Americans: “Tragedy of the Commons proves that people are incapable of working together for mutual benefit, because personal greed will always lead to the devastation of the collective common good.”

Chinese: “Why do you not simply arrest and punish the bad actors in your society when they overstep and impede on the general welfare?”

Americans: “Because that’s fascism. Also, we’re arresting and deporting you for asking.”

If we play that game we can’t trust American numbers either

😏

Interesting how it’s southern states at the top eh?

Legit amazed California wasn’t higher on the list. They’ve been doing mass-incarceration at an industrial scale since the 70s. But I guess the population is big enough that the per-capita statistics work out.

States like Alabama, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have such small and anemic populations and dedicate so much of their domestic budget to incarceration that they’re basically giant publicly subsidized slave plantations.

Nothing more American than privatizing and off-shoring our concentration camps.

The trick is to always assume “China is lying about its internal statistics” and inflate whatever number they give by an arbitrary large percentage. 1.7M is obviously an under-count because the CCP is always lying about everything.

Also, you can do some broad brush “Everyone in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, North Korea, and Taiwan are prisoners of the Chinese state, so actually that’s over 60M people” napkin math to make the numbers look better.

Well, in that case, how about you pay me that $10 you owe me?

If they actually had nukes already, none of this would be happening.

Something would be happening.

Israel seems perfectly happy to unleash wave after wave of terrorist attack and assassination campaign on individuals within the Iranian government. To date, this tier of attack has failed to cause any country to break the nuclear taboo. We didn’t nuke Afghanistan after 9/11 (although a few fringe elements suggested we should). Russia hasn’t used nukes in Ukraine. Despite suffering their own wave of terror attacks, France and England haven’t unleashed nuclear hellfire in North Africa or the Middle East. Indian and Pakistan haven’t traded nukes over their border disputes.

Would a nuclear-armed Iran drop a nuke over Solemani or the pager bombs against Hezbollah? If nuclear-armed Israel can keep their bombs on the ground, I have to assume Iran wouldn’t be any more extreme.

Consider that Iran has already taken down - allegedly - as many as four F-35Is, I can think of a few reasons why the US has been reluctant to tangle with either country.

Trump’s rush to invade Iran only happened after Israel preemptively launched their military decapitation attack and missile bombardment “preemptive” strikes. The US has been dragging its heels on an Iran invasion since the 2002 Millennium Challenge suggested an all out war with Iran would be a disaster for US international fighting capacity. The definition of a pyrrhic victory.

Already, the US deployment away from the Pacific Rim has resulted in Chinese ships occupying territorial waters that the US had historically patrolled.

So this is already shaping up to be a historic internationally reorienting military blunder, even without nukes involved. Imagine the US trying to do an Iraq-style land war in Russia, plus an invasion of Iran, plus the low-key war with Yemen and Somalia, plus our military operations in North Africa, plus policing the Pacific, plus doing our military exercises on the US/Mexico border, plus whatever dumb horseshit military parades Trump wants to see.

Actually, that first guy never lived there. That first guy isn’t even a real person. That second guy’s grandparents were in another war on a different continent, so they’re actually just small beans feeling a lot of trauma right now. It is incredibly racist to suggest Second Guy did anything wrong, and if we catch you saying as much then we’ll arrest you and deport you to a prison camp where you’ll be enslaved for the enrichment of some pro-Second Guy aristocrats.

The protesters are too extreme. This is just what Trump wants. By provoking a police response, they are going to hurt their entire project.

They should behave more like… checks notes school shooters?

This is a very romanticized version of American intervention in WW2.

The bitter truth is that we had guys with Nazis war trophies back home who were waving Confederate flags the year after their deployment ended. Hell, we had guys like Mark Fuhrman, who were decorated detectives in the LAPD back in the early 90s with a naked well-established fetish for European fascism. And that’s before you get into the Ratlines that imported thousands of Nazis into Latin America under cover of the CIA and Opus Dei.

This isn’t something that got lost in translation or distorted through history. It’s a direct consequence of American fascism reproducing itself in America as an outcropping of American tendencies.

The Stars and Stripes is as much a symbol of fascist oppression in Vietnam and Indonesia and the DRC and the Oklahoma Reservation system as any German flag.

That starting point kinda makes the rest of us the conservatives of the community.

It makes the rest of us the liberals, certainly. But a lot of the turf battles between .world and .ml tend to be on US political orthodoxy running up against any other country’s reported histories. People getting sucked back into the argument over whether the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 was worth defending, for instance, is the baseline for what defines a “Tankie” (evil Khruschevist authoritarian villains) versus “A rational centrist” (not all CIA-backed color revolutions are bad, people!)

So it’s less a question of right versus left and more a question of nationalism versus internationalism.

If you want to feel challenged, look into who we defederate from.

One of the benefits of .world is that admins generally don’t bother outright banning anyone for their political views, even when they’re taken as “extreme”. You can head over to these other sites, but don’t expect to post very long before you’re given the boot.

Admittedly, Reddit’s political subs were much the same. Easiest thing in the world is to say something on a political sub of any flavor that will get you banned, whether its /r/progressive or /r/libertarian. If that’s the kind of sub someone is looking for…

But I don’t really see them as challenging so much as insular. Structurally closed communities where appealing to the whims of the moderators is more important than any actual ideological tenant.

“People in the Middle East have been fighting for thousands of years, so you shouldn’t be surprised this is happening,” I yell from the cockpit of a US aircraft as I release the MOAB onto a mosque holding an Eid al-Fitr ceremony.

‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

…

“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.

Incidentally, “Free Basics” and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist “Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!” and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say “If you don’t legislate favorably, we’re going to flood your populations’ media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition.”

I’m not tempted to test the theory in order to find out. Either way, the sudden collapse in human life would put enormous downward pressure on carbon emissions. Can’t burn gas if you don’t have anyone left to pull it out of the ground.

Cash and Monero being on the same tier is very funny

The Roman Aqueducts were largely slave driven like the rest of Roman society

The aqueducts were gravity driven. That was cumulative value add. They were an early form of automation.

Meanwhile, the cotton gin was slave driven. It still set off a rapid economic expansion in the southern US which mapped neatly to Marxist presumption of capital accumulation.

Capitalism as an encompassing system is only a few hundred years old

Industrialization as a global economic enterprise kicked off a few hundred years ago. The human propensity to accumulate wealth and the methods of compounding returns have always been with us.

The M-C-M’ circuit wasn’t always here.

Periodically, some community would find an opportunity for capital improvements that afforded a rapid growth cycle. Capital projects like the Roman Aquaducts and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for instance, dramatically increased the surplus yielded by labor. The number of people who could live within a community rose and economic output rose with it. But it was still dwarfed by industrialization and geographic constraints limited the rate of expansion (you can’t build aquaducts and hanging gardens everywhere and expect to yield equivalent surplus). So you hit that classic Marxist diminishing return on profit and the rate of economic expansion fell back down into the low-single digits.

The circuit did exist though. The fundamental economic benefit of cyclical growth had a soft ceiling that primitive societies hit.

Now we’re in an industrial era that doesn’t feel like it has a ceiling. But it does. There really are ecological and resource limits, even to a post-industrial world. One day, we’re also going to hit that ceiling (assuming we haven’t already). I don’t think it would be fair to say - a few centuries after peak production / climate apocalypse sends us into a perpetual global depression - that Real Capitalism Has Never Been Tried.

Neither would I benchmark “When capitalism starts” the day after we construct a Dyson Sphere and master superluminal travel, because we’re kicking off a bigger wave of economic expansion than we enjoyed while earthbound.

What I might argue the ancient world lacked more than the M-C-M’ circuit was the degree of fictitious capital (which requires a big surplus-laden economically literate middle class). But that’s not capitalism et al, just a facet of modern speculative investment.

The mechanism of capitalism - deriving revenue from capital to further develop and accumulate capital and thereby expand streams of revenue - were always here. The rates were lower, limiting the accessibility and the appeal to individuals who were already cash flush and very forward looking. But capitalism, as a productive force, has always been with us.

Sure. But that was largely due to the constraints on the rate of growth prior to the industrial revolution. Capitalism was still functionally exigent, it was just operating under a rate of growth capped by the surplus human and animal labor could produce.

The advent of transatlantic travel (wind power) and the waterwheel and eventually steam power and modern fertilizers was what caused human productivity to spike. Suddenly, you could see returns on investment at double or even triple digits within decades. Prior eras saw single digit growth in even the wealthiest countries on Earth. Wealth was accumulated at a glacial pace.

Piketty’s “Capitalism in the 21st Century” covers this in depth.

Rome was a power center for over a millennia in large part because of the enormous consolidation of investment capital within the city limits. The Republic-cum-Empire took in revenues, built capital, expanded its economy, and then consumed the expanded economic output as revenue. But that took centuries to accumulate. None of Rome’s neighbors ever had the surplus necessary to invest or the time to expand like the Romans did. London managed a similar scale of development in decades. And then it burned down. And then it was rebuilt a few decades later.

You can argue that the desire to rapidly accumulate wealth is a facet of human nature. You can also argue that the rate of accumulation only became notable in the last 400 years, such that “capitalism” as a productive force wasn’t relevant until recently. But you can’t argue that cumulative gains were somehow unknown to anyone prior to the Dutch East India company.