The world would be a better place if everyone in the US treated these bigots and freaks as heavy handedly as Chinese citizens do

This is very obviously aged-up. Cameron Diaz is 53 not 73.

I Saw The TV Glow

The EU disagrees with you after a thorough investigation.

Police investigating themselves inevitably find the people they are policing were in the wrong.

China has been giving its EV manufacturers massive state subsidies for a long time now

Chinese manufacturers benefit from the state investment in infrastructure and the at-cost production of utilities through SOEs. They produce professionals out of universities funded with state tax dollars who do not carry enormous personal debts. They have a large high speed transportation network that reduces delivery delays and mobilizes much of the idle workforce.

In any other country, we’d acknowledge this as capital investments in the economy at-large. In China, we pretend that this is some kind of unfair business advantage.

Before there was AI slop there was auto-tuned slop.

And it ultimately flopped. The market became saturated with a product that people associated with flat, tinny, overly-electronic music. People scrambled to get away from it, and we got a mini-folk revival with lots of acoustics and more traditional instrumentals as a result.

In the same way, we’re seeing a scramble to get away from AI music saturation. I don’t think it’ll ever go away (any more than auto-tune did). But it creates a demand for something distinctively not-AI as a result.

I’m starting a new Facebook group called “Arrest All The Pedophiles” and everyone should join and then you should buy my new crypto-coin called “ArrestThePedsCoin” which will put arresting pedophiles on the blockchain.

there’s nothing wrong with for example having tariffs on products that the manufacturing powerhouse china deliberately sell at a loss to gain monopolies

Chinese firms don’t sell at a loss. Western firms operate with oversized profit margins. The labor and materials that go into a Chinese EV or a solar panel or a plastic widget or steel girders are all globally commoditized. What separates Chinese exports from EU domestic products are rents. Enormous, economy-crippling rents.

And that’s what these tariffs seek to protect.

Germany certainly lacks planning that far ahead

Germany has plenty of economic planning. It’s just happening in the Zurich banking industry, not the Berlin parliament. The goal of German policy is to maximize profit per unit of labor, rather than value per unit of materials.

That Germans are revolting at the domestic plan stems from these strangling profit margins.

One of the primary appeals of early streaming platforms (first via MySpace and then later through services like Napster and Pandora) was the opportunity to explore outside your normie musical tastes. For folks who weren’t living in some major metroplex with an active indie music scene, this was a reliable way to find new music and get outside whatever your parents had on repeat in the car on the way to school.

The modern scene has exploited a desire for “newness” in the abstract and stuffed everyone’s feeds with AI slop. But there is still a demand for media broadcasts outside the ClearChannel “Top 3 Pop Songs on a Loop” and Oldie “Mandatory Metallica” stations that go beyond what you have already listened to.

How do you fill your local collection if you aren’t listening to stuff outside your local collection?

The solution to “falling behind China” is to close off our economy from the Chinese economy, isolate the Chinese economy from its neighbors, stir up violent opposition to Chinese government and policies both on its borders and within its interior, and accuse anyone doing business with China of abetting genocide and organ theft and Far-Left Communist ideologies.

If a country continues to do business with China, we will associate it with the crimes of the Chinese government in the same manner. Russia, Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, big chunks of the EU, I guess now Canada - all increasingly on the US shit-list for reasons tangential to the amount of business they’re doing with China.

Eventually, we will need to go to war with China (or, at least, launch a series of proxy wars all along the Chinese border that can bleed the country into bankruptcy). But for the time being, we will content ourselves to vilifying its leadership, sanctioning its trade, and picking fights with its regional allies.

And this will work, because it’s never not worked before now.

Trust The Plan.

40 is the new bankrupt

Looks at me brother. I am already in my mid-40s.

If you’re being turned down by the bank, it’s not because the bank is passing up an opportunity to make money in order to keep you from owning a home. It’s because their risk models say that if they give you the loan, they might not make money they think they’ll make more money loaning that cash to your landlord.

Banks fuck up all the time. They are not run by immaculate money wizards. The idea that you aren’t getting a house loan because you’re a big risk, but Sam Bankman-Fried secured $60B because FTX was a safe bet, hasn’t born out in practice.

They do show a heavy bias towards people who already have (or appear to have) a great deal of money. So that institutional bias fucks individual lenders over in the long run, while creating a great deal of financial risk at the top of the wealth pyramid.

History has a lot of failed socialist experiments

Every socialist experiment is the end result of a failed capitalist experiment. Often, a slew of failed capitalist experiments.

But that hardly matters in the here-and-now. We’re trapped in a brutal dictatorial police state governed by heartless sociopaths and their legions of dimwitted thugs. Trying to argue with ICE Agent Jonathan Ross over the finer points of economic policy won’t benefit you, because he’s paid very well to not listen and just keep firing.

Similarly, the pent up public desire for liberation, for democracy, and for a bit of social justice isn’t going to go away because you cooked up a spreadsheet showing the long term GDP of respective socialist and capitalist states. We’re well past the point of high minded academic bullshit.

all of its successes were hybrids with capitalism

Every successful socialist state has ended up having to do business with the prevailing global hegemony. Of course, you could say the same of the feudalists. Nobody got to ignore the knock-knock-knock of Theodore Roosevelt’s White Fleet a century ago and Trump’s US Navy hasn’t been any kinder in the modern day.

But in another hundred years? If China or India or Brazil become the prevailing global economic powerhouse, I have to wonder what hegemonic propaganda your great-grandkids are going to be regurgitating to justify their own status quo.

A lot of the conversation about public policy has degraded to “Listen to this bitch, she sounds so fucking dumb, who talks like that? A dumb bitch, that’s who” and “Shut up, you’re poor and you just want everyone else to be poor”.

FOX took a minute to evolve from its William F. Buckley / Milton Friedman style highly academic bullshit to its modern WWE-style punching a nerd in the dick on TV and calling them gay incarnation. As a result, the reactionary social media has largely displaced them among under-60 conservative ahem “thought-leaders”.

Me: No, it’s not. How is it different?

Well, for starters, my fire department and my road construction/maintenance are heavily privatized.

I have no gf

This checks out.

Most people support economic policies if they think they’re getting a net-benefit from them.

If you can deliver propaganda to convince them that they are economic losers - particularly by reviling the popular figureheads of those economic policies - they’ll sour on the policies quickly. You can see this in MAGA-world on a routine basis. Trumpies will quickly go out of pocket for some get rich investment scam, while foaming at the mouth against private businesses they’re told are unfairly raising prices.

The issue is almost never socialism v capitalism in the abstract. It is consistently “what’s in it for me?”, with one’s personal savviness and educational experience dictating where you break on the socialism/capitalism spectrum.

Everyone knows what Anarchy is. It’s when you run around in a big circle waving your arms and shouting “This is Anarchy!”

Also, “we’re abolishing hierarchies” is a very popular idea among people at the bottom of a hierarchy and very unpopular among people working their way up the ladder. That’s why younger people (especially high schoolers / college-aged types) and service-sector workers are quick to adopt it while the elderly and the professional class tend to revile it.

People like the commodity fetish because it removes the act of consuming from the process of sausage-making.

I don’t think there’s a superabundance of people who explicitly want to own slaves. Even when slavery was legal, you had a large and outspoken contingent of abolitionists who revolted at the intimate presence of slaves and slavery within their neighborhoods. Anti-slavery sentiment was what fueled the Northern effort to win the civil war.

At the same time, if you can disguise the mechanism of slavery and divorce the public by distance from the brutality of the institution, it is very easy to win tacit approval for the fruits of slave labor. This is particularly true when you’re selling commodity goods to an impoverished underclass.

Slavery as a function of imperialism wins consent of the governed by guaranteeing them a minimum standard of living that their foreign contemporaries lack. Slavery as an act imposed on the immediate population brings reflexive disgust and active opposition.

So let’s come up with a different name for it?

National Socialism has been very popular of late. Maybe we try that.