511–520 of 839 posts
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Almost 10 years later and still no pitchforks?
A health insurance CEO was shot dead in the streets. It’s only one pitchfork but it’s still a pitchfork.
Middle manager from Minnesota scraping in at the very bottom of the 0.1% wealth line, in a system with power-law dynamics, is a high-profile mugging.
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I love the fact that the Democrats are considered 'left'. The US electorate has the choice between a right-wing free-market capitalist party, or the Republicans.
Left and right are always relative to a centre, and different in every country.
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> We are stumbling fools without systems and rules (organizations, institutions, laws, regulations, ...) to rely on. The wide masses yes - the 1% who is looking to profit immensely from the upcoming chaos not. DOGE is not about trimming government costs, it is about allowing the large companies to rip off the masses without repercussions (e.g. the planned demise of CFPB or OSHA/DoL) and it is about preparing the tran…
The rich are endangering their riches in this experiment. The pitch forks will have their field day eventually. 2014 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...
The history of modern revolutions is that the rich are fine. Hell, even in the French Revolution, most of the aristocracy fled with their lives and moveable riches. In the intervening centuries, mobility of both people and wealth has substantially increased.
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So, basically, left wing conspiracy theories? In reality, whether taxes fall or not likely depends on whether the savings are returned in the form of income tax cuts, or whether the savings are used to repay the massive debt that has accumulated from decades of deficits. Both outcomes are good in the long run.
Prediction: when Trump leaves office, the federal workforce, budget, and debt will all be higher than they were at the start of his second term.
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You're literally talking about moving violence enforced slavery to something closer to voluntary trade of labor. That's far from exclusively Marxian, even most brands of ancapism advocate such philosophy.
Yes, it's also a wealth transfer, and slaveholders (other than in DC) were not compensated. If you're ignoring that huge economic event in your analysis of the economics of the latter half of the 19th century, trying to replicate it today is going to be very rough. Given your other replies in this thread, you're not interested in arguing honestly and I'm not going to continue engaging.
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Before the election, Vivek or Elon or one of the galaxy-brains floated the idea of firing every other employee in the federal government based on the last digit of their social security number. The cruelty is the point.
It was Vivek and his plan was to randomly (lottery) fire half of all federal employees the first year and then randomly fire half of those who remain the second year get to an overall 75% reduction.
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> just look how fast Luigi Mangione got out of the news. What news would there be? He was arrested and locked up, his court case hasn’t started. Should we have “Luigi still in jail” headlines?
I'd have expected a debate about healthcare cost and actual reforms resulting out of it because the momentum clearly was there, but hey, here we are... For a while, until he was caught, there was a debate beginning to form what drives someone to execute a healthcare executive on the street - but the day he got caught, the debate got suppressed and no one is talking about it anymore.
It was all show no thought. The big questions remain unanswered. Where are costs inflated between pharmaceuticals, providers, hospital administrators, insurance administrators and patients seeking unnecessary care? How do we reform insurance when most people hate our healthcare system while simultaneously liking their own coverage?
Luigi didn't add anything substantive to the debate. Instead, his role was in facilitating venting. Someone still has to come up with an idea beyond "I hate this."
> there was a debate beginning to form what drives someone to execute a healthcare executive on the street
On Twitter, maybe. For most people, it was another Manhattan mental-health case murder. The chase and his good looks provided salacious intrigue, but only for so long as he was on the run.
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This is Russia driven. Its right out of Aleksandr Dugin's playbook for Russian political dominance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Dugin had ideas of spheres of influence. Roughly speaking, he thought that America should be dominated by the US, Europe/Africa by the EU and Asia by Russia. This however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#The_Techn... So it is not necessarily Russia driven, but surely RT has recently…
It sounds like he’s less concerned about the west, but knows that there needs to be political chaos in order to prevent the US from interfering with Russia’s political goals.
I guess that seems obvious at this point, but worrisome that the US government is now actively supporting of those goals.
If you take an objective view that these are geopolitical conditions that would be beneficial to Russian objectives, and pair it with the concurrency of these things playing out, then it’s hard to see it as coincidence.
If anything this whole DOGE scenario has illuminated is how confused and overconfident many in this country are. We are stumbling fools without systems and rules (organizations, institutions, laws, regulations, ...) to rely on. I wonder how much behavior like this stems from weak regulation in the US to begin with. It seems like it would reinforce the rise of agents that assume they can ask for forgiveness after acti…
Uppers have this effect on people.