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The modlog is public. You can see exactly what comment led to the ban if you search for it.
The modlog is public. You can see exactly what comment led to the ban if you search for it.
The US state department lawyers and the British House of Lords have evidence. That’s why they’re pursuing convictions of the Chinese leaders involved. No, wait— sorry, I misremembered. They both concluded there is insufficient evidence.
Not sure about that but there was a study during WWII – in Britain, I believe – that showed a negative correlation between hours/productivity. Essentially, once you push workers past 40hrs week, they don’t really produce any more than they would if their hours were capped. Exhaustion, hunger, thirst, physical accidents, mistakes, all adds up across a workforce so the returns diminish quite quickly.
Is that because it became harder to consume or because workers worked less hard?
And swoop in to buy all the assets of soon-to-be bankrupt small-business owners. Big capital does not give a single fuck about who it cannibalises and it will come for those who sing the praises of capitalism as much as those who hate it.
He’s in luck. The [b]ankers started trying to make it happen earlier this year: https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2023/feb/09/the-reserve-bank-wants-unemployment-to-rise-it-should-be-careful-what-it-wishes-for
They’re hand in glove, that’s for sure. Any attempt to paint Musk or any other haute bourgeois as separate from the capitalist state is intended to confuse readers and hide the material relations in capitalism.
The reason it seems like I’m dodging the question is because if I can challenge the assumptions in the question and show that it’s a faulty question, the answer becomes irrelevant. Still, if you keep reading, you’ll see that I have provided an answer below.
As for my opinion, it’s like anyone else’s. It isn’t worth much. My statements of fact, however… in a world where people try to paint the US in a positive light, endlessly making distinctions to deny any blame to the US state for all the horror that it unleashes on the world… probably also not worth much.
I either make a logical argument that stands up to scrutiny or I don’t. If my argument stands up, it doesn’t matter whether I look like a weak idiot. If my argument fails, it doesn’t matter if I pretend control or to appear smart or to act it.
For a bourgeois state, it is ahistorical to separate the government from it’s businesses. Companies and the government go hand in hand. It was, for example, the East India Company, rather than the British ‘state’, that colonised so much of Asia.
In relation to WWII and the US-Nazi connection, Michael Parenti wrote in Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, CA, 1997, p17):
Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by allied bombings. General Motors collected over $33 million. Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms. Thus Cologne was almost levelled by Allied bombing but it’s Ford plant, providing military equipment for the Nazi army, was untouched; indeed German civilians began using the plant as an air raid shelter. [Citing Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (Dell, NY, 1983).]
Fn14: After the war, Herman Abs, head of the Deutsche Bank and in effect “Hitler’s paymaster,” was hailed by David Rockefeller as “the most important banker of our time.” … Rockefeller [failed to say] a word about Abs’ Nazi connections, his bank’s predatory incursions across Nazi occupied Europe, and his participation, as a board member of I.G. Farben, in the use of slave labor at Auschwitz: Robert Karl Miller, Portland Free Press, Sept/Oct 1994
All this, and we haven’t really touched on:
The US is to be applauded for is role in defeating the Nazi war machine, including supplying the allies. The US soldiers who fought the Nazis were heroes. But it is problematic to claim the US (i.e. it’s ruling class) was on the right side of history through that period.
Likewise, in Ukraine, the US worsened the whole mess, possibly caused it all, by meddling in the region since before the 90’s. Since the recent invasion US media and spokespersons have been nonchalantly saying the US has reaped many benefits from the war with very little cost (except for Ukrainians—added in parentheses, as if the Ukrainians are of secondary concern).
I do think the invaders are bad, whichever war were talking about.
I think we agree in principle and I think I know what you mean but I must raise a challenge. There’s an example that shows an invasion is not necessarily bad, the one that you pointed out: the Allies invading Nazi Germany.
If invasion is not bad in one example situation, then logically it doesn’t hold as a blanket statement. It cannot of itself lead us to conclude that Russia is bad for invading Ukraine. To be clear, I am not saying Russia is good for invading Ukraine; I’m saying it is not self evidently bad by virtue of being the invader.
To further the clear statement, I wish Russia had not invaded. I wish the war would end today. Short of that I wish a ceasefire could be negotiated for today, so that peace and an end to the war can be negotiated for the near future.
No flippant comments about how dangerous war is for the workers who must fight in it. Only firm conviction that the only right choice is to stop the killing and maiming as soon as possible, not to send increasingly dangerous weapons with increasingly higher chances of causing collateral damage.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, the US wanted the opposite at all stages and it’s representatives (officials and corporate agents) have machinated to ensure that war broke out and now that it cannot stop.
You brought up the example of the US in relation to WWII. If you make a comparison, you can’t get stroppy when people point out that it contradicts your main argument and in fact supports the argument that you’re trying to challenge.
However, for as long as you think the US is the Good GuyTM, you’re going to struggle to find examples that support your viewpoint, so you may want to be careful with any comparison. Otherwise, you’ll start to notice a pattern of them pointing out that the US was as monstrous as always in the cited example and then you’ll say they’re doing whataboutism ad infinitum.
The yanks were funding the WWII Nazis before they ‘sent supplies to the allies’.
Congratulations on your promotion.
It’s often the way. Hopefully someone else reading will see the flaw in forever calling an alternative viewpoint ‘bad faith’ because it’s presented with humour.
If you’re talking about violence used to uphold their rule, you can’t separate domestic and foreign violence. All those people living, working, and dying young in atrocious conditions outside of the US for US prosperity, all those people gunned down in the dark or in protests against their government’s subservience to the US, and all those people murdered in wars and ‘conflicts’ and by sanctions to further US interests must be counted.
Otherwise you’re doing that thing where you redefine violence in such a way that distorts the picture. It doesn’t matter whether you now explicitly mention the US because by nature of a comparison, the US is implicated, anyway. Likewise, replace US for every other government in the above equation for the true figures of how violent a state is in its own protection.
Did he assign a trait to liberals? Because if not, there’s no inconsistency.
Then a follow up question: is there a difference between ‘liberals’ as a group (i.e. not liberalism) and a government (i.e. an institution)? If so, there may be no inconsistency.
What I mean is, when people talk about governments it’s often as a non-human legal person, which can act, omit, sue, and be sued, but which does not have the full range of human traits, like insincerity. Whereas a group that does not have legal personality and only describes a collection of humans, albeit in the abstract, like ‘liberals’, can demonstrate a fuller range of human traits.
Then, as an experiment, switch the terms and see if it has the same ring to it:
politics for [governments] are just a big reality show
Does this anthropomorphise ‘governments’ in the same way as attributing human emotions to them?
I don’t necessarily have answers to these questions but it seems that you can’t be calling someone out for bad faith unless you can strongly argue yes, no, yes, to the above questions.
That’s a different story to being told, for shaking hands after competing. So at the very least, if you’re right, there’s another plausible story than the one presented. Which casts doubt on the narrative. Which means we’d be wise to suspend our belief until there are better sources than unreliable western media that have a firm track record of being number one and refusing to shake hands with numbers two and three in making shit up competitions.
No worries. We’ve got to stand together during tough times like these.
From one lib to another I thought that was high praise sorry
I’d expect no less from a user of such a liberal instance.
I’m at a loss as to how you’re interpreting my words. You say you’re asking simple questions, then you put words in my mouth and ask me to defend them.
If the Ukrainian government can’t be trusted to decide on when to surrender, who do you suggest?
When did I say or imply this?
If you think saving Ukrainian lives isn’t a good reason to find an alternative to war, this is unlikely to become a fruitful discussion.
Or breakroom, by the sound of it.