rubpoll

The title is the usual "bad thing in American capitalism? This is just like China!!"

But the top comment is "I wish."

It can't be emphasized how wacky it is to see the most reflexively contrarian, NATO shilling, warthumping, America-fellating, Milton Freidman worshipping jackals suddenly realize China has everything they thought American liberal democracy would provide, even bare basic checks on billionaire freaks.

Oh the times, they are a changin.

I feel like Casandra. Very gender affirming.

Loukanikos (Greek: Λουκάνικος: "the sausage loukaniko"), initially named "Theodor", was a Greek riot dog that participated in almost every anti-austerity protest in Greece. He was commonly known for joining protests, barking at police, helping in street battles with the Greek police as well as participating in anarchist rallies and picket lines, at least since December 2008. Loukanikos had a reputation of being fearless, usually being in front of the protests and having tear gas thrown at him multiple times. He was active throughout all Greek protests and often leading the protesters towards the police. Initially a stray, he moved from building to building, but was said to have preferred to be on the streets. He was groomed and cared for by multiple left-wing organizations.

Good Dog

The UAP phenomenon implies the existence of a superhuman authority that humans must submit to. By appealing to this authority, whether directly or by allowing the subject to suppose such an arrangement must exist, human power structures are able to reclaim the theological principle of a will and aims beyond human understanding. In doing so, all acts of inhumane violence, elite tomfoolery, and evidence for the invalidity of moral and ethical justifications for enshrining power in our existing institutions become handwaveable and invite the subject to these acts and arrangements to engage in the storytelling aspect of social mythmaking that is starkly lacking in the post modern global secular state order. - Any_Pilot6455 on the truanon sub.

So, in regards to the explanation for this UFO shit being "the military wants more money", I kept going "but the military can get all the money it wants, without making up nonsense about aliens".

... but I didn't consider a nascent desire for the ruling class to bring back a hightened religious fervor, as an opiate for the masses. In this God is Dead world, where even the overtly religious don't sound convinced of their beliefs, the ruling class needs human beings to stop thinking that human beings are in charge of human beings.

They need a new God to blame for everything.

Capitalists would much rather we blame aliens for our miseries instead of capitalists.

The ruling class would much rather have us believe they're just as powerless in the face of an omnipresent God-Thing / Alien-Thing, then to believe they - the wealthy and powerful humans - really are in charge, and that our miseries are the result of their choices and actions / inactions.

So much of our government and economy revolves around offloading responsibility for bad things. One party can blame the other party, one branch of govt can blame another branch, the feds can blame the states, the states can blame the feds, ceo's can blame weak regulations, regulators can blame voters, voters can blame non voters. How nice it would be for the people in charge if we all just collectively blamed aliens, while simultaneously assuming there's nothing we can do about it.

more or less

Very helpful. 🍑

Link to part 1 is near the top.

I didn't think I could have less faith in the US, in terms of it being a country instead of literally just a bunch of rich psychopaths making shit up and killing people for money.

I was wrong. I was so wrong.

Similarly, the US economy is so highly financialised that nearly half of the stated GDP consists merely of book entries transferring money from one account to another, not in any way comparable to the real production of manufacturing or the provision of real services. When we remove the financialisation aspects from the accounts, the US real GDP is reduced by nearly 50% and the national per-capita income falls to about $15,000.

From the above, you can see that the size of a nation’s GDP can be largely irrelevant to the wealth and prosperity of that nation, and that comparing nations on GDP is fraught with difficulties and arguments. GDP used to be a simple measure of goods and services produced in a nation, and was probably an accurate indicator at some point in the past, but it gradually became a way to record the score in a game of ‘mine is bigger than yours’. So, in addition to the real issues outlined above, we also have the US constantly trying to move the goalposts to increase its score by finding ever more creative ways to boost the GDP numbers.

One clever trick by the US government is something called “imputed rent”, which means that if you own a house the government adds to the GDP the amount you would have had to pay in rent (but didn’t), on the mind-twisting basis that if you didn’t own that house you would have had to pay this rent. This one item alone added about $1.6 trillion, or 15% to the US GDP. Also, GDP is adjusted (downward) for inflation so, as you will see in a moment, the US badly understates its annual inflation rate which automatically inflates its GDP by about another $2.3 trillion, or about 20%. These two items alone mean the US GDP is falsely and artificially inflated by about 35%.

It's all fake. The longer you read the article, the more sanity points you lose. Absolutely everything economists pretend to be experts on: GDP, Per Capita Incomes, Inflation - it's all fucking made up. Absolute quackery. Absolute hokum. Absolute snake oil.

Every economist is a lying priest making shit up as they go along, all to explain why the God they call The Market has decided to punish you with poverty and reward absolute parasites with wealth.