iie [they/them, he/him]

I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.

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i mean it’s basically a trolley problem. whether or not we blame someone who was born into naziism, at some point we have to stop them before they hurt others. and if the nazis are armed and organized, we start running out of peaceful ways to stop them.

one of the features rich capitalist countries share is extracting trillions of dollars out of poorer countries every year lol

the best time to treat cancer is early, before it metastasizes and becomes inoperable

“the Ukrainians” are not a monolith. You may be aware that a civil war raged for 8 years before Russia invaded?

Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

From the abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

further down:

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What is it, like, 70% of Americans want single payer healthcare?

I mean Reddit’s director of policy, Jessica Ashooh, is former Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force — she’s literally a state department plant.

You ever notice how America seems unable to meaningfully damage China’s economy?

This is because China’s economy is integral to everyone else’s. You can’t really hurt China without hurting yourself. Their annual trade volume is in the trillions of dollars.

China paid a price for this leverage. The price was allowing capitalists to operate within China. That is how you do business with the rest of the capitalist world.