I’m not turning a blind eye to anything. I’m just not making up conspiracies where there’s clearly none. There isn’t some hyper intelligent grandmaster planning everything out 15 moves in advance. This isn’t Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom running the show. It’s a bunch of morons whose understanding of economics ended with mercantilism asking ChatGPT how to run an economy.
It makes complete sense if you are looking at it from the perspective of an oligarch. They are just trying to tank the economy to hoover up even more assets. They’re banking on an eventual recovery, after which they’ll be even richer and more powerful than they are now.
As with most things in life, assuming some grander Machiavellian scheme is usually wrong. People don’t think and plan like that outside of movies and TV. Most people, especially the very rich and powerful, only plan for the short term.
There is no 3-4 steps down the road. They’re just trying to repeat exactly what they did during/after the COVID recession. And the Great Recession. And the '01 dot-com recession, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe dumb people who bought the Trump line on tariffs think that, but most people know it’s not true.
All the talk about bringing back manufacturing is just a smoke screen to cover the fact they’re intentionally tanking the economy so the oligarchs can buy the dip and get even richer when the economy recovers. That’s all it is.
It’s not that complex or Machiavellian.
Look at what rich people have done after every recession of the past 40 years and how what’s happened to their wealth after the recovery. The economy crashes forcing middle-class people to sell off what scant assets they own. Even people on the lower end of upper-class tend to sell off assets when the stock market crashes. Super rich people who have enough money to weather the economic downturn buy the dip, gobbling up all those assets people are selling. Then when the economy recovers the rich people make out like bandits (which they are).
That’s all that’s happening. He’s tanking the economy so Musk and his other rich friends can buy the dip and increase their wealth even more when the economy improves.
WFH isn’t available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that’s almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That’s just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.
I’m not debating the the Democratic Party has moved to the right over the past decade. However, (a) I wouldn’t call the Democrats Progressive, and they never really have been. There is a fringe of the party that is progressive, but they’ve never been the majority or leadership. And (b) both progressives and the Democratic Party are still to the left of George W Bush on most issues. He campaigned on a same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. He was a climate denier. He fabricated evidence of WMDs in Iraq in order to start his second of what would become decades-long wars. He opened Gitmo. He institutionalized a torture program as policy. None of that is anywhere close to what progressives are pushing for now.
I guess my main question to you is this: who are you defining as ‘progressives’?
All the President’s Men is my favorite political movie.
It was a gradual thing. I remember when my uncle got married in 2006 he told me that he had met his wife on Match.com, but it was a bit of a secret. My uncle didn’t mind if I and my siblings knew (I was 20 at the time), but didn’t want my dad or grandparents to learn because he felt there would be some stigma because they met online.
It was my generation (I was born in '86) that kicked off the apps/online dating thing. I started dating my (now) wife in 2010. We met at a party and neither of us ever did online dating or the dating apps. But so many of our friends did/do.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we were the fist generation to socialize on the internet on a large scale. We grew up in high school on AOL Instant Messenger and Myspace. We got on Facebook back in 2004/2005 when it launched. We were just very primed to be open to online socializing, which is just a step away from dating.
As soon as we became old enough to be in charge of our own finances and be a demographic group businesses were willing to market to, the online dating world opened up in a BIG way.
This is a common myth that isn’t really backed up by the historical or archeological record. Most pirate crews were not proto-anarchists looking to live a life of absolute liberty. They were more comparable to modern street gangs. The captains tended to be a strongman type leader who imposed their will over the crew through fear and coercion. The pirates themselves tended to be outcasts from society who couldn’t turn to authorities to try to escape their situation for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were criminals who knew they’d be imprisoned or killed if they went to authorities.
Probably the only place where anything close to what you describe ever really existed was small communities in Madagascar which became the inspiration for the probably mythical Libertatia. The communities that definitely did exist weren’t some ideological project to try to craft a society absent hierarchical power structures. They were just small, impoverished communities of families where the patriarchs (the pirates) spent most of their time away (at sea doing pirating) so the communities largely ran themselves without a power structure. This isn’t because they had an ideological opposition to them, but because the authority was the pirate leader who spent 3/4 of their time away (and, therefore, couldn’t do the job of being in charge) and when they were home they spent their time partying.
No, the idea of authority is not necessarily contrary to anarchism. You need to first examine the source of that authority’s power, the structures which put them into power, and how that power is enforced.
If it’s coercive in any way, that is, if you are threatened with violence in some way if you do not comply, then it is indeed counter to anarchism. However, that’s not how anarchist brigades in 1930s Spain, the Makhnovshchina, the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, the anarchist brigades during the Russian Civil War, etc worked. First, membership was pretty much always voluntary. If you didn’t want to follow an order, you didn’t have to and you wouldn’t be executed or tried as deserter or whatever like in most traditional armies. If you didn’t want to follow an order, it was generally accepted that it was your right to refuse.
Second, there weren’t set terms between elections like you might be thinking of within a modern representative democracy. If an elected officer was issuing commands the rest of the soldiers didn’t agree with or like, they could be voted out at any moment, including in the middle of battle. This tended to present problems in the Spanish Civil War where the Soviet Union tried to exert complete control over everyone on the anti-fascist side. They’d send in Soviet officers to lead anarchist battalions. As soon as the Soviet gave an order that the rest didn’t like, they’d vote him out. When the Soviets refused to give up authority, the entire battalion would disband, steal all their supplies, and reform a few miles away as a “new” battalion and elect their own leader.
They also weren’t usually structured like we tend to think of military units with a mass of enlisted and a few detached officers issuing orders. The officers tended to come from the enlisted ranks. The officer position was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. Plans were usually made collaboratively by the whole unit (or those who cared to take part). If the heat of battle when snap decisions needed to be made, the officer tended to be the one who made those decisions, but there was no expectation that anyone who disobeyed would be killed or court-marshalled. People obeyed because they knew the person making the decision, why they were making the decision they made, and that if it was a bad decision they could replace that person.
It was called the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno as part of the Makhnovschina movement.
There was also the anarchist CNT-FAI which had an army of decentralized militias, collectively organized by Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil war of the 1930s.
During the Russian Revolution and early parts of the Russian Civil War, there were also a lot of anarchist militias and military units, most notably the Kronstadt sailors. The various groups never coalesced as a single army, and, therefore, were easily crushed by the Bolsheviks.
There was also the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, which was an anarchist society of more than 2 million people in the late 20s/early 30s. They never had a whole army, but they did organize militias along anarchist principles.
The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, founded in 1994 and still active today, is organized along decentralized principles and is closely associated with anarchism.
More recently, the YPJ and PKK operating in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the militias fighting the ongoing revolution in Myanmar are not entirely anarchist, but have strong principles of direct democracy at their core.
In all instances, the overall organization of the militaries were not entirely dissimilar to a traditional military. There were enlisted soldiers led by officers who gave orders that were expected to be followed. There was a higher level command structure which organized the army to distribute resources and coordinate strategy and tactics. The big difference, however, was that the leaders (officers) tended to all be elected democratically by the people they led and could be replaced/voted out democratically whenever the people who they led decided they needed to go…
There’s a common myth that anarchists are opposed to organization. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. Anarchists are all about organization. The thing we oppose is hierarchical power structures. Systems that place someone, anyone, above anyone else and say, “you must do what your superior tells you on threat of punishment” are inherently evil. But free associations are not. Rather than thinking of an officer in an anarchist militia/army as a leader whose commands must be followed or you’ll face steep punishment, think of them as a central coordinator. Their directives aren’t followed because you’ll be court marshalled or otherwise punished if you don’t obey. They’re followed because people at every level are included in the process and allowed to have their voices heard. Everyone has a degree of ownership and influence over the process. People follow directives because they understand where they’re coming from and why the decisions were made. Yet, if at any time someone decides they no longer want to take part, they have the option to just leave.
Because society isn’t structured around proscriptive definitions. Just because you can craft a definition of human trafficking which sounds similar to a normal parent/child relationship doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.
History is written by the victors
I have a BIG nitpick with this framing. While it is correct in many instances, it’s imprecise, and sometimes just flat out wrong.
A better framing is “History is written by the historians”. In other words, the historical narrative is set by those who put forth the effort to do so. In many cases, those historians are writing from the perspective of the victors, but not always.
I’ll give you a few examples:
The Mongol Empire was one of (if not the) largest contiguous land empires in world history. They conquered everything from China to eastern Europe and Mesopotamia. By any interpretation of the word, the Mongols were the victors in virtually every conflict they had. Yet they also didn’t really write histories. There’s only 1 real Mongolian historical text we have: The Secret History of the Mongols. It was an account of the life and conquests of Genghis Kahn written shortly after his death. Yet, as the title alludes to, it wasn’t a public document. It was written for the ruling dynasty. The earliest copy we know of is a copy from ~200 years after the original was written, and it didn’t become widely read until another 300 years after that. For the first half-millennia after the Mongol conquests, the historical narrative was entirely based on the accounts people who were conquered by the Mongols. In other words, the history of the Mongol conquests and their subsequent empire were almost entirely written not by the victors, but by the conquered. This heavily influences our popular conception of the Mongols as barbaric war mongers who committed horrific acts of violence. We don’t think much about any other contributions the Mongols had in the realms of culture, economics, political administration, philosophy, diplomacy, etc because the people who wrote about the Mongols (and set the historical narrative) had no interest in portraying them in a positive light. Compare that to someone like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, etc. All of them were similarly successful conquerors and warlords, yet the historical narrative about them is FAR more complex and positive than that of Genghis Kahn. Because the history of Genghis Kahn was not written by the victors.
Another example which is probably more accessible to a lot of people: The American Civil War. For most of the 150 years after the war ended up until just the past couple of decades, the prevailing popular narrative portrayed in pop culture and taught in schools was the Lost Cause narrative. The war was about States’ Rights. Slavery was not a part of the war at the beginning and the Union only brought it in later to justify their aggression towards the South. It was called the War of Northern Aggression by many. The South was primarily fighting to preserve a pastoral and romanticized way of life, etc, etc. This is the narrative portrayed in fiction such as Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. Of course, we know this to be bullshit. It was a war over slavery and the South was fighting to maintain the most brutal and oppressive form of slavery the world has ever seen. Yet for over a century that wasn’t the broadly accepted historical narrative because after the war ended people in the South put a lot of effort into creating and disseminating the Lost Cause narrative while the victors (the Union) didn’t put any effort into crafting an historical narrative. The North was more concerned with reuniting the nation and rebuilding, so much so that they completely gave up on Reconstruction and let the same people who had led the Confederacy run the South as an apartheid state for the next century.
These are just 2 examples, but they aren’t the only ones by a long shot. History is not always written by the victors. It’s written by the people who put forth the effort to write it, and the historical narrative ends up reflecting this down to the modern day.
Remember: if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product.
They harvest your data for a variety of reasons. 1) they pair your data with your broader Google profile (including search results, ad clicks, website views, etc) to better deliver targeted ads. 2) they train their AI (although that’s an indirect revenue stream, and much more recent).
The very first time Trump’s name was in a major newspaper was in the 1970s when The New York Times reported on the Nixon administration suing Trump and his father for racist housing policies in the apartment buildings they owned in NYC.
Then in the 80s he was the model for Biff Tannen, the villain in the Back to the Future movies. He was parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to MAD Magazine to SNL as the epitome of the sleazy 80s business guy.
No, he was never cool except to a very small slice of people who the sleazy 80s business guy aesthetic appeals to, and nobody thinks those guys are cool.
If we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I don’t think most deserve, there’s also a theological argument. For religious people (specifically Christians), they believe that people are made to God’s plan. If you are born male, they believe that’s what God intended. So changing your gender is, in their mind, blasphemy against God because it’s denying his plan for you.
Of course, this argument completely falls apart when you draw the parallel to people who change their hair color, get corrective or cosmetic surgery, etc. God also intended you to be blonde with bad eyesight, but you dyed your hair and got Lasik.
But the real answer is just bigotry. They try to rationalize their bigotry, and may not even recognize it as bigotry themselves, but that’s what it is.
I know when they were threatening to pull out of OnlyFans and Pornhub, the big concern the payment processors cited was child abuse. I don’t know to what degree that’s the entire story, so take it with a grain of salt.
Their complaint was that the primary method those sites had to prevent child porn from being uploaded was reports from other users. By definition, this means that the site has to allow the child porn to be uploaded, and only then takes it down after it’s been reported. So someone must have seen it before it gets removed. They said they didn’t want to be associated with sites that share child porn. That’s why PornHub removed a TON of amateur content and changed their rules so that all users who upload content have to be verified on the site. That’s their new control to prevent child porn.
Right now, it would likely harm other countries at least as much as the US. We’re just too interconnected into every aspect of the global economy. Cutting off the US cuts off a lot of services that other countries rely on.
But, Trump’s current foreign policy is driving countries away from the US fast. Give it a few years for countries to disentangled themselves from the US and it would likely be more effective without harming themselves in the process.
The egg is the only possible correct answer to this.
Modern chickens didn’t exist until something like 10,000 years ago. The egg was a key development in allowing animals to live on land, and first came about somewhere around 300 million years ago.
But if you want to narrow it down to just chicken eggs, then you have it right. The immediate predecessor to the first thing that can be called a ‘chicken’ laid a chicken egg from which hatched a chicken.
The egg absolutely came first.