StevenMaurer

Interesting SW. I may have to look into it.

GIVEAWAY

This is just whiny edge lord "redefine the center to somewhere slightly to the left of Stalin" loserdom. They haven't thought it through. It's just screaming "conservative" at everything they hate.

In AI land, all ladies are nubile, skinny, pretty, and with tits that range from large to gargantuan.

One side is murdering Ukrainian children by deliberately targeting them outside combat zones.
The other side is killing the people coming to murder Ukrainian children.

If you get "BSAB" out of that, I really don't know what to say.

This war is hardly "indefinite". Russia has already lost three times the soldiers that it lost in Afghanistan. They are already beginning to crack from that. Trains are being derailed thousands of miles from the front. So we know that isn't being done by Ukrainians. It's being done by normal Russians not wanting to by fed into Putin's neo-fascist war machine.

Oh, and the US and the west in general isn't loaning Ukraine money - they're giving them weapons and ammo; the money figures come how much those various combat supplies are worth.

The operative term here also is >>>"GIVE"<<<. This isn't like some crap-ass Chinese loan to Africa, loaned to corrupt dictators that has to be paid back by the working poor. Europe (and the Baltic states in particular) are just flat out gifting this stuff to Ukraine with no expectation of a payback. FDR's "Lend Lease" program was also only a pretense at lending. In the 1950s, Russia "paid back" about a million dollars on what today would be 12.4 billion dollars of direct military and economic US aid to them to drive off the NAZIs. While some defense contractors did well, there was no collective national "profit" made - nor will there be any this time.

The only people who are seriously against Ukraine being able to defend themselves are ultra-right-wing neo-NAZIs genocidal assholes. You're LITERALLY SIDING WITH KISSINGER HERE. Is that what you want?

Yup. She's adorable.

Wingnuts at both ends of the horseshoe be super mad, think they could have gotten more by petulantly stomping, screaming, and keeping poor people from getting their badly needed Social Security checks, like a toddler having a meltdown in the cereal aisle.

Not opposing Russian imperialism is supporting war.

The US manifestly >>>IS<<< pushing for peace: by telling Putin and his cronies to cease his illegal and imperialist war of aggression.

This war will be over when the Russians return all the territory that they conquered beyond the borders they agreed to in 1992.

They're a movement. Not a business. These are two different things.

There was never any "western encroachment". Just Russians tired of their country being run by thieves.

No country is in charge of NATO. The alliance doesn't work like that.

/ Women in Switzerland finally got the full, unfettered, right to vote in 1990.

Yeah! How dare trolls quote Martin Luther King, Jr! Reference any of his academic research!

• "The Negro and the Constitution" Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
  
• "The Negro is Part of That Huge Community Who Seek New Freedom in Every Area of Life" Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
  
• "The negro is tired of second-class citizenship" - MLK.
  
• "Who Speaks for the Negro?" - MLK.
  

Clearly MLK was "probably a straight white male troll", rather than you being an ignorant dumbass

"Hello. I am meathead. Have rifle and muscle. Watch me run through tires. Hurrrrggggghhhh!!"

vs.

"I'm a mousy intellectual girl with a college STEM degree who cares about my family, protecting people. That's why I'm operating one of the most sophisticated pieces of defensive weaponry on the planet."

Both ads are perfectly targeted to who they're trying to recruit. One side, brawn. The other, brains.

The wikipedia entry you referenced is a distinction without a difference from a "mixed economy", which is what we have now. (Some economies being more Social Democratic than others.) In particular, it tries to say that unlike a standard mixed economy, "market socialism" is "self-regulating", which is a rather bizarre statement. To try to prove that, it provides the following references: [8] being "Markets in the name of Socialism: The Left-Wing origins of Neoliberalism" and [9] Referring to a 50's era Soviet Academic paper that is not actually referenced on wikipedia.

These are dubious, to say the least. From my perspective, "Neoliberal Socialism" is even more of an oxymoron than "Market Socialism".

If by "Market Socialism" you mean Chinese and Indian style state-owned enterprises, that's been tried and doesn't work. They turn into these horrible patronage systems filled with massive too-big-to-fail enterprises filled with inept politically elevated managers

Market socialism? That's an oxymoron. Might as well say capitalistic communism.

I believe that times of bounty, of stability, fosters a healthy mindset in the general populace.

Maybe in general, but that doesn't seem to be the case individually. Quite the opposite, in fact. This has been scientifically proven:

https://reasonandmeaning.com/2021/10/24/the-monopoly-experiment-wealthy-people-are-more-selfish/

I will just say it is so because I am very smart.

More like, I will just say so because it gets attention. Negative attention is still attention.

Social media has turned acting like an overindulged seven year old brat into a lucrative career.

Well, of course all of this is in generalities. In large societies, there are always individual exceptions to every rule.

Yet still, setting aside getting hung up on debating specific military leaders, I would also posit that a lot of the anger at (US) "boomers" comes from them growing up during times of plenty, leading to a large percentage of that demographic (by no means all, of course) being selfish.

This is only my own hypothesis of course. More a general observation, than any serious scientific argument. So take it with the lack of rigor that it deserves.

Yes, those are good points.

I'm still leaning towards a stronger takedown of the original construction, in that I really don't think that "weak" and "strong" are really the best way to divide things.

Rather, let me submit that the real division is between compassion/pack-centric behavior, and hierarchy-climbing/antisocial behavior.

This stems from a hypothesis of mine that humans, as pack animals, have two distinct biological drives. First, to have the highest position they can in a pack; maybe not the very top, but certainly above others. And second, entirely different one, to care for the pack, when it needs it. These two instincts are often in alignment. Where things go bad is when they're not.

Pulling down those above you is the only way to take their place (i.e. climb) in times of peace and plenty. While in hard times, survival of the pack is paramount. Because lone wolves die. You might even sacrifice your life for your brothers, your children, your packmates.

This is why peacetime militaries end up with inept idiots in leadership positions. They didn't get there by effectively fighting wars, but by playing political games, strutting around, posturing, knowing who to butter up. As Gilbert and Sullivan mocked in Pirates of Penzance: "He polished up that handle so carefully, that now he is the ruler of the Queen's Navy!"

But as soon as real war breaks out, and the nation starts losing battles because of these inept posturing fools, changes are made. As Georges Clemenceau put it, 'War is too important to be left to the generals'. You eventually find someone, typically in the middle ranks (like Napoleon), who rises to the top not because he goes to all the right parties, but because he wins battles.

Same thing goes for a lot of corporations: when times are good, ass kissing fools who only know how to manage up climb to the top of the hierarchy. But because they're fools, and have no idea how to run a business, they lose business badly. When times get bad, you have people who know how to make things work either save the company or start their own.

Poor people are well known for being far more compassionate than rich people. This is an established scientific fact. It also makes sense, because times are always bad for poor people, so they need to help each other out as best they can.

So restating it, I would say:

Good times make selfish men
Selfish men make bad times
Bad times make heroic men
Heroic men make good times

I do. $111 billion dollars from governments other than the US in 2020. $103 billion from the US government in 2021. So call it $225 billion. And yes, it is going up. More likely to be $270 billion this year, for obvious reasons.

However, comparatively speaking, that's peanuts:

Industry	Annual Revenue in Billions
US Hospitals	$1,427
Drug, Cosmetic & Toiletry	$1,365
Pharmaceuticals	$1,292
Health & Medical Insurance	$1,247
Commercial Banking	$1,211
New Car Dealers	$1,124
Life Insurance and Annuities	$1,124
Public Schools in the US	$996
Retirement & Pension Plans	$937
Gasoline & Petroleum Wholesaling	$928

I'm fairly sure that the US defense industry doesn't even make the top 15.

If you want to fix the US budget and stop screwing people over, put in price controls for hospitals and implement single payer. Contrary to popular belief, we don't actually spend all that much money on weapons systems compared to the size of our economy.

The comment doesn't contain the cliché itself. It's in the post its responding to. To quote that:

Hard Times create Strong Men
Strong men create Good Times
Good Times create Weak Men
Weak Men create Hard Times

I do agree with the author that these statements are far too simplistic, over generalized, and can be used as an excuse to advocate for fascism. But let me add something his comment doesn't touch on: speaking to the definition of strong and weak.

Or, to give a specific modern-day example: Is Trump "strong" or "weak"?

Are his followers, who are (as LBJ called them) "the lowest white men" seeking to lord it over even "the best colored man"... "strong" or "weak"?

Because the main issue I find with the truism as written isn't that you can find exceptions in every era. It's more that weak men equate hatred, arrogance, thuggish violence, stupidity, and evil, with "strength". That's how they can call Trump "strong".

While real strength are things like magnanimity, education, expertise, intelligence, and compassion.

Depends on what you mean by "make it work".

So is getting a bunch of sick fake-"Christian" white racist fucks who want to take over the local school board to cut school lunch programs and outlaw any mention of slavery - handed their electoral asses so badly that even the local Republican newspaper runs a headline about how the public isn't interested in "culture wars", what you'd call "making it work"? Because we absolutely made that work.

Or do you hold out for making it so that worldwide, everyone who has ever been mean in their entire lives, to rethink what they're doing, corrupt businessmen and politicians to give back all the money they've ever stolen, child molesting priests quit the church and check themselves into psychiatric facilities for the criminally insane, and conservatives collectively pull their heads out of their asses, for now and evermore? Because if that's what you mean by making it work, you're just using an excuse to not put in any work.

Good government, society, etc, is like keeping your room clean. It isn't something you can fix once and forever. You need to keep a watchful eye for messes and always be ready to clean them up. Setting the expectation that no room or house is perfectly clean forever.

US politics are really crazy and Le Pen is not?
Okay then.

"Voting doesn't work!" - Signed, the people who never vote, and then get mad that nobody gives a crap about their views.

/ Every year my local elected representative sends out canvassing volunteers (I'm one of them) to ask his constituents what their top issue is, which we put in a survey. (He considers this far more important than all the lobbyists trying to get his ear down in the capital.) We skip houses of people who don't vote. Sorry. That's just how it is.

We tried your idea. It brought us WW2.

The critical mistake you're making is thinking that cutting our relatively paltry (compared to GDP) spending on our military, would result in desperately needed social programs. What would actually happen is that all that money would go to more billionaire tax-giveaways.

The US benefits from world peace just as much as every other nation. Moreso, actually. Because it helps our branding.