[jato0072]

A mostly peaceful protest.



Violent insurrection. Look the officer has turned his back to the violent insurrectionist! What a Clown World Narrative! See Herbert Marcuse "Repressive Tolerance". " Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."

Trump and now MAGA broadly presented a unique proposition, Burn-It-Down.

I am pretty sure the far left is the "burn it down" crew, but I catch your drift. When both Left and Right want to use violence, then we will have a problem. For now it is mostly the Left using such techniques. J6 Buffalo Man couldn't even be bothered with being arrested for trespassing by a gaggle of Capitol Police Officers as he toured the Capitol building. Such scandal!

[Pops]

The bomb throwers back in the '70s were definitely of the left. They must have hit a nerve because things seem to have changed enough that the people doing the killing today are largly on the right. Which I guess is typical for those who once had power to get excited when they feel they are losing it.

The numbers are hard to argue with. Right-wing ideologies were behind a majority of the nearly 600 domestic terror attacks that occurred from 2010 through 2021, according to data shared with Military Times by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. During that period, right-wing extremists were charged with 353 plots or attacks that caused 147 deaths, the data show. In the same time frame, far-left extremists carried out 126 plots or attacks, killing 23 people. The rest of the political violence during those years was committed by jihadist groups and ethnonationalists, which included antisemitic and Jewish extremists and Cuban exiles, among others.

Military Times

As for the insurrectionists, over 1,000 have been charged so far, not sure the exact tally but certainly over 500 have plead or been found guilty of all sorts of crimes including sedition. Pretty sure none have been found guilty of leaving their tour group but you can draw your own conclusions.

Going back to the topic I think much of the current turmoil is the "late" stage of capitalism we seem to be in. The meme-worthy "late stage" is where capitalists increasingly focus on capital itself, IOW, financial products and rent seeking rather than physical goods and services. So maybe I agree with the OP more than I initially thought. It's about consolidation where the owners increasingly eat each other, charge for little value added because they can. Financial profits are maybe 20% of GDP now, but who knows, so much is off the books.

Between globalization, shrinking middle, loss of privilege and yes, wealth inequality we get anarchist on the left and authoritarianism on the right.

Cash is king...

[Plantagenet]

Between globalization, shrinking middle, loss of privilege and yes, wealth inequality we get anarchist on the left...

Hey POPS....good to see you posting again. I hope things are going great for you.

IMHO we're not seeing "anarchist" on the left......the problem the left has right now is that progressives are supporting Hamas and turning against Biden and against the Ds. Hundreds of Progressives within the Biden administration recently denounced Biden's position against Hamas and there was a huge riot last night in DC at the DNC headquarters when progressives tried to occupy the DNC building to force the D leadership to support Hamas.

dnc-headquarters-violent-progressive-protest-leading-democrats-evacuated


Progressives riot in DNC headquarters to show support for Hamas

You can see this same schism going on in the Democratic Socialists of America, America's largest progressive organization. The DSA is in chaos right now as older members are quitting in droves to protest younger members who are supporting Hamas and parroting their anti-semitic slogans.

DSA founder angrily quits to protest DSA support for Hamas

God knows why people on the left want to support a group like Hamas that wants a medieval style theocracy that just murdered 1200 plus Israelis and kidnapped 230 more innocent civilians, including a large number of babies, children, and women.

Cheers!

[jato0072]

God knows why people on the left want to support a group like Hamas

It is simple, the Left plays the Oppression Olympics.

Oppression Olympics is a characterization of marginalization as a competition to determine the relative weight of the overall oppression of individuals or groups, often by comparing race, gender, socioeconomic status or disabilities, in order to determine who is the worst off, and the most oppressed.

In the mind of a Leftist, Israel is the oppressor and Palestinians (including Hamas) are the victims.

[Pops]

Hiya Plant. There definitely is a coolness to Biden. Not sure if it's just the age thing or what, he has acted in a much more progressive way than I expected. And pretty productive: Health Care, energy, first guns law in 30 years, CHIPS, an actual infrastructure bill and bi-partisan at that, recovery act, lots of social stuff Lefties are interested in. Compared to the soft-right Clinton "third way" globalism and Obama's ineffectiveness, he actually made some of trump's blater on protectionist trade policies and reshoring into law— not sure if that's a left thing but I approve. And he finally got us out of Afgan, might not have been pretty but he did get out.

I think there is just so much blather and projection on the right the average observer doesn't have the time to sus out the facts. I see vids of maga whacados who say "just go on the internet and do your research!" LOL, I can ony imagine their sources: Alex Jones, etc. Maybe when it gets down to actually doing some campaigning they can highlight some actual results.


I don't really have much feelings about the Israel / Palestine thing, except sympathy for everyone — I don't have a god in the fight. I would guess protests are about Palestinian babies being killed and not in support of Hamas per se, maybe not.

People on the left, especially younger people, are less likely to have been indoctrinated into the ancient hatreds, tho they do have their share of animosity. But it is the right who harbor the fascists and anti-semmites is it not? or is that the whole point, project antisemitism on the left so that it becomes a "both-sides" issue?

The whole thing is a conundrum in my mind, anti-semitism is a right-wing trope, after all the Jews killed Christ in the story didn't they? Now that I think of it, the last church service I attended forty-something years ago was an Easter service where that was the exact message, made the celebration a brightly-colored, sunny rebirth of ancient hatred. Lots of people's acquired beliefs are strange to me, probably didn't pay enough attention in vacation bible school.

I heard Chomsky propose another reason Israel is such a protectorate of the US. He called them a settler colonial society: just like us, the Australians, the Canadians. We are a specific brand of imperialism that doesn't just rule over the colonized natives, we eliminate them. Maybe a little esoteric, the whole Armageddon bit about the promise of watching the sinners getting their just desserts is probably more likely reason for the love/hate.


Then of course there is oil.

.

[mousepad]

People on the left, especially younger people, are less likely to have been indoctrinated into the ancient hatreds,

It's the opposite actually. As europe and the rest of the west is rapidly muz-slimifying, the hatred against jews is just going to increase.
Combine that with the oppression olympics played by the left including the self-hatred of ones own identity and culture, and things look pretty sad.

[Pops]

It's the opposite actually. As europe and the rest of the west is rapidly muz-slimifying, the hatred against jews is just going to increase.
Combine that with the oppression olympics played by the left including the self-hatred of ones own identity and culture, and things look pretty sad.

You make a valid point, not all young people escape the training. The guys marching with tiki torches in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us" were indeed pretty young.

Though I'm confident they aren't leftists and that they also hate Muslims. Fascism is equal opportunity that way.

I'd never heard of the oppression olympics. Interesting example of projection as we all know who the undisputed gold medalist of whining is and his team all consider themselves great victims. Who has time to worry about anyone else?

Also telling is that the slur you come up with is that leftists are culturally "self-hating." Again it looks like projection—everyone MUST hate someone so the left must hate itself. That anyone would have any self-awareness or willingness to view actual history critically I assume must be foreign—and we know foreign is bad LOL

I'm from working poor people mostly. There is no one with as fragile an ego and committed to their own honor as a poor man. After all honor is all he has. A person of means is unlikely to go off half-cocked at some slight affront but poor men do it routinely. They literally have nothing else to lose so admitting any cultural defect is tantamount to treason.

Such rigidity is a great weakness and a great weight I think. Combine that with hopeless act of voting for people who could care lees for their plight and work only to advance their masters and no wonder they are pissed.

(see how I worked that back around to the topic?) LOL

[Plantagenet]

Hi Pops -- I'll have to disagree with about Joe Biden being "cool". Seeing him mumble and stumble around is the exact opposite of cool, IMHO. And joe sure has bungled things overseas. He clearly bungled the US withdrawal from Afghanistan OOOPS!!!, and then he utterly failed when he pledged he would prevent Russia from invading Ukraine by threatening Putin with sanctions OOOOOPPPPSSSSS!!!!. And of course the Biden administration was publicly boasting about how peaceful the middle east was thanks to Joe Biden's policies just before Hamas attacked Israel. OOOPPPSSS!!!! again.

So how could things get even worse???....well....OPEC is scheduled to meet starting on Nov. 27th, and Joe Biden, of course, also bungled the US-Saudi relationship by repeatedly attacking and insulting Crown Prince Muhammad OOOPPPPSSS!!!!!!

The news today says Saudi is talking about getting OPEC to extend current production cuts and perhaps cutting production even more to protest the Israel/Hamas war.

saudi-arabia-production-cuts-gaza-israel-hamas

There's a chance Prince Muhammad and the Saudis will now take their sweet revenge on Joe by instituting more oil production cuts or even by revving up a full oil boycott just before the 2024 election. And Joe Biden has already used up half the Strategic Petroleum Reserve OOOOPPPPSSSS!!!, so the US is not in a great position if we get more oil production cuts or a boycott.


Ick!!!! I actually touched him. ---- ALLAH FORGIVE ME I TOUCHED HIIIIIMMM!!!

Nothing will kill the capitalist global economy quicker then a global recession caused by an oil boycott.

Cheers!

[ralfy]

For increased immigration, there's also population aging. As for Biden, several of his policies involve MAGA, like FTAs in the Inflation Reduction Act, continuing Trump's America First, and calls for oil exploration.

[theluckycountry]

European leaders have come out over the past few weeks and stated the obvious. That the mass immigration was always about replacing workers in nations whose birthrates had fallen. The unintended consequences though, as evidenced in Sweden, have brought conservative parties into power to reverse the trend. Of course it's not really being reversed because of the trouble it has caused but because the economies of Europe are floundering and they don't need as many workers now. At least that is what I see.

It's the reverse of Hanlon’s razor, namely, “never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice”.

[Pops]

LOL Plant, I meant voters are cool toward Biden, not that Brandon is cool. I won't waste time arguing except to say it would be nice if the US president were omnipotent but I'm afraid that is too much to ask.

Lucky, I agree that immigration is about workers but also consumers. It is really as simple as bring in workers / consumers or watch your economy shrink, maybe slow but maybe catastrophically as might soon happen in China.

But back to the OP, Big Tech is all about advertising, Google, Amazon and Walmart.com are making big money selling ads on their main platforms, even as far has having no responsibility for fulfillment, just acting as digital sales platform. And really, Apple's app store is just a different form of advertising / distribution. This to me is the end stage. First, ALL GDP growth for many years has been put on credit. Second, rapidly expanding markets have stopped growing but the addiction to quarterly profit growth continues— witness simultaneous inflation and ballooning corporate profits. Finally, oncoming population decline meets parochial ethnonationalism closing borders.

The end of revenue growth because of the end of babies is a death sentence for big capital. Streaming services for example have hit the saturation point, so what is the go-to reaction of providers? Why increase rates and add more ads of course. Streaming subscription rates across the board are going up. I really like Apple News, the other night I got an email saying the subscription rate would increase 25% on the 12th —I got the email at 9PM on the 11th. Pissed me off so I cancelled. But all types of business will go down this road as revenue shrinks.

Population decline will surely be worse than the population bomb, for humans if not the Planet. In human economics more consumers covers a multitude of sins. Increasing financial wobble will undoubtedly induce increasing chaos in everyday life as billionaires stagger around knocking things over wondering where the billions went. Twitter is the canary in the coal mine.

Then there is AI...

.

Nate Hagins has a podcast called The Great Simplification check it out

[Plantagenet]

it would be nice if the US president were omnipotent but I'm afraid that is too much to ask.

I'm just looking for basic competence......but I'm afraid that may be too much to ask as well.

Nate Hagins has a podcast called The Great Simplification check it out

I posted about the Great Simplification podcast here a couple of months ago. Nate Hagens has some really great guests and does in-depth explorations of things like climate change energy and geopolitics, AI, permaculture, the human brain, and even peak oil.


the GREAT SIMPLIFICATION podcast is again Recommended!

Cheers!

[Tanada]

LOL Plant, I meant voters are cool toward Biden, not that Brandon is cool. I won't waste time arguing except to say it would be nice if the US president were omnipotent but I'm afraid that is too much to ask.

Lucky, I agree that immigration is about workers but also consumers. It is really as simple as bring in workers / consumers or watch your economy shrink, maybe slow but maybe catastrophically as might soon happen in China.

But back to the OP, Big Tech is all about advertising, Google, Amazon and Walmart.com are making big money selling ads on their main platforms, even as far has having no responsibility for fulfillment, just acting as digital sales platform. And really, Apple's app store is just a different form of advertising / distribution. This to me is the end stage. First, ALL GDP growth for many years has been put on credit. Second, rapidly expanding markets have stopped growing but the addiction to quarterly profit growth continues— witness simultaneous inflation and ballooning corporate profits. Finally, oncoming population decline meets parochial ethnonationalism closing borders.

The end of revenue growth because of the end of babies is a death sentence for big capital. Streaming services for example have hit the saturation point, so what is the go-to reaction of providers? Why increase rates and add more ads of course. Streaming subscription rates across the board are going up. I really like Apple News, the other night I got an email saying the subscription rate would increase 25% on the 12th —I got the email at 9PM on the 11th. Pissed me off so I cancelled. But all types of business will go down this road as revenue shrinks.

Population decline will surely be worse than the population bomb, for humans if not the Planet. In human economics more consumers covers a multitude of sins. Increasing financial wobble will undoubtedly induce increasing chaos in everyday life as billionaires stagger around knocking things over wondering where the billions went. Twitter is the canary in the coal mine.

Then there is AI...

.

Nate Hagins has a podcast called The Great Simplification check it out

Egaads! An Omnipotent politician of any stripe is the last thing this old earth needs! Even if you agreed with 90 percent of what she/he wanted to achieve the other 10 percent would be plunked down on you as pure inescapable oppression. Far better a weak imperfect human or a perfect inhuman leader because without that perfection omnipotent power is the worst of all outcomes.

[mousepad]

that leftists are culturally "self-hating."

I agree. It's crazy to me. How can one hate ones own identity and history so much? I mean, europe as an example is bending over backwards to "not offend" imported muzslime. Instead of forcing them to adapt to the local culture. Better of course is to not import culturally incompatible people at all, but that idea is completely lost on the left. How dare you to value your own identity and culture above the ones of an import. You damn racist, you!

and we know foreign is bad LOL

All in moderation. Importing 1 chinese in a european town of 1000 is a curiosity. Importing 5000 into a town of 1000 is a total change of culture and identity. But we can't express that concern, lest we be labled racist for doing so. And the left has no tolerance for wanting to protect ones own identity, culture and values. It is all evil and must be destroyed.

A person of means is unlikely to go off half-cocked at some slight affront but poor men do it routinely.

What's your point? If you have nothing left to lose, you easily lose it.

Such rigidity is a great weakness and a great weight I think.

Weakness for what? Wanting to preserve ones own identity and values is weakness? Not for me. For me it's strength.
All in moderation of course. As the old saying goes. All in moderation, even moderation.

[ralfy]

Look up "population aging".

[theluckycountry]

How financialization heralds the end of the industrial age

It must be stated loud and clear: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is an entirely artificial and misleading metric. Contrary to common wisdom it is not a measure of real economic activity, only the amount of financial transactions taking place. There is a world of difference between the two. Sure enough, with the inclusion of finance, insurance and real estate (the so-called FIRE sector, all inflated by ballooning debt levels) there is an ever increasing amount of money changing hands these days… Too bad, though, that these entirely fictional activities do not add a scintilla of value to the economy. Quite to the contrary.

Western neoliberal economies are on the brink of a steep economic decline. Barring an energy / productivity miracle a prolonged and deep recession is clearly on the horizon. While mainstream pundits keep “informing” the public how GDP was actually growing in the past decades (except for a few brief moments), and how the G7 is still the top economic power block, the real economy of goods and services tells a completely different story. Growth — in the sense of real economic output — has stopped 18 years ago in the West, and conditions are now ripe for a rapid contraction. A sobering assessment of the real economy — in which your humble blogger is still actively involved — has become due. Buckle up.

As long time readers might already know by heart: money is not the economy, energy is. Money is but a claim on energy and resources. Everything we mine, grow, manufacture and consume takes energy to produce. No energy, no production, no services. The more we produce / consume the more energy is used up. And while it may seem like that rich countries have somehow decoupled their economies from energy use (ie managed to grow GDP much faster than energy consumption), in fact the opposite is true. All they did was send their high energy intensity manufacturing and mining abroad, then imported all they needed using their overvalued currencies, thus becoming more independent on foreign trade than ever.

What the recent fixation of our elites on GDP really shows is how we have switched from a real economy based on value added work to an entirely fictional financial economy based on rent seeking. Did you know, for example, that penalties on late credit card payments count as GDP? Well, it’s euphemistically called ‘providing financial services’. Or how about the entirely fictional increase in the rental value of the home you actually occupy? If you had rented it out, you would’ve received an ever growing sum, right? Oh, you didn’t get a penny for living in your own house? That’s your problem, we will still count it as GDP growth. Or how about systematically under-reporting inflation? So any additional money you spend (above official inflation levels) on the same product or a service you used to by much cheaper yesteryear now counts as GDP growth. Clever, huh?

Full article https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/ ... um=reader2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo

[Pops]

Thanks, I hadn't read this guy before.

Financialisation is probably the end stage. Capitalists have decided the better way to make money is simply pay less tax, pay less wages, inflate prices and why not just not make anything? Every streaming service has hit saturation point so how to increase next quarter's revenue? Just raise rates.

That is obvious, not so obvious and way more scary is the hidden debt in the shadow bank "system". Most banks are probably in better shape after 08 but non-bank investors like pensions, equity and hedge funds were dying for a return when rates were effectively zero and now could hold paper that counterparties can't cover at today's jacked-up floating rates.

My little brain can't count high enough to understand the numbers. But I'd guess for every dollar of "real" money there are 3-4-5-6 dollars of claims. These aren't on any "money supply" report, these are claims and counter claims, insurance and credit swaps, all backed by one skinny deflated buck. It's musical chairs but with 5 or 8 too few chairs What happens when confidence goes negative and all those chits are called in? how does it ever unwind without collapsing?

Overinvestment leads to correction leads to rinse and repeat. It's just the business cycle, until it isn't. During the great depression half the US had socialist leanings and some New Deal programs are still with us—quite a few countries went quite socialist and are still there today.. it took world war and the gutting of every other major economy, industrial and colonial power to put the US and it's capitalist not just back on top, but head and shoulders above the rest of the world for 75 years. It also took lots of propaganda and washer dryer combinations to put down the revolt of workers against corporations and ther memory of the Gilded age plutocrats. Every US capitalist today should thank god for 2 huge oceans that made invading us nearly impossible.

Interestingly the party of no tax/ no regulation (the capitalists) is swapping educated upper class managers for uneducated working people from the other party who have nothing in common with the ownership. I guess as long as the working folks are feed enough scapegoat to placate them the owners will be OK. Better hope they don't repeat 1929, we're too far in debt and too long past our manufacturing prime to win another global war.

[ralfy]

Part of GDP is consumer spending.

Also, capitalism requires increasing production and consumption, with profits from sales thanks to consumption reinvested to increase production even more.

Meanwhile, financial gambling increases credit, which also increases amounts that can be invested.

That's why the claims made in other threads that capitalism doesn't involve profits and that a steady state economy is an example of capitalism are ridiculous.

[theluckycountry]

It's interesting to ponder where the vast majority of people's life saving are. Probably the lions share by far is in overpriced city real estate, land that is worth so much because, well because one day in the future someone else will want it, and because they aren't making anymore land... This argument is so retarded considering how much land, vacant land, exists outside of cities.

But the jobs are in the cities! What jobs? paper pushers, overpriced health services that actually do more harm than good now, Dog washers, people mowing lawns, and millions of people working in stores selling stuff to each other like phones and lounges and car parts. Then you have all the workers just maintaining the city. As "real" jobs vanished all these parasitic jobs filled the void but they won't outlast the cheap oil that funds them. Some cities will survive because they are trading hubs etc but most will be depopulated like has happened throughout history.

Then you have retirement savings, that's the second biggest store of wealth. Trillions of dollars in digital accounts backed by nothing but techno promises, overpriced RE, and overpriced oil dependent corporations. I've said it more than once, when you have a pension system which mandates an inflow of capital from wages every month into these financial institutions the value of the shares etc is buoyed up, increases over time. It's a huge cashcow and every few years we see a big reset in the values of these companies as the top 1% skim off some of the life savings of the working class. It's a joke really but everyone is fooled by it, fooled by the assurances of men is expensive suits, men who wouldn't piss of the average person if they were on fire.

Just imagine waking up to discover your life savings have vanished. It happens all the time to people now, look at the ones scammed by the crypto exchanges that collapsed, the ones all in Enron. But this is small scale. The Great depression collapse was Big scale, companies and banks. This is a treacherous time in history, a time when you shouldn't be overly concerned with the return ON your life savings, but instead concerned with the return OF your life savings.

[yellowcanoe]

But the jobs are in the cities! What jobs? paper pushers, overpriced health services that actually do more harm than good now, Dog washers, people mowing lawns, and millions of people working in stores selling stuff to each other like phones and lounges and car parts. Then you have all the workers just maintaining the city. As "real" jobs vanished all these parasitic jobs filled the void but they won't outlast the cheap oil that funds them. Some cities will survive because they are trading hubs etc but most will be depopulated like has happened throughout history.

Business's require a higher educated, higher skilled workforce than was previously the case and this is why businesses tend to locate in cities even though many of their costs will be higher than if they located into a town. It's no consolation to have lower property taxes and lower costs to rent/purchase the property you need if you can't find the specialized workers you need. The fact that most woman want to have a career instead of being a housewife also contributes to this problem. A man cannot move to the smaller community to take a job if his wife would be unable to find a job to further her own career.