• 56 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • Being wealthy in the US/UK/Canada is so much better than being rich in China because the marginal advantage is substantially larger

    In China? You still take the train. Transit is probably still faster than driving. Your food expenses don’t scale as fast because cheap food isn’t made of garbage. You already likely own a home. You probably come from a tier 1/2 city, so traveling domestically is cheap. Your kid still has to grind for gaokao.

    In the US? You fly business. You drive around in your S Class. You can bribe infinite extracurriculars for your kid to get into a top university. You basically never have to interact with anyone in the lower 90% of incomes, and you don’t need to be THAT wealthy to do so.












  • Republicans accept a post-truth society where everything is someone’s propaganda, that the federal government is out to get them and that the union would be better served as a union of state-level republics. Democrats still believe in the existence of a ground truth and want a union with centralized control (i.e., they are Federalists). Like the Federalists, the Democrats are backed by wealthy financial states (New York, California) as opposed to more rural/working-class states (Alabama, Ohio) and support heavy industrial subsidies (Biden’s IRA, CHIPS) as well as weak state governments.

    This is a fundamental difference that explains a lot, actually. The role of government has always been to convince populations to pursue the policy goals of the elite. The foundations of representative democracy involve choosing which elites’ policy goals to follow. The Republicans want to follow state elites (to borrow a Chinese proverb, the mountains are high and the President is far away). The Democrats want to follow federal elites.

    Here’s the real problem. The US gets to choose between a career politician and a career businessman (swindler, by definition). Who represents the working class? Who represents the people who actually built America’s economy?





  • The entire principle of authoritarianism is either public support or public apathy. An authoritarian regime is only as stable as its populace.

    A government that butchers its people against the will of the populace cannot survive even if it is democratic. A government that butchers people with the will of the populace will survive regardless of whether or not it’s authoritarian.

    See: Israel, America, Canada, Australia, UK

    There’s no fundamental difference between a democratic and authoritarian government in this regard. The primary difference is (and has always been) whether property is managed as a function of the state (monarchies, socialism) or as a function of the individual (democracies, anarchy).

    Well, that and the “people” that get killed in democracies are usually of a different skin colour than you, so maybe you just don’t care?