europe was one thing that drove European imperialist policy in the 19th century, as it opened up new places to send their excess people, in addition to opening up markets for exports. There's a similarity between the American frontier and European imperialism there.)

Still, it was a terrible time to be a worker in the US. The bits I've read about labor in the US from the 1880s to the 1920s is surprising; all sorts of elements that seem like their ripped from dystopian science fiction stories' representations of corporations: corporations that use their own privately owned armies to maintain order amongst workers, occasionally killing them in massacres, and company towns that have incredibly invasive laws that effectively turn the towns into forced labor camps. Brutal stuff.

is everyone still at Massassi a socialist?

I'm not.

Well, I support Warren, who said she's capitalist to her bones (whatever that means). But most people here have given up arguing against Jon`C on economics (with the exception of Wookie06), so probably nominally socialist by American standards. There's also a lot of hatred here for centrists like Kamala Harris, who even to me comes across as one of the worst, wishy-washy establishment candidates (edit: same with Beto, tbh now that I've read more about him).

I think a big issue right now in American politics is healthcare. I am a little skeptical that Sanders would be able to do anything resembling what he seems to be promising in terms of publicly funding healthcare (and education), [edit: or that it would be cost-effective, since the US Congress always seems to corrupt and make inefficient any kind of public funding; c.f. Obamacare, which morphed into Romneycare], and I also think he might lose to Trump just because Americans hate people who are overtly socialist.

Warren's not bad. I think I'd prefer Andrew Yang or Buttigieg. At least Yang has a compelling story to tell about what the problems are, and has policy ideas are oriented towards addressing those problems, rather than most candidates whose policy ideas don't seem to be rooted in such an analysis.

But I think I'm largely drawn to them because I'm not a huge fan of where the Democrats are headed and I'd prefer an outsider to come in and push the party in a different direction than the one it's apparently headed. As it stands, the Democratic candidates seem largely interchangeable, with the differences mostly being differences in tone (especially in terms of how critical and suspicious they are of establishment institutions).

I hadn't heard of either of those candidates. I am not hugely excited about the mentality of the Democratic party these days either, so I should probably check them out.

Check out Yang's interview with Joe Rogan. It put him on the map. It's intriguing, but on the other hand, Yang tried courting Trump supporters and now 4chan loves him, and it's gotten kind of creepy. Also, he may have killed his upward momentum by coming out against circumcision.

It means she supports indentured servitude, but not slavery.

”make inefficient” is just a fancy way of spelling “profitable”.

Governments can do whatever the **** they want. Wait until the next financial panic, sell off 20% of GDP in bonds and use the proceeds toward a perfectly constitutional eminent domain buyout of the largest health insurance companies at bargain prices. #wow #whoa suddenly it’s single payer healthcare.

This will never happen because the purpose of the United States government is not to provide public goods, it is to protect the right of the richest Americans to profit. And yeah, de facto regional monopolies in a market with almost perfectly inelastic demand is pretty ****in profitable. It’s a privately collected business tax.

Americans, or the spectators who think they’re playing on the team? Because only one of those kinds of people know what socialism even is.

Actual Americans hate socialism because socialism = you aren’t allowed to invest and take rent.

Spectators hate socialism because it’s the ~wrong team~

yeah, wtf. I spent the last 20 minutes reading some of the 4chan memes about Yang. There's a thread on /pol right now anticipating a debate between Yang and Ben Shapiro about the issue of circumcision. They also like him because they think that his support for universal basic income will sustain their chan lifestyle. I got a kick out of it because it was bizarre but it is also depressing, because I think UBI is something that should be talked about. Very, very oddball choice though to bring up the issue of circumcision. I wouldn't go so far as to surmise that he is explicitly courting anti-Semitic supporters by making an issue out of it, but either way it's quite strange.

Yeah, there are elements of his campaign that I find troubling. Some people have said that the Christchurch shooting was a shooting inspired by internet culture and designed to have the internet as its audience. It's an odd comparison to make, but Yang's campaign seems similar in being a (partial) product of internet culture, especially since he started acknowledging the memes in his own tweets, so that he's now in on the joke, as a mouthpiece of the online cult that's grown around him, and reflecting it back on his fans.

Solidifying, maybe, the "internet culture" part of the electorate that Trump currently has on lock-down (and which probably began with Gamergate). Perhaps the last remaining soft-underbelly that his Democratic competitors haven't been able to get at.

I dunno, though. He seems like the real deal. He's got massive appeal in Silicon Valley / Hacker News just for the UBI argument alone. And apparently he's got a well-received book out, which should make for an interesting read. I'll definitely be watching his JRE podcast and and anticipating the first Democratic debate, which he should be included in, having got enough donors to qualify.

Edit: found the circumcision thread. Looks really innocent to me. Clearly was a "setup" by the likely anti-Semitic single-issue voter Twitter account that asked him the question out of the blue, if you ask me.

hmm

Not really sure where the inconsistency in that statement is... UBI get's bandied around in these circles as a catch-all solution to social inequities. And isn't it a start?

And yeah, wantrepreneurs love the idea of UBI, because it means they can quit their job and go work on some nutty website full-time.

So basically his book is a 304 page argument in favor of the lump of labor fallacy.


45 million Americans will lose their jobs to automation in the coming decades. Yep, sure. And those jobs "won't be replaced", so the obvious answer is to fund a UBI... somehow. Well, sorry to say, but rich folks are pretty good at hiding their money from the government, so they aren't gonna be paying for it. You won't risk a capital wealth tax because it will smother investments, and you won't get it out of businesses because they're taxed on net. No, middle class people would pay for it, and they're already too financially stressed to pay for extant services. (Insert your country here, because it's true across the whole world.)


You live in the Bay Area. It's a ****hole. Every unpainted house, every cracked, ****-stained sidewalk is work. There is no shortage of work, not even remotely, anywhere in the United States. There has probably never been so much work that each person could be doing.

The problem here isn't the "45 million Americans will lose their jobs" part, and it's not the "automation" part. It's the "those jobs won't be replaced" part. Because history has shown us countless times that rentiers have no incentive to invest, and Americans have been systematically denied access to those hoarded means of production, and have no way to create their own employment. That is the problem. Those jobs won't be replaced because capital has stopped allocating labor.

So even if you somehow solved all of the problems of a UBI - like the funding, like the inflationary effects, like the fact that slumlords are gonna triple their rent the second they know their tenants are making some money - it won't solve the real problem.

yes, they want the non-coercive labor market. I get that. It would be awesome! The US will bomb anybody who tries to make it happen, including themselves, but it's a beautiful dream!

meanwhile, the tech capitalists want a UBI because someone else gets to pay for it.