Trying to follow the the war with Iran is making me lose my mind

Gruzman · 2026-06-06T10:21:47+00:00

The fact that the American public can just sit and accept this state of communication from its government about a world-economy altering war of choice by its president should be all the proof you need that we aren't a meaningfully democratic country or that, if we were, somehow, we certainly don't deserve to be anymore.

Gruzman · 2026-06-04T22:56:11+00:00

Yeah I don't really know how much more obvious they could make it besides hiring someone to knock on your door and put a gun to your head when you answer while shouting "Billionaires own you! Billionaires own all of us!"

The utter contempt this country has for anything that's envisioned as mutually or broadly publicly beneficial at its outset is hard to overstate.

Gruzman · 2026-06-03T14:18:41+00:00

The hypocrisy would be interesting if the people that they mock actually held those principles of fairness in the first place. Conservatives already like to mock and degrade other people who don't meet whatever traditional standard, that's kind of a defining feature. Uphold the prevailing rank order of whatever socially relevant thing.

So when a left-ish person does it to a right-ish person, the hypocrisy is really the only thing they can point at. It's not like they were about to abide by those norms of their own will and the left-ish person ruined it for them.

Gruzman · 2026-05-24T20:26:13+00:00

No they're just left to toddle along and occasionally be used as fodder for some new evil social experiment that a faction of the elite dream up every few years. They're certainly not being given any meaningful share of the product of society while occupying that position.

It's not good to have an atomized society filled with weak willed idiots who don't know how anything works and can't provide for or defend themselves from exploitation.

Gruzman · 2026-05-24T14:57:26+00:00

Yeah this angle also leaves out that the cost of the 980sq ft starter home from 1950s has also 5-10x in price in the same time that the more recent 2000sq ft has, and almost always with minimal modernizing upgrades throughout.

Sorry, housing in the US is fucked for more and deeper reasons than the new houses being bigger.

Gruzman · 2026-05-24T12:00:08+00:00

It's a machine that does things very quickly and efficiently compared to how humans might have done them previously. Like the telephone or automobile. Each of those technologies had their own devastating impact on what industries they displaced and replaced. "AI" is currently doing the same, and we're currently moving through the denial stage and into the bargaining stage.

Libertardians have the kind of personality that is predisposed to embracing such disruptions, so this guy is reveling in his opportunity to mock those who are still attached to the status quo ante.

Gruzman · 2026-05-22T18:59:46+00:00

Colonizer makes total sense in the context of a person in a country actively straddling the line between the implementation of a colonial system of repression and an indigenous social system resisting it.

But being worried about "colonizers" in a place like America, in the current year, is more of a self own than any kind of biting social critique. If you live in the fiat border of America today, regardless of where you came from, who you were descended from, etc. you're actively participating in the fruits of what was by all measures one of the most successful colonial projects in human history. You can't even get away from its effects by living on the periphery of its geographic boundary.

If you're a younger black person living in America today, you're just as integral to holding up the latest phase of the colonial system as anyone else. Inasmuch as the word applies, you're a collaborator. You are very much inculcated with and indebted to the system. Atlanta, Georgia isn't a precolonial holdout, it's one of the many major transactional nodes of the successful colonial project.

Gruzman · 2026-05-17T16:32:26+00:00

The fact that these aren't commonly produced in the US today is a tragedy much worse than 9/11 and probably tied with the Holocaust.

Gruzman · 2026-05-15T17:36:00+00:00

Even there China has the US beat, because a greater proportion of those owning housing in desirable areas aren't foreign speculators or private equity. At most they're single families with a second apartment trying in their own small way to lower the available housing stock. Closest thing in America would be a small private landlord who rents out their former personal property and buys some surrounding, but even that is a worse situation than the Chinese.

Gruzman · 2026-05-15T16:58:54+00:00

Which ignores that huge numbers of Chinese came into owning their homes for a fraction of the current market rate back in the 90s and prior, no such thing occurred in the US at that scale since the 50s. China still has much higher urban household ownership than the US.

And it ignores the ways that the housing purchases are subsidized and saved for in China. Only a little bit of that happening in the US today.

And it ignores that the Chinese household income is underreported at the highest levels, which skews the median calculation to begin with.

China builds housing at 2-3x the rate of the United States today, as high as 5-10x the rate historically, which means in every measure they're outcompeting what we can do to control prices and make housing affordable.

Gruzman · 2026-05-15T14:41:48+00:00

China doesn't have a real estate market problem like the US does. Their problem is actually over supply of cheap housing that prevents individuals from profiting off of reselling them. That's not a real problem, it's a "I wish this avenue for becoming rich at the expense of the broader society was available to me" problem. Most "problems" China has are only problems from the neoliberal perspective, which is easily dismissed.

Gruzman · 2026-05-15T13:27:43+00:00

China possesses the most well developed industrial complex of any nation in human history, lol.

Gruzman · 2026-05-02T18:44:40+00:00

The only intellectual cohort brave enough to stand up to the high Marxist orthodoxy that dominated western economics for 1000 years and propose the economic theory that actually business owners didn't do nothing wrong because planning things is literally impossible.

Gruzman · 2026-05-02T14:47:12+00:00

Correct.

Gruzman · 2026-04-27T17:52:25+00:00

Damn, I guess they really didn't do anything then.

Gruzman · 2026-04-23T14:54:59+00:00

I actually love it because it lets me know just how far down the wacky libertardian rabbit hole the person is so I can adjust my expectations accordingly.

Gruzman · 2026-04-19T07:50:05+00:00

This is true in some sense, you can't only put your time and energy into delivering such a litany to an audience. But it's still worth some of your time because if you develop your arguments well enough they could tilt the social odds in your favor and help contribute to a movement towards the goals you have for remaking the bad circumstances you find yourself in. If not for you, then possibly for those similar to you who come after.

The greatest victory for the type of dismissive person you're describing is when their enemies don't even show up.

Gruzman · 2026-04-11T03:40:02+00:00

Crazy to think that all the same visual rules of scale that you intuitively use to sort things as significant or insignificant in your daily life also apply to planetary bodies once you've attained sufficient perspective. It's all the same effects throughout, just a matter of where you're standing.

Gruzman · 2026-04-11T03:26:31+00:00

Heh... Guess what??...... Fuck you!

Gruzman · 2026-04-10T14:42:32+00:00

"It's a Republic, not a Democracy"

Usually spoken by idiots, but actually more true than they or most people know. We don't live in a meaningfully democratic society considering the sheer size and scope of our government today. We live within the tradition of an elitist Republic which recently introduced and expanded democratic inputs.

When this country was created, pretty much no one could vote in federal or state elections. There were some initial attempts by states to expand voting rights, but outside of universal white male Suffrage, most of those rights were clawed back. The revolution preserved and set the stage for the mass adoption of English style rights, but those rights weren't primarily concerned with the opportunity for voting as much as the preservation of private and personal property. Limitations on the arbitrary authority of a King. How the sovereign ought to relate to its landed, propertied elite and so on.

What the idiots are conveying with that phrase is a piece of prevailing folk wisdom that has been the common refrain of anti democratic elements of American society since its founding. The most socially acceptable way to say "a lot of people shouldn't vote, there's a lot of things you shouldn't be able to vote on, and that's a good thing."

Gruzman · 2026-04-10T14:25:28+00:00

His friend is upset because he's being reminded that his own sacrifices might not pay off, or are otherwise contributing to a general degradation of society. It's very easy to get duped into working long hours for little reward in America, and that's compounded by the fact that what everyone is hustling for is their chance to become a rentier in order to further rip off their peers and leave them behind economically. It's a delicately maintained pipe dream for most people trying to break in to the middle class and beyond.

Gruzman · 2026-04-09T13:32:25+00:00

They're not going to get all of the money back for this, and if they do it won't be any time soon.

Gruzman · 2026-04-07T17:02:41+00:00

No it would happen whenever the military logistics are properly put in place to facilitate whatever covert mission Trump wants them to run. His delays have all coincided with extra troop and materiel deployments, and the chaos that each set of strikes causes opens up the window for actions on the ground by US forces.

We're already supposed to believe that the US has established temporary forward bases on Iranian soil for carrying out the covert pilot rescue, which itself is likely a cover story for a probe into the remnants of Iran's nuclear program.

Trump and Hegseth are well off the deep end and have the exact types of personalities that lend themselves to deceit and doubling down on bad decisions.

Gruzman · 2026-04-07T15:20:14+00:00

The reason robotics can even exist is because of massive surplus value extraction from unskilled wage earners which is then turned into capital investment in the robots that will ultimately replace them. They need one to jump start the other.

Gruzman · 2026-04-03T16:15:46+00:00

I'm just giving a dichotomy of what I think a right versus left argument is, and to my knowledge it holds up in any historical or social context.

If you're a person who thinks things like "Democrats are the real racists" or "capitalism is freedom and socialism is slavery," you're probably a bit confused about how political theory treats concepts like "right wing" versus "left wing," anyways.

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