ChomskyNormal4m

The entire world was communist from the time cave paintings were drawn in France tens of thousands of years ago, to about 10000 years ago.

Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries. In the US, with two economic crises in the past decade, Covid at a peak, global warming, racial strife, riots on streets etc., I am not sure what is working in the real world with the economic system here.

People have been saying the CCP is on its last legs for over 70 years.

In those seventy years it has led a country which grew to have the second largest GDP in the world.

-- writing this from the USA, where Covid is spiking, where there are armed right wing Covid open for business riots at statehouses, as well as against police kneeling on black men's throats killing them leading to nationwide blm antifa riots, where the president won't concede the election, where U3 unemployment is currently 6.9% etc.

(I heard about the Hong Kong riots in the US News until the open-business/blm/antifa riots happened with a much higher body count)

> While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur!

I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report from the 1980s where the author tried to project that if the US and USSR had a full scale nuclear war, US GNP would be back to normal within five years.

Who knows what government bureaucrat had a program requiring an Orwellian report like to justify whatever policy.

Who is this we? If you want to store up MREs and tin foil hats and build a bomb shelter, be my guest. Most of our efforts will be to prevent a large-scale nuclear war from happening or needing to happen.

999 times out of 1000 if I ask a working class American to explain Marx's concept of surplus labor time, they would have no idea of what I was talking about. That is false consciousness.

You're talking as if they rejected the idea. They don't even know what the idea is.

A sizable amount of working class Americans have no idea that people die. They have no idea that their grandparents died. They have been to wakes and have seen the corpse of their grandparents or whomever, but when I talk to them they say their grandparents are elsewhere and enjoying themselves. They do not mean this metaphorically, or that they live on via children or their works or memories. They have no concept that these people are not around any more, permanently. They go to churches where a man stands in front and says this, I guess they believe him. This would be part of false consciousness, although not a needed component of them. They are as ignorant of death as they are of their economic exploitation. They are ignorant and uneducated. If you want to call them stupid as you do, that's your right.

> inflation protection and avoiding capital controls are arguably the most impactful innovation since the internet

Inflation protection? Bitcoin lost one third of its value in the past three years. How is that inflation protection? You would have done better to hold most commodities or most currencies in that time period to protect from inflation, other than Bitcoin.

> There was a whole probably 4 years (at least) to register to vote up to this day. For the prepared...

I moved from one state to another in June. I did not have four years to prepare. I was also not allowed to register immediately, you must reside for some months to register. Also this state has voter suppression to make registration more difficult. They certainly do not have online registration, but they piled on extra Covid difficulties lately. I did manage to register however. What you are saying is ridiculous.

The smallest measure of blacks as a percentage of US population would be 12%, and at Yale blacks are half of that.

The southern states had laws, somewhat compliant to federal law, that you could vote if your grandfather could vote. A way to keep those of African descent out.

Yale has policies to give slots to legacies, effectively the same thing.

Only this time the federal government and Justice department is what fights to keep the handful of those of African descent going to Yale.

It's what America means. It's what the flag stands for.

Also, if anti-colonial feelings in Africa are a black American export, I guess that means the 1879 victory of the Zulus over two British columns in the battle of Isandlwana were a black American export.

> Africans in Africa share little of the fervent anti-colonial attitude prominent in the American Black community here.

Like who, Umkhonto we Sizwe? Patrice Lumumba? The MPLA?

> African writers in Britain and Africa, respectively, write to disparage the export of the Black American anti-colonial perspective

Is this new? The South Africans had Buthelezi to go around the world criticizing the anti-apartheid movement, and there were ones before that.

Benedict Arnold ended up not sharing the anti-colonial attitude of his fellow Americans. Nor did Vidkun Quisling of his fellow Norwegians share anti-colonial attitudes. We are not unaware these people exist.

> A sane response would challenge the claim that lockdowns are the answer with a simple question: where is the proof that the last one worked?

New Zealand has two large islands, and some smaller ones. Lockdown worked there. 5 million people, 3 Covid deaths since June. From yesterday to two weeks before yesterday there were 28 new cases. Those sprung on from a mysterious outbreak that started August 11th near a facility that receives refrigerated and frozen foods. New Zealand went into lockdown and tracing and it has been contained so far.

Great Britain is also an island, but it prioritized differently. In New Zealand, social life is open right now, but also the economy is less constricted, because the disease has been contained.

> Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer who tried to uphold republican principles in the final civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic.

Cicero was a man who fought against the tribunes representing the vast majority of Roman citizens, and for the power of the idle class aristocracy which did not work.

He also was like an ancient embodiment of QAnon (which sees the US Democratic Party leadership as involved in a child sex conspiracy) - he accused populare aligned senators like Catiline of defiling the sacred Vestal virgins in Senate hearings.

If saying "now" is "terribly misleading" - the Federal Reserve says black unemployment was higher from 2010 to 2012 then it is now.

> Or the greater access to jobs blacks and other minorities have gained in this time.

The black unemployment rate - 13% according to the Federal Reserve - is higher than it was a half century ago.

Much of the reason for it is to pump money into the economy via Raytheon, Lockheed Martin etc. It all ultimately boils down to money.