Zompist Bboard Again

I don't think you can convince humans out of making money when, as in our society, access to the entirety of the social product (you know, almost all goods) is mediated, in some way or other, by money. ascetes are always exceptional.

like... hear me out: small recap, dune is about an aristocratic kid in a feudalistic society who is born into power, loses power as a result of an attack by his enemies, and then proceeds to accrue more and more power, at least at first, in order to survive and regain his former position and status:...

ah, I think i understand better now. a trump dictatorship -which is not an obvious outcome of this election, though not for lack of desire- would show significant approaches towards russia, that much is true.it's a long jump from there, though, to eternal global dominance by a cohesive and permanent...

abstention increases the odds of trump winning more than voting for biden, sure, but rallying cries aside, they're not the same thing: if they were, why is abstention not a vote for biden? what's the asymmetry? is trump the default? is abstention both? the us system is wack, but it's not that wack.....

so there are more powers that rival the us, but if the us loses power then there won't be? again, this is homefront: first worlders love to imagine poor third worlders as some powerful, scary threat when, in reality, they're living under zinc plates and making a hundred bucks a month. no, iran is no...

Aristocrats are vulnerable to regime change. Dictatorships can survive indefinitely by paying the police and the military. The only way to defeat that is coordinated mass action so all-encompassing that the police and the military side with the people against the regime. In my opinion, the most opt...

Vote for whoever he tells them to vote for? I kinda feel this is correct. I can even imagine the narrative. But you are the one who is saying "support Trump because it will weaken the US etc. and make the world a better place as a result", when anyone who doesn't vote for Biden due to the...

middle class really is a nebulous concept, but from the perspective of people in really poor countries (like russia was before the revolution, say), eveyone in germany is middle class or above. The last time the US engaged in reigme change abroad was Iraq in 2003. they've just otten better and less ...

I'm not so sure about that. I don't know exactly how effective the troll farms and propaganda are, but given the popularity of regressive authoritarianism they're evidently accomplishing something. yes! though they're by no means the only source thereof. I think zomp's model here is too simple as i...

at least here, pool halls are either expensive and in a posh neighbourhood or cheap and in street you wouldn't like to park your fancy wheels, so it's likely the two groups won't notice each other.

yeah, the rightwards turn in my own country motivated me to finally go and get my burgundy one so i get the feeling. it's pretty and has a bunch of pictures of vehicles inside.

this feels like that fps game where north korea invaded the us (fun game, silly premise)... they may want to supplant the us as sole superpower, but they're so just fantastically far from being able to get there it's like a minimum wage millenial wanting to buy a house in a good neighbourhood. the u...

I'm not confident that Trump's bad policies will significantly weaken the empire. The empire can keep chugging along indefinitely with unboundedly bad policies. total agree on the rest of it, but on this not so much. sure, the cultural hegemony is pretty airtight right now but look at, say, de-dola...

do we need to defend the institution of the protest itself no? man, that's dystopian. Okay: it has been the case throughout history that international pressure sometimes works in dissuading states from particular lines of policy: it is, after all, a Bad Thing for any state to have a very bad interna...

well yeah... if one saw the us as some benevolent hegemon instead of the evil empire i see it as then sure, we see the world differently enough that we're not likely to agree on any of the details: for example, the notion that the us empire wants other countries (with the likely exception of its cor...

China does seem to be less interested in imperialism than the states: it does not have a military base in every corner of the planet, nor does it seem interested in it, but even if China was exactly as interested in a globespanning empire as the US, it simply cannot have one: it's not that storng. s...

well, yeah, but without the international and public pressure would there have been a solution at all? the "solution" might have been "south africa has a right to exist as an afrikaaner white ethnostate" without it.

The solution to the Middle East conflict will not be found on Threads, or TikTok, or in the streets of any city that isn’t within a 2-hour car ride from downtown Jerusalem. street protests and popular disapproval of the whole thing were important in the dissolution of the south african apartheid re...

Those are mostly neoliberal traits from the 80s after ww2 and before the collapse of the USSR so not necessarily relevant. notice how i said "since the start of the decline of the soviet union, say andropov on" instead of "since the official dissolution of the soviet union". The...

oh, shit you know the guy's gonna sign up for the elon musks's upcoming "upload your mind" business. it's gonna be called "eternity" or whatever.