partial_accumen

oh man, you really should.

For the purposes of framing your question, are you meaning:

• commit to a single person in a monogamous relationship long term?

or

• commit to a legal construct of a relationship such as marriage?

There are different answers for each.

Do they refer to it as their Thousand-Year Reich or is that just its unofficial name?

I’m unable to upvote this. I’m part of the control group.

I am the official spokesman of the UK, never heard of it

Oh man, you may need to turn in your Brit Card to the King. The term was likely born in Britain, and used as a central part of the UK’s success in WWII.

The usage “crib” was adapted from a slang term referring to cheating (e.g., “I cribbed my answer from your test paper”). A “crib” originally was a literal or interlinear translation of a foreign-language text—usually a Latin or Greek text—that students might be assigned to translate from the original language. The term “crib” originated at Bletchley Park, the British World War II decryption operation.

source

And I still get downvotes when I tell Americans two No Kings protests in four months isn’t going to be enough.

Perhaps you’re getting downvoted because thats a strawman argument you’re creating? Is there anyone of any legitimacy saying two protests would be enough? Of course not, you know better. I can tell you thats why I downvoted you.

They got private donors to fund the troops, I believe.

Doesn’t that mean they cease to be the US armed forces and are now a private militia? Is that what those troops that signed up for? I don’t think so.

Because what do they have to lose? Johnson is ramming every negative policy through with every legitimate and dirty method out there. The basic government institutions that support our society are being dismantled or sold off to the highest oligarch with crony capitalism. Open corruption by trump in pardoning obvious unapologetic criminals that promise trump fealty or lick the boot. trump is literally tearing down the White House (thats something we only allow Canada to do historically). Johnson refuses to seat a Democratically elected Democrat representative for over a month.

What do Democratic lawmakers have to lose at this point?

I had no idea CPAP machines cost so much!

Come on, New York, elect someone cool for once.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez is pretty cool in my book and New York elected her.

The left begins at socialism.

If you’re talking about the political spectrum I would think the extreme far left would begin at anarchism and eventually graduate to socialism as you move farther right.

The scary part of this one is that previously, we had administrations that, while still being right-of-center (yes ML, I know), had at least enough sense to prop things up well enough to recover.

I’ll admit I haven’t cataloged all financial crises in American history, but I can’t think of any right-of-center administrations that have cleaned up a things for a recovery. Perhaps only exception might be the Oil Crisis under Carter, and the recovery under Reagan. Great depression, Black Monday, Great Recession, COVID recession, all happened under right-of-center Presidents and recovered under left-of-center Presidents.

I started another point-by-point rebuttable about my individual disagreements with your arguments, but I think we’re just too far away from one another for more meaningful discussion on this. Thank you for your discussion up to this point though.

Edit: I should have lead with this, but I’ll add it now after-the-fact. I really appreciate you taking the time to response and share your views and data. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with it. I want to thank you for talking.

Capitalists in the US, facing internal market saturation and steadily falling rates of profit, have had to expand outward, leveraging a strong overseas military to keep the global south under their thumb.

My point is that capitalism isn’t the only system susceptible to this. All governments in human history have fallen to a version of this if they rise to any substantial size.

The empire of Japan did the same thing for the same reason causing their start of WWII in the late 1930s. In China the Qing Dynasty collapsed in the 1910s under the weight of its expansion. Rome did the same with collapse in 98AD to 117AD. The Aztec empire fell because of contact with European explorers, but the Aztec society was certainly based upon strict social hierarchies mirroring much of Europe with an aristocracy on one side and serfdom on the other.

It isn’t about “discovering” new systems. History is not progressed by people randomly discovering new ideas, but is a gradual material process, and the ideas that rise and fall are secondary to that and support that process. Liberalism arose because of capitalism’s rise and need for ideological justification.

I disagree. We haven’t found a stable system yet, so more exploration, discovery, evolution (whichever euphemism you want to insert here) is needed to arrive at something stable for humanity. The alternative is we just accept we get a few generations or tens of generations before society falls and we rinse and repeat.

As for socialism, the easiest answer is the PRC.

That… was not was I was expecting as your exemplar of socialism.

This century is going to be marked by China’s undisputed rise. As they continue to develop, market mechanics will continue to be phased out

I’m not so sure about that. First, China has a lot going for it to reach what you’re describing. I don’t dispute that. However, there’s been a shortcoming I’ve observed of China’s path to growth over the last 50 years that I don’t see called out. They’ve reach market mature and economic success far faster than a nation like the USA given the same amount of time. They have been, and still are, on a speedrun of national growth. However, this means they’ve had multiple generations robbed of “the good times” during growth were the growth slower.

Compared against the rise of the middle class in the USA post-WWII we’ve had 3 or 4 generations gain wealth, education, health care and raise families of their own with good paying jobs and readily available resources. In the USA we have grandparents or even great-grandparents that can tell us about the national poverty of living through the Great Depression, and how that shaped their choices (and those of their line). In China, its many times, the parents that lived through that subsistence poverty and their (now middle aged adult) children are the first generation to experience a middle class lifestyle and resources. Two to three generations of generational wealth building simply didn’t occur in China because they’re moving and developing so fast. The problem with this is, the boom times of manufacturing wealth have already started to decline in 大陆. Commodity manufacturing is already shifting out of China to other nations in the global south. Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and others are getting new manufacturing work that was previously going to China.

China has some giant problems looming in the next 50 year. Its population decline (as a result of state-enforced controls of birth) overcorrected and set up China to possibly be worse off that South Korea or even Japan in the decades ahead. source

China is a large net importer of both energy and food. All of these things together give me doubts China will be a long term stable society.

Other countries, like Cuba, manage to maintain higher quality of life metrics despite being under intense embargo than peer countries.

Cuba has done decently given its circumstances, but its historically another authoritarian regime. Further, much of Cuba’s progress might be attributable to artificial support from the Soviet Union to maintain its ally so close to its largest opponent.

The USSR had, in its time, the most rapid improvements in economic growth and quality of life in history.

…for those allowed to live.

None of these countries have been perfect utopias, or anything,

Dismissing Stalin’s purges and the Holodomor against Ukraine, much less the brutal repression of culture in Eastern Europe is doing a disservice to your argument of not being “perfect utopias”. The Soviet Union was as much an empire as the USA was in its expansion into other nations and suppression the local populace for exploitation.

but all have surpassed the inherent unsustainability of capitalism.

The Soviet Union was both born decades to centuries after other modern capitalist nations, and collapsed before them doesn’t really lend credence to your statement here about surpassing unsustainability.

To circle back to my main point. I’m not saying the USA has this figured out. I could write pages on what we’re doing wrong and how its leading to our decline. I’m saying nobody in the world in recorded human history has figured out how to have a sustainable system of governance. All systems are exploiting another to sustain themselves, and when that exploited group is exhausted a cycle of exploitation repeats or the nation collapses.

If you live long enough, you’ve been through a number of bubbles. For me thats:

• Black Monday (1987)
• Dot com bubble (2000) which also bled into 9/11 economics impacts
• Great Recession (2008)
• COVID (2020)

The next bubble will just be another. Economy will slow, value of most assets will drop. Jobs will be lost, homes foreclosed on…and then the recovery will begin again. We’ll look in the mirror shocked we survived it then in a few years we’ll completely forget about it and be terrified of the next bubble.

So, prepare by living within you means, take care of yourself and your loved ones, and just be ready to weather the next storm. We’ll get through that one too.

Imperialism, however, is self-defeating, and the rate of profit is lowering while there aren’t really new markets to plunder anymore. This causes crisis.

Potentially yes, but empires can last for hundreds or thousands of years. Democracy is relatively young by comparison, and we’re already seeing large cracks in it in the USA, one of the older democracies.

The point being: humanity hasn’t yet found a long term stable form of government.

It’s not particularly outlandish to orient the economy around collectivized production and distribution based on need, rather than profit. Socialist countries already exist, and achieve good results compared to peer countries. They require working class organization, which is a difficult but possible process.

I’m interested in your perspective on this. Which socialist country are you using as an example of what you describe above?

My god, the rest of article has additional quotes that make this guy SO MUCH WORSE than the headline makes it out to be!

the story is illustrating “book smart” from “street smart”.

who’s who? I thought Light and L were fairly similar in their types of intelligence and both felt book smart.

Light = Book Smart
Light’s Father = Street Smart

Death Note is a variation on the Hero’s Journey trope

how? It just seemed like a typical “antagonist and protagonist are mirrors” with a villain protagonist in Light.

Hero’s Journey is so common, I too, would consider it “typical”.

Combine L, Near, and Mello all as one entity “the hero”. How that composite travels through the story I see it well mapping against the hero’s journey. Another portion of the variation is that the story primarily follows Light/Kira, which is the antagonist, not the hero.

sure thing. It’s just combining that with the “I smelt the onion in his farts, that breed of onion only grows in the nagasaki region” style writing of “smart, observant people” makes the show kinda silly , while the tone is suuuuper serious about everything.

I don’t think that’s out-of-place either for the story. Much like the difference between Light and his father, the story is illustrating “book smart” from “street smart”.

Like so much other modern fiction, Death Note is a variation on the Hero’s Journey trope. In this case, the hero is a composite between L, Near, and Mello.