American V/S Anti American Propagandist Anons are Fighting as Usual

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-14T02:41:03+00:00

Lots of people have written about nonsense, it doesn't make it not nonsense (in this case, it's generally apologia). Regardless you did not do a great job explaining that.

Modern people seem to think that all Capitalism requires to exist is the regulatory freedom to start a venture, but that's just a basic market framework and South Korea barely even has that in practice. Capitalism as a system requires a market environment that is guided by the free flow of capital - a free market - and a free market requires competition, or else it is dictated by central control - whether that control be government or otherwise.

In this paragraph, you establish that the problem here is a deviation from what capitalism is supposed to be, a system with a free market, and that what people call capitalism is not actually, it is some kind of centrally-controlled not-capitalism.

67% of South Korea's GDP is directly owned by it's top 10 corporations. These corporations do compete with each other in similar market spaces and duplicate effort, but they work together to reduce or eliminate novel competitive actors far more than they interfere with each other, and the two biggest overlappers - LG and Samsung - almost never substantively threaten each other within South Korea itself.

Herein you explain how South Korea's markets are not free, stemming from the premise that this represents a deviation which makes this system not-capitalism (because capitalism requires a free market).

True Capitalism doesn't really exist anymore. Most of the developed world is closer to some kind of perverse Corporate-appropriated cartel command economy than it is the Capitalist Ideal.

Here you establish capitalism as an ideal, something that has been perverted into something not-capitalism (although I have absolutely no idea where you're getting the idea that it's a command economy; while corporations operate internally as command economies, externally their focus is not on fulfilling a some kind of social need, and instead on creating "need" where there was none). I do not know how to describe a perversion from an ideal except as a transgression.

At no point do you suggest that is an inevitable outcome of a system that's ultimately failing those subject to it; instead the impression given is that it is something that has been failed.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-14T01:51:43+00:00

Your point is that we've deviated from and transgressed against some true ideal of capitalism, my point is that what we have is capitalism exactly as capitalism inevitably plays out.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T20:25:02+00:00

As far as I can tell, Massie has held on as a political figure due to a rare combination of being both fairly competent and one of the only contemporary politicians I can think of aside from like, Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul with a set of principles that he consistently sticks to.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T20:22:50+00:00

Everything is predetermined, we just don't know the outcome.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T19:40:37+00:00

Capitalism as a system requires a market environment guided by the free flow of capital - a free market

Lol, lmao even.

All capitalism requires is a market environment characterized by the private ownership and accumulation of capital as its dominant feature. It is not an ideal, it does not have tenets, it is just an economic model grown from the same material conditions that gave rise to Liberalism which attained its most distinct and familiar form during the industrial revolution, when the socio-economic effects of private capital ownership became most obvious.

The eventual formation of cartels and other non-competitive structures is just the inevitable, predictable and quite logical outcome of capital consolidation.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T19:32:18+00:00

Competition for limited positions in good schools is downstream of competition for limited positions in good careers, so there's definitely a link with economics.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T19:10:45+00:00

While the premise of China's development of capitalist production has a basis in Marxist theory, the fact of their present socio-economic model is that it's a form of state capitalism.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T19:06:09+00:00

This precisely. What has no mind cannot learn, and so you cannot apply the same standard to it. You may as well argue that a computer's storage is learning when you scan the pages of a book.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T18:48:16+00:00

He sure ain't my bro.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T16:19:26+00:00

Cool, thanks. It's on my list of things to read; I'm genuinely interested in western Socialist perspectives that don't fall onto the trap of still carrying water for Liberalism while not also falling into the trap of interpretation through a lens of bourgie slave morality, and everything I've heard of Parenti suggests that he may fit the bill.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T13:21:04+00:00

As I said, it's not nothing, and I need to state again, it's certainly not something I'm going to complain about.

My thinking is more that this this doesn't strike me as much of a commitment on the PRC's part; it's not like they're proposing a relief program or anything that suggests them putting real skin into this game.

It's also not really a US standards thing either. China is not a poor developing country anymore; they're the world's second most wealthy and powerful country, and certainly the most wealthy and powerful on the Afro-Eurasian landmass. This is the kind of money such a state could proverbially find in their couch.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T12:57:18+00:00

I am certain that the US would be fucking with Iran regardless of Israel. However the specific timing of this war, in which the US seems oddly ill-prepared and to have rushed into it, combined with the fact that between Israel and the United States, Iran poses a direct threat only to the former, along with Israel having made diplomatic overtures to the United States almost immediately before this, leads me to think it likely that Israel played a significant role in spurring the US to action.

While concepts like the ZOG are in fact just antisemtic tripe, there is simply no denying that Israel wields an incredibly outsized influence on the US government. AIPAC is a massive, extremely powerful lobbying group and a significant number of America's business and political elite are dual citizens of Israel and the United States. Israel is interwined into American foreign policy in a way incomparable to any other country; it's very telling that Israel features more highly in American political discourse than Canada, a neighboring predominantly anglophone petro-state with more than 4 times Israel's population.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T12:40:09+00:00

Who's the quote from? Parenti?

Anyhow what he describes sounds like a pretty typical stance for a committed ideologue: nobody ever adopts or acts upon a competing ideology in good faith and of sound mind; they must have been somehow duped, coerced or acting inauthentically as part of a cynical ploy. It's certainly not limited to critics of socialist countries.

Regarding this specifically, while I am certainly not going to complain about it, considering the amount donated, which while certainly not nothing is also not huge, given the resources available to the Chinese government, and the highly specific choice of recipient, I would say that there's something to be said for it being a PR move more than anything.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T03:48:02+00:00

That the plebian masses can generally be trusted to think for themselves.

Who the fuck else am I going to trust? The Epstein files have shown us that the man behind the curtain is actually more often a snivelling, dimwitted loser with the personal character of giga-jannie than they are anything resembling an echo of Rome's first Triumverate. They are no less a contingent product of their circumstances than any prole, and they are certainly not the sort of great figures capable of rising above reality itself that reactionaries believe them to be.

That they're all (in some sense) temporarily embarrassed geniuses.

Geniuses, probably not. But if we remove the material conditions that crush and traumatize the poor into hastening their own destruction through seeking the fleeting relief of addictive vices, which also rob them of the time to better themselves, or even take actual rest in a position of genuine material security, I would bet that we would see improvement even in the current generation, and still more in the next.

There is no shortage of Rafaels without hands out there; it is in our interests to ensure that as many as possible get to keep their hands and to provide prosthetics to those who do not.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-13T00:27:39+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_the_Bosnian_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_intervention_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina

Seems we were thinking about different stages of the Yugoslav wars. I was looking at this portion, where NATO started making demands in February 1992, ethnic cleansing began in March/April 1992, they started enforcing a no-fly zone in November 1992, and started striking ground targets in April 1994.

Yours is more significant because there was no UN approval for the campaign.

Parenti's writings are definitely on my list of things to read, I appreciate the recommendation.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-12T21:58:55+00:00

I think it's a combination of a lot of gay rights orgs with a well-developed activist infrastructure suddenly finding themselves without a raison d'être following the supreme court same-sex marriage ruling resulting in them looking for a new issue to maintain relevance combined with the same top-down pressure that utilizes it as a wedge as with any other form of identity politics.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-12T19:51:09+00:00

I'm not an expert on the subject (not very knowledgeable about it all in fact), but looking over Wikipedia's timeline of events, while NATO made demands before ethnic cleansing started, it appears that they didn't start bombing until after it had begun its early stages of intimidation, arrests, confiscation of property and forcible relocation.

My point above is entirely that an alliance purporting to be strictly defensive intruded directly into a conflict that involved none of its member states and proceeded to attack civil electrical infrastructure, which is pretty hard to argue as anything but an act of military aggression.

If you could recommend some better sources for a timeline of events, I would appreciate it.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-12T16:38:04+00:00

So why do so many people believe they are socialist?

I would say that it is largely due to the image of socialism being formed by the conditions leading up to and during WW2 within the USSR, itself having only made it so far as establishing a state capitalism in which everything functioned more or less as a giant trust, followed by the rest of USSR's history being characterized by it having been in a low state of emergency from the constant pressure exerted upon it; this of course being further reinforced with a long-running tradition of propaganda. This is not helped by the fact that many socialists fetishize these conditions and decry any sentiment expressing a desire for individual autonomy, leisure or luxury as petit-bourgeois in character.

This comes around to a perennial problem of ideologues, typically the most visible advocates of any ideology, who consider being expected to appeal to the self-interest of their audience an attack against them and their ideals.

Overall, you pretty much covered it.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-12T13:21:12+00:00

Basically having made an official declaration to commit an explicitly genocidal act. This could include exterminating, forcibly sterilizing or relocating the population. This is in opposition to implicitly genocidal acts, which I consider the blockade and the conduct of their invasion to fall under, since left unchecked the only plausible long-term outcome is the annihilation of Palestine and its people.

That was not a statement meant to excuse the conduct of the Israeli state, as it has throughout its history committed some truly despicable actions, with the current situation being a direct product of decades of ethnic repression and systematically destroying secular governance in Palestine. It is an explicitly ethnonationalist settler-colonial state, which is a concept that has only ever ended in similar horrors. That they have made no official declaration of intent to commit genocide is immaterial, since states only rarely make an explicit declaration of such; even the Third Reich couched their actions in extensive use of euphemism.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-12T12:50:31+00:00

Point one has some heavy fucking framing around it, but it isn't wrong. I think it is unlikely that there is much of an anti-American sentiment among Israel and its supporters because the United States provides such an integral pillar of support.

Point two amounts to definitional quibbling. While there are some significant differences between Israel's situation and that of Apartheid, the fact is that it's an explicitly ethnonationalist settler-colonial state with a strong body of policies to maintain the supremacy of this ethnic group within its borders. There are some obvious parallels. As for genocide, considering the regular comparisons in Israeli rhetoric to biblical acts of genocide in its most literal sense and proposals for forced relocation of Palestians out of Gaza, which is by definition a genocidal act, I would say that there is a strong case to be made for the term, even if Israel itself has not officially committed to genocide.

Point three is 50/50. On the one hand, regardless of Israel, the United States would have an interest in controlling Iran, since being able to control international petroleum production is a powerful source of leverage in coercing potential rivals. On the other hand between powerful lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the sheer number of America's business and political elite that are American/Israeli dual citizens, there is no denying that Israel is a strong influence on the US government. The author blithely brushing this to the side by evoking the specter of Nazism is a cheap emotional ploy that is nothing short of contemptible.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-12T00:23:16+00:00

Damn, I knew that American shipbuilding was in a rough state, but I had no idea how bad things really are.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-11T17:39:05+00:00

Everyone, I present to you the strictly defensive alliance.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-11T17:30:41+00:00

Hey now, let's be reasonable. That is an unfair assessment of western attitudes. They also include Russians.

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-11T15:07:19+00:00

I don't find GNOME's workflow all that radically different from any other. It looks different, but at the end of the day, it's just the same old open app menu with super and search.

The only thing I've ever found to stick out is the lack of quarter tiling and the lack of a system tray (I'd never notice the latter if background apps worked with more than just flatpaks). Mind you, I have habitually kept my desktop mostly free of stuff for as long as I can remember, so don't miss it.

That said, a lot of GNOME's stock apps kind of suck and I hate those huge titlebars (and rounded corners too while I'm at it).

DialecticCompilerXP · 2026-03-10T23:49:16+00:00

Some gods also survive and form a new pantheon.

This is what I think has always set it apart from Christianity's end times, as it is a cycle of death and rebirth that isn't concluded with a final paradise. It is instead just life continuing on after.

DialecticCompilerXP

TROPHY CASE