The US dumps money into “defense” because it is under a dictatorship of capital and it just so happens that selling weapons is an extremely effective way of converting public tax dollars into private capital. The US profits from endless violence, plain and simple. “American exceptionalism” i.e. chauvinism is just how they sell it to the people at large in order to appear democratic.
If the US left NATO it would cease to exist. It’s a protection racket, and one without a real threat at that. It was always intended as a red scare tactic (operation gladio for example) and to isolate the USSR, which no longer exists, by expanding US military influence across Europe. NATO has never been about european defense and it would be a solution in search of a cause without the US.
I’ve yet to see a convincing explanation of why China would even be interested in this data… what good would it even be to them?
We know American tech, media giants, and government contractors and agencies use it for profit and domestic control but, even if you believe China is just as much of a dystopian capitalist surveillance-state as the USA, what profit is there for Chinese capitalists to extract from American data that they can’t already extract much more efficiently through American data brokers? As for the government end, is the interest in having control over Americans in American territory even comparable to that of the American government? It’s not like the vast majority of the data would even be actionable or relevant to the Chinese government.
It just doesn’t make sense for Chinese capitalists/government to be even a fraction as aggressive in surveilling Americans as their American counterparts. It seems more like a distraction to me and an excuse to avoid talking about American surveillance being every bit as bad as you imagine Chinese surveillance to be.
As for being the “largest exporters in the global market”, if the profit was all that enticing on a private scale, the US capitalist class certainly could have chosen to compete with China in that avenue. They chose to boost their short term profits by deindustrializating instead. What does that tell you?
Sure, if you assume their “political enemies” are the Republicans. Rather than assume incompetence; because, you’re right, this is a pretty glaring oversight that only bumbling incompetence could begin to explain away; you could make a much more fitting assessment with the “political enemy” being the working class.
That is who this law is being wielded against, the only ones who were ever threatened by it, along with being completely disempowered to abuse it against the ruling class who passed it. Those are the enemies that fit your description.
Is the implication that new developments or information may have come out in the <4 months since this article was published which invalidates some or all of the information it contains? I’m having trouble seeing why this is an issue that needs pointing out in this particular case.
Where would you prefer content like this be posted and discussed?
Nah this definitely sounds like a situation where “it’s the end of your senior year and there’s no other way we can effectively reprimand this behavior” and he might have already been a problem student.
There was a kid that shit his pants at my middle school. Left a little nugget that slid out of his basketball shorts in the hallway. I guess there was also some on his seat which nobody noticed until a girl in the next class sat in it.
The problem is that a capitalist system will not allow itself to be reformed in this way, as the “reforms” that Marx poses are antithetical to the very foundation of capitalism.
To give some accessible examples; you can’t house homeless people or give people healthcare and higher education because homelessness and debt is a whip to keep the workers working for whatever wage and conditions are offered by a capital owner. You can’t deconstruct racism because it was invented in the first place to keep the working class at war with itself rather than struggling against the conditions set by the ruling class. You can’t stop imperialism because infinite growth requires infinite and unrestricted expansion into new territories.
The system of capitalism manufactures its own required conditions through cruelty and social inequality (and yet, it’s these very things that lead to resistance), and without those necessary components the whole system collapses. The ruling class will not allow this to happen, because this system serves their material interests, and thus fundamental change cannot happen until the working class; whose material interests are directly opposed to those of the ruling class; is in power. The ruling class will pay lip service and the occasional half-measure in order to obscure this reality and make “reformism” seem possible, but 1) that is all they will do especially in the absence of a real threat to their power and 2) they will always eventually claw back even the smallest and hardest-fought of crumbs. Crumbs are good and all but there comes a point where our energy is better spent fighting for the whole cake.
This is just wrong. There are more than enough resources to go around. More homes than homeless, more food production than food insecure, more clothes than anyone could ever wear in a lifetime; things like transportation, energy, and production could be greatly optimized via collectivisation; and so on. The problem is endless profit-seeking and exploitation, not overpopulation.
The people that have access to these resources, many of which are extracted from the global south, consume way more than their fair share because of the infinite growth drive of capitalism. There is never “enough”, regardless of population; because to stagnate or to shrink is to fail under capitalism. Overconsumption is a problem that could be solved, quite comfortably I might add, if we were enabled collectively to put our minds to it.
You would do more to lessen suffering, by having kids and raising them to fight for that world; because that world is in fact possible; than to prevent their personal suffering by simply not bringing them into existence. Assuming anti-natalism is the only thing stopping you from having kids, of course; not everyone wants or needs to reproduce and I completely agree with destigmatizing that decision, but at least be honest that you just personally don’t want to be a parent. Don’t introduce new stigma for people that do want to be parents.
I take issue with this universal suffering idea. Sounds eugenics-ey. Cause it’s reasonably predictable which children will struggle more than others simply based on material conditions of their parents. It’s less of a “gamble”, for certain people who, often enough, just so happen to be directly responsible for some amount of suffering in the world. Even if I grant you that suffering is universal even in the most optimal conditions, it’s not like someone with optimal means is questioning the ethics of becoming a parent. And if they are, it’s most probably in the hyper-natalist, “populating the world with my superior spawn” direction like the musks of the world. Doesn’t anti-natalism kinda indirectly suggest leaving the world in those kinds of hands?
Also, humans are not cats and dogs and any ideology that leads you to make this comparison, especially w/r to population control and euthanasia, should be rejected just on the face of it. Point blank period.