Right, so the quantum field model is designed to solve the assymetry paradox, but it’s just unconfirmed speculation. It’s a hypothesis, barely a theory, not a law. It’s discussed honestly for the most part, unlike the way orthodox economics discusses supply & demand. Just because you can find something roughly analogous in a hard science doesn’t make the problem substantively the same.

And do you really think supply & demand isn’t taught as a law? We hear the phrase “the law of supply & demand” bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?

And you actually think housing speculation doesn’t happen on a wide scale? Like… what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you’re denying that housing speculation is real?

https://www.urban.com.au/expert-insights/property-speculation-to-continue-boom-but-will-a-bust-follow
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26457/w26457.pdf

The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble. I really don’t understand where you get off saying speculation isn’t a thing.

Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.

Here’s a quote that confirms what I just told you:

Even more disturbing are the figures comparing vacant homes to the homeless population of a given country. While Canada ranks lower on this list at 13, it is still not a ranking that we should be proud of at all. It would take just 9% of the over 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada to give every homeless person in the country a place to live.

Like sure, there might be a housing shortage in the market but not in reality. In reality it’s a hoarding problem. We know from the pandemic that governments could house everyone if they simply made it a policy priority, but they don’t.

And as for the “lab politics” of economics, I’m glad you’ve been able to see that issue, and I think that’s a good term for it. The lab politics doesn’t come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.

Social sciences are a little different, usually capital can kind of just ignore the policies proposed by social scientists, even if they can cause minor problems for them.

For economics though, when someone like Marx comes along and points out that capitalists are stealing value from the working class and that working class can unite to overthrow their oppressors because in reality those oppressors create nothing and they depend on us, then that has real teeth. That causes problems, of the revolutionary variety. The ruling class has to respond to that, so they will use their influence to fund think tanks, sponsor economics departments that are friendly to them and torpedo institutions that say things they don’t like.

Richard Wolff talks about this:

Sure. I’m a product of the elite top of the American university system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford in California to get my master’s degree. And then I went to Yale to get my Ph.D. So, by the normal standards of this profession, I’m the elite product of these institutions.

I was always struck that as I went through these schools, studying history, politics, economics, sociology—the things that intrigued me—I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx. And I remember telling that to my father, who looked in stunned disbelief at the very possibility that an educated person going to such august universities would not be required to at least read people who are critical of the society, simply as a notion of proper education.

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/25/watch_extended_interview_with_economist_richard_wolff_on_how_marxism_influences_his_work

Just like kings used to, they have raised up their own class of priests to proclaim to the commoners that their power and wealth is justified and good, and we should all bow to their blessed interpretation of the mystical movements of the market. That’s why they don’t do science, and they quibble on the minutiae of the interpretations of long-dead texts, just like the priesthood did, because they can’t work in the realm of science, because it would destroy their entire project.

My point about convexity being a handily-written escape clause was not to say that economists invented it out of whole-cloth, it’s to point out that it’s tautological. It’s basically saying, “Prices follow our law in all of the cases where they follow our law.” So it’s not a law then, is it? It’s an observation of extremely limited utility that just so happens to provide a justifying narrative: “our law says the market will be stable,” when we see the absolute opposite in many places.

And if you feel like you’ve seen it in person, then again the data should exist. Again I’d say if you’re saying this is an example of the effect, without seeing the data, then you’re admitting out loud that you are just confirming your own preconcieved ideas rather than seeing any real evidence. These are statements of faith, not science. Orthodox economists would be proud.

I’m not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times. That’s literally what the concept entails. It’s analogous to supply & demand in that the graphs are merely illustrative and it is only applicable in very specific situations. The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.

As for the “don’t try to time the market” advice, if you’re right about that then someone should tell all the real estate speculators that are leaving extremely expensive real estate empty because they can’t rent it out and don’t want to sell at a low price. It would help our housing shortage immensely. Either they don’t exist, or your story about that isn’t complete.

I don’t need you to look into Australia - price cycles and boom-bust cycles are well-documented economic phenomena. I linked an Australian case because I’m familiar with it.

And to the extent that other sciences engage in politics over actual science, they are also being unscientific. However I’ve never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an “orthodox” school, except in economics. It’s the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.

Cooking up charges and rigging a court case specifically to take you down is a different level of hate though.

Oh arrested? Wow, only guilty people are arrested by states led by their fascist political rivals. If he’s arrested, he must be guilty. That’s how justice works.

You could’ve said “convicted”, but that was annulled and a UN human rights committee found that:

The committee concluded that prosecutors and the lead judge in the investigation, Sergio Moro, showed bias in Lula’s case, violating his right to be presumed innocent.

I’m not a fan of politicians in general, but I’d take these charges more seriously if the people prosecuting them weren’t so flagrantly politically motivated and breaking the rules. Presumably the reason he was tried in the wrong court was because the state was shopping for a judge that wouldn’t give him a fair trial. If he’s that guilty, they’ve muddied the waters by not actually caring about his guilt, and it’s going to be way harder to get anything to stick anymore. Like they were in charge of the whole fucking country, how were they this bad at persecuting him?

What I do know is that when a fascist like Bolsonaro is that mad at you, you might actually be doing something right.

Okay, thank you for the information about econometrics, but the economics that goes from data to model tends to be heterodox, not orthodox. Occasionally orthodox economists will accidentally do real science and they usually don’t like what they see.

My question was about why you don’t see the data being presented when being taught about supply and demand, and you basically answered it by saying that the data isn’t there. Now, I see your point that the prices tend to be relatively stable and so the data doesn’t extend beyond these short line slopes, but then why are we told that supply & demand “sets prices” when there is no evidence of, for instance, a shock to the system upsetting prices which then follow a standard supply & demand curve to restabilise?

Well, because such a situation would not be “convex”, so economics has written an escape clause for this phenomenon whereby it can avoid ever making any real predictions about what the market will do in a situation that isn’t already “stabilised”.

And also, if it’s just short line segments, why is it fashionable to use a curve that implies more data than exists? Again, I would say that it is to ape the aesthetics of science without actually doing it.

And it’s very strange that you turn to your personal anecdotal experience to say that you’ve “seen supply & demand play out”. If that were true, then you should be able to gather the data and present it. The fact that data doesn’t exist should tell you that you are probably using confirmation bias to evaluate your personal experiences.

For instance, the housing market is something where ideally there would be very inflexible demand, because people don’t need more than one bed, typically. The reason the demand is flexible is because there are in reality two markets in the same space. The first market is the people who want housing to actually live in, and the second are landlords that hoard housing, speculate and leverage assets against loans and so on. The landlord market is responsible for both the short housing supply and high price, because they would often rather keep housing scarce and drive up rents, and speculate against one another than put their property back out on the market to go to a competitor. Selling a property you can’t rent out is a pretty bad financial decision, you’re better off waiting until the housing market flips and it becomes a seller’s market again. If a financialised housing market didn’t exist, housing would be much cheaper and homelessness would be much, much less.

The reality of all markets is that they are subject to boom & bust cycles which supply & demand cannot account for. Housing in particular is notorious for huge bubbles that burst spectacularly.

Here’s an example from a government consumer watchdog in Australia: https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/petrol-and-fuel/petrol-price-cycles-in-major-cities

Here’s the really damning sentence:

Petrol price cycles are the result of pricing policies of petrol retailers and not from changes in the wholesale cost of fuel.

They straight up say that it is not about supply & demand.

Here’s the heterodox explanation of this phenomenon: the Supply Chain Theory of Inflation

EDIT: Actually this is a separate phenomenon, but it does emphasise how prices are set by sellers, and not by supply and demand. Wherever a seller can get away with changing their prices, like for instance in petrol sales, they will, but then it follows boom-bust, not supply-demand.

And this is where the authors of that article talk about how orthodox economics institutions will launder heterodox theories. The point of doing this would be to maintain their prestigious position as the arbiter of all economics knowledge, as a result of which any damage such information might do to existing insitutions can be dampened by orthodox economists putting their own spin on the information. If they never acknowledge where the theory comes from, they get to rewrite it however they want. That’s distinctly unscientific.

Okay, so I think we’re largely in agreement except for a little misunderstanding. I’m glad because that means you might be a little more receptive to some of the stuff I might share. I have more links but I’m writing this novella on my phone if you can believe it. I’ll share them later.

My criticism about the professional class being paid by the owning class to justify their wealth was specifically about orthodox economics, like the Chicago School who would literally construct studies to justify whatever you wanted if you paid for it. The yardsale model - that’s a great link by the way, the graph that emerges perfectly mirrors our actual economy - is an example of heterodox economics, which largely stands in opposition to orthodox economics. The opener to that page is very well written. It’ll do a better job than me.

Now, for an example of how completely divorced from reality orthodox economics is, the market convexity concept is perfect. The exceptions you mentioned about veblen and giffen goods aren’t the main problem with convexity. The simple problem of inelastic demand is a much bigger problem. This is all couched in extremely obfuscating language, those articles are impenetrable to anyone who isn’t steeped in economics language.

I assume you know what inelasticity is, it’s something for which demand doesn’t change with price, for instance things like shelter or food. So, to demystify the language, another term for “inelastic demand” is “need”. Basically, if you read between the lines even slightly, the founding, econ 101, highschool level principle of orthodox economics has been forced to admit that it doesn’t work for anything anybody actually needs. And then they go on insisting that this principle should govern our entire society. Got to keep that yardsale going.

Market convexity is an amalgamation of post-hoc justifications for why supply & demand is so hard to find in the real world. When I mentioned the perfectly straight, bisecting, perpendicular lines graph, you admitted that was just an illustration, and I agree, it is a doodle. I know it’s now in vogue to use slightly curved lines, but that’s just because economists are aware of how ridiculous the first illustration was and they put in just the slightest amount of extra effort to hide it.

When I’m asking for the science, let me ask you this: what data constructs the graph? Where did it originate? This is the question I’ve never had answered. Just literally the graph appearing in real world data, just one time.

See, when actual sciences want to “illustrate” a concept, sometimes they idealise, but they almost always have real data and real graphs to show. Their idealised lines pass through data points with error bars. Scientists work hard for their data, and they always, always show it off. Stress-strain curves, electron microscope images, star life-cycle data, red-shifting, animal population surveys, and on and on. Real data is complex and interesting and beautiful and scientists will show you their cool slide and say “you can see such-and-such feature here and this indicates…”, it’s great.

I have looked for the supply & demand version of this and can find nothing but hand-waving excuses.

Also, the convexity article talks about the Nobel Prize in Economics, which is wrongly named. It is the Nobel Memorial Prize. It was named after Nobel, because it’s not a Nobel prize, because the Nobel prize committee rejected the economics category because it isn’t a real science. Some Swiss bank then financed the wish.com version Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

I suspect this isn’t so hard for you to accept since you’ve already come so far in your understanding of heterodox economics. You still seem to have some respect for the orthodox schools, which is strange when you understand so much of where they have led us.

As for the Epstein thing, I don’t have any reason to believe that anything has changed. We know Epstein was part of the trafficking of minors, and absent any evidence about the state of that practice, the idea that removing two people from the network actually fundamentally altered anything seems hopelessly naive. I think the burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to claim the practice has been abolished.

Which dictator do you mean? The democracy movement and the June struggle was in 1987, 10 years before the general strike.

Also, neoliberal capitalism is very, very happy with right wing dictators because they love oppressing workers and lowering wages. Just look at Pinochet in Chile.

And again the June struggle was won by popular struggle, not market forces. The idea that the unions supported the dictator is a weird one too. Like, where are you getting that, and is there any evidence they weren’t just yellow unions approved by the dictator?

Even then I don’t know why you brought those things up. You just added a bunch of details and I guess assumed those details - some of which were very wrong - were somehow in support of some point, but you didn’t say what that point is.

And I don’t know why you think I’m talking about industrialisation when I talk about workers improving their lives. That is not at all what I’m talking about. And industrialisation isn’t a capitalist thing, they just happen to coincide in human history. We don’t have alternative Earths to test the idea, so crediting the gains of industrialisation to the market and capitalism is weird. You just put that out there completely unsupported.

That’s another thing neoliberal economists love to do, just blame all the problems of capitalism on unions and regulations, and credit every good thing that happens on the glorious invisible hand.

And since you understand a good amount of economics, perhaps you can tell me what is the scientific basis of supply & demand for instance? I’ve looked for this information and had people try to show me, but they’ve never actually shown it. It’s a fundamental part of economics so I’m told. What is the science behind it? The perfectly straight, perpendicular bisecting lines on an unscaled graph do not suggest any scientific basis to me, they suggest the aesthetics of science devoid of its substance. If you could disabuse me of this notion then perhaps I could move on from my current woeful ignorance on the matter.

And finally, you don’t think there’s any conspiracy around Epstein, fine. I bet it’s easy to maintain that idea when you just ignore all the evidence I gave you.

They don’t have to choose, they have the power to make Aussie politicians bend the knee, and everyone knows it. That’s what they’re afraid of.

Land acknowledgements devoid of teeth are common, where someone flaccidly admits that Indigenous people exist and have some unspecified connection to the land, not where someone actually states out loud the crimes that put their opera house on that land.

This was a good acknowledgement that actually implicates the current ruling class. That’s why they cancelled him.

Edit: he actually went on to say more, but I stand by the fact that this wasnt just a standard acknowledgement.

It’s fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. That’s literally the place I had in mind when I talked about the working class organising to better their lives. They have deeply militant unions.

You know they had an honest to goodness general strike in 1997, right? And that they were specifically striking over laws that would legalise strikebreaking? That’s going to have a tectonic effect on the quality of life of workers in general. They fought hard for their pay increases and got them. That’s not attributable to market forces. Striking is literally a breakdown in market behaviour, where the bosses have squeezed so hard and so unfairly that the workers have to withdraw their labour in order to get what they need.

And every single worker’s benefit we enjoy today was a function of labour activism. 8 hour days, the weekend, child labour laws, OSHA, I could go on. And all of those benefits are actively fought against by the ruling class because they erode their power over us and raise our wages.

Also, orthodox economics is basically the managerial class being funded by the owning class to come up with post-hoc justifications for why they should keep their wealth. It’s not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.

Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent goes into this in some detail, about the forces that act to ensure that the dominant media narrative caters to the ruling class on all levels, and he has talked extensively on how this process works in academia as well. I forget if the academic discussion is a large part of the documentary, but it’s well worth watching anyway. It’s free on youtube: https://youtu.be/BQXsPU25B60

Also… if you really think the Epstein network was just two or three people… I mean wow. You know authorities seized a bunch of blackmail from his island, video of rich people with kids, and it has never surfaced since? Those same authorities ruled his death a suicide, because they’re doing their best, honest, but they just can’t seem to find that missing collective brain cell that would let them figure out the blindingly obvious. Was that the one guy arranging that too?

I’m not saying the ultra wealthy run the network themselves, that’s what I’ve literally been saying they don’t do. The difference is if they got caught actually doing the deed, if would be a very different matter, because you physically cannot do that via proxy. That’s how the blackmail can exist, and why it was covered up.

Oh and to answer your question about who their drug dealers are, they have middlemen for that as well. Personal assistants who are on call for anything the client needs, who will readily break the law rather than disappoint a client, and whose instructions are generally vague enough that any legal risk falls on the assistant. Again: diffusion of responsibllity.

Don’t kid yourself, the society of the wealthy and powerful is rotten to the core, just as it was in the days of monarchy. They just have better cover for it nowadays. It’s no longer the divine right of kings, but the invisible hand of the market.

I think our disagreement here is pretty narrow, about how covert the coverup really is. But when you say you “have a pretty good picture of how it works,” I have to ask if you know anything about who is currently supplying children for the ultra-wealthy’s sexual entertainment. If you don’t know, if it’s not generally known, then I think that means there is a covert network that does its best to stay hidden.

If you think that’s somehow no longer happening any more, then I think you really don’t understand how the world works. People like that do not give up their indulgences easily.

You may simply think I’m ascribing more planning and coordination than I really am, and that would just be a miscommunication. However, I do think there are definitely some small number of people who put a lot of thought into how to get away with this, and they’ve largely succeeded for decades.

A journalist could get to the bottom of the coltan mining trade and expose one chain there, but how do you think they’d fare exposing the latest Epstein-style network? Do you think they’d live through it?

Honestly even that’s ambitious.

Yeah, that’s true, but my point was even in the worst-case scenario that consequences really did happen to someone, it would be a middleman, and that’s by design. Epstein was no different in that respect.

Sure, it scares them, but do they really viscerally believe it’s not just a thing on TV?

There was a guy on some news network around 2020 when people were panicking about Bernie Sanders and his nefarious communist plot to destroy America, and one guy was talking about how there was a time when he was really scared the communists would come in and kill all the rich people and he might’ve been one of those people strung up in Times Square. He certainly sounded terrified to me. Like I’m sure it was partly crocodile tears, but also you don’t pull that story from nowhere. That’s obviously something he thinks about.

I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m always actively terrified of being hit by a train, but I take steps to avoid it. That’s what I mean - they know it’s a threat.

If you want poor countries to get on the development path, this is the deal basically, and slavery and other awful things tend to slip in along with that.

This is tangential, but it’s my biggest issue with what you’ve said. Poor countries all over the globe are made and kept poor by colonialism which rolled into modern capitalist imperialism. Africa in particular has been particularly brutally invaded, pillaged and oppressed for centuries. The most recent mechanisms by which this is done have been the World Bank and the IMF sucking them into predatory loans with structural adjustment policies that are calculated to keep them poor and strip them of vital infrastructure.

The cheap labour isn’t some natural transitional state between “undeveloped” and “developed”. It is an imposed condition, and the only time such countries “develop” and improve their station is when the working class organises and forces change to happen. It is never handed down from above or a natural outworking of wealth flowing in from the market. The market is structured to ensure that any wealth that flows in from the exploitation of cheap labour is kept in the hands of a few and siphoned back out as quickly as possible.

This is very similar to the way that the working class is kept in a state of poverty by capitalists within their own countries, and oppressed by the state and the legal system. This is the situation that allows wealthy people to prey upon the children of poorer people with relative immunity. The girls are often plied with money, and if they do go to the police, what do they say? “Trump raped me on Epstein’s private jet?” The cops won’t touch that, and the wealthy know they won’t touch it. We know it because that testimony exists and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Even if a detective took the case, he’d wind up at the bottom of a river before too long.

I’m not saying this is a “conspiracy” in the sense that this entire situation is engineered just to get young girls, it’s evolved over centuries to maintain power, and the powerful will take advantage of it every way they can.

Yes, it is a lottery, but within their ranks there are those accepted as “one of them” and those considered “nouveau riche”. If you look at that article I linked, he was a teacher at a prep school who lied about his qualifications, drank with the students and walked around the halls with a fur coat and gold chains with his shirts hanging open. Regardless of his family’s wealth - it doesn’t sound like it was that much - he was being gauche. He was acting like the nouveau riche that the wealthy look down on. Most of the very wealthy are people you never hear of and that’s intentional; they stay out of the public eye because they’ve seen what happens to the rich & powerful when revolutions happen. They can’t stay totally hidden, but they prefer privacy.

And I’m not saying the wealthy acted as a united bloc to hire him and then dump him. I said “someone” might have done that. I’m sure it wasn’t all planned out by some shadowy group, but it’s pretty straightforward to imagine a strategy of deniability, where he buys his way into the inner circle by taking on all the risk and doing the dirty work of trafficking minors. He might have known that his head would be on the block if the network was ever compromised, but that would be a trade he was willing to make for access to billionaire-adjacent levels of wealth and a steady stream of underage girls.

And the idea that it was just Epstein and Maxwell doing all the dirty work by themselves is laughable. There was definitely a network in place to enable their work, and powerful people above them providing cover. The entire ruling class who they were buddy-buddy with were complicit to some extent. The idea that that network simply disappeared or dissolved when those two were arrested is also ridiculous. I would bet any amount of money that the network that trafficked those girls barely paused its operation. They hung out Maxwell to dry and buried Epstein, and they carried on doing what they do. Anyone in the network who acts a little too indiscreet can probably be hung out, but anyone being smart about operating a network like that would be recruiting people to act as middle men purely to provide a buffer and ensure they themselves don’t end up twisting in the wind. The fact that Epstein was crass and gauche makes him the perfect fall guy, because everyone goes, “Oh yeah, that guy, he was always a creep.”

And yes, somebody did a covert operation to kill Epstein. I can’t “prove” it either but there is no way that didn’t happen. Someone made the call and a small group would’ve carried it out. There are any number of people who would do that and ways to get it done. The wealthy have access to private armies who hire ex-intelligence operatives, they would have absolutely no trouble with it. You don’t need a huge conspiracy for that to happen, but the entire structure of capitalism relies on diffuse responsibility and layers of deniability. The ruling class don’t get their hands dirty as a rule.

So for instance Intel, Apple, NVidia, AMD and so on are profiting off of coltan mining in Africa, where child labour is rife and the death rate is prodigious. However, if the layers of bureaucracy, corruption, bribery and corporate shell games ever allowed someone to be held accountable for how many kids they fed into a meat grinder to get their precious metals, then the person who would go to prison would be a mine operator in Africa or maybe an executive who interfaced directly with the mines. It wouldn’t be the shareholders of the companies who are demanding the coltan.

That’s not a covert conspiracy, but the basic principle of putting middle-men in between you and the awful things you’re doing is still there, it’s a tried-and-true method.

Now, trafficking children so the wealthy can personally molest them is something that inherently cannot be diffused. Those individual people are doing the molesting. So that means this particular part of the operation does have to be covert. We know it’s covert because we mostly only have speculation about who was actively molesting and who was just given a ride on a private jet. We also know it’s covert because Epstein was killed to cover it up. We know for a fact that multiple former US presidents were on the list and they were rapey kinda guys, plus there is direct testimony of Trump forcibly raping a 13-year old if memory serves.

That’s sort of an open secret, but also there’s obviously a lot of it being hidden. Of course it’s being hidden. The wealthy are terrified of having their heads cut off. The extraordinary thing in this instance would be if there wasn’t a covert conspiracy.

Thing is they technically can be, but are they ever? Epstein wasn’t a billionaire, he was in the crowd but he was nouveau riche, not truly considered one of them. This kind of gatekeeping shows just how much the wealthy deliberately maintain the class gap.

And he was definitely a limited hangout: “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

It’s the phrase “while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case” that really describes what’s happening here.

That’s why he was killed - they couldn’t risk a high profile person like him talking. They hung out as much as they could afford, and with someone they didn’t really care about. It looked sus, but they really couldn’t afford more, so they just killed him.

In fact, he taught the wealthy’s children and was seen to flout the boundaries with students and the dress code. He was plucked from there to start rubbing shoulders with the ultra rich and trafficking children for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone noticed his indiscretions, and decided that they could extract him from that environment, keep their own kids safe, and ply him with wealth to start exploiting children professionally. Then, if the whole scheme ever came down, they had a ready made fall guy.

People like you make it harder to criticise the US for legitimate reasons.

Hell, “election monitoring” in South America is a pretty historically good reason to criticise them, but now anyone who wants to make this point has to grapple with being called a tankie, and we have to sit alongside statements like “the Soviets who brought a workers’ paradise”.

Gee, that might have happened if any functioning soviets actually survived the first couple of years of the USSR, and it hadn’t become a full-on counter-revolutionary state capitalist empire.

Edit: Actually looking at this person’s posts they appear to be sarcastic here. Sorry, but there are ways to do sarcasm that land, and this wasn’t it.

The media loves that tactic, we saw it the whole time with the BLM uprising.

Unfortunately you’re basically highlighting the reason that propaganda like this works: immediacy bias.

This story, and the idea of the video, of the woman being raped is immediately visible.

The historical context surrounding this story, and the political context of its dissemination, is not visible. All the stories that were neglected by the media that is cynically using this current story are not immediately in front of us.

It’s hard for people to step out of that immediate reaction because it feels like the story they just heard is happening in front of them. We’re not mentally built for a global news environment where news stories can be cherry picked for their desired impact.

It’s ironic that something called “immediacy bias” is being exploited by the media, when immediate literally means “without media”. Maybe in this case it should be called the immediacy illusion.

I honestly don’t know why anyone is strategising as if they’re on the same side as dems or any politician. I’m not even convinced we have a common enemy in Trump, because they don’t seem serious about beating him.

The question you should ask when voting is “Who is my preferred enemy?” Biden won’t abuse the carte blanche immunity from criminal prosecution? Great, sounds like he’s the weaker enemy, so vote for him. Force him to keep the position he clearly doesn’t want. Force him to disappoint his base for another four years.

While he’s doing that, get to work building alternatives that meet people’s needs from the bottom up and wean them off of this criminal system, to undermine it and prepare people to thrive as it crumbles.

The great thing about this political theory of change is that it’s the same regardless of who’s in power. It decouples you from the capricious, disempowering shifts of electoral politics.

If we’re not restricting their activities to regular incursions in their immediate neighbours then I think it’s fair to say the US has perpetrated more disastrous invasions in every continent on earth than any other. If you count proxy wars then it gets worse.

I assume you don’t know much about the US’s interference in Latin America.

Like China sucks, but they’re not wrong when they say the US is the most destabilising influence in world politics.