> The COVID-19 pandemic showed East Asia to be the best place to put key elements of the supply chain. ... Importantly, authorities see it as vital to enable the gathering of many people together in crowded spaces. ... Because of this, you cannot simply send everyone home forever. Meanwhile, the 25M people of Shanghai are approaching their third month of complete welded-apartment-door level lockdown.
The End of Industrial Society
171–180 of 203 posts
Re: The End of Industrial Society
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jonah Bennett goes deep down the anti-semitic neoreactionary rabbit hole [1]. Interesting how Peter Thiel keeps funding these types of people [2]. [1] https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation... [2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
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Re: The End of Industrial Society
#173Re: The End of Industrial Society
#174Palladium magazine was founded by Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett. It is funded by Peter Thiel. Jonah Bennett previously worked at The Daily Caller and he resigned from Palladium when it was discovered he had authored some racist messages and was friends with various white nationalists. Samo Burja, the author, is undoubtedly a more serious and educated person. However, he promotes a “Great Founder Theory” which is not so…
Also worth pointing out that Samo Burja spent about a month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine insisting that everyone was underestimating the Russian military and that they would take Ukraine in a rout. Public intellectuals need to be constantly judged and re-evaluated in the light of their actual predictive capacity. Burja certainly presents as an intelligent person, but since I’ve been paying attention to him…
Re: The End of Industrial Society
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best solution for people proposing autocratic solutions is to give them exactly what they want, good and hard. (Of course the collateral damage to innocent people is not worth it.)
America + Europe have been getting Democracy! good and hard for quite a while, time to shake things up
Re: The End of Industrial Society
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s uncomfortable for the Thiel-funded new right movement that their dream state is essentially realized in present-day Russia, and they’re not able to explain how their ideas would lead to a different outcome. Protectionist policies, focus on national identity, celebration of traditional values and gender roles; a “national CEO” whose transformative powers transcend the slow, frustrating democratic machinery. This…
> It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged That's silly. Canada is the loyalist colony. They are still part of the Commonwealth. If Theil is a monarchist, then surely Cana…
Re: The End of Industrial Society
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
? The history of aristocracy is about amplifying perception of power. Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are. The stage elaborate public things to legitimize their power. The Pharaohs themselves lived an entirely 'stage performed' existence to convince the plebes of their ostensible legitimacy. There are 'other groups' with power, whereupon the public knowledge of their influence w…
> Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are. This is only true in a limited sense. The single most important justification for the King's power has been his divine right: a doctrine of preordained power that no earthly force can usurp. This works pretty well on illiterate peasants who fear divine retribution, but the cat is more or less out of the bag on that front. And note: that is…
This is largely why the French Revolution was so vehemently opposed by foreign leaders and why they tried almost everything to get another king on the throne in France or to destroy it trying. It was a living, breathing, functioning and preferable alternative to monarchy. If not clamped down upon it was only a matter of time until it spread.
Re: The End of Industrial Society
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
has Thiel ever specifically claimed to be a monarchist? not that I'm aware of - but he has close ties with Curtis Yarvin who is a technocratic monarchist, has explicitly expressed anti-democratic sentiment, and hangs around in a mixed crowd of paleolibertarians (a system which leads directly to the sort of hyper-capitalist corporate monarchies Yarvin yearns for) and crypto-fascists like Trump. His behaviour, the comp…
"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron." Which he clarified this way after so much outrage. "It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. Wh…
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.
This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.
It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.
Re: The End of Industrial Society
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any source for Thiel being a fascist?
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Re: The End of Industrial Society
#180He lost me here. I've (recently, and this is strictly my point of view) become of the opinion that the only true lasting civilizations are the East (mainly China) and the West (The Ruhr area being its center). Civilizations have sprung on the shadow of these two giants but they were mercantile: The Roman Empire, The Islamic Khalifs, Portuguese traders, the USA are all civilizations relying on linking East and West. These two areas of the world had two things in common: 1. Lots of people, and 2. they were industrial.
They produced stuff and they needed to trade. The journey to trading between these two was so profitable that it enabled the financing of whole civilizations which claimed the titles. There are little signs that this order will change. These two areas go through their ups and downs but seems to bounce regularly (World War 2, China civil war, Japan, etc..) to reclaim their status.
Offshoring, so far, has only kicked off an internal market in China. Most countries who are doing offshore industrial jobs still rely on the motherland for technology, organization and development. The US seemed promising on the East coast (the most Western part of the US?) but it didn't last that long.
Of course this doesn't address a post-industrial world: There are no guarantees that these two areas will remain the dominant ones. But my guess is that it'll be the case like it has historically been.