freagle

Stop psychologizing the present day oligarchs in a vacuum. It’s not about the government protecting anyone.

This is the definition of government.

The reason oligarchs don’t have an incentive to build private armies over the last several centuries is because competing with other oligarchs through warfare DESTROYS CAPITAL.

It’s not about protection. It’s about waste. It’s less wasteful to win Bezos yacht in court than it is to bomb it and sink it to the bottom of the sea.

it’s only a matter of time before these Oligarchs start building private Armies

Just to be clear, this is why governments exist. Not to stop people from building armies because it’s bad. But to avoid the waste that comes from economic competition becoming militarized.

Bezos and Musk both make more money by NOT engaging in warfare with each other. But if warfare between them would give them an edge, then the government is the structure they create with other capitalists to rejigger the incentives so that Tesla doesn’t start bombing Amazon.

Bombing is a waste of capital.

But of course there’s the corollary - if Musk and Bezos get richer not bombing each other, then they could probably get more richer if they joined forces and bombed other people.

And that’s what the US military and CIA do. They are the military arm of the capitalists, so there is no need for private militaries. The capitalists all get together and bomb people not part of their in-group as a way of making themselves richer.

If the people of the US manage to gum up the works and stop the military from maximizing profit for the capitalists, then the capitalists will form private militaries and coordinate them to maximize their profits by bombing people not in their in-group. Today that means periphery, 3rd world, and socialist countries. Tomorrow that could mean the technologists against the financialists.

The reason social democracy doesn’t work is because it doesn’t change the power structure. It’s treating a symptom and not the root cause. By leaving the root cause untouched, the symptoms will always come back.

The US runs NATO. The US decided to put Nazi officers in charge of NATO. The US came up with Operation Gladio. The US decided to expand NATO to undermine MAD and try to win nuclear war like psychopaths. The US got NATO to attack a bunch of countries not in Europe despite claiming it’s a European defense force. The US had NATO dropping Depleted Uranium in civilian areas in Yugoslavia in a so-called war for humanitarian reasons.

NATO is literally just an American nuclear military staffed with fascists and deployed in Europe with zero legal accountability, zero democratic accountability, and zero reason to exist other than to project US power in the region.

Europeans have zero fucking control over what happens.

You can’t really be serious. You think a few local elections have anything to do with Venezuela?

I got news for you. The USA has been attacking Venezuela since GWB was in office. Literally every president has done something against Venezuela since then. Most of it has been coup attempts and collective punishment to starve the Venezuelan people. But no one gives a shit because even Mamdani says shit like Venezuela is a dictatorship.

No, Americans are JUST fine with bloodshed as long as the president follows a narrative that makes the US look like heros.

Jesus. Blame the fucking genocidaires and the billionaire kid fuckers instead

Ukrainian independence and freedom is secured through negotiations. When Ukraine negotiates an end to the war and cedes territory, they still have independence and freedom. You are making up goal posts by saying that ceding land is an end to independence and freedom. It’s not. The end of independence and freedom would be Russia occupying Kiev. That is not in the cards. Russia will never occupy Kiev, they don’t have the resources for it. Instead, in the absence of a negotiated end to the conflict, Russia will bombard Kiev and the rest of Western Ukraine to destroy all infrastructure, all manufacturing, and all energy production. So Ukraine will be independent but destroyed entirely. The negotiation is to prevent such bombardment at the cost of the Russian speaking territories on the border with Russia and a legal guarantee that Ukraine will not allow foreign military bases that are hostile to Russia to establish themselves in Ukraine.

No. They have a massive incentive to keep infrastructure working, whereas the US can just let bridges collapse and never even bother rebuilding them because there is no incentives. The primary source of questions are from Western news media asking “but at what cost?”

Ravaged by opium addiction because the Europeans realized they could make huge profits by getting people addicted. Fun fact, when China decided they would ban opium Britain sent the war ships and bombed the fuck out of them and ripped entire cities away from China, put them under British rule, and gave all Europeans total immunity from Chinese law within those cities so they could be full blown hives of scum and villainy with official clearance by the crown.

Man, so interesting. Why do we have to pay those workers to build something that society needs? Is it because the workers need to eat? Why are the workers starving? Is it because the food they need is locked away in a hoard of wealth that only gets distributed by people who own the hoard? Why won’t they just feed people? Oh they only feed people if it means they’ll make a profit?

Hmm. How does a system this cruel stick around? What’s that? 90% of the wealth of the world is owned by a vanishingly small number of people who will only deign to feed people if it makes them a profit?

Man. Real “imperfection” you got there. I’m sure we can fix it with some reforms though once we learn more about economics…

Yes, exactly. Trump is trying. The Democrats instead say “oh no!! The Republicans are doing stuff! Voters, only you can save us!”

Meanwhile the Ds collaborate with the Rs to temporarily suspend the filibuster so they can pass a spending bill. Or they concede all leverage on empty promises that the Rs have been breaking for 30 years. Or they send their hopes and prayers and raise a fist on the steps of Congress but do abso-fucking-lutely nothing that materially changes the trajectory of the fascist wave.

But yes, blame the voters who can’t even afford health insurance in 2026 or who have been food insecure for years or who can’t buy homes or who have to pay 50% of their income in rent.

It’s the VOTERS who are to blame, of course.

Look at the POTUS today having “zero control” over local things and still actual effects on those local things, from education to AI regulations. Man, sure would love a POTUS that understood the kind of power they have even if it’s not official and use it to slow down the march to fascism.

But I guess voters should get out and vote for Democrats who openly state that they are totally powerless to stop fascism because of the rules.

The country has been run by insane lunatics who kill hundreds of thousands for decades. Read your history. Both parties are part of the death cult that is necrocapitalism and they oversee the death machine. Biden had toddlers in solitary confinement at the border. Obama killed so many people in drone strikes. Reagan oversaw arms smuggling and death squad deployments. Bush obviously did Iraq. Obama and Hilary did Libya. Biden oversaw Gaza going off.

Voters didn’t end USAID. Voters stayed home partly because they realized that no matter who they voted for the government was going to kill hundreds of thousands of people in their name anyway. That kind of government doesn’t deserve a popular mandate.

Man, such an interesting thing to do under a Democratic president who knew exactly what was going on and who was in office when the SCOTUS ruled that anything the president did while in office was legal. If only someone could have stopped those damn Republicans!

You blame the poorest working class people and not the party that spent a billion on their campaign and still couldn’t convince anyone they were worth voting for?

So someone outperformed the party on messaging? You mean the party spent its money incorrectly? You mean spending almost a billion dollars failed because of some “relentless messaging”?

Sounds like the party failed, again.

The party IS big money. The government IS big money. They didn’t chose. It’s structural. They literally cannot choose.

A party that is of the masses, by the masses, and for the masses is called a communist party.

And WHY DID PEOPLE STAY HOME?

I assure you that it is the party’s job to inspire people to vote and not the people’s job to inspire the party.

Spanish people are white.

Read about the origins of racism and race science. Racism, as we know it, was articulated about 650 years ago by a scholar in Portugal. We all live under that specific and concrete historical process of racism. It became entwined into every aspect of our lives over 600 years.

It’s not a surprise, it’s the water we swim in. It’s what we pushed onto the rest of the world.

Who am I being thankful toward? Who am I giving thanks to in this specific case?