Automation denial is very similar to climate change denial.

It may not be a depression though. Political extremism is a very likely response. The rise in populism, trump Brexit etc is quite likely fuelled in part by the leading edge of the problem.

How to shake hands with a midget that you love,respect,worship and fear 101

not very vigorous handshaking from putin

prolly cos he knows where that hand has been

How did the trump putin handshake go? Did he try his macho bull**** on a true psychopath?

Edit: just watched a video but it cut a split second before the trump jerk would have taken place.

I still don't understand how it's legal for Trump to ignore multiple ongoing national security breaches from Russia when it's clearly because they benefit him personally. And there's no accountability at any degree of this (min) complacency or (max) abetting??

Like, Trump could watch Putin murder citizens and cheer him on because the victims were black Democrats, and he wouldn't be responsible for any of it? Does not compute.

We could literally be held hostage and taken over within months, without any murdering at all. Matter of fact, probably without even breaking a single law.

The executive branch enforces the law. If it doesn't, then congress is supposed to be a check on the executive branch. Good luck with that.

If Trump stands by and claps & laughs over a foreign leader breaking laws though? Sounds criminal at some point, depending on the details and severity. But I don't think it is.

It just seems really problematic. The current situation isn't sustainable as long as Trump doesn't "become" POTUS, and Putin doesn't de-escalate his US attacks (propaganda, bots, nuclear power plant hacks, threats & extortion, 2018/2020 election bombs).

I have no idea what we can do regardless of what they say happened at the TrumPutin meeting today. Trump may try to put it to bed by saying he brought up the election and Putin said "Nope, wasn't us", which he believed to be true.

While it's true that finance capitalism in the late 30s wasn't quite where it is today, it had no problem with Nazis. IBM happily sold machines to count the number of consumers being incinerated and international banks had no problem with their deposits.

We're pawns in a game between the market forces that want us to be powerless, complacent consumers for the benefit of the 0.1% and the market forces that want us to be crushed under a dystopian boot for the benefit if the 0.1%.

Amazon or Lockheed, which do you choose? It doesn't matter because JP Morgan Chase wins either way.

I think the notion that the ultimately the optimal solution that markets will create is a world full of middle class consumers should be called Utopian Capitalism, if it isn't already. Forgetting future growth of automation, the singularity, environmental destruction and letting capitalism run forever I don't see why it's clear that it settles in the "Utopia" where everyone is a consumer as oppossed to the what it has from slavery through colonization and neo-liberal imperialism where there's some balance of people who are consumers and some who are, essentially or literally, industrial property.

The invisible hand is value neutral. It's just natural selection applied to transactions. It optimises oppression if oppression is the flavour of the day. It needs 2 visible hands to keep it in check.

Well yeah, but he wasn't driving a tank.

It still appears that Trump is cowering to Putin at every turn. Meantime, Mueller and company quietly toil on their investigation. There's gotta be a there there.

No question that people are amoral, or immoral, and will continue to trade with and do business in bad regimes.

But capital flight from Nazi Germany was a real thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Flight_Tax

Germany had to create a big tax to prevent it, because it was common. Obviously of Jews and the persecuted fleeing and trying to take their money. But some businesses and other wealthy as well, who saw the writing on the wall and didn't want to pay for total war and Germany rearmament. In addition, the Germans lost money/assets AND human capital (e.g., Germany lots of smart people, like Einstein).

And the Nazis and their funders and business partners had to launder tons of money through Switzerland to get the transactions done, partly because the statutory environment in the rest of the west made (eventually) investments in Germany illegal.

None of that is to celebrate the inherent morality of capitalism, but simply that:

1. lots of people and capital did flee Germany
2. it was harder for people to invest in Germany due to popular and legislative pressure outside of Germany

Capital is like water and found its way in and out of Germany but it wasn't a free trade free-for-all the way the modern economy is. And that's partly because of the aggression and brutality that was part and parcel of a fascist regime, lots of people did lose the appetite to trade with them. And lots of people and money fled. The markets still functioned in Germany through most of the war, but the environment was harder and certainly not ideal for capital.

No question, though, on perhaps the larger point: capitalists would much rather deal with fascists than socialists.

Well I guess Canada would have the same amount of problems as, say, Australia or Columbia. What exactly they'd be is unknown, but it's a pretty big leap to just assume that the Nazis or Soviets could just waltz in and occupy all of North America. Of course if they developed nukes around that time then maybe it would be a lot different, but had that happened you'd assume that the more likely scenario is that they destroyed each other first. If us Canucks won the nuclear race instead that would be another thing that would also make the whole thing moot.

Anyways, one could also make a credible case that without a USA in existence WWII never would have happened in the first place, so there's that too. Hitler may have lived out his days as a disaffected Austrian coal miner or something.

Yeah, a lot of people on TV have been saying Trump won't pin the election hacking on Russia because it delegitimatizes his win, and they're saying it like it's fact.

The truth is, however, he's much more likely to be owned by Russia. Not just because of his overall favoritism towards Putin in general, but because Trump would be denying ALL 2016 election interference and not just Russia's. No?

@dvaut re Nazis

The sanctions weren't driven by market capitalism though. They were imposed on it by an independent civil society.

The indifference of capital to human suffering is obvious. Two relevant questions though:

Do market economies have any inherent power and tendency to resist fascism?

Do market economies actually move society towards the Western Civ values of universal education, suffrage, civil liberty etc? Or, is stratification of society along those lines as well as in terms of wealth the beacon we're drawn towards?

Yes. The Putin praise seems to predate the election by quite some time. And the whole "wouldn't it be great if we got along with Russia" thing seems to be an issue that is separate from the election itself. I think the unusual devotion from Trump to Russia has more to do with money and political favors (like dropping sanctions etc) than it does with the election itself, although that's still a part of it.

We should drop this obviously, but I can't help saying it's impossible for the Cunucks to have won the nuclear race. You could build one now for sure, but we had 100000 people working on it in facilities across the US.

An underrated part of American exceptionalism is that among the wealthier countries per capita we have by far the largest population.

Sort of related to this, but more about the Democrats and the stock market is this good piece about how Democrats thought the stock market was going to tank when Trump won the Presidency but it turned out the stock market went up and the Democratic befuddlement because they envision themselves as careful stewards of the economy and thought capital would punish Trump for not being a careful steward


https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/201...tegy-economics

Huehue,

They're all a bunch of Once-lers.

Guys,

Mueller's got this, right?

But tons of the populist, derpy right adore Putin and have for some time. Here's me in 2015:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...php?p=47701328

Why do we need convoluted explanations when simple ones suffice? You could easily predict Trump's Putin fetish if you simply assumed Trump is a fan of right-wing chainmail and cable news fanfic, which he is.

KISS method: Trump adores Putin because Putin in an authoritarian that signals a bunch of masculine virtues and Trump is a wannabe authoritarian at the head of a faux masculinity cult.

Okay, I read it. I don't agree with 100% of it, but most of it seems pretty much right. There is definitely a strong sexist contingent within the alt-right.

Again, I think our difference is much more about what the threshold is for answering the Fascism questions with a yes for America as a whole. If I were answering the question for just the alt-right I would absolutely have gone with yes.

I would never characterize the alt-right as a weak group because, as you say, they wield significant power at this time but I would still argue that they represent a minority of America.

Haha all your recent posts were good but this one is great.